Categories
DIY Gardening How-to Nature

My Tote-ally Awesome Rain Barrel

I’ve now had a full season with my mega-sized rain barrel. It’s great. Here’s how it works and what I learned along the way.

The “barrel”: I also have a proper 55 gallon barrel collecting rain from my garage, but the barrel that’s the focus of this post isn’t actually a barrel – it’s a caged IBC tote (“Intermediate bulk container“) that holds a whopping 1,040 liters of rainwater!

Status: full.

I bought it from a local government unit, the Washtenaw County Conservation District (store link). It didn’t fit in my minivan so I carried it home on my cargo bike – that’s a whole ‘nother story that I wrote up as The biggest thing I’ll ever tote on a bike.

I won’t lie, these IBC totes sure are ugly! And mine is visible from the street. Here’s how it looked at first:

I had planned to build a wood screen in front of it and paint a mural or something, but it was simpler to buy online a black cover that zips right on. Also, apparently these totes will grow algae inside if you don’t cover them or paint them black to block out the sunlight, so this was a 2-for-1 solution.

Fully installed
Continue reading “My Tote-ally Awesome Rain Barrel”
Categories
How-to Life events ruminations

Notes on a Non-Directed Kidney Donation


“Do you have any questions?” the surgeon asked. After a year of learning all I could about kidney donation, I did not. Following a quick debate over who would shave my abdomen – the surgical team, eager to start, waved off a nurse – it was finally happening.

On October 30th my left kidney was removed via laparoscopic surgery, flown to California, and transplanted into a complete stranger. This kicked off a chain of paired transplants: in exchange for that person receiving my kidney, their loved one put their spare kidney up for grabs to another stranger with a loved one willing to donate, and so on. Last I heard, seven transplant surgeries were scheduled as a part of my chain.

Those recipients will live longer lives. And richer ones: free from dialysis, they can play, work, and travel. This came at little cost to me. I spent a night in the hospital followed by several weeks of recovery at home, mostly spent reading and taking walks. During the screening process, a surgeon categorized me as a “chronic do-gooder” type – guilty as charged – and as such I will confidently say there is no better deal out there when it comes to doing good.

Here are my collected notes from throughout the process. Along the way, I read, listened, and watched much of what’s out there about non-directed (aka “anonymous,” “altruistic,” or “good Samaritan”) kidney donation and have woven in a reading list of sorts. Those writings were above all what convinced me to donate.

Continue reading “Notes on a Non-Directed Kidney Donation”
Categories
Gardening Local reporting Nature

Conifers along Miller Ave at Mack School

A row of young pine trees growing along a busy street

In 2021 I helped win a grant from the Washtenaw County Conservation District for planting native trees at Mack School (where my kids attend Ann Arbor Open). We planted the trees in 2022. Some didn’t survive, but the ones that did are looking decent. Here is a row of eastern white pines (pinus strobus) we planted in 2022, seen today in 2024:

A row of pine saplings planted along a busy street
Note the spruce at the end of the row…

They are hanging in there! I didn’t water them at all this year and they survived nonetheless. Some are only two feet tall, the biggest is close to five feet. I’ve read that once established they grow quickly and I look forward to that. Eventually the trees should provide a good visual and sound barrier against car traffic on Miller. In the spring I plan to mulch them again and maybe upsize the protective cages they are outgrowing.

Here’s a picture I took in fall 2022, when I noticed the trees – much smaller then! – were shedding yellow needles:

A one-year-old pine tree with yellow needles on the middle of its trunk and green ones elsewhere

I was concerned at first but learned this is normal behavior. White pines shed their two-year-old needles. These older needles are typically on the inside of the canopy or middle of branches.

I was removing some Glechoma hederacea (“creeping Charlie”) from around one of the little pines at drop-off this morning when a woman approached me and introduced herself as a long-time neighbor of the school. She pointed out the spruce tree at the end of the row of pines and told me that her former neighbor planted it. It had been her neighbor’s Christmas tree that year, I guess with the root ball intact, and she got approval from the school to plant it.

She estimated that her neighbor moved away a dozen years ago and planted the tree four years before that. Now children play in its shade. Look closely at the picture above and you’ll see kids have dragged a variety of sticks and stumps under its canopy to pretend with.

It was a nice reminder as I tended to these saplings of what they may eventually become. Not all of my trees will survive, but some will flourish and be enjoyed by all kinds of creatures. I’m grateful to the former neighbor who gave her Christmas tree another life.

