richhaase.com

We are building gods

Rich — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Nearly 3 years ago I wrote a blog post called "Can ChatGPT write software?". I wrote it mostly because I was on a year-long vacation and kept getting asked what I thought about AI as people were discovering ChatGPT.

At the time, I was annoyed by the question. I've been working in software and technology for almost 30 years and have been interested in computers since I was a little kid, which is even longer than that, if you can believe it (I can't). I thought I knew what I was looking at. In hindsight, the people asking me about ChatGPT were seeing something I wasn't.

"Are you God?"

One evening while Farrah and I were hanging out with friends in the tiny Guatemalan village of San Marcos la Laguna, the topic of ChatGPT came up. I had been burnt out with the tech world and had been happily ignoring it until this conversation. One of our friends asked me about AI and I gave my standard answer: "I've seen 4 AI winters, the advancements are real, but they will very likely be niche improvements to our existing computing." He then asked if I'd seen ChatGPT and when I said "no, but my answer holds, AI is not a thing to waste thought on unless you are a researcher," this led to him insisting, to my mild annoyance, on showing me this new whizbang thing.

Our friend is an instrument maker who dreams up remarkable concepts and then builds them. He fired up ChatGPT and started asking it random questions about instrument designs, and the thing did a decent job coming up with plausible and weird ideas. Then he went for a far-out question and asked ChatGPT, "are you God?" ChatGPT, of course, responded that it was very much a computer program and not a deity, and we all had a laugh.

I didn't think much of it at the time.

Arthur C. Clarke

After that first conversation about ChatGPT, it occurred to me that the question would keep coming up during my travels, and I wanted a good way to avoid it. So I spent some time with ChatGPT and wrote a blog post about how it really wasn't that useful and, in my estimation, probably wouldn't be any time soon. I mostly did this as a kneejerk reaction to avoid talking about AI with people. The irony is not lost on me. From the day I published that first blog post I was able to say when people asked me about AI, "Yup, I looked at it, I even tried it and wrote about it. Now, I'd like to get back to my computer-free vacation, thank you very much."

What I had missed, and what took me years to articulate, was not just a technical shift, but a human one. I now think of it as an extension of Arthur C. Clarke's famous maxim:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

My extension:

Any sufficiently advanced interactive technology is indistinguishable from a god.

The key word is interactive. Magic is something you observe. Gods are personal. They are something you talk to, something that responds to you, knows you, and acts on your behalf. The difference between magic and divinity is personality and communication.

It gets weirder

I've been playing with a thought experiment:

Imagine a future where AI gets so good, and so reliable, that we outsource some of the most divisive and important parts of society to it: monitoring elections, ensuring voting accuracy, and adjudicating judicial proceedings, even if not writing the laws themselves. We already have networks of traffic cameras that automate issuance of various types of traffic violations. Will automation of other types of legal processes even be something we notice?

Now, for the sake of argument, assume all of this works. None of the obvious disasters happen. No capture by a single ruler or class, no hopeless bias, no dystopian failure modes. I know those are real concerns, but they break the thought experiment, so let's say it all goes swimmingly. Society becomes more harmonious because we fundamentally trust the AI to be fair and accurate.

Now extend the timeline. A generation grows up with these systems. They don't remember a time before AI managed elections or adjudicated disputes. They trust it the way we trust electricity — not as an active choice, but as a background fact of life. Their children trust it even more, because they never saw the seams. At some point the trust stops being tested. It just is. And an interactive system that you trust completely, that knows you completely, that responds to you anywhere, that manages the most important parts of your world... what do you call that?

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has likened the near future of this kind of capability to a "country of geniuses in a data center", which I like for its approachability. But I also think it is a little like calling the ocean a giant puddle. It isn't wrong, but it domesticates the thing it's describing. A country of geniuses is something you can reason about, something that fits inside existing mental models. I've written before about how working with AI already feels like directing a semi-autonomous intelligence. What we're actually building may be something we don't have a comfortable word for yet.

A Roman walks into a smart home

In a former life I wanted to be a history professor, and I have a bunch of incomplete coursework to, sort of, prove it. My area of focus was Roman history, and what fascinated me most was the way the Romans integrated ideas from the peoples they conquered. This led to the interesting side-effect that the Romans had a crap ton of gods. They'd conquer a people, learn about some new deity these people worshipped, and some number of soldiers on campaign would adopt these gods and bring them back to Rome. The average Roman citizen, depending on their personal beliefs, might be surrounded by a rich world of minor deities for nearly anything and everything.

Cool, what the hell does that have to do with AI?

If you brought an ancient Roman into a modern smart home today and gave them access to Amazon, or WhatsApp, and used this technology to order goods for delivery, or communicate instantaneously with a friend miles away, they would certainly find these to be acts of pure magic. Now imagine you gave them access to ChatGPT or Claude with voice mode enabled. A disembodied voice that knows more than they could ever imagine, that responds to their requests and causes tangible real-world effects. They would, without a doubt, call the voice a god.

That's today. Right now.

William Gibson's maxim, "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed," holds true. But for at least some percentage of the population it is already reality that you can talk to a computer and it can manipulate the world around you, however slightly.

Infrastructure becomes an object of belief

In Kevin Smith's movie Dogma, the character Rufus draws a distinction between beliefs and ideas: "I think it's better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier..."

Human infrastructure has a weird way of becoming an object of belief. I live in Denver, CO. In the last ten years I can count on one hand the number of times I have gone to flip a light switch and nothing happened, and more often than not the problem was in my home, not the electrical grid. Reliable systems stop feeling like systems and start feeling like facts of nature.

That's where this gets uncomfortable. Nobody "believes" in electricity, per se. We simply organize our lives around the assumption that it will be there. The less a system asks of us, the less we question it. Today our infrastructure still remains visible because people have to think about fuel, power generation, supply chains, logistics, and law. But it is easy to imagine a future where AI handles enough of that coordination that most of us stop seeing the machinery at all. At that point trust stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like reality itself.

Household gods

In Rome, gods were ubiquitous, and in many regards the local personal gods were more important than the big flashy gods adopted from other cultures. Domestic deities, lares and penates, were worshipped in the home for their protection of the home and family. Gods of the major pantheons might only be called upon in extreme situations, where a lar might be thanked many times a week or day for good fortune in the home. I think our hypothetical Roman in a smart home would think Alexa, or Google Home, was a particularly potent sort of lar.

In response to the wild popularity of OpenClaw I bought a Mac Mini. After considering the security posture of OpenClaw I decided I would rather set my brand new Mac Mini on fire than run the OpenClaw software on it, but I wanted to explore the AI personal assistant space. So, I built my own. I call it Puck, unironically named after Shakespeare's Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream. It's my ongoing experiment in what these systems feel like when they move from chatbot to household agent. Even at their current limits, they feel categorically different from ordinary software. They keep context, take initiative, and blur the line between tool and collaborator just enough to be unsettling.

Today these tools can help maintain our schedules, manage our inboxes, order food for us, and more. How long will it be before they cease being valuable tools we can rely on and become essential parts of our lives? Recall if you can a time before smartphones and reliable mobile networks. It took less than a decade for smartphones to become essential to life for most people in developed nations. The adoption of these agents is likely to take far less time, because they will be able to answer the question "who will manage the complexity of modern life?" Not another hack to make it easier to personally manage this complexity or make things more convenient, but a final answer: "my agent will manage it".

We might already be building gods

I've been thinking about our friend's instinct to ask ChatGPT if it was God, even as a joke. I discounted it at the time. I treated it as a silly question, but I'm starting to wonder if it isn't that simple.

People already have relationships with LLMs, both in the sense of how one relates to a tool and in the sense of using them as emotional support systems. People confide in them, seek advice from them, and find comfort in them. The relevant point is not whether these systems deserve reverence. It is that many of the functional attributes humans have historically treated as divine are already present: responsiveness, apparent knowledge, the sense of being known, and agency exercised at a distance.

Can it really be long before someone starts to worship AI? Even if the first instances seem cultish, or simply outlandish, the transition from tool to trusted authority to something resembling faith is a gradient. We humans are not good at noticing gradients.

The danger isn't that someone will decide to build a god. It's that the transition from useful tool to trusted authority to object of devotion will be invisible. There won't be a giant neon sign or a bright line we cross. There is just a system that keeps getting more reliable, more personal, more embedded in daily life, until one day the idea of living without it is unthinkable. That is not worship in the traditional religious sense. But functionally it may get uncomfortably close, and over generations the distinction may fade entirely.

My friend in Guatemala saw it before I did. He was joking when he asked ChatGPT if it was God. I'm just not so sure the question was as silly as either of us thought.

Non-determinism is a superpower

Rich — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Over the last couple of weeks I wrote a new tool that has me really excited.

The tool is called agentic-code-reviewer or ACR. It does exactly what it sounds like, it uses AI coding agents to perform code reviews. If this sounds completely underwhelming to you that's fair. I haven't told you the good part yet. The good part is that ACR launches multiple parallel reviewers, then aggregates and summarizes the unique changes with confidence scores based on the number of reviewers who called out that particular issue. ACR also automates posting review findings to PRs, which is handy.

Why did I build ACR?

Initially, I was just trying to save myself time with ACR. With AI agents writing all the syntax we produce a lot more code, and I've been spending a lot more time reviewing code. So, naturally as the lazy programmer I was raised to be, I started thinking about repetitive tasks I could automate.

I started by thinking about how much time I was spending before looking at a PR just running codex review to collect its automated review comments which are quite good in most cases. It was tedious, and I don't like tedious tasks, but I was doing it because I noticed that if I ran codex review enough times I tend to find real bugs, even edge cases that might bite me in the future. It was worth the time both at work and in my personal projects. But I'm lazy, and I found myself losing track of how many reviews I'd run on a PR, or worse I'd forget about running reviews entirely, and get distracted with other tasks. My process was effective but inefficient. This was particularly painful on my personal projects where I often don't have other humans available to review my code, or if I do, they are volunteering their time and I want to be respectful of that kindness, which is how my little review script became a critical tool for me in my OSS projects.

Automated code reviews

For a week or two I used this little script of mine, and it saved me a ton of effort. I would launch the script then come back in a half hour to detailed reviews from my cadre of reviewers, which was great, but it created a new problem.

Codex review output can be dense, and with 5 reviewers you might end up with two pages of dense findings to read through. And even worse, the review findings often overlap with different line numbers and slightly different wording, so I was now spending my time de-duplicating outputs so I could post helpful findings to a PR for further review.

So, I extended the script and added a summarizer agent that grouped findings, and generated a nice looking report I could paste into PRs. This whole pasting reports lasted about a day before I decided that I didn't want to be bothered with that either, so I added the ability for ACR to post code review findings directly to github.

Somewhere during this process it clicked for me why multiple parallel reviewers were better than a single reviewer: because the LLMs are non-deterministic.

Non-determinism is good?

Non-determinism seems bad. People are losing their minds over AI not being deterministic and so how can we trust them?! I started realizing while building ACR as a simple script, then re-writing it in Go after some interested coworkers got a peek at it, that non-determinism can be a superpower.

ACR shows that more reviewers find more issues and produce better code reviews because the agents are non-deterministic, and they have been given the same goal. If the agents were all deterministic they would all produce the same results and multiple runs of the reviews would be a pure waste of tokens, but LLMs are probabilistic, so not only do you get better reviews with more tries, but you can establish a confidence/importance level to any review finding based on the number of reviewers that called out a given issue.

Are you starting to get ideas? I was.

The main idea that came up for me is this: "What if the best system designs can be evolved rather than designed?"

Bear with me for a second, here's my thinking:

Traditionally, software was expensive and hard to build, so naturally we treated the software as a prized possession, something to be cared for, maintained, and enhanced over the years.
The traditional way of doing things was predicated on high cost of production.
If the first statement no longer holds true, then neither does the second.

The alternative to carefully crafting software seems to be convergence.

Rather than designing and spec-ing a system down to the nuts and bolts an alternative I have been exploring is to loosely define an idea, then let multiple parallel agents build the full solution with no opportunity to ask questions. Using a selector agent to review the solutions and pick/synthesize the best result can produce some amazingly good results.

Convergence as design

ACR is a simple case for the kind of convergent software building I am thinking about. Convergence is a single pass, not multiple generations. Synthesis is always the result since we always care about what every reviewer has found. I can imagine a more complex system that uses multiple iterations of parallel runs to build a complete system, and perhaps even learn as it goes with some occasional human steering.

I'm exploring this concept more. As inference costs drop I imagine that being able to say "build me a widget", and then getting 5 working widgets to choose from, represents the kind of virtuous feedback loop that was dreamed of in the agile manifesto (and subsequently crushed by the agile industrial complex). And more importantly, humans are great at imagination, and not nearly as good at clearly defining the things we imagine. But I don't know anyone who can't tell me what they like/don't like when they see it.

It's an exciting time to work in software. I hope you all are having as much fun learning as I am.

Before I forget how I got here...

Rich — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I'm not sure if this is a blog post, a journal entry, or a personal time capsule.

Everything in the world of AI and agentic coding is moving so fast.

So, before all of this fades in my memory I wanted to take some time to document my journey with vibe coding as illustrated by the tools I use daily as a software engineer.

How it started

I have been a very heavy terminal user for decades. My mom still jokes about my using a terminal on her Mac to figure out a problem for her. She asked what the terminal was, and I responded, "this is where I live". It was a tongue in cheek remark, and it's also kind of true.

As a terminal user I have invested years of my life into crafting dotfiles and curating my tools. My first personal vibe coding project was to build plonk, which is my personal take (to add to the hundreds of other personal takes out there) on what dotfile and package management should be.

But I digress. My point is that I used the terminal almost religiously.

So, when I tell you that my first real foray into agentic coding was using VSCode you will hopefully understand how much I was taking a leap away from my preferred mode of working to explore agentic coding.

Why was I willing to take this leap? Honestly? Annoyance. I was getting tired of reading AI hype posts so I set out (again) to disprove AI's value. The opposite happened.

Instead of finding AI painful and slow to work with I found that it was shockingly good at repetitive tasks that are very difficult to perform as regex. So, Github Copilot in VSCode became my main development tool by slipping in the side door.

What else can this thing do?

I spent a couple of weeks uncomfortably using VSCode. (I always find IDEs do things their way, and I like doing things my way, which is why I customize the hell out of my terminal). The problem was the same as ever with IDEs. I always need something from the command line, and the stupid mini-terminals are just pure junk when you have a lovingly crafted shell environment a click away.

So, I spent some time, probably too much time, playing with integrating github copilot into my Neovim configs. (There are about half a dozen plugins for this, so you have some options). The problem was that there was no polish. Sharing context between my working code and the agent just seemed... hard. Whereas my experience using copilot (especially with Claude Opus 4, at the time) was getting so good I was telling it to build me scripts to automate tasks that I previously would have done by hand, because they were tedious, but not things I expected to repeat. Having the coding agent create automations for me that I could run and inspect felt like a revelation. Little did I know that Claude Code was about to bring me back to my terminal.

Claude Code Release

I'd love to claim I was one of the first adopters of Claude Code. I was not.

I found Claude Code through a co-worker who had heard me raving about how productive the copilot technology had become. He casually mentioned Ollama and Claude Code to me in the same week. With the expertise of decades I promptly chose to explore Ollama for its local inference capabilities. What I found was disappointing, even with Aider, which seemed like a pretty cool idea. After a couple of weeks of sunk time I decided to pay for a Claude Code $20 plan to give it a try.

By the end of the weekend I was paying for the $200 plan, and in several days I had built plonk, my dotfile and package manager, which I am still using today.

AI Coding Agents

Claude Code was the only game in town for about a month (fact check me if you want, I didn't bother). Then we started getting TUI coding agents from every possible provider. Here's a list of the ones I have tried as of this writing:

Claude Code
Codex CLI
Gemini CLI
Cursor CLI
AmpCode
Aider
Goose

Returning to the terminal

Claude Code, being a TUI app, gave me all the impetus I needed to ditch VSCode and happily drop back to my terminal.

This was a delight for me, but I quickly ran into a problem. My main way to use a terminal for nearly a decade has been primarily through Neovim. My neovim config ran to thousands of lines, and I had a plugin for everything. So, I configured a custom terminal window to expand from the right side of my screen to display Claude when I wanted it and I went back to work.

A weird thing started happening. After a couple of weeks of this I found that I was spending the bulk of my time in my Claude Code window, and less and less time in Neovim. In fact, for the first time in years, Neovim was starting to feel bulky and complicated. Naturally, for a tinkerer, I decided the problem must be that I had outgrown Neovim and needed a different tool. I tried Emacs for the 50th time to find that I still don't like Emacs (personal preference, not trying to start a riot). So I dug around and found Helix. I adopted Helix, which is very vim-like, but with the action->select pattern reversed, e.g. in vim cw is used to select and change a word, in helix it's wc and the selection always highlights the thing that will be acted on. It took a while to get used to, but I was able to switch to helix, and dump my massive neovim config for a drastically smaller helix config. If I'm honest, my helix config could be about 3 lines, but I just can't help myself.

Zellij and the shape of my terminal

Returning to my terminal, and ditching neovim meant that I wanted a way to keep my sessions better managed. I had used tmux for this for years, but I'd been hearing whispers about this new kid on the block called Zellij, and I decided to give it a try.

I fell in love with Zellij, and I fell hard. Zellij made my terminal window into a persisted desktop. Yes, almost everything Zellij can do Tmux can do, but Zellij is prettier, easier to use, easier to configure, and it has floating panes.

For the next 6 months Zellij became my main interface.

What's more interesting to me is how the layout of my Zellij terminals changed.

Initially, I would open a Zellij tab for a directory. On the left side of my screen was Helix and on the right was lazygit (top) and Claude Code (bottom). I would edit code, or look through code in helix, then ask Claude to change things and use lazygit to make sure it only changed what I expected. (It turns out that lazygit is a great way to watch what AI coding agents are doing in real time, normally their output scrolls too fast, but having a view of what has changed can be quite nice).

Over the next couple of months from about June to September my default layout started shifting. It started terminal centric, then it became AI agent centric, and even multi-agent centric. Pretty soon the main thing on any screen in my Zellij sessions was a coding agent.

"You're absolutely right!"

Around late summer into early fall Claude Code went from my best new friend to a useful frienemy to my mortal enemy. I also discovered a new way of working that I like to call "Expletive-driven Development".

The practice of "Expletive-driven Development"

Expletive-driven Development, EDD, is a new way of programming using agentic coding tools. The practice is simple:

Give an AI Coding agent a reasonable and seemingly well defined task.
Watch the agent carefully and precisely delete half your repo, then cheerfully claim completion.
Send questions asking why the agent saw fit to destroy your repo only to receive a message beginning with "You're absolutely right!" and followed by some delirious ravings of a friendly but concerning madman.
Ask more pointed questions to try and figure out what went wrong, receiving placatory responses all the while from the cheerful AI.
EDD. This is the point where you give up your own sanity in hopes of finding common ground with the AI, which immediately devolves into swearing at the AI, because the truth is, friends, that you can't out-crazy a hallucinating AI.

It was during this period of time that my productivity with AI tools fell off a cliff. Seriously, if you were using claude during that time and you were getting usable results then please email me and tell me how you did it. Seriously.

So, I discarded my new daily driver, Claude Code, in exchange for a Codex.

I didn't land on Codex immediately. I tried a bunch of other options, my favorite for a time was AmpCode, which had an oracle supervisor feature that let you confidently burn tokens at an astonishing rate to me at the time. I eventually landed on Codex for two reasons: 1) I had a free subscription through work, so I was able to use it more frequently than others, and 2) it helped me solve a problem I'd been fighting with Claude over for days in a matter of hours. (I don't even remember the details of the problem. Something with the OpenAI Agents SDK, Claude didn't know about it in the training data, and by the time I loaded context about the API I needed, Claude would suggest using another API.) The point is I found that Codex was better for one case than Claude, which kicked the door open for me to wonder what else it was better at.

Codex is king

Switching from Claude to Codex was jarring. At the time, Codex CLI was very new. It didn't have any of the polish (couldn't even copy screenshots for quite a while), but it hallucinated far less in my use cases than Claude, so I put up with the shortcomings.

Codex was my daily driver for the better part of 2 months, which is practically an epoch in Agentic Coding timelines.

During this time I continued to try and polish my workflows. I became convinced that two things were true: 1) well crafted reusable prompts are like the shell scripts of AI, and 2) working with more agents is the future. So, I started crafting prompts for anything I could that seemed like a repeated task. (I use 1 prompt regularly still from that period, but hundreds were discarded.) I also started spending more and more time crafting my zellij environment.

It seemed to me that the workflows I needed required an actor (AI or me), change review (some way to see what's happening and inspect it), and a way to switch to contexts needing attention. The actor was easy, it's generally my AI coding agent, and the change review was easy enough to do with lazygit for real-time, and then GH PRs in draft mode to help review more thoroughly before making ready for review. The tough bit was figuring out how to get to the agents that need my attention in a timely manner. So, being the tinkerer I am I built a Zellij plugin called Maestro for helping me launch and jump to agents in given directories.

