Author: Even that’s Odd

  • This New Old House, Part 23: Mistakes Were Made. Lessons Were Learned.

    This New Old House, Part 23: Mistakes Were Made. Lessons Were Learned. So here we are. The end of the road. Or at least the end of the story as I’ve been telling it. If you’ve read this series from the beginning, you know we built a Connor Homes kit colonial on 14 raw acres…

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  • The Solar Story Is More Complicated Than the Brochure

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    There was a window — and I think most people missed it. A few years back, the federal government and New York State were practically paying you to put solar panels on your roof. Between the federal tax credit and the NYSERDA grant, we were looking at roughly $10,000 coming off the top of a…

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  • How We Ended Up With a Bernedoodle

    I’ll just say it upfront: the Bernedoodle is one of the most bougie dogs on the planet. Possibly the most bougie. We own one. His name is Hobbes. He’s been part of the family for three years now, and I feel like I should explain how that happened, because it wasn’t exactly a straight line.…

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  • We Made It Illegal, Then Called Them Illegal

    I was listening to BBC Newshour the other day. A Democratic senator was trying to talk about immigration, and the reporter kept pushing the same question: these people broke the law to get here, so why should they be allowed to stay? You could hear the senator stumble. He couldn’t find the answer. And the…

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  • Activist, Deactivist, and the Fox Guarding the Henhouse

    A new format: my unfiltered gut take on the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act ruling and the partisan-gerrymandering racket, followed by a fact-check of every claim I made. Bias up top. The check at the bottom.

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  • Confessions of an Adult Toddler

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    My shoe philosophy has done a full lap. It started where everyone’s starts — slip-ons and Velcro, because I couldn’t tie laces yet — and it has now, decades later, returned to that exact spot. Different shoes. Same logic. The toddler was right. For most of my adult life I was a laces guy. Tying…

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  • The White Sole Argument I Lost to Myself

    For most of my adult life, white soles felt like a costume. Like I was dressing as a younger version of myself. The white-soled sneaker had a specific era for me — Air Force 1s, old Puma Clydes, that whole lineage of clean white rubber under suede or leather — and at some point I…

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  • This New Old House Part 22: Porch Upgrade (That Happened to Coincide with Lockdown)

    Our kit house came with about a dozen front-entry options. Most of them weren’t really porches at all — they were flush to the house, or very slightly recessed with some nice trim work. A couple had actual covered entryways, but those weren’t the style we chose. So we ended up with a flush entry…

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  • Spider Eyes

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    We went to Belize a couple springs back — Spring Break 2024, jungle half of the trip at Sleeping Giant Rainforest Lodge — and I learned something there that I cannot unlearn. It doesn’t bother me, exactly. But it has rewired how I look at my own yard at night, and I don’t think there’s…

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  • ProLife / ProChoice / ProReason?

    A federal appeals court just ordered the FDA to require in-person dispensing of mifepristone — the pill used in roughly 60% of abortions in this country — and it applied that ruling nationwide at the request of one state. Louisiana sued, the Fifth Circuit said sure, and now everybody from California to Vermont is supposed…

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  • Gonna Party Like It’s 1999

    A new US party structure, by way of Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the Nordics. Three things need to change if we want a country that actually moves instead of just performing motion for the cameras: The first two are arguments for another day. This one is about the third — because the two-party…

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  • US Against Them : Enough is Enough

    The third song in the Enough Is Enough campaign. It’s not red vs. blue. It’s about the people on top who need us fighting each other so we don’t notice them.

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  • BrokeCon By Design: The Complete 25-Part Series

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    A 25-part series on how American life got rigged against the bottom 90% — system by system, with receipts.

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  • Crashed My Bike Trying to Avoid a Garter Snake, And Then My Dog Wanted In On The Action

    We live right next to the rail trail — our property literally borders it — so we end up using it a lot. I walk the dog there. I ride my bike. The section closest to us is the rough version, just packed dirt that gets muddy after rain and stays covered in sticks and…

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  • Do Unto Others: The Complete 5-Part Series

    A 5-part series on transactional empathy, asymmetric hypocrisy, and what democracy requires that we’re no longer providing. Start here.

