First garden post

I feel blessed to be able to sit in the shade on a day where temperatures are above 12C. With no clouds in the sky and no jet noise overhead. The soundscape is full of birdsong with a hint of national road traffic behind our border wall. It is a Saturday which means only a few heavy goods vehicles.

Part of my daily routine involves checking my Whoop app and it explains why my left foot is screaming for a break. “Nice steady walking block today, Bernie” the app says. Whoop tells me that my “40:29 walk landed 6.0 strain … 10,095 steps on a yellow 44% recovery day.” I feel some throbbing in my left foot even though my heart rate stayed mostly in Zone 1, aligning with a Build Better Recovery, a plan I set up with my Whoop coach.

I’ve told Whoop to build me a Recovery Playbook. Let’s see if that suggestion leads to fewer steps and more cycling. I need to get back into the saddle again.

I also need to listen to Whoop and get back into journaling. The best journaling I can do leverages the Ghost publishing platform and that’s the one I’m using to type these words on the screen of my iPad Mini. It feels so wholesome. I wonder if any of the 11 people who subscribed to this Topgold Journal sense any of the wholesomeness that flow from my renewed pledge to spend more time journaling.

If you’re a subscriber who stumbled onto Topgold.ie after hearing me show people how I use AI on my phone and on my iPad Mini, please let me know by email or via Bluesky what you valued most. This past week, several people told me they enjoyed watching or using Meta.ai with my Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. When I got that feedback, I worried that I was devolving into a Meta advocate—even though I use those Smart Glasses for reading, listening, and recording every day.

I will amend this post with a short video and audio so you can see and hear what I enjoyed while writing this post.