Tag: Family

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 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
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.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work Medical

Day 1749 and Some The Worse For Wear

Every time life gets intense I wonder to myself why am I speeding into the turn? And then I look back at the last almost half decade (which is easier than I’d expected as I’ve written every day) and I feel the achingly slow pace at which we tackle the challenges of our lives.

We’ve had really big wins and really glass chewing teeth grinding bloody inch by inch progress that barely feels like a win at all.

It’s easy to focus on the bruises when they aren’t a metaphor like yesterday’s adventures in scalpel driven hormone treatment. But the the wounds that are more emotional are just as easy to spot.

Some pain has given me relief and some has been so heartbreaking it crushes me that it’s beyond my control. Bodies and borders are often beyond the control of mortals.

So I’m just rushing headlong into fun things like shopping columns and biohacking and my portfolio companies and my political engagement and hopefully we find the money and solutions to all the bottlenecks which range from family and pain to visas. And yes the bruise on my butt is literal.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1746 and Processed Pizza Hangover

Yesterday was my birthday and we celebrated it in grand style and semi- tradition by spending two hours walking every single aisle of Costco.

Now you might think all that walking around would leave your body feeling invigorated, and honestly it did, but we finished our grand tour by eating at the Costco food court. Now there are probably ways to eat healthy there but not how we did it.

We went for the classics including the dollar fifty hot dog and soda combination (a bulwark against inflation that has stood longer than seems possible) a slice of pepperoni pizza, a strawberry smoothie and a chocolate chip cookie. I had the pizza, some of the smoothie and half the cookie while Alex had the hotdog, a root beer, the rest of the smooth and a little bit of the cookie.

Our mutual and biohacker in chief Bryan Johnson gifted me a birthday roast of this meal. Which was not only hilariously funny but absolutely true.

Happy Birthday.

We didn’t feel immediately worse but we woke up today with what I’d qualify as a hangover. We can enjoy the above roasting as we generally don’t eat junk food and when we do it’s in more of the local beef category than the hyper processed and hyper preserved category.

Before you think this is a show of virtue, this preference never did anything for my aesthetics or metabolism, it’s just that it always makes me feel bad.

I am quite sensitive to preservatives and refuse to eat most forms of American bread and most varieties of prepared meal. No matter how good the ingredients are, the preservatives just do not agree with me.

It’s not that I’m a healthy eater naturally so much as hyper palatable foods are often hyper preserved foods and that sends my histamine response soaring into cytokine storms. So it’s no wonder I woke up feeling hungover.

I did real damage to myself as Bryan pointed out. We had a lovely time and I like to think the joy and happiness reduced our cortisol enough to bring us some balance. But it was easy to quit drinking for the same reason as it is easy to quit fast food. You feel like shit afterwards.

One of the most amusing fights I recall my parents having was my father taking my kindergarten class to tour a Carl’s Jr kitchen. They gave us a kid’s meal at the end, and while I turned up my nose at the burger, I did eat the french fried potatoes. My very crunchy and wise mother was not happy. “Now she will have a taste for French Fries!”

And damned if she wasn’t right. I still haven’t ever eaten a fast food hamburger. The idea of it is revolting to me and I’ve no clue how that came to be programmed in me. I may be one of the few people in America who has never eaten a Big Mac. But I love french fries. And good potatoes fried in a decent oil never leaves me feeling awful. But bread that doesn’t go moldy? That gives me a hangover every time.

Categories
Aesthetics Biohacking

Day 1745 and a Very Costco Birthday

Alex and I love a Costco date. The beloved warehouse cooperative sells bulk goods and the luxury surprises to its members at fair prices. It remains a top notch place to enjoy time together in search of treasure. Which is why we choose it for my birthday celebration today.

We got some groceries, walked every single aisle, found surprise and delight, and wracked up a couple thousand steps indoors in rainy weather

A birthday date inside Costco in ok

I don’t know quite how we started on the Costco date. It was probably one of our preparedness habits as we check our stocks and resupply as basics get used up and items expire. But Costco is also about the hunt. This Pendleton throw is a fine birthday present.

The seasonal arrivals for Halloween were still going strong but we saw Christmas ready to go. Thanksgiving hasn’t popped up yet but we did see a turkey order form.

You also learn a lot about the biggest trends in health and wellness as their supplement and beauty aisles are the stuff of legend. Creatine and collagen have hit the big time for men and women and everyone is thinking about hormones.

DHEA is a better mix but adaptogens are good

Now the real coup de grace of a Costco trip is the food court. Which is never the caliber of high quality and healthy that you can get in other areas. But it does make for excellent birthday party food.

