After I got back from New Orleans a few weeks ago we launched right into spring break mode, and pretty much all I wanted to do was listen to dub reggae and make block prints.

In a Tuesday mailbag, “The point of this world,” I wrote quite a bit about music:

Music is a form of transportation. A joy in the past year has been the way our vacations with the boys have synced up with a particular kind of music — every time I hear Yellow Magic Orchestra, for example, I’m back driving around in the deserts of New Mexico. Whenever I want to be driving around Oahu, I put on our Oahu mixtape.

On Friday, I shared some images of a print I made: “Be the weird you wish to see.”

There are terrible things happening in the world, but you can’t let it rob you of getting joy out of your day-to-day living while you can. One thing that never fails me: Stepping away from the screen and leaving the house. This week I found some major treasure on one of our daily walks. I took my kids to a baseball game. I shopped for records and art supplies and chatted with strangers. I know I’ve said it over and over and over again but I’ll say it again: the more I make an effort to engage locally with my neighborhood and my city, the better I feel about life.

A bunch of folks asked me how I do it, so I shared “an unofficial guide to block printing”:

I want to emphasize that I am a total amateur at this stuff, and I will miss a bunch that you can learn elsewhere in tutorials by more qualified people. That said, I wrote a whole section in Show Your Work! about how there’s a lot of value in learning from beginners. Because beginners have only recently figured stuff out, they know what a beginner needs to know better than an expert does…

And tomorrow’s newsletter starts out with an animation made with a bunch of the block prints I made for Tuesday’s posts.

This is how the newsletter comes together: just one thing leading into another.