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electoral_vote_feedDay 19.043: Exile #2’s Sunday Column #544
Feb. 22nd, 2026 09:47 pmexilesme_feed
There have been beautiful blue skies over the last couple of days, and some moments above freezing. Yesterday, I
even braved our nature group outing without the two thermal under layers that I usually wear. However, this being Maine we received the following blizzard warning earlier today, proving that winter is not done with us yet. It’s one of three systems lining up to come our way so it could be a busy week.
Whiteout conditions are expected with visibilities below 1/4 mile due to falling and blowing snow. The greatest potential for blizzard conditions will exist late morning through afternoon Monday. The hazardous conditions will arrive during the Monday morning commute and will continue through the evening commute. Strong winds will down tree limbs and blow around unsecured objects. A Few trees and power lines could be downed. The power outage threat is elevated.
Whiteout conditions are expected with visibilities below 1/4 mile due to falling and blowing snow. The greatest potential for blizzard conditions will exist late morning through afternoon Monday. The hazardous conditions will arrive during the Monday morning commute and will continue through the evening commute. Strong winds will down tree limbs and blow around unsecured objects. A Few trees and power lines could be downed. The power outage threat is elevated.
Day 19.042: Fresh snow
Feb. 21st, 2026 10:58 pmexilesme_feedThe snow that fell in our large storm nearly a month ago is mostly still with us. We’ve had a few melting days and a few inches of fresh snow in the interim, but no widespread open ground. Last night we got a few more inches of snow and - as things stand - expect some more on Monday.
Day 19.041: A quick stop at Pine Point
Feb. 20th, 2026 10:50 pmexilesme_feedOur second stop on Monday was for a quick visit to the co-op pier at Pine Point near the mouth of the Nonesuch River. Here is some of what we saw there:
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| American Black Duck x Mallard hybrid |
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| Common loon (we saw eight) |
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| Red-breasted merganser |
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| Greater scalp |
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| Common eider |
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| Long-tailed duck |
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| American black ducks |
Friday Inspiration 524
Feb. 20th, 2026 12:00 pmsemi_rad_feedI saw this film at Mountainfilm last May, and have been patiently waiting for it to show up online, as it was the most powerful thing I saw that weekend. Rob Shaver has been living with stage four cancer for 20 years, and he’s still running, with the help of his brother and his mom. I’ll just say that if you have time to watch it, it will affect you. (video)
I loved this explainer of a very simple but important design concept that we probably don’t think about too often: The Molly Guard. Why is it named the Molly Guard? The answer is just perfect. (via Kottke)
I did a “webignar” livestream and question-and-answer session last night about this year’s Running to Stand Still trail running and writing workshop with the Freeflow Institute. If you missed it, you can watch it via this link for the next 40 hours (until 9 p.m. MST February 21). If you don’t want to watch the whole thing but you’d like the discount code for $250 off your registration, just watch until about the 00:20 mark. The code expires at 9:00 p.m. MST Saturday, February 21.
I stumbled upon this Thread about eating for health vs. eating for performance, and I am henceforth treating it as gospel because it validates my belief that I can eat things I like because I spend a lot of time moving my body (it is of course a bit more scientific than that, as the article linked at the end of the thread details).
Maybe you’ve been watching the Olympics lately, and maybe you’ve found the coverage to be enjoyable. But have you read the Olympics stories on Defector? I am including this gift link to Sabrina Imbler’s story “High-Level, Actionable Insights From Watching Doubles Luges For The First Time” because it contains many gems like this sentence: “Doubles luge appears to be the consequence of somebody watching luge and being struck by the idea of stacking another guy on top of the first guy. Apparently back then there were no bad ideas.” [GIFT LINK]
I have been a paying subscriber to Lyz Lenz’s newsletter for a couple years now, and I was delighted to see that the most recent post she wrote was not behind a paywall, because it’s about how Guy Fieri taught her 11-year-old son to love food (and to finally, finally eat something besides chicken nuggets and Go-Gurt).
Perhaps you would enjoy seeing a cutaway rendering of the Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg, Germany? I did.
