Categories
Finance Preparedness

Day 608 and What Timeline

I’ve been obsessed with a movie called Margin Call this summer. If you haven’t seen it, well it’s on Netflix, and it’s an exceptional piece of cinema with a top notch cast reflecting on why finance is so prone to boom and busts. It’s a great office drama even if you have no interest in banking. And it’s only an hour and forty odd minutes w two key Pete Davidson SNL skit criteria. It is both Tucci Gang and a Short Ass Movie.

One of the clincher scenes is Jeremy Irons explaining his job as the bank’s CEO to Zachary Quinto the young rocket scientist turned risk analyst.

I’m here for one reason and one reason alone. I’m here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That’s it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I’m afraid that I don’t hear; a; thing. Just — silence

Margin Call

I found this particular scene rather riveting as it reflects both the seeming ease and intense dangers of being in charge. Your entire job boils down to making a few big calls exactly right over a time horizon your average working stiff doesn’t even have the luxury to consider.

I’ve been considering my own preferred time frame on which to make decisions. I’m no Jeremy Irons. I don’t make exceptional calls on what will happen in a few months. I do however have quite a nose for what will unfold over much longer time horizons. I’d trust myself to make the right call over a decade. I scan the horizons.

Which if you are following along with some of my life choices should be modestly unsettling. I moved to Montana to a rural homestead. I invest in early stage startups that fit my chaotic thesis. I am comfortable being labeled a doomer and a prepper because catastrophic emergencies are in inevitability in complex systems.

And it’s hard to imagine a time when complex systems like climate change, geopolitics and macroeconomic trading pressure held more sway than now. Like Jeremy Iron’s character I am listening for the music. And my ear is trained on the silence coming down the pike.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 607 and Shopping

I’m in a heavy “bitches be shopping” phase. Moving into a new house always necessitates some new purchases but adjusting to an entirely new lifestyle is a heavy lift.

We don’t have much furniture that effectively made the transition from loft in lower Manhattan at the start of the pandemic to townhouse in Colorado for 18 months. So it’s almost like starting from scratch furnishing a farmhouse in Montana. We are using Havenly to help us decide on items we want for areas we’ve never had to furnish before like a dining room and guest rooms. It’s an amazing service that does all the product market work of finding items in your price point and desired styles.

But of course, it all takes forever to get furniture and I wish we’d started on this earlier. As rationalized not starting till we moved in but of course every week some new piece of furniture gets delayed. I’ll be lucky if I get the dining room table by mid October at this rate.

A rendering of our dining room from Havenly

The other big shopping project is upgrading my wardrobe as even after two winters in Colorado most of the adjustment from Manhattan to the Rocky Mountains was technical fabrics and activewear clothing not actual workwear.

Now I have outdoor clothing needs that are less “let’s go for a hike” and more “someone needs to stack wood” or “turn over the soil in the raised beds.”. I guess this means I’m changing over from Merril hiking boots to Ariat paddock boots and from hiking pants to Carhartt canvas work pants. I placed an order for a bunch of stuff today and am modestly enthusiastic about it.

I’ve spent a small fortune on adjusting to Montana life and a huge chunk of the purchases feel aspirational. Or at least my perception of what kind of adjustments are required. As much as I’ve lived in the country, and worked on a farm, my childhood is well in the distance. I’m working from memories.

Categories
Biohacking

Day 606 and Recovery

As you might know, biohacking is more than just a hobby for me. It’s the way I keep on top of any remaining chronic health challenges. In particular, I love how my Whoop helps me pinpoint where I am between strain and recovery.

I had absolutely stellar recovery scores last week even as I pushed my strain significantly. I was “in the green” which meant I was getting enough rest to recover from all my activity. But I’ve had a few days of yellow “warning” recovery scores that suggest I may need extra sleep and less activity strain.

I felt it this morning when I had some anxiety hit me hard as made a run to the grocery store. If I am feeling particularly tired I can easily let myself get anxious and overwhelmed if I don’t feel I’ve got the space and time to recover myself physically. I was racing against the clock to get lunch for everyone (both Alex and our house guest) hoping I’d be home within enough time for making meal and taking shower before my usual Monday therapy power hours.

I was thus quite relieved to find that therapy was canceled. A little end of summer reprieve. All the rushing to get things done went poof as did any remaining anxiety. I didn’t need to push. I could pay attention to my recovery. I was now free to heed the edicts of the Whoop. I hope this bit of good luck puts me into the green tomorrow.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 605 and Inventory

I like to be prepared. It’s my personal opinion that this winter is going to be a bit rough. There is no single issue but rather a patchwork of intersecting crisis points that make me a little edgy.