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  • Divided We Fall: The Complete 10-Part Series

    A 10-part series on the culture war as a business model — and what the data actually shows on the issues it sells you. Start here.

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  • Passing the Buck: The Complete 15-Part Series

    A 15-part series on how costs got shifted off corporations and government and onto individual workers — and what it would take to reverse it. Start here.

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  • Vehicle Roof Philosophy

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    I Was Wrong About Moon Roofs

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  • This New Old House, Part 21: Post and Beam Kit Barn

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    From the moment we started planning the house, we knew there would eventually be a barn. Eventually being the operative word — we were already stretching to build the house, so the barn was going on the someday list alongside retirement and peace of mind. What we knew for certain: no attached garage. I know…

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  • Union Strong: The Only Thing Standing Between Us and the Bottom

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    I’m not a union guy in the way you might picture a union guy. I’ve complained about unions. I’ve worked around them because the budget demanded it. I’ve watched strong-arm tactics that embarrassed everyone involved. I’ve sat in a production office calculating how much cheaper everything would be if we just went non-union. And I…

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  • My Wheel Philosophy That Became a Tire (Tyre) Philosophy

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    I am a firm believer in snow tires and I think the fact that I have to say that out loud in 2025 is genuinely one of the more baffling things about living in the Northeast — like, we all agree the earth is round, right, so can we also agree that all-season tires in…

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  • The Upside Down

    We are living in the Stranger Things Upside Down. Same country, wrong version of it. I used to think Trump Derangement Syndrome existed on both sides. People so blinded by their feelings about one man that they couldn’t think straight. I had some sympathy for that framing, honestly, because I knew people on both ends…

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  • Youth Sports Is Broken (And I Helped Break It)

    I’ll start with a confession: I was part of the problem. That’s not false modesty or a rhetorical device to soften what I’m about to say about the adults who turned our town’s recreational youth sports leagues into something unrecognizable. I genuinely made things worse. I yelled at kids. I put pressure on my sons…

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  • A Picture to Replace the Thousand Reminders

    I have two kids. Twelve and almost fourteen. And look — I know that whatever they are, that’s mostly on me. You are what you’re exposed to, right? I get that. But some of this is just kid behavior. And some of it is personality. And some of it, honestly, is just the particular era…

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  • Why I Started My Ecom Shop as an Accidental Designer

    It started, as most things do in my house, with baseball. My kids got into it around six years old — right past the T-ball phase where everyone’s just spinning in the outfield catching dandelions — and from there it was spring ball, fall ball, soccer mixed in, the whole blurry chaos of youth sports…

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  • Paris, September 2024: Tag Along Trip

    My wife Jennifer had to go to Paris for work and she was kind enough to buy me a plane ticket so I could come with her. I’ve done this before — tagged along to Vietnam once, Kauai another time — and I’ve learned that seeing a place through the lens of someone else’s work…

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  • Aphantasia, Dyslexia, and ADHD: How I Made a Career in a Visual Industry Without a Functioning Mind’s Eye

    There I was on 87, Ubering one of my kids to a travel baseball tournament in New Jersey — kid in the back with headphones on, or asleep, which amounts to the same thing. Half-listening to NPR because it’s either that or the silence where my own thoughts live. And a Radiolab episode came on…

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  • PARTY OF ONE : ENOUGH IS ENOUGH SONG 3

    Here’s something nobody in either party wants you to think about too hard: they cash the same checks. Not the same voters. Not the same rhetoric. Not the same culture war. But the same donors, the same bundlers, the same checks written before the election and collected after. The red team and the blue team…

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  • This New Old House, Part 20: Interior Doors, Trim, and Hardware

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    I wasn’t sure this post was needed. I thought we’d covered interior doors and trim somewhere — maybe with the windows, maybe with painting. Turns out we hadn’t. So here we are. This will be short. That’s what I always say. The doors For interior doors, we went with five-panel solid wood from Solidhardwooddoors.com, which…

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  • Why Have I Started to Smell Like A Frito Corn Chip?