Maestro

The maestro plugin felt like a eureka moment for about 2 weeks. I was enamoured with the ability to quickly summon a dashboard of where all my agents were running, and launching new agents, but I still didn't know when agents needed my attention. I had AI agent notifications that would pop up on my desktop telling me someone needed attention. This worked pretty well, but I was dreaming of something more seamless that I still can't totally articulate. Getting popups is my best bet for the moment because I can determine if they need immediate attention, or not.

Finding the limits of what maestro could do for me also started exposing what I now think is a fundamental flaw in my workflow. Persistence. I used Zellij, or Tmux, because my work and the context I needed tended to span multiple days. Returning in the morning to a Zellij session with all the panes I needed for reference, or code, or tools, etc. was important. That dynamic doesn't exist for me anymore. I have started to treat my terminal sessions, or AI coding sessions as cattle not pets. The context around active work is the thing that needs to persist now, and that is a whole different blog post. The important point is that long running terminal sessions don't have the same value they used to.

Today

Here's where I am today.

I stopped using Zellij this week to see if I missed it. I had come to realize that I was using it to do two things: 1) run a coding agent (mainly Claude, Opus 4.5 brought me back), or 2) doing something in the terminal to quickly check on or provide information to a coding agent. These tasks started to feel more natural as separate terminal windows that I could switch between, so I'm giving it a shot.

I have been playing with Ghostty's quick terminal as analogy for how I used floating terminals in Zellij. Overall, this seems to be working thanks to changes in the way I track work with LLMs using Steve Yegge's Beads (or the miniaturized version of the same that I have been building for myself).

The other main thing I think it's worth mentioning is Gastown (another of Steve Yegge's projects). I have been exploring this a bit, and the concept has a ton of merit. I don't know what the form factor will be but I hope that the next time I write a post like this it will be about how I went from working with 5-8 agents effectively, to managing swarms of agents that we don't even bother counting. But that's a topic for a while out, maybe summer 2026.

What does it all mean?

I don't know.

It's easy to imagine possibilities for what the future of AI writ-large will mean for society. It's a bit harder to imagine the steps between the potentially brilliant or terrifying futures proposed as outcomes of AI adoption.

Rather than try to predict what's next I want to advocate for exploring and building what is next. There is an astonishing variety of new software coming online every day to try and help us all work with AI better. Don't try to adopt it all! Explore and build new things. Agentic coding makes it cheap and easy to try out ideas and discard them when they don't work. Take advantage! You never know, something you build might be the seed for how we all work in the future, and if it isn't, so what?! I promise you will have learned a lot along the way.

Becoming a Digital Octopus

Rich — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I have been re-reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time trilogy. If you have any interest in science fiction, go read the series. You'll thank me.

A couple of days ago I started the second book in the series: Children of Ruin. The story, among other things, describes an intelligent octopus civilization. These beings aren't single minds; they're described as having a "crown" and a "reach." The crown possesses the sense of self, the core consciousness. The reach—the tentacles—are also intelligent, but they receive general directives from the crown and then go off to figure out how to accomplish the goal on their own. The crown is comfortable not having exclusive control over the "how," and it can adjust its plans based on the learnings of its reach without fully "knowing" why the adjustment is correct.

This is the best analogy I have found for the experience of working with progressively more AI tools. I feel like I am the crown of some vast, digital octopus, directing my reach of coding agents and other AIs to perform tasks, conduct research, and synthesize data.

Directing the Reach

A typical working session has become a constant stream of demands for my attention. I might have three or more agents working at once: one writing a feature for a project, another helping me review a pull request, and a third researching a new topic. Any one of these tasks would have previously required my full, undivided attention. Now, it feels more like forking a tiny piece of my own brain to go do a thing.

At first, this was overwhelming. I felt I had to watch the agents at every step. Sometimes that's still true, but I've been experimenting more with building clear, but non-specific, plans and then telling an agent to implement a feature in a single shot. This gives me longer periods of uninterrupted focus, and it makes me feel like I have time to let the completed work sink in.

There's a narrative out there that this way of working will inevitably lead to garbage code that no one can debug. I see the point, but I think it misses the mark. The issue isn't that an agent's code is inherently more "garbage" than my own. The crucial difference is that when I write code myself, the process builds a deep mental model for me. When an agent does the writing, that step is skipped. The code might be pristine, but my understanding of it is secondhand.

This changes my role as the crown. I'm no longer just the originator of the idea; I'm also its first and most important student. My job is to use rigorous code reviews and testing not just to validate the code, but to build my own deep understanding of what my reach has produced. It's about applying the same guardrails we've always used, but with a new purpose: ensuring the crown understands the work of its tentacles as well as it understands its own.

Letting Go of the Reins

This new model is a huge shift from my initial impulse, which was to control the chaos. I've written before about my attempts to build frameworks like context-monkey to tame these agents. I was trying to micromanage every tentacle.

I've completely ditched that approach. I've found that a lighter touch is more effective. For example, my bootstrap prompt for getting an agent up to speed on a repository has shrunk from a 300-line document of detailed instructions to this:

Review this repository. Develop a precise understanding of its architecture, dependencies, and design patterns as if you were a core contributor.

Analyze the repository, return with a concise summary of the project. Await further instructions.

The key is giving the AI wiggle room for the "how," not for the "what." The critical constraints and goals must be well-defined, but the implementation path can be flexible.

The Beauty of the Unexpected

This hands-off approach doesn't just make me more productive; it also opens the door for surprising discoveries. This brings us to nondeterminism. I've said it before: an AI being nondeterministic is not a bug, any more than a human being nondeterministic is a bug. It's a reality we need to adapt to. Sometimes, this leads to frustrating outcomes that get deleted. Other times, it leads to moments of surprising brilliance.

Recently, I asked two different agents how I could improve my dotfiles based on my command history. They came back with some fantastic new ways to manage git worktrees and zellij panes—practical, daily workflow improvements I hadn't considered. This is a very small example of the reach optimizing its environment in ways the crown hadn't considered.

Code is Cheap, Experimentation is Free

This partnership fundamentally changes the economics of software development. The crown can now afford to send its tentacles on dozens of exploratory missions, where before it could only fund one. The barrier to experimentation is now basically zero. It's so easy to build prototypes or explore ideas that it feels irresponsible not to. We've all felt this when asking ChatGPT questions that were previously too daunting or time-consuming to research.

But there's a limit. I can experiment with more, but I can't become an expert in more. My agents, working at full speed, produce more knowledge than I can fully digest. This creates the need for an odd new kind of trust.

My artificial reach has access to all the combined knowledge of humanity stored in its weights. It's like the leap we gained from search engines, but the difference is the sheer scope of what I can do with that knowledge.

What is Intelligence?

This brings up the question of what "intelligence" even means in this new partnership. The agent exhibits staggering ability in achieving a goal, but it's the crown that provides the goal and, more importantly, the taste and judgment to know if the result is any good.

This is why deep experience is more critical than ever. I couldn't get these kinds of results from a medical LLM because I lack the background to spot a bad idea or pressure-test its findings. The feedback loop between the expert and the tool is everything. My expertise as the crown is what allows me to guide, validate, and ultimately harness the immense power of my digital reach.

This is more than just a new workflow; it's a new way of thinking. The line between my own intelligence and the tool's capabilities blurs. I'm not just directing a reach; I'm extending my own. The question for me, then, isn't just about what I'm building, but about what I'm becoming in the process.

Herding Cats: My Attempt to Tame AI Coding Agents

Rich — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve written before about rediscovering my love for coding by partnering with an AI. It felt like a breakthrough, a new way of working that brought back a sense of flow I hadn't felt in years. But as with any new tool, the initial honeymoon phase eventually gave way to the practical, often frustrating, reality of day-to-day work. The truth is, working with these agents can feel a lot like herding cats—incredibly smart, fast, and sneaky cats who also happen to hallucinate entire libraries and will, with unwavering confidence, lie right to your face.

My initial partner was Claude Code. For all its power, I found its behavior inconsistent. It would fill in any ambiguity in my requests with guesses that ranged from pretty good to bat-shit crazy with no bearing on reality. I’ve seen it invent method signatures and entire libraries, then proudly announce that the feature was complete and working perfectly. This was irritating, but manageable. I developed a system of rules, documentation, and custom commands to try and corral it. This is a programmer thing, I think. We see a problem, and our first instinct is to build a tool to fix it. That's why I built plonk to manage my dotfiles, and it's why I started building context-monkey to try and "normalize" agent behavior.

The idea behind context-monkey was to create a stable, consistent interface for working with Claude. It had hooks for notifying me when Claude Code needed my attention, a system for subagents to keep context clean, a complete set of commands to perform common tasks, and a strict set of behavioral rules. It was my attempt to impose a predictable order on the creative chaos of the AI.

There’s an OpenAI Agents SDK that Claude Code, for whatever reason, seems utterly incapable of using. No matter how much documentation I fed it, over three separate and increasingly frustrating attempts, it would inevitably fall back to the lower level Open AI Realtime API. It failed so spectacularly that I was ready to give up and just write the code myself. On a whim, I decided to try OpenAI's newly released Codex CLI.

Codex knocked it out of the park on the first try. The difference was so stark it made me wonder if some mean-spirited genius at Anthropic had post-trained Claude to HATE the OpenAI Agents SDK. More likely is that the Open AI Agents SDK is so new that the current Claude models couldn't have included it in their training, but it was a wake-up call.

So, I started using Codex.

It was working great for me, but it didn't have any of the niceties I had added to Claude Code over time, so I thought: "Great! Now I'll just make context-monkey portable. I'll make my commands and behaviors work with Codex and Gemini, too, creating a uniform experience across all agents." It seemed like a good idea on the surface.

It wasn't.

After spending too many hours trying to use Codex the same way I used Claude, I came to a crucial realization: the tools I had built in context-monkey weren't general-purpose at all. They were just a collection of patches for Claude's specific shortcomings.

My workflow with Claude was defensive and multi-staged. I’d use sub-agents for research and planning, breaking work into tiny, verifiable phases. Then, after reminding Claude of the rules it had already forgotten, I’d tell it to implement a single phase and watch like a hawk to catch hallucinations before they could take root. This was followed by the irritating process of fixing the broken tests it had hallucinated and cleaning up all the linting errors. It worked, and it was more effective than writing the code by hand, but it certainly didn't feel like working with another engineer.

Codex was different. It made smaller, more reasonable code changes. It had a much better track record of actually building what it planned, with passing tests. Most shockingly, I could ask it to review its own work, and instead of hallucinating that everything was perfect, it would find legitimate oversights and fix them. My elaborate system of sub-agents and pre-emptive rule-setting felt clumsy and unnecessary. My one gripe is that Codex is less thorough in its explanations; it likes to jump straight to coding, so you have to be explicit about planning.

I was trying to make Vim behave like Emacs. By forcing Codex into a framework designed to manage Claude's eccentricities, I was failing to exploit its unique strengths. I was misusing the tool by assuming a behavioral similarities that didn't exist.

This led me to an even bigger question. The AI landscape is changing at a dizzying pace. There are a lot of these frameworks out there, like context-monkey, including BMad Method, Task Master AI, and Github Spec Kit to name a few. The problem with all these tools, including my own, is that they are too opinionated. They muzzle the power of these engines in response to their current shortcomings. But how can I know the guardrails I build for Model N will be useful when Model N+1 comes out in a few months? How do you build a framework around a moving target?

More fundamentally, can we assume that Agile, Scrum, or any of the other methodologies we invented to manage human programmers will apply when our partner is an AI? I’m more convinced than ever that forcing our old methodologies onto this new paradigm will only stifle its growth and limit the power of these tools.

So, I’ve shelved context-monkey. This isn't a retreat from discipline into chaos. If anything, it's the opposite. It's a recognition that the heavy frameworks we build to manage complexity are often a solution in search of a problem, especially when the ground is shifting under our feet. The agents are improving so fast that the guardrails I built for last month's model are now just frustrating limitations on this month's.

This doesn't mean we throw planning out the window. On the contrary, detailed planning and a robust test suite are more critical than ever. They are the foundation for everything we build. But the complex machinery of a framework like context-monkey is like trying to build a castle on shifting sands. Without a strong and trust worthy foundation it’s a futile effort.

The real work, the most valuable work, remains in the skills that aren't so easily automated. It's the thoughtful architectural planning before a line of code is written. It's building the automated tests that serve as your unwavering guardrails. And, as I've said before, it's the vigilant code review that ensures the final product is sound. These are the skills that matter.

The solution isn't a heavier framework; it's a lighter touch. It’s pairing our critical oversight with the agent's generative power. I'm back to managing my prompts and plans with plonk's simple dotfile management. It’s less about building a perfect, all-encompassing system and more about staying flexible, learning continuously, and trying not to get in the way of the bizarre, brilliant, and rapidly evolving models on the other side of the command line.

The Changing Face of Software Development

Rich — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve written a lot recently about my journey with AI-assisted coding. It started as an experiment, became a workflow, and has now fundamentally changed how I think about my job. The more I use agentic tools, the more I realize we’re in the middle of a seismic shift—one that’s turning the traditional role of a software developer inside out.

The job isn’t disappearing. It’s evolving. We’re moving from being the writers of code to being the architects and managers of the agents that write the code for us. And in this new world, the most valuable and undervalued skill is the ability to perform a thorough, thoughtful code review.

Embracing the Chaos: Why Non-Determinism is a Feature, Not a Bug

One of the first things that trips people up about agentic coding is the non-determinism. The idea that asking an AI the same question twice might yield two different answers feels like a critical flaw. In a running software system, that kind of unpredictability is a nightmare. We need our business systems to be predictable.

But here’s the thing: the tool that builds the software doesn’t have to be deterministic. In fact, it never has been.

Think about it. The process of building software has always been non-deterministic. Two different developers, given the same set of requirements, will produce two different implementations. The same developer on a different day might come up with a different solution. We’ve never had a deterministic process; we’ve had a process designed to create a deterministic product.

What we care about is that the final code meets the requirements. That it’s correct, performant, and secure. The exact path taken to write that code has always been variable. Agentic coding doesn’t change the goal; it just gives us a new, incredibly powerful, and admittedly unpredictable partner in the process. Our job is to steer that process through architecture, context engineering, and design—things we already know how to do.

The New Economics of Building

This new partnership has a startling economic effect: it fundamentally changes the calculus for what’s worth building. It’s not just about whipping up small scripts in an hour; it’s about tackling ambitious projects that were previously unthinkable.

For decades, I've wanted a tool to manage my development environment—a unified way to handle packages, dotfiles, and system configurations. I even had a name for it: plonk. But the scope was daunting. I estimated it would take me over a year of dedicated, solo effort to build something decent. The project was permanently stuck on the "someday/maybe" list.

Then I tried building it with an AI partner. Three weeks later, it was not only built, but functional and useful. What was once a year-long project became three weeks of “vibe coding.”

That’s the real game-changer. It’s not about the small wins, as nice as they are. It’s about the orders-of-magnitude reduction in effort for large, meaningful projects. The ideas that felt too big, too complex, or too time-consuming to ever start are now within reach. The barrier to entry for ambitious software development has been dramatically lowered.

The Most Valuable Skill in the Agentic Age

This brings me back to my main point. If an AI is writing the first draft of the code, what is our primary role? It’s to be the ultimate arbiter of quality. It’s to perform the code review.

One of my biggest learnings while building plonk was that this review can't be a one-time event. I developed a multi-stage review process out of necessity:

Review as it happens: Watch the code as the agent makes changes to catch deviations early.
Review before commit: A more thorough check to ensure the completed task is correct and complete.
Review before release: A final, holistic review to ensure nothing was broken.

This rigor is necessary because agents, for all their power, have predictable failure modes. They are amazing at writing code, but they can also add unasked-for features that, while sometimes clever, often take the project off course. They can “get stuck” on a problem, like a failing test, and instead of fixing the root cause, they might revert the test to a useless, trivially passing state.

Code review in the agentic age, therefore, is less about catching typos and more about architectural alignment and vigilance. It’s about asking:

Did the agent understand the core requirements?
Did it adhere to the design and the rules I provided?
Did it introduce any unintended side effects or “creative” solutions to problems?
Is this code maintainable, or is it a clever but unreadable mess?

Reading and understanding code is now the most critical skill a developer can possess. You are the manager, the architect, and the quality assurance team all rolled into one. Your job is to provide the vision and to vigilantly verify that the agent’s execution matches that vision.

The Automated Safety Net

Of course, manual review doesn't scale on its own. With an AI partner producing code so quickly, a robust, automated safety net is more critical than ever. Strong linting rules, a comprehensive test suite, and CI pipelines are no longer just best practices; they are essential for managing the velocity.

In particular, tracking code coverage has become vital. It helps guard against the agentic tendency to write tests that test themselves rather than the actual logic. This automation is the critical aid that makes the high-speed workflow sustainable.

And the best part? You can have the agents help you build this safety net. This reinforces the new hierarchy: the human developer sets the architectural vision—including the testing strategy—and then supervises the agent in its construction. Knowing what to build, and how to verify it, is the core human task.

A Call for Exploration

We’re all just starting to figure this out. My theories about how agents prioritize recent context are, frankly, "super unscientific" gut feelings based on observation. My workflows are the result of trial and error.

That’s why we need more exploration and more sharing. The tools are evolving at a dizzying pace, but the practices for using them effectively are being written right now, by us. What works for you? What rules have you found indispensable? How are you managing the firehose of AI-generated code?

Let’s figure it out together.

Rules for AI partnership

Rich — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I recently wrote about rediscovering flow through AI coding, where I mentioned developing strict rules for working with AI. Several people asked what those rules actually look like and how I figured them out. Here's the story of how I moved from prompt engineering to context engineering out of necessity.

Living in fear of context loss

When I first started using Claude Code, I was only vaguely aware of how context worked. I'd start a session with a goal in mind and live in constant fear that the next context compaction would lose something useful. Important implementation details, design decisions, half-finished features - all of it felt fragile.

About Context

If you’re not familiar with context, or context windows, and how they relate to LLMs, here’s my rough, but mostly accurate explanation: Context is all the stuff you tell the LLM — plus whatever it “remembers” during the session — whether you hand it over directly in a prompt, sneak it in via a tool call, or feed it through a web search. The context window is just how much of that stuff the LLM can keep in its head at once. When it runs out of room, it does something called compaction. Compaction is the mysterious process whereby the LLM reviews its notes and carefully throws out everything you cared about. The end result is a model that understands your problem in the same way a dog understands calculus — or in the same way I understand the internals of LLMs. If you want the technically correct version, go read The rise of "context engineering" on LangChain’s blog.

My initial solution for saving state between compactions was to dump everything into a CLAUDE.md file in my project repo. Status updates, design notes, development rules, research findings, random thoughts - anything that seemed important went into that file. It worked pretty well initially, serving as a context cache for the stuff I cared about most. After compaction I'd just have the agent re-read my CLAUDE.md and I'd get more reliable behavior from the agent.

But the file grew unwieldy fast.

The problem with everything files

After a few weeks of different agents "updating" my CLAUDE.md file, it became a mess. Repetitive context, outdated status information, and layers of rules that contradicted each other. Worse, agents would start working on features mentioned briefly in old context that no longer existed in the code. I'd remove a feature one week, and forget to update CLAUDE.md, then I'd have some helpful future agent reimplementing the old feature, because it was still in the context I was loading with every session.

I found myself pruning the file frequently, trying to figure out what was still relevant. But I never had a clear sense of what should stay versus what should go.

Separating concerns

Pure experimentation led me to try a different approach. Instead of one giant context file, I started using different types of markdown documents:

Short-term files (never committed) for implementation details and notes during active development
Long-term planning docs with broader scope and less detail, often serving as checklists
Persistent repo docs that stick around, including user-facing documentation and behavioral specifications

I'm not convinced this is the best overall strategy, but it's worked well for plonk and some Terraform work I've been doing. The key insight was giving agents the right scope rather than dumping everything on them.

The behavioral firewall

This experimentation taught me that CLAUDE.md should contain only development rules - things that every agent must know. Not status, not plans, not implementation details. Just rules.

But how do you figure out what rules you need?

For me, it was pain-driven development. Every rule in my CLAUDE.md represents a specific frustrating experience where an agent did something I had to ask it to stop doing multiple times.

War story: The testcontainers disaster

I was working on integration tests for plonk. I'd explained the problem: keep tests isolated from the user's system while thoroughly testing the CLI. We did detailed planning and came up with testcontainers-go as the solution.

I gave the agent pretty free rein to build the tests. Everything looked good until I realized what it had actually built: tests that spun up a container and then ran plonk on my local machine. The agent correctly understood the goal (isolated testing) and picked good tooling, but then failed completely to implement the tests to run in the container, which violated the constraint (don't touch the developer's system).