You’ve got crop yields all over the place from another wild climate change year. You’ve got the rising costs of fertilizers. You’ve got an energy crisis brought on by the war Russia is waging against Ukraine. You’ve got whatever China is up to with its Covid policies. And then of course you’ve got our lingering economic fuckery and well you can see why I’m worried.

I went through our emergency food stores today and did some turnover and replenishment. We didn’t opt to move some things with us to Montana (some items had expiration dates necessitating donation) so it’s been on my to do list.

I’ve got a spreadsheet that includes fats, starches, sweeteners and less glamorous proteins like beans and canned fish. It theoretically calculates our our caloric needs and what is provided for in our supplies so we can more easily assess if we have enough on hand for different scenarios. In reality, I’ve never actually had full inputs clean enough to generate an output I trust. So I kind of wing it with this basic level of precision.

I’ve tried to abide by basic best practices for emergencies. Ready.gov is a surprisingly decent resource even if it might shock you what you should have in hand. You need supplies for a three day disaster like a snowstorm or hurricane. You need three weeks of supplies for an interruption that takes a bit of resolve. And you ideally three months of food on hand if something goes really wrong. The Mormon Church says you should keep a year of food on hand.

I don’t think we’ve quite got a year of food on hand but I have taken a lot of tips from the LDS suggestions for food storage. We’ve got pounds of wheat (and a hand crank grinder). We’ve got 25lbs sacks of rice. We’ve got big jugs of cooking oils. We’ve got sugars. We’ve got spices. I’ve got quite the collection of dried legumes.

I feel like I basically have what is necessary for a bad winter in Montana. I hope we’ve got enough for any supply chain constraints that might make it harder to get things to our modestly more rural homestead. But in truth I’m just following lists and hoping if something happens I didn’t fuck up too badly. And I’d we did well we’ve got shotguns and ammunition and the local deer are a little too cavalier about their safety. For now.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 604 and One Click

I’ve been procrastinating on two core projects for the fall. Both of which involve making a modest investment between $100 and $250 depending on how fancy I want to get. So it’s not a throwaway amount of money but it’s also not money I should be hesitating on.

I’ve been in my head about it for two or three weeks even though I regularly need to make decisions about much larger sums of money for projects with much longer time horizons. I finally got myself over the hump on clicking order after going over my plans with my husband Alex for an hour. Which we’d definitely bill at more than we spent.

PROJECT ONE: TEST APPLE ORCHARD

The first project is getting in a few apple saplings in a fall planting to test out where we want an orchard. It’s not a full orchard with a big wiz-bang multi-year permaculture plan. We literally just want to get in four to six dwarf trees in the soil as soon as possible as we’ve been told it’s feasible to do fall plantings of heartier Zone 4 varietals.

We did a soil sample and the results came back with very encouraging results. Our back pasture has excellent quality soil despite being compacted by horses.

A soil health assessment from Ward Laboratories.

And yet I struggled to make a purchase. I made a trip to the nursery. I fucked around on a bunch of websites. I ordered catalogs for next year’s spring plantings. Finally this afternoon we threw caution to the wind and bought six dwarfs from Stark Brothers. The total came to about $250 and if it all fails well I’m glad I spent the money on fruit trees instead of a disposable consumer good.

PROJECT 2: SEED STARTS

The second purchase was seed starter supplies for our winter hydroponic crops which we plan to cultivate in the barn. We got a LettuceGrow system early in the pandemic and absolutely loved the quality of greens we got out of it. We’d been able to buy starts (aka seeds that have sprouted and begun to grow) for it in Colorado but this winter I wanted to do my own growing from seeds up into starts.

The goal was to have constant rotation of red and green leaf lettuce along with romaine and kale by staggering seed tray starts. It would be easier and have fewer failure points if we did a new batch of seed starts once every couple of weeks for consistency and move them from one grow light seed tray to the LettuceGrow once it fully sprouted.

I had even less of an excuse here as one of my girlfriends did a massive seed start project this year from scratch and wrote up her entire shopping list and project guide complete with pictures. She did the hard work of translating various guides including one that I had even been involved with making from Josh Centers at Unprepared. He’s got a very thorough guide to starting a garden from seeds straight through to harvest which is worth paying for Substack for just that post.

Here were all of my friends and colleagues just out there doing the work. And I was too scared to experiment myself. Finally today we bought everything we needed from Amazon and purchased six or seven seed types from Johnny’s hydroponic collection. All told for everything it was $86 for a set up that should work for many seasons.

THE LESSON

While I’d never tell anyone to just go nuts putting shit in the ground without some research, I do think it’s possible to be too in your head about growing. I’ve been reading so much about fancy techniques like permaculture that I had neglected the most basic lesson of both startups and gardening. Execution is exponential. Just start doing something. Make it small. But you have to just start. Just plant. Just make things.

