Every Friday at noon, Julia and I have a household meeting. Like these newsletters, it doesn’t always happen on the week, but we try nonetheless. Topics include our shared calendar, Rufus’s developmental milestones, house and garden projects, dates, social plans, etc. House Meeting is when we check in on existing tasks, delegate new tasks, and, when one or both of us is stuck, help each other get unstuck. How did we even manage before we had House Meeting? I don’t remember.
One big house meeting topic is always our budget. Sometimes it’s so big that we have to schedule a separate meeting to go over it. We’ve been using YNAB for years now (long enough that I’m comfortable sharing this referral link), and while it’s a useful planning tool in these meetings, we still struggle with sticking to those plans. We’ve tried to ask, in the moment, “Is it in the budget?” and more often than not still end up finding some way to justify the purchase.
We generally want to spend less. And when we do spend, spend more mindfully. In issue #429 I linked Sarah Lazarovic’s “Buyerarchy of Needs”, but even that simple chart, in the thrall of a potential delivery order or gadget or gizmo that promises to make our parenting life easier, isn’t always top of mind.
So at a recent House Meeting, we realized that we needed a financial “safe word.” A quick incantation to pull us out of the weeds. At first we considered, as a safe word, Rufus – a reminder of who and what we’re trying to be frugal for. But we say his name so often that it’d lose its desired effect. The safe word had to be rare. It had memorable. And provocative enough to make us pause.
The one we landed on – and I don’t remember how exactly we got there – was pineapple.
August Digital Mending Circle
is this coming Tuesday, from 7:30–9:00PM Eastern. I’ve had Bebop on the back burner, in part because I have to update the dev environments on multiple machines, so I might spend the time updating those.
We use the same Zoom link every month. If you don’t have it yet, just hit reply.
Reader Andrew F sent me this egregious example of Daylight Computer, once again, engaged in calmwashing. To promote their summer outdoor co-working meetups, they have (seemingly) ripped off a classic Alan Kay sketch:
Does moving Kay’s signature to the back of the dude’s shirt make it “homage”? I’m leaning no. To be clear: I’m not against these kinds of meetups, nor am I against techno-optimism – the Digital Mending Circle is very much in the same spirit! – I just cringe at the hyperbole.
Speaking of techno-optimism: I’ve been doing some freelance editing over at Every. A few essays I’ve worked on recently include this one by Vivian Meng – describing an experience on a trip to China that will be familiar to Sunday Letter readers – and Alex Komoroske’s piece on how a little-known browser patch from the Netscape browser days is at the root of our biggest gripes with modern apps.
(Alex is also a part of The Flux Collective, whose newsletter is one of the few I read in-inbox and don’t kick over to a read-later pile.)
I love this bookbinding case project from Gerald Schulze at Small Works, where I RISO-printed my neighborhood pattern zine:
Small Works’ newsletter for shop updates, Printing in Detroit, while unfortunately intermittent (I get it!), is exemplary for a local business. I especially dig the equipment notifications section.
File under Great Names for Podcasts: Everything is Somewhere, the official podcast of the American Surveyor (as in, land surveying) magazine. Here’s the host, Angus Stocking, talking to Maggie Moore Alexander and Yodan Rofe about Christopher Alexander and Building Beauty.
Which makes this my annual reminder to you that Building Beauty is open for enrollment for the upcoming fall semester. Here, again, is the program intro I helped record and edit earlier in the year.
Lastly – While looking at rugs for Rufus’s nursery I came across Nestig’s happily small array of washable rugs in in collaboration with Eric Carle and Richard Scarry. The Brown Bear one would go well in any room, but my favorite is the Scarry 2-Seater Crayon Car:
Pineapple.