I was surprised this morning when I emerged from the aquatic center and the still, humid air was dark. The past few months I’ve been swimming at 5:30 am, and every day when I’ve pushed the glass door open into the morning after my laps, I’ve walked out into light. Not so this morning. The pool was closed last week for end-of-summer maintenance, and in those 8 days, the season changed.
Well, obviously it didn’t actually change. The forecast shows temperatures nearing 90 degrees farenheit in coming days. And the title of this post may be a little dramatic for August, when we have daylight from 6:30 in the morning until 8:15 at night.
But the point is that darkness is my friend. I was excited to emerge into an inky morning after my swim. I can’t wait for cool air and shorter days, jeans and sweaters and crackling fires.
Summer was fun, but I’m done with it. I’m ready to move on. Over the weekend I went to the candle store and stocked up on fall scents: harvest, autumn leaves, witches’ brew, pumpkin spice. I trimmed oak branches so I can see my bird feeder, cut back summer-burned flowers, dug up plants that weren’t thriving, and started thinking about how to arrange the garden so it has more autumn flare. I want it to blaze come October. And then I want to cozy up into the night.
Our son is asleep in his room, and our daughter asleep in hers. My husband went out for a hike before the day becomes too hot to enjoy it. I didn’t join him because I procrastinated the groceries yesterday and needed to go today. I ran at sunrise to also beat the heat, then went to the grocery store, and now I have a little bit of time to sit before the kids wake, and our daughter gets ready for work, and our son starts packing.
The school year is about to begin. Our daughter starts her senior year of high school on Wednesday. She’s spent the past two weeks working on college applications. This time next year, we’ll be moving her out of our house and into a new life. Meanwhile, our son starts his second year at UVA in the coming days. He is finished with the dorm, and we move him into an apartment on Tuesday.
In three days, our son will be gone again, and it will just be my husband, our daughter, myself, and the cats. In one year, it will just be my husband, me, and the cats.
I feel… weird. Mixed up. I’m excited for our kids: they’re ready to expand beyond their childhood years, and they’ve got the whole world to look forward to. I love that they get to bust out of this place and see so much more than the little bubble of our town. I’m also excited for my husband and me: we have time and means we haven’t had in our entire 25 years of marriage. We’re eager to explore the world, to visit our children wherever they are, to eat and cook whatever we want, to go away for the weekend on a whim.
But also. I love being around our kids. I like them as people. They make me laugh, and I love having them in my space and in my daily life. It’s hard to give them up. We’ve had a fun summer with them both here. We went to the Outer Banks for a week, and they took their own cars so they could come and go as they wanted. We swam and played in the waves, made multiple trips to the candy store for chocolates and salt water taffy, bought our son some shoes, escaped the heat by retreating indoors to watch cycling races and Studio Gibli movies. We’ve eaten lots of meals together. We’ve talked books and music and jobs and travel, played Euchre and cribbage, lazed around with the cats, gotten Boba and takeout, and spent a lot of time in comfortable quiet.
August is the hottest month of summer, but it also feels like a turning in the year, even though I know it will still be weeks before temperatures start to come down. The sun blazes down on the drooping sunflowers. They’ve turned their energy from making flowers to making seeds. I love watching goldfinches land on the edges of the flowers’ dipped heads, then bend their heads underneath to pull seeds out. The big butterflies are finally here — the swallowtails, the monarchs — and so are the hummingbirds. The garden is a profusion of late summer blooms. Spring is soft pinks, but late summer is hot yellows and oranges, fiery magentas, and firecracker reds. I mostly watch everything from inside because it’s too hot to go out, or if it’s not too hot, then I get eaten by gnats.
As I sit here in the quiet with my coffee, knowing everything is about to change again, I look forward to autumn. I’m ready for the natural world to lower the energy level a little. I’m ready to open windows and clean up the garden, even as it’s full of flowers. I’m ready to see that golden September and October light, eat root vegetables, and hike through crackling leaves. I’m ready to reacclimate to life without our son here, and to go visit him when fall is at its peak on his campus. He says its beautiful. I’m ready for the cats to stop shedding so much, and to drive through autumn mountains with the top down on our car. I’m ready for the time of year that feels quiet and reflective.
My garden has exploded in flowers. I sowed sunflower seeds for the first time in several years, and I feel joy every time I look out the window to see their lemony yellow petals and their happy faces turning toward the sun. As the sunflowers bloom, so do all of the coneflowers — black eyed Susans, echinacea, white coneflowers, and all the other colors we have in the garden.