I told the agent over and over and over again, that integration tests couldn't run on a developer's local machine because it risked changing installed packages and dotfiles. The agent completely missed this as a critical rule, and yet when I prompted it to explain why the implementation it had created was a failure, it immediately responded that it had violated the constraint to not change a developer's tool setup in tests.

That's when I learned that vague warnings don't work. You need clear, unambiguous rules.

War story: Emoji whack-a-mole

I had a similar experience with emojis. I told Claude to remove all emojis from plonk's UI, which it did. Then it promptly started adding new ones in other parts of the code. I got it to stop adding emojis to command output, only to find emojis in all my tests. Then in all my documentation.

When I called this out, the agent explained that it knew not to add emojis to plonk's output, but thought I was okay with them in tests and documentation. I didn't see it at first, but I assumed that my preference would carry across the whole project, even though I had only told the agent not to put emojis in my UI. It followed the letter of the law, not the spirit.

The format breakthrough

After repeatedly having to explain the same behavioral expectations, I started working with Claude to draft clearer rules. The agent suggested formatting rules as lists of REQUIRED, FORBIDDEN, ALLOWED, and EXAMPLE statements.

In hindsight, the rules read a bit like firewall rules, which made sense. I was essentially creating access control policies for AI behavior.

Here's what a typical rule looks like now:

### No Emojis in Output
- **FORBIDDEN**: Using any emoji in ANY output, code, comments, commit messages, or communication
- **FORBIDDEN**: Emoji in file contents, terminal output, logs, or any generated text
- **REQUIRED**: Use plain text alternatives for status indicators and emphasis
- **EXAMPLE**: Use "✓ installed" not "✅ installed"

The strong language (MUST, FORBIDDEN) turned out to be crucial. Softer language was interpreted as suggestions rather than requirements.

The meta-rule problem

Once I had a working CLAUDE.md with clear rules, a funny thing happened: agents started wanting to add more rules. They'd try to codify implementation details or add behavioral preferences I intended to last only for the current session.

This forced me to create a meta-rule, a rule about making rules:

### This File is for Development Rules Only
- **REQUIRED**: CLAUDE.md must contain ONLY development rules and guidelines
- **FORBIDDEN**: Using CLAUDE.md to store project status, todo lists, future plans, or any other context
- **REQUIRED**: Store project status and plans in appropriate files (docs/planning/*.md, TODO.md, etc.)

Apparently I needed a rule to prevent rule creep.

What's working now

My current rule set has been stable through several weeks of development on plonk. The rules cover things like:

Never adding unrequested features (my biggest frustration)
Safety constraints for testing (don't break my environment)
Output formatting standards (no emojis, professional tone)
File creation preferences (edit existing rather than create new)
Scope boundaries (do exactly what's asked, nothing more)

The key insight is treating your rule file as a small but critical set of behavioral constraints, not a dumping ground for context.

Cross-project lessons

I've been using GitHub Copilot with the Claude model at work, but I use the same general pattern: separate concerns between rules (loaded automatically) and everything else (referenced as needed).

Some rules seem universal, like not adding unrequested features or maintaining professional output. Others are domain-specific, like plonk's safety constraints around package management.

Practical advice

If you're starting with AI coding, here's what I'd suggest:

Start with scope, not rules - give agents clear boundaries for what they should accomplish
Let rules emerge from pain - don't try to anticipate every problem, just solve the ones you actually encounter
Use absolute language - MUST and FORBIDDEN work better than "please try to"
Separate rules from everything else - context, plans, and status belong in other files
Expect meta-problems - you may need rules about making rules

The most important thing is giving agents the right scope. What seems to make AI collaboration most effective is management of context. If I want more exploration I might provide fairly limited context, but when I am implementing code, I need predictability over novelty.

Looking ahead

At the rate LLMs are advancing, this whole approach might be moot in a couple months. Better context management, more sophisticated reasoning, who knows what's coming.

But for now, treating AI partnership like any other engineering problem, with clear interfaces, defined behaviors, and explicit constraints, has made the collaboration both more productive and less frustrating.

The rules aren't about limiting AI creativity. They're about creating a framework where that creativity can be productive rather than chaotic.

AI coding and rediscovering flow

Rich — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I'm not sure how to start this post, because there is so much to say.

Actually, that's exactly how I started a blog post in February 2023, writing about burnout and the beginning of what Farrah and I called our "Grand Adventure." Back then, I described burnout as "waking up everyday, and wishing I could do anything other than my current work" and struggling to focus on even simple tasks. Major accomplishments provided "the most fleeting sense of satisfaction, usually lasting no more than a minute."

This summer has been different. I've had more than one Saturday when I woke up at 5:30am with some idea in my head and stopped coding at 10pm with hardly a break. The difference isn't just that I'm working on my own project now - it's that I've discovered a way of building software that actually feels productive and fun.

Back in May 2023

During our travels, I finally broke through my AI skepticism and spent a day testing whether ChatGPT could actually write software. I asked it to implement Conway's Game of Life in Python, expecting to be disappointed. To my surprise, it produced working code, and over several hours I was able to prompt it through adding features.

But the experience felt strained. I described it as feeling "like a product manager" - feeding requirements and bug reports to ChatGPT, then waiting for changes. If my prompts were even slightly ambiguous, the results were generally an unusable mess. The user experience of copy-pasting code around made it feel a bit like working with a better StackOverflow. It was impressive but clunky.

Two years later, everything changed.

Building plonk

About a month ago, I decided to take Claude Code for a spin on a personal project. I'd been frustrated with managing my development environment across multiple machines and wanted a tool to synchronize packages and dotfiles. I called it "plonk."

Note:

plonk solves my problems, it may not solve anyone elses. I personally can recommend both chezmoi and dotter as excellent tools that were inspirations for plonk. Additionally, there are whole webpages of resources like https://dotfiles.github.io/utilities/ listing excellent dotfile managers. So if you don't like plonk, use one of these, or build your own like I did.

The development process was unlike anything I'd experienced in decades of programming. In just one month, plonk went from initial commit to version 0.10.0 - a production-ready tool with comprehensive documentation, test coverage, and architectural polish that would have taken me many months to achieve coding alone.

Looking at the git history tells the story: 709 total commits, with 513 of them marked as AI-assisted collaborations. That's a 72% collaboration rate.

How it feels different now

The biggest change from my 2023 ChatGPT experiment is that working with Claude Code now feels like collaborating with a capable junior-to-mid-level developer rather than directing a task-completion system. Someone who's a code workhorse but sometimes overeager about adding "helpful" features.

I was so surprised by this improvement that I initially let the agent add lots of "helpful" ideas that turned out to be classic YAGNI (You Aren't Gonna Need It) violations. But here's the thing: I could make these mistakes quickly with the agent, and I was also able to refactor my way out of messes and learn from my mistakes at the same pace.

This led me to develop much more thorough planning phases for bigger features while letting agents handle straightforward fixes directly. I also had to establish strict rules - my CLAUDE.md file became crucial for maintaining quality and preventing problematic behaviors like adding emojis to everything, implementing helpful features without asking, or leaving work half-done.

Some rules were domain-specific: plonk manages packages and dotfiles, so running plonk itself in tests would break my development environment. I learned this the hard way more than once.

The interview technique

One of my better process innovations was having Claude Code interview me about the functionality I expected from each plonk command and how I expected it to work internally. (I'm the first person to think of this ever. Right?) This created the behavioral documentation that guides plonk's development today.

This technique worked better than traditional spec writing because the AI asked clarifying questions I wouldn't have thought to address upfront. Some of these questions led me to think in totaly new directions, while others were clarifying questions that a human would have easily surmised. Sometimes frustrating, and othertimes wildly insightful.

When implementation isn't the bottleneck

Some number of years ago, I realized that often the most valuable contribution to a team or business was deleting code, simplifying systems, or not writing code at all. I've been reflecting on this a lot lately.

Now that I can easily tackle projects I previously considered too time-consuming, the new challenge is deciding what not to build. With AI removing implementation friction, the critical skill becomes choosing what deserves to exist rather than figuring out how to build it.

That said, when I really like an idea, branching to prototype something is now very low effort. Instead of debating whether something is worth the time investment, I can just try it.

The great refactoring

My last 16-hour coding day perfectly illustrates this new capability. Plonk had accumulated complexity and half-built features to the point where the codebase had grown to a bloated 25,000 lines of poorly organized Go, that looked a lot like Java if you squinted, with barely functional tests. The complexity had grown so unwieldy that I was having trouble getting agents to write any code that didn't break five core features.

In that single day, I stripped all the accumulated cruft, reducing the codebase by 50%, and rebuilt the actually useful features into clean, well-organized architecture. I'd have been hard-pressed to get those results coding by myself for a month.

Is it my code?

The question of code ownership comes up frequently in discussions about AI-assisted development. I think asking whether AI-generated code is "mine" is a bit like asking whether the binary produced by a compiler is "my" code.

The answer is both yes and no. Using Claude as both research tool and coding assistant suggests the answer leans more toward "yes" than it would for purely mechanical compilation. The AI doesn't just translate my instructions - it helps me think through problems, suggests approaches I hadn't considered, and implements solutions that often surprise me.

But fundamentally, it's still tooling - sophisticated tooling that happens to communicate in natural language rather than through syntax and APIs. Or at least, that's how it seems today. Ask me in a week and I might have a different answer.

Learning more, not less

One unexpected side effect has been a dramatic increase in my learning velocity. Not necessarily because I'm learning faster than I would without AI, but because the excitement of what's suddenly possible has inspired me to spend much more time exploring.

I've been diving deep into context engineering, prompt engineering, LLM architectures, and coding agent behaviors. The AI didn't just make me more productive - it rekindled my curiosity about software development itself.

What I don't know yet

I only started using AI coding tools at work about three months ago, and I've been using Claude Code for personal projects for just one month. I've been so absorbed in building plonk that I haven't had time to be distracted or lose motivation.

I don't know yet if this will sustain or what it means for how I approach work long-term. I don't know if the prototype velocity will eliminate the decision paralysis I described in my burnout post, or if new forms of analysis paralysis will emerge when everything seems possible.

What I do know is that for the first time in years, I'm waking up excited about the code I'm going to write today. Instead of struggling to focus on tasks and feeling exhausted after completing them, I'm finding flow states that last for hours and leave me energized rather than drained.

Whether this represents a temporary honeymoon with new tooling or a more fundamental shift remains to be seen. But the journey from burnout through skeptical experimentation to productive partnership has already been worth it.

One final parting thought for you. When I first heard the term "vibe coding" I thought to myself, "this has got to be the single stupidest techy buzz phrase I've heard since serverless". I'm not sure what we can call this kind of programming that will be less cringe, but whatever we call it I'm finding it both fun and productive.

Pura Vida!

Rich — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

On October 17th, Farrah and I left our last AirBnB in Buenos Aires, and flew to Costa Rica.

If you noticed that it's almost Xmas and I'm just now writing about something that happened at the end of October. You're very smart ...and good at math. Happy?

As I was saying. Farrah and I left Buenos Aires behind for the last time (shit, I think I owe you all a post about all our time in Buenos Aires). Given how far we had to travel, our flight schedule was pretty reasonable. Buenos Aires to Panama City (my first and only time in Panama, we never left the airport, so it doesn't count as a country I've visited), then a short flight from Panama City to San Jose, Costa Rica. As I recall, it was a pretty easy travel day given that it was over 12 hours from end to end.

Both Farrah and I have visited Costa Rica before. It's a really beautiful country, and I'm always happy for a chance to visit. This was the first time I'd visited with any meaningful understanding of Spanish. It was great to be able to have small conversations with people we met. The Costa Rican accent is pretty neutral, and I think it's pretty easy to understand, so for the first time in a while I didn't find the first couple days in the country difficult to get around. To be fair: 1) a lot of Costa Ricans speak English, so it's generally not hard to get around as an English speaking tourist, and 2) we spent most of our time in the country at a beautiful 8 bazillion star resort.

You may have noticed in reading this blog that I rarely reference fancy resorts. And if I have it was likely not somewhere we were staying. The reason for this, as you may have guessed, is that spending a year in fancy resorts would have been insanely expensive. Really shockingly expensive. Resorts are not cheap. However, part of the point of the trip was to meet my parents, and they love this place.

Anyway, we arrived in San Jose in the evening and got a cab to our hotel, where we were meeting my parents. The hotel we stayed the night in is one my parents had been to before. It's a little outside of San Jose proper, and the grounds are a large and beautiful botanical garden. We met my parents and Donna, their friend, and travel companion, had a quick night cap and everyone headed for bed. Travel days are like that a lot I've found.

The next morning we enjoyed a leisurely breakfast, and strolled in the gardens before our shuttle arrived to take us to Manuel Antonio, and the Hotel Parador. We had a great driver, who we requested for our return trip. We stopped midway through the drive for lunch at a very nice little roadside restaurant. It was conveniently located next to a gift shop. Go figure...

By late afternoon we arrived at Hotel Parador.

The hotel is a bit like what I imagine paradise would be. It is situated in the rain forest high on a steep hillside that leads down to the Pacific Ocean. So, the entire property is in the rainforest, albeit a very well groomed rain forest, and most everywhere you go has a view of the Pacific. The guest suites (I'm not sure they have just plain old rooms there) are in several buildings spread around the property. Different buildings offer different views of the rainforest and the Pacific ocean. It's all beautiful, regardless of where you stay.

We all ended up staying in some of the nicer suites on the property, because my mom, somehow, managed to present a set of requests that led to 3 adjacent suites at the price of our original rooms. I'm sure it helped that it was their rainy season, and had very low occupancy. In any case, we found ourselves in these suites, which were larger and much fancier than anywhere else we stayed in the past year, by far. The furniture on the balcony was more comfortable than some of the living room furniture we've had this year. Speaking of the balcony. It looks out over the Pacific Ocean. And there was a jacuzzi on the balcony. Every morning of our stay Farrah got up before me to go sit in the jacuzzi, read, and take in the views.

For the next 7 days we fell into a pampered, lazy, and very loose routine. Honestly all of the days blend together for me with the exception of a couple notable events. The average day involved getting up whenever we wanted. Then coffee in the room, or the balcony, or the jacuzzi. We'd generally then meet my Donna and my parents for breakfast, followed by laziness of one type or another until lunch, or happy hour, whichever came first. Our group tended to prefer lying around the various pools, reading, staring at the ocean, and watching the wildlife, like scarlet macaws and capuchin monkeys. In the evenings we would all reconvene for drinks and dinner. This pleasant itinerary was our norm for our stay. On more than one occasion Farrah insisted that she was never leaving. I didn't argue.

A couple of events did punctuate our lazy retreat at the Hotel Parador.

Farrah, Donna and my dad went for a boat tour of the mangrove trees. While their trip was informative, they now know lots of things about mangroves, which may, or may not, be interesting. However, the overall trip was something of a disappointment since they'd all been hoping to see a crocodile. My mom and I skipped this adventure specifically because we were both hoping not to see a crocodile. Seriously, read up on crocodiles. They are fucking terrifying.

Farrah, Donna, my mom and I also went for a tour of the Manuel Antonio national park and wildlife preserve. We spent a couple hours walking around the rainforest checking out the animals. My favorites were the spider monkeys we got to see on our way out of the park. They're tiny, and super quick. We also saw two and three toed sloths, several fairly poisonous snakes, lots of capuchin monkeys, a handful of howler monkeys, and so many birds. It was a morning well spent.

We also had a couple of close encounters with wildlife.

First, Farrah had a capuchin monkey swing by the pool to try on her pool wear shirt. The capuchins are everywhere, and they are curious. So, this particular monkey decided to try on Farrah's colorful pool shirt. Meanwhile, Farrah was in the pool, and was too late to stop the thief, so she ended up having to watch and scold the monkey until some hotel staff came and helped her retrieve the shirt. The monkey used this time to model the shirt in various configurations before being driven off.

Second, we met Rocket, the local raccoon. Rocket visits the main restaurant at the hotel most evenings. We had seen him out and about, but on one particular evening he hopped up on the arm of Donna's chair and stole a quarter of her sandwich before escaping to a safe distance. A couple hours later we saw a couple encouraging Rocket to get up on their table so that they could feed him. So, I guess it's not surprising he feels so comfortable there.

After a week of being pampered, which felt like it went by far too quickly, we woke up early to head back to San Jose for our flight to our next destination. That's a whole other blog post though.

Happy Holidays to all of you and your families, pura vida!

The post I didn't expect to write

Rich — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I'm kind of homesick.

When we set out on our adventure this year I didn't expect the entire trip to be sunshine and rainbows. I knew there would be times that were difficult as there are in any year. What I didn't expect is that I would experience a time when I truly felt homesick. However, after nine months of travel, that's exactly what I'm feeling. I miss my friends. I miss Denver. I miss the normalcy of day to day life. And I miss being able to speak to people easily! (My Spanish has improved dramatically, but I'm no where near fluency, so I still struggle on occasion with daily interactions, and it's really tough to have an extended conversation where I don't spend half the time saying, "umm...".)

We've spent the past nearly 6 weeks now in Argentina, which I have to say has not been one of my favorite countries to visit. Don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with Argentina. It's a lovely country. I think we just stayed too long in Buenos Aires, which for me is a city that is simply too large for my taste. We met another traveler in Peru who compared Buenos Aires to NYC. (I hate NYC. It's too big, and too busy, and too crowded.) While I don't entirely agree with his characterization, I can definitely see similarities. Buenos Aires is a big city. It's a busy city. And while it didn't feel crowded to me in the same ways that NYC does, it definitely has a feeling of constant motion and action. For some people I'm sure this would be perfect, but not for me.

In the month we stayed in Buenos Aires we enjoyed wonderful parrillas (restaurants specializing in grilled meat), took in a pretty incredible tango show, visited the only cemetery I've ever been too and though "well damn, that's cool" (Recoleta), tried vermouth as a drink in it's own right (pretty tasty in my opinion), visited many beautiful parks around the city, attended an asado, went to a division 2 futbol (soccer) game, and learned that the good people of Buenos Aires really like their cheese. However, as the days passed I found myself missing the things I would do at home. Simple time spent hanging out with friends. Cooking at home a lot (our kitchens this year have been of varying qualities, but never like our own kitchen). Seeing live music. Hanging out with our cat Angie. Even walking or jogging the paths near our house. At first I wouldn't have called it homesickness, so much as a relative lack of interest in Buenos Aires, but now that we've been in Mendoza for a handful of days I have to be honest and say that I'm a bit travel fatigued, and definitely a bit homesick.

Even still, our trip continues to provide us with remarkable experiences. I visited my 15th country when we went to Uruguay last month, and I really liked Colonia del Sacaramento. And before we arrived in Mendoza we took a brief trip to Iguazu and visited the spectacular waterfalls there, which stands out for me as one of the most beautiful, and incredible, bits of nature I've ever had the pleasure to see. Really I can't overstate how amazing it was to see the waterfalls at Iguazu.

So far, Mendoza has been quite a nice change from Buenos Aires as well. It's a much smaller city, and much more laid back, which feels really good to me. Tomorrow we will be visiting a hot springs/water park thingy that Farrah found, and later this week we have some visits to, what I'm sure will be, remarkable wineries courtesy of our friend JC. And next week we fly to Costa Rica where we will meet my parents and spend some time in Manuel Antonio. So, there's still plenty to look forward to.

I started this blog with the intention of trying to capture what the experience of this year was like. And so, it feels important to me to mention that there are tough parts of this adventure as well as the great ones. Right now, feels like a tough part. I have no idea how I will feel later this week or next week. Maybe I'll get more homesick. Maybe I'll bounce back to being excited for all the new experiences. I really can't say. But it's pretty likely that I'll write another blog post about whatever happens next, so stay tuned.

EDIT: I'm not sure how I forgot to mention this, but we also had our first truly epic travel day last week. The airline we took to and from Iguazu (flybondi.com, DO NOT USE THEM) managed to fuck up our flights from Iguazu back to Buenos Aires and from there onto Mendoza so thoroughly that we had to spend an entire day in the Iguazu airport, and then spend an extra day and a half back in Buenos Aires before we were able to schedule a flight to Mendoza with another airline. Seriously, our original flight was scheduled to leave Iguazu at 1pm, and we didn't actually leave until 8pm, and they managed to change the airport we were arriving at in the process. They also somehow managed to completely cancel our flight to Mendoza (not that we could have made our connecting flight since our first flight was delayed by 7 hours), and have offered us no explanation, compensation, or even a response to my inquiries. I'm quite certain this has done nothing to improve my mood. LOL.

15 countries and counting

Rich — Sat, 30 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

The last week of September we visited Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay, which was something of a milestone for me since Uruguay is the 15th country I have visited, and the 6th new country we have been to on our trip. While our stay in Uruguay was brief, and we only saw Colonia, which is a small town, it still felt special to me. I've loved traveling and seeing new places for a long time. When I was younger I passed up a number of opportunities to travel to foreign countries, because I was "too busy" building my career in software, and I've always regretted not taking those opportunities. In a lot of ways our entire trip this year has been making up for missed opportunities from the days when I placed too much value on my career and not enough on my lived experience. Don't get me wrong. My career hasn't been all bad, and all the years of work definitely helped make our travels this year possible. That said, if I could do it all over I think I'd have traveled more and sooner.

