Ephemerality – Tales from Easement Acres

February 20, 2026February 20, 2026

Feeling Blue

Of all the decisions I begrudge my parents for, vehicle availability ranks high on that list. I can get over a lot of things, and being a parent myself now, I understand that money is always limited and decisions have to be made. However, once that lesson is understood, it confuses me as to why parents would decide to have more than one child when they can ill-afford the first. But three? Even the wealthiest of my contemporaries rarely go that route. A third child is usually an accident or a surprise twin.

But: Catholicism. Organized religion has a remarkable inability to consider a more modern quality of life. It makes sense to encourage a population to have many kids when the goal is to grow the community and half of children die before age 5. And in a time predating birth control (or even after it became available but the church prohibited it), it probably didn’t require much encouragement anyway for young couples to engage in more sex – for God, and the community, of course.

Anyway, speaking of quality of life and vehicles, here are some activities directly tied to available transportation in one’s formative years. More specifically, if one doesn’t have access to a car in the suburbs:

Dating – difficult (unless of course you’re a girl and find a boyfriend with a car, as my sisters did)
Extracurricular activities – difficult and always needed a cranky parent
Working – difficult
Finding a job that actually pays well and offers a career – impossible
Feeling like a total loser – at least this one’s very easy

Overcoming this barrier was eventually possible when my future father-in-law sold me his old Corolla, which I then unceremoniously lost to black ice on one of the worst damn on-ramps in the state. Fortunately, the insurance payout gave me a down payment for my truly first car (I don’t consider the Corolla to be a first car): a used 2003 Honda Accord, which I proceeded to drive for the next 18 years, ultimately naming it: Old Blue.

Unsurprisingly, I never became a luxury car type of person. Possessing a car at all was my luxury, and an economic utility vehicle that consistently maintained its basic functions was sufficient.

But Old Blue’s age has shaken my confidence in this later quality. I no longer feel that it will always work in a time of need, and repairs are getting numerous and costly. Its latest issue is a rusted exhaust line, which I exacerbated by driving over a snow mound and ripped open. Now the engine exhausts under the hood, which wafts into the cabin, not to mention bypassing the muffler so it sounds like one of those small penises you hear at night playing Toretto. I’ll get that fixed eventually, but for now I needed something more reliable.

I wanted a station wagon. I wanted a car with a car’s chassis – not the typical SUV/crossover standard that everyone seems to make now. Or as I call it: do you want a long turd or a short turd? Seriously, they all look the same, with that turd-shaped aerodynamic (analdynamic?) profile. Bend over and think of England, fellow motorists. And with Liz’s Ascent, we don’t need another type of such a vehicle. One anal probe per family is adequate. I want an actual car, but with the cargo space and convenience of an anal probe…I mean hatchback.

This limited my options. Volvo apparently still makes station wagons, though I’ve never seen a new one. And Mercedes makes one, but I’m not ready for that cost. So, a non-station wagon non-anal-probe-hatchback car. That leaves compacts. And with that comes certain problems, notably image and demographic appeal.

Here’s what I’ve come to accept are the two types of people who buy compact hatchbacks:

This tends to lead manufacturers into douchey territory, with trim and accessories. When’s the last time you saw a hatchback white Honda Civic and one of the above stereotypes didn’t come to mind? What to do?

Here’s what’s on offer today:

Honda Civic – Absolute no for both the reasons above, my relationship with the local dealership, and past experience with their modern vehicles.
Toyota Corolla – Lower horsepower and front wheel drive only – nah.
Mazda3 – I drove one of these as a rental and really liked it. It was underpowered, but I didn’t know which version I had. It was worth considering, except…
Subaru Impreza – Standard AWG with higher HP on the RS model, and despite past misgivings with the Ascent, the dealership was completely accommodating with repairs and warranties and rentals. Top contender.

