Updated: March 30th, 2025
We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through which no one else can take for us … The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are not the result of training at home by a father, or by masters at school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by reaction from the influence of everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
What I’m Reading
I have no idea why I have so many books going at one time but I’ve always been that way…
- In Search of Lost Time, vol. II–Within a Budding Grove Part 2, and The Guermantes Way, Marcel Proust. Apparently this is the longest novel ever written and seldom do people actually finish the whole thing–challenge accepted.
- The Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained, edited by Jennette ElNaggar
- Collected Essays: Reflections on Self-Knowledge, Emotional Maturity & Calm, The School of Life
- I’m also listening to several podcasts while I paint my office–Moby Dick Energy, and Towards Thee I Roll (both of which claim to read and review Melville’s opus; neither of which actually complete the book unfortunately), and whenever I am in the car–Philosophy Talk.
- Lights On (audio book), Annaka Harris–this is a documentary of writing the book Consciousness and the follow up interviews and investigation into the “unknown corners of consciousness and the cosmos.”
- Nexus, Yuval Noah Hurari
Moved Into a 100-Year Old House
Projects, Projects, and more projects.
The house is livable and ready for entertaining at this point and we have already hosted a dinner party and a few overnight guests. Now we are working on … hmmm, what to call it?
My Office
My office project is a redesign and decoration in the “dark academia” style. This includes painting in a dark green color saturation (walls, trim, ceiling, and doors). I plan to ‘hack’ some IKEA Billy bookcases to look as if built in. The rest of the ‘decoration’ I already own, I just need places to put it. Hence the bookshelves. If my painting of the room passes muster, I can see being tasked with other rooms (see below).
The “Sun Room”
Kathleen calls this room “Grande Soliel.” Big comfy furniture, artwork hung, a book shelf rearranged, knitting projects next to the chair… Eventually this room may get painted but the scheme will likely remain nautical. I think “haint blue” will end up on the ceiling in here.
Kitchen
Just a few minor tweaks, mostly regarding equipment like cutting boards, as I learn more at a cooking class I’ve been attending. More about that below.
Basement Workshop
I’m organizing tools, and building a workbench and tool shelving unit.
Dinning Room
Painting, likely.
Living Room
Painting. A new TV, probably hung. Something like the “frame” which looks like artwork rather than a TV hanging.
Landscaping
We will start with the front porch–furniture and flowers. I plan to reduce the grass as much as possible. I’ve never had a ‘tree lawn’ before.
There are numerous regional variations for the term ‘tree lawn’: a parkway, nature strip (Australia), a shoulder (United Kingdom), city grass, curb lawn, sidewalk buffer, and verge. It is also called a devil’s strip, parking strip, and planting strip. The ‘devil’s strip’, has an interesting origin–the phrase is found exclusively in northeastern Ohio, specifically in and around Akron–arising from the strip’s ambiguous status as a nebulous piece of land that falls between public and private property. The area is effectively rendered a no-man’s land, leading to it becoming known as the devil’s strip.
I’d like to plant some ground cover on the Devil’s strip, preferably flowering, that doesn’t require mowing. On the slope from the sidewalk up towards the house, maybe some creeping flox (again something I don’t have to mow). The flatter area would be grass with a sandstone walkway for the mail-person (who walks across the front yard as a shortcut to using the sidewalk; rather than get mad about the trampled grass and dirt, give them a place to walk).
Then ground cover underneath the preexisting flower beds. I’d like to stick to natives and support pollinators. Back yard next year.
Zettlekasten & ‘Second Brain’
I’ve processed through all of the papers, scraps, and notebooks brought over from my last job and years of self study, and through my more business-like files. Most of that went into the recycling bin or was shredded. A few scraps of information went into my zettlekasten and the rest end up in a digital archive (I’m switching from Evernote to the Apple Notes app; yes a future blog post will explain why and how).
Next step is to process all of my old common-place notebooks and review the books I was reading when I scribbled in those notebooks.
All of this processing will land in my zettelkasten on 4×6 cards, filed into my antique library card catalog (see “Writing a Book” below).
That said, projects around the house have come to dominate my time. I need to get better at splitting my day–like a maker/manager schedule–with the realization of course that I can’t do ‘everything’ (see Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman).
An Atelic Activity
I’m taking “Basic Cooking Skills” at the Loretta Paganini School of Cooking, International Culinary Arts & Sciences Institute. I’ve taken Basic Skills 1 and start 2 next week. There are 5 in the series. Each one is four three-hour classes per month. I’m having fun and that’s what counts.
The Centenarian Olympics
I am “de-trained.” I’m also retired from law enforcement–a group that suffers from higher rates of all-cause mortality, I think in part because they just stop. They are tired and worn out and what purpose is there NOW for training?
Enter Peter Attia and his centenarian decathlon. As outlined in Doctor Attia’s book Outlive, The Science and Art of Longevity, the centenarian decathlon is a frame work he uses to organize his patients’ physical aspirations for the later decades of their lives.
“Think of the Centenarian Decathlon as the ten most important physical tasks you will want to be able to do for the rest of your life. … I find it useful because it helps us visualize, with great precision, exactly what kind of fitness we need to build and maintain as we get older. It creates a template for our training.”
Peter Attia, MD
Time to stop talking about it and get started training for my version of the ‘Centenarian Decathlon.’ I need to line out my ten (or more) events and get to work on a training plan.
Regardless of the events the over-arcing mission is intentional, purposeful, deliberate, goal-driven training to optimize three physical fitness dimensions, highly correlated with longer ‘health-span’:
- Aerobic endurance and efficiency–for metabolic flexibility and maximum aerobic output,
- Optimal strength and power to weight ratio,
- Stability, balance, and coordination.
Update: Moving from the apartment to the house during the winter holidays was enough to knock me off my gym-five-days-a-week routine. House projects has been enough of an excuse to keep me off. As the weather starts to change and the days get longer, I’m getting mentally prepared to get back to it. I have done some maintenance but that’s not enough.
We switchedfrom our ‘fancy’ gym to the local YMCA, but what I really want to do is eliminate time and distance barriers by programming around my home-owned equipment. Running and the rowing machine for my aerobic endurance and efficiency, kettlebells and a sandbag for strength and power to weight ratio, and yoga and other movement practices for stability, balance, and coordination.
However. so that “I’m programming it” and “I’m preparing to” doesn’t become the never-ending excuse, I will return to the gym-five-days-a-week routine ASAP.
Writing a Book
To move in that direction I’ll be reviewing old “common placing” books, book marginations and my indices, and developing my (analog) zettelkasten of 4×6 cards into my antique library card catalog (thank you Kathleen).
A small confession: I’m an organizing junky. I have common placing books from 1995(?) which was a combination of travel journal, spiritual practices, and the notation of interesting stuff I read or learned or found. Problem is the accessibility of this information is near nil. So too are all the marginations and self-developed book indexes that I wrote but never processed. That’s a big backlog of lost learning and knowledge.
For these reasons I’m likely to be blogging about this process and my re-reading and research.
Coaching
Due to my move and other projects, I am not accepting new athletes/clients at this time.
Like what you’re reading? Has this information been helpful or entertaining? It’s all free, of course, but if you feel moved to the point of spending money, I won’t stop you from clicking this PayPal donation button…
