Hey! Thanks for stopping by. Below are my most recent posts :)

  • Best American Short Stories 2015

    I picked up The Best American Short Stories 2015 at a used bookstore sale. The price was right, the premise was appealing – a curated collection of the best short fiction published that year – and I’ve always been curious about the short story as a format.

  • Flying over Bay Area Suburbia

    One of my favorite parts of flying is getting a true birds-eye view of the pattern of a large metro area. I found Northern California’s land use to be absolutely fascinating.

  • Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco

    I picked up Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco for the same reason I pick up most literary fiction I know nothing about — it won a pile of awards and the setting intrigued me. A murder mystery that opens in New York City and winds its way back to Manila? That sounded like exactly the kind of ambitious, globe-spanning novel I’d enjoy.

  • Redwood Forest & Ecosystem

    On my trip to Redwood National Park, I learned that the story isn’t really about the Redwood trees – it’s about the entire ecosystem, which is both under threat and at the center of conservation efforts today.

  • Boardwalk at Lassen Volcanic National Park

    In Lassen Volcanic National Park, there is a trail headed up past Drakesbad Guest Ranch to Boiling Springs Lake. It goes through the Warner Valley, which is something out a story book…that has also been recently hit by a wildfire. The creeks, grasses, and trees are all just idyllic even with the burnt up trees.

  • Banana Slug Exploring Leaf Litter

    Banana slugs are a hilariously adorable resident of the Pacific Northwest. On my trip to Olympic National Park and Redwood National Park. I was carefully looking for them in their perfect habitat. Never saw one. But then this guy shows up right at our door step in our cottage parking lot near Willow, California.

  • Elk Meadow at Redwood National Park

    The Elk Meadow in Redwood National Park was, only a few decades ago, a giant paved lumber yard with trucks, oil spills, giant cranes, warehouses, and piles of felled old-growth Redwood trees. Now, the National Park Service has helped nature along and the land is a fully restored meadow with bubbling creeks and Elk grazing in the distance.

  • Lake Delanor at FD Roosevelt State Park in Georgia

    Lake Delanor is a man-made lake at the center of Roosevelt State Park’s cabin & campground area. It connects to the Pine Mountain Trail system and the picnic area. It’s lovely, peaceful, and a perfect setting for cabins & camping.

  • Sunflower Farm in the Sacramento River Valley

    Driving along I-5 in California, I was taken how seemingly every town was like the world’s producer of some random crop. We drove through a town that produces like 95% of the world’s apricots, another one that does rhubarb, another one that does sunflower seeds. It’s really incredible to see. Also, they all had huge bee boxes along the fields letting the bees do their thing.

  • Black Bear Cub Waiting To Cross the Road in Six Rivers National Forest

    I got to see a small Black Bear cub crossing State Highway 96.

    On the same trip, I also had a massive male Black Bear dart across the highway in addition to weasels, birds of prey and more. The highway goes through some of the most remote areas that I’ve ever traveled through but still been on a State Highway.

  • The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

    The Complete Stories is the only collection that includes every short story Flannery O’Connor ever wrote — including “The Geranium,” which she submitted as part of her master’s thesis at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. If you’re going to read her, this is the one to get.

  • Erskine Fountain in Grant Park, Atlanta

    The Grant Park Conservancy has been restoring old, abandoned features of Grant Park over the past decade. The Erskine Fountain is a special addition, which really shines with all the blooming lilies (and it’s very close to Zoo Atlanta’s entrance).

  • Abundance by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson

    I don’t usually read best-selling political books of the moment. They feel too tied to whatever news cycle is happening right now, and I’d rather read something that has aged a bit.

    But it feels like we’re at a genuine inflection point in American politics. The party coalitions that formed in the late 60s and early 70s—now going on 50 years old—are breaking down.

  • Consolations by David Whyte

    Consolations is a collection of short essays and poems. Each entry is just a page or two—a few hundred words at most. But Whyte packs an incredible amount of meaning into that small space.

  • Discourses by Epictetus

    I picked up The Discourses by Epictetus from Standard Ebooks, then ended up buying the print Penguin edition as well. Stoic philosophy has had waves of popularity over the years, and I love that the most recent wave has brought a blossoming of new translations, resources, and accessible texts.

