On Summit

It's spring in Akron and things at the Akron almost-mansion are (mostly) moving forward. In my last update on this project I alluded to the fact that we're spending every weekend at the house attending to the business of patching, prepping, priming, and painting. Well, we're still doing that, one room at a time, and actually starting to see some progress. Three rooms are pictured through two doorways. One doorway is arched and the next is rectangular. The closest room is painted yellow. The next room is tangerine. The last room is a kitchen with blue-grey floors. My wife has determined that this house is going to be cheerful, bright, and full of whimsy. I support that initiative and will point out that those efforts begin with paint selection. While I wouldn't go so far as to say we're selecting colors based on name alone, it's nice when the moniker fits the theme. Here you can see we chose Optimistic Yellow (Sherwin Williams) for the dining room, and Cheerful T...

In a previous post I shared that our recent visit to Paris was planned primarily around seeing the Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Foundation Louis Vuitton . There's obviously lots of other things to see and do in the City of Light and I wanted to follow-up with some more pics from that trip. We typically stay in the Latin Quarter near the Seine and a couple blocks over from Blvd St. Michel. It's an area that maybe isn't highly regarded by "travelers in the know" since it's pretty touristy, but like it or not, we're tourists. The fact is it's close to a lot of things we love (Jardin de Luxembourg, Musée de Cluny, the Seine, Notre Dame), walking distance to others (the Louvre, the Orsay, Jardin des Plantes), and it's central enough that you can get anywhere in the city pretty easily. Plus, there's nothing like taking the RER train from Charles de Gaulle airport and entering the city via the Saint-Michel-Notre Dame metro station. It's ju...

Within hours of the announcement that then president of The Ohio State University, Walter Edward "Ted" Carter had resigned, I received an email from the OSU Alumni Association. To the Association's credit, it wasn't a fundraising email. Rather, it was a missive designed to reassure alumni like me that leaders come and go, but the strength of the OSU community rests with its people. I was assured that our great university would weather this moment, move forward, and succeed. To say that letter came at a bad time would be an understatement. My opinion of and support for my alma mater had been in a freefall over the last few years as I watched scandal upon scandal stack up on campus. So, I reflected on my relationship to the university and offered a version of the following as my reply: Thanks for the update. I don't know that my one voice really makes a difference, but I wanted to write and let you know that any time the subject of college selection comes up in my p...

I'll start with some disclaimers. I don't know the first thing about how the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) awards franchises. I expect you don't either. We refer to these civic pleas for major sports franchises as "bids", but what exactly constitutes a bid? Is there a request for proposals I can review? An application? A notice of funding opportunity? Is there a form to fill out? A list of specific targets that a city or community is expected to meet? Some measurable standards? Rubrics? Transparency? If any of those things exist please help me out, because I can't find them. Rather, and by the look of what's happening in Columbus right now, a "bid" for an NWSL franchise consists exactly of a current billionaire MLS owner expressing interest, sending out some press releases, talking to city hall, eyeballing city property, and getting the attention of the central Ohio soccer community. Normally, I'd be excited about the idea of expa...

  On Wednesday April 1, 2026 I'll be rebooting the #library30 photo challenge and inviting people to participate in this year's event. What is it? Even though I work in a library, it's not uncommon for me (and others in the field) to look to related cultural institutions for new ideas and new perspectives. That's how #library30 happened. My wife (who worked directly with museum professionals at the time), alerted me to the #museum30 initiative that had been launched by  Magnifying Zoology  in 2017. The premise was pretty simple. Participants worked from a set of daily prompts and posted pictures on social media related to the prompt along with the #museum30 hashtag. As I followed that hashtag and saw the amazing stories that were being shared, I thought, "Libraries should do that...". And #library30 was born. A plain text list of these prompts are provided at the end of this blog post.  How does it work? All you have to do is upload a photo related to the dail...

This blog post actually has its origins in early 2020. That spring, The Metropolitan Museum of Art was hosting a major  Gerhard Richter retrospective at their Met Breuer location. Gerhard Richter is one of my favorite contemporary artists, so plans were made for a big NYC trip in June that would include the Richter retrospective and more. Then COVID happened. The Met's blockbuster retrospective, originally scheduled to run March 4 - July 5 lasted just over a week, closing, as much of the world did, after March 12. It was disappointing to be sure, but I wasn't alone there. In truth, if your dashed travel plans were the worst thing that happened over those weeks and months and years, you could rightly count yourself among the lucky. Still, it was a missed opportunity, and one that stayed with me. Fast forward five years to the late summer of 2025 when I learned that the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris was mounting an even bigger Gerhard Richter retrospective   ! Well, it...

I feel like I've been slacking recently in my efforts to keep up with this blog and the work that's been happening at the Akron almost-mansion. That's a testament I think to how busy I've been, and also to how weirdly routine this whole project has become. I don't want to say the novelty has worn off (the house still offers its share of surprises), but we'have fallen into some pretty regular patterns this winter. We drive the 110 miles north almost every weekend to patch, sand, prime, and paint. We spend a day and a half covering ourselves in the dust of the 20th century's finest paints, wallpapers, hardwoods, and plaster and then traverse the same 110 miles back home. We move garbage, cardboard, tools, and equipment out of one room and into another (and then out to the garage). We go up and down two flights of steps; first for the joint compound tape, then for our masks, and then again for the right screwdriver. We misplace tools only to trip over them minu...

In a previous post , I channeled my inner-Woody Hayes to offer shout outs to the contractors who are helping make our Akron almost-mansion a habitable reality. Now, I want to give shout outs to the family who have been with us every step of the way too. A pair of siblings are seated on a functioning radiator in an otherwise empty room, save a portable table saw. They are smiling and appear happy. Before we embarked on this journey we held a "family meeting" where I laid out our plan (such as it was. LOL.) and described what we were going to need to make this project happen. Specifically, I made clear that my wife and I couldn't do this without their help. We lived (and still live) 110 miles away from the house we're trying to rehabilitate. I shared their would be times folks might be called upon to meet contractors, accept deliveries, take out trash, and otherwise represent our interests in matters related to the house. A group of people are pictured raking an unreaso...