A bell curve with a smooth brain, a midwit and a Jedi. The midwit explains Sepp Holzer’s permaculture. The Jedi & the brain just plant.
Categories
Aesthetics

Day 603 and Summer Vacation

It feels like I’ve always disliked summer. I suspect people like it because of it’s association with vacations. But I find neither summer nor vacations to be that appealing individually or in conjunction. What is there to like about heat, ozone pollution, and fire season? And then you want me to add travel and disruptions to my routine? I’m skeptical.

This is probably more a reflection of how much I’ve come to hate the intense heat associated with climate change in the west. Heat domes that keep the temperature over 40 C for weeks and their associated forest fires are the stuff of nightmares. But I don’t recall looking really forward to summer breaks as a kid except for the ones that were spent at an ashram. I enjoyed all of the meditation and yoga. But otherwise summer was just a weird time when I was mostly alone.

So it’s a bit of a surprise to feel like I’m having a summer vacation and I like it. I promised myself I’d take off all of August so we could really settle into our new homestead in Montana. I didn’t expect it to feel particularly relaxing as we have a chore list a mile long. It was meant as a different kind of working summer.

But I feel like I’m having the best summer vacation of my life. The weather is lovely and cool at the moment. The food is spectacular. All cherries and steaks. I’m spending a lot of time outdoors just by walking around the neighborhood. I’ve got time to workout. We installed a full lifting cage in the barn. I’m getting plenty of sleep. My Whoop is entirely green except when I push because I want too. My time is entirely spent on personal projects. Maybe this is what people have been raving about?

Categories
Preparedness

Day 602 and Doing It

I never had a wedding so I missed out entirely on “you did a big thing” gifts. City hall weddings don’t inspire Boomers to open their wallets as it turns out. But buying our first home seems to have triggered a celebratory mood amongst our nearest and dearest. People are happy for us.

While we don’t have a gift registry (though maybe we should), I’ve been impressed by the thoughtfulness with which our friends have approached our house warming.

One of our friends sent a card that perfectly captured the intensity and joy of the situation.

“There is no better feeling in the world than than going from ‘wondering if you can do it’ to realizing you’ve just done it.”

I assume this was some kind of Hallmark graduation card but it really did capture some of the awe of the moment. Having spent 18 month searching for a homestead I’ll admit I wasn’t entirely sure when we’d actually graduate to the “just done it” phase. It sort of happened all at once when we stumbled onto a property that met every single one of our criteria.

We took a very research intensive approach to deciding on where to live and what to invest. Maybe it was the founder mindset that plagues both my husband and, I but we just couldn’t help but do an aggressive deep dive into all the variables. Some people move on vibes but we needed the numbers to back up the feeling. Checking the math is probably a good habit.

It’s a relief to get to the “we just did it” phase though as with any long play you find yourself wondering if it’s all just an elaborate fantasy. In an age of quick fixes and instant gratification, the slow roll isn’t that glamorous. Trusting that your preparedness will positive yield action is hard. Trusting that you will act when your preparation are needed feels even harder. But here I am. Having done the thing.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 601 and New Limits

The past couple of days have been super intense. Heck, the past month has been a lot. I passed out last night with my phone in my hand a bit after 9pm and woke up well after 8am this morning. My Whoop indicated I had high strain for the past two days and needed more recovery.

Still I went about my usual routines but soon found myself yawning and struggling to keep my eyes open after eating lunch. I felt lucky I hadn’t scheduled much today. I got back into bed figuring I would read a little bit. I kept drifting off. So much for being productive this afternoon.

One of my biggest fears is doing too much. Because I’ve been a workaholic in the past, I have a lingering sense of unease anytime I can tell I’ve been pushing myself for a few days. It used to be that my body would simply crash if I applied too much pressure, but as my health is at about 80% improved from my initial diagnosis I can no longer rely on such direct feedback.

I say that like it’s a bad thing but it’s a huge relief that I can modestly over do things and not immediately find my body crashing into a rest period. But it also means I have to be much more conscious of my own needs for rest and recovery as it’s no longer quite so obvious when I’ve done too much. This represents both a huge achievement for me and also a transitional moment in which I must find new boundaries.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 600 and High Season

A lot of folks seem to be coming through Montana over the next two weeks. Maybe it’s the nature of high season that people flock to Montana at the end of the summer?

But it’s been quite fun to have all kinds of friends, mutuals and acquaintances reach out to make plans. Visibility on Twitter has played a large role in this, as anyone passing through Montana might be inclined to grab a meal or a drink if they scroll their local mutuals. I like to think I am top of mind because I am a good hang but it’s probably because I’m just quite visible.