Comedian Jimmy Carr makes many valid points about why laughing is important in this essay, but my favorite part of the whole piece was probably the opening paragraph, in which Carr, who is somewhat famous for responding to hecklers when he does standup, tells the story of the best heckle he’s ever heard of, which is simply *chef’s kiss*.
—
Day 19.040: Four miles on the beach
Feb. 19th, 2026 10:50 pmexilesme_feedAs I mentioned, on Presidents Day, Exile #2 and I went for a walk on the beach at Old Orchard Beach. We ended up walking 4.2 miles which took us from south of the pier nearly to the Scarborough town line and back.
Here is some of what we saw along the way:
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| American herring gull |
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| Rock pigeons on the pier |
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| The largest gull in the world (great black-backed gull) |
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| Clam for dinner |
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| The pier was wearing ice shorts |
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| Sanderling |
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| Horned grebe |
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| Common loon |
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| Sanderlings |
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| Sanderlings in flight |
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| Wind vane |
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| Some of the 31 sanderlings that we counted when several groups converged |
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| Another clam bites the dust |
Training log - Week ending 2/15/2026
Feb. 19th, 2026 03:28 pmwellimtryingtorun_feedThis week was 50 miles of running, 9 "miles" pool-running, and 1000 yards of swimming.
The most notable things about this week are that all of my runs were outside, and that I raced. Oh, and I saw my favorite band (Nine Inch Nails) again.
The snowcrete has slowly started to melt away. Between that and some plowing, there are several running routes that are mostly passable. By which I mean that there are stretches of ice each morning (some of it black) from snow that that has melted the day before, seeped across the trail, and then frozen overnight. As the morning progresses, the ice melts away, and by noon there are plenty of good running options. Unfortunately, I work during the day, so I continue to run in the morning, carefully picking my way around ice and sections that look like they could be water or ice.
The track is still far from clear, but I wanted to do some fast running outside last week in preparation for Saturday's 5K. On Wednesday I headed down to Georgetown, thinking I could do a 10 minute tempo circling around the waterside park (the loop is about 1300m) followed by some strides, with running underneath the Whitehurst or in the plowed bike path as back-up options.
Unfortunately, stretches of the waterside path were icy, the road under the Whitehurst was surprisingly busy with cars, and there were numerous bikes using the bike lane. So, I ended up finding a short section of the waterside path that was not icy and just going back and forth between two points that would be easy to identify on a map later. I did 8 of the longer reps first - each took about 90 seconds so I went with a 60 second jog for recovery. Then I did 8 shorter reps that took about 21-23 seconds each, at what felt like a very fast effort, with about 30 seconds for recovery.
Later I mapped it out and confirmed that the longer reps were 330 m in length and the shorter were 90m (so 7:20 ish pace for the longer reps and 6:40-50ish pace for the shorter reps). It was obviously a unusual workout, but it gave me an opportunity to do some faster running on outside pavement, so I tallied it as a productive morning.
We saw Nine Inch Nails on Wednesday, which meant I went to bed just before midnight. I took 2 hours of PTO on Thursday morning so that I could sleep in, workout, and then start work. Even so, I still ended up in a bit of a sleep deficit that had to be repaired Thursday night, meaning that my running mileage was lower than I would like for Thursday and Friday. I race better when I don't reduce mileage too much, and so I wonder how Saturday's race would have gone had I run more for the two days prior. OTOH, I was pretty happy with the race overall, and seeing NIN was totally worth it, so in the end everything worked out.
Completely unrelated, but because I don't know where else to put it, here is my #1 tip for outside winter running based on the past few weeks: coat your face with a) sunscreen and then b) vaseline. Protects your face from sunburn, wind burn, and the cold.
Dailies:
Monday: 7 "miles" pool-running in the morning; yoga in the afternoon; foam rolling in evening.
Tuesday: Upperbody weights/core and 8.5 miles very easy (9:59). Foam rolling in evening.
Wednesday: 8 miles in the morning, including 8x330m in 89-91 seconds with 60 second jog, followed by 8x90m in 21-23 seconds with 30 second jog. Leg strengthwork and foam rolling in evening, followed by Nine Inch Nails concert.
