I started buying houseplants about four years ago. No research went into it, I just picked two that I liked from the grocery store and brought them home. This proved fatal for one of them. I think I overwatered it. Or maybe it got infested by malevolent insects. I don’t know. I didn’t try very hard to save it. I wanted my apartment to have that leafy, green look but I didn’t want to sink time and effort into making it happen. I wanted the reward, but not the work.

Apart from that early casualty, however, my approach of low involvement has worked pretty well. The other plant – a lemon-lime dracaena – has lived and thrived in the years since I brought it home. Multiple times I’ve repotted it and today it stands at two or three times its original height. I’m proud of it, somewhat. Several of its leaves are at their edges browned with decay due to some reason I’ve neglected to investigate. Nonetheless, it lives on.

Every now and then I get the motivation to watch YouTube videos to learn how to perform certain tasks of plant care. The people who make these videos tend to chat at the camera for a while, stroking and poking their plants as they slowly approach the subject at hand. I watch these videos impatiently, jumping forward with irritation until I find the bits of information I need. I want to get the task done as quickly as possible. Plant care for me is more chore than hobby.

It’s a funny thing to find yourself resenting chores you created for yourself. Nobody and no thing require that I have plants in my home and yet I have several. Five in the bedroom, one in the living room, three in the kitchen, one in the bathroom, and seven in the office. Many of these are second or third generation houseplants that I planted from snippings I trimmed and propagated in water.

I stopped buying plants a while ago and yet I keep accumulating more of them. The list above is almost twenty in number without including my biggest and oldest plants, which are back in my apartment in Seattle, 238km away. Over there I have my lemon-lime dracaena, a sizeable monstera, a growing ficus, a tentacled pothos, and several other smaller plants. The better job I do at caring for my plants, the longer they live, the bigger they get, and the greater my responsibilities become.

Watering plants is a surprisingly effortful task, especially when you water them all on the same day. For some, I stand on tiptoes and extend my arm rigidly overhead to let a stream of water arc into the pot. For others, I do a mini deadlift and lug their fragile figures to the tub. Any spills I mop up on my hands and knees. A long way from lounging on the couch and enjoying my living room. Sometimes, I feel that the work their upkeep demands has surpassed the pleasure they give me.

For a long time I accumulated plants and grew them with the aim of making my living room lush with green leaves. Eventually, I realized the vision. And I loved it. But, as is often the case, the happily ever after is a lot more tedious than its still image suggests.

I am living a weird life. It isn’t one I dreamed up for myself, but one that has developed bit by bit over the years from the conditions imposed on me by life. Enviously I’ve held onto everything in my grasp and years later I find myself sprawled across two countries, in two apartments, both full of houseplants. This abundance has enriched my life while encumbering it. Perhaps it’s time to lighten the burdens I’ve put upon myself.

I’ve been traveling, furnishing, reading, writing, and more.

An odd perk of splitting my time between Seattle and Vancouver has been furnishing and decorating a second apartment, a task for which I have enough gusto to do twice over. More than twice, actually. I’ve starting telling friends that I would gladly help them lay out their spaces. I told one friend in particular, who finds furnishing and decorating stultifying, that when he buys his house, I will invite myself over and personally hang the artwork and mirror that have been leaning against his apartment walls for years. I routinely watch Never Too Small and Noah Daniel and have been toying with the idea of making TikToks or Instagram reels about my amateur interest in interior design. I already have the topic for the initial video: how to get cheap artwork that you love.

Among the finest decisions I’ve made recently is buying patio furniture for our balcony. I bought it secondhand for $420 USD ($575 CAD), delivery included, and within a week have spent many more minutes (in either currency) lounging, reading, writing, and working on it. I expect to recoup a good deal of the principal when we resell in a year or two.

