Operation Unless

It's about that time for New Years resolution junkies (yours truly) to formulate grand plans for the coming year... only to watch plan adherence crumble by mid-January.  Here's how I'm tweaking my approach-

1.  Pick a theme for 2018:  Unless
2.  Pick a boulder-sized project that will not be competed out by simultaneously attempting other boulder-sized projects:  Write a book
3.  Pick some supporting month-level focus areas
4.  Forge a set of daily habits to keep me on track


1.  Pick a theme for 2018:  Unless

The Lorax is one of those deceptively simple books that have haunted me.  I think the ideas this book broached made me receptive to epic challenges like training for a permaculture design certificate or contemplating starting my own Riot 4 Austerity or Zero Waste project.  The Lorax made me ultra-sensitive to things like the bleaching MacGyver and I saw honeymooning on the Great Barrier Reef.  Thanks to the Lorax, a huge constellation of ideas about sustainability and conservation can be summarized by the single watch word: Unless.   


2a.  Pick a boulder-sized project:  Write a Book

They say everyone has a book in them; I have been procrastinating on mine for years.  I would come up with excuses like "I don't have enough experience in X to pretend to be an expert," or "the experiences I gain in X won't apply to a wide enough audience to justify writing a book."  But now I've seen colleagues and authors I respect share their self-publishing journey and help lay out stepping stones for my own.  Having been retired for a year and living comfortably, I feel I'm at a place now where I can scuttle a lot of the pressure I was putting on myself to churn out enough mass-appeal best selling stuff to replace the income I used to collect while working for Initech.  So yeah, let's write a book that *I* would use as a reference.  If in the fullness of time other people want to read it or pay for the pleasure of doing so, that's an unexpected bonus. 

2b.  ...that will not be competed out by simultaneously attempting other boulder-sized projects...

This is tricky because I already have some prior commitments.  It is more realistic to look at them all side by side, anticipate if there are obvious conflicts in the direction they will take me and be clear in advance which priority would "win" if it came down to a metaphorical knife fight between them...  Since last year was a very selfish year of training for an Ironman, I have promised to support MacGyver on his objectives for this year (which revolve around a target weight and an upgraded landscape).  I'm pretty sure many of the Unless-themed activities will support or at least not work at cross purposes with this prior commitment, but it would be unrealistic to deny that there may be some friction from time to time and if a compromise couldn't be found, MacG's needs would win the knife fight.  That said, I've come to believe that a recipe for spousal harmony (or good partnerships in general) is to not to get too personally invested in changing the other person.  What you see is what you get and chalk any positive change they make up as an unexpected bonus.  This is in keeping with the general idea that you should care more about stuff that's within your immediate sphere of control rather than worrying about stuff you have second to nth order degrees of control over.  So if hypothetically, achieving MacGyver's objectives *requires* that I ride him like the sadistic taskmaster that I am, you know, to the point where I can't juggle some side projects of my own, I would be in pretty flagrant violation of the spousal harmony covenant.  This morphs from a partner project to a me-wanting-to-change-my-partner project and it might be good for me to "get a hobby."  Also, let's bury this easter egg in the middle of a blog post in a wall o'text paragraph lest the scant portion of this blog's already scant readership that knows me in person reads it-- fascinating how touchy I am on this topic, this warrants a deeper reflection when I am more comfortable oversharing, but I digress-- since the biological clock is ticking and parenting seems like a challenging fun adventure, we're exploring that whole starting a family project as well.  It seems like the majority of the books I've been voyeuristically devouring on this topic warn that we should stay pretty flexible on the expectations we set for future selves who might roll "morning sickness," "preeclampsia," and other fun dot spells that could throw a wrench in otherwise well-laid plans on other fronts.  Oh, and finally, as sort of a concession if the year of family planning doesn't work out and because stuff books up stupid early, we signed up to attempt to hike rim to rim on the Grand Canyon next October.  My thoughts on that are pretty similar to my commitment to MacGyver.  So in the broadest of priority strokes, spawn>macgyver goals>unless book>canyoneering.

Now I can run around brazenly telling people my 2018 project is writing a book.  Full stop.  No more hemming and hawing about the numerous adventures I could choose now that I've finished the Ironman and returned from honeymoon (my prior commitment evasion excuses).

3.  Pick supporting month-level focus areas

Sweet.  This is mostly to scratch that itch I have to be continuously planning something and the paradoxical paralyzing overwhelm I feel when trying to build an entire plan for the year in one sitting.  The nice thing about sustainability is I can repurpose a lot of the structured categories outlined by Astyk when she drafted her Riot4Austerity game.  She had 7 categories, but since we are in socal where Heating Gas is not quite as focal of a thing, I'll combine Gas with Electric for 6 categories and cycle through focusing on each of them for two months of the year.  Calendar events set.

4.  Forge a set of daily habits to keep me on track

I love the web app Habitica that I downloaded on Google Play.  Unlike other to-do lists, this one has sections encouraging daily rituals and habits.  However, I've found I need to prune out those sections periodically because caffeinated past self thinks I can achieve a lot more in a day than current self actually manages and because some habits just stop making sense (i.e. measuring my heart rate in the morning to figure out if I'm overtrained and need to scale back today's workout now that I'm not training).  I've found it works better to be parsimonious and get some habits anchored down to the point where inertia is carrying them before trying to layer more habits in.  It is also helpful to sequence them together, for instance by adding a series of habits to do right after waking up or at a meal time.  It is harder to add an orphan habit if there aren't other established habits to group it with and remind you to work on it.

Another framework covered in a Tedx talk I want to experiment with is the concept that you have a couple "selfs" in control of your behavior.  You have an emotional self (some books call it Chimp or The Elephant) that usually runs the show and exerts the most control when you are upset or in some way dissatisfied.  This conceptually might be why it is hard to delay gratification and choose to deprive yourself now for future rewards when you're already feeling dissatisfied.  There is the logical part of your brain (some books call it Professor or The Rider) that you can use to make plans in the future or rationalize your past.  These plans are great but if there is upsetting adversity, the emotional part of your brain can instead pressure the logical part of your brain to justify procrastinating hard stuff for the future in favor of doing more pleasurable stuff in the present.  And then there is the third part of your brain which is The Robot of inertia, muscle memory reactions and interpretations to things.  Basically, the habits and rituals that acrete over time.  When emotion and logic are in agreement, programming can be written to the robot so you don't have to use so much self-discipline and arm twisting to get stuff done.  Cool, so I wanted to find a set of habits that furthered Operation Unless and it seemed like keeping all those parts of my brain happy was a crucial condition.

Daily tasks (over coffee + breakfast)

• Emotional:  create and visit a pinterest page of inspiring pictures of projects I can attempt related to Operation Unless.
• Logical:  read/research a bit about a topic related to Operation Unless daily.   
• Robot:  journal (medium TBD) daily about this journey celebrating observations and noble failures of any projects attempted.  Worst case scenario: at the end of the year you can publish that brain dump as a deliverable... but budgeting some time later on to edit and curate would be ideal.  

