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There are basically three stories here

Spent the day sweating. I was in my office, and so it was only a low-grade sweat. Nevertheless, the 10 or so feet of elevation difference from the ground floor to the second floor is important in terms of the sun. That extra .2 degrees is a real nudge on the ol’ Endothermic Me Meter. I think we got up to 98 degrees today. I find I could do more of the things I need to do outside if I could get outside. It was a productive time inside, though.

I devoted the day to steps that will bring my online class into a real-world classroom. I have taught nine sections of it online, and feel confident in saying this one works well as an online class. Not all courses do, but that’s OK. The university is leaping into more online spaces. We wanted to put the class about digital media back in the classroom.

All of the material is there. It is a well designed class. (One of my colleagues built this class and she has been very kind and generous of her time and thoughts and resources and I’m just trying to do it well and make the smallest changes necessary from time to time, just for relevance. I like the class, and when I compliment it, I am complimenting her work. She certainly deserves the acknowledgement.) But I have to bring online order into a real world chaos. Or vice versa. This is how that’s going.

I have printed out a general calendar to keep track of the happenings in the course. I started by highlighting the days of the class, marking the beginning of the term, the final, and dates it will meet. I counted the weeks. I printed another calendar, one for last spring, so I could write out the proper sequence of events. This rough draft calendar helps to visualize all of the moving parts. I did this because it occurred to me, just last night, how much of the class will shake out in the classroom. I’ll take elements from the online version that would feel vestigial in a classroom and turn them into big talking points. We also have prepped lectures, reading materials, and several long videos we’ll watch over the semester. The elaborate, messy, and ultimately redundant calendar system helped me bring it all into order today. Now all I have to do in that class is make sure all of the assignment dates on Canvas make sense. (While it is an in-person class we are also encouraged to use Canvas.) I have to consider the finalized version of the module setup in Canvas. And I have to update the lectures. That’s all I have to do.

I also made a spreadsheet for the lectures, so that I might keep track of my progress with them over the course of the term. I prepped up the first lecture today, too. Fourteen more weeks of that to go.

For my other classes, I have to finish polishing one class. I made a To Do list today and that class only has three items on the list. My final class has one item. It says: Everything.

So I am caught up on everything except work, which is where I am behind.

In the evening, I went outside, just to cool down. It helped.

Let me tell you what I did last night. We watched Sunday’s stage of the Tour de France Femmes, completing the nine-day event. No surprises there, but some nice racing and the strongest rider won. My lovely bride announced she was going upstairs, which meant it was time for me to do the dishes. We had spaghetti, which was tasty, and I had a frying pan, the great big pot, and various complementary things to clean. I cleaned them with varying degrees of success. I stepped outside to retrieve the garbage can which, having fulfilled its weekly chore, deserved a happy return to the normal resting place.

Then I pulled out one of those new tape measures I bought this weekend. You have to put a little thought into what the first task will be. A stereo needs a great first song, the first movie you call up needs to be worthwhile, and tools need a meaningful first effort. And so I measured the parts of a fly rod that my father-in-law left with us on his recent visit. And, now, every time I pull out that tape measure I’ll think of that.

And probably also this. That’s a silly thing. Tape measures don’t need nostalgic firsts.

Anyway, he left this rod here and it needed to be safely stored and tonight was the night I was determined to find which bin in the basement had all of my old poster tubes. It took some doing, but I did. And wouldn’t you know it? Each one was about two inches too short.

I figured I would make do. Brought them upstairs, set about making do and found he’d also left the actual tube in which fly rods are stored. Excuse me, the fly rod carrier. And give fly fishers this: they have a strong accessory game. Inside the tub was a little cloth roll that held the actual parts of the rod. Once filled, you slide that into the tube, then put on the classy aluminum cap. The carrier is a rich dark green and the cap looks bronze and the whole thing looks like it should be in The Study.

I left this one in our library.

Some magic happened in the basement. I discovered a computer monitor I’d forgotten I had. (Haven’t we all been there? Forgetting high end computer equipment for years at a time? I know I have. How many monitors do I have? If I knew that I wouldn’t be rediscovering them, now, would I? Also, three, if you don’t count the laptop monitor.) I can do something with this, I thought. And I’ll only need to find an HDMI cable. Wouldn’t you know it, right there, in that same bin, there was an HDMI cable. These things could have stayed there, but they are meant to be used, and so they would come upstairs. But that was only the beginning! I found a few empty storage bins, and now I have started a stack of empty storage bins. And this is the beginning of reorganizing that corner of the basement. One of those empty bins just had bubble wrap in it from the last move. Couldn’t throw that away, so it stayed there. But now I wanted an empty bin. I also wanted the bubble wrap, so I set about looking for somewhere to put it and, wouldn’t you know it, at the center of the wads of bubble wrap was a plastic bag. So I laid out the bubble wrap. Then I flattened the bubble wrap.

