WFH frenzy

With Amanda out doing a couple of days of online training, I've decided to work from home for today at least. I am veritably overwhelmed by the array of things to do, things to ponder, things to read, people to write, etc. that present themselves to me. Some of them, admittedly, are things that I have hesitated to allocate weekend time to: for example, take my 40-year old mountain bike out to the solid waste management facility and "throw it into the bin for metal," as I have been directed to do by my bike-whisperer neighbor Russell. 

I resist doing it partially because I'm sad to do it and partially because I don't want to give up precious weekend time. Weekday time, however, feels less precious. Anything I do on a weekday can, if given the proper spin, be made to feel productive. Perhaps it's not the "highest and best use" of my time, as we sometimes say, but if I have a work-relevant podcast I am listening to, and if I'm out in the world thinking slightly differently than I might if at my desk at work, who's to say it's not productive in the strictest sense. I might even run into a client or prospect if I go to a store. It might give rise to thoughts that blossom into not just a blog post, but a Substack post (I really need to write one of those).

There's also actual work to be done.

Ask me again at the end of the day. At least I've gotten a blog post out early and can now check that box.

Missing hands

We had a guy come out and give us a quote on replacing some ducts back in the spring. They were ancient ducts, original to the house, even. Not surprisingly he also recommended we think about replacing the furnace too. I did a little light research and realized he was right: that would be a smart thing to do. So we greenlit the project, conceptually. I reached out to try to get it on the calendar.

Since June I've been back and forth with this salesperson, actually more back than forth. I call him, or email him, or text him, maybe he gets back to me and says he'll call me the next day, and then doesn't. Last week I called his employer and asked about him. Apparently he still worked there, but they didn't have any record of his interaction with me because, well, they have no CRM and are managed out of a paper bag. But 10 minutes after I called them he texted me and apologized and said he'd get back to me. He didn't.

It has been hot and the HVAC companies are busy, I guess. But still. I suspect this primarily has to do with the much-ballyhooed "shortage of contractors." They're all retiring, or so we've been hearing for a decade or so now. So it would only seem natural to let more people who would like to do this work into the country. It ain't rocket science. People want to live here and work. Let them.

A new wrinkle

Headed out for a bike ride around 11:30 Saturday morning. I know it sounds late for August, but it didn't look that hot our, upper 80s but not 90s. I've ridden in much hotter weather.

Then again, what with going north and then hosting a fundraiser, I hadn't ridden for a month. In any case, I got all geared up and lubed up and headed out, planning for an 18-20 minute ride. I huffed and I puffed up Curtis, the most imposing climb of the ride which has the misfortune of coming right at the beginning. Once I was up that, I figured I was in good shape.

Over at Estes and Airport, I rode around inside the new Aura/Booth complex, trying both to gauge occupancy (rising but we won't really be able to tell till the semester starts) and, more importantly, what will be occupying the pair of commercial spaces not yet filled up by a gym. A cafe? A brew pub? Those are the logical candidates. A bodega with features of one, the other, or both would be brilliant but I doubt there's sq ft for it. I also looked at an interior parking area behind the row of units facing onto Estes. There the Potemkin village comes to an abrupt end. It's a huge heat island of concrete and onto which many 10s if not 100 and change units back. Ugly as sin. 

But I digress as, I suppose, I did yesterday. My main point was that when I got maybe halfway up Hillsborough towards Calvander, a little shy of the middle school, my left calf cramped up pretty good. Turned out I was 5.2 miles from home. I got off, found some shade, pounded water mixed with Noon, ate a packet of yellow mustard (thanks Sherman for that tip) and then made for home, this time going through town for ease of hills. I stopped at Weaver Street to refill my 2nd water bottle and there ran into someone I hadn't seen maybe since high school (Christoph Nettesheim), though I've talked to him on the phone. He had to hustle, but not before I extracted from him a promise to come to our next reunion. I made it home.

The key moral here is, I think, that I need to plan and execute my rides a little better. I hadn't ridden my bike since June and my biking muscles were a little in retreat. Since I got the new Prius I haven't been riding my e-bike to work at all, which has been a valuable way to keep my biking legs doing at least a little something a couple of times a week. Plus I didn't prehydrate mindfully enough. Aging is not for slackers. 

