The road to Constantinople is long. Whether a knight on horseback crusade bound or a bitch in an Audi, it’s a long haul to Istanbul.
That’s not me flexing honest just that the rental guy sold me on the quattro as a comfortable ride for long hauls so for you cavalry types it’s the destrier of our times.
My route is basically hugging the Aegean. I drove down the Adriatic, nodded at the Ionian and spent an evening on the Aegean before breaking at Thessaloniki. The reverse was no picnic for Odysseus and he started in Troy. Which is around the corner relatively thinking.
Unlike our friends in antiquity, I have further to go to make it to the capital of empires that is Istanbul.
I’m excited for both the work on the ground but also to see the sights. Making it across multiple border crossings is absolutely worth to see the intersection of so much history. Oh and also to tour a factory.
Concurrently we are moving through a massive global economic reorganization that impacts how one plans for even local businesses like a med spa.
So while we’ve purchased our first chamber before the tariffs have gone into effect, it seems reasonable to get ahead of the game and begin the sourcing process.
In a twist that one of my friends described as “an extremely Julie situation” I’m heading to Istanbul tomorrow. I’m in Europe so I’m actually going to drive. Any recommendations for hotels, great meals and must see sights are most welcome.
This then turned into an offer of a tour of the factory by their team (since we are in the market as we plan out our Montana medical spa) that was topped off by an offer to discuss the experience on my favorite podcast.
Apparently manufacturing complex medical equipment in this new era of tariffs and bilateral trade agreements is a topic of interest to many people as Turkey may end up a better trading partner than China for many categories of sophisticated equipment.
The Trump administration is making attempts to reorient more of the world under our trade & defense umbrella rather than China is obviously on everyone’s mind. Turkey is an advanced manufacturing industry from which I have imported in the distant past for textiles so I’m sure I’ll learn a lot from this trip.
I’ve been holding myself a bit back from the world as I’ve been trying to take care of myself and lay low. Too much system input and a spate of bad luck (housing and health issues) made for a bumpy time.
So while I’ve been steadily attempting to stay online for some information flow my epistemic hygiene has mostly consisted of “staying offline” and working through routines that provide positive feedback loops.
I’ve been keenly interested in hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy from both my very effective first set of treatments and the experiences I’ve seen in my own social circle. Everyone from local Bozeman friends (mostly men) working through injuries and chronic issues to tech’s favorite health billionaire Bryan Johnson have shared their enthusiasm for the therapy. It quite frankly just works.
We’ve acquired one (and am researching another provider that Bryan himself owns) as I’m exploring businesses that would allow us to bring them to Montana. Step one will be letting our friends come use ours in the barn! S
tep 100? Maybe MilFred Industries ends up with a wellness brand. I’ve certainly got extensive experience in every adjacent category from fitness (Equinox) to branded wellness (Goop) and direct to consumer cosmetics (Stowaway) so anything is possible.
I like routines as much as the next autist. Which is to say I like them quite a lot. But I don’t care for being on autopilot as I go through my day.
Being present feels better than disassociating from the moment. I can’t help but feel like running a subroutine with little attention is a bit like falling away from myself.
I was in a hyperbaric chamber oxygen treatment session today and found myself struggling to breathe. The chamber I am using has an oxygen concentrator which is meant to flow at 100%. But I could barely feel anything in the tubes and found myself taking the mask off to get a breath. The ambient air for comparison is 21%.
Had I been on autopilot maybe I wouldn’t have noticed. I think there was an issue with the valves in the chamber but the technicians didn’t seem to take my explanations particularly seriously.
They kept insisting that it automatically adjusted to my breathing. I kept trying to increase the flow using different breathing techniques like Wim Hoff and square breathing but nothing seemed to work.
I still feel off. Like I’ve got altitude sickness or pneumonia. I can’t catch my breath. If anyone knows anything about HPOTech I’d love to know if it being at 23% means anything so I can figure out if there is a valve issue or if that was just it being at the end of the session.
I’ve had a week of poor sleep that feels like it’s catching up with me. My mood is sour and my mind is mush. This sort of state leaves me with anxiety.
The running joke in the family is that anytime the markets are about to go off I feel it in my body long before it hits the Bloomberg terminal.
I feel anxious about everything which is to say I am not anxious about anything. It’s simply pervasive. If past market issues caused snowblindness this feels more like swamp gas. It stinks, is favored by conspiratorial types and is a fantastic excuse for seeing things you shouldn’t.
