Happy Birthday to me. I am 47 today.

It is genuinely hard to sum up the richness of my life right now, the depth of experience, and the weird ideas I have for the future. I'm setting up goals and having dreams in ways that I would never have allowed myself to do before. I'm doing the work of it all in tandem, attempting to break up older patterns that are holding my back, or at least crying about the parts that are unchanging in an attempt at acceptance. And I have a support network that is helping me though all of that, even and especially when I start losing sight of things. How strong and weird that all is.

I've done my usual traveling, but this time with the arc pulling further south than I would have ever imagined. Still routing myself through America's Obstacle on a regular basis unfortunately, but sending me upstate per usual. But also Muskoka and

I'm going to crash the party here in haq's node, because I'm a jerk like that.

And because I had a vaguely similar experience recently, although one much much much lower down the zen warrior slope than he describes in his writeup.

I tend to not drill with Italian steel like Haq, because I'm a Fudd. I drill with American steel and wood, born in New York State. Not because I am patriotic about where I source my gats (as a Jew with at least

"How to Dodge a Cannonball" is a 2025 novel by Jamaican-American writer Dennard Dayle, and is a black comedy set in the Civil War. It follows the wartime career of Anders, a teenage flag twirler that pretends to be black as he fights in an all-black regiment, and as he gets swept up not just in the war, but in a series of tangentially related conspiracies.

Several comparisons have been made to Catch-22, and Slaughterhouse Five is another obvious comparison. I myself was