Gardener of Life

Oct. 20/26 I've spent a good part of this year working alongside an AI assistant, and I'll say it plainly: it has changed how I work.

Oct. 19/26 This is how worked ran on the ranch a blend of two things — what the extension office recommended, and what years of walking that ground had already taught you.

Micro.blog isn't part of the usual pipeline.

Oct. 14/26 Most mornings I reach for my phone before I've fully decided to be awake, and the ring has an opinion waiting for me before I've formed one of my own.

Oct. 13/26 Oct 13/26 During harvest, the day started before the sun did, and breakfast wasn't a suggestion — it was fuel you loaded before a shift that might not let up until dark.

Oct.12/26 Out in the field, lunch was whatever we'd brought from the house — nothing planned as an event.

Oct. 9/26 Ulysses is home base.

Oct 7/26 I wear an Oura Ring on my right hand, and most mornings I don't think about it much — I roll over, tap my phone, and see whatever score it's decided to hand me overnight.

Oct 6/26 Some mornings I know the number before I look.

Oct. 5/26 During harvest, the day started before the sun did, and breakfast wasn't a suggestion — it was fuel you loaded before a shift that might not let up until dark.

Oct. 2/26 I've been writing in iA Writer this week, which for me counts as a small rebellion.

Sept. 30/26 This week the assignment was just to notice — not fix anything, not journal a treatise, just pay attention to how alcohol sounded when it came up.

You don't trust a season, you trust a run of them.

Sept. 28/26 We didn't call it the Mediterranean diet growing up.

Sept. 25/26 The Stream Deck sits at the top of my desk, a little slab of backlit buttons no bigger than a paperback, and most days I forget it's even there until I need it.

Sept. 23/26 I've been wearing a continuous glucose monitor for a while now — a Libre 3 stuck to the back of my arm, quietly logging what my blood sugar does every few minutes, day and night.

I spent a lot of summers learning that the feeling telling you something's wrong is usually the last one to show up, not the first.

Sept. 21/26 For a good while, it was just me — my own kitchen, my own meals, nobody to answer to but myself.

Sept. 18/26 For years I had a folder called Downloads that behaved the way you'd expect.

Sept. 16/26 Three months ago I upgraded to the Gen 5 Oura ring, and once it was on my finger I mostly forgot about it, the way you forget about a wedding band or a callus.

There's a pattern I ran into three times this week, in three rooms that don't usually talk to each other: something that used to happen on its own has quietly stopped happening on its own, and getting it back means doing it on purpose now.

Sept. 14/26 I spent twenty-seven summers watching a thermometer do things that would alarm a person who hadn't grown up with it.

Sept. 11/26 For a few weeks this summer, Craft just sat there.

Sept. 9/26 There's a number that gets thrown around in the research on aging — somewhere between three and eight percent of muscle mass, lost per decade, starting around thirty and picking up speed after sixty.

Sept. 8/26 Trust what you can see and touch over what sounds good on paper.

Sept. 7/26 I used to load apricots onto a truck by the bin, and about all that happened to them between the tree and the cannery was a wash and a sort.

Sept. 4/26 I dropped Obsidian last week.

Sept. 2/26 I pulled up two nights on the Libre 3 app last week, side by side, because I couldn't stop thinking about the difference.

Sept.1/26 I used to think most of the important systems in a life ran themselves.

August 31/26 Inflammation is one of those words I heard for years before I understood it as anything besides a doctor's term.

Aug. 28/26 Privacy wasn't a setting when I was young.

Aug. 25/26 I used to think of sleep as the quiet part.

SoloGardener Chronicles I've been putting off starting this one.

Aug 25/26 I've come around to trusting the small, boring, repeatable thing over the elaborate one.

I didn't know what inflammation felt like until somebody asked me to pay attention to it.

Aug 21/26 I've been running Alfred on the Mac Studio for about eight months now, and I still catch myself reaching for the mouse out of old habit before I remember I don't have to.

I danced for years.

Aug. 18/26 There's a decision every one of us makes constantly without noticing we're making it: do I trust the instrument, or do I trust what I'm carrying around in my body.