Sauna – Julie Fredrickson

Day 1732 and It’s Getting Hot In Here So Take Off All Your Clothes

You might want bring towel though, as our handcrafted Finnish sauna will need some use before the cedar is completely smooth. Yes, that’s right, the MilFred family Yellow Barn now has a sauna. And she is a beauty. Just check out the view we picked for her.

Alex and the wonderful family who built the cedar sauna structure placed her under the back awning of the big yellow barn today. Wiring and electronics are underway as I write.

We’ve been slowly but surely turning our barn into our ideal wellness center both for our own use and eventually for the wider community as well. We are privileged with skills, capital and loads of very expensive personal experience with chronic illnesses.

So naturally as geriatric millennials it is always our instincts to turn our pain into something useful and also if we are lucky pay back the expenditures and turn a profit. Which we can then reinvest. It’s the circle of life for a generation who found the circle of life to be a tad more inflationary than expected.

The man of action putting the finishing touches on the electronics. We don’t have anything in our home systems connected to the cloud, so he built his own fully local controller with
ESP32 as the brains, 60a 240v contactor for heater, RGBW LED controls
UI/ final control via Home Assistant and HomeKit. You can snag the code on GitHub

In true MilFred fashion, we are building and testing everything all on ourselves. An n of 1 is good, an n of 2 is better, and if you’d like to test it out hit us up while it is a work in progress. Build in public and beta test with your friends.

Tucked under the awning of the barn so one can easily pop in from gym, HBOT or cold plunge to warm cedar comfort and mountain views

We’d like to ultimately build a space for healing, relaxation and training for those who prefer time tested modalities like heat, cold, oxygen and pressure.

Friends and family can come and test out our now very impressive range of equipment as we build this all out.

We have one of the few hyperbaric oxygen therapy chambers available outside of hospital use in the region. You can pressurize to 2 atmospheres and set a range of parameters for a range of treatments. I use it for my inflammatory condition while Alex is treating the remains of long covid. You’d be shocked what pressure and oxygen can do.

If you want a work out get in some squat reps in our power cage, take a swing at the punching bag or lengthen your spine on our Pilates reformer. You can even climb around on the rock wall built into the the barn ceiling (not even kidding that is the work of the previous family).

If you are looking for a spa day you can have a sweat in the sauna, do red light therapy on your face, chill out on a PEMF mat, and hopefully soon take a dip in a cold plunge. Though if you are ambitious you can sprint across the front pasture and jump in our pond but I’ll warn you that the ducks might not love it.

The pond is fed by a creek that comes from the canyon above our house

The point being that we are building by hand and through personal experience something that improves our lives and others and that’s a pretty hot thing to do. Don’t worry, we will provide towels and robes if you do indeed take off all your clothes. Just come on over and try it out.

Day 1730 and Steering The Titanic of Adult Habits When Icebergs Are Ahead

We are all us humans on the good ship Lollipop. I mean this as a stand in for Mother Gaia/Terra/Earth. We are all in this together right? Wrong? Who knows.

I happen to be on the America decks, so even if I can see the sea is perilous the orchestra is still playing. Maybe I’m rearranging the deck chairs. Is there anything that can be done to steer myself away from collision other than seeking a life raft?

It’s a kludgy metaphor but I am personally trying to move around several of my own ingrained adult habits with the hopes that I can change the direction of life for smoother sailing.

It’s hard to retrain your body after years of pain, compensating biomechanics and environmental factors beyond one’s control.

I’m putting on my life vest and trying to steer myself well so that I save myself and maybe in doing so save others.

If anyone has physical therapy videos they recommend I am working to retrain muscles that are compensating for my thoracic ankylosis. I also intend to go in person to physical therapy if possible.

And onto other topics less bleak than avoiding disasters, both personal and political, as you can indeed do more than you imagine to steer your own life here is some inspiration.

I enjoyed reading this piece on the rise of the online schizo and how to protect yourself as someone who is burdened with a strong case of apophenia. Worth a browse if you are concerned about your cognitive security online as no one wants to catch a Babylonian death cult meme virus.

Audrey Horne has a new substack called Secret Ballot where my friends and mutuals make some appearances and it includes a good calendar of social events in D.C if that’s your thing.

If you are following AI and eschatology (and really who isn’t these days) you may have heard about the Peter Thiel anti-christ lectures. I’d love to brag about being invited but I didn’t have the chance attend what with death and illness. However this two part interview with Thiel at the Hudson Institute covers the basics.

I spend a lot of time on artificial intelligence policy thanks to my advocacy on Montana’s right to compute law as well general interest in enabling more people to maintain the level of control and access they seem appropriate for their own lives. The right to repair movement is the seed for a wider right to compute movement.

On that note Alex is building automation into the sauna being built and has put the code up on GitHub if you are into that sort of thing. You have a right to build things and own them and no one is forcing you to buy convenience if you would prefer to keep your data on your own servers. Even if it’s the data for your air conditioning or your sauna.