In 2019, my wife and I joined another couple for a backpacking trip in the San Juan Mountains of south-central Colorado. On the way back, we stopped for a day at my in-law’s condo in Ruidoso, New Mexico to recover a bit. But instead of resting and …
Reading
How to Take Smart Notes
Sönke Ahrens
- first ski trip in the southern hemisphere
- first trip to Chile
- first trip to South America
- first trip to the southern …
- Every resource is accessible through the archives page.
- The entire site is more flexible in the future, since it’s based on metadata …
photos
travel
The Second-Most-Ridiculous Hike We’ve Ever Taken
Greener, More Flexible, Grass
I came across this March 2022 post about having control over your day by @ChrisHannah, where they advocate for flexible working hours:
Personally, I think the best solution for people and companies (where the job allows), is if your entire working …
photos
travel
The Picture
Some friends and I were talking about The Picture—the one you’re proudest of, the one you always want to show people, the one that makes you wonder if maybe you’re actually a photographer after all.
I’ve taken some pretty pictures, but I think the …
Even though I went to the office on Friday after landing from Chile 🇨🇱, the first Monday back always feels like the “real” return to work.
Feels good to get back into habits of reading, journaling, and morning pages—all those practices that I’m happy …
books
I’ve lived in San Antonio for twelve years, and today I got my first library card.
(I’ve read dozens of books on Libby over the years with what was apparently a “temporary” card, and I finally had to go get a real one to keep reading.) 📚
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travel
We realized on day 3 of skiing that our skis were conveniently RGB-colored and of graduated lengths, so we posed them for a group shot.
Then I took a candid going up one of the lifts.
And of course we couldn’t let the boots feel left out, even …
photos
travel
Went to bed excited for overnight snowfall to improve skiing conditions. Woke up to exactly half my wish granted: almost 7” of accumulation, but whiteout conditions this morning. ⛷️
Chilean Firsts
Achievement unlocked: snow skiing 🎿 in August. To be fair, we cheated by flying to Chile 🇨🇱 to do it.
It’s also many other firsts:
Initial Reflections on 15 years of Twitter
Since the ongoing implosion of X, née Twitter, began, I’ve been combing through my archive of 15,000-ish tweets across 15 years since April 20, 2008.
It’s the longest record of anything in my life, stretching back further than my oldest Day One entry …
books
Finished reading: Thirty Questions by Timothy C. Tennent. Structured like a catechism but with answers far too long to memorize. Not a bad introduction to Christian doctrine, but fits better as a study: Tennent clearly expects you to do some of the …
Information architecture update complete! Almost everything’s a river, which gives me two huge wins:
Finished watching: Tetris. Tons of fun, and filled in the hard-to-believe story of which I knew only the outline—who knew a movie about IP rights and the KGB could be so enjoyable? Lots of clever little nods to 80s video games. And of course I had to …
Made some good progress today redesigning information architecture for VerseNotes.
Current theory: only standalone articles are dated; everything else is a Jekyll collection.
New theory: (almost) everything in one river of dated posts with judicious …
Just dropped off our skis to get waxed. Starting to get excited for Santiago next week!
I do feel a bit silly waxing snow skis in Texas in July. 🎿 🇨🇱
Finished watching: Oppenheimer. Superb acting from a cast I didn’t expect tells a story I of which only knew a small fraction. Fun sound design, although parts were noisier than they needed to be. Only real complaint is that it did not need all 180 …
books
Finished reading: The One Hour Bible by SPCK. Edited by Philip Law. A great idea—not paraphrasing or summarizing but eliding: using the actual words of the New Living Translation to tell the story of God in fewer words.
Unfortunately, while this …
My yoga app introduced me to a new pose tonight: locust pose. I’m reasonably certain you can see it in my heart rate just after the two-thirds mark. 🧘♂️
Non-Alcoholic Beer Replacements We've Tried, With Notes
We have tried a bunch of non-alcoholic (n/a) beers lately, looking for something that satisfies the desire for something bubbly and refreshing but doesn’t have the associated buzz, drowsiness, lack of focus, terrible sleep, and other downsides …
books
Finished reading: For the Body by Timothy C. Tennent. A critical exposition of the need for the modern church to develop and espouse a positive theology of the body rather than the decades of pure negative theology: “don’t do that; that’s wrong.”
A …
Finished watching: Silo (2023). Incredibly slow start, but every episode was better than the last, and the final scene is worth all ten episodes. I’m not sure if it was better that I’d read the books first, or worse because I didn’t …
I had forgotten how much getting a car serviced costs. My 2014 Altima has been solid since I got it in 2016, modulo oil changes and tire changes, but today it needed some (expensive) help.
It was a lot of time and a lot of money, but I guess I can’t …
books
Finished reading: Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft. Tremendously dissatisfying. A chaotic run through a fascinating world, but the plot was so contrived to prevent progress as to frustrate me with every page turn.
Not recommended. If you want a …
My First iOS Apps
Today, Phil Schiller celebrated the 15th anniversary of the iOS App Store, and many people posted the first apps they downloaded. Here are mine.
Pharrell Williams's "Happy" as a Spenserian Sonnet
Back in 2014, there was a Twitter account, or maybe a Tumblr account, that published pop songs as sonnets1. I loved the spin on genre, but I noticed that they were all Petrarchan (Italian) sonnets, which go ABBA ABBA CDE CDE, or Shakespearean …
Finished watching: Ted Lasso. Three seasons and only two clunkers. Amazing record. It’s not common that we get a mostly wholesome high-quality smash hit show, and I’m so glad to have seen it. Believe! 🍿