So here goes!  

Skinheads...

Yesterday...

Today!

I don't think I'm having a meltdown.  Although I haven't had a proper haircut in about a decade, there was just a culmination of small reasons to change my hair...

Ironman logistics-- I get that Justine Leconte says "wet hair" is oh so stylish these days.  Yet between daily swims, zone 4 spinning sessions, and showering off the effects of training, it felt like 1/2 my waking life my hair was soaking, dripping onto the back of shirts and making me generally feel uncomfortable and hygiene-challenged.  It would get pinched and snagged in latex swim caps.  The end of my ponytail could snag under my armpit while running and jerk my head mid-stride.  Plus the cholos on the bike path seemed to really enjoy catcalling an unattended female jogger and while they probably thought of it as a compliment, a group of strange men taking an interest in you comes across as more of a threat.  None of this is "lost the race" size distractions, but annoying like a really persistent mosquito.  

Anti-vanity-- It seemed like the last 2 decades I had this "brand" of being the approachable girl next door your mom would totally approve of, mostly executed by growing my hair out as long as possible and dying any greys that might belie premature aging but otherwise keeping things low key "I woke up looking like this."  That worked great, I snagged my prince.  Then I discovered he doesn't really care as much about physical appearance as I had assumed... or conversely, maybe I cornered him into trying not to seem shallow and now he's gotta stick by his claims and help me figure out how to use his clippers.  *evil grin*  Either way, a hairstyle choice that would devastate MacGyver was no longer a plausible excuse for a deal breaker.  Which left me alone in grappling with the "scariness" of this project.  What was I afraid of?  Would having short hair net me worse treatment by random dudes? Would I swap the cholo catcalls with lesbian comeons?  Would my androgynous build and eschewing makeup get me confused for being a dude?  Just how much of it was grey now?  I know I don't have cute Natalie Portmanesque elfish features, but would I look hideous?  My hair grows slow and life doesn't come with a control + z function to undo so this was an all-in gutsy move.  What would my tri club and master gardener friends make of all this?  

Adventures-- ever since Mandy chopped her locks and said she donates periodically to Locks of Love, that seemed like a cool upright citizeny ritual to copy.  Since my hair grows slow and they need 10" minimum it took a pretty long time to qualify for their donation requirements.  Plus they said they can take grey hair but they sell it and use the proceeds to make wigs so I figured now was the time to maximize the chances my hair made the cut for a kid wig.  Then there was the whole fiasco on the news with the skinheads in Charlottesville, VA.  I don't usually get all that involved in political stuff but seeing footage VICE did of the alt+right rally was really upsetting and sort of galvanized me to do something pro-social...  I may be descended from the Lees of VA, but if I want this to be my homeland, I need to earn that right, not wave a tiki torch around and insist it is my birthright.  What happened with our culture to radicalize people like that?  What made them so angry, alienated, entitled?  The glee they get out of public outrage, it seems like they never evolved out of the rebellious teenager stage but these are people in their 40's and 50's.  So I guess on some level I'm a liberal skin head, or at least shaved head now.  

SNAP Challenge

Debrief on the 30 day Food Stamp Challenge at $5/person/day.

We "cheated" a bunch, so this could be an interesting one to periodically circle back to and tighten the screws on the rules.

• Food already in the house was considered free.  The main motive for this challenge now was to eat down some of our less popular pantry reserves.  
• Quickly abandoned trying to track what MacGyver buys/eats at work.  So that meant our $10 daily budget covered only about 4 meals a day rather than 6.  
• "Fitness" nutrition (i.e. gels, bars, etc.) was not counted towards this budget because I already have 2 coaches very concerned about my disinterest in fueling.  
• We kinda stopped counting on day 29 because day 30 was a fun cross-continental funeral adventure and being on the road subsisting off fast food (even when air dad is able to seat you in heavily snack provisioned zones for the flights) is untenable on $5-$10 a day.  

Results

• MacGyver lost 10 lbs.  
• My weight has a lot of variance, but I think I came down 1-2 lbs.  
• Maybe a 50% reduction in random/redundant pantry inventory... still haven't found a use for surplus cricket flour.

Tips/Takeaways

• Good and Cheap cookbook was geared towards this SNAP purpose and is free in pdf form but it is more sporting to buy a glossy paperback version so the proceeds can go to a good cause.  It was helpful to have experimented a bit with this "capsule" of recipes before starting the challenge, but we didn't slavishly build menus off this book during the challenge.
• Local grocery store has overlapping promos on Weds, so I would bike there with a backpack.  The backpack reined in how much I bought (typically $25 or less).  I found it particularly discouraging to buy high liquid content, chill requirements, or excessively packaged convenience foods which also tend to be pricier...  MacGyver would say a drawback to this strategy is that I didn't get enough of his favorite foods (i.e. meat and beer) but he also thinks the cutback in beer contributed the most to his weight loss.
• CSA box-- I have a fraught relationship with these boxes.  If I load the equivalent contents into my Sprouts Amazon Now cart, it costs $6.79 but the CSA costs $17 and is much less convenient to pickup fortnightly and often requires more cleaning and prep.  It does force us to eat veggies, often ones we wouldn't select for ourselves (i.e. lettuce) and that premium pricing does go towards supporting a local food shed though.  If we were truly on austerity measures, I would cancel CSA and hope that I supplemented with an increase in grocery store trips and veggie share of my cart.  In a similar vein, I found myself opting for non-organic options with killer sale prices (bacon, eggs, etc.) when ideologically, I would rather be in the premium price for organic/sustainably harvested camp.  
• Create convenience food-- the most dangerous intervals were ones where we were exhausted, hungry, and didn't have a plan.  Filling fit packer containers with prepped or precooked "budget" items increased the likelihood we would eat them rather than skipping a meal or defecting to a fast food joint or an off-schedule calorie/nutrition light grocery run.  After a couple disasters and as our emergency snack pantry levels dwindled, I found myself doubling recipes or cooking something in parallel to eat later as an insurance policy.  I would scrutinize perishable things that didn't seem to be "moving" and try to find ways to make them more enticing-- maybe cut the grapes into smaller clusters?  etc.  That said, if you're not already in the habit of elaborate baking projects (pizza dough, bread, dumplings), it is unrealistic to anticipate you'll suddenly have time to knock those to-do's out while grappling with whatever withdrawal symptoms you have from absconding from cafes, sugary convenience foods, alcohol and other luxuries.
• "Working remotely" and traveling was perilous.  There are few places that will let you camp with a laptop for hours on end that don't also expect you to purchase something that will annihilate your food budget for the day.  Starbucks comes to mind.  I found myself trying to limit the number of days I might need to "hang out" to carpool somewhere to avoid temptation.  When I heard the siren song, I tried to choose the simplest and smallest size options to get the fix without going deeper in the hole.  But I wasn't too aggressive with maximizing my dollars here because I learned in previous frugal challenges a tall house coffee doesn't scratch that "indulgence" itch that a tall latte monogrammed with my misspelled name would and therefore doesn't trigger a "I've been bad and now need to stick to the straight and narrow" cooldown.    
• Big mason jars FTW.  I got an additional four of the gallon sized dry goods jars and six of the half gallon size wide mouth jars shipped from Ball and these are the best storage/organization investment ever (especially if you standardize on one mouth size across all your jars).  They allow you to raid the bulk bins at the grocery store and have an attractive place to store your loot.  You can also see these otherwise unglamorous rice, flour, trail mix, bean, etc. staples and that seemed to be half the battle to incorporating them into the rotation more.  As a corollary, anything dusty and shelf-stable I wanted to move, I started to push into clear glass cabinets so I could see it better as well (and because its typically gauche packaging was something I was motivated to zen out of my kitchen).  

