Waking alarm to hydro / supplement / meal timing is all pretty higgledy-piggledy. My impulse was to blame that on housesitting "vacation brain" but now I think about it, probably more that the morning alarm has been suspended for well over a week now.

The corollary to that: going to bed on time to get 8+ hours, i.e. falling asleep by 10:30.
I've been getting lax about honoring the evening "start shutting down" reminder.

* * *

I was settling into a solid habit of eating a serving of carrots as a snack or in salads, for 2-3 weeks. Then I learned that most of the B-carotene is wasted in raw carrots; 4-7x less bioavailable than lightly steamed or roasted. BUT that adds an offputting level of prep complexity AND the idea of eating a serving of (even lightly) cooked carrots the day after - much less 2-3 days out - is offputting.

But why carrots? Eating a daily serving of carrots is associated with ~17% lowered risk of cancers (esp. lower GI, breast, lung, prostate). Sweet potato, pumpkin and leafy greens also supply beta carotene, but carrots specifically deliver a unique cocktail of additional compounds (alpha-carotene, falcarinol, maybe others) that translate to cancer-reduction where those other veg don't so much.

* * *

CA: This flew under my radar til today but apparently within the last couple of weeks, Gaia's Blessing gave me enough epic chaos shards to alchemy a very nice new trifecta chaos gem:
Epic Water Offense, +Physical.Pierce, +Base.Attack%
Sticking it on my Flame Belt was one option, but I decided to Reshape it to defensive and stick it on my Hades Armor. Refined to P.Pierce +74, Base.Att +9%.

* * *

Having pondered BASB ("Building a Second Brain", Forte 2022) for a good while now, the most profound and interesting idea there was: embracing and supporting intentional dabbling in topics of personal, amateur curiosity that we circle back to again and again throughout life, adding a little knowledge here and there as we go along. For me, for example, there's a constellation of "stuff I know about literature" (more than many! not nearly as much as some!) that intersects with "what makes great stories" and "TTRPGs as a storytelling format". Within the TTRPG-centric part of that constellation, since the 2022 D+D 5E refresh of the old 1989 Spelljammer rules I've been especially pondering how to fix SJ's very uneven player-engagement in vehicular combat. Quite separate from Spelljammer action scening but still within the TTRPG field, I've also been keeping an eye out for fiefdom-development subgame systems that are more fun than bookkeeping.

And then completely separate from that, over the years I've periodically stopped to admire from afar cottage industries like cider brewing, soapmaking, active-culture foods like yogurt / sauerkraut / kimchi. And then, in yet another distinct mental channel, topics around bodybuilding and nutrition.

Forte's book acknowledged and embraced this sort of lifelong personal-knowledge-base development in a way I had never quite encountered before.