Thursday: 4 miles very easy (11:09) on steep hills, followed by PT exercises. Streaming Pilates in the afternoon; foam rolling at night.
Friday: 4 miles very easy (10:46) and 250 yards of swimming in the morning; foam rolling at night.
Saturday: 4 mile warm-up, and then 5K race in 23:24 (7:41/7:33/7:14/0:56), followed by a 3.5 mile cooldown. Foam rolling at night.
Sunday: 15 miles easy (9:55), followed with leg strengthwork, 750 yards of swimming and 2 "miles" of pool-running. Foam rolling at night.
I Made 8 Pieces Of Fan Art For ‘Meditations for Mortals’
Feb. 19th, 2026 12:00 pmsemi_rad_feedI can’t remember when or where I first read the Gandhi quote “there is more to life than increasing its speed,” but it feels like I’ve been reminding myself that for something like 15 years now. Every year, it seems like the societal pressure to do the exact opposite—to make more stuff faster, streamline your workflow, get this app/hack/course on how to maximize productivity in your work/career/life, pay a robot or someone halfway around the world almost nothing to do the work you don’t like, optimize optimize optimize—keeps increasing.
I have tried to maintain a healthy amount of skepticism for all of that. Sometimes I feel like I’m just being a curmudgeon, or maybe I’m getting old, or surely this skepticism is going to result in me getting left behind or becoming irrelevant. I have a bit of a crisis of confidence in my judgment from time to time.
And then I read something Oliver Burkeman has written, and I usually breathe a sigh of relief. I was a late adopter of his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, waiting almost an entire calendar year after it was published before I listened to it while remodeling a garden shed into an office for Hilary. There is nothing more validating than when somebody who is way smarter than you says some shit you’ve been feeling, and says it in a far more intelligent way that you could ever say it.
And Oliver Burkeman was doing exactly that, calling bullshit on the idea of our obsession with productivity and “optimization”—or maybe not quite calling bullshit, but more questioning it in a way that his readers could call bullshit on it in their own lives. Like sure, you can try to get it all done, but you’re never going to, so maybe relax a little bit and just concentrate on the stuff you really think is important. I became an instant fan.
When his new book, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, came out in 2024, I bought it the same way you buy your favorite band’s newest album: You hope it sounds pretty much the same as their previous stuff, but just different enough from the last one. As I read it and underlined passages, I thought, “I should try to illustrate some of these bits sometime.”
I finally got around to it last week and did exactly that. Since the book is broken up into 28 chapters, one intended to be read each day for four weeks, I picked two chapters from each week and tried to draw something that I thought captured something in those chapters. I’ve included the passages I underlined from those chapters too. [In the way of a disclaimer, this is purely fan art and was not any sort of paid promotion—fingers crossed I don’t receive a cease-and-desist from the book’s publisher.]
—
Day 2: Kayaks and superyachts: On actually doing things
Rather than paddling a kayak, we’d like to feel ourselves the captain of a superyacht, calm and in charge, programming our desired route into the ship’s computers, then sitting back and watching it all unfold from the plush-leather swivel chair on the serene and silent bridge.” (page 12)
Day 7: Let the future be the future: On crossing bridges when you come to them
“What is worry, at its core, but the activity of a mind attempting to picture every single bridge that might possibly have to be crossed in the future, then trying to figure out how to cross it?”?(page 39)
Day 9: Finish things: On the magic of completion
“People think finishing things ‘would drain even more of their energy and they get tired just thinking about it,’ Steve Chandler writes. They don’t see that ‘leaving things unfinished is what’s causing the low levels of energy.’”(page 53)
Day 14: Develop a taste for problems: On never reaching the trouble-free phase
“The author and podcast host Sam Harris recalls being at lunch with a friend, moaning on about the various problems he was confronting in his work, when she interrupted him mid-flow. ‘Were you really expecting to have no more problems at some point in your life?’ she asked.” (page 76)
Day 16: The reverse golden rule: On not being your own worst enemy
“Can you imagine berating a friend in the manner that many of us deem it acceptable to screech internally at ourselves, all day long? Adam Phillips is exactly right: were you to meet such a person at a party, they’d immediately strike you as obviously unbalanced. You might try to get them to leave, and possibly also seek help. It might occur to you that they must be damaged—that in Phillips’s words ‘something terrible’ must have happened to them—for them to think it appropriate to act that way.” (Page 91)
Day 19: A good time or a good story: On the upsides of unpredictability
