I have been brought low by either a cold or allergies.

I’m about halfway through Ed Yong’s An Immense World and it’s quickly becoming one of my favorite nonfiction books I’ve read this year.

I love Yong’s style: a friendly, calm tone that sounds almost effortless. Short, conversational sentences. Simple words. No reaching for intricate phrasing or poetic imagery when a short explanation will do. The effect is something like having dinner with your favorite high school science teacher — a science teacher with perfect recall of an entire field’s worth of relevant knowledge. It’s a 2-inch thick, 500-page book covering a century worth of international research and it’s just so… easy to read.

A book of this breadth and complexity would be, I think, an incredible piece of work even if it was an impenetrable, academic, punctuation-averse fire swamp in the finest tradition of Das Capital. But it’s not. It’s a symphony that plays like a pop song.

I was really sad to read the other day that we lost Ahmad Jamal. A phenomenal jazz pianist, he kept playing and recording over an 80 year (!) career. He lived to 92.

I discovered his work when my wife’s coworker loaned us an album. It was Live at the Pershing Lounge 1958 — a compilation of live recordings by the Ahmad Jamal Trio. I’d never heard it before but they had me by track 3. It’s become one of my very favorite albums. I’m not a music expert — these days I think I fall somewhere between ‘basic’ and ‘enthusiast’ as a listener, at best — but there’s something about that album that just feels perfect. Some delicate, sublime balance they managed to hold for 72 minutes, and they held it so effortlessly that I don’t doubt they could have gone on forever. It sounds complex and sophisticated and deep to me, but also inviting, unpretentious, and easy to listen to.

Rest in peace, Ahmad Jamal, and thanks for everything.

I decided to try an experiment.

In my drawings, I use pigment ink in my pens and on my brush. Pigment-based inks are usually more 'archival' and permanent than dye-based inks.(Note: For more on ink and its many incarnations, check out Will J. Bailey’s wonderful, in-depth video.)Once an archival ink has dried on paper, it should be water-resistant, pH-neutral, and lightfast — it should not fade in sunlight.

But I'm curious just how true that is. I've seen some light-exposure tests here and there, but I'd like to see for myself. So I made some quick swatches of my three favorite pigment-based inks.

I went for a short hike with my daughter a few weeks back, on a day when school was closed. A lovely, warm day, and it was nice to be back on one of our favorite trails: Cascade Falls in Patapsco State Park.

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.