Here are some things that caught my attention in recent weeks. As the days stretched toward the summer solstice., my excursions into books and reading were gradually supplanted by jaunts beyond my house. These are just notes on places, people, and ideas that I may revisit in more disciplined attempts at writing.

4/16/26  A Guardian investigation of price-gouging at Dollar Stores results in action by Utah authorities.  Can we do something about Safeway’s slippery pricing?

Safeway is where I shop for groceries. Up and down the coast, my cell number gives me automatic member bargains. I have the app, too, and can scan the bar odes of items advertised on sale or to see if an item I need is on sale. I read the Tuesday mailing either specials or pick one up when I go forth with my empty cart. My grocery bills regularly indicate savings of 20% and 36%.  

I doubt that people without smart phones do as well as I do.  Checkers at our local store are well-trained in customer service and often make suggestions to help us save money. But shoppers are less likely to get unsolicited help when they check out on their own, which is increasingly required.

4/17/26  Today I came across a 64-page workbook I co-authored with Pam Collette for our work with Afghan women leaders.  funded by UNDP and UNOCHA.  At the time I was Information Officer for the World Food Program in Afghanistan and Pam was with Save the Children. The draft is dated June 1996 which would have been as the Taliban were emerging in in local and provincial governments but before the warlords overturned the Soviet-leaning Afghan government of President Najibullah. Strengthening Skills in Leadership and Communication was a series of workshops that could continue openly for female refugees in Pakistan but not in Afghanistan. I’ d like to hope that when the women we worked with were pushed underground with the Taliban regime, the training they had requested continued to serve them. (This surfaced in a weekly Google dump and showed up in an online library in Kenya as Pamphlet HD 8670.6 .S774 at the Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University)

4/23/26  The Washington Post reports that “The Trump administration halts shipments of U.S. cash to Iraq” as punishment for Baghdad’s support of Tehran.  

New Mobility uncovers A Malpractice Case Against Parking MD.  Parking MD skirts the law by offering anyone a parking permit medical evaluation online.

How good it was to land on this history article on Maxwell Levy that explains in detail the mechanics of shanghaiing in Port Townsend.  From the 1890s to 1910, when he retired, Maxwell Levy was the “king of the crimpers” in the booming port of Port Townsend. A crimp or crimper is one who forces or entraps sailors into service against their will or when they are insensible, such as drunk. Levy was the leading supplier of sailors to ships leaving port.

4/26/26 “A Sausalito houseboater for 40 years, Stewart Brand is finally coming ashore” Brand’s century-old tugboat is up for sale at $1.8 million. “Just keeping going has a lot going for it,” says Brand, “worth every penny as far as having  an absolutely marvelous place to live and go have adventures.”  

4/30/26  This report in the New York Times this week is fascinating!   Longevity Science Is Overhyped. But This Research Really Could Change Humanity. A new therapy has the potential to cure hundreds of diseases — and even reverse aging.

Independent Sector reports the Value of Volunteer Time in WA state is now $42.98. I keep stumbling on people who have been volunteering at the same place for twenty or thirty years and double down at retirement age. We need more and better volunteer recruitment programs to capture talent needed to move on from the current mess.

5/2/26    The invisible force making food less nutritious.  Many of humanity’s most important crops — including wheat, potatoes, beans — contain fewer vitamins and minerals than they did a generation ago. The invisible culprit behind this damaging phenomenon? Carbon dioxide pollution.  

I’m a fan of obituaries, especially off beat ones. Offbeat Obituaries Honor Loss With Levity (and Brutal Honesty)  

5/10/26  Selena called with Mothers’ Day greetings while Jack and I were getting the new gym ready for the Smith Machine, its parts still boxed in the entryway. As she and Joe drove north from Chicago to see his family, we shared photos of the gym layout and Jack’s new view of the garden.

Boatshop mate, Emilia Ramsey’s She Tells Sea Tales presentation appears in the latest 48º North. 

I have to log on to the library copy of The Atlantic to get Claude Mythos is Everyone’s Problem. On second thought, maybe I don’t need to read it!  