I did not iron the bubble wrap. That’d be ridiculous. Also, it would melt.

Wouldn’t it?

Hang on.

Yeah, bubble wrap melts under the iron. Don’t do that.

So I smoothed it out with my hands, and then I folded it over. Then I stuffed the smoothed out, folded over bubble wrap into that bag and put the bag in a cabinet, where it will sit until we need to wrap something, or someone else needs bubble wrap, or I think of a better use for that cabinet.

This is momentum. Because before and after the bubble wrap diversion I found the three empty bins, I was able to re-sort a few things on shelves and I’ll remember none of this the next time the mood strikes, in four months.

Also, I changed the air filter.

Back upstairs, I cleaned the rando cabinet. Our refrigerator sits inside the wall, basically, and there are two cabinets above the fridge — one of them is famously for Poseidon) — and then there’s a vertical cabinet that holds a lot of cookbooks, but may soon get re-purposed. And below that there’s the cabinet that is the junk drawer of cabinets. It holds our flashlights, 1/64ths of the North American supply of batteries, some tools, some cat treats, and so on. It is the so on that’s the problem. I want one of those new tape measures to stay in that cabinet, with those tools. These are the basics. Two screwdriver sets, a cheaper hammer, some stuff that came with furniture, etc. They live there so we don’t have to fumble about the garage for a small indoors project. And so you can see where all of this is going. Everything is getting reorganized. Well, it is one day. Last night a handful of things that had landed in there for no reason got thrown away. I prioritized the cabinet based on assumed frequency of need. Most important things going on the top shelf and descending from there. It was not done to the degree of my recent linen closet re-organization, but I was able to find three percent more shelf space, and the tape measure or the cat snacks won’t fall out the next time we open the door.

And, thus, I am caught up on everything except work, which is where I am behind. But I have a growing awareness of that behindedness, and also some time to remedy the situation. Not much, so I must step into the task with some alacrity, but time.

I have all of the material in place for two of my three classes. I’ll probably need to add a bit more to the third class. I also need to sort some things out. That scheduling is important and busy work and, experience has shown me, one prone to overthinking. Fortunately, I never do anything of the sort. But I might start! I might step into overthinking with some alacrity.

That’s how I usually do it. The overthinking, I mean.

I also find myself in the healthy activity of dreaming about things I’d like to do. Things I want to do when the weather breaks. When there’s less to do. When I’m not busy. When I have six days in a row of not doing other things when it isn’t almost 100 degrees. But there will always be obligations and obstacles. I am thinking about the things I’ll do after my next travel trip, things I want to do on the site, but should in no way start now because, see above.

And this, friends, is how you find yourself looking into the etymology of “marcescent.” Probably Latin, but definitely also proto-Italian, or Lithuanian. Possibly Ukranian. Could be Greek. As for the word itself, look it up.

I read somewhere recently that a person should have five hobbies. This hipster think piece of Instagram-quality was implying you’d be more well-rounded, or you could keep them fresh — a new task for every night of the week! — or these things could be seasonal. So I invite you to count the things that are your active hobbies. This does not include work, sleep, family responsibilities, etc.

How many did you get?

Can you see your way into finding the time to adding that third or fourth or fifth hobby? Pretty tricky, right? I would say I have four and practice at three of them. I wonder where the fourth or fifth hobby would go. In this line of reasoning it is something like “At least one of your hobbies takes up too much of your time and gets in the way of other hobbies.”

Well, OK, I do read a lot. Got me there.

I’d like to do more with the website, which has been a state of catch-up since May. But I’m caught up. Now school work time is here. No hard feelings; work must be done. It is happy work, generally speaking.

Can’t ride less. I need to ride more! Fulfilling that hobby’s true ambition would get in the way of other hobbies. Also, there are things I need to build. Critically, there are things I need to finish building. The story of me can’t be the half-finished guy, or the ha-fin-gu, if you will.

That loosely covers the present hobbies, without digressing into their ROI, and says nothing about adding another.

