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My 2025 in Pictures

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 21:34:57 -0500

Another year has come and gone, and a lot has happened. Most of it, given the realities of the world around me, bad. But I only have so much control over that. My focus here will be mostly the good, some just the memorable (such as when Sully got sprayed by a skunk). And as usual, this is written primarily for future me. For those that want to follow along with my various adventures and misadventures in 2025, you are most welcome. But I don’t expect the basic day to day activities of my life to be terribly compelling to someone other than me, so apologies in advance for anyone who keeps reading.

Travel

For the first time in three years, my travel actually ticked down, if only slightly from ~39K miles to ~37K. Some of that was merely the good fortune to have a couple of work events in Boston rather than cities I have to get on a plane to visit, but overall my travel remained more manageable than in years past.

The goal for 2026 is to hold, or even reduce that number. I qualified for Delta Platinum this year on my last flight; if I’m slated to miss it next year, paying the difference would be well worth the investment and saved time.

Health

This is essentially a glass half full / half empty section. On the bad news side, my weight ticked up rather than down a tiny bit and I did not make my admittedly aggressive walking mileage goal of 3,178 miles - the distance from our house to San Francisco. I didn’t even match last year’s mileage, in fact; I was ~20 miles short of last year’s total at 3,116 miles walked in total. I also did not get my planned 60 mile walk in, due mostly to poor scheduling on my part - it’s much harder to do that with snow on the ground, because an extra minute or two per mile times sixty miles significantly lengthens the effort.

But on the flip side, it was a challenging year in many respects. Work was busy, and while my health overall was fine and I managed to not get COVID when both girls got it in late September, after years of not getting either I managed to get both flu A and B in the same winter. Between the travel, then, and the various illnesses - both mine and the family’s - I’m comfortable with what I accomplished this year. Walking over three thousand miles is a significant commitment, both in terms of time, the number (and cost) of shoes you go through and the early mornings you have to put in to make it all work. 3100 miles is still 3100 miles.

Net net, then, it could have been better, but it could have been a lot worse. My focus on this year is trying to better this year’s mileage number, continuing the process of taking off weight I’ve gained and restarting my yoga practice because…yikes. Functionally, my limbs are roughly as flexible as rebar.

With all of that said, on to the pictures.

January 5

First sunrise walk of the New Year.

January 11

Of all the sports she plays, basketball is easily the most entertaining. It was and is the highlight of our weekends. And last season, she got to wear my old number.

January 29

2025 was, among other things, the year I finally became friends with the island’s crows - all of them. I’d made some progress in 2024 with a murder on a specific street across the island from us, but now crows from the bridge, both docks, the neighboring island and the main road through the island all know me and will come say hi. A couple of weeks ago, in fact, I got stopped by a woman coming across the bridge who asked, “excuse me, but are those birds following you?”

February 6

Another pretty nice little sunrise.

February 9

Got a little bit of snow.

February 17

Did a hut trip to one of the Maine Huts and Trails venues (Flagstaff). We DIY’d a Pulk-like sled to carry in our supplies, which worked fine except for the fact that by hooking it up to loops on my pack, the poles ended up jabbing me in the ass on the downhill segments. Other than that, great trip.

February 21

After our experience at Omni Mount Washington last year, and reading a bunch of research touting their health benefits, we started actively considering the possibility of building a sauna here at the house. To test out our potential interest level, we rented a portable sauna for my birthday weekend (if you’re in Maine, btw, the Driftless folks are super nice).

The verdict? We’re now planning to build one.

February 28

Got out to see my BFF to belatedly celebrate our birthdays. I had not been informed that Das Boots would be involved, for the record.

March 4

Hit the first 500 mile mark. Celebrated as is tradition by shotgunning a beer.

March 14

Kate does cold dips. I don’t know why, I don’t understand it, but it’s bad ass to watch. In case you’re wondering how cold the water is, that shape at the top of the image is an iceberg floating by with a gull on it.

April 5

Portland stood to say we want no kings.

April 19

Soft top installation day.

April 21

While horsing around with me, Eleanor ended up kicking the back of my foot. She said her toes hurt, we said that’s what happens when you stub them but you’ll be fine. Still reporting pain that night, we took her shoe off to find this ominous bruise. Turns out, she’d broken the growth plate in her foot. She made a full recovery, even taking part in lacrosse practice while wearing a boot.

April 24

The good news is that Kate got to do a cold dip on her birthday. The bad news is that I had to do it with her.

April 25

Eleanor and I used some of the reclaimed wood from my Dad’s wheelchair ramp to build a reading nook in her closet.

May 4

Lacrosse season - which was drizzly and cold pretty much every day - arrived.

May 5

We liked the portable sauna so much that we got it back out here for Kate’s birthday.

May 7

First visit to Fenway of the season.

May 20

The last time I was here was with a group including my friend Sean. I miss you, buddy.

May 21

Back at Fenway, this time in a box. Huge shout out to the AR person who got me in to the “influencers” box, where a bunch of them took selfies in the first five minutes then retired to sit on couches inside not bothering with the game (even though Crochet was throwing).

May 27

First long walk of the year.

May 29

Went camping with some friends in Acadia. They’ve got the best campsite locations dialed in.

June 11

First doors off day of the year.

June 14

Finally got to see the Life of Chuck, a film by Mike Flanagan based on a Stephen King novella with a unique structure. It’s the best feel good disaster movie you’ll ever see.

June 19

Got to visit the secret beach that is not on our island, but up the coast. Such a privilege.

June 20

Annual Jaws viewing: complete.

June 27

First (but not last) visit of the summer to one of the world’s great bars, Coveside.

July 10

2025 was another great hydrangea season, but I’m worried about 2026 giving that the starving island deer (we’ve got tons of deer but zero natural predators) have resorted to feeding on them.

July 22

Windstorm ripped across the island and snapped off a huge tree like it was a toothpick, dropping it on to the secret beach.

July 26

Took the ferry over to Chebeague Island, which is a quick ride but feels like a totally different world.

August 5

Took in our first family concert down in Portland, the Avett Brothers.

August 23

Annual pilgrimage to the falls: complete.

August 25

Started a project (which is actually still unfinished, now that I think about it) with my favorite little woodworker.

August 29

After the season, one of the Red Sox executives was asked what the most electric regular season game of the year was at Fenway. His answer was a summer game against the Pirates. The Pirates started arguably the best pitcher in the big leagues in Paul Skenes. The Red Sox pitcher Payton Tolle, meanwhile, was making his major league debut. Not only were Eleanor and I at this game, we had the best seats I have ever had at Fenway after four decades of going there thanks to our friend Kim. Eleanor even got to see her favorite player, Roman Anthony, take Skenes out to right field.

And that is why when Kim and I had lunch last month and she offered to pay, I informed her that she was never buying lunch again.

September 3

One of our neighbors from down the street was kind enough to take me out striper fishing. Unfortunately, the only thing I caught was this crab.

September 13

Went up to the AMC lodge at Little Lyford with a couple of Eleanor’s besties and their families. Beautiful spot.

October 2

Survived another Monktoberfest. Mostly in one piece.

October 8

While I was running from meeting to meeting at a conference in Orlando, the girls got to tour Harry Potter World.

October 11

Another year, another free Patagonia repair of my ancient soft shell.

October 18

Portland still didn’t want any kings.

October 26

Preparation for the annual island community Halloween party begins.

October 27

Walking home from a work dinner in San Francisco, I heard a nearby roar which ended up being a dive bar watching the World Series game which was into the 13th inning. I lasted until the 16th, then was absolutely wiped and headed home in theory to sleep but which in practice meant watching the last two innings from bed.

November 8

Another year, another Biggest Little Game in America.

November 13

Have been making slow progress in getting to know some of the individuals among the aforementioned island crows. This is one of the boldest, Gray Feathers, who will fly within a foot of me (but won’t land on my shoulders. yet.).

November 16

Sully had a professional bath at noon, so naturally six hours later he got himself sprayed by a skunk. Fortunately, my past self understood that our dog was a total donkey and that this was inevitable and had purchased the above shampoo against that inevitability.

December 31

First up: fireworks.

Normally I close out the year by watching Trading Places. This year, I watched the last episode of the best TV series I’ve seen, and it was perfect. And a perfect end to the year.

My 2024 in Pictures

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 20:41:12 -0500

As years go, 2024 was one. It had its share of wonderful moments, its scary moments and some devastating lows - you probably know the worst of them. It was a year of some family travel, as we got to visit London, Paris, New York and Nova Scotia - though not without some notable complications. It was a year with some health scares, and the usual end of year holiday break spent with at least one of us feverish and coughing uncontrollably for more or less the entire vacation.

In the wider world, meanwhile - well, actually I’m going to skip that. It’s my year in pictures, and sadly I’m sure 2025 will have its own brand new set of fresh horrors. For this space, I’ll focus on the things I actually want to remember, not the ones I’d like to forget.

Travel

For the second year in a row, my travel ticked up, but not unreasonably so. From the immediate post-lockdown total of 24K miles flown in ’22 to 30K in ’23, 2024 clocked in at 39K. I would have preferred to hold around 25K, but it’s still a far cry from my 85K years, let alone the 100K+ hellscapes.

The goal for 2025 is to hold at that level or even drop it a bit; we’ll see how that plays out.

Health

My overall health in 2024 was fine. I’d hoped to come out of the year lighter than I went in, but I more or less held steady. That’s not the worst outcome, however, given the stress of trying to get through the run up to the election and its aftermath. I can live with that, but the goal is to enter next year lighter than I did this one.

In better news, I completed my goal of walking 3K miles in a year for the first time, finishing the year at 3137. That was just shy of the distance from our house to San Francisco, but as noted over on Instagram it was enough to walk from our front door to Seattle and Vancouver to the west, Oaxaca and Tijuana in Mexico and Fort Providence in the Northern Territories in Canada.

Walking remains a highlight of my day, and has kept my health steady even when other habits have slipped. Making it even more rewarding is that after years of effort I finally started making progress in making friends with the island crows when I’m out walking. They now recognize me and fly over for peanuts. Puts a smile on my face every time.

With all of that said, on to the pictures.

January 1

For New Year’s eve 2024, Kate and I did a date night down in Portland. When we picked Eleanor up from my Mom’s the next day, she fell asleep almost before we were out of the driveway.

January 3

We made a trip to the Maine State House as part of a protest against gun violence. A picture of Eleanor at the protest actually ran on the front page of the Press Herald the next day.

January 7

First snow walk of the year.

January 10

Maine got absolutely hammered by the first of two major storms. The tides were so high that multiple buildings got swept away, and the local ferry pier was totally submerged

January 12

In preparation for more storm flooding and astronomical tides, I made a flying trip down to our office which was right on the wharf down in Portland to get mine, my Dad’s and his Dad’s Williams chairs home so that they weren’t damaged.

January 14

The anticipated flooding nearly destroyed the ferry wharf.

January 22

Got a nice sunset, at least.

February 2

After he got fixed, Sully communicated to us that he did not like the Cone of Shame by eating it.

February 3

At Artisane Studios down the road, Eleanor made herself a bench for her room.

February 11

We watched the Super Bowl this year as a family from the hot tub. Part of it, anyway.

February 14

We all celebrate pitchers and catchers in this house.

February 21

Nice little birthday dinner at Pai Men, my favorite place in Portland.

February 22

Eleanor and I built a cedar bench for the hot tub. The mitre saw was my grandfather’s as well, so multiple generations were involved.

February 24

We watched the first spring training game together, as we have every year since she was a baby.

March 14

Got back to the sister event to the Monktoberfest in London, the Monki Gras. It was off the hook as it was every year.

The only complication was that Kate and Eleanor arrived on Friday, which was fantastic until the latter woke up crying with a terrible ear infection at 3 AM in our hotel room. She and I then hopped an Uber over to the hospital which was hard to navigate as a non-citizen and took over three hours, but to the NHS’s credit we were treated at absolutely no cost. Same at the pharmacy.

March 17

We then hopped the train down to Paris for my next conference and Kate and Eleanor’s next leg of vacation. Trains are so much more comfortable to travel in than planes.

March 20

While in Paris, we did not need to visit the hospital, which was great. The downside there, however, was that the hotel we checked into only had a queen bed. And not only did they not have a cot for me to sleep on, they couldn’t even come up with extra blankets and pillows. So I slept on the floor for the duration using my suitcase as a pillow.

But the girls had a good time, which is what matters.

March 24

We’d only been home for a couple of days when we got hit with another massive storm, only this time it was ice. It downed trees everywhere, but the biggest issue was that it snapped off the utility pole on our street knocking out our power and internet and trapping us at home.

Fortunately school ended up being out until it got repaired and our neighbors couldn’t have been better about offering to pick us up groceries, offering to drive Eleanor to school use of their car, etc. Thanks Ashley and Trevor!

March 26

Best of all, our propane held out just long enough to power the generator until the power was restored. It was very, very close though.

April 4

Speaking of storms and propane, a couple of weeks after the last storm, we got a blast of snow that knocked down a tree. It missed hitting our propane tanks by less than three feet, and its branches miraculously fell in between the tanks themselves.

I don’t know if they would have exploded if they took a direct hit, but I’m very happy we didn’t find out.

April 15

Got to take in a Mariners game with our friend JT. First time at the park, and it’s great place to see a game. I even got to hand off a foul ball to two little girls watching the game with their Dad, which I’d never had the chance to do before.

April 19

I don’t love getting up early to get out for walks, but when I get to see the sun rise it takes some of the sting out.

April 20

Got to introduce Eleanor to the joys of using a brad nailer.

April 26

While on a combination work visit for me / birthday trip for Kate (the room had two beds this time, thankfully), I got to visit the MLB offices for the first time and see the room where instant replay is reviewed. Thanks Justin!

May 1

Speaking of NYC, I love walking the High Line trail while I’m there. It really is a great city to walk in.

May 7

While out in Denver for a work trip, RedMonk bought beers for people we know - two of whom happened to be college buddies of mine. Thanks coming by Andrew and Nat.

May 11

Spent the weekend after snowshoeing in the Sangre de Cristo mountains with one of said friends, Andrew.

May 22

Someone asked me how I walk when I travel, and my response was that I generally find the nearest water, then walk along it. This time it was Boston.

May 26

The Seadogs do a great job making a trip to the park fun for kids.

June 1

Eleanor’s first violin recital.

June 3

Back in San Francisco, this time with a good view of Karl the Fog rolling in.

June 14

Got to celebrate the last day of school with a few of Eleanor’s besties and their families. Kids jumped in the water fully clothed, because of course they did.

June 15

First doors off day of the year.

June 20

Was down meeting a friend for dinner at our local waterside venue when a squall rolled in and dumped rain on me.

June 26

Annual pilgrimage to the secret beach. Thanks Whitney!

July 3

Whatever else it was, 2024 was a banner year for the hydrangeas.

July 4

Fireworks with friends, per the usual.

July 17

Riding bikes and picking flowers (per the big sign saying PICK ME with clippers) with the kiddo.

July 19

Clamfest’s Stephen King game was strong this year.

July 26

Circus Camp recital was very different from her violin recital.

July 30

Might not be the last time, but this was the first time I had to hide out in the ferry building to get away from a thunderstorm passing directly overhead.

August 4

We took a ride up to Nova Scotia for a reunion with Kate’s family and her parents rented a house with a pool. Predictably, it absolutely dumped rain one day, and just as predictably as soon as the threat of lightning had passed the kids were back in the pool - rain notwithstanding.

August 5

Rode the ferry back from Nova Scotia.

August 16

Eleanor started feeling crummy on the way back from Canada, and a couple of weeks later she ended up in the hospital with pneumonia and, as it turned out, Lyme disease. It was scary and wrecked August for all of us, but once they got her on the right meds she was back on her feet and good to go.

August 30

My little helper and I converted an old hall closet into a craft closet with shelves.

September 6

Took a run up to Absolem to finalize Monktoberfest planning. If you visit Maine, you really need to hit this place. It’s gorgeous, not far from Portland and no one knows more about spirits - any of them - than Ryan Travers.

October 3

Another Monktoberfest in the books. No major disasters this time, though our dinner venue was tripping breakers all over the place.

October 10

My first time seeing the Aurora Borealis. Absolutely bonkers.

October 16

As happens to me every couple of years, I went to a conference in NYC and ended up with a crazy hotel room with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, three fridges, a foosball table and a sizable balcony.

That I was in for maybe nine hours total.

October 18

Our little Irish dancer got up and danced to the music of the local Irish music group while they practiced.

October 31

We recruited a couple of Eleanor’s besties to come trick or treat with her on our island.

November 1

Kate was in the water every month this year. Personally, I think it’s crazy, but it’s also crazy bad ass. Got to share in the experience this time - from the shore, not the water.
I’m not crazy.

November 9

With the girls off to Canada for a cousin’s birthday, I snuck in one last trip out to Colorado to see my best friend. The timing was good, as I really needed to laugh at that time.

November 19

Successfully fermented a hot sauce with habaneros that I grew. While I learned from last time and pulled the food processor outside to grind them up, boiling the sauce still ended up tear gassing the house and the girls upstairs.

November 24

Spent a good part of the year dodging these guys, who have decided that island skunks don’t need to be nocturnal. Regrettably.

December 22

Everyone was too sick for us to get together to put it up with them, but our neighbors down the street got the little holiday tree up on the bridge which is a delight every time you pass it.

December 31

Ended the year with fireworks at a friend’s house, Trading Places and an Orval. As one does.

I Have Squandered My Days With Plans of Many Things

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 23:43:38 -0400

Things were going pretty well with our summer until Eleanor ended up with pneumonia. Eleven days later she was hospitalized with a high fever and a partially deflated right lung having not responded to a double course of azithromycin and amoxicillin. After she slept the first night in her hospital bed hooked up to an oxygen tank and Kate and I “slept” in chairs in her room, I went in to brush my teeth the first morning and came out to the scene above, what Eleanor sleepily called “a doctor party.”

The mass gathering of doctors and nurses had been assembled because Eleanor’s blood oxygen levels were scary low and her resting heart rate was scary high. One of them, from under his mask and full gown, said “don’t be alarmed.” I stood there blinking and stupid from no sleep and tried to imagine a world in which anyone would not be alarmed under the circumstances.

But that’s the bad news. Or most of it, anyway. Sure, there was a weird 3 AM allergic reaction that had Eleanor’s lips looking like Angelina Jolie’s, intermittent vomiting, a prescription mix up that sent us home with a potential overdose of thyroid medication rather than the appropriate antibiotics and an eventual diagnosis of Lyme disease on top of the pneumonia.

None of that is as important as the good news, however, which is that the second morning we were at the hospital the high end antibiotics (as in: used to treat anthrax and the plague) they’d put her on had kicked in, and her blood oxygen and heart rates numbers had come back not quite to normal, but to levels that were at least regarded as safe and no longer required the poor thing to trail an oxygen tank behind her to use the bathroom. We got to go home, and while she may have been carried in there, she walked out on her own two feet.

The whole process took a lot longer than anyone wanted, then, but with time and medicine she eventually got back on her feet and started school without incident or restriction yesterday morning. All of which is thanks to the miracle of antibiotics, the high quality care we received from urgent care to our pediatrician to the hospital and, I say with no small amount of pride, our daughter’s toughness - you would have made my Dad very proud, Little Bear. Seriously. I did not have “my daughter will pull her own IV out of her arm when it was time to be discharged” on my summer bingo card, but here we are.

Oh, and before I forget, let me also give a special shout out to Kate’s parents and her sister and family who swung into action while we were all staying at the hospital to feed and walk the dog, clean the house, take our garbage to the dump and have Eleanor’s room (and stuffies) neatly organized for her return. They’re the best.

Anyway, before we spent August driving to and from hospitals and waiting for chest x-ray results and prescriptions to be filled, however, we did manage to have some fun. Here are a couple of shots from the non-medical crisis portions of our summer.

Wouldn’t be summer without a trip to the secret beach up in Phippsburg.

Hosted friends to (belatedly) celebrate Midsommar in honor of my and Eleanor’s Scandinavian heritage.

Other friends, meanwhile, hosted us for the 4th.

Stopped to pick flowers at one of the island houses (whose fence has a big “PICK ME” sign on it with clippers, don’t worry).

Speaking of flowers, it was a banner year for our hydrangeas.

Started growing our own hot pepper plants.

Finally sourced whole, unshelled peanuts to begin the recruitment of my island crow army.

The girls weren’t in it this year, but Clam Fest was a lot of fun.

Boarding

Took the Cat over to Nova Scotia for a family reunion with Kate’s side of the family.

With Eleanor unable to go to camp for a couple of weeks, there were a lot of 5 AM wakeups to get my walks in. Good news was that I got some decent sunrise shots, though several mornings it was nothing but dark and fog.

One day when she was able to go to camp, I managed to sneak in an even longer walk.

Turned some of those hot peppers into my first (successful, non-moldly) fermented hot sauce. Mistakes were made, but it’s a) edible and b) non-toxic.

My little helper and I put new shelves in the craft closet, so we don’t have another “beads down” incident.

Speaking of said little helper, check out this stool she made at camp. Kate and I figured she just built the frame and they dropped in the seat, but no: she wove that herself. Studio Artisane rules.

Ultimately, there were lots of other fun activities: bike rides, birthday parties, island dock jumping and even an unplanned sleepover or two. We saw lots of animals from foxes, raccoons and skunks to eagles, owls and ospreys to a surprise giant salamander. We had movie nights, fires in the firepit, drinks out on the deck with friends and hot tub time. A shocking number of baby teeth were lost.

And not, we think, because of the summer’s s’mores.
The crazy medical scramble notwithstanding, then, it was all in all a good summer, because we eventually came out of it one piece. Here’s hoping fall is just as much fun but with a lot less drama.

How to Chemically Treat a Goodland Hot Tub

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 23:36:00 -0400

About a year ago, we bought a wood fired hot tub - specifically this one from Goodland. We love it and use it every day it doesn’t rain and some days when it does. And It’s utterly amazing in the snow. Anyway, for those that want the background, I went through our thoughts around buying the tub and our initial experience in a lot more detail here.

When I wrote it up, however, I promised to follow up with details on how we treat our water. To do that, I’m going to lay out our process for filling and treating the water in our Goodland. For those of you in the same boat as we are, then, hopefully this is helpful.

Why treat the water at all?

We save time not repeatedly filling and draining the tub - not to mention saving water - but mostly we treat our water because we’re on a well. It’s a good well and reasonably deep, but we don’t want to overtax it. The average bath tub is something like 50 gallons. The Goodland is around 250. If you filled it every day, in other words, it’d be like taking five baths a day - not that you’d have to. You can usually get at least a week out of a given fill even untreated. We’d probably be fine, then, but when it’s the water source for our primary and only residence, why take chances?

If you’re on city/town water or if you have a handy source of water nearby - creek, river, lake or ocean - that will unquestionably be easier to do.

But for us, treating the water in our Goodland makes the most sense.

How is the water treated?

There are two components to our water treatment approach: chemical and filtration.

What’s filtration?

It’s not enough to just treat the water with chemicals to keep it bacteria free. Even if you have both covers for the Goodland as we do, you’re going to get debris in there: leaves, pollen, ash, insects and so on. You can’t easily remove those via chemicals.

What do you use for filtration?

The bad news is that I have yet to find a perfect solution to this problem - there just aren’t many commercial options available. My assumption is that there’s not a major market for external hot tub filtration systems because the majority sold come with inline filter equipment built in. Whatever the case, you basically have two options: internal units that sit in the tub, or pumps that sit outside of it.

There are many more external options than internal ones, and they’d be much easier to integrate. We ruled those out, however, because we use our tub heavily in the winter and an external filter is much more likely to freeze.

So instead we got an oversized combination filter/skimmer unit intended for above ground pools. Specifically, we got a Bestway Flowclear 680. It’s too big for the tub, I have to clamp it into place and you have to remove it to fit more than two people in, but that’s a thirty second chore.

And the upside to having the filter in there is that it automatically circulates the water as it heats up, so I don’t have to keep mixing it with the Goodland paddle.

Do you still have to clean the tub manually with a skimmer net?

Yes. The Bestway’s filtration system is better than its skimmer function. But skimming a hot tub the size of a Goodland is not like skimming a regular sized pool; it doesn’t take that long at all.

Ok, so what about chemicals?

While I’m no expert, and there are alternatives, the most common two options for chemical treatment are bromine and chlorine. Bromine is a little gentler and has less odor, but is more expensive. Chlorine is a little harsher and you get a faint chemical smell, but it’s cheaper.

We opted for chlorine, but via a salt water system.

What’s a salt water system?

For this system, you add pool salt to regular water to achieve a salinity level that is substantially lower than seawater, but still feels softer and gentler on the skin. An electrically powered salt water system then uses the salt in the water to generate more consistent, lower levels of chlorine than is typically found in a hot tub which makes for a gentler experience. I was sold on the Salt Water idea by this video from Swim University.

As for which system, we use the Saltron Mini for our Goodland.

Can the Goodland handle salt water?

Yup, there’s no issue whatsoever. Neither the aluminum nor the cedar are impacted by salt water.

One caveat, however: if you use your Goodland in the winter and you use a salt water system, do not buy the pond de-icer that Goodland recommends on their website. The stand for it is steel and it will rust immediately and stain the cedar it sits on and color your water.

How does the treatment process work?

Let’s divide that into stages. There’s the initial fill, and then there’s the ongoing maintenance.

The fill is very straightforward. You simply filter the incoming water; for that, we use one of these attached to our garden hose. In our case, it pulls out the iron and other minerals present in our well water.

The filter doesn’t slow the process when it’s working - it takes us about an hour to fill the tub. That filter is rated for a couple of thousand gallons before it’s shot, but ours slowed to a trickle after two or three fills. Turns out if you shake it a couple of times, performance goes right back to normal.

What about ongoing maintenance?

That can be divided up into three parts: skimming, filter maintenance and chemical treatment.

If you’ve ever been around pools, skimming is simple: it’s a mesh net that you use to fish medium to large debris - i.e. leaves, bugs and so on - out of the tub. With both covers on our tub, I have to do this maybe once a week. Twice in the summer.

How about the filter maintenance?

That’s also not that complicated. Changing the filter on the Bestway is a thirty second chore. The filters last a couple of weeks, and when you notice reduced flow out of the unit you turn it off and pop in a new filter.

Lastly, what about chemical treatment?

Once you get past the initial setup, treatment is very simple. Our Ph, hardness, salinity etc doesn’t tend to change much once it’s established.

But out of the gate this one’s more complicated and depends on your water composition. The first thing you’ll need is test strips. We use two types: this one to test Ph, alkalinity, chlorine, hardness and so on and then a second to test salinity.

Incidentally, I do not recommend this test unit: it’s slow to read and the results tend to vary pretty widely from our strips.

What is the first thing to add to the water?

The first thing we add is salt. Our well water obviously has no salt in it to start. Our Saltron system is optimized for 2000-2500 PPM salinity (by comparison, seawater is 35,000 PPM). To get to that level, I add 5.25 lbs or 2265 grams of pool salt. There’s no chemical difference between pool salt and table salt, apparently, but it’s optimized for quick dispersal and dissolution.

What comes next?

Next comes adjusting the alkalinity. Out of the well, ours is 80 PPM. To get to the recommended 100 PPM, we add 2.5 tbsp of alkalinity increaser. Notably, that’s a Spaguard product, and that’s what we use across the board a) because it’s designed for hot tubs and b) it’s easy to adjust the doses to a Goodland sized tub.

After getting the alkalinity where we want it, there are just two more adjustments to be made before getting to the all important chlorine.

First, we adjust the Ph. Our water is 7.2, and we want to get to 7.6. To do that, it’s 2.5 tsp of Ph increaser.

Second, we need to add calcium to the water to make it harder. Our well water is zero PPM, so we add 14 grams of calcium hardness increaser.

How does chlorine treatment work?

The Saltron system mostly takes care of this on an ongoing basis, but it’s like a battery trickle charger - it can’t establish the baseline chlorine level on its own, it can only keep it topped off.

So after taking care of the rest of the water chemistry, we add 1.5 tsp of Spaguard chlorinating concentrate. That gets us to a 3+ chlorine level and then the salt system takes it from there.

If the tub is exposed to the sun which destroys chlorine, or if the salt system is left off for a period of time, your chlorine may go back to zero in which case a reapplication of 1.5 tsp is required.

What other chemicals are necessary?

Every so often, most often following heavy use, heavy rain or some combination of the two, the tub begins to get cloudy. At that point, we “shock” the tub using this enhanced shock product. I believe the dosage is 4.5 tsp for the Goodland, but definitely check my math on that before applying it.

Whatever the dose, applying this once a week or every other week keeps the water very clear.

How long will a given fill with the above treatment regimen last?

As a rule we cycle our water after six months, but typically it’s still clear at the time we do that. We’re also pretty strict, however, about being clean and showered before we get into the tub.

How much time does the above maintenance take on a weekly basis?

Not more than an hour. The only things that are really required regularly are skimming, testing and correcting the chlorine if necessary. Everything else is mostly an up front setup cost in time.

Anything else to add?

Just be aware that all of the above measurements are specific to the water chemistry of our well - you’ll want to adjust the amounts to your particular water source.

Is treating the water worth it?

Easily. First, it keeps our well safe and unstressed. Second, it’s really not that much work on a weekly basis. And third, once you have your doses dialed in, it’s just not that complicated to treat your water.

In a perfect world, we’d be pumping creek water or seawater in for every soak, but given that those aren’t options for us treating it is the next best thing.

My 2023 in Pictures

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 20:13:31 -0500

If 2022 was a year of cautious re-emergence from lockdown for myself and my family, 2023 was an acceleration of that trend. One that came with benefits, but also a personal cost for myself as I’ll get to. It was indisputably a cost worth paying, however. Life was not back to normal, to be clear. Much as there was a permanent demarcation between what travel was like pre and post 9/11, so too is travel in the wake of COVID a fundamentally different activity. There’s a lot more overhead to travel these days, the least of which is masking. But if 2023 was a reminder of anything it was that physical, face to face connections are priceless, and therefore worth that overhead.

Every year involves a certain amount of sickness, loss and tragedy both on the personal and global scale. This year was no exception in that regard, but that was balanced by an appreciation for what I have, both for the time spent with the people close to me and for an opportunity to reconnect with friends I had not seen, in some cases, for decades.

It was a complicated year, then, but a good year. As always then, these are the moments – significant at times but mostly not – that characterized my year personally. Before we get to the pictures, however, a quick check-in on travel and health.

Travel

For better or for worse, my travel in 2023 was a mild escalation from the year prior. While thankfully falling far short of my hundreds of thousands miles a year peak, my 2023 travel schedule ticked up from twenty thousand miles to around twenty five. A couple of extra trips in the fall and spring travel seasons, no more, but the trajectory’s slope was up. That bears watching for 2024, because while my current travel load is sustainable, it’s important to me that it not escalate to anything like my pre-pandemic slate.

Health

Overall, my health and fitness in 2023 was steady. I lost some more weight in the first half of the year, added a bit of it back in the second half and didn’t end up exactly where I wanted to be but I’ve been able to more or less hold the line.

That was possible in large part thanks to my continued love of walking. I was active 334 out of 365 days, and I just missed hitting 3000 miles walked this year at 2,973, a number which was almost 500 miles ahead of my 2022 total. My BFF and I have a joint 3K goal this year, so fingers crossed time, availability, weather and health permit us to hit that goal.

With all of that said, on to the pictures.

January 1

As is my custom, rang in the New Year watching Trading Places and drinking the world’s best beer.

January 2

As literally no one could have predicted, Kate got absolutely hooked on the World Junior Hockey Championships while watching it with her family, so we watched a lot of that.

January 9

A year later, I finally finished rebuilding our basement after it flooded.

January 18

With a “write a persuasive letter” assignment at school, the great dog campaign of 2023 was launched.

January 23

First big snowstorm of the year.

January 24

The dog campaign’s pressure kept ratcheting up.

January 29

First visit of the year to our friends up at Absolem Cidery.

February 4

It got cold. Very cold.

February 12

Ate terrible food and beer with friends for the Super Bowl, then had to walk 12 miles the next day. Suboptimal.

February 18

Borrowing an idea from my friend Lewis, we did a Dad’s “Best Day Ever,” in which we sat around in robes, drank beer and ate terrible food.

February 25

First Red Sox game of the season.

March 4

Saw college friends I hadn’t seen since before the pandemic - at the usual venue.

March 16

Family outing to Bluey’s Big Play.

March 18

Annual St. Patrick’s Day event at our place.

March 25

To all who celebrate.

March 26

Kate’s mini portable projector makes its debut.

March 29

Frogs were back.

March 31

From a still undetermined source, I got COVID for the first time. I was fortunate, first in that it was not too bad for me - roughly 36 hours or so of a very sore throat and mild fever - and second that the girls were in Boston, so I was able to successfully quarantine myself in the basement without them getting it. Oh, and lucky for the vaccines that made my case mild.

April 8

Finally tested negative.

April 22

Kate and I did a spa weekend. No one had told me spas had outdoor hot tubs, saunas and steam rooms. I thought they were just for manicures, pedicures and the like. I like spas now.

April 28

Traded in my Apple Watch for an Ultra because, after testing, it was clear that the former wouldn’t last me through a long distance walk I was planning.

April 29

Missed brush pickup day in town by a matter of hours and had to take all of the winter’s downed pine tree limbs over myself.

May 1

Last training session for my planned long walk, and also my longest distance up until that point.

May 6

First doors off day for the Jeep.

May 12

First Seadogs game of the year.

May 19

Thanks to a strained calf, it wasn’t clear that this was going to happen, but I managed to walk 50 miles for the first time.

May 25

Got to see some old friends in Colorado.

May 28

Eleanor got to run the bases at Hadlock. She came in dead last, all because she wanted to help a little friend.

June 8

Chaperoned Eleanor’s schools’ Beach Day. I was responsible for keeping an eye on a mere four kids, and my big takeaway was that teachers should be paid seven figure salaries.

June 10

Eleanor had her first Irish step dance recital and was great, in spite of one of her fellow dancers who almost tripped her up.

June 21

I had to meet him via Facetime because I was traveling in NYC, but the inevitable outcome of the great dog campaign of 2023 - a black lab named Sully - arrived on this day.

June 22

Speaking of NYC, walked the High Line trail there for the first time. Great little park.

June 25

Missed the first day of summer because I was away, but got our annual Jaws viewing in nevertheless.

June 27

Not sure if the video will ever see the light of day, but in one of the more surreal work experiences I’ve had an entire film crew flew into the Portland to shoot a video with me and a client. It was absurd.

July 4

Turns out trying to get someone to come out and address your complete lack of water pressure is challenging on a beautiful 4th of July day - hence the bike pump (worked the first time, not the second). The entire well tank ended up needing to be replaced, and the guy who installed it a week later said he had no idea how the old one had not started a fire.

July 6

Sully was not sad that we live just up the road from a beach.

July 19

We got a wood fired hot tub. Lots more on that addition here.

July 22

As cool as it was to get a hot tub that was how miserable it was to deal with a sewage back up. And as with the well tank situation, trying to get someone to come out and address a septic system on a gorgeous July Saturday proved to be impossible, which is why I now know a lot more than I’d like to about how septic systems work.

August 19

Last time Ferd and I saw a show together, it was Pearl Jam. This time around it was Sigur Ros in Boston. They’re so good live.

August 22

Made the annual pilgrimage to the falls with my little sidekick.

September 5

Not sure how this happened, but we had a second grader on our hands.

September 7

Like everyone else these days, we got our share of Canadian wildfire smoke.

September 9

A friend turned 40 so it was time for a lakehouse.

October 5

Another Monktoberfest in the books.

October 7

The timing couldn’t have been worse coming on the heels of our event, but I kept a promise and flew down to NJ the day after to attend my high school reunion. And while I grumbled about the flight, it was beyond worth it. Catching up with the first friends I ever had - some of whom I hadn’t seen in literally decades - was an incredible experience. I hadn’t laughed that hard in a long time, and we all picked up as if we’d seen each other yesterday. Just a delight from start to finish as I got lucky with my high school friends.

October 15

Got back up to Bremen for a cider pressing for the first time in a few years.

October 27

Maine is a safe state in most respects, but we are, sadly, no more immune to gun violence epidemic than the next state.

October 28

As with our St Patrick’s Day party, we’ve continued our Trunk or Treat Halloween party begun during the pandemic. The best part was when the costume parade turned into a costume race.

October 31

Speaking of Halloween, no one takes it more seriously than the island.

November 2

Hit my annual walking goal for the a couple of months early.

November 11

Time for the Biggest Little Game in America.

November 20

Last year was the first time I’d walked the distance of the Appalachian Trail. This year it was the Pacific Crest Trail distance.

November 22

Had a fantastic Thanksgiving out in Minnesota with my brother’s family.

December 19

The island got crushed by a windstorm, with trees down everywhere including large limbs in our yard.

December 31

To ring in the New Year, Eleanor had a grammie sleepover, we boarded the dog for the night and Kate and I headed down to Portland. Kate did a cold dip with a friend, which I noped right out of, then we had dinner at Street and Co and a quiet night on the town.

We Bought a Wood Fired Hot Tub

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 23:18:57 -0500

Let me be clear about this up front: we were not hot tub people. If someone had told us a year or two ago that we’d end up buying a hot tub - much less a wood fired one - well, I can’t speak for Kate, but I would not have believed it. Neither of us grew up with a hot tub, lived somewhere that had them or belonged to social scenes in which hot tubs were a regular method of socializing.

Not that there’s anything wrong with being a hot tub person, obviously. It’s just that that was not a descriptor that would have applied to us. And yet we are now technically hot tub people, of a sort. How did this happen?

Three things conspired to turn us into the proud owners of a Goodland wood fired hot tub.

First, and most importantly, was our move to the island. One of the things that happens when you move to a beautiful place is that you’re not inclined to leave it for anything less than exotic destinations. As we shifted away from spending a summer week at cottages on the coast up north, then, we decided to deploy some of that vacation budget to exaggerating the vacation-like characteristics of our existing house. How could we make it even more enjoyable to spend time here during vacations? As we might put it in tech, how could we give our regular house new features? That led us to begin considering various additions like saunas - something we still might do eventually. We did some research, and that’s when social media kicked in.

Second, then, was YouTube. As we started casting about for ways to upgrade our house, YouTube’s algorithm inevitably led me to this video about a family that purchased a Goodland wood fired hot tub. Not only had I never heard of Goodland, I didn’t know wood fired hot tubs existed. The idea of a wood fired hot tub, which is an experience quite distinct - for better and for worse - from a traditional electrically heated hot tub, however, seemed intriguing. They’re not for everyone, as I’ll come back to later, but we were at least in the target demo as wood is our primary heat source for the house in winter.

Last came the unexpected and improbable discount. Knowing what we know now, which is that the hot tub gets basically daily usage, I wouldn’t have waited on a discount. We’d pay full fare, and happily. Not being hot tub people at the time, however, we were intrigued but on the fence, skeptical as to how much we’d use it. Then, having signed up for Goodland’s newsletter, I got this email.

Over a thousand dollars off because it literally fell off a truck and got scratched, and the tub was already here in the great state of Maine. That seemed an awful lot like fate, so we pulled the trigger. And since it arrived in July, at least one of us has been in the hot tub nearly every day that it hasn’t rained. Also, a couple of days when it did rain.

If you’re at all curious about the Goodland, you probably have questions. I certainly did. To Goodland’s credit, they’ve answered a ton of them here. But here’s what I’ve figured out thus far after six months of usage. If there’s anything I missed, drop a comment or email me and I’ll update this. I’ll also do a follow up post on our water treatment process later; that’s involved enough to need its own space.

Why get a hot tub?

Everyone’s reasons here will differ. For many, as mentioned above, it’s socializing. While you can technically fit four adults in this tub, however, that’s not why we bought ours. What we were looking for was an opportunity to spend time outdoors, in all seasons, in a place that is inherently screen-unfriendly. Whether it’s the whole family, Kate and I, or just one of us individually, hot tub time is a time to sit, soak and take in the blue sky or the night sky. Particularly if you’re in a relationship with someone, a hot tub - at least in our experience - represents an opportunity for more focused, less distracted one on one time. It’s an investment, in that way, in your relationship.

I’ve also found that if I’m quiet enough while I’m out there, it’s like being in a blind for watching nature go by. So far I’ve seen foxes, raccoons, deer and several neighborhood cats saunter by no more than twenty feet away - totally unaware of my presence.

Why get a wood fired hot tub?

Part of it is cost. For a traditional hot tub we’d have to have an electrician in to do potentially expensive work. For us, on the other hand, as a household who already deals with firewood on a daily basis, there is no additional cost to a wood fired hot tub. But there is also an almost meditative benefit to using a wood. It’s inarguably less convenient than a regular hot tub where the temperature is maintained constantly - it can take a couple of hours to get up to temp. But the process of building and starting a fire has value in the same way that heating the house with wood does. For me, at least, the ritual of heating the tub is an enjoyable one, a contemplative one. Your mileage may vary on that, of course.

Why buy a Goodland?

For us, at least, it was a couple of things.

Aesthetics: the Goodland hot tubs are beautiful to look at. Aesthetics are generally more Kate’s concern than mine, but even I appreciate the way it looks.
Company: the company, which is very small and Canadian (a plus for Kate as her Mom is Canadian), encourages via their products a slower, more thoughtful approach to life - an approach that resonates in a world that gets more sped up by the day.
Design: the hot tubs are well and thoughtfully designed, and not only are easy to take apart and set up, but can be moved and installed by two people. They’re also built with materials intended to last.
Price: at ~$6300, the Goodland is not cheap. But given that quotes for a lot of the traditional hot tubs start at $10,000 - and that’s before the requisite electrical work, installation charges and so on - the Goodland was more affordable for us even absent the discount. And it has no impact on our monthly electrical bill either, unlike the traditional alternatives.
Size: not being hot tub people, as mentioned above, we did not want a huge tub that would seat half a dozen or more people. We also don’t really have the space for that. The Goodland’s size fit our needs best.

Is it worth the money?

Everyone’s answer to that will be different. For us, it was about usage. If we spent that much money and we used it every so often, as a special occasion, that would be a waste of money. If we used it multiple times per week, on the other hand, that would be worth the money.

For us it’s easily been worth the money. Honestly the first time I used it in the dark and the cold - and more recently, the snow - and looked up at the stars while floating in 100 degree water, it was worth it.

If I buy a Goodland, do I need the cover and end covers?

If you’re going to reuse the water at all, you definitely need the covers. Even with them it’s amazing how much crap ends up in the tub. If you’re not going to reuse the water, you probably want them anyway to keep leaves and other debris out of the tub when it’s empty.

They’re an added expense, yes, but it beats having everything the wind blows ending up in your tub.

Speaking of reusing the water, is the hot tub’s water treated with chemicals?

The short answer is that you can do either untreated or treated water. And as the tub is cedar and aluminum, you can also do salt water which is what we do.

Which should I do?

That depends entirely on your situation. In the video I linked to above, they pump water into their tub from a nearby lake when they need it, and drain it when they’re done. So they don’t treat their water. If you have a nearby water source, be that fresh or salt water then, you can just use that. This is much simpler and lower cost.

We don’t live on a lake, and we’re on a well. Our well is good and deep, and the tub’s capacity is comparatively small at ~250 gallons, but we don’t want to run the risk of overtaxing the well at our primary residence so we treat our water.

I’ll save the process for another post, because while it’s simple enough once you figure it out there are a lot of moving pieces. Detailing all of that would take more space than I have here.

How long does it take to heat the tub?

It all depends on your starting temperature. When I’ve got residual heat left over from the day before, and it’s a temperature in the sixties or seventies, it’s maybe an hour and a half. If temps are in the thirties or forties, however, it’ll take several hours. Instead of starting a fire in the afternoon, then, I just do it in the morning.

I’m concerned about the water freezing in the winter: how long does it take for the water to cool down?

Longer than you’d think. If you’re heating the water every day or every other day, it’s not an issue unless you’re dealing with extreme cold. In our case - with only an extra layer of rigid foam insulation sitting under the tub - here’s an example. Firing up the tub one afternoon, the temperature peaked at 103.6F at 2:30 in the afternoon. The low temperature that night was 17F. By 8:30 AM the next day the temperature was down to 65.3F. And that’s a more extreme example; typically if the overnight temps are in the twenties and thirties you might see the hot tub temp the next day in the seventies.

The takeaways, then, are that extreme cold can bleed heat reasonably efficiently, but even in very cold weather a heated tub is not going to freeze overnight. And you can slow that further by deploying insulation on top of the water and/or a tank de-icer (though as I discovered, you can’t use that with salt-water because the stand is not stainless).

What are comfortable temperatures?

Everybody’s tolerances differ, obviously, but speaking personally the sweet spot is 98-101F. 102F is hot, and 103F is too hot for me for more than a few minutes.

To maximize time in the water, however, I’ll get in at any temp north of 90F and comfortably wait for it to warm up.

How do I manage temperature?

There’s a bit of a learning curve here, but it’s not too bad. Generally, you use a Goodland like you would a wood stove. I generally line the bottom of the stove with small logs, light a firestarter like fatwood on top of those and then place kindling strategically around that.

That will typically burn for an hour or two, then I just feed it until I get close to my target temperature and back off. When I want combustion to stop or slow, you can either close the opening entirely or leave a slim crack at the back open.

How do I get the temperatures even at the top and bottom of the tub?

Left to its own devices, any body of water will stratify into layers of differing temperatures. To ensure that you’re not stepping through a top layer of hot water into much cooler water, the contents have to be mixed. In an electrical hot tub, this work is performed by jets. In a Goodland, you have two options.

First, you mix it by hand. Goodland includes with the tub a nicely designed paddle which will ensure the water mixes top to bottom.

In our case, however, because we’re treating our water, we have a filter that sits in the tub and circulates the water as part of its normal operation.

Surprisingly, however, because most traditional hot tubs come with their own filtration system, it was difficult to find one appropriate for a wood fired hot tub like the Goodland. I eventually settled on a Bestway Flowclear 680 Gallon Skimatic Filter pump designed for above ground pools but Amazon doesn’t sell it anymore. It’s a little too big and attachment is wonky, but it works and keeps the water clear.

What other accessories do I need to budget for?

Aside from the chemicals if you’re going to treat the tub, and filter system mentioned above, there are a couple of things that we use. Some of which are necessary whether you treat your water or not; others of which are optional.

Hose Filter: our well water is full of iron, so this screws on to our garden hose and pre-filters the water before it hits the hot tub.
Water Temperature Sensor: we have an Ambient weather station in our house, and this floating wifi temperature sensor pipes our current temperature into our display at home. As a bonus, you can also check the tub temperature via the Ambient app, and via their API you can pull a JSON feed which I use to display the hot tub temperature on our family dashboard.
Smart Power Cable: in order to be able to remotely turn on and off our hot tub filtration system and our salt water system, I picked up this smart outdoor power plug. I can schedule them and turn them on and off as necessary from my phone.

Do you happen to know how much a fully loaded hot tub weighs?

The tub weighs approximately 275 pounds with all of its parts, and the 257 gallons of water weighs approximately 2143 pounds, so before any people are in the tub you’re looking at a weight of around ~2450 pounds.

Can my deck support that much weight?

I was curious about the answer to this myself, because a lot of the Goodland videos you see have the tubs deployed on decks of varying heights and design. Because my wife is a lawyer, however, I’ll note that none of the below constitutes advice and I have no idea what your particular deck may hold. But I can at least tell you how I looked at the question.

The first thing I did personally was inquire with an engineering company as to what it would cost to get a professional assessment. Their quote was $2K, which meant that I could spend a third of the cost of the hot tub only to be told that my deck could not support the weight. I opted out of that.

Google research, meanwhile, told me that a deck approximately our height off the ground could support up to 100 pounds per square foot. My conservative math said that the Goodland would represent between 125 and 150 pounds per square foot, so our original plan was to drop in four new posts to over-reinforce the existing area of the deck.

Given that this would have mean trying to dig four foot deep holes under the crawlspace of our deck, however, we decided to punt on the matter and simply set up the tub on the ground. That was a good decision, because I no longer have to worry about load capacities and so on but more because I didn’t have to roll around under the crawlspace under our deck for a week.

What should I know about a wood fired hot tub that isn’t obvious?

The amount of work that goes into it, especially if you treat your water. It’s worth it for us, but if you’re the kind of person that just wants to get in and get out with no work on your part, this tub isn’t for you.

Anything else to add?

Just that we’re very happy with our Goodland and highly recommend it for those willing to put in a little work. For those with Goodlands already, meanwhile, I’ll follow up later with a post on our water treatment plan if there’s interest.

My 2022 in Pictures

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 08:54:34 -0500

Whatever else it might have been, 2022 was a better year for me than the the one that preceded it. It was a year marred by worldwide tragedies major and minor, struggles on a personal level for myself and of many people close to me, all of which played out against the backdrop of the ever present invisible menace of a pandemic gone endemic. A pandemic that was and remains deeply traumatic, and whose trauma continues to be made manifest across the population in ways both predictable and not.
But while life was not back to its pre-pandemic normal, the reality is that - barring a universal vaccine which is not on the near term horizon - it never will be. What we’re left with instead is a world of constant risk calculations, a world in which, as one doctor put it, before the cautious among us go to an event we have to decide whether it’s worth the possibility of getting COVID to attend.

In several cases this year, for myself and my family, and for the first time in years, that risk was accepted. Which lead to a number of fun adventures, both here in state and out of it, that we’d have ruled out in years past. Whether that’s the appropriate calculation or not is, of course, a matter of perspective. But it’s what we did, and it was a good year. The best year out of the last few.

So as always, these are the moments – significant at times but mostly not – that characterized my year personally. Before we get to the pictures, however, a quick check-in on travel.

Travel

How much I traveled in 2022 depends on what it’s compared against. Relative to my pre-pandemic travel heydey, I traveled virtually not at all. But relative to the last two years, I was a globe trotter. Between my first visits to Colorado and San Francisco in three years (yay!), and my first visit to Las Vegas in the same amount of time (sad face emoji), I had to figure out how flying works again. It’d been so long that I’d forgotten the sequence in which I need to put on the messenger bag and Patagonia backpack I travel with typically, and thus got completely tangled up in them while taking them off to clear security my first flight out.

And not only did I get on a plane, I left the state multiple times again for the first time in years.

I have mixed feelings about this, to be honest. I actively don’t want to resume my prior heavy travel schedule and have no intention of doing so. But it was genuinely delightful to see so many people in person this year for the first time in ages, and the realization that I will not be doing so as often is a bit sad. But as the man says, compromise is about being “halfway happy.”
With that, on to the pictures.

January 1

As is our custom, we spent the New Year’s holiday drinking fine beers with friends.

January 3

Which then necessitated us following up with drive by COVID tests before school resumed.

January 7

Got some good snow and was first out on the trails that morning.

January 14

Pretty nice little sunset.

January 17

Almost got blown off the bridge. Not for the first time.

January 22

Cold enough to mark the opening of the skating pond on the vernal pool next to our house.

January 29

Went out for a walk in a blizzard.

Came back to practice my traditional nor’easter tradition of reading Night Shift by the fire with hot cocoa that may or may not have had bourbon in it.

Also came back - in what is typically referred to as foreshadowing - to some minor water intrusion in our previously dry basement.

February 12

Two weeks later and it was “warm” enough that we went down to the beach.

February 13

A day later, it was cold enough that everything iced back up, I fell (again) while out walking and broke at least one rib.
As injuries go, it could have been a lot worse, but I do not recommend it.

February 17

The good news with broken ribs is that other side of my body worked just fine, and while it took a lot longer not being able to use my left arm at all, I got the firewood loaded with basically no problem. If you’re going to break a rib, I do recommend breaking it on your off hand side.

February 19

Went ice fishing with friends and got to see a bald eagle grabbing fish off the ice not fifty feet away. Did not get a usable picture of it, however.

February 26

She called it a “beauty day,” but I believe the UN considers having things repeatedly jammed under your fingernails torture.

March 9

More foreshadowing: minor water intrusion in the basement shop. It was not a lot of water, but it was a very “ominous portents” kind of day.

March 13

Woke up the next day to full basement flooding. I spent something like two hours hauling it out manually, another three rigging up our brewing pump to pump the water out, but whatever I pumped out flowed right back in. Tried to call our insurance company and couldn’t get through. My only guess was that it was blocked gutters, and I made an emergency visit to rent a tall ladder from Home Depot, which I got home in sleeting rain only to discover that - my measurements notwithstanding - it was a good five feet short of being tall enough.
Eventually I got through to the insurance company who told me to have Servpro come out and pump it out. Servpro started with one truck. Then another arrived. Then a third, and a fourth.
When we went to bed that night, they had had no more luck clearing the basement than I did with my shop-vac.

March 14

As it turned out, the basement couldn’t be cleared, because the end of the french drain system that surrounds our house had frozen. Which mean that as water drained down along the sides of the house and collected in the drain system, it could not exit the system and instead flowed into our house.
Once we figured that out, an excavator punched a bunch of holes in the pipe, there was a geyser of water and Servpro subsequently cleared the house in a half hour.
That was the good part. The bad part was that our insurance company initially told us we weren’t covered at all, and it wasn’t until our broker got involved that they allowed that there might be some coverage. Which there ultimately was, but not nearly enough to cover the damage and it took months for the carpet to be replaced and patching the sheetrock they extracted is still pending, though hopefully soon.
The lesson here is: if you have french drains, check them to make sure they will not freeze. Just trust me on this.
In a fun bonus, it turned out that the first leak was a totally different problem that had to be discovered later: a partially blocked valve in our septic system that overflowed when high volumes of water were passed through it, as in a shower. Not good times, bad times.

April 2

After a long delay thanks to COVID, we finally had a service to celebrate my Dad’s memory. It was as crushing as it was needed.

April 10

The debut of a brand new soft top for the Jeep.

April 15

Red Sox home opener with my little fan.

April 21

Windstorm did a number on the island.

April 24

Sacrificed the beard as part of a birthday present for Kate. This has elicited a wide variety of commentary, the most notable of which was “DUDE! YOUR FACE!” She was appreciative, at least.

May 7

For better or for worse, we’re all in on heat pumps now. Furnace and tank were removed.

May 14

First doors off day with the Jeep.

May 17

First time on a plane in 894 days. As mentioned above, it was a bit of a rough reentry.

May 20

First time seeing my BFF in three years, was immediately Tom Sawyered into demoing a deck.
More seriously, I never again want to go a year let alone three without hanging out again.

May 27

The wait was excruciating, but finally Stranger Things Season 4 dropped. And what a season it was.

June 9

Awful day. What I thought was a minor dental issue for my cat turned out to be a tumor, and I had to say goodbye to my feline companion and friend of almost twenty years. You were loved, Pook.

June 11

Went to my first reunion in years, and got to see the BFF for the second time in a month, my college buddies and a host of other folks over a couple of days in an absolutely bonkers setting.

June 15

Lucky enough to be up the coast a bit for a week with friends at one of the best beaches in Maine.

June 21

First day of summer.

July 4

Fireworks with friends.

July 15

The girls were featured players in the local parade.

July 16

Pretty nice little sunrise.

Followed by a visit to an incredibly cool private island in Casco Bay, one that features WWI and WWII military bunkers including a climbable submarine tower.

July 21

Went to see The National for our first concert in who knows how long.

July 23

Excellent visit with Crazy Uncle Corey in Vermont.

July 29

Went camping with friends. That absurd amount of gear is what we brought for a single weekend.

August 5

Someone made her theater camp debut as a “flying squirrel,” in a costume that she made herself.

August 27

Family outing with my mom, brother and his kids to Splashtown Funtown. Other than the Tilt-a-Whirl, which was a terrible mistake, a good time was had by all.

August 30

Took the best kid in the world to one of my favorite spots in the world, completing my annual pilgrimage in the process.

September 6

Said best kid in the world enters the first grade.

September 17

Our down the street neighbors, whose two little girls have the most adorable tiny beekeeping suits, invited us over for their honey harvest.

September 18

The next day it was time for our annual cider pressing.

October 6

For the first time since 2019, we were able to host our conference, The Monktoberfest. This one was special because my Mom was a guest of honor to commemorate the 10th year, and because my BFF gave a talk about his own event, the Flyathlon, which has raised a half a million dollars for local conservation efforts. It was a lot of blood, sweat and tears holding an event in the COVID era, but it was legitimately incredible to see everyone.

October 22

Hard top: reactivated. Sadly.

October 27

In 2021, I set a goal to try and walk 40 miles a week for the year. It seemed ambitious, but as it turned out I enjoy walking so much I hit my goal two months early. I got up early to get the walk in, and shotgunned a beer to celebrate the mark. If you’d told me a few years ago that any of this would have happened, I would have said you’re crazy. But it did.

October 31

No one takes Halloween more seriously than the island. No one.

November 2

pic.twitter.com/NXhteWFm21
— steve o'grady (@sogrady) November 3, 2022

RedMonk had a significant birthday, which we thought we could sneak past people, but instead which our coworkers conspired against us to generate reactions which were literally overwhelming.

November 8

My daughter’s stuffie Tiana Sprinkles visited San Francisco for the first time and I visited it for the first time in three years and it was so, so good to catch up with work friends I haven’t seen in far too long, and even more to the point one of my best college friends.

November 19

Celebrated the kiddo’s bday at the climbing gym, an inspired idea of Kate’s, clearly, not mine.

November 27

As happy as I was to be back in San Francisco, that’s how sad I was to be back in Las Vegas. The cabana we rented the first day eased the blow, however.

December 20

As I’ve been stretching out the distances I’ve been walking this year, it occurred to me that I might be able to complete a marathon distance walking. After I saw that the training plans maxed out at 38 miles a week - or two less than I’ve tried to average - I decided to try it. Thanks to logistical support from Kate ranging from assuming drop off and pickup duties at school to drive by checkins with me, guidance from my BFF on how to best manage plantar fasciitis and distance events, and advice from coworkers on local footwear options I was able to complete a marathon distance walking.
It’s not running, obviously, but it was still a fun undertaking, and if nothing else I have to be the only person ever to complete that distance on this two square mile island.

December 25

Quiet Christmas at home. Note how my wrapping skills have dramatically improved.

December 27

Went on a post-Christmas ski vacation with our family, Kate’s family and my Mom. A ski vacation that included a lazy river that sold Heady Toppers.

December 31

As is our custom, celebrated the New Year with our friends and fine beers.

Walking, Weight Loss and Diet: Frequently Asked Questions

Mon, 24 Oct 2022 18:40:07 -0400

When I originally decided to write up the details of how I let my health and fitness fall apart and how I was trying to piece it back together, I did it for a simple reason. There was an outside shot, I thought, that hearing me talk about my own implosion and nascent recovery might be useful in the event that someone else found themselves in a similar, if hopefully not quite as deep, hole. I didn’t think this was likely, necessarily, but I figured there was at least a chance, and if it helped even one person that was enough to justify both the effort of getting it all down as well as the embarrassment, frankly, that comes with laying out your various failures publicly.

Surprisingly, however, after writing all of this up and talking through everything from the original reboot to the details of my walking routine to a bit on diet changes, I heard from a sizable number of people. Nothing crazy - none of the posts went viral or anything like that - but since pressing publish originally I’ve heard from a lot more people than I expected to. People that I talk to every day, in some cases, others that I haven’t heard from in decades. People I knew, people I didn’t. People that I knew were struggling in some way, people who I thought had it all together.

Some of those that reached out were just checking in with encouragement, which was of course appreciated. The majority, however, have had questions for me beyond what I’d written up. Questions about all sorts of details, things I hadn’t thought to document. A lot of these I’ve tried to tackle in the follow up posts on walking and diet, but there are other questions people have asked that I’ve been answering individually in private.

After doing this for a bit, however, it occurred to me that these questions I’ve been answering privately via email, text, comments or DMs might in fact be common questions - that maybe others had the same questions, but didn’t want to ask. Which led me to wonder if it might be helpful to roll them up and answer them in one place.

So here we are.

What follows, then, are the most common questions I’ve gotten from people. And just as a reminder, before we get into them, I am completely and totally unqualified to be dispensing health and fitness advice - so take all of the following with a grain or three of salt.

Q: How long did it take for walking to become a habit?

A: I don’t remember the answer to this, precisely, but I think the answer is a couple of weeks. I’m spoiled in that the island we live on is beautiful, so I never regarded getting out for a quick walk as much of a chore.

This was my first real, tracked walking week. As you can see, I was easing into the process with a couple of walks broken up over the course of the day.

After a couple of weeks of this, and gradually adding on distance, it evolved into something of a routine. One that I now plan my schedule around, with the help of an accommodating family.

Q: Is there anything that’s been useful in keeping you motivated?

A: After walking for a couple of months last year, I thought it would be useful to have an annual goal to work towards. So after looking at what I was capable of at the time and what I could reasonably expect to accomplish given my schedule and available time, I set a goal to walk 40 miles a week for the entire year. I take one rest day a week, so for six days a week that comes out to an average of a little under seven per day. This goal was highly motivating, because it gave me something to shoot for, and as I write this I’m a tick over thirty miles from completing it.

As a result, I’ve set new goals, like hitting the full Appalachian Trail distance (I’m probably not going to make the distance to City Beer Store this year, however).

Tl;dr: as any real fitness person will tell you, in other words, goals are a Good Thing.

Q: Do you use any particular tools to track your walking?

A: I use an Apple Watch and Strava. The Apple Watch is ok, except for its miserable battery life and its tendency to pause my walks because it apparently can’t differentiate between human skin and a wet raincoat.

Strava, on the other hand, is an absolute joy. It tracks my walks, my effort, my goals, my time - it even tells me when I need a new pair of shoes.

And as an aside if you’re thinking of trying to find me over there, my account is all private. It’s the one social network on which I am aggressively non-social.

Q: What is something you wish you’d done sooner?

A: Mostly I wish I’d started walking years ago, but more specifically I wish I’d gotten a full rain suit and waterproof boots. When I started out walking, I had an old delaminated raincoat that was not remotely waterproof. I eventually upgraded that to one that is waterproof, but after walking in the rain my entire lower half would be soaked. These days, I have added rain pants tucked over my waterproof Hoka hiking boots, and as you can see from the picture above even in a storm that dropped 3" of rain I stayed mostly dry.

There’s no bad weather, as the saying goes, only bad clothing. Given my Mom’s Scandinavian heritage, I should have remembered that sooner, but better late than never.

Q: Do you need to change everything overnight, and completely overhaul your life?

A: This is what I thought at one point, and you’ll see this advice frequently. As one example, over the last decade or so, I’ve watched a lot of YouTube woodworking videos. One of the folks who has made a lot of the videos I watched is Steve Ramsey. Off the topic of woodworking, he talked about his own fitness journey and had some very specific and dramatic recommendations - among them that you had to quit drinking, get up at dawn and that any exercise had to make you sweat - that you had to exhaust yourself with any workout you’re doing.

With all due respect to what he’s accomplished, which is fantastic and impressive, I’m here to tell you that none of that is true. And more importantly, I think that advice can be actively harmful when you’re starting out. If you’ve gotten yourself off track fitness and health-wise, and someone tells you that you have to start rolling out of bed at 5, quit alcohol completely and work yourself out until you’re crushed to make any difference, I think you’re much less likely to get started on the road to recovery. It’s too daunting.

Also, none of that is necessary. I still drink on weekends. I do get up at 5, but certainly not every day and that wasn’t until months into my process. And while some of my summer walks left me soaked through in sweat, I’m not exactly destroying myself aerobically. Yet I’ve lost a serious amount of weight not doing half of the things he recommends as essential.

Net net, if someone tells you that only massive, immediate and radical changes can get you back on track I’d reconsider that advice. Changes will be necessary, almost certainly. But every little bit adds up, and small changes that lead to progress can make it easier to make other small changes and so on.

Q: What got you started? What was the inspiration?

A: This one I haven’t talked about anywhere publicly before. My friends and family know this, but no one else has heard it. A year ago in late September, with Eleanor now back in school, I finally felt that I had the time and energy to start trying to reverse my slide. I started a line diet on September 26th. My progress was there, but slow and uneven.

Twenty days later, I found myself in the ER. Here’s a picture.

The short version is that I woke up one morning with significant pain in my arm - my left arm. If you’re not a doctor, generally left arm pain is Not Good. I was pretty sure I had just slept on it wrong, but knowing that I was woefully out of shape and not too far away from a problematic age for that sort of thing, I called urgent care. They were full, but told me based on that pain that I should go to the ER.

I was admitted within twenty minutes of showing up, and they ran a chest X-ray, did an EKG and did bloodwork to see if I’d had or was about to have a heart attack. The good news was that all of that came back clean. I was not having a heart attack, nor did it appear as if I was about to have one.

But the bad news was that my BP was sky high, my resting heart rate was through the roof and as I sat there looking at my feet, the only thing I could think was that while everything was fine this time, on the track I was on I’d end up back here sooner or later. And with the way things were headed the next time I probably wouldn’t be that lucky. As I sat there on the gurney, then, waiting for the test results to come back - by myself, because COVID - all I could think of was how I’d be letting down my family if I let things continue on as they had been.

In my family growing up, there was no greater sin than not doing your job, and I had not been doing my job. I had failed. But fortunately it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.

One year later, I still have work to do, but I’ve come a long way.

Q: What’s the hardest part?

A: For me, at least, it was getting started. By far. Getting on the scale for me, and seeing how far I’d let things go, was deflating and discouraging. I know this has been true for a few of you as well. The thing that made that bearable, however, was the line diet. Because once I’d gotten on that scale, and absorbed that blow, I could forget about that number and just focus on hitting the next number the next day. Without that feedback, and being able to measure progress, I would not be where I am now.

Q: What do you listen to while walking?

A: Other than work briefings, conference talks or Red Sox games, it’s mostly audiobooks. I tried podcasts, initially, but I didn’t want to have to keep juggling episodes mid-walk. Having to get my phone out on the bridge to the island - which is windy and always twenty degrees colder than the rest of the island - in the middle of winter and manually pull up new episodes with gloves off gets old fast, so I switched over to audiobooks pretty quickly.

One of the common reactions from people I’ve talked to about audiobooks is that they prefer the experience of real books, and my reply was “so do I.” My retention from audiobooks, for one, is not the same as when I physically read a book, whether that’s on paper or in digital form. But the audiobooks I prioritize for walking are primarily for entertainment, so retention is not a real concern.

Back when I was getting started, I made the decision to re-read - or in a few cases, read for the first time - Stephen King’s back catalog. I was fortunate, in that they were all available as audiobooks, and I’d accumulated dozens of them from an old emusic.com subscription (subsequently I’ve started using audiobook service of our local library). When King started walking himself for fitness, audiobooks weren’t a thing so he had to pay his children to read books onto tape for him to listen to. Most of the things I listened to I had not read since I was a teenager, or in a couple of cases, since I was ten or eleven. If you’re looking to kill time while walking, King’s books are tough to beat. They have the twin advantages of being both long and entertaining, so I killed mile after mile after mile listening to It, The Stand, The Dark Tower novels and so on. I’ve since gone on to read a great many other authors - most recently it was revisiting Susanna Clarke’s transcendent Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - but I feel a particular debt to King, in fact, for playing a part in getting myself back on track health-wise.

King or otherwise, if you find yourself needing to be entertained while walking, then, audiobooks are your friend. Now’s your chance to “read” things you’ve been meaning to read, or re-read things you haven’t checked in on in a long time.

Q: Do you have a link to a line diet spreadsheet?

A: I do. I didn’t find this myself, so I can’t claim credit for discovering it, but unfortunately I can no longer remember who did find it and point me at it. Regardless, this is the public spreadsheet that I made a copy of and have used ever since.

Q: What if you’re not seeing improvements?

A: I’ve gotten this question several times, and my response has generally been two things.

First, make sure your goal is reasonable. If you’re trying to lose too much weight, too quickly, that can become self-defeating. If it’s taken time for you to dig yourself into a hole, it’ll take you time to dig yourself out of it - regardless of how quickly you might have been able to drop weight in the past. Give yourself a reasonable pace, and just try and hit your mark every day. And on that note…

One thing I have definitely learned is that weight loss is decidedly non-linear. I’ve had stretches where I’ve eaten light, walked 14 or 15 miles in a day and lost minimal weight or even gained a bit, only to “drop” four or more pounds overnight a day or two later. It’d be nice if weight loss was a straight line as it is on the graph, but that hasn’t been my experience. And even if you end up going up a bit from that new low mark, the baseline is now lower. Over time, if you’re putting in the work, that number will inch its way down one way or another.

Doing this for a while, I’ve learned to not really sweat today’s number. My focus instead is always on the baseline. As long as my baseline continues to drift down, I don’t sweat the occasional gains from things like weekend indulgences - because they allow me to live my life in a way that makes this whole process not onerous.

So my advice is to just keep on it. You’ll get there.

Q: How much weight have you lost?

A: I haven’t gotten this question as much as you’d think, but it’s one I’m still not going to be public with. My condition could have been worse, to be sure, but it could have been a hell of a lot better. Let’s just say that it’s a significant fraction of my prior body weight, and enough that I’ve had to get new, smaller jeans once already and (hopefully) will need one more set before I’m through.

Bonus Questions

Q: How often do you need to replace your Hokas? (I find I need to replace mine every 4-5 months)?

A: I’ve settled into a routine where I replace them between 450 and 500 miles. I’ve got Strava set to email me when I hit 400 miles, and after that I play it by ear with the shoes. If I begin to feel smaller rocks or acorns underneath the forefoot and midsole, or if I start feeling the miles more than usual, that’s a sign that it’s time for a new set. I’m on my sixth pair now. Four pairs of Bondi 7’s, and now on my second set of Bondi 8’s.

For what it’s worth, however, my walking mentor Dean has something like a thousand miles on his shoes. I chalk it up to him being a lot smaller than I am.

Q: Have you encountered any injuries along your journey?

A: The only real injury I’ve had was when I fell on an icy trail this past winter and broke a rib or two. That was a funny injury in that I could not roll over in bed, cough or sneeze, but walking was mostly fine. I got my 40 miles in each of the weeks after I fell, because per my Strava comment the day after:

> Didn’t get lucky with the ribs, pretty sure at least one is cracked. Only hurts when stopping or starting, though.

Other than that, I haven’t really injured anything. Lots of aches and pains along the way, of course. Usually it’s a tight back because my posture sucks, but I’ve had some very transient knee pain, a couple of scary days when I thought I might have been coming down with plantar fasciitis and numerous other bruises from falls.

But otherwise, I’ve been lucky so far. Fingers crossed that continues, because I can’t imagine not being able to get a walk in every day.

Q: Are you curious about adding anything in to your wellness - for example yoga? massage? Acupuncture?

A: I have, and in fact, I’ve been doing yoga daily longer than I’ve been walking. Initially, it was an accessible way to ramp up to some physical activity, and more recently it’s been a way to try and heal and stretch out some of the aforementioned minor aches and pains I accumulate. I was telling someone a couple of weeks back that my primary practice now consists of me Googling “yoga with adriene + body part that hurts the most today.” They thought I was kidding, but I was not kidding.

In addition to the yoga, I do some basic bodyweight work. Pushups before yoga every day, and then some simple upper bodyweight routines via TRX straps in our basement three days a week. Nothing terribly fancy or sophisticated, but trying to make sure the upper body gets some work in as well.

As for acupuncture or massage, I haven’t yet tried those yet, though I have no doubts about the therapeutical value of either. It seems probable that I end up trying one or both before too long.

I Have Squandered My Days With Plans of Many Things

Thu, 08 Sep 2022 22:48:02 -0400

For the better part of the last decade, I’ve spent the bulk of my summer vacation working on and being injured by various home improvement projects at the house, briefly interrupted at some point by a week’s vacation in a cottage on the water somewhere up north. This year, things were a little different.

First, because we’ve moved. The new(ish) house is larger but more importantly in significantly less need of repair than the old house. Which means that there’s just not as much for me to do - in spite of the ceiling fixtures and curtain rods I replaced last week. And all of the missing sheetrock in the basement from our flood which I have yet to replace.
Second, because we moved to an island. Our original plan was to skip the cottage entirely and just enjoy our first real summer on the island, though we pivoted on that to take a week at a cottage earlier in the summer to overlap with a friend’s kids. We followed that up with weekends camping with friends, Eleanor’s first sleepover with friends, visiting a friend’s Vermont lakehouse, making two separate trips to another friend’s place on a private island in Casco Bay, and one to my sister-in-law’s cottage up in South Bristol.
Third, because unlike in her early years there was no daycare for the six year old. The front part of her summer was loaded with all kinds of day camps - acting, STEM, magic and more. The last couple of weeks of August, she was home with us. Which meant dreaming up new ways to keep her entertained.

We did our best.

Anyway, here’s what I did on my summer vacation.

I opened the first morning of summer vacation by trying to kill time with Eleanor by making breakfast eggrolls. Not only did she not want to eat them, she managed to repeatedly scald me with molten oil by dropping them in from a foot above the wok.

Not good times, bad times.

Later that afternoon, however, we were up at Kate’s parents’ place for a birthday party and some cousins time.

The next day, she disappeared for an hour and wouldn’t let me see what she was doing until she emerged with some homemade - and hand decorated - armor.

wrote up the experience of putting together a little family dashboard in our kitchen.

if you've got a lot going on in your house, and especially if you've got kids heading back to school, this might be of interest.https://t.co/oWbbo8Jjk7
— steve o'grady (@sogrady) August 16, 2022

Out of both a desire to be productive and a need to begin prepping for school re-entry, I took some time to set up a combination digital calendar/picture frame/weather station/family to do list/tide chart. So far, so good.

With the girls gone for dinner at a friend’s house, I took the opportunity to try and make dumplings from scratch by hand. Unsurprisingly, things didn’t end well and I did not even ask them to try them later.

Apart from the aforementioned light fixtures and curtain rods, the only real home improvement project was building a shelf behind the old, inherited sectional couch in our basement. I cut up the same 2x6’s that once were part of the wheelchair ramp I made for my Dad, stained them, dropped in a power outlet and called it good.

I’m not sure that I’ve ever caught a sunrise while on vacation before - in fact, I’d bet against it. But I was there for a couple of good ones.

Later, we built a fort.

And she read to me in it.

We rode bikes all over the island, which was mostly fun. Except for the days when it was hot and she’d want to walk the bikes back halfway across it.

Set a walking goal before the start of the year, and after crossing a particular milestone there was only one GIF to talk about what was left.

headed up to my mom's house tonight for a cookout with my brother, who's in from out of town. bright sun when we got there.

this was five minutes after we brought the food outside and fired up the grill. pic.twitter.com/s5HHrNrpNp
— steve o'grady (@sogrady) August 25, 2022

Headed up to my Mom’s place to see my brother and nephews, and, well, the usual weather followed.

The next day the cousins came down to the beach by our house and, well, the usual weather followed.

Two days later, we all went to Splashtown Funtown. It was as advertised, though just take my word for it: don’t get on the Tilt-a-Whirl. Even if your beloved daughter says “Daddy, will you take me on the Tilt-a-Whirl?”

In between our various adventures, Eleanor and I spent a lot of time sitting together on the couch reading while poor Kate had to work.

Then there was the day I was tasked with sewing together “vests” for her stuffed animals, and sewing tiny ferns on to those vests. Turns out I’m a lot better at reading to her than I am sewing.

Another night, one when Kate had to work, Eleanor and I made orange chicken together. The bad news is that she didn’t like it and wouldn’t eat it. The good news is that she didn’t manage to burn me this time.

Arguably the highlight of my vacation was taking Eleanor up to my happy place, one I’ve visited every summer for well over a decade. We were supposed to do this as a family, but the weather and schedule didn’t cooperate the week Kate had off, so instead I just took my sidekick.

Over the weeks I was out, I got a lot better at making cardboard weapons.

To the point that I ended up having to create an assembly line of sorts to manufacture them at scale.

By the end of vacation it was cool enough for firepits, and we got to deploy the new Solo heat deflector for the first time. Early verdict is that it does work and deflect heat to the sides, but you have to be close.

Vacation nights, I’d close the day by watching the kinds of movies that I hadn’t seen since a sleepover at a friend’s house when I was a kid. And probably didn’t need to see again because they were awful and should never have been made.

And then, on one of our last beach days of the summer, Eleanor got to make her paddle board debut thanks to an incredibly kind neighbor.

All in all, while it wasn’t all sunshine and unicorns - there were some rainy days in there - it was a summer of adventures that Eleanor hopefully will remember for a long time. And worst case and she forgets, I can always send her this.

The SOG Diet

Mon, 27 Jun 2022 22:13:43 -0400

After I talked last month about walking and how it’d played a role in my weight loss, a couple of people reached out to ask me what I was doing about food. “If you can’t outrun a bad diet,” one of them asked, “I’m pretty sure you can’t outwalk it either.”

Which is true enough. If you’re eating badly, unless you’re running the Iditarod and burning nine thousand calories a day it won’t matter how much you exercise. Walking has been critical to helping me burn more calories, but as I had a big hill to climb that wasn’t going to be enough. I had to reduce my intake of them at the same time. Here’s how I’ve done that. But first, the caveat.

The Caveat

If you read a review on the Wirecutter, one of the first things they’ll do is explain why you should listen to a particular reviewer. They’ll go through their various qualifications, the testing methodology and so on in an effort to establish their credibility.

I’m going to do exactly the opposite here. I am not credible, and I have no relevant qualifications whatsoever. I’m not a nutritionist, I haven’t tested and compared different diets or approaches - I haven’t even really studied them. Literally the only reason to pay attention to any of this is the fact that, as pictured here, I have had a little bit of success losing weight in recent months so I can at least relay what has worked for me.

My goal here therefore is not to convince you that my approach or particular diet is right. It probably isn’t. What I’m going for here instead is to walk you through my thinking on the chance that something in here can be applied to your situation. And perhaps more importantly, serve as a reminder that a few small, doable changes can add up to meaningful gains.

What I Was Not Willing to Do

Calorie Counting: A lot of diets that work for people come down to counting calories. Either literally doing just that, or via some system of points that are easier to count than the calories themselves. That sounded tedious and exhausting to me, so I’ve steered clear of that entirely. My hope - thus far born out - was that if I both increased my caloric burn and just broadly decreased my intake of food, I could skip the calorie counting. So far, so good.
Metabolic Hacking: Similarly, a lot of people have had great success with keto or other metabolic hacking diets. I didn’t want to do something like this, first because I wasn’t particularly keen on dramatically specializing my diet out of a concern that it might be depriving me of things that I might need, but more because that didn’t seem sustainable to me. Even if I was successful taking off pounds using one of these plans, it seemed likely that I’d just put them right back on unless I adhered to the diet indefinitely. This wasn’t what I was looking for.
Rigid, 24/7 Restrictions: Lastly, I didn’t want any set of rules that I had to follow 24/7. I didn’t, for example, want to get together with friends on a weekend and have to navigate around a bunch of restrictions. Instead, I try to do the right most of the time and not get in a twist about the occasional indulgence (read: beers on weekend nights).

What I Was Willing to Do

Track my Weight: This is a non-starter for a lot of people and I completely get it. It’s hard to get on a scale if you’ve let things go. But what success I’ve had with losing weight historically has come from the line diet, so for me weighing myself daily was not optional. And after that first weigh in, I just keep my focus on trying to beat my number each day.
Eat Less: As I’ll get to momentarily, I started with exercise, not diet, but that just made it easier for me to make the decision to eat less. It’s not like I was eating fast food all the time or anything crazy, but I had to be willing to make some cuts to my food intake. Otherwise my progress, if any, would have been slow.
Make Some Changes to What I Ate: Again, I didn’t have to do anything really radical here because I wasn’t gorging on burgers or eating pints of ice cream in a sitting. But I did make a few small changes here and there for nutritional purposes as well as weight loss.

The Rules

No Breakfast: This wasn’t a big deal for me, as I haven’t eaten breakfast regularly since I was a kid. My PCPs over the years have had varying opinions on the importance of breakfast, and it seems like one of those medical subjects where each new study contradicts the last. For me, at least, I don’t have any less energy if I don’t eat breakfast - I walked over ten miles this morning without any - and I actually tend to feel sluggish if I do. Your mileage may vary here.
No Eating After Dinner: This was a more significant change. Because I had a tendency to stay up too late, I’d end up getting hungry around midnight and would raid the fridge for leftovers. Under the new plan, I don’t eat anything after dinner, and with very rare exceptions I do this pretty much seven days a week. Eating before bed is not super helpful in general per the science, and it’s additional calories I just didn’t need.
Eat a Varied Diet: There’s not much question that eating a diet heavier in protein versus, say, carbohydrates is helpful from a weight loss perspective. And as I’ll get to, I’ve tilted my consumption there just a bit. But I also wanted to make sure that I was getting an appropriately diverse set of nutrients - carbs included.
No Beer Four Days a Week: When the pandemic began, I was adhering to a pretty strict schedule of only having beer Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. I held up for about a month or two, then that went out the window. I wasn’t getting shellacked every night or anything, but I was having at least a beer or two every night, if only for medicinal purposes. Those extra calories had to go. So for several months now I’ve been back to the Thurs/Fri/Sat schedule, and you can see the difference quantitatively.
These Are More of a Set Guidelines, Not Rules: If the time that will work to meet friends for a beer around a firepit is Tuesday night, I have beers on a Tuesday night and I don’t think twice about it. If I’m at my college reunion and we make food late night, I eat after dinner - so be it. The core assumption here is that if I do the right thing most of the time, the good will outweigh the times when I have to make an exception to the above rules.

The SOG Diet

Enough with all the rules and guidelines and caveats: what’s the actual diet? The joke is that there actually isn’t one. Basically, I eat two meals - lunch and dinner - and occasionally a snack in the afternoon if I’ve walked a lot.

Lunch: is always the same: what I refer to as “terrible tacos,” pictured above. These consist of a tortilla into which I place first some sort of protein. Could be turkey, bacon, left over actual taco meat or most often chicken or turkey sausage. On top of this I throw in a bunch of different random vegetables from our fridge: some combination of lettuce, avocado, pickled jalapenos, onion, carrots, cabbage, cukes, carrots or tomatoes. The more different colors that are represented, the better. Then I add a fried egg - my cholesterol numbers have always been pretty good - and some sort of hot sauce. It’s thai sambal above, but I rotate regularly through a bunch of different sauces from Big Tree Grocery (which, as an aside, is so, so good). One day it’s sambal, another it’s chili crisp, next it’s gochuang and so on. I leave out filler I don’t need and probably wouldn’t be able taste anyway like cheese.

None of the ingredients make any sense, there’s no cohesion or thought into how they might taste together, but the terrible tacos cover a couple of bases for me:

They get me both protein and more and more varied vegetables than if I was having, say, a basic turkey sandwich
I can make and eat them in ten minutes or less, which is helpful on busy days
I don’t need any specific ingredient; I can work with basically whatever we have as long as we have tortillas
The Big Tree sauces are excellent, and either hot, overpowering from a taste perspective or both, so I get some variety in how my lunch tastes
The taco is filling, if mostly comprised of vegetables, so I’m never hungry after eating

That’s pretty much it. I eat these things close to seven days a week, unless we go out for lunch or pick something up special. So far I haven’t gotten sick of them, though I’m not much of a food person in any event so that’s not a major surprise.

Snack: is always something small. A protein bar, maybe, or a wedge of cheese. Maybe a small portion of this tabbouleh salad our local market makes that has kale in it, but in which, mercifully, you can’t taste the kale.

Dinner: basically I eat whatever we’re having. Could be rice bowls, could be a grilled chicken salad, could be sushi - or it it’s Tuesday, it could be normal, non-terrible tacos. Basically the only adjustments I make are first by going lighter on the carb portions than I might have otherwise; a little less pasta, for example, or a little less rice, and second by eating a little more protein than I might otherwise. These adjustments are very slight, I’m still eating both carbs and protein, just a slightly different ratio than I might have otherwise. Overall, however, it’s simple: eat a little less overall, and a little less of foods that aren’t great for your weight and a little more of foods that can be helpful in that regard. And after dinner, that’s it. No more food until the next day.

And that’s it. That’s the “diet.”

Things That Aren’t a Problem for Me That Might Be for Other People

No Dessert: For the most part, I have no sweet tooth. I don’t care for cake, ice cream, pie or most desserts. So skipping desert is not a big deal for me. I do, however, really like peanut butter, and got a couple of bags of peanut butter cups for Christmas. They’re still up on the shelf. I find it’s easier to not eat them if I don’t have a fresh memory of what they taste like. So while I could indulge myself per the guidelines/rules item above, I’ve just dropped anything sweet entirely.
I Eat the Same Thing Every Day: After he retired, my grandfather ate the same thing for lunch - a bowl of corn flakes - every day for decades. I appear to be cut from a similar cloth in that respect, because as mentioned above I eat basically the same thing for lunch seven days a week, week in, week out. That’s probably not something everyone wants to do.

When to Start

Personally, I found it easier to start with an exercise plan and then gradually adjust my diet. As I ramped up my physical activity I was burning enough calories via walking that I was seeing some weight loss, which meant that dieting for me was essentially an accelerant. This meant that I was getting concrete, tangible results faster, which made the challenge of making adjustments to my diet much easier to swallow. If you’re losing, for example, a quarter of a pound per day on average and then you can watch yourself double that after a few small diet changes, the incentive to make and keep those changes is much higher.

How to Roll Out Changes to Your Diet

Much like an exercise regimen, I think diet changes are best rolled out incrementally. If your entire diet is different overnight, it’s a shock to the system that’s more difficult to sustain over time. If you make one change, learn to live with it, then make another, and so on, you can boil the frog, so to speak, and wake up after a couple of weeks with a significantly different diet that seems to have materialized out of nowhere. I’ve described a bunch of different changes above, and they were all made at different periods over time, and thus the changes while significant in the aggregate at no time have seemed onerous.

The Net

As stated above, the way I’ve done things is not for everyone. My version of the tacos, as but one example, is not going to work for a vegan. For those of you that don’t have access to a kitchen for your lunch, likewise. But the idea isn’t that you have to do what I’ve done. If anything in here is helpful to you, that’s fantastic, but that’s not the point.

The important takeaway for me, at least, is that if you’re struggling with your diet and your weight - and I’ve heard from a bunch of you that are - you can make a small change here and a small change there, and it all adds up. You might not think you can, at times, but literally anyone can make a small change. And then another. And then another.

Don’t worry about the big picture, just put one foot in front of the other and focus on those small changes. Make enough of them and you’ll get where you want to go, I promise.

Good luck.

Saying Goodbye

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 23:02:05 -0400

Eighteen years ago this month, I hopped in the car and drove up to Augusta to the Kennebec Valley Humane Society. They had a cat there that no one, apparently, wanted to adopt. Which, in turn, made me want to adopt him, hence the ride up north.

As it turned out, however, someone did want to adopt him, and drove off with their new cat about an hour before I got up there. They tried to talk me into coming to see a new batch of kittens that had come in, but I resisted, having had my heart set on the cat that had been adopted. Eventually I gave in because, well, kittens.

When I walked into the room with the them, they were rolling all over each other and play fighting. One of kittens looked up and saw me, sprinted over and proceeded to climb my leg like a tree. When I pried her off my hip, she was purring loudly.

Her name was Azrael. I had to have her put to sleep last week.

When she came home with me that June, I was living alone up the coast from here in Maine, far from friends and family. Az was my companion in those early years. She was my local friend. She rode in with me to the office every day, and rode home with me at night. She curled up in my lap if it was available, and next to it if it wasn’t. She would drape herself over me at night, or crawl under the blanket and go to sleep behind my knees. And her most favorite thing in the world was to be carried. She’d sit in the crook of my elbow, paws on top of my hand and just quietly sit as I wandered around randomly carrying a cat and trying to do things like laundry one handed.

My relationship with her, however, was a lot different from other people’s relationships with her. In my experience there is a type of cat that is basically a one person cat. I grew up with one. Azrael was another.

She liked Kate, which didn’t help much since she’s allergic. One of my happiest memories, meanwhile, was when she gave the newborn Eleanor a tentative lick the first time they met - and she was a very patient cat with a very affectionate toddler. She also got along just fine with my best friend Andrew.

But that was pretty much the list. She hated pretty much everyone else - even people who were kind enough to make sure she had food and water while I was traveling. Best case, they wouldn’t even see her. Worst case, there would be hissing. And if you didn’t pay attention to that and got too close, she would cut you. Happily. The last veterinarian we went to tried to get me to take a fancy plastic cat carrier for free because they were so scared of me taking her out of it. I assured them she’d be fine for me, and she was.

Azrael may have been a tiny cat, but she was fierce. Even those of my friends that didn’t like her - which is to say most of them - would allow her that much, I think.

If she wasn’t particularly friendly, however, she was adaptable. She lived in everything from a one room cottage to a loft to a basement to, when we had that finished, the RedMonk office briefly. She took it all in stride. She was on a plane more than my daughter’s been to date. She didn’t like it, but as long as I was able to stick my hand in the cat carrier so she could know that I was there, she’d settle.

I worked with a guy once whose cat crapped on his clothes as a means of expressing its displeasure when he traveled. Az never did anything at all to protest; she was just overjoyed to see me when I got back.

Throughout all of the changes in my life over the last two decades, Azrael - most commonly referred to in the house as “Pook” - was there for me. Moves. Marriage. A daughter. My deteriorating and then recovering health. My Dad’s death. Throughout all of the ups and downs, I could sit down each night, she’d curl up next to me and I’d feel loved.

Pets have many wonderful benefits, but I’m not sure there’s any that are more important than that.

Last week, I noticed a couple of things that were off. Her food bowl was fuller than it should have been and she felt lighter. And she was making a noise as if she was grinding her teeth, which had never happened before. I took her in assuming it was a dental issue. They called and told me it was a growth, very likely squamous cell cancer. In the span of about thirty seconds I went from wondering how long she’d be in for dental work to desperately trying to get around the fact I was going to have to say goodbye.

Because that was clearly what had to happen. Surgery on the mouth of an eighteen year old cat would be trading at best a few months for me to come to terms for an agonizing, painful struggle for her, which of course is no trade at all. It would mean selfishly putting her through hell so that I didn’t have to feel sad until later.

We might not always be able to be kind to people in these situations, but we can at least do that for our animals.

A half hour later, I was at the vet’s sobbing as they brought her in. True to her nature, they’d had to administer the sedative before they brought her in because she tried to cut a few of them up. Even in her weakened state, she was still fierce.
I thanked her for always being there for me and for making me happy. I told her that she’d been loved. And then they gave her the second drug, and she was gone.
You won’t find many other people who liked her, let alone loved her. You, reading this right now, probably wouldn’t have. But I did. So very much.

Goodbye Pook. You were a great cat.

Why I Walk and Why You Might Want to Walk Too

Tue, 31 May 2022 23:31:15 -0400

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Since I started walking longer distances and have lost some weight in the process, I’ve gotten a bunch questions from people about it. My original plan was to wait and write this post answering some of those in early January, with a full regular calendar year of walking under my belt. Then it occurred to me that waiting to drop a post on walking tips until the middle of winter was a spectacularly dumb idea, even by my standards. Putting this up now in case some of you have the opportunity to use some of the following advice to walk during weather which is actually pleasant seems like a much more reasonable approach.

This particular revelation was triggered in part after reading a tweet from my friend Kim, the one here.

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That reminded me of a conversation I had a few weeks ago, in which I made a similar argument to a friend when I compared walking to cameraphones. The camera in your phone might not always be the best option to take a picture, but it’s much more likely to be the camera you have on you. Similarly, walking may not always be the most metabolically efficient activity, but it’s one that most of us can nearly always do.

It may not be the sexiest exercise, but it’s accessible as hell. So here’s a bit on why I walk and how I walk, and why you might want to as well. Best case, something in here will be of use to you.

Why You Should Walk

Weight Loss

It’s not hard to find studies on the internet that tout the benefits of walking in terms like “lower mortality” or “greater longevity,” but as far as I’m concerned that all comes back to the single greatest benefit of walking for me: weight loss. As I discussed back in December, my physical condition wasn’t so hot pre-pandemic and had deteriorated to outright problematic by last fall.

Historically, the best and most enjoyable way for me to exercise was running. But when you haven’t run regularly in years and you’ve gotten out of shape in the meantime, getting back on that particular horse can be challenging.

Fortunately for me, while on hiatus from a couch-to-5K program due to a back tweaked while on said couch-to-5K program, I ran into our local walking legend Dean. After a single conversation with him about his experiences walking 10+ miles a day as someone a few decades older than I am, walking went from little more than a mere rehab activity to a primary exercise focus. Shortly after talking to Dean, I Googled for “online activity calorie calculator.” This is what it told me I might expect to burn calorically:

Cycling, moderate pace for 30 minutes: 375 calories
Running, moderate pace for 30 minutes: 675 calories
Swimming, mild pace for 30 minutes: 375 calories

Those aren’t bad, and literally any exercise is better than none. But given the weight I’d added, I was looking for something a little more significant, and the reality of the couch-to-5K programs I was trying to ramp up on was that it’d be a month or more before I’d even work up to 30 minutes of moderate running.

After hearing about Dean’s experiences losing weight via walking, however, I asked the calculator what kind of calories I might burn if I walked for two hours. The answer?

1150 calories. If I could find a third hour in there every so often? The number jumped to 1750 calories.

All of a sudden, walking became a lot more attractive as an option. Now most of the cyclists and runners I know will object, noting that they don’t work out at a moderate pace, they crush their workouts. But particularly when I started all of this, I simply wasn’t in a position to push like that. I was, however, willing and able to walk, and to keep walking.

As it turns out, the calories burned on those long miles pay off. Here’s a line chart of my weight over periods stretching back over a decade. As you can see, I wasn’t in a great place with my weight even before the pandemic hit, but that - and a number of other things going on, it must be said - didn’t help.

It took me just shy of 70 days of walking to get back to my pre-pandemic weight, but that was still too heavy. A hundred days after that, I was lighter than I’d been since 2011. And I’m 15 pounds lighter than that now.

More importantly, walking has become part of my day to day in ways that other exercise routines haven’t, which means that this feels more sustainable. This isn’t some crazy, crash diet sprint I can’t maintain, it’s the accumulation of a few small changes and an exercise I genuinely enjoy.

My current plan is to keep going and see if I can get to my high school / college weight; still a ways to go there. But worst case, if I can do nothing more than hold more or less where I am, that would be an enormous win versus where I was a year ago at this time.

It’s Enjoyable

I am not a morning person. I never have been, and I never will be. I’m just not wired that way, and if I needed more proof my six year old is cut from the same cloth. Getting up at five in the morning, therefore, is not something I do for fun, or even willingly without major justification.

And yet I regularly get up at that unholy hour to go for my walks, because - the 5 AM part aside - I genuinely enjoy it. The only hard part is rolling out of bed; once I’m up, out and walking I’m happy about it. Here are a few reasons why:

It’s meditative, for one. When all you have to do is put one foot in front of the other at a deliberate pace, your mind is free to wander, to process or just to zone out. Walking is a perfect way to temporarily detach from your day.
You can get to know your community better. I’ve gotten to know a bunch of other regulars out on the trails, not to mention their dogs, and they were good dogs. At the same time, they also have gotten to know me. Embarrassingly, I’ve had close to a dozen people that I don’t know other than from the trails stop me to say kind things about my progress losing weight, and to cheer me on. After seven months, one even stopped to show me a “secret” trail that I never would have found otherwise.
You may get to see things you wouldn’t otherwise. Chris Arnade, for example, walks 12 miles a day in cities all over the world and the pictures he’s taken are incredible. While my walking has been strictly local, however, I’ve seen all kinds of things I would otherwise miss, including some incredible sunrises like the one above (good) and a skunk that almost sprayed me (bad).
Lastly, while I could never manage the trick of listening to audiobooks while running - I needed music - I can while I walk, which means that I’ve been absolutely plowing through books.

No Impact

In the interest of full disclosure, “no impact” is a little bit of an exaggeration in my case, since I ended up going down on icy trails and roads this winter several times, breaking a couple of ribs on one occasion. But that was based on some poor choices on my part.

The simple fact is that relative to a number of other exercises, most notably running, walking has next to no impact. Per this study, for example, “Running produces ground reaction forces that are approximately 2.5 times body weight, while the ground reaction force during walking is in the range of 1.2 times body weight.” The cardio benefits of running offset that additional impact, to be sure, but particularly if you’re just getting started or are restarting with a fitness regimen walking is easier on the body. It is, of course, something that a lot of us do every day anyway.

It’s Easy to Scale Up

Not only is walking low impact, it’s inherently easy to scale up or down. You can start slow, and up your pace. You can walk a short distance, or walk a little further. You can also, as I’ve started to do a bit on our trails here, mix walking with running to get a little extra cardio work. It’s inherently flexible and adaptable to whatever you might have on a given day.

How To Start Walking

When you get started walking, the single most important thing - as with any exercise regime - is to start gradually and build yourself up over time. I started by walking across the bridge and back to our house. Then I started walking past the house and back via a nearby trail. Then I added a loop. A route down one side street to a local dock. Another down to the ferry. Then loops on the next next island over. And so on.

This meant two things.

First, my mileage grew in a slow, manageable fashion. I’d walk a route, and when I felt comfortable with it, I’d add some distance. I started out by walking 1.6 miles last October. Over a recent 12 week stretch prior to a week of travel, I averaged a tick over 8 miles per day six days a week.
Second, it means that I can very easily add or subtract distance based on the window of time I have available. I can walk a route as short as a half hour, as long as four or more hours, and anything in between just by manipulating my routes up or down.

A few other quick tips that may help you get started:

Plan: I’ve found it very helpful to map out my week on Sunday nights. I look over my schedule, the weather and - depending on the season - the sunrise/sunset/civil twilight times, and slot in tentative plans for when I’ll be walking each day and for how long. Predetermining the schedule both ensures that I’ve thought through what my windows are for each day, and also helps ensure that I’m not surprised by the days when I have to be up and out early in the dark.
Rest: Walking may be low impact, but I’ve found it beneficial to still build in a day per week where I have no walks planned. If nothing else, it makes me look forward to getting back out on the trail the next day.
Yoga: I get asked about stretching a lot: do I stretch before I walk, after or both? With the caveat that I am absolutely not the person to take advice from on this subject because even playing sports in high school and college I never really stretched, I do not at this point stretch before or after my walks. What I have found success with instead, however, is 15-30 minutes of yoga at night before bed. I’m more flexible today than I was a decade ago, and yoga is the reason why. I don’t know for certain that it’s helped me from getting tight even after three or four hours of walking, but I’d bet it’s a big part of it. Yoga With Adriene is my recommendation if you’re interested in that.
Injuries: When I was in high school, my coaches impressed upon us the difference between being hurt and being injured. While playing contact sports, the reality was that something was going to hurt pretty much all the time. This is also what happens as I’ve gotten older; something, somewhere is probably going to be sore. The trick is distinguishing being hurt from being injured, which is to say a situation in which continued activity might make something worse. This is a hard thing to learn, and it really depends on an individual’s history, tolerance for pain and so on. In my case, I find that when I get sore while walking, more often than not if I just keep walking the pain resolves itself, and usually pretty quickly. Every so often, however, something worse pops up and you have to take care of it. Listen to your body, but not too quickly, if that makes sense.

How to Dress for Walking

Clothes

One of the things I had to adapt to while ramping up my walking, particularly as it grew colder this past fall, was working out the appropriate layers. Running generates enough body heat that even in winter, I used to run in shorts and a long sleeve top. Walking doesn’t generate anywhere near that much heat, and I have the added complication that the bridge I walk across is significantly colder than the rest of the island, so layers - lots of them - were key.

It’s a little more complicated than this depending on windspeed, precipitation and so on, but these are my starting points for different temperature bands:

60 or above: shorts and a t-shirt
50 - 60: pants, t-shirt and a merino 1/4 zip
40 - 50: pants, t-shirt, a merino 1/4 zip and a merino vest
30 - 40: pants, t-shirt, merino vest, merino hoodie, merino hat, merino glove liners
20 - 30: pants, t-shirt, soft shell, merino vest, merino hat, ski gloves
20 or below: pants, t-shirt, soft shell, merino 1/4 zip, merino hat, ski gloves and scarf

You’ll note that there’s a lot of merino in there. I’ve had merino gear for nearly a decade now, and as far as I’m concerned it’s the perfect fabric. It’s lightweight, keeps moisture off of you and is warm in the winter and cool in the summer. I’m in the process of replacing any clothing I can with merino alternatives, right down to my boxers.

My gear comes from a variety of manufacturers: the 1/4 zip and hat come from Minus33, my hoodies and boxers come from Woolx (if you want $20 off anything from there, incidentally, click here) and my vest and glove liners come from Ibex. All of it is good, and I recommend all three companies.

The only thing I’ve found that merino does not deal well with is pet hair, but that’s a small price to pay in my view.

Shoes

With the exception of walks in heavy snow or ice, all of my walks this fall, winter and now spring have been in Hoka’s - specifically the Bondi 7. I’d never even heard of the company, but when I looked up reviews on the best cushioned running shoes Fleet Feet said the Hokas were it.

I like the Hokas so much I’m now on my third set, and I have even gone out and replaced my Salomon hiking boots with a Hoka alternative. They’re heavily cushioned, stable and great for both putting miles in on pavement and even the occasional sprint down single track trails.

Can’t recommend Hoka enough, even if some of the boots look goofy as hell.

Backpack

One of the things I learned to carry early on was a backpack. As you peel layers off, it’s nice to not have to carry them or tie them around your waist. It’ll be handy come summer as well to stash water in. I picked up this cheap, ultralight pack from LL Bean. It weighs next to nothing and does exactly what I need it to do.

Equipment

I’ve never worn crampons regularly before this winter, but then I’d never fallen on an icy trail and broken ribs before either. Now I carry these. They’re a bit of a pain to put on while on a trail, but they do the job nicely.

What’s the Catch?

Walking isn’t all sunshine and unicorns. A couple of the downsides.

Time

By far the biggest catch to walking is the time it requires. With other exercises, you hit it for a half hour or an hour, and get back to your day. Walking, at least if you want it to be comparable calorically, simply takes more time because it’s much less metabolically efficient. In my case, it hasn’t been too hard to find windows because my commute for the last year and a half has not been a half hour down to Portland and a half hour back up, but the ten seconds it takes for me to walk downstairs. Between that reclaimed hour and an hour for lunch, that’s all the time I need to walk around seven to eight miles.

Still, while all of our schedules at RedMonk are flexible, they are very, very full these days. When I can’t find that window during the day, then, I have to resort to alternative tactics.

Go Before Everyone Wakes Up: As mentioned above, if I’m out the door a bit after 5 AM, I can get two hours in and be back in time to wake up my daughter for kindergarten at the usual time of 7:20 AM. This is admittedly easier in the spring when it’s light out and the weather is clear than the middle of winter when it’s dark and you can’t see the ice, but you do what you have to.
Break up the Walk: Don’t have two hours? Take an hour in one window and an hour in another. Or four half hour chunks. Whatever works.
Work While You Walk: This is a staple of mine particularly for longer 2.5-3 hour walks. I almost never have those kinds of windows during a weekday; but I do frequently have listen-only multi-analyst briefings, conference talks I need to catch up on and so on. I can’t really engage, because of wind noise if nothing else, but I can absolutely listen to a briefing while walking.
Offset Work: If all else fails, sometimes I can trade work hours for evening hours. I try not to do this too much because it was an unhealthy if necessary habit during the period of the pandemic where my daughter was home full time, but every so often it’s my only option. I go for a walk during the day, and write - or do whatever else was on my plate - at night, after everyone else has gone to bed.

The point is that there’s usually a way to find time. It might be more or it might be less depending on your situation, but generally where there’s a will there’s a way.

It is inarguable that walking is expensive in terms of your time, but it’s a cost well worth paying at least in my case.

Weather

Maybe it’s hot where you live. For me that happens, but it’s neither common nor excessive. My problem at least over the winter months is ice, and more specifically falling because of ice. The first time this happened was a shock; by the fifth or tenth time, I had the process down. Or thought so until I broke my ribs. After which point I bought crampons, which brings me to the point here: prepare for whatever your climate brings. If it’s hot, dress accordingly. If it’s cold, layers are your friend. If it’s ice, get crampons. And if it’s really, really cold rain, do what you can, and make sure to wear a raincoat that has not delaminated like the one I wore for too long, but be prepared that you’re probably just going to be really, really cold.

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VO2 Max

Walking has had a major impact on my weight loss, but its effect on my overall cardio health was more muted. My VO2 max - even as measured imperfectly by an Apple Watch - has ticked up to the point that I am now technically “above average,” but the above part is literally by 0.1. So the “above” is a little bit of an exaggeration. Plan on finding higher intensity exercises, then, to augment your walking approach if cardio health is a priority.

Safety

Walking can be dangerous depending on where you live - certainly it was for Stephen King in this very state. Maybe it’s the neighborhood, maybe it’s the weather or maybe it’s the wildlife. Walking is safer statistically than some other fitness options, but it’s not risk free. A few suggestions:

Walk Against Traffic: I’m always surprised when people don’t do this, but it’s surprisingly common. If you’re walking around cars, and the sidewalk isn’t an option, proceed against the flow of traffic so you can see the cars ahead of you and get off the road if necessary. Which reminds me:
Mind Your Surroundings: It’s sometimes good that walking is meditative, but not always. My biggest issue in this regard was zoning out and missing the presence of black ice this winter - but after a couple of hard, painful falls, I got a lot more attentive.
Don’t Freak Other People Out: I’m not that small of a person, I’m a guy, a lot of my winter attire is black and up until a couple of weeks ago, I had an often crazy beard. All of which is to say that my sudden appearance on back trails frequently elicited emotions like alarm from other users of the trail systems, particularly women on their own. Especially the time I hadn’t realized that my nose had started bleeding and crusted half my face and beard over with blood. It’s gotten better over time at least with the regulars as they’re used to seeing me, but I haven’t yet figured out how to convince new people that I’m just trying to get my work in. What I do, however, for their safety as well as my own - particularly if they have dogs - is smile, steer well clear of them, move slowly but steadily on my way. It always hurts my heart to know that people are, even temporarily, frightened of me, but that is unfortunately the world we live in. All I can do is try not to make it worse.

Boredom

The Arnade piece linked to above mentions boredom as a real problem, but to be honest I am never bored. I’ve been walking variations of the same paths on the island here six days a week for months, and I can’t say that I’ve ever been bored. Probably part of that is that we live in a beautiful place, but honestly I think it’s the combination of distractions - be those in audiobook, conference talks or other forms - and the purely meditative nature of walking for me. Your mileage may vary here, however, so consider options for keeping yourself entertained.

The Net

All of the above is probably more than you ever wanted to know about walking, but if by some odd chance I missed a question you have post it here and I’ll answer it if I can.

This piece will obviously be less relevant for those of you with fitness routines that already work for you, but for those of you without that, all I can tell you is that in my life so far, there’s a before walking phase and an after walking phase, and that I’m a lot healthier in the after.

If you’re looking to get healthier yourself, you might give walking a try.

Remembering My Dad

Sun, 03 Apr 2022 12:00:37 -0400

A little more than a year after he died, our family came together yesterday to remember my Dad. It was wonderful to see so many friends and family, some for the first time in a decade or more. For those of you that would have liked to attend but were unable, the following was the eulogy I delivered, as best I was able, at the service itself.

Years ago, when my brother and his wife got married, I was seated in the front row at the church with the rest of the groomsmen. My parents were sitting in the pew directly behind me. A couple of minutes into the ceremony, I heard some sniffling, then a couple of barely suppressed sobs.

I turned around to tell my Mom to pull herself together only to discover that my Mom was just fine. My Dad, however, who I maybe saw cry four or five times as a kid, was nearly bawling. And this, after yelling at my Mom the night before because she fell apart at the rehearsal.

And for anyone inclined to doubt that story, I encourage you to swing by the reception after the service – we have pictures.

Anyway, I’m bringing this story up now for two reasons. First, because I generally don’t like reading from scripts and never do this when I have to give a talk for work. I hope you’ll all bear with me, however, as I don’t believe that I have much of a choice due to the second reason, which is that I’m very likely to have a “Dad at Nick’s wedding” style breakdown momentarily.

My brother will talk to you about who my Dad was, and he’ll do that better than I could have. I would speak to you instead of what my Dad would want you - all of you - to know. What he would want you to remember, and to be.

For a guy just shy of six feet, my Dad seemed like a literal giant as a kid. We grew up on stories of his adventures - the postcards home from Swiss Scouts talking about my Uncle Jeff swimming naked or one of his fellow scouts falling down a chimney (but not to tell his parents) were particularly entertaining. It all became the stuff of legends. As did the stories of his freak athleticism - how many people - ever - have broken their dominant wrist, trained themselves to play tennis with their off hand, and made the state semi-finals? The businesses he ran, the rare stories he’d tell from his time in the service - all of it - turned my Dad into an almost mythical character.

Honestly, the man even had a bull whip like Indiana Jones that he picked up at a scout jamboree. It was almost too on the nose.

As the years rolled by and I became yet another surly teenager, my Dad was reduced for a time from hero status to that of a mere man. I focused on what my Dad couldn’t do, or perhaps more accurately what I thought he couldn’t do, and ignored what he could.

Eventually I grew up. I had jobs. I ended up running a business of my own. I paid taxes. I had relationships, then a marriage, then a child of my own. I had to think about bills and revenue and houses and schools and tuition and what I wanted to pass on to my daughter. And I understood how hard all of that could be. How tiring.

And I understood something else: that my father did all of the above, and still found the time to coach both my brother and I in two sports. And serve on town committees. And his church.

When he retired, I used to joke with him that he was the world’s worst retired person, because he couldn’t simply be content and play golf every day, or learn to fish. Instead he became active in the local schools, the local church, the local town, the local food truck and even the local fire department.

The first thing that my Dad would tell you, then - never, ever explicitly, as that was not his way, but strictly by his own example - is this: be of service.

I never really thought about it when I was younger, but looking back it’s remarkable how many of my family’s significant moments were narrated to me by my Dad. For my cousins who are here today: each and every time one of you got into my college, it was my Dad who shared the good news with me. Same with your engagements. For my aunts and uncles, your new jobs. Whether the news was good or whether the news was bad, my Dad made sure I knew what was going on with my family.

He absolutely hated to talk about himself, but he certainly loved to talk about all of you and how well you were doing. He did that because he loved his family, and because he was proud of his family - most of all, of course, his grandchildren.

He also loved the people his family considered family. He understood, for example, that my best friend, who had the misfortune of booking a vacation for his own family in the Caymans the week before we picked today as the date for his service, was family to me. And so my Dad treated him like family and asked after him the way he would about family - which backfired, unfortunately for him, the time he came home with me for Thanksgiving and my Mom had one of her rare but spectacular cooking misfires with an experimental pumpkin soup served in an actual pumpkin.

But maybe the best example is our wives. He adored you both, and would have done anything for the both of you. He loved the families he indirectly joined. There’s a reason those families are here today, and there’s a reason my Mom insisted that they sit in the family section. It’s because my Dad would have insisted on it.

The second thing my Dad would tell you, then, would be to cherish your family - both the family you’re born to and the family you choose.

After my Dad died, some of my first thoughts were two things.

First, the time that I drove a golf cart into a service ditch full of goose excrement with his mother sitting next to me. On the way home he was apoplectic and swore “we will never laugh about this.”

We laugh about it still, as my aunts, uncles and cousins can confirm for you at the reception.

The second thing that came to me was much less memorable, just a random morning from a couple of years ago. My daughter Eleanor had had a string of ear infections, and woke up with a fever and couldn’t go to daycare on a day when both Kate and myself had work obligations that would be difficult to reschedule. I called my parents - forty five minutes up the road - with no warning, and out of desperation, but reconciling myself to the likelihood that they would have had something else going on, busy as they both were.

I needn’t have worried, because my Dad said what he always said, “No problem. We’ll be on the road in ten.”

I honestly could not count the number of times he - and my Mom - both have bailed me out.

“Dad, I need you to pick up a thousand pounds of crushed rock.”
“Dad, I have three sheets of plywood waiting at Home Depot.”
“Dad, I need help moving.”
“Dad, I need a place to live while we get this business off the ground.”
“Dad, I need you to rent a wood chipper and help me get rid of this massive brushpile.”

And, my personal favorite:

“Dad, Eleanor’s vomiting everywhere but I’m in San Francisco and can’t get home until tomorrow: can you and Mom help Kate?”

When the news broke that he’d died, there were dozens of stories of my Dad making an introduction, getting people a job, talking them out of bad jobs, mentoring them as they progressed through their careers. There were all the kids he coached, telling us that they were passing on the lessons he taught them to their own kids or the teams they coached.

He never did any of this with a thought of reward. He would brush off any gestures of gratitude. Thanks, likewise, were unnecessary. He helped because he could help. That was it, and he didn’t think any more about it.

There are hundreds of other things that my Dad might have told you today, but the last thing I’ll leave you with, then, is that it’s not about you, it’s about being there when the people you love – particularly your family - need you.

He was always there for me, and I’ll miss him.

Goodbye, Dad, and thank you.

My 2021 in Pictures

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 21:09:44 -0500

It’s funny now, but there was a time when we all thought 2021 would kick off the new roaring twenties. Instead, we left it much as we did 2020 - meek, frightened and exhausted. The initial shocking efficacy of the vaccines and the incredible, unprecedented speed of their development led many to hope in the spring that the light at the end of the tunnel was finally in view.

As it turned out, that light was the train called Delta which plowed through all of our tentative, carefully laid plans to get back to a world that looked, well - maybe not normal but normal-adjacent - like a runaway freight car. And just when it looked like the Delta train was done rolling through the station and we could once again move forward, along came another bigger, faster one called Omicron that the epidemiological math says is worse than the measles and had countries dusting off their discarded lockdown policies and kids back in masks at schools.

But for all that 2021 was underwhelming at its best and tragic, awful and spitefully brutal at its worst, I remain grateful because it got me to 2022. It also, with one crushing exception, got my family and friends here. Given the state of the world the last year, and the decade that was March 2020 before that, that’s about all I can ask. For all that the world these days might look grim and dark around me, being here inarguably beats the alternative.

Last year, I debated whether or not to do this sort of year in pictures post. This year I didn’t think about it much, because if I could do it last year, I could do it this year - and I felt like I should.

So as always, these are the moments – significant at times but mostly not – that characterized my year personally. Blessedly, with but a few exceptions, there are no politics in here because I don’t have pictures of it. Before we get to the pictures, however, a quick check-in on travel.

Travel

Where I traveled in 2021

The tl;dr version of the travel section is that there was none. Or very little. I had desperately hoped that 2020 was the last year I’d go without seeing my best friend who lives in Colorado. It was not. Here’s hoping 2022’s the charm in that regard.

For the second consecutive year, we didn’t leave the state, though we were fortunate to see some friends who left their state to come visit ours. We played it safe and cautious for another year because Eleanor was ineligible for vaccination for the bulk of it and thus unprotected. We played it safe to the extent that I got offered Red Sox playoff tickets - twice - and turned both of the very kind offers down.

These would have been my seats for the second game.

ALCS Game 3

The Red Sox - in the form of the maligned-at-the-time deadline pickup Kyle Schwarber - would hit a grand slam in the second en route to a 12-3 win. I promise that I will recover from missing this game.

Someday.

Anyway, there was one positive development travel-wise. While I did not leave the Great State of Maine, that dot at the top of the map up above, the one north of Farmington and Skowhegan marks the return of a tradition that had taken a hiatus due in part to COVID and in part to our move. But we’ll get to that.

With that, on to the pictures.

January 1

Kicked off the New Year with a lazy day in our PJs.

January 2

Took advantage of the holiday break to continue getting the shop set up, this time with a wall-mount for my drill/driver set.

January 6

today is a stain on the United States of America that can never be removed, and one of the darkest days of my lifetime
— steve o'grady (@sogrady) January 6, 2021

Will never forget this day, sadly.

January 8

Literally counting the days until the vaccines’ arrival.

January 8

Cranked out an exceedingly poorly crafted outfeed table for the shop.

January 17

My reboot began.

January 20

Joe Biden sworn in. There was only one suitable beer to celebrate with.

January 25

Received the worst two telephone calls of my life. The first was my Mom, letting me know that my Dad was en route to the hospital and that it didn’t look good. The second, an hour later, confirmed that he had died on the way and that they had not been able to resuscitate him.

I fell apart. Did my best to pull myself back together. That night, I watched one of his favorite movies, a movie he had watched with my brother and I over and over when we were kids.

I miss him every day, but carry what he taught me and am doing my best to pass it on.

January 30

With my Dad gone, my parent’s house was too much for my Mom to manage on her own, so my brother and I began the process of helping prep her house for sale. I did what was needed on the ground, he took care of the harder, finance related questions.

February 1

Speaking of my brother, bless him, he sold my Dad’s truck remotely. Because of parts shortages the vehicle market was so bonkers it sold for better than twice what I’d hoped for.

February 5

Started down the rabbit hole of DSLR-as-webcam, which as an aside, you should never do.

February 12

Per usual, got some help loading the woodshed.

February 19

My birthday present made its debut a couple of days early.

February 20

Celebrated my birthday with Hearts. As is right and proper.

February 24

RedMonk shut down for the morning to watch one of the six year old’s favorite people absolutely smoke her dissertation defense.

March 1

We watched the first spring training game together, per tradition.

March 6

It took her less than five minutes to learn to skate better than I can.

March 18

After your kid’s been out of school for hundreds of days, you have to get creative.

March 19

Got an absolutely incredible, wildly over-the-top care package from an old friend I hadn’t talked to in far too long to cheer us up after my Dad’s death. One of my gifts - a print of my Dad and I - left me in tears. All of Eleanor’s, however, were a huge hit, not least of which the pictured squid.

In case that friend is reading this right now, as I know she checks in from time to time: thank you. I will literally never be able to communicate how touched we all were. Are.

March 20

First roof off day of the year.

March 27

Having never tried to repair audio gear before, I was mildly shocked to have successfully swapped out a broken woofer on my twenty-two year old HSU Research subwoofer. This seemed like an excellent improvement to the home theater setup until I cranked it up and discovered that it could be felt two floors up and at the opposite end of the house which made people not watching what I was watching rather unhappy.

April 2

Opening Day. At last.

April 8

Dose 1 for me. If social distancing wasn’t the rule, I would have been running around high-fiving random strangers. Thank you science.

April 10

Continued to help my Mom get ready to move.

April 30

Dose 2.

May 14

For a brief moment in time, I felt invincible.

May 26

With our oil burning furnace nearing the end of its lifespan, and afraid that if it went we’d be out of luck due to supply chain issues, we decided to bite the bullet and preemptively replace it with heat pumps.

So far, so good.

June 1

Went through box after box of things of mine that had been stored in my parents’ basement. All of my childhood and high school memorabilia. Some of my early work documentation. Remote control cars. Several dead mice.
Some real gems emerged.

June 15

Emboldened by the vaccines, I did my first meetup with the Maine tech community since the pandemic had broken out.

June 17

Tough to beat a lake house with friends.

June 20

First day of summer means only one thing.

June 21

This table - the top of it, anyway - has been in our family dating back to colonial times. Now it lives with us for the next generation of O’Grady’s.

June 25

It was Hadlock Field rather than Fenway, but this is the first time I’d been at a ballpark of any size in, what, years? My longest drought probably since I was in college.

July 3

Every July 3rd, I pay my respects, as my parents taught me.

July 4

4th. Fireworks. Friends. No masks. Life was good.

July 16

The actual move was a slow moving disaster because her buyers’ shitty realtor who almost blew everything up at the last minute due incomplete financing on their part, but my Mom managed to sell and get into her smaller, more manageable house thanks in large part to her realtor, who is incredible.

July 26

Took a ride up to Boothbay to see the trolls.

August 6

For the first time in a decade or more I didn’t make it up to my happy place last year, but I made sure to remedy this last summer. The water level was a little lower, the temperature a little warmer, but otherwise all was as I remembered it.

August 21

This was supposed to arrive a lot earlier to provide us with some distractions while she was out of school, but better late than never.

September 7

After 543 days of being out of daycare / pre-K, we had ourselves a kindergartner. It’s been a fantastic development for everyone involved.

September 21

Between the climate change-driven increase in violent weather and the fact that we live on an island, one of our top priorities after moving in was a standby generator. Step 1 began on the 21st. The good news is that the guy we had come dig the trench called DigSafe first. The bad news is that the DigSafe guys missed the cable that provided our internet, which it turns out doesn’t like backhoes much.

It turns out it’s a little challenging to work from home with no internet.

October 7

There was no Monktoberfest, sadly, but seeing a bunch of Monktoberfest people - in person - was the next best thing.

October 17

It took a month and a hell of a lot of wrangling between three different vendors - just finding a propane company willing to service a generator only account was an ordeal - but the generator finally went live.

October 29

Boosted.

October 31

There is no small island on this planet that has more Halloween gear than this one, I guarantee it.

November 9

Dose 1. Hallelujah.

November 13

It was a lot closer than it needed to be, but the good guys pulled it out in the end.

November 24

First time I’ve seen these nephews in something like two years.

November 30

Birthday girl.

December 1

Happy bday - here’s your second shot.

December 5

This indoor birthday party was brought to you by at home rapid tests.
Unrelated, the decision to switch from the giant wooden pole to the foam bat was a good one. The piñata was a tank.

December 12

Sections of the grout were coming up, so I regrouted them. The new grout held for approximately one week.

December 19

Wasn’t much, but technically qualified as the first plowable snow of the season, which meant the debut of our battery powered snowblower (it did just fine).

December 31

Nothing fancy, but closed out the year in fine style with sushi, quality beverages, Hearts and friends - again, thanks to testing.

The Reboot

Wed, 15 Dec 2021 23:46:34 -0500

I was taught from an early age that as bad as a given situation might be, things can always be worse. This was deeply engrained in me during my formative years, and that attitude is second nature in our family. On the occasions when we call each other with bad news, for example, the custom has always been to preface it with “well, the good news is that I don’t have cancer.”

On the one hand, this training has served me well over the years. It’s helped me maintain my perspective during periods that might otherwise have capsized me, and it’s been a reminder to appreciate what was still good in my life when things looked bleak. On the other, this is an approach that can obscure the fact that while things could be worse they, at times, could certainly be better.

Case in point was my health and fitness entering 2021. I’d successfully avoided COVID thanks to strict protocols and the privilege that allowed me to follow them. This was, inarguably, something to be appreciated: things could most certainly be worse. That enormous win aside, the trajectory of my health otherwise was headed south and picking up speed.

There were a lot of reasons for this. The pandemic took its toll on me, of course, as it did on everyone. The weight of living in isolation, holed up to protect ourselves from an invisible enemy that neither science nor our immune systems had ever seen before was bad. Adding to that load was suddenly losing half my workday to become a part time pre-K teacher as we pulled our daughter from school for 543 days. Spending that much more time with her was an incredible gift, of course, but came at the cost of pushing half my work hours into the evening, which in turn led to a serious case of revenge bedtime procrastination and very, very late nights as I’ll get to.

But it wasn’t just the pandemic, though that made everything else harder. Some of the other challenges were mundane in nature, merely physically taxing. We had to prepare our house to move in three weeks when it should have taken three months, for example, and I ended up having to do a lot of the literal heavy lifting on my own because Kate’s work blew up thanks to COVID and she ended up working 80 hour weeks. From trip after trip to storage units late into the night to blazing afternoons with a belt sander on our deck during the hottest month in Portland’s history, moving was at once the best thing we’ve done in a decade and yet deeply traumatic. And not just because of the torn rib cage muscle.

The month before COVID ignited here in the US, meanwhile, my Dad began chemotherapy to treat an aggressive case of mesothelioma. I was only able to go with him for the first few sessions; after that, he had to go alone because they admitted patients only - thanks, again, to COVID. When I visited him and my Mom between treatments, it was almost always at a distance - on their deck if it wasn’t too hot or cold, in their garage if it was. I was able to hug my father but a handful of times during his treatment, and less than a year later he was gone.

And of course all of the above played out against the backdrop of the worst President this country has ever seen tearing through guardrail after guardrail en route to damaging, perhaps permanently, the country that I love but had lamentably taken for granted. I never thought we’d see another Nixon; instead, impossibly, we got someone worse.

Recounting all of this may sound like I’m making excuses for where I was, but I’m not. Countless people, for instance, saw their newfound ability to work from home as an opportunity to get into better shape while I, instead, ended up in a flat spin. Handed an unfortunate combination of circumstances, my job was to adapt and take advantage. I failed.

But that failure, fortunately enough, did not have to be permanent. As the man once said, “it’s not how you start; it’s how you finish.”

If I was going to have a better finish, however, clearly something had to change. Several somethings, actually.

The issues facing me were numerous. My physical activity level had cratered, my sleep patterns were a mess, my diet had declined, I wasn’t drinking more on a daily basis but I was drinking more often, my blood pressure and resting heart rates were up and various more specific measures of cardio fitness like my VO2 max were miserable.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that after an extensive and almost completely unplanned reboot, I still have a long way to go but I’m slowly and steadily getting back on track. It took me sixty-one days, but I got back down to my pre-pandemic weight two weeks ago, which is a good start. My weight was up even before the pandemic started so I’ve got more yet to lose, but I continue to chip away. My blood pressure and resting heart rates are down, and the latter’s the best it’s been in a number of years. I’m getting more consistent sleep, and I’m down to drinks two to three days a week. As for my VO2 max, well, it still sucks but I’ve got an idea about that.

Just as it may have seemed like I was making excuses for the physical tailspin I’d found myself in, it seems possible that claims of pulling myself out of it - or, more accurately, starting to - might come across as a humblebrag. For whatever it’s worth, I assure you it’s nothing of the sort. All I’ve done so far is undo some of the damage of the last two years: there’s a lot more work to be done.

More to the point, a couple of weeks ago, one day after I set a personal record for my longest walk (we’ll get to that), my best friend ran 48 miles. At altitude. Losing weight I never should have gained in the first place, walking a few miles or getting my resting heart rate back to reasonable fitness levels is nothing to brag about.

The purpose of talking about all of this publicly - which isn’t particularly comfortable, is on the off chance that relating my own experience gives someone else who’s gotten off track some ideas, or maybe a nudge to course correct and get themselves headed back in the right direction. I’ve learned firsthand how inspiring other people’s experiences can be, as I’ll get to shortly.

Anyway, the logical question is what I’ve been doing differently. The answer is a number of things. One thing was clear early on: if I tried too hard to plan big things, it wasn’t going to work. Frankly if I’d thought about it much, I almost certainly would have fucked it up.

Instead I focused on baby steps, or an “incremental path to victory” as we might put it at work. The first of which was yoga, which is somewhat shocking given that even at my peak physical condition in high school or college I was about as flexible as a piece of cast iron.

Yoga

Per YouTube’s history, at 9:34 PM on January 17th, 2021, I searched for “yoga with adriene 30 days.” Looking back, that might be where things started. I certainly didn’t think of it in those terms, yoga was just something small that I could do. While my exposure to yoga was minimal and what experience I’d had suggested that I was bad at it, it made sense for two reasons. First, it was physical activity that seemed more accessible and sustainable than, say, online HIIT workouts. And second, I hoped it would pay dividends with improved flexibility, which has only become more of an issue as I’ve gotten older.

Both of those assumptions, as it turned out, have been born out. With maybe half a dozen exceptions, I’ve practiced yoga every day since that night. I’ve gone through every 30 day Yoga with Adriene program there is (one twice), a specialized gravity yoga course for tight hips and of late have focused on yoga for my back (see below). To be clear, I’m still absolutely terrible at yoga. But while I remain comically inflexible, I’ve made enough progress that I can now at least sit cross-legged on the floor or touch my toes. Accomplishments that my six year old daughter would laugh at, of course, and appropriately so, but basics I was just too stiff for for years.

But while yoga was a fantastic addition, I wanted to kill two birds with one stone and ramp back up to some cardio work while physically getting outside more. Enter walking.

Walking

My initial efforts at cardio focused on running. If you’ve only known me in recent years, this will come as a surprise, but I used to run a lot and reasonably well over longer distances. But over the years, I gradually fell out of the habit. To the point where it’s probably been three or four years since I’ve run a mile in less than ten minutes.

Trying to get back into the habit, I had three problems:

Being out of shape, the added weight and lack of recent physical activity meant that I kept getting nagging injuries even when easing back in via the various “Couch-to-5K” programs. Nothing major, but just enough to be discouraging and stall my progress.
Getting back into running was also frustrating psychologically. Intellectually I understood that between age and inactivity, I couldn’t just roll out of bed and perform as I used to. But part of me expected to, and that was irritating.
Perhaps most importantly, however, I wanted physical activity to not to be my primary engine for weight loss but to contribute to it, and given the ramp time of the Couch-to-5K programs it’d be months, potentially, before I’d be running for long enough periods to see any material caloric impacts.

After tweaking my back during one of these running programs, then, and putting it on pause for fear of doing more serious damage, I decided that while I was healing I could at least get myself outside and rehab by walking a bit. I started just walking across the bridge to the island we live on and back to the house. It’s a little over a mile, so it was both quick (and beautiful).

Enjoying those walks, I gradually tacked on another half mile. Then another mile. Then two. But even as my distances increased I didn’t take walking seriously as part of a fitness routine until I met an older gentleman named Dean. I mentioned above that it’s surprising how someone relating their experiences can be inspiring, but that’s exactly what happened.

Everyone on the island knows Dean, both because he’s out walking every day and because he gives every car that passes a big, exaggerated wave and a smile. That and the fact that he clearly walked serious distances as you’d see him all over town was all I knew of the man.

Then he stopped me while I was out on one of my rehab walks.

When I first started walking, Dean and I would pass each other occasionally. He’d smile and wave, I’d nod and wave back and we’d go on about our business. After this happened a couple of times, however, he must have decided that I was becoming a regular and he slowed and stopped in front of me. He asked me where I was walking, how far, and pulled out his phone to give me suggestions for new trails to try. He talked about his own routes, and the difference walking had made in his own fitness. When we parted, now as acquainted fellow walkers, it felt almost like I’d been inducted into an exclusive, private club. More importantly for my purposes, however, I came away from that conversation with two important facts. First, that walking had helped him lose weight, and second that as someone who was probably two decades my senior, he was averaging 10.6 miles per day - and sometimes exceeded that significantly.

All of a sudden I stopped thinking of walking as merely something to resort to when I was unable to run. After that one brief conversation, which could not have come at a better time for me, walking was elevated to the status of legitimate exercise option. It was low impact enough that I could sustain it without injury (with the exception of an intermittently sore lower back due to my shitty posture), and it could contribute to weight loss provided one was willing to walk for distance. Which I was.

From Halloween on, then, I’ve been slowly increasing my mileage and I’m now averaging something like 40 miles a week, with one day off. I’m a far cry from Dean’s daily pace, admittedly, but to be fair he’s retired and the master of his schedule and I am neither.

Best case, I’ll get back to some running as my overall fitness improves. I know for a fact the ability is still in there because of the Olympic-level sprint I managed a couple of weeks back when I was out for a walk and saw a skunk lift its tail at me in what seemed like slow motion. But in the meantime this is something that I can do on a sustainable basis that is pleasant, gets me outside, delivers results and can even be incorporated into my workday if I have listen only calls, conference talks to catch up on or even just need to think through a piece I’m writing. I don’t have much hope, probably, of being the most famous Stephen in the state that enjoys walking, but I can live with that.

Few physical activities short of ultramarathons or the Iditarod are going to burn enough calories to drop weight if your diet is poor, however, which brings me to food.

Diet

Sadly, with one minor exception, I have no shocking diet tips or secrets to reveal. I’ve lost weight for the most part simply because I’m eating less. Many in the tech industry swear by keto or other nutrition hacking approaches, and more power to you if you’ve found something that works for you, but those have never held much appeal to me. The closest I come to these kinds of things is intermittent fasting, but that’s not deliberate on my part. To the extent that I practice something like that, it’s purely a function of the fact that we tend to eat dinner at six because we have a kindergartner and I haven’t eaten breakfast regularly since I was a kid.

The one minor exception I mentioned above is the Line Diet. I first encountered it via Rafe Colburn, but his site seems like it’s offline so here’s a piece from Jeremy Zawodny explaining the concept - though I never used the five day rolling average he mentions. Conceptually, it couldn’t be simpler: you enter a starting weight, a target weight and a target date. The spreadsheet (or iOS apps, search for line diet in the App Store) will then draw a line between those points and give you a weight you have to hit to stay on course. If you’re under your daily weight, you don’t need to do anything special. If you’ve over the weight, you eat light.

There’s no magic to it, but I’ve used this to successfully lose weight a couple of times in the past and it’s working well this time. It works, at least for me, because it’s an accountability mechanism. If you’re thinking about having a late night snack, for example, it forces you to consider what impact that might have on your weight tomorrow, and thus what you’ll be able to eat. It might not be the approach for everyone, but it’s what has worked for me in the past and what is working for me now. For whatever that’s worth.

One other thing I’ll mention is that I’m not rigid in my rules. Technically I don’t have “cheat days” in the way that some diets allow, but you’ll notice a pattern to the average amount of weight I lose - or don’t - per day of the week.

That’s not an accident. I’ve found that my approach is easier to sustain longer term if I allow myself the occasional indulgence on weekends. For me, as long as the overall trajectory is headed in the direction I need it to be I’m fine.

Last but not least, one thing to think about with weight loss is sleep.

Sleep

If you Google “poor sleep weight gain,” you’ll find dozens of pages of search results discussing the correlation been poor sleep and weight gain. Which intuitively makes sense; if you’re tired, your decision making suffers, your self-discipline is impaired and you may feel a need to make up for the sleep-induced lack of energy artificially via food or drink.

Basically what this meant for me was that I was fighting weight gain with one arm tied around my back, because my sleep habits were an absolute disaster.

I’ve always been a night owl, and if I needed any further proof of that there’s the fact that while some people’s kids are out cold at 6 there are nights where I’m pleading with mine to get the hell to sleep at 9:30. But being a night owl is one thing. Burning the candle at both ends, as I was, just isn’t sustainable or advisable.

First, I was going to sleep too late. This is a chart of the hours at which I went to sleep since 2015 (with the exception of a couple of years for which I don’t have data). As an aside, I got the idea for these charts (and a bunch of the code) from the post here.

It’s fine to go to bed at 1 AM or 2 AM if you can sleep late the next day. But I have a six year old, and you generally don’t get to sleep late with six year olds - even six year olds that are night owls. So I wasn’t getting to sleep late.

While both of these charts are a bit misleading because they include the sleepless nights of a new parent and odd sleep patterns from the days when I was traveling, what the one above says plainly is that the majority of the time I don’t get even 400 minutes of sleep, which is a tick over six and a half hours.

Now I don’t need or frankly function well on a lot of sleep - seven hours is about the most I can handle without feeling paradoxically fatigued when I get up the next day. And I can technically function on five or even fewer hours, if necessary. But constantly getting less than six hours night after night was just not helping.

Now, instead of working nights or tinkering on pet projects (like the above charts) while absentmindedly having the 80’s movies I grew up on in the background, I’ve taken to heading to bed hours earlier and reading on my Kindle. As Craig Calcaterra describes below, I’d fallen out of the reading habit and am trying to be deliberate about getting back into it. It’s early days, but the results so far are promising.

Reading at night has the twin benefits of being a more worthwhile way to spend my time than checking Twitter for the hundred time that day or watching a movie for the fiftieth time and being an act that hastens rather than delays the onset of sleep as my laptop or phone would. More reading and more sleep are a virtuous rather than vicious cycle, and the additional sleep has a tangible impact on my overall health.

That’s it for the major changes, at least at this point. There are two other minor things to mention.

Other Things

Apart from yoga, I’ve mostly neglected my strength training since I stopped going to my trainer at the beginning of the pandemic. Recently, however, I’ve begun to start back up there as well. As with the above, I haven’t done anything fancy - mostly just the tried and true pushups with some upper-body bodyweight work via our TRX. I’ll post back here when or if that expands.
While a range of my health metrics from BP to heart rate have improved, my VO2 max has not as mentioned above. A big part of the issue is that my normal walking routes rarely spike my heart rate beyond 130 bpm or so, and that only for brief periods. To remedy this, I’m planning on introducing some basic jump rope work. I did a lot of rope work in high school and college as part of my training for other sports, and if done well it can get the heart rate up even if done only for brief periods. We’ll see what, if any, impact it has on my other cardio metrics, but it’s worth a shot.

The Net

If you’ve read this far, you either have too much time on your hands, we’re related or you’re looking for something. The best advice I can leave you with is this: if I can make these changes, you can too. Maybe not all at once, but the journey of a thousand steps and all that.

As Arthur Ashe put it, “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”

Good luck.

543 Days

Tue, 07 Sep 2021 20:04:44 -0400

543 days ago we pulled this kid out of daycare as the outbreak picked up steam and shut huge swaths of the country down. She has not been back in a classroom until today.

Over that span, Kate and I have done the best we could to teach her, to play with her and to challenge her - even as the two of us have also been working full time jobs. Jobs that - at least in Kate’s case - were made far more challenging by the pandemic.

Restricted to half day shifts, a lot of my clients got used to email arriving well after midnight. And unsurprisingly, a lot of the rules we lived by as a family pre-pandemic - no TV or movies during the week, for example - were suspended as we struggled to balance childcare with our professional responsibilities. This was particularly true in the pre-vaccine world where we were often isolated from family and friends that might otherwise have been available to lend a hand. For large stretches there, we were on our own.

Net net, I know a lot more about the Octonauts than I ever expected to.

While this time has been taxing, I have tried to appreciate the unexpected opportunity to spend more time with my kid than I ever could have in the pre-pandemic world. I got to spend hours watching her learn to ride a bike, to read, and to devise ever more complicated games that I then got chastised for not knowing how to play in spite of the fact that she never explained the rules to me.

Due in large part to selfishness and ignorance, we’re not where we might have been as a country. I have no idea how long she’ll be able to remain in school, and I remain terribly conflicted about sending her in spite our community’s excellent vaccination rate. I’m grateful, though, that for however long it is she at least has some opportunity to be with all of her peers, because that’s the one thing we could never duplicate that every child needs.

I’m also grateful for the help and assistance we’ve gotten from our friends, family and coworkers. From the pod friends following the same protocols we did who took her in for periods in the early days to the grandparents that have been only too happy to tag in post-vaccination to the aunts, uncles and cousins who’ve babysat her over this summer to my colleagues who’ve put up with almost two years of limited and unpredictable availability from me, we could not have done this without all of you. Same to distant friends - shout out, Colorado - that have kept me sane over these last seventeen months.

Most of all, though, I’m proud of this kid. The pandemic has reshaped all of our lives, and given her formative stage I worried in the initial days of the pandemic that it would damage her irreparably. Instead, she has shown adaptability, a positive attitude and an undiminished desire to dunk on her dad at every opportunity.

If anything, this period has made her tougher and more resilient. It’s a truly awful way for her to have to learn these lessons, but if this is all we can salvage from it, it’s something.

I’m proud of you, Little Bear.

Goodbye to All That

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 00:08:19 -0400

ME: *“So I saw the property.*MOM: *“And?"*ME: *“I have good news and I have bad news."*MOM: *“What’s the bad news?"*ME: “The bad news is that it’s an absolute shithole.”

So went the first conversation the O’Grady family ever had about what would become the O’Grady family property in Maine, for a time.

That exchange happened a little over twenty years ago. I was just outside of Portland on I-295, speeding back to my apartment in Southie. Back in those days, before I moved up here, I didn’t get much coverage north of Maine’s largest city.

As the geographically closest family member, I’d been dispatched by my parents to Georgetown, ME to look at a potential piece of property they were considering as a place to retire. So I dutifully hopped in the car and legged it up there to meet the realtor, Esther, a very nice woman in her sixties.

She drove us over the Bath bridge, down the island of Arrowsic and over a few more bridges on to the island of Georgetown. Long populated by the Abenaki tribe, the first English settlers arrived in the 1640’s, about twenty years after the Puritans landed in Plymouth. The population these days is actually down about three hundred from what it was during the 1790 census, 1333. Its primary claim to fame, among my friends at least, was that its stellar lobster shack, the Five Islands Lobster Company, was featured in a car commercial. A Nissan Maxima ad, I think it was.

The short version is that it’s a beautiful but sleepy little town. With way too many mosquitos.

The property in question had previously belonged to a retired MIT professor, one who had sadly let the property fall into disuse and then ruin prior to his death. The yard was tall grass that came up to my chest, the two cottages on the property were open to the elements and ruined and the best that could be said about the main house was that while it didn’t keep the squirrels out, it kept the rain outside.
Mostly.

You couldn’t beat the potential of the place. That was the good news I relayed to my Mom in my initial evaluation.
It had three separate theoretically livable structures, and it was right on the water. And I mean right on the water. The two cottages are maybe twenty feet back from the cove - a proximity that you could never achieve today with setbacks. Waking up in one of the cottages was like waking up on a yacht, not least because the entire front of both structures were windows. Georgetown, for its part, is a quiet little town, but not too far from a small city in Bath and just up the road from Reid State park which has one of the best beaches in the state.
But rehabbing the property would be a project, and a major one, and I wanted that to be crystal clear to my parents. Fortunately for them, they were in no immediate rush. Both were several years out from retirement, and the ability to break up the property rehabilitation into digestible stages via the cottages was attractive financially. They could start with the smallest cottage to make the property usable quickly, move on to the second slightly larger one to expand the usability and then finish up with the larger main house as they neared the finish line of retirement.

This was the plan, and they ended up following it, more or less. They got thrown a few curveballs, to be sure, but they did what my parents always did: they dealt with them. They tackled the construction iteratively, and they cleared and tamed the land the same way, by hand.

This was the wreck of the main house, none of which they were unfortunately able to save.

And these were the two cottages, the bones of which were in good enough shape that they were ultimately leveraged as the basis for the structures that are there today.

My parents poured everything they had into the property. They would drive up from New Jersey every chance they could, and spend the week or the weekend or whatever meager time they could spare getting up at the crack of dawn, bush-hogging the lawn, trimming back out of control growth, clearing dead trees and gradually turning the property from a tick and mosquito infested morass into a livable, enjoyable couple of acres.

Regrettably, my parents bought the property at the extreme limits of my digital history. I wasn’t as diligent about archiving everything as I should have been back then, so I have some pictures from that era, but not all. Sporadic email. A few ancient moving receipts. But what I did manage to turn up might help explain how I feel about the property, and why I’ll miss it now that it’s been sold.

As nearly as I can determine, the purchase of the property was made in July of 2002. I didn’t know it at the time, but my business partner James and I were four months away from quitting to start the firm that would become RedMonk. The timing would prove fortuitous, because the day we quit was the last day that I had any income for a while.
I had money saved up to tide me over, but when my landlord at the time in New Hampshire decided not renew my lease to give his similarly unemployed son somewhere to live I had a choice to make. I could move back to Boston, which would be tremendously beneficial to my social life but would dramatically shorten my runway for getting our little startup off the ground. Or I could move up to this new property that my parents had bought but would not be occupying for years and live rent free.
So on May 30th of 2003, I moved up to the bustling metropolis of Georgetown, ME. When I got there, the small cottage was a couple of weeks from being ready, and so for a month or two, I set up shop in what was left of the main house. When I’d come home at night, I’d hear the red squirrels running away, and all of the screens had huge holes in them so there was a sizable population of mosquitos inside. Technically there was running water from the well, but there was no filtration and no water heater, so as I preferred to shower in water that wasn’t cold, orange and laced with iron, I joined the YMCA. Oh and there was no stove, just a hot plate.

Good times.
I ended up living in Georgetown for about two years while we got RedMonk off the ground, before I decamped for Denver. Much as I loved Denver, though, and I really did love Denver, I missed Maine, I missed the water and I missed Georgetown.

The first year I moved out, in 2005, I came back east to stay in Georgetown for two weeks. The second year in Denver, I came back east for four weeks. The third year it was more like four months. The fourth year, I met Kate and I never went back. Maine was in my blood by that point.
Here are a few reasons why.

There aren’t many things better than sitting by the water, watching cormorants, ospreys and the occasional bald eagle hit the water - hard - and improbably, impossibly explode back out with a fish gripped tightly.
Every so often we’d get the occasional lost seal down our way, and the prehistoric looking sturgeon were alarming, leaping high out of the water for reasons that no one apparently understands.

It’s surprising how much satisfaction there is to be had transforming an overgrown jungle into a more balanced landscape that gets rid of - or at least limits - the role of invasive species such as Japanese knotweed and gives opportunity to the native flora. But my parents gave me that opportunity during brush cutting and collection days.

One of the handy things about having access to a property that is either about to be torn down or still under construction is that playing beer games like pong or foosball become easy decisions. Even if beer spills or things get wrecked, what’s the harm?

The house was enough of a destination that it hosted many friends over the years. We had a couple of memorable Memorial Days up there, none more so than the time we used the veritable forest of mint in the side yard to make mojitos that looked like salads.
In more recent years, friends got snowed in with us for the weekend. Which was all the excuse we needed for non-stop Hearts marathons by the wood stove.

When I first lived on the property there was neither a dock nor a boat. When I started coming back, however, these had been acquired and transformed the property completely. Instead of being landlocked, the boat and dock combination opened up a world of possibility.
I still remember being ratted out by the GPS, however.
The boat had a combination GPS/depth finder. And unbeknownst to me and unlike the GPS in, say, your car, it retained a track of your movement. It turns out docking is in fact quite hard, particularly when you’re doing it solo. This only occurred to me literally as I was on the final approach that first time. The short version of the story is that I must have made twenty or thirty passes at the dock before I was able to tie everything down on my own. The GPS recorded the maze of all of these aborted docking wave offs, but I assumed they wouldn’t persist between sessions.
I was wrong.
As soon as my parents took the boat out the next time, every single last missed pass at the dock came up as a knot of lines and my parents had questions. Questions I would have preferred not to answer.

When I lived up there on my own, I’d schedule my work calls from early morning through 1 PM or so, and then I’d pack a quick lunch and a beer or two and take the boat down to the top of the cove. I tried various hardware combinations to take calls from the boat - and one of you that might be reading this was kind enough to send me a headset with wind reduction algorithms - but I never did get any of them to work. The person on the other end of the line could always tell I was on a boat.

So anyway, once I’d cruised down the cove, I’d throw out an anchor, stretch out and read a book and have a beer. If it got hot, I’d jump into the cove, swim around to the swim platform, dry off and lay back down. Rinse, lather, repeat. Then I’d come back and, having no other obligations, work for a couple of hours after dinner.
The only time this anchor-and-swim strategy proved to be problematic was when I ventured further afield, anchoring up near the Chops just south of Merrymeeting Bay on the Kennebec. No matter what I tried, I could not get the anchor to come up, and was convinced I was going to have to dive in and follow the line down and free it by hand before the boat itself freed it for me.
Net net, though, there’s literally nothing as relaxing as taking a boat out to some quiet, calm water, parking it and relaxing with a book and a cold beverage.

While I’d lived there on my own for a number of years, Kate and I lived up in Georgetown together for a little while we house hunted and eventually bought down in Freeport. We were living in Georgetown, in fact, when we got engaged and when we got married. Our engagement dinner was at the now sadly closed Robinhood Meeting House, and this was taken while we were packing for our honeymoon.

Fishing up there took a while. First, because I decided to fish the salt water with flies. Compared to the river gear I was used to, everything was bigger, heavier and harder to cast. I gave myself golf ball sized welts on the back of my head several times hitting it with the large salt water flies, but I counted myself as lucky that I never hooked my scalp or ear. But even when I had the technique down - or at least down well enough to not hit myself in the back of the head - I couldn’t find the fish.

I caught one, pictured above, after kayaking down the cove a ways and fishing off an uninhabited small island. But I never had any real luck until the poor ospreys blew up.
Over the course of that summer, an osprey family had made a nest in a particularly unwise location just above a power transformer across the street. Around 4 AM one night, their luck ran out and the transformer exploded, showering the street with sparks, knocking out power and practically ejecting me from bed.
Unable to get back to sleep, I grabbed my rig and wandered back down to the dock to fish. As it turns out, dawn is a good time to fish. After months of striking out over and over, I pulled out a fish every other cast until my arms got tired. Nothing big, but fish after fish after fish. It was glorious, though mitigated by the poor osprey family’s demise.

Speaking of ospreys, The Osprey restaurant - a bar/tavern at the local marina - was the only place on the island to get a beer, so I spent more than a few nights there doing just that, while watching the Sox with the bartenders I’d gotten to know and looking out at the water. As local joints go, it’s tough to beat a marina bar.

I was never a regular at the lobster shack down on Five Islands, on the other hand, but it was a staple whenever anyone came to visit. There aren’t too many places where you can watch the lobsters you eat get hauled out of the water, but this is one of them. And it’s not just lobsters, please note: their onion rings are great as well.

Whenever the weather was good, whatever the season, Reid was right down the road. The water is cold, but after a minute or two you forget that. Worst case you go numb.
You can fish down at Reid too, though as I learned when I got kicked out a few times the park rangers have a very conservative definition of the word “sundown.”

If we’re being honest, though, what we all enjoyed the most about the property was bringing the kids. Whether it was picking vegetables, baking cookies or going down to the Blessing of the Fleet, they made everything fun. A lot more challenging, obviously, but fun.

The times there weren’t always good. Having to put in a ramp for my Dad after he broke his leg during his battle with cancer was an unhappy milestone.
But that’s not what I’ll choose to remember.

When I think about Georgetown, I’ll think of lazy afternoons on the dock.

Or waking up and looking out these windows, feeling like you’re at sea.

I’ll miss the Georgetown house a lot, but I’ll certainly never forget it. May it give its new owners as much happiness as it brought to the O’Grady family.

10 Things I Learned from My Dad

Fri, 19 Mar 2021 02:23:55 -0400

None of the doctors ever told me my Dad was dying. Not the surgeon at Maine Med who first went in to do the biopsy of the lung. Not the surgeon at Mass General who did the biopsy of a lymph node. Not the oncologist at Maine Cancer Care the first few chemo treatments, which were also the only ones I could attend thanks to COVID. None of them.

But they didn’t have to. Mesothelioma is hard to Google, because the search results are heavily polluted by law firms in search of riches from ignorant or irresponsible manufacturers, but you can get the gist. And the gist is that it’s not good.

Mesothelioma is a malignant tumor that is caused by inhaling asbestos fibers. How my father, who spent his career on Wall Street theoretically well removed from the material that used to be common in building materials, firefighting gear and the like ended up with these fibers in his lung is an open question. We’ll never know for sure, but the evidence strongly suggests that it’s a consequence of my father going back to work downtown shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Per WikiPedia:

As New York City’s World Trade Center collapsed following the September 11 attacks, Lower Manhattan was blanketed in a mixture of building debris and combustible materials. This complex mixture gave rise to the concern that thousands of residents and workers in the area would be exposed to known hazards in the air and in the dust, such as asbestos, lead, glass fibers, and pulverized concrete. More than 1,000 tons of asbestos are thought to have been released into the air following the buildings’ destruction.

As an aside, before someone mentions the 9/11 victims fund, he was aware of it. Given the limited pool of funds, however, this was a non-starter for him because he would never have been willing to take money away from the first responders or their families.

Anyway, my father’s commute for four decades had him walk off the Path trains into the Trade Center en route to the Exchange every day. I know this because I did it with him one summer. He was fortunate enough to be on vacation up here in Maine not just for the attempted bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 but for 9/11 as well. It would be as tragic as it would be ironic if he survived the attack in 2001 by not being there but the air he breathed when he returned to work ended up killing him twenty years later.

Pragmatist that he was, however, he’d have taken that trade.

It’s a similar trade, in fact, to the one he took when he was first diagnosed with cancer while at Harvard Business School in the early seventies. Cancer treatments were a little less sophisticated all those years ago, and to attack the cancer that he had the doctors irradiated large swaths of his body. Today, they can apparently target areas smaller than a dime. He was told that he had an 8% chance of dying within six weeks, and a 92% chance of living out most of the rest of a normal lifespan - albeit with some side effects.

Side effects that he accepted without complaint. His immune system went haywire, for one, and he developed allergies, the worst of which was poison ivy. If that so much as touched him, it was in his blood stream and off to the races. My childhood memories are always a little hazy, but I remember that. The side effects changed his hair color and density, and it left him permanently immuno-compromised. It’s weird when you’re a kid and your Dad’s mustache randomly grows in bright red.

Not that any of that mattered much: I don’t remember him missing a single day of work, ever.

For fifty years, the deal that he’d accepted was a good deal. Despite a few scares along the way, the cancer never came back until he noticed being short of breath and developed a chronic cough two years ago. Never one to visit a doctor unnecessarily, and probably for good reason given his history, he nevertheless went and ended up on the track that led to the diagnosis and the year that was 2020.

Christmas 2019 was a sad affair. My Dad had been diagnosed merely days before, and his weight loss left him gaunt and weary. When shown pictures of the dinner later, he replied with typical bleak humor, “shit, I look dead.” Still, we tried to take an optimistic tack with 2020. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about cancer today, it’s that your primary goal if they can’t cure you immediately is to buy time, because they might be able to in future.

So that is what my Dad set out to do. Always goal oriented, his assessment was that based on trajectory at the time, he was unlikely to make it until the Fourth of July. Thus his goal was to make it beyond that date. To that end, he promised his oncologist one thing: that as long as they would agree to treat him, he would show up. At times, this meant employing some gamesmanship, no stranger to the lifelong athlete. As he continued to bleed weight he couldn’t afford to lose, he slyly wore heavier and heavier shoes to his weigh-in’s so they wouldn’t remove him from treatment.

So intent was he on continuing treatment, in fact, that he literally broke himself out of the hospital to get the toxic substance injected into his body. He’d fallen and shattered his femur - in retrospect, likely due to the fact that his heart had begun to stop unpredictably due either to a bad valve, arrhythmia’s or both.

All in all in 2020, he dealt with the cancer, a bad valve in his heart, a congenital heart murmur gone rogue, five surgeries, and the broken leg. To add insult to injury, his access to the thing that made him most happy - his grandchildren, and to a lesser extent his children - was drawn down to a trickle thanks to the pandemic.

Insult, injury or otherwise, he fought to the last. Every time he seemed to take a hard won step forward, some new fresh hell would drop him back ten steps, or even twenty. But he was a fighter, and every time he got knocked down, he picked himself up off the mat and waded back in.

He died as a fighter, Monday morning. And despite the terminal prognosis, the cancer never won. His body may have ultimately failed him, but his spirit never did. It was his heart, or maybe his brain, that killed him. Not the cancer.

That terrible endurance was something I never wanted to learn from my Dad, but I did. He taught me many other things, some of which I wrote down in an admittedly lengthy letter to my then unborn daughter. Here are ten that I’ve thought about this week.

Have Priorities

My Dad grew up with very little. What wealth his family on one side had had at one point had largely petered out, and while his father always worked, you don’t become a minister for the money. Still, the family prioritized education, and so he went to Williams like his father and brother before him, and from there it was on to Harvard Business School. That provided him with access to jobs that featured, let’s just call it, high income potential. For the first time in his life, he had money. And but for his kids, that could have been his life.

Instead, he eventually came to a fork in the road. Down one path lay wealth and comfort; the other was precarious, stressful self-employment as an independent floor broker - the upside of which was predictable hours that allowed him to get home in time to coach my brother and I, first in soccer, later adding lacrosse in the spring.

Every family has different choices to make, and I can’t imagine the financial stress both of my parents bore. But I think I can speak for my brother when I say that I’m glad he chose us.

You Do What You Have To

When my Dad enlisted in the army, he and my mother were dirt poor and living in a trailer in Georgia. Every dollar, therefore, was precious. As a semi-related aside, if you get the chance, ask my Mom what it was like to work at a K-Mart in the deep south with a wicked Boston accent.

Anyway, after finding out that paratroopers got an extra pittance per month, my Dad signed up for jump school. The only problem with this transaction was that my Dad was terrified of heights. Every morning he had to jump, then, he’d get up and vomit because he was scared. But dollars were precious, so he got his wings.

Later, in business school, he had to go in regularly to get blasted with high doses of radiation. This had the intended effect of killing off the cancer and the unintended effect of giving him nearly full time nausea. He didn’t intend to miss class, however, so he merely requested a seat on the aisle so he could get to the bathroom quickly. All professors but one complied; the hold out required an appeal to the dean. He had no such impediments while competing in tennis tournaments during treatment, however; he’d merely vomit in between sets.

My Dad never really sat us down to talk about working through fear, sickness or injury. We just watched him.

Be Yourself

All the years my Dad worked on the various exchanges, he dressed - in general - as comfortably as the dress code permitted. He had nice suits and ties when they were needed, but his normal uniform was LL Bean chinos, a plain white shirt, his trading jacket and one of a couple of ties kept in his desk. That was who he was. My Dad paid no more attention to NYC fashion then he did to bars after work or coke in the bathrooms. His worst vice was coke, the soda.

It never occurred to me that this was in some way different or unique until I moved to New York City after college. Some friends had Armani suits and Gucci loafers. I was much more likely to be the one who kept us from getting into a bar because I was dressed like a 1930’s rail-riding hobo.

Like my Dad, for better or for worse, I knew who I was, and I never worried too much about what everyone else was up to.

Let Your Kids Be Who They Are

My Dad was an athlete all his life, and a very good one. Great, even. My brother and I grew up on stories of his freak athleticism, how he started on his college teams as a freshman, all of that. So naturally what I wanted more than anything else as a kid was to be like my Dad. But it was apparent pretty early that I was not going to be like my Dad.

I wasn’t a total loss on the field. I managed to start for teams in high school and college eventually, but particularly when I was a young kid and my height outpaced my coordination, I was a far cry from what my Dad might have reasonably expected of his progeny. Some, maybe most, former athlete Dads would have been embarassed by a kid like me. Others disappointed. Maybe both.

Whether I played well, and I usually didn’t as a kid, was not relevant to him. The only thing my Dad ever cared about was my effort. It could be five minutes of garbage time at the end of the game, and all my Dad asked was whether I had fun and tried my best.

I used to take that for granted. Looking back, I wonder if it was ever hard for him to watch me struggle. If it was, he never showed it.

Help Those Less Fortunate

He never used the word, as far as I’m aware, but my Dad had an innate understanding of his privilege, his humble socioeconomic origins notwithstanding. He came by it honestly, to be fair. As my Mom tells the story, their engagement party in Michigan was an interesting event because in the day’s prior my Dad’s father had been publicly excoriated for supporting women’s access to birth control and his mother had been arrested in Detroit after being part of a sit-in to protest an urban renewal effort that, no surprise, was slated to replace low income housing.

When he returned to Williams after his military service, he and my Mom ran the ABC House in Williamstown, which brought inner city kids out to a different life in the Berkshires. One of the kids that lived with them, Ted Ferriss, became a lifelong friend, and quarantined himself for two weeks to be able to visit my Dad in Maine from New York this fall.

He also believed in gender diversity within the workplace, and I can’t articulate that any better than the following snippet which was taken from an email I received from one of his former employees.

Your dad is one of the gruffest people I know but has the absolute best twinkle in his eye and biggest heart underneath the gruffness. I was living on my brother’s couch/floor for the first month in NYC and your dad continually was checking in on my apartment hunt and making sure I was doing ok in my transient state. No one else was doing that. I also loved what a big effort he made to hire women into a predominantly male industry and ensure we were all treated equally. Granted “equally” meant he treated us all like crap and made us haul waters from the main office blocks away down to the floor of the Amex, but to this day I’ll maintain that I was treated better at [REDACTED] than any other job I ever had in NYC. He made so many ridiculous jokes, but he always made sure we were in on the jokes instead of being the unaware butt of the joke. I always felt like part of the team / one of the guys / however you want to say it. It was just a great environment thanks to him, and a pretty unique situation for a 22 year old girl on a trading floor.

He used to talk to me about the importance of hiring people from different backgrounds when I was younger, and I didn’t fully appreciate its importance, or how unusual it was for an old white guy to appreciate it. I do now.

Principles Matter

My Dad was, first and foremost, a man of principle. He was rigidly, and at times, uncomfortably, honest. His moral code did not encompass shades of gray; for better and for worse, he was a man of black and white. There was right and there was wrong, and he never struggled much to tell one from another.

This was the moral compass that led him to enlist in the army. His number would probably have him drafted anyway, but his feeling was that if his country called him to serve, it was his duty to answer that call. Whether or not he approved of the Vietnam war was immaterial. He did not, he was simply of the opinion that it would not be appropriate for him to pick and choose when to serve.

This was also the moral compass that gave him a respect and appreciation for those who refused to serve. This is something he wrote almost a decade ago.

I recently heard from an old friend from grade school (in Switzerland). He attended Stanford and was in the ROTC program. Upon graduation, he turned down his commission as an Army Officer and refused to be drafted. He did not hide in Canada. Ultimately he was arrested and convicted as he should have been (later pardoned). He asked me if that was a problem for me. My answer was that he did what he believed in - very openly and suffered the consequences. I respect him for that.

In an era of fluid and ambiguous morals, my Dad was something of an anachronism. I don’t think I ever appreciated that enough.

You’re Not Better Than Anyone

My Dad was never a people person, exactly. My Mom, in fact, likes to say that my Dad was always better with children than adults, though arguably that’s more because he was so good with kids than deficient with adults. In any event, whatever his people skills, there is one thing my Dad positively excelled at, and that was extracting people’s life stories.

There’s a truism that everyone wants to talk about themselves. What my Dad wanted to talk about was the person he was talking to. Where were they from? Where did they go to school? What did they do for a living? How was business? You’d go to dinner and by the time the check came anyone at the table could have written a thousand page biography on the server.

This made for some very long dinners, and a lot of “Dad, you can’t ask that.” It also meant that my Dad stood out, and often connected with people in his life that no one had ever asked about.

I’ll never forget the time that I was attending a client analyst day held at the New York Stock Exchange. This being well after 9/11, security was high and thorough. After looking over my license, one of the guards looked up at me and said, “are you related to that Steve O’Grady?” After hearing that I was his son, he shouted down the line that I was “Steve O’Grady’s kid.” I got the most cursory of wand treatments, and they sent me on with “say hi to your Dad for us.”

My Dad came from nothing, and whatever he became in the world, he never forgot that.

Focus on What You Have

Growing up, I don’t remember any of my friends’ parents going through a stereotypical mid-life crisis, but that’s also not really the kind of thing a parent would discuss with their kids. What I do know is that my Dad didn’t spend much if any time focused on what he didn’t have. Part of that might have been that he didn’t have the time to worry about that between working full time and coaching the rest of it. But my Dad was also someone who focused on what was in front of him, not what anyone else had.

When he got sick, we talked about the prior bouts with cancer, and his view was that at a minimum, science had bought him fifty years. If they couldn’t give him another ten or five or two, well, at least he’d banked the fifty.

We also talked about his classmates at the Officer’s Candidate School, the ones whose names are etched into the black granite of the Vietnam Memorial. He got to live his life, they did not.

Whatever else he was, my Dad was not an ungrateful man.

How You Measure Your Life

Best known for his work on the business theory of disruption, Clayton Christensen’s most significant insight might have come in terms of how one thinks about their life. This was his advice:

Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.

If we accept this metric, my Dad’s life was a massively underappreciated success.

Since he died, work has trickled out widely in spite of our best efforts to inform those closest to him personally. Here is a random sampling of quotes I’ve gotten from people who knew my Dad. Kids he coached, grown ups he hired, all of whom got the full, sarcastic Steve O’Grady experience.

I’m very sorry to hear about your Dad. Wanted to send my condolences to you and your family. He left me with great memories coaching us when we were kids.

Your dad was a big influence on me and I recall many of the valuable lessons he imparted as our coach growing up. He will be missed.

I actually heard about his passing from a…colleague…a little earlier today. He started a chain with about 15 of us who were all hired by Steve around the same time and the consensus is clear, he impacted all of us in such a positive way and really helped us all get our foot in the door with our first “real jobs”. I’m sure this has been a really hard week, but I hope you can take a little bit of comfort in knowing your dad was loved and respected by so many of us, and will not be forgotten.

I was so sorry to hear about your dad. I have great memories of him and his time with and impact on all of us.

I have fond memories of spending time with your father in our younger years and also later in life as we became “adults”. He loved and supported your brother and you, your interests and of course your Mom. Obviously, your Dad sometimes gave us all tough love. It makes me smile and laugh to think back on his firm and sometimes joking delivery. He will be missed.

I’m sure when word gets out more publicly, there will be many, many more of these, because if there’s one thing I’ve realized, it’s that my Dad touched a great many lives. So many more than I ever realized.

My Dad was at heart a metrics person. I don’t think it ever occurred to him, however, to think about his life in terms to the raw number of lives he impacted. If he had, I think he would have been pleased at the numbers if eager to be dimissive of his actual impact.

Put One Foot in Front of the Other

COVID has made things more complicated for everyone, but I managed to keep most of the impact at arm’s distance until May 20th. After he got sick, my Dad felt it was important to remain as active as he could, and to keep busy. On that particular day, his job was to get gas for the ride on mower. Late that morning I got a frantic call from my Mom telling me that my Dad had fallen and shattered his leg.

What we didn’t know at that time was that his heart had begun to stop irregularly, and he wasn’t lucky in his timing. Toppling over in the parking lot of a gas station, he’d annihilated his femur. It was bad enough that he passed out and fallen without an ability to break his fall, but he’d lost so much of his athletic muscle mass due to the disease that there was nothing to cushion the blow.

The ambulance came, and my Mom couldn’t ride with him. He got to the hospital and none of us could go see him. He went under the knife with no one by his side, and trying to piece together his condition by phone after the fact when he was on painkillers with no one there to advocate for him was a literal nightmare.

Right before he went under, one of the nurses asked him if we was scared. His reply might be the best summary of his life I can think of. He told her, “What good would that do? You’re going to put me out. I’ll hope to wake up, and we’ll go from there.”

There was no waking up this time, not for any lack of fight on his part. Now my family has to go on from here.

I miss you, Dad. Wherever you are, I hope they have the Coke made from the Mexican sugar cane.

My 2020 in Pictures

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 01:13:58 -0500

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, but mostly it was the worst of times. The English language doesn’t really have vocabulary capable of articulating what it was like to live through 2020, and while pictures may be worth a thousand words the ones that follow won’t do it justice either. Historically awful and unprecedented is about the best I can do.
This year was bad enough, in fact, that I debated whether to abandon this traditional post entirely for a year.
But that idea didn’t sit well for several reasons. Most obviously, while this was a genuinely terrible year for me, my experience was a cake walk next to that of millions of Americans. Unlike actually essential workers, I was able to seamlessly transition to working from home full time. Unlike restaurant owners and staff, the impact on my industry was relatively light, and my employment was unaffected. And with a few notable exceptions, most of my friends, coworkers and loved ones were likewise not part of the 384,000 and counting Americans that lost their lives at least in part due to a complete and unmitigated failure on the part of the federal government to protect its citizens. What was a bad year for me, then, was a living hell for far too many.

Stupidly, not posting my annual year in pictures also felt like surrender, and a lack of gratitude for the few good - even great - things that happened to me this year. The more I thought about it, the more posting seemed mandatory rather than optional.

So here we are.

As always, these are the moments – significant or mostly not – that characterized my year personally. Blessedly, there’s basically no politics in here because I don’t have any images of that horror. Before we get to the pictures, however, a quick check-in on travel.

Travel

Normally this is the part where I mine openflights.org and TripIt for travel stats like miles flown, number of airports, etc that make me sad, lamenting both the time spent in flying metal tubes and the time away from my family. This year’s travel update is easy, because there was no travel. I have not been on an aircraft since December of 2019, which is very likely my longest stretch without a flight since high school.

I never left the country, obviously, and with the exception of a quick hop down to Boston in January, I never even left the state. I’ve spent the balance of the year hunkered down, rarely straying more than a twenty minute drive from home - and then only for curbside pickups. This unprecedented time at home, along with a growing kid, led to space issues that led to a move, but I’ll get to that.
The question for me, sitting here in January 2021, still under lockdown conditions, is what happens when we’re on the other side of the global pandemic. Do things snap back to normal? Or has my industry proven that travel is less necessity than luxury, and my time away is scaled way back from its one time heights.

As a Dad who cherishes doing bedtime with my kid every night, including our ritual of looking at shark pictures, I know what I hope for in that regard. I was not taught to blindly expect the best outcome, however, but to prepare for the worst. If I’m writing this a year from today, then, I’ll be very curious what I have to say about my travel and any return to normalcy.
The one trip I do want to make when it’s safe is out to Colorado. 2020 was the first year since 1993 that I didn’t see my best friend at least once. I hope not to repeat that.

With that, on to the pictures.

January 1

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The year opened innocently enough with a day of good sledding.

January 12

Went to a local concert, which is hard to imagine now.

January 21

i do not like where this is headinghttps://t.co/XMenC8c7Wa
— steve o'grady (@sogrady) January 21, 2020

Man I had no idea.

January 23

It took some doing, but I snagged Pearl Jam tickets for Denver, and we planned a four day weekend out there for the family to go see the band with my best friend and his wife. This would have been Eleanor’s first time on a plane, and she was very excited for it.
Alas.

January 23

After the high of scoring Pearl Jam tickets it was off to the low of heading with my parents to my Dad’s first chemotherapy appointment (I have not been able to go with them since March). I haven’t talked about this publicly before, and I’ll save the details for another time, but 2020 has been a roller coaster for my poor father, who’s endured cancer, a badly shattered femur and a heart that began stopping for five to ten seconds at a time, not to mention a hospital stay in which none of us were allowed in to be with him or even see him and five surgeries - a record for him, as he pointed out.
Through it all, my parents have handled the situation exactly as anyone who knows my parents would expect: by focusing on putting one foot in front of the other, and by relying on each other. Before he went in for surgery on his leg, one of the nurses asked my Dad if he was scared to be going under with no family or friends around to lean on. He replied, “What good would that do? You’re going to put me out, I’ll hope to wake up and we’ll go from there.”
When chemo began, my Dad promised his oncologist that as long as they would treat him, he would show up no matter how terrible he felt. The average number of treatments most patients who have what he has can endure is a tick under four. My Dad had eight - and he had to break himself out of the hospital while in a wheelchair to get to one of those - before they transitioned him to his current regimen, which brings the total up to 22 and counting. All of which is not particularly surprising, of course, because this is the same man who, during his first bout with cancer fifty years ago, played in tennis tournaments and attended classes at Harvard Business School while having to vomit every twenty minutes from the massive doses of radiation that were the standard treatment at that time.
My Mom, meanwhile, took on her new role as caregiver with the same indomitable outlook and unflinching sense of responsibility that she inherited from her father. She pivoted from an active role on I’ve lost track of how many different local committees and boards to being a full time nurse, cook and patient advocate overnight. The next complaint I hear from her about this abrupt and unexpected turn her life took will be the first. When I talk to her every day, she’s cheerful, focused on what she controls and always more interested in hearing about what’s going on with our little family than in her own struggles.
These are the two toughest people I know.
If there is one thing I’m thankful for in 2020 it’s that my Dad was not taken away from me. My parents are, each in their own way, an inspiration and a standard that I will never live up to. Here’s hoping 2021 is kinder to the both of them than 2020 was.

February 21

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Got out for a quiet birthday lunch at Slab. That’s not in the cards this year, but I look forward to the day when it’s possible again.

February 22

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We had no idea at the time what a train wreck of a season the Red Sox, the sport and the country were about to have, but we enjoyed the first game of Spring Training anyway.

March 11

things are beginning to move quickly
— steve o'grady (@sogrady) March 12, 2020

Things that had been gradually deteriorating in February finally fell apart during the second week of March. The suspension of the NBA season was perhaps the most shocking indication of how truly unprecedented the events were, but it was merely the beginning. Within a week lockdowns were spreading, we pulled Eleanor from daycare - permanently, as it turned out - and transitioned into bunker mode becoming part time schoolteachers in the process.

March 13

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Shortages didn’t take long. It was probably four or five months before we could reliably get toilet paper, as but one example.

March 14

Having decided in late February to potentially list our house, we started preparing for a sale by getting a storage unit. We knew that the spread of the virus was a wildcard, but we thought at the time that it would be a couple of months at most.
Oops.

March 16

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We pulled Eleanor out of daycare the Monday after the lockdowns began. Kate’s work schedule exploded given the unprecedented challenges the virus posed to higher education, so I was mostly on duty in those early days. I thought I was doing pretty well until discovering at the end of literally the first day that Eleanor had cut off huge hunks of her own hair.

March 18

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Didn’t take long for everyday experiences like going to the dump to get weird.

March 19

As so many educational and non-profit organizations did, bless them, the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy spun up educational videos virtually overnight. A couple of days a week, then, Eleanor and I would watch virtual shark classes as part of general enrichment activities with her out of school.

March 20

With curbside experiences a little rough around the edges in the opening stages of the pandemic, buying beer in bulk became a no brainer. Credit to Maine Beer Company for running a great contactless setup.

March 21

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As we pondered moving in the wake of the outbreak, one of the decisions we made was to upgrade from shitty old foam core doors to newer, solid core doors. The idea was that if we moved, they’d show better, and if we didn’t, they’d offer some noise reduction while we were all crammed into a small house for months on end. The doors were picked up curbside, of course.

And while I always endeavor not to get injured, it’s amazing how much more careful you can be on a project if you know going to the ER might mean getting infected with a potentially deadly pathogen.

March 21

2200 miles away or no, my best friend set up a zoom for virtual beers and called ahead of time to coordinate what we'd pull from our cellars.

today we each drank a 2011 @AllagashBrewing coolship cerise together, which was glorious.

things like this get you through. pic.twitter.com/3WAJ48Gd2j
— steve o'grady (@sogrady) March 22, 2020

In the face of a global pandemic, we all had to make adjustments. Zoom’s not the same as in person, but we made do.

March 25

At the first hint that masks might be an effective deterrent - long before they were officially approved as such - my Mom leveraged her skills with a sewing machine and launched into action making cloth masks for the entire oncology unit at Maine Med where my Dad was being treated.
Per a text from one of the doctors, the masks plus the giant batch of chocolate chip cookies she baked and brought to the office, “put a smile on the face of everyone in here, one that was needed.” Many of the nurses apparently liked them so much they chose to wear the cloth masks over their issued N95’s.
Later, my Mom made masks for all of our local friends. When I relayed their thanks and appreciation, my Mom’s reply was “thank them all from us for helping to keep your father and I safe.”

March 26

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Twelve degrees above freezing is apparently warm enough to pull the roof off if you’re in need of a smile.

March 29

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Got some help stacking wood.

March 30

this has been making the rounds, and for good reason. doctors and nurses are wading into harm's way just because strangers eight hundred miles away called for help.

new york will not forget this, atlanta. https://t.co/xBsx27RgMW pic.twitter.com/HLLN50Xc0T
— steve o'grady (@sogrady) March 30, 2020

Even amidst the misery, it’s worth noting that 2020 featured its share of heroes as well.

April 1

Well before Eleanor was born, I’d jotted down a long list of potential life lessons for her. The pandemic and more particularly its accelerating death toll was, among other things, incentive enough to finally complete this stalled project. The result was thisistheway.us.
Unexpectedly for what was literally a labor of love, some people actually read it. People not related to me. Some even had good things to say. Tough to say which was more of a surprise. The site even did more traffic than redmonk.com did for one day.

April 10

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Kate, as usual, was way ahead of me in demonstrating our appreciation for some of the essential workers that kept our house supplied.

April 12

We did our first official socially distanced outing with friends out of the back of the Jeep in a driveway.

April 14

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Among the limited benefits to the pandemic was vastly more time at home, spent doing things like watching Eleanor get more confident on her bike by the day.

April 14

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Can’t even imagine how bad the past year has been for restaurants, those who own them and those who work for them. This was not a typical night at the River Grill.

April 20

another image for the history bookshttps://t.co/nr4RcRBSfR pic.twitter.com/t3hNF3FX9y
— steve o'grady (@sogrady) April 20, 2020

It’s a sign of how bad things have been this year that this iconic image barely registers.

April 25

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I am no foodie and as such am generally not snobby about food. But having grown up outside of NYC, I’m very particular about my sandwiches. For all of its other culinary talents, Maine’s sandwich game has, for most of the time I’ve been here, been woeful. That all changed when Ramona’s opened. The place is legit.

May 3

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It may not be true that there “ain’t no laws when you’re drinking Claws,” but the pandemic did certainly cause people to rethink what was strictly legal about open containers versus what was more, say, a guideline.

May 10

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The good news was that I put together a swing. The bad news was that it broke with her on it. Twice.

May 16

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Got my first, but far from last, pandemic haircut thanks to Kate. Eleanor, predictably, spent the entire time looking for opportunities to spray me in the face with cold water.

May 23

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I’d actually never had a margarita pre-pandemic.

May 24

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If you need a break from everything that’s going on, there’s nothing quite like putting on a seventy year old ballgame - replete with seventy year old ads and news bulletins - and loading a woodshed.

May 24

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Kate’s birthday present - an Ooni woodfired pizza oven - made its debut. Cooks a small 9" pie in around ninety seconds, so we’re looking forward to the days when we can once again have people over.

June 2

1000 protesters here in tiny portland. what would the number be if we were not in the middle of a pandemic?https://t.co/BZAO6nboYp pic.twitter.com/7lNnkTX5Zi
— steve o'grady (@sogrady) June 2, 2020

Would that we could have been there.

June 7

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After my Dad broke his leg, my parents were in need of a temporary wheelchair ramp, so I put my meager skills to work on one. For the curious, this how I built it. It’s not actually that difficult.

June 20

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We missed a great many things in 2020, but not the annual First Day of Summer Jaws viewing.

June 21

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It being summer finally, it was time for the doors to come off. And put a pin in that garage comment.

June 21

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As part of our “we might sell the house” plan, we wanted to fix the railing on the deck. The good news was that while there were huge shortages on PT lumber due to the pandemic I managed to score the last few sections from Lowe’s. The bad news was that it fell out of the truck and all over the road on the way home.
I was able to jump out quickly to grab it thanks to not having any doors, at least.

June 28

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Historically, we haven’t bothered with air conditioning given that there just aren’t that many hot weeks in Maine and we’ve all been out of the house during the hottest part of the day, whether at work or daycare. Between climate change and the pandemic-driven working-from-home situation, however, we invested in the only AC units we could find. Which turned out to need more clearance than we had, so I had to shoehorn them into the windows and build a false sill. Anyway, they went in eventually.

July 4

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Did the only kind of fireworks we could - socially distant fireworks.

July 12

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If I had to do it all over, I would just rip the entire deck off and rebuild it. Or maybe just burn it down and salt the earth so that nothing could ever grow there again. But instead we opted to sand it and refinish it. It was about as fun as you might imagine.

July 14

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With our dishwasher already down, it was the stove’s turn. And while it’s next to impossible to get anyone to service appliances that they didn’t sell here, it is literally impossible during a pandemic. Off to YouTube I went.

July 24

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I was not of the opinion that MLB should have been playing, but seeing as they were we had tradition to hold up. This was us on the much delayed Opening Day.

July 27

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Having eventually wrestled all that PT lumber home, I finally got the railings replaced, a job that whoever built the deck originally made nearly impossible by using railroad spike-sized nails.

August 1

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It took two tries, but I eventually figured out what was actually wrong with the stove and fixed it. Good times.

August 5

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So We Moved

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 17:01:31 -0400

When Kate and I bought our first house together seven years ago this past May, we bought purely because it was on the water. We knew the house needed a lot of work, and the best that could be said of it aesthetically is that we wouldn’t get rained on. Our bet was that the house itself could be fixed, and that the location - and especially the view - were worthy of the effort.

So we got to work.

We repainted the whole thing. We redid the kitchen, but on a budget. The budget meant that I did the tile work, which was mostly acceptable because I started on the section that would be hidden by the range so my initial mistakes were largely out of sight. At one point the budget also involved me ripping out our kitchen sink and counters so that the stone counter people could measure, then putting them both back in for a week until the counter folks came back to install the counters they’d custom cut. That sounds crazy, even to me right now, but it actually happened.

We did a ton of other work. One year I dug a french drain in the back yard so that the basement stopped flooding. Another year it was installing a new maple fireplace surround and mantle. Whether it was ripping out inconveniently placed closets or patching the holes in the hardwood floors caused by ripping out inconveniently placed closets, or building organizers for the closets we spared, it became a thing over time. The bulk of my summer vacation each year would be spent on home improvement projects.

Many of these projects left me with injuries of varying severity. I got shocked at one point and couldn’t move my arm for an hour. I almost lost the tip of my index finger when a saw horse collapsed and two heavy sections of melamine plywood crushed it. I ended up in the emergency room because an unfortunately springy piece of corner bead sliced open my leg and had me pulsing blood with each beat of my heart.

As an aside, in my defense on that, I wanted to just seal it up with duct tape and the doc who stitched me up agreed that that would in fact have worked. But my efforts to hide the severity of the problem failed when Kate caught me turning large sections of our deck red. After our friend Ryan took her side, it was off to Midcoast in his Jeep with my leg in a trash bag so I didn’t turn his back seat into a scene from CSI.

Point is, the blood, sweat and tears thing is true quite literally true with our old house. We worked hard to make it better.

Which we were happy to do because our plan all along was to be there for a long time. To that end, we engaged a designer to draw up plans to expand the house and give ourselves more breathing room. Three things then happened in succession, each of which changed our calculus with respect to staying.

First, our designer ghosted us. We liked him and his work very much, and his initial draft plan looked great and we were good to move to phase two where he delivered final construction ready plans. Except that he didn’t. He didn’t return calls, he didn’t return emails. For the better part of a year he was MIA, to the point that I’d started to worry that he’d passed away. At that point, he turned back up, said he’d taken on too much work and was ready to re-engage. The problem was that in the interim, the President of the United States had decided to pick a fight with, well, everyone. Between the trade wars with Canada and China alone, our projected costs for building had spiked dramatically. Building, suddenly, looked a lot less attractive.
Second, we had a kid. Besides making us really, really tired, our daughter’s arrival changed our calculus considerably. Suddenly school systems mattered, and as she grew so too did her impact on our livable space. What was a livable space for us as a couple was more and more cramped as a family of three. A living room overrun by stuffies and kid’s tea sets makes for some long days.
Lastly, there was the global pandemic our country is still in the midst of thanks to incompetent leadership. As it has for everyone, COVID-19 has dramatically complicated our lives. Both Kate and I were suddenly at home full time. So was our daughter, who we pulled out of daycare in March.

I remember volunteering to go get takeout in February solely because I wanted to get out of the house after working from home three straight days. If only I’d known.

The first two factors were enough to get us to at least entertain the idea of moving. So I did what I always do when I need help, and I turned to our local tech Slack. One of the folks in there - thanks Dan! - connected us with a local realtor (who was, as an aside, incredible). We met with her for the first time on February 13th. That meeting was encouraging, and she saw more promise and possibility in our little property than the other brokers we’d spoken with, and we decided to move forward.

Then came March, and COVID-19.

things are beginning to move quickly
— steve o'grady (@sogrady) March 12, 2020

All thoughts of moving went right out the window as we struggled, like the rest of the country, to adjust to lockdown conditions and trying to juggle two full time jobs with a third job of being full time preschool teachers. We were doing the best we could to keep our heads above water, and the idea of adding additional burdens to our plate was just unthinkable. And even if we were ready to list, the market cooled considerably in the early stages of the outbreak.

That is where things sat until late July. By that point, we were still out straight but at least we had our routines down. After seeing so many people in our tech Slack refinance at bonkers interest rates, I pinged my ex-CFO little brother and asked for his opinion on re-financing or even, if such a thing could be accomplished, selling. After a few days of watching market numbers, he came back with a bunch of charts that I didn’t understand but a message that I did: that if we wanted to sell anytime soon, we should do it now and do it quickly.

The last time he gave a family member this advice it was to my parents in the run up to 2008.

So it was that we met in proper socially distanced fashion with our realtor out on our back deck the Monday of July 27th. She talked potential numbers, they worked for us and we asked about timing. She said the sooner the better. Kate and I, much to my later regret, agreed to list in just shy of three weeks.

For some homes, and in non-pandemic times, this would be a perfectly reasonable ask. For us, it was insane. The next three weeks were easily my worst in recent memory, as might have been inferred from my tweets at the time.

FRIENDS: how's the move going?
ME: you know that part in event horizon where they decode the last transmission from the lost ship and it's the latin 'liberate me ex inferis?'
FRIENDS: uh
ME: it means "save me from hell"
FRIENDS: ah
— steve o'grady (@sogrady) August 16, 2020

I spent my two weeks of summer vacation moving half of the items in the house over to storage using my hand truck and my actual truck. We had so much that needed to be moved we outgrew one storage unit and expanded into a second, much larger one, nearly filling that one too. Nor did we have time to pack properly; the night before the photographers arrived, in fact, we were basically pulling things off counters and throwing them into boxes (and when they were unable to shoot due to poor weather, I ran around the house shouting “DEUS EX MACHINA!”).

Some of those boxes even got labeled, if you can call these labels.

I also spent vacation out in the blazing sun sanding our house’s long deck, then staining it twice before giving up and painting it once. I replaced the deck railings, a task which was substantially complicated by the fact that due to the pandemic there were massive shortages of pressure treated lumber, and when I finally found some I spilled it all over the road transporting it home.

I installed a new dishwasher, spraying myself with disgusting bilgewater in the process. I replaced parts on the range, it worked for two days, broke again, after which I took everything apart again and found the actual problem. Kate and I painted the sun room in our house, including the cathedral ceiling, in spite of the fact that I couldn’t figure out how to work our borrowed paint sprayer and almost doused a floor and two cabinets with Benjamin Moore Decorator White.

It didn’t help that all of that sanding took place in August, which was the hottest month on record, ever, in Portland. It also didn’t help that I badly tore a muscle in my left rib cage less than a week into prep, and when I Googled how long that recovery would be the answer was 4-6 weeks.

Anyway, I could go on, but you probably get the point: this was not my favorite start to August ever.

The worst part of all of this, however, was the uncertainty. We were fairly confident, based on our understanding of the market, that we’d get offers. We had no idea whether they’d be acceptable offers, however. And even if we were able to successfully sell the place, we had no idea where we were going to be living, first because there were less than ten houses available in the four or five towns we were looking in combined and second because all of the available rentals had been snapped up by out-of-towners fleeing COVID.

The good news was that our effort, and the wise counsel of our broker both in terms of how to prepare and what to list at, paid off. We ended up listing late on a Thursday night, and were under contract by Sunday to a nice couple from Boston. Our broker - bless her - even managed to wrangle a rent-back from our buyers, so that we had up to two months to look before we had to move.

The better news was the miracle that was our purchase.

During one of the showings of the property we were selling, we were casting about for somewhere to be. These days, after all, you can’t just clear out to a restaurant for lunch because COVID, or visit with friends and family, also because COVID. The process of selling violated our respective quarantine protocols, so we were on the outs with our pod for the duration.

On a whim, then, we decided to go look at two properties.

The first was a rabbit warren and felt smaller than our then current house in spite of being almost three times as large. The second, on the other hand, was interesting. Really interesting. It ticked a lot of boxes for us. Right town, gigabit bandwidth, attached garage, and it was much larger than we would have wanted pre-COVID but perfectly sized in a world of pods, lockdowns and quarantine protocols. Even better, it was on a quiet, private street where kids can wander and ride bikes and families can walk out the driveway and make a left into nature or a right onto a rocky beach across the street. And did I mention that it was on an island?

The second property might not have been perfect, but it was as close to it as we were likely to find - certainly in this market.

The problem was that a lot of other people saw the same attributes we did, and we were outbid. Sad news, but expected because we, alas, were not paying in cash and needed to actually have our sale close first. Thanks to our broker’s relationships, however, and some serious coaching on her part regarding our offer, we ended up as the backup offer. Which we originally agreed to not out of any sense of real hope, but more because we had nothing better on tap, and by nothing better I mean nothing else period.

But remember how I said miracle? Late in the afternoon on Sunday, August 30th, we got a call from our realtor. Given that we were still finalizing a bunch of the details with regard to the closing on our old house, this was not unusual. The news was, however. The original buyers for the property we wanted, who were from California, had decided to renege on their offer and stay in California. The exact scenario, in fact, that our friend Corey had mentioned as a possibility of days previously. This left us, as the number one backup, as the prospective owners of the house that would have been - and is, in fact - such a good fit for us across a number of dimensions.

That closing was last Tuesday, and the movers arrived on Wednesday. Almost a week and a half later, we’re still living out of boxes, which is half us being totally depleted from the entire process and half the reality of working from home with no daycare thanks to the pandemic. But we’ll get there. Eventually. I hope.

In the meantime, I need to thank a few people:

First, a big shout out to our local tech community: we honestly wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the Computers Anonymous Slack crew. They got us curious about selling, found our realtor and our mortgage broker, and took everything from a broken dishwasher to an old electric log splitter off our hands so we didn’t have to move it. They also had to listen to venting about how miserable the prep was, poor things.
We also owe an enormous debt to our realtor, who was the reason we decided to sell, the reason we sold for what we did and the reason we were in a position to land the house that we did. My experience with realtors has been less than stellar, generally, but she’s outstanding. If you’re in Maine and need a realtor, get in touch: this is who you want to work with.
My RedMonk colleagues, meanwhile, were incredibly patient with me. Already limited by my part-time childcare responsibilities, I added to that random and unpredictable absences for house prep, moving, closing and other responsibilities. And more specifically, as someone who’s self-employed, the documentation asks for the lender were incredibly broad, and Marcia got everything I needed efficiently and never griped once about my - or more accurately their - repeated demands. Couldn’t have done this without our team.
My wife’s family was amazing. With my parents out of action temporarily due to a medical issue, Kate’s parents went so far above and beyond the call of duty it can’t be properly conveyed. Kate’s Mom helped us pack, move and watch Eleanor. Kate’s Dad was a machine whether scraping and painting the side of our house or loading and unloading two and a half cords of heavy firewood with me. Kate’s brother-in-law, meanwhile, served as courier for our closing papers sacrificing a Sunday afternoon to get them executed.
Mom and Dad if you end up reading this, I know you would have been here if you could, so please no apologies. You’ve never shirked a job in your lives and you obviously didn’t here. Also, thanks for the advice that led us to pick the realtor we did, and for your support and guidance along the way.
To my brother for goading us into doing this.
Our pod friends Shawn and Ryan for taking time that they didn’t have to come up and help us pack, but more importantly distract our kid so we could pack. Also for keeping us sane along the way.
To Kate and Eleanor. The past few months have been incredibly stressful mentally and physically debilitating, but we got through it in one piece together.
Lastly, to our old house: you were good to us, and you will be missed. Here’s to many more fine years with your new family.

And for my part, here’s to never moving again.