Tag: Homestead

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Biohacking Chronicle Emotional Work Startups

Day 2000 and Don’t Stop Believing

Well I’ve done it. I have written and published to the internet a blog post every single day for two thousand days in a row. So I am going to toast myself to a job well done.

In earlier milestone posts, I was always surprised I’d made it, but now the harder thing to decide is if or when I’ll stop, not if I’ll keep going.

Half a decade goes by a lot faster than you think. The accomplishments actually do add up if you keep yourself pointed in the right direction.

In a personal capacity, we got ourselves to Montana, set up a life that let us live the way we’d always dreamed and invested in the future we wanted to see.

From a civic perspective during that time we helped pass meaningful reform in housing, testified for crypto rules of the road and worked to ensure Montanans have a right to compute.

A new era of networked algorithmic power has been building for many years and our rights to use compute as we see fit is bolstered by our 1st, 2nd and 4th amendments.

From an investing perspective, we have been first in Solana’s most crucial infrastructure player Squads. Because yeah crypto is going to matter a lot in an artificial intelligence age. We have stuck to our core mission of adaptation by backing the tools needed to benefit from our new AI speed run.

And yes we care about open source. From vector databases to inference labs to experimental dueling models, we have snuck into some strange experiments. And oh yeah we were the first check in a small modular nuclear reactor that is winning the atomics renaissance race (at least this week having achieved criticality).

There have been a lot of failures in those years though oddly not investments or policy. I have battled health issues and fought to not just maintain working capacity but to gain back the capacity I thought I’d lost forever.

I did woo woo whacky things from PEMF and HBOT to peptide stacks and traditional biologics. Thanks to the horrors of hormones and steroids I was early to GLP1s and made some good investments there too.

Maybe I’ll tag all of this more cleanly later but I do think it’s important to remember the days are long but the years are short.

Get on the airplane. Go meet up in person. Buy that dream house. Build a solar array and a sauna. Do wildly romantic things and go to galas. Say yes to more.

And open your heart to the heroic efforts others are also putting into making our lives and our world better. We live among every day heroes. And yeah lots of bad shit has happened in this time too. My father died. We failed for five years straight at getting a visa for a close family friend.

I am aware of the shitty compromise we all make to survive. But you have got to hold on to that feeling. So yeah on day 2000 I think I’ve earned the right to be corny as hell. Don’t stop believing.

Categories
Homesteading Preparedness Travel

Day 1986 and Non-Doms In Anarcho-Tyranny’s Future

I hate to be feeling anything but patriotic as we get closer to America’s 250th birthday this July 4th. America has so much optimism in my corners of the world from nuclear energy to artificial intelligence and I want to celebrate this with my countrymen.

Alas there is always the nagging feeling that no matter one’s dedication to one’s nation, having a plan B in place has proven wise. Historically speaking in times of great change, technological shifts, and generational hand overs it has paid to plan ahead and be flexible.

Maybe I feel this more keenly with the rise of antisemitism from populist camps both left and right. I’m not Jewish, but my husband is culturally Jewish.

The fear that lurks in the back of the mind can’t be dismissed. They are history’s favored scapegoat. And I can’t help but feel technology is right behind as the next source of blame.

Add in the challenges of getting travel visas for unfavorable passports in my extended family, and I am always abroad. I never excited visa issues to prevent someone from being allowed to visit my own family America and we’ve never found a solution in a half a decade of work and advocacy.

So now we consider having a hide-y hole secondary residency sometimes. Never in my life did I expect to lose years of our lives to trying to manage visas that simply cannot be granted or to decide that perhaps it might be wise to have another residency just in case.

Many other nationalities are “Non Doms” in cities like London for similar reasons. You may want to get further from the front of a kinetic conflict or perhaps your government is looking messy or corrupt, perhaps your work has caught the attention of Leviathan in your home but other nations will welcome the work you do.

