Scope Creep, 2026-06-11

For cosmetic purposes, your “face” extends well past your chin, and all the way around your neck, and down past your clavicular notch to somewhere in your upper sternum.

This is just one of the things I’ve learned recently. After I learned it, I started putting face lotion on the whole area, all of my face. I can’t say I’ve noticed any improvements since I started doing this, but I’m trusting the system; it doesn’t seem to be making my face any worse, at least.

Some other things I’ve been thinking about recently:

• Well I learned very much about the history of lab glassware, which I wrote about here, for Asimov Press. Maybe my favorite line in the essay: “If necessity is the mother of all invention, then ambition is its accelerant.”
• Here’s a technical bulletin by the Carpet and Rug Institute on the acoustic properties of carpet. If you want to reduce noise in a room, or reduce the amount of noise transmitted through a floor/ceiling assembly, you would be wise to choose pile rugs (the cut ends provide “more ‘fuzz’”) and lay them over pads that have high permeability.
• Here’s an essay on Gerrit Rietveld’s Red and Blue Chair, and an essay on building a replica of the Red and Blue Chair. The Red and Blue Chair was developed in 1917-1918 and produced in its distinctive colors in 1920. Rietveld was part of De Stijl, a Dutch movement in art and design which Piet Mondrian proclaimed “should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour.” The Red and Blue Chair is nothing if not abstract, and the house that one original Red and Blue Chair was installed in — the Rietveld-Schröder house — seems to actively defy any desire to program its interior spaces. Both architect (Rietveld) and client (Schröder) had “a fierce commitment to a new openness about relationships within their own families and to truth in their emotional lives.” Come to think of it, I have a fierce commitment to these things too, though at this point in my life I’m not exactly looking to art movements to enable them.
• “You can hardly go anywhere on the web without getting dicked over by a dickover.”
• Hot divorcee summer is a thing, and you don’t need to be divorced to take part.
• A few weeks ago I made my first batch of oleo saccharum lemonade of the year, and I really can’t recommend it enough. My technique is adapted from Stella Parks and Jeffrey Morgenthaler; if you want to know my precise method, just ask in a comment ;)
• I’ve been reading chapter books aloud to my kids (6 and 9) at bedtime, and we’re due for a new one. Got any good recs? Shoot me an email, or put it in a comment below!
• I went back and re-read Ian Frazier’s profile of Stealhead Joe, an apparently legendary fly fishing guide who Frazier took a trip with once. The piece, which appears in Hogs Wild as “The One that Got Away,” was originally published as “The Last Days of Stealhead Joe” in Outside. It is a fantastic essay, full up with tragedy and beauty, and pleasantly unconcerned with leaving the reader better informed. Frazier spent time with Stealhead Joe, and he felt some things about Stealhead Joe, and he wrote those things down. I don’t know — it’s a pretty cool premise.

But you know, the thing that’s really got my attention is my summer, and how I’m going to use my time. I will be working; I write for a living, and if the past couple of months is any guide, then I’ll spend more time writing this summer than ever before. But I will also probably spend more time parenting than ever, and this is because, on the 3.5 average days per week that I’ll have my kids, I’ll be doing dad camp — not sending them off to be with some other adult.

We’ve talked about it pretty extensively over the past month, and we’re all pretty excited. I’ve told them that I’ll need to work some of the time, and that while I’m working they’ll work (draw, read, do a craft project, listen to an audiobook) too. We have a list of museums, and a list of new things to eat, and many many physical things to do outside. At some point we’ll camp out in the backyard, and at some other point we’ll go and catch a weekday matinee, and I definitely want to bring their bikes to Central Park and ride a lap.

Most of the other parents I talk to about this seem totally stunned at the idea, and overwhelmed by the prospect of juggling a full workload and also 50% of their kids’ waking hours. And I’m kind of overwhelmed too.

But here’s something I’m proud of: Last Thursday was a school holiday in New York City, and I had my kids. I told them I needed to work in the morning — I had to catch up on reading House, and then have the Reading Group call at noon — and that while I worked, I kind of expected them to work too. Then I grabbed an old The Far Side book off of the shelf, and handed it to the nine-year-old, and kind of nudged her, and said “I think you’ll like this.” And then she spent the next two hours with me, sitting in the backyard, on lawn chairs, reading.