“In short, the more we try to render the world controllable, the more it eludes us; and the more daily life loses what [social theorist Hartmut] Rosa calls its resonance, its capacity to touch,move and absorb us. As soon as any experience can be completely controlled, it feels cold and dead; a work of art you fully understand or a person whose behavior you can predict with total accuracy is no fun at all. What brings fulfillment is being in a certain form of reciprocal relationship with the rest of the world, including other people; you might liken it to a dance in which you alternatingly lead and follow.” (page 105)
Day 22: Stop being so kind to future you: On entering time and space completely
“The commitment-phobe can’t bear to enter ‘time and space completely’ because letting himself be pinned down to one relationship or career path means renouncing the other ones. He imagines that what he’s doing instead is keeping his options open, though he has of course chosen a path—because choosing to use up some of your finite time in a state of non-commitment is still a choice. On the other hand, the too-responsible type holds off from entering time and space completely by always locating the real value of her present-day actions somewhere off in the future. (page 124)
Day 27: C’est fair par du monde: On giving it a shot
“You won’t feel like you know what you’re doing. But nobody ever does; that’s just how it is for finite humans, attempting new things. The main difference between those who accomplish great things anyway and those who don’t is that the former don’t mind not knowing. They were not less flawed or finite than you. Every thing they ever did was done by people.” (page 152)
—
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Day 19.039: Saturday birding
Feb. 18th, 2026 09:58 pmexilesme_feedAmazingly, I have yet to give my report on last Saturday's birding. We gathered at Biddeford Pool and had views from different positions of the Pool, the narrow entrance "the Gut", and out into the bay in two directions.
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| Horned grebe |
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| Common loon |
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| Common goldeneye |
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| Bufflehead |
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| Long-tailed duck |
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| Bald eagle (on this distant flagpole on an island in the bay) |
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| White-winged scoter |
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| Distant scaup |
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| Canada geese |
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| American herring gull |
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| Surf scoter |
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| Surf scoters |
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| American tree sparrow |
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| Northern cardinal |
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| White-throated sparrow |
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| White-throated sparrow |
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| Northern mockingbird |
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| House finch |
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| Surf scoters |
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| Black scoters |
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| Black scoters |
Day 19.038: Pancakes
Feb. 17th, 2026 10:32 pmexilesme_feedAfter our Mardi Gras themed potluck at church on Sunday, it was back to Shrove Tuesday today with some pancake flipping to mark the occasion:
Race Report: By George 5K, 2/14/2026
Feb. 17th, 2026 03:59 pmwellimtryingtorun_feedI ran the By George 5K on Saturday, finishing in a time of 23:24.
I went back and forth on whether to race this. I had assumed that the race wasn't happening after the Snowcrete storm of late January left the DC area encased in....snowcrete. This race was to be held on Hains Point, which was a very low priority for being plowed (for completely understandable reasons, since there are no residences or businesses on Hains Point).
As of the beginning of this week, Hains Point was still under about 8 inches of snowcrete, and thus completely unrunnable. But, on Tuesday, Hains Point was plowed, and the race was on. Now I just had to decide whether I was going to run it.
I haven't been able to do any long runs in the past month due to the weather. Since I'm now about 9 weeks out from Boston, I asked my coach whether it would be better to race the 5K or do a long run. He was firmly in favor of the race, so that was an easy decision.
***
The race started at 8 am, with bib pick-up at 7 am. I got there around 6:50 in hopes of getting a 5 mile warm-up in. Things like putting my shoes on and getting my bib took a bit longer than I expected, so I only got 4 miles in, including my normal 3:00 minutes/4x30 second/4x10 second fartlek. That would have to do.
