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. Sarcopenia, they call it, which is a tidy word for something that
Sept. 8/26 Trust what you can see and touch over what sounds good on paper. I wrote that line about food this month, half-thinking it belonged only to food. By the end of the week it had shown up twice more, in a glucose graph and in an
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. That was the whole ingredient list. Apricots. Maybe a rinse of water. If you'd asked
Sept. 4/26 I dropped Obsidian last week. That sentence would have surprised me a year ago — I'd built half my note-taking identity around that app, the graph view, the backlinks, the promise that if I just kept adding notes the connections would eventually show themselves like
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. One night the Oura Ring gave me an 89 sleep score — deep sleep where it should be, heart rate dropped and stayed
Sept.1/26 I used to think most of the important systems in a life ran themselves. The body handled its own business overnight. A letter sealed in an envelope stayed private without anyone doing a thing to keep it that way. You didn't manage these things — you
August 31/26 Inflammation is one of those words I heard for years before I understood it as anything besides a doctor's term. I knew it from the trees before I knew it from myself — a scraped limb on an apricot that swelled and wept sap for weeks,
Aug. 28/26 Privacy wasn't a setting when I was young. It was just the shape of things. A letter went in an envelope and the only people who read it were the ones it was addressed to. A phone call happened on a line that ran to
Aug. 25/26 I used to think of sleep as the quiet part. Nothing happening. The body idling until morning. Then I started pulling up the Libre 3 graph after a bad night next to one after a good night, and I stopped thinking that. A poor night doesn'
SoloGardener Chronicles I've been putting off starting this one. Everything else on this site has a shape to it — the pillar posts run Monday, Wednesday, Friday, The Long View shows up every Tuesday like clockwork. This doesn't work that way, and it isn't supposed
Aug 25/26 I've come around to trusting the small, boring, repeatable thing over the elaborate one. That's not a new belief exactly — twenty-seven years of watching complicated systems, irrigation timing, rotation, weather nobody could predict, will teach you that lesson eventually whether you'
I didn't know what inflammation felt like until somebody asked me to pay attention to it. Before that it was just background noise — a stiffness in the morning I chalked up to twenty-seven years of climbing in and out of a tractor cab, a heaviness after certain