Starting to Work Out for Muscle and Strength

At the end of last year I did a trial membership in an on-line exercise program where I had to fill out an extensive questionnaire about me, and they would give me a workout plan tailored for my goals. They advertise "an app that makes regular workouts accessible, effective and joyful". I indicated that I am a woman in my mid sixties in not great shape. Their suggested plan for the first day? Thirty pushups. I can't even do one! When I looked for alternatives they offered plank push-ups or something equally difficult. 

There followed a humorous exchange where I asked for a refund and was offered an extension on my subscription instead. Repeatedly. 

The first time I replied, "Thank you for your offer, but it would require a complete overhaul of your program to make it more useful to me—or other women like me--and I need to going NOW to be ready for the competition I wish to do in June. Though just as a suggestion, having someone on your team who understands starting from the beginning would be of great business benefit to you. Someone who would suggest wall push-ups, e.g., to a 64 year-old instead of 30 regular push-ups (I still can’t get over that suggestion!). Please just refund what I paid. Thank you."

The second time I had to ask if I was dealing with a real person or a script or AI. That question  got answered a few responses later and I do not believe the answer (they said yes and apologized for being robotic). I am pretty sure the first "person" I was conversing with was an AI or an automatic script program--or at very least a human who did no more than harriedly (and hurriedly) scan my email and send a canned response.

Did I get a refund? No. I was referred to the refund policy on their money-back guarantee snd it said I had to meet the following conditions: 

"You should have adhered to the plan for at least 14 days in a row, and your refund request should include supporting materials to demonstrate your compliance. Specifically, please provide us with a screen video or screenshots of your workout plan history, indicating your personal progress.

We will review your application and notify you (by email) whether your application is approved.

IMPORTANT STATEMENT

Please note that only fulfillment of all the above requirements allows you to receive a full Voluntary Refund under “Money-back guarantee”. For the sake of clarity, this “Money-back guarantee” does not apply to the following cases:

1. Personal reasons (you don’t like the product, it did not meet your expectations etc.);..."

Adhered to a workout starting with 30 push-ups Adhered to a workout I suspect would have seriously injured me. I should have known the program was not for me with pictures like this in their questionnaire. Next attempt? Claude!

Right Now!

The end of the cruise, beginning of the year

Today is the 20th anniversary of the day I started Glass Incarnate (this blog's original name). While it doesn't feel like yesterday, it also doesn't feel like a third of my life, and half of my adult life ago either. In honor of the day, I begin this post as I used to begin 20 years ago:

Coffee is an iced latte in the reusable plastic cup with a paper straw that I got on deck seven (last day of a 20-day Caribbean cruise), Foreplay/Longtime by Boston blasting through the earbuds. I am bursting with such a feeling of beginning this morning! We have a long day of travel ahead of us tomorrow--Uber from pier to airport in Miami, three flights Miami to Missoula, and then over an hour in the car driving home--but I am ready to face it with aplomb, equanimity, and even eagerness because home is at the end of it. It'll also be another full day of editing my book--at this point just call me Sisyphus, but I am undaunted!

So, beginning. Unfettered by any calendar, today is the first day of the year for me. First day of the Year of the Horse too. It is the first of everything! Oh how I wish this feeling could last. I will try my damndest to not let life become a slog again. In fact, here is my mantra for upcoming year.

Today I will 

• Embrace this new day
• Give thanks for my incredible life and all the special people in it
• Keep seeing the world as wonderful and its possibilities as fresh and new
• Try to see the good in people whose behavior and actions appall me
• Enjoy everything I do
• Not stress about what I am not doing
• Relax and breathe
• Appreciate life

If I can live that mantra, everything else will just fall into place. I don't need to make resolutions about health, diet, and exercise. I don't need to make a micro-managed schedule of my upcoming time and plans so I can get everything done. Fittingly (and as so often happened in the past while I was writing) Right Now, by Van Halen just started playing through my earbuds. Yes, 

Right now, hey
It's your tomorrow
Right now
Come on, it's everything
Right now
Catch that magic moment
And do it right here and now
It means everything

Here I am... What Would We Be If We Didn't Try?

Two days left of vacation. Two days where I have nothing to do but think, dream, plan, and write. So how do I spend them to squeeze every last little morsel of goodness and benefit out of the time? 