Categories
Biking DIY How-to Making Repair

DIY Upholstered Seat Cushion for Yuba Spicy Curry Cargo Bike

a blue and white striped cushion on the back of a longtail cargo bike

I got my first Yuba Spicy Curry bike in 2017 and have been riding one ever since. It is the long-tail bike seen in many of the photos of Things I’ve carried on a cargo bike and The biggest thing I’ll ever tote on a bike.

This year both of my weathered passenger seat cushions split open (Yuba has entirely changed the seat cushions they sell since I bought mine, and I hear the new ones are more durable). So I undertook my first foray into upholstery, refashioning my old and busted Soft Spots into one double-length cushion, a couch of sorts.

My coworking friends at Workantile have many interesting skills. One of them is a hobbyist upholsterer! With her tools and know-how it only took an hour or two, using materials we already had lying around.

First I measured and cut a piece of plywood to cover the full tail of the bike. It turned out that the foam from the old seats was still in good shape, so we reused it. We stuffed some foam scraps between the two old blocks of foam:

the foam cores of the two seat cushions, laid next to each other
All the foam, resting on the plywood base
Packed tight and held in place by special spray adhesive
Continue reading “DIY Upholstered Seat Cushion for Yuba Spicy Curry Cargo Bike”
Categories
Books

The secret ending of Naomi Alderman’s The Future

I finished reading The Future and for some reason I kept going, even past the second-to-last page at the back describing the book’s fonts … after which was a final page with a cryptic note. I wonder if anyone reading the book on Kindle or audiobook finds it? I was surprised at myself that I’d read the back sections.

The rest of this post contains spoilers for the book.

Continue reading “The secret ending of Naomi Alderman’s The Future”
Categories
Gardening ruminations

The SEO garbage search result that sent me over the edge

This post is a spiritual successor to LLMs are good coders, useless writers.

After getting steadily worse for years, the experience of searching the web just hit a new all-time low. I clicked on the top non-ad search result and encountered the worst word-salad nonsense I’ve ever seen. It was too perfect not to share.

I had let the small patch of lawn in my yard get knee-high. My reel mower can’t cut grass that tall, so I broke out the old weed whacker I got on the cheap at ShareHouse. It immediately ran out of the cutting string that it came with, so I found myself at the hardware store shopping for a refill.

I didn’t know if I should replace only the string or swap out the whole head. So, standing in Lowe’s, I whipped out my phone and searched it up: “restring toro weed trimmer”

(I winced when my kids started saying “search it up,” but I’ve since come to appreciate it. It avoids centering a corporation, unlike “I Googled it.” And I wasn’t using Google: the DuckDuckGo browser on my phone is, sadly, Microsoft Bing in disguise).

The first non-video result was from “Backyard Lord.” I’ve included screenshots in case that link dies, as it sure ought to.

Looking at it now, the “Pro Tips for Easy Trimming” suffix reeks of LLM garbage, as does the domain “Backyard Lord.” But the listed steps seemed like what I wanted. I clicked on it.

The page started off okay:

But that was the end of the plausible content. The next block was just keywords and mentioned a tennis racket??

The next block contained the prompt for the LLM! All highlighting mine:

From there it becomes free-association insanity. There’s a step-by-step guide … but each step discusses a totally different industry! Step 1, preparation, is about starting a business:

Step 2 is about restringing a guitar:

Step 3 is empty and Step 4 drips with irony as it talks about strings in the context of LLMs:

Continue reading “The SEO garbage search result that sent me over the edge”
Categories
Local reporting

A three-eyed creature haunts the streets of Ann Arbor

I first met this adorable creature in Ann Arbor in April 2022. It was painted on a post at Packard & Arch at the tiny Forsythe Park. It offered good (albeit saucy) advice:

I’m glad I photographed it because it was soon gone. A week later the creature appeared a few blocks south, on the side of the Argus Farm Stop. This message was purely encouraging:

I didn’t see it again after that. Until this month, when the creature returned to a couple of spots on Madison St.

Here it is beaming on a planter at Madison and Main:

On an electrical box near Washtenaw Dairy, on Madison west of First [painted over as of November 2024]:

Radiant! Does anyone know what it’s saying? The same red and white paint is used in both pieces a block apart, perhaps they were created in the same evening.

[Added October 2024] A dog who is also a spicy life coach on Madison near Main St:

Is that paint? Marker? I know little about street art but I appreciate it when it’s well-done, creatively and technically. I’m glad the creator still calls Ann Arbor home – it’s a pricey place to make it as an artist – and continues to share this creature with us.

