OOTDS Supplemental: A Quantifiable Kitchen

(and a seasonal recipe for candied orange peel)

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” - Socrates

Just around the corner from us is a suburban home that has actually appeared on Google Maps as “The Quantified House”. It is inhabited (inevitably: this is Silicon Valley, after all) by techbros, and they use All The Apps There Are to measure everything that is measurable: their exercise regimes, their heartbeats and sleeping patterns, their nutrition, their working hours and the methods they use to stay focused, so on and so forth, all of it. And, of course, they record it all in spreadsheets and reports online.

That is not and never will be me, obvs. I cannot be that disciplined & organised, and nor would I want to be. I have from time to time enjoyed and found usefulness in recording my daily word- or page-count, in one way or another; it helps to keep me honest if I have a target to achieve and records to aspire to. At the moment I’m not setting myself any targets at all, though, so those habits have more or less lapsed. I do still keep an eye on the numbers, just to know where I am in the piece, but it’s a wayward kind of eye that just nods and shrugs and moves on.