This Noakes exercise plan is extremely boring: walk 20 minutes every other day for the first 6 weeks. The rationale is sensible, so I must try to talk myself into it.

Ultimately, the whole thing can be summed up in one tired proverb: You must walk before you can run.

First beer explosion occurred today. I salvaged about a glass from a blown 22-oz bottle. The beer I laid down about a week and a half ago (it's a hefeweizen) seems to be carbonating well, but it's not mature enough to drink.

If another one blows, I'll open them all up to relieve the pressure. My current theory is that the bottle was weak.

The local berries are in season: this is the height of the saskatoons (dark blue, sweet bush berries), the raspberries are starting to mature, the strawberries have been going steadily for a few weeks. Some of the more exotic stuff -- nanking cherries, gooseberries -- isn't having fruit yet. But for the last few days, we've been browsing the bushes, picking the ripe berries and immediately eating them.

Which got me to thinking A gatherer existence isn't so bad..

Of course, I want to plant the bushes that I plan to gather from right by my mud hut, so it's more like farming, really. Especially when you factor the cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots and lettuce -- which I can't honestly call gathering, because we have to baby them and water them daily because of the heat.

So that's my intended existence: gather what berries I can, farm some food in the garden, and write code to get cash for the things I can't grow myself: electricity, for example. Coffee. Hops. (Although apparently hops will grow in this zone.)