Banned Book Club: Anarchist Cookbook

Watched the American Anarchist documentary on Netflix released after the author's death and was moved by the irony of the situation.  Angry 19 year old pursues his bucket list objective of writing a book, thinking himself cleverly subversive in repackaging obscure but public knowledge in more incendiary easier access prose, book sells better than expected and despite his tirade against the oppressive power of private property he could use the royalties money, original publisher gets bought out and he sells his rights to acquirer, becomes a teacher focused on at risk youth, book starts to be connected with terrorist acts perpetrated by at risk youth, has lost publishing rights he would need to discontinue the book.  It is a tragically great story.

Plus lately I've been interested in people who seem to have done a public 180 on their thinking about a given topic (i.e. Neil Strauss: The Game-->The Truth, Tucker Max: I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell--> Mate, etc.).  

Prefatory note on Anarchism today-- By "today" he means 1970.  After brief delight at the cozily familiar anarchist "zine" feel (i.e. Days of War, Nights of Love), this chapter quickly deteriorated into Nixonian era current event name dropping and overly theoretical rants about Socialism, Marxism, and the parallels or lack thereof between WWII and Nam.  I had to bushwhack through persistent flashbacks to UofChicago core social science curriculum shot through with labyrinthine German 19th century exposition and the hope the professor wouldn't cold call on me to express my opinion on the topic.  It is too bad the author didn't want to be involved in updating this to make it more accessible to readers living after the soviet collapse.  Anarchy as I understand it is anti-hierarchy or more generally anti-authoritarian ways of organizing society.  Anarchy as he defines it is creating disruptive chaos in hopes of destabilizing the oppressive state and discontinuing the institution of private property which must be at fault because you feel alienated.  (OK, that might not be the most sympathetic interpretation of the thrust of his argument).  I'm not sure I'm on board with this particular creed, but it was helpful to work out for myself what my specific objections were.  

Chapter One: Drugs-- By now, I'm skimming and questioning whether what I am doing actually counts as "reading" to cross this banned book off my own bucket list.  Interesting acknowledgement of the paradox that drugs can numb would-be revolutionaries into complacency and should be avoided, but drugs can also lift some of the cultural constraints of one's world view and open up the possibility for exploring plausible alternatives to the status quo.  Ironic his view of utopia includes a transition into a time when no one is imprisoned for drug possession as it seems like that is what the decriminalization movement is starting to achieve.  The Pot scene has evolved dramatically since the 70's and Youtube would be a far more practical resource.  He seems to be afraid of needles.  I am not sure I have a large enough social circle to consume 15 pounds of bananas so I can render their skins into a psychedelic.  Not surprising for a 19 year old author, but curious there is very little discussion use of drugs for suicide beyond the standard cautions about overdosing, since suicide seemed to be another popular reason for banning books these days.

Chapter Two: Electronics, Sabotage, and Surveillance-- Completely skimmed this as feature-loaded smartphones and cameras have completely changed the surveillance landscape.  Shoplifting may also morph into various forms of fraud with the shift towards digital retail rather than high tailing it into a nearby mass transit hub.  I'm not sure how many pre 1964 Chevies are still in working order to hot wire (but if we got into a Season 1 of Walking Dead highway gridlock zombie apocalypse situation, that would be a handy skill to have... maybe Echo will take over the ignition for us soon).  It seems like a more developed Social Engineering section (i.e. tv series Lie to Me) could be useful and timeless to both the good guys and the baddies (although I guess we all think we are good guys).  

Chapter Three:  Natural, Nonlethal and Lethal Weapons-- I was only interested in what he had to say about air guns (apparently nothing unless they are the same as bolt action rifles) as I'm not entirely sure how deadly DH's trash panda deterrent would be if it fell into the wrong or unskilled hands.  Amusingly convenient to see that the "How to make tear gas in your basement" section is immediately followed by "Defense and medical treatment for gases."  Odd there isn't a first aid section following the knives and guns section.  

Chapter Four: Explosives and Booby Traps-- What a fun way to learn chemistry concepts.  At this point, my mind has completely wandered to the Warren Buffett documentary I watched last night and the concept of buying "cigar butts" or companies that are on the decline but if you time your purchase right, still have one good smoke left in them, as his wife summarized it.  I also got to thinking about the Drawdown book on carbon sequestration I'm concurrently reading and wondering what a great investor someone with deep macgyver-like understanding of materials science and how things work (like this applied chemistry chapter) could be at anticipating which old guard industries still have some "good smoke" of assets that would be of use to future industries.  

Postscript:  Was I the only intrigued by this Vera point system that determines whether you qualify for a summons or go to a jail until your court date?  It had me wondering about a lot of implicit race/sex/age/etc-isms built into the system and if there was a statistical basis for them.  Sure, prior record is a plausible indicator, but employment duration?  family ties?  duration in residence?  

So I think I've pretty much scratched my "banned book" subversive itch for the time being.  Hopefully I'm not on some watch list for this purchase. 

Banned Book Club: Grapes of Wrath

This one intrigued me for garnering both a Pulitzer and a ban from a county less than 200 miles away.
Lots of practical insight for Peak people facing the prospect of having to bug out here--

1. Avoid debt, it can whittle your options down to the point where it feels like you don't have any. 
2. Conversely, avoid running your operation strictly to maximize profits.  You'll lose the versatility of diversified sources of resources and income and have your margins squeezed by even larger, more specialized operators.  
3. It helps to be technically savvy in whatever the transportation vehicle du jour is. 
4. Water.  Know how to find it, purify it, transport it.  Be aware of water property rights when entering new terrain (i.e. Mojave).
5. Air.  This came more from Ken Burns documentary, but it is interesting that a variety of natural disasters can jeopardize air quality and at the point when that becomes apparent, supplies of protective equipment sell out fast. 
6. Sun.  Exposure could be inevitable and durable items like hats may have more utility than consumables like sunscreen you might not be able to afford.
7. Modest procreative ambitions.  This one might not be a popular takeaway, but I was struck with how large these farm families were and how that could increase the stakes for any decision because there was always a crisis with someone they were trying to troubleshoot.
8. But conversely, a big theme of the whole book was how resilient humans were for being able to ban together and help each other, even strangers, even if it inconvenienced us and that if we abandon this instinct, things get brutal fast.  