Maybe it was a TikTok-quality piece. Typing this out it doesn’t seem to rise to the caliber of rigor and taste that an Instagram-quality piece would demand. It has the necessary saccharine vibes and FOMO necessary, but challenging you to pick up hobbies that TikTok element of lemmings to it. Who cares how many hobbies you have? Have one. Have 14. Be as good or as bad at them as you like. Pour exactly the right amount of time and money into it as you require. Get out of them exactly what you need.

I had a brief chat with the linguist and author Gretchen McCulloch recently when she was talking about what she called “the great joys” in realizing that she can just go learn to do a new thing once in a while. Take a weekly class for a bit, meet new people, and get, as she called it “medium proficient” at the thing.

This made me smile. I often tell students one of the perks of my job is staying in touch with former students (the one that choose to do so) because it is gratifying to see them develop interests of their own, not what the state or their parents or this curriculum insisted on. So now I have former students who are running for local office, one just received a prominent national AI innovation award (when he isn’t lawyering), softball, travel volleyball tournaments, wandering abroad, hiking close to home, and of course they spend their time with family, have side hustles, or just try new things. I talk about one former student in particular in class too, because it’s not all about curriculum. You want that Paper in college, but my point is always that there’s much, much more to it than that. This of course applies to the rest of life, too. I’m writing about those people and the rest of you and myself, too.

What do we want to do with our time? It’s not a selfish question.

I diverged at some great length into a great deal of text about Type 1 and Type 2 fun. After I deleted that I spent some time writing three more paragraphs about it, that time it was grounded in the idea of how you might find an additional hobby. There are plenty of opportunity and this should be easy, is what I was saying. First you have to define what you want — learn a process, gain a product, make more friends, try the thing that has always astounded you? You can work on these questions for a while.

I’m beginning to see, just now, where my days go.

Speaking of reading and learning new things, we return now to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second installment in his Revolutionary War trilogy. It’s excellent. Highly recommended.

From time to time I look up the people he’s writing about. No way in the world you’ve ever come across this young man’s name. And it stands out well enough that we should be able to find him online despite the mists of time.

By the time young Barnardous Swartout Jr. played his part in the largest drama of his life at the ripe old age of 16, at least one branch of his family had been in the colonies for four generations. His great-grandfather made the trip over from the Netherlands sometime before 1660. They’d all lived and died in New York, as did Barnardous. The 2nd New York regiment was a part of the invasion of Canada, at Valcour Island, and participated in the battle of Saratoga and Monmouth, which is where we meet him. They were also at Yorktown. How many of those Swartout was at remains beyond me at the moment. We do know he survived the war. He is buried in Sleepy Hollow. I wonder if he knew of Washington Irving’s tale, which was published just four years before he died. I wonder if Sleepy Hollow itself had strong feelings about it at the time.

Barnardus was married the same year as this battle. He and his wife, Mary, had 13 children, at least 11 of which survived into adulthood. He becomes a merchant, and apparently a successful one. He was also a local tax collector, and otherwise paid close attention to politics. He had farmland on the Hudson. If you’ve ever driven over the Cuomo or Tappane Zee bridges you’ve looked down upon his land, some 300+ acres of what he knew as woods, orchards, pastures and meadows. He becomes the sort of local fixture that when other property is written about in the newspapers of the day his place is mentioned as a fixed point. He was also a charter member of The Society of the Cincinnati. He had a two-floor home, multiple barns, and good livestock when he died in 1824.

If you click around enough you can see some of his descendants beginning to move around. I looked at the grandchildren he might have known, mathematically at least. One, was a housewife in Brooklyn, who died at 71. Another stayed in Sleepy Hollow. One served in the navy and two in the army, one of whom died of an illness during the Civil War. Two of his grandchildren survived into the 20th century. (There’s one man, Steuben Jr., that did not know his grandfather, Barnardus, but did live long enough to read about the horrors of World War I.) Some lived in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa. Some had large families themselves; others, perhaps did not. Maybe having that many brothers and sisters was enough. (Online record caveats also apply.) They were Masons, Quakers, they had spiritual epitaphs, they were American. If there had only been a reference in here to a canal this man’s family would have been a complete reference to early white U.S. history.

That family name is also still in New York. Hopefully they’re in good order.

books / history / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
6
Aug 26

You know, those kinds of days

You know how, some days, you get a lot of work done? Yesterday wasn’t one of those days. You know how, though, on some days, you get some stuff done and you figure it’ll pay off later on? Maybe yesterday was one of those days. You know how, some days, you just wind up cleaning things instead of doing work. Yesterday was one of those days.

