A breather week between two work trips, slow-walked around Juniper’s spring break, with three days in Asheville to see what a year of recovery looks like.

Shipped

Not much, and that was the point. Juniper’s spring break lined up with an exhausted post-San Carlos me, so I took one workday off entirely and slow-walked the rest. Long lunches, catching up on appointments, the kind of week that exists mostly to make the next week possible. Next week I’m off to Austin doing essentially the same kind of work we did in San Carlos — UI improvements, bug fixes, small things to have something to show off when we get there. I did just enough this week to make sure I’d have something to show.

Read

Started Starter Villain by John Scalzi. Just enough pages in to know it’s going to be a fun ride. Exactly the palate cleanser I was looking for after Tchaikovsky.

Cooked

We didn’t eat anything fancy in Asheville, but we ate well. A tasty Indian street food place downtown, great barbecue on the way out of town, and one morning we stopped at Vortex Doughnuts, an Asheville staple, for delicious doughnuts and coffee. That last one soured a few days later when news broke that the owners had shut the place down abruptly without paying their employees.

Noticed

Spring has sprung. It’s been years since I had a garden, much less a farm, but I still have to fight off the urge to drop everything I’m doing and play in the dirt this time of year. Maybe next year the time will be right to revamp the little bed we have, or better yet, finally put in the raised beds we’ve talked about since buying the place.

The Artemis 2 moon mission launched last week while I was sitting in a conference room in San Carlos. Everyone there was so focused on our own mission that my boss didn’t even know there was a moon mission going on. I’m a big believer in a future where humanity expands cooperatively beyond our planet, and even though this is a small step in that direction, it’s exciting all the same.

Thinking About

Impermanence, adaptation, and determination.

Saturday we drove the two and a half hours up to Asheville for a three-day mini-vacation — a cheap hotel room downtown and three days of just exploring. It was our first time back since Hurricane Helene, and Juniper hadn’t really seen the town from the perspective of a young adult before. Some of our most beloved places were destroyed in the storm and the aftermath. The River Arts District is one of my favorite places anywhere, and it was devastated. A year later there are still collapsed buildings, vehicles half-emerged from mud, all kinds of remnants and evidence of what happened. Sobering to walk through.

But it was also wonderful to see the recovery work. Artists who, if not fully recovered, have at least been able to dig out their studios, rebuild, recover artwork they’d made and clean it up. The process has begun. Among the ruins were artisans and craftspeople still creating, often using the destruction itself as material and inspiration.

I’m not a frequent visitor to Asheville by any means, but there’s a deep cultural connection between Athens and Asheville, and many people I know well split their time between the two. There’s something about the people and the place that amplifies the creative work produced there. Seeing so much of it destroyed, and coming back a year later to see still so much destruction, was a lot for my soul to take in. The things we love, the things we create, will inevitably get destroyed. Seeing the perseverance of the people who had to witness that destruction firsthand is inspiring.

What’s Next

My first trip to the Natera offices in Austin. Looking forward to meeting more of the team in person and seeing what a different corner of this organization feels like.

Vibe Check

A breather of a week, recovering from California and gearing up for Texas, while enjoying spring break and the small luxury of nobody having to get up early for school.