Sam Firke @samfirke@a2mi.social

I have officially voted in this November's local election📩 !

Also our City Clerk is pretty cool for sending email confirmation to confirm receipt of ballot.

I finished migrating expenses away from my Capital One Quicksilver card (1.5% cash back, profits used to finance fossil fuel projects 🤢) and canceled the account! Now I'm fully using a card I got through my credit union.

I updated my blog post accordingly: https://samfirke.com/2021/09/10/fight-climate-change-put-your-kids-allowance-at-a-credit-union/

I find it wild that there aren't super-repairable, open-source appliances like washing machines and dishwashers. I get that the current planned-obsolescence model is profitable, but we should have a gov't funded initiative to develop them, or at least an eccentric millionaire backing an effort.

I'm not "late to school every day", we're practicing "health-informed staggered drop-off" to avoid kids congregating at entrances 🧠

The Goodyear Blimp has been hovering over my house for three hours, hardly moving. It's the world's least-covert drone.

📣📣 New blog post on banks, kids, and climate change📣📣:

https://samfirke.com/2021/09/10/fight-climate-change-put-your-kids-allowance-at-a-credit-union/

I have a fixture with two of the fat tubes and they were strobing. I replaced with plug-n-play LED tubes, they strobed. Does this mean the ballast is shot? If so, what should I do - replace ballast, or bypass the ballast and order some LEDs that don't need a ballast?

The kind of plug-n-play I have, FEIT, apparently doesn't work with a bad ballast.

MI State dept of the environment (EGLE) made a very nice interactive map of the Gelman dioxane plume on the west side of Ann Arbor: https://egle.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=b2d077fdef2b4005883a5305a92ad1df

One of my data visualizations at is now public-facing. Check out the real-time graph at the bottom of https://www.a2gov.org/solar.

The 2021 figure is year-to-date. Residential solar is taking off 📈

I am enjoying short books (<200 pages), especially political books where the brevity sharpens the focus. Some have been great, others only okay but either way they are fast reads!

This one caught my eye this morning: 5" x 7", 115 pages. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/grounded What a great format.

I bought a skateboard this week and practiced a little on the next street over. It was fun and a way more vigorous activity than I remembered!

I also blogged some thoughts about trying it again: https://samfirke.com/2021/08/05/revisiting-skateboarding/

I wrote a grant for planting a small forest around my kids' K-8 public school and it got funded! For minimal $$ ($200 in wholesale trees plus some in-kind assistance) but the main thing is the official stamp of approval and momentum this will contribute.

Someday the barren grass playground will have a shady grove 🌳

Sewed up my Beamo throwing toy #fixedit

this video from ChipDrop on why the service (where arborists dump a huge pile of rough chips in your driveway) may *not* be for you 😂

https://getchipdrop.com/for-gardeners/

Happy summer solstice 🌞

And happy volunteer amnesty day, from projects tech, civic, personal, or other.

https://www.volunteeramnestyday.net/

@micah gave me a tiny baby chard plant and now it is thriving 🌱

Maple tree growing out of the crotch of a large oak tree

Grabbed 540 lbs of free compost from this morning. The drive-on scale was fun, I liked knowing the weight of our bounty exactly.

City of Ann Arbor is piloting returnable, reusable takeout containers in a few restaurants this month! Pictured: from El Harissa. #A2Zero

There are chimney swifts nesting at my kids' school! Gotta get out here at sunset to see them en masse.