You know how, sometimes, you think “I am going to do this chore tomorrow,” and you go to bed feeling enthusiastic about it, almost already patting yourself on the back for the work you’re going to do tomorrow, but then you don’t really feel the same way about that the next day?

Just me? OK then.

Yesterday I cleaned my desk, which was threatening to encircle and collapse upon me. A few small things got thrown away. Momentum builders, I thought, with a handful of short runs to toss things into a garbage can. Also, I had some cords and cables which have been vexxing me. Vexxing me, I say. I am vexxed. Two Xs. Or, I have been. Now some of them are out of site, and I am merely vexed.

Also, I cleaned my phone off, which desperately needed some attention, moving some videos to an external drive gave me almost 40 GB of space back. Now my phone feels lighter, somehow?

While those files were transferring, and while I was moving cables, I cleaned beneath part of my desk, too. Beneath my desk is a tennis ball, which I bat around with the cats occasionally, and a stool I made in a 7th grade shop class. I wonder if any of my old classmates still have theirs.

We also had some weather, which turned into threats of threatening weather, which turned into another realization that we’ve done terrible damage to our weather forecasting abilities in the last 20 months. Meanwhile, we had our first generator test yesterday. It fired up and ran for five minutes and then turned itself off, exactly as intended. You can hear it in the house. It isn’t overbearing, but you know it is running. Given the number of lawn mowers and leaf blowers we have around us, it’ll blend in soon enough.

By the time all of that was done, and I was ready to work, it was time to knock off for the day. So I did. Tomorrow, then, I thought to myself, feeling enthusiastic about it, almost already patting myself on the back for work I’ll be doing tomorrow. Tomorrow was today. Those pats were unearned.

I had a meeting scheduled this morning, my first official work thing of the new school year, but it was canceled and will be rescheduled for September. I like how this is starting off.

Anyway, let’s return to the site’s most popular weekly feature, the regular check in with the kitties.

Despite the cleaning, I can never get ride of this box. It has been claimed by the management of this domicile. (Though we do need to hang the cool thing that is inside the box. Let me add that back to the list …)

There’s a ledge on our stairs, and I love it when the cats remember it is there. This week it has been a spot for Phoebe.

Last night my lovely bride moved an empty laundry basket, just so it wouldn’t be underfoot. This simple effort stirred Poseidon and brought him across the room to inspect the procedure. The baskets are his, I guess. Especially when they have laundry in them.

Those towels were fresh out of the dryer, so you can understand. (As I write this he is sitting in my closet, on a pile of clothes. They, too, were clean before he found them. I found this out because I was doing laundry at the time.) So he likes clothes.

But he also enjoys his private time, in his cabinet above the refrigerator.

And, yes, I leave a cabinet empty for the cat. I also put a blanket in there so he could be cozy. He sits there, happy as can be, of his own choice or if we are trying to keep him away from dinner.

So the cats are doing just fine, as you can tell. Except Phoebe needs a belly rub right now. I’ll do that, and pat myself on the back, feeling enthusiastic about the effort.

We return to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. It is such a terrific book and I can’t encourage you enough to get this if you haven’t already. I am into 1778 now and am trying to decide if I want to read more and faster, because it is such a nice read, or if I want to slow down because I’m through the halfway point and I’d like to delay the inevitable end. It’s the kind of book.

Anyway, the Carlisle Peace Commission has landed, and the British are packing up to leave Philadelphia and this one little tidbit gets back to that idea of public sentiment, which, somewhere in 1777, shifted rather demonstrably. And go figure. War at home, difficulties on the domestic economic front, the occasional story or propaganda about a slaughter here or a massacre there. By the time these guys showed up, the only real peace overtures that Lord North and King George offered in the revolution) everyone had picked a side. You were almost certainly a patriot ready for independence or you were strictly a loyalist and, at this point, you might be considering Canada, the islands, or the jolly ol’ isle as a better alternative. Opinions and jaws were set.

In part that’s why the British were leaving Philadelphia. There are a lot of tactical considerations, but everyone that knew what they were looking at and could see it clearly seems to have realized there were difficult days ahead for the redcoats. So it was back to New York. Several thousand loyalists and deserters would take the trek, too. The women and children by see, the rest overland. It was a huge logistical move.

Let’s look at some of the people involved here. Joseph Reed was born into a family of means. He studied law. He becomes a founding father, a soldier, an aide-de-camp to Washington. At one point he was accused of treason in the press. He was also big into Pennsylvania politics, of course. (Those two things are not related.) He was due to be returned to the congress, but his health betrayed him. He died at just 43 years old.

