Year: 2025

Categories
Homesteading

Day 1767 and Muskrat Love in Montana at MilFred Pond

And what feels like a lifetime ago, when Alex and I were searching for the perfect property on which to have our little homestead experiment, we were on our second scouting trip in the Gallatin County area when an almost impossibly perfect property went on the market.

I was particularly adamant about finding something that had its own water, and not just on a well. Ideally, something that had a stream crossing it. As silly as it sounds, you really are looking for a river that runs through it sometimes.

What we found was a farmhouse with a giant yellow barn that had a perfect pond fed by a mountain stream coming down straight from the canyon above us. It was honestly so perfect, it was a little bit terrifying to make the decision to offer on the house the same day. But somehow we had the guts to make the move and make an offer, and we got the property.

That pond has provided us with so much tranquility and beauty over the years that I almost can’t imagine why hesitated in the first place, except that the leap of actually doing the thing felt so enormous at the time. It was exactly what we had wanted to find, and with everything we had on our list. It is a treasure in all seasons.

Not that we fish in it, but trout do come down the stream as it flows year-round. We have a family of ducks, and during migration season, Canada Geese will often be attracted to it as well. Thanks to the stream that feeds it. It seems to be a thriving ecosystem even though we have quite a bit of work that we really need to do in order to deepen it and really let it breathe.

But clearly it can’t be doing too poorly, as we have found a new creature who has made a home with us. Over the fall, we have noticed that anytime we walked past the pond, a small mammal would splash and immediately disappear.

Now the temptation, of course, was to think that maybe we had a beaver as we found a dam. But this is as unlikely as finding river otters, although that would be a fantasy life to have such creatures nearby.

But of course, the real indigenous aquatic animal in Montana is the muskrat. They are actually quite common in several areas of our state. Being known for our rivers, means Montana has an ideal wetland environment for the funny, web-footed voles known for making the occasional frustrating dam, their very fine pelt and amusingly “odoriferous secretions from the perineal glands.”

The Milfred Muskrat in what we hope will remain their home for some time.

For weeks now, we’ve been trying to quietly walk up without upsetting or alerting our new mammal friend as quite obviously we wanted to get a picture. They (or maybe it is just a singleton) had moved too quickly at every turn for us to ever get a good look.

But today, Alex managed to quietly snap a few photos of the muskrat, happily swimming about the pond. It’s been hard to see or hear anything but a quick splash as we go by, as they are so swift in their movements.

Muskrats are very effective swimmers, and ours is clearly a fine specimen who has decided our cat tails make for an excellent food source.

Now, they are allowed to be trapped over the winter if one has a permit. So perhaps it was Providence that allowed us to see our new neighbor today. I have no intention of letting anyone take our Milfred Muskrat away. So just know if you come across the property line for him or her, we will defend them vigorously.

But if you come visit and are very lucky, you too might catch a glimpse. And you too might fall in muskrat love like we have.

And they whirl and they twirled and they tango
Singin’ and jinglin’ a jango
Floatin’ like the heavens above
Looks like muskrat love

Captain and Tennille

Categories
Biohacking Media

Day 1766 and Thursday Styles Theory Strikes Again: Testosterone for Women Edition

One of my long standing theories, and a personal coinages, is the Thursday Styles Problem. It’s a theory of knowing directionally what is coming, but never being quite sure of when.

The New York Times publishes its “styles” section on Thursdays and Sundays. If you work in media, public relations or culture, you are aware of the general trends that will emerge on Thursday ahead of time. If you know “what everyone knows everyone knows” ahead of time, there is a lot of money to be made.

Predicting the trends sounds easy when I put it this way, but the timing of it requires quite a bit of foresight, and considerable planning.

The trend piece is researched and reported over months. It requires the editor to be familiar enough with the trend to approve the writer taking time & resources. That means other upstream media has to have covered the topic in the niche which requires its own planning and coverage.

