Hello, my name is Sean Gillies, and this is my blog. I write about running,
cooking and eating, gardening, travel, family, programming, Python, API design,
geography, geographic data formats and protocols, open source, and internet
standards. Mostly running and local geography. Fort Collins, Colorado, is my
home. I work at TileDB, which sells a multimodal data platform for genomics and
precision medicine. I appreciate emailed comments on my posts. You can find my
address in the "about" page linked at the top of this page. Happy New Year!
Snow-covered cones, craters, and lava flows of Craters of the Moon National
Monument in Idaho, viewed from an airliner traveling between Denver and
Seattle on February 21, 2025.
Running in 2025 started out badly, but I hung in there, rode my bike and
chugged on the elliptical machine when I couldn't run, did a lot of physical
therapy, and finally got into good enough shape that I could plausibly try the
Bear 100 mile race again.
Aspen, fir, and spruce trees bordering the Sinks area at the top of Logan Canyon.
September, 2025.
I had little margin for error at the Bear, and misplayed my hand. I went out
too fast and suffered for it after mile 35. I did manage to battle on for another 18
hours and 40 miles, and reached a new personal distance best. The best part of
the whole event was the road trip with Ruthie, my crew chief, and staying with
my aunt in Cache Valley before and after the run. And the fall colors. There
were a lot of good parts. Crossing the finish line, sadly, was not one of them.
I did finally finish an ultra-distance run in November, a 32 mile trip from my
home to the summit of Horsetooth Mountain, around the reservoir, and back. My
house is behind my crazy hair in the photo below.
Horsetooth Mountain from Herrington Trail. November, 2025.
Self portrait on the summit of Horsetooth Mountain. November, 2025.
In July I got to spend a weekend with my friends David and Marin at Never
Summer, a great time. After the Bear I ran regularly with my local friend Dana
as he was ramping up his running, and paced him during his DIY marathon. I did
a day of trail work with
local runners in May, and volunteering at Black Squirrel and Blue Sky Trail
Marathon in September and October. I train alone, mostly, but I really do like
to spend time outside with other runners.
My running numbers for the year:
965 miles
144,864 ft D+
231 hours
That's less than two-thirds of my running volume for a good year. Things are
looking up, however. I've been running and biking consistently after the Bear and am in good
shape. I'm eager to get the 2026 season started. More about that soon.
Rasterio 1.4.4 is on PyPI now. The first release in a year and ten days. If
you're using Rasterio in 2025, shoot some thanks to Alan Snow, aka @snowman2 on
Github. He's leading the effort to get Rasterio caught up to recent GDAL and
Python changes, and it's not a cakewalk!
2025 was another good year for gardening. We had only a tiny bit of hail damage
in May and June, and a lengthy period of warm fall temperatures. I had the
usual great green bean harvest, plentiful cucumbers and melons, and exceptional
crops of peppers and tomatoes.
The difference-maker for me, this year, was commercial fertilizer. I'm
a zealous composter, and we funnel our kitchen scraps, coffee grounds, garden
debris, fall
leaves, and such into our vegetable beds. And yet the productivity of some of
our crops has declined. Tomatoes, in particular. I'd almost given up on
tomatoes. This summer I used
a modest amount of Dr. Earth fertilizer in my tomato and pepper beds
and was rewarded with a bumper crop from just six San Marzano plants that my
neighbor gave me. In September I put 18 pint-size freezer bags of 6-7
peeled plum tomatoes in my chest freezer along with eight pint containers of
tomato sauce. Paul Bertolli's recipe, with some tomato leaves and stems for
an extra summery kick.
Plastic containers of peeled plum tomatoes.
A pot of chopped tomatoes ready to be turned into sauce.
Massive quantities of excess tomatoes is my big takeaway from this gardening
season. So many curries and stews are going to be based on this surplus over
the next six months.
I've got good news for people who love news about Rasterio, the Python package
for reading and writing classic GIS raster data. Alan Snow is the release
manager for 1.4.4 and 1.5.0 and has shepherded a release candidate with 40 wheels and one source
distribution onto the Python Package Index: https://pypi.org/project/rasterio/1.4.4rc0/. The release notes are here.
Please try these out and let us know if they work as expected.