William Henry Drayton gives us that amazing quote. He was a founding father from South Carolina, not to be confused with the later Congressman William Drayton (no Henry as a middle name) who would have been a toddler toddler at the time of the Peace Commission. (The Draytons were cousins.) William Henry Drayton, an ambitious rice plantation owner of South Carolina was a big voice in the lowcountry politics of his time. He gets overlooked a lot, but he was one of the people who thought Independence Day should be marked with fireworks. He also commanded a frigate, served as a judge, wrote part of Carolina’s 1778 constitution and was in the Continental Congress from 1778 until his death the next year at just 37 years old. He was a polemicist, a bomb thrower, and a big, loud, quarrelsome part of that body, which might help explain the attitude that came with that message to Carlisle.

Carlisle is Frederick Howard, the 5th Earl of Carlisle. He ran that particular effort, which found itself ill-informed, ill-timed, and ultimately critical of how the British government was handling this whole thing. And here we can get into the dangerous waters of trying to understand the many attitudes of people who’ve come long before us. But let us just stay general enough and say that King George and his prime minister, Lord North, had their critics at home. While the king was more or less insulated from that, it did exist in some considerable sort of which. For our purposes, it was loud enough to be remembered 250 years later. The British opposition saw France gearing up and worried about the French allies, Spain. The problem with a big empire and a big government is a lot of voices and a lot of needs and a lot of people pulling in different directions and what is a king to do? Well, we’ll send these three guys to try to patch things up.

Dear reader, I hope this does not come as a surprise to you, but they were unsuccessful in those efforts. This reconciliation offering was somewhat comparable to where the colonies started the process, but on this side of the ocean that was now off the table.

Howard was a British statesman, diplomat and author. When this little job failed, he wasn’t blamed, though he thought. In fact, he was made the viceroyalty of Ireland, but that might not have been the most plum assignment given larger global events. William Eden was there, too, a high ranking cabinet member, a member of parliament, a spymaster. Joining them was Commodore George Johnstone, a naval officer who had also served during the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War. He was a politician, a member of parliament, a director of the East India Company, and he’d previously been the governor of West Florida from 1763 until 1767. It was Johnstone who was rumored to be offering bribes. Despite these three men, and the British Royal Navy behind them, and the rumors of bribes and whatever else, they could not succeed. They appealed to Congress, but were rebuffed. They appealed to the people, with no more luck.

Some historians point out the value in what the Carlisle Commission was bringing to the peace table, while others have focused on the idea that turning the Congress turning them away was the last obstacle to realizing the American project, even if, as others have argued, Howard, Eden and Johnstone had very little chance of success, as they seemed to think themselves. Perhaps, as some have argued, they were sent, and arrived, too late, to have any real material impact. Soon after, the British efforts in North America ground to a halt for months and the revolutionaries had to interpret that as best they can, perhaps they were leaving, distracted, or done.

Or perhaps, as Andrey Kuchkovskiy wrote in studying the commissioners themselves:

The Carlisle Peace Commission suffered from poor timing and a lack of political and military support. While the public supported their efforts, the officials initially did not, and by the end of their time in the colonies, even the commissioners expressed doubt about achieving peace. Additionally, the expansion of the war after France allied with
the Americans dramatically undercut the commissioners’ efforts. Had the commissioners remained in the colonies to pursue peace, or potentially renewed their conciliatory efforts with a new commission, they could have arguably achieved a possible agreement …

They arrived in the early summer, they departed in early fall. The French were sailing for Boston. The war would continue.

And so does this book. It’s terrific!

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3
Aug 26

This covered more ground than anticipated

It was oppressively muggy — central Arkansas muggy — last night. Also it rained. Rained all night. Rained into the morning. Thunder was my alarm clock. The storm front blew away mid-morning. We’ve been in triple digits with the heat index into the early evening. I’ve sat here to sweat.

I spent several hours doing work stuff today. Don’t you want to know about it? I had to find the notebook that held the fall 2025 notes for a class I’m teaching again. I figured it was in one of three places, and I found it in the third place: a bookcase. Also, there were two notes books. So many notes I made for myself! I’d forgotten that.

When last this class met it was a twice-a-week class. This fall it will meet once a week. So the bulk of my day was in starting the reorganization process. Moving things around, renaming modules. Oh, and I updated this document I maintain with pages and pages of university resources. And I updated the syllabus for the course. It’s funny: some parts of working through all of those details can be easy, and some parts seem like a huge effort.