Yesterday, in the monthly PHRF race Mustang Sally raced against Varya, the boat Jen and Peter had invited me to sail on one Sunday Funday last year. I see Jen when I ride past Broin Toss Rigging; she is one of those who is passing on Brion’s legendary approach, including use of synthetics matched on traditional wooden boats. Here’s Jen talking to Off Center Harbor about Varya’s rigging. 

5/11/26  Meet Ahmed Hilal Abid, a US citizen born in Afghanistan, who founded of The House of Wisdom,  a nonprofit providing free tutoring, mentorship, and academic support to immigrant and refugee students in Washingtron state. 

Useful article here: When travelers should ignore professional advice  – and when not to.’  “We’re in an age where skepticism is the default setting,” says psychologist Frank Niles. “So when a professional says, ‘Don’t go there’ or ‘Do it this way,’ some travelers instinctively do the opposite.”  So why are travelers seemingly more skeptical? When should you be contrarian — and when shouldn’t you? And what is the biggest mistake the skeptics are making when they travel?

Here’s a how-to document for those who want to design, build or garden in Seattle’s P-Patch Gardening Program And here’s one from the Seattle Department of Transportation for those who want to garden the furnishing zone between the sidewalk and the street.

5/13/26  The assault on democracy continues at the state level:  Most TN Democrats stripped of their committee assignments.  “Speaker of the TN House Cameron Sexton just removed me and every Democrat — and therefore every Black elected official in the state legislature from any committee we served on,” Rep. Pearson said.

5/17/26 Reading List: River of the Anthropocene: Could the Mekong River Define SE Asia’s Future? By Jonathan Zhou, Circle of Blue, July 24, 2025.

How to Deal With That Drawer Full of Old Gadgets Here’a a NYT Tech Tip that blends in the tested practicality of Wirecutter.

5/28/26  Mom’s birthday.  Preecisely,the century and a quarter anniversary of her birth. I’m reading Dark Age Ahead by one of her contemporaries – Jane Jacobs — who notes how fast the past slides away and speaks of cultural forgetting.

5/29/26 OMG. I guess we have to follow all these insanity vanities and dangerous, insulting distractions. Rep. Don Beyer, who represents our old district in Northern Virginia, is introducing a bill into Congress to stop The Arch at the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery.

In Lebanon, 700 killed since the mid-April ceasefire.   10 Israeli soldiers have fallen as well, a usual ratio in Bibi’s war that we’re all US taxpayers are invested in.

This from Niki Lavender, PA-C, just hit My Chart following my visit to Jefferson Health Care’s extraordinary Express Clinic. A recent sonogram confirms it’s not DVT: The mass in the popliteal fossa has the characteristics of a Baker’s Cyst, this is what April had also suspected. I am happy to hear the pain is improving! You can continue activities as tolerated, and I recommend continued compression with a neoprene brace or ACE wrap. 

Another surge of gratitude for my health and toleration of all usual activity, except my usual bolting up a flight of stairs.

5/30/26 Every month I receive sanitity and sanitation wisdom from my heros at SOIL Haiti. Here’s the May 2026 Newsletter. Consider joining me as a Cultivator. As I see it, SOIL Haiti is the best place the world for my investment of a few bucks to ensure 1) homes have their own private toilets and 2) the surrounding soils are regularly restored for food production. SOIL Haiti succeeds where advanced societies continue to fail.

For several years, my favorite podcast has been Hard Fork. Kevin Roose and Casey Newton engage in comic banter reminiscent of Click and Clack, the Tappet borthers on NPR’s Car Talk. Thier New York Times podcast drops every Friday with three in depth segments. This week, they interview a calm, reasonable Sundar Pachai on AI anxiety. Reac the NYT article “Sundar Pachai Understands Why People are Anxious about AI” and/or take 29 minutes to watch or listen to this interesting interview.

Insanity vanity continues. Arwa Mahdawi is pretty great every week but in This Week in Patriarchy she takes up Trump’s attempt to recruit young men to the cage fight on his front lawn.

