Maintenance, houses, and stuff

We’re home, having driven over 2400 km (apparently about a quarter of the circumference of the Moon, thanks Wolfram Alpha!) and seen lots of family and friends. Now, back to Ottawa at maybe its finest season, the start of fall. “Back to school” is still a familiar, energizing feeling, even though there’s no school in the cards this year—looking forward to the weeks and months ahead.

• Speaking of back to school, Erin Boyle’s list of back-to-school maintenance (“in lieu of fall shopping, let’s try care”) has a bunch of relatively low effort, high satisfaction maintenance tasks.
• This dovetailed nicely with a short essay Sameer shared with me: “The home as a place of production”, by Karen Rosenkranz. Its vision of home appeals: “This home of the future is one of reduced complexity, a place filled with fewer things, but things we know how to care for and repair. It is a place that connects us to the outside, the weather, the seasons, also when that’s not always comfortable.” Care and repair were top of mind while visiting my grandparents this week, where we helped them repair a lawnmower (kind of) among other little chores—their life and home have exemplified this idea of making do, my Nonno rejecting the idea of buying new when he could figure something out with the tools and supplies on hand.
• “The House” by Brian Lam (founder of Wirecutter) (post is subscriber only, but free, and interesting if you’re into architecture / old houses / woodworking) explains his journey and mindset restoring his family’s house, an older one with varied influences and a long list of problems. Perhaps most interesting is where Lam lands: “I will never do it again and advise anyone without the time and money to avoid owning an old home if they can.” Despite having restored a “forever home”, the journey to do so changed his idea of the ideal home. All interesting to consider as we reflect on a year in this (rented!) house, thinking of ways to make it even more homey for the year ahead while wrestling with the question of how much time and effort to invest into something that ultimately isn’t ours.

And three more, less related, links to finish things up:

• Those who file access to information requests lack privacy protections.
• Dave Rupert on what makes a good form. (Through this, I learned about FormData. Neat!)
• Glad to see that Frank Chimero has done one of his periodic light redesigns, resurfacing old entries from his blog on his homepage. “Whiteboard Accounting” is an old favourite, harmonizing nicely with some recent conversations with self-employed friends of mine.

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas