You should probably skip this one

It's really not very interesting. You think I'm joking but then you'll read it and say "oh I guess I should have listened to her. I've just lost 20 minutes of my life and for what?"

Freestyle Disco

I should probably just title these posts with dates, which is to say that there will be no overriding theme for this one as with 95% of my writing. I’m a rambler. Whenever I start thinking, “hey a few people are reading this, maybe I should take my writing more seriously” I start to self censor and I stop writing. So I’m just going to write whatever, as usual.

I am thinking about this because I have had a few moments recently where I recognized that there is an uneven amount of sharing between myself and a few of my comrades. I am unloading a bunch of crazy and and then ask how they’re doing.

They’re doing fine. Things are fine. Nothing to say really.

And I think, hmm. I wonder if this is a social cue that I am oblivious to. The room is doing a conga and I am just over here trying to win a freestyle disco championship.

This is why I started to blog in the first place, back in 2003, all lost to the digital ephemera gods unfortunately. I was continually sending my friends long-ass crazy emails about whatever I was thinking about, and it was almost entirely a one-way communication. I decided a blog was more of a consenting infodump. If folks wanted to hear my crazy list of 16 made up excuses to get out of a conversation involving a nutria and a made up relative they could CHOOSE to read it. They wouldn’t feel pressure to respond.

Fun fact: Substack has a bunch of buttons you can add to a post. Unsubscribe isn’t one of them. This would have been a funny place to put one.

What I’m really saying here is I probably should be writing here more rather and cornering my friends with detailed diatribes about my feelings or whatever less. Feel free to unsubscribe if you discover that freestyle disco, or whatever it is I am doing, is not your jam.

And now for a bunch of other random things.

Chicks and Whitewash

Our chicks are now about 2.5 weeks old. Now the pressure is on to get the East Wing (chicken coop) really cleaned up. They grow fast. They need more space. They aslo need it to be clean and not a germ festival. They’re still little.

We’re thinking of whitewashing the coop. Whitewash is a mix of hydrated lime and salt that kind of seals everything and makes concrete and wood which are kind of hard to disinfect a little less germy. I’m sure it’s not perfect but I suspect it’s better than not doing it.

Trying to clean up that coop to be chick friendly feels daunting. The threat of avian influenza makes me think more and harder about that but in the three broods of chicks I’ve raised I’ve always been pretty mindful about exposing them to pathogens the adult flock might have. Though once they become adults I get a lot more lax, just letting them smoke cigarettes and stay out late.

I kept thinking, man I wish we could just whitewash the coop, because my only experience with that was when my family did dairy when I was a kid and the whitewash truck would just come and blast the whole inside of the barn with white pancake batter and it would look fresh and new and a little lumpy.

It never occured to me that you could just do it yourself, by hand. And then Brian suggested it. Apparently you don’t need hire a giant truck full of white pancake batter. So we’re thinking of trying it with paintbrushes for about 20 minutes and then going and getting something that will hook up to the air compresser when we realize it’s going take all day.

Black Austrolorp and New Hamphshire Red Chicks

And here I’m going on and on about whitewash when I really intended to tell you about trying to keep their little feet clean and transitioning them from puppy pads to wood pellets and the egg eaters.

Oh the egg eaters

We have been getting a LOT fewer eggs lately. I know there was a minor problem with some fragile eggs getting broken and some of the chickens eating them. But I’m getting 4-5 eggs a day instead of 8-9 lately. I have looked EVERYWHERE and I’m not finding a secret nesting spot. The chickens look healthy so my suspicion is that some of my flock have developed an egg eating habit. Not cool guys. I can’t really know unless I set up a camera. It’s not for sure but it is my best guess.

#30DaysOfBiking

On April 1 my friend Jesse reminded me that it was the beginning of #30DaysOfBiking. I had said I’d try again this year. In all the years I’ve started it, I’ve never once completed it. Maybe this will be the year.

Essentially this is a goal of getting on the bike every day in April with no minimum distance. It’s a chance to actually get your tires inflated, discover that squirrels have somehow stored nuts on your handlebars, figure out what to wear in every kind of weather, because in April you get every kind of weather. Then by May when it really starts to get nice you’ve already got a habit going.

There really was a black walnut lodged between the spedometer and my phone mount on my e-bike. I haven’t ridden the e-bike yet. I’m kind of motivated to be me powered more often this year.

It’s April 4 and I’ve gotten the tires pumped up on two of my bikes and gone out for a short ride every day, one in the rain, one in the wind, one in the cold, and today was kind of a nice average of the rest. I rode the folding bike 2 days and my touring bike 2 days.

The touring bike photo is from a different year.

Stress management tactics

I have a number of friends going through some really difficult stuff on top of the dystopia we have all found ourselves in these last few months. I cannot imagine what that is like because I feel like I’ve had to really pull all the tools out of the toolkit to just keep going in the baseline dystopia. I haven’t been leveled up to ghost pepper dystopia.

Ok I haven’t been using ALL of the tools. I have not been going out and taking macro photos. I have not been drawing. I don’t know why. Those things make me happy but they take a certain level of slack and right now there’s none of that. I shouldn’t even be writing this. I have stuff to do that is important. I’ll get it done though. Later?

I just keep thinking I should share my stress management tactics in case they are useful for other people.

Freewriting

Freewriting is a tool that I’ve used for a really long time. I remember doing it right before a job interview in 2006 so I must have picked it up somewhere before then. Essentially I try to write (usually typing) for about 15 minutes straight without stopping. Spelling, punctuation, sense, they don’t matter. Just write everything. Don’t think, don’t craft, don’t correct. It’s like a bloodletting but a thoughtletting.

There’s something about dumping it out that helps stop rumination for me. It’s written down. I don’t have to hold on to it anymore. I never go back and read any of it. It really is just like I’m getting some distance, some perspective on my thoughts, and then throwing them away.

Freewriting in this way is maybe a little like meditation. You have thoughts. You observe them, but you don’t attach to them. That’s an interesting thought floating by, how curious.

Meditation

I have been meditating on and off for most of my life too though. So I’m biased toward that as a tool. I know I tell this story too much, but I think I was maybe 10 or 11 and I was having insomnia. I think I was worried about nuclear war or the entire human race leaving on alien ships and leaving me behind—normal kid worries. The doctor gave me a smoking cesation cassette tape, which was really a body scan mediation. It worked great and after a while I just made up my own without the smoking cessation part.

You would think that would have made me immune to smoking but I did give it a go for about one year when I was 21. Luckily I was able to quit. That might have been the most difficult thing I ever succeeded at.

I still medidate but not daily. It works great so I don’t know why I don’t do it all the time. I usually prefer silent meditation because I’ll get hung up on something someone says in a guided meditation that seems silly to me. But I’m sharing one of my favorite guided meditations in case you find yourself tired or stressed or laying awake in the night. My friend Eve shared this with me a couple of years ago and I’ve had it in regular rotation since.

Reboot your nervous system—20 Minute Yoga Nidra Reset

Don’t Panic

This one probably won’t be anyone’s stress management tool except mine. Almost as far back as the smoking cessation tape, I had the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy audio book on cassette. I have been listening to that over and over for probably 30 years now, not on cassette anymore. Now I have digital versions. I know that’s a weird one but my brain is trained to calm down when it’s on at this point. I’ve been trying to mix it up and listen to different versions recently. Sometimes I’ll listen to other audiobooks for a change of pace but Hitchhikers is really my place of calm.

Ok this is getting long.

I still have at least three other things I meant to write about but I’ve been excessiveley long winded and I think I should stop. I’m blaming the late afternoon coffee.

Hope you are all surving and that your dystopias are mild or medium and not ghost pepper. I also hope you got some blue cheese if you like eating mold.