This kind of thing is ephemeral and feels worth recognizing and documenting. My dad played poker with a guy who made a hobby out of photographing antique ads painted on sides of brick buildings around Chicago. By the time he published a book with his decades of photos (Fading Ads of Chicago), half of them had faded away or been covered up, painted over, knocked down.

If you have seen this creature elsewhere, send in your photos or tip me off to where I can spot it in the wild.

November 2024 update: I was tipped off that the artist is Benjamin Layman. I’m not outing him, he has taken credit for a creation on Reddit under his real name. See his Instagram where you can buy originals or commission new work.

I’ve also updated the post with a new photo and noted that a past work has been painted over.

Categories
Climate change Gardening Nature ruminations

Relating to natural life today

In the last month I took a family vacation to the Great Smoky Mountains and read two novels about logging: Ron Rash’s Serena and Annie Proulx’s massive Barkskins. Here are some resulting thoughts about trees, creatures, and the people who inhabit their world.

The natural world in America is nothing like what it was

We fall into the trap of thinking that climate change is unprecedented in its destruction of the natural world. But it has a clear predecessor in the deforestation of the period c. 1600-1960, documented in Barkskins, during which nearly every tree in America was cut down, every forest razed, and most wildlife extirpated. The first two sections of Barkskins start with Europeans trapping all of the beavers, minks, and martens in the northeast. Only after the furs are gone do they move onto logging.

In Serena, the logging barons clear-cut the Smokies before selling the land to the government for a national park. Serena is fiction, but this part of the story is true. In the Smokies, we hiked to Avent Cabin, a structure built around 1850. It contains a picture showing its setting around 1920, when it sat in a clearing: all of the surrounding trees had been logged. Now the cabin is again back in the woods, as the regrown trees approach a century of age.

Of course, letting the land go wild again does not recreate the complex webs of life that existed before Europeans arrived. Keystone species like the American chestnut and the passenger pigeon are extinct and megafauna like moose and bear – characters in both novels – have limited presences. The city nature areas and state parks I visit are a sad joke compared to what they held five hundred years ago. At the end of Barkskins, a character muses about “dark diversity,” the species whose absences from an ecosystem can be measured. There’s a lot of that here.

Both novels do a good job painting the picture of natural splendor that was destroyed forever. As a Michigan resident, I particularly appreciated the Breitsprechers’ trip to survey the endless, towering white pines of this state. My family has stopped at Hartwick Pines State Park on our way up north, a tiny postage stamp of old-growth forest that escaped logging. It’s the closest we can get to experiencing what was once here.

Despite being once despoiled, the trees and wildlife in the Smokies were still beautiful by modern standards. This lifted my spirits. There’s something encouraging about the fact that we’re a hundred years past the low point for trees in the Smokies and moving in the right direction. When it comes to logging, at least.

Continue reading “Relating to natural life today”
Categories
Cooking Recipe

Easy Vegan Chili with TVP

This chili is easy to make, healthy, and my kids all like it, so I cook it frequently in the colder months. It’s also vegan and gluten-free.

The recipe evolved over the years (from a mediocre starting point) and I typically just cook it from memory. But a couple of people have asked for this recipe and I’d probably be more consistent if I cooked it to spec each time. I recently took notes as I made a particularly good batch and behold, a recipe.

There’s one lesser-known ingredient: TVP, which stands for textured vegetable protein. This recipe works fine without it but the TVP takes it to the next level. I keep TVP in the pantry but acknowledge it’s a divisive ingredient that some people dislike. Wikipedia notes, “Because of its relatively low cost, high protein content, and long shelf life, TVP is often used in prisons and schools, as well as for disaster preparedness.”

Without further ado, chili. It’s not spicy (unless your chili powder is powerful) so that everyone in my family can enjoy it. I like it hot so I just add hot sauce or chipotle powder to my bowl. This makes a big batch, around 8 servings. It’s good leftover and freezes well.

In short, saute the vegetables and cook a bit longer in tomatoes with spices until everything is soft. Then add beans and broth, cook a while, add TVP, cook a little more. Serve over thick, crumbled-up corn chips (Ann Arbor Tortilla Factory is the best, Fritos is fine too).

As in my lentil soup, smoke gestures at the meat that some might be expecting. Feel free to increase or modify the spices, this is a starting point.

