My own family was never much for celebrating holidays or milestones. Birthdays, graduations, anniversaries (such that we had) tended to go unremarked upon as I got older.
We were never a gift family, so I think this distancing worked out for the best. The commercialization of life’s important moments, especially religious holidays like Christmas really bothered my mother in particular.
We have a rule that no one should buy a gift out of obligation but only if one spots an item and feels moved to buy it for someone. We treasure gifts with meaning much more than an item bought out of a sense of duty to a date or relationship expectation.
Today happens to be a birthday in my immediate family and a “big” one in the sense that it’s a year people often like to celebrate. They have asked that I not make much of the day as it is their preference to keep things low key. Anxiety can even creep in from putting expectations on the day and I’d never wish that on my most loved.
I have a truly blessed life with a wonderful close family in my immediate family. As the circle extends perhaps I can gripe (and who doesn’t) but my nearest and dearest are everything to me. The love they show me, the patience with which they grace me, and the love the accept from me are my reasons for being.
So if a milestone needs to be left without a marker to make them happiest I will do so. I do not wish to impose any of my feelings upon them. I want only to lift them up. My love for them is without expectation.
If being anxious and hidden is their choice I love them. If it is being peaceful and alone that brings them joy I love that for them as well. Whatever I can do I shall. My life matters in the tight weave of the tapestry we have made of our life together. No markers or milestones needed.
One of my mother’s great passions is children’s literature. I am an avid reader and credit my love for books to my mother’s knowledge of the space.
She built a beautiful library to cover my needs from kindergarten to the upper grades that covers hundreds of foundational texts. It is the foundation of my moral, civic and business life.
Or if you prefer something a little less pretentious, I read all kinds of things from science fiction to periodicals to grand biographies as an adult because I was taught to read in the classical cannon of literature and history that has benefit many generations before me raised in the Western Cannon.
Children’s books tend to be sneered at self serious adults and it is more the pity. The beauty of childhood is that we need not approach all issues with grim learned gravity, rather in appreciating the childlike perspective see the truth that only a child’s eye reveals.
There are many books in the Western Cannon appropriate for children that can introduce them into the joys of critical thinking. And it can be quite intimidating to set out to build a library of you were not raised with this knowledge. This is a market opportunity.
Over the last 25 years I’ve seen the classics that I read as a child disappear from high quality prints. You could find items circulated in cheap paperback or you could search for used books. My girlfriends would text me about where to find classic high quality booksas their own children reached reading age. A child deserves a library that is not only quality in content but in form as well. Beautiful illustration sparks the imagine and quality binding grounds the experience.
My mother slowly built our library as my mother practiced her discipline as a teacher. It was not just raising me that drove her, but the combination of homeschooling and teaching in Waldorf schools that honed her favorite choices.
Many homeschooling families will attest to the challenge here. They know what they would like to find for their children, but it’s hard to find classics you can rely upon and curriculums vary in quality and tone.
So when my friends, Hannah and Josh Centers, told me last year that they were working on an imprint called Chapter House focused on great children’s literature in the Western Cannon I was excited. I knew the demand was there.
They are also homeschooling parents interested in improving themselves in their effort to raise educated independent children. They have first hand experience in the challenges. They are, what we would call in startup world, operating in real world conditions.
We publish restored editions of classic children’s books in four Chapter House box sets, made with premium materials and meticulous craftsmanship.
We also curate a grade-by-grade bookstore from select publishers, giving families a complete reading curriculum for children at every stage
I have often wished I could gift my mother’s library to new parents. In reality, it was almost an impossible task. It easily costs many thousands of dollars and cannot easily be assembled. I feel like what Josh and Hannah have put together is the start of being able to gift my mother’s favorites.
Josh and Hannah very graciously listened to many stories about this library and my mother’s teaching inspirations which means that wish has been granted. Their choices reflect treasures from my childhood and those of many other children educated in the classical tradition.