And while hype cycles have shortened, culture still takes time. And really important cultural trends may even require years to be relevant enough to be Thursday Styles worthy.

And can you afford to wait for the cycle to run? Breaking news happens and a piece gets pushed. A hotter trend might push the piece for weeks or months. If your business can’t survive the long game of becoming a Thursday Styles trend, being first hardly matters. Being right doesn’t matter as much as being right on time.

There is an art to this. Publicists play long games. They seed articles with a long arc in mind. Prediction markets place bets on the likelihood of something occurring, but with many actors you can’t really control when and how a thing happens.

It’s hard enough that Alex Danco believes it to be its own cultural movement and a force akin to past movements like modernism. Predicting the future is now an active part of living in the present for everyone.

So naturally when something I am doing happens within a month or so of me doing a thing, I tend to feel smug. When Albania was on the front page of the styles section while Alex and I were vacationing there, I gloated. I’d been hip to the forgotten European country for years.

Today I got a push notification about women taking testosterone. It had the full ugly animations of a thirty minute reporting on a full blown phenomenon.

Frustratingly it is very light on specifics as to what constitutes a “high dose”, while framing the piece almost entirely around the wonders women experience from taking a higher dose of testosterone than what might be considered average. 5mg a day is roughly average, and the procedure I did lasts 4-6 months, so I am starting at an average dose after having been on a 3mg a day cream without getting an improvement in my bloodwork.

We’re started me with 10mg of estradiol (range 6-25mg with 8-10mg being most common), and 75mg of testosterone (range 50-150mg with the most common being 75-100). Day 1754

I have been very open about my dosing, my own bloodwork, and what went into why I chose to do it. Which, I’m glad, as the New York Times sure isn’t telling. Being very honest and open about details seems important as I have the privilege to experiment and I want others to benefit from that.

Because of minor complications, I’ve been attempting to be entirely transparent with those as well. The treatment itself is not dangerous and is tolerated very well, but I have had unusually high incidences of skin infections due to the IL-17 inhibitor I take for my chronic inflammatory condition, which led to a longer recovery than I’d have preferred.

Now that this is a full blown trend I promise to report back as I heal and as my blood work begins to show results. Until then, if you want to know what other trends I think will hit big and want to get ahead of the pack, remember I am just a message away. And I keep a shopping blog as well so you can buy what I buy before it shows up with a rave in the New York Times.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 1765 and Hollowed Out

I’m at home with a freaky red light mask that could absolutely pass for a horror movie prop. My husband is sealed up in a hyperbaric chamber with two atmospheres of pressure and oxygen pumped in through a mask.

It may be Halloween but neither of those activities are horror movie material even though you could easily imagine them featuring as props in a serial killer series or Final Destination.

And yet these are things we are doing for health and wellness. One man’s horror movie is another man’s idea of a good night off and you can really tell we are tired childless adults that this is our idea of winding down on a Friday night.

The childless part wasn’t entirely a choice but we picked lives of professional intensity a long time ago so Friday night spent in self care is a sign that we’ve earned some respite.

Millenial success stories involve long hours. Millennials being all hallowed out on All Hallows’ Eve shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone, given the current state of American politics.

I’ve never liked Halloween much as if I want to dress up I don’t need social permission and I really don’t care for parties or socializing. I got all partied out in my twenties when I had to do a ton of it for professional reasons. I know it sounds glamorous but nightlife is work.

I had a tequila client and I had a hotel with the hottest nightclub in the New York City. I somehow managed to have both Patron and Le Bain as a client in my advertising agency era, and while loved both clients it did mean eventually all I can associate with nightlife is work. When I had a night off I stayed at home and read science fiction with a face mask.

Which means some things never change. There is no suburban holiday with children to dress up and take out. And I barely have recollections of doing any of that as a child. It’s no surprise this holiday has no hold on me

I don’t know why I have no fond memories of it but I don’t. I have almost no memories of Halloween. The precious few years in which we lived in suburbs, where I had both parents and I was young enough to go trick or treating barely register. And I don’t feel sad about it

I am much sadder about the kind of world we fought to succeed in as adults. I am happy to be home and with the horror movie treatments to heal the ravages of the real world that have been enacted on both of our bodies.

The long hours over decades, the multiple Covid infections my husband suffered, my own autoimmune issues and the realities of aging are not horrors but they are real. And I acutely am aware that Halloween is pretend.

And nobody should have to pretend that they aren’t hollowed out when they are. That is a fairy tale for children and for the people who still are. Neither category include me. It’s perfectly fine to be tired on a Friday.

If I’m going to put on a mask tonight it damn well better have health benefits. Here is to red light therapy and collagen masks. May they heal what ails you on all hollows eve. You can face the dead and your demons tomorrow.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1764 and Not so Easy In and But Out of the Woods

It has been sixteen days since I confidently decided to insert testosterone pellets by tiny incision into my left buttocks. I was felt certain we’d checked all the appropriate risk factors and my tolerance threshold was met.

I felt I was making pretty decent progress on healing over five days as I had not only the benefits of HBOT but also read light therapy. I was pretty darn pleased and felt well.

And then it seemed I took a turn six days further on. Perhaps some trauma from the lidocaine and epinephrine induced enough of altered window of immunity that some bacterial weaseled its way in the wound and viola a subcutaneous infection called cellulitis.

I was put on two different antibiotics and we figured it would clear quickly. That was incorrect And it has been a slow healing process

Barely improving day by day. And I had somehow made the decision the night before the procedure that I would just waltz into a new beauty shopping blog as the holiday season warmed up. So that was perhaps bad luck on my part. And has slowed me down on something I was doing for some joy so I hope I didn’t let anyone down. I am muddling through.

Today I got an ultrasound on the wound after a fever spike and did a number of blood tests to see where my white blood cells and inflammatory markers were at.

The local hospital was having computer troubles which meant trouble scheduling an ultrasound but we managed to find another imagining clinic this morning.

Back at the hospital for bloods (they do walk ins for blood draws) they still appeared to be having issues with computers. “Your insurance isn’t recognized” was the verdict thirty minutes after using it at other lab. That made for a chuckle but we got it done.

The results are already in and we seem to be looking at healthy epithelial tissues and my CRP and Sed Rates were not elevated. Of course, half the reason I am worried is I take an immune suppressant for chronic autoimmune inflammatory condition.

It seems to manifest frequently as skin infections. My old drug wasn’t nearly as effective but it also didn’t have side effects. S

Hopefully slowly and with lots of protein and rest I’ll be healed and can spend my time on work and my pet beauty blog.

And tomorrow I’ll cross my 30th HBOT treatment mark so maybe it can make progress on building me up instead of dealing with a flesh wound. Which is actually just damned good luck on our part.

Categories
Politics

Day 1763 and Baumol’s Cost Disease Accelerationism

Today was a pretty big news day. It was a FOMC meeting with a cut, Jerome Powell gave some forward guidance that a cut in December is not guaranteed (cue market upset), and NVIDIA became worth $5 trillion.

This is apparently 16% of our GDP and without investment in artificial intelligence related build-out, our economy would have only grown by 0.6%.

Without Magnificent Seven spending, GDP would have grown at a mere 0.6% annualized rate instead of around 1.1%-1.2% – Fortune

So America would be looking about as gnarly as Europe without the Magnificent Seven and AI infrastructure build-out spending.

About 92% of GDP growth in the first half of 2025 was driven by investment in data centers, AI infrastructure, and information processing, with NVIDIA as a primary contributor Yahoo Finance

Which is a scary large amount for any corporation, but is somewhat rational in the logic of a civilizational technology changeover akin to the Industrial Revolution.

