Good video about the remarkable Robert Owen, textile manufacturer, co-operative socialist, and founder of the utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana—which I’ll be visiting on Wednesday.

Grist mill at Spring Mill State Park. It’s our local state park and it’s easy to forget how beautiful a place it is.

A friend invited me to take what I wanted from a stack of old records he inherited. Some good stuff, especially a stack of Frank Sinatra. But the thing I love most is this absolutely metal cover art on a Jerry Falwell recording. I’ll throw out the record but I want to do something with this cover.

Purple tinged photograph of two men standing before a row of grave stones, with the album title “where are the dead?”

Made a pasta tree for Rachel to dry her homemade pasta.

Sixteen inch tall dowel attached to a circular base and with three smaller dowels passing through the upper portion

Darryl Cherney and Judi Bari with some top notch Earth First! tunes. (In this case, BLM refers to the Bureau of Land Management.)

We’ve seen a monarch butterfly several days this week and yesterday spotted a yellow swallowtail butterfly. Rachel also found a swallowtail caterpillar this week in addition to the four monarch caterpillars.

Once I get this next big batch of work to the auditors, I think I’ll take a day off. I want to plan a solo, local, day-long road trip. A combination of sites from Roadside America, historic cemeteries, and sites from this video (the narrator isn’t the best, bless him, but his videos are useful).

Sitting on my back porch during lunch break, I drifted to sleep while thinking about the back to the land movement—and was suddenly awakened by an incredibly loud, low-flying airplane. Yeah, that feels about right.

Check out all these tiny bees (not sure of species) with their full pollen sacs on this sunflower.

Sunflower with yellow petals and orange-yellow center with several small bees with pollen sacs filled with yellow pollen

The Narrow Road to the Deep North:

Finally, I sold my house, moving to the cottage of Sampū for a temporary stay. Upon the threshold of my old home, however, I wrote a linked verse of eight pieces and hung it on a wooden pillar. The starting piece was:

Behind this door
Now buried in deep grass,
A different generation will celebrate
The Festival of Dolls.

What did the next homeowner do with the paper containing a handwritten verse of Bashō?