I had a slice a pizza, half a strawberry smooth and half a cookie
The famed $1.50 hot dog

Alex got himself the infamous hotdog and turned it into a proper Chicago style dog with onions and relish and mustard. I won’t eat encased meats myself.

Our Twitter friends were following along as we posted pictures from each aisle with comments about commodities pricing, cosmetics merchandising and other sundry topics. And as an added treat Bryan Johnson roasted our birthday meal

Julie, a good learning experience. These 2,050 calories will cause a massive insulin spike followed by a post-meal crash. Increased hunger 3-4 hr later. Your arteries constrict and blood vesselsl stiffen. The nitrites are a group 1 carcinogen (increased colorectal cancer risk). Acute oxidative stress. Impaired endothelial function by 20-40% for several hours. Gut microbiome will shift towards pro-inflammatory Firmicutes, an obesity-like profile. The dopamine spike from fat+sugar+salt mimics an addiction reward pathway. Repeated, will desensitize dopamine receptors causing you to escalate stimulation to achieve the same pleasure.
Happy Birthday.

Contemplating life choices is the perfect way to enjoy the day. Plus how great does this new blanket look on our couch?

Categories
Chronicle Travel

Day 1743 and Noticing Anarcho-Tyranny Through Habits

I’m coming up on the 5-year mark of writing every single day. It doesn’t feel like I’ve been at it that long, if I’m honest with myself. When you commit to doing a basic task as a daily habit, you don’t expect it to change your life.

I’m not actually sure that writing every day has changed my life, though I think I’ve gotten better at the process of writing and the habit of finding space to think, organize, and get my thoughts together. That is a positive change.

When I first started, there were a number of goals I had in my life that seemed a lot more achievable than half a decade of writing.

Once you’ve achieved such consistency, you notice how little gets done in other areas when you regularly do things for yourself. One of my goals that I’ve had almost as long as this blog was a visa for family friends so they could travel freely to America to see me just as I see them. Pandemics and problematic presidents sure slowed that down and now I despair it will ever happy.

I honestly had no idea that the United States was so broken in its state capacity that granting a travel visas would consume more time than blogging and I’d achieve much less working to obtain a visa for years as its functionally impossible to get a legal visa.

Here I am with all of this writing (fantastic training date for an artificial intelligence) and yet I’d still have failed at obtaining a travel visa for family friends. We have so much power and yet not quite enough to get around America’s failures.

Maybe this is why projects like the Network State appealed to me. I’ve worked on policy like the Right to Compute which has taken on more and more meaning as I go through my life.

I can’t believe I was able to pass a bill into law before I could get the state department to do its job. And government workers wonder why some of us wouldn’t mind if they got fired.

I know I can rely on my own skills, my capacity to use the hardware and software at my disposal, and that the currencies of the web will happily engage with me in trustless and transparent manners.

This is not something I can guarantee when working with the United States and our State Department. It’s a hard thing to look at straight on as it traps me and my family into a kind of anarcho-tyranny where because we follow the law to the letter we are discriminated against while others brazenly broke laws.

High trust people who display their commitment daily are worn down by this bitterly painful reality that what we put in doesn’t guarantee us all that much when the state is concerned. We move fast and keep at it. The American state department moves slow and failed at every step of the way.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1742 and Ensorcelled

My mother’s great passion is children’s literature. She is a Waldorf teacher & minor luminary in the world who started several schools.

She believed that there were texts which are “medicine for the soul” which teach children through the enchantment of stories.

Sometimes a story is the only thing that can save your life – back cover of Ensorcelled by Eliot Peper

She raised me with many amazing stories from Grimm’s fairytales to Madeleine L’Engle. Michael Ende and J M Barre were the storytellers which taught me to love reading and left in my heart the joys of literature through stories of adventure & growth.

J.M Barre’s Peter Pan in Kensington Garden and Peter Pang and Wendy. Michel Ende’s Momo and Eliot Pepe’s Ensorcelled

It is with great pleasure I read Eliot Peper’s enchanting novella Ensorcelled. It’s part coming of age story meetings great adventure in the wilds and a delight for young at heart & young readers of literature.

I don’t know if he meant it as a story to be enjoyed by children, as it was such a delight for me as an adult that I went through it in one sitting. Though I do think it would be wonderful reading for young people.

It’s a beautiful printing so you might be inclined to want to keep it pristine but it’s perfect for an afternoon outside. Maybe go touch grass with it in hand. Find the enchantment for yourself.

I’ve been a fan of Peper’s science fiction so it was a real change of pace to see his range. I felt lucky to have an early copy and I genuinely enjoyed its spirit. I went I was going to read a near future thriller and got joy & delight. Which I very much needed.