For some comparisons, Standard Oil at its height represented about 5-6% of the total U.S. stock market value at the time and 1.5% of America’s total GDP. AT&T’s Bell Systems were worth about 3-4% of America’s GDP at their asset peak in 1984 so not entirely an unprecedented situation though Nvidea’s percentage is a very networked era problem.

How afraid should we be about the potential for a market bubble in artificial intelligence? That is a questions for Carlotta Perez

Having lived through both the dot-com crash and the global financial crisis, I have some fears, but also this feels about as rational as any of the other ways we’ve handled valuations and value in past boom-and-bust cycles.

There is significant revenue from very real demand. It is just hard to see the demand as it’s industry demand not consumer. And the consumer demand we have is likely coming from professionals who are more enabled in ways we can’t count. I couldn’t have answered half the questions I had for this post before the LLM age.

And that demand for efficiency was coming and needed to be addressed over some time horizon, no matter what.

As different industries cope with their extreme lack of efficiency in the face of other industries who are efficient and in demand wages rise everywhere and basic needs like education & healthcare get more expensive despite not being delivered more efficiently.

So we still need those inefficient industries but what do we do? We have to find solutions.

Because we were going to need to build out the infrastructure for diversified energy transition. Much of this is being spent on build-outs for things that we genuinely need.

We need nuclear. We need power grids that aren’t from the dark ages. We need the efficiency for compute as government services have gone full runaway Baumol accelerationist. Unless we do the hard work that’s going to take 10 to 15 years, most liberal economies will collapse under the weight of the social safety net.

So we need to do a fairly thorough job of investing in the future, independent of whether it’s artificial intelligence driving our future or developing an industrial policy of, say, going to war with China. Necessity is the mother of invention and I’d rather the need be capital growth than war to drive industry.

I don’t know why this “facts of budgeting life” works people up so much. Booms and busts and bubbles build real things and we really need more efficient energy, healthcare, and education.

The economy is a nutrient gradient and money moves to where it gets fed. Right now the promised efficiency of a solution to unsustainable spending is paid for by gains in areas which did get more efficient. That is just the whole game. Grow faster and bring along anything that isn’t for the ride.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1762 and New Nodal Points

I suspect that if I am any good at seeing the future it’s because I enjoy touching the present so much.

I think it’s a fools errand to professionalize “the spark” of active players meeting and exchanging information. Not to say that working at your game is wrong. You should work at it. But know what game you are playing.

I’m experiencing a kind of multi-modal view of my own focus and how it can be turned into more time touching reality. I know it sounds silly but the verbiage of the moment is enabling in strange ways.

I don’t always like consensus. I need to experience the consensus myself before I’ll join up. But I love to be first. I love being your first fan. I love being first to a new trend, narrative or aesthetic. I want to see a thing first.

To engage with others in this market place of ideas and trade in our knowledge for our own priorities, is for me, the stuff of life. I love a market. What is the mood of now so I can find others who might understand the possibilities of tomorrow. Every angle counts

I do think it’s all up for grabs future at the moment. I am leaning into some personal weirdness partially for my own happiness but partially because I think maybe this strange node of “people who want to communicate that they value beauty” to the world will be a vector for finding interesting people working on what is going to explode next.

Put out a little value for people with your own skills and maybe that is the node through which you have the opportunity to see what they see and in return you both learn more together.

I am trusting when everything goes up in “the churn” I enjoy picking up new skills. I am enjoying turning myself in a new direction. I think it might actually get me to my original goals. To invest in founders building their weird chaotic nodes of next should be.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1761 and Give Me A Break

It has not been an easy year for me or my family. The struggle to find a path to a sustainable place of health feels harder than ever.

I am living in some type of thermodynamic hell. Everything I try comes with equally forceful reactions and I wish I could say more of them were positive.

Even when results look positive they have high costs that make me reconsider if I should have done it at all. Switching my immune suppression drug put my inflammatory markers in the best place we’ve seen them in years.

