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At the moment, my life is in disarray. A record Arctic cold snap has turned normal routines upside down. The water to the upstairs is shut off. We’re going crazy each night to keep the remaining pipes from freezing. An ice dam is causing water to leak into our house. I’ve injured my knee, not through anything cool like snowboarding, but because the cat slept on it wrong. The new web development class I’ve spent months preparing for has turned into a dumpster fire because of incorrect assumptions, snow days, and a fractured schedule.

On December 31st, I finished a ten-year daily journal. Every single day for a decade, I wrote an entry. The format was simple: one page per day, laid out so that when I flipped back through, I could see exactly where I was on any given date ten years prior. It was a satisfying thing to complete.

For over a year now, my favorite large language model has been Anthropic’s Claude. I use it in two ways: the way that’s most familiar to people, chatting in my web browser or their desktop app, and a specialized, programming-focused interface called Claude Code that I run directly in a folder on my computer. Claude Code has actually become my favorite way to access Anthropic models, so when I saw their announcement about Cowork, which is essentially a version of Claude Code that isn’t oriented toward building software, I got genuinely excited. That’s exactly how I’ve been using it myself.

I’ve been thinking about the research showing that strong friendships and social connections are an indicator of longevity. Initially it seems weird. You’d think it would be about diet, exercise, stress reduction, and things like that. But the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. When you have close friends and social connections, that sustains you. It gives you things to look forward to, people you can vent to and laugh with. You can find out about their lives, too: what they’re doing, what’s important to them. Then they can do the same for you.

I’ve been thinking lately about how much can happen when you just keep showing up. Not in any dramatic way, just consistently, month after month.

I recently heard Cory Doctorow speak about enshittification, his framework for understanding how digital platforms decay over time. The talk was wonderful and thought-provoking in the way good author talks should be. Cory challenges my thinking regularly, particularly when we don’t see eye to eye. I actually agree with most of what he says about AI, though my personal experience leads me to draw different conclusions from time to time.

Something very special happened recently, and I almost didn’t even notice it. For a few days, I had achieved the domestic trifecta: I had a full tank of gas, my fridge and pantry were stocked up, and I had a load of laundry cleaned, folded, and put away.

I’m getting nervous about my new web development class now that it’s just a few weeks away. It’s my first time teaching older students — tenth, eleventh, and twelfth graders — for a full semester, and I’m doing it alone. Last year I dipped my toes in with a smaller group, learned some things, and made some mistakes. But this is different.

I miss Google Reader.

That probably dates me, but I don’t care. Google Reader was one of those tools that fundamentally changed how I engaged with the internet. It made aggregation effortless. Find a good source, add it with a click, and suddenly everything you cared about was in one place. When Google shut it down in 2013, I was genuinely upset at losing something that had become essential to how I kept up with the world.

By November the leaves are down, grey blankets everything, and the cold starts to bite. So why is it still one of my favorite months? Part of it has to do with my birthday and the happy associations that come with it. But it goes deeper than that.

Last year, my students were hitting usage limits on free ChatGPT accounts mid-conversation. I was working hard on prompts to help them use AI as a thought partner rather than a shortcut or search engine, but I kept running into limitations.

October in Southern New England is one of the most special times of year because this is when the leaves turn. Driving through the countryside or even just commuting to work means explosions of radiant color everywhere you look.