The animals were with me the whole month. They took over my canvas tent and Serenity was the kitchen/common space. Mr Animal cooked most of the meals, Mrs Animal baked a lot, and I gained weight.
They also helped me move rocks for the shade structure bench retaining wall, helped dig out the Burrow, built some chairs, we spent three days in Death Valley, did various local hikes, and practiced idleness. It was absolutely a great time, I feel very fortunate that I got to spend so much time with them.
It highlighted for me how important it is to me/my wog to build sufficient shelter infrastructure for people to stay here. We lucked out that they arrived in the narrow window when a canvas tent isn’t absolutely miserable here. I want people to be able to stay any month. The Burrow is the next major project in this direction.
Between EREfest, the animals, and my time in Japan so far, I’m finally grokking how important good food is for social activity. My food is fuel attitude might finally be changing. Cooking will feature prominently in my Skillathon plan.
Mathiverse is staying with me for a couple weeks in January and I’m going to cook all our meals as my first Skillathon chunk… their palate is more discerning than mine so I’m going to get better feedback than I can provide myself as well as motivation to make decent stuff.
I’m in Japan with my family. We’ve been in and around Tokyo and then in and around Kyoto. In a few days they go home and I’ll be on my own here till mid December unless I decide to move my flight up. I’m probably going to be at workaways the rest of my time.
I’m glad I came. I’m getting lots of inspiration from many elements of the culture here, and reflecting on the elements of culture I don’t like. A rich environment for observation and reflection for me. Lots of ideas for projects and ways of approaching projects when I get home.
The timing worked well in another way; I’d already been introspecting away from stoke and towards devotion as a state goal before getting here. Less ‘away from’ stoke and more seeing stoke as something to be held lightly, with an attitude of devotion as the preferred state of choice. Stoke requires certain external variables to line up. Like flow, it’s nice when it happens but chasing it as The Goal can lead you to disappointment or clenching striving. My tagline of ‘Chasing stoke…’ felt discordant recently.
Devotion can be chosen at any moment under any circumstances. Japan seems like a good place to think about devotion… partly because it’s a place where you can see both the pros and cons / potential pitfalls of devotion focus instead of overly idealizing or romanticizing it.
Death Valley
Mr Animal’s shaksuka
), it really does mean a lot. I’m sure I’ll have some sort of preorder thing once I get to that point and will be sure to make it easy to find.