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I would never hire him to do work for me.

Betty

Betty

Betty

Betty

Betty

Do you watch YouTube videos much? I have been lately, often enough to actually pay to see them without ads. I hadn’t expected that to happen.

August 27, 2026

From Angus yesterday:

Sunrise. Two of the villages rather polite ( and usually apolitical ) seventy year olds are heading off in their little red Volvo. He a retired professor of economics, she a designer of fabrics for Harrods. They’ve prepared a packed lunch and will be joining a protest against the building of a data centre in a village on the road to Edinburgh. Scotland is an ideal location for these things. It has lots of wind power and no shortage of water to fuel and cool the servers. This combination has attracted droves of resource hungry AI companies. What is only now becoming apparent ( and generating unhappiness ) is the size of these things. The one they’re protesting against will cover 60 hectares and be 12 metres high. That will dwarf the wee place.

12 meters is about 40 feet, and 60 hectares is 148 acres. So presumably it would be an approximately four-story building covering about 6-10 square city blocks, about 84 soccer fields. Why would anyone object?

Angus also mentions the cruise liners he and his wife can see from their garden in the evening:

We stand by the garden wall looking out over the sea as the Orkney bound cruise liners twinkle like gin palaces in the gloaming.

The whole world is changing fast

August 26, 2026

In 1975, a movie filmed in Martha’s Vineyard made people afraid to go into the water. Today, a real animal in Martha’s Vineyard is making people afraid to go outside. “It’s gotten to the point now that grandparents are not allowing their grandchildren to come visit them,” said Sam Telford.

Kaitlin and Torben told me about this yesterday, and I read this article last night.

Scary stuff!

August 25, 2026

Some dogs like to chase squirrels.

But not all of them do.

August 24, 2026

Bliss

We were at Cornell University for about 8 1/2 years — over fifty years ago. And I still remember the dogs and the squirrels. The dogs were always hopeful, but the squirrels always won. They would often wait until the last couple of seconds to scamper up the tree.

August 23, 2026

Andertoons

B. C.

August 22, 2026

Speed Bump

Cockroaches have reputaton for being resilient. They’ve been on earth about 320 million years, 100 million years before the dinosaurs. And they’ve survived multiple mass extinctions, including the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. It’s hard to believe they won’t continue thriving.

August 21, 2026

It is really hard to get help up on the land because it’s such a long drive, part of it on bumpy dirt roads. So you can imagine how we felt when Andy discovered this broken (double pane) window.

We (including Kaitlin) started phoning around, looking on the internet, trying to see if anyone would touch the project. Sierra Pacific Windows had installed the windows in 2012, so I looked on their website to see if they happened to have the correct dimensions of what we needed. (Andy had measured the window and glass, but it wouldn’t hurt to double check.) The website wasn’t set up for that, so I phoned their number.

I figured it was a longshot, but it wouldn’t hurt to try. I was gobsmacked. They actually had the order number from July 2012, and they sent me a quote to replace the glass. I signed the quote, sent it right back, and phoned to give them my credit card number for the deposit — half of the total cost. That was impressive enough, but in addition they are not charging us for the glass, just for labor and the cost of travel.

When the glass arrives at their Albuquerque warehouse they will phone to arrange a time to bring it up and install it. Things could still go wrong, of course, but even if it does I am still blown away by their attention to their customers. How different that is from so many businesses nowadays.

August 20, 2026

Betty,
Click on image for higher resolution.

Do you write in cursive very much? I do — almost every day. I’ve read we’re more apt to remember things if we write them rather than type them, and it seems to work for me.

Do you think kids should be forced to learn cursive? I remember the hours of handwriting practice when I was a kid, so I understand the argument that school time is better spent on other things. But I like the idea of thinking of cursive as a secret code, so it might be fun to turn learning it into a game. Give out the clue sheet, of course.

I keep thinking of Charlemange, who was highly educated, learned to read, and kept writing tablets and notebooks under his pillow so that he could practice whenever he had spare time. Apparently he never really mastered the writing part.

So I think it’s not a bad idea to expose kids to cursive and to give them the tools they need if they want to learn to write it. What do you think?

August 19, 2026

Yesterday Angus wrote,

Outside the golf club we meet our Edinburgh solicitor. I say he’s our solicitor but the firm of lawyers we’ve used forever has been taken over and amalgamated into a large international ‘practice’ as their Scottish outpost. As a consequence he’s become rather too grand for us. The takeover supposedly enables us to access a ‘wider variety of services’ but our needs tend to be rather prosaic and corporate restructurings and access to an international network of offices across Asia and the Gulf aren’t high on our list of priorities.

He tells us that the number of Americans wanting to come and live in Scotland has doubled in the last year. Obtaining residency permits is keeping him very busy and, from the looks of his large Mercedes SUV, well remunerated. I think he said nearly 10,000 American families had already applied for Scottish residency this year but it could have been 20,000. We will doubtless bump into him again and when we do I’ll ask what the numbers are. He also says that cold weather tourism is indeed a thing. His Edinburgh client base of hotels have never been busier. Tourists that used to go to London for a week are now heading north for some of the time. Volumes are up 15% over last year which is, seemingly, unheard of. 2027 is shaping up to see similar growth with early bookings from Spain and Italy surging.

I hope Scotland doesn’t start getting so crowded that it ruins the things we loved about it.

August 18, 2026