Lush green has roiled up and hidden us from our neighbors as we approach the high point of the year, the summer solstice(June 21 2:46 am). Light from 4:30 am to 9 pm. Had a couple of sturdy Unity College boys put the dock in Thursday. Just in time. We lose heat tolerance over the winter and now that it's mid eighties and a bit humid, we have to go soak in the lake from time to time to cool off. I've been on 32 hour weeks at work (with two half days worked at home)since May and I don't think I can go back to 40. I usually work at home on Tuesday and Thursday and take those afternoons off. I'll just buy 20 percent less stuff. Still working through Michael Shermer's The Science of Good & Evil. Paused in the middle of it to read Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough, architect, and Michael Braungart, chemist. It's about designing and manufacturing things, and the facilities that make them, so that they are infinitely recyclable and totally non-polluting. The book itself is a good design, made of synthetic paper, waterproof, durable and infinitely recyclable. It gives a new vocabulary ("waste equals food", "technical nutrients") and shows how designing something with its entire life cycle in mind solves waste and pollution problems. His design ideas start with the quality of the workplace where they will be manufactured. At my workplace, I've changed offices for the 4th time in as many years. I'm back in the hive (a set of 4 cubicles where the programmers live) in Travis's old space with a real sit-stand desk and a wall of windows from which I can see the weather and the line where the lawn meets the woods at an old rock wall and things that sometimes wander out of the woods, mostly wild turkeys, more rarely a fox. I'm near the glass back door into which a hawk once flew at full speed making a sound that brought the whole building to see what had happened and killed the hawk cleanly with a broken neck. The other reading I've enjoyed is the series in The Atlantic by Bernard-Henri Levy called In the Footsteps of Tocqueville, an account of his road trip through America from the viewpoint of a European, making him seem at times like a socio/political Diane Arbus. Hmmm. Levy and Toq kind of look alike, don't you think? The current mp3 download is an old one from The Band; only recently did I understand the reference to "what went down on the Plains of Abraham", a big field outside the walls of Quebec City.

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