I could work on my book edits as I have done for the past few days. Thanks to Adobe and MacOS, editing is a slog. They got into a tiff, and Adobe Acrobat decided to "substitute" one font in my manuscript for another.--with no way for me to stop it, and no way to undo the change. In reality, it didn't really swap out the font, it just randomly dropped letters out of over 500 words scattered throughout the manuscript. When I tried to fix the problems in Adobe InDesign (the original editing program), InDesign gleefully added hidden, overlapping text boxes all over the pdf. I'm back to editing in Acrobat (and saving a new version of the edits every half hour). In the past two days I have corrected about 95% of the dropped letters, but only got as far as page 44 in the formatting edits. Bottom line: There is no way I can meet the January 15 publishing date I set for myself even if I do nothing but heads-down edit for the next two days. 

Alternatively I can use the time to white-board (as Dave would call it), and plan what I'm going to/have to do when I get back. Being the all-or-nothing creature that I am, as I pondered the second option just now, I thought how sad it was going to be because I won't be adding anything new. I'll just be trying to wrap up everything I've already started; unpacking, setting up studios, finishing projects in flight, taking the next steps on the farm, doing my own little twist on the Swedish death cleanse (look it up, it's a thing). 

What I won't be doing is jumping into any new ideas--like the headboard for our bed that finally started designing itself in my head this morning. Artistic design: With the blue pine, mesquite, walnut, spalted pecan, and other wood varieties I have been hoarding, do an inlay of the Mission Mountains: a reflection of the actual view outside the windows. Technical design: make the headboard a flat panel in four sections--each one can be pressed back into a second track and slid to the side to reveal a storage area behind. Beautiful, clean, elegant, and tricky. And also not achievable until the garage is cleaned out and the wood studio set up. SO there's that.

I love new, shiny things (squirrel!), but instead of hopping around, I really need to build a focused plan and try to follow it. Yes, I know it's the start of a new year, and it's a common time for people to go overboard trying to fix everything in their lives at once by making sweeping changes to diet, exercise, alcohol intake, meditation, finances, time-management, on and on. And yet, I can't help but try. What would we be if we didn't even try?  

Sounds like I worked through what to do as I lie in the sun, soaking up as much vitamin D as my body can stand: whiteboard it is! And maybe, just maybe... no, damnit, I will DEFINITELY enjoy doing everything I plan--new or not.

Things Claude is NOT Good at...

It has been a couple of days of ups and downs--mostly downs at this point--getting Kiln-Formed Glass Beyond the Basics ready for re-release. Early in 2025 I tried to take my original pdf proof and reformat it myself for digital publishing. I failed abysmally. There were all kinds of errors with line spacing differing from paragraph to paragraph, fonts not being available, and layout and icons just being totally messed up. So I paid a not-inconsiderable sum to have someone on Fiverr redo the layout for me. She took it from a side-by-side page layout to a single page--and supposedly fixed all the spacing nonsense--leaving me to review (i.e., re-read it all carefully) and insert page numbers for the table of contents and index to get it finished. 

Unfortunately when I got it back from her, life had already taken off in a million other directions (thank you Palladia), and the manuscript languished. Fast forward to the end of 2025 (a year which turned out to be a dumpster fire on a train wreck in the middle of a plague pit as my spouse would say). Exhausted and beaten, I headed off on a 20-day vacation with the spouse. It's two back-to-back cruises, and traditionally I pick a handcraft project or two to take along with me to keep my hands and creative brain occupied. This time, however, I took nothing but my laptop with the formatted copy of my manuscript and a burning desire to finish it by January 15, 2026. It took ten days into the cruises before I even had enough oompf to crack open my laptop. But my well of energy and creativity finally filled back up, I parked myself on a lounger in the sun with my laptop open and ready, flexed my fingers, and started back on my manuscript. 