Over the winter we did a mold test on our bedroom after I had had a batch of sub-optimal bloodwork and flares in my autoimmune condition. We wanted to be thorough in assessing potential reasons for any issues from environmental to pharmaceutical.
I was suspicious that mold would be a culprit. Or perhaps I did not want it to be a culprit. Mold has always seemed like an excuse the professionally sick lean on like a crutch. You can imagine some worried well Goop reading white woman blaming mold.
I don’t know if this is engrained ableism on my part (lol) but no one wants to be that annoying sick woman with the litany of vague issues plaguing her life. And yes I fear this about myself because I do have to manage an autoimmune condition.
So I went into mold testing with some cynicism. It’s mike making a claim you’ve got a diagnosis of fibromyalgia. Sure both mold and fibromyalgia are real but I’ve learned from experience that you must avoid both lest you be seen as someone unserious.
The wall next to bed.
Alas it has turned out to be serious. It took most of the winter to work through the breaking down the walls part but once Alex began pulling back the walls it was dramatic and easy to spot.
The bedroom getting ripped apartment.
As it turns out the wall on my side of the bed has quite a bit of mold types growing happily. As best we can tell it must be some type of small leak in the pipes.
Gnarly white spores
There’s a couple hydronic heater pipes right by the baseboards so the current theory is maybe one developed a tiny pinhole leak for a bit that sealed itself back up. Don’t ask me about that one as it’s on Alex.
His plan for now is to remediate it, patch things back up, fog the room and have the carpets steam cleaned. Which is a bigger job than we might like but much better than it could have been.
Going to a spa or a hair appointment has an added layer of stress when you’ve got skin allergies.
I don’t need clean or organic beauty (though I do prefer it). It’s not about being fancy so much as I need it to be free of synthetic fragrances like Limonene.
Limonene is a naturally occurring, colorless liquid terpene hydrocarbon (C10H16) found in citrus fruits and other plants, known for its citrus scent and used as a flavoring agent, solvent, and in various products like cleaning products, cosmetics, and supplements
Somehow I became allergic over the years to a number of fragrances both natural and synthetic. A clean beauty list of “no no”ingredients has become common as everyone from Sephora’s to BeautyPie agreed on things like keeping products free of paraben, sulphate and Methylisothiazol.
It’s a little harder to justify not including citrus or lavender unless you are trying to cater to the most sensitive skin. Both are quite popular for all kinds of personal care. I have to be careful of almost all soaps.
Some of my interest in preparedness (and in travel size cosmetics) surely comes from having to carry around basics from shampoo to shea butter. It’s a pain to have to consider but also a pleasure to always be prepared for any scenario.
Americans are big fans of private property; or so our reputation says. But we’ve got a lot of exceptions, rules and regulations how we exercise our rights in that regard.
From zoning laws to bodily sovereignty, restrictions on what you can do with your “stuff” really runs the gamut in America.
I refused to join security clearance service Clear or take part in genetic testing at 23andMe because I simply didn’t trust that my genetic and biometric data wouldn’t end up being sold to a private equity shop in the event of bankruptcy. Which alas is exactly what is happening to 23andMe.
I don’t care for the state having my biometrics but at least it’s possible to advocate medical rights and personal privacy. The TSA and the State Department have me cleared for TSAPre and Trusted Traveler.
I don’t love it but I’ve got some rights that leviathan is meant to abide by. I don’t believe we’ve yet found a way to bind a corporation to a similar term of service. But the cyperpunk future seems more likely to give us less control not more.
Between the law of the low road and our current tendency toward “the idiot plot” in all areas of life it seems like ownership of our bodies and its data is a pipe dream. Hell you can’t even keep a Signal group chat secure anymore as any old idiot (or savvy Machiavellian) can drop in a journalist.
One of the more exhausting problems that arose over the winter was mold contamination in our master bedroom and adjacent rooms.
It’s taken six weeks to get in the right folks for testing and assessment. We’ve not been able to start remediation as the best option for the job isn’t available.
Alex has been able to negotiate access to the various necessary tools to begin but it’s quite a bit of work to DIY during which I’ll need to be out of the house.
Working through cleaning all of the clothing and other sundries in the closet is also a massive project. Our dry cleaner is going to make out like a bandit.
However the worst bit of this has been the anti-fungal course of antibiotics my physician recommended prophylactically as during all of this we’ve been suppressing my immune system (with some negative side effects) as part of a medication protocol change.
I swear I can feel whatever mycotoxins may exist in my biome fighting the drugs. I’ve had an astonishing array of negative intrusive thoughts that don’t feel like my own. You have to wonder if my ride-along mycelium simply don’t want to lose their host.