    I’ve been noticing something for the past few weeks. I smell like Fritos. Not after eating Fritos. Not near Fritos. Just as a default condition of existing. I’ll be sitting somewhere, not doing anything corn-adjacent, and I’ll get this whiff and do that thing where you look around the room trying to find the source…

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  • Updated My Travel Fit, Watch Out Portugal

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    If you read my Portugal post, you know how this started. Jennifer had opinions about my travel wardrobe. The citizens of Lisbon had opinions about my travel wardrobe. I came home suitably chastened and with a list of things to replace. Well, I’ve replaced most of them. This is the follow-up I promised — what…

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  • LIVING THE DREAM: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH SONG 2

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    We say it like it’s a fact. Greatest country on earth. Number one. Living the dream. But when you actually look at the data — the rankings, the numbers, the verified receipts — the scoreboard tells a different story. Living the Dream is the second Enough Is Enough protest song.

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  • Strait of Hormuz: The Board Game Edition

    Like most people, I’ve been watching this story with a mix of disbelief and exhaustion that is quickly becoming the default setting for following American foreign policy. I want to be upfront. I’m not a foreign policy expert. I don’t pretend to understand all the moving parts and I’m genuinely open to the possibility that…

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  • This New Old House, Part 19: Bathrooms

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    When we designed the bathrooms, we made one decision upfront that was purely forward-looking and, honestly, pretty smart: the first-floor powder room got a shower. The room next to it — which we were using as a playroom, game room, whatever it is on any given Tuesday — could eventually become a bedroom. Aging parents,…

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  • My Clothing Philosophy (Who Even Has One Of Those?)

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    If you’ve been following my ongoing clothing saga — the chore coat search, the Red Wing chronicles, the light duty boot quest — you might have noticed that I have opinions. Strong ones. Possibly unreasonably strong ones for someone who spends a meaningful portion of his life mowing a lawn and cutting firewood. But here…

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  • The Navien NCB-240/110 Propane Combi Boiler — One Year In

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    Our Triangle Tube Prestige SOLO 110 finally gave up the ghost. Actually, “finally” is generous — it went out on its own schedule, which was, of course, the worst possible time. The short version: indirect water heater tank with an anode rod that needed replacing, ongoing iron and sediment issues, and the slow creeping realization…

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  • Drowning in It

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    There’s a moment every four to five weeks that snaps me back to reality. I load up the car, drive to our local transfer station, hand Dan a coupon, and drop off a single 44-gallon bag of trash. One bag. And I think — okay, we’re doing our part. We compost, we recycle obsessively, we…

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  • The Peace President Needs to Fund His Wars Instead of our Health and Child Care. So Democrats Talk About Crayons?

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    Sort of an Opinion piece but not really, it’s just this country is batshit off the rails. You seriously could not make up how out of touch these people are. WTF Is Wrong With Us? No Seriously… Let me set the full scene, because context is everything here. IHere is everything you need to know…

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  • This New Old House — Part 18: The Kitchen

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    Layout and Flooring The kitchen is where you spend most of your waking life in a house. Jennifer did the layout and it works — the flow is right, the dining area sits just off the kitchen where you can see into it without being in it, and the whole thing makes sense in a…

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  • My GMO Concern Confusion (Until I Finally Looked It Up)

    For years, I walked past products screaming NON-GMO! and thought… so what? I’ll be upfront: I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed. I’m also an optimist — or maybe a pessimistic optimist? An optimistic pessimist? I’ve never quite nailed that down, and honestly, that tracks with the fact that I spent years vaguely confused…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Make Less But Pay More Part 15: How We Get There

