Welcome to the new acornometrics.com, the social commentary blog of Arlene and Larry Dunn. Here you will find our musings on a broad array of topics, including the struggle for social justice and equity, the scourge of American racism and efforts to eradicate it, adventurous music in a multitude of styles and forms, gardens and gardening, food and drink, poetry and literature, and more. You will also find some of our own poetry and fiction.

We originally launched acornometrics in 2012, on Tumblr, calling it “an imaginary game of chance operations using acorns as runes to determine the path forward.” That conception was, in part, a whimsical riff on indeterminacy, as used in the artistic practices of the Fluxus movement and John Cage, whose centennial birthday we were celebrating that year. But it also bore a bit of serious meditation on the way chance occurrences often steer the path of one’s life.

Why acorns? From 1988 to 2013 we lived, most of the time, in rural northwest Indiana, on a 20-acre homestead on a hummock of sand left in the wake of receding glaciers in the last Ice Age. On the crest of that gentle hill was a beautiful woods full of White Oaks. We dubbed the place Acorn Ridge Gardens, and the acorn became our insignia, our rune. Acornometrics is our third acorn enterprise, preceded by Acorn Ridge Gardens, a landscape plant nursery, and Acorn Ridge Group, a management and technology consulting firm.