I just did a bad thing*

but also successfully climbed a large scary rock

Shorter one this time!

☠️ “So how’s the book going?”

The book’s fine, honestly. The past two weeks were outlining and prepping the next part, and the next three-ish weeks will likely be sprinting again on writing it.

A few days ago, though, disaster struck: I realized, with a jolt of horror, that I had lost a bunch of my old Signal messages. Yup, I bought a new phone, wiped my old one, and mailed it in for trade-in (you know, responsible recycling and all that), but had forgotten to move the locally stored archive of my Signal messages over to the new phone first. Poof! Gone. A reporter’s nightmare, of my own making.

i am the bird

It’s not all disaster. I have copies of my more recent messages on the desktop Signal app (though they are impossible to export easily — lmk if you know how??), and when people had sent me important docs on Signal I usually saved them elsewhere (thank you past Ellen).

But it was a pretty brutal loss**, mostly because of how utterly avoidable it was. I am trying to comfort myself with a few thoughts:

1. everything in life is transient

2. by baring my soul here, maybe someone else will avoid the same dumb fate***

3. also, I tried lying down on the rug and yelling up at the ceiling, and that helped a little bit too.

* for a good song about bad things, go here

** I’ve checked, and I’m 99% sure there’s no way to salvage this, but if you have an expert suggestion, lmk. And of course, this is specifically how Signal is designed to work, so it’s not that surprising that there’s no recourse.

*** also a scenario that happens if your phone gets lost/stolen/destroyed, alas

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✅ Review it with Huet: Half Dome

I spend many of my waking hours contorted over my laptop screen like a witch stirring her glowing cauldron, but everyone also says you should take breaks, so my mom and sisters and I recently climbed Half Dome in Yosemite.

I’m afraid of heights (a very practical fear if you ask me). I climbed Half Dome when I was 16 and again maybe 5 years ago. When I was 16, I cried the whole way down. Can you blame me? This is the view.

source. i regret to inform you that the rock face underneath the cable path is noticeably slippery from the years of hiking traffic

Surprisingly, the next time I climbed it, I felt fine (and walked down the cables forward). This time, I was terrified again and inched down backward. No tears, but a medium amount of mortal panic. I was so desperately looking for a sign of comfort that when a nearby crow cawed at me I took it as an omen that I would survive. Thank you crow.

Here’s my review: Worth doing once, but otherwise overrated. (Also apparently misnamed: about 80% of the dome remained after the glacier, not half. Boo hiss!)

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thanks for reading / see you next time / here’s a picture that could be from anywhere but you’ll have to trust me on this one

i’m blinking