Apply that nonsensical observation for most of my days for the next five or six weeks.

Tomorrow I’m going to restructure the outline of that class. Hopefully that will be done by Wednesday. The rest of the week will be spent in making sure the work works right for both the style, and schedule, of this new version of the class. And I need to figure out how I’ll update the old slides in an efficient way.

That, I think, will be solved by some inspired bit of epiphany. Or I’ll just do it the long way 15 times in the next few months. Copying and pasting is such a bother, innit?

Also, I have to work on two other classes. I suspect I’ll begin one of those next week. The good news is that they aren’t starting from scratch. I’ll just agonize over them as if they are.

There’s a new look to the site, and if you go to the front page you can see it now. It starts like this, the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa.

Go ahead and look. That link will go to a new tab. Give it 60 seconds of zen. This page will be here when you’re ready.

The new idea for the front page is to update those images each month. If I don’t mess that up I have front page updates prepped to take us into next June. If I don’t mess it up.

I also updated the mobile version of the site. Just some easy text corrections and changing a few buttons that needed changing. Still not sure why it looks as intended on a phone, but broken in a computer browser. That’s an issue for another day. I wonder how many times I’ve said that about this issue.

And, of course, because the first of the month was this weekend I also did all of my regular monthly computer updates, changing various files, updating spreadsheets, cleaning up files, and so on. It’s not the most fun thing to write about, but this is is an old machine now, and it’s necessary. Fortunately these are easy chores.

Do you know that feeling when you learn something new and you just have to tell someone about it? I learned this yesterday and I have to tell people about it. Admittedly, I like this tale more than anyone else will, but I have that feeling, and so now you get to learn about this too. And for that we must return to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy.

When the Augusta’s ammunition and gunpowder burned off the explosion was heard more than 50 miles away. The vessel’s remains sat in the water for about 90 years, a sometimes navigational hazard. I found a great 2015 lecture that talks about the ship, recovering the vessel’s remains, a tourist attraction, scavengers, and then …

That appeals to me in more ways than one. I’d just like to make things and then point to them later and say “That came from …” and the rest of that sentence not be “the lumber yard.” You can see some better photos of the HMS Augusta furniture and paneling from the DAR themselves.

Here’s one other, unrelated, Revolutionary War note for the day. Just 250 years and one day ago, John Adams wrote to Richard Cranch, the colonial watchmaker, clockmaker, and repairman of Boston. He talks about the inoculations against smallpox and a few other events of the day. But also this.

You mention the Exultation at a Declaration of Independence. Is not the Change We have seen astonishing? Would any Man, two Years ago have believed it possible, to accomplish such an Alteration in the Prejudices, Passions, Sentiments, and Principles of these thirteen little States as to make every one of them completely republican, and to make them own it? Idolatry to Monarchs, and servility to Aristocratical Pride, was never so totally eradicated, from so many Minds in so short a Time.

I’ve rambled on a bit, as it turns out, a few times recently about the public moods of those heady, dangerous, uncertain days. It’s not as if they had a bunch of surveys in the field to gauge things on the home front, or beyond their own social circles. They just knew what they knew, heard, read, and felt as they did. But there’s the great John Adams, certain of a sea change all the same.

It’s a remarkable kind of public politics, really. A revolution of its own, perhaps. Gauging the public interest like that wouldn’t have mattered quite the same way to a monarch. And it matters, of course, more and more now. Also, we still find the pros guessing at it often as not.

Cranch and Adams had been friends for decades. It was the watchmaker that introduced Adams to his future wife, Abigail.

I guess you could say, at both points, Adams knew what time it was.

Cranch married Abigail’s sister, so they were all related. And while the couples remained close, John kept his friend at arm’s length over money-making schemes. Cranch was not lucky in business. But, he served in the Massachusetts legislature, and was a trial court judge for almost 30 years. He and his wife died within a day of one another. He was apparently a forgotten man until modern historians wrote about him in just the last few years. His son became a federal judge in D.C. Two of his grandchildren became a painter and a minister. One of Cranch’s great-grandchildren was a man named Henry Ware Eliot, who became president of a brick making operation in St. Louis. And this is how history never ceases to astonish me. This man, the great-grandson of a Revolutionary War era man, died in 1919. Henry Ware Eliot, by the way, was also the father of T.S. Eliot.

I didn’t see that coming, either.

