Copper plumbing is different now, no blow torches were used in the installation of a new propane furnace in our basement. With all this stuff in place it has a steam punk look. Unfortunately four trucks up and down for three days turned our driveway into a mud pit. My wimpy-ass Prius has to stay up top in the neighbor's driveway.
I finished this book in the sleepless hours and then at 2:30 am I had to get up and figure out why I didn't know the answer to this problem:

If a test to detect a disease whose prevalence is 1/1000 has a false positive rate of 5%, what is the chance that a person found to have a positive result actually has the disease, assuming you know nothing about the person's symptoms or signs?

It was a good read about how narrow specialization makes us less good at problem solving and how cross-domain experience and wild analogizing makes us more innovative. In the news this week, a giant container ship is wedged aground in the Suez Canal blocking all traffic and costing billions in trade delays. This seems like a really simple problem in search of an innovative solution. Where are all those cross-domain thinkers when we need them?

Sara Trunzo has shown me a grant-style language model that is going to be very useful to me going forward. My language was wrinkled clothes piled on top my dresser. She starched and ironed it, then gave it epaulettes and a monocle. I will submit my first grant tomorrow. It is for $10K to be used for business resources.

I woke up from my second vaccine shot hyper sleep this morning thinking about designing a town self-study, replicable by any Maine town. Start with the data set of town voters going back 5 years. That gives you age, gender, neighborhood, party affiliation. Add the commitment book of property tax data. That gives you wealth by ownership information and separates renters from owners. Add GIS location info. That lets you assign town zones or create bands radiating out from the post office. Then you can start asking questions.
Does downtown look like a city in terms of voter preference relative to the rest of town?
Do renters tend to vote differently than property owners?
What is the breakdown of voters by age, gender, wealth, neighborhood?
What are the trends over the last 5 years?
Are Unity College students still around although the campus is closed?
There was a big increase in voter participation in the 2020 presidential election. Who were those voters?
A year from now we might be able to add another voter attribute: library patron.

I'm not sure why asking for a data set vs a print out is threatening to people. I had an interesting exchange of wordy emails with the CVR manager in Augusta, and the upshot of that, if I am parsing the bureaucratic language right, is that it's a town matter and they don't care. That puts me back at step one where I ask the town clerk for a data set. The other conversation I had about it was with folks at the League of Women Voters who agree that the league should maybe put out a set of guidelines or a workshop for getting things done in the face of needless paranoid entrenchment on the part of our small town governments.

Last night's EDC meeting would have made a good short story, where there's an elephant in the room that no one speaks directly of, but instead people make up hypotheticals to try to elicit a desired answer from the TIF consultant lawyer guy who apparently didn't know about the elephant and who kept giving them the same answer: the EDC is an advisory committee and town meeting is the legislative final say about things and no, the selectmen cannot overrule spending approved at a town meeting. My understanding of how town government works has been affirmed by their consultant. Sweet. I will be turning my petition signatures next week and according to state law, the selectmen have to call a special town meeting within 60 days.

The library has to have a policy for everything in the world. Just look at the Blue Hill Library's impressive policy document. It's a good thing that we have real librarians. Diana and Annie are hashing out our policies. They were in the same graduating class and didn't realize that they now are almost neighbors on the same road. The Saturday morning donations period has become quite social. People stop by just to be there. I am spending a lot of time writing two grants, one to the Stephen & Tabitha King Foundation and another to the Start Up Scale Up program of Maine Community Foundation. The latter grant is for a specialized business reference collection including subscriptions to two databases not in the Maine Digital Library. We got our first real reservation for the AirBnB suites. On Thursday, both suites will be occupied. Still haven't figured out a key box thing. By the end of this month Melissa and I will have both our Moderna shots. I so look forward to Sunday morning breakfast at Ralph's which has recently acquired an espresso machine. Half Jack with a latte. Yes.

List made in a wakeful night:
1. What you thought of as binary turned out to be a continuum.
2. What you thought was an essential and causative feature turned out to be an incidental attribute.
3. The future is creole.
4. We are in the grasp of the ungraspable -- Rilke