Sometimes parenthood feels like a very odd inversion of my childhood.

When I was a kid, holidays, snow days, and sick days were time off to relax, and were usually pretty fun.

But as a parent they're more work. Shoveling snow, policing cookie intake, dispensing cough syrup, de-escalating tantrums, mopping up barf. Late bedtimes. Long car rides. Virus-sharing. So much cooking. So much laundry.

In parent-times, regular school days are when I get a break. Eight hours of peace and quiet. I can finish a cup of coffee, and write a whole email without interruption. Glorious.

The other day I sat down to work and had that restless, scattered feeling.

That feeling usually tells me that whatever I’m trying to get done in the next hour is going to be a slog. I’m a freelancer. I work at home. There’s no boss looking over my shoulder, no coworkers sitting nearby. That makes staying focused a bigger challenge.

I just finished reading the last of Becky Chambers' Wayfarers novels, and they've already become favorites.

There are four books in the series, each telling a story from a different corner of a fictional universe called the Galactic Commons. The 'GC', as it's called, is an interstellar alliance that seems to combine effective resource-sharing and cultural bridge-building with crippling bureaucratic glut and relentless political maneuvering — not unlike many of our orgs here on Earth.

I've always loved to write and draw. Growing up, I searched for ways to connect those two things.

I wrote stories, and then illustrated them. For awhile, when I was 12-ish, I drew a comic strip, which I 'published' weekly on our refrigerator door.

Later, my Dad gave me his old camera and I became fascinated by photojournalism. I could tell stories by walking around and capturing the things I saw on film.

Somewhere in my teens I discovered computers. I played with compositing my photos and drawings in an ancestor of Photoshop, called Aldus Photostyler. It was, by today's standards, appalling. No layers. Truly awful masking tools. RAM measured in kilobytes. But Photostyler also offered millions of colors, perfect gradients, and the ability to push pixels around like paint. I was infatuated. My hand ached from the stiff buttons on our roller-ball mouse.

The internet became a household thing around the time I started high school (1995). I began learning how to make web pages I could display in the Netscape browser on our chunky, beige Compaq PC. I was intrigued, but I also found the nascent web frustrating: brittle dialup connections; low-bandwidth, grainy images; very, very limited styling and layout options.

Working on a new illustration for an upcoming essay, I've learned a bit more about how to use gouache in my process.

Specifically, the problem I'm trying to solve is dark backgrounds. My work-in-progress essay takes place mostly at night, and the illustrations need to be very low-key — mostly dark tones with just a few highlights. This means I need to work dark-to-light instead of light-to-dark.

When I was a kid, I remember that Paddington Bear, in my picture books, would always introduce himself as being from darkest Peru. This puzzled me a little. Was it always dark there? Did the people in Peru never get to see the sun? Was that a problem for them?

I realized later that he meant ‘dark’ in the sense of ‘unknown’ or ‘unexplored’. It implied a certain fear, maybe even menace; jungles and monsters; racist, colonial ideas about ‘uncivilized’ foreign lands.

As far as I can remember, Paddington never seemed willing to describe what his homeland was like. So it remained: darkest Peru.

Underland is a book about what lurks below the world’s surface.

It’s about the underground — digging, burying, and exploring — but it’s also about time, eternity, and death. The story it tells jumps from caves to mountains to mines to catacombs to the bottom of the ocean. A travelogue written in the present tense, it uses short, austere sentences that feel at once immediate and deeply polished. I get the sense that much of the book began as scribbles in a rain-spattered notebook. But then the scribbles were erased and rewritten, worked over again and again, perhaps, in late-night fevers, until all the facets shined.

Robert MacFarlane somehow writes nonfiction prose with the rhythm and care of poetry. Not a word out of place in 500 pages.

Really, really enjoying Stromae's new album "Multitudes." My French is absolutely awful, so I need to spend some time studying the lyrics, but the instrumentation and production are amazing.

This week I got a coat of varnish on my Measurements painting and we hung it in the kitchen.

This piece is an experiment: a mural-size diagram of US imperial measurements using typography. My old neighbor, Greg, told me that when he was a kid, his teacher showed him how to draw diagrams to remember the ratios between units. He’d draw a big G (gallon) with four Q’s inside (quart). Then inside each Q, two P’s (pints), and so on. To convert between units, you can count letters, e.g. four cups per quart.(Note: For the record, imperial units are a train wreck. They’re inconsistent, weird, and impossible to remember. Nonetheless, for some reason, America has never let go of them, and so here we are. Metric units do not require diagrams like this.)