It’s Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, so I’m out at Squam, eating delicious food and spending time with family. When I was living on the west coast that wasn’t really in the cards, so we’d host our own, which was a delight, but it’s nice to do the big family one again.
Continue reading “Gobble Gobble, Squam”Category: Life
General updates about what’s happening in my life, and personal writing.
Oops, missed September
Current status:
- ~500 unreads in my RSS feed (and that’s after some aggressive scanning and running through some of the higher-volume-but-lighter-weight stuff).
- ~100 open tabs of stuff to either finish reading, share, or process in some way.
- Inbox is read but I’ve got a handful of messages to still respond to (apologies if you’re waiting).
- Been terrible at keeping in touch in general, so you could apply that statement to various messaging services as well.
- Completely missed posting anything in September, despite plenty of desire and even some thoughts to share.
Lots of excuses: I flew out to a conference at the end of August, but promptly got sick the first day of the event and missed it; we bought a house and that’s been a steady supply of tasks; the work project I spent the last 10+ months on finally released and the month leading up to launch was kinda crunch-y; we adopted another dog and have been getting her acclimated… the list goes on. After the flurry of stuff the past two or three months plus the year of traveling, it feels like I haven’t had a chance to catch my breath in a while and I’m fucking tired.
Some quick thoughts:
- I’ve been pondering looking at other blogging options, possibly rolling something up with a platform like Astro or similar. It’s no diss on WordPress, but it doesn’t hurt to experiment. It might give a nice opportunity to try out different layouts and patterns and ways of approaching the site beyond the traditional “blog” experience (maybe start thinking more of the garden concept). I’ve got a few underutilized domains sitting around, so I’ll probably experiment there rather than muck with this blog directly (for now). My actual blogging/writing needs are pretty simple: a spot where I can write without it feeling like a chore; working RSS feed support; maybe some improved media handling. Everything else is gravy.
- One of my favorite online communities (the Slack associated with the XOXO festival) is going read-only soon, as the conference has officially run its course, and there’s sort of a scramble within the community to find a solution folks can migrate to. As I mentioned before, I don’t have a particular desire to run a forum or online space again, but the conversation has still piqued my interest and left me curious about what the options are these days, especially if you want something open source.
- A few I’ve noticed while looking around is setting up an XMPP server, or a Matrix server, or a Rocket.Chat server, or a Mattermost server, or a Discourse server.
- They all seem like kind of a pain in the ass in different ways. I think the ones I’d be most interested in experimenting with personally would be either Matrix or Discourse (and yes, I know Matrix is technically a protocol, but I don’t really care whether it’s Synapse or Conduit or whatever). I think it’s kind of neat that Discourse is primarily forum software, but they’ve implemented what looks like a fairly robust chat system on top of it, so you get a hybrid chat+forum experience.
- Thinking about my relationship with information in general, and how to better organize both what I write and what I read and want to save. Sort of a perennial topic if I’m honest, but I’m getting that itch again. This blog is still too high friction to be a scratch notebook, but as a step past that it might still fill a purpose. Pondering giving a genuine go at using Obsidian for that lower level scratch role.
Tired, a little fried from the pace of things lately, but hopeful that this fall and winter will strike a better balance. Hope you’re all doing alright as well, and that this fall turns out to be slow in all the best ways.
Home(Owner) Again
I wasn’t really mentioning this publicly, but now that the papers are all signed, I’m happy to announce we just bought a house! It’s a very, very, very fine house in a quiet neighborhood in Rutland, Vermont. Which means, yep, I’ll be a Vermont resident again. It feels like a nice culmination to spending the last year exploring the country (almost exactly a year – we left August 17th, and here it is, August 6th). We’re still planning to travel when we can, but it’ll be nice to have a home base again. Looking forward to it!
Winter is Fading
I’ve been remiss about keeping up with this blog – mea culpa. No real excuses other than being tired a lot, between the traveling and working.
The traveling does continue to be fun, though. We’ve basically done the perimeter of the continental United States – we started in Oregon, then went through Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, up into Ontario and Quebec in Canada, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Washington D.C., Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and we’ll be getting back to Oregon later today.
Obviously we stayed in some of those locations longer than others, and a few were effectively drive-bys just long enough to be able to count them. Still, not a bad range to do over 7 months – 29 states and 2 provinces. And we’re not done – we’re going to spend a few weeks in Portland to see friends and do some preparations, and then we’re heading east again, this time cutting more through the center of the country. (At this point I just need to visit Alaska to have done all 50 states – Simone has more to visit, but is rapidly catching up with this trip.)
Doing the perimeter of the country worked well for us – it meant that as the weather started to get cold in the northeast, we were able to cut south and enjoy far more temperate climes for the winter (though we did still bump into the cold spell here and there, and even snow in both New Mexico and Arizona – you don’t think of the southwest as being snowy, but the northern parts of both states are high enough in elevation that they do actually get a fair bit of snow).
California is quite a bit greener than it has been in past visits – even LA was looking pretty lush. This is in large part due to the heavier rain and snow the state has received the past two winters. I’d love to believe that the shift will continue and maybe they’ll finally get out of perpetual drought conditions, but the cynic in me sees it more as building up more tinder for when the wildfires come again. Regardless, I appreciate seeing it right now.
I’ll try to update my gallery soon, but in the meantime, you can sort of see the ongoing travelogue on my Instagram.
Wrapping 2023
October in New England
Here we are, halfway through October. It’s been a bit over a month since my last post. In that time, we spent more time in Peterborough, New York City, Newport (Vermont), and Holderness. We socialized, we saw friends, saw family, had a good time. It’s starting to get cooler out, and we’re currently far enough north that the leaves have begun dropping in earnest.
You can hear the crickets
We’ve been on the road for a few weeks now, and it’s been pretty good, all told. Some highlights behind the cut.
Continue reading “You can hear the crickets”On the Road Again
The short version is that Simone and I (and Cecil!) have put most of our belongings in storage, and have begun a grand sojourn around the country, with plans to stop at various destinations for anywhere from a few weeks to a few months at a time. Our first destination is Vermont, and we plan to be there for most of the fall (at least September and October, we’ll see beyond that). (Doesn’t mean the whole time will be Vermont – we’re definitely planning some day trips to other parts of New England, and a weekend in New York City to see a few friends. But it is where we plan to have our base of operations for the fall!)
The how is actually pretty straightforward: my job is very remote friendly, so barring the occasional travel day, I can do my job anywhere with a semi-decent internet connection. And Simone is in a remote-friendly graduate program, so again, nothing to hold us in one spot. So if you have that freedom, why not make use of it? I’m still working through all of this, which is also an interesting experiment, to see how I do keeping up with work while traveling. (And yes, they’re aware that I’m doing this and have my boss’s blessing.) Continuing to get paychecks certainly makes the traveling a lot easier!
The Answer
Well, I’m 42 now. Happy birthday to me. What have I been up to lately? It’s been a few months. The short version is: a fair bit of travel, work, and not much else concrete.
Click for the longer version2023
Happy New Year and all that. It’s now 2023, arguably an auspicious year in Discordianism, and hopefully a good year for the rest of us as well. I’m currently in Palm Springs with Simone, having spent the past few days wandering around and enjoying the desert while it’s not quite so murderously hot. (It’s even raining! How novel!) We had a nice wander through Joshua Tree National Park yesterday, and are having a nice relaxing New Year’s Day.
