The girls were delighted to see me when I got home from Montreal. However, we all took a little while to get back to the rhythm of family life. I wasn’t quite sure what my schedule or plans were for most of the week. My post-travel day of rest turned out to impact all of us.
One phrase that I’ve been saying more and more is: “weaving the web of community.” I don’t have especially much to say about it and so I haven’t got a blog post or a note about it (yet). But, I feel like it’s an important idea for me right now.
I keep ruminating on how vital it is to connect to community. To reach out to people you know. To go visit the local groups associated with your interests. To invite people to tag along to events. To talk to strangers. To organize things that are meaningful for your community.
After the conference last week, in Montreal, I got excited about French again. I decided to pull a book off my shelf that has been there since highschool, Le Chevalier Inexistant (Worldcat). It is way above my French reading level, mostly due to archaic vocabular and verb tenses, but I can catch the meaning of few sentences per page. It turns out that that’s enough! Italo Calvino is an absolute wizard.
This week, I skimmed a couple books from the library.
Godly play : an imaginative approach to religious education by Jerome Berryman (WorldCat)
The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way by Charles Bukowski (Worldcat)
I’m noticing that I rarely use the reading part of my website.
Spinning up a new page for a book requires getting a bunch of bibliographic information for the header.
That seems to be just a bit too much friction.
Maybe it’s time for another bookmarklet?
Or, I could use the gather and dump mechanism to transclude a bunch of stuff from week notes in to a “Year N Reads” page.
I submitted the piece on Faulhaber Polynomials to the U(t)-Mathazine.
After a nice long break, I got back to doing course development. This week, I started working on the homework and solutions for MAT B41.
I biked around a fair bit. I continued experiment with the “14 Minutes of Anything” approach to exercise. Google just informed me that 14.4 minutes is 1% of a day. One day, I fooled around with kettle bells again and got serious delayed onset muscle soreness which messed my arms and shoulders up for a day. Another day, I tried out jump rope. That was a nice cardio exercise with minimal equipment. A day later, my calves and soles hurt. I think the bottom line is that after a life time of inactivity, everything will hurt a bit at the beginning.
This week, I played a lot with the Malawian string figure Chishango (Shield) from BISFA Vol 25. It involves a movement which occurs is many Malawian figures. One figure produces a lovely seven diamond type figure. This got me revisiting my favourite “look alike” pair Po (Night) from Hawaii and Lalakai (Woven Basket).
If I’ve learned one thing from being a cartoonist, it’s how important playing is to creativity and happiness. My job is essentially to come up with 365 ideas a year. If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I’ve found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I’ve had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness. We’re not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves.
A forever world in Minecraft is the concept of starting a world in Minecraft single-player, and playing that for the rest of your life. — 0x30.dev
Published: Jun 6, 2025 @ 15:00.
Last Modified: Jun 7, 2025 @ 07:57.
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