More generic review posted here.

IF...

Close enough!

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   [aka mass swim starts]

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, 

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   [conservative coaches say train a year first]

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, [hopefully <= 17 hours]

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,  ["gentle rollers"]

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, [you're young/tiny, you recover faster/have a lower center of gravity/less surface area...]

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: 

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   [my favorite days are recovery days!]

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   [TP data OD]

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster 

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   [=teachable moment]

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken 

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, ["fun adventures" can mean so many things...]

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, 

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools: [pedicure calluses]

If you can make one heap of all your winnings [desk job]

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, [IMAZ]

And lose, and start again at your beginnings 

    And never breathe a word about your loss; [: x]

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew [including you, IT Band]

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   [or 140.6 miles, which ever comes first]

And so hold on when there is nothing in you 

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’ [...and a lot of Carbopro]

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   [6 bike lengths!]

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,  [tri hards]

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,  [even if they are in your age group]

    If all men count with you, but none too much; [dongs are in different age groups]

If you can fill the unforgiving minute [...er 6 hours, 30 minutes?]

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   [23,400* seconds]

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son! [an Iron*man]

Banned Book Club: Lysistrata

I should have been more specific about *how many* banned books I intended to read.  Scrolling through the list, it is fascinating to look for patterns in how many books a given government bans and their reasons.  Australia seems to have had no qualms with heavy handed censorship which seems bizarre for a people whose persona doesn't exactly ooze political correctness.

I started out with the free version of Lysistrata.  Oof.  The good news it is only 73 some pages and could be skimmed in an hour.  The bad news is that I found the trash talking in rhyming couplets and allusions to gods, geography and less-than-current events nearly incomprehensible.  It was kind of clever the Spartan characters picked up Scottish dialect as I had just come off a steampunk Victorian YA read that had employed similar devices, but you can imagine this did nothing to assist with reading comprehension.  So I watched the 3 min summary on a whiteboard youtube just to be sure I had followed the general gist.

Kinda interesting a Greek military junta in the 1960's banned this one, as it looks like they let a lot of other edgy stuff through like a German sex ed documentary featuring live birth.  The junta looks like it generally undid itself by bringing military force down on student protesters and division within the ranks of leadership.  Fascinating to learn that the Greeks were embroiled in a civil war such a short time ago since in my head it seems like such a wise old country full of stoic philosophers.

Also kind of curious what the literal translation of this would be.  A while ago, I stumbled upon a theory that as our culture has globalized, we've become less violent.  We think violence is increasing because our standard for what we consider to be violent is a moving target and is rising faster than actions, leading us to run exposes and documentaries on violence society might have previously thought were unremarkable... Like the T-shirts that have filled my pinterest feed emblazoned with "Wooden Spoon Survivor."  Some of the lines in here would seem to support that theory if this was a faithful literal translation.  Every couple of pages, I'd find a jarring scenario where a character would be trying to woo his wife with flattery and then 2 lines later be wishing her dead or brutally beaten... but maybe that was a double entendre that was clumsily translated.  

Palliative Care

I'm not entirely sure how "read a book about palliative care" got on my bucket list tracker, but it seemed timely as my last Grandma transitions to hospice care.  I read The Conversation.  You can save yourself time by watching the video theconversationbook.org instead.

The gist of the book is that our medical complex is predisposed to take any and all actions that could prolong life.  Many of us will face terminal illnesses where these invasive, uncomfortable measures may substantially decrease the quality of our lives for marginal gains on the quantity of life.  He thinks that more frank conversations with individuals about what they want their end of life care to look like could smooth some of the grief and anxiety of this phase.  He encourages people to document their wishes and share these with loved ones who may ultimately be responsible for making those care decisions, stating that without those conversations, loved ones are only doing slightly better than chance (i.e. 60-something percent) at guessing which option the recipient would have chosen.

Cool.  For posterity, I [Belle] can go first...  (the rest of this is pretty bleak, so feel free to skip if you're looking for more light-hearted fare)

Hopefully when the time comes to make these decisions, this blog post is deeply buried in the archives and forgotten.  Incidentally, if the course of treatment I got was inconsistent with this, don't beat yourself up about it.  Maybe I changed my mind and at a minimum, I should have let you know this post existed before putting you in such a crappy situation.  MacGyver would probably be making these decisions for me unless for some reason he is unavailable.  Hopefully he'd keep any surviving parents, siblings, and extended family in the loop though.

What things are most important to you?  What makes you happy?
I'm happy when I feel like I am useful and helping people.  I don't want to get to a point where people who care for me feel I am a burden or where I can't recognize and connect with people who have been a non-trivial part of my life.  My favorite activities currently are reading, training for triathlons with the tri club, learning to garden with the master gardeners, and adding/checking off things on my bucket list... I reserve the right to change those later.

What fears do you have about getting sick or needing medical care?
Main fears-- pain/symptoms that are unmanageable, becoming a time/financial inconvenience to people who care for me, loss of independence and autonomy and the dignity that comes with it.  I'm afraid that if I have a terminal illness that I know will eventually completely incapacitate me, I won't be allowed to take advantage of programs like death with dignity to time the end of things on my own terms.

If you were very sick, are there any specific medical treatments that might be too much for you?
I think life-prolonging procedures should be saved for candidates that have a good chance of recovering and resuming a high quality of life as an outpatient.  I don't want procedures like feeding tubes and breathing support if the odds are good that I would need to stay on them for the rest of my life.  I don't want heroics that have only the slimmest chance of improving things.

Do you have any beliefs that guide you when you make medical decisions?
I want to leave the world in a better state than I found it.  I believe it takes fewer resources to make someone comfortable and manage their symptoms (increase their quality of life) than it does to increase their quantity of life.

I think we should do what we can to understand the most likely health problems we will encounter and make lifestyle choices to mitigate these to the best of our ability.  When health conditions arise, I would prefer to manage them through lifestyle modifications rather than medical procedures or prescription medicines whenever possible.  As much as I love statistics and evidence-based medicine, I'm open-minded about the efficacy of holistic medicine.  I believe some of it may not be substantiated in clinical trials because it is not something that could be patented and profited from.

I think there is a lot of guilt that comes with the trend of family diaspora.  My closest relative is 400 miles away.  My parents are 2K miles away.  I wouldn't want anyone to feel obliged to move to/stay in OC for my benefit.  I am OK with moving closer to a caregiver if it is convenient.  My ideal "elderly" situation would be to design and build a tiny house on a trailer bed and set up camp on an amenable caregiver's property so I could be independent but have opportunities to help out and be monitored and helped myself if necessary.  MacGyver doesn't like confined spaces, so if he's still in the picture, let's defer to whatever arrangement makes him comfortable.

