The Cost of Adventure

/ Travel

As we get set to start a new adventure in New York City, we’ve closed the chapter of our short RV life. We bought this Winnebago EKKO new and owned it for just under two years.

We explored some amazing places in the Southwest and beyond in its diminutive 23 feet. We visited many National Parks, including an unbelievable week at the Grand Canyon.

With the sale finalized, I ran the numbers that no boat or RV owner ever wants to see. We spent a total of 102 nights on this coach. Let’s just say we could have spent those nights at the nicest suite in the Seattle Four Seasons and still had money left over for breakfast.

But the experiences? Priceless.

Winnebago EKKO
Winnebago EKKO

/ Links, Technology

Bear is a fantastic notes app if you’re on Mac and iOS. I use it for my reading notes, commonplace book and linked backup of my Day One journal. I wrote a post about Bear last year, but this video does a great job of showcasing its features if you’re curious.

Savor the Moments

/ Journal

One of the things I love about keeping a journal is how a past entry can transport me so completely back in time to that moment. Here’s a passage from my journal on this day eight years ago:

I try to soak this in – the goldfinches perched on the feeders, fluttering and pestering one another for the best feeding spot, Puget Sound so blue and ruffled, distorted by the heat of the fire, the sight and smell of fresh cut grass, so green and healthy, the sounds of birds in every direction announcing their delight that spring has sprung. Ah yes.

Reading this, I am back on the porch of our old house, basking in the newfound sun after a long Pacific Northwest winter. I hear the birdsong. I see the ruffled waves on the blue water.

My life is so different now. I am worlds away from where I was back then. But in the space of a paragraph, I am transported.

Savor the moments. Write what you feel and see in a journal. Write something every day if you can. Practice time travel.

Systems, Not Goals

/ Quotes

So much of my work in strategy revolved around the achievement of goals: quarterly goals, annual goals, and five-year goals. All of these were tied to a specific metric, which often produced an unintended counter-result. Focus on the inputs that will make you smarter and stronger. Do the workouts, practice your craft. Be one percent better every day. Play the long game.

Gerald’s Game by Stephen King

/ Horror, Reading

★★★☆☆ | Horror | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads

Stephen King must have felt he needed a challenge when he started this one. How about a horror novel with just one character handcuffed to a bed with the only way to move the story along is through inner dialogue. Oh, and let that character be a woman, and let that woman be sexually abused by her father as a child. Yep, that would be a challenge.

And, I guess he succeeded? Maybe? I’m torn over this one, because it feels offensive to me that a male author would attempt to put himself in the tortured mind of an abused woman.

…

Gerald’s Game by Stephen KingRead More »

Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

/ Psychology, Reading

★★★★☆ | Psychology | Audio | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads

Another great Malcolm Gladwell read. I think I’ve read all his books now and even took his Masterclass on writing. I listened to the audiobook, which was the perfect format for this one. Gladwell has an engaging reading voice and employed his podcast artistry by including recordings of his interviewees in the audiobook. I love how we weaves together diverse topics into a central theme.

Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

/ Literature, Reading

★★★★★ | Literature | Print + Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads

Rereading a book you haven’t read in 40 years is an interesting experience. I remembered only the bleakness but little of the story itself. I enjoyed most of the book, though all the decades of Hemingway parodies and copycats stole some of its luster. Still, it is a timeless classic that reinvented the novel. Makes me want to go back and read all those books I read when I was young. If this one is any guide, it will be like reading them again for the first time.

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

/ Literary Fiction, Reading

★★★★★ | Literary Fiction | Print + Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads

What a beautiful and poignant book. Hopeful and joyous at the possibilities of life, but bookended by the realities of disappointment and loss. 

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

…

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Quiet by Susan Cain

/ Psychology, Reading

★★★★☆ | Psychology | Print + Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads

Fascinating deep dive into the world of introversion and extroversion. Some meaningful parts of our temperament are genetic and passed down from our parents. If you’re a fussy, highly sensitive baby at four months, there’s a good chance you’ll grow up to be introverted. There seems to be a biological connection between high physical sensitivity and introversion.

Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments—both physical and emotional—unusually deeply. They tend to notice subtleties that others miss—another person’s shift in mood, say, or a lightbulb burning a touch too brightly.

According to Cain, bloggers are almost always introverts. We’ll share personal details with an online multitude they would never disclose at a cocktail party. This is me.

…

Quiet by Susan CainRead More »

Laozi’s Dao De Jing by Lao Tzu

/ Philosophy, Reading

★★★★★ | Philosophy | Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads

This short book oozes with wisdom with the help of Ken Liu’s wonderful translation and notes. Read this one slowly and set aside time for reflection. So much of the advice is contrary to conventional western views that it can seem non-sensical. But try, you must. ★★★★★ 

Can you open yourself to your senses—quieting the mind like water?

Death is good. Senescence is good. The beginning is good. The end is good. You are, like all things in the cosmos, swimming in the flux of Dao.

Creative Nonfiction: The Final Issue by Lee Gutkind

/ Essays, Reading

★★★★☆ | Essays | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads

An interesting selection of essays from the print run of the Creative Nonfiction literary magazine. There were some essays that appeared to stretch the boundaries of truth, but that’s the creative part I guess.

Highlights

If things could be undone, if time could be wound back, like a film, if the past could be kept alive to compensate for the deficiencies of the present: these are the wishes that form character, that grow out of events that form character. It does not take much. The tree bends once, twice, then does not bend again. It grows now as it always will. — Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

There are many things that capitalism produces, and noble behavior on either end of the rich/poor spectrum is not one of them. But we admonish only the poor. — Brian Broome

The Age of Napoleon by Will Durant

/ History, Reading

★★★★☆ | History | Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads

The eleventh and final volume of the Story of Civilization, covering the years from the beginning of the French Revolution through Waterloo. Napoleon’s rise, dictatorship, stunning victories and ultimate defeat were thrilling to read.

From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step. — Napoleon

Babel by R.F. Kuang

/ Fantasy, Reading

★★☆☆☆ | Fantasy | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads

I tried to like this book. It has all the elements of a book I would love: etymology, 19th century England, a diverse set of characters, magic, and an academic setting (Oxford, no less!). But I found it slow and repetitive, filled with one-dimensional, unlikable characters, and lecture after lecture on how the rich and powerful mistreat the poor, especially those who aren’t white and British, except for those that are poor and British. It took me almost two months to finish this, and it was a struggle.

I appreciate the idea behind the story, but not how it was told. Not every book is for every reader.

…

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/ Quotes

Sometimes I’ve thought of grief as missing an amputated limb, but walking with a limp is better.

Anne Lamott: You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly — that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.

Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks

/ Reading, Writing Guides

★★★★☆ | Writing | Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

An entertaining book filled with practical advice on how to improve your storytelling, whether in front of a live audience, on a date, or in a written essay. Dicks shares examples of his own stories, then breaks down why they work. ★★★★☆

Quote from Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks: "Storytellers end their stories in the most advantageous place possible. They omit the endings that offer neat little bows and happily-ever-afters. The best stories are a little messy at the end. They offer small steps, marginal progress, questionable results."

/ Family

Connor would have turned 23 today. The very prime of life. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t miss him, but these birthdays are tough. Hug your kids. #forever20

Connor Breen

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