Jake Weidokal

Book Reflection: Tuesdays with Morrie

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 07:52:01 -0400

Finished reading: Tuesdays with Morrie : an old man, a young man, and life’s greatest lesson by Mitch Albom 📚

I enjoyed Tuesdays with Morrie. It felt like a healthy dose of memento mori. I hope to be as graceful as the subject, Morrie, when I encounter challenging circumstances in my life.

I didn’t have a lot of notes, or even quotes, from this book, but one thing that stood out to me was how Morrie responded when asked by the author what he would do if he had one full, healthy day. By this point, the ALS had a near-complete grip over his body, and he was confined to his bedroom. His answer included:

Inviting friends over, one by one, to share their joys and worries and how much they mean to each other
Sharing good meals with friends
Walking in nature
Going out dancing

His answer struck me, because the list is simple and these are all things I would want to do too. In fact, the list is so simple that I could easily make time for all of these things this week, or even today. And I have the health to do them. But I often don’t do them. It made me pause to consider why I am not devoting more time to these things in life that are so important.

And I think that is the point of this book. To wrestle with how we are living. Unfortunately, that is something that many of us don’t start until it is far too late.

Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.

Morrie Schwartz

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 16:08:58 -0400

Watched: Materialists 🍿

Watched this for date night while the kids were asleep, and it was pretty good! It follows the usual romance trope of “emotion versus logic”, but did it in a way that felt fresh and interesting.

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 11:39:45 -0400

I’ve recently started a concerted effort to study philosophy. I want to ask good questions. Questions that grant me a long life, rather than a short, wasted one.

““It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.” - Seneca” (Susan Rigetti, So You Want to Study Philosophy…)

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 08:08:47 -0400

It feels nostalgic to look at clouds. I remember laying in the grass as a boy and staring at them.

It doesn’t take long to look, so I wonder why I stopped?

The clouds were particularly beautiful yesterday, around sunset, just outside my bedroom window.

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 23:17:04 -0400

Its time to migrate to a new pocket journal again! I‘ve been using the one on the left since August 11. I love the process of looking through my old journal, reminiscing, and then manually transferring things over to the new journal.

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 23:10:38 -0400

Started reading: Tuesdays with Morrie : an old man, a young man, and life’s greatest lesson by Mitch Albom 📚

I don’t know if it’s the changing of the leaves, but I’m craving a story that is wholesome and stirring. This is another book from my Goodreads shelf that I can’t remember when or why I added it, but the description sounded like just what I’m looking for.

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:54:03 -0400

Finished reading: The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli 📚

I should not have read this as an audiobook! It was beautifully written and I was excited to listen each time, but the material was too dense to fully absorb audibly.

I’m planning to write up a “book review” on this soon, as inspired by:

my college pastor Eric Asp (who recently read and wrote about Don Quixote)
this article that I happened to come across today: Why I started writing about every book I read

This quote from the article captures my aspirations for my book review.

In my book review process, I take the juiciest off-the-cuff impressions and, through expansion, rewriting, and additional research, turn them into clear, informed opinions that will stick in my mind.

The thing that’s most surprising to me is how little I am able to plan the book review.

I have a few notes from my journal, a few half-baked ideas, a general idea of the direction I’ll take. But then, when I start writing, stuff I didn’t anticipate floods out.

This is proof, again, that I don’t know what I truly got from an experience until I write about it.

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 08:53:27 -0400

“The brilliant Japanese writer Haruki Murakami once wrote, “Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.”” (James Clear, Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds)

I try to remind myself of this often. Software engineers are always squabbling over the “right” approach, and more often than not there is an emotional attachment. I also try to think of this in reverse, such that my view of reality is not perfect and it is okay to adapt it to new information.

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 14:33:48 -0400

Started reading: The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli 📚

I’ve been spending a lot of time on podcasts, but I want to transition to audiobooks. Podcasts keep me entertained, but I don’t feel like I’m getting much from them. So I’m hoping audiobooks can fill that void. My plan is to listen to fiction audiobooks, since I prefer nonfiction in physical-form for annotation.

To that end, I looked at (what I thought were) fiction books I saved as “Want to read” in Goodreads and started requesting the audiobooks from my local library using Libby.

The first available was “The Order of Time” by Carlo Rovelli. I don’t remember how I discovered this book. I assumed it would be an interesting sci-fi novel, but it turns out it is very “sci”, and not very “fi”. The book is written by a theoretical physicist who specializes in quantum gravity. His aim is to dismantle the intuitive understanding of time being something that moves steadily from past to present. He compares this to other “intuitive understandings” that have been dismantled, such as the earth being flat or the sun revolving around the earth. After listening for a few seconds, I realized this was nonfiction, and I thought about returning it for another book. But then I listened to the whole intro and was hooked. The author sold me on the idea that there is more to time than I realize, and I’m looking forward to finding out what that is.

Oh, and as a nice bonus, it’s narrated by Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch).

Your Flaws Are Your Draws

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 07:56:21 -0400

When I started my career, I put a lot of emphasis on learning how to say things the right way. I’d think, “How do I sound competent in this interview follow-up email?” Or, “How do I sound like a professional instead of sounding like normal me?”

Post-AI, this seems to be flipping. I expect more movement away from prim and proper corpo-speak. Everybody can talk that way now with AI, so what’s the point of the formality circus? It used to be a proxy for competence, but we can’t trust it anymore. Not only that, I think it’s becoming an indicator of the exact opposite. Over-formality is a proxy for incompetence. Any time I get a super crisp, professional, courteous email, I suspect the sender just offloaded it to AI. Especially if I know them and that isn’t how they talk. When I see someone whose emails are all offloaded to AI it just feels… lazy.

Instead, I think your flaws are your draws in this new era. If you have something to say, you should just say it as plainly as you can. And keep it short. I hope short, flawed, and authentic becomes the new corpo-speak. That’s what I’ll be doing.

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 16:55:10 -0400

I got up early to mow this morning and was fascinated by the snail trails in the morning dew on my neighbor’s fence. I’ve been noticing a lot more snails this year.

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 07:23:37 -0400

I’m really starting to notice how much my mental outlook changes based on how consistently I’m exercising. I’ve been feeling some anxious and lethargic energy creeping back in lately, so I decided I need to get back to running to sweat out this bad juju. My schedule is pretty full these days between family, church, work, and projects, so I’m back to running at the butt-crack of dawn. I do love the solitude of the early morning though. There’s something special about being outside and moving through the world as it wakes up around me.

Cheap code is changing how I debug

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 15:20:14 -0400

Do you remember when software was expensive to make? When you couldn’t just snap your fingers and make some code appear with a full test suite? Crafting code this way was hard, but it was rewarding. I would be so proud when my snippets of code all worked together to solve the problem at hand. No software lives forever, but I would have been sad if that code had to be thrown away. I spent time on it, I thought hard about it, and I made it exactly the way I thought it needed to be. But now, code is cheap.

Code is Cheap

AI can generate code as fast as you can dream it up. The effort is trivial and the cost is laughable compared to the amount of time we used to spend writing code. We can take a moment of silence to be sad about this new reality of our precious craft…

Sit with your sadness for a bit…

Okay, the moment is over. Now that we got that out of the way, let’s talk about what this means for how we build software today.

A New Approach to Debugging

I’m going to drill into one area of change I’m excited about, which is that this unlocks new ways of debugging. For example, AI can instantly create tailored, disposable debugging utilities. This speeds up debugging because we can iterate more quickly on our hypotheses about the root cause.

The current approach many developers take with AI-assisted debugging does not work for complex bugs. Most developers I work with tell their AI: “Find the bug and fix it.” This would be great if it worked, and it actually does for simple bugs. Problem solved. But in my experience with more messy issues, this leaves room for too many assumptions to be made by the AI. It implements a “fix” that does not work. You say: “This doesn’t work, try again”, and the cycle is repeated. It’s an exercise in falling down rabbit holes, hoping AI stumbled into the right one. And if not, you have to drag it back out and start over.

Hypothesis Driven Debugging

A better approach is to use AI to do “hypothesis-driven debugging.”

Gather context
Generate hypotheses
Rank and select one
Build throwaway utilities to verify hypothesis
AI runs experiment, or hands off to human if it is not capable
If issue is not fixed, return to #2. If it is, implement the fix and remove the throwaway utilities.

Workflow breakdown. Scroll to the bottom of the post for a link to a full-size version.

This is a good process run on your own, but doing it with AI is incredibly helpful. For one, it can generate a multitude of hypotheses quickly. It can help rank them by likelihood * effort to test to determine the hypothesis that is best to start with. AI is also great for the experimentation piece. Depending on the hypothesis, AI might be able to just run the experiment for you and report out whether the hypothesis was correct or not. But if it can’t, it can give you the tools and detailed instructions to run the experiment yourself, and then to feed the results back into AI for analysis.

A Real Example

Let me give you a real example where I used this. We had a bug in the front-end of a software product I support. On one of the pages, we use query parameters to prefill a complicated, multi-step form that is generated based on various sources of data. The bug we faced was that the prefill would intermittently fail, but not always in the same place. Developers could never reproduce it on their own machines. Forcing a slow connection would not reproduce the issue. There seemed to be some similarities in the underlying data for the affected cases, but we couldn’t pin anything down.

Eventually, I asked AI to make some hypotheses about what could be causing this, and pointed it toward areas of the code that I thought might contain the culprit. One of the hypotheses was that this was the result of a complex race condition. This seemed reasonable because there are 6 different API requests that feed into the form one way or another. Based on this hypothesis, I had AI create some throwaway code that allowed me to toggle delays for the various API calls from the query parameters. For example, it looked something like this:

https://myapp.com/complex-form-page
	?productsApiDelayMs=1000
	&ordersApiDelayMs=2000
	&cartApiDelayMs=500

This made for a great experience, because I could easily try different combinations of request speeds and eventually identified the race conditions that were causing the bugs. There were actually 4 separate failure points that needed to be fixed.

Objections

At this point you may be objecting, why not just use the network tab in the developer tools to throttle individual requests? This is a reasonable objection, because I absolutely could have done that. My reasons are speed and feel. I would argue that making the throwaway code is actually faster. This would not be true pre-AI, but now it is. I don’t throttle individual requests in the developer tools too often, so it would take me some time to do that. Especially for 6 separate requests and configuring them all differently to get precisely the order I want. But my custom utility, made by AI, is perfectly suited for what I am trying to do. It’s fast, and easy to see what I have configured. Which leads to my second point, which is that the custom utility just feels better. Dev tools has a lot in it. It can feel a bit overwhelming. Our application also makes a LOT of requests, and to target the ones I want in dev tools, I would need to remember the URL paths to filter on for each of my API requests, which could take some time. But with the AI approach, I can just say: “make a query param for each API request involved in initializing this form that allows me to delay it in milliseconds.” Then I can plug those query params into the URL as demonstrated in the code snippet above. I believe this is a better experience than using the developer tools for request throttling. And I think there are many cases where these one-off tools would provide a better experience than standard tooling.

Why is Nobody Doing This?

So why am I not seeing more developers doing this? I think part of it is habit. We all just reach for what we’re used to, whether that’s IDE debuggers, dev tools, peppering the code with console logs, or something else. I think another reason is that code still feels precious. We’re used to perfecting it, refactoring it, reviewing it, writing tests for it. We put a lot of time into code. So it feels wasteful to create code destined to be tossed away almost immediately. But code is cheap now. As developers we need to understand the new implications of disposable code, and change our habits accordingly.

Conclusion

Creating AI-generated throwaway debugging utilities is a new, fast methodology for quickly hypothesizing and experimenting to find the root cause of defects. To be clear, I’m not advocating that this should replace all existing methods of debugging. In many cases the existing tooling should be the preferred approach. It is simply another tool in our developer toolbox, and one that I don’t see many developers reaching for.

If you want to give it a try for yourself, I distilled this into a skill file for coding agents. You can view that here: Gist | Hypothesis-Driven Development Skill

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:04:07 -0400

I just completed my first Field Notes pocket journal. It’s covered in scotch tape because the cover completely separated from the pages after being stuck in my suit pants pocket all day during a particularly hot and humid wedding.

I wonder if that was just a one-off or if this is a durability issue I’ll run into more often. I’m being optimistic and hoping it was just a fluke. I love the art on these National Parks Editions, each from different artists.