When I die, I'd prefer to be cremated rather than buried under a lawn someone needs to constantly mow, making loved ones feel guilty for not visiting me more often.  I never cared for lawns.  I have a bucket list item to get turned into a diamond (i.e. lifegem), so if anyone wants to help me out with checking that off the list, awesome.  If I don't have enough savings to do it though, don't worry about it.  No need to author a grandiose obituary for me.  No need to guilt people into making epic journeys cross country to attend my funeral.  If anything, I think it would be cool to arrange a day of service and enable folks to do a little bit of volunteer work in my memory instead.

Cateye

Super flattering pic, I know!  It might be time to re-henna my Roguish streak of grey...

I'm going through a periodic "girly" phase and admiring the subtle 50's cateye look that seemed to be en vogue around the office before my departure last December, I added "apply cateye" to the bucket list as a reasonably easy to dispatch goal to slot in around the doosies like train for an Ironman.

Then spent an inordinate amount of time watching youtube videos, cross referencing products against the EWG website for toxicity and generally adding too much complexity to the whole project.  Eventually, I decided to KISS and streamline my materials--

• Stila Stay All Day eye liner:  a youtuber recommended this as the felt tip go-to for n00bs.  Also, seems a lot of Amazon customers have beaten a path to this product and posted largely favorable reviews.  $22 seemed kinda expensive for what it was, plus it scored a "4 moderate hazard" on EWG for the endocrine disrupting powers of propylparaben.  boo.  I also eventually want something more metallic-- copper or bronzey to be a more unique/signature Bellepic look.  There are gels out there that do that, but require a brush to apply.  You can also dilute eyeshadow and treat it like eye liner.  All of this sounded like it was adding a few too many points of failure for my initial make-this-stupid-easy-so-you-can-enjoy-success-and-build-on-it objective.  
• Maybelline New York Great Lash Big Washable Mascara also scoring a "4 moderate hazard" on EWG.  I went with this largely because of its low-low addon price of $2.99 and figured I would feel less regret if it molders in the bathroom for a couple months, I read a "your mascara goes bad after 6 months" article, and decide to toss it.
• Physicians Formula Super BB All-in-1 Beauty Balm Cream scored a slightly better "3 moderate hazard."  I was looking for some sort of basic base to cover my dark circles and veiny lids but didn't want to go crazy with primer, concealer, eye shadows, and whatnot.  I liked Tarte's BB, particularly its EWG score of 1, but found I didn't use it enough to justify the price.  If I did buy another tube, I'd want to get it matched at an Ulta or Sephora to make sure I had chosen the right shade.  Physicians Formula was 1/3 the price, so figured I would see if I end up cateyeing enough to justify a spendier foundation.  

All in, this haul cost $40 on Amazon and I've started a little contest with myself to do X mins of house/yardwork at $10/hour to pay for such non essentials.  Factoring in the shiny new spray hose, strawberry plant, and tomato seeds I currently owe the house 7 hours of TLC.

Not included in this purchase, but glad I had on hand: q-tips and baby oil.

Day 1 of road testing this application, I was introduced as "that pretty lady in the vegetable garden is one of the Master Gardeners," by the train conductor who gives visitors a tour of the zoo by rail.  That said, he's introduced me the same way even when I'm my post-workout messiness.  Also made slightly more extended eye contact with fellow pedestrians as I walked to the Zoo, the coffee shop for lunch, and home and generally found myself in a grinning self-satisfied mood for more of the hike.  So that was fun.  Maybe my laser eye contact victims were actually scrutinizing how one of my edges sort of feathered from my gardening exertions and needed a touch up when I got home, but whatever.

Conclusion:  definitely don't feel like I need to "put my face on" to leave the house, but the fun of getting into character once in a while offsets the questionable chemicals I'm probably injecting into my body.

Sprouts!

So I have a lot of bucket list challenges around growing food in the yard.  To make it more wieldy, I started to think about the stats the urban homesteaders in nearby Pasadena posted.  I figured if I started with just a small area of the yard and refused to "unlock" more of the yard until I'd achieved their yield/foot on what was under cultivation, I wouldn't feel quite so overwhelmed.  As near as I can figure, they're harvesting 1.29 pounds of produce/square foot using about 12.7 oz of daily water.

Now I didn't think MacGyver would be thrilled to see I had cannibalized mesh screens from potentially reparable windows, so for this pilot, I'm improvising with a french press to approximate a mason jar with a screened lid.  Turns out he's equally "thrilled" with the prospect of his decaffeinated wife trying to persuade him to make her a beverage with the backup stovetop espresso maker instead.  Supposing this thing can generate 200 grams of sprouts/week, that would equate to about 31 pounds of produce per masonic square foot per year if kept in constant rotation...  I guess we'll have to see what this weighs next monday or repeat under more controlled conditions (I spilled half the sprouts into the sink on the first watering).  In any event, the yield/square foot seems to have the potential of falling well beyond the Dervaes harvest target, although this probably uses a bit more water.  If the sink grease trap in the side yard was rebuilt to route water to the landscape though, we might be able to stretch that water investment a bit further.

That said, the prospect of running 212 sprout jars concurrently to hit that "2 pounds of kitchen scraps/chicken/day" target is pretty daunting, so once I get this habit and recipes to support it locked in, I'll probably be looking to diversify into other edibles.  

Mocking Peeps

The two surviving eggers aren't egging much, so it seemed as good a time as any to tackle the bucket list item of raising yard birds from peeps.

After an inordinate amount of deliberation, and drunken approval from MacGyver, I ordered ten 1-3 week old chicks from Dare2Dream farms.  We and MaGyver have both purchased pullets from there, with varying degrees of success.  MaGyver's seemed to settle in for a happy season of laying until a mountain lion debacle.  Of the 8 or so adolescents we've acquired or been gifted by Ma, only 1 sex link remains and her survival instincts are far more impressive than her egg laying abilities.  A lot of our loss was likely due to high prey drive fur kids, but a couple birds went into inexplicable declines and had to be humanely dispatched.  So we weren't feeling super bullish about the health of D2D DNA, but they had 3 advantages that outweighed that concern.

1.  They do regularly scheduled deliveries by van to our area.  Seems way less stressful on chicks than entrusting them to the postal service (our alternative if we sourced through our favorite feed store).
2.  They offer a greater selection of peep breeds with easy online check out capabilities.
3.  We've seen their farm in person and appreciate that this is a family-ish farm, not a depressing chicken hangar like the 100's we pass driving over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house in Delaware.

The species we selected/observations coming into day 7:

• 2 Barred Rock-- MaGyver's favored breed of her flock. These were the tiniest (youngest) peeps in the delivery.  One "pasty bum" got a blocked vent on day 5, but MacGyver seems to have restored her to her previous high spirits.  These have little white halos on their heads to differentiate them from the aussies.   
• 3 2 Easter Eggers-- the hardy exotic-egg-colored mainstay of our original flock albeit sourced from a different hatchery.  MacG considers these the "cutest" they are slightly bigger than the Rocks but still relatively young.  One declined late on day 4 and was dead by the afternoon of day 5.  Seems like coccidiosis and timeline-wise would match contraction on a pretty stressful day in a van.  This is a bummer in that if I had reported the peep "sick" it could have been exchanged since it was acquired within the week.  The "death" guarantee ends at day 4.  Grr.  But we didn't expect all 10 to make it to adulthood, we just wanted better guidelines on what to expect.  Bro-Epic's gift of a Small-Scale Poultry Flock book takes a very Darwinian approach to the whole thing.  Vaccinations and medicated feed be damned, make sure your small flock gets a varied diet, had dry bedding, and celebrate if a protozoa culls weaker genetic material out of your flock.  
• 3 Australorp-- intrigued by their spec sheet of high productivity and dual use utility.  Plus SoCal climate is on an equivalent northern latitude to southern hemisphere Oz, so it isn't implausible the birds adapted to one climate might do well in the other once they get their seasons flipped.  These are my (Belle) favorites.  There are 2 youngish ones that are slightly bigger than the easter eggers and a punk that is almost the size of the gold sex links whom I've dubbed "Rustle Crow."  MacG thinks he must be a rooster because he's tearing around the brooder, initially jumped out of the brooder and got wedged between its side and a wall until I could rescue him, and otherwise behaving like a pint-sized version of those kitchen raptors in Jurassic park.  His next-biggest sib seems to be adopting similar mannerisms, so I think it might be his growing up in a land full of poisonous critters rather than his/her chromosome count.     
• 2 Gold Sex Link-- supposedly productive and quiet, the ones we previously purchased were some of the first the dogs desqueaked.  These are the biggest of the haul, the delivery guy saying they were about a week older than the others.  That said, they are much more chill than contemporary-sized Rustle Crow.  They usually just swan down like little blond angels and let a bevy of smaller peeps pile up around them.  

Accoutrement:

We got the $75 brooder package because I was doing too much hang wringing to figure out of the heat lamp on AMZ would be delivered in time and whatnot.  

• Heat lamp + cage + clamp mount-- yes, awesome.  kinda wish the cage were fully closed since Rustle managed to almost burn herself jumping onto the edge of the box and I'm still nursing a singed knuckle.  
• Feed & Waterers-- We technically didn't need since we have a couple mouldering in our side yard from our last chicken integration apartheid (plus there are plenty of diy suggestions on youtube).  We've moved the waterer onto a slightly elevated slate shower tile to keep some of the bedding out of it.  
• Lidless cardboard box-- quickly became apparent this would not contain chicks beyond their first week of peeping as Rustle aptly demonstrated on day 1.  
• Feed-- convenient to have some on hand right away that was ostensibly what they were eating on the farm.  I'm a bigger proponent of the organic stuff when possible from Scratch 'n Peck rather than medicated pellets.  I sent MacG out to get the Scratch 'n Peck equivalent at the feed store but the only thing they stocked was grower feed for +5 weeks.  He's ground some of it up in his brewing mill to make it easier for small beaks and I mortar and pestled up some breakfast eggshells to act as diy grit until the AMZ drop shipment of age-appropriate feed shows up (ETA around the time they're 3-4 weeks old...) 
• Shavings-- convenient to have on hand.  Easy to acquire from a pet store run.  My preference would be some sort of straw or hay that isn't as easy to kick into the waterers and water log them.  

Tasks for coming weekends will be to get an outdoor situation of some sort set up for them so they can start sourcing their own grit, learning to perch, etc.  I'm not so sure we'll ever get to a carbon-neutral stage with them because the Justin Rhodes (awesome permaculturist) youtube interview with Karl Hammer pegged the table scrap needs to support a chicken without grain at 2lb/chicken/day (with caveats that some have found they need a lot more than that).  There's no way our kitchen generates 126 pounds of denser-than-lettuce-leaves refuse a week even when I am being most lax about avoiding food spoilage, so the culling may have to continue.  

Sensory Deprivation Float

This is what I imagined the experience would be, but it turned out to be a lot less claustrophobic and peaceful.  Newport Float floats you in a tub in a closet so you have about 7' of space to bounce pinball toe-to-head in and if you panic, you can stand all the way up without bumping your head.

I came across float therapy reading Tools of Titans.   Ferriss lists something like surviving three 90-minute floats as prerequisite before dosing with psychotropics.  Zoinks.  I was more interested in this as a way to jump start a mindfulness/meditation habit.  The past week, I've been trying to get in 20 minutes of sitting quietly/day using the super basic secular instructions Leo outlines here (Ironically, Leo does 35 minutes of BS'ing about a "no bullshit" approach.  The core points are covered from 13:30 - 19:00, so watch that section and take 20 mins to apply it before deciding if you want to watch the video in its entirety).  Coming off the half ironman, I was also somewhat persuaded on soaking in epsom salt helping absorb magnesium and addressing muscle soreness and other helpful effects, even though there isn't scientific evidence to validate your body is doing any sort of absorption.  Anyhow, my 20 min meditation practice went OK for the first 5 days, then the wheels fell off the bus on the weekend where I was coughing, congested, and so full of self-pity I didn't even bother to build a "To-doodle" (a sort of coloring book inspired daily task list I'm prototyping and may blog about more in the future).  So I decided to reboot with a novel and more challenging mindfulness adventure on what would be day 8... Plus Newport Float was running a deal on $35 morning/late night floats and this was the first available opening.

It turned out to be pretty relaxing.  Not unlike the weightlessness of scuba diving where you can become hyper aware of your breathing, your heart beat, even your stomach growling.  I liked being forcibly locked away from the buzzes of my phone for a designated amount of time.  I liked that the FAQ suggested you could use the time to meditate, sleep, or think creatively.  Since my mind likes to chew on creating and reflecting on curiosity-inspired lists (i.e. 10 things in the world I believe are scarce and how might someone conclude the opposite, they're abundant).  I think I cribbed this anxiety-management habit from Scott Adams' book, but don't quote me on that.  The main point is that this "creative thinking" is antithetical to traditional meditation "note the thought, but don't get drawn up in its story, let it pass like a cloud" approach.

/Tangents about reflections I had in the tank...

So my first line of thinking was on this floating facility's business model and the feasibility of copying it.  I was impressed that Ron the proprietor immediately answered an email I sent about floating with a head cold late last night and wondered how much of his customer service he personally handles and how much he can outsource.  I didn't like the prospect of being chronically "on call."  I did like the prospect of minor customer interaction, set a timer, do my own thing for an hour and a half and right when I'd be at a good point to take a mental break, I wake the customers up and pocket $35-$60 each for their service of keeping me focused on whatever desk project I wanted to focus on.  Suppose in broad strokes, he profits an average of $35/2 hours (90 min sessions with 30 mins of pre-post showering) and he does 40 hours of that a week, over a year each tank might make him $35K in a year with 4 weeks of holiday.  He has 4 tanks, but I get that his cost structure ($50K for ozone cleaning system alone) probably means his margin is a bit tighter.  Right, satisfied that a diversified SteamStead in a gentrified area might benefit from having a deco chamber or two, I move on.