I’ve been trying all week to get photos, but every time I’ve gone out, the sun was too harsh and all my photographs were too contrasty and glarey. I got one photo of the sunflowers and a blue sky, but most of the other photos weren’t great. Yesterday I took advantage of overcast skies to try to get some shots that show off the colors and profusion of blooms. July is hot, but the flowers are pretty.
Lemon queen sunflowersRudbeckia with calamint, white coneflowers, allium, and Russian sageMagenta coneflowersBack gardenFirst orange cosmo from seeds I sowed a while back. I’ve been waiting ages for them to finally bloom.White coneflowersGoldenrod beginning to bloomLemon petalsRudbeckiaCommon milkweedSunflowers and prairie flowersHydrangea and prairie flowersFrom the prairie gardenEchinaceaLemon queens and blue sky
I used be a recreational cyclist, and I used to be big into cycling in the early 2000s, the era of Lance Armstrong and Jan Ullrich. I loved watching the Tour de France. I loved listening to Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin call the race. They’d sometimes hand the commentary over to Bob Roll, who was still young and rowdy in those days, and he was reliable for entertainment.
July was always an exciting month because the Tour was on. We’d watch the teamwork of professional cyclists in the dance of pulling and protecting their leader in a moving caravan of 150-200 men riding shoulder to shoulder at high speeds, with only a layer of lycra for protection against the pavement they often crash and slide along. We’d watch the chaos of bunch sprints where riders propel themselves at 40+ mph under the power of their own legs. We’d watch the brutality of climbing mountains for more than 10 miles at grades that average over 7.5%, and then attacking with huge bursts of power in the middle of those climbs. We’d watch time trials where the riders don’t get the help of their teammates, it’s just each cyclist alone with himself, riding against the clock. And we’d watch the team time trials that are just beautiful to behold in their fluidity.
When I was pregnant with our son 20 years ago, my husband and I were visiting a friend in Marseille on a year that the Tour happened to come through. We got to see the peloton come screaming into town. We saw the yellow jersey of Lance Armstrong streak by and heard the whir of 150 high performance bicycle chains turning over cogs.
Then all the ugliness started to come out. The doping. All the cycling heroes lying through their teeth about the doping. I wasn’t surprised but I was disappointed, and I lost interest. It was hard to find decent coverage of the Tour in the days before streaming services anyway, and I stopped watching. After a while, I didn’t know any of the riders anymore. Until this year, I hadn’t watched a Tour probably since 2005.
Last week, my sister-in-law visited. She’s also into cycling, and she used to race. She was on the UGA cycling team, and we used to ride together and work out together when we were in town at the same time. We also used to watch the Tour together. When she visited last week, she told us that the same people who produced the Formula One Drive to Survive show on Netflix did a Tour de France Unchained show for the 2022 Tour. She said that she had also lost touch with the Tour, and especially who all the riders are now, and the show caught her up on who’s who and what’s what now.
I felt a surge of excitement about the prospect of getting into the Tour again. I was surprised by how excited I got. My husband and I binged the whole Netflix show in three nights, starting on July 1, the day the Tour began. We signed up for Peacock to stream the Tour and have been watching every day. Paul Sherwin passed away a few years ago, but Phil Liggett and Bob Roll are still calling the race. The first time I heard Phil’s voice this week, I was struck by a deep nostalgia, and I remembered the joy that bicycle racing brings me.
I’m super excited about the Tour again, and about all these young fresh riders. I’m already attached to a few of them, like the current King of the Mountain, Neilson Powless, from the hot pink EF Education-Easy Post team of misfits, as they were described on the Unchained show. I’m attached also to team Jumbo-Visma’s Jonas Vingegaard who won last year’s Tour. I want to see Fabio Jakobsen do well, too, and you’ll see why if you watch the Netflix show.
I don’t love extreme heat — I don’t know how I survived however so many years living in Florida — but I do love summer for my flowers, for the abundance of fresh produce, and for the sports I like, which I realize now still include cycling.
Last week was rain, rain, every day. On Friday, the skies didn’t clear, but the rain did stop, and I was able to sneak in a mow before the rain began again. Saturday, it finally cleared. I spent the morning pulling weeds and clearing the jungle of rhubarb that grew between our wild, gangly forsythia and our neighbor’s fence. Then I got out my camera and snapped some shots. My new passionflower is blooming, and coneflowers are beginning to open up. The milkweed I planted from seed two years ago is brilliant orange and thriving. We’ve got bees galore right now. No caterpillars yet.
Passionflower.Lavender.Agastache.Milkweed and bee.Bee carrying pollen.Alium bud.Alium about to bloom.Bee on lavender.Hydrangea leaf.Blanketflower.Moonbeam coreopsisBirdbath with cosmos, coreopsis, and salvia; waiting for the liatris to bloom.Milkweed ready for caterpillars.