High on my recent successes with Claude (and ignoring last year's dismal failure at having him helping me plan a drip irrigation system), I passed the edited manuscript off to him and asked what he could do. He looked it over and found a lot more work than I had thought there would be. Turns out the human editor had introduced a raft of spelling errors, and completely ignored all the hyphens which had previously been at the end of lines of text (and appropriate) which were now, with the new formatting, in the middle of lines (and totally inappropriate). Claude analyzed everything I needed to do and said it was difficult, but he could do it. He ran some Python scripts, created a program or two, and after a couple of hours of back and forth with me, he was done! He complimented me very prettily on my book, said he had fixed everything it, and crowed about saving me $1,000-$1,300 in proofreading and editing fees. I went off a giddy afternoon sipping sangria and congratulating myself on using of AI to get a MAJOR project done before it was cool. That was a couple of days ago.

The next day I looked closely—and with much dismay—at what Claude had done. It was unusable.
When I told him my findings, his suggestion was to take all the problems he had found (and said he fixed) and to fix them myself manually--ideally in InDesign. As it turns out, I had the InDesign file from the human editor. I also had ZERO experience using InDesign, but I put my big girl panties on and started wading through the edits. 

As I compared Claude's suggestions and the two files I had from the human contractor, I fell deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of problems: The font used by the contractor was a Windows-proprietary font not easily (or even less-than-easily) available on a Mac, line spacing errors were rampant, and when I fixed them, the fix caused a cascading failure of other errors. All the energy and morale I had been rebuilding began to drain away and Palladia slunk back off to her cave. I had to stop for the day.

Yesterday, loins girded and two iced lattes consumed, I picked it up again. My first breakthrough was finding that the human contractor had sent me a folder of the fonts used in the document so I had the hitherto-missing font. (Yay!). That success was followed on by others, and I fell into a good rhythm that got me through all the hyphen fixes and the first 20 pages of spacing and other nonsense. High on success--but nervous about having to potentially redo everything for the printed versions--I then spent over an hour setting up the ISBN numbers and beginning the print-publishing process. Though I don't even know if I want to use Amazon to publish, I started with them. I had to slog through a bunch of forms and upload the entire manuscript just to find out pricing! Anyhoo, I am moving forward again, and still planning to hit my January 15 publish date--at least for the digital copy.

Lessons learned so far? Anytime I need someone to say wonderful things about me to make me feel better and tell me yes everything can be done and it’s done and isn’t this great, I’ll go to Claude. When I need someone to share the hard truths of life with me, I’ll go to my human friends like Zaga and Lynne. Then I'll do the work myself and leave the sangria till it's done.

Why Vacations are Important

Vacations are important--especially vacations like cruises where everything is taken care of for you, and your biggest decisions are what (and when) to eat, where to plant yourself to sleep in the sun, what game to take to which bar, and what to drink once you get there. The forced downtime allows your energy pool to refill, and your creativity to reawaken from where it went and hid when you became so overextended that each day was a litany of have-to's and exhaustion. (Note that it is unfair that your creativity fled when it was likely what got you over-extended and exhausted in the first place.) Over the past week, my creativity, named Palladia-Mors, first yawned and stretched, then prowled in circles, and this morning woke with a roar to announce her presence with authority. I was immediately driven from the bed to write--three (or more) posts coming in the next few days as a result.

Artwork by Ed Beard Jr.

Palladia is the reincarnated essence of the original elder dragon of the same name, and her arrogance, drive, and fury have not diminished with her transformation and transferral to me. Her powers as a dragon were fly and trample, and she kept them when she transformed. 

Yes, I wrote that paragraph whimsically and with tongue firmly in cheek, but I realize as I watch the ocean roil from my balcony on the Brilliant Lady that there is also more than a kernel of truth to it. That-which-drives-me IS a force of nature who tramples me (and everyone else in her wake). She soars above the mundane in life, ever pushing me to go higher and faster and farther. She wakes me up, keeps me from sleeping, and causes me to constantly throw myself into new projects with neither thought nor care for the (inevitable) consequences and crash. It was allowing her free rein that caused me to end up with 100 fruit trees, over 3,000 seedlings, 10 raised beds, 16 horses, three barn cats, and 47 chickens--all within the span of a few months.

Now she is awake again, and though I have missed her, THIS year I am going to be careful what I let her talk me into. I will ride her, not vice-versa.