I had a nice ride Saturday evening. My lovely bride was off having a girls’ day and by the time I set out I had most of the roads all to myself. It’s quite lovely to be out when most everyone is already where they need to be. I did the river ride, which is the second route we designed for ourselves when we moved here in 2023. We haven’t done it in a good long while because a bridge has been closed since July of last year and there’s a sad and spooky part after that, but the road is opened once again.

Just behind me in that photo is where that new asphalt begins. If they’d just paved down another 100 feet or so (and, again, this road was closed for a year, they had time) they could have repaired the biggest mess of potholes you can find in the county.

When you get to the bridge it has that new overpass smell.

New overpasses have smells. Turns out it is not a pleasant smell, but surely it will descend upon the highway below it.

On the other side of the overpass we regained a pleasant little downhill, and a stretch of land that gives you three or four houses on one side, and a cornfield on the other. There is an intersection soon after that, so it was only ever a closure effecting about 1.5 miles, but still, it’s nice to have that road back. This corn is a definite change of pace.

From there you go up a little hill, through more fields, past the famous local artist, respectfully cruise by a memorial, and sprint through a tree canopy so you can get to an access road that’s a half-mile, tree covered stretch of brand new asphalt. A car followed me down that road, but the driver stayed respectfully behind me while I tapped out something in the 20 mph range. After that, back off the access road, another overpass, more trees, watch out for deer, go as fast as you can by the house where the people always yell, and then into the wind.

If I go the way of our designed route I would eventually get to a four-way stop and go straight, but last year the county made a shambles of that stretch of road. If I turn to the right I can stretch this ride. The weather was nice, I was not pressed for time, and so I went that longer way, making my road selection as it suited my whim and wind direction.I stunk it up on the one real hill on the route, as usual. Twice, though, I broke 34 mph on a flat stretch. Haven’t done that recently.

Maybe I’ll do it again!

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31
Jul 26

Fastest July ever

Happy weekend! I’m making it a long one. There was work, a little, but then my lovely bride and I decided to sit down and read books. First we read inside. Later, we read in the backyard. We know how to party.

The electricians came back to finish the install of the generator. Took them part of a third day to get it done, but at least this time it wasn’t 108 degrees outside. They’ve completed their tasks. Nice guys, unfortunately their shop is a long way away, or I’d call them our local electricians. Maybe they still will be.

And so we have a generator. The local inspector has to come out and inspect all of the gas and the electrical work, and hopefully that will be painless. Our electricians seemed to know what they were doing. The various gas people who’d come out seemed to know what they were doing. I’m sure it’ll all look good.

This is how it works. If the power goes out, the system realizes it, and the generator fires up 10 seconds later. When the power comes back on, the generator set up realizes that, and turns itself off. Our job is to keep the air vents cleared, schedule annual maintenance, and, if the generator has to run for long stretches of time, check the oil.

Since we’ve been in the house the power has gone out three times. Once for about three hours, once for slightly longer. The first time we weren’t home, so I don’t know those details. Always in the back of my mind, though, this is the first time in my life that I’ve not lived on a priority grid — near a hospital or nursing home — and it could take a while to have the power restored if there’s a widespread outage. The neighbors talk about a big storm that came through and famously left them without power for a week. And that’s why we, and the neighbors, both have generators now.

Also, we got a shutter fixed today. Somehow some wind got in behind one, bent it over from the top down, and pulled the two top screws out of the siding. It just dangled there for a few days. It’s too far to reach via ladder alone. Also that roof is steep. Also, once in a while I get the impression that I am not as young and as bulletproof as I used to be. Also, that angle.

Anyway, a guy shimmied up the ladder, pulled out the old one, put up our new one (both are plastic, and look roughly identical) and held up a pleasant conversation the whole time — like he’d done this all before.

I promised to catch him if he fell. He promised to not mess up the gutter. He held up my end of the bargain and decided it wasn’t worth testing whether I meant it. (I meant it.)

Thing is, those shutters, pretty standard aesthetic pieces, come in packages of two. So now we have one extra shutter. Hopefully we won’t need it anytime soon. I put it in the store-it-and-forget-it section.

At the concert last weekend, Train did a curious little medley, the theme of which, if any, escaped me. But the crowd enjoyed themselves an awful lot with it.

It’s a party band vibe. A lot of crowd pleasing things, and tons of those local references that make the crowd scream. A lot of energy throughout.

The demographics here make no sense, and that’s probably the best part about it. For every person my age we saw at the show there was one person much older, and three people in their 20s. Age is just a number at a rock ‘n’ roll show. Maybe the demographics never should have mattered.