And fortunately, Subaru has thoughtfully separated out their douchey demographics into their WRX category, which is a souped-up Impreza. If you go on Reddit and read Impreza reviews, you’ll very quickly encounter some comment about how the poster should have bought a WRX, because that’s a “real” car, for which aftermarket douchebag add-ons have flooded online retailers. Want a spoiler with a wide muffler while pretending to be Formula One Frank and cranking RPMs with a turbo late at night? WRX.

So I went with the Impreza. The 2026 Impreza RS, to be specific. Old Blue’s 160HP always felt just a tad underpowered on hard accelerations, so I wasn’t keen on the Impreza Sport’s 150HP. Granted Old Blue was old and no doubt lost some HP over the years, but even so, I wanted a little more power. The RS’s 180 HP so far seems to fill that gap with just a bit more oomph. And the top-tier model for the Impreza line comes with some luxury additions that certainly don’t hurt – like everything the automotive industry has done within the last 23 years. Seems there’s been some technological advances.

It’s also my first new car! It only had 8 miles on it when I test drove it. So just a couple other butts have been in there. No chance of anything weird that I don’t know about that’ll fail unexpectedly in the future.

Should have taken a pic of the odometer sooner

And it’s all mine and no one can touch it!

Okay, that’s not true. Part of the reason for getting it was so the kid would have a small and easy car to learn how to drive with, equipped with all the modern safety features. But that’s a year away, and for now it’s all mine! Then once she learns how to drive, she can have Old Blue. It might be a beater, but I won’t leave my own kid without a personal transportation option.

–Simon

February 18, 2026February 12, 2026

Four o’ Clocks

Being a 90s kid was no joke. If one had a mother with a propensity for drama, as I did, then prime time Television was her oyster. After the daily soaps concluded, it was off to “real” drama. There was 20/20, Unsolved Mysteries, and whatever Barbara Walters was going to indignantly talk about that evening. But Dateline was my crux.

Dateline, for the uninitiated, was an hour long show that took one news event and tried to squeeze it until tears came out. And it usually approached it with two messages: “men are evil and they will kill you”, and “your children aren’t safe and they’ll be abducted”.

Sadly, that unmarked van filled with candy and psychoactive drugs never appeared, but that didn’t stop mother from confining me to my suburban corral: the backyard, enclosed with a privacy fence.

The red box roughly highlights the back yard section. And if the satellite distance reference is accurate, I calculate my pen to have been about 3000 sq ft. Or ~0.07 acres.

As one might imagine, the mind of a child tended to wander in such a limited environment. And as the summers of my stunted social development compounded, I withdrew entirely and accepted the yard as my entire world. I became intimately familiar with every detail of that small space.

And in that space was a small patch of annuals. Specifically, four o’ clocks.

One day, I noticed that the spent flowers, which had dried on the plant, had an pleasant earthly tea scent. Further observation also revealed that the petals crumbled easily, and effused their aroma quickly into water, specifically a mug of water left out on the concrete patio in the hot Texas sun. Furthermore, the resultant tisane tasted delicious. I had stumbled upon something.

But the experiment was cut short when mother, having taken her usual Schindler’s List perch by the full-length backyard windows, witnessed my activities and intervened. The resultant lecture was less a cautionary lesson on knowing with certainty that a plant is edible and more a morality lecture on how my selfish and careless decisions impacted other people (her). I came out of that conversation with no additional scientific knowledge, but instead sobbing and begging for forgiveness – exactly what a Catholic mother wants. The overlord of morality had won again.

Fast forward to today and I was watching Netflix. And as with any Netflix show involving food, that Danish chef guy was there talking about his amazing restaurant and how he forages ingredients. But, for the first time, I noticed a certain flower being used as a garnish. Nasturtium flowers always show up, because they’re pretty and taste peppery. But this looked different. I swear it was a four o’ clock flower. This necessitated a quick internet search.

30 years later and I find out that not only are the flowers edible, but they’re specifically used in infusions: exactly what I was doing.

I get that information is much more accessible today, and that digging through encyclopedias gets tedious and that was a rabbit hole mother didn’t want to explore, but did every childhood mistake have to end with crying?