New opportunities

In recent months I've been offered to chair a board I've been on for a long time. Also, the local Democratic Party is spinning up an interesting venture (a "service corps") to provide direct services to the community and it wants board members. In some ways I think the service corps a good idea. I even gave a little money towards the kick off. In others I'm less sure. I've been thinking about that this morning.

The big problems are with expected scope and systems. What can someone asking for help reasonably expect the Corps to do? Help with anything? Is it to be a privately-funded analog to NYC's 311 service, providing a guide or entry point to municipally-provided services? Or will it endeavor to help with just about anything, including services typically-provided by the private sector?

Either one of these is a massive undertaking. Is the goal to ultimately provide all of the services or primarily to build goodwill and let people know the Democratic Party is trying? To build internal, aligned connectivity.

How will it set guardrails around requests on risky, loaded issues? Like if someone calls in saying "my insurance company won't pay for gender-transition surgery for my 11-year old"? Or "I can't afford ammunition for the handgun I like to carry everywhere?" 

At some point in time it risks become a big, lossy overlay on the full set of governmental and non-governmental services, mostly a recipe for failure. But maybe the thing is that you don't expect petitioners to get everything solved for them, they just need to have a place to ask and someone on the other end of the line. And it becomes another place to aggregate constituent concerns, to listen and learn.

It's an interesting endeavor but it has the potential to become all-consuming and one where setting boundaries is very difficult.

Need for adventure?

Met with a client yesterday who has, this summer, gone to the summit of one mountain on one continent and also done a multi-day hiking trip around another mountain on another continent, on top of a business trip to Asia. When I had first run into her into the hallway in our office after the latter trip, he had said he was exhausted. Then both of us got busy for a week and change before out meeting and we hadn't caught up properly. I asked yesterday if how he was feeling now, did he feel like she'd had enough. He said that in fact he had already planned another expedition in Latin America.

On a professional level the thrust of my questioning was to suss out how much money he was going to need in retirement. Might his travel needs flatten out? The answer their was a clear no.

But, truth be told, I'm also thinking about myself. Mary and I just had a nice trip up the East Coast. It was great. We saw old friends and clients, much of whom are the same thing. We got some exercise, went up to the top of some (small) mountains. But it wasn't very adventurous.

At home, in the evening, I continue to ingest adventure content on YouTube, first and foremost Itchy Boots (where our Dutch heroine Noraly is about to pass for the last time out of Argentina as she rides her motorcycle north towards Alaska), but also other channels here and there too. It's entrancing, if sometimes slow going.

When I was younger I got out a bit. I went to some somewhat offbeat places in my 20s, mostly in Eastern Europe. But I could have done more. Sometimes I wish I had done so. By now I'm not all that adventurous and Mary definitely isn't, though she'll go a lot of places if I do the planning and, if she's been there before and she feels like she might get a good picture out of it, she'll go there again (hence her multiple trips to Juneau and Haines).

I think probably we should be breaking out a little more. I could even go on a trip or two without her, given her limited taste for ascending mountains.

But there's always the carbon to think about. YouTube for sure has a lower carbon footprint. And our back porch here in the morning is rather nice...

Early Rising

Over the last year or two I have been obscuring the face of my bedside clock and also the one in the bathroom before going to be because, if I wake up to pee and see that it's something like 5 am, it will probably be difficult for me to fall back asleep, and it's already too late for me to take the two Sonatas it takes to knock me out. Not knowing what time it is therefore helps me get back to sleep. My discipline lapsed last night and I forgot to cover the clock in the bathroom. I went in and discovered it was 4:45am.

Right about now I have legitimate things to be worried about. Mom seems to be unable to get out in front of medical issues that are making her unhappy, and she's not getting any younger. It makes me want to see her more. Meanwhile business is ramping up. Opportunities for actual business growth are presenting themselves, but the fact that I'm financially stable and with a 6-handle on the front of my age makes me think whether growing my business is the right thing for me to be doing.

On top of the basket case that is American public life in 2026. The Right, the Left dominate the headlines but nobody wants all of that really. Nor do they in China, I don't think. Or even, left to their own devices, in Russia.

Towards the end of our collective 60th birthday party at Sidetrack earlier in the summer I heard Will talking to someone about sleep and his issues with it. I should take the topic up with him again next time I see him.

