I am trying to get healthier, but that suggests it is even an achievable goal. It would be wonderful to get back to endless working hours or even just eight hours on my feet.
Every time I make a tweak to my routines and I see a change in my biometrics, it’s becomes eventually cause for concern. There’s no stable equilibrium to be found, and I know that’s part of life, but I’d like a stable equilibrium that’s a little bit better than one day at a time or ideally a couple weeks at a time.
Take my experiment with Bimzelx. Even when I achieve an outcome like getting my CRP rates into the normal bounds, it came at a cost that is simply too high to maintain. I had four separate incisions and surgeries last year from soft tissue infections.
What good is a drug that tamps down my immune system so much that I need to always go under the knife? It was like Goodhart’s Law came to haunt me personally.
I am going off the biologic (I am 12 weeks from my last injection) and already seeing change in the wrong direction. Not enormously bad but my immune system will pop if it’s not locked down.
Yet there’s very little I can do except keep going and hope that the balance will be more manageable, as I don’t know that I could have another year like 2025 again.
I set out trying to reboot my immune system last year, and it certainly seems like it worked. But can I keep the numbers in a place that are low enough to let me live, and ideally live with fewer medications?
I am constantly working against some new tweak or some new problem, and even little gentle experiments like a Pilates reformer workout or 10 minutes on the trampoline can turn into a full-day migraine if I am not immediately able to tamp it down. Thoracic pain will pop up crushing my breathing if I take a nice slow hike in the pastures beyond our house
I’ve struggled with migraines for the lasts seven years and change. It came along with my autoimmune diagnosis but has lived a separate life from ankylosing spondylitis and psoriatic arthritis.
Typically I get them in my luteal phase of my cycle but as I’ve began to experiment with hormones in pellet form (just tucked away in my fat) I’ve began to struggle with them on a more regular basis. It’s no longer tied to any phase of my hormonal cycle.
I don’t know what I did today to kick one off, but about an hour ago I had to lay down in the dark because I just cannot seem to get any relief from the pressure inside my head.
I have a prescription for something called Imitrex, which helps quite a bit, but I’d really prefer to not have them in the first place.
I am not sure I can get anything else out today, except that this is happening and I can’t fix it, so my apologies there.
Yesterday I was firing off zingers left and right like some kind of Internet Yosemite Sam hollering like cartoon frontier gunslinger.
Hair trigger with a side of facial hair
I am displeased with how silly things have become as I ponder the downsides of things falling apart and the upside of accelerating into the turn. That darn rabbit though right?
So this afternoon with some intentions of productivity on my mind, it only makes sense that I passed out sometime after lunch. I got an hour of deep sleep in the mid afternoon. Which is upsettingly more than I got the entire night before.
Don’t mind the alarmingly high heart rate
My heart rate was racing but my body did not care. I’d been exposed to too much autonomic stress the past couple of days and it was just done with letting that happen.
They say Sunday is a day of rest but that is because we are meant to use our response to consider the things that matter most in life. Family, faith and in some cases football. But I spent it passed out in a dark room without a thought in my mind. I hope it helped.
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.
I am no spring chicken. That’s why we bought some spring chickens this weekend. I kid I kid. I do however have a forever 35 face. I come from a line of women who age well sure but I have very consistent habits.
I’m lucky to have an ageless look. My husband would say I have a forever 28 face as I somehow look better having crossed into my forties than I did when we met at 28. Meanwhile my husband has gone from boyish wonder with full head of hair to distinguished grey beard with a bald pate.
Now sure husbands are supposed to say nice things like “no honey you haven’t aged a day!” Except I really do seem to have benefited greatly from genetics and routine.
He may be right, not out of any urge to flatter me, but simply because some women do look better with a little age on them. I looked young with a rounded features right until I looked ageless somewhere in my late thirties.
Alex and I at 29 where you absolutely can spot my pre-retinol skin Alex and I two weeks ago before touring the West Wing during our trip to D.C
I don’t look all that different when I compare and contrast between photos from then and now. I gained and lost as much weight as a Kardashian (more than once damn you prednisone and bless you semaglutide) but my face has somehow retained its plump without a maximalist approach without gaining wrinkles. I’ve lost the fine lines.
I didn’t start Botox till forty and I’m grateful as I need much less now. I didn’t pull anything out either even when cut looks were all the rage. I’m glad for my rounded features now.
But I have added in more to my beauty routine as I age because I enjoy it. I found it humorous when a 31 year old pursing a doctorate in clinical psychology said out loud what I’ve darkly joked about with girlfriends for years. It’s really hard to be completely controlled.
For a year in my early 20s, I was also spending literally all of my money on a psycho 100-step skin-care process. Looking back, I didn’t have the executive functioning to be successfully anorexic, which is what I also wanted. But I did have the discipline to enjoy this complicated multistep ritual of the skin care. I found it satisfying.” New York Magazine
Now we can all joke and say she shouldn’t be in practice but I never felt I could pull off an eating disorder either even though I often wished I could. That eating disorders are dangerous enough to kill you isn’t the point. It’s being able to control your body enough that you can kill yourself that we desire.
I hated that no matter how much effort I put into diet and exercise I could never achieve the standards of waif like beauty put out in the heyday of Anna Wintour’s heroin chic era. Millennial beauty expectations were a bitch and I could never quite work up the control to hate myself. Sure I got really fit with a heck of a squat but I always had to watch every single macronutrient and instead of skinny I got lean.
And while I appreciate a good Molière joke about The Imaginary Invalid, weight was never the issue that got me in trouble.It was hormones that got me.
So I knew poor health with a healthy weight and I knew poor health with a lot of weight gained trying to fix the poor health.
I will never allow myself to get over the BMI band again to avoid the medical discrimination I faced when I gained weight while on prednisone.
Alas no my autoimmune condition was not mitigated even an iota by weight loss. I had it before I was fat. I got fat treating it. I still have it now that I’m at a healthy weight.
But the desire to maximize your looks and your health always intertwine with women. Increasingly it does for men too. Body dysmorphia respect neither sex nor gender. I doubt it will ever again.
Beauty is a skill set. And some of that skill set is now pharmaceutical in nature. And if we are honest, it’s been that way for a few decades. It’s just that everyone know about it now. The network age comes for us all.
A chunk of preppers and preparedness enthusiasts are just shopaholics. Shopping is common response to anxiety and depression. Doing something that you can control in a world you can’t control has logic to it.
So if you aren’t up for getting first responder certified or spending time in your local library I’ve got just the thing to sooth your anxieties about the current situation in the straight of Hormuz.
I vibe coded a dashboard of common household items with petroleum byproducts in them. It analyzes ingredients and wholesale pricing and assigns risk scores so you can make a shopping list of items most impacted by the ongoing supply chain crisis.
A screenshot of the dashboard I vibe coded today to soothe my anxiety about supply chain disruptions and get ahead of pricing hikes and potential shortages
From diapers to sunscreen, you’d be shocked at just how much our basic needs are downstream of petroleum byproducts. Now it’s just a silly little thing I used AI to put together, but petroleum dependency in consumer packaged is high.
From food products and personal care to drugs, you will find we that we rely on petrochemical feedstocks everywhere.
I’ll mess with it as I add in new data sources and get suggestions for categories I’ve missed. But I’d love for you to check it out even if I am not quite done improving upon the basic idea. You might learn something.
Even if the fighting ends today (as I write this a temporary two week cease fire has been agreed to), the damage to processing, production and manufacturing is already enormous.
Say you aren’t worried about price hikes but you are concerned with the environmental impact of your purchasing habits. I included alternatives in the dashboard if you’d like to make a switch.
Time to buy Aquaphor and Vaseline
The data is compiled from DOE, S&P Global, Investing.com, Packaging Insights, VCCI trade reports. A petroleum dependency score is assigned based on estimates of ingredient analysis.
The prices reflect wholesale market trends so you can be prepared to get ahead before retail prices go up. I’ve even included a bit of context on what aspects of the product are petroleum derived ingredients just for fun.
Below is a screenshot for food preservatives. A type of dependency many of us would like less of in our consumption. Maybe the dashboard helps you improve your diet with a little knowledge. Who knows! Isn’t vibe coding fun?
On another note, I remain amazed at what we can do with artificial intelligence and natural language input. This took me very little time thanks to Claude Code, Perplexity Pro and Cloudflare. If you haven’t explored the wide world of vibe coding now is definitely the time.
I’d like to have something positive to say today about the Artemis II mission, going further than we have traveled into space than ever before but it’s much too hard to pay attention to expensive achievements by NASA when your pale blue dot seems set on imploding itself, fourth turning style. But I’m always here for a joke about how we can’t engineer a toilet for zero gravity.
All anyone in finance can talk about is the short seller research firm Citrini that sent analysts to the Strait of Hormuz, only to discover via the mysterious analyst 3 that actually plenty of shit is getting through as long as you pay a toll to the militants holding it hostage, which plenty of people who are desperate for oil are absolutely doing. I am SHOCKED well not shocked exactly.
Meanwhile the Easter Bunny stares into the middle distance as an old man threatens another gerontocracy with obliteration. Not to put too fine a point on it but everybody is going to suffer no matter how this turns out.
And we wonder why Zoomers are all reactionaries. Gee, their older millennial siblings couldn’t possibly have any experience in these matters, could they? Doesn’t matter. They aren’t going to ask us even if we have actually lived through this entire charade once before.
Incidentally has anyone checked in on Condoleezza Rice recently? Seems like she might have something valuable to add here.
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 feel terribly today. I do not know why other than some vague gesturing at my current biohacking experiment with hormones (testosterone & estradiol pellets inserted into my left buttcheek) required prophylactic antibiotics.
Antibiotics never makes you feel great, but here is a nice thing to get me off the hook of having to write something cogent.
I have been using WordPress so long my account would have the vote if it were human. While yes I have been writing for nearly two thousand days in row on this blog, it is not my first WordPress blog.
I wrote in college and that turned into a fashion blog which turned into an advertising and blog network. I took a break from blogging after I felt I had enough visibility but came back to it five years ago and here I am.
Now I’m going to nurse this migraine as my daily writing commitment with myself is “as long as I get down a few sentences or a couple paragraphs it is good enough.”’ And you too can be good enough to write every day for many years too if you just decide to start.
My brain feels pretty scrambled at the moment. I wish I could say it was over easy but I’m clearly closer to fried than coddled at the moment. Yesterday had some big news. Valar is prepared for a long slog and that means on paper I’ve got a unicorn and a fund returner.
There’s nothing quite so satisfying as becoming big enough that instead of listing the founder and the team, they mention the celebrity investors.
It’s good that people know we have dry powder for an important mission, just as energy insecurity becomes a real concern, along with all of the cascading effects of side products and elements that are part of the hydrocarbon processing chain. Don’t worry. They’ve got a plan for nitrogen if it comes to it.
And obviously I want to brag, as do all of the other people who took a risk on this exceptional team, especially those who wrote multiple checks (we followed on three times) when it was unclear how far we could go and how fast it could be given regulatory hurdles and funding constraints. Those are now gone.
I do feel like I paid a number of social consequences for being a loud mouth and also generally being anti-consensus during the first few years. And I am glad to have paid that price. Real reward comes from real risk.
I felt we had not adequately addressed American energy independence, clean energy, renewable energy, or any of the many effects of our rampant demand for energy.
I do believe that carbon heats the planet and we have to address it in a way that meets our demands and gives us abundant supplies. I thought well how we could possibly serve it in a way that is sustainable and clean without nuclear?
And I’m as surprised as anyone that the Republicans are the ones championing this but we’re in a place where it’s very clear that we have industrial needs and a geopolitical context that require us to go much faster and invest much more deeply in the solutions that we’ve put off for so many years.
I didn’t get into technology to do some set of financial arbitrages or eke out an extra few dollars so I could have status in the world. I know it’s naive but I’m not very transactional and I do it because I think it’s the right thing to do.
We need to slowly push the markets towards funding the things that are necessary and not just the things that give extra capital to people fighting for status and power. I hope that I can look back on the work I’ve done and feel proud that I tried.
Thanks to this blog God knows I’ve got the receipts for it. We’re barely out of the first quarter. Not even confident we’re at halftime. There’s so much work to be done but I feel like I’m playing the right game.