So I have been keeping on the on other jurisdictions I could see us living in if only for vacations for now. I see the value in owning a plot of land and having residency on another country should my passport become a “bad” passport in the future. Being prepared has new boundaries.

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Community Preparedness

Day 1940 and Spring Runoff Season

I joked to my husband that he better get back before nightfall. He had been in the capital Helena for our work on the digital innovation task force. Sunset was at 8:20 or so. The days are getting longer.

The day’s work went at a good clip as the weather coming in was on all minds. We were in for another large late spring snowstorm.

In our corner of the valley we got maybe a couple of wet inches but even up the canyons it was more than a foot.

It kept snowing all night through early morning. It was also quite cold. We went from lashing dry wind and the first fire of the season to snow in no time. Our AQI was poor from the fire south down range of the valley. Hopefully this helped.

It was snowing when I woke but by the time I showered and finished a cleaning round, it was already shockingly bright. Bright blue clear skies and full sun acted like a solar snowblower.

The clouds cleared so quickly and the reflection of the high altitude sun glinting off the white melting snow had me applying sunscreen twice.

We had warm days recently so the spring melt of April is already rising. Adding to snow today was looking at a picture of the challenges of our summer ahead.

Our snow pack is low, We had a rush of snow after warming which will push growth. But can it sustain itself the dryness? The fear is dried out forests and grasses like tinder by August. I hope by being away we can stay a step ahead. The patterns of the Rockies are becoming familiar to all of us.

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Homesteading Preparedness

Day 1932 and Who Took Off Their Snow Tires Early

We did not have much of a winter to speak of Montana. Sure, Farmer’s Almanac predicted a lot of snowfall but even such an august institution can’t always get it right.

We got almost no pre-season snow fall. Which one can shrug off. We dutifully schedule our snow tire switchover at the end of September anyway. Alex bought his lift tickets with high hopes for a good ski season. Then the openings of our local mountain and Big Sky looked dicey. And yet still we hung onto hope.

We had no white Christmas. The deep freezes of January usually come with snowfall. It was grey this year. February would surely come through right? Alas wrong again. March did not go out like a lion. There was little water to whip up in our non-existent bay. And so, in April we cried and our hopes stepped aside as we waited for pretty little May.

People began to take off their snowtires. This just wasn’t our year. Spring would arrive early right? Any hopes of good days of powder were thoroughly dashed. It was over till next year right? Wrong!

The weight of wet snow

It snowed a big wet mess of deep sloppy powder on Good Friday. Hooray! Indeed it was a good Friday. Except, oh no, our snow tires are off.

Then, last night, when no one honestly believed the forecast for 6-10 inches one bit, we went to bed expecting a normal day. The days had already begun to lengthen substantially. Birds were hatching and the green was growing.

A heavy wet mess dumped onto our patio overnight

Clearly we were wrong. I tossed and turned all night as my joints bubbled and ached. I thought I was using a flare. But when I woke up it was clear my body knew more than my brain and the weather forecast was correct. It has snowed almost a full foot.

The hot tub needed to be dug out

Now the particulars funny aspect of all this is that Alex took the snowblower off the tractor yesterday. He needed to cut the side pasture down before new growth hit so the snowblower attachment was replaced for the trimmer. We’d let long grass grow and then flatten which required more than a riding mower. It needed the Deere to cut through.

So the front walkway was hand dug out but the drive to our road is going to remain snowed in for a bit. The sun will come out tomorrow. I did however have to reschedule a haircut. But that’s the price you pay for trying to get ahead of the weather. We never should have taken off our snow tires early.

Categories
Chronic Disease Chronicle Emotional Work

Day 1825 and Thoughts On Five Years of Writing Every Single Day

Much as it amazes me, I have written a public post every single day without fail for five straight years. I’ve not missed a single day.

I’ve written so many posts and essays, it honestly astonishes me. I didn’t expect to have this kind of longevity when I began but the world changed a lot in this past half decade. I am a woman of habits & routines, this blog helps me manage the chaos and instability that surrounds us. And hopefully I’ve become a better thinker (and writer) for this habit.

