Friday, December 20, 2019

Weekend Reading: The Mostly not about Impeachment Edition

First, the most important news of the week: I finally got to go out for a rollerblade! OK, this is not really the most important news of the week, except for me. It is important for me because it made me feel so much better and less draggy. I need to make sure I get exercise more regularly even when my Friday afternoon rollerblade can't happen.

The actual most important news of the week is probably the impeachment vote and the political wrangling about the trial in the Senate. But I'm only going to share one things about that: Jennifer Rubin's opinion piece about how Pelosi might play her hand next.

The rest of this post is going to be about other things.

First, I finally wrote up the story of our first Tesla road trip and the lessons it contained. It has a happy ending but waaay more time in Yuma than we would have liked! There is a lesson for us as individual electric car owners, but also a lesson for a society that really, really needs more people to choose electric cars and is not doing what it needs to do to encourage that.

Next, my "if you only read/listen to one thing this week" pick is Ezra Klein's interview with Saul Griffith, appropriately titled "How to solve climate change and make life more awesome." This was a really inspiring podcast, with useful advice about how to act individually (make the best decisions you can on the big energy usage pieces of your life: where to live relative to work, what kind of car to buy, how to heat your home) and don't sweat the small stuff. Instead, push for more visionary infrastructure decisions by society as a whole.

We need to replace our heater and that podcast finished convincing me that we need to replace it with an electric heat pump even if that is more expensive. Because we can afford it and that's the right thing to do. So, guess who's about to learn a lot about electric heat pumps? Feel free to drop relevant links in the comments!

This book sounds interesting!

I found this article about the vaping lung disease informative - it turns out there may have been cases as early as 2017.

I think this is an insightful tweet:


At the time I saw this, my YA title would have been "A Lego set of groceries and exhaustion" which is honestly felt about right.

Bunny!


That's all I have this week. It is still the busy holiday season, after all. Have a good weekend everyone!

Friday, December 13, 2019

Weekend Reading: The Very Hectic Season Edition

I didn't intend to take two weeks off from posting here! I also have a post about our first long roadtrip with the Tesla that is probably 75% written. It will go up over on Adjusted Latitudes... when I get it finished.

But time to write has been in short supply. This is a very hectic time of year, both at home (we haven't even started sending out Christmas cards yet....) and at work. I now work for a company that sells software to other companies, and all of my customers have end of year goals, remnants of 2019 budget to spend, planning for 2020 projects to do... so I am extra busy trying to get everyone what they need. I had a cold at the start of the week (thanks, Petunia!) and worked from home on Monday thinking I'd take it easy and maybe work a reduced day. Instead, I sat down at my computer at 7:30 and worked through until 4:30.

Anyway, I didn't want to let another week go by without at least saying "hi," but I don't have a lot of time for a post and I didn't have a lot of time to read things... so this isn't a long list this week. Maybe next week I'll at least finish my post about our road trip!

If you read only one thing, read Dahlia Lithwick on speaking truth to nonsense.

I really like this essay about how we need to redesign life for longer life spans.

How to cut solo car commutes: charge for parking by the day.

I read this article about the zero-waste movement and... yikes. I'm not sure what I think, other than that more people should adopt my mantra of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

If Jane Austen got feedback from a guy in a writing workshop.



In recommended listening:

I really enjoyed Ezra Klein's interview with linguist Gretchen McCulloch about her book "Because Internet" - I've had the book on my "to read" list for awhile and this podcast just reinforced that.

And my representative, Scott Peters, was on The Weeds talking about his bill to encourage more housing near transit.

Bunny!


Herd of bunnies!