Another line of thinking was marveling at how much ego I had attached to making it the full 90 minutes on this, my first session, despite my head cold.  How I wanted some hypothetical audience to marvel that when benchmarked against other newbies, few of them make it for that long.  All sorts of strategies I had in order to hang in there for that long (counting breaths/heart beats to approximate minutes, evaluating  the pruneyness of my fingers), even if doing so turned out to be torture for hungry-full-bladdered-me whose needs I was ostensibly giving my unwavering attention to by doing this exercise.  It's weird how competitive we can get and the tension that can create.

The main theme my creative thinking kept circling back to ended up being on concluding that we reap what we sew.  I had started by asking myself what the nature of ADHD was, if it was increasing, how that might be adaptive in the grand scheme of evolutionary pressures we face.  I came out of the reverie concluding that if we are preferentially breeding plants/livestock to mature earlier, to be burlier (fat or muscle), to look prettier on the shelf, why are we surprised about the hormonal/obesity/vanity issues within our own species?  Why are we surprised about the disregard we have for our elders?  It is challenging to figure out how long a commercial hen's hypothetical natural life could be, let alone throw a birthday party for them when they get there, why would the arc of a human lifespan be that different.   If we look for cheap, commodities from afar it seems inconsistent to resent our employers from sourcing employees globally, warehousing them similarly, and swapping them out when they reach their planned obsolescence.

/End tangents

Leaving the facility and strolling to a coffee joint a couple blocks away (7 leaves-- they make a sweet delicately authentic mint thing they call Sereno which I liked more than my Kean Grasshopper go-to), things seemed a lot more bright vibrant.  Not dissimilar from that stayed up all night tired but relaxed feeling coming out of burning man adventures... which might have included psychotropics.  This was the point of view it seems like good photographers should have, to see the beauty everywhere that we miss when relentlessly caught up in trains of thought.  A guy in a wheelchair by the 7 eleven asked if I was "In Treatment," determined I was "A Normie," and warned me to "be careful in this neighborhood" and I got the jolting tutorial in what Fear felt like physically (one of my creative prompts was to better understand how basic emotions manifest physically to me in hopes of better acknowledging them rather than suppressing them and wondering why their influence pops up surprisingly in less constructive areas).  That this might not be the most gentrified of areas to loiter waiting for a ride or bike to if indisposed.

At any rate, going to a float facility is a little bit too much of a transportation hassle and cash drain for me to make a habit of, but I hope the "bootcamp" effects will persist in my own daily meditation practice and I might welcome some future visits as a less consumerist gift idea for myself or to share with others that are similarly open to the experience.

Tortillas from scratch

This wasn't the press we used, but clever!  I wonder if we could design one with a house seal on it for signature tortillas in the future, or offer to machine custom ones for other tortilla aficionados....

Inevitably, we buy tortillas (TJ's corn & wheat are our favs) and forget about the remainder languishing in the fridge until they get moldy.  Or we have all the makings for tacos except the tortillas themselves and give up and order pizza or similar tragedy.  Therefore, learning how to tortilla is an important life skill.

The hardest part about making tortillas from scratch was finding Masa Harina at Sprouts, our Anglo-focused grocer.  Since flour is pretty shelf-stable, I just ordered a bag on AMZ Prime, but kind of resent the complexity this adds to our provisioning supply chain.

/Tangent-- Incidentally, I'm very impressed with AMZ Now for groceries. Like Prime Instant Video and Sbux rewards, it is interesting to reflect on how much I ponied up for the privilege of being an early adopter of these services and how much more affordable and smooth the customer experience has become now that they're out of beta.  Groceries are now available from Sprouts within 2 hours of ordering, honoring all the in-store sales that are featured in their paper circulars, and delivered by a friendly uber/lyft/courier.  The delivery charge is about 10% of your order, which seems reasonable vs. the alternative of several laden backpack 5 mile bike trips praying the eggs don't break or our time if MacGyver/I "clocked out" to go to the store, plus the self-discipline benefits of being able to search only for organic, or skip the ice cream/beer cases that would have otherwise tempted Hungry Self to stray from The Plan.  /End tangent

Anyhow, AMZ ships Bob's Redmill Masa Harina and "Bob" seems pretty committed to curbing the unquestioning use of GMO, at least in what gets planted if they can't control pollination contaminants, so I ordered a 24 oz bag of that instead of just going to one of the 2 local latino grocers within 4 blocks of the house for Maseca.

Best tip I found was to use a freezer bag trimmed to fit the press rather than wax paper or foil.  This worked beautifully.  I didn't bother to cut 2 separate pieces, I just let the natural crease in the bag define the top half and the bottom half.  Some tortillas had an unnaturally straight edge from dough pressed flush into the crease, but that seems less messy than alternatives.  

I also just used the cast iron skillet to cook them, no oil.  I think if MacGyver were more actively involved in this step, a lot more Canola would have gone in the skillet and into our arteries, but these pucks showed no signs of getting stuck.  I kept MacG distracted on Ye Olde Stove grilling fajita veggies and reconstituting some questionable dried black fungus mushrooms I had languishing in the back of the spice drawer.

MacGyver is typically a flour tortilla devotee, but I think these corn ones won him over.  He said he doesn't like the preservative taste of the store bought corns and his aversion was more to preservatives than corn.

If I were repeating this recipe, which I probably will, I would experiment with more than the 1/2 teaspoon of salt and supplementing even more lime juice in conjunction with water to make these more piquant.  The TJs flour + corn combo also seems to use baking powder and honey, so maybe incorporating those will make the home version even more addictive.

Total yield off 2 cups of masa=12 tortillas (8 tortillas + 1 testilla + 2 accidentes I dropped on the floor and fed to dogs + 1 leftover that fed the chickens).  At that rate, a bag of Bob's makes 23-34 tortillas.  These would run  $0.08 to $0.35/tortilla depending on whether you bought flour in bulk from AMZ and whether you count my 25% waste rate as part of the yield or not).  This still compares favorably to the $0.31-$0.43/tortilla of the premade ones from La Tortilla Factory we would have chosen otherwise (not factoring in that we waste a decent amount of these due to fridge neglect).  In broad strokes, I would say handmade tortillas cost 58% of what store bought ones would, saving you about $0.16/tortilla)... If I'm more cynical, I would say my hourly tortilla making wage is $0.85, but I spent a lot of that loitering and talking to MacG which I might actually pay to have the privilege of doing at say a bar or restaurant, so :-P .  Plus it seems like Bob's cardboard box and wrappers for flour bags would be less net waste and more compostable than the plastic baggies for each 8 count of LTF's we would have to dispose of otherwise.  If maseca bags are paper, they'd be the smallest carbon footprint, but I worry about the GMO issue.

