August 2025, pt. 1

Smack in the middle of an up-and-down long weekend. Mostly up, really, just some bleh feelings today that led to the usual mood spiral. But doing better now, so there’s that?

Fun things from the last week, for posterity:

• wine night with friends (bring a wine and a pairing, act like you know what tasting notes are!)
• a bunch of web API wrangling and algorithm implementation to figure out our optimal Communauto plans (fiiiiinally opting for a test-driven approach, first writing a bunch of tests that fail and then refining the algorithm until they all pass) (also if I had a proper value for my personal time, I’ve probably blown past it in trying to precisely model our usage, lol) (will write this up separately, eventually!)
• a morning spent woodworking, maintaining tools, doing yard work, and weeding (weeding, mostly by hand, was maybe the highlight!?)
• patio fish and chips
• burritos with salad from our garden (soon we can add garden tomatoes to them!)

Ooooookay!

• Don Moynihan on the connection between an independent public service and perceptions of reality.
• Paul Wells covering a recent Stephen Harper speech, with some interesting reflections nearly ten years after resigning as prime minister.
• Peter Follansbee with research into the historical work of joiners, derived mostly from court proceedings. The list of interior woodwork required for a sailing vessel (“Articles of Agreement Indented concluded the [blank] Day of Decemb anno Dom One Thousand Six hundred Eighty and ffive …”) made me reflect on just how much woodworking would be required for one of those old ships.
• The last three links are from various writers, each respected in their field. And each is writing on a platform, Substack, that also cheerfully platforms literal Nazis. 2025! (If you’re writing on Substack and don’t want to be associated with that, or you’re just curious to learn more about why people “should probably leave Substack”, How to Leave Substack is an excellent site.)
• I admire Sameer’s bravery in taking on driving on the left.
• Enjoyed the book recommendations in my friend Sam’s Forests in Her Mind newsletter, each of which features one “stellar, woman-authored sci-fi, fantasy, or horror story”. (But not just the book recommendations—also the other delightful bits of narrative!) I was unsurprised, but still delighted, to also see a very structured spreadsheet listing the recommendations.
• And, finally, a poem for the week (with thanks to Sameer for the inspiration): “Let there be lapses”, by Annie Mueller.

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas