![]() ![]() Life continues.DataConnect does not provide speaking slots as a benefit of any conference sponsorship level. Four out of five kids will start attending in-person school this month (for the first time since March 2020). I’ve got a big potential project at work that I’m excited about (but also afraid that it will cut into my existing side-project time). I’ve got some more blog posts I’m itching to write, including several technical ones. I’m trying a new schedule now, and it seems to be helping as long as I don’t get behind (I got behind during the road trip and it took 2+ weeks to dig myself out). I’ve been coping by spending the occasional free evening building a quick and fun demo (like this or this), but that doesn’t really help me make progress towards my goals. When I go too long without side-project progress, I start to feel like I’ve lost control of my time and something needs to change. My lack of progress here has been a source of frustration pretty much all year. continues to faithfully bring in income but I have some new ideas I want to try there too. I want to set up affiliate links, content guides, and song self-submission for. Side-projects have been deprioritized behind parenting, work, church, and health, and that has proven to be a deadly combo for the things I want to do. Now we have a “spot where deck once was” that we’ll eventually need to decide what to do with. It took a while and we burned through a lot of electric screwdriver bits but it saved some money and the kids got experience using power tools. Our deck was rotting so we got the kids involved in disassembling it one plank at a time. I have a lot to learn about faith and selfless service and I guess this has become an ongoing opportunity for that. This is the part they don’t tell you about in your LDS youth groups growing up. I spend 15-20 hours a week on Church responsibilities these days. ![]() I also enjoyed finishing three audiobooks that have been on my list for awhile. I knew the lives of my peers had all diverged in the last 15 years but it’s a little surreal to witness it in person. We ended up staying with a lot of different families in succession and it was interesting to compare their different lifestyles, each valid in their own way. In retrospect, the timing was perfect (getting our visits in before the delta variant started picking up steam in the US). We did a big family road trip in July, driving with our five kids across ten states to visit a lot of family and friends we hadn’t seen in a while. It’s interesting work though and it’s kept me busy, which is probably a good thing right now. Work has been pretty wild though… I’ve been a part of several high-profile launches this summer which have caused my hours and roadmap to be pretty unpredictable. The rest of the world may be resisting going back to the office but we had a pretty special thing in Dayton and I still miss it. It’s been over a year since Sparkbox permanently shut down the Dayton office. Again, it’s more for mental health than physical health but I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how great it’s made me feel physically, so I’m keeping it going for as long as I can. I started this as a way to give myself the space to think and plan in a way that I haven’t in a while. One outcome of this journaling is that I’m now running three times a week (which I haven’t really done since 2016). At times I’ve found myself journaling two or three nights a week, which has been good for my mental health, but it’s also cut into a lot of that blogging time I used to have. In the past, my blog has filled the role of a journal in many ways, but recently I’ve needed to work through a lot of personal questions and journaling in private has been helpful. I made sure to write a journal entry describing the experience in detail, so I wouldn’t forget what it was like. We had a ton of them at our house and it was fun to experience them while my kids were all about the right ages to appreciate them. It felt to me like a mysterious natural phenomenon like a solar eclipse or tsunami. But this year they came, and I was so unreasonably excited about it. ![]() I had heard rumors about the 17-year Cicadas ever since we moved to Ohio, but then each year would come and go and we’d never see or hear them. It’s been a whirlwind of a summer though, so I thought I’d try something I haven’t done in a while and just share a bunch of life updates. It’s been over two months since my last post, which hasn’t happened since… * checks the archives* …I first started this blog in 2010. ![]()
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