And in what’s turned into a weekend ritual, I have tweaked the blog template some more. Per Jason Becker’s recommendation, the Archive page now only has titled posts. Cleaning those up will be a task for another weekend.

My dad is visiting from Serbia, and maybe I am getting old and less tolerant, or maybe not seeing him for two years has made me more sensitive to how he does things, but I have been noticing more and more an unusual tendency of his which I imagine to be the consequence of his post-WW2 1950s Yugoslavian childhood.

There is the habit to save everything: every scrap piece of lint, every empty container, every cardboard box. This, I can understand. We don’t necessarily have the space to set aside every octagonal glass jar or a quirky spice container he encounters — and I cannot begin to imagine the packing process for his flight back — but these are at least pretty and/or may have a future use.

But then there was a pile of broken kinder surprise toys waiting to be mended with a glue that will inevitably be more expensive than all the trinkets combined. Or the shattered $15 IKEA picture frame ⊕ The frame in question is the RIBBA, which I am absolutely positive had cost less than the current $15 and had a glass front instead of the current plastic one. So it goes…, “because do you know how much this would have cost back home”. Or, back home, a bottle of white wine received as a gift from someone decades ago and saved for a special occasion only to turn to vinegar. And in parallel, the urge to never, ever use anything up to its last bit.

Chocolate? Leave last few squares in the foil until they turn white and inedible. Pot of coffee? Drink until there are about to fingers left, keep at room temperature overnight, then pour down the drain. Dinner? Purposefully eat around the best bits, then whether or not you are full place them in a glass container — preferably one you salvaged from the recycle bin — and leave in the deepest, darkest reaches of the refrigerator until other family members start wondering about the funny smell.

So to my list of standard Latin phrases I should add Ne quid nimis — nothing in excess — even when the excess is in saving.

Walking through Hillwood yesterday was too much so I had to tone it down.

A day that began in Hillwood gardens in DC ended at the National Aquarium in Baltimore. These two were happy to pose.

While responding to a tweet I realized that an essential emoji was missing from the ever-expanding collection: one for RSS feeds. Come on, people, it’s not difficult.

It isn’t every day that a podcast goes from my Testing to the Regular playlist, so I have to mark the moment. “Reason is Fun” by Lulie Tanett and David Deutsch is, well, fun and thought-provoking throughout, even if (because?) I often disagree with either or both of the hosts.

Incidentally, this is the first time in nine (!?) years that Overcast’s Suggestions for you section had something that was both new and noteworthy. There were a few more that look promising, so either the algorithm has changed or it has finally learned my tastes.

In a scene right out of The Wire, a man was shot while watching a soccer game in Adams Morgan, right next to our kids' old elementary school. In fact, had we not moved a few months ago, it would have been their current ES — this happened not 500 feet from our old back yard, as the crow files.

So anyway, if you cut the police budget, crime goes up. Who knew? (And yes, this continues to annoy.)