Recently

I wanted to throw out a brief update on what I’ve been building, writing, reading, and other stuff over the last month.

Listening

For several years now, I take a photo at every concert I attend. It’s a nice little reminder to myself about where I was in the show, and even though taking a cell-phone photo doesn’t produce great results, I love stretching that muscle from back in my concert-photojournalism days. Well, I’ve decided to start putting them up on this site (along with some words about each show). Here are my concerts from the last month:

Beyoncé at Soldier Field

You’re pretty sure it’s going to be a fun night when, as you walk up to your friends’ apartment, you run into a couple more friends also going to the show. And then you eat some dinner and play some games and drink some drinks and head down to the

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First Aid Kit at The Salt Shed

The Swedish duo’s ethereal and intertwined voices harmonizing and melodically moving through the concert hall were amazing to experience. Truly beautiful singing, a wonderful performance of folk-rock music that resonated the crowd for hours. And they played out the crowd with ABBA, which created…

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Kandy Muse and Jimbo at Roscoe’s

We braved the storms last night to watch Kandy Muse and Jimbo perform at Roscoe’s, and it was a fantastic decision. Watching Kandy command the crowd with sultry stares and seeing Jimbo rip the head off a doll to drink out of it like a water bottle (on the

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Japanese Breakfast at The Salt Shed

A great evening seeing Japanese Breakfast perform a second time

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Grapetooth at West Fest

Grapetooth was a fun, tongue in cheek show on a perfect sticky summer night

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Final Day of Re:SET Chicago

LCD Soundsystem, Jaime XX, and Idles at the last day of the first year of this festival

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I’m going to Lollapalooza this weekend, so there will be some photos from those shows next time.

Building

I painted and mounted some new pegboard in my studio office. It replaces the myriad thumbtacks and tiny shelves I had previously screwed to the wall to hold the smaller tools. Build places to house your tools - you will find yourself building more things with them when they are visible and near.

I wanted more greenery in my basement studio, but it hardly gets enough light to sustain me, let alone a plant and photosynthesis. So, I built my own mount and softening cage for some LED grow lights that I then mounted beneath a top shelf. It’s a bit tight, but it fits, the cactus is already reaching upward, and the mellow light puts some warmth in the workspace.

Writing

I’ve been updating the software and design behind my Notes Garden open-source software over the last few weeks: compressing the visual patterns, adding proverbs, building a custom index for organization, etc.

To support some of those changes, I’ve also released a new version of my open-source Ruby gem/library for interacting with the Readwise API: readwise-ruby v0.5.0

Harvesting

From the indoor garden we’ve been eating tomatoes and lettuce and kale and jalapeños (so many, I pickled them) and cilantro and sage and mint and more. Advice : pickle your jalapeños in cold brine. The first time I pickled jalapeños, I used boiling hot brine (as recommended to me by a cookbook) and it basically made pepper spray and a very unpleasant evening in my kitchen.

On the patio outside, I’ve been graciously picking the giant hydrangeas, eagerly plucking basil and mint, carefully funneling the solar panels into power banks.

We also harvested our first nectarines this weekend, and since then we’ve been eating a couple fruits from the tree each day to keep up with the ripeness.

To Pick a Nectarine

Every spring, I eagerly plant outside as soon as the soil is soft enough for my hands to turn over. We don’t get much sun on our patio, probably not enough to sustain produce-bearing trees and bushes. But this year, I found a fruit tree for sale on one of

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Reading

I wrote up reviews of some books I’ve finished in the last month:

After Reading: A Philosophy of Software Design

I had been recommended this book a handful of times by coworkers at Shopify, so I finally ordered it, hoping that I would find it as valuable as those others. I started and finished it this morning, highlighted a few key sentences and diagrams, but ultimately felt that it was

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After Reading: The Creative Act

A call to embrace the creative process: the continuous cycle of sourcing, crafting, and sharing.

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After Reading: The Good Citizen

A woven history of violated and reclaimed citizenship in the United States

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I’ve also been adding more notes to my Notes Garden - some recent favorites (each one links to its source article/book for you to read in full):

Lewis Hyde has made extensive studies of gift economies. He finds that ‘objects will remain plentiful because they are treated as gifts.’ A gift relationship...

Lewis Hyde has made extensive studies of gift economies. He finds that ”objects will remain plentiful because they are treated as gifts.” A gift relationship with nature is a “formal give-and-take that acknowledges…

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Time is not money. Time is beans. It was as serious as many jokes are, which is to say about half. Saying it meant that...

Time is not money. Time is beans. It was as serious as many jokes are, which is to say about half. Saying it meant that you could take time and give time, but also that you could plant time and grow more of it and that there were different vari…

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The first image ever transmitted to Earth from another planet was rendered by hand in pastels. On July 14, 1965, the Mars Mariner 4 spacecraft...

The first image ever transmitted to Earth from another planet was rendered by hand in pastels. On July 14, 1965, the Mars Mariner 4 spacecraft took 22 photographs with its onboard television camera as it made the closest approach of its flyby. T…

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I’m currently reading Writing Tools (this is already changing my writing) and Braiding Sweetgrass (this is already changing my relationship to my environment), so expect to hear about those soon.

What have you been building? What have you been harvesting? This time of year, the two start to overlap…