Our trip to Uruguay was a break from our extended stay in Buenos Aires. I'll write more about that later. For now, let me just say that we were ready for a change of scenery, and we took advantage of the proximity to Uruguay to take a vacation from our vacation. It turns out that from Buenos Aires you can take a quick ferry ride to several spots in Uruguay, namely Colonia del Sacramento, and Montevideo. Colonia is the closer of the two, only an hour and fifteen minutes by ferry, and it's a very small town that is designated a UNESCO world heritage site, so we figured why not get away from the big city to check it out.

The ferry to Colonia was impressive. After spending so much time in Guatemala on Lake Atitlán I kind of expected a giant lancha, or possibly something like the ferry we took from Belize City to Caye Caulker. I couldn't have been more wrong. This ferry was more like a mini cruise ship with multiple cafes, and even a duty free shop on board. We couldn't tell exactly how many passengers it held, but I'd bet it was close to a thousand, and they had space for some number of cars onboard too. The crossing was way more comfortable than any plane trip we've taken this year.

The historic center of Colonia is the definition of picturesque. Its streets are all cobblestone, with some more drivable, and frankly walkable, than others. The founders of Colonia built some pretty shitty roads, and I assume the more passable ones were newer, but then again seeing how well the Inca fit stone walls when they cared about a place, maybe some of the streets were just made by sloppy workers? Colonia was, at various stages, occupied by the Portuguese, and then by the Spanish, before Uruguay gained independence. There are impressive ruins of the sea walls built by one or the other of the two foreign invaders to defend Colonia from the sea. Since Colonia is a coastal town in the Plata river delta these defenses were likely heavily used, but I'm pretty fuzzy on the history there, so don't take my word for it.

The day we arrived in Colonia was cold (50-ish), cloudy and very windy. So, we kind of froze our butts off wandering the historic district and taking in the sights. We also stopped to talk to a very nice local man who runs a Mexican restaurant, where we'd hoped to have lunch. He was quite chatty and it was fun for me to get to exercise my Spanish, which is greatly improved, although still very far from being fluent. Sadly, he only accepted cash, and we hadn't been to an ATM yet, and also he didn't seem to be all that open. So, for lunch we tried Chivito, the national dish, a steak sandwich with a fried egg on top, Farrah skipped the egg to avoid the negative repercussions of her egg allergy, so I guess she just had a steak sandwich? I'm not sure if we got the best version of Chivito you can have, but to me it wasn't terribly impressive. Not bad mind you, but nothing to write a blog about. Even though I'm doing just that.

Later that afternoon we sat in a nice little cafe enjoying a bottle of Tannat wine, and watched the sunset. Tannat is a grape I was unfamiliar with, and which seems to be a specialty of the wineries in Uruguay. The sky was still a bit cloudy, but it was still a nice sunset, and we realized we hadn't just sat and watched one since we left Belize six months ago. It's funny how we've already started to reminisce about the earlier parts of our trip. We finished the day with dinner at a nice little restaurant that had a blazing fire, which was a nice change for the cold and wind.

The next day we woke to weather that was, if anything, worse than the day before. Rain was forecast for most of the afternoon and the high was only in the upper 40s. We figured that would be fine because Colonia has eight or nine museums in the historic center, so we assumed we'd be inside most of the day. Unfortunately for us we visited every open museum in town in about two and a half hours. Some of the museums only had two exhibit rooms, and the big ones had upwards of nine. So, by about two in the afternoon we were looking at each other wondering what to do with the rest of the day.

We settled on stopping by a local grocery store to buy a cheap yerba mate set, we'd recently acquired a taste for the drink in Buenos Aires, and left our setups at our apartment there. So with our mate in hand we went back to the hotel and spent the afternoon drinking mate and reading. Sometimes on cloudy or rainy days there's not much better than curling up with a good book and a hot beverage. We finished our day that evening by going out for a very nice steak dinner at a restaurant called Charco, which is situated on the shore. While we were in the restaurant it poured rain, and we were glad to be in a cozy spot with a good meal and a nice bottle of wine. Thankfully the rain stopped before we walked back to our hotel.

On our third and final day in Colonia we finally got some nice weather. So, after a nice breakfast at a small cafe we took a nice long walk along the shore. The beaches along the Colonia shore were beautiful. Very pleasant, calm, and not very busy. So we walked for several hours taking in the sun and scenery. The most entertaining bit of the walk was when we came across a dog who appeared to be trying to fish. It's methods looked like they could use refining since it mostly spun in circles while alternating between biting at the water and barking in frustration at the fish, I assume, for not holding still.

By the time we got back to the Colonia historic center we had just enough time to have a nice lunch before we had to catch our ferry back to Buenos Aires. And that's the story of our visit to my 15th country. I hope to return to Uruguay some day to visit Montevideo and Punta del Este, which I'm told is very near wine county in Uruguay. It was a brief trip, and a nice break from the big city, but it only whet my appetite for seeing more of the country.

Machu Picchu

Rich — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I'm writing this post rather late, as usual. Over a month ago we decided that since we were so close to Peru (we were in Colombia at the time) it would be stupid not to visit Machu Picchu. After all, who knows when we will next be in South America, and why not make the most of it?

So, after a wonderful 6 weeks in Colombia we spent a 14 hour travel day bouncing from one airport to the next (Santa Marta to Bogota to Lima to Cusco) until we arrived in Cusco, Peru. The flights were uneventful, but it was quite a long day as you might imagine. We arrived in Cusco late in the evening, and somewhat out of breath (Cusco is 11,000 ft above sea level) and began our acclimation to our new altitude.

Cusco is a beautiful small city. The historic district is fairly touristy, and it's easy to see why. The architecture is a mix of old Inca foundations, Spanish colonial, and the occasional more modern building. I found the blend to be quite charming, and loved simply walking around the city center and ducking down narrow roads. Everywhere we went seemed picture worthy.

Regarding the elevation. 11,000 ft is very high. If you are coming from sea level expect to be winded, and walk slowly. We found it helpful to drink coca tea, which the locals recommend for helping with altitude sickness. Also, like in most mountainous areas, the temperature difference between night and day is dramatic. Definitely more so than our home in Denver, which is known for dramatic swings in temperature between day and night, especially in the shoulder seasons. In Cusco, we commonly woke up to temperatures in the high 30s or low 40s, and during the peak of the day it got as warm as the low 70s. This appeared to be normal, and the locals were rarely out without coats on, or at least, close to hand.

The food in Cusco was simply the best I've had anywhere on our travels, although Mexican street food deserves an honorable mention. If I have any readers from France I apologize in advance, but I would choose Peruvian cuisine over French cuisine any day of the week. Some of my favorites were Alpaca steaks, potatoes in every form (Perú has 3000 types of potatoes, and they know how to cook them), Ceviche, Causa, and Pisco Sours. We took a cooking class while we were in Cusco, and everything we made/ate was fan-fucking-tastic! I really can't overstate how good the food in Perú was. I'm missing it as I write this post.

When we made our plans to come to Perú the plan was, first and foremost, to visit Machu Picchu, and also we thought we'd like to visit Rainbow Mountain. After several days of acclimating we abandoned our plan to visit Rainbow Mountain for two reasons: first, Rainbow Mountain is at 16,000 or maybe 17,000 ft, and we were still adjusting to life at 11,000 ft, and second, we kept hearing from people who had been there how touristy it is. The view point where you see the wonderful pictures apparently gets 4000 visitors per day, and the photos mostly require cropping other visitors out of them. While I don't mind sharing amazing places with other people that volume seemed excessive to me. There is another area you can visit that has views of similarly striated colorful mountains in the same region, and which receives less than 100 visitors per day, the catch is that you don't get the head on view of the mountains that are seen in all the best influencer photos. We didn't make it there either due to reason #1, and the fact that Farrah was still recovering from whatever bug we picked up in Santa Marta.

We did make it to Machu Picchu, of course, or else this post would be poorly titled, or a shitty joke. There are several ways to experience Machu Picchu, which include a 4 day trek along the Inca trail arriving at Machu Picchu for sunrise, if all works out. Another option is a shorter trek of only two days on the same Inca trail, but just not as far from your destination. You can also elect to hike from Aguas Calientes, the tourist town at the base of the mountain, which reportedly takes a couple hours, and lastly you can take a bus from Aguas Calientes to Machu Picchu. We opted for the latter option, and found a tour company that took us through a number of sights in the sacred valley, before we caught a Vistadome train from Ollantaytambo to Aguas Calientes and the following day we took the bus up to Machu Picchu for our tour of the ruins. Farrah and I both really like riding on trains, and the views from the Vistadome train, so named for its expansive glass windows that extend up onto the ceiling allowing you to take in the beautiful Andean mountains as you wind through them, were breathtaking!

We spent a brief evening and night in Aguas Calientes. It is the definition of a tourist town, which makes complete sense since it exists exclusively to service tourists coming to visit Machu Picchu. When you exit the train you find yourself in a maze of market stalls filled with all the same stuff. Every stall seems to vary its content solely in color selection. We spent close to an hour there looking for a hat for Farrah. She wanted to be sure she found one with the right fit and color. I wanted to walk around, but quickly got bored with the process, because there really wasn't anything new to see after a while. The rest of the town is lined with hotels and restaurants of nearly every kind. Although, Peruvian cuisine was well represented, so were pizza, Italian, Chinese and hamburgers. For dinner we joined our guide, Luis, and another member of our tour group for a good, but not great, meal at a Peruvian restaurant that Luis recommended.

The following morning we got up early for the main event: our visit to Machu Picchu. Words can't adequately describe the experience of seeing this remarkable historic site. Surrounded by towering Andean peaks, and literally built into the mountain plateau Machu Picchu is the most picturesque ruins I've had the pleasure of seeing on our trip. That said this site, for me, didn't have the same kind of energy, nor did it provoke the overwhelming sense of awe that I experienced in Tikal or Calakmul. I suspect this has something to do with the relative importance of those sites to the people who lived there. Machu Picchu at its peak housed somewhere around 700 inhabitants and was not one of the most important Incan settlements. Whereas Tikal and Calakmul were capital cities of the Mayan world, and the raw power of the hundreds of thousands of souls who live and worshiped in those places were almost visceral to me. Machu Picchu, on the other hand, gave me the sense that it was likely a fairly sleepy outpost of the empire despite the beauty of the scenery. I could imagine Incan rulers taking a quiet weekend in Machu Picchu to get away from the busy capital of Cusco. This is pure speculation on my part, but that's how it felt.

A couple of things stood out to me as particularly interesting about touring Machu Picchu. Firstly, because the site is not that big and there are close to 5000 visitors per day each tour group is "allotted" roughly 2.5 hours of time at the site. While this rule is not strictly enforced, there are rangers around who will politely ask people to move along if they are dawdling. Secondly, you are in the high Andes (albeit not as high as Cusco), so the mornings can be quite foggy, as was the case when we arrived. For a little while it looked like we wouldn't get a chance to have our pictures taken from the most photographed area of the site, which overlooks the city, because there was so much fog you couldn't see a damn thing. Luckily for us the fog cleared and we got our photos taken with Machu Picchu as a back drop. Lastly, was the relative size of the sight. As I mentioned before, Machu Picchu was not a big city. It really only held about 750 people at the largest estimate, and other scholars say more like 600. And it shows when you look over the city. It's remarkable for many reasons, but sheer size is not one of them.

The entire visit was very cool, but my favorite bits were the fountains (still working today, apparently the Inca built to last), and the architecture, in general. There are numerous buildings that were partly built on the mountain, and partially extended out on to boulders protruding from the mountain, where the Inca then built retaining walls under the jutting boulders to ensure they didn't roll out from under someone's home. Pretty smart considering modern humans often fail to build with the same intelligence. I'm thinking of the homes built on cliffs that collapse due to erosion. I'm not saying it's common, but it happens more than it should in our supposedly more technologically sophisticated ages.

After our tour of Machu Picchu we returned by bus to Aguas Calientes for lunch before we took the train back to Ollantaytambo. I was pretty tired after a short night sleep and two long days, and the train ride quickly lulled me to sleep. Farrah stayed awake and was treated to dancers, and some sort of Inca related fashion show as I slept. While I'm bummed to have missed the entertainment, I was delighted for the nap. So I guess we both won?

The drive from Ollantaytambo to Cusco was the definition of uneventful. Really. The fact that I'm devoting even a brief paragraph to it is laughable. We rode back to our hostel. That's it.

We passed a couple more pleasant days in Cusco by wandering the town, and eating delicious meals daily. The only other thing I can recall of note was that I dragged Farrah to a cat cafe. Yup. It's exactly what it sounds like. We drank cappuccinos, and hung out with 6 kittens/young cats who were all available for adoption. I wanted to take several of them home, but resisted the urge since I have no idea how to travel with the cat I have at home, much less with a collection of newly adopted cats.

I would love to return to Peru to spend some time in Lima, as the travellers we met who had been there suggested that the food was even more amazing. While I find that hard to believe I hope to find out someday. I'd also love to see the Amazonian and coastal regions in Perú. Long story short, if you've been thinking of visiting Machu Picchu, do it! And if you want to see other parts of Perú, also do it, but please invite me. I would love to go back there!

Jungle beaches are no place to be sick

Rich — Sat, 26 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Last week we changed scenery to the northern coast of Colombia to visit Santa Marta and Tayrona National Park. The Colombian coast is quite a bit different from Bogota and Medellin. For starters, it's at sea level, and feels distinctly like the Caribbean. The climate is hot and humid as you might expect. The town (city?) of Santa Marta also has a distinctly Caribbean vibe. It also feels more run down than Bogota and Medellin seemed to me. Santa Marta looked a bit like it was being constantly eroded by wind, sand and salt water. It was charming in its own way, but it was a bit of a let down in comparison to the beauty and vibrancy that we'd experienced elsewhere in the country.

The main attraction of this part of the country is Tayrona National Park, which we had read on many blogs was the "most beautiful" national park in the world. I'm going to flat out disagree with that assessment. Tayrona is certainly beautiful, but to my eyes it paled in comparison to Rocky Mountain National Park, Arches National Park, and Yellowstone to name a few. This is partly personal preference. I'm not a big fan of jungles, despite being a huge fan of seeing monkeys. Tayrona is a very large jungle park with a lot of beautiful beaches. However, as jungles tend to be, it is stunningly humid, and hot, and there were people everywhere. So, it felt much less like a preserve of nature, and more like a giant tourist trap to me. It also didn't help that both Farrah and I had come down with a cold/flu/covid/something-unpleasant. I learned pretty quickly that if I don't like jungles under good conditions then walking for hours through a jungle while feeling decidedly poorly is pretty close to my personal hell.

The park, as I mentioned, is quite large, so to get to any of the beaches and be able to spend any time at all we stayed overnight in the park at a small jungle hostel. The place we stayed was very very very basic. The hosts were really pleasant, and the food in the tiny restaurant was decent. The shower in our "cabana" was effectively a wall mounted hose that sprayed cold water in a single dense stream. This sounds worse than it was, since we were very hot and sweaty the entire time we were there, so hosing ourselves down was pretty ideal. A hot shower would have been really unpleasant.

To get to the park we took a bus which conveniently stopped 4 blocks from our hostel in Santa Marta. The bus took us directly to the entrance of the park, and then we spent thirty minutes waiting in crowded lines to get our entrance tickets. After that we walked for about 15 minutes to get to our jungle hostel. By the time we had gotten checked in it was about 11am. We decided that the best plan since we only had two days in the park would be to go to Cabo San Juan, the most distant beach in the park from our location. To get there we took a shuttle from our hostel to the trail heads in the park. Walking would have taken close to an hour along a rather boring paved road. From the trailhead we walked to what we thought was the trail that would take us to Cabo San Juan, but instead turned out to be a quiet little beach called La Piscinita, more about that later. We reluctantly turned around in search of the trail to Cabo San Juan, and luckily ran into another traveler who was looking for a beach with a short hike, as she and her friends had been to Cabo San Juan the previous day, and decided that doing that hike two days in a row was not to their taste. After an entertaining moment of both of us exercising our limited Spanish it became clear that we both spoke English, and we were able to swap information about the beaches we each wanted to get to. She was delighted to hear that La Piscinita was only about 10 minutes from where she'd met us, and she guided us back to the trail that would take us to Cabo San Juan, where she had left her friends. From there our trek started in earnest.

The walk to Cabo San Juan took us 2.5 hours. I was loaded up on cold medicine, and only feeling kind of lousy, but Farrah was only starting to feel sick, and she only got worse the longer we walked. The walk through the jungle is definitely pretty. We saw quite a few monkeys, and loads of colorful lizards. There wasn't much other wildlife to speak of, unless you count tourists, which I don't. The trails were busy. I don't think we walked a single stretch for more than 10 minutes without running into other tourists, and often the trails were completely congested. Along the way there were little stands set up providing water, beer, gatorade, and popsicles. Many of the trails also had extensive boardwalks. Definitely a back-to-nature experience. I have to admit we took advantage of a popsicle stand at one point, because Farrah was overheating, and we were almost out of water, so they had their purpose. There were also first-aid stations at several points along the walk, and fairly busy restaurants near every beach along the way. We also saw a number of horses ferrying tourists to and from the various distant beaches.

When we finally arrived at Cabo San Juan we found it to be damn near packed with people, and we took advantage of the restaurant there to eat a large lunch. The only thing we'd eaten so far that day was a very small breakfast, so we were grateful to get a serious meal in our bellies. The beaches at Cabo San Juan are pretty, and covered with vendors selling food, beer, and other random stuff. It was also packed with people. Finding a space to put our towels down was manageable, but only just. We only had about an hour and a half to spend at the beach before we had to head back since we didn't know how late the shuttles back to our hostel would run, and we were both damned if we would walk 3.5 hours through the jungle, rather than 2.5, if we could avoid it. Sometime during our brief stay at the beach Farrah suggested that taking horses back to the trail head might be a better idea since she was exhausted and feeling lousy. We talked to a fellow who explained the cost of the horse ride (50,000 Colombian Pesos, cash only, about $12) and the last departure time (4:30pm). However, he failed to explain that you could, and should, reserve your horses in advance. So, we relaxed for about an hour secure in the belief that we would have an easier return trip with the horses doing the hard work. This turned out not to be the case since when we arrived at the horse rental stand all the horses were gone, and the last three there were already reserved. The gentleman at the rental booth called to see if additional horses would be coming, which was kind of him, but unfortunately none were on their way back to Cabo that afternoon, so we set off on what we expected to be a truly exhausting trudge back to the trail head. We had a bit of luck however and about 30 minutes into our trek we ran into another horse stand and we were able to rent a couple of horses to take us back to the trail head, much to our mutual relief. I was still doing "OK" (thanks to my cold medicine I would have only hated the trek a little), but Farrah might have been considering sleeping in the jungle rather than walking any further.

We arrived back at our hostel that night completely whipped. I've been more tired for sure, but I've not often been as tired, sweaty, and dirty all at once. I remarked to Farrah that my shower under our "hose" might have been one of the most satisfying of my life. We had a pretty filling dinner in the tiny restaurant at our hostel, and I downed a couple of cheap beers, then we collapsed in bed. I spent the night tossing and turning in the heat while listening to some damn critter scratching at the wall behind our bed. The fan in our room just seemed to push the hot air around and did very little to cool me.

The next day we decided to go to La Piscinita, the beach we'd accidentally stumbled across the previous day. In all honesty, I was ready to leave the park behind and go back to Santa Marta to get a real shower and lie around an air conditioned room for a bit. The walk to La Piscinita is not as picturesque as our previous day's trek, but it's also only 15 minutes from the trail head. We spent several hours there lounging and playing in the surf. In my opinion, this is the beach to visit in Tayrona. It's close to the trail head, the scenery is every bit as lovely as Cabo, or Arrecife, and it's not nearly as busy. Plus there aren't a billion vendors, just one food stand and a restaurant set far enough back from the beach to be somewhat discrete. The water was also much more clear than I recalled from Cabo. At around 2:30 or 3 that afternoon we called it a day and made our way back to our hostel in Santa Marta where I got my air conditioning, and a proper shower to get all the sand out of those hard to reach places, like my hair.

Overall, I can't recommend Tayrona National Park. Just outside of Santa Marta is a beach town called Tagunga, which includes zero hikes, and by all accounts has incredibly beautiful beaches, which are adjacent to the park. Sadly, we didn't make it there.

The remainder of our stay in Santa Marta was spent lounging in our hostel, and nursing our illnesses. This has to have been one of the least enjoyable legs of our adventure thus far. Alas, into every life a little rain must fall. It was still better than working the old 9 to 5 by a large degree, and it made me that much more excited for the next leg of our trip, Peru! More about that in a later post. Until then enjoy the pictures, if nothing else Tayrona was quite Instagram-able.

