I spent some time in the studio with Lisa yesterday. While she was busy carving a fox into lino block, I set out to scratch a tiny artistic itch:

This was inspired by this Sora video that I had AI create back in the fall, with the prompt:

@peter.rukavina is an exercise coach, dressed entirely very bright purple spandex. His name is Pete. He is leading an exercise class, using only rosebushes as the apparatus. His students look kind of like him, but with beards. 

This is what it came up with:

I realized, after making my homage to the video, that I had changed the wording from the video’s “take your rosebush” to “grab your rosebush,” because it rolls off the tongue better. Sora doesn’t have a tongue.

Twenty-four years ago I posted Nicholson Sisters (and Brother Bob), which started:

There are some families you can’t escape.

Everything I wrote about the Nicholsons, all those years ago, has only become more true in the almost-quarter-century since, as kids have grown up (and become opera singers and trumpet players and competitive swimmers and bartenders and videographers), as a slice of the family cemented itself into the provincial burgeoning of the Green Party, as kids have had their own kids.

Through all this, Elizabeth Nicholson—mother, grandmother, great-grandmother—was a regular reader of this blog. 

One of the things I sometimes find myself doing when writing blogs posts is imagining a single reader, a single reader eventually reading what I’m writing. More often than not, it was Elizabeth who I imagined.

We didn’t know each other well, but, somehow, all these words, over all these years, and all my weaving into the life of the Nicholsons, over all these years, made it feel like we knew each other very well indeed.

Elizabeth died last week, and I feel like I’ve lost a close friend.

She will be missed.

Bookbinder JS is a heartbreaking work of genius. It’s a standalone JavaScript-based application for imposition.

If you have a PDF file that you want to bind into a book, this is the tool you want.

We watched the documentary Between the Mountain and the Sky last night, and were quite moved by it:

From the Duplass Brothers, Between the Mountain and the Sky follows CNN Hero Maggie Doyne and Top Malla over twenty years as they build a home that becomes a family to more than fifty orphaned children in Nepal. At the height of this journey, an unimaginable loss shatters everything, and the filmmaker steps from behind the camera—deepening the story into a meditation on grief, resilience, and the power of love to heal.

Through a mix of raw home videos and vérité footage captured through a lens of love, the film reaches a rare level of intimacy — resisting staged interviews, makeup, and talking heads to reveal something far more human. It offers an unfiltered look at compassion that runs deeper than headlines and heroism, revealing a raw portrait of motherhood, loss, and the quiet courage to keep going.

The “Duplass Brothers” are Mark (who you might recognize as “Chip” from The Morning Show) and Jay. They are prolific creators; I know them best from Togetherness (recommended).

Maggie Doyne and Top Malla run BlinkNow, and funds from the pay-what-you-can streaming of the documentary support the group’s work.

I have the fortune to be able to join Lisa for morning workouts when my own workout at Kinetic with Cayla isn’t running.

Being able to train with Lisa’s coach Matt Cormier is a great way to mix things up, and working out with Lisa from time to time is lovely (she is fierce).

When Cayla was on vacation a few weeks ago, I ended up doing three workouts with Matt, and, by way of thanking him, I proposed printing him some business cards for his recently-rebranded RISE80 gym.

“Matt’s pretty edgy,” Lisa said, when I suggested this, throwing down a gauntlet.

Here’s what I came up with:

The cards were printed on my Golding Jobber No. 8 in 120 pt. Akzidenz Grotesk on business cards I inherited from Bill and Gertie Campbell when I purchased the press.

You can see me and Lisa working out in this recent Instagram reel from Matt.

From Danny Gregory’s (great) weekly email newsletter:

It’s been over a year since I started using inexpensive tempera sticks to add color to my sketchbooks, and the romance has not faded. Jj laughs at how much I talk about these juicy lipsticks full of colo,r but I think they’re the perfect medium for me. They’re fast, they’re brightly colored, they’re rough, and they keep me feeling loose and spontaneous.

—From A few of my favorite things. - by Danny Gregory

A tool from Buttondown facilitated combining multiple RSS feeds into one:

Lots of things take RSS. Relatively few things do a great job of interleaving multiple RSS feeds. This is a simple tool to do that.

—From rssrssrssrss - Combine Multiple RSS Feeds into One

Here’s a combined feed of news, publications, and public alerts from the Government of PEI, for example.

Jeremy Cherfas has a fascinating story about inmates in Italian prisons cooking their own food:

An extremely unlikely source tipped me off to the existence of Cooking in Maximum Security. In some respects, it is completely ordinary; a book of recipes — Starters, First Courses et cetera — along with handy tips for making the dishes. In others, it is eye-opening, because all the recipes, and the inventions necessary to make them, were contributed by prisoners in Italian maximum security prisons. Not only that, but cooking is an essential and integral part of the prisoners’ everyday lives. Matteo Guidi, an anthropologist and artist who teaches in Italy and Spain, guided the process of compiling the book.

—From Eat This Podcast

My brother found this photo of my father, taken in Venice in 1996. By happenstance, he was then the same age I am now. We share a goofy grin.

In Hoera voor Dead Week/Romjul, Frank points to the Norwegian word romjul:

The period between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve.

Frank points to an article by Helena Fitzgerald in The Atlantic that calls this “dead week,” and begins:

Christmas is over and we have arrived at the most wonderful time of the year—nominally still the holidays, but also the opposite of a holiday, a blank space stretching between Christmas and New Year’s Eve when nothing makes sense and time loses its meaning. For many of us, this is the only time of year when it feels possible, and even encouraged, to do nothing. I look forward to it all year long.

We are now in the midst of that week, and I’m still trying to find that nothing. Having romjul to call the week only helps.