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    Part 15 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. This is the final installment. The last fourteen installments have been an attempt to describe a structural problem. This one is supposed to be the part where the writer describes how to fix it. I want to start…

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  • Angry Old Extremely Religious Christian White Man Yelling from His Porch Syndrome

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    What finally broke my brain was the sequence. The Epstein files dropped. The same movement that built itself on QAnon, on “protect the children,” on Democrats running pedophile rings out of pizza basements — the moral foundation that supposedly separated them from the godless left — went quiet. Or shifted. Or decided that maybe context…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Make Less But Pay More Part 14: What We Could Have Instead

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    Part 14 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. The previous thirteen installments have been an attempt to describe the structure of cost-shifting in American economic life and to trace how that structure was built. This one looks at what other developed countries do, partly because the…

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  • Are We About to Come Full Circle on Who We Trust?

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    I was driving to yet another baseball tournament Saturday morning, half-awake, NPR on in the background, when a story about AI disinformation in the Iran conflict completely hijacked my brain for the next forty-five minutes. The segment was trying to walk through which images were fake and which weren’t. Iranian state TV had broadcast AI-generated…

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  • This New Old House — Part 17: Exterior, Siding, Roofing & Trim

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    Siding By the time we got to the exterior, the siding decision came down to two options in the Connor package: cedar or HardiePlank. Jennifer would have preferred the cedar — she always gravitates toward natural wood — but once we actually looked at what HardiePlank offered, it wasn’t a real contest. HardiePlank is fiber…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make Less Part 13: How We Got Here

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    Part 13 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. The structural picture this series has been building was assembled over roughly fifty years, through a sequence of policy changes that, taken individually, were always defensible on some narrow technical or ideological ground, and that taken together added…

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  • Is the Iran War America’s Biggest Self-Own of Self-Owns?

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    Three and a half weeks in. Twenty-four days of US and Israeli strikes on Iran, oil at $112 a barrel, thirteen American soldiers dead, the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed, and the administration now scrambling to lift sanctions on the very country we’re bombing — just to keep gas prices from completely destroying what’s left…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make Less Part 12: The Bipartisan Consensus

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    Part 12 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. The previous installment looked at where the money goes. This one looks at why the political system has not redirected it, which is a question I find harder to answer in a tidy way than the structural-economics questions…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make Less Part 11: Who Profits?

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    Part 11 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. The ten installments before this one traced where the money goes — the categories where household spending has grown, the mechanisms by which it has grown, and the structural reasons for the growth. This one is about who…

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  • WTF Is Up With MTG?

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    Something happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene and I’m still not sure how to file it. Six months ago she was the most reliably deranged member of Congress. She’d stalked a teenage school shooting survivor through the Capitol on video. She’d endorsed online conspiracy theories I genuinely do not want to type out in detail on…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make LessPart 10: The Compound Effect

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    Part 10 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. This series has spent nine installments going category by category through the structural changes that have shifted costs from corporate balance sheets onto American households over the last fifty years. Each installment looked at one slice of the…

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  • What’s Wrong With the Democrats. What’s Wrong With the Republicans. It Doesn’t Matter.

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    Neither One Will Deliver for You. Let me start with something that should be obvious but somehow never gets said out loud. Neither party won the last election. The other party just lost it more. That distinction sounds like splitting hairs until you realize it explains almost everything broken about American politics for the last…

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  • How an Angry Old MacDonald Became a Protest Song

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    It started with a question: What is actually wrong with this country, and why do we seem so far apart? The division felt real. The anger felt real. But when you actually looked at the polling data, something didn’t add up. Americans agree on almost everything that matters. Healthcare. Wages. Campaign finance reform. Taxing the…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make Less Part 9: Death, Taxes, and Everything In Between

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    Part 9 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. This installment is about all the other fees: the ones below the line on the bills I have already written about, the surcharges and convenience charges and service fees and resort fees and processing fees that have become…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make Less Part 8: Insurance