We continue on with Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. Sometimes, even writers who have won two Pulitzer Prizers, and/or the editors who edit them, can get punchy.

This is, so far, the only Looney Tunes reference I’ve read.

Col. Donlop was killed at the Battle of Red Bank. It was a poorly conceived assault by the German officer and his British commanders. The Hessians were trying to avenge a previous slight. They thought they had the element of surprise. They did not have the proper tools for a fort siege. They never had the initiative and, ultimately, the battle becomes a big morale win for the Americans.

Some of our colleagues are working at that site even now. Just a few years ago archeologists found the remains of 15 Hessian soldiers there, and the project has become a public and educational dig. Dr. Janofsky is the real sort of archeologist you’d want to meet. The kind that can bring history to life for people who thought they were uninterested. I had the chance to see her speak earlier this year. She’s incredibly passionate about the work and of course steeped in the time she’s studying, but a part of a program that’s using the most modern techniques (isotopic testing of remains!) to further the research. Between the discovery in 2022 and 2024 the researchers have held a few “public dig days” and almost 400 community members have taken part.

Read Atkinson’s book. (If you know how to party like I know how to party, this will be a great start to August for you.

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30
Jul 26

This is no time to ask for more time

I spent the day reading and playing with cats. These were excellent choices. If this day came around again, I would do much the same thing. I’d just also do other things. There are always a lot of things I could do, a lot of things I want to do. You just can’t fit them all into every day. I’m never sure how to remedy that, but I’d like to figure it out. I’d like to figure out how to do all of the things I want to do, to the degree and extent I’d like to do them, so that each day has all of those things, nothing was overlooked, and there’s nothing to regret.

Or, how do you put 10 pounds of your interests in just two hands?

Also, how have I not figured out the solution to this dilemma by this point?

At the show last weekend, they brought Ed Robertson back on the stage to do a medley. Train played their shockingly ancient breakthrough hit “Meet Virginia,” and Robertson has been coming out for a little “Country Roads” ad lib. I expect he’s been doing the Canadian bit throughout. But Pat Monahan has a topical lyric in here.

I can’t not hear Country Roads anymore without thinking that we need some profound exploration and explanation about why it has such a growing, lasting resonance.

That’s a weird thing to think about at a rock ‘n’ roll show.

My lovely bride went out for a run. I went for a ride. I did a part of what we call the marsh ride, turning left before you get to the marshes. So it’s the non-marsh ride. It was one of those rides where I set out just to move my legs a little bit, having gotten started too late in the day. When it came down to it, I was riding well on the flat portions. Every time I looked down at my bike computer I was impressed by the speedometer. I was riding fairly poorly on the little hills. No need to look down to realize that. Some things you sense in more ways than one, and you do not need an LCD screen to convince you.

Anyway, cut over from one road to the other on some quite side roads, which was my plan, and then spent the next four miles wondering if I had enough daylight to add on a few more miles. I did not. One must be near home before dark if one did not bring along headlights. And one must never be late for dinner. This was what I saw over my shoulder at 7:55 p.m.

It was a nice little 17 mile ride, just enough to make me feel like I’d had a nice little bike ride.

We continue on with Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. This is one of those little supposed anecdotes that hits on all of the themes I’ve been thinking about the last few days.

The question is whether you believe that. The anecdote here feels as much like wartime propaganda as something that really happened. But let’s assume that Moses Dunbar’s dad made that offer. He was the second of 16 children. His dad, John III, had fought for the British in the French and Indian war, but was supplying rebel forces during the revolution. They disagreed on politics, but also religion. As a young adult, and freshly married, Moses joined the Church of England. This was a problem for John, a strict Congregationalist. And of course that little passage omits other details. Moses had been arrested once before, and released. He’d thought about fleeing. He enlisted. He was captured, escaped, and was re-captured. The emotions of those times were running high. Connecticut’s Nathan Hale, a 21-year-old Continental officer was hanged just six months prior in New York, and people in Connecticut were surely thinking of that.

Moses Dunbar was eventually hanged in front of a large crowd of onlookers. He was apparently the only person to be convicted as a traitor and executed in Connecticut. Rumors were that his remains were later moved by his family, and there is another marker in another cemetery, but apparently this is still something of a mystery. He was buried, initially at least, at the Ancient Burying Ground in Hartford, where the founder of the Nutmeg State, one congressman and four governors are also interred. You can read a bit more about Moses, including his last letter to his children, here.

You should also read Atkinson’s book. It offers some great insights into the times.