What I’m tending this season

A now page: what I’d tell a friend I hadn’t seen in a year, not a résumé. I hold my life as a handful of areas and try to keep each one in true rather than winning at any of them. This is where they stand, autumn 2026. I update it about once a month.

Body

A fall semester, built like a school term

August through mid-December, four tracks: Thursday nights on the mat with the Guru; a ten-minute daily form, Monday to Friday; two martial arts practice sessions and two resistance training sessions a week in the garage, where a round caller runs the clock and writes the log; Wednesday tai chi. Training runs in two-week blocks. Progress is read as a seven-day mean, not a single morning’s number, and never as a verdict. The assignment this term is conditioning and confidence in my own body.

Writing

Letters every Sunday, a book in harvest

Letters 11 through 30 of Staying in True land here and by email each Sunday morning through January. Behind them, a book: the same philosophy told through a life instead of toward a reader. It’s in scene harvest, two scenes a week through November, then assembly. It won’t be finished this season, and it isn’t supposed to be.

The garden

Establishment year, now under a tarp

An in-ground vegetable plot in the back yard, zone 7b, twelve hours of sun. This was the year of clearing sod by hand, laying two mulched paths, testing the soil, and amending it. On August 26 the whole plot went under a tarp to smother the bermuda grass while the lime does its slow work. It stays there until spring 2027, when the first beds get planted. The tending is the practice; a harvest is the gift, not the deadline. The running record is on its own page.

Hands

A sweater vest on the needles

Worsted weight, my own pattern, worked in the evening rotation a few rows at a time. Knitting is the one area where nothing is measured and nothing is due, and I protect that.

Work

Solid, and reframed as the patron

The day job, senior data solutions engineering from home, is steady. I’ve stopped asking it to be the meaning of things. It’s the patron that funds the rest of this page, and that’s an honorable job for a job.

Money

On a plan, and mostly automated

There’s a plan, the good decisions are automated, and I look at it on a schedule instead of in the middle of the night. Nothing to report is the report.

Keeping

This site, a homelab, a school’s servers

This site went up in September on a server in my house. Behind it: a small homelab, backups in two places, and the learning platform I keep for the martial arts school. The current job is a private workshop behind this site where my own dashboards and tools live. See what I build.

Now pages are a small tradition started by Derek Sivers. Mine leaves some areas off on purpose; a life has rooms that aren’t on the tour.