We keep chickens on our little homestead in Montana. Having playing hens is a relatively low maintenance though we do have predators we’ve generally been lucky. But it is all relative A lost hen to a fright is better than losing a hen to someone’s lost dog. Losing a hen from the flock is always sad.
We recently lost two laying hens to someone’s dog getting loose. We have video of the dog working the wiring on the coop for an hour till he loosens something just enough to wiggle in.
The lab mutt proceeded to play with the chickens for half an hour to an hour. A mother with two kids comes down the drive and gets the dog. Alas two chickens died while he was in the coop. No note was left and we don’t know if they knew we’d most hens to their dog but it was upsetting.
A bowl of eggs from our hens
Having eggs is a nice perk of living out in “zoned rural” county land as no one can yell at you for having animals. Farm fresh eggs are fantastic I’m sure though I don’t tolerate eggs well so we mostly use them for bartering or ingratiating ourselves with friends.
No one said no to a dozen eggs during the price hike. But it’s also pretty normal to keep chickens and have a garden so you barter for what you don’t have which is fun.
But after a few good years with our first flock it was time to add new hens. So we drove to the new Tractor Supply which I’ve been meaning to visit for ages but haven’t had the chance. Yes I like the Odd Lots episode about them.
It is exciting both because it’s a well merchandised retail experience whose excellent financial performance matches its in store experience but also because it is chick season. You can go to the store and in a box not all that different from a fast food bucket acquire your own flock.
It’s not a KFC family meal but it does contain chickens.
I’d seen some concerns about the price of chicks ranging from $5-$8 a chick on Twitter but we weren’t sure if we were going to buy this season. But we are also generally a bit later in the season for getting chicks here so we put it off.
Obviously we are on alert for long term consequences from our geopolitical situation but our hens are more for fun than calories. Did we want to get more when it’s like keeping pets?
Finally after a Good Friday snowstorm it felt like we might need to consider the consequences of spring even if others were well on their way with sprouting seeds and hatching chicks.
Tractor Supply had all kinds of breeds of chicken and some of the older ones who had been quite expensive a few weeks ago were now half off. Spring is late here but Tractor Supply gets them all at the same time at each store.
Once we were the cheep cheep cheep of the chicks it was all over. It was like picking donuts. I’ll take the Cinnamon thanks. We decided to go with five. Everything from chocolate to frosted right?
They all snuggled up together except for the runt who is a beautiful fluffy wonder.
They are now all safely in our barn with heating lamps, food and water as well as a camera live streaming them on our local network because who doesn’t want a baby chick camera? Hopefully we can raise them up without any incidents and introduce them into our existing chicken coop. We’ve got six weeks or so to find out so wish us luck.
One of the more frustrating debates in current American life is who gets to be an American? This did not used to be such a hot topic. I grew up in America in which if you swore to uphold the Constitution figures, no less than Ronald Reagan welcomed you to our shining city on a hill.
Now your best chance of becoming an American is apparently crossing the border and waiting multiple years in legal purgatory. America is a country of ideals not blood right? Well, other countries are also having the debate in reverse. See today’s amusing story about Eric Adams
But is he Shqiptar? Definitely not Arbëreshë right? Wikipedia is now in a fierce debate as to whether he should be considered an Albanian American. He holds citizenship but he’s not an ethnic Albanian. But he holds an Albanian passport? Much to debate.
Ethnic Albanians being massacred is whole tragedy that believe it or not America once went to war over. No I’m not kidding read your nineties history.
So when Eric Adams says stuff like “New York City is after all the Tirana of America” it’s a diaspora issue. Lots of Albanians left in that era and came to New York.
When Adams goes to Tirana it’s just confusing. But that is a thing he would say about any place he’d visit and vice versus. It’s a bit Adams does.
You might not know it but I’m a fan of Albania. My husband and I vacationed there last summer and I go regularly to the Balkans to visit with family. They are not blood family but besa. It’s a whole thing. I’m not Shqiptar. And I have no Illyrian blood. But I wouldn’t mind being an Albanian American for a publicity stunt.
