I was curious what our food spending looked like, so I tried to get a picture of what this has looked like over the past year. We have a good idea of our total spending: we buy most groceries on a house credit card so we can split it fairly, and if someone accidentally buys groceries on a personal card (or vice versa) we are pretty good about fixing it in the spreadsheet. This comes to $15,875 for 99 person months, or $160/person/month. On the other hand, three of the people are children, currently 9y, 7y, and 2y, so it's probably more useful to count them as two people, which means 87 person months, and $182/person/month.

Of the 87 person months, 12 were vegan, 15 were vegetarian, and 18 were vegetarian-leaning. Since it's easier to cook a meal with fewer dishes, however, vegan and vegetarian food was more common than you would get by dividing person months.

These spending totals don't include any spending on restaurants, but with the exception of Jeff's work providing lunch, and the older kids getting school lunch, this isn't something anyone in the house does much of.

The bulk of this, $140 of $182 (79%) is via grocery delivery, which means it ought to be possible to see exactly how we spent the money. Unfortunately, Instacart does not seem to have a nice export feature, but I wrote some code to parse manual copies from the order history. Here's our monthly per-person grocery delivery spending by area with an attempt at a taxonomy:

Sometimes people will talk about Chesterton's Fence, the idea that if you want to change something—removing an apparently useless fence—you should first determine why it was set up that way:

The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. — G. K. Chesterton, The Drift From Domesticity

Figuring out something's designed purpose can be helpful in evaluating changes, but a risk is that it puts you in a frame of mind where what matters is the role the original builders intended.

I currently control my rhythm stage setup with a USB keyboard. This works, except that my hands are often busy playing instruments when I want to change something. I already have a microphone in front of my mouth running to a computer, which I use for my whistle-controlled bass synthesizer: could I use speech recognition?

Another way to look at this is that a lot of my exploration here has been finding some way to play bass and mandolin at the same time: whistle bass, bass pedals, bass and drum pedals. With speech recognition I could call chords to the computer!

A few days ago I asked for advice on how to make a cap for my MXR M222 talkbox. I got a lot of good suggestions, including looking for a matching rubber stopper, 3D printing with 95A TPU for flexibility, or turning something on a lathe and embedding a silicone O-ring. But then Paul Ganssle saw my post and reached out: he saw one of these on Thingverse and offered to print me one.

In the summer the kids don't need to be to bed so early and it stays light longer. When the weather's good we've been doing a lot of evening picnics at the beach. It's not too crowded (making parking easier), there's less direct sun (don't need to deal with sunscreen), and it doesn't conflict with the toddler's nap time.

Often we go to Shannon Beach ("Sandy Beach"), on the Mystic Lakes:

They test bacteria levels, and when they get high they close the beach. Check the DCR Alerts Page before going.

This is the closer option for us, but when it's closed we often go Revere Beach:

This is on the ocean, but it's sheltered enough that waves are typically just a few inches. It's also colder: I'll swim at Sandy Beach, especially in the late summer, but I'd need to go hundreds of miles south of Boston if I wanted ocean water that didn't chill me too quickly to be fun.

Both have free parking, and Revere Beach is on the Blue Line. Neither have lifeguards: at Sandy Beach there are ropes that keep the older two within an area they can easily touch and we stay close to the toddler; at Revere Beach if they want to go past their knees they need an adult with them.

The older two often want to eat quickly just before leaving or in the car because (a) they prefer hot food and (b) they want to play the whole time we're there. But it's still important to them that the trip be a picnic, and Julia and I enjoy eating on the beach. Also a good fit for portable ice cream!

Why is Google such a valuable company? More than half of its money comes from search ads: when people are looking to spend money it's very common that they use Google. Even slightly influencing spending decisions, with the scale of their userbase, lets them bring in massive amounts of money. They are a very successful intermediary.

Right now I bet there are dozens of startups trying to figure out how they can build AI assistants to be even better intermediaries. The business plan looks something like: