I've been planting trees on our vacant lot for the last month and it's starting to feel like a forest again. We have a ridiculous amount of chipmunks and red squirrels.

ecib and I gave blood yesterday. TBH the donation part was the secondary motivation. There's pretty compelling data for something called the "healthy donor effect", where blood donors have lower risk for cardiovascular disease. There's some debate about the size of the effect, because people that donate blood tend to be healthier in general, but even with some aggressive controlling for that, the effect seems to persist, especially when the population studied is older. Some posit that it's due to a reduction in ferritin, but I doubt it is one factor. I almost passed out last time and they had to stop, but I made it through this time. A pint is not a small amount of blood for me.

More progress on mike's painting.

I'm trying to figure out trees. I think they are so fucking hard because your brain can pick out what's wrong with them so easily due to the contrast on their edges. I've been looking at a lot of paintings to understand what success looks like, but it's one of those things where the process of application is critical. I'd love to see how Inness got this feathery effect:

steve, thenewgreen and I are in Denver next Tuesday evening. Text me bro.