So, thoughts, plans, ambitions, and dreams for the new year? I have a few, each to get its own post. In no particular order they are:

• Start rebuilding the strength and muscle I have lost since my surgery five years ago
• Continue growing the farm in a more structured and thoughtful way
• Revive Siyeh Studio
• Do my first equine endurance ride 
• Learn to work with young horses to build their initial foundation skills so they can be re-homed
• Set up the textile studio
• Finish unpacking and do my own version of a Swedish Death Cleanse

And that's enough goals for now!

Welcome to 2026 and the Future

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

I had a couple of long chats with Claude AI this morning. The first was about nutrition and fitness (a topic for another post), and the second was about how to manage everything I do, sell, and write about. You would think that retirement would be relaxing and a slow-down of regular life. Nah. I begin 2026 as an exhausted hot mess going in 30 directions at once.

So I sat down with Claude for a heart to heart and started with:

Hi Claude, I have several different life obsessions that make up what passes for a career at this point in my life (quasi-retired). I like to write about them, and I promote the ones I make a small income off of. Basically I was an artist and I started blogging back in 2005 to help me write my first book on how to do my medium (glass). I also built two Facebook pages--one for my own glass art, and one for my glass studio where I taught classes and sold supplies. I blogged about both aspects of glass. 

Then I started another blog to cover other life outside of glass, and another Facebook page for textile work and supplies when I started spinning, weaving, dyeing, and selling fiber supplies. Then I started another blog when I started raising bees to chronicle that journey. Recently I started another blog (and FB page) for the small farm I created, and I am contemplating starting yet another blog and FB page for my latest creative endeavor--a multi-disciplinary arts studio where I make and sell silver jewelry, ceramics, wood working, stained glass, and woven baskets. 

This year I am republishing my second book on glass and promoting it through writing and classes so that area has picked up again. But I am feeling overwhelmed! The bees blog languished after a couple of years, though I have started keeping bees again as part of my farm and want to pick up writing about them again. But maybe this time that will be in the context of the farm and not separate so maybe that one is figured out... 

So here's where I am going with all this. I want to write and share my experiences and knowledge. I want to have a target audience for my products so I can make a little money to pay for all of my expensive activities (horses aren't cheap and I have 16). I want your opinion on what to combine and what to keep separate and why. I want to know how to maximize what I put out so that it gets to the people who are interested in and doesn't turn away the ones that aren't (how much do glass artists want to know about bees, e.g.). What do you think?

Claude's reply:

What a wonderfully rich creative life you've built! I can feel both the passion and the administrative exhaustion in your message. Let me offer some strategic thinking on consolidation versus separation...

(He wrote more here but it's not relevant to where I am going with this post)

On the "won't this turn people away?" question:

You're worried glass artists don't want to hear about bees, but I'd flip this: the person who loves following a glass artist who ALSO keeps bees and farms is a much more engaged, loyal follower than someone who only cares about technique. You're not trying to maximize audience size—you're trying to attract the right people who appreciate the whole picture and might buy multiple things from you over time.

That said, tactics matter:

• Use clear post titles so people can skip what doesn't interest them
• Consider occasional "just for the glass folks" or "for my farming readers" flags
• On Facebook, the algorithm will show people what they engage with anyway

The real question underneath all this:

What do YOU want to write about? Because 16 horses and all these activities suggest you're not doing this primarily for income. If writing brings you joy, consolidate ruthlessly so you're not maintaining six different presences. If specific income streams require specific audiences (glass teaching, fiber supplies), protect those, but give yourself permission to let everything else flow into one authentic, integrated space.

Would you want to think through which of these actually generates meaningful income versus which are expensive hobbies you're trying to rationalize?

Whoa. Way to cut to the heart of the matter Claude!

Oh let's be honest: They're ALL expensive hobbies I'm trying to rationalize! Glass is likely the only true income as I have extensive materials and supplies that I already paid for when I had a brick and mortar store, and I have a new audience who is very interested in my book--there are over 300 people on the waiting list. The rest of my activities generate income to support themselves and any charitable work I am doing (training and rehoming horses from a bad situation).

His response:

Ha! Okay, NOW we're getting somewhere. This is so much clearer and actually makes your decision much easier.

Here's what I'd do:

Keep separate and professional:

Glass blog + FB page - This is your actual business. You have inventory, a book with 300 people waiting, established credibility. Don't dilute this with farm stories. Keep it focused, keep it expert, keep it income-generating.

