Week Notes 51

This post is 51 of 51 in the series week notes.

General #

We were all quite sick this week. Last week, Mabel got sick on Friday night. Mira got sick the next day. Megan and I just knew it was coming for it. How do you describe being sick? This was a soure throat with absolutely crushing brain fog. On Wednesay morning, I had to fill some paper work and completely forgot my own phone number. I masked up at work and barely kept moving. Many thanks to the students who put up with their totally wrecked professor.

Parenting #

I picked up and carried a child while they were vomiting. It was such a primal parenting maneuver. Of course, I got sick later.

Reading #

Telgemeier, Raina, et al. The Cartoonists Club. First edition, Graphix, an imprint of Scholastic, Inc., 2025.

We picked this one up from the library and it is so good. Our family reads a lot of Raina Telgemeier. We’ve lived and breathed her book Ghosts for weeks at a time. I learned to make tamales because of it.

This new book, The Cartoonists Club, is totally brilliant. It tells the story of a few kids who fall in love with comics together and form a cartoonists club in their school library. They all have their own strengths as cartoonists and come together to make a table at a local comic convention. While they’re learning about comics from their librarian, Ms. Fatima, they’re becoming friends and finding themselves as creators.

At its core, The Cartoonists Club is a young-adult-ification of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. It talks about lots comics theory: facial expression, body language, the magic of comics. This makes for a bit of info-dumpy reading, but it would be great for a middle-schooler. You get to watch as the cartoonist club leader, Makayla, learns to make a double-sided single-page zine.

Also, huge shout out for zine representation! The cool animator dad in the comic has some zines in his backpack. So rad. Zoe and Véronique , y’all gotta check this out!

Jeavons, John. How to Grow More Vegetables (and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops) than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land with Less Water than You Can Imagine. 9th edition, Ten Speed Press, 2017.

This “How to Use This Book” section had a lovely quote:

Alan Chadwick advised, “Just grow one small area, and do it well. Then, once you have it right, grow more!” The genius of these guiding words should form the backbone of your learning.

I think that I’ve been a bit too eager about exotic aspects of plant breeding, and need to stay humble with our little garden plot. It is nice to run off and read all sorts of stuff but really one learns gardening by gardening.

I went on a little bibliographic adventure. A composer reached out to me asking about history of the poem The Cost which appears on my site. I admitted that I had no idea about the history, but we went hunting for it. It seems like that it is from a 1974 Unitarian Universalist meditation manual.

Teaching #

This week, we did a deep-dive in to symmetry and geometry. How many symmetries does an equilateral triangle have? A square? A dominoe? These sorts of questions seem a little bit silly but they conceal a profound message. It turns out that these questions all have different answers: 6, 8, and 4 respectively. And this suggests that the number of symmetries can be used to distinguish various objects. For everyday ho-hum shapes like triangles, squares, and rectangles, distinguishing shapes seems like an easy task. It is a lot harder to visuall tell shapes apart in high dimensions but the algebraic approach goes through just fine.

Several students in the class asked for additional resources on this topic. Generally, this stuff is split up in to two courses “Algebra” and “Geometry.” In MAT A02, we’re going straight in to both topics. Our current textbook has a few paragraphs on this stuff, but the students could use a lot more.

This suggests that the project of writing up The Magic of Numbers as a course text would be useful, at least for this topic.

Playing #

I learned a nice little vim hack recently. It often happens that I paste some large block of text, and then want to indent it. This requires me to to dance around with the navigaton keys to select the text that I just pasted. A quick Google revealed that one can visually select the last modified or yanked text with `[v`]. Magic! It uses the following marks:

 '[  `[	To the first character of the previously changed or yanked text.
 
 ']  `]	 To the last character of the previously changed or yanked text.

What really blew me away though was popping this in my .vimrc. My vim setup has been stable for years. So, there was a bunch of stuff in my .vim that I had totally forgotten about! A bunch of little things that I’d wanted years ago just popped back up.

 " save file quickly 
 map <leader>w :write<CR>
 
 " display wordcount
 map <leader>W :! wc --words --chars % <CR>

 " Quickly compile LaTeX 
 map <leader>c :write <bar> ! cross-compile.sh <CR> 
 map <leader>l :write <bar> ! pdflatex --shell-escape --enable-write18 ./% <CR>

This last one, to just compile a file directly, has been there for years and I totally forgot about it. It got eclipsed by cross-compile.sh which does a bunch of other stuff related to docstrip such as keeping track of character count by time.

Gardening #

I’ve decided to put all the Garden 2026 stuff on one page. Zak has a lovely Reflection on the 2025-2026 Growing Season and I think that I’ll make something similar and update the notes page as we go.

Last November, my family helped put in garden boxes for a community garden (WayBack) at St. Dunstan’s of Canterbury Anglican. This year, we received a bunch of seeds from Hawthorn Farm Organic Seeds. I’m going to help get the tomatoes and peppers started indoors.

Community garden boxes