Alas it is so effective that I’ve had four major skin infections in 2025 of which four required going under the knife. And the fourth was caused by a small incision that was considered so safe and routine we almost didn’t consider antibiotics at all.

I just so badly want something to work in a way that doesn’t come with staggeringly high costs. Normally I’d link around to all the relevant posts but I just need a break so I’ll leave it as an exercise.

But can you imagine anything more depressing than having an infection on your ass? I sure can’t. I am stuck trying to keep pressure off of it while working on all the various projects of life and I am a slow healer.

I don’t even get to see if the HBOT is doing anything for my main concerns, as if it is we are only going to see it when I clear this crazy infection.

I suppose the good news is that one of the best treatments for high risk wound care is actually hyperbaric oxygen therapy so the positive and the negative are at least balanced.

Categories
Culture Emotional Work

Day 1760 and Optionality or Commitment Issues

As I sat inside our hyperbaric chamber for my 26th sessions of oxygen therapy, my mind was on commitment. I like a routine and a plan and being locked in on my follow through.

I don’t recall when I was introduced to the concept of optionality, but it wasn’t something I recall being raised with. Despite being raised by hippies and yuppies,who themselves struggled with commitment, I never doubted that loyalty and stick-to-it-ness were crucial personal values. I don’t like to quit.

Maybe somewhere in my 20s though it became clear that many of the people I dealt with in “the big city” always had their eye on their next move.

Maybe it was campaigns like the World Economic Forum’s infamous “You will own nothing and be happy!”

Trends slowly put the meta structure of optionality as a construct into my mind. And it wasn’t too foreign to me.

We moved a lot as a child, and I never felt like I could get too used to anything because change was such a regular part of my life. I could reconcile being committed to always changing as the balance.

So the idea of always trying to add in additional optionality struck me as a little bit funny. Why would I always be looking for the door, or looking for my next move, or the next upward opportunity, when so much of what I longed for as a child was a basic sense of stability in my own home life?

Now, of course, the idea of optionality is baked into almost everything we do. Owning things is expensive, and financial challenges made the sharing of resources and assets like homes and cars seem perfectly natural to a millennial who had barely gotten by in the Great Recession.

But now, as I watch reality television like Love is Blind, a dating show designed to result in commitment, we see so much fear.

An inability to choose a path or to consider changing the path you are on to be with another seems to plague participants the further they take the franchise. Optionality is one thing but we’ve stumbled into a world where commitment is a foreign language.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1759 and Who Are We After Someone’s Death?

They say you shouldn’t make any significant changes after a death in your family. Grieving is a process and allowing oneself to feel the range of emotions in loss is important.

You might not feel your grief if you jump into something new. Making a change could be hiding your grief from yourself. And so I am trying to sit with my grief.

The loss of my father on the last day of the summer was both expected and painful. As I have had to find my own way to grieving, without being part of his memorial, I thought a lot about what life going forward meant as I honored our past and let him go.

I wondered about which parts of my history and my identity gave me my life. If I wanted to make changes in my future, or to broaden my horizons, what would it look like?

How could I be sure I was being true myself in the challenges of my chosen life and true to the deep and complex relationship I had with my father. All these questions arise.

Somehow I am happy. I feel more love for myself as I see the ways I tried to love my father, and how he tried to love me as his child.

Being who we are, means seeing the child in ourselves who wanted to be loved for who they were, while learning as an adult that acceptance is up to us, not the generation who birthed us. The liberation of birth anew.

I hope the many experiments I’ve run with my biohacking over the last two months are helping me stay in my body during this process. I am on my 25th hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy treatment today. Which is fortunate as I am healing yet another skin issue as I try to find ways to have the strength to be myself in my very challenging body.

And so I wonder, am I the same without my father as I was with him? I am always searching for ways to become better, stronger, more informed, more capable, more successful and ultimately I fear those are all synonymous with finding ways to be more lovable to him? I couldn’t always tell.

