Third-generation farmer turned ballroom dancer, artist, and photographer. Navigating life with Type 2 diabetes for 20 years. Sharing what I’ve learned along the way.
Food & Diet
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
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. Here's what it is, if you haven'
Health & Wellness
I danced for years. Then my knees and hips started arguing with me about it, arthritis being the kind of negotiator that doesn't really negotiate, and I had to let it go. That's a loss I didn't expect to feel as much as I
Food & Diet
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. Most days it doesn't matter which way you lean.
Aug. 17/26 There was a jar on my mother's counter I never once saw her open while I was watching. Walnuts, still in some of the shell fragments, like she'd cracked them herself and swept the mess into the jar along with the meat. Nobody
Apple & Technology
I spent an hour last week looking for a photograph. Not a photograph of anything important — just a shot of the almond rows in bloom from a few springs back, the kind of light you get maybe four mornings a year if you're paying attention. I knew it
Aug. 12/26 I've been watching a number on my wrist for about a year now, and it took me most of that year to stop overreacting to it. Resting heart rate moves. Mine sits somewhere in the mid-50s most mornings, and I used to check it
Food & Diet
Three things landed on my desk this month, from three different directions, and they all turned out to be doing the same trick: something quieter and more automatic took over a job I used to have to do myself, on purpose, with effort. What was interesting wasn't the
Harvest season had a smell before it had a sound. Apricots first — that sweet, almost fermented smell that hung over the orchard rows in the early morning before the heat came up and changed it into something sharper. Then later, when the rice fields dried down before cutting, a dust
Apple & Technology
Aug. 7/26 I typed my email address into a form on Tuesday and caught myself mid-keystroke thinking about how many times I've typed that exact string in my life. Thousands, probably. Same twenty-some characters, same finger pattern, over and over since sometime in the nineties.
Health & Wellness
August 5/26 For twenty-seven years I knew hunger as a kind of weather. It came in on its own schedule, sometimes gentle, sometimes a front you couldn't ignore, and you planned your day around it the way you planned around rain. Lunch wasn't a
Food & Diet
August 4/26 That thirty-second habit at the produce section, the ten-minute TextExpander snippet, the single line dropped into Everlog — none of them look like much on their own. What struck me this week is how little they had to do with the size of what they were