My “h” key has gotten sticky, and WordPress has offered me a new editor. It’s taking some time to get used to, but I try to resist the urge to mistake “unfamiliar” with “initially difficult and therefore bad,” so I’ll give it a try for a while. Knee-jerk resistance is one of the standard intellect-signaling responses to new experiences. “I’m super smart because I immediately recognize how inferior is this new thing to the old thing, and in these specific ways.” You know the type. Heck, if you’re normal, you know the feeling. If you want to resist something, resist that.
I’m just a guy who can’t catch a break from the rain.
New condition: Dashboard Fatigue!
The “Race/Ethnicity Dashboard shows its cards a bit too shamelessly with statements like this:
The dashboard below shows the impacts of COVID-19 on communities of color compared to whites in King County, Washington.
They don’t care one whit who’s surviving, they only care whether white people are surviving with disproportionate success. Presumably because of some form of racism. I point again to my insistence that the perception of racism far outweighs the reality of it, precisely because of its necessity in the lives of the people fighting it. It’s the paradox of activism: You define yourself by fighting injustice, but you can’t fight an injustice that you’ve eliminated. It hurts you to be successful. The activists gain far more from racism than any actual racist does. Who needs it most? Who suffers if it goes away? And so who works hardest at keeping it alive? The whole thing’s a rollercoaster that climbs out of the gate and just keeps going up. You’re stuck wriggling under that locked-down lap bar, wondering how high they could possibly have built it and could you have taken a different ride, or is this miserable escalator the only one in the park?
Hint: There’s a dashboard for that.
Roughly one month of work:
Everything is laid and set, though a few of the wall caps still need to be glued. There was no rain in the forecast, so I spread the joint sand, which wanted 48 dry hours after being initially watered in. Then I woke up at 4:30 this morning to the sound of rain in the downspout. It’s a pretty light rain, and I’m not worried.
Drainage! Backfill! Lighting! More work to do, but the hard part is over.
Yes, language alert, but it’s fairly apropos:
Settle for losing at the ring toss, Comrade Citizen!
Andy Havens 
Seriously impressive work. What’s the orientation N-S-E-W?
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The camera is pointed generally West. The wall you can see the most of is running N-S, South on the left of the pic. I’ll stop short of trying to figure out why you ask, and settle for hoping you’ll just tell me.
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Or I could have said “the wall of which you can see the most…” 🙂
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It’s a patio! Just wondered whether coffee or cocktails would be preferred. But with this information in hand, and the trees in the west behind, looks like both.
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