I guess she was worried that if the psychoactive drug van wasn’t showing up, I’d start randomly sampling plants to find drugs on my own. But as it turns out, my culinary curiosity led to foraging – something Netflix is now telling me is the mark of a genius chef. Who knew?

–Simon

February 13, 2026February 9, 2026

Consumption and Creation

[Note to self: add this to the Quantitative Philosophy Index when it posts]

My personal life philosophy defines an individual’s value on the activities one engages in when in an autonomous state. More simply: what you do with your personal time quantifies your life’s meaningfulness. I don’t see the level of impact itself to be the defining factor, since so few of us are ever granted the circumstances under which to achieve greatness, but that doesn’t preclude us from seeking a virtuous live, even if the tangible results are comparatively minor.

Setting this premise: after a day of my daughter watching anime and binge-eating, I tried to explain that she was, in some non-so-friendly-terms, being a completely self-indulgent and useless sack of loafing teenage flesh. In the aftermath of that conversation, however, I though it more helpful to create some definitions. Here’s how I break them down:

All voluntary human activities fall into one of four categories:

Active Creation (Cr_a): activities that require direct engagement and production.
Active Consumption (Co_a): activities that involve using someone else’s creation, but still require direct engagement.
Passive Creation (Cr_p): activities that are either a secondary component of active creation, or prerequisites/maintenance activities to support active creation.
Passive Consumption (Co_p): activities that involve using someone else’s creation in a manner that is strictly self-indulgent.

These activities are not equal in value. Cr_a is the highest, with Co_a and Cr_p secondary, and with Co_p the least.

Creation/Consumption vs Active/Passive graph

As an example, washing dishes and doing some reading rank above watching TV all day, but rank below cooking dinner. Co_a and Cr_p ultimately support Cr_a – without which Cr_a couldn’t take place, while Co_p remains generally nonconstructive outside some mental health benefits. Obviously these baselines require some interpretation. I’d consider reading a classic novel to be Co_a but reading a trashy romance novel Co_p – one must be honest with themselves.

This is all fine for abstraction, but let’s quantify. What constitutes a day seized? At what point does one achieve virtue for the day? I’ll assign values:

Cr_a = 5

Co_a = 3

Cr_p = 3

Co_p = 1

This almost works with a Fibonacci sequence. Indeed, Co_a and Cr_p could probably have tier 2 and 3 pointed subsections, but I’ll keep it simpler for the sake of this exercise.

Virtue = Cr_a + Co_a + Cr_p + Co_p

Day’s value = amount of daily virtue.

As for a daily virtue benchmark, here are the highlights from a recent Saturday, which I feel was a notable example of one such virtuous day. I…

Made pizza, made my own cheesey bread, cleaned the kitchen x3, cleaned out the fireplace, started a fire, watched Fallout, took measurements and material inventory for needed house projects.

I’m sure there were more, but these are what I remember. This would come out to:

5+5+3+3+3+3+3+1+3 = 29

It was a busy day, so lets round down to 25 to be more realistic with goals. A virtuous day requires 25 points. For a day off. As for a working day, let’s say 12 – half rounded down.

Now math:

Cra=5,Coa=3,Crp=3,Cop=1

S:=Cra+Coa+Crp+Cop

O = day off

V = day is virtuous

V⟺(O∧S≥25)∨(¬O∧S≥12)

Not having a philosophy background, the concepts of virtue and excellence seem to escape the kid’s comprehension. Maybe this could add context. If not, it’s a good overview and reminder to myself for when I start to feel lazy, now that I’ve thought the concept through. Virtue is universally available. All we have to do is act towards it.

–Simon

February 11, 2026February 2, 2026

Snow and Suicide

Actually, I find that the snow makes winter less depressing. Snow gives the cold purpose, without which we’re forced to endure damp grass, dormant gardens, and grey skies without purpose. Fortunately, we’re getting lots of snow this year! Yay! Take that, suicide month!

And after an extended weekend of shoveling a Cold Ton, we were left with the material for a proper snow fort, or rather, a quinzhee!