By furnishing the balcony we’ve added to our apartment a whole new space to be in. It’s like a tree house, perched up among a variety of leafy growth. Beyond the branches, in the evenings, lays the orange pink sunset silhouetting cranes on the port and past them the city skyline. It reminds me of this bit from Gail Sheehy’s memoir:

My alcove is more modest, but magical still. A private little post embedded in the city. A perfect place to read and write.

I’ve been sitting out on the balcony with a little stack of books and

.

I think the ongoing masculinity crisis can be understood as a

.

Most of what I’ve

has to do with New York, but I also finally wrote a review of

, the first of Cormac McCarthy’s last

novels. I also wrote a

in my series of how to coordinate metaphors.

Z and I went to Tofino with my family for a week to celebrate my mom’s birthday. We spent time together, ate great meals, surfed on beautiful beaches, hung out at a wonderful airbnb near the heart of town, spent a day in an outdoor spa in a private cove lounging in hot tubs filled with seaweed, and even saw the Northern Lights. Z and I want to go back.

A week later, Z and I went to

to affirm our suspicion that we would like to live there before we have kids. I have a bad habit of winging trips, but in the month leading up to this one I dedicated good hours to research and planning. The time spent was well worth it, rendering some of the most memorable experiences of the trip: Comedy Cellar, Village Vanguard,

, Whitney Museum (for free), Tiny Cupboard Comedy Club, Roberta’s, and SEY coffee. Some of these I booked in advance, and the others I was aware of and pounced on when the opportunity arose.

We recently also spent a weekend with friends at an airbnb in Lake Cowichan. The weather was a bit disappointing, but we had a great time hanging out in and around the hot tub.

I’ve delivered some good results at work recently. My tasks continue to be interesting and plenty. However, it looks like my next promotion, which I was expecting in September, won’t happen until December. I’m disappointed, but when I reflect on it carefully, I notice it’s not that important. By no means do I need to be promoted. It’s alluring because it’s a quantifiable and salient achievement. But it’s not important one.

Spotify again rejected my request for an extended quota. I emailed them back asking to speak to a real person. No response. It looks like it’s going to be difficult to make my app available to all Spotify premium users, unfortunately. That project will sit on the backburner for a while.

As for my other recent programming project – this site – I have some interesting new ideas. To encourage myself to

, I want to re-order posts by their most recently edited date rather than their original publish date. That way, I could breathe new life into old ideas that I failed to do justice on initial attempt and baptize them again as new pieces. This aligns with the dynamic aspect of my

idea. A related idea I have for this site is to let (hypothetical) readers see past versions of each post, in the spirit of what I wrote in my essay

last year:

One of my core interests, and one of the core passions behind this site, is the process of writing. Interfaces that illuminate and accentuate that process intrigue me.

Peep Show. Second watch. So funny.

Curb Your Enthusiasm. Hilarious. Like Peep Show, soothing with its insanity.

Baby Reindeer, which was haunting, disturbing, and fantastic.

Welcome to Wrexham. S3 is less ambitious, but still good.

House of the Dragon. Good

. Rewatched S1 in preparation for S2, which is currently airing.

Fantasmas. Unsettling in a very effective way, like a hyper-pop Black Mirror. Wonderfully weird and delightfully non-linear. By now I know I am a sucker for tangential and episodic storytelling.

Dream Scenario. Unsettling. I kept oscillating between sympathy and disgust for the main character, an intended effect, I think. However, ultimately, it didn’t seem to have a cogent point to make. Or maybe I missed it.

Challengers. Very entertaining. I loved the toxic triangle between the three main characters: one chooses to be dominated, one needs to dominate, and one dominates himself to preclude others doing it. The codependence and power dynamics rang true until they fell a bit flat towards the end.

Radical Wolfe, documentary about writer Tom Wolfe (and former colleague of Gloria Steinem at New York magazine). Somewhat entertaining but suspiciously uncritical, as biopics and posthumous documentary tributes tend to be.

Enjoying the rare and splendid sunny days of PNW summer. Biking, paddleboarding, playing soccer, volleyball with friends.