I am doing everything I can to biohack my way around a chronic autoimmune condition that interferes with my quality of life. My love for my life and work is strong.
I’ve not had good sleep this week between the excitement of huge wins and the terror of facing down another global crisis brought on my conflict.
You’d think I’d be used to it. Russian invaded Ukraine the week before I left to live in Frankfurt. I was living in Tallinn when 10/7 happened. I was also there when Estonian cables to Finland were cut. One of my best performing companies has had to work around three kinetic wars.
No wonder sleep can be elusive. Yesterday all dream roads carried me to horrors. I woke myself multiple times. You can literally see in my sleep tracking the spiking heart rate and my forced waking.
The positive side to this fitful pained sleep was being up early enough this morning to prepare for a Costco preparedness run and still arrived before their executive member hour was finished.
We rotated our basics like rice and beans. Tinned fish, chicken and other canned and stable shelf proteins are just part of preparing for a nightmare that we hope never comes. Preparedness is a civic obligation. Help yourself to take the strain off the system so we all make it.
It’s possible we are facing an industrial process cascade thanks to the war in Iran and I like us have supplies just in case. We can’t know what comes next but it’s good practice to check expiration dates and make sure you have everything from first aid kit supplies to soap. You’d be surprised at just how much processing fuel fuels the rest of the world’s production.
After all this, I was happy to get stumble into bed and take a long nap. I didn’t even wash the sunscreen off my face. I was running a deficit and wanted to have REM sleep where I wasn’t trapped in horror. Thankfully I got almost two hours of restorative sleep this afternoon and I am ready to go back to bed as soon as I can.
I was talking with my mother today as I was organizing some logistics for her birthday. Don’t tell her that though as it’s a surprise. Just kidding she knows I’m up to something.
As we talked shared pictures from a recent work trip where she was able to visit our extended family. Her brother lives in Texas after a long military career. It got me thinking about the very different lives it’s possible to live even within one family.
My mother has siblings that she is not related to by blood that are nevertheless our family. Her mother was unable to stay with her father. She married a man I consider my grandfather and gained a large family in the process.
One of my cousins (not by blood but through love) had her children when she was still a teenager. We are roughly same age. She has nearly fully grown children while I will likely never have children. We had very different life trajectories.
She didn’t have an easy time when she was a young mother, but seems to be in a good place now. She is married to a kind man (not to her children’s father though they were married for a time), enjoys watching her son play varsity baseball and football, and lives near her parents. She earned a beautiful life the hard way.
My aunt and uncle are hard working, deeply kind and patriotic people. They supported their daughter every step of the way. Which in the late nineties and early aughts was harder than it looked for a conservative military family in Texas.
I feel lucky my mother got to have such a wonderful brother (and other amazing siblings). My grandmother was an incredible woman. She got remarried at time when single mothers had it even tougher than my cousin did.
I think of the lineage of my mother’s family and wonder which of us made the right choices, which one of us thinks we made the right choices, and how we feel about those choices in the grand scheme of things. Lots of my family believe I made all the right choices. And maybe they are right.
Both my mother and grandmother heavily encouraged my interest in academics and the sciences in particular as they both wanted to pursue scientific careers and were unable to do so. I know I am their pride and joy.
But as I think of my mother’s upcoming birthday I know she won’t get to see her grandchildren playing varsity sports under Friday night lights in Texas with her mother sitting beside her. Her mother, my grandmother, has passed.
There won’t be three grown generations to coincide together because that’s just not how it works any more. And I don’t believe she is disappointed. And I know my grandmother wasn’t either. They wanted this life for me.
And it’s a good life. But I am also glad that my cousin was able to have a good life too. If only it were easier to balance some of the choices. If they were choices at all.
Yesterday I went from the bright blustery Pacific surf beaches of San Diego to the fault block ridges of the Bridger Range in Montana’s Rocky Mountains. Going from one climate to another in the span of a few hours remains a wonder for me.
