We are packing up for our first camping trip of the season. We will be camping at Presque-Ile again with the same family as last year.
All weekend, and in to this week, I’ve had a bunch of ideas for blog posts. None of them will get written. Here are some blog-post-fish that got away served up as a stream of consciousness info dump.
Ursula Le Guin rocks. I’m reading Always Coming Home right now and it is absolutely stellar. It is in a genre of its own. I’m calling it speculative anthropology. The whole thing is so meta and strange.
Discovering new-to-me authors. I have my lifetime favourites such as John Scalzi and Tolstoy. But, like, there are whole canons of literature that I’ve known about for ages and never touched. And it is really exciting to find out about someone new-to-me and be like: “Wow! There is a lot of this and it is all great.”
The kids playing in the neighbourhood. We have some neighbours directly across the sidewalk who love to play with our kids. This week, they’ve really started playing together full time. The transition from “we must always watch our kids constantly” to “the children are playing together somewhere” is a small miracle of parenting. This makes me think of The Play Deficit. Also, the fact that kids thrive with other kids. And the important of widely mixed age groups. Lots to say here.
Touching grass and being online. A group of smolweb people over at Bearblog Carnival are currently chatting about digital minimalism and staying in touch. Here’s the prompt: “how do you stay connected while practicing digital minimalism, and how did you make the switch?” And, I absolutely feel that. Super-duper important. But, also, maybe, feeling connected as a human and being in contact with people online are fundamentally opposed to each other? Perhaps this is like a “sustainable fossil fuel industry” or something.
A guy with a lizard. I ran an errand at the plaza this week and there was a fellow with two dogs on leashes and a lizard on his back. Seeing a guy with a lizard in the real life was at least as fun as a week of the internet.
Tahitian Carrying Wood. There is a classic Navaho string figure called Carrying Wood. It depicts a bundle of wood on someone’s back. I tend to use it as a go-to piece for string figure analysis. This week, I found a similar looking string figure from Tahiti called “wood laid across.” A striking example of convergent evolution of string figures.
Handy, Willowdean Chatterson. String figures from the Marquesas and Society Islands. Vol. 18. The Museum, 1925.
Teer, Samuel, and Ashanti Fortson. Brownstone. HarperCollins, 2024.
There’s a hot mess of themes around community and connection here. I have a whole story to tell about living in our particular neighbourhood but I tend not to write that sort of loose sociology stuff here. I hope that you’ve enjoyed this hodge podge of blog-post-fish that got away.
Happy Canada Day! 🍁
Published: Jun 29, 2026 @ 19:00.
Last Modified: Jun 30, 2026 @ 21:14.
Home / Now / Archive / Office Camera / Bookmarks / Tags / Feeds / Top of Page
Thanks for reading! If you have any comments or questions about the content, please let me know. Anyone can contact me by email.