January 9, 2024

It's Tuesday evening and I'm warming up from walking to the store. 

Winter has settled in after months of mild weather and my nose, fingers, and toes feel it as soon as I step outside.

Soon it'll be -40 like usual and I'll be barricaded inside my house, cozy with our radiant heat and blankets and multiple cups of tea.

It's been a good day. I submitted a proposal, booked a discovery coffee with a potential client, took a few meetings and wrapped a strategy consulting session with a small business we've been supporting.

I have cheques to cash and emails to send to my new bookkeeper. 

More proposals to send out this week and onboarding a new client to start on next week.

The business feels good; the kind of steady chaos that makes me feel invigorated and excited when I roll out of bed in the morning

though it's hard to wake up at my usual time when it's dark out so I've been sleeping in a bit

(I've convinced myself that summer is the time for early mornings while winter's the time for long, late nights and quiet mood lighting.)

I read an article today about different kinds of teams; how larger businesses split up different groups to tackle tasks and how they work independently and in lockstep with each other

(stuff that's boring to most people but fascinates me for some reason)

and tonight I'll finish a book about haenyeo which are female divers from the Korean island of Jeju. The book is called The Island of Sea Women and I'm obsessed with it.

The book is a piece of historical fiction about the haenyeo's practices how they're fading with time and modernization

(which is a trend that seems to be effecting everywhere these days)

but the parts that interest me the most are the scenes that describe diving in frigid waters, finding different sea creatures and knowing how to feel the water, the tides, the pull of the ocean and knowing how to stay safe

all while managing temperatures that would cause hypothermia in most people, including (according to researchers who come to the island) basically every other group of humans who live in unusually cold climates.

Maybe it's because I grew up and live in a place where it's been known to get colder than the surface of Mars, but I don't mind the cold most of the time and I'm not surprised that it turned out that women on Jeju were the ones who were able to withstand the freezing temperatures

(females are strong as hell, after all)

even though this woman is a wuss who bundles up in 597586482 layers to walk to the G-damn grocery store in broad daylight.