Next up: Olympic National Park

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:56:26 -0400

TIL: A 1997 episode of Pokémon sent 685 people to the hospital with seizures. Here’s a wikipedia entry about it.

Warning: the Wikipedia article has snippets of the scene that caused seizures for viewers.

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 21:41:09 -0400

Finished reading: Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Common, Oscar Levy 📚

This was a hard read that took me months to work through. I’m going to let it simmer for a while, and then read the analysis in the appendix that weaves in context from Nietzche’s various life experiences. It was interesting to work through criticisms of my beliefs while also finding other parts of this work that I agreed with. Many of the ideas were tough enough to understand through the parables they were encapsulated in, but reading it in old-timey English was the cherry on top that made this an excruciatingly slow read for me. I found myself rereading sections multiple times very often.

I’m very glad to be done with it, but also glad that I challenged myself with this book. It might be a while before I take on something this difficult again though. I think I need to build up my stamina for reads like this, much like I need to build of my cardiopulmonary fitness for running races!

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 08:02:39 -0400

This paragraph hit hard this morning. I found this in an essay titled “Why Story Matters” in the Late Summer 2026 edition of The Classical Teacher, a homeschooling magazine that showed up in our mailbox recently.

Every good story must have a conflict. If yours does not have a conflict, if you are not fighting for something (or against it), if you are not risking something of yourself to bring about some good, if you’re not on any kind of quest - it’s probably because you didn’t fight back when you should have. It could be that you let the dragon get away with it.

Martin Cothran

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 13:15:47 -0400

I’ve heard tuna described as “chicken of the sea”, but why have I never heard anyone refer to pistachios as “clam of the tree”?

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 05:44:14 -0400

I updated my Uses page. While updating it, I had fun considering the items I no longer use. A lot has changed!

Now 2026-07-17

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 08:14:37 -0400

What I am up to now. Check out my /now page for the latest update.

This is going to be a very brain-dumpy update. There’s a lot that has happened since my last update to my /now page!

Two weeks ago on July 1, my son was born! He and his mom are healthy and doing well. In fact, this postpartum period has felt much easier than our first kid, which has been a huge blessing. I’ve been enjoying my 4 weeks of parental leave to spend time with him and my family. Also, I am using this time to update my blog, purge our messy garage, and build a playset in our backyard.

My daughter also turned 3 recently. This is such a fun, chaotic age. She has a lot of energy and particularly loves singing and dancing. Right now, one of her favorite activites is cutting paper with scissors. It’s a little bit dangerous and requires lots fo fine motor skills, which I think makes it exciting for her.

I accepted a new job with Progressive Insurance as a Senior Software Developer. I actually accepted the offer from the hospital the day my son was born. I had already been working there as a contractor since October, but now I will be there as a direct employee. I’ll be on the same doing the same work. I am building software that uses machine learning models to estimate repair and replacement costs for cars that have been in accidents, based on photos of the damaged vehicle. Most of my time currently is going toward a greenfield application that will be used to generate data to train the models more rigorously in pursuit of improved model outputs.

I left NASA because I was commuting an hour to work in-person every day, and my job had shifted away from software engineering more toward product management. I really missed being hands-on in the code. I was waffling on whether I should stay or not, but then the deferred resignation program was offered a second time. The deal was that I would get 6 months of not working but still receiving bi-weekly pay and benefits as usual, AND on top of that I would get basically the government equivalent of severance, AND I could work elsewhere during that time, BUT at the end of the 6 months I would voluntarily resign my position. So I took it, along with around 4,000 other employees who opted into the second round of the deferred resignation.

That kicked off a fun season of life where I was hanging out with my wife and daighter all-day, everyday. I started to think about various business ideas I could start during this unique time, or whether I wanted to go back to work full-time as a software engineer. I ended up starting Cuyahoga Digital, a web design business. I worked with one client and that went great, but I’m not sure web design is where my passion is at, and I’m hesitant about how AI will impact the niche I was targeting (websites for small businesses). I’m thinking I will keep the business name but focus on a different aspect of software. My two front-runners write now are AI consulting or website rentals. But for now, I’m focusing on my full-time gig and family since there has been a lot of change in those areas.

