Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

As holiday cards began to roll in, Michele, my wife, and I discussed whether we were going to do a Christmas card ourselves. After being married 30+ years with our kids grown and out of the house, our life doesn’t lead to photos of far-flung travel and excitement.

Recently, our neighbor Emily put out a zine featuring my 20 years of Halloween costume data. I was honored and thrilled to see an actual paper zine. For those that don’t know, a zine is a small self-published booklet often made by hand.

When I saw it, I had thoughts about what I would put into a zine.

We considered various card concepts until the idea clicked: make our own zine. Not a holiday themed one, but just filled with work and ideas from both of us.

I found a great template on Sinoun Chea’s site. We went with an eight page zine template.

We started filling up the pages with small bits we thought might be interesting to the people on our Christmas card list. Some images of Michele’s work, several best of 2025 lists, a short essay about buying a smart TV, and a few things we had no idea if others would find interesting.

Once we finalized the content and design, I looked into printing. A few pages have color images and I found out quickly that color printing is still pretty expensive at local print shops. At over $2 in printing costs per issue, the total was adding up quickly to a big number. We decided to double down and buy our own color laser printer, as we’d probably be making zines again, not just for the holidays.

I felt very DIY as I folded and stapled the issues together. The physical work of putting a zine together is far more rewarding than uploading images to a print company on the internet. Michele helped with the card list and labels. We got a lot of feedback from friends and family and they loved it. One couple told us they’re going to make one themselves.

If you’d like a copy, you can print it from this PDF.

When printing, choose two-sided printing and flip on the short edge.

We had a blast making a zine. If you have some spare time, you might consider making one yourself.

Going analog in a digital world is refreshing.

I’ve been trying to be more consistent with alt text, but let’s be honest, writing it manually can be a chore.

Most AI chatbots do a good job of generating the alt text for me if I give them an image. They often catch details I overlook and add in information that I, as a human, would typically leave out.

To make it simpler, I wanted to right-click any image to automate getting AI-generated alt text.

It took about 15 minutes to build.

I used Claude Code to make a small Python script to send the image to the Claude API and return the result to a local web page to copy the text easily.

It was strikingly simple to do this. The script operates on Windows 11 using the Claude API.

To use it, you need to run Python, a few dependencies, and make a few registry edits to add the right-click menu option. Claude Code did this for me directly, but it can be done manually.

I had Claude Code create a GitHub package with documentation and uploaded it here: https://github.com/cruftbox/image-alt-text

If you are using MacOS or another LLM, it shouldn’t be hard to modify it to work with your preferred setup.

This kind of ‘vibe coding’ feels great to scratch my own itch with ideas that are idiosyncratic to me.

I did my best to transcribe:

Proof by Cornelius Eady at the inauguration of Zohran Mamdani

Proof.

You have to imagine it.
Who said you were too dark, too large, too queer, too loud?
Who said you were too poor, too strange, too fat?

You have to imagine it.
Who said you must keep quiet?
Who heard your story, then rolled their eyes?
Who tried to change your name to invisible?

You’ve got to imagine.
Who heard your name and refused to pronounce it.
Who checked their watch and said, “Not now.”

James Baldwin wrote, “The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”

New York City of invention, roiling town, refresher and renewer.
New York City of the real will.
The canyons whisper in a hundred tongues.

New York, where your lucky self waits for your arrival,
Where there is always soil for your root.

This is our time.
The taste of us, the spice of us,
the colors and the rhythms and the beats of us,
In the echo of our ancestors who made certain we know who we are.

City of insistence.
City of resistance.

You have to imagine an army that wins without firing a bullet,
A joy that wears down the rock of “no,”
Up from insults,
Up from blocked doors,
Up from trick bags,
Up from fear,
Up from shame,
Up from the way it was done before.

You have to imagine that space they said wasn’t yours.
That time they said you’d never own.
The invisible city lit on its way.

This moment is our proof.

I learned a lot about pain, pride, and empathy this summer.

The entire episode started with a Sunday walk in May with my wife Michele. She has a five mile loop she does and I decided to come along. I’d done it before.

On the walk, we climb a small hill, which didn’t seem much of a problem, but as we got down to the base of the hill to the flats, I started feeling a pain in my lower back and down my left leg. We stopped for a bit to stretch and continued on. The pain got worse and worse the further we went. Instead of stopping and getting a ride home, I forced myself to keep going, stopping every few hundred yards when the pain became intense. Even after the walk was over, the pain continued for several days. In hindsight, this was incredibly stupid.

My childhood lessons about perseverance and pushing through discomfort, values I was taught to prize, ultimately caused lasting harm. Being taught to be tough and endure difficulty is good, but taken too far can be damaging.

The doctor said it looked like sciatica and put me on a regimen of anti-inflammatory drugs and physical therapy. The pain slowly receded.

By June I was feeling better and went back to my usual tasks and tinkering. I decided to repaint my curb numbers and got to work sanding and painting. Bending over the curb was painful, but I was focused on getting the job done, and kept working. I got the final bits done and my lower back was screaming at me.

That evening the pain got worse and worse and I had trouble even getting comfortable to sleep. The next morning, even walking was extremely painful and I went to Urgent Care the first thing. The doctor was very direct, all she could do was prescribe painkillers. I’d have to see orthopedic doctors to see what the underlying issue was and how to fix it. They gave me a bunch of opioids and sent me on my way. I really don’t like taking opioids but needed them for a couple days to get through the pain and be able to sleep. It took days to get comfortable enough to walk more than a few steps.