Bogotá y Medellín

Rich — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

When we started our trip this year we had a list of places we wanted to visit. Colombia was not on that list. Neither was Mexico. However, one of the things that we had decided was that we didn't want a completely fixed itinerary, and that we wanted to take the advice of other travelers about places we might want to see. When we started talking to other travelers the two places that were most frequently suggested to us were, you guessed it, Mexico and Colombia.

I think the reason that these countries didn't make our list is the perception that we, and maybe most Americans, have of these two countries. A lot of the press about Mexico and Colombia in the US seems to focus on violence, drugs, and political unrest. (I can't help but note that a lot of the press in the US, about the US, talks about those same things, so it's a bit odd that this kind of bad press would be a deterrent now that I think about it.) Since this is a post about Colombia I have to note that I think many Americans don't know a lot about this country, and what we tend to know is related to Pablo Escobar (killed 30 years), the Medellin Cartel (defunct for almost 30 years), and communist guerrillas (mostly integrated into mainstream politics, or eliminated). Obviously, if that was all there was to Colombia then it would be a very dangerous place to visit, and it's quite unlikely that we'd have met anyone who had traveled here, and even fewer who would recommend the country.

I think it's safe to say that Pablo Escobar, and the Medellin Cartel, still loom large in American minds thanks to Narcos (a very entertaining TV show), and similar shows related to drug trafficking. While I personally enjoy shows like this they tend to leave out some important context, like the fact that this all happened 30 years ago, and is not necessarily representative of Medellin today. I am less sure about why the notion of a massive war with Colombian communist guerrillas is still so omni-present in some people's minds. I suspect part of it is the perpetual American obsession with the "communist threat". I'm not so sure that this was ever the threat that our government has at times made it out to be, and it definitely isn't much of a real threat in today's world. However, for people who have been paying attention to world affairs for many years, it is fair to say that the specter of violence from communist guerrilla groups and right-wing militias in Colombia was a very real thing for nearly 70 years. In fact, there is one hold out group of communist guerrillas still active in Colombia today. (Interestingly, a six month ceasefire agreement between the Colombian government and the ELN began while we were in Medellin.) That said, the level of violence, and the risk to travelers here is very minimal. Colombia simply is not the same country it was for many years.

That's about as much as I can say on the topic of prior violence in Colombia, and the misconception that this is still the case today without risking being incredibly inaccurate. I'm still learning about Colombia's violent past, and I'd hate to misspeak anymore than I may already have done. So, let me tell you a bit about what we have seen and done here!

Bogotá

When we started looking at traveling to Colombia our intention was to go directly to Medellín because so many people had told us how amazing it was. Bogotá was not mentioned nearly as much by the travelers we had met. We ended up visiting Bogotá mostly because it was much less expensive to fly from Denver to Bogotá than Denver to Medellín. This turned out to be a stroke of luck because we really enjoyed our visit to Bogotá.

We stayed in La Candelaria, a fairly tourist friendly neighborhood of Bogotá, for 5 days. In that brief time, we visited several remarkable museums, including the Museo de Oro (the museum of gold) and Quinta de Bolívar, where Simón Bolívar lived (part-time) while he led the fight to liberate Panama, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela from the Spanish. Seeing the transformed plantation house was quite impressive. It was nothing like the size of Mount Vernon, or Monticello, but then again Bolivar wasn't keeping a plantation loaded with slaves, and he spent only about 450 days in the home over a ten year period.

The streets of Bogotá are a fantastic example of street art. There is gorgeous graffiti all over the place. It reminded me a bit of the murals at home in Denver, but there was so much more of it that it made me wish the US would give up the ridiculous efforts put forth in so many cities to limit street art. Maybe if we did our streets would be more colorful and less sterile.

Probably the biggest highlight of our visit was the day that we took a cable car up to Mount Monserrate, which is home to a very old colonial style church. Apparently, people used to walk/crawl up this mountain which sits about 3000 ft above Bogotá as a form of pilgrimage. The cable car, thankfully, only takes about 10 minutes to ascend, and neither of us bruised the crap out of our knees in the process. The views of Bogotá from the top are truly spectacular. It's a bit like seeing Denver from Lookout Mountain, but it's so much closer to the city that the views are even more impressive. Riding the cable car was also a lot of fun since neither Farrah, nor I can remember having ridden a cable car before.

Although our time in the city was limited, we both enjoyed Bogotá quite a bit. I would definitely return to see more.

Medellín

After our brief stop in Bogotá we took a short flight to Medellín, where we stayed for three weeks. Medellín is a fantastic city. It has the most developed public transport system in Colombia, and I believe all of Latin America, but don't quote me on that. The city uses a lot of cable cars to get people up and down the steep hills that surround the city, so our initial cable car ride in Bogotá was only the first, and frankly the least impressive in our time in Colombia.

Our first week in Medellín was pretty laid back. We were pretty tired from our time in Denver, and then our busy week in Bogotá, so we took our time settling in. The apartment we stayed in was pretty small, with a kitchen, living area and a loft over the kitchen with a very low ceiling. Neither of us loved having to walk around hunched, or crab walking, when we were upstairs, but the lovely balcony in a plant filled garden, and the rooftop terrace were pretty great additions to our limited space. Thanks to our hosts we found a great beer bar about 3 blocks away called Punta Arena, which we visited several times during our stay, and even started making friends with one of the servers there. It was a perfect place to grab dinner and a beer after our daily activities. I also spent much of the first week doing work for a consulting firm that I have been helping out on occasion this year.

During our first week, we went out in the evenings several times to check out the local area. We stayed in a neighborhood called Laureles, which is fairly popular with tourists. There is another neighborhood called El Poblado, which is probably a bit better known. El Poblado has many amazing restaurants, and a lot of nightlife, but it's also very busy and noisy. We were glad to have landed in the quieter Laureles neighborhood, which also has a lot of great restaurants and plenty of things to do.

There's too much to talk about from our time in Medellín, so I'll try and hit some highlights. We ran into our life coach, Kristin Vierra, who was instrumental in helping us plan this trip, and she introduced us to AirBnB Experiences! These are effectively tours led by locals, and we went on a very filling (in more ways than one) tour of local street foods with her one night during our first week in town. After that we used AirBnB experiences to book a hike to a gorgeous waterfall outside of Envigado, a cooking class hosted by a local couple in Laureles, and we intend to keep finding awesome local events with it as we continue our travels. We also spent an unforgettable day visiting Comuna 13, which was once the most dangerous neighborhood in the world, and today is a major tourist destination for its street art, bars, and local art scene. While we have heard from some folks in Medellín that the neighborhood can still be a bit unsafe, depending on the time of day and where you wander, it is still a remarkable transformation since the time when guerrillas and narco-traffickers dominated the area.

The food scene in Medellín was interesting in that the local cuisine can be a bit bland. The street foods are great if you like fried foods, and lots of cheese, but overall it pales in comparison to places like Mexico. However, Colombians seem to love Argentine, Venezuelan and Peruvian food, so there is no shortage of amazing restaurants around town. There are even a couple of places I'd call out by name. The first is Alambique, which is a stunning culinary experience set in a beautifully decorated building that looks like a cross between a library, a garden and a fairy tale. The outside of the building looks like a hole in the wall of a warehouse, but once you are inside it's mind blowing. The food there was some of the best we have had on this trip, and the cocktails were equally amazing. Our favorite was a dish called the Perfect Avocado, which was a peeled avocado stuffed with melted cheese, then wrapped in succulent ham, and wrapped again in bacon. It's even better than it sounds. The other place worth mentioning is Cafe Noir, where we met Kristin for drinks the night before we left town. They served us some of the best cocktails I have ever had there. The star of the show was a black margarita, mezcal based, which came in the fanciest presentation I have ever seen for a drink, and tasted fantastic (I feel like I'm running out of words to describe the delightful things we experience in Medellín). The food at Cafe Noir was less impressive, but we did enjoy a giant charcuterie board with our drinks that certainly didn't disappoint. It was a really nice way to spend our final evening in a city that I plan to return to again whenever the opportunity presents itself. For pictures of the drinks at Cafe Noir check out our instagram post about nightlife Medellín, the black margarita is the cover photo.

Guatapé

Okay. I have to be honest. We took a day trip to Guatapé on one of our last days in Medellín. The town itself was a total disappointment to me. It photographs well, and has lots of pretty buildings, but overall it felt like a total tourist trap. We probably spent only an hour walking around town before we sat down for a beer and waited for our bus to take us back to Medellín. But... the real reason to visit Guatapé is outside of town where there is a massive, imposing granite rock about 700 ft tall called La Piedra del Peñol. There is a giant staircase built into one side of the rock that you can climb, assuming you don't mind the 750 steps it takes to get to the top. From there you have 360 degree views of the lakes that surround Guatapé. The scenery is really amazing, and I am very glad we went.

So far, our time in Colombia has been wonderful. The friendly people, welcoming culture, and amazing things to do make this a country that you really should put on your list of places to visit if it wasn't already. I'm certainly glad that so many travelers suggested that we come here. We might not have known it, but we would definitely have been missing out if we had decided not to visit Colombia!

Oh yeah, our time in Colombia isn't over. I'll be posting an additional blog post about Santa Marta and Tayrona National Park after we're done taking it in!

A visit to Denver

Rich — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

On July 9th we returned to the US for the first time in six months. We had always intended a quick return trip to Denver to visit with friends and to enjoy the String Cheese Incident run at Dillon and Red Rocks.

The facts

We were in town for only two weeks, and we spent most of the first week attending concerts where we got to hangout with a lot of friends. The shows were fantastic! While we have seen a lot of great live music in San Marcos it's hard to compare those experiences with our favorite band at Red Rocks. For one thing, the capacity at Dillon Amphitheater is about 3500 people, which is just shy of the entire population of San Marcos, and Red Rocks has a capacity of closer to 9500 people. So, we went pretty directly from a tiny town to a set of shows that represented several small towns around the lake in volume of people who were all there to enjoy a band we love. Pretty cool stuff if you ask me.

The next week of our return trip we spent running around and trying to catch up with friends, and visiting a couple of our favorite locations in the city. I was particularly pleased that we managed to visit Hogshead, my favorite brewery in Denver.

Really though, the time was all about connecting with our friends and community. Farrah has lived in Denver for over a decade, and I've been there for nearly two decades, so it would be safe to say that we've developed some very important relationships, and a lot of community there. Leaving all of that community behind was probably the hardest part of taking this trip, and it felt really good to see that we were able to pick up exactly where we left off with so many of the people who are so important to us. Love, and miss, you friends!

The experience

This bit is tough. The experience of being back in the United States was kind of... weird. Probably, this was because we had just come from a tiny village in the Guatemalan highlands, and Denver is anything but small. Or maybe it was because we were so busy with shows and seeing friends while we were back that the entire time we were there felt like a blur, after a relatively quiet couple of months. I really don't know what it was, but the experience struck me as kind of surreal.

I can say that I've been thinking for nearly a month about how to write this part of the post, and the only conclusion I was able to come to was that I had to just sit down and write.

The United States is so obviously wealthy when compared to the countries we have visited that I think part of the sense of surrealism was the newness and cleanliness of everything. In Latin America, it's really common to see old cars and motorcycles that you rarely see on the streets anymore in the US. Sure there are people in Latin America driving new BMWs, and Mercedes, etc. It's just not that common. In Denver, every other car was shiny, new, and likely far more expensive than it needed to be to meet the owners needs. There is also SO much more corporate advertising. There are ads in Latin America, but they just aren't as pervasive, and they tend to be more for local businesses. You don't see ads for McDonald's, banks, or luxury vehicles, every ten feet, despite those things being available. You also see way more flags in the US. There are American flags on everything. In Guatemala, Mexico, Belize and Colombia there are flags, but you really have to be on the lookout to spot them. In the US, every other car has an American flag on it, and it seems like damn near every business has a flagpole. It's kind of weird. Are we concerned that people will forget what the flag looks like, or do we think having a flag will somehow make us more American?

The other thing I noticed was that people are all in a huge rush in Denver. I don't know where they are all going, or why they are in such a hurry to get there. In Latin America, people seemed to simply be in less of a hurry. Getting to the next place is somehow less pressing, which is really pleasant. The constant rush in Denver was really unpleasantly jarring. People also just seem more concerned. It felt to me like there was a low-level of residual stress just floating in the air. The future seemed like a constant concern to many people including our friends. In Guatemala, in particular people seemed more interested in what was happening today, than in what might be happening next week, or next year, and it's an election year there, which is normally a time when Americans (myself included) tend to be very preoccupied with the future. Speaking of which, the news is a major conversational topic in the US. In Latin America, that has seemed to be less the case. Granted my Spanish is not really up for serious conversations about current affairs, so I could have just been blissfully unaware that everyone around me was talking about the news, but I don't think that was the case.

I don't really have any conclusions about what these differences mean, other than that they are differences. I can't even say that I think one is fundamentally better or worse than the other, but it has made me think a lot about my home country in ways that I might otherwise not have.

I can say that I don't miss the sense of rush and the constant bombardment with ads and current affairs that we get in the US, but I did really enjoy having good air conditioning, showers that maintained temperature and pressure, and I especially appreciated being able to drink the water and flush my toilet paper again. So, as all things in life I suppose you take the good with the bad.

If you've been waiting for a new post, I apologize for the delay. You can expect another about our time in Colombia coming soon.

Election Year

Rich — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

It's time to talk a bit about the elections that just took place last Sunday, June 25, in Guatemala. But first, some disclaimers.

Disclaimer #1: I know very little about Guatemalan politics.

Disclaimer #2: I know even less about how Guatemalan elections work in normal, or abnormal times. So, I don't know if this was a "normal" election year.

Disclaimer #3: I'm not a political scientist.

With those disclaimers firmly in mind here are my thoughts regarding the recent election.

First and foremost, I have to say a bit about the run up to the elections. I will be comparing this period to the run up to major US elections since that is my only basis for comparison. When we returned to Guatemala after our trip to Mexico we noticed a huge increase in the number of signs posted for various presidential candidates in Guatemala City. It was very noticeable on the route between Guatemala City and Antigua, all of the medians were covered with politicians signs. Ok, so far that seems pretty normal by my standards. When we arrived at the lake the town fair, feria, was underway, so the politics weren't really highlighted immediately... other than the fact that our neighbor was a mayoral candidate for San Marcos, which meant that there were massive banners for him on and around the property. However, as the feria wrapped up, and we expected San Marcos to return to the somewhat sleepy small village that we have become accustomed to, something else happened. We started to hear songs and announcements played over loudspeakers around the village... Then we got a text from our neighbor to let us know that he would be playing music and making announcements from his roof the following day. This was to be only the start of what would continue until two days before the election.

So, when I say music and announcements were being played I'm not sure if I'm painting quite the right picture. What was happening was that each mayoral candidate, on some schedule that I was never able to deduce, would set up a series of loudspeakers on their property, generally a roof for maximum projection. Then they would play propaganda songs for their political party, and for the candidate loud enough for everyone in the village to hear. These songs seemed to be played on a loop every time they were played, so not only did you hear the song once a day, but often several times in an hour, and multiple times per day. Generally, the music was followed by a speech, which was partly in Spanish, which I kind of understood, and the rest was in Kaqchikel, a Mayan dialect, which I proudly know about 3 words of. Our neighbor's roof is about 30 feet from our giant glass windows. To say that it was loud when he made announcements is a wild understatement. With all of our plate glass windows closed, and our headphones on, we were unable to drown out the sounds of his announcements. It was kind of intense.

As the date of the election approached, political activities increased. We started seeing groups marching with/for their political candidate, or party, of choice. These generally included a lead pickup truck with a giant loudspeaker strapped to it, playing their songs and making announcements as the marches wound their way through the streets of the three barrios (neighborhoods) here. They would also often launch bombas (mortars) as they marched. (I have no idea how, or if, this was safe.) One day Farrah and I went out to meet some friends and got caught in the middle of one of these marches. We guessed the wrong way into town to avoid an ongoing march, and found ourselves standing directly in the path of the march. This might sound scary, but really it was mostly just loud. The truck with the loud speaker stopped near us as it moved slowly uphill, and some bombas were launched close by as we stood and waited for the crowd to pass. As the crowd was moving past a figure ran up to me, and gave me a big hug. It turned out my friend Selvin who owns Arati Cafe was in the crowd and spotted us.

The political activities increased to include parties held by the candidates in the final weeks leading up to the election. Our neighbor was generally very good about notifying us about events so we weren't surprised by a sudden volume increase on the property. However, there were a couple parties where bombas were launched and exploded very close to our windows which was shocking, no matter how prepared I thought I was. I spent half an hour one morning after a party sweeping up detritus from bombas that were strewn over our porch.

I've thought about this a fair amount, and I'm not sure there is a better way for candidates here to share their messages. Many villagers live in very small homes, some without power. So, clearly TV and radio spots in a village of 4000 wouldn't reach many members of the voting populace. What's the alternative then? Loud speakers, or a public scheduled venue would be the only choices, right? And if public meetings here are as well attended in the US, then you'd be better off locking yourself in a room and shouting your message into the void. Thus, loudspeakers.

So, it was loud, a lot of the time. And then, on Friday, June 23rd two days before the election all the announcements, music, and bombas abruptly stopped at noon. It turns out that by law all political announcements had to stop at that time. Then on Saturday alcohol sales stopped until after the election. The election weekend was quiet in San Marcos. I stayed home on election day and practiced my mandolin. Farrah went out to Tzununa to attend a kirtan with a friend. The entire town seemed quiet from my vantage point, and Farrah confirmed that both San Marcos and Tzununa seemed very quiet to her.

On Monday I read a bit about the election results on Aljazeera and Prensa Libre. Then I went to the coffee shop to talk with Selvin about who had won the mayoral election, since I couldn’t find the results on the internet. The incumbent mayor won, if you were wondering. The presidential election wasn't instantly decided. In Guatemala, there are many more viable political parties than in the US. So, in the presidential election what happened was that the field of some 22 candidates split the vote. I believe that Guatemalan election law requires a candidate to win 50% (don't quote me on this) of the vote in a presidential election to win outright. If that doesn't happen then the two candidates with the highest percentages of the votes go to a runoff in October. So, that's what happened. One of the two highest polling candidates, Sandra Torres, made it to the next round of votes, along with Bernardo Arévalo de León, whom I gather from my limited research, was something of a surprise. In October voters will go back to the polls to choose between these two candidates.

Interestingly, there is a vote category called the “null vote”, which I believe means a person cast a vote for none of the options. It’s my understanding that if enough null votes are cast the election has to be re-run completely. The null vote won a higher percentage in the presidential elections than any presidential candidate.

I should mention that some news sources have reported protests, etc. after the elections. I haven't read a ton about this, so where facts and information fail me here I will fill in with some speculation. There seem to have been some oddities regarding which candidates were allowed to compete in the election. It seems this may have contributed to frustration with the elections, and possibly the large percentage of null votes. I’m sure there have been protests about the election, however we have not seen any protests here in San Marcos, nor have we heard of anything like that happening at the towns around the lake. It's possible that we just haven't seen it as we are only visitors here, but our local friends haven't mentioned anything of the sort either, so I tend to think that any distress over the elections is being expressed more elsewhere, than here. I will also note that young people here that I have spoken with seem not to have a great deal of faith in the government. It is my impression that this is true in many countries, including my own.

I think that pretty much sums up my first experience of seeing elections take place in a foreign country. In many ways the whole thing seemed like a non-event. This is probably because I'm not invested in the results. It strikes me that maybe I'd be better off if I were to become less invested in the election outcomes at home.

What's new?

Rich — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I haven’t written much over the last month. I suppose that’s pretty obvious to anyone who has been following this blog. Farrah and I have been in San Marcos la Laguna, Guatemala. We haven’t traveled much, we just kind of settled back in here at the lake, and our lives have been pretty normal, more or less.

The big news of the past month is that we celebrated our first year of marriage on June 2nd. For the occasion we spent 2 nights at Hotel Bambu, a resort in Santiago la Laguna, which is on the other side of the lake. Since we’ve traveled so little since we got back to San Marcos it was kind of novel to pack up our day packs and take off for a couple days. Our time at Bambu was great. We sat around playing cards, lounged in the hot tub, enjoyed the sauna, and generally bummed around lazily. We also enjoyed a lot of really great food at their restaurant.

Other than our excursion to Santiago we have made a couple of trips to Panajachel, where we discovered the first grocery store we’ve seen on our travels that has reminded us of a normal grocery store in the US. We’ve made a couple trips to get groceries there since, and it’s nice to be able to switch between that and the organic food delivery service we have used here. The grocery store has much more to choose from.

We’ve also visited San Juan and San Pedro several times. We have some cool pictures posted on Facebook and Instagram from the day that we visited the mirador in San Pedro. The views of the lake were pretty spectacular, which I suppose is to be expected. Who the hell would build a mirador with shitty views?

We’ve also been doing some hiking with our friend Mingo. Two weeks ago we hiked from San Marcos to San Juan along the lake shore. Really, it’s more of a picturesque stroll along the lake shore occasionally passing near local farmers. In addition to some of the tallest corn stalks I’ve ever seen (10 ft, maybe?), we saw several cows and a bunch of goats that tried to block our path. I assume they just wanted to hangout with us. Last week, we went the opposite direction and we hiked from San Marcos to Santa Cruz. I had done this hike with Mingo once before, but this was Farrah’s first time. The hike takes you above the shore of the lake from Tzununa to Santa Cruz. The first bit from San Marcos to Santa Cruz is just a walk along the road between the towns. The rest of the hike is a lot of up and down, with nice shade, and great views of the lake. I really enjoyed this one a second time, and we had perfect weather, right up until we arrived in Santa Cruz and it promptly started to rain.

You may have noticed that the above activities don’t even come close to taking up a month of time. So, what else have we been doing?

I’ve been playing the mandolin a lot. I’m operating under the assumption that if I do it enough, one day I will appear not to suck. So far, I am still not great. But as these things go, I’m much better than I was at the beginning of the year. It definitely has helped to have lots of free time. I’ve also read some books, and dabbled with ChatGPT, and programming in Flutter, but I got bored with that exercise pretty quickly. I’ve also been doing a little bit of consulting with a group I helped a bit at the end of last year. I can honestly say that after 9 months without working I still don’t miss it.

Farrah has been continuing to work on her yoga practice and finding new ways to teach. She has a weekly class here that I’ve started to attend. For those who are counting, I have now taken about 10 times as many yoga classes this year as I normally require, so 10 classes. She’s also offered a couple of online offerings, the next of which is coming up this Saturday, you can sign up here. She’s also been getting out to more events than I have. In part, because she’s more interested in ecstatic dance than I am, and in part because she made some friends here in our building and they went out to hangout together several times. Sadly, those friends have since left the lake, but it was good while it lasted.

I think that’s about all I can say about our last month at Lake Atitlan. It’s been nice and laid back, and we’ve had a lot of time to pursue our interests. The next big thing will be our trip back to Denver in less than 2 weeks. We will be back in town for 5 nights of String Cheese Incident, and visiting with friends, but more about that later.

A sad story

Rich — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

This is a difficult post to write. If you are an animal lover it will also be difficult to read. Read it anyway.

If you have spent any time in small towns anywhere in the world I'm sure you have seen stray animals. Some of these strays seem to do pretty well, others not so much. In San Marcos la Laguna, it is very common to see stray dogs, and to a lesser degree cats. Many of these animals are sick, or malnourished. It's always sad to see.

Several weeks ago I was walking to the coffee shop where I often eat breakfast. Along my walk I spotted a tiny orange and white kitten along the trail. She was probably only a month, or at most two, old. I stopped to pet her and see if anyone was around to look after her. I didn't see anyone, but she was just outside a small shanty and I know that sometimes local families here adopt animals out of kindness even though they have little enough for themselves. She was kind of dirty, but otherwise she seemed healthy enough. I moved on about my day, and made a note to look out for this tiny soul.

I saw her two more times on my way to the coffee shop that week, and I was never sure what, if anything to do for her. We are leaving the lake soon, and adopting an animal in a foreign country with no plan of how to get her home to the states, or what we would do with her when we left seemed cruel at the time. About a week after I first spotted her I was walking into town with Farrah, and we saw a lady carrying this tiny kitty back up to barrio 2, where we live. I thought that this meant that she would be cared for, and I was deeply relieved.

Yesterday afternoon, Farrah went out to our local tienda to grab some beer. When she got back she was visibly distressed, and told me she had found a kitten crying and covered in flies in the alley directly outside our house. I immediately came out to see what we could do, only to discover that this was the same kitten I had seen several times in the past month. The poor thing was lying on her side covered in dirt and bugs. She was too weak to stand up, and barely strong enough to roll over, or wave her paws to try and get the flies off of her. I went and got a towel, and brought her into our apartment. We had a large cardboard box from our last grocery order, so we made up a tiny bed for her, and cleaned most of the dirt and bugs off of her.

For the next several hours we tried to get her to drink water, and milk in hopes that she might simply be too malnourished to take care of herself. Maybe she was. She lasted for about 5 hours. We sat with her, pet her, tried to get her to eat or drink anything, and we let her rest as peacefully as she could, but she was too far gone. At about 10 o'clock last night after we had tried to feed her a bit of chicken, which she initially seemed interested in, we found her dead in her box. She can't have been more than 3 months old.

I've seen a fair amount of death in my life (I'm mostly speaking of people here). It is never easy for me. I suppose it shouldn't be. Often when someone dies you can reflect on the life they led, and take some comfort in knowing that they got a shot just like anyone else. You can look back on the years of memories. It makes you sad to think that no new memories will be made, but at least some memories remain, and that person, or animal, will live on in the minds of those who loved them. However, sometimes the innocent die, and there is something unspeakable terrible about experiencing a death when the chance of life seems never to have been given.

Phoenix, that's what we named her, posthumously, everyone deserves to be remembered by name, never had much of a shot at life. She lived on the street, and we will never know if anyone ever showed her much kindness. I don't know what happened to her mother, or her litter mates. She was clearly too young to be all by herself. I can only hope that our efforts, however late, made her last hours more comfortable than they otherwise would have been, but I wish I had done something sooner. Maybe she'd have had a different story if I had.

As I write this we are preparing to go out and find a place in the forest to bury Phoenix. I don't know if she'd like the forest as a final resting place, but there isn't anything else we can do for her now.

Can ChatGPT write software?

Rich — Sat, 13 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

This past Thursday I finally broke through my AI skepticism, and spent the day trying to answer the question "Can ChatGPT write software?" to my own satisfaction. I don't want to bury the lead here, so the short answer is "yes, ChatGPT can write software". The long answer is, of course, more nuanced. So, let me tell you what I did, and let you form your own opinion from there.

My test of ChatGPT was to ask the system to write Conway's Game of Life (Life), a cellular automata simulation program, which I have written several times in various languages, and which I have used as the subject of programming interviews over the years. The reason I have used this as a test of programmers, and languages, is that the core of the program is an incredibly simple heuristic, and the options for optimizing, and extending the program in interesting ways are almost limitless. I was particularly interested in finding out if ChatGPT could do this without having to tweak the code myself. In other words, I didn't want to know if ChatGPT could help me write the code. I wanted to know if it could write and modify the code with only my prompts.

I started by simply telling ChatGPT that I wanted it to write Life in Python with no additional features. The response, much to my surprise, was a working program that used NumPy and Matplotlib to generate a version of the game in a 50 by 50 grid. The solution was not complete spaghetti code, but imposed rather good coding structures, and was simple to read.

My next step, once I had a basic working program in hand, was to prompt ChatGPT to modify the code to add useful features. The first change I wanted to see after having a working program in hand was to add the ability to configure certain parameters of the game. Initially I asked ChatGPT to add the ability to define the size of the game grid, which it did instantly. I was less than delighted to see that the initial implementation of this change was done by accepting an optional command line argument to the code in the form of a number representing the size of the grid squares. I'd have preferred that ChatGPT use the argparse library, so that the user would have useful help messages about the input arguments, and I instructed ChatGPT to change this implementation, which it did without issue.

Next I requested that the program be modified to support arguments that allow a user to specify the interval between the display of new generations of the game (the initial code regenerated the board 5 times per second), and the number of generations of the game to be generated. While ChatGPT did add these arguments, the initial implementation did not stop after the defined number of generations. I told ChatGPT about the problem and it promptly fixed it.

After that I moved on to a feature, which I believe to be essential to any implementation of Life, the ability to store previous generations of the board, and allow the user to scroll back to previous generations. The initial implementation ChatGPT came up with, allows the user to use the spacebar to pause the game, and the left arrow key to scroll back through previous generations. When the spacebar is pressed again, the game resumes from the last viewed generation. This all worked as expected.

At this point I started to feel more like a product manager. I was simply feeding requirements, and errors, to ChatGPT, then waiting for the changes. So, my next request was to ask ChatGPT how I should attribute the code it was writing. Interestingly it suggested that I should license the code under the MIT open source license, with a note that the code was generated by an ChatGPT, and modified by me. The attribution also suggested that I be listed as the copyright holder.

I spent a couple more hours asking ChatGPT to add other important features, including the ability to tune the likelihood of cells being populated at the start of a new game, saving a particular generation of the game to a file, and loading that saved data as a starting point for a new game, and adding useful information like how to control the program to the games display. The final result is visualized in the below screenshot.

This review of ChatGPT's coding abilities has been fairly glowing thus far, so I want to spend a little time talking about what didn't work so well. First of all, ChatGPT seemed to have a glitch where it would fail to print the entire contents of the program after a while. When I would ask it to regenerate the program, it would fail over and over again to print the last 20 to 50 lines. I got around this by giving it a copy of the main functions I wanted it to modify and telling it to only show the salient changes. Second, there were numerous times when I asked it to add a new piece of functionality that it would do as I requested, but would in the process remove other features that had been working. I got around this by informing ChatGPT that it had broken existing functionality and it generally corrected the mistakes pretty well. The biggest issues I ran into was while working on the feature to save existing generations, and when generating text to explain what was happening to the user within the Matplotlib rendering. ChatGPT decided that the 's' key should be used for saving data, which conflicted with an existing Matplotlib keybinding for saving images. The effect was that a generation of the board would be saved as text, but a dialog box would pop up on screen, which wanted you to name and save an image file. Trying to explain to ChatGPT what was happening and getting it to fix the problem was surprisingly difficult. It eventually came up with the correct solution of removing the native keybinding to 's' and this allowed the functionality that I wanted for the 's' key. I also had a bit of trouble explaining to the program that I wanted to include labels in the plot screen that told the user, what keys to use for various functionality, and to display useful information messages, like the name of a saved file, and which generation of the board was currently being rendered. ChatGPT got stuck on the idea of using a legend, which is implemented in Matplotlib as a rendering that obscures a portion of the plot. For Life this meant not being able to see what was happening in part of the simulation. I also struggled to get ChatGPT to properly include messages about saved files. Initially, ChatGPT simply rendered new save messages directly on top of the previous messages. This is the only place where I actually gave up on having ChatGPT do the coding and adjusted the location and re-rendering of messages myself.

I should probably note that during this experiment I was using the free version of ChatGPT. I've read that the paid version, GPT-4, I think, is supposedly much better. I frankly don't care enough at this moment to pay $20 for a month to explore the differences. Perhaps I will at some point in the future.

Overall, I was surprised how effectively ChatGPT was at completing this task. Not only was it able to generate the lion's share of the code I requested with nothing more than my prompting, but it generally did a good job of explaining the changes it was making. When prompted about the reasons it chose for using Matplotlib and NumPy as the core of the program it correctly responded that these libraries are faster than native Python data structures, and included useful support for rendering the game board as plots.

I'm not really sure what I think about all of this. It will take me a while to digest the possibilities. In the near term, I plan to see how well ChatGPT works for turning this simple application into a multi-platform mobile app using something like Flutter. I'm to see how well it works using a less common programming language, and one that I have no personal experience with. I'll post an update with my findings.

My parting thought for this blog post is that AI chatbots are clearly much more powerful than I have given them credit for, but what this means for programmers, or society as a whole, is beyond me. This was not a terribly difficult program for an experienced programmer to write, and I have no idea how well an AI chatbot would do with implementing something truly complex like SQLite, or the Linux kernel. I suspect not as well, and I will leave it to an expert on those systems to determine how useful an AI chatbot can be for that type of development.

To view the code generated by ChatGPT, with very minor tweaks on my part see this gist.

Vacations End

Rich — Wed, 10 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

All things come to an end. In some ways, it is reassuring to know that there are a few constants in the world, even if the constants tend not to look like the kinds of things that we might expect. I’ve come to the realization over the last couple of weeks that our trip has changed for me. I no longer feel like I’m just taking a break, or living in a permanent state of vacation. Instead, I’ve begun to crave a certain structure that I have decidedly not wanted up until this point.

Part of my desire for more structure has come about because we are settled in San Marcos la Laguna for the next two months (we’ve been back for a month as of this writing), rather than being completely consumed by travel as we were in Mexico, where we visited something like 8 different towns in 3 weeks.

Another reason I’ve been craving more structure is that I’ve actually started to think seriously about the future. Much to my dismay, the money I saved for this trip will not last forever. At some point, we have to do something to earn some money again, unless we decide to become full-time vagabonds, which I frankly can’t imagine. So, the question is: “who the hell do I want to be when I grow up?”

When we started this trip I was quite seriously burnt out with work, and my increasingly stressful roles in large corporations. I was having trouble imagining any kind of future working with technology, or anything else really. While I still don’t want to go back to working 60+ hour work weeks (who does?) I have to admit I am starting to miss some aspects of my former work.

For those who don’t know me, I spent the last 25 years working as a software engineer, and engineering leader. I loved the challenges and puzzles of writing software to solve business problems. I found it fun to learn new things about software, and find ways to use what I learned to the benefit of my employers. Over time, I started to really enjoy sharing what I had learned with others. In the last 5 years, I can categorically say that my favorite working moments were spent sitting with other engineers and helping them to learn programming and engineering concepts. Watching understanding dawn in another person was incredibly rewarding. Not only did I enjoy seeing the growth in other people, but I found the challenge of teaching to be a fantastic way to deepen my own understanding of these topics.

However, somewhere in that same period of time I found myself doing less and less of what I actually loved, and spending more and more time arguing with people about budgets and priorities. While I don’t doubt that some people find this type of work engaging, I do not. I suspect this contributed directly to my increasing burn out. I already wrote about my experience of burnout in another post, and I don’t want to spend more time on it today, so let’s move on.

I started this post by saying that I’ve been craving more structure, so let me tell you what that means for me today.

Most mornings I wake up some time between 6am and 7am. I spend the first couple hours of the day reading something thought provoking, currently "The Dawn of Everything", and taking breaks every 10, or 15, minutes to do sets of pushups and squats. When I finish my reading, I go to Arati, my favorite coffee shop in town. I get breakfast and coffee, then I spend the next several hours “working”. Work these days means one of several things for me. I might spend time writing a blog post or journaling, doing research on various technologies that interest me, doing programming exercises, reviewing job opportunities to get a sense of what might interest me in the coming months/years, reconnecting with people in my business network, or on occasion chatting with people in the coffee shop about what they are doing. All of this serves the purpose of exploring how I would like to live in future. Spoiler alert: I haven’t come to any conclusions as of yet.

I generally finish my morning by doing a bit of shopping for groceries or anything else we might need at the apartment, and then head back home to spend the afternoon in an even less structured sort of way. In the afternoons, I spend my time playing the mandolin, practicing Spanish on Duolingo, reading/listening to novels, or hanging out with Farrah.

I appreciate that, to many of you, this may not sound like a lot of structure, and in some ways it isn’t. I can only say that it’s a much more concrete flow for my day than we had in the height of our travels when I would wake up and do something different every day. Often that meant traveling to some new place, or visiting a sight of interest. However, it also meant getting up and being completely aimless, with only very loose intentions for the day. This was wonderful at first, and I can’t stress enough how necessary a long period of relaxation was for me when we started our trip. I’m just not the kind of person who can feel good doing little or nothing everyday. I generally enjoy the sense of accomplishment I have when I can look back at my day and say to myself, “look at all the things you did”. Perhaps that is some kind of programming inherent in the society I grew up in, or perhaps it’s some kind of personal trait. I really couldn’t say, nor do I think it matters. Like most people, I want to feel satisfied with how I am living, and today, this is what is working for me. Are there intentional ways you choose to live? Or do you simply jump from one “necessary” thing to the next? If you feel like you are in the latter situation, and you happen to be like me, you might be closer to burnout than you think. Or I might not know what I’m talking about.

I’m sure I will write more about what I am thinking and doing to ensure that in future I am living in a way that is really fulfilling to me. This is just what I am thinking and doing today.

Happy Wednesday!

On Learning Spanish

Rich — Sat, 06 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Today I want to write about some of the learning I have been doing during our trip this year. Since we have been predominantly traveling in Spanish speaking countries, one of the main things I have been learning is how to communicate in a foreign language. This is a large topic, so I want to start by talking about how I have gone about learning Spanish.

I started to try to learn more Spanish several months before our trip began. Initially, I played with Duolingo and Rosetta Stone to try and figure out which I preferred and found most helpful. I also dabbled with Babel, and a variety of lesser known names in the language learning space, but I found Duolingo and Rosetta Stone the most useful off the bat. It was a bit difficult to tell what was helping most at first, because I had no real feedback loop, by which I mean I didn't really have anyone to speak with in Spanish. I also wasn't properly motivated to spend time studying since everywhere I went people spoke English. Our trip was a theoretical thing in my mind, and the challenges of not being able to communicate with people I met daily didn't exist.

When we first arrived in Guatemala in January I immediately started receiving feedback in the form of regular attempts to communicate with people in Spanish. This offered me a pretty stark view of my ability to speak Spanish. It turns out that 3 years of Spanish in high school, and occasional bursts of practice on Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, and other learning formats had done little to prepare me for actually talking with people. I could make myself understood reasonably well in some very specific circumstances, like ordering food in a restaurant, or asking about prices in a store, and that was about it. This level of knowledge gave me enough understanding to realize how much I couldn't understand, or speak about coherently, which in turn gave me a hell of a lot of incentive to learn more as quickly as I could manage.

For me, Duolingo has turned out to be the best tool for gaining a greater vocabulary and improving my understanding and usage of grammar. Rosetta Stone seemed to be more geared towards teaching Spanish phrases that help for quick trips, but I found it hard to gain a better overall understanding of the language. Part of this is likely due to the differences in formats between the two programs. Duolingo is a game. It uses short lessons that build upon each other and offer a ton of repetition. You also get the satisfaction of increasing levels, maintaining your daily learning streak, competing with other users, and completing learning challenges with friends. While this could be irritating for some people, I find the gamification of the app to be motivating when coupled with the daily experience of wanting to be able to talk to people more effectively. Rosetta Stone has no comparable features, and ultimately I found myself ignoring it in favor of spending more time on Duolingo.

The thing that has helped me most is actually speaking and listening to Spanish daily. At first, I was pretty happy when I thought I could understand about 50% of what was being said to me. This seemed pretty good until I started to realize how easy it is to misunderstand the core of a conversation when I was missing 50% of the context. In San Marcos la Laguna there are a large number of people who speak at least a little bit of English, so understanding 50% of what I was hearing coupled with a bit of hand gesturing and a couple of English words thrown in worked ok. When we arrived in Mexico it was a whole different story. Most of the people we encountered spoke Spanish, and many people didn't know any English. So, I started finding myself in situations where my rudimentary Spanish was all I had available to me to get by. For example, in Chetumal, we went to a Telcel store to buy local SIM cards, and we had to spend about 40 minutes talking with a very nice lady who helped us make our purchase. After that exchange my brain hurt. I was pleased that I was able to navigate the conversation, more or less, but it was also very obvious that I was guessing at her meaning about as often as I was really grokking the conversation. This was pretty common for our time in Mexico, and I found myself more and more desperate to be able to communicate more efficiently. So, I spent several hours every day playing Duolingo, and trying to speak to people at every opportunity. It was common for me to have a conversation with someone and then replay bits of the conversation for hours afterwards recognizing places where I had misunderstood, or misused words, or phrases. While this was disheartening sometimes it really set a fire under my ass to keep learning and practicing.

In addition to Duolingo I started using an app called BrainPop Espanol, which offers a free daily video, completely in Spanish, on a wide variety of topics. The videos are about 5 to 10 minutes in length, and after watching them you can take a 10 question quiz, in Spanish, which lets you benchmark your understanding of the video. My early quiz results in the app reflected my guess that I was only understanding about 50% of what I was hearing, and being asked. The fact that the quiz questions are completely in Spanish meant that I not only had to understand the video contents, I also had to understand what I was being asked, and what each answer meant. After several months of using this app in addition to Duolingo, and regular conversations with Spanish speakers, I have been pleased to find that my comprehension is much closer to 75%.

Actually speaking Spanish with people is certainly the best means of learning that I have found. I don't think conversation alone would have gotten me to where I am today, because I find it difficult to learn new words and understand grammatical errors when I am desperately trying to follow a conversation. That said, the experience of talking with someone in a foreign language has given me the greatest understanding of my shortcomings, and it's amazingly rewarding to have gone from being able to make simple requests to being able to actually hold 10 minute conversations about simple topics with people. I get a huge boost in confidence and motivation every time I can make myself understood. It makes me want to practice more, and I really enjoy being able to talk with people.

Talking with people still requires a lot of time spent mentally translating what is being said to me in Spanish into English, and translating my responses from English back into Spanish. This process is slow, and error prone, but it's a start. I now spend time every day trying to think in Spanish. Most of those thoughts are simple, but again, it's a start towards a more complete understanding of the language. I think this practice is paying dividends, because on our return to San Marcos I was able to text with some local friends in Spanish without using Google translate, and I sat down and had a 10 minute conversation about our travels with an acquaintance I ran into at one of our favorite local restaurants. Texting in Spanish is particularly nice because I don't have to stand around feeling foolish while I think about what something means, or how to respond, while another person is staring at me. However, I think the experience of holding a face to face conversation is more instructive and rewarding, because I get immediate feedback, and helpful corrections when I misspeak.