Thankfully at least one source of minor one-time stress seems to be abating: our local drought. 4-6 weeks ago it seemed really bad. Now it appears to be moderating. It's not all done, but it's a comfort to see one thing back off.

Return to NAIRU

As I sometimes do, this week I looked at the tables of economic data in the back of the Economist. One of the most important relationships in economics for the last few decades has been that between inflation and unemployment. Ideally, both of them should be stable. The Fed has long had a stated goal of 2% inflation, and the idea has been to set interest rates to manage business cycles to keep inflation around there. When the economy is growing fast, tight labor markets drive up the cost of labor -- a big component in the cost of everything -- so banks raise rates to slow growth in order to drive unemployment up to the equilibrium rate of unemployment, the NAIRU for short ("non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment").

Recently we got the news that inflation had run above the target rate of 2% for 63 consecutive months. Leaving aside discussions of causes, which I'd say are manifold and contain amongst them a lot of COVID-driven accident compounded by policy mistakes on both sides -- amongst the biggest being ill-targeted stimulus from Biden and too-tight borders and excessive Fed jawboning from Trump (early 2018 rate cutting cycle was a mistake -- markets should have been left to correct and settle) -- that's a long time.

But the biggest mystery to me is why public discussion of what the NAIRU should be has vanished. It sounds like a really wonky discussion but it's not. When the debate first came on my radar, back in the mid-late 90s, consensus on what the NAIRU should be hovered around the 5.5-6% range. Unemployment went down to 4% in the height of the dot-com boom then topped out at 6.1% in August 2003, by which time the Fed was lowering rates. Admittedly, we now see that may have been a mistake because it created the credit conditions which created the financial crisis. Under Obama we climbed back from the brink, and by the time Trump was elected unemployment was well below 5%, where it has stayed with the exception of the short-lived COVID megaspike. 

I'm going deeper into the weeds than I intended to but my main point is that since late in Obama's days, we have tolerated unemployment much lower than we would have historically. It sounds cruel to want higher unemployment when everybody wants to work (in theory, except when we are complaining about our jobs, of course). Maybe we actually need to get back to managing to somewhat higher unemployment.

One more thing: it's important for there to be unemployment up and down the labor value chain. Highly compensated people need to be getting let go for a bunch of reasons, both economic and social (for the growth of empathy). We need businesses to fail. Career and business failures create the seeds of creativity and growth. We may see a lot of this as AI gets integrated into the economy. We may need empathy from and for many.

Nickled and Dimed in China

After The Economist gave it a good review and perhaps even put it on the magazine's best of the year list for 2025, I decided to check out Hu Anyan's I Deliver Parcels in Beijing. Mostly honestly because the book had been a bestseller in China, selling about 2 million copies.

The book narrates the author's 19 different jobs after leaving school in a tale of increasing downward mobility. He delivers parcels, he works in a bike store, he does graphic design for some weird zines, he is the proprietor of a clothing store in a mall. His compensation rarely seems to correspond with what I would have thought the work was worth. Through it all 95% of the time he's a nice guy to a fault, he doesn't assert himself, he lets himself get trampled on by bosses, coworkers, customers, just about anybody. Naturally sometimes he gets pissed off. Throughout there's a pronounced contrast between his extreme earnestness and the general shittiness of those around him.

He lives in crappy apartments. For periods he lives with his parents. He goes through punk rock periods (as one would) and periods of reading pretty heady books. Then he tries writing. Then he writes some more. Eventually he writes articles that go viral, which grow into this book. More than anything it reminds me of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, which itself didn't blow my mind when I read it back in 2014. And yet, we have to read these kinds of books, because they are not our lives.

 

 

House.os

For some time our dryer hasn't been getting our clothes as clean as it should. We've been thinking maybe we need a new dryer. Up in Maine Carol pointed out that it was probably our dryer vent which needed cleaning. Since I'm pretty sure that hasn't been done in some years, I'm betting she's right.

There are lots of books about home repair and maintenance but it would be very good to have something like an OS that would remind you when things need to be done and perhaps even call vendors. Hell, you could have an agentic OS that could interface with vendors and negotiate with them. You could develop standard interfaces which parameterize the services on offer (sweep chimney? Roto root? Trim hedge? Clean dryer vent?) and negotiate prices. There probably is one in development if not in production.