It was a chilly morning - between 28 and 30 degrees, depending on which source you consult. I've learned that getting cold will wreck my race - it's pretty common for people with Parkinsons to discover that their symptoms get much worse when they are cold, and that has definitely been my experience. In particular, my muscles get very tight, which then makes it challenging for me to run fast enough to warm up.
So...I need to stay warm. Since this was a short race, I decided to err heavily on the side of warmth, with thick tights for my legs and a tank top plus two thin/breathable jackets and a buff. I warmed up in this outfit, thinking that I'd remove one jacket for the race. But I never felt too warm during my warm-up and this was a 5K, so I stuck with both jackets. Definitely overkill for most people, and the bulk probably slowed me slightly. But I am confident it was the right choice for me - I was comfortable for the first half of the race and only slightly warm for the second half.
***
The race started right at 8 am. I was able to jog around until about 3 minutes before, which I hoped would keep me loose at the start. As it turned out, I was a bit looser, but still tight. I think some of this was from having to navigate around other runners, and some was because the urge to chase down others tends to make me tense. I dealt with the latter by telling myself that the first mile was for relaxation, not chasing.
That mental technique worked decently, and I was able to find my groove earlier than usual for a race (win!) From there it was just a matter of building pace while taking a bit of care on the course. There was a bit of ice on the inside of the course against the curb, and wet pavement meant that the painted lines and bicycle markings on the asphalt were a bit slick. I stayed a bit wide, rationalizing that any time lost from running with was much less than the time I'd lose from being overly cautious on slick pavement.
When I hit the halfway turnaround, I was already working pretty hard, which felt like a win. From there it was just a matter of staying loose while continuing to build all the way to the finish, passing a few people along the way. And for the second time in two months, I had the great feeling of finishing a race knowing that I had given it my best effort.
Splits ended up being:
Mile 1: 7:41
Mile 2: 7:33
Mile 3: 7:14
last bit: .13 in 56 seconds (6:40 pace)
This course had no mile markers, so all splits were from Garmin autolap. The course was definitely accurate - that little bit of extra was a mix of Garmin satellite error and me running wide (mostly the latter since my current Garmin seems to be extremely accurate on Hains Point).
All in all, I was pretty happy with this one. Technically speaking, it's not as good a performance as the 10 miler I ran last month. But...because it always takes me about 2 miles to get up to speed, I know that my 5Ks are generally not going to be as competitive as longer races.
When assessing my fitness from a shorter race, I'm more looking at relative stuff - just how bad was my first mile (in this case, much better than previous races). And how fast were my final miles? In this case, 7:14 is the fastest mile I've run in any workout or race (including some 3000s that I've raced) since last April, when I closed Cherry Blossom with a 7:08 mile. So, to be able to run that fast and then pick up the pace from there for the kick makes me pretty happy - my training is on the right track.
Other notes:
- I wore the Hoka Rocket X3 for this race and was pretty happy with it. For a supershoe it's pretty stable and doesn't throw me forward the way many other supershoes do. It is definitely going to be my racing shoe for the One City Half Marathon and the Boston Marathon.
- I think the fact that I was so bundled up helped my race more than it hurt it. I was starting to overheat slightly in the last mile of the race. But...that was my fastest mile, so overheating didn't hurt me. In a longer race, I think I probably would have gotten rid of one of the jackets. But for a 5K, this was the right choice.
- My last 5K race (in October of last year, in perfect weather on a fast course) was 24:40, so over a minute slower. So, again, progress.
They want serfs
Feb. 17th, 2026 08:13 pmphilipbrewer_feedA pretty good recent episode of Gil Duran’s Nerd Reich podcast had an odd hole in it.
In the one I’m talking about, the one with Quinn Slobodian, Quinn explains that there’s a reason the many efforts to create a seastead, charter city, network state, and such never go anywhere: They’re unnecessary.
[Y]ou don’t actually need to create a new polity to have your own sense of entitlement and privilege reinforced in every imaginable way, and to have your own economic comfort facilitated by the institutional arrangements of the state in almost every way. With some creative accounting and some use of offshore havens and trusts and so on, you can really game the whole thing very well already, right?