I’m curious about playing goalkeeper for a new team. I’ve been an outfield player exclusively for years, but I used to play goalie part-time and fill in when needed. I miss it a bit. And goalies are always in demand, so it should be an easy way to get more playing time. Hopefully I’m not overestimating my skills in net. I think I’ll find out soon.

Cap Hill Block Party. Excited about seeing Chappell Roan, who is apparently great to see live.

Visit PEI, before Z’s mom and stepdad sell the house they have on the beach there.

I’ve been getting injured, visiting the Canadian East, defining my pattern language, enjoying summer’s end, reading, writing, coding, and more.

I’ve been getting a bit unlucky. My first attempt at returning to soccer goalkeeping resulted in a badly sprained finger. The xray showed “a couple tiny fragments of bone,” which the hand doctor that I was later referred to described as “technically a break.” To him I relayed the playful question my friend had asked: what happens to the bits of bone? Yes, he confirmed, they get “resorbed.” (A subsequent internet search confirmed it was indeed a real word.)

A few weeks later, back in the outfield, my domain, I took a meanly struck soccer ball to the back of the head. In my couple decades of playing soccer, I’ve headed many, many balls deliberately and even taken several to the face. But I can’t recall ever getting hit so firmly on the back of the head, or it ever hurting so much. The real headache, though, was navigating the quagmire of bureacratic medical advice. Was I really in mortal danger? Or could I just go home and rest? After a lot deliberating, consulting, and a tentative visit to the Emergency Room, my wife and I decide to go home for the night and consult a doctor the next day.

Z and I spent a week in the Toronto area and then a week in Prince Edward Island. It’s embarrassing how much friendlier folks are over there compared to Vancouverites. One of our theories on the subject is that it is easier to make friends in cities with more transplants, since they are circumstantially motivated to make connections. People who have lived in a place for a long time already have an established social network and are therefore not incentivized to form new friendships. Especially when the local culture is one of polite detachment. In Vancouver, strangers walking past each other on the sidewalk rarely look at each other, even in residential neighborhoods. It’s very offputting for me and Z. We are warm and friendly people.

Before I moved to Seattle in 2019, I was warned of the Seattle freeze, the aloof attitude of locals and their aversion towards making new friends. But this stereotype never matched my experience of Seattle. Everyday I have friendly interactions with folks – at the coffee shop, by the mailboxes, at the lake, on the street. The generous spirit extends to include dogs, which can be found everywhere in the city – in grocery stores, in shops, in pubs, and even in restaurants. I suspect that the tech boom and consequent influx of transplants from all over the US, Canada, and abroad has made the city a good place to make friends. Notably, my friends here are almost exclusively not from Seattle. Several from Winnipeg and Victoria, one from Brooklyn, one from Arkansas, one from Connecticut, one from Montreal, one from Oregon, a few from the Midwest, and so on.

One of my best friends just bought a house in West Seattle and a bunch of us are seriously considering moving in with him. I would live upstairs with him and three of our friends would live in the groundlevel suite downstairs. It’s an exciting prospect, even though it would mean giving up our lovely apartment in Capitol Hill. I would really miss the proximity to urban life, but would love to live in a little complex with a bunch of people I really like. According to an architecture book I’m currently reading, A Pattern Language, that’s how people should live. It asserts that even couples should not live alone:

The catalyst for this potential move is that Z and I want to reduce the total we spend on rent across our two homes, mine in Seattle and hers in Vancouver. But the change has the potential to be much more than a practical compromise. With our friends living downstairs, we would realize the House Cluster. The backyard, which includes a garden, would serve as a sort of “public land” connecting our households. The book makes strong claims about these aspects:

Even if I don’t end up moving, I am very excited to help my friend plan, furnish, and decorate his new space. And the book is serving as perfect inspiration.