While starting Cuyahoga Digital, I also applied to full-time software engineer jobs. And that process was so much harder than I expected! I must have sent out hundreds of applications, I got a handful of interviews, and I think 3 times I made it to the final round but was rejected at the end. And each time it was the same explanation, “We really like you and would love to have you join, but it was between you and someone else and they had more recent coding experience”. Not having recent coding experience really hurt me in my job hunt, but eventually I landed back at Progressive as a contractor on their Claims Payments team working on their invoicing and payments systems.

I’m writing this from an M2 Macbook Pro, so I begruglingly have at least a toe in the Apple ecosystem now. But honestly, I love this thing. It’s easily the best laptop I’ve ever owned. I get excited to use it each time I open it up. The build quality feels super premium, the keyboard is surprisingly pleasant to use (coming from Thinkpads, with extra-deep key travel), and the screen is gorgeous. Plus, it’s FAST.

I also bought an iPhone, but that was an intentional downgraded to an iPhone SE 3 after my Pixel 7 Pro started acting up. The iPhone SE is a 4 year old phone, with the smallest possible screen I could find while still having the usual smartphone features. It even has a physical home button! I have a love/hate relationship with it. I bought it so that I would spend less time on my phone, which I think has worked so far? I’m still on my phone more than I would like, but It’s very annoying to use. It seems like a lot of app developers no longer account for this small screen size when developing their apps, so I sometimes get weird behavior like things not showing up on screen. And overall, I liked the Android operating system more than iOS. So once this iPhone craps out, I’m going to switch back to Android.

My wife and I have been on a house project binge. A lot has changed around here since my last update:

finished our basement
fenced in our backyard
poured a concrete patio in our backyard
bought all new living room furniture

And currently, I am working on leveling out a section of our yard to build a playset for our kids.

We sold our 2012 Toyota Prius V. I was sad to see it go, but we traded it in for a 2024 Kia Carnival. After being accustomed to a 15 year old Prius, our new minivan feels like living in the future. And I am loving the amount of cargo space we have in the back while still accomodating two kids' car seats.

I should tell the story of buying the Carnival. It was used, so we had a pre-purchase inspection performed. That uncovered a few things, but it took weeks for the dealership to resolve, because they took it to another dealership for warranty work. Well, when they finally had it ready for us, we planned to go in that day at 6pm. This was June 30th. If you’ve paid from the beginning, you’ll rememeber my son was born July 1. My wife’s contractions started intensifying around 4pm, so we weren’t planning on going in to get the car. But then, about an hour before the dealership would close, it seemed like her contractions had stalled. So we decided I should go get the car while her parents stayed at our house with her. I had a lot of fun telling everyone at the dealership “My wife is literally in labor right now, so if we could speed this along, I would really appreciate it”. The poor finance guy was trying to sell me on all the extra packages and I was just jittering and repeating “please, can I just decline everything?”. Eventually, after making his appeal that these packages were “smart money” and “investments”, he relented and let me decline all the extras so I could walk out of there. But by then, my wife’s contractions were 4-5 minutes apart, so I drove to the hospital in the new van and met her there when her mom dropped her off. That was not exactly how we had planned for our trip to the hospital to go!

I got into running at the beginning of the year. I signed up for a half-marathon Spartan Beast race with some friends, so I started running since January to prepare. The race was in May, and although it was pretty difficult, we all ended up finishing it. Apparently our course here in Cleveland is the muddiest Spartan venue. We don’t have much else in the way of mountains or interesting terrain. The race started with a hundred yard walk through waste deep water, so my shoes were soaked from the get-go. And at one point, as I stepped into a puddle of water, my leg sunk down into a hole of mud clear up to my mid-thigh. And it was about as wide as my leg, so I couldn’t get my foot lose no matter how hard I tried. My friends had already crossed the water, so they looked back, said “you’ll be fine!”, and ran off. I must have been stuck there for a minute, exhausting myself trying to get out of the hole, when finally two other racers showed up and asked if I needed help. It took both of them grabbing under my armpits and me pushing with all my might to hoist me up out of my muddy hole. We collapsed on our backs together, laughed, caught our breath, and continued on with the race. Eventually, I caught back up with my friends who I had been running with. That event was a lot of fun, but I think the best thing was how I fell in love with running during the preparation for the race. I’m glad to have a fun new hobby that is keeping me healthy.