  • Useful Not True by Derek Sivers

    The core premise is straightforward: humans create stories and frameworks that aren’t literally true, but are still incredibly useful. Not useful in a “white lie” kind of way. Useful in a “this is how civilization actually functions” kind of way.

  • Lassen Volcanic National Park

    Definitely one of the most underrated National Parks. There is not a lot of tourist infrastructure, but my goodness, it is wild, scenic, and alive.

  • Pink Azaleas

    Spring in Georgia brings azalea and dogwood blooms. They never get old.

  • America’s Great Forest Trails by Tim Palmer

    I picked up America’s Great Forest Trails by Tim Palmer after seeing it on a shelf at my local bookstore. It’s a coffee table reference book highlighting America’s great forest trails—of which we have thousands and thousands of miles.

  • Lassen Volcanic National Park after Dixie Fire

    Lassen Volcanic National Park was hit pretty hard by the Dixie Fire of 2021. We got to visit in Summer 2025 and saw not only how the land was recovering, but also how much it still impacted the Park after 4 years.

  • Cinder Cone at Lassen Volcanic National Park

    Lassen Volcanic National Park has all the types of volcanoes within its boundaries. It’s really cool! And Cinder Cone is one type that’s a lot more climbable than the others. It’s tough but straightforward. The volcano is also highly symmetrical and surrounded by the Fantastic Lava Beds!

  • Prairie in the Okefenokee Swamp

    I always imagined the Okefenokee Swamp to be mostly dark, green, cypress forest. It’s not. It’s mostly open “prairie” covered in a couple feet of water. It’s beautiful, haunting, and full of life. But the lack of trees really gives a sense of how big the place is.

  • Deep Tech by Pablos Holman

    Deep Tech by Pablos Holman is a book by one of the most perennial hard tech entrepreneurs in America. Holman is known for his work at Blue Origin and Intellectual Ventures, and he currently runs a venture capital firm focused on what he calls “hard tech” — using technology to solve problems in the physical world rather than in the software or digital world that has been the focus of Silicon Valley for so long.

  • How To Read The Bible by Harvey Cox

    How to Read the Bible by Harvey Cox is an accessible, nuanced, and genuinely creative introduction to engaging with the best-selling and most influential single book in the world.

  • This Dark Road To Mercy by Wiley Cash

    This Dark Road to Mercy is another memorable novel from Cash. Without getting into too many spoilers, the book follows two young sisters in 1990s North Carolina who find themselves on the run with their estranged father. It’s a tense, propulsive story that weaves together themes of family, poverty, and redemption against the backdrop of Appalachian culture.

  • Mud Boiling at Lassen Volcanic National Park

    At Lassen Volcanic National Park, I was surprised by just how volcanic it was, everywhere. And yes, I know it’s in the name. But I was not expecting lava rock to be everywhere and for all the lakes & springs to have a whiff of sulfur and boiling water to them. It feels like the Earth is genuinely alive & active beneath your feet (which, in fairness, it is..). Boiling Hot Springs Lake in the Warner Valley is a little off the beaten track, but we had it all to ourselves on a summer weekend.

  • The Fantastic Lava Beds at Lassen Volvanic National Park

    In the Southeast corner of Lassen Volcanic National Park, there are entire square miles of lava beds. They are so perfect and so beautiful in their starkness that they were literally called the “Fantastic Lava Beds”. There’s no hiking across them, but there are several excellent trail around and through them. In fact, the original California Trail goes around it.

  • The indie web has never had more options than it does now. Short form video & big platforms might be dominant, but I absolutely love all the options now.

  • Testing Post Formats

    So WordPress has post formats. But I have no idea how they interact with the Kadence theme (much less the ActivityPub plugin). So I’m testing this out!

  • Canyons at Crater Lake National Park

    On my visit to Crater Lake National Park, I got to explore some of the Park outside of the rim & the eponymous Lake. It had never really occurred to me that…the water in Crater Lake goes somewhere. Like, it never fills up and it also never sinks down. However, it maintains its level via rain / snowfall, evaporation and some seepage into the porous rock at the top.

    However, even though no water leaves the caldera, the rim is incredibly steep, incredibly high, and incredibly snowbound. So it’s the source for a lot of creeks. And these creeks all run through volcanic soil, which creates some beautiful, complex canyons all around the Park.

