My garden is slow to come together this year, but after assembling my raised beds last week, I filled them with soil this week… It’s another small step, but as long as I keep making them, eventually I’ll probably, hopefully be able to grow something. 
Once upon a time in the earlier years of my cocktail experiments, I did a lot more basic infusions and making other ingredients like shrubs. I’d find some interesting herb or spice and stick it in some vodka and see what happened. I don’t do this as much these days, and in truth many of those old infusions are still around today, but thoroughly oxidized and largely useless. Anyway, nevermind all that, my point is I started making some more infusions (and a fat wash!) this week, and it’s been fun. Douglas fir is one of my favorites that I’ve made in the past, so another small batch of that, plus local California bay leaf, and Mugwort, which I hadn’t tried before. The mugwort in particular was quite interesting and rather good! The fat wash is pistachio butter for an upcoming alliteration-based drink that I’ll probably talk more about soon once I finish the recipe…
A few weeks ago I decided to start a more concerted effort to get to a “target weight” that I’ve had in mind for many years. My plan seemed simple enough: cut down on the (recently rather frequent) desserts, exercise a bit more, and keep my fasting practice to 3x/wk, while minimizing eating out. Well, so far I’m struggling with all but the fasting, though I have reduced desserts a bit. But when you have ice cream like Bad Walters coming out with new flavors every week it’s hard. 
I got onto this pop-up train mid-pandemic, it’s going to be difficult to get off of it… Anyway, it’s only intended as a short-ish experiment, 45 days or so, hopefully I can pull it together and not drag this out. I just want to try something, that’s all…
For many years I have wanted to create my own dating app to fix all the problems I have seen in my ~20 years of using them (yes, really, OKCupid started in 2004!). But I’m not a coder, and didn’t really see a path forward. This past week I got connected with a quickly growing group of people aiming to create an open source dating app (and hopefully non-profit, collective, or similar business structure). It’s something I’ve given a lot of thought to and am putting my project management abilities into for the moment. It has the potential to take up a lot of time, but also seems like a super worthwhile and possibly exciting project, so we’ll see.
I got my 2nd booster (4th shot) for COVID this week. I don’t technically qualify, but it’s been 6 months since my previous, and I honestly feel like the CDC is dragging its feet on rolling out guidelines for the general population. So yes, I told the CVS appointment scheduler I was “immune compromised” when I wasn’t. Appointment slots were wide open, there is no availability issue for those who really need it, and they didn’t even ask me at the appointment itself. So… 
I’d rather be safe than a total rule-follower in this case.
I have been thinking of shaving my head for quite a while now, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. My hair stylist gave me what I think was a particularly good cut last time, maybe in a subtle effort to keep me. So I made another appointment with him this week, after previously canceling on the intention of shaving it all off… Oh well. If you want to encourage me to give it a try, comment below, otherwise I guess I’m back to regular haircuts for a bit. I can always try it later…
I went to a wedding yesterday and I have to admit, I wasn’t as COVID-safe as I really should have been. There was reasonable expectation that everyone there was vaccinated and safe, but they weren’t testing people or doing proof of vaccination. It was mostly outdoors, but there was one moment in particular, we were all inside (some 50 people), almost everyone unmasked, and two people had just shown up, the only ones who were masked… and it really struck me that I was being needlessly careless. I didn’t have to mask the entire night, but at least doing so in that room would have been prudent. I felt bad about it the rest of the night and into the next day. I realized it was just like some of those stories I’ve read throughout the pandemic, “We went to an all outdoor wedding with everyone vaccinated and now 20 people have COVID”, etc. It’s just not worth it. So… it’s an important reminder to me, and maybe to you as well. I know most people are “over it” or just aren’t really concerned about going through a week or two of feeling crappy, but it’s “long COVID” that worries me, and that’s why I want to stay cautious. Especially as cases sadly are once again rising… Stay safe out there!
I’ve been working on a way to buy a house with some business assets for a while now, and I think I finally have a pretty solid plan. It has been surprisingly hard to get the info I need, but at last I found someone really knowledgeable on the things I need details about, including 1031s, employer-provided housing, house purchase tax write-offs, etc. It turns out that if you own a business there do appear to be some clever ways to reduce housing costs, if you have enough assets in the business anyway. Should be interesting to finalize all this in the coming weeks and see if I can actually purchase a house in the end. It’s far from guaranteed, but at least now I feel like I have a good, well-informed plan coming together.
I’m one of those people that doesn’t go to the doctor often enough. I’ve had some prescriptions that needed transferring to Kaiser, and some tests and a general physical that should have been done, for some time now. Well, I finally had my (virtual) visit and got some lab tests, plus my prescriptions transferred. 
It was a lot easier than I feared, too. So if you’ve been procrastinating on some medical stuff too, here’s your gentle nudge to see if you can just go for it. One of the things I was worried about was the possibility of having diabetes or pre-diabetes, as several of my friends have ended up having it recently, even a rather skinny and otherwise seemingly healthy fellow. Fortunately my test results appear to show negative, so that’s a relief. Give it a try, who knows, you might get good news!