While this may seem minor, I changed my pocket journal setup recently. That’s a big deal for me. I had been rocking the same custom setup for a long time. I had a travelers notebook leather cover, with a paper folder insert, plastice zipper insert, one notebook insert, and then a leuchturmm pen loop that held a fisher space bullet pen at the top. The space pen was modified to take Zebra pen refills for smoother writing. It was both a wallet and journal combined, and it went with me everywhere. I had perfected it and built it uniquely for myself, but I’ve turned away from it now. Instead, I’ve been carrying a Field Notes journal with me everywhere and using a Ridge wallet for my cards. I like the journal being just a journal, so it is not as thick to hold and write on as when I had it combined with my wallet. I don’t love the Ridge wallet because it’s so heavy. I’ve dented and damaged multiple things in our house from accidentally dropping it, and it feels like a hazard to have around small children for that reason. So I’m planning to replace it with a Carhartt Nylon Duck Front Pocket Wallet. We’ll see if I like that better.

So in summary, a LOT has changed, and I’m too tired to organize or spell-check this update so I’m throwing it up as-is. I’m really loving life right now. I am so excited to watch my son and daughter grow, to start this new chapter of my career, and to do it all in style in a minivan. God has been good to me and my family. Since my last update we have had hard seasons and scary moments, but God has been faithful through it all and I’m excited to see where he takes us in the future.

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 08:13:38 -0400

My chipotle order has changed. I’ve gone all in on the “get as much as possible for leftovers” philosophy, so I double up on most ingredients now. And I dropped the sour cream and hot salsa.

The Magic Swaddle

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 08:05:49 -0400

I am again in a season of diapers and burp cloths. In other words, my son is born! We welcomed him July 1, and it has been wonderful spending time with him. This has felt much easier than our first kid for a variety of reasons, which has been such a relief.

One thing that I feel like I need to share is this new swaddle we’ve been using. It has been life-changing. We call it the “magic swaddle”, because our son has been sleeping so well when we put it on. I’m talking 3+ hours consistently, as a newborn. We are setting alarms to wake him up in the night to make sure he eats.

It’s the Happiest Baby Sleepea® 5-Second Baby Swaddle. This swaddle was actually a “free” gift from the hospital, that we almost didn’t take with us! We had no idea that they had this swaddle for us, but as my wife and son were starting to be wheeled out of our room in a wheelchair to go home, I opened up a drawer under the hospital’s bassinet and found it in a little gift bag! I’m terrified to think of the alternate universe where I didn’t stumble upon this swaddle. It is amazing how well it works, and it’s much easier to put on than other swaddles I’ve tried. Completely straightforward and dad-proof.

If you have any new dads or moms in you life, consider getting them one of these!

p.s. Holy crap, I was looking on this company’s website and they sell a bassinet for $1,695… that is insane. I can’t vouch for the macbook-priced bassinet, but the swaddle is worth every penny.

Tue, 26 May 2026 10:43:12 -0400

I was just working on my laptop outside when I saw a big fuzzy jumping spider on the umbrella above me. I didn’t want him near me, but I didn’t want to kill him, so I waited until he moved to the top of the umbrella and then I bounced him down into the grass below my 2nd story deck. That was about 90 minutes ago. Just now, he popped up around the edge the table near my hand, staring right at me. I was spooked, so I brushed him down onto the floor.

Are we friends now? Or enemies? This is making me want to learn more about jumping spiders. I didn’t expect him to be back so soon.

I wish I had gotten a better picture before he ran off again.

Tue, 26 May 2026 07:52:06 -0400

I am elated that I can start my days on the back deck again! And for some reason, there is no construction noise in the neighborhood this morning. Just birds chirping and the highway in the distance. This 54°F weather with light sun is just right for sweatpants, a hoodie, and a warm coffee ☕️

Sat, 02 May 2026 11:06:14 -0400

It was a gorgeous morning for a run. Thankfully, my earbuds died halfway through. I felt way more present hearing the gravel crunch under my feet while the birds chirped.

I love starting my Saturdays this way now. And I’m lucky to have these beautiful trails just a few minutes from home!