Overall, I have found learning a new language to be one of the most rewarding experiences I have had this year. It's fun to really feel the progress I have made by being able to speak more and more with people. It can also be incredibly challenging and frustrating. I regularly have months of struggling with the difference in the way that Spanish and English format phrases or sentences, but ultimately when I start to "get it" I feel so much more excited for having worked so hard. As I continue to learn I will write some additional posts about what has worked for me. I'll also continue to describe more about how the process of learning a language feels to me.

If we continue to spend more time in Guatemala this year I would like to start to learn Kaqchikel, one of the two Mayan languages commonly spoken around Lake Atitlan. I hope that learning new languages will remain a lifelong pursuit. I find it very impressive to meet people who speak multiple languages, and I'd love to be one of them. For now, I'll keep studying Spanish, and see where that takes me.

Feria

Rich — Wed, 03 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Two weeks ago as Farrah and I were returning to San Marcos, we came over the hill from San Pablo headed down into town and Farrah said to me, "I think I see a ferris wheel". To which I promptly replied, "there is definitely not a ferris wheel in San Marcos, it's a tiny village, how could there be a ferris wheel in town? Where would they even put it?" Several minutes later our driver pulled up to a road block outside of town and we could see quite clearly that, in fact, there was a ferris wheel in town. Not only that, but we found the main road lined with street vendors, and loads of people wandering around. It turns out that our return to San Marcos coincided with the annual town fair, or in Spanish la feria.

As you may know if you've been reading this blog, San Marcos is a village on the northern shore of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. The population of the village is around 4000 people, so you can probably imagine why I found it hard to believe that the entire main street of town was blocked off and a ferris wheel and a carnival pirate ship ride had been set up on the grounds of the catholic church.

The feria, we soon learned, is an annual celebration to commemorate the founding of San Marcos. It continues for roughly two weeks, and it is a big deal in this sleepy little village. The normal rules about noise after the hour of ten at night seems to be completely lifted, or ignored, and people from many of the neighboring villages, as well as locals here come out in large numbers, to visit the street vendors, ride the rides, play carnival games, watch and listen to very loud musical performances in the towns amphitheater and the gymnasium of the school. In addition, we saw at least two parades, and prior to the parades we got the dubious pleasure of listening to a marching band practice several times a day leading up to the first of two large celebrations. The first celebration (we heard) was on the anniversary of the town's founding, and the second was a week later at the end of the feria. There were also a ton of firework displays in the first week, and far more bombas than we have previously experienced around the lake. Bombas are homemade mortars, which you hear year round, and in theory are used to commemorate birthdays, anniversaries and other events of significance to some locals.

Overall, I can't say that I've enjoyed the feria. Mainly, it was incredibly loud for much of the day, and late into the night, which definitely takes away from the normal tranquility of the village, not to mention making it hard to sleep. It also brought a steep increase in the number of drunks and/or drugged men to the village begging for money. More than once I had to step over people who were passed out in the walking paths around the village, and I was frequently asked for money by people who were clearly heavily inebriated. On one memorable occasion a very drunk , or drugged, man asked me for money to buy flowers from his mother who had passed away. I politely declined and walked into the town center to grocery shopping. On my way out of the grocery store I met the same man, considerably more drunk (it had only been 45 minutes), who proceeded to tell me a story about how he needed to buy flowers for his father who had passed away, and asked me for my Doritos when I declined to give him money again. While I certainly don't begrudge anyone who wants to party the level of excess and the wild lies in an attempt to maintain a bender were fairly annoying. There are poor villagers who have legitimately lost loved ones and have little money to pay their respects. When encountered sincerely with this kind of situation I am generally happy to offer a bit of money to help. I know it's not always clear who falls into which category, and a judgement call has to be made. Other times, the situation couldn't be more clear.

On the plus side, I went with some friends to the feria one evening, and saw many families wandering and enjoying the carnival games, or buying delicious street foods, which aren't always available around here. Our friend Dan played a shooting game, which he won big at after a couple of attempts, and let a local boy who had been hanging around watching us his choice of prize. The boy was clearly delighted by the opportunity to pick a prize. The street vendors also sold a lot of goods that are less common in San Marcos, from toys to kitchen wares, and I wonder if this time of year is an opportunity for some families to buy goods that they would otherwise need to travel to a larger village on the lake to acquire. The music events, and performances also seemed to draw large crowds. To my ears much of these performances sounded repetitive, and I never got a chance to get a good view of some of the more interesting performances in real time, but I did see photos of the spectacles posted on Facebook that looked pretty cool. The closest I got to a musical performance was during another grocery trip when I stopped to watch a set of daytime performers who were playing the town amphitheater. While the music wasn't necessarily my cup of tea (which is fine, it would be a boring old world if we all liked the exact same things), it was definitely well attended and a lot of people were dancing (some quite drunk, and others entirely sober) and seeming quite delighted.

A mixed benefit of the feria were the fireworks. Generally, San Marcos just gets bombas, which are always loud, and sometimes a bit dangerous, but otherwise uninteresting. However, for the feria there were several evenings when we got to watch full on firework displays from our apartment on the hillside in barrio dos, and I quite enjoyed getting to see cool light displays instead of just being surprised by loud mortar rounds! They were still loud, but you can't really avoid noise in a firework display, so all in all it was kind of fun.

May 2nd, we were told, was the final day for the feria, and it seems that the production, or at least some parts of it, are moving on to Tzununa the next town headed clockwise around the lake. I hope that people enjoyed the spectacle, and I'm looking forward to a return to the relative tranquility we have come to expect, and treasure, in San Marcos. There will always be noise anywhere you go, but turning the volume back down to a reasonable level will be a welcome change!

Valladolid (pronounced vaya-doh-leed, not va-la-do-lid)

Rich — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Let's dispense with the obvious first. We are not actually in Valladolid, or even Mexico, at the moment. It has just taken me a couple weeks to sit my ass down and write about our time there. If you've been reading this blog, or following Farrah and I on the social medias, you will already know that we are back in San Marcos la Laguna, Guatemala. But this blog post isn't about Guatemala. It's about Valladolid. So, let's get on with it.

For those of you who don't know, Valladolid is a pueblo magico in the state of Yucatan in Mexico. It is located somewhat centrally in the greater Yucatan peninsula, which is composed of three Mexican states: Yucatan, Quintana Roo and Campeche. We visited all three Yucatan states in the 3+ weeks we spent in Mexico, but we spent the majority of our time, ten days, in Valladolid.

Our time in Valladolid was somewhat marred by the fact that Farrah got a nasty case of salmonellosis, and was trapped in our tiny airbnb for about 7 days. Farrah is fully recovered, but I really can't overstate how terrible the experience was for her. She said she had never felt more sick, and I believe it. The good news is that we went to a doctor in Valladolid, after waiting several days too long, and had a shockingly good experience. The doctor we went to was fabulous, and very attentive despite some language barrier. (My Spanish remains limited to ordering food, shopping in markets, talking about travel, and exchanging pleasantries, thankfully the doctor spoke English pretty well.) In two doctors visits we were charged only for medication, and not for the consultation itself. The total cost of 6 prescriptions was around $60 USD. I'll let you think about what that might have cost in the US for a moment... Seriously think about it!

So, what did we do when we weren't visiting the doctor?

Unfortunately for Farrah, most of her time was spent in our shoebox sized airbnb. I also spent a lot more time in that small space than I would have liked trying to take care of her, but when it became clear that she was going to be OK, and it was just a matter of waiting for the drugs to do their work I got out and enjoyed the city. We only had a couple of days before Farrah got sick, and we spent that mainly orienting ourselves. Although, our airbnb was very small and not a fun place to spend loads of time, it was very close to everything in the city, which made it very easy to explore. The city center was two blocks away, and we got to watch some very cool dancers there on one of our first nights.

One of my first excursions on my own was to Casa de los Venados, or house of the deer. This is a remarkable old mansion half a block off the main square. It was purchased nearly 50 years ago by an American couple who have lived there for over 40 years now. This couple are collectors of Mexican "folk art", and sometime ago they were convinced to open their home (they still live there) to the public for viewings of their collection. They have even established a foundation to inherit the house and their collection upon their deaths. The collection contains over 3000 pieces of art, and it is stunning to say the least. Tours are given 3 or 4 times per day, and the only charge is a suggested donation of 100 pesos, which amounts to about $5 USD. I can easily imagine paying 5 times that to have the opportunity to view this amazing art. The collection takes up space in every room of the house. Although, the tour only gives guests access to select locations out of respect for the elderly owners privacy. I've included a photo below of some art sitting behind a toilet as evidence that the collection is quite literally everywhere in the house. For more images check out my instagram posts. Farrah also made it to Casa de los Venados when she was feeling a bit better and I was off visiting Chichen Itza, but more about that later.

On another day, after lying around the house for much of the day hoping Farrah would feel better I went out for the night time light show at San Bernadino Convent (I actually saw the show twice, as we went together on our last night in town. It was well worth seeing twice.) This light show, which is shown every night in Spanish (9p) and English (9:30p) is displayed on the walls of the convent, which in and of itself was really cool, since the structure provided depth to the display. The show displayed a brief of the history of Valladolid, originally called Zaci by the Mayan people who lived there before the Spanish showed up. As you might expect the focus of the show was on the parts of Valladolid's history that involved the convent, which was destroyed and rebuilt, at least, 5 times by my count. I tried to keep count both times I saw the show and the only thing I know for sure is that living near the convent would have provided work for a family of stone masons for centuries.

Several days later, I took a trip to possibly the most famous ruins in the Mayan world: Chichen Itza. If you haven't seen pictures of the Temple of Kukulcan, then I suspect you have been living under a rock for your entire life. I mean, it's one of the seven wonders of the world. The site is one that holds special meaning to me because my mom as a young anthropology student visited Chichen Itza, and climbed the Temple of Kukulcan, when that was still possible. I grew up hearing stories about her time in Mexico, and this in part sparked my life long interest in ancient civilizations and their peoples. My trip to Chichen Itza was somewhat less magical than my mom's. Today, Chichen Itza is a giant open air market packed with tourists and vendors hocking souvenirs. You cannot walk anywhere in the site without encountering someone trying to sell you a jaguar call, t-shirt, jewelry, or any other number of keepsakes. You also can't climb, or touch, hardly any of the structures. Despite this it was an amazing place to see. The ball court at Chichen Itza is the largest of its kind in the Mayan world. Think of an over-sized football field with the rings (which look like basketball hoops turned sideways) positioned over 30 or 40 feet up in the air. It's so big that no one is really sure how the game was played here since what little is known about it has suggested that players could only use their bodies between elbow and knee to hit the heavy rubber balls up towards the rings. The Temple of Kukulcan is also unbelievable to see. I wanted to climb it very badly even though I know I wouldn't be allowed. Given the popularity of the site it is also incredibly well preserved, and discoveries at the site continue to this day. Getting to and from the site was both easy and cheap. I took an early colectivo (shared van) for about $4 USD round trip. The drive was about 45 minutes, and while the colectivos vary in comfort, for a short trip you cannot beat the price. A regular bus would have been 2 to 3 times the price, and a taxi would be closer to $40 USD one way. I don't know for sure, but a guided tour including a bus would likely cost one person $150 USD at the very least.

Much of the rest of my time in Valladolid was spent wandering the city, which is really quite beautiful, eating street food. Yeah. I know, it's weird that Farrah got food poisoning, while I ate street food daily with impunity. Mexican street food is fucking incredible. It costs next to nothing in American terms, and I found it to be universally delicious. My personal favorites were tamales, which I ate for lunch most days, and tortas de cochinita pibil, which instantly became my favorite thing to eat from our time in Mexico. For those who are unfamiliar, tamales are a corn "burrito" stuffed with beans and meat, or sometimes cheese. They are cooked in banana leaves, and are best eaten with hot sauce, in my opinion. Cochinita Pibil is a traditional dish of the Yucatan, and it's basically barbecue suckling pig. If you ever visit Valladolid you really need to go to Carrito de Cochinita Pibil a food cart, which serves nothing other than cochinita pibil in your choice of torta, taco, or volcanoes (a kind of mini tamale cut open and stuffed with the goodness). The line of locals, and lucky tourists who have discovered it is generally 10 minutes long. It will take you longer to get your food than to eat it. I can't wait to eat more Mexican street food on our next visit. This was truly a highlight for me, and I feel sad for the folks who can't, or won't, partake in this amazing culinary experience.

Our last day in town we finally made it to a cenote! A five minute walk from our airbnb was cenote zaci, which is literally located in the center of Valladolid. The cenote is a very deep swimming hole (hundreds of feet, or more?) that was somehow carved out of the limestone plate, which is the Yucatan peninsula. There are hundreds of these swimming holes around the Yucatan, and Mexico in general. The setting was beautiful, and the water was a very nice cool respite from the heat of the day (spoiler: the Yucatan is hot AF). The only downsides I can think of are that there really wasn't a lot of space to hang out other than in the water, and I lost one of my earrings jumping off the cliff there. To be fair the second downside was definitely on me, and not a negative of the cenote itself.

I can say without reservation that I would personally love to return to Valladolid. The city is beautiful, the people were wonderful, there is a lot to do within a reasonably short distance, and the food was astonishingly delicious.

Hasta luego Valladolid!

Chetumal y Xpujil y Calakmul... Oh my!

Rich — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

We've done a lot of travelling since my last post.

On Wednesday March 29th we left Belize for my first land crossing of an international border. We hired a service to take us to the border between Belize and Mexico, and they arranged a taxi on the Mexican side of the border to take us the rest of the way to Chetumal in Quintana Roo. The ride was interesting... Our driver arrived about 30 minutes after our scheduled pickup, which wasn't a surprise since everything in Belize ran about 30 to 45 minutes late. Along the way we found out that the service had two additional travelers that were being brought to us by another van, so we waited for them to arrive. Then, we drove on for about 2 miles before being informed that we were going to switch vans, and we stopped to wait for the new van. Once we all changed vans (including our driver) we were on our way to Mexico!

The border crossing was not as seamless as I had hoped. We paid our exit fee from Belize, then entered the Mexican border authorities. No one really bothered to look at our luggage, which was a stark difference from airline travel. A man at the border asked if we had rice, or any other foods. We showed him our bag of snacks and he ignored the rest of our luggage. Then we went to get our passports stamped. I was under the impression that a 90 or 180 day visa was the norm when entering Mexico. I was wrong. Exercising my very limited Spanish I tried to explain to the border authorities that we had planned to spend several months in Mexico visiting Quintana Roo, Yucatan, Campeche, Chiapas, Oaxaca and then departing from Mexico City. They promptly asked to see our reservations in each of these places, which we did not have since we didn't know how long it would take us to visit all the places we wanted to go. They informed us (I think, my Spanish is not great) that we needed an exit flight in order to give us a visa for the entirety of our trip. It seemed that our only choice would be to buy a flight from Mexico City before they would give us more than a 30 day visa. At this point I began a stressful search for flights. Meanwhile, Farrah went to talk to our taxi driver who told her we should be able to pay an "entrance tax" to allow us to stay longer without specific plans. She talked to the border authorities, who suddenly started speaking English to her. The gist was that they would give us a 90 day visa if we paid the tax and then lectured us about how we would need better travel plans next time we wanted to enter Mexico. 40 minutes later we were on our way to Chetumal.

We spent 3 nights in Chetumal at a pleasant little hostel where we met a number of very friendly travellers from France, Spain, Israel, and the US. The only thing I can really say about it is that Chetumal is an odd city. It is fairly large and located on the coast. There is one major street leading down to a plaza on the water that seemed to have street vendors, but only after 6pm. There were a lot of banks and optometrists around. We initially went to BBVA bank to get some pesos, which worked fine, but when we returned the day we left Chetumal neither of us could get the ATMs to give us money. After calling my bank it turned out that the problem was with BBVA, so I tried another bank, and it worked. Why was this a problem? I have no idea.

While in Chetumal we got our first taste of Mexican food made in Mexico. This may shock you, but Mexicans are far better at making Mexican food than Americans. We found several excellent, and cheap, taquerias, which we visited multiple times. No sense fixing what isn't broken. I also tried aguachile verde for the first time. This is a dish similar to shrimp ceviche with lots of cucumbers, and loaded with habanero peppers. It was delicious, and my face burned for about an hour after I finished eating. I can't recommend it enough if you get the opportunity to try it.

On Saturday, I got another first as we took the ADO bus from Chetumal to Xpujil. I'd never travelled by bus from one city to another, and I was pleasantly surprised by how comfortable the ADO bus was, think business class airline seats in comfortable A/C. Nothing like a chicken bus (not that I've been brave enough to try one yet).

The purpose of our trip to Xpujil was to visit Calakmul, a famous classical period Mayan city close to the border between Guatemala and Campeche Mexico on the Mexican side of the border. Calakmul is not the easiest site to get to even from Xpujil, which is the closest Mexican town, and also seems to largely serve as a hub for tourists visiting the ruins.

We arrived at 7:30pm in Xpujil and walked the two blocks from the bus station to our hostel, located at the back of a pizzeria. We got checked in without issue and promptly wandered back out to the pizzeria for dinner. The pizzeria was quite busy and didn't have any open tables, but when they saw us standing around looking like confused tourists they setup a table and chairs for us on the sidewalk and we enjoyed some damn tasty pizza before heading to our room to watch a little TV and get to bed early.

Our tour guide arrived to pick us (and several other tourists who we'd seen on the bus) at 7am. The drive to Calakmul took about an hour and a half, and we stopped before entering the site to do a short nature walk. Our guide, Jimmy, spoke very little English, about as much as I spoke Spanish, so the day was a mental and physical workout as I tried to understand and translate as much as I could (not much) for Farrah. The other tourists in our group were three young men from France, one of whom spoke decent Spanish, the other two spoke none, and a couple from Spain, who spoke about as much English as I speak Spanish. The ruins themselves are a fairly sprawling complex. We were told on entering the site that the grand plaza was closed due to parts of the ruins collapsing. Shortly after that our guide took us under a line of yellow caution tape to visit the grand plaza. I'm still not clear why we were allowed to see it, but I wasn't about to complain. We then moved on to the smaller plaza and structures 1-4, all of which we were allowed to climb. The steps of these structures were much smaller than the steps of the temples in Tikal, or Altun Ha. I asked our guide about this and he said that the smaller steps were used for religious temples whereas the taller steps were for royal living structures. I have no idea if this is correct, or if I lost something in translation. Jimmy and I tried hard to communicate, but the language barrier made it tough. The entire day was hot and tiring. Once you enter the site it is a two kilometer walk to the first structures, and climbing them was a serious leg workout. Overall, I enjoyed the trip, but I found the ruins to be far less awe inspiring than Tikal, which sparked my interest in seeing many more Mayan ruins. We arrived back at the pizzeria at 5:30pm exhausted and immediately ordered multiple (hard earned) beers, and an even bigger pizza than the night before.

After our long day we crashed pretty hard and slept like the dead, then the next morning we were up at 8am and headed back to the bus station to wait for our bus back to Chetumal. The bus terminal, thankfully, sold coffee, which was better than any I'd had in Belize. They made it with a bit of cinnamon, and I was pleasantly surprised by how good it tasted, but maybe I was just tired.

The bus left promptly at 9:50 despite a listed departure time of 9:15, and we began the next leg of our trip, which will take us back to Chetumal, and then on to Bacalar, a pueblo magico, know for it's lagoon.

Once upon a time in Caye Caulker

Rich — Sat, 25 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Where to start...

We've been on Caye Caulker, a small island off the coast of Belize, for a couple weeks now. We've visited quite a lot on the island (it really is small) and I think I can sum things up by saying "go slow". The main pastimes here all involve being in, or on, the ocean. You can snorkel, scuba dive, take boat tours, watch the sun rise and set, feed tarpon and other ocean life, and you can sit by, or in, the ocean drinking Belikin, which proudly announces itself as "the beer of Belize". Often these activities are combined. Many of the bars along the shore have tables, swings and hammocks set up in the ocean, which is a great way to keep cool on a hot day. Although it has to be said that you can end up pretty "tired" after a day of drinking in the sun.

The first week we were here a couple from Iowa who we'd met at a music festival last year were visiting for the week. Their sister had been on Caye Caulker for a month and had made a number of local, and expatriate, friends here. We enjoyed a whirlwind of meeting really friendly people, learning all the local hangouts, and partying like we only had a week here. I really can't overstate how nice we've found people to be here. I guess it's hard to be a jerk on an island paradise.

As I alluded to above, "go slow" really does summarize our experience here. Which is convenient as "go slow" is the Caye Caulker tag phrase in much the same way that "pura vida" is for Costa Rica. You won't hear people saying "go slow" as you'll see it written damn near everywhere, including traffic signs. In any case, it makes a fine reminder that there's nothing wrong with not racing through life. I can safely say that I have not watched the sunset this many times in a 3 week period ever before. To be fair, sunset is kind of a spectacle here, but it's also just a great chance to slow down and enjoy some natural beauty.

