Chrome Tabs : 63 → 66
Gmail Inbox : 58 → 64 Unread, 63 → 69 Total
A bit of a quiet/mellow week. No Table of Contents this time! 
Ironically my garden and yard work activities are going better now - in the fall and into winter - than they did in the spring and summer. After a bunch of pruning the last couple weeks in my front yard, this week trimmed back all of my herbs and I’m now drying a bunch for use through the winter. And my passion fruit is bearing a ton! I probably have 30+ fruits coming, and there are about 10 ripe ones on my counter already. It’s been fun and satisfying being able to use them in cocktails, rather than the typical passion fruit syrup or liqueur. Unsurprisingly there are nuances in the fresh fruit that neither captures. I’ve been playing with a grapefruit + passion fruit + rum + lemon + cinnamon + spices thing the last couple nights, each one with the pulp of a whole passion fruit in it. 
Good fun.
We had a power outage during the rain this past week. It was only an hour or so, but it’s been a long time since I was forced to just be off my computer and sit in darkness of an evening, and I found it rewarding. For quote same time I have been concerned about how much my computer mediates my experiences and thoughts every day, and this was a good and unexpected reminder that this is indeed so. Sitting there in the dark, cuddling with my cat, listening to the rain, seeing the darkness all around… it was interesting and actually felt good. The kind of thing I’d like to do more often without being forced to. That said, after a while and not knowing when it would return, I did get my laptop out and set up tethering on my phone for wifi and… as soon as I did, the power came back. But I will try not to forget this important reminder…
For several years I have had the habit of looking at my tasks for tomorrow the night before, so that I am hopefully/theoretically more prepared for what I have to do, and I can also adjust any task loads or dates that don’t make sense. In reality I often don’t even get to the tasks I do leave for myself, but that’s another matter. More recently I also decided to try reviewing all my tasks for the coming week, as part of my regular Sunday review-and-plan habits. I’ve been doing this for a few months now and have certainly found it beneficial vs. just dealing with tasks one day ahead. I can now theoretically structure the whole week (which was, it must be said, my explicit long-term goal when I moved to Amazing Marvin over a year ago). That said, my Sundays are already pretty busy, so on a recent Saturday I just decided to do the weekly task review, and found that the time it opened up on Sunday was really nice to have. So I’ve moved my weekly task review permanently to Saturdays.
I’ve had back pain off and on for many years, of various types, in various locations. Some I have found ways to mitigate, others are still a mystery to me. The last couple years in particular I’ve had something I’d describe more as shoulder pain, and have been unable to figure out exactly how to address it. I got a new chair recently, a Steelcase Gesture, in the hopes that it would help solve it, and for a little while it did seem to have an effect. But the issue always waxed and waned, and it seems to have returned, suggesting the chair has little impact on its own. So that’s a bummer. Back to the drawing board (I think my bed might have something to do with it actually!). My hamstring injury is also slow to heal, as these things are I guess, and that’s frustrating…
I got a question from someone on a dating app about why guys often don’t have pictures of themselves smiling with teeth. It’s a good question, I have far fewer of these than almost anything else, and yet it’s true that when I am really smiling spontaneously, I often do open my mouth, or otherwise have teeth showing. I responded with some thoughts actually engaging with the question, and she unmatched with me shortly, so I guess she didn’t want an actual explanation. 
But it did inspire me to go looking and see if I had any worthwhile “smiling with teeth” photos, and I maybe do, so I switched out a few on some of my profiles and will see if it makes any difference.
This is not especially notable, I suppose, but it was a really nice week for socializing. I saw a dear friend who has been really busy with school and I thus haven’t seen for an unusually long time. It was brief but sweet, illuminating, and vulnerable, in the good ways. Then I had a really lovely dinner and catch-up with a couple old friends, one of whom I likewise hadn’t seen for a long time, possibly the entire pandemic! Then as the week ended I went to a party with another group of friends and ended up being a bit of the bartender, which is a role I actually really enjoy. I had a great time with all of them and feel so grateful to have these many connections and important people in my life - people who give me honest, sometimes hard, but good feedback; people who are damn fun to spend time with; and people who appreciate me and let me know that they do often. 
One of the things I get way too invested in from time to time, and quite randomly, is making silly graphics projects. Often times they are just good realizations of very bad puns. In fact… that’s true most of the time. 
I have become the go-to Photoshop wizard for my friends, and this week I was asked to create a couple of arguably quite terrible pun images. I present them to you here for your amusement and/or derision, “Our Lips Are Seals” and “Petty Cash”, along with a previous creation that was more my own inspiration, “Peets” (Toe Beans) which if you’re a Bay Area resident and/or cat fancier you might enjoy, but otherwise will probably make little sense. 
For some reason I really enjoy the detail work to make these things a reality, so whether there’s an audience or not I’ll probably keep making them. (original images available on request for comparison)
Finally, a couple weeks ago I had an idea for an Instagram-like app that would bring together a bunch of otherwise scattered tools to help food creators connect with and sell to fans, and help fans find new, local popup-type food options they’d be interested in. So this past week I really fleshed out the concept a lot, the planning doc is now over 3000 words, and in particular I’m contemplating a crypto/DeFi element that could be quite interesting. The next step is to vet the concept with several domain experts I know, food creators on one side, and DeFi folks on the other. 
I hope to write up more about this here soon and would very much welcome feedback!