Finished reading: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler 📚. Brilliant book.

When I lived in Florida over 20 years years ago, gated communities were everywhere. I’ve lived in Oregon for 10 years now and I still haven’t seen one.

10/365 📷

New bed day.

I ask you one thing Do you remember me? I miss you

9/365 📷

To be seen by others is the core of being. Perhaps this is why humans are driven to create minds besides our own: We want to be seen. We want to be found. We want to be discovered by another. In the structured loneliness of this modern world, so many of us are passed over by our fellow humans, never given a second glance.

Excerpt from The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

What does it mean to be a self? I think, more than anything else, it means the ability to select between different possible outcomes in order to direct oneself toward a desired outcome: to be future-oriented. When every day is the same, when we are not presented with the necessity to choose between different possibilities, we say we don’t “feel alive”—and here I think we guess at what being alive actually is. It is the ability to choose. We live in choices. —Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

Excerpt from The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

Morning walk.

Photo from a few weeks ago of a dragon made of Christmas lights and spitting flames in downtown Caldwell.

8/365 📷

Kids are under the weather this morning and my wife put on Murder, She Wrote. The kids are actually getting into it 😆

Greenland is about 26% larger than Alaska and 56,000 people live there.

Shocked a younger millennial today by affirming that I, too, am a millennial and turn 44 in about a month.

I needed to get away from my desk today, so I drove out to Metro’s Killen Wetlands near Banks. I’d never been there and sort of stumbled across it by accident. Usually I drive south on my lunch break, but today I decided to go west. Washington County is some of the most beautiful countryside anywhere, dotted with farms and nurseries and awesome vistas. It made me wish I had $5 million to buy a couple acres. The upside and downside of the UGB is the high price of land.

7/365 📷

The sky is on fire this morning. We don’t get many of these this time of year.

Just me and a date with the S3 finale of The Bear.

My wife and I are at the point in our marriage where she intentionally puts the paper towel and TP rolls on backwards just to annoy me.

I’ve discovered that I prefer listening to nonfiction audiobooks over fiction. For me, fiction is for relaxing, nonfiction is just processing information.

We went out to eat last night with a few good friends and their kids. Had a great time. After we put the kids to bed, we watched Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. I’m not one for writing reviews, but it was entertaining. I was skeptical at first, but it was fun and I needed something that wasn’t too serious.

5/365 📷

Currently reading: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler 📚

Completely forgot, but I recently passed 8 years as a nonsmoker. Unfortunately that’s about the time my weight gain started. Not sure what’s worse, being despised for being a smoker, or being treated so differently as a heavier person. At least I have my lungs, I guess.