Having said that, they do talk a bit about why, given that there are already tools to protect your property and money (freeports, trust, special economic zones, and the like), anybody would work so hard and spend so much money to create an actual place that’s outside the control of any government. They don’t quite come around to answering that question, which I think is unfortunate, because I think they both know the answer.
The people pushing these efforts want serfs.
They don’t want workers who can join unions. They don’t want software engineers who hesitate to create autonomous munitions or tools for surveillance capitalism. They don’t want maids or pool boys who feel free to resist their advances.
They want the right to be mean to people, in a situation where the people have to just take it.
That’s what places like Próspera offer that you can’t get from a family company incorporated in a special economic zone.
Day 19.037: Washington’s Birthday
Feb. 16th, 2026 10:01 pmexilesme_feedToday goes by various names but for me it is one of the holidays that my workplace observes and it was a beautiful sunny day.
After a morning getting some chores done, Exile #2 and I ventured out in the afternoon for a walk along the beach at Old Orxhard Beach. We ended up walking over four miles and - for the first time in a while - both felt rather over-dressed for the weather.
Now we come to the time of passing away
Feb. 16th, 2026 09:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rimrunner
Over the weekend, I got the news that two members of extended communities that I’m part of had passed on.
Mike Lee, I never met in person. He taught non-classical gung fu—the style developed by my own teacher, Jesse Glover, and there’s a great deal more to that story—in Chicago, and we only ever interacted over Facebook. We had several friends in common, however, from the shared martial arts community of people who knew Jesse, or who knew Bruce Lee. Or both. The man I saw on social media had that mix of genial presence and essential physical confidence that I associate with many of the martial artists and fighters I’ve known. In the memories and stories posted by family, friends, and especially students, I was brought back to the passing of my own teacher twelve years ago—not least because he appears in many of the photos and videos that people shared.
I often say that meeting Jesse was one of the most fortuitous events of my life, even though I didn’t properly appreciate it at the time. He was a remarkable man, an excellent teacher (I borrowed several of his techniques for my own library research workshops), and while I never had the drive and discipline to be a great martial artist, I learned so very much about self-defense, about myself, and about the life experiences of people very different from me. It was one of the few true mentoring relationships I’ve ever had in my life. Hearing about Mike and who he was to so many brought it all back.
Tara I mostly knew from the Mercury nightclub, which for many years was basically my living room. I loved goth music and the goth aesthetic, and Tara would greet me at the door when I’d go there to dance several nights a week. She was sarcastic and funny, and cared deeply about goth as a community, not just as a club aesthetic. I’d played my own part in supporting that community, helping to subsidize a café that operated in Seattle’s Capitol Hill for several years and became a meeting place to socialize, often before hitting the clubs. But after a time I moved on to other things, mostly stopped clubbing, and chiefly interacted with the Mercury by scrutinizing the DJs’ posted playlists for new music. I’d heard in a roundabout way that Tara’s health hadn’t been great, but it was still a shock to see, through a mutual friend’s Facebook update, that she’d passed.
If you live long enough, you’ll come to a time in your life when more people you’ve been close to will have died than will still be alive. I wasn’t close to Mike or Tara, exactly—as I said, I never met Mike in person, and Tara’s and my friendship was more one of shared context than anything else.
But I’m fifty-one years old, and there’s more of these ahead of me.
Day 19.036: Exile #2’s Sunday Column #543
Feb. 15th, 2026 11:41 pmexilesme_feedExile #2 writes...
We had a Mardi Gras potluck after church today, which was fun, and involved at least some attempts at southern food. A friend I was sat with reminisced about the time she had gone to New Orleans for a couple of days during its famous Mardi Gras celebrations. “But not,” she added, “the last couple of days. It gets really wild then!”
True to our roots, I expect we’ll go a little bit wild and flip some pancakes on Tuesday. Phew - watch out, everyone!
We had a Mardi Gras potluck after church today, which was fun, and involved at least some attempts at southern food. A friend I was sat with reminisced about the time she had gone to New Orleans for a couple of days during its famous Mardi Gras celebrations. “But not,” she added, “the last couple of days. It gets really wild then!”
True to our roots, I expect we’ll go a little bit wild and flip some pancakes on Tuesday. Phew - watch out, everyone!