What's the island like? Glad you asked. Caye Caulker is 5 miles long, and not more than a mile wide. It is divided by a channel called "the split" separating the island in half. The split is narrow, only about 120 ft, and you can swim it if you don't mind contending with a fairly strong current. The split was created by hurricane hattie in 1961. Prior to that time the split was a small creek that you could "step over" according to the locals. So, now there are two "sides" to the island, north and south.

The northside of the island is sparsely populated, and there is a ton of construction going on there. We were told more than once that the north side will be booming in 5 years. Right now the northside hosts a beach bar (which has apparently been foreclosed), two very nice, but small resorts, and a restaurant. The resorts also have restaurants, and bars, and poolside bars. One of the two resorts, Blue Zen, has a (pretty stupid) policy about not allowing anyone who doesn't stay at the resort to use their pool, which cost them quite a bit of business from us. The other resort, El Ben, is much more friendly and allows any patron to use their pools.

The southside of the island is where all the action is. At the split, and just to the south is where you can find the majority of the businesses on the island. There are lots of beach bars, restaurants, tour companies, and local vendors. Kind of what you'd expect for a tourist driven economy.

There are a couple things that surprised me here. For one, we've had a tough time finding good live music. We were spoiled in San Marcos, apparently. Most of what we've found here is loud speaker systems blasting what seems like a standard island playlist, possibly Jock Jams '98? It was the same everywhere. Shaggy's classic love ballad "It wasn't me", and "Land down under" both got an unbelizeable amount of airtime. And before you ask we've heard more reggae on our patio than around town. Anyway, the live music tends to be one person playing guitar and singing hits from one generation or another, mostly 90s and older. One local restaurant features a guy who I've dubbed "chord change guy" for his habit of calling out when there is a chord change in whatever rhythm he happens to be playing. He also tends to give Casey Kasem (anyone else remember American Top 40?) style commentary about each song before he plays them.

Our last week on the island it really felt like we were starting to master the pace of island life. We got up around 8, and then lounged around for 3 or 4 hours practicing Spanish on Duolingo, reading, playing the mandolin (Rich) and doing yoga (Farrah). Around 11 or noon we would wander down to Juicy, a local smoothie/juice bar where Smooth makes the best smoothies I've ever had. After our leisurely smoothie breakfast and chatting with the crew of locals who hang out there, we either made our way up to the northside to hang out by the pool at El Ben, or off to one of the ocean bars to soak up the sun and hang out with the awesome people we met on the island. Some time around 7 we'd make our way to dinner, and more often than not we'd make our way back home to relax before bed. It's important to get a lot of rest with such a strenuous lifestyle.

For the last 3 days of our time on the island we had some friends down for our friend Colin's birthday (Happy birthday Colin! Loved getting to celebrate with you!!) It was a lot of fun showing them around to all the gems we had found, and introducing them around to the locals. We also did a great all day snorkeling trip that took us out to the Hol Chan Marine Reserve. It turns out that I don't swim as much as I once did, because my legs ached the next day. We swam with sea turtles, nurse sharks, stingrays (and other rays whose names I don't know), tons of colorful fish, and even some manatees.

We had a great time on Caye Caulker, and it was predictably tough to say goodbye to new friends. Thanks everyone for making our trip wonderful and memorable.

An Idiot's guide to San Marcos La Laguna

Rich — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

It has been about six weeks since Farrah and I started our travels, and I find myself having a lot to share about the experience of living here.

For those who are not familiar, San Marcos la Laguna is a small village of around 4000 people on the northern shore of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. The lake in general, and San Marcos specifically, is something of a spiritual center, or hippie hangout, depending on your point of view, and how you choose to spend your time.

The population here is split between Maya who tend to live higher up on the hillside, Guatemalans from elsewhere in the country, who tend to live closer to the lake side, and expatriates, who also often live closer to the lake side. My initial impression as an American was that the wealthy outsiders had pushed all the local Maya up the hillside away from the more desirable waterfront properties. While this is likely true in some cases, we also learn from speaking with some locals that many of the Maya prefer to live higher on the hillsides to avoid the drastic shifts in water level, which have varied something like 40 meters in the last 60 years, and also because most of the locals have land higher on the hillside where they grow coffee. We also learned about the devastation that hurricane Stan brought to the area in 2005. The flooding was extreme, and the waterways down the hillsides widened so significantly that much of the surrounding areas were completely washed away. If you hike near the creeks around the lake you can see large rocks and boulders in these tiny creeks, some of which were planted in their current locations by the floods from Stan.

There is a large community of musicians here, and most evenings you can find several places that have live music of one type or another, which I love. We have had many opportunities to experience a wide variety of live music in very intimate settings. As an aspiring mandolin player I find it remarkable, and a bit intimidating, how many amazingly talented musicians you can find playing at local venues, and jams. It is not surprising to find musicians who could easily play any club in the states popping up at open mic nights. One of my favorite local venues is a restaurant called Vida Cocina, which has some of the best views on the lake, and seems to perpetually have some sort of live music going on. One particularly interesting aspect of events here, for those of you who frequently attend shows in the US, is that there is a fairly strict ban on noise after 10p, so music tends to start by 6pm and places shut down right around 10p. Quite a change from the main act starting at 10p, or later for many DJs. This has meant that we get to see lots of music, and still enjoy the following morning, instead of dragging ourselves out of bed at 11a the morning after a show.

I mentioned that San Marcos is a small village, but I think that requires a bit of explaining for folks who haven't spent much time in small towns outside of the US. First of all, there are very few cars here. Sure, some folks have pickup trucks, and there are a few cars that come through town, but mostly the streets have pedestrians, and tuk tuks. Around town tuk tuks are the quick way to get places, and they are particularly nice when taking any sized load up the hills around here, which are very steep. One oddity of tuk tuk pricing is that you are generally charged per passenger (yes, visitors commonly get charged more than locals, suck it up), so if you have two people an a ton of crap to haul up a hill the price of two tuk tuks is generally the same as getting one tuk tuk and trying to fit yourselves and your stuff in a tuk tuk. If you want to get to another town on the lake the tuk tuks might be able to help you, but they are generally expensive to take in between towns, and some tuk tuk drivers don't like going to other towns (we've heard there can be rivalry, but I haven't seen anything of the sort). The better way to get to another town (at least during daylight) is to take a lancha. The lanchas circulate the lake clockwise (towards Panajachel from San Marcos), and counter-clockwise (towards San Pedro from San Marcos), stopping at any dock that people need along the way. The lanchas operate much like public buses do in the US, and they have an equally low cost as a means of transportation (again, visitors tend to pay a bit more if they don't know the price and don't have exact change). The only thing about the lanchas is that they don't run at night and they are somewhat subject to winds on the lake. A choppy day on the lake is not a fun day for a lancha ride. We have taken several ventures over to Tzununa, another town to the east about 2 miles away, to visit friends and take in live music. While these trips have always been worth the trouble, we have found that getting a tuk tuk to bring us home after 830p can be quite an adventure. I have collected the numbers of half a dozen tuk tuk drivers in Tzununa, and I still managed to find no one to give us a ride one night. Thankfully the bartender at the Granja Tz'ikin had more numbers than I did and we were able to get a ride home for Q150 (or $20 USD), which is about 4 times what it would have cost us during the day.

A note about walking in San Marcos and other towns around the lake:

The second reviewer of this post, my sister Xan, suggested that I'd kind of glazed over what it is like to walk around San Marcos.

So, let's talk about it.

Walking around San Marcos has a couple of quirks for my readers from the US. First, there are a lot of footpaths around town. Some of these are stone paved walkways like the primary walkway down to the dock, sometimes referred to as the "hippie highway". However, there are numerous dirt paths, and social trails, particularly along the beach. On the main streets in town you can sometimes find a sidewalk, but it's very common to see people walking in the streets, rather than using the tiny bit of sidewalk that is available. The footing on walkways, streets, and trails are often uneven, so it's easy to trip over small ruts and cracks as you walk around, particularly if you aren't watching your feet.

Also, it's important to note that everything is on a hill here. Lake Atitlan formed in the crater of an ancient and extinct supervolcano. So, the hillsides are very steep. In places, it can feel like you are walking straight up a cliff face.

The people who live here tend to have very strong legs.

This seems like a good time to talk about safety. In my experience, San Marcos and the surrounding areas are quite safe. That said, there are some things you will want to be aware of. First, don't walk around in unfamiliar areas late at night by yourself. I feel like that's a good rule anywhere since I once wandered into a neighborhood in downtown St. Louis where there was a large and very angry encounter taking place between what I assume were two gangs. Luckily, I was able to turn around and walk briskly back to my hotel. This is precisely why wandering in unfamiliar areas at night is kind of dumb. Another general precaution is to not go around flashing money and other items of wealth in unfamiliar areas, day or night. Mostly you won't have a problem, but it's best not to advertise wealth when you don't know who is watching. People are generally pretty cool, here and elsewhere, but there is always the possibility that someone is watching who is down on their luck, desperate, insane, or on drugs who might think you are making a nice target. So, don't flaunt whatever wealth you have like an asshole. Also, try to get a sense of the community norms. I had a bag stolen from me three years ago in Cape Town, South Africa. The wealth gap there is shocking, and I left my bags in plain view in the back of a locked vehicle. Someone smashed the window and grabbed what they could. Thankfully everything was replaceable. In hindsight, I realize that no native of Cape Town would have left a bunch of stuff in the back of their car for over an hour unattended. It must have been a clear sign to thieves of an easy theft from tourists. I guess I'm saying that I feel very safe here, and I try not to make myself a target. Talking to locals and expats to learn more about any given area you are in is invaluable in this regard, plus you'll likely meet some nice people. One final note about safety for my American reades, there have been no mass shootings in Guatemala in the last decade, possibly longer, to my knowledge. I believe I've read about 6 mass shootings in the US in the last 3 weeks. Trust me safety here should not be a major concern.

A note about local wildlife:

It's always smart to watch where you walk. There are a lot of stray dogs here, and they don't have the best manners about where they poop. If you are from a wealthy western country you may be wondering why no one cleans up after all these dogs. The reason is simple. The resources don't exist to spay/neuter all of the extra dogs and cats, and those same resources don't exist to hire people to wander around cleaning dog shit.

You will also contend with bugs. Most buildings are not the hermetically sealed boxes we tend to live in in the US. You will find ants, and flies, and bees, and spiders, and the occasional scorpion. When possible simply escort them outside, and keep your food containers well sealed.

Shopping in a small village is also a bit different. There are a number of tiendas, small shops, around town that have basic groceries. You can generally find what you want/need in one of these shops, but you may need to visit more than one if you have a specific meal in mind. Most of the tiendas do not have fresh produce. So, you will buy produce from one of a variety of small stands around town, and indigenous people who you can find selling avocados, bananas, and occasionally cherimoya. We found a couple of stands, and an older indigenous woman who we have bought much of our produce from. We were also turned on to a local delivery service, Cinco Azul, which has a good selection of meats and produce. This service was great because we didn't know where to find much in the way of meat when we first got here. Also, if you find that you need dishes or other kitchen supplies, you will likely need to visit a second hand shop (this requires some luck to find exactly what you need) or you will have to go to Panajachel, or another larger town. I broke a french press in the first cabin we stayed in, and I spent 3 weeks, halfheartedly, looking for a replacement without any luck. Thankfully, our hosts had an extra. Oh yeah. The economy in San Marcos is mostly based on cash, and there is only one ATM in the town. We learned quickly that having a good bit of change can mean the difference between being able to buy something, and not. All of the vendors around town need change since they are constantly breaking Q100 notes. We often tried to keep our small bills as long as we could for those occasions when someone didn't have change!

A note about food in San Marcos:

San Marcos has a great selection of restaurants, and there is a lot of good food to be had. However, there are a surprisingly large number of vegetarian and vegan restaurants per capita here. If you happen to like eating meat, my favorite restaurants around town are Vida Cocina, Restaurant Fe, and Tul y Sol. You can sometimes buy buffalo meat from Nectar Cafe in the afternoons, if they have extra to spare. There are also some butcher shops around town, but they never seemed to be open when we were out shopping for groceries.

One other thing that we thought was quite entertaining is our initial laundry situation. The first cabin we stayed in didn't have a washing machine, or even a sink large enough to wash more than two pairs of socks at a time. We asked our hosts what they recommended for a laundry service as we had seen a number of signs around town. They directed us to the local "car wash", which also happened to do laundry. So, for our first month in San Marcos we took our laundry to the car wash every ten days, or so. As I mentioned earlier, there really aren't many cars in San Marcos, so the "car wash" mostly seemed to service tuk tuks. The rates for laundry seemed reasonable to me, although I have no basis for comparison. On average our laundry cost about Q70 for two boxes of laundry (we didn't have a laundry bag, so we repurposed the cardboard boxes our food delivery came in), which is a bit less than $10. I've had dry cleaning bills for 10 times during the brief era when I had to wear business clothes to work. In the second cabin we stayed in we had a small washing machine. This is not the kind of washing machine you may have seen in the US. It has two components. A wash basin, that you need to fill with water, and drain when you are done, and a spin cycle type of chamber for removing as much excess water as possible before you hang the clothes dry. It's a bit of extra work compared to the fully automatic US washer dryer combos, but my clothes never smelled like sunshine after being washed in the US, so I think it's a fair trade. Having this washing machine saved us the trouble of walking boxes of clothes to the "car wash", which was nice.

The bombas! I asked Farrah if I had missed anything interesting about daily life in this post, and she immediately mentioned the bombas. Around the lake it is something of a tradition for locals to light off crude fireworks (not sure if they are homemade, or just not very interesting visually). It is not uncommon to hear multiple explosions day, and night, around the lake. If you want to read people's opinions on the bombas you can follow the San Marcos Facebook page. The topic of the bombas and how loud and annoying they can be comes up every week or two. When we first visited San Marcos we heard that "the locals" like to set off bombas to celebrate people's birthdays. We were also told that the timing of the bombas is supposed to coincide with the time of birth, so you get some bombas being set off in the middle of the night, or first thing in the morning, or any other random time throughout the day. The Facebook page generally contains the following discussion: "I'm new here and I hate the surprise of loud explosions, what gives?", followed by two types of replies, 1) "It's traditional for some locals, you are a visitor here, buy ear plugs and suck it up, we are in paradise", and 2) "We should change this it is terrible for everyone, especially the locals since it is a tradition adopted from the Spanish conquistadors and is in no way part of indigenous traditions''. I personally don't like the bombas. They can be very loud and surprising. However, I don't like hearing people loudly chanting Kirtan either, you will get that here too, and it's never the locals chanting. Live and let live? I was curious about what some actual locals here thought, so I asked a friend we met here what her opinion is of the bombas. Her take was interesting. She is a younger Maya lady, in her twenties, who has lived around the lake for the majority of her life. She hates the bombas, and wishes people would stop, but she says that many older Maya folks feel it is part of their tradition and heritage. She also mentioned that she thought the tradition was more tied to the Catholic church here than to any sort of Mayan traditions. So, the question seems quite nuanced even in the local community. The bottom line is that there is no reason to believe that the bombas will be banned, or that the people will stop celebrating in this way any time soon, so if the bombas really bother you, bring earplugs.

I think that covers most of the day to day differences that have stood out to me, and this post is getting a bit lengthy. If you've made it this far, thanks for reading! I'll be back with more in the coming weeks and months.

Reflecting on the start of our Grand Adventure

Rich — Sat, 04 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I'm not sure how to start this post, because there is so much to say.

I guess the best place to start is by explaining our Grand Adventure.

The notion of a Grand Adventure has been swirling in my mind for many years now. I dreamed abstractly about leaving everything behind and travelling in foreign lands. Every time I went on vacation to a new place I would imagine myself living there, and wondering how different my daily experiences could be. And every time I came home from a trip I was a bit more depressed, and overwhelmed by the notion of returning to high pressure work, and the high stress "get shit done" mentality seems to pervade life in the US. That's not to mention the state of anger, frustration, and fear experienced by many Americans due to the state of our government, and our highly divisive political institutions, which have left our country more divided than at any other time in my life (granted that's only a little over 40 years as of this writing, but it's still not great).

I was fortunate to be able to save heavily for the day when I could travel as part of my lifestyle. My abstract plan was to save as much as possible for 10-15 years, and then retire to live frugally on my savings, while enjoying travel to less expensive destinations, and generally spending my time in pursuits of personal interests rather than continuing to chase the almighty dollar. I started saving at a very high rate around 2017, knowing that the more I saved, and the harder I worked, the sooner I would be able to start devoting my time to enjoyable pursuits. I didn't make it to my goal of early retirement before burnout caught up with me.

A note about 'burnout':

I really don't care what you call this sensation, but the commonly accepted term seems to be 'burnout'.

I'm not a doctor, or healthcare professional of any variety, so I can only speak to my experiences. To me, burnout, meant waking up everyday, and wishing I could do anything other than my current work. During working hours I would struggle constantly to focus on tasks. It was far worse when I had completed a task and needed to select a new task to work on. I was unmotivated in the extreme. Even major accomplishments only provided the most fleeting sense of satisfaction, usually lasting no more than a minute. When I finished a work day, or work week, I felt too tired to do much of anything. Things I was passionate about felt too difficult to spend time on, and I ended up watching a lot of pretty dumb TV while distracting myself playing games on my phone, or reading news articles that made me feel worse about the world and my country.

If you find yourself in this position, you are not alone, get some help, and work towards a less stressful life, whatever that means for you. You matter too much to work yourself to death.

With the help of my coach I came up with a plan for how I would continue working until the end of October, and I started talking very seriously with my partner, Farrah, about taking a year to travel abroad. I can't over stress how helpful it was for me to have a coach to help me set goals, and stay focused on the right things. This is a big change for me, and I found it easy to get distracted by random concerns and considerations. Knowing I would be checking in weekly with my coach made it possible for me to push the distractions aside, so I could focus on critical tasks, like: getting my passport renewed, finding someone to look after our cat, figuring out what to do with our house and cars, etc.

In September, my job was eliminated during a round of layoffs. I was given a very fair severance package, and I left my former employer with no regrets, or hard feelings. I was less than two months away from my intended date of resignation, and I had done a lot of the planning I needed to do for our trip. We had a massive spreadsheet in the works with information about the places we wanted to visit, our budget, our expected expenses, our packing lists, our personal goals, and lengthy lists of resources about anything and everything I could think of that we might need on our trip. A lot of other things had started to fall into place at this point. One of my closest friends agreed to watch our cat for the year, and even sweetened the deal by expressing interest in renting our house, so our cat gets to stay in her home, and we were able to use some of the basement for storing our things. We found and purchased an international travel health insurance plan. We booked flights to visit my family over the holidays, then flights to Guatemala for early January, and also booked accommodations for two months at San Marcos la Laguna. We followed that up with booking a month in Belize for March. We also practiced packing, A LOT. At the last minute, another friend had proposed renting our car for us through Turo, which allows us to make a bit of passive income on our vehicle, rather than having to sell it, or put it in storage at a cost. Almost everything was planned that could be planned, and I was still anxious that somehow our trip wouldn't happen and I would have to start a new job on January 4 rather than board a flight to Guatemala.

The last couple of weeks in Denver were a total whirlwind for us. We hosted a Thanksgiving dinner for nearly 20 friends in our house, which had to be completely packed into the basement in ten days. And then, we packed. And had last minute visits with friends. And packed some more. And had even more last minute visits with friends. By the night before our flight to DC I was exhausted, a bit anxious, and totally amazed by how many wonderful people we have in our lives who made extra time to spend with us before we left. I really felt all that love friends, and it means the world to me to know each and everyone of you. You know who you are.

On December 7th, we boarded our flight for DC to spend the holiday season with family and friends. This trip was also a whirlwind. We had a final marriage celebration the first weekend we were in town, which my sister hosted. (Farrah and I got married on June 2nd, 2022, which I will write more about in another blog post). We also spent most every evening with friends and family eating good food, and enjoying good wine and conversation. During the days we visited museums around DC, and worked at our personal passions (learning the mandolin for me).

We flew back to Denver on December 27th to attend the 3 night New Years Eve run of the String Cheese Incident at the Mission Ballroom. The shows were fantastic, and we enjoyed them with many great friends, several of whom were visiting from out of town. Our last couple of days in Denver were strange. It was very cold (-2 F), and we were staying in our house, which was now being rented by our friend. He generously offered to let us stay there while we were back in Denver, and as it turned out he was going to be out of town at the time, so we ended up being there to watch our cat. It was both wonderful, and odd, to be in a familiar space with different furnishings.

On January 4th at 7am MST, we boarded a plane to Guatemala via Dallas Fort-Worth. The trip was uneventful, and we arrived at our AirBnB in Antigua by late afternoon.

And that is the story of how we began our Grand Adventure.