Easy Vegan Chili with TVP

Serves about 8. I’m separating the ingredients and cooking steps so that my recipe software can parse this post correctly.

Ingredients

  • 3 tbsp vegetable oil
  • 1 red onion, diced
  • 1 yellow onion, diced
  • 4 cloves of garlic, diced
  • 2 bell peppers, chopped
  • 1 can (14 oz.) diced tomatoes
  • 1/2 tsp chili powder
  • 1/2 tsp smoked paprika –
  • 1 tsp dried oregano
  • 1 tsp ground coriander
  • 2 tsp ground cumin
  • 4 oz or less tomato paste. If I have an open jar of tomato sauce in the fridge, I use it up here instead of the paste. An entire 6 oz. can will make it too tomato-ey.
  • 5 cups cooked or canned beans. I use a mix of black, kidney, white, and/or pinto beans depending on what’s on hand.
  • 2 quarts vegetable broth
  • 1 cup textured vegetable protein (TVP)

Directions

  • Dice the onions and garlic and saute in oil.
  • Add the peppers and saute another minute or two.
  • Add the can of tomatoes and cook until peppers are soft, between 5-10 minutes.
  • Add the spices and tomato paste, stir.
  • Immediately add the beans and broth, stir.
  • Cook until beans are about done. If they’re already soft, this can be as little as couple minutes after it comes to a boil. Adjust seasoning as needed – it will probably need salt.
  • Add the TVP. TVP sponges up liquid, which makes it a good hack for drying out a too-watery dish. Here that means you may need to add more water or broth if the TVP has soaked up too much liquid after cooking for a few minutes.
  • Check seasoning and acid one last time. It may need a teaspoon of vinegar for brightness.

This is all tolerant to variation. Use different kinds of onions, beans, spices, add bay leaves, etc. Just get the overall consistency and spicing right.

I was recently tempted into making the Serious Eats Chili Paste and I have some cubes of it frozen. I added some to the latest batch of this chili and it turned out very nice. I don’t often have time for such fanciful cooking but if this recipe is too simple for you and you want to work harder for more flavor, that would be a good twist.

Long live the bean soup project!

Categories
ruminations Software Work Writing

LLMs are good coders, useless writers

My writer friends say Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Bard are overhyped and useless. Software developer friends say they’re a valuable tool, so much so that some pay out-of-pocket for ChatGPT Plus. They’re both correct: the writing they spew is pointless at best, pernicious at worst. … and coding with them has become an exciting part of my job as a data analyst.

Here I share a few concrete examples where they’ve shined for me at work and ruminate on why they’re good at coding but of limited use in writing. Compared to the general public, computer programmers are much more convinced of the potential of so-called Generative AI models. Perhaps these examples will help explain that difference.

Example 1: Finding a typo in my code

I was getting a generic error message from running this command, something whose Google results were not helpful. My prompt to Bard:

What’s the matter with this Python dict definition?

details = {
‘electrification_lvl’: decoded_vin.get(‘ElectrificationLevel’, None),
‘engine_kw’ = decoded_vin.get(‘EngineKW’, None),
‘fuel_type_primary’ = decoded_vin.get(‘FuelTypePrimary’, None),
‘fuel_type_secondary’ = decoded_vin.get(‘FuelTypeSecondary’, None),
‘battery_kwh’ = decoded_vin.get(‘BatteryKWh’, None)}

Bard told me I had a “significant issue”:

“You used an assignment operator (=) instead of a colon (:) to define the key-value pairs. This will cause a syntax error because assignment statements are not allowed within dictionary definitions.”

Yep! So trivial, but I wasn’t seeing it. It also suggested a styling change and, conveniently, gave me back the fixed code so that I could copy-paste it instead of correcting my typos. Here the LLM was able to work with my unique situation when StackOverflow and web searches were not helping. I like that the LLM can audit my code.

Example 2: Writing a SQL query

Today I started writing a query to check an assumption about my data. I could see that in translating my thoughts directly to code, I was getting long-winded, already on my third CTE (common table expression). There had to be a simpler way. I described my problem to Bard and it delivered.

My prompt:

I have a table in SQL Server called EV_VINs_Presence. It contains columns “vin”, “snapshot_date”, and “locale”. Every record that has a locale value of “Ann Arbor” should have a corresponding record with the same “vin” and “snapshot_date” but with the locale value of “State”.

Write a SQL Server query to return any records that do not have such a corresponding record.

Bard replied:

Continue reading “LLMs are good coders, useless writers”