There’s something strangely satisfying about starting a new book while traveling. While in Toronto and PEI, I returned to A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, a book I’d perused a few years ago. I was reminded of the book while writing my personal list of essential homemaking ingredients and came up with the title

. I’ve been thinking about writing a piece like that for a while and, when I finally started, it gripped me like a fever. Writing it while sitting at a bench on the deck looking out over the couple kilometers of green pastures connecting me to the Atlantic ocean was one of my favorite moments of my PEI visit.

The last couple months have been a fertile time for my writing. I

about a handyman that fixed my kitchen cabinet a couple years ago, and I even

. I wrote about the book

and about related thoughts I had

. I wrote a

on the topic of rules and a

on the topic of storytelling.

The latter compared the writing between House of the Dragon and The Sopranos. At Z’s encouragement, I shared it on r/HouseOfTheDragon and I received some encouraging responses. It was the first time I shared my writing with complete strangers and I intend to do it again. I think it’s a great way to motivate diligence in my thinking and writing and to test my reasoning. (It so happens that I recently came across a blog by a fellow programmer and writer and noticed that he posted his writing on r/TrueLit.)

Other books I’ve partially consumed recently include “Short Introductions” to Hegel and Hume, and The Listening Book.

Recently a couple friends and I went on our last paddleboarding session of the summer. It was a worthy finale. We paddled up Lake Union to a new brewery perched at the water’s edge to attract aquatic patronage. There we had drinks and appetizers before paddling back through the darkening dusk, drifting along the halflit houseboats towards Seattle’s twinkling cityscape. Back at the dock we emptied the boards of air and dove back into the lake a few times to the sound of my oldest playlist on my bluetooth speaker. Everything sounds better in the dark.

The sudden splash of water strikes the air like a crackling snare drum and even the howl and hiss of a deflating paddleboard seems to hold color.

While in PEI, I started watching Lost, which is the alltime favorite of one of my friends, and Z started watching Brooklyn 99. I’m not sure why, but, as I said about reading A Pattern Language, there is something pleasing about starting something new while on a trip away from home. Change of routine feels right alongside a change of environment.

I started rewatching Mad Men. This time I much more easily recognize Don Draper’s extreme immaturity. It hides so well behind his restrained eloquence and impressive jawline. I also notice that Peter Campbell is offered as a character foil. He’s unsuave and unhandsome, but similarly insecure and helpless. He’s deeply envious, unaware that all the potency and respect that Don enjoys does nothing to salve the wounds that disfigure his hopeless self-image.

I did a

on this site! Specifically, I built the two features that I mentioned in

.) Thanks to these, it’s now possible to see which posts were most recently modified and even to see each revision of select posts like

,

, and

.

We’re going to Japan for two weeks over Xmas! I’ve never been and I’m very excited to go. I intend to spend time researching, planning, and learning about Japan over the next few months.

I expect to be promoted to Senior Software Engineer in December. I should know by November. We’ll see. I’ve been at Microsoft five years now, so I’m neither late nor early.

I’ll be playing a lot of soccer over the next few months. I hope that’ll naturally help me resume weight loss. I lost fifteen pounds in the latter half of last year and I’ve maintained since then. I would still like to lose another twentyfive pounds.

I’ll be watching every Arsenal game that I can. They are widely recognized as contenders to win the league, even more so than they were a year ago. It’s exciting and unnerving. The season is so long.

I’m overhauling Z’s Vancouver apartment. I changed the pendant light above the dinner table and I’m in the process of swapping the couch. There are many more things I plan to do. Replace the coffee table, install bedside wall lamps, hang up the TV, and make space for the practice drumkit Z intends to buy. I’m motivated by my excitement. If anything, it’s hard to stop thinking about it.

Sadly, summer is over. But I also love the fall. I’m looking forward to the coziness that comes with it. For me, September is a very nostalgic month. The sudden turn in weather reminds me of the beginning of the school year, a time I found quietly thrilling, like the opening montage of a new season of a TV show.