This is a log of my extremely unambitious running career. It’s mostly an aide memoire to myself. If I wanted to brag, I’d need to find another subject. Past runs (latest on top) 2024-03-06 (endurance) distance 18km, duration 2:30, avg speed 8:20. I wasn’t fully in shape, but it was a warm Saturday morning, and it was good to be out in the forest near the lake! 2024-02-04 (intervals) 8.04km, duration 58:39, avg speed 7:17.

Spring comes early this year. It’s the first half of March, and the days are already wonderfully warm and sunny, with highs around 16°C. This is a clear sign of the climate disaster, and absolutely isn’t great for nature. But it’s warm enough to get the whitewater kayakers stirring, assembling their gear, and heading out to the river. On Friday evening, a club mate asked “anyone up for a few runs?

I wanted a small, portable computer. Like an iPad, but running a real operating system. A Fedi friend pointed me Microsoft’s Surface range. I bought a used Surface Go off Ebay, and slapped Debian on it. This is a Surface Go, with the small print saying “Model 1824”. Seller says it’s probably a Surface Go 2, I’m guessing it’s a 1. Anyway, it’s not a speed queen. But it seems to run Gnome well enough, supports web browsing and text editing just fine - and that’s exactly what I want to use it for.

Content warning: Blatant consumerism. This is a post about espresso machines. Nobody NEEDS an espresso machine in their home. These things are an expensive luxury, and a superfluous indulgence. There are better ways to spend your money, for example by giving it to people who have less than you. The decision to buy one isn’t easy to reconcile with the desire for a better world where resources are more fairly distributed.

One of the people I follow on the Fedi shared a food pic of a starter they’d had in a vegan restaurant in Lisbon. I was hungry, so I decided to reverse engineer the thing. As it happened, I had almost all required ingredients around. This is a starter that comes with strong flavours. It should be brightly acid, salty, spicy and umami. It should combine crunchy and soft textures.

Just yesterday I finished Convenience Store Woman by Murata Sayaka (Goodreads link). I loved it! At 163 pages, it’s short and punchy. Keiko is 36 years old, and has worked at a convenience store for 18 years. She finds humans baffling, and navigating society difficult. But in store, there’s a rule for every situation. It’s an environment she knows intimately. Here, she feels truly at home. While Keiko is happy, everyone around her sees an ageing woman stuck in a dead-end job.

In my last post I said I would hand in my old jeans at the Nudie store. They’d be used for patching and repair, and I’d get a 20% off on my new pair. That’s not how it went. I went to the store with exactly this course of action in mind. It was just before closing time, work had kept me in the office longer than I had anticipated.

Let me start with a confession. I’m a lazy dresser, even by German standards. Ideally, I don’t need to spend much (or any) time thinking about what to wear. And I’m certainly not very aware of trends.1 I’m also trying to buy fewer clothes, and wear them for longer. When I heard about dry selvage jeans, I dismissed the idea at first. It sounded so… fashionable: Dry denim, also referred to as “raw” denim or unwashed denim, refers to a pair of untreated denim, which means they have not been washed or bleached.

I used to love fiddling with tech. Lots of evenings, nights, hell, even days spent getting a computer to do things Just Right. Obsessing over config files. Custom configurations. Window managers. All the wonders that Linux systems have to offer. This didn’t end when we had kids. Now I had less time and energy left from a day full of carework and wage work, but I still found relaxation in tweaking an OS install.

Some time around last Christmas, I decided that my kayaking technique could really use some improvement. So I booked a one-week course with Outdoordirekt. I had had a good experience with them before, on a one-week trip of guided runs in northern Greece. The kayakers I met there had done most or all of their training with that company, and they were good at what they did! I had also heard very good things from others.