Wouter summarizes 10 years of home maintenance.

Often lost in the discussion of lowering the carbon footprints of our homes is the ongoing background battle against entropy that consumes so much household energy.

From I carry myself a little different, by annie mueller:

You take a risk, you do a thing, and it doesn’t work: you fall down. You get bruised. Next time, you’ll pause. You’ll remember, and think:

• “I’ve done this before. Nope. I know how this ends. It hurts.”
• “I’ve done this before. It might hurt. But even if I fall again, I know I’ll survive.”

You take a risk, you fall hard, and it’s bad. You get broken. The pain is real and raw and ragged. The recovery is slow, so slow, and while you’re in it, still in the pain, the bones are setting, regrowing. The wound is healing. The marks will be there: the twinge, the scar tissue.

You don’t get to choose whether the pain marks you. But you get to decide what the marks mean.

Three years ago yesterday, I wrote this to Catherine’s friends and family:

On Monday she had a CT scan, the report of which concludes “evidence of disease progression with increased metastatic burden in the lungs, liver, and bony skeleton.”

We don’t know why Catherine died, specifically. She had incurable cancer; she died from that, yes. But how? Why then? What stopped working enough to make her stop working? We don’t know. But whatever it was, that report—evidence of disease progression—was the bellwether. She died 41 days later.

During those 41 days she was in great pain more often than not, in and out of hospital, in and out of coherence. But she lived.

And, indeed, on this chilly day in early December, despite being more winded than usual, she helped our friend BJ take paint to be recycled, walked a package to the post office, and decided that she’s cooking supper for us. We’ve gone out for supper this week, twice (our meal on Wednesday at Hojo’s, a new Japanese restaurant, was, Catherine said, one of the best she’s ever had). We bought an electric car. We laugh more than we cry. We’re looking forward to Christmas.

Three years later, these same 41 days have a strange quality to them: the ting of winter is in the air, the sunlight hits the house in a certain way, it’s impossible to deny there’s a vestigial nervous dread in the air, despite time having passed.

The marks will be there: the twinge, the scar tissue.

And yet it’s a season of hectic hope: new love, new family, new possibilities. I wake up happy; the days are full of promise. There’s stuff happening — delightful, exciting, hopeful, bright, challenging, growthful.

You don’t get to choose whether the pain marks you. But you get to decide what the marks mean.

I missed this when it was released in 2011: a rich cover of Bob Dylan’s One Too Many Mornings by Stephen Fearing on the tribute album Younger Than That Now.

The how we feel app is a thing of beauty, winner of Apple’s 2022 Cultural Impact award in the App Store, and, my experience this week suggests, a good way to track my emotional well-being from day to day.

According to ChatGPT, email apnea is:

A term used to describe the act of holding one’s breath while reading or responding to an email, typically due to anxiety or stress. It can also refer to the habit of checking emails frequently, interrupting natural breathing patterns.

I’ve never noticed it while emailing, but I’ve been paying attention to my breathing while texting, and I’m pretty certain that texting apnea is a thing. Especially when I’m noticing I’m making lots of mistakes, if I stop, look, and listen for a second, I notice I’m holding my breathe. 

Stanley Tucci cooks spaghetti aglio e olio.

It’s my favourite way to have pasta. Patience is the primary ingredient.

I don’t understand the role of this Bridging humanity and efficiency video from Health PEI — is it marketing? celebration? politics? education? — but it’s well-produced, and uncommonly clear for health system communications. Dylana Arsenault should be put in charge of talking to the public.

Some high-quality barista work at Receiver Coffee on the North River causeway this morning. Accompanied by top-flight service.

Colin and Samir are a YouTube duo who experimented with many different approaches to filmmaking, having focused, most recently, on conversations with YouTubers about YouTube.

As a starting point, I recommend How Hasan Minhaj escaped the YouTube Algorithm and The Nearly Impossible Job of Managing MrBeast: Samir and Colin are skilled interviews, and the “behind the music” approach, diving into the mechanics of influence, the algorithm, and how “content creation” works is fascinating, both as a watcher and a maker.

Bruce MacNaughton writes, in It Was a Big Night, about his early kitchen experiences:

The custom was to serve old food to staff who were further down the pecking order in the kitchen brigade. The dishwashers usually received food well past its prime, covered in a gravy of some sort to mask it.

What will I cook for these men? I couldn’t imagine cooking this way for three 80-year-old Portuguese characters who were very hard-working. They always spoke Portuguese while working. They grab half-smoked cigars from the plates, wipe them off, light them and smoke them while washing the pots and pans. They were real characters.

It was 4 in the afternoon, so I cooked breakfast. I pan-fried potatoes with onions, eggs sunny side up, bacon, toast and jam. Being nervous how they would receive the plates, I rang the bell and watched the three men shuffle up to the counter. They looked at the plates for what seemed like forever. Then, finally, they turned and looked at each other in dead silence. Then they looked at me with tears flowing down their cheeks. It still gets me when I remember that moment. The men were so grateful for a fresh meal. I agree with what Don Miguel Ruiz once said, “Respect is one of the greatest expressions of love.”

The personal thing category of Bruce’s blog is a steady source of compelling tales well-told.