Family Photo: Hold On Calvin and Lawrence were playing on the spinny thing at the park. Lawrence wrapped his arms around the middle bit while Calvin ran around gripping the outside bits, kicking his legs up to swing freely from the catharpins or whatever those bits are called. Part of me wanted him to be more cautious. The spinny thing spins up some pretty good momentum. If he let go, I didn't envy my future self returning home to explain how Calvin got scuffed up by centrifugal force. Part...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Family Photo: Playa del Carmen, México Over Christmas, we visited my brother and his fiancée in Playa del Carmen. They're nomads, but Mexico is their current port of call, so it seemed like a good idea to travel down and visit them for the holidays. Paul Graham has a line in an essay about how "What surprised you?" is the best sort of question you can ask someone coming back from a trip. Travel is a form of information gathering, and "What surprised you?" gets at "What new information have...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Family Photo: Plans Happy New Year!What are your plans for 2026? I started the year with some AI-assisted planning. Personal planning won't transform the economy, but we invested $400 Billion on AI capex in 2025, I might as well get some benefit while the tokens are still cheap. My ultra-precise initial prompt: I'd like to do some beginning of the year planning. The goal of this session is to think about different domains of my life, capture my intentions and perhaps some goals or habits...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
1 Family Photo: Christmas Cards 2025 was a good year, though not without its challenges. Sometimes it felt like running just to stay in place. Reflecting over these last dozen months, I think we can see a lot of growth. I'm grateful for another year surrounded by the love of family, both near and far. I am also for you, dear reader, wherever this message reaches you. Want to be added to our Christmas card list? fill out this form. We'd love to send you a card next year. Add Me To Christmas...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Family Photo: Gift Exchange Our church had a Christmas potluck & gift exchange. Everyone brought a dish for the potluck and everyone brought a $10 wrapped gift for the gift exchange. After the potluck, all the gifts were placed on a table, with all the chairs arranged in a circle around the table. The rules were explained: Everyone gets a raffle ticket to determine selection order. When the first person's ticket is drawn, they select a gift from the table and unwrap it. When everyone else's...
3 months ago • 5 min read
Family Photo: Road Trip I'm happy to report Calvin and Lawrence are still excellent road trip companions (see #103 - Screens). This Thanksgiving, we again visited my sister's family in the Bay Area. This is our third year making that trip. Now it's a tradition (see #31 - Tradition). It's fun stacking up these newsletters. I get to look back chronicles of our other visits (see #83 - Thankful and #138 - Airplane). -- We've outgrown our own car for longer travels, so for this year's road trip we...
3 months ago • 3 min read
Family Photo: Share Lawrence said he'd share his cookie sandwich with me. This is how he split it. When you share Stuff, you split it into halves. Or, for Lawrence, some other set of fractions. Ideas aren't the same as Stuff. Ideas don't have to be divided up to be shared. Economics has this fancy word, non-rivalrous, to describe goods whose consumption by one person doesn't diminish how much they can be consumed by other people. Ideas are even better than non-rivalrous. Sharing ideas,...
3 months ago • 5 min read
Family Photo: Climb Last week, we visited the duck park. It's not called the duck park...the park is named after the lake. But we didn't go to visit the lake, we went to visit the ducks. It should be called the duck park. The duck park has ducks, and a lake, and trees, and big open spaces, and a playground with whatever that thing in the picture above is. It provided lots of opportunities for climbing: We climbed down the muddy banks to visit the ducks; we climbed up trees growing alongside...
3 months ago • 4 min read
Family Photo: Check-in Lawrence and Calvin with their new umbrellas - I'm glad we checked the weather. The kids have minimum school days this week for parent-teacher conferences. This is convenient because the kids had two days off last week to observe Veterans Day, so they're used to missing classes. They also have all of next week off for Thanksgiving. At drop-off, I heard another mom call it 'No-school November'. I thought that was funny. By chance, right now I'm skimming Bryan Caplan's...
3 months ago • 3 min read