Through Charlie Gorichanaz’s Eyes
Today marks my 38th birthday. We’re long past the days I could confidently say my age without thinking about it. How time flies! Anyway, I spent the day out running in the San Leandro Watershed. This is Run No. 3 on my super fast ramp up from not running at all to attempting the Burning Man Ultramarathon in three months. I did 6 miles 12 days ago, then 10 miles a week ago, and was aiming for 14 today. Due to confusion around which trails are closed to the public, I made some modifications, but it worked out at 15.8 miles. The only other problem was I expected overcast skies but got completely sunny instead, and I ran out of my 1.7 L of water in the heat. Thankfully it was toward the end!
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In an effort to find a balance between my personal daily note taking and the blogging I used to do, I’m trying something different: a brief summary of the past month along with a selection of photos. In theory I may retroactively make some of these for the prior months, but we’ll start with May 2026!
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Yesterday I passed a huge personal milestone: shadowing a medical examiner. This may seem to come out of nowhere, as I’ve thus far barely mentioned my career plans after writing of the culmination of my time at Fitbit and Google. But my gears started turning in late 2024 after my Japan and Vietnam trip. Long story short, I’ve been taking classes for the last year and a half and have thus had very little time to write!
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My Duolingo renewal date is this month. I used to love Duolingo, but I have gotten so tired of how they completely screwed up my progress on the Mandarin course several times that I now canceled my subscription. I will probably keep doing a minimal one lesson a day for now, but am close to ditching it entirely.
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My last living grandparent passed away in September at age 87. I have thus traveled back home and made my first visit to Oconto in northern Wisconsin in more than a decade. It was bittersweet and surreal to meet so many family members I have not been among since half my life ago, when I last saw Grandma.
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September went quickly. I got sucked into my new classes, of which I am taking four: Second semester organic chemistry, first and second semesters of physics and physiology. It’s already intense. But over in the garden, some of the squash are starting to be fully developed. Most exciting, I have tomatoes! But they are very small!
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In August I started to get some mature cucumbers and a few beans and zucchini, but not much else. I upgraded the tomatoes from 5 to 7 gallon buckets and added cages in that process using 4 inch square wire fencing.
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July is when most of the squash started growing well, and I realized I planted way too much too close together. I also started getting powdery mildew on the pumpkins and aphids on the kale.
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In June the potatoes and butternut and acorn squash really started to take off. Everything else I transplanted barely grew at all. I started to consider if I should plant fresh seed to avoid transplant shock.
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