An interim step would be for entrepreneurs to locally run a something like an estate-manager-as-a-service business which provides to homeowner's an outsourced management of all physical plant maintenance functions. Again, this probably exists. If not, I know a couple of people who could spin one up in different locations.

The other side of this trade is already consolidating as contractors (electricians, HVAC people, painters, plumbers etc) retire and sell their businesses to private equity funds at retirement. Eventually some type of aggregation should happen from the purchaser side.

Then again, this would take away another opportunity for contact with humans from different walks of life than oneself, one of the great pleasures of commerce. And thereby deny both vendor and purchaser opportunities for growth. It would also deny parents the opportunity to teach children valuable lessons about entropy, attention, planning, work, self-reliance...

Afterglow

The caterer made little chicken and waffles thingies for our fundraiser the other night, and in the end there were all these chicken tenders leftover which have formed the basis of a number of meals since then. Yesterday's lunch and then dinner at our night-after party attended by eight. Today for lunch I explicitly opted not to eat them because I knew they'd be part of tonight's dinner. Then, around lunchtime I was walking down the hall towards the common area of our coworking space, and I espied a guy having Chik-Fil-A for lunch and instinctively yearned for some.

Jonathan and Sharon will soon be by to help us polish off the rest of the leftovers, except we have way more wine and beer than we need, probably enough for a Christmas party. Also desserts.

But because we had little to pair the chicken with I had to make a slaw. Then Mary bought some tomatoes to go with the plethora of garlic toasts that never got dressed with goat cheese and other stuff. So again we will have a surfeit of food.

D-Day

At or about 5:30 today, something like 160-180 people will descend on our house in excited anticipation of seeing our current and most recent governors at our house to help the former help the latter raise money for his US Senate run. And let there be no doubt, we need him to win.

Over the last few days I've run into a number of people who've said, "I'm looking forward to the event at your house." But then I check the RSVP list and don't find their names. Some of them may be blowing sunshine up my butt, but I suspect most of them just don't think it's important to RSVP. I even know people who like to show up and write checks because they don't want to get the emails and texts that come with handing over your contact details to the machine. All of this makes it rather difficult to predict how much food and wine to order. We set a high minimum for this event because we've demonstrated that we can fill the house with a lower minimum. Next time we may have to go higher yet.

And then, overnight an unanticipated storm blows in. All of our porch furniture got soaked. A screen got blown off one window and all the windows along the rear of the house -- washed on Saturday -- got wet, and some got crap blown onto them. Hopefully the grass in the park out back will be dry enough by 530 that people can park on it without mucking it up.

In any case, the farmers need the rain so we just need to give thanks and suck it up  

Ending Moravia

Moravia's The Conformist isn't doing it for me so I think I will put it down, about halfway in. There are just so many books on my shelves waiting to be read that I shouldn't allocate time and attention to something that fails to energize me.

There are certainly virtues to reading the "minor literature" of a period, the stuff that was heralded at the time but didn't stand the stern reductive force that the canon imposes over time: only a few books for any given time or place tend to command attention decades or centuries later, particularly in other lands. My Major Oral exam in my PhD program, which I designed myself (as is the custom) focused on the minor prose writers of the 1820s-1830s, people like Orest Somov, Vladimir Odoevsky, Ivan Lazhechnikov and some others whose names I've forgotten. For my dissertation I read people like Panaev, Mikhailov, Askochensky and others, also largely lost to the sands of time. 

You can learn a lot about a period from these books. What were people focused on and worried about at the time? What was their concept of human nature and what -- in the author's view -- made their contemporaries the way they are? 

Moravia focuses relentlessly on fascism. How could Italy -- and individual Italians -- let themselves become Fascists. Writing in late 40s-early 50s, the palette Moravia reaches for is a mix of Proust and Faust: traumas visited on the child by fucked up parents create aberrant behaviors, guilt and a desire to be like everyone else. That's about it.

Who knows, I may go back to it. I doubt it.

