§ Hello. Happy spring, officially.
The daffodils are flowering and our honeysuckle vine is suddenly dotted with tiny green leaves. Most importantly, I found almost a dozen tiny ramp shoots sprouting up through the soil—an exciting culmination to an almost years-long wait.
My favorite stretch of the year occurs between now and the summer solstice. It’s a time full of optimism, new growth, and ever-lengthening days.
§ With that said, it snowed on Monday.
§ On St. Patrick’s Day, Tuesday, I took the backroads to work and drove along the cuyahoga river down past Irishtown Bend—the stretch of riverside land that was home to a major portion of Cleveland’s Irish population throughout the second half of the 1800s. It was a neighborhood built organically by waves in immigrants seeking refuge here in the midst of the great famine until it was unceremoniously razed in the early 1900s.
What remains today is a broad empty expanse of hillside covered in a uniform layer of smooth red-brown dirt littered with yellow bulldozers, cranes, and dump trucks all preparing the site for what will eventually become a park.
§ Later that morning a meteor exploded directly above Cleveland. Draw from that what you will.
§ Friday and Saturday were our robotics team’s first round of competitions. On Thursday afternoon the robot effectively couldn’t move but by the end of the competition the students got everything working well enough to rank ~20th out of the ~40 teams in the region.
§ Back in 2024 I described James Blake’s new-at-the-time album Playing Robots Into Heaven as an exhilarating collection of song “sketches”. In the intervening years the album has continued to hold up remarkably well. I still listen to it every few months and each time come away feeling newly inspired by the creative risk-taking Blake displayed on basically every track of the album.
Well, I was excited to see that he has a new album out this week: Trying Times. Unfortunately, this new album doesn’t quite capture the same creative spark that made Playing Robots so intoxicating. Instead, Blake is back to his formula of predictable melancholia. There is really only one song that feels truly fresh.
Despite the “sketchbook” quality I identified in Playing Robots, the album still held together well as a contiguous identifiable whole. Trying Times, in contrast, feels more like a loose collection of samey, uninspired tracks. It has a really great album cover though.
§ The first season of Small Prophets concluded. It was beautiful, sad, hilarious, and bizarre. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