All these tourists has got a bit of a “center of the universe” feel to it. It’s like a mountain summer town version of Manhattan during fashion week. Or Los Angeles during the Oscars. I’ve got to say it feels like I’m Monaco and it’s F1 racing season. Every city of note has an event that brings all of the jet set to their hometown.

I’m usually mixed on doing too much social activity but I’ve been feeling like socializing more. I’ve even been eating out with much more frequency. And what’s amazing about it is that in the past I didn’t want to do more than a couple events a month. But this end of summer in Montana thing has me looking forward to more deck cocktails, eating cold cherries on the marble kitchen slab, going to pubs and ale houses, and maybe even a few steak houses too.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 599 and The Lamentations of Their Women

A bunch of people asked me about what happened to me on Twitter over the weekend. I’d been hitting a bunch of different niche communities like startup Twitter, finance Twitter, doomer Twitter, and discourse Twitter with a thread that has a bunch of extremely extra and occasionally outright hostile weirdos saying reactionary shit.

I think it all started when my friend Ashley wrote a post about the commodification of women’s bodies. She was responding to another piece of discourse and found herself getting dog piled by one of the most irritating but unavoidable portions of the the internet; reactionary angry young men.

I didn’t like that Ashley was getting ripped for functionally agreeing with right coded, socially conservative men. I thought “damn, you can’t win with them”.

Entering the Fray

I decided to jump in and tease some of these boys. My inner child loves to shitpost as she finds humor and playfulness protective. I promptly got blocked. I went about my business. Now that I live on our homestead in Montana, I’ve got a lot of chores.

But I couldn’t leave well enough alone. I kept discussing the damn discourse. I expressed my concern that we’ve got such an intense population of reactionary young men who act as if they are perpetually victimized. I expressed empathy for how men are getting screwed and mostly got told it is women’s fault. It did some numbers but it wasn’t going into a context collapse situation just yet. Basically another day on Twitter.

The thread started out with all of the empathy and good faith I’ve come to expect from niche Twitter. We avoided purity politics. Tucker graciously discussed his own journey and how he let go of anger and began taking responsibility for himself and his family. Jack made some jokes. A number of internet friends discussed the varied ways they handled the systemic discrimination that some masculine virtues experience in modernity. Much wisdom was shared about how different they had grown up to be men.

Later that night I wrote a throwaway post about how we’ve got a crisis of masculinity and maybe only other men can get through to angry young boys? I suggested that perhaps right coded men who discuss modern masculinity would have an easier time reaching them. I tagged Tucker Max and Jack Murphy as men who seem to have done a good job taking responsibility for their own lives.

I basically went to bed with a sense that people had been good to each other. And I didn’t really notice being quote tweeted by a niche main character in groyper Twitter or what it would mean for my tomorrow.

It Escalates

His thread contained the following:

  • A very intense discussion of the ethics of doing butt stuff and posting about your experience with polyamory and cuckcolding.
  • The ethics of charging for coaching and clubs and whether one can have masculine virtue if your wife sleeps with other men.
  • A surprising amount of hysterics about what constitutes hypocrisy if one claims to be masculine.

Basically a bunch of people who haven’t figured out their own shadow lives told me exactly how uncomfortable they were with other people’s sex lives.

But honestly it was just so much fucking butt stuff.

Unfortunately that visibility of discourse meant I suddenly got flooded with harassment. A coordinated re-tweeting campaign began. People started digging into back posts and old news headlines. My direct messages got flooded with threats against me and my husband. It was definitely enough that we started thinking about security around the homestead.

I can only assume someone’s group chat or some message board was like “look at the phenotype on this bitch”. And to be fair, some people came with good jokes about venture capitalists moving to Montana. But then there was the graphically racist, as in, “oh we still have Nazis” plot twist. I realized I might need to actually start blocking people. I felt modestly disappointed as I hadn’t been dogpiled in a long time. But protecting myself was more important.

Why

Now you can ask why am I even stepping into these spaces if they contain this kind of abuse? What can I say there is a part of me who enjoys a frisson of danger. The feminine urge to protect our menfolk often runs head long into the reality that they can be dangerous. Walking into male spaces has inherent risks if you take up space in public life.

I have to be honest honest with myself that there is a breed of men who considers all public spaces to be male. I am an offense to them even if I am in the process of lamentation for our men. The space I take up by existing with different preferences is proof enough I am an enemy to be subjugated.

So I guess I owe anyone I teased about blocking on Twitter an apology. There are some people in too much pain out there. And I am not in anyway responsible for their emotional health. Only they can choose to let go of the pain.