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You’re right. I haven’t posted in a while, because it’s hard to know which stuff to post. So let this serve as a jump back into the posting waters, with some generalized updates:

• Both Sam and I are now employed. I am what you might call under-employed, but it works for now and forces some time organizing skills that are worth developing. Also led to an interview for a better job that I don’t have details on yet.
• The garden has gone through two frosts now, and we’ve pulled out most of the greenery. We have a funny system set up to hopefully ripen the tomatoes: a long pole stretched across a chair with the tomato vines draped across it. The tomatoes dangle down, hopefully turning red with a little more support. I wish I could speed up the process with some ethylene. Unfortunately, it’s not sold retail. For the garden plot, the hope is to switch to a sunnier locale next year, meaning that I need to pull out my herbs and sow a winter cover crop to make this plot more appealing. Luckily, I have extra wheat from my uncle to put down – it looks really attractive when it shoots up around Easter, and puts nitrogen back into the soil.
• Our road trip west was wonderful – and included cutting 21 mohawks! But get this: two of the mohawks turned out to be NEXT DOOR neighbors here in town. It was bizarre to meet 1000 miles away and find out we live so close in real life. It also included learning how to provide a variety of services in a pretty urban environment, including lots of bike repair for Sam, and general bartending for all of our friends. It is a great experience to realize how much we all like to fix things.
• I got to meet four bats up close through a volunteer position at the DBG. Wish I had brought the camera – but they were amazing even without it. A neat fact: only New World bats (microbats) echo-locate, and it makes them look like they’re silently screaming. I very much want a bat detector for Christmas, but understand if you’re not interested in dropping $300-$1800 for a hobby device.
• I’ve been tutoring calculus. It’s a good reminder of how much cooler calculus is than the math sections that come before it, and how much fun it is to share with someone else why we need calculus. I think I must be doing a better job than I expected.
• I have an obsession lately with reading and learning about America’s urban decay. That is to say, I am watching The Wire, reading Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and closely following the corruption and replacement of St. Louis’s police chief. Our current city really doesn’t have urban decay – it’s much too wealthy and restrictive for that kind of thing, but St. Louis has it in spades. I’d like to think that there are people in St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, the Bronx, and other major urban centers who are working to improve the education, opportunities, and lives of people who live in crumbling urban areas. I’d like to get back into more of that at some point, even if the overarching point of The Wire is that the situation is hopeless.
• We had a chance to show around an architect friend from Austin recently. Having visitors is fantastic for discovering the area in a new way – she had very different things she wanted to see compared to other visitors, and with the fall color, it was easy to oblige. This is a hint to those of you who might come visit – we are well outfitted to show you around and put you up.
• I’ll end by offering two interesting links that I think reflect my thoughts on the changing political landscape: a meticulously researched poll website called www.fivethirtyeight.com (referring to the exact number of electoral college votes) that gives some very well researched data on how various national and senate elections may go. The second is Flickr’s partnership with the Library of Congress. The set linked to in particular fascinates me. It is all shots of Americans during the Great Depression and just afterwards, showing the poverty, agriculture, industry and lives of citizens during the last period of serious economic turmoil. Flickr and the Library of Congress are asking individuals to tag the photos with any information you might have – if you can identify people, towns, crops, or other information it allows them to have a better understanding of what the Farm Security Administration was recording.

So there – an update – and a likely probability of more updates soon.

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