While working on some math notes Ted’s Restaurant, an elderly lady came up to me and said: “Doing your homework?” Thinking nothing of it, I said, “Yup — It never ends!” She told me that her grand daughter is in her eighth year of university and is working for a PhD. Awesome! It was heart-warming to be mistaken for a university student.
Really, at heart, I am still a student.
This whole project got started because we kept some pumpkin seeds at Halloween. For the last three years, I’ve been buying more and more pumpkins. Last year, we had eleven. I have, one might say, a pumpkin problem. While we were carving pumpkins at Halloween, Mira pointed out that we could keep the seeds. I would need a lot of space to plant them and we live in a tiny town house. I knew that UTSC had a community garden but didn’t have a plot. I asked around about getting a plot and was able to secure one for this season.
So, I spent a bit of time clearing the plot last week and took the family down to the allotment garden for the first time on Saturday. It was a blast. Megan, my wife, is enthusiastic about the pumpkin seeds. We made four mounds of fresh composted manure, and put in the seedling we had germinated on our porch.
I read through a good chunk of A Philosophy of Walking (TPL) on the commute to Toronto and back. It is fine. The thing that I liked most about it was how French it felt. It was full of strong declarative stuff: “It is impossible to return when walking.” Everything I read felt like a perfect example of the classic style advocated in Clear and Simple as The Truth (UToronto).
Rohit wrote a post about how many books one will read in a lifetime. I remember stumbling on a video that discussed the same “small bookshelf” phenomena via Ben Borgers’ post 5 Pages A Day. I sent Rohit an e-mail1 with this response, which I think is worth noting here.
I enjoyed reading your post about short bookshelves. It is a sobering thought.
One thing that I think is worth considering is how many books you come in contact with, or explore. Like, I almost never finish a whole book. But, I probably look at 20~30 books a month.
I know that every semester, I throw out about half a foot of articles. Do I finish them? Nope. Does that make them worthless? Of course not.
If one skips writing sessions on weekends, that’s $2/7 \approx 28\%$ of the week! So, writing every day ought to include writing on weekends.
Sometimes, it takes a forty minute writing session to ask the question that you want to ask. Gotta remember that asking (and answering) are both valid uses of writing time!
I heard back from The Canadian Friend about the piece that I sent in a few weeks ago. They want minor revisions, but seem happy with the piece. Woo-hoo!
I went down a bit of a rabbit hole looking at material from Everyday Systems. Reinhard Engels has a neat bunch of “systems” for handling “common personal problems” like sedentary lifestyle and poor diet. He’s been practicing some these systems for over twenty years.
I like his idea of being an “urban ranger” which boils down to “walk more”. This week, I read about the philosophy of walking. It felt rather French but without much substance. Reinhard practices what he’s preaching. You’ll learn a lot more by going for a walk than reading about walking.
The podcast episode 14 Minutes of ANYTHING has a really practical perspective on exercise: Just do fourteen minutes of anything. That’s the whole idea. Set a timer, do something physical, stop when the timer goes off.
This is simple enough that I can understand it.
On Wednesday, I walked to Bible study via the valley really enjoyed it. Also, I did fourteen minutes of something involving weights in the basement. Both were good experiences; they got me moving.
This week, I played some actual2 games! I went downtown to meet up with my friends Alex and Sai. We played Antidote and GOPS. I don’t play a lot of board games with adults anymore, so it was nice to play for an hour and a half or so. Antidote is a hidden-information deduction game. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing until I started writing down all the things I knew at various times. It seems like three-player Antidote can be played (proxied) with a standard deck of cards. The rules are here. This got me thinking about proxying card games in general.
I did a bit of fiddling with the website. In particular, I setup a Bookmarks page. At the time of writing, it collects up all the links from all previous week notes posts.
To implement it, I made a pair of Hugo shortcodes gather and dump.
I can gather information into named parts of the Hugo global scratchpad and them dump that information on to a page.
These allow me to do a bit of rough-and-ready tranclusion between pages.
I’m still pondering other use cases for them.
For example, I might aggregate all the garden updates to the garden page.
Published: May 23, 2025 @ 16:00.
Last Modified: May 23, 2025 @ 19:19.
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