If you’d like to look back with me, I have a round up of 2021‘s best posts from fashion theory to the emotions of startup exits. They feel like a lifetime ago.

In my round up of favorites from 2022 aka year 2 of the experiment, we moved to Montana, bought our first house, had silly viral hits, & I became a certified wilderness first responder.

In my third year of posts from 2023, things remained intense. I accelerated into chaotic optimism, helped other millennial women understand fucked up fertility, and experimented with living outside America part time to improve my visibility on global issues.

And in fourth year of writing, my round up of my best posts of 2024 really showed a world sped up even further. My essays ranged widely with emotional work, crab bucket zero sum-ism & young men, Vernor Vinge’s legacy becoming our actual reality and the bizarre experience of digital memetics becoming constant real world issue.

So now it’s time to think about year five of the experiment. 2025 was a hard year for me even as it contained incredible wins. Going into it, I wondered how could year five top the past four years chronicled here? It both does and it doesn’t. Life, and the time we spend living it down, isn’t getting any easier. Life is barely human at all anymore. I feel the struggle in myself as I am still very much human.

It’s easy to feel as if I’ve not accomplished as much as my own written records show I did. If you ever feel like you get less done than you’d like, I encourage you to keep a log or journal as it helps show how much can do and how much does get done. Plus if you publish it online you’ll contribute to a wider humanistic understanding as our digital life becomes more mechanistic.

Another facet of this writing experiment has been fighting a chronic disease in my personal life that has no cure. Managing disabilities during with the pandemic years as it overlaid civilization shaking political and technological changes has been hard. I want to work and live as if I am healthy and it isn’t likely to ever be true. I work smarter because I can’t work harder.

I don’t always write about my investments in these posts, but I see how my thesis of chaos has forced us all into requiring more decentralization, compute and power. My once weird ideas are now common knowledge. Now everyone agrees with me.

The end of the neoliberal consensus and the beginning of the artificial intelligence buildout would have been hard on anyone. I’m proud that I was able to turn this change to my advantage.

I realize I’ve written quite a bit about the experience of these years where I wrote daily without showing off the last year of posts.

Since I’ve got one more day before 2025 officially ends, perhaps I’ll put the round up of posts tomorrow as I’ve given an overview of the experience of half a decade of daily essays today. What’s one more day among thousands right?

Categories
Biohacking Homesteading

Day 1788 and Where is Our Winter?

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?

Categories
Internet Culture Startups

Day 1707 and Putting Some GPU To Work

I try to give my own slight biological grey matter processing power a run every day through this writing habit.

I try to move my own body with walking, weight lifting and other condition so it can stay a somewhat workable machine. Tuning my body requires more work than tuning my mind as my brain rarely gives me issues but my tissues are always in some stage of revolt.

I have other assets behind my mind and my body. I’ve purchased a car. Precisely once and I have looked into buying others and shied away. My home doesn’t need to do work beyond housing me and my “disposable and durable” goods which range from a tractor other home appliances. A few of them do produce things for us like keeping our land and our laying hens.

We’ve got a gorgeous solar grid that generates electricity we can barely use. It goes into Bitcoin mining and stacking and running utilities but I’ll admit in a little lax about putting my our existing compute to work.

I’ll admit this is pretty stupid as we invest in crypto, we invest in hardware and energy, and we have invested in compute and inference networks. So why am I not doing more for passive yield on this?

Humans have been working as inference machines since we decided to keep records with something beyond the digits on our hands and the foot of our feudal lord.

Counting and abstractions being necessary for all sorts of engineering feats from cathedrals to graphical processing units. And now we have inference tokens just waiting to be brought down in cost as we bring networks online. So I am setting up my compute to be a part of those networks because sometimes it’s good to focus on little resource allocation problems to take your mind off tbh fe.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 593 and Walking The Lines

We’ve been in our Montana homestead for two weeks. I wanted to say “only” but I do feel as if I’m starting to feel at home. The boxes are dwindling and we’ve cleaned up most of the major debris and boxes inside. We are still waiting on the various bits of furniture we ordered new for the home but most of what we already owned is accessible.