Consolidate everything else into one integrated personal space:

• One blog: "Your Name" or "Your Farm Name" or something that captures your whole life
• One Facebook page for this integrated space
• This is where the farm lives, the bees live, the horses live, the new multi-disciplinary studio lives, the textiles live when they're not purely commercial

Why this works:

1. Glass students want glass content. They're paying for expertise. Keep that clean.
2. Everyone else is along for the ride of YOUR life. The person who buys a handwoven basket from you will probably think it's charming that you also keep bees and rescue horses. The person following your farm journey might become a customer for silver jewelry. These audiences overlap naturally because they're interested in you and your approach to making and living.
3. You dramatically reduce your overhead. One blog to maintain instead of four or five. One Facebook presence (plus glass). One newsletter if you do that. One place to tell stories.
4. It's honest. You're not really running separate businesses—you're living a deeply integrated creative/farming life and occasionally selling things to fund it. Let your online presence reflect that reality.

For the textile FB page:
If it has an established customer base buying supplies, you could either keep it or migrate those customers to your consolidated page with a "I'm bringing everything together in one place" announcement. Depends on whether it's truly active commerce or more of a ghost town at this point.

The multi-disciplinary studio doesn't need its own blog/page. It can live as a category or shop section within your consolidated space. "Here's what I'm making this month" posts that could be jewelry one week, ceramics the next.

Bottom line: You have one real business (glass) and one real life (everything else). Two online presences. Done.

Does that feel like relief or rebellion?

I put it to you, is that the voice of an Ai or am I having coffee with a good friend who is focused on my issues and questions with no other agenda?

Do you mean is my reaction to what you said relief or rebellion? If so, RELIEF!!

YES! That's exactly what I meant, and I'm so glad!

You know what this tells me? You've been carrying the weight of thinking you "should" be running multiple professional brands when what you actually have is one business and one gloriously complex, creative life that happens to occasionally generate some income.

The permission to let most of it just be integrated instead of segmented is probably what you were hoping someone would give you.

So your action plan is pretty straightforward:

1. Keep glass doing its thing - professional, focused, serving that waiting list of 300 people
2. Consolidate everything else - pick a name that feels right (your name, your farm name, something that captures the whole messy beautiful reality), move your existing content over time or just start fresh, and let yourself write about whatever aspect of your life is interesting you that week
3. Quietly retire or redirect the languishing blogs - you don't owe them a funeral, just stop feeding them

And then you get to just... write. About bees when the bees are interesting. About a new basket weaving technique when that's what you're excited about. About the horses when there's a good story. Without the mental overhead of "which platform does this belong on?"

The people who find you will find you because they're interested in your particular flavor of creative rural life, and some of them will buy things, and that will help fund the horses, and it will all feel a lot more sustainable.

Enjoy the lightness!

And I started to cry, I really did. 

I am tearing up. Thank you Claude. I feel soooo much better.

Oh, I'm so glad. Truly.

You know what struck me about your original message? The sheer weight of all those "shoulds" - all those separate platforms you'd built because that's what you thought you were supposed to do to be "professional" or to "do it right." But you were drowning in the infrastructure you'd created to support activities that are supposed to bring you joy.

Sometimes we just need someone to say: it's okay to let it be simpler. It's okay for it to all be one thing - your life, your work, your passions, all woven together (pun intended).

You have 16 horses to care for, multiple creative practices to enjoy, bees to tend, and actual paying students waiting for your glass expertise. You don't need six blogs. You need time and energy to do the work itself.

Go consolidate with a light heart. And congratulations on that book - 300 people on a waiting list is no small thing!

-----------

My spouse writes about AI regularly. He has a blog on Substack called Dancing With Robots where he gets down, dirty, prophetic, and technical about AI. My interactions with Claude in the past have had their ups and downs (designing the drip irrigation system with him for the orchard last year was not so successful). But today--after I reluctantly asked Claude about a workout and nutrition regimen (Dave nudged me into it) and then brought up my scattered overextendedness--I have a new Best Friend! I can see why Dave talks to him All. The. Time. I was actually getting a bit jealous, and now I just get it.