Leer un libro en español....

Goodreads Review-- 

This is the first book I read in Spanish... Now I have a surfeit of vocabulary words for "shrugged," "smiled," "raised an eyebrow," "sighed." It will be interesting to see how this gets rendered as a movie because a lot of the scenes seem contrived. 


Este es el primer libro que leo en español ... Ahora tengo un exceso de palabras de vocabulario para "encogió los hombros", "sonrió", "levantó una ceja", "suspiró". Será interesante ver cómo se hace renderizado como una película porque muchas de las escenas parecen artificiales.

**

The rationale for this project intrigued my physical therapist, so if you are in the same camp-- 

#1 I live in the barrio and generally believe that being able to communicate with a variety of people makes the world a better, friendlier, safer place.  This goes back to formative lessons learned in: The Butter Battle... I wonder if Seuss' work is available in Spanish?  Anyway, this better-ability-to-relate-to-a-variety-of-people, is one of the main drivers for having a bucket list in the first place.  Now I have all this exposure to stuff I wouldn't ordinarily do, thereby meeting people I wouldn't ordinarily meet and/or quickly stumbling upon sort of shared interest when I meet strangers rendering them less strange.  Specific to wanting to be bilingual, on a police ridealong, the night ended with investigating an homicide.  Lots of bystanders wanted to help the police find the shooter who was still at large but could describe what they had seen only in Spanish.  

#2 The prospect of live interaction with Spanish speakers and possibly paying for their time (i.e. Verbling) is a little bit too much of a jump into the deep end for me.  That said, I didn't want to make up Spanish sentences myself because I want to start soaking up common parlance-- connotations, common phrases and euphemisms, etc.  I tried to read 100 years of solitude but that was so fantastical I wasn't sure I trusted my translation after a couple pages-- really?  the gypsy sold him a sextant?  I opted for something that I thought would be a limited and contemporary vocabulary page turner that I could basically get for free using paperback swap credits.  Oscuros, the spanish translation for "Fallen," a YA book in the Twilight genre seemed to fit the bill. 

Typing stuff into google translate was tedious in some ways but the bomb in important ways, in that you could get a nice Espanol-bot lady to read back what you had typed, you could even try speaking a few words and see if the algorithm recognized what you were saying as an actual Spanish word.  Lots of free feedback!  Plus I learned random stuff like the phrase the book translator used for "swallow" in Spanish is pretty ugly, literally translates back to "drink saliva" and ironically a mustache is a "bigote." 

Paint the House

The sabbatical also seemed like a good time to tackle the long standing bucket list item of painting the house.  I saw a team painting an historic house in Tustin on my weekly coffee constitutional and figured it was a good omen.  

Before-- also before the drought completely killed boxwood and magnolia

Four weeks of 6 day weeks of prep and paint work, a sizable chunk of change, and we're pretty much done.  

MacGyver and I are still adjusting to it.  The house went from being creepy farm house that happened to have a dense city grow up in its orange groves while it was collecting ghosts and cobwebs to it to being a more urbane SFO painted lady wannabe.  

Part of the insecurity might be because my art training ended abruptly in middle school.  I think there is also a bit of remorse that we don't have the excuse of "the house is a fixer upper" to use to explain our rather lax house and grounds keeping practices.  A lot of it is a perplexing reaction to a few critical remarks from people we care about that somehow wipe out the avalanche of compliments and kudos coming from others, now discounted as "just being polite."  At any rate, there is no HOA and it will need to be repainted again in a decade or so, so we have plenty of time to upgrade our gardens, learn about color palettes and find other reasons to estrange ourselves from relatives before our next rodeo.  

After-- Dunn Edwards Passionate Plum and Cobalt.  Metallic gold source unknown.

Pinterest inspiration... eeeh nailed it?

Half Ironman

Completed Santa Rosa 70.3 this Saturday 5/13.  Felt like most of the weekend was actually spent shotgun in the truck with a motion sick fur kid on lap.

Coach suggests post race report to be even more ready for the next event (IM AZ in Nov)

Swim: 0:53:03
T1: 0:15:20
Bike: 3:50:57
T2: 0:06:45
Run: 2:23:02
Total: 7:29:07

Prerace--

• Rehab strength session 2 days before was cutting it pretty close.  Epsom and rolling seemed to help, but that was right under the wire.
• Didn't swim it day before because would rather not deal with a wet-wet suit the morning of and still think that was the right call for this race.
• Should have recorded observations when driving the whole bike course more seriously with more thorough notes-- there was dodgy pavement and big rollers later on in the course that I was aware of but they still surprised me
• Good pre-race eating decisions (no booze, tomato soup, pork sliders, sushi, ravioli, etc.).  
• Caffeinate before the race or go off of it entirely and time withdrawal symptoms for recovery week (this is budget friendly but logistically tricky if you're using starbucks as an office between workouts while on sabbatical)

Swim--

• For rolling starts at races with 3K people, eat gel painfully late, like well after elite women have left.
• I went 18% further than I had to because agoraphobia.  Coveathlons over the summer should be good practice.

Transition 1--

• This was mostly frittered away walking up a BIG hill from boat launch.
• Oversized booties were a drag to swim in, but saved me from the traditional surgical removal of gravel.
• Heat mitigation hacks be damned.  Just wriggled into a dry tri-top, sleeves, jersey, vaseline lubed socks, running shoes.  wasn't cold on 40 degree descent.  

Bike--

• Visualize the yard sale of debris people will be dropping over the first 5 miles
• Bring something to blow your nose on
• Chocolate covered espresso beans and peanut M&Ms aren't going to work on hotter races
• Skipped aid stations because I didn't like the queue for biffs.  Probably won't be able to do that on full unless I'm on liquid fuel and it is incredibly dialed in and compact.
• Second computer, not just for battery life but watch kept pausing when it bumped up against aero bottle.  

Transition 2--

• Abusing a biff as main priority
• Didn't bother with any elaborate gear since I was already in shoes, run course was shady and the bag I had hung on the bar instead of dropping on the ground was now entangled with my neighbor's bag and covered with bike chain grease.  Just grabbed a bib and hat and went.  

Run-- 

• Felt like a cakewalk.  Stuck with 1:30 run - :30 walk with alerts on the :30, but eventually got sick of pacing with the same people and I didn't feel like I was suffering as much as they looked and I had a better feel for availability of aid stations.  Plus there were stretches that felt like single track because people were doubling back and I didn't want to jam up traffic by walking.  
• SCAR rehab strength work held through mile 12.  Worst pain was pressure from tracker over front of ankle.  Maybe I'll loosen that after the swim next time.  
• Spearmint Clif bloks taste like dentist, mocha gu tastes bad even when you are deep in caffeine withdrawal.  This is the drawback of Aid station roulette. 

Belle's remaining bucket list pinned here.