Great Minds Think Alike (but you already know that)

Highlights: Lucky joined me for 'car ride training' during a few late morning errands. Within five minutes at the first stop, when left alone, he broke his leash and moved to the front seat! The next stop, a dog park, was met with eager anticipation once he saw where we were. The final stop afterward was much easier, partly thanks to a reinforced leash knot at the break point and his exhaustion. Wendy reached out asking for help setting up the reMarkable she'd bought over a year ago. I spent about 30 minutes walking her through various details, insights, and uses. I did some cleanup in the backyard after the rain, fixing a few hanging lights loosened by the wind, but I'm waiting until Tuesday to handle any other needs, given the continued rain through Monday. I played around with some data export and presentation tools for a project I've been wanting to do. It's not a top priority among my other goals, but it's a fun engineering challenge that brings back memories of automation work I did in my professional years. My skills are a bit rusty, but they are still there.

Insights: It's the second day of the new year, and also the second day I've used the Daily Stoic and Daily Buddhist as meditations. I like this routine; it's been working well for me so far. This morning, the weather was beautiful — I spent time at Starbucks reading, writing, and experimenting with some software. I'm trying out a few random dictation and grammar tools that might help me speed up my writing without giving away actual authorship to AI. On a personal note, I caught myself a couple of times becoming irritated at things not working or not going as I expected. Yet, I quickly recognized it and let go of the frustration, which felt like a rewarding improvement. One of my goals this year is to practice what I preach. I also felt good about limiting distractions, like going to the gym, walking Lucky, and driving — without giving in to the urge to add more to the moment with music, podcasts, phone calls, or other "optimizations" that dilute my full attention to the primary task. On a side note, to capture this for posterity, I noticed last night in bed that the skylight on the roof of Nina and Kevin's house behind us crests right at the edge of our fence. It looks like a full moon is rising over the horizon. Tres cool. Oh, and today I learned that you can long-press the trash can in the iPhone mail app to easily choose between deleting or archiving. Who knew?

⚖️175.8(-1) ❤️63(60-111) 👣 6,121/2.8mi (🧘‍♂️ 🏋️‍♂️)