1. Keep doing what you’re doing. You’re wonderful.
2. The way your Mom treats you kids is not right.
3. Be friends with your father. Talk to him. He wants to hear from you. Just open your mouth.

1. Keep doing what you’re doing. You’re wonderful.
2. You should really date other people. Locking yourself down at age 15 1/2 is not wise. See what other guys are like.
3. Most importantly, relax, Tytania, enjoy life. Like when your boyfriend shakes you sometimes and say, “Be happy!!”?? You take everything so, so seriously. It is serious, but if your first rule above rules was, “Relax, Tytania, Enjoy Life,” the others would follow so much more naturally and joyfully.

Those are my two regrets about my teen years. I wish I’d dated other people, and I wish I’d been happier.

I thought I was just going out to pick some little tomatoes – I thought the string beans* were done. Far from it!

*Mostly shown here are Dragon Tongue string beans. They’re good – even when they get overgrown (as shown) they taste good and not mealy.

In the Champlain Islands searching for flat biking roads. So many hidden little gems on the lake. No, person in the water is nobody we know.

“To have high morale is to believe that you are able to do the things you want to do; to have low morale is to believe the opposite… Morale is your motive force, and you live or die by its maintenance.” https://guzey.com/morale/

Outward: beautiful day

Forward: going to give a talk at the Fair!

One bad thing: something gross happened, will not elaborate.

Here’s a picture of bright red fungus we saw on a walk over the weekend.

My brother had these as pets when we were kids. We called them “newts.” Xopher says they are “efts” or juvenile salamanders. Turns out we’re all right.

Stop looking inward (my aches! my pains! my plummeting estrogen levels!) and backward (OMG my 20s were so awesome, and so very long ago).

Start looking outward and forward. Wow. It’s a beautiful world.

by Peter Attia, MD

Dr. Peter Attia is an oncology surgeon, a data guy, and an extreme athlete with trauma in his past. That all plays into his approach to longevity: lots and lots of screening, monitoring, and “training” for old age as if you were training for a sporting event.

The chapters on exercise and nutrition were fantastic. My favorite quote: “Cardio or weights? Low-carb or plant-based? Olive oil or beef tallow? I don’t know. Must we really take sides?” This is NOT a book telling you the One True Secret to long life; it all depends. Some certainties though: Exercise is the best medicine. If your metabolism is not functioning well, make it a priority to get that under control. Screen for everything, screen early, screen often.

Then come chapters on sleep and emotional health. I had really been looking forward to the chapter on sleep, as it’s kind of a bugaboo for me. I had grown to feel I could trust his opinions, and I wanted know what he thought about better sleep through pharmaceuticals. He had stated in an early chapter that he had nothing against using medications in general where appropriate, such as statins; so it felt promising that I wouldn’t get some knee-jerk anti-medication attitude.

I started reading the chapter one night shortly before bedtime, and didn’t get up to any of the advice; just lots of emphatic “Sleep is crucial! Quality, uninterrupted sleep! It’s a must! You risk Alzheimer’s if you don’t get it!” Nice scary nightmares to put a random chronic insomniac to sleep with.

The next night I delved in further. Alas, he’s anti-Ambien. Ambien sleep isn’t REAL sleep and yadda yadda yadda. However to give him credit, he had positive things to say about trazodone.

The whole sleep chapter was disappointing and did not feel nearly as data-driven as the previous chapters. It just felt like he got it in his head that sleep was very important to health and decided it warranted a whole chapter on a par with exercise & nutrition, but he didn’t want to put any work into it.

For the emotional health chapter, I commend him for telling so much of his personal story. This chapter was driven by his own experience and that was OK.

I guess the real overarching theme of the book, though, was that everyone is different, and you must find what works for YOU. Your exercise ability, your own metabolic reactions – these are going to determine the “right” exercise and diet for you. He could have been a LITTLE more understanding about chronic insomnia, though, and respected that different things work (and don’t work) for different people. As I said, a bit of a bugaboo for me…

Thank you, God, for another crack at a summer day, because frankly yesterday we were gypped out of a Saturday.