Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.William Faulkner, Mosquitoes  Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals.How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different. Kurt Vonnegut, A … Continue reading Joie de vivre →

So I am not doing general homeschooling groups anymore. Just local ones where everyone in it has an honest face and address, and the kind of personal accountability that involves. Ever since the beginning of the pandemic, I have been noticing a curious phenomenon in homeschooling groups, which is an amped up presence of far-left … Continue reading Be careful in social media homeschooling groups now →

So I finally checked all the messages I receive from this blog, and found a litany of "Are you okay? We haven't heard anything from you in several weeks." I am so thankful for each and every one of you regular readers of my crazy dispatches. We have been busy with moving across the state … Continue reading Checking in →

Longtime followers know that I have a thing for tracking California utilities' (and regulators') failures to maintain their electricity transmission infrastructure at even a basic level. Despite all the crowing about climate change, California utilities using equipment is that is long, long past its useful life is one of the leading causes of wildfires. The … Continue reading Yet again: California utility may have caused the Bobcat fire →

Biden's campaign is, I think, the first presidential campaign to have ever been done with literally zero human interaction. He has billionaires dropping hundreds of millions of dollars a piece on television and online advertising in a handful of swing states, but he has absolutely no ground game to speak of. The campaign set up … Continue reading Biden’s campaign is shaping up to be an interesting social experiment →

When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there … Continue reading On “Cuties” and protecting children from toxic influences →

Disaster selfies. (Associated Press) It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.Ansel Adams Oh beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.George Carlin You think … Continue reading The land of fire and ice →

I had this idea to use vintage travel prints from around Florida as decor in our new mid-century modern house in South Florida (assuming everything works out, fingers crossed). In the process at looking at those, I found this picture of Palm Beach from 1905. How cool is this?

I am a big fan of Sally Clarkson and all she has to say about homeschooling, having a home-centered life in general, and that education should leave a child with a sense of enchantment about their world. I was pleasantly surprised to see she has a piece on Fox this morning about how her adult … Continue reading Sally Clarkson on Fox News today →