I posted on Instagram recently that I had started doing Morning Pages. I was curious if any of my friends had done it too. Thanks for your comments in that post.
Coincidentally- I do think that reading James Clear’s Atomic Habits (or re-reading it recently) was a good motivator to keep me in the Morning Pages “program”. It’s a 12 week committment! I’m at about week 8 or 9 now.
I have gotten in to the daily habit of writing three long hand pages. It’s hard and there are days I don’t want to do it. But it’s oddly addictive and it seems to clear my head out in the mornings.
I’ll write a longer post once I finish. But I’m still interested in your writing habits and practices.
The one thing I do want to add is that I thought I was picky about my pens and paper before, but I’m a million times more attentive to my “gear” now. For example, the journal picture below shows a nice knock-off moleskine type journal that we would give out to guests at our office. But that paper bleeds a bit with certain inks and when you’re trying to write three pages every morning you pick up on it.
I recently posted a video to Instagram of me using an Ooni gas fired pizza oven when we were housesitting. I received a number of questions from you all basically asking the same thing: “Worth it?”
I wanted to give you some feedback and hopefully answer your question.
First I just wanted to say that I think the Ooni oven is a really well made product. It’s light, it’s relatively small (it can fit on a smaller table), it’s easy to hook up and get running and it’s very easy to clean up.
Notably, the interior pizza stone on the inside is removable and can be cleaned off if needed. Most of the time you can just do a “burn off” and flip the stone over to do this process. But you could use a grill brush after a burn off if needed.
That said- here’s my attempt to answer your question- “is it worth it?”
Yes and no.
Do you have outdoor space? Do you like to make multiple pizzas for one meal? Do you have a family and maybe each person wants their own pizza? Do you entertain frequently? If so, go for it.
Do you live in a small apartment with no outdoor space? Do you really only need to make one pizza to share for dinner? Then no, skip it. Get a baking steel.
The recommendations as an alternative idea for the “no”. When my friends bought their ovens (I have multiple friends with the Ooni), I received a birthday present called a Baking Steel. You may have seen them in use on Kenji Lopez-Alt’s videos. The Baking Steel is perfect for making pizzas on indoors in an oven. The version I have is also flippable and can sit on the stove as well. I used mine as a part-time griddle and also as a pizza steel.
It works in any oven, but excels in ovens where the broiler element is up top. Sadly, my broiler is one of those old-school drawer types that sits below the main oven compartment. But it’s still great.
I recommend the Baking Steel for anyone as it has multiple uses. You can even use it to make smash burgers (video below). That said- if I had outdoor space, I’d have an Ooni too.
Let me know if this helps or if you have any other questions.
Here are some pics from the Ooni and my Baking Steel. Some useful videos below as well. Both Andris from BS and Kenji have loads of videos. Kenji has a lot using the Ooni as well as his Steel.
I totally agree with this editorial from Vinograpy:
Bringing a bottle of wine to a restaurant right now says quite clearly, “Drinking what I want to drink from my own stash is more important to me than your survival as a business.”
Also- I’m not sure why the algorithm started suggested these types of videos to me (I must have been looking up a song) – but I wind up putting on videos like the following on in the background:
I’m not sure why I put some of those on, I don’t like all EDM. I do like that Analog Journal channel on YT though.
preamble/disclaimer- I’ve seen some crappy posts on social media criticizing people for being “lazy” during ‘Rona, or people criticizing others about using food or their couch as a coping mechanism. That’s shitty. I’m not trying to do this or weight-shame anyone. My intention is to write this in the style of a Kedrosky Daily Graph
Like many others in SF, our company switched to WFH in March of 2020. We later made WFH a permanent thing (at least for us… for now).
Unrelated, I happen to track my weight. Sure, it may not be healthy psychologically, but at one point I was interested in the “quantified self“ and tracking weight (mostly the moving average as described in the Hacker’s Diet) was a part of that.
A nine year old weight tracking chart. Drop off starts with COVID SF Office Closure and SIP