  • Creek at Lassen Volcanic National Park

    Lassen Volcanic National Park is a park of colors. Blue water cuts through layers of red, orange, and yellow volcanic rock, coursing through green pines under a blue sky.

  • Flowers on the Beltline

    The Beltline arborteum is an underrated, but seriously appreciated part of the project. In the Spring, I love seeing all the native plants and flowers blooming along the trail. The Westside, with its larger easements, has especially large plantings.

  • The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays by Albert Camus

    The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus is one of those books I’ve read a couple of times and finally just decided to own. I picked up the Vintage Books edition specifically because it includes bonus essays — particularly “Summer in Algiers” — that I think represent some of Camus’s best work.

  • Antimemetics by Nadia Asparouhova

    The core premise of antimemetics is deceptively simple: we live in an age where ideas spread faster than ever, and yet some ideas don’t spread at all. Not because they’re obscure or unimportant — but because of something specific about their nature.

    Asparouhova calls these antimemes.

  • Camping Georgia by Jimmy Jacobs

    Camping Georgia by Jimmy Jacobs is a Falcon Guide focused on finding good tent camping spots at established campgrounds throughout Georgia.

  • Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferriss

    I picked up Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferriss after getting so much value from The 4-Hour Work Week. That book did an excellent job helping me reframe and understand the world of business and productivity, so I figured this would be another solid read.

  • Crater Lake

    Crater Lake has to be one of America’s most photographed landscapes. But seeing it in person still exceeded the expectations. It has a depth of blue that I couldn’t quite capture – and I don’t think anyone can. It’s also so photogenic that I don’t think it’s possible to take a bad picture of it.

  • Catawba Rhododendron Flowering

    I get a lot of the rhododendrons mixed up but one easier(?) way for me to just to note when it’s flowering. This guy was a particularly hot pink along the trail.

  • Roses Blooming

    Roses in the neighborhood are the absolute best. Kudos to anyone who plants them along the sidewalk, just far enough to prevent thorns interactions, but close enough to appreciate the color and varietal.

  • The Beach at Mistletoe State Park

    Mistletoe State Park is a underrated little Georgia State Park near Augusta On Clark Hill Lake. It has a nice set of walking trails, walk-in campsites, and a pretty big beach for a State Park.

  • Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

    I picked up Oedipus Rex as part of reading through the Theban trilogy. I was browsing Standard Ebooks and the collection caught my eye. I hadn’t read it since a required literature class in college, so I figured it was time to revisit and see how it held up.

  • The First Man by Albert Camus

    The First Man is the manuscript that was found at Albert Camus’s side after his death in a car accident in 1960. It sat unpublished for decades — held back by his estate, his daughter and granddaughter — before finally being released to the public.

  • A Saddle on The Conasauga River Trail

    The Conasauga River Trail is wholly within Georgia’s Cohutta Wilderness. Even though it’s mostly along the river, it also goes up onto saddles between ridgetops, especially at the end.

  • Mount Shasta

    Mount Shasta is a potentially active stratovolcano in Northern California. I got to see it on the drive from Crater Lake National Park to Lassen Volcanic National Park.

  • American Chestnut Tree Growing at Atlanta History Center

    Efforts to bring back the American Chestnut have been slow but steady. And I was surprised to find a planting at none other than the Atlanta History Center! It’s not as old or as established as the ones at Allatoona Dam, but they seem healthy and strong. They are a fun little Easter Egg tucked inconspicuously in the very back of the Center’s property near The Wood Cabin.

  • A Lake in Acadia National Park

    It’s always astonishing to me to see fresh water that is coming off granite in forest with no real runoff. Almost all the lakes in Acadia National Park are glacier melt and are shockingly clear.

  • Antigone by Sophocles

    I read Antigone by Sophocles after finishing Oedipus Rex. Both are part of the Theban Trilogy, which I grabbed from Standard Ebooks.

  • Network State by Balaji Srinavasen

    The Network State by Balaji Srinivasan is a book I picked up mainly because my work is tech-adjacent, and for a while this book was everywhere among the tech elite. Even though it seemed ridiculous on the cover, I wanted to understand what my peers were paying attention to.