Locomotoring

Last year, the afternoon of the 31st, our cruise ship had landed on the Half Moon island of the South Shetland Islands in the Antarctic peninsula. A lot happened in 2024, I was expecting it to feel like a long year (link to Radiolab episode The Secret to a Long Life), but that didn’t happen.

Jan 1, 2024 had started with a hike on the Antarctic landmass – Portal point. I could have remembered the awe inspiring trip with gratitude, and yet, all I remember is various shades of grey – the sky, the ocean, the snow. I also remember the chatter – chatty people out chatting the chatty penguins. I remember the infamous Drakes passage, more so because I wasn’t sea sick like most of my fellow passengers. Crossing this passage takes two days each way or 40% of the total travel time, where the 50 ft high waves thrash the cruise ship around. While the hopscotch to Ushuaia via Buenos Aires was pleasant, the hopscotch back to Bay Area turned into a series of delays thanks to grounding of every Boeing 737-9 MAX. The trip had ended with a long COVID isolation too.

The winter found us committed to a plant based diet. It is not saying no to eggs, occasional tinned sardines and anchovies. It is saying yes to boatloads of kale, tofu and legumes. We find ourselves joined to Live Earth Farm CSA, operating out of Freedom, California, who deliver fresh farmed goods every week, six doors down from home. At the start of the spring, Viome measurements put me right at the cusp, where my gut bacteria was learning to thrive. My hemoglobin markers started to creep up, and my weight started to decline.

Spring found me starting a vegetable garden. It was a simple start – tomatoes, peas, peppers and herbs in bags filled with compost from our local recology center. I hunt for purple plant varieties that are rich in anthocyanins – peas, basil, malabar spinach, okra, red-veined sorrel. I found herbs that I had never heard of before – vietnamese rauram, mexican hoja santa. I sought out the odd ones – white bitter gourd, mouse cucumber, ghost pepper, white eggplant. I learned to preserve seeds. I picked mulberries with a newfound earnestness. The plum yield reached epic proportions – the green plum chutneys, jams, lacto ferments got exhausting. I learned to cook new plant based meals like the Armenian flatbread, south Indian mixed lentil Adai, Ottolenghi’s roasted cabbage with chana daal, Bengali Kumror Chakka, Sri Lankan Jackfruit curry and much more.

We marked the autumn by our first multi-day front country camping. There have been two camping trips before. The first one was crew assisted when we undertook the rafting trip through the Grand Canyon and second one was a single night front country camping. Neither trips had made us feel prepared. It is amazing how camping tech changes in a decade. The Antarctica trip had geared us with warm inner layers. We upgraded the mattress pad from a skinny half inch backpacking one to a four inch car camping one. For food, we explored upgrading instant ramen with silken tofu, tinned garbanzo beans with home made ensembles of herbs, and packaged Indian meals with fire roasted dry pappadams and bread. We planned for emergencies. We familiarized with our gear ahead of the trip. In short, immense amount of planning went into making the trip successful – a very different experience from crew assisted trips where you simple log off, and show up.

The year also marked my numerous experiments with genAI. I have been using it for drawings, I am often interested in what the mind remembers and not what the lens sees. A Prompt Engineering course from Vanderbilt via Coursera also came in handy for product requirements development at work. More recently, a course on Human-Centered Generative AI via Stanford is giving me mature perspective that the elders in the field are navigating.

They say that one should choose good activities over doom scrolling. I struggle with choosing between a growing list of good activities – cooking, hiking, gardening, watching movies, reading, writing, mushroom foraging, photography, sound recording, …. To the list of activities, we added archery this year.

“When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit.”

I am looking forward to a time when my goals can be irreverent. For now my goals are modest, perhaps in 2025 I shall learn to grow mushrooms.