While I enjoyed the nervous system soothing peace that comes with watching the waves, I did feel a sense of relief coming over the snow capped peaks into the Gallatin Valley.
It’s been a dry winter with very little snow pack, ans the accumulation is much needed. It’s odd for Montana to have had so little snow this winter. I missed much of it but in truth I’ve seen more real winter in the mountains of Sarajevo and Greece than Montana.
I’ve been at sea level for long enough that I am nervous about my adjustment to altitude. After unpacking and restocking groceries, I went for a mile and a half loop that is my usual leg stretching route.
My V02 max remained identical to the scoring from the day before at sea level. My other biometrics are in a difficult place with my resting heart rate high and my heart volatility quite low
Twenty mile an hour gusts wiped across the valley which encouraged me to move a little faster than usual and breath deeply when I could. It was a stark contrast from the slow ambling cross sandy beaches that made up my recent exercise. The stress of altitude isn’t just the oxygen and exposure to the sun but the generally more challenging conditions.
While the mountains have enjoyed some fresh snow, the valley is brown and dry. It’s bizarrely warm at 58 degrees as we spring forward. The record high for March 8th is 62 in 2004 but we are meant to see an inch of snow and a drop back into the lower 30s.
We shall see how I adapt but I need some rest as the rate of change for everything is as jarring as waking up on the beach and falling asleep up in the mountains in the space of one day.
We’ve not had any real snowfall in our corner of Southwest Montana just yet. It’s not unusual to get snow in September but it is now late November, and I can only recall a smattering of frost and a light dusting of snow. We’ve not needed to shovel the walkway, let alone plow out the drive.
The Bridgers are bare without even a hint of a snowcap. It has been 50 degrees and sunny for too many days. It just doesn’t feel natural.
Last night we set ourselves up for our idea of a wild Saturday night with sauna session after sunset. It was a balmy 180F inside our cedar sauna. Cooling off was a little trickier than usual though.
We set a sand timer for 15 minutes. When it finished we rush out with our felt hats and drop our towels to let the sweat evaporate. It is glorious to go from heat to cold shock.
Alas that doesn’t work as well when it’s in the mid fifties even in the November nighttime. Staring up at the stars, we could see the heat mist off our bodies and our breath but only just. It was twenty degrees too warm for that party trick.
Getting back in the sauna for round two was harder than I expected. The rush from heat to freeze to heat is part of the experience. Without the full range of our normal temperature change it just felt a little off. Stimulating but also a little scary. Where is our winter?
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.
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
A culture lacking optimism is a culture without a future. Even before the pandemic, American youth had plenty of reasons to temper their optimism. Inequality, corporate dominance, rising debt particularly for school, unaffordable housing, lack of social support for family, the changing climate and the frequency of natural disasters all tend to weigh on you.
I’m a optimistic person so I always presumed I’d find a way around things. And I largely did. I got an education. I started my own company. I sold it. I found I had developed a valuable skill set. I met a man through one of my best friends and we got married. All was well in my American dream for many years.
But cracks had always been there. Little details that made me question common cultural, social and political assumptions. I discovered the limits of modern medicine with a chronic disease. I saw the disaster that financialization could wreck on families with a bankruptcy. I wasn’t naive about our systems and their inequalities.
But the knowledge that the future could be worse than today wears on you. Once you start living in a liminal state it gets worse. The pandemic made it harder for me to believe in the future because the present became a holding pattern. Ben Hunt at Epsilon Theory calls this The Long Now.
The more we put off investing in a future the more the long now stretches on. We borrow against all the things that could build us a better tomorrow. And we fall back. We put off doing things that would make our future better because it’s rational to do so. What if things get worse?
I’m tired of living in the long now. I’m investing in myself. I have been investing in my body and my health. And I’m ready to invest in a home. Not because I particularly want to own property but because I want to stop the long now and believe that my future is something I can build.
