Resist the enclosure of the human psyche.”


Finished reading Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke. Thanks to @toddgrotenhuis for mentioning it. The lesson that will stay with me is that a relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain–and not only metaphorically. In fact, we may have to sometimes embrace pain as a way to reset a healthy balance.


My only advice is never to give advice.


Looks like I’ve been on micro.blog three years today. I was briefly on the service once or twice before that but I didn’t use the community aspect so it didn’t last. I’m glad I tried again because I’ve found some great friends and acquaintances here!


One benefit of living in a small town: parades with fire trucks and classic cars and tractors and the high school marching band and Shriners.


Got a flint and steel in the mail today and I’ve successfully made a small fire from it. The plan is to use it to make a Yule fire two weeks from today. I’ll practice a few more times. I recall an Episcopal priest’s repeated failures one Sunday and I’d like to avoid a similar episode.


There are many powers in this world. Which ones am I feeding with my time, attention, money, energy?


Cheap man’s mocha: half a mug brewed coffee, half a mug milk (I used oatmilk), 1 tablespoon cocoa, 1 tablespoon sugar.


I’ve added “The Owens House” as a blog category to contain all posts about the history of our house. This will interest exactly one reader of this blog (Rachel)–who will also not like the fact that I’ve called it the Owens House. But I like it, and it’s my blog, so there.


I recently wrote a bit about the Schroers, who were the second family to live in our house. Over the weekend, there was a tour of some of the local historic churches and one of them was First Presbyterian, where Dr. Schroer was a deacon. We definitely wanted to go to that one because we knew from this news clipping that his wife and daughter donated a baptismal font after his death:

Auto-generated description: A group of men stands around a newly dedicated baptismal font, with one man holding a draped cloth covering it.

Thankfully, it was still there:

Auto-generated description: A wooden baptismal font with a hinged lid stands in a church setting, partially surrounded by greenery. Auto-generated description: A wooden surface features a plaque dedicated to Dr. William H. Schroer, presented by his wife and daughter on June 30th, 1957.

We were glad to be able to give the members of the church a bit more background information on their baptismal font in exchange for adding a couple of images to our house lore.