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    Part 8 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. On the morning of December 4, 2024, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was shot and killed on a sidewalk in Midtown Manhattan on his way to his company’s annual investor day. The bullet casings recovered at the…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make Less Part 7: Phone and Internet

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    Part 7 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. This installment is about phone and internet service, which has become the cleanest example in modern American life of what happens when a utility-style market is allowed to deregulate into an oligopoly. It is the most unavoidable monthly…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make Less Part 6: Food Monopolies

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    Part 6 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. This series has been working its way through the categories of household spending where the cost has been quietly shifted away from corporate balance sheets and onto households. Food is one of the larger ones, and one of…

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  • The Metric System Makes Sense to Everyone

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    When I was a kid, we started learning the metric system in school. There was an actual plan. America was going to join the rest of the world and switch from the imperial system — the one built on the length of some king’s foot — to a logical base-ten system that scientists, engineers, and…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make LessPart 5: The Auto Trap

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    Part 5 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. The first four installments traced cost shifts inside relatively well-defined transactions — wages versus productivity, employer-to-worker benefit transfers, overdraft fees, credit card interest. This one is harder, because the cost being passed to households is built into the…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make Less. Part 4: Credit Cards

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    Part 4 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. Part 3 looked at the overdraft side of consumer banking. This one looks at the other side of the same relationship — the credit card. Most of the largest credit card issuers in the United States are also…

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  • How MTV Killed the Video Star (And Cable/Network Greed Finished the Job)

    I’m not a media analyst. Smarter people than me — like Evan Shapiro, who you should follow on LinkedIn — dissect this industry for a living. But I spent years working inside broadcast television, and I’ve been chewing on this particular problem for more than a decade. So here’s my slightly obsessive take on how…

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  • This New Old House, Part 16: Chim Chimney, Chim Chimney, Chim Chim Cherooh-Noo

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    Some mistakes cost money. Some cost time. The chimney cost both, repeatedly, for years. If you’ve been following along, you know that this build had its share of “we didn’t know what we didn’t know” moments. The windows. The spray foam learning curve. The drywall saga. But the chimney — the chimney was different. Those…

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  • Dress to Impress (Who, Exactly? The Fine People of Portugal Obviously.)

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    We just got back from Portugal and it was fantastic. Lisbon, Porto, the hills, the pastéis de nata, the Super Bock — loved all of it. I dress for the weather. I dress for the walking. I dress to stay dry and not have to check a bag. Apparently Portugal noticed. So did Jennifer. They…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Make Less But Pay More. Part 3: Banking Fees

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    Part 3 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. In Parts 1 and 2 I walked through the picture: the math on a typical American household has tightened over fifty years even as productivity has climbed, and several specific costs — housing, healthcare, higher education, transportation, retirement…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Make Less But Pay More. Part 2: The Baseline Shift

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    Part 2 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. In Part 1 I walked through the math on one specific case — a nurse making $77,000 a year, doing everything right, with $625 a month left after mandatory expenses. The argument was that the math has gotten…

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  • This New Old House Part 15: Flooring – Wide Plank Heart Pine Dreams vs. Reality

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    After painting came flooring. And I had a very specific vision: wide plank flooring with exposed face nails, just like colonial homes from the 1700s. Old growth wood with character. Reclaimed if possible. The authentic historical look. The Connor Homes kit included flooring as an option. It was beautiful — I think it was reclaimed…

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  • The Telo MT1, Almost — And the Truck I Actually Want

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    The setup, briefly: we have a 2016 Audi Allroad my wife loves, somewhere past 100,000 miles and probably pushing 125k by the time we replace it. Comfortable, capable, hauls everything. The brief for its replacement is simple — she wants an EV wagon. I did quietly float a small EV pickup as an alternative. That…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Make Less But Pay More. Part 1: The Impossible Math

