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Finished reading: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir was great fun. We should have more enthusiastic high school science teachers as heros in our stories📚

Well, guess I had a good sleep! Today is a rest day. So, peak performance includes sitting around and catching up on some TV 😀

Apple Watch screenshot showing my Readiness to Train score increasing rapidly overnight to 10/10

🎶 After a last scrobble on Dec 4 2007, I’ve resurrected my Last FM account and connected it to the Albums app. This should encourage me to listen to more complete albums, while also tracking what I’m listening to. I’ll keep using the Apple Music app for those “in between moments” when I don’t have an album queued up

📺 Season 1 of The Peripheral is good. I remember enjoying the book, but not enough of the details to worry about spoilers or notice any changes made in the show

What I think about when I say goodbye to my beloved dying pet

But it was still deeply upsetting. My eyes started to water just writing about it. The good death of a beloved animal who has led a good life is both sad and OK. The inescapability of mortality means we have to accept it but we don’t have to feel good about it.

Reading this brought back memories of our prior black lab, Ceiligh, and our decision to euthanize her once she was diagnosed with significant and incurable cancer.

In addition to everything described in this essay, two other factors made this a very difficult decision:

  1. We made the choice on her behalf. Of course, we made the choice to reduce her suffering, but it was still an active choice for which we were accountable.
  2. Our kids were young enough to not have experienced much loss yet, while also old enough to understand what was happening. Explaining to them why this was the best outcome was difficult.

We valued Ceiligh’s role in our family and welcomed her predecesor, Lucy, knowing that the choice might arise again, while also knowing how much she would enrich our lives.

Our black lab, Ceiligh, later in life

Finished reading: The Biggest Ideas in the Universe by Sean Carroll. I really appreciated this book. Starting from high school math, Carroll leads you through 200 crisp and entertaining pages to actually show you how to derive Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. A nice middle ground between the analogies of popular science books and the intense detail of a text book. I’m looking forward to the next book in the series. 📚