Did a three day 1000s of Cats tour of Kyushu last weekend. I had two ways to get a blog post up and four ways to get thoughts out of my mind. I didn't use any of them barely at all. I was so in the moment doing the shows and looking around that documenting didn't cross my mind. Besides the work tasks I had to do, I didn't do most of my daily routine things. Stuff like morning writing and the like.

I got back at it once I got home but kind of interesting everything went out the window for a couple days. I thought I would get a lot of writing done on the Shinkansen but I was traveling with someone. Too much looking out the window and talking about the upcoming adventures.

We have another tour like this one coming up in November so I am trying to come up with a strategy. My mind keeps arriving at dictating micro thoughts with the watch and then combining them at the end of the day if I don't have morning writing time. At least it is something rather than a three day streak gap.

It also makes me curious if I should make the medium I use for morning writing randomized. The choices would be paper (then scanned), watch (voice dictation), phone (typing on small keyboard), iPad (writing with apple pencil), and laptop (typical keyboard). Probably a good idea to keep my skills up with all of them at a steady pace.

Gonna go set that up and see how it goes.

Lately I've been obsessed with seeing how small of a device I can get a thing done on and then doing it on the smallest device. The thing that prompted me to do this is all of the old radio shows I listen to. They dreamed of being able to do the things on a watch in the 1930s. There are comics and radio shows from then that can back this up.

So for them I've been trying to get as many tasks to watch level as possible. It's fun. It's a great way to dig into the device and see what it can do. Searching for answers leads to rabbit holes where I find the things I didn't think of. If a thing can't be done on the watch, it gets bumped to phone then iPad/laptop.

There is a point to this besides having fun and learning the devices. Sometimes you are stuck somewhere. I always have paper/writing device. I always have the watch. I always have the phone. With the larger screens, it is between sometimes and never. Being able to chop through little tasks when I have energy to burn because there is a typhoon outside rules. So if I can shift the little things I can do to "watch and up" level or "phone and up" then I have some things to do.

I have noticed some things are easy to get myself to do on the watch and some take a lot of willpower. Listening to podcasts and music from it for example. At the beginning it was a lot quicker to pick up the phone or turn on sound from the laptop. That's just because I am not pro at the watch yet. Also the idea of listening to something on a tiny speaker when there is a little bigger speaker close was a thing. Do I really need to listen to someone talking about tech in full lush stereo all the time though?

Getting thoughts out of the head and into a list rules on the watch. With the new os update, the Notes app is so nice to have. For as much as I like Shortcuts, I need to revisit them on the watch. They were clunky at best for me earlier but I bet that is sorted out.

We have cracked the code on growing herbs on our veranda. Basil was no problem, and we can't keep up with our plants. Dill, on the other hand, was a struggle. It took a bunch of A/B testing to find the spot it likes. Once we found it, the plants went into overdrive. There was a perfect spot where it gets a morning dose of sun, then spends the rest of the day in the shade.

Dill is pretty expensive at our local supermarkets, so this rules. A little fresh dill on simple food wakes everything up. The same goes for a couple of basil leaves. Simple accents on simple food rule.

I am trying to apply this "perfect light" light plant lesson to my Reminders app and task system. I had sections set up by context (personal, work, band, etc.), and things weren't quite getting done smoothly. Tasks weren't getting the right light.

I changed the sections to what device I am on, and things went turbo. My devices are watch, phone, laptop, drums, home, and outside. Home and outside are a little bit more loose than the other, but they work for me.

This setup works for me because @watch clears out the sand-sized tasks. Then @phone clears out the gravel-sized ones. When I get to @laptop, the rock-sized tasks are more visible.

Is the sorting of tasks into where they can be done tedious? Yes, but I use sorting and tagging to review the task. Tags are my old context (personal, work, band, etc.). The tags are emojis, which make them really easy to spot.

New moon is the beginning of the cycle, so that means planning for the next four weeks. There are a few areas that I need to get started on, so this is the perfect time to ruminate on them.

First is a need to get back to making things for 1000s of cats as opposed to the last couple of months. I was in admin mode since July. It feels like a lot of the business side of the band has a system now. There was a lot of figuring out how to do things due to rogue waves. I need to make things, whether it is free digital downloads, podcasts, ringtones, or whatever.

The second thing that is going to start is the website. It is currently using static HTML files with some JSON files for the shows. We need to switch the site to Drupal for a few reasons. One being that I would like to communicate with our mailing list. I've looked into all the services, and our list is approaching the size where we'd have to pay a monthly fee to send out emails.

Another reason for going with a CMS is that we can edit and add to the site at rehearsals, commuting, and shows. Do band stuff while in band mode. Use all that waiting-around time purposely. Also, I can set things up so that everyone can update content. Currently, only I can, and it isn't fair. No one wants to ask someone else if things can get updated.

Yet another reason to do this is getting everything into one spot. We have so much info spread out over tons of apps, folders, and files. We need a spot that is where everything is and is accessible and editable by everyone. Fun to plan but feel the need to convince myself this is a good move.

My thinking has shifted a lot over the past month. That trip to the post office was really jarring for me. It was like all the news I was seeing from the US was suddenly in my face. Being across the ocean, I have the luxury of turning on or tuning out the barrage of news. Being told that I can't send our stuff to a place and being from the place made things very real. Then it got me ruminating on what this all actually means. As I zoomed out levels higher and higher, I could really start to see what is really happening.

Not being able to ship small things to the US isn't about economy. It is about cutting off people from their homelands. It is about messing with people’s interests and hobbies. It's about unworldly people bothering worldly people. Cutting people's ties to the globe. Ruining relationships. Choking scenes like music and art.

It is very discouraging and energy-draining. That is probably their aim. Make everyone so tired that they just give up. I was drained for about two weeks for sure. I am not drained anymore, though. We figured out how to flow around this problem. That will be true for any other problem set in front of us.

Don't let them drain your energy.