JC

I found a Porcini spot! Now we just need some decent regular rainfall before it gets too cold.

So I haven't vaped since mid August, win! I'm using nicotine pouches for now. I haven't had an energy drink since mid August, win! But I'm drinking more Coke than I'd like, that's something to work on. Alcohol is still something I reach for in the evenings but deciding not to is becoming easier. Meanwhile I've been lifting weights because I decided I will go ahead with the tattoo I've ummed and arred about since I was about 15, and my bicep needs to be in some sort of shape to take it - which I'm using as the motivation to start lifting heavy things seeing as that's recognised as a good way of increasing health-span.

Last month I went down a rabbit hole. I had a Technics portable CD player in the 90s and my memory told me the music had always sounded better on that than anything I've listened with since. Turns out I wasn't just imagining it or romanticising the past. That old CD player had Technics 'MASH' digital to analogue convertor that was use in their higher end separate CD players too. Back then most CD players took all the individual dots from the CD and just joined them up like a dot-to-dot drawing, you know the thing, the drawing ends up looking like what its supposed to but with straight lines and sharp corners where the dots are. The information on a CD is similar. The original music is sampled 44,100 times per second with around 32,000 positive or negative volume levels. So the speakers, or headphones, are giving 44,100 different signals per second, and the volume level sets the position the driver (speaker) should be, 32,000 being pushed out to it's maximum and -32,000 being pulled in as far as it can. So on a normal CD player the driver is moved 44,100 times per second and set to each of the volumes set which pushes the air in front of it to our ears. With the Technics MASH DAC the inbetween points are worked out so the driver moves more smoothly and believe it or not our ears can hear the difference. The rabbit hole didn't end there though. The real magic is how we hear individual sounds though, whether it's coming out of a speaker, or the real world. Inside our ears are increasingly long tiny hairs which pick up increasingly deeper toned sounds and while the air coming into our ear is a mish mash of all the different sounds around us (or on the CD) those hairs decipher that signal into the individual sounds we hear. Just magic. Anyway, that old CD player I had was long since gone, so I scoured the internet and picked one up for an absolute bargain price which has breathed life back into my old CDs. Bliss.

It dawned on me that while 90 minutes of Breathing Room is great if life is complicated and it feels like everything needs attention all at once, but sometimes there's just one decision or issue that's going round and round in your head that needs room to breathe, so I'm offering 30 minutes now too. So for those that maybe weren't sure about commiting to 90 minutes, or knowing they didn't need 90 minutes, there's now an option that meets them where they are.

If the elf could visit every single night my children would love it. As it is the elves visit them, when they're with me, a lot more than most households. So it was no surprise that one of them made an appearance recently, yes before it's even been Halloween. Then a halloween themed elf seems to have joined in the fun too.