An old J channel on old vinyl siding is myoby Dick. I'm at obsession point now. Time to pull off siding and do it right.🙄

Feels like Mars light. Thanks to COVID pandemic, I have plenty of N95 masks.🙄

Evening all…… Hope your days been nice 😊

Saw pelicans over the Cape May Canal today, and had to share the news with the hand.

"I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars." — Walt Whitman

Founded on what now??

60 years ago I would read the Newark News (and other papers). Back then it was sifting through headlines, Dear Ann Landers, the comics, the sports pages, the classifieds, and, of course, the obits (Irish sports pages). I pretty much do the same here with BlueSky. Not a bad way to start the morn.

Every fookin' July morning, as good a test of long-term relationships as any....

Science teacher bloviating: "Nature never sucks, nature only blows!" The man was *pushed* out by the air pressure behind him. Gazillions of gas molecules randomly bouncing around and colliding with things is the heart of much of science. And why the "but survives" bit? The NYT sounds disappointed.

First tomato salad. Very simple: cherry tomatoes, basil, and garlic, all from the garden.

It's a Mike Tyson kinda start: Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.

Schrödinger's Cadaver

Trimming the garlic is one of my favorite gardening activities. You pull them out of dirt, and under the dirt is beauty.

Looking at our town's weekly arrest report, and it's as good a harbinger of economic downturn as any. What are people shoplifting? Diapers. Deodorant. Detergent. Talking $10-30 lifts l. Desperate times for so many.

I secretly love looking at other teachers' Amazon wish lists just to check if I am missing anything for the coming year. Amazing how similar classroom needs are. Also amazing how many teachers need to *buy* Lysol and Band-Aids using their own funds. Classrooms are festering Petri dishes....🙄

Our AC just gave up the ghost, or rather the fan seized, I can buy a new fan for a couple hundred. Turns out it was manufactured in November, 1987. Thinking maybe time to replace. 😬 Open to suggestions. (And yes, it uses Freon....)

I don't trifle with truffles nor AI.

My Dad wore his full military dress to a Dr. King speech in D.C. back in 1963. He was a Captain in the Marines, a fighter pilot, and a patriot.

Fookin' 90 degrees on the bay.

First jellyfish sting(s) out of the way--large one got both my left leg and top of my right foot. I swim underwater a lot--grateful it was my leg, not my face. (Pretty much an annual event.)

Who are the stern men sitting in fancy seats in suits at these World Cup games? Everybody else is having a blast and they're sitting in too much clothing looking far too formal. (When I was a kid I figured out early that I would rather be under the sun--so rare to see a real smile in a luxury box.)

Just a few months ago in these same parts. The edge of the bay was lined with blocks of ice the size of small boats.

AC saves live, I get it, but.... On a day like today folks would sit outside, see other people doing the same, chat about, well, the weather, and not move anymore more than their lips and whichever hand was holding the lemonade (or beer or whatever). Slowly. With purpose. With others.

I was sitting on a pile of jetty rocks when I saw a man below me trying to find a good place to let a "conch" go. His daughter was quite concerned, not quite trusting her Dad to get it right. I was several feet above him, feeling like a mountain goat. I'm *that* old guy now. Good place to be.

The ferry horn sounds about as loud as it gets today (we're about a mile away)--tells me we have a southern breeze with a lot of humidity. Good day to jump in the bay. (The beach will be impossibly crowded, but I don't plan on swimming on the beach.)

I picked up (and put back) a hermit crab ambling around the edge of he bay at low tide. I wonder what it's doing at this moment.

Gonna pretend BS is Reddit: Anybody out there have experience with ordering custom *paper* banners for classroom walls? Trying to avoid plastics/polyesters. (I'm looking at a local print shop just up the street; also going to check if the district has a large printer.)

Every coach can simply let the kids play, and wait to see if anything happens next. It's that simple.

World Cup dinner: Pirate Booty and Guinness.

This is also how people talked themselves into supporting ending affirmative action, targeting high profile Black administrators at universities, and banning Black theory and scholars from curricula.

lebron never let messi score on him

A reminder that the king can, actually, fuck off #England

explaining alive to a cucumber is hard. I tried

Trump just created Ticketmaster for the Strait of Hormuz

Yeah. A lot of this -- most? -- is absolutely willful ignorance. Especially when said about the South. Any good faith critics of this nature seem to confuse strategies with tactics. He built a toolkit of tactics specific to New York but his strategy is just functional, responsive governance.

*taps sign* Brother these are the moderates. Abolishing Ice, arms embargo on Israel, public option healthcare, bans on members of Congress being able to trade stocks, etc ARE the moderate stances! bsky.app/profile/mark...

It is vital you buy your small child (or the small child you know) that cheap, shitty watercolor set and that cheap, shitty colored pencil set and that cheap, shitty sketchbook Don't even wait for a reason, just bring it home one night That stuff is transformative in ways you've totally forgotten

This has to be AI.

I don’t hate my madness at all, it has some things that would make life inherently hard no matter what that I can roll with. I hate my entire society’s hatred of my madness!

In the end, the bay prevails

Our local jetty is breaking apart, but as its functional use diminishes, its aesthetic appeal improves.

Sunsets never grow old, and can never quite get captured.

A few weeks ago I found a tiny plastic Jesus in the crack of a sidewalk. A week or two later, I found a (not as tiny) plastic human leg on the same block. They are among us.

This student's tomato plant was left over from the spring of 2025, survived the summer in school, struggled through the winter on a west-facing windowsill, and this week we got this. The breath of two years of students in one, tiny tomato.

He built the wall!! Congrats.

Moments after sunset. We're truly spoiled on the west coast of New Jersey. Night after night after night. This one is from soon before the solstice.

This year's garlic so far: Rough spring--hot and dry with a surgery thrown in, so maybe a tad smaller than usual, but still fookin' amazing every time I pull one up.