6/31/26 Today’s Circle of Blue’s Federal Water Tap newsletter reports that the U.S. Supreme Court finally reached a settlement in a Rio Grande water rights case brought by a Texas Attorney General against New Mexico. It took a long time:

First articulated by Texas in its 2013 Complaint, the dispute, in some sense, began about 8,000 years ago, in ancient Mesopotamia, when the Sumerians invented the concept of irrigation and incited a run on Earth’s navigable waterways.

Hon. D. Brooks Smith, United States Circuit Judge, Special Master

Also among my regular reading, is Bethany Snyder’s Substack, Advocacy with a side of Sass. I met Bethany when she presented in a long-ago Zoom and and now she’s a regular in my life. My work encouraging local officials to build and maintain clean, safe public restrooms on our streets means lining up the citizen advocates without whom they are reluctant to act. That something as basic to the health of people and public places as a public restroom can be controversial or devisive still mystifies me, but it is.

Bethany is helping me get my act together. In her post today, she muses on fandom. What Advocacy Pros Can Learn From OnlyFans. Bewthany’s questions: How do you get people to pay attention? How do you keep them engaged? How do you turn someone from a casual observer into a committed supporter? Her answer: It’s all about the relationship

Today, she got me thinking about fandom. So I set aside my morning book – Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs – to consider this So I restacked Bethany’s post with this comment:

I’ve been a huge fan of Jane Jacobs most of my life, and a good part of hers. My memory of sitting five feet in front of her at Powell’s Books is vivid. In the latter part of her Decade 9, Jane Jacobs was also seated. She held to her ear a home-made green papier-mâché trumpet so she could hear the questions from her admirers. She was accompanied by a young niece, who read the scene-setting passages from the book and the passages her aunt referred to in responding to our questions.

As I read her works and works about her, my Jane Jacobs fandom grows stronger by the day. Best known as the champion of urban living, Jane Jacobs explained how things work, proposed changes, and successfully rallied neighbors to stand up against the powerful Robert Moses to stop his neighborhood-destroying expressway across Lower Manhattan. She inspired my advocacy for walkable neighborhoods with clean, safe public restrooms. Now, as I read her prescient final book, Jane Jacobs shows me how the relationship-building behind advocacy success actually works in this dark time.

6/3/26 Wednesdays I work in the Northwest Maritime Boatshop. Today we got started restoring Ruby back into mint condition after she’d sailed on the bay and attempted last summer’s Washington 360 race. Tyler gave Tim and me task of removing the benches, starting with removing the bungs I’d fashioned two years ago to cover the screws holding everything in place. I always forget how to do things so I took reminder photos. To remove bungs you use two correctly sized forstner bits, drilling first with the ordinary one and second with one with the brad removed, which gets you down to the stainless steel screw, the square head of which you clear of wood with an awl and then insert a driver bit to remove it.

Little 13-foot Ruby, a sid skiff was built over a period of several years from plans long ago prepared by my friend and reknowned boatbuilder Ray Speck. Her remarkable story – she was built from the old mainmast of the 1907 schooner Martha – appears here in 48º North.

6/5/26 Today I joined three other women on a walking tour of the Community Forestry Project on Chimacum Ridge led by Forest Manager Ryan Helzer. The land, parts of which had been commercially forested by Pope and Talbot, was acquired over a number of years by the Jefferson Land Trust. Now it is being carefully managed to restore the diversity of plants and ensure that local shipwrights and CTE highschool students have the wood they need for the boats and tiny houses they are building. Trails throughout welcome hikers, runners, cyclists and wheelchair users year round. (I still need to caption photos with my notes.)

6/5/26 Thomas Piketty of the World Inequility Lab makes the case for wealth taxes, shorter work weeks, more sustainable diets, and investment priorities in this piece in The Guardian, which also caries an op-ed wake up call regarding the conclusions of the Lab’s recent report.

6/6/26 I’ve been reading the occasional new novel but this list compiled by the Guardian of their Readers Top 100 Novels of All Time shows me what I’ve missed. (Anyone reading this with comments on their faves?)

6/9/26 Stewart Brand is still going strong at age 87. His focus on maintenance is dribbling out little by little thanks to a website called Works in Progress. This enables Brand’s fans and critics to submit comments and illustrative examples before the section goes to publication. The Maintenance of Everything: Part I is already out. I liked this image from the section on maintaining EVs (and keeping them from burning everything around them up.)

