I've lately ended up calling a bunch of parties and I've been happy with calling mostly longways whole-set dances. These are ones that are shaped like a contra dance in terms of having two lines facing each other, each person across from their partner, but your role doesn't matter and you're not grouped into hands-fours ("minor sets"). I want to be able to teach it in a single fast-paced walkthrough, match it tightly to the musical phrase, and be able to drop out after a few times through. This means I need most of the figures to be very simple, and a low piece count.

On the other hand, if I build every dance out of the same small number of building blocks (ex: reshuffles of Galopede), dancers will start to feel "haven't we done this one before"? So I also like dances that have a "hook": an interesting figure that we don't do in the other dances. Some examples:

In 1992 Tony Parkes, one of the best-known New England contra dance callers, wrote a book: Contra Dance Calling: a Basic Text. In 2010 he published an updated second edition. I found used copies of each and read through them, interested in both what he thought, and what he thought to change.

I read the whole 1992 first edition, then skimmed the 2010 second edition with the older one open at the same time, looking for changes. My notes:

EDIT 2026-07-08: Gizmohub, despite the announcements, did not stop working on the 7th. Instead, a Verizon tech called me, and told me that they were not going to take Gizmohub down until they'd resolved these issues. They also walked me through getting set up, including getting me the 2FA code that was not coming through. Apparently delivery of 2FA codes to Google Fi has been an issue for them. After our call I saw that this 2FA code (but not the earlier codes) did actually come through under "Spam and Blocked", so if you're having issues I'd recommend looking there.

Two years ago I bought a pair of Gizmo watches for my kids (review). There's a companion app for texting and configuration ("Gizmohub"), and Verizon is moving everyone over to a new one ("Verizon Family"). But the new app doesn't work for watch-only accounts like ours yet, and they're still saying they're going to turn off the old app on July 6th. Without the app we won't be able to text back and forth, see where they are, or add new contacts (the watch blocks calls except to/from contacts).

I first got the notification that Gizmohub was going away as an email on 2026-06-10:

Choux pastry (the kind used in eclairs and creampuffs) is very picky, and depends heavily on the chemical properties of eggs. Five years ago I played around with trying to make it eggless with aquafaba and xanthan gum. It didn't work, but now that we have vegan egg white protein, can we do this for real?

Nope. I gave it several tries over vacation, and wasn't able to get it to puff properly. Here's the closest I got:

I keep my recipies on my website, and like most of my website it grew over time instead of being designed. A couple years ago I added some progressive enhancement that puts checkboxes on the ingredients, and today I added a rescaler:

Our family is on vacation in North Carolina for a week, spending some time at a pool, and they're playing a (weirdly short) loop of music. Listening to She's In Love With The Boy for the fourth time I was thinking about how it's an example of a common pattern in country music: a repeating motif, recolored by the verses. In this case it's a father saying a boy isn't good enough for his daughter (verses 1 and 2) until his wife reminds him that her own father said the same thing about him (verse 3).

Some others with variations on this pattern: