Posts · sogrady.org

So I Built (Another) Woodshed

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 23:56:00 -0400

Eleven years ago, I built a woodshed at our old house. Mistakes were made, but overall it did what it was built to do, and I learned a lot in the process. Five years later we moved to the island, and the new house came with its own woodshed.

The shed we inherited had two major issues, however. First, it was too small for our usage. Between the wood stove, the Solo fire pit and most recently our wood fired hot tub, we go through something like five plus cords of wood per year, and this shed stores maybe two. The bigger problem, however, was that it’s simply old and falling apart. I considered trying to shore it up to buy another couple of seasons worth of service, but it’s compromised to the degree that that would be a waste of time.

For two years, then, while we tried to figure out next steps, we simply stored our wood in the driveway. This has been a nightmare for several reasons: the wood isn’t kept dry, it can be impossible to get at in the winter when a foot of snow freezes like a shell on top of the covering tarps and it looks like absolute crap. Also, everything from squirrels to snakes ends up nesting in there.

Anyway, over this past spring we finally arrived at a household consensus not only for what kind of shed to build but where to put it. Mostly so that I didn’t have to generate a cutlist, I picked up a set of plans off Etsy for $20. Instead of a two cord shed, we decided to build a larger four cord shed to accommodate the volume of wood we typically go through.

To do this, we had to move it. Our current shed is right by the door to our great room where the wood stove is, which is convenient for bringing wood in in the winter but inconvenient to load from the driveway. The new shed was too big for that spot, and is instead across the driveway, which means that I’ll have to bring wood around by cart. That’s not ideal, but it will be much easier to load in when the firewood is dropped off.

With all parties finally in agreement, I made plans to get to work this August while on vacation. And that’s when things started to go wrong.

Permitting

Being married to a lawyer means that you have to do everything by the book which means getting literally everything permitted. Even a woodshed. When I contacted the town about getting one for the planned new shed, they told me there was actually no permit for our old shed. Which I assume means that whoever built the shed was neither a lawyer nor married to one.

The town permitting took a month, but otherwise proceeded without incident. Then Kate worried about the vernal pool setbacks - again: lawyer - and that triggered multiple rounds of interactions with the town and state. Shockingly, however, we eventually got the go ahead - the only catch was that I had missed my best window to build, which was a week in which I was on vacation but Eleanor was in camp.

But by carving out a few hours here and there, I gradually got to work. Which brings me to the footprint.

Footprint

When I built the shed at our old house, I built it on grade, which is to say I dug down ten inches, filled the area with crushed stone and put concrete pavers on top. This was miserable and in my writeup I recommended against on grade in favor of poured concrete footings.

And that was indeed my plan, until I realized that I had no way of knowing definitively where precisely our water line ran. Faced with a choice between an on grade foundation which wouldn’t dig deeply enough to hit the water line (not so much for the fiber line, alas) or concrete tubes that may or may not cut off the water supply to our house, I did what I had told myself last time not to do.

The bad news was that this new much larger shed required a new much larger footprint than the last time I’d gone through this exercise. I had to remove over five cubic yards of dirt, sand and clay and replace it with over five cubic yards of crushed rock. The good news is that my nephew was looking to pick up some pocket money and had a couple of spare days before he headed off to school. Eleanor helped as well, so I at least didn’t have to do this part on my own.

Once the crushed rock was in place, I had to put in the pavers the shed’s skids would sit on. There were fifteen in three rows. Each paver needed to be level by itself, and level with its neighboring pavers and with every other paver on the grade. Long story short, this work was tedious, fiddly and absolutely miserable. But it eventually got done. Next up was building the foundation.

Foundation

The foundation for the shed was three skids of 16’ pressure treated (PT) 4x4’s, on top of which was placed a frame of PT 2x6’s. This was easy enough to assemble, but when I checked it for square it was off by several inches. Which meant a trip to the hardware store to buy a ratchet strap which temporarily succeeded in making my frame square but did so by cracking and ripping out the bottom of one of my end joists. Which in turn meant a trip back to the lumber store to get a replacement 2x6, and to install it I had to essentially take the entire frame apart and put it back together. And when I did that, I checked it for square and I’d somehow made it worse.

One more application of the ratchet straps - more carefully this time - and some temporary braces and I ended up with a rectangle rather than a trapezoid. As I laid down the flooring - regular 2x4s rather than cedar for cost reasons, and we’ll see how that ages - I could remove the braces and it held square.

Onward.

Posts

Next up were the shed posts, composed of two 2x6’s. I thought it would be a pain in the ass to level and plumb these without a second set of hands and I was right. But using spare lumber as braces, I eventually got all four posts up, then connected by cross-beams.

While the posts wrapped around the corners of the foundation as two 2x6’s joined as an L, they didn’t offer much strength front to back. So it was time for rafters.

Rafters

Before building, I had Claude look at the plans and it told me the pitch for the rafters should be 4 to 1. Measuring out the instructions using a speed square, it was 5 to 1. Not sure which to go with, I defaulted to the original plans over AI’s interpretation of them and it worked.

In the last eleven years, however, I have not gotten a lot better at cutting out bird’s mouths for rafters and they were a bit rough. (Side note for future me: don’t use the circular saw, go with a jig saw - and try not to snap its blade off mid-process). The warp on several of the rafters didn’t help either. But eventually I got all the rafters up. And the purlins on top of them running perpendicular.

And then it was time for siding, and that’s when things got interesting.

Yakisugi / Shou Sugi Ban

In my last shed, the siding was all cedar for its weather resistant qualities. A decade later, with a much larger shed, that lumber would run 2-4X the cost of the more basic pine. But the pine would rot much more quickly - unless, that is, it could be made weather resistant via the Japanese technique known as yakisugi or more commonly shou sugi ban here in the US.

Basically, this means burning the exterior of the wood to render the charred surface much more resistant to weathering.

The traditional method for this is using three planks to form a triangle, and burning the middle, rotating the triangle up and down to allow the fire to burn the length of each plank. This requires skill, technique and experience that I did not have. So instead I borrowed a flame thrower from one of Eleanor’s friend’s moms.

This past weekend, then, while the girls were away, I laid out all of the siding in the driveway, and systematically burned it all using the flame thrower. You can lightly burn wood, but in search of the best weather resistance and a preference for a darker shed, I opted for a much deeper level of char. Except for knots and some patterns in the wood, the siding is now a deep black.

After doing the siding, I next took the flamethrower to the shed, burning the posts, the beams and all of the non-PT wood to protect it. This has led to some questions in the household about why the foundation isn’t black, but given that burning PT wood releases toxic fumes they’re not going to get the yakisugi treatment. Instead, I’ll probably turn to some sort of stain eventually to have the shed be more aesthetically consistent.

As not fun as leveling the pavers was, the act of burning this wood was a delight. Using a flamethrower on its own is entertaining, but seeing flame interact with the wood, revealing and then obscuring the grain was wild. Best part of building the shed by far.

As an aside, to the couple that walked by the top of the driveway and then more or less sprinted off when they saw me laying down swaths of fire, sorry if I freaked you out.

Roof

The only things left to do after applying the siding were fitting the drip edge and roof panels on. It took some persuading at home, but I eventually got the go ahead to use corrugated metal for the roof rather than plywood, felt paper and asphalt shingles. Given how terrible the experience of roofing was last time, this was a big win. I’ve even got extra panels if/when these get damaged. Other than putting in the top couple of rows of screws, which was at the very limit of my ladder, the roof wasn’t difficult to put on. We’ll see how it ages, but it is far easier to install than a traditional shingled roof.

Lessons Learned

A pickup bed makes a fantastic mobile equipment shed. Last time I took over our dining room table. This time around I just kept all of my tools in the back of the pickup, and backed it up to the worksite when it was time to build.

Having help - particularly for moving thousands of pounds of dirt and crushed rock - is pretty great. Shout out to Eleanor and my nephew for their help. No shout out to Sully, who continued his standard practice of picking the least convenient place possible and lying down.

I knew this going in, but it was even worse than expected, but budget extra time for extra trips to the hardware store. Even though Hancock delivered all of the necessary lumber and fasteners to the house, mistakes in ordering, mistakes in the cutlist or simply mistakes that break things mean extra trips to the store. I conservatively was in Ace Hardware half a dozen times, Hancock twice and Home Depot three or four - twice on Saturday alone.
Internet woodshed plans are worth what you pay for them. I bought $20 plans and they were definitely worth $20. There were a few mistakes, instructions that were unclear and overall the plans were very basic. I tried to have AI upgrade them with a more detailed plan, but it just made different mistakes. In the end, it might have been simpler to adapt my own plans, but I really didn’t want to have to generate the cutlist from scratch for something this big and complicated.
With dimensional lumber, warping is a fact of life. I would have been better off, however, if I identified the most warped pieces ahead of time, because for the foundation in particular having the middle joist - on which the floor framing rests - be warped almost an inch and a half out of square was not particularly helpful.
Given that my day job is basically nothing but computers and video calls, building things with my hands offers an entirely different kind of satisfaction. Even if I spend half the time trying to recover from my own mistakes.

Maybe the most important takeaway - having used a borrowed Flame King unit, I need to get my own. Every house should have a flamethrower.

60 Miles

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:03:37 -0400

Over 1100 days ago, I went for a 50 mile walk. There was no particular reason for it. I wasn’t walking as part of an event, it wasn’t part of a group charity drive and it wasn’t to get anywhere. I never left my island, in fact. As someone who enjoys walking and walking long distances, it just seemed like a logical next step having walked a marathon distance six months earlier.

While I was wiped out and trying to recover from the grueling 14+ hour effort, my daughter innocently gave me an unintended backhand to the face with the simple question: “What’s next, Daddy, 80 miles?"

In the years since I’ve thought about her challenge, but ultimately arrived at the realization that the logistics of walking 80 miles are essentially the logistics of walking for 24 hours straight. People have done that and much more, certainly, but speaking as someone who doesn’t walk for a living it was a bit more than I wanted to take on. Instead, I picked a more realistic interim target: 60 miles. It’s a step up from 50, but more achievable for me at the present time than 80.

All that remained was picking the day, and then working up the mileage to try and hit that goal. As it turns out, yesterday was the day. Also as it turns out, that choice turned out to be a mistake, but I’ll come back to that shortly.

After an early bedtime Tuesday night, I was out our front door at 4:50 in the morning and hit 60.02 miles right outside that same front door at 12:34 AM. In the 18 hours and 55 minutes I was moving, I took 129K steps and burned just shy of 8K calories per my Apple Watch.

Anyway, that’s the gist of it. If you’re interested in the gory details - and honestly I’m capturing the rest mostly as documentation for my future self in planning future dumb adventures - feel free to read on.

The Weather

The last time I did a long walk, I did it in May. For a variety of reasons ranging from family illnesses to work travel, that didn’t happen this time around, and instead I picked the first day of July. For the record, even in Maine, if you’re going to be walking for a while outdoors, May is a better month to do it than July.

As with my 50 mile effort, I never left my island - assuming the little island connected to us by causeway counts as my island. Unlike last time, however, I couldn’t follow a pre-selected route because I had to change things up because of the weather. Out of all of the days I could have picked, I landed on one with “dangerous” heat warnings. I even had a pop-up thunderstorm scare at mile 57, accompanied by ten minutes of heavy, heavy rain.

Screenshot

The morning was relatively cool, so I followed a standard 16 mile route that I do from time to time. After that, however, I started opting for routes that offered tree cover. We have a trail that runs the length of the island, but it hasn’t been cut back recently and to reduce the tick threat, I used that sparingly. Instead, I spent the hottest hours of the day walking a loop in the preserve on the immediately adjoining island which offered not only good shade but sea breezes. After that, I had to make it up as I went along, and spent the last twenty miles basically walking up and down the main road on our island on repeat because my feet were shot and I needed as flat a surface as possible.

To be sure, “extreme” heat in Maine is just another day in, say, Atlanta, but with feels like temperatures in the mid 90’s and sky high humidity, I had to account for it in route and attire. Speaking of.

The Attire

My standard walking attire in the summer is a lightweight merino wool t-shirt, merino boxers, nylon shorts and synthetic socks. That’s exactly what I wore yesterday, except that I swapped outfits three separate times because I was soaked. Changing the t-shirt, boxers and so on wasn’t entirely critical, but dry socks are because wet socks can lead to blisters. Unfortunately, even with the sock rotation my feet were effectively destroyed by the end of the walk, in part because my socks were sweat through.

I also rotated through two different sets of HOKA shoes - one of which was brand new, but alas, that didn’t seem to make much of a difference.

The Feet

After my last long walk, for the last ten to twenty miles, it felt like the entire soles of both feet were one big blister. The good news is that when I woke up the next day, my feet were more or less recovered, and I was walking again two days later.

This year, however, while my left foot was mostly fine the day after, my right foot has a big blister on the heel and an even larger one on the pad of the forefoot. It’s damaged enough that I’ve been hobbling around all day, shuffling like a nonagenarian in an effort to put as little weight on the damaged foot as possible.

In a perfect world, day two will see significant improvement, but if not, I may have some tedious blister remediation work ahead of me.

The Pace

When I did my 50 mile walk, my average pace was under 18 minutes per mile. This time around, it was almost 19. A lot of that was the weather: I intentionally kept my pace easy so as to not overheat, and I had to opt for different routes as mentioned above for shade purposes which were slower going. Also relevant was that this was ten more miles than last time and I’m three years older. And maybe the biggest issue was the deteriorating condition of my feet.

In the end, however, I can’t say I care that much about the pace. I made it, and that’s what I care about.

The Sustenance

One of the important planning questions in walking a long distance is what to eat and when to eat it. Unfortunately, while there is a ton of information on nutrition for ultra-marathons, there isn’t a lot for walking. It’s an important distinction, because the delta in the caloric expenditure of running vs walking - even the kind of walk/running typical of an ultra-marathon - is significant.

What I landed on was a series of egg wraps throughout the day, with some gummies in between for quick energy and then a protein heavy pizza upon event completion. This seemed to work, in that I both had sufficient energy and that I had no digestive complications along the way. Which, if you read about ultra-running meal plans, sound pretty horrifying.

Anyway, the most important aspect for me particularly given the high temperatures and humidity was water. The night before I refrigerated both a Camelbak-style bladder and two 32 ounce water bottles - the latter two of which were filled with salt-laden electrolyte mixes. I went through all three of these by 5 PM, and cycled through the two water bottles twice each after that.

In a challenge like this, staying close to home is essential unless you have a support crew because there’s no way I could have carried all of the water I would have needed. Instead, I just rotated back through the house whenever I was out of water.

The Reward

My best friend and distance mentor - who recently completed an absolutely insane 100 mile, 10K vertical gain and 10 different species of fish challenge - has a tradition to close out long events with a big beer. Based on some back of the envelope calculations based on ABV requirements and my specific distance, I landed on Bissell’s Betwixt and Between as my celebratory beverage.

It was delicious, and had an outsized impact on my depleted system.

The Thanks

My Girls: first, and most obviously I need to thank Kate and Eleanor both for making a day like today possible, but more for putting up with all of the work that goes into it. I couldn’t do things like this without their support and understanding. Special additional thanks to Eleanor for my prized “GOOD LUCK DADDY BRACELET.”
My BFF: my primary inspiration for doing crazy things like this, I need to shout out my best friend Andrew for not only being my distance mentor on everything from what to eat and how to deal with blisters, but more importantly keeping me focused the last ten miles via constant text and talking me in for the last half mile. Appreciate you, friend.
My Island People: one of my absolute favorite things about walking on the island is the support I get from island people. From the little kid’s tiny thumbs up sticking out the window of a car driving way, to all the people who honk at me (most of whom I don’t recognize), to the people out in their gardens who stop me to ask how much I walk and tell me to keep it up to Terry, who sits out in front of his house and gives me a big wave as I pass. I felt nothing but support yesterday, even as I’m apprehensive about seeing someone post to our local town social media group asking about the guy who was walking up and down the main island road last night until the wee hours.
My Crow Friends: as some of you know, I’ve spent the past few years befriending local murders of crows all over the island. I feed them unshelled peanuts, and they welcome me wherever I go. To the point that a woman stopped me a while back on the bridge to the island, saying: “excuse me, but are those birds following you?” Anyway, my crow friends were a big help yesterday, keeping me entertained during a long day - and one crow friend in particular, Gray Feathers, probably had one of the best days of his life because he got no fewer than eight drops of peanuts.
My Apple Watch Ultra: I’m still not thrilled with the battery life overall, but while it promised 20 hours of usage on the Low Power mode, after 19+ hours the watch had 35% left on the battery when I finished. After all of the research I had to do in how to charge it mid-event if necessary, I was thrilled it wasn’t necessary.

The Takeway

Maybe the best takeaway from all of this? Eleanor hasn’t asked me about 80 miles or any other crazy distance yet. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.

Books: Spring 2026

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:54:23 -0400

Having promised myself if no one else that it wouldn’t be another eight year span in between book reviews, here I am back four months later. I’d put it off again, but my list is already long enough to be barely manageable. As I’ll cover shortly, it’s been an interesting and eclectic few months of books. A bit of literary fiction, some genre fiction, some classic noir, sci-fi new and old, an unfortunately necessary dose of US history and finally some essential comic relief.

As always, I’m making no effort to review the following thoroughly or in detail. I’m not writing school-length book reports, not least because it’s entirely possible that I’ll be the only reader and I don’t need those. My goal here instead is to provide a high level value assessment, a bit of color commentary about the author, titles or both and leave the decision of whether anything sounds compelling up to the reader.

The only other thing to note is that the links are Amazon affiliates, because I always enjoy seeing if people find any of the books interesting, and if so which.

With that, on to the reviews.

The Good

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

I’d somehow never gotten around to this title, but after several recommendations I finally gave Never Let Me Go a read. I was a little more ambivalent about the book than the folks that recommended it, but that’s because all I kept thinking about while reading it was a line from Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park: “life will find a way.” I can’t explain any more than that without spoiling things, but if you read it, you’ll understand. Where I struggled with plausibility, however, the characterization, the quality of the prose and the underlying theme made this worth a read for me.

James / The Trees, Percival Everett

These two books are not connected other than their author and sharing a core theme of the Black experience in America, but I’m grouping them here because if you like one, you’ll almost certainly like the other. James is a retelling of Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which I also re-read recently and is depressingly still very relevant) from Jim’s perspective with a very clever conceit, while the Trees involves two Black detectives investigating brutal race-related crimes that are seemingly impossible. I found James the more satisfying of the two because I struggled with the ending to the Trees, but these are both well worth your time. Everett can write, and these books have a lot to say about what it’s like to be non-white in America, both then and now.

Those Across the River / The Lesser Dead / Between Two Fires, Christopher Buehlman

Equally brutal but less impactful because of the distance from reality that genre fiction affords, the first two novels are basically books about monsters. Which types, I’ll leave opaque here, but there’s a familiarity to both along with some genuine creativity when it comes to form. The Lesser Dead in particular attempts to use some of the standard tropes jujitsu-style, working against expectations, and while I thought the ending was a bit convoluted, it was a great read. Those Across the River was, as his debut novel, a little less sophisticated in both prose and format, but I enjoyed both of these books, though not as much as his much more ambitious historical fiction, Between Two Fires.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones

I haven’t had the opportunity to read too much genre fiction written from the perspective of Native Americans, but I’ll have to seek out more of it because the Buffalo Hunter Hunter was excellent. Other than the wrapper narrative, this is basically the stories of two men: a white minister and a warrior of the Blackfeet or Pikuni people. Central to the book is the Marias Massacre, in which the United States army attacked and murdered nearly two hundred Piegan Blackfeet - principally women, older men and children. This novel, and the story that unfolds, is about reckoning. And if you choose to read this, for what it’s worth, I highly recommend the audiobook. The narrators - Shane Ghostkeeper in particular - are exceptional.

There is No Antimemetics Division, qntm

I described There is No Antimemetics Division at one point as something like a cross between Max Barry’s Lexicon and The Magnus Archives podcast. Which doesn’t help much if you don’t know one or both of those, but it’s enough to say here that this is an intensely layered book, with reality as subjective as if Philip K. Dick had written it. As with Lexicon, or The Matrix or countless other sci-fi titles, the opening is purposefully, intensely confusing, but while I wondered if the novel, which had been written serially, would hang together and be coherent as a whole, the answer is generally yes.

The Chill / The Underground Man / The Galton Case / The Zebra-Striped Hearse, Ross MacDonald

A little while back I fed my Goodreads list into Claude, an AI bot, and asked it to point out any obvious holes in my reading. One of them was the fact that while I’d read most of the classic noir titles from masters of the craft like Chandler and Hammett, not to mention heirs to their legacy like John D. MacDonald, I’d never read a single title from one of other giants in the field, Ross MacDonald (no relation to John D). Where Chandler had Philip Marlowe, Hammett had The Continental Op and John D. MacDonald had Travis McGee, Ross MacDonald’s series hero/anti-hero was a private detective by the name of Lew Archer. Curiously, Claude recommended I start with The Chill and The Underground Man which I liked least of the four that I read. The plots stretched and then snapped my ability to suspend disbelief, but there was enough to the books otherwise to read The Galton Case and The Zebra-Striped Hearse, and while they also were preposterous at times, they evinced a sense of style and quality of prose that made them worth it. I’d still rank Ross MacDonald well behind Chandler and Hammett, as well as my personal favorite John D. MacDonald, but the Lew Archer novels have substance to them and are least better than Rex Stout’s.

The Hilarious

Surely You Can’t Be Serious, David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker

I don’t remember where I came across Surely You Can’t Be Serious, but this oral history of the making of Airplane was exactly what I needed after plowing through some of the depressing mid-twentieth century US history I’ll get to in a moment. The making of Airplane is a remarkable story of perseverance from Hollywood outsiders who changed comedies forever, and inspired countless comedians and filmmakers for decades - many of whom are quoted in the book. The book was educational, both about the film industry of the time in general as well as bits of trivia I’d never heard before, such as the fact that the Kentucky Fried Theater that made Airplane possible was also the inspiration for Saturday Night Live. But mostly the book made me laugh. This is another one to listen to as an audiobook if you can, as where possible it’s read by the actual actors, directors, comedians and filmmakers who contributed to it.

The History

The Burglary, Betty Medsger / Fugitive Days, Bill Ayers / The Last Honest Man, James Risen

Getting back to that history, my consumption of non-fiction concerning the United States in the middle of the last century is apparently directly proportional to the current president’s administration. During his first term, I inhaled books like All the President’s Men, Days of Rage and Nixonland. This time around, it’s subjects like: a group of activists who broke into an FBI office to publish highly confidential documents that eventually broke open the shameful history of COINTELPRO, a first hand account from an activist of his thoughts and behaviors of the time and lastly a biography of a Democratic Senator from Idaho (imagine that) - Frank Church - who helped expose the US intelligence agencies’ near total lawlessness and lack of accountability. Of the three, Risen’s Last Honest Man is easily the best written, though the Burglary’s narrative is the most compelling at least until you get to the modern material. Fugitive Days, meanwhile, provided some insight into the mindset of the young activists, but was lighter on the underground insights than expected and both self-aggrandizing and shockingly sexist for a memoir written decades later. But if you are struggling with the parallels between the present day and the last time the country was tearing itself apart, any of the above titles will provide you with a much better education on the state of the United States in that span than I ever got in school.

Proto, Laura Spinney

One of the criticisms of this book chronicling the rise of Proto-Indo-European, the ancient language from which everything from English to French to Sanskrit is descended, is that it spend more of its time on history than it does on linguistics, and it’s a fair point. Another is that the dots here, from DNA to ancient primary sources to linguistics, aren’t perfectly joined up. Also true. But in spite of that, Proto is a fascinating read if you enjoy history and want to understand more about how languages evolve. The extrapolation on the geographic path and timing of the Romany people via the presence - or lack thereof - of loan words, for example, was almost enough by itself to justify reading this. It’s dense, but recommended for all fans of history and possibly for linguists as well.

The Very Different

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick

I knew Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? differed greatly from its film incarnation Blade Runner, but I was unprepared for just how little the two had in common. Many of the characters are present in both, and the rough plot is similar enough. But Dick’s novel is as basic in its prose as it is inventive in its structure. It’s much more occupied with class and social mores than the film is and in that way reads more like a novel of the fifties than one published in 1968. Ultimately, it’s worth a read if only as a companion piece to the film, but approach it knowing that the two are deeply, radically different works of art.

The Meh

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr

Generally regarded as a science fiction classic and winner of the 1961 Hugo Award for best novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz did little for me. Miller did well to make the actual apocalypse of his post-apocalyptic world something of an afterthought, a vague background consideration. It elevates the book, which is structured in three parts, from a basic genre title to one with more ambition. But the religious themes were largely lost on me, and characters were difficult to relate to in any meaningful way. My recommendation if you read this is to keep your expectations minimal and understand that parts of the slow moving plots will be a slog.

The Plot Against America, Philip Roth

Widely considered one of the United States’ best novelists of the last century, having won the Pulitzer among other awards for American Pastoral, Roth’s The Plot Against America was in theory right up my alley. An alternative history, one in which Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR for the Presidency, it had a great deal going for it: a plausible alternative history set up (and one grimly relevant to the present day), the author’s undeniable ability to write and a plot which - while introduced too late - justified the read. But the novel spends so much time in the moment with its protagonist that it’s structurally weakened. Time has to be sped up on multiple occasions to actually advance the plot. Also, a microscopic view of the life of one child in New Jersey - and I can say this as a child who grew up in New Jersey - is not intrinsically the most fascinating of narratives even given the context, with the result a plot that seriously drags at times. The characters are fully fleshed out and three dimensional, and operate with the wide range of behaviors you’d expect from humans rather than cardboard cutouts. But other than the quality of the writing and the thought exercise of “Yes, It Can Actually Happen Here,” this was a long, slow read that I had to force myself to pick up and finish.

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.

Books: Winter 2025

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:02:12 -0500

When I started posting quick reviews of things I’d been reading back in 2014, I didn’t commit to any regular schedule. As it turns out, that’s a good thing, because my first follow up was a year later, my second was two years after that and, as far as search can tell me, it’s been eight years since I last checked in.

Which means whittling down a list to check in about was a job in and of itself, because eight years is a lot of books. Some of these are more easily covered than others because they’re series - there are twenty complete Aubrey Maturin novels, for example, and I have no intention of trying to comment on them individually. Even so, I’ve had to leave off some recent reads like Holly from Stephen King (entertaining) or Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson (convoluted but worth it) simply because the list was getting too long. There are also a number of books that didn’t make the cut simply because they weren’t any good, but that readers would be unlikely to run into and thus didn’t warrant a warning unlike a few of the books below.

Anyway, I mostly post these reviews for my future self, because the following are not exactly fit for the New York Times Book Review. But in case you find yourself in need of a new read - or just want to know what to avoid - the following is for you. As always, I’ve added Amazon links not for the pennies I’d earn but to see whether any of the recommendations work, and if so which ones.

The Good

The Aubrey-Maturin Novels, Patrick O’Brian

Most people who’ve read any of the Aubrey Maturin series are shocked to discover that O’Brian was not a sailor, and had no naval history background at all. For those that have not, it’s an incredible discovery because these books are comically dense with nautical, naval and historical terminology, customs and events. Aubrey is the dashing but occasionally buffoonish English sailor and eventual captain; Maturin is his slender, Irish naval surgeon / naturalist / spy and best friend. Together they have a great series of adventures set against the backdrop of Napoleonic Europe. If you like historical fiction, this series is among the gold standards. And there’s no shortage of material.

The End of the World As We Know It, Anthology

Released this summer, The End of the World As We Know It is a series of short stories set in the universe of The Stand, the post-apocalyptic novel by Stephen King. King gave this effort his official blessing, in fact, in return for one condition: that none of the short stories could leverage the main characters in that novel or change their fates. Which, as it turns out, is absolutely no impediment whatsoever from a creative standpoint, as this anthology traverses the post-Captain Trips world from Florida to Pakistan, from the Northeast to the Deep South. What would it be like on a small island? How about in a big city? If you enjoyed the Stand and want to return to that world viewed through a dizzying array of perspectives, this is the book for you. Like all anthologies, some efforts are better than others (the mermaid one was pretty weird), but overall it’s worth your time.

Fatherland, Robert Harris

As someone who studied Nazi Germany in college and reads more than his fair share of historical fiction, it’s not clear how I missed Fatherland for so long but I was glad to remedy my error. In tone and subject, it’s almost like a cross between The Man from the High Castle and V for Vendetta. It isn’t great literature in the way that the next novel is, but it’s well researched, the plot moves and isn’t entirely predictable, and it captures a plausible alternative future neatly enough that the resonance with the world around me at present was uncomfortable at times.

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

I’ve read Lonesome Dove two or three times previously, but every time as with my most recent re-read I was struck by what an incredible achievement it is. It is putatively a Western, but it is at least as much an incredibly diverse and three dimensional set of character arcs, an unvarnished and unromantic history of the West and a novel which implicitly and unpretentiously shows off its understanding of a very different time and world. How many Westerns, for example, turn on the difference between horse qualities or knowledge of water sources? Lonesome Dove is, inarguably, a staggering achievement.

What I had not known, however, was that it has both two prequels and a sequel. The bad news is that none of them are on the same level as Lonesome Dove. The good news is that there are few books that are, and both the prequels (Dead Man’s Walk and Comanche Moon) as well as the sequel, Streets of Laredo, will either spell out why some of the characters from Lonesome Dove are the way they are or explain how they died. The prequels are worth at least to see Call and McCrae as inept rookies who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing.

Tackling the four books is a lengthy task, however, so if you just read one, make it Lonesome Dove. You’ll be glad you did.

Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett

I’d read several of Ken Follett’s thrillers growing up - Eye of the Needle first and foremost among them. But I’d somehow never gotten around to Pillars of the Earth, which according to the author at least is his fans’ favorite book of his. The scope of the plot involves the construction of a cathedral, and it is a work covering, ultimately, decades of 12th century history. While Follett had clearly done his research - particularly when it came to the construction of cathedrals and the rise of early mercantilism - this is not a novel that rubs that history in the readers face in the way that, say, the Aubrey Maturin novels do. Follett is ultimately more focused on the character arcs than the history they’re traversing, and overall it’s a novel with twists and turns and a good deal of historical context.

Fair warning, however, Pillars is a bit like Game of Thrones, both in its levels of violence - and especially sexual violence - and its propensity to put its main characters in harm’s way.

Piranesi, Susanna Clarke

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is one of my all time favorite novels, so I was both elated and a little anxious when Piranesi was released. On the one hand, a new Clarke novel was exactly what I had been waiting for for years. On the other, it had no relation to the Strange and Norrell universe and, well, what if it wasn’t up to that standard? In the end, these apprehensions were silly, as Piranesi is an excellent novel, and entirely original. It’s a little bit like the Matrix, in that the opening is confusing and difficult to process, but as the novel progresses it picks up speed and all is revealed. It’s worth reading just to step into an entirely different universe, and Clarke writes so well.

Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir

In my first review of books, I recommended the Martian for its precise technical detail and its immense sense of humor. I’d recommend Project Hail Mary for exactly the same reasons. While both novels involve space and spaceflight, however, and a protagonist - willing or unwilling - with a sense of humor, they are very different books. If you’re like me and the novel has not been spoiled for you before you get to it, there’s a point in the book about halfway through where you’ll think: this could go one of two ways, good or bad. I’m delighted to say it was the former.

One other note: if you can, listen to this on audiobook. I don’t usually say this, but I think it’s better than reading it in physical form. Once you’ve read it, you’ll understand why.

The Terror, Dan Simmons

AMC thought enough of Simmons’ novel the Terror to turn it into a TV series, though my understanding is that it’s only the first season that’s based on the book. The Terror is a fictional account of the lost vessels Terror and Erebus which were attempting to find a Northwest passage through the Arctic ice. At the time the novel was published in 2007, both the Terror and Erebus were still undiscovered, but by 2014 both had been located - and likely would have been far sooner if Inuit testimony had been accepted at face value. This novel has shades of the Aubrey Maturin novels in its level of historical detail and if they were on a polar expedition, but is also a creature feature as its revealed in the opening pages that something on the ice is killing off the men of the Terror and Erebus. If you like a horror novel with painstaking historical research, this is for you.

The Complicated

Remembrance of Earth’s Past Trilogy, Liu Cixin

There are many people who consider the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy one of the finest works of science fiction ever written. Netflix certainly saw something in them, as they turned the Three Body Problem into a series. And it’s not hard to see what they saw. They are intricately plotted, and each novel is something of a tightly wrapped puzzle to be slowly revealed. Their scope is also wildly ambitious, using plot devices like hibernation to skip through thousands of years of history. I personally struggled with the novels, however, for a few reasons. There’s definitely a streak of misogyny to them, there are passages particularly in the first novel with its video game sequences that are very dull and many of the character decisions just don’t make sense. If you’re looking for a sci-fi series that zooms all the way out to look at and answer the Fermi Paradox, however, this will be right up your alley.

Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari

On the one hand, Sapiens was interesting because most of the histories I read are focused on a few decades, a few hundreds of years or at most a few thousand. Sapiens, on the other hand, attempts to cover a million plus years of history, and that exercise is both novel and has value in terms of trying to gain new perspective on the passage of time. On the other hand, the challenge with covering that much history, and anthropology, and sociology, and botany and, well, you get the picture, is that you have to be an expert in every field. And no one, Harari included, is. As a result, there are people who…don’t think much of Harari’s existing knowledge base, or his research. For my part, even as a layman, there were whole sections that seemed either intuitively wrong, or in some areas where I have some specific research background, were wrong or at least misrepresented. And there were other sections that were borderline imperialist, racist or both. I’m glad I read it, in the end, because the exercise of zooming out was valuable as mentioned, but I had to take more or less the entire book with several grains of salt.

The Bad

The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova

I won’t spoil the antagonist here, but suffice it to say The Historian is something of a horror novel. Unfortunately, while there was enormous hype around the release of this book, it seems to exist more as a travel guide than fictional story. The publishers apparently thought they might have the next DaVinci Code on their hands, and while it didn’t match that success, the quality of the writing was similar. The characters are relatively two dimensional, their relationships are implausible and the plot requires a constant suspension of disbelief. And the ending is anticlimactic, to put it mildly. Overall, one to avoid.

Angel of Darkness, Caleb Carr

Speaking of implausible, this sequel to the Alienist - Carr’s novel which has an Alienist, or proto-psychologist, turn detective - lurches from implausibility to another. Combined with the decision to have a narrator who is theoretically uneducated but essentially just reverts to the same stylistic crutch phrases over and over, I didn’t enjoy this one. The Alienist has its issues, but is worth a read. The Angel of Darkness, not so much.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig

At some point when I was in college, I remember people raving about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, so I decided I’d finally give it a read a couple of months ago. It’s entirely possible it’s my failings as a reader, but I found this an absolute slog. There are effectively two parallel narrative tracks; one part is a father and son motorcycle trip, which is complicated by some serious mental health challenges all around. The second is a lengthy, dense and - for me, at least - tedious philosophical discussion on the nature of “quality.”

As mentioned, it could just be me, but I do not understand at all what people see in this book.

The Meh

Bone Clocks / Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

These are two different novels by David Mitchell, with some minor overlap in characters. While they have their moments, and they’re inventive, I didn’t particularly enjoy either one. Part of it is that Mitchell has a gift for writing unsympathetic and at times, repellent, characters, and part of it particularly with Cloud Atlas was the structure. The latter was an attempt to mimic If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Calvino, which I’ve reviewed previously. I’m glad I read Calvino’s book but I didn’t enjoy it, and I enjoyed Cloud Atlas even less - though still more than The Bone Clocks. It’s also worth noting, for whatever it’s worth, that Mitchell is not terribly optimistic about the future, and his books reflect that.

The Abominable, Dan Simmons

The Abominable is a novel released after Simmons wrote The Terror, and the initial conceit (don’t skip the introduction, because it’s not actually an introduction) demonstrates pretty clearly that the author is trying to ward off claims that he’s just rewriting the Terror in another extreme setting. Which shouldn’t have been necessary, because while they have weather elements in common, this was a very different novel, not just because it substitutes mountain climbing detail - and boy is there a lot of that - for naval detail. The Abominable is much more of a thriller than horror story, though there are elements of that as well (please no one suggest a sky burial for me). Ultimately it’s not a bad book, but there is a lot disbelief to be suspended and the central MacGuffin of the story really doesn’t make much sense if you think about it. If you like novels about mountain climbing, however, this will definitely be your jam.

The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty

Easily the most surprising reaction I had to any of the books on here was the Exorcist. As someone who enjoyed the movie as a kid, and the third sequel as a college kid, and hadn’t read it since maybe high school, I expected a lot more from the book. Instead, there were long stretches were I was simply bored - a reaction I never would have anticipated. Either it hasn’t aged well or I haven’t.

Walking Hurt

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 21:49:15 -0500

Over the past few years, I’ve been relatively fortunate with my health as I’ve gradually ramped up my walking mileage. I’ve gone from an average of 8.3 miles a day to 8.5 to a tick over 8.6 so far this year. It’s not that walking doesn’t have wear and tear on your body, far from it.

As Dean, the person responsible for getting me into this habit, and I were laughing the other day, something always hurts. Particularly as you get older.

In that, it’s a lot like the organized sports I played growing up, in which I was taught that there was a difference between playing hurt and playing injured. Injuries were things like broken legs that couldn’t be played through, that you just had to let heal. The hurts were smaller injuries: bone bruises, broken fingers (or ribs), lacerations and so on. And while you couldn’t play injured, you had to play hurt because something was always going to be hurt.

Walking not being a contact sport, the hurts these days are usually - if not always - less dramatic. But a couple of them have been new to me, and for my future self if not some of you who’ve also started walking, this is how I’ve tackled them so far. I’ve haven’t figured them all out - I’m currently dealing with a tight psoas muscle that I haven’t found a good approach for other than stretching - but below is what I’ve tried and what’s worked thus far. Maybe something in there will help you.

Blisters

While Hoka has updated the Bondi shoes I walk in and I thought I might have been developing a hot spot on one heel this morning, I’ve generally been lucky and have historically had no blister issues with them with one exception which I’ll come back to in a bit. It probably helps that my socks are all wool and wick moisture, but mostly it’s because the shoes I wear are comfortable and fit well.

On the couple of occasions I have had blisters, I’ve used duct tape on my foot before a walk if the issues were minor, or two pairs of socks if it was a little more serious.

I’ve had to use moleskin and so on years ago with hiking boots, but so far with walking I’ve been lucky. Here’s hoping my new Bondis don’t change that.

Feet Splitting

This may or may not be a problem that any of you have had, but I used to have major issues with my feet drying out, cracking and splitting. My solution to this has been simple, if regrettable. I no longer wear flip-flops. If I’m outside, I’m wearing shoes of some sort, and if I’m inside around the house - particularly in the winter when our wood stove sucks all moisture out of the air - I wear slippers.

This was a major change for me, as I used to wear flip-flops year round, but it just wasn’t worth the hassle. If you’ve got cracked feet, then, I’d think about what you’re wearing.

Calf Strain

The Monday before I walked fifty miles, I pulled a calf. As I noted in Strava at the time, it came out of nowhere. I’d never done that before, and I was actually taking it easy on my walk in preparation for the longer distance.

I was lucky in that it abated and I was able to get in my long walk, but I’ve had this problem a couple of times since with both calves. I don’t know what causes it or how to avoid it - I haven’t noticed any particular patterns that lead to it.

But I have had success mitigating the impact by using compression sleeves for the calf and/or compression socks. I don’t like them because they’re a pain in the ass to take on and off, but I always keep two spare sleeves in my pack now in case one of my calves gets cranky out of nowhere. I feel kind of like a jackass in the summer with a weird sleeve around one calf as if it was a fashion statement, but it beats the hell out of not being able to walk.

Knee Pain

So far I’ve only dealt with this a couple of times, and it’s frankly terrifying because I don’t want to deal with complicated issues and that’s knee issues. The last time I dealt with this, it was mostly lateral motion that was the problem, but I stopped rucking - which is to say walking while carrying around a weighted backpack - to avoid putting additional pressure on my knees.

My best advice here is to listen to your body, and take it easy. I’ll probably end up adding knee braces to my pack alongside the calf sleeves just in case.

Plantar Fasciitis

The first time I got this was many years ago at a conference in Portland, OR, in which I walked something like seven and a half miles in flip-flops. For weeks thereafter, I had periodic spikes of pain shooting through my foot. That was the other reason I gave up wearing flip flops; no footwear is worth jeopardizing my ability to get out and walk.

The best mitigation for this that I’ve found came by way of recommendation from my distance mentor Andrew. He’s an ultramarathoner and pointed me towards insoles. Specifically, I get these from our local Fleet Feet because I have a high arch in one foot and a borderline high arch in the other.

Over longer distances, that can contribute to the kind of pain I was feeling. The insoles haven’t completely solved that problem, but it is a night and day improvement. For what it’s worth, I replace these after about a thousand miles, or after the second set of shoes.

One very important note: they need to fit your shoes precisely. The blisters that I mentioned above, as it turned out, were caused by insoles I got from Amazon that were the right size for my shoes, but didn’t fit perfectly. This led to sliding and movement in my shoes, and thus blisters on my feels. Now, I get the people at Fleet Feet to cut the insoles to fit when I buy the shoes. The result? No blisters.

Broken Ribs

The best way to deal with broken ribs is not to break them. If you’re unlucky enough to do so, however, there’s not much you can do except grit it out. The typical recovery time is six weeks, and that’s what it was for me though I could feel the broken rib(s) when I slept on them for a couple of weeks after that. Unless you have problems breathing, which is indicative of a punctured lung and something you need to get treatment for immediately, there’s not much anyone can do about broken ribs. I found walking was fine as long as I didn’t move the arm on the side where I broke them.

But honestly, just try and keep your feet if you can. These are no fun.

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.

50 Miles

Fri, 19 May 2023 23:08:27 -0400

Last fall, I made the mistake of looking at how much I was walking per week and comparing it to a marathon training program, and as one of those maxed out at 38 miles a week and my weekly goal was 40, I began to wonder if I could do that. Which is why, in December of last year (and as a side note to anyone who wants to try this, I don’t recommend scheduling it for December in Maine) I walked a marathon distance for the first time.

It left me tired, but not totally debilitated, at which point I started to wonder what ultramarathon training schedules looked like. Turns out the training for that maxes out at a 32 mile long walk, so you can see where this is going.

Long story short I got up early this morning, walked for a little over 14 hours and completed a 50 mile distance for the first time. I’ve mentioned that this was in the works to friends over the last few weeks, and the three most common questions were:

Why?
Is this a part of an organized event or program?
Where did you do it?

The latter two are easy. There was no program. When I asked for advice about sharing my location data on Twitter, in fact, everyone assumed I was doing this as part of some organized effort and said “oh, the race organizers will have that.” Instead, it was just me, walking out my front door and rather than walking an extra long loop I do on the island here from time to time, doing that and then adding two more on top.

People are always surprised that I walk the distances I do on two islands that are less than three miles square combined. But I honestly think walking the same trails is what makes it all work. It’s beautiful where we live, which is a bonus, but more importantly walking the same trails repeatedly rather than having to navigate an unfamiliar track or trail means that I can just tune out. Whole sections of my long walks are done on autopilot, where I might as well be in the world of whatever book I’m listening to rather than the actual trail I’m walking on. To the extent that I often can’t remember if I did a particular section of a trail or not unless I’m paying attention.

The first question I can’t really answer, though, other than to say that I just wanted to see if I could do it. This wasn’t some 50 for 50 challenge - I’m not 50 yet. It wasn’t trying to match my ultramarathon running friends, because they go farther than I do and are running those distances rather than walking them as I am. I just enjoy walking, and this seemed like a logical next challenge. Most folks I talk to think it’s crazy, but Walking Is The Way for me.

Admittedly, this time around was definitely more taxing than either the marathon walk or the 32 mile training prep. Both of those were tiring, but not too bad. Today, as I approached 40 miles my feet were in some pain in spite of my Hokas, my lower back was sore and I definitely felt the extra miles energy-wise - in spite of last night’s pasta dinner and the variety of bars, peanut butter packets and wraps I brought with me on the trail. The last ten miles were more of a grind than I’m used to while walking, but nothing like the wall that marathoners hit from what I’m told. I was just more tired than usual.

To those that think this was a little crazy, Dean - the guy who got me into walking in the first place - told me that the women’s record holder for fastest completion time for the Appalachian Trail did 54 miles a day for the entire length of the AT. That objectively seems crazy, and after having done this today I take my hat off to her because it is legit bonkers. If today was crazy, then, it was small time crazy, but more to the point fun.

Once it was done, anyway.

Before I forget, there are a bunch of people I need to thank:

My girls for taking good care of me, checking in on me regularly, encouraging and tolerating my crazy habit and a special shout out to Eleanor for my cool bracelet which helped get me through.
My distance mentor, AKA my best friend Andrew, for patiently fielding a continuing stream of dumb questions on my part concerning everything from gear to diet to injury recovery. Also, for getting me the new pack that I used for this that has like 50 front pockets for sunglasses, sunscreen, multiple headphones, gloves, empty bar wrappers and so on as well as an easy set up for a Camelbak-style bladder system. Also the recommendation for a bladder system.
My other distance mentor, our friend Condor, for his general advice and specifically his recommendation of anti-chafing gel which came in super handy around mile 38 when my feet started to fall apart.
My friend Dean, the OG walking expert here who’s the one who got me into walking in the first place. Was great to run into him today, and true to form once he found out today was the day I was doing 50 he shooed me along saying we could catch up later.
All of my coworkers, for making it possible not only for me to get in today’s effort, but also adapting to my sudden absence today rather than yesterday due to injury (long story) as well as my various training walks.
All of the folks here on the islands who have gone out of their way to stop me on my various walks to express their support. I never understood how islanders pull for each other until I got out and started walking the islands every day. Apologies to those folks as well if they saw me circling their houses today over and over and were confused.
Pearl Jam for getting me through the last half mile.

Unrelated to the above, a couple of quick notes on battery life if only for me, at least, in the event that I try something like this again, but also for anyone else that wants to do longer events:

Phone: you can’t necessarily do this if you’re running or cycling and you definitely can’t if you’re swimming - or at least it’s less practical - but I always bring my phone and run my audio (almost always audiobooks) off of that. I have an iPhone Mini, which probably wouldn’t make it through 14 hours of running Bluetooth audio so I brought a battery pack and charger and fueled it up after mile 30 or so.
Headphones: technically, the Airpod Pro’s I have will do the 14 hours - but only with a lengthy charge in the middle from the case. So instead, I bring along the old, depleted first generation Airpod Pro’s I have and swap them in when the gen 2 unit dies and thus I’m never without audio. They don’t last long at all now, but it’s long enough for the other set to recharge.
Watch: I ended up very relucantly upgrading from an Apple Watch 7 to an Ultra specifically for this and similar events. Even on low power mode, the 7 lost a quarter of its batter life in two and a half hours - and worse cannot be recharged by a battery pack while continuing to record a workout. The Ultra’s results, I’m happy to say, were much better. I charged it to 100% capacity last night - note that by default it doesn’t fully charge unless you tell it to - and after 14 and a half hours of outdoor workout with GPS today in low power mode (i.e. the screen’s not always on) the battery life was 50% when I finished. I’m not happy to spend $800 on a Watch that doesn’t really offer me much in the way of new features, but it did what I needed it to do here.

All in all, today was a good day, and my kid was responsible for both the best and the worst things I’ve heard. The best was “GO DADDY!” The worst was, “what’s next, Daddy, 80 miles?”

I’m sore enough right now that I’m making zero commitments, but I appreciate her faith.

Cheers.

Rebuilding the Basement

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 22:13:37 -0500

A year ago this March, our basement flooded. As life experiences go, I don’t recommend it. It could have been a lot worse, because the water never got above a couple of inches deep, which meant that we didn’t lose furniture, electronics and so on. But it also could have been a lot better.
That Saturday being my morning to sleep in, Kate and Eleanor came downstairs to hang out in the playroom they had just reconfigured and discovered water. Everywhere. Very kindly, they let me continue to sleep because it didn’t appear to be getting actively worse, but when I woke up I had no idea I was going to spend the day first hauling water out manually with a shop-vac up the basement stairs and out the front door, then actually thinking the situation through and using a pump, only to give up and let the professionals take over on Sunday.
Professionals who had no more luck than I did, at first. Even with the addition of three more additional trucks over the course of the day, the water was flowing in faster than their professional gear could haul it out – so you can imagine how effective my little 14 gallon shop-vac was.

Fast forward a day and they discovered the cause, which was a frozen pipe in our perimeter drain system. Like a lot of houses built in the past twenty years, our house has a series of french / curtain drains around the perimeter of the house to ensure proper drainage. Little did we know that one of ours was either improperly installed, had become exposed over time or both, and frozen solid. With no way to exit the system, the water backed up and, with nowhere else to go, flowed back into our house.

Eventually someone – not me – figured out that might be the problem, and we called the guy who’d done the excavation for our generator and within ten minutes he’d found the drain pipes and punched a bunch of holes in the one that was frozen. That created a very small geyser in our backyard for maybe twenty minutes, and when the professionals came back they cleared the basement in maybe a half hour.
The lesson here? If you have perimeter drains, make sure they’re not frozen. Just trust me on this.

Anyway, I bring all of this up now because over the last week or so, we’ve finally completed – according to some definition of completed, anyway – the final repairs. Specifically, we re-paneled the basement hallway and beer room / pantry. We were lucky in that most of the basement, the entirety of which is finished, had wood paneling which warped a little but otherwise dried out eventually. The middle of the basement, however, was sheetrock, the bottom three feet of which had to be extracted by the same folks that (eventually) drained our basement.

For them to get at the sheetrock, however, we had to move our considerable beer collection into the downstairs shop, and move all of the shelving the beer used to be on into the middle of the room with all the drywall. This left both the shop and the beer room more or less unusable.

Until this week.

We decided, in large part because drywall is heavy and a pain in the ass to deal with, that rather than replace the missing three feet we’d simply drop in manufactured wainscoting panels. For a room that is in our basement and sees no traffic, our general feeling about the overall aesthetic was a shrugging emoji. What follows, then, is what happened and what we did.

Here’s the hallway with the water beginning to seep in (I have video of it sloshing around, but it’s too painful to watch).

And while it’s tough to see, here’s the water on the floor of the beer room. All of the dark on that carpet is water.

So here’s what the hallway looked like after they got done with it.

And here’s the beer room.

Again, and I can’t stress this enough, it could have been a lot worse. But if you’re used to having walls around, having half of them isn’t all that enjoyable. Now let’s fast forward nine months.

Still no walls.

Worse than no walls, we had more water. Which wasn’t my fault. Or entirely my fault.

When we had our furnace removed, I was told that part of that process would be draining the system. Which I presumed meant the baseboard pipes with water in them. Imagine my surprise, then, when I took a sawzall to one and water began aggressively spraying me in the face and all around the room.

My timing was unfortunate as well, because while Kate was out when the pipe was initially cut and thus didn’t hear me run around yelling, she came home to find me suspiciously wet and covered in damp drywall. I told her we’d had a bit of a minor problem, and she said, “Ok, just tell me it’s not water again.”

I wasn’t sure how to answer that question.

Anyway, let’s skip past all that and never speak of it again. Eventually the residual water in the system was drained – the shop-vac was much better draining the finite amount of water in a limited pipe system. And I was thus ready to go in putting the basement back together, so I moved a bunch of beer boxes from the shop, managed to dig out my brad nailer and I got to work.

As mentioned before, the old wood paneling and trim was warped, but more of less survived intact so I was able to salvage that. So that went in, and then the wainscoting panels on top it, topped by some obviously not stain-matched new pine trim (there was no top trim before).

If you’re looking at it from a distance, or if you did poor work quickly, at night, and you want to hide said poor work by being strategic about your camera angles, it’s passable. Ish. For a room in the basement, at least. I should note, however, that while I hold this opinion, it is by no means the consensus opinion in the household. My only hope is that no one - particularly another member of the household - takes a camera and looks more closely at that horrific trim transition, the trim being proud of the door jam, or the gap in the paneling.

To me at least, the thing we should really be focusing on is that we have walls again.

Next up was the beer room. And if you thought I’d take the time to paint the new trim where the old steam baseboard used to be to match the old trim in that room, you obviously weren’t paying a lot of attention to the quality control on the hallway. The best thing that can be said about the work in here is that it is better than having half a wall missing.

Probably.

With the room more or less back in shape, it was time to focus on what was important: getting the beer room back online. Step one, the Allagash shelf.

Step two: the sour and dark beer shelves. Though I still need to find a storage mechanism that doesn’t hide them away in boxes, but also means that a bumped shelf doesn’t cost me irreplaceable aged beers.

With the most important task out of the way with the beer re-shelved, it’s time to start picking up the last pieces from the flood, and rebuilding and reorganizing the shop. Once that’s back up and running, after all, I can do a lot more poor quality carpentry.

Besides “don’t let your basement flood,” the only other takeaway I’ll leave you with, for the two of you that have read this far, is get a compressor and a brad nailer. Out of all the power tools in existence, it might be the most fun to use.

Enjoy.

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.

The Gear Guide for Walking

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 14:19:06 -0500

It could be mere curiosity, it could be interest as more people I’ve talked to have been getting out walking in the elements, but let’s be honest: it’s probably that Christmas is a few short weeks away and people are getting desperate. Either way, I’ve been getting a bunch of questions from people on gear. From general questions on what types are good for particular situations to specific brand and item recommendations, people have asked what works and what doesn’t.

Before I get to the more specific recommendations, let me answer a few common questions up front:

Q: Why do you have multiple versions of the same items? Two hoodies, for example.
A: In a couple of cases it’s pretty simple: it’s good to have more than one t-shirt, for example, merino wool or no.

But in cases like hoodies, hats, jackets and so on, it’s a different tools for different purposes thing. Aside from things like t-shirts, underwear and so on, I don’t have duplicates of the same item, I have slightly different versions. Even subtle differences in the weight of a midweight hoodie versus a heavier weight option make them better or worse options depending on conditions.

Q: Isn’t all this gear expensive? How do you fund it?

A: It sure is, and the answer is over time. The number one rule for me, at least, is simple: if I already have something workable, use that. I got my hard shell, for example, as a Christmas present in 1998, my soft shell is 15 or 16 years old, and my down coat is 11 or 12 years old - and all three have been repaired at least once by the original manufacturers.

The clothing I’ve needed to add, meanwhile, I’ve bought slowly and tactically. A hoodie one month; t-shirts another. A quarter zip and gloves later. And with rare exceptions, it’s all come out of my own personal corner of our budget so I’m not impacting our household finances at all. Other strategies include shopping at outlets (all of my Patagonia gear has come from the Freeport outlet, for example), birthday or Christmas presents, waiting for sales and other discounts (speaking of, if you want 20% off any of the Woolx stuff mentioned below, click here), or buying things used.

It’s taken a year and a half, but I now have almost everything I could need for the conditions I’m most likely to face and the gear I’ve bought should last a long while - with the notable exception of my shoes. Those wear out faster than anything else, alas, and I look at them basically as an unavoidable expense.

Q: Do I need a bunch of gear to get going?

A: Absolutely not. When I got started, almost everything I was wearing was cotton and the running shoes I was using were four years old. You’re better off just getting started with whatever you have on hand. As walking’s grown into a steadier habit for me, however, I’ve chosen to invest in things that both make me more comfortable and make it possible for me to get out in conditions that would otherwise be problematic. But when I got started, it was soft pants, a Carharrt hoodie and my insulated work gloves that were more leaf than leather.

As Arthur Ashe put it, “start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.”

Q: Isn’t this a lot of gear? I don’t use this much when running, skiing, etc.

A: Right, but you don’t generate nearly as much body heat when walking, so in cold temps you may need to compensate with more clothing than you would otherwise.

Q: Why do all of this? Isn’t it miserable? Can’t you just walk on a treadmill or something?

A: It might seem odd, but some of my favorite walks have been the ones with the worst weather. There’s nothing that makes you feel more alive - or more appreciative of bourbon-infused scratch cocoa - than trudging around in a blizzard for a couple of hours or nearly getting blown off the bridge. Sounds weird, but it’s true.

Q/A: This one isn’t a question I’ve gotten from one of you, obviously, because no one’s read this yet. But it anticipates a question. When I go on clothing sites, things are typically laid out as base layers, mid layers and so on. I’m not using that organizational structure below, because depending on conditions, a base or mid layer could be an outer layer or an outer layer an inner layer. I don’t find that way of sorting things helpful, personally, so I’m just referring to things as jackets, hoodies, vests and so on and instead sorting by conditions which is how I plan myself. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Conditions

DARK

You’ll need a headlamp. There are more powerful models, but I use this Petzl. It’s bright enough to get me through trails in the woods in full dark, and more importantly is rechargeable so I’m not constantly cycling through batteries - here’s the battery by the way. I wish it charged via USB-C rather than micro-USB, but that’s about my only complaint.

RAIN

Rain Coat

You may read that and think, “duh.” But I was literally dumb enough to go out for months wearing an old raincoat where the water repellent was peeling off like the paint on a hundred year old house. I finally replaced it with a Patagonia Torrentshell and that’s been excellent. More waterproof than my old one, more breathable and it has big side vents for when it’s warm out.

Rain Pants

As I was telling coworkers this week, this was the biggest game changer for me. Even after upgrading my raincoat, in heavy rains I’d be dry up top but soaked below the waist before I even got down to the main road. To the point that my pants would get so waterlogged, my shoes would fill up with water and overflow. Eventually, with a big storm forecast to drop multiple inches of rain during my available window during the day, I went out and got rain pants - Grundens Trident. I wish they had side pockets, but otherwise they’re great and keep my legs and my feet dry.

Waterproof Footwear

I could have gone the waterproof trail running shoe route, but instead I killed two birds with one stone and started incorporating my Hoka Anacapa hiking boots. They’re almost as lightweight as my regular running shoes, but they’re waterproof. Between the coat, pants and boots even in heavy rain I can stay 90-95% dry, which is a massive improvement over this time last year.
And it beats waiting two or three days waiting for regular sneakers to dry after they get soaked.

STORAGE

I don’t bring along a bag every walk, particularly those of shorter duration, but the more layers I have on or the more uncertain the weather is, the handier it is to have a bag - and more particularly something tiny and light that you don’t notice. This LL Bean bag is tiny, ultralight and cheap. I’ve used it to carry everything from discarded gloves to stripped outer layers to trailside trash to the beer I shotgunned trailside after completing my annual mileage goal. It’s perfect for what I need it to do.

ICE

If you’re going to walk when there’s ice, you need cramp-ons. Just trust me on this. The Yaktrax are not only Wirecutter recommended, they were Mainer approved when I asked around. They’re a bit hard to get on while wearing gloves, but it’s not too difficult and it beats the hell out of falling.

SUN

Sunglasses

Obviously. I’ve had a pair of black black Ray-Bans for fifteen years or so, and when they broke I went out and bought exactly the same glasses - much to the chagrin of the more fashionable member of our household. So you probably don’t want what I have. Just make sure you have something to protect yourself.

Something that’s hopefully more fashionable than what I have.

Sunscreen

I’m no expert on this, but as I saw a video in which a guy had to have part of his ear removed because he didn’t wear it, it’s probably a good idea. If you’re going to be anywhere near the water, make sure to pick something reef safe.

WARM/HOT

Hat

I wear my Sox hat, obviously, and you should wear one too. But anything that keeps the sun off your head and shades your eyes a bit will do. Bonus points if it shades your ears, otherwise sunscreen (see above).

Boxers

Don’t worry, I’m not going to put up pictures of my underwear. I used to wear cotton oxford cloth boxers, but cotton being cotton I’ve now swapped them out for these merino boxers from Woolx. They’re great; breathable, wick moisture and are comfortable.

Shorts

My shorts are a set of ordinary black Nike nylon shorts and an equivalent Under Armour set with a Williams logo on it. If you’re an Eph, you can get the latter set here. But it doesn’t really matter; shorts are not something I’ve felt a need to invest much in.

T-shirt

I wanted to solve two problems with my t-shirts. First, I was tired of picking out different shirts every day, so I wanted all of my t-shirts to be exactly the same (you might notice a theme here). Second, I wanted them to be merino wool rather than cotton so they wouldn’t chill me in winter. After evaluating shirts from Wool & Prince, Woolx and Taylor Stitch I eventually settled on the latter because they’re slightly cheaper and because they’re almost entirely merino, as opposed to the others which incorporate more synthetics.

The wool t-shirts are fantastic in cooler temps, and while I sweat through them in summer, that’s no different from cotton. I wear these Merino Tees, then, year round and just rotate through an identical set picking up a new, identical fresh one every day.

Socks

As I explained it to someone a couple of weeks ago, these Balegas are socks for people who hate socks. They’re easy on, easy off, they’re low profile enough you forget that you have them on and they’re excellent at resisting foot stink. Like the t-shirts, I’ve got a bunch of these and just cycle through them.

Sneakers

I’ve already talked about this a number of times, but the tl;dr is that I’d never heard of Hoka’s before reading a recommendation for them on a Fleet Feet review. I’m now on my sixth pair of Bondis. If you’re looking for a heavily cushioned shoe, and in my opinion you should be, you won’t do any better.

COOL

Glove Liners

When I started out walking, and it was cool but not cold enough to wear my ski gloves, I tried to find something that worked. I tried my work gloves, as one example, but those either had holes in them or the insulated set proved to be too warm. Eventually I ended up getting a set of Ibex merino glove liners. These killed several birds with one stone: first, they provide enough warmth to keep my hands mostly warm for cooler temps. Second, they serve as replacement liners for my ski gloves which are so old the liners have worn out. Lastly, in both scenarios, they have touchpad fingers which allow me to use the touchscreen on my phone without completely taking off my gloves - which is huge in the winter.

Hat

When I started out, I just wore whatever winter hats I had available - and that will work. But if you’re putting in a lot of mileage, and sweating, you might find that your forehead gets irritated and even breaks out in some light acne. After reading a recommendation online, I switched to this Minus33 100% merino hat, partly on the theory that its antimicrobial nature would be better than polyester alternatives but mostly because I was already sold on merino. This hat is soft and warm, and perfect for all but the coldest temps.

Vest

Out of all cold weather clothing, I probably wear a vest the most. Indoors, outdoors, whether it’s over a t-shirt or as an additional layer under a jacket or on top of my 1/4 zip, I wear a vest all the time. For years that was an Ibex, and their Shak vests are fantastic, but having had luck with their their hoodies and preferring the lower cost, I got this Woolx vest when I needed a new one. It does exactly what I need it to do, and is exceptionally lightweight.

1/4 Zip

If it’s not windy, the Minus33 1/4 zip is an excellent layer on top of my t-shirts. I’d never had a 1/4 zip until Kate got me one last Christmas, but they’re hugely versatile. It provides lightweight warmth, even in passing showers, and if you get too hot while you’re out, you can unzip the top, roll up your sleeves and be perfectly comfortable.

Lightweight Hoodie

If it’s a little toward the cooler end of the spectrum, if there are higher winds or both it can be nice to have a layer slightly thicker than a 1/4 zip that has a hood you can pop up for colder spots. For this I have a Woolx Boulder hoodie. It’s lightweight enough to wear indoors in houses (like ours) that are cool - and it’s great for flying in - but it shines on walks that are cool but not cold, and as mentioned if the wind kicks up you can throw on the hood for an extra layer of warmth.

Pants

When people buy clothes for me it usually doesn’t go well, but early in the pandemic Kate got me a set of these “athleisure” UGG fleece pants - I know, I know - but they’re really excellent. They provide the warmth and ease of movement of sweatpants, without the irritating tight bottom cuffs that leave your ankles exposed in cold temperatures. Can’t say enough about them, and they’re great to fly in as well.

COLD

Buffs

Surprisingly useful, buffs or neck gaiters are great for keeping your throat and neck warm, and optionally your face as well. I’ve got two: a synthetic one I got from my Flyathlon-running BFF Andrew Todd which is great for cool temperatures, and then a slightly thicker merino one from Woolx. Which one I choose depends on the outside temperature.

Gloves

When it’s too cold for the glove liners alone, I bust out a very old set of Patagonia ski gloves. They wouldn’t be enough on their own, because as mentioned the liners are shot, but the combination of glove liner and outer gauntlet style glove is great for colder temps.

Heavyweight Hoodie

The midweight hoodie is great up to a point, but is thin enough that it can’t handle legitimately cold temperatures. For that, I swap in my heavyweight alternative, the Woolx Grizzly hoodie. It’s the heaviest weight merino hoodie I’ve found, and is perfect for colder temps either on its own at the higher end of the range, or with underlying base layers if it’s colder than that. This plus the 1/4 zip, for example, is great combination.

Soft Shell

As mentioned at the top, my soft shell is an old Patagonia jacket - so old, in fact, that the label has rubbed off and I can’t tell which model. But basically the soft shell is a thin insulated layer with a mostly windproof and water resistant exterior. If there’s wind, rain or both, then, that makes the hoodie unsuitable, I throw on the soft shell. It gives me similar warmth but is better protection against wind, rain and snow.

Socks

Nothing fancy here; anything long and reasonably thick from Smartwool will do.

BLIZZARD / DEEP COLD

Hat

While the Minus33 hat I have above is excellent, it’s not all that heavyweight. When it’s really cold, then, I throw on a heavier weight merino hat from Ibex. It’s a little scratchier than the softer Minus33 hat, but a lot warmer for cold temperatures.

Goggles

No specific recommendations here, just wear whatever ski goggles you have on hand.

Scarf

When the winds are high enough to cut through the buffs, I swap in a scarf - or what Skida refers to as a “bandana.” It’s got windstopping material on one side, and fleece on the interior, and it’s excellent at keeping wind off your face. Be aware, however, that if it’s cold enough, like anything else that is absorbing water vapor from your mouth in frigid temperatures, it will eventually freeze solid.

Long Underwear

Eventually I’ll replace this with a merino equivalent, but for now when it’s really cold I throw on synthetic long underwear - an old set of Patagonia long johns.

Hard Shell

By far the oldest gear I still have is an old North Face ski parka. It’s a hard, waterproof shell that is a great outer layer in deep cold, high wind or very wet conditions. It doesn’t get used all that much, fortunately.

Down Coat

Another old Patagonia outlet find of indeterminate model, I only crank out my down coat if it’s legitimately cold - single digits or below zero. And even then, only if I’m not going too far, because it’s too easy to overheat while wearing thick down. Still, in deep cold over short distances, this is the easiest way to stay warm. I often don’t even have to wear anything more than a t-shirt underneath it’s so warm.

Snow Pants

This will be a new addition to my arsenal this winter, as I wouldn’t have fit in my old snow pants a year ago at this time. They fit now, fortunately, and it’ll be nice to have them back and available for the same conditions that might necessitate my hard shell.

ACCESSORIES

Books: Walk enough and you’ll want some audiobooks. Your local library is your cheapest route, but if you’re looking to give someone a present Audible gift certificates have worked well for us.
Headphones: I switched from Jabra’s to Airpod Pro’s after my brother got them for me last Christmas. There’s been no real difference sound-wise, but the Airpods are much better at relaying notifications from text, Slack and otherwise - except, oddly, I can’t get them to pipe in updates from the Workout app on my Apple Watch. Speaking of.
Watch: If you’re going to be walking long distances, you’re going to want to track that somehow. Both for motivational purposes as well as monitoring and managing your workload. The Apple Watch has worked well for me. While it’s battery life is abysmal relative to other fitness trackers from Fitbit to Garmin, it makes up for that by doing a bunch of things well. Whether or not an Apple Watch is for you, however, you’re going to want a tracker of some sort.

BONUS

Quick thoughts thoughts on merino vendors:

Ibex: the brand rebooted a few years ago, and they haven’t quite duplicated the old gear, but it’s high end merino wear aimed mostly at athletes and seriously outdoor types. Good, but pricy.
Minus33: the Carharrt of merino brands. Low(er) cost, workman like items.
Taylor & Stitch: higher end clothing brand that also has some nice merino items. Bonus: two of the founders are Mainers!
Woolx: specifically aimed “weekend warrior” types rather than high end outdoor athletes. More economical.

Even More Walking Questions

Sun, 20 Nov 2022 23:53:41 -0500

Before I get into the questions, let me just say up front that I’m sure most of you are probably tired of hearing about walking by this point. It is, after all, just walking, and I’ve already written about it multiple times. At the risk of beating a dead horse, however, I am still getting questions every time I talk about hitting some milestone or other. And if I’m getting questions from some of you, it seems at least possible that there are others of you who had the same question but didn’t feel up to asking. Which is why I want to make sure not just to answer those questions, but to do it in a way that makes the answers available to anyone who wants them.

It also belatedly occurs to me that the people who are tired of hearing about walking probably just didn’t click through to read this in the first place, so maybe the entire above paragraph was unnecessary.

Regardless, the following are questions I’ve gotten publicly and privately from people who want to know more about walking, how it can fit into your life and so on. And as always, if there are other questions not answered here or in prior discussions, drop a comment and I’ll either answer it here or queue it up for a future post.

Q: How do you carve out the time in your day to take dedicated, intentional walks?

A: This or some variation of it is the most common question I get by far, which makes sense. Walking is intrinsically less efficient than alternatives like running and therefore takes more time to achieve similar results.

Tl;dr: it’s a big time sink.

I’ve talked about this before, and there are a variety of tactical approaches, the summary of which are:

Get up early in the morning (or late at night, potentially)
Breaking up a long walk into small walks
Work while you walk
Walking during work hours and making up the work at night

All of which is true. But the longer answer is that like anything else, you carve out time by making it a priority.

This was the problem I had with most prior workout routines. I’d do well for a time, but eventually I’d get busy, demotivated or both and my habit would slack off. And when I eventually had difficulty motivating myself to get to the gym and lift or to get out for a run, I’d get down on myself for not making the time for those activities.

The good news is that I’ve never, not once, had this problem with walking. Hot or cold, rain or shine, walking has been easy for me to do because it’s motivating for multiple reasons. I like getting outside, I feel good getting my work in, I enjoy listening to a game or an audiobook when I don’t have conference calls or talks, and even on days when the weather is miserable there’s a sense of adventure. Walking out in single digit temps or in the middle of a monsoon has a way of making you feel alive in a way that working out in a gym never did for me.

So the real answer to the above is that I choose to make the time for walking because I genuinely enjoy doing it.

Q: I know you walk for, what, two hours? Is that the bare minimum?

A: Absolutely not. The two hour mark for me was nothing more than an artifact of my goal to walk 40 miles a week for a year. In two hours, I can - depending on conditions - walk just under seven miles or so, which is roughly the distance I need to hit six days a week to hit a 40 mile goal. So first, the two hour thing is nothing but an arbitrary number of mine.

Second, annual goal aside, I’ve tried to walk more than two hours regularly because it helped me lose more weight faster. You very probably have less weight to lose than I did/do, so two hours may well be overkill in your situation.

Third, I’m privileged to have a job in which the hours have some flexibility to them. I’m not a doctor making rounds, for example, so if I’ve got a two hour window between meetings I can pop out for a walk and make up the time later that night or listen to a work call or conference talk. That’s not a common arrangement, so two hours may well not be feasible for you, at least all at once. This is particularly true for the parents of infants and toddlers I’ve spoken to: you’re doing great if you can get yourself out of bed in the morning, so cut yourself some slack. I didn’t really get my walking going until my kid was in kindergarten every day.

My best recommendation when people ask this question is to forget about the time: just go for a walk. When I started, some of my walks were literally 15 minutes. If walking is something you enjoy, you’ll find a way to make it work with whatever your schedule is and you will very likely walk more over time than you do when you start. But the important thing is that every bit counts, and that there is absolutely no “bare minimum” to hit.

Q: Could you share your walking routine, e.g., do you go a certain distance every day, at a certain time?

A: The funny thing is that outside of my routes, as I’ll get to, I don’t have a routine. It’s funny because in general, I am highly routine oriented. I have routines for everything: what I do with my wallet and car keys when I get home, how I get my daughter out the door in the morning on my days to drive her, when and how I get to the airport when traveling. And so on.

As much as I’d love a routine for walking, though, and hope to have one someday, it’s just not feasible right now given my work schedule. Instead, I have a “take what I can get approach.” Every Sunday I look at my work calendar, and try to determine what my windows are.

It helps that I don’t commute any more, and it also helps that I don’t have to get in a car and drive to start my walks - I literally just walk out our front door. But basically I look for pockets in my calendar where I have a two hour open window, or a window with one to many briefings in which I’m not required to participate verbally. A lot of days, there isn’t such a window and instead I get up at 5. But if there is, I look at my queue of briefings, talks to listen to or even posts to write (walking can be very good for thinking through arguments and cases to be made) and slot those in if necessary.

But basically my only routine is “how much time do I have?” Some days it’s less, some days it’s more. When we had four day work weeks this summer, for example, and my daughter was in camp, I’d walk for four or more hours. Short or long, however, it all adds up.

It has been helpful to me, however, to have default routes that match my available window. I have one route for an hour, another for an hour and a half, another for two and so on. This helps keep things simple: my available window dictates my route and I don’t have to think much about it. I don’t have a single routine, then, but I do have a standard approach depending on my schedule on a given day.

Q: How do you deal with work pressures?

A: There are a couple of different angles here. Most obviously, with respect to the general pressures of business, helping to run a company and so on, walking is nothing but beneficial in that regard because it reduces my stress. On the days when I’m dealing with, say, a difficult person, the best part of my day is putting on my shoes, putting on an audiobook, walking out of the house and forgetting said person exists for a while.

Where walking and work becomes more difficult is the zero sum nature of time: while you can do some types of work while walking, at some point the two compete for your time. There’s no simple answer to this. There are strategies as mentioned above to working around your particular schedule and available windows or time, but there’s only so much you can do. If you’re working sixty plus hours a week, for example, something has to give - that time has to come from somewhere.

The only thing I can tell you there is to think carefully about your priorities, and ask yourself where your own health stands in that equation. If you’re working so much that you can’t fit even a half hour of walking in, it might be worth asking whether your schedule could use some adjustment.

Q: You live in Maine, right? Do you walk year round? How do you deal with weather?

A: I do live in Maine, and I do walk year round. Some of it is acclimation, obviously: we’re used to cold weather up here. But most of it is clothing. As mentioned before, there’s no bad weather, only bad clothing.

Here are ten things I’ve learned about how to dress for bad weather:

Layering: it’s a cliché, but it really is all about layering. If you wear a thick coat, for example, it’s a binary on/off switch. That’s not ideal. Between the variability in the weather you’ll be walking in and your own internal temperature as you walk, layering affords you the flexibility to take layers off to cool down or put them back on to warm up. Or, as is the case frequently with me, add rain protection if Poseidon realizes you’re out and starts dumping on you.
Storage: related to layering, the ability to add and subtract layers is dependent on having somewhere to store them. Because most of my walks are a half day or less, however, I don’t need or want a big heavy pack, so instead I carry this LL Bean ultralight pack when I need to carry extra layers. I barely notice it’s there, but in the case that I need to hurriedly throw on raingear or have somewhere to stash gloves I no longer need it’s perfect.
Fabric Weights: one of the things I’ve invested in over time is different weight fabrics to give me more options depending on conditions. I have two different hoodies, for example: a midweight and a heavyweight. The former is better for cooler days as I won’t overheat, the latter is preferable when it’s actually cold. Similarly, I have two different winter hats: one that’s lighter weight for most cool/cold weather, and a heavy, thicker hat for when it’s legitimately freezing. The more conditions you encounter, the more apparent it is that one size - or fabric weight - does not fit all.
Fabric Material: when I started walking last fall, I would go out in cotton t-shirts, cotton boxers, my cotton Carharrt hoodie and my insulated leather work gloves. This was fine until I started sweating, and then it got cold, fast. These days basically everything I have from socks to underwear to t-shirts to hoodies to hats to gloves is merino wool. It wicks moisture well, doesn’t stink after I’ve sweat in it and keeps me warm even when it’s wet. But merino isn’t good enough for some conditions, which is why I have raingear (as I’ll come back to), a soft shell (for cold and higher wind), a hard shell (for heavy wind / snow) and more. The point is that over time I’ve assembled an arsenal of different clothing options to protect myself from whatever weather I’m facing, but I’ve put more thought into what it’s made out of than I used to.
Weather: speaking of weather, knowing what it is and what it might be is absolutely critical to dressing appropriately. It’s not enough to know the temperature; you need to pay attention to windspeed, dew points, humidity, “feels like” temps and so on. All of these will help you make an informed decision about the appropriate level of clothing for a given walk. Oh, and pay attention to thunderstorm warnings. Hearing a massive boom of thunder overhead while you’re out walking isn’t all that fun.
Cramp-ons: this isn’t complicated: if you’re going to walk in the winter, and it gets cold enough to freeze where you live, you need cramp-ons. They’re awkward and not fun to put on, but after breaking my ribs last winter I’m not going to have to learn that lesson again. Take it from me: unless you enjoy not being able to cough or roll over in bed, you need cramp-ons. These are what I have.
Raingear: when I started the only raingear I had was an old delaminated raincoat. This kept me dry under heavy rain conditions for around ten minutes. My lower half, on the other hand, had no such protections and would be soaked immediately - to the point that my shoes would fill up with water and overflow. Over the past year I first remedied the raincoat situation by getting a new one (Patagonia Torrentshell) and then invested in a pair of rain pants (Grundens Trident). Between those and my waterproof Hoka Anacapa boots, I can walk in a heavy rain and remain mostly dry. This is useful in all conditions, but is particularly important when it’s cold. Being cold is one thing. Being wet and cold is miserable.
Shoes: the more and the further you walk, the more that you’ll care about your footwear. When I got started and was carrying more weight than I am now, I was worried about foot injuries in particular. So I Googled “best cushioned running shoes” and Fleet Feet recommended a brand I’d never heard of before - Hoka - so I bought a pair. Six pairs of Bondis later and I’m sold. I love my Hokas so much I went out and replaced a not yet worn out pair of Salomon hiking boots with the aforementioned Anacapas because I wanted the same cushioning and light weight while hiking that I got while walking. Whatever you end up getting, however, my own experience suggests that cushioning is a good thing. I once walked about seven miles in flip-flops and got plantar fasciitis as a result and struggled with it for months. Two plus thousand miles in Hokas later and I haven’t yet had a repeat.
Headphones: I was gifted these, but the Airpod Pros my brother got me for Christmas last year have been very helpful. Unlike the Jabra headset I had previously, the Airpods will read out Slack messages or texts to me, for example, while I’m walking so that if there’s something urgent I need to weigh in on while I’m out I’m made aware of it.
Apple Watch: one last minor item: if you have an Apple Watch and you’re out in the rain, be aware that if your raincoat gets wet, the soaked material can pause your workout without alerting you. The solution is to either pull the sleeve up beyond the Watch so that there’s no contact - which works fine if it’s not cold - or to have a sleeve or glove layer underneath to prevent the wet coat from making contact with the Watch screen.

Hopefully all of this has been helpful, but as always, if there are questions that I didn’t get to, feel free to drop them in a comment or post them to me in some other way and I’ll answer them when I can.

Cheers, and happy walking.

Twitter, Mastodon and the Fediverse: I Have Questions

Sun, 13 Nov 2022 23:31:06 -0500

Just under sixteen years ago, I joined Twitter. I did it reluctantly, because initially it seemed both trivial and self-important. Which was both right and wrong, as it turned out. Since that time, a lot has happened. The business I helped found has grown - thanks in part to Twitter. I met and married a girl - not thanks to Twitter, but also not in spite of it. And we had a child whose exploits and repeated ownings of me are objectively speaking the most popular things I’ve posted to that service.

I’ve got some history with Twitter, is what I’m saying. It’s why like a lot of people I’m sad about how completely, appallingly and predictably unqualified the new owner is to run it, and how shocked I am in spite of all of that that he’s driven a service widely regarded as a global town square to the brink of ruin less than three weeks after acquiring it.

If you’ve read any history, you’ve come across accounts of people wandering through abandoned cities. Once thriving population centers, they were where thousands, tens of thousands or millions lived out their lives. Fast forward some period of time - in some cases a very brief period of time - and they were ghost towns, emptied of people, trade and history. The most interesting and unanswerable question wasn’t when the city had been abandoned, or even why. The question was who was the last to leave.

No one necessarily expected to be asking that question about Twitter in November of 2022, at least until it became clear that the eventual acquirer had pushed his trolling too far and would be forced by courts to complete the acquisition lest even more embarrassing texts come to light, but here we are.
I’ll save the elegy for Twitter for another time. It’s not dead yet, after all, and it might feel like going for a walk. Like others, I can’t see it coming back from all of this, but it certainly wouldn’t be the first time one of my predictions missed the mark.

Instead I want to talk briefly about the primary proposed alternative, at least in my circles: Mastodon, and the distributed network it powers, the Fediverse. I’m not going to write a primer on that - numerous outlets have already done that, e.g. Wired - but I do have questions. And given that some friends are scheduled to chat about all of this tomorrow at noon ET, I thought I’d throw some of these questions out there for discussion. I’d ask them myself, but given that said discussion is smack in the middle of a consult I’m not able to attend.
As I consider the Fediverse, then, and Mastodon, I’m less focused on the experience and what it’s like for me personally than I am occupied with questions. Questions I’m trying to answer to understand what the future of both might be, and therefore whether and how to invest my time accordingly. Here are a few of those.

How accessible is the Fediverse?

If you’re a technical user looking to communicate largely with other technical followers, this may not be an issue. The technically savvy can probably traverse the gap between the world in which you just sign up for Twitter and the one in which you have to pick an individual server from one of dozens.

But speaking as someone who follows a lot of different communities on Twitter ranging from my technologist peers to baseball writers to shark researchers to meteorologists to historians to national security professionals, it’s not clear if all or even most of these populations will be able to make this jump seamlessly, if ever.

The difference between “go signup at twitter.com” and “here are a choice of different servers with different communities and rules” might not seem insurmountable, but it’s certainly not ideal. So I’m curious as to how the on ramps will be bridged over time.

What are the impacts and costs of a federated network?

While no expert on the Fediverse, in spite of having been a nominal member of it for five years or so, a couple of things have jumped out about the network during my usage.

There are UI costs to a federated, decentralized network. In some cases, I can click a button and follow a user. In other cases, I have to cut and paste an identity URL into a search box, and click through twice to follow a user. In still other cases, I have to do the above, but first enter a URL of my own to follow a given user. None of these, again, are unsolvable UI problems. But they are highly likely to be discouraging to the casual user, particularly those accustomed to centralized services like Facebook or Twitter.
One of the founding principles of the Fediverse is that each server can have its own culture, norms and expectations. Centralization is no panacea when it comes to content moderation, of course; Facebook, Twitter and the like are regularly referred to as cesspools, and with good cause.
The Fediverse’s reaction to this, apparently, has been to allow individual servers to determine their own policies on content moderation. Which seems like an improvement, until it is more properly revealed as a tradeoff. In one example that is preventing people I know from joining the Fediverse - policies intended to limit the impact of racist discussion and behaviors as a means of protecting sensitive users from harm in practice have meant that People of Color (POC) are prohibited from speaking freely about their own lived experiences with racism, because non-POC don’t want to have to see it. That’s not the intent, but the intent doesn’t matter. It’s bad.
More subtly, there are policies like this one from fosstodon.org:
“Do not “shitpost” - while humorous posts are allowed, and actually encouraged, there is no place for “shitposting” on Fosstodon.”
On the one hand, as someone who doesn’t particularly enjoy shitposting, this sounds good on paper. On the other hand, it begs the question: who is determining what is and is not a “shitpost?” Another question: who has the time to evaluate all of the posts on a given network to determine whether it’s shitposting, and are all of the accounts likely to be evaluated similarly?
In many respects, the idea of federated cultural policies reminds me of the situation with alcohol in the United States. Because alcohol is regulated not at the federal but the state level in the US, the laws vary. Some states allow spirits of any kind to be shipped. Other states allow wine, but no other spirits. Other states prohibit anything from being shipped. I went to college in a state that did not allow alcohol to be sold on Sunday, so instead we drove across the border to a state next door that did. Some states have a maximum on the alcohol content by volume of a given beer; per the Sam Adams website, for example, their Utopia beer is illegal in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Utah, Vermont and West Virginia.
Regardless of whether one drinks alcohol (I do) or Utopias (I don’t), the mishmash of conflicting rules and regulations seems both arbitrary and problematic for everyone involved to navigate.
But in a federated world, this is the reality.
Processing the deltas in expectations between federated servers might be challenging as an individual. What further complicates matters is the fact the behaviors of others on your server may be held against you. If someone else on Twitter behaves badly, other than a general sense that it makes Twitter a less pleasant place to be overall, the impact on my account is zero. I learned this week, however, that because the instance I joined five years ago lacks content moderation resources (we’ll come back to that shortly), my posts may be de-emphasized or even outright banned from other servers

The good news is that the Fediverse makes it possible to up and move from one server to another with no loss of followers. But while I might be willing to undertake that given the right incentives, how many ordinary, less dedicated social media users would be?
And given that servers are largely community run and thus - as pictured above - likely to be short on moderators, how long will it be before getting particular servers de-federated becomes weaponizable - with bad actors descending in concert on a targeted server with the express goal of having it become uninhabitable and defederated?

What about verification?

One of the dumbest decisions of the new Twitter owner’s tenure has been to mess around with account verification - the inevitable result of which has been chaos. See, for example, a random account temporarily shaving $15 billion off Eli Lilly’s market cap with a single tweet.

This is a theoretically solvable problem in a centralized universe such as Twitter - at least if you’re smart enough to not light it on fire because you haven’t thought things through. How this would or could be solved in the Fediverse is unclear, however. Registering a household brand name on any given server is a trivial thing, as is registering that brand name on lots of them.

How should users determine which identities they can trust? Should that burden be on them in the first place? Or is the idea that the Fediverse isn’t a network for brands at all - in which case, how do I actually get somebody like Comcast or Spectrum to respond to a support request? Because while Twitter’s good for that at present email sure as hell doesn’t work.

What are the economics of the Fediverse?

I remember talking to a friend working in the investment space many years ago about open source software. He could not comprehend or even believe in a world in which groups of software developers, often working without compensation on a volunteer basis, could possibly create something that would outperform a competitive project produced by a commercial entity. While I understood his skepticism, that model did not then and never has confused me. Obviously the monetary investments into open source software are and have been foundational to its ascent, but the intellectual challenge of solving interesting problems is something that has and presumably always will attract the interest of software developers, whether they’re paid for the work or not.

In my experience, however, this is not the case for the more mundane, and often thankless, task of operating that software on an ongoing basis. After the novelty of spinning something up wears off, it becomes tiring to run and maintain software. Which is why in most scenarios in which software needs to be relied upon, someone is paid to do the job of running it.

As a side note, if you’re reading this and objecting - “but I run my own email server!” - that’s great and I respect your dedication while questioning your priorities, but it is my sad duty to inform you are the exception that proves the rule.

Regardless, this is why I’ve been curious about the Fediverse and Mastodon’s financial footing. The software development, as far as I can tell, has been mostly crowd sourced. Which, ok. Maybe that can be made to work. But who is running all of the federated Mastodon servers? Will they keep running them? Why will they keep running them? What if they don’t keep running them?

Also, besides the cost of the time spent keeping the software up and running, there is the expense of hosting. I haven’t run a Mastodon server myself, but every indication I have seen to date by those that have suggests that it is likely to be non-trivial in cost for anything sizable.

For most social media historically, the cost of the service has been indirectly born by advertisers. Ad-based models are self-evidently problematic for any number of well known reasons. But user funded services come with their own set of tradeoffs, most obviously by privileging those able to pay for a non-critical technology service ultimately resulting in a less diverse user base.

I understand, for better and for worse, the business model of ad-based social networks. What is not clear to me, at least at present, are the economics of the Fediverse. And I’m not the only one with questions on that subject:

And what about funding?

Andrew Couts [WIRED senior editor of security]: I don’t actually know the answer to that. It’s a nonprofit, so I believe it’s mostly crowdsourced funding. I know they have a Patreon page, and so that’s who you would be giving to. You would be giving to the main Mastodon nonprofit. But besides that, I’m sure that there are Patreon pages for individual servers, individual instances, and it’s mostly just a crowdfunded thing. Nobody owns it, so there’s nobody to pay or anything of that nature. You’re not going to be charged $8 for using Mastodon. And if you were, you could move to another Mastodon server and ignore that.

Even if you wanted to monetize Mastodon in traditional ways, its federated nature might act to limit the ability to generate revenue. Much as the asinine decentralized pools of subsets of the population that represent regional health care networks here in the United States limit their respective ability to negotiate with suppliers and in so doing drive up costs, so too do the smaller pools of federated users constrain the economic potential of any given Fediverse server versus the centralized populations of Facebook, Twitter, et al.

Which might sound perfectly acceptable and even attractive if you don’t want to see ads ever, but then you need to figure out who’s going to pay for everything if it’s not advertisers. Because even if the software development costs can be figured out, the hosting and operational costs - not to mention things like content moderation, trust and safety, security and so on, which are both hard and expensive - have no clear solution from where I’m sitting.
So even if I want to believe, and I do want to believe, my fundamental question is: how is all of this going to work economically?

Last question: “Toots?”

Really? Toots? Toots? And I thought “tweets” was silly.

All of the above said, if Mastodon could import my Twitter archive, I’d definitely do that because skeptical as I am, I’m rooting for it - “toots” notwithstanding.

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.

Why I Set Up a Family Dashboard

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 23:02:49 -0400

When I was in the middle of installing our Dakboard-based family dashboard / calendar / to do list / weather station / Red Sox schedule / etc display for the third time (we’ll come back to that) Kate asked me if my botched installation was going to be a part of my writeup. I demurred initially, saying that I had no intention of writing this up and her response was laughter. “Of course you’re going to write it up. Here’s what worked, here’s what I messed up, and so on.”

Well, chalk one up for Kate because here’s the writeup I said I wasn’t going to write up.

Why set up a Family Dashboard?

I blame my colleague Rachel for this entire ~~debacle~~ exercise. She posted a picture of her family’s Dakboard set up with calendars and so on a month or two back, and while I resisted for a while, eventually the sheer potential utility of it wore me down. So I tapped my personal fun money budget and here we are.

What do you use it for?

There’s no one thing. In contrast to some of the devices we have at the house that serve a single, specialized purpose - think the Honeywell D6 thermostats we have that control our heat pumps - the family dashboard performs a number of tasks.

Some examples:

Kid Activities: when you have kids, there are activities. Plural. Keeping track of them all is hard, and as with a lot of people who live by their calendars my rule has always been that if it’s not on the calendar, it doesn’t exist. So from camp to grandparent sleepovers, keeping track of kid activities is huge.
Tide Chart: we live right near a beach, and said beach is tidal. So the tide chart is useful for determining whether the local beach exists at any given moment or whether it’s underwater.
Pick Up and Drop Off: we haven’t used it for this yet, but having a display that tells us who is responsible for dropping Eleanor off at school and who’s responsible for picking her up will be a lot easier than frantic last minute texts. “You’re getting her, right?”
Dinner Plans: when your life is busy, it can be difficult to remember what you’re supposed to be having for dinner. Hence the calendar entries that tell us what we’re supposed to be having for dinner.
Shopping List: living on an island means that a trip to the grocery store is not a mere “pop over to the corner store” excursion. Instead, what’s useful is making sure that any trip to the mainland - to pick up your kid at school or camp, say - a two birds with one stone operation. Which means that having a running shopping list is very handy. This one’s especially useful because Todoist - the app responsible that integrates with Dakboard for our shopping list and to do’s - can updated by voice via the Google Assistant that lives in our kitchen. So when we run out of, say, pickled jalapenos, rather than having to remember that, as I’m cleaning out the jar in the sink I can just say “Ok Google, add pickled jalapenos to my shopping list.” And they appear automatically on the dashboard as a visual reminder.
To Do’s: think shopping lists, but instead of groceries it’s things we’re supposed to do. Like email Corey back the Watch charger we stole by accident.
Weather: when you live in Maine, knowing what the weather is and might be is more important than it is in a lot of places. So having that available at a glance rather than having to paw through a phone is incredibly useful.
Sunrise/Sunset/Humidity: just as the weather information is useful, understanding what time the sun is going to come up is useful for early morning walks, understanding what time the sun is going down is useful for planning evenings around the fire pit and understanding what the humidity is is useful for understanding why you feel so miserable.
Red Sox Game Start Time: self-explanatory.

Why Dakboard?

The short answer to “Why Dakboard?” is because it’s what Rachel and her family used. The longer answer is that after looking around at a bunch of alternatives like Mango Display or Magic Mirror, Dakboard seemed to be the most mature and appropriate for our usage.

I will say that having gone down this path and spent money on it, I have essentially guaranteed that one or both of Apple and Google will very shortly make available a superior and potentially cheaper option. Certainly one that is less of a hodge podge than what I’ve thrown together.

Amazon has something similar-ish in the Echo Show devices, but they had some limitations in their service compatibility as well as features we didn’t want or want to pay for like cameras and speakers.

How much does it cost?

The cost could be $0 if you have a spare computer and display lying around - especially if you’ve got free counter space and don’t need to deal with a wall mount. In our case, the extra monitors we have on hand were either too old, not fit for a wall mount or both, and the only surplus computers were way too big for our kitchen, where we decided to put the device. We ended up spending maybe $340 or so all in.

Could we have saved money by taking a DIY approach?

Certainly, but I noped right out of that. The $50 or so I might have saved would not have offset the hours of research into compatible models, sourcing accessories and so on. That kind of thing would have intrigued me when I was 20 and didn’t have as much going on. These days I’m busy and only too happy to make that someone else’s job.

I did not, however, go for pre-integrated displays and compute elements because the premiums attached to those seemed higher.

What are the requisite pieces of a dashboard?

This is what’s necessary as well as what we did about them.

Monitor: Most obviously you need a display. Almost anything will do, but I opted for a basic 27" LG IPS display - IPS because that apparently makes it viewable from wider angles, useful for a wall display. It weighs less than eight pounds as well, so is easy to wall mount even on drywall.
CPU: Again, you can use almost anything, and I briefly debated wiring the display to an Intel NUC we have in the basement that serves as the basis for our local Netflix equivalent, sogflix. That would have meant drilling a bunch of holes in floors and walls to pass through an HDMI cable, however, and Kate understandably wasn’t super keen on all of that given that this is something of an experiment. So instead I opted for a Dakboard-built CPU which is basically just a Raspberry Pi that they preload and configure for you. As mentioned above you can save some money by investing more of your time in a DIY setup, but I wasn’t willing to make that trade.
Wall Mount: So this was a bit of a debacle, as mentioned above. Having never set up a wall mount before, I simply looked up the specifications from the monitor - which were 100 x 100 VESA, four screw holes that are 100mm apart in other words - and found a universal monitor mount (this one). Technically this worked, but it was way too big and whether I set up the monitor in portrait or landscape mode the wall mount stuck out obtrusively. So I went back to the drawing board and ordered a second wall mount (this one). The good news was that this one didn’t stick out at all and was perfectly hidden by the display. The bad news was that once the wall mount was attached to the display, you could no longer plug in any cables. Third time was the charm, however, and if you are looking for a wall mount for the LG display above this is the one you want.
Adapter: One last thing that I had not anticipated was the fact that when there is (ideally) not a lot of room between the display and the wall, this is a challenge for most HDMI cables that don’t have a right angle in them. Fortunately enough, however, I discovered that they make right-angle pass through adapters for exactly this purpose. You can grab them here.
Dakboard: Oh and we pay Dakboard $5 a month. Technically it’s not necessary, as they have a free offering, but a) that didn’t let us do a few of the things we wanted to do and b) having invested in the gear I’d like the software it runs to stick around. Your mileage may vary there, however.

How long did it take?

The good news is that the set up is simple; wall mounting the gear took less than a half hour. Of course I’d already done it twice, so that likely was a factor. But the hardware setup - particularly if you know the gear works - is easy.

The software side of things is just as easy. Particularly if you pay Dakboard the couple of bucks a month, you can start with one of their templates and just drop in what you need. Connecting your calendars, to do lists and so on is the matter of a few clicks.

I have zero front end web skills and the design sense of a blind monkey, and it was still easy. In terms of degree of difficulty, then, this one is about as hard as setting up an Apple TV or Roku.

What was harder than expected?

Finding a wall mount, obviously. Basically you need to know three things: what mount pattern the display uses, how physically large the wall mounting hardware is and whether it will be concealed by the display, and lastly how large the mount plate is and whether that will obscure the cabling connections. You can measure the first two things and the third was pretty easy to figure out once I knew to look for it.
The other thing that was tricky was which calendars specifically we want to use. Historically, for example, I’ve only maintained one calendar, my work calendar. If I used that, however, all of the screen real estate would be gobbled up by my various meetings. Likewise for Kate. So in addition to easy adds like our tide calendar or the Red Sox one, we had to create a new third family calendar. As an aside, if anyone does this from their Google Workspace account and finds that they are unable to grant their partner/spouse edit rights to it, tell whoever administrates your account that they have to change that permission in two separate places. Thanks for nothing Google. Anyway, neither of us was thrilled to have to create another calendar, but it’s actually useful in some ways to separate family and work items and has been manageable so far.

Was it worth it?

We’ll know more after the school year starts, but so far it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: providing easy visibility to a bunch of useful information in a high traffic area. No more having to turn to our phones to look things up. It’s all right there.

Particularly if you can learn from my mistakes, then, I think it’s worth it.

What’s your favorite part?

Surprisingly, as I’ve never thought much about them, it’s the digital photo frame. One of the features you can enable is photo backgrounds that pull from sources like Flickr, Instagram, Google Photos, Smugmug and so on. Most of the default templates just have standard landscape pictures for their backgrounds, but I connected it to a Google Photos album of pictures of Eleanor. A couple of times a day, then, one of us stops and says, “Oh, I remember this, come check it out.” As with the picture of Eleanor dressed up as Eleven for Halloween in the picture at the top.

It’s pretty great.

What’s next?

On the software side that will depend on what Dakboard adds as far as further integrations. There seem to be more since I started playing with it, so that’s promising.

On the hardware side, assuming that we continue to leverage this and find it useful, I’ll be hiding the currently exposed cables with cable sleeves. And if we really like it, I’ll ultimately probably try and drop in a new electrical outlet behind the monitor so they don’t need be hidden at all. But I wasn’t ready to start playing with electrical boxes and Romex cable until we knew this was going to be here for a while.