I finished another good book this week, watched some more Shakespeare, binged a podcast series about using AI to create a podcast episode, was inspired by open source, and listened to some new music I love.
Reads
I’m enjoying the anthology of American short stories I bought a few months ago. I like to pretend that one day I might write a short story, and as I read the anthology, I collect the first sentences to study and reflect on. Every stab I’ve taken at fiction sounds self-conscious in the opening sentence, and it’s a joy to read authors who craft a compelling first line. This week I read Katherine Anne Porter’s “Theft” from 1930, along with “Double Birthday” by Willa Cather and “Wild Plums” by Grace Stone Coates, both from 1929, and both about the confines of class distinction and the limitations they place on joy for all classes. I thought Coates’ first sentence was pretty great, and it certainly made me want to keep reading:
I knew about wild plums twice before I tasted any.
– Grace Stone Coates, “Wild Plums”
For longer fiction, I finished Brendan Slocumb’s novel Symphony of Secrets this week, and I loved it. Our trip to NYC jazz clubs catalyzed me to finally do a thing I keep saying I want to do but have never actually done: learn about music. As with everything I’m interested in learning about, I immersed myself in a novel. The setting is today and the 1920s music scene in New York. The characters are musicians and music publicists and music historians. They speak the language of music. They are moved by music. Their hearts and souls are in music. And the story was a page-turner. I recommend it.
In non-fiction, I’m still making my way through Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. The crux of what I’ve gotten through so far is that, in economic terms, as the cost of prediction decreases due to machines being super fast and good at prediction compared to humans, the value of complements like judgment and decision-making — which require humans — will increase. In other words, our humanness doesn’t make us less valuable: our uniquely human capabilities become more valuable as machines make prediction easier and faster for us. Humans can harness AI to complement our own skill sets, and because AI lacks critical components of decision-making (judgment, action, outcome), an essential role of humans is that of machines’ supervisors.
Listens
This week, I fell in love with the title track from Jenny Lewis’s new album, Joy’All. I’m trying not to listen to it over and over again, even though I want to. I don’t want to wear it out too soon.
I’m fascinated by the implications of AI, what it’s capable of, and how people are reacting to it, so I listened to several podcasts this week, including a three part Planet Money series where the hosts had AI write an entire podcast episode, including creating an AI generated voice of one of the hosts. The result was both impressive in what it was able to do, and funny in how corny and wrong AI got some of the elements. The first two episodes are about how the hosts worked with AI to create the AI-written episode, and the third episode is the AI-written episode itself, along with the podcast team’s reaction to it. My coworker recommended the series, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in AI’s implications for knowledge work and creative jobs (spoiler: we’re safe. See above for human judgment and decision-making).
Similarly, Fresh Air’s Could Artificial Intelligence Destroy Humanity? is a great listen to assuage fears and also explain today’s AI technology for folks who are hearing the buzz but aren’t familiar with exactly what ChatGPT is, how it works, what it’s shortcomings are, and whether it will kill us all (spoiler: unlikely, though given enough time, anything is presumably possible, assuming the infinite monkey theorem that given infinite time, a monkey typing random keys would eventually write the works of Shakespeare).
Watches
Speaking of Shakespeare, I watched Hamlet this week. I didn’t enjoy it as much as Macbeth; I found my attention wandering in several parts. I don’t know how much of that was that the production I watched stayed 100% true to every word Shakespeare wrote for Hamlet, and it was hard for me to follow at times, or how much was simply that I didn’t care for the story as much. As with Macbeth, though, my eyebrows shot up several times when words were spoken, I recognized them, and I had no idea they had come from Shakespeare. For example, the whole “What a Piece of Work Is Man” speech, which I know large sections of from Hair. All these years I’ve been singing that song, and I had no idea it was from Shakespeare. It seems fitting to include alongside all the AI stuff this week.
What a piece of work is man How noble in reason How infinite in faculties In form and moving How express and admirable In action how like an angel In apprehension how like a god The beauty of the world The paragon of animals
– Galt MacDermot via William Shakespeare
Finally, WordPress, the open source software that powers this blog and more than 40% of the web, turned 20 on May 27. In celebration of the anniversary, to talk about WordPress’s history, and to talk about the principles of open source and their implications for our future, WordPress’s co-founders, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, joined with Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal open source project, for the first time ever. They talked about why and how open source — software that’s available to everyone for free to use, study, redistribute, and improve — is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation, is based on rights instead of restrictions, and enables software to evolve and improve because it has a world of contributors instead of a restricted group within a walled organization. I was once again inspired by and proud to work for a company whose mission is to make the web a better place through open source.
Butterfly Mind 