In July, I tried everything from physical therapy and chiropractic work to acupuncture, finally culminating in an MRI and a steroid injection to help reduce the inflammation.

This all helped reduce the pain and I slowly increased my walking to be able to go a few hundred yards before having to stop. I was hopeful I was past the worst, but I was wrong.

At the end of July I received the report on the MRI and it basically said there was a fragment of a disc pressing on a nerve root at my L5-S1 vertebrae. Reading it, I realized the complexity of the problem and that it wasn’t going away with rest. After reading the MRI report, my physical therapist told me I’d likely need surgery and she didn’t want me to do more work until I’d seen the spine surgeon and got clearance.

Slowly the pain diminished and I was able to do small things around the house. Toward the end of August, I was bending over the dishwasher to empty it and felt a twinge. The twinge shortly gave way to pain that kept increasing.

The pain kept escalating to a level I couldn’t believe. Words do not do justice to describe the mind-shattering and crippling pain in my back and down my left leg. There was only one position I could get relief, my back flat on the floor and my legs up in a L shape, on a chair or ottoman. Even with the opioids, even going to the bathroom was an exercise in agony, having to lie on the bathroom floor to recover.

I’ve led an active life and have broken multiple bones, torn ligaments, and had shoulder and knee surgery. I thought I knew what pain was, but again, I was wrong.

The revelation that this level of pain existed was eye-opening. I had heard people complain about back pain and having to stay home from work due to it, but never could imagine this is what back pain could be like.

After two days of this, Michele took me to the ER. She put down the back seats and I lay in the back of the car as she drove. The ER doctor shot me up with even more painkiller and told me the same thing I had been told previously, all he could do was give me more painkillers and anti-inflammatories. I’d have to see the spine surgeon to fix this.

Back home, I tried to rest and hoped the anti-inflammatories would help get me through to the appointment with the spine surgeon. Once again, I was wrong.

A few days after the ER visit I took a shower. Getting out, I was drying off and felt a twinge that rapidly became pain. Naked, I laid down on the floor, hoping to get the pain under control. But the pain just kept getting worse, reaching levels more intense than I had ever felt before. Even my recovery position and stress breathing did nothing. My brain was panicking because I knew I couldn’t endure this for long. Michele was with me and I told her to call the paramedics. We didn’t know what else to do.

Soon I could hear the sirens in the distance and before long the paramedics arrived. They did their best to extract me carefully from the bathroom and get me into the truck but I was hit with waves of pain. I answered their questions and explained the history as they placed an IV in my arm. They assured me they could help. And sure enough, they gave me a dose of IV fentanyl and the pain switched off, like they had flipped a switch. By the time I got to the emergency room, I was relaxed and in relative comfort.

Yet again, the ER doctor explained the limits of what they could do and before long I was home. More days of lying on my back followed.

I stopped taking the opioids three days after the ER visit. I found myself looking forward to my next pill and knew I had to stop.

In those days following the ER, lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling, my perspective on ‘strength’ began to shift.

Our medical insurance is good and we weren’t being saddled with debt, unlike so many others the poor or no insurance at all. Going through this kind of painful ordeal and worrying about the cost is why so many people self-medicate with drugs and alcohol.

I used to judge those who became addicted to prescription painkillers as weak-willed. However, experiencing this level of pain myself, and realizing the luxury of not having to work during it, has shown me that for many, opioids aren’t a choice, but a desperate necessity. I now see how easily anyone could fall into that cycle.

I’m ashamed it took me suffering personally to have empathy for the millions of other people dealing with chronic pain issues. The sad truth is that the arsenal of tools to deal with chronic pain too often comes down to ever-increasing amounts of addictive drugs.

My appointment with the spine surgeon was in September and we decided to proceed with a microdiscectomy to remove the disc fragment and “clean up” the surrounding area.

The surgery was on October 13th taking only about an hour. They did the entire procedure through a 1.5 inch incision. The surgeon, the OR team, and the medical technology were absolutely incredible.

There was about two days of pain afterwards, mainly from them cutting me open a bit, but the sciatic pain was gone.

After an entire summer of pain, it was gone. Gone like it never existed.

Realizing this filled me with enormous gratitude for everyone who helped me through this. Michele, my daughter Zoe and her boyfriend Christian, the nurses and doctors at the urgent care and emergency rooms, the surgical team, the inventors of the medical tools, the friends and family that let me know they were thinking of me. It’s still overwhelming now, even as I type this with tears in my eyes.

If you are dealing with back pain and hesitating to get help with it, I urge you to see a doctor and find out what can be done. Pain makes everything in life worse, even if you think you are managing it.

My recovery has gone well, gaining strength and confidence, but being careful not to create a new injury.

Getting myself to think differently remains a challenge. While being able to endure some pain and hardship is important in life, taking it too far, as I had done, is a bad thing. Deciding to take two trips to bring in the groceries from the car instead of trying to do it in one, getting help to lift a heavy box, and limiting my time sitting in front of the computer don’t come easily. I have to make the conscious decision to not revert to my old ways of thinking about pain.

It was a hard summer, but I am grateful to come away changed, having more empathy for others.