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    Part 1 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. A few years ago I started keeping a list. It began with a conversation at the field after one of Henry’s games. A guy I have known for a decade — coaches another team, runs a small landscaping…

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  • This New Old House Part 14: Painting – Or: Why I Hope I Never Have to Use a Paint Sprayer Again

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    After drywall came painting. And by “painting,” I mean painting literally everything in the entire house. Every wall. Every ceiling. Every piece of trim. Every window interior. Every door. All 27-28 of them. Both sides. Jennifer and I decided to do all the painting ourselves to save money. This seemed like a reasonable decision at…

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  • Americans Agree on Almost Everything—We Just Don’t Realize It

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    I scroll Instagram mostly because I have to. Crooked Number lives there and you can’t sell baseball mom shirts to an empty room, so I spend more time on it than I’d choose. Which means most of what I see is algorithm-served noise I didn’t ask for. One of those infographics floated past the other…

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  • How I ignored a broken well tank for two years

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    January 9, 2026 Looking back, I think the well tank bladder had been broken since at least summer 2024. It might have been failing for a year or two before that. What I was noticing: the water pressure would drop a little, then go back up when the pump kicked in. I thought the pressure…

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  • Rainy February in Portugal with Two Kids (13 & 12)

    We had to go to Portugal in early February for Jennifer’s AIMA residency appointment, which is the kind of thing you don’t get to schedule. They tell you the date, you show up. We figured if we had to be in Portugal anyway, we’d escape the sub-zero temperatures at home, pull the kids out of…

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  • The heat pump job I gave the wrong company

    March-April 2025 If you read my previous post about the emergency boiler replacement, you know that Company PPH didn’t exactly shine during that crisis, while Company NCS stepped up and saved Thanksgiving. You also know that I felt guilty about the miscommunication and decided to give PPH the heat pump job to make it right.…

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  • When the boiler died the Sunday before Thanksgiving

    November 2024 Our Triangle Tube Prestige Solo 110 boiler had been breaking down occasionally, and each service call was costing a minimum of $1,200. I got so frustrated with service companies that I learned to fix minor issues myself. But every technician told me the same thing: boilers have a lifespan of about 15 years,…

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  • This New Old House Part 13: Drywall – The Most Boring Post (But There Are Lessons)

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    After spray foam insulation, plumbing disasters, HVAC complications, and window decisions I’d come to regret for the next fifteen years, we finally got to something relatively straightforward: drywall. It went fine. Which, in this build, was its own kind of miracle. Hiring a Subcontractor My friend who was acting as our general contractor took one…

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  • Do Unto Others Part 5: What This Means for Democracy

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    Part 5 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → This is the last installment of the series, and I want to do something I have been putting off for the previous four pieces — actually try to land the question of what all of it means. Quick recap of what…

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  • Do Unto Others Part 4: Flooding the Zone

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    Part 4 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → In 2018, Steve Bannon gave an interview to Michael Lewis. It was during Trump’s first State of the Union, and Lewis was writing for Bloomberg. Asked about the Trump media strategy, the line that came out — and that has been…

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  • Do Unto Others Part 3: Both Sides Are Hypocrites

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    Part 3 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → Last installment I said I’d take up the question you hear at every Little League snack bar and every Thanksgiving table the second you start documenting things one party has actually done. But Democrats do this too. The asymmetry isn’t real,…

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  • This New Old House Part 12: Insulation and Air Sealing – When Tight Isn’t Right (Or Is It?)

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    When we decided to build our Connor Homes kit house, we had visions of a super-efficient, modern home wrapped in the latest insulation technology. We’d read all about spray foam, tight building envelopes, and energy efficiency. We were going to do this right. We sort of did. Maybe. I’m still not entirely sure. The Plan:…

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  • Do Unto Others Part 2: “My Own Morality”

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    Part 2 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → In the New York Times interview published January 8, 2026, Trump was asked whether anything constrained his power on the global stage. He answered: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can…

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