This has opened up some mental space for me to get a lay of the land. Literally. The heatwave that greeted our arrival improved, meaning as long as I am outside before 10am it is pleasant enough for long walks.

I’ve been taking different routes around our rural neighborhood. Where we live outside Bozeman has lots of gravel roads, big plots of land, and interspersed pieces of county and state property in between.

I’ve been making an attempt to walk as many routes as possible circling our land. Part of the exercise is because it is nice to go for long walks but I’m equally interested in feeling like I know the lay of the land and am prepared to navigate our back roads.

I’ve done concentric rings changing my direction as I see fit. I’ve opened them up and tightened them down. I’ve left due east to exit the property and then gone in every direction.

Seeing our land from the east, south, west and north shows completely different things. The closer I am the more I recognize new facets. But I’m learning to spot the lines of our land even as I am further out. The frisson of excitement I get from spotting our house from afar never gets old.

Walking as many types of property lines as I can has sparked my imagination. I spotted where our hedges could use some additional density. I spotted a window upstairs we’d been neglecting to close as it’s for a room that’s still empty. I’ve spotted where the deer seem to prefer coming in (the fawns can’t jump our fences) and where I might prefer to go out if our front drive is blocked.

The exploration has been grounding. I have a firmer sense of place. My body is beginning to recognize where I am. And it’s an absolutely lovely way to get in some thinking. I highly recommend walking the lines of your property and your neighbors. You never know what you might find.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 381 and Homestead Shopping

I just got back from a whirlwind week driving across Montana. I’ve been researching homestead properties for the last year or two but I hadn’t done much scouting outside of Colorado. The Marshall Fire that burned down two entire towns in Boulder County about 5 miles from my house had shook me. My husband and I decided it was time to begin more seriously looking for a safer place to live as climate change continues. So we got in the car and headed north.

Ironically this week we are also closing on a mountain house in Colorado. And yes I realize it’s a bit contradictory to panic about an urban wildfire and then buy a home in the mountains. It was a bit unexpected but we made an offer on a home in a town I happen to love about twenty minutes and an additional 3,000 feet up from Boulder. So basically prime fire country. And strangely I’m ok with the risk as it won’t be our only residence (at least not long term). I decided the desire to live in the mountains was worth pursuing now while we still had the chance. Who knows if in ten years Colorado Rockies will be considered insurable. It’s now or never.

Our current thinking is to use the mountain as our winter home and rent it out during the spring and summer high season. While it’s rented out we will decamp to work on a homestead property in Montana. We know it will take time to fully develop the kind of resilient off grid home we want. It’s a long term project that we suspect will take a decade or more. Frankly we need to make a commitment to buying something while rates are low, we have the free cash, and before inflation gets worse. So we’ve gone from never owning a home to deciding we will own two! It’s great feeling decisive.

Our focus in Montana was finding what areas we liked and where we could see ourselves investing in significant acreage. We want a homestead that has the capacity to get through disasters both natural and man made. That means buying land we can cultivate for both farming and ranching. Well the gentleman farmer style.

Quite frankly I can’t manage the heat in Colorado in the summers anymore so going north was a priority for climate change. Montana is increasingly being viewed as the new Colorado for folks who grew up in a rural Colorado and miss it. But we still want the amenities of a well developed town within half an hour or so. We want Boulder but the kind from 20 years ago that had less climate risk and fewer people. Naturally we checked out both Bozeman and Missoula. I don’t know where we will land but we had a good time exploring. We figured if we could tolerate Montana in January then the nicer months will be a breeze. I’m sure I’ll be writing more about the homestead and preparedness journey. And in the meantime if you want to rent a really nice mountain house in the summer drop me an email.