I’ve found myself wishing to indulge a past professional calling with a side project. I’ve been writing a beauty shopping column where I go deep on my autistic special interest in skincare and the business of appearances. It’s been making me happy.

I have even decided make a special offer founding members who join my first year as I wish share some of my own happy knowledge. For a nominal fee I’ll build a routine from my cosmetics library and decant and organize the perfect skincare routine optimized exactly for the life you are living.

And so I ask does this count as a change? Am I jumping into something new, even if it is small, too soon?

All I know is that it feels right and like a joyful offering, even if there are parts of me that hurt. Perhaps there is a good kind of change to be had in endings with new beginnings. A personal passion once put aside, reemerges to serve others.

I think that is something my father would have liked to see me do. I have pursued so many of the things I know he wanted for me in this life. I do have a future full of technical change and a portfolio focused on the future of computing.

And yet here I am feeling freed to show that some aspect of who I am as a woman does want to serve others. If it is in the cause of helping be comfortably in your own skin that seems rather a positive thing to become after this life change.

Categories
Culture Reading

Day 1758 and Fluctuation in Society

I was ordered into bed for a couple of days by not one but two doctors. As I mentioned yesterday, a small incision for testosterone pellets must have let in a small amount of bacteria.

Maybe we didn’t pick the correct antibiotics (or maybe it was an inadequate dose) so what looked like healthy healing turned into a subcutaneous infection just as it was all look well which needed managing and cause me a bit of trouble.

So I’ve been catching up on costume dramas like The Gilded Age about the 1880s boom times in America. I’m on the third season of it and while not quite done but I’m enjoying it.

It’s provided me inspiration before as I’m fascinated that corporate charters are what lead to America’s experiment in self governance and each new era of technological and commercial development seems to kick off new organizational opinion of how best to manage society.

No matter the era or the people involved, humans will always find new ways to organize themselves into hierarchies that reflect changes in technology and material conditions.

As eager as we may be to unravel past cultural ways of organizing our status and importance, we always find new ways to set new standards of who matters and why and the same human nature finds a way to creep back in.

Position, birthright, inheritances and other ways of marking nobility and aristocracy manage to find a way to accommodate wealth and power lest they lose all status.

And who has wealth and power in this century whipsaws so fast, it feels like change is as seasonal as the weather. Even if in reality, society changed little if at all. Money and birth still matter quite a bit no matter how many followers someone has on the latest attention gathering platform.

I’ve mentioned my fondness for Paul Faussell’s Class: A Guided Tour Through The American Status System as a good jumping off point for understanding how American has organized its flavors of granting social capital within our supposedly classless society.

The Gilded Age attempts across the seasons to show that our society is always changing with subplots about rising in society through invention, intellect, political organization and sheer force of will.

Gilded Age’s director Julian Fellows also directed Downton Abbey which famously showed a British aristocratic family struggling with money, social change and war.

Both shows may show ways of changing one’s position in society but the skeptics exist at every turn. Even Fussell has Class X in his guide who exit rather than participate in what he calls the charade of meritocracy.

Fussell argues that it is essentially impossible to change one’s social class —up or down — but it is possible to extricate oneself from the class system by existing outside the system as a X person. Wikipedia

I find this particularly funny as we have entire institutions dedicated to deciding how we see and experience class and their luminaries hate how society organizes itself as much as anyone. The New York Times’s infamous columnist David Brooks finds Fussell’s book a “caustic and extravagantly snobby tour through the class markers of its time” which strikes me as especially funny as he once dedicated a column to worrying if he’d put his assistant into an awkward spot by presuming she wouldn’t know how to order in “gourmet” Italian deli.

Bourgeois bohemian that Brooks was, it never occurred to him that an Italian deli might actually be a lower class marker for plenty of people. American Society being filled with semiotic markers in America to ever really manage a static set of signifiers for all that long.