April 18, 2026. Slept like a baby. Woke up to 34 degrees at 7:30am, jumped out of bed to pee, put on my onesie, turned on the heater, and climbed back under the covers. That's the cold morning routine. After a bit I climbed out and made my coffee with heavy cream and ghee. Delicious.
Another windy day. Not my favorite, but it's good for the indoor task list. Everybody tends to hunker down in their rigs when the wind picks up. Camp looks like a ghost town on days like this. It's the kind of day I got my kite for, but my last experience has given me pause. It was a fairly high wind day in Kingman. I put the kite up with my new reel, well-engineered, robust. It went way out, really high, just sitting there in the sky. Then out of nowhere it did a nose dive from the top of the sky all the way straight down into the ground. I wound it back up and sent it up again. Same thing. The terrain in Kingman was forgiving, just low scrub brush. Here there are trees and rugged terrain and it feels much riskier. I think my new reel has surpassed my kite's capabilities. I don't want to think that, but I probably need a different kite.
My stay here is sailing by. I love it here. I'm getting better at managing the balance between social interaction and my projects, but it's still a challenge. My best time is early morning, before anyone is moving. I can have what feels like a full day of work done by 10 or 11am if I get up early enough. Yesterday we went on a field trip to a nearby ghost town at 10:30. Got back around 1:30. I planned on spending the afternoon at my computer, but friends kept swinging by. I changed a friend's transmission fluid. Consulted on an e-bike purchase. A new friend brought over a high-end FPV drone you fly with VR goggles and a Wii stick. Some dear friends came by just to chat. I love all of it. But I've learned I have to create an environment that supports deep work or I'll say yes to everything else. I've gotten better at it. And I know that pretty soon I'll be back on my own and will think of all these interactions fondly. For now I joyfully accept the balance, while continuing to work on it.
Two packages I'd been waiting on came back undeliverable. Two things I was excited about. I don't know where I'll be after this, so I don't know when I'll next be in a position to receive anything. That's just one of the costs of doing business out here.
The electrical setup has been working great. Solar is consistently giving me more power than I need. I set Starlink to shut off automatically at midnight, which has helped a lot. My sleep is more regulated now, largely due to the keto, so the midnight cutoff doesn't bother me. I've been asleep by 11 most nights. I'll probably still downgrade to the Starlink Mini eventually since it uses a third of the electricity, but I'm not in a hurry.
The freezer continues to change everything. Twenty-five pounds of frozen meat in the van and no ongoing undercurrent of concern about how much I have left. There's plenty.
I'd planned to skip the evening campfire to get some work in, but my friend Slapshot stopped by to say it was his last night. I didn't want to miss it. So I went, and ended up on the OneWheel again, cruising the paths in the dark. It's satisfying in a way that's hard to describe. You don't feel the rocks and terrain even though you can see yourself floating over them. It's like riding a soft cushion. Meditative and pleasing. I can't get enough of it.
I've been pretty obsessed with Claude Code for the past few months. Yesterday I got a new terminal app called Ghostty and had Claude Code make me a custom theme. That's where my mind wants to go all day. I'm still figuring out how much to lean into that versus resist it. Interestingly, the lower Claude plan that throttles my usage has turned out to be better for me than Claude Max. The limits are actually useful. They make me more deliberate.