Books Are Magic

In Princeton Ted recommended that we listen to the Sound Exploder podcast on our drive back to NC. Since we were indeed a little tired of our current list of podcasts and had even -- you may be shocked to hear -- squabbled a little over listening to a little too much of mine (so we listened to more of Mary's for a while), we decided to take Ted's recommendation. We listened to Lindsay Buckingham on the early days of Fleetwood Mac and the crafting of their first hit, whose words I could mumble imprecisely but right now I can't recall for the life of me what song it was. Then we listened to Lindsay and Stevie Nicks at length about the backstory of their predecessor band to Fleetwood Mac and one of the songs on their first record, which Mary had never heard and doesn't really care to hear again, but we heard about their early days and time passed as the miles of Maryland's Eastern Shore disappeared in the rearview (Google had sent us down Route 13 to Annapolis to avoid construction).

Finally all of that ended and it came time for the episode I had picked out for me: Emma Straub talking about the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs. I had assumed that Straub was a member of the band, but she was in fact not but had first been Stephen Merritt's personal assistant and then traveled with band for a decade running their merch table while they toured in support of the triple album that cemented them into cultural history. Goes to show you how music connoisseurship declines once you have kids and a job.

Anyhoo, after Straub spent a decade touring with the band she published books and opened a bookstore (Books Are Magic) in Brooklyn that has become something of a thing and now has two branches, but will apparently open no more. I like that. I will need to visit it.

Not because I need books, mind you. I have a lot of them and one of the successes of my vacation was that I got rid of a couple of them, giving one to friends and leaving another in an AirBnb. I also did not stop and peruse the shelves of any of the excellent looking used book emporia in upper New England. 

I will get more books, however, in the fullness of time.

Mild overwhelm

Back in the saddle for a day with a very full list of tasks and meetings that will persist for a couple of weeks. Towards the end of yesterday we learned that our upcoming fundraiser with two well and rightly loved governors will be probably 40% larger than any we've had and has already well exceeded its seemingly ambitious fundraising target. Sadly, not too many of the attendees will be my close friends (thanks so much, guys), so this will be really a fundraiser rather than a party with friends. Hopefully there will be some food leftover and we can invite people the next night to clean up the remains, something that has evolved into a beloved tradition. I guess I just have to embrace the true fundraising aspect of it.

Meanwhile there are things I need to do out the wazoo at work. Clients to serve, notes to input, expenses to log. My new associate Amanda is off on vacation for a couple of weeks. 

To say nothing of the things that need doing around the house. And tennis that needs to be played. 

The doorbell just rang downstairs and I went to see who it was, since I saw no delivery van. It was a guy with long hair and a beard and a hardcover book in his right hand who said he was out advocating for peace on earth. I told him we supported his cause, but needed to get ready for work.

Home again

And so we have returned from our epic 3-week adventure in the north, which included:

• ~2500 miles of driving
• Sleeping in 9 different beds
• Meals with 13 different people or couples in 6 different states
• 2 instances of dodging World Cup games (including the final) using advanced knowledge of NJ infrastructure

All in all, a most successful trip, from which more stories may yet be gleaned. For today, I must focus on reentry to the land of the working, as my young associate Amanda heads off on her own two-week car trip extravaganza en famille tomorrow and I must make use of this single working day to synch up with her.

Also, it is Spirit Week and Alma Mater day at the office and I have to find something in school colors (CHHS, natch) to wear to the office.

More on the paragraph

As I often do, I brought some more serious books along with the espionage/mystery stuff with me on vacation. I started with the Ernaux I already mentioned, partially because I knew it was bite-sized and easily consumed in almost one sitting. Next on deck was Alberto Moravia's 1951 The Conformist, which I picked up used somewhere. Now that I poke about the internet a bit, I see that the book doesn't appear to have been received that well and isn't even considered to be Moravia's best, but probably survives in print because of attention brought to it by Bertolucci's 1970 film. But somebody translated it into English and it has survived so here I am, reading it. It's OK. I may come back to it later.

One noteworthy feature of the book is its rather lengthy paragraphs. I have railed a little on the prevalence of the one-sentence paragraph earlier on the blog. In Moravia paragraphs can easily run a page, a page and a half. My gut says that he displays a bias towards the long paragraph because it signals the high style and seriousness of modernism. Moravia's book is shot through with hints of Kafka and Proust if not Joyce, Faulkner and Broch, those other high priests of modernist interiority as signaled by paragraphs that at times strike the modern reader as veritably interminable.

