I always look forward to the spring ephemerals.

We’re expecting a bit of snow today but OFA says it’ll be an early spring. Warmer-than-average temperatures and lower-than-normal rainfall here in the Ohio Valley.

A friend and I were talking last year about our mutual need to over-intellectualize everything we do. “I need a theory to tie my shoes.” Now, mind you, I’m not saying that’s a good thing; quite the opposite, in fact. I think this friend and I do this because we both have similar sorts of brains that have suffered similar traumas.

All of which is to say I can really get into practical work once an idea has given it a framing.

Ever since I wrote about my experience with working from home, I’ve been thinking about households as workshops. I am 90% sure I derived this from Wendell Berry’s various discussions of productive households, as opposed to households as sites of consumption. (I’m a blogger, not an academic, so that’s the best you’re gonna get for source citation.) The preeminent example for Berry is of course the family farm, which is both the site of work and the source of goods that fulfill the needs of the family itself and contribute to the local economy.

Now, obviously, most of my work is for the benefit of an entity thirty miles away from here. But that work is done here, and that means it is in some real way situated within my household. This relativizes my “day job” in ways that wouldn’t be possible if I was sitting in the office, surrounded by co-workers, in an environment where The Institution is all. (This is, no doubt, behind some of the most insistent calls to return to the office by those who would have their employees devote their lives and bodies to their work.)

I grew up in a blue collar household and I’ve always had what you might call the blue-collar attitude toward work, that is, it’s just a job and its purpose is to give you money to do what you really want to do. Hustle culture, devotion to career, finding meaning in employment—these things have always been nonsensical to me. This attitude, combined with working from home, works well to remind me of the purpose and limitations of my day job. It places it within its proper context, i.e., the household.

People who read this blog know that I also garden and dabble in woodworking and DIY. Rachel gardens even more than I do and bakes bread and cooks and shovels seven hundred pounds of rock and many, many more things. We were discussing this the other day and we concluded that we really are making some progress on turning our household into a productive—not merely consumptive—place.

Reframing my household as my workshop has helped rid me of the nagging feeling that I should be doing something else. That repairing the stove, for example, is an annoying distraction from my “real work.” And, strangely, I was never quite able to articulate what that “real work” was meant to be. It was always just the vague feeling that it was something else, something more important. (Arrogance is a besetting sin of mine.) But if my household is my workshop, then my real work is here, now. My real work includes all of this, from accounting to building raised beds to helping my daughter navigate adult problems.

It’s obvious, isn’t it? I’m not sure why it took a certain idea clicking into place to make me see the union of all these things, but that’s the curse of my addled mind.

After our mishap last weekend, we got the new part in today and now we have a working stove.

New video: Green Man’s Grotto, February 2024. A tour of our backyard garden at its worst, with a few ideas for the upcoming growing season.

Adam Kotsko, “The Information Environment: Toward a Deeper Enshittification Thesis”:

The near-total context collapse we are now experiencing was already baked into the workings of the Mosaic web browser and the dream of the “information age” that it encapsulates. Information does want to be free, as it turns out — free of context, free of pleasure, free of empathy, even free of comprehension. The effort to just cut to the chase and give us the information has actively destroyed the conditions for understanding and using that information in an intelligent way.

New video: DIY gone wrong

This morning I’ll be preparing the final tax returns for the beard products business I co-own with three friends. We had a decent year or two but it’s been effectively defunct for two years at this point. We’ve all been too busy and our interest waned over time.

Is there any way to get the “new post” page on the web interface to remember (instead of having to click the option every time) to show categories? @help

This is a great piece on Eminem’s boxes of rhyming notes. Via Austin Kleon’s Friday newsletter.