I used to drink the first cup of the morning while doing something else — reading mail, tidying, planning the day in my head. The coffee went down without being tasted, and by the second cup I had already lost the morning.
The fix was not discipline. It was moving the chair. It now faces a window and nothing else, and there is no table beside it big enough for a laptop. The first cup takes eleven minutes. I know because I timed it once, out of suspicion, and have not needed to since.
On repairing a bicycle badly
The rear wheel had a wobble I could not true, and I spent two evenings making it worse. The spokes were not the problem. The rim had a flat spot from a kerb I hit in spring and had forgotten about entirely.
What I took from it: when an adjustment makes things worse in both directions, you are adjusting the wrong thing. I now write the date on a strip of tape inside the rim whenever something hits it hard. Memory is a poor maintenance log.
Notes that survive
Most of what I wrote down last year is gone — not deleted, just unfindable, scattered across three apps and a drawer. The notes that survived had one thing in common: they were written in one place, by hand, with the date at the top.
There is nothing clever about it. The system that survives is the boring one you can still use when tired.
Rain, and the small roof
I built a shelter over the back step out of four boards and some tar paper. It is ugly and slightly crooked and it has changed the house more than anything else I have done this year, because now the door can stay open when it rains.
Small structural things beat large decorative ones. I keep learning this and keep forgetting it.