I've also been dipping into the New Yorker archives here on vacation on my new tablet and have started reading the first 1961 Rachel Carson article that expanded into the 1962 book Silent Spring. Carson also prefers long paragraphs. Looking at them I can see obvious places where a modern editor would probably break them into new ones, on account of a shift in narratorial focus.

There are of course no hard and fast rules as to when paragraphs should begin and end. They are more or less supposed to contain units of focus or content. A bias towards longer paragraphs on the part of an author or (dare I say it) an era seems to indicate human subjects with greater integrative capabilities. To the extent that -- as many have said -- we live in an attention economy, the inability and/or wholesale disinclination to attend to things for longer hollows us out. When Our Robot Overlords finally arrive to conquer, they may discover there is nothing here to seize.

Laura Lippman

The thing about mysteries is, or rather are, that because many people enjoy reading them and many people secretly aspire to be writers, many try their hand at writing them. And there's a bit of a craft to it, a bunch of conventions to help one along. And so, it turns out, a pretty decent quantity of people get good at writing them, which makes the pleasant serendipity of finding one seemingly at random possible.

That's what happened to me with Laura Lippman. I picked up the first (for me -- Lady in the Lake, 2019) of her books at some kind of free location: maybe a little free library or in a coffee shop. I liked it well enough that I picked up a second one (What the Dead Know, 2007) in a used bookstore. I just finished that one and am delighted to have a new author I can look for in used bookstores or libraries, perhaps even a new bookstore, as there's no reason for me to wish to deny her revenue, though it seems like she is doing well enough so providing for her livelihood may be less important than supporting a used bookseller.

The Trifecta

Today I accomplished my summer vacation trifecta. On this trip I have

1. Eaten fried clams
2. Eaten a lobster roll
3. Swum in very cold mountain river water. In fact, not once but thrice in the same day

As of now I can pretty much go home now and/or devote the rest of vacation to delivering Mary to suitable photo locations and then walking back and forth getting in extra steps while Mary photographs things. Which is substantially what vacation is anyway.

But it is rare to accomplish all three in one trip.

Up in the holler, South Duxbury, VT

After a bunch of automotive adventures, some of which I may in the fullness of time recount, we find ourselves up a holler near the "town" of South Duxbury, Vermont in a little cabin. Maybe 450 square feet, all super-efficiently laid out. Really the stationary equivalent of a Winnebago/RV. As if to demonstrate this, we've already had one minor squabble about washing dishes. She was wrong, I was right.

Anyhoo, yesterday evening as we were sitting at the compact dinner table eating ravioli and an arugula salad with slivered almonds and strawberries when we heard a little bustling activity outside our window. Someone, it seemed, was trying to get into the shed in the back which holds the garbage cans and various other sundries. When I investigated it yesterday evening, the shed's doors were fasted by not one but three different latches, which clearly implied there were bears in the area.

And so, a bear. I thought I saw a black shape out there. We turned off all the lights so we could see better outside. The pathetic little flashlights on our phones were no help, but I did hear a growl.

A little chat with the AirBnb host confirmed that bears had been known the bustle about back there (hence the three locks) but that none had ever tried to get into the cabin.

Having spent a lot of time in Alaska, Mary has done an awful lot of internet research about bear attacks. She did some more. For my part, I got all traces of food out of the car out in the driveway, blasting first a little Hendrix and then (when I recalled the snacks in my tennis bag) Gang of Fours "Love like Anthrax" through our little portable speaker to keep the bears away. I returned safely.

Happening

In between mystery novels I just read through Annie Ernaux's Happening, a 2000 memoir of her 1963 abortion. 

One wouldn't think Ernaux would be as distinctive as she is. Maybe plenty of women have written unsparing narratives of their own abortions and I just haven't come across them because I'm a guy. Maybe there are others who are gimlet-eyed observers of the simple of time, changes in mores and how a storyteller can refract and embody it all.

But I don't know them. All too often the quest for distinctiveness forces authors and artists to reach for some kind of quirk instead of just being themselves on the page, canvas or whatever. Ernaux skips all that and just does what she has to do. She feels, thinks and remembers deeply and lays it out for the reader. I'll keep reading her.

If only her books were a little longer.