Elsewhere today, the New York Times, points to new research why kids aren’t having sex like in the old days. Fertility rates down? iPhones up. Have Middlebury researchers figured it out? The first iPhone was released in June 2007, they wrote, and was available only on the AT&T network until February 2011. The study compared fertility rates in U.S. counties that had near-universal AT&T coverage with counties that had little or none.

6/14/26 Busy weekend. We have to get Ruby restored so she can move to the Bellingham HQ of Grizzly Industrial Tools, the boatshop sponsor that at NWM. After adding another coat of varnish to her spruce benches, I spent the rest of the day sanding the five coats of TotalBoat satin varnish, appropriately branded “Lust”. Beyond the open door where I was working in pleasant (and VOC-protecting)sea breezes, the Commons was filling up.

By the time I was done, Uncle Funk and the Dope Six were in full swing, Megan had everyone dancing, and I stepped into a party of friends, neighbors, strangers and had a good chat with a canoer who had come all the way from The Netherlands so he can paddle and sail all the way from Port Townsend to Alaska. He’s from Deventer, a small town where the train stopped on the way to visit Mini at her family’s village in the early ’60s.

Thinking about my own small bicycle adventures, I read about new foot ferry options on Kitsap Transit and the King County Water Taxis that leave from Seattle.

6/15/26 I hadn’t remembered that David Hockney was really young when he burst on the art scene. Then he kept doing new and different things right up to the end. Another good one for my obituary collection. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/jun/12/artist-david-hockney-dies?CMP=GTUS_email

6/16/26 Jack sends me good exercise stuff from the New York Times. The idea here is clear and basic. To keep whatever strength you have you have to keep working on it. Sweet idea: Need a weight? Use an empty plastic gallon milk jug. Add water. Add reps.

6/17/26 I’ve been thinking about effective advocacy. Where are our models? Today I started The Crooked Places Made Straight. In what the author, US Senator, and Senior Pastor at Atlanta’s Ebeneezer Baptist Church calls a sermon for the public square, he looks back at what kinds of advocacy worked for racial equity. And provides advice on how to do it again. Later I landed on United Spinal‘s Advocacy Program. This one calls for a deep dive.

What doesn’t work? Brand messaging that depends on AI exposure. In a review of a report by WordPress VIP, TechCrunch says 86% don’t fully trust AI and still want to explore original sources.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/16/sixty-percent-of-u-s-consumers-say-ai-in-brand-messaging-is-a-turnoff-survey-finds/?utm_source=marketingcloud&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Voices+for+the+Free+Press+6-17-26_6_17_2026&utm_term=Active%20subscriber

6/18/26 Tradespeople with skills are aging out and dying off. We need more, especially in the marine trades and in all the interlinked skills subsets. At the Northwest Maritime boatshop, I meet teenagers who are choosing careers and discovering where they fit. The industry has come up with funding for training and apprentice programs. One to look at popped up on Grant Station today. https://info.jff.org/blackrock-future-builders-rfp

6/19/26 While it’s depressing to read about PFAS, the impacts are dribbling in. What does a longitudinal study have to say about the lasting impact of prenatal PFAS/PMOS exposure? Yikes!

6/20/26 With Roland, Steven, and Kristina I went out on Mustang Sally in signficant wind. Roland put us through the paces. For four hours we did rapid squats to avoid the book before dealing with one of six or seven necessary adjustments. Then Roland called me to my favorite place the foredeck and had me practice stead acurate moves from the mast to the forestay, a distance of about 10 inches more than my armspan. “Just go for it!” he said, explaioning that my direction was correct but that something could happen if I hesitated. Mustang Sally has none of the stantions and lifelines which surrounded me on Aurora’s foredeck. I think I’ll practice this week with the boat tied to the dock.

We sailed back to the dock. It was well after 4pm after we’d put away the boat and fixed what we’d broken, but Roland cheerfully suggested we go out to lunch. No takers, fortunately. Too tired to pedal home, I revived myself with a nap on Morning Light and then went home to cook a big dinner in the long evening sun. Springtide ended with a wonderful day!