First spring ephemeral I’ve spotted in Murray Forest this year: cut-leaved toothwort

Worth reading: “The IKEA Humans” by Samuel Biagetti

Jennifer and Jason are drawn to IKEA because it reflects who they are: they too are modern, movable, and interchangeable, their wants satisfiable in any neighborhood with a food co-op and a coffee shop. More fundamentally, Jennifer and Jason are untraceable, a “composite material” made from numberless scraps and pieces. They have a long catalog of home towns, and their accents are NPR neutral. They can probably rattle off the various nationalities in their family trees — Dutch, Norwegian, Greek, and Jewish, maybe some Venezuelan or Honduran for a little color. From these backgrounds they retain no more than a humorous word or phrase, a recipe, or an Ellis Island anecdote, if that. They grew up amidst a scramble of white-collar professionals and went to college with a scramble of white-collar professionals’ kids. Their values are defined mainly by mass media, their tastes adorably quirky but never straying too far from their peers’, and like the IKEA furniture that they buy in boxes, they too cut themselves into manageable, packaged pieces and market themselves online. They are probably “spiritual but not religious.” They have no pattern or model of life that bears any relation to the past before the internet. For all intents and purposes, they sprang up de novo in the modern city.

Peter Larson, A Year and a Day on Just a Few Acres:

Every place on the Earth has its own, unique energies. When I was an architect, I learned how to sense these energies, define them, and put them into terms others could understand. Healthy, living places were made, or most often grew, via working with, not against, their underlying energies. I think people used to sense these energies of place more than they do now, and used to value them more than they do now. The loss of this sense had increasingly allowed economics to dictate the qualities of places, and resulted in the creation of more and more “dead” places: shopping strips, placeless housing subdivisions, whole centers of communities blown out for corner drug stores and parking lots.

Worth reading:

• “Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI” by Erik Hoel
• Dougald Hind’s reply to the above, “The Hand Made Web”

No one is more surprised than me that the screen door I’m building is square and the half-lap joints are mostly okay. Tomorrow I’ll put dowels in the joints.

Still the funniest video on the internet. Rachel and I think of this every few months and laugh ourselves silly watching it over and over.

Two great ideas from the “In Defense of Maintenance” episode of the Mortise and Tenon podcast:

• “Maintenance-free” means “disposable.”
• The value of maintenance is that it requires attentiveness to and participation with the things in your life. This is a better framing than “self-reliance.”

I’m looking forward to this book: Land Healing: Physical, Metaphysical, and Ritual Approaches for Healing the Earth by Dana O’Driscoll (Grand Archdruid of the AODA). It looks like a great mix of both practical and spiritual work for those who want to contribute to renewing the land.

Rex Krueger says “don’t measure”—and I’m trying to live by that as I build a new screen door for our back porch. I was recently burned by over-reliance on a tape measure when building a garage shelf.

My grandpa’s license plate. My dad’s tool box. He added the State Farm sticker; I added the Mortise and Tenon sticker.