Let's do a new thing.

This year sucked.

In April, my dad died. This blog isn't about that, but it's a part of the reason I'm here now so I'm going to address it briefly. Cancer took my father from me, after months of pain and suffering. I watched him take his last breath and it broke me. I have been struggling since then just to get through day to day. I still can't get through a night of normal sleep, I struggle to focus on important daily tasks, and I am generally checked out from the things that used to bring me joy.

I can't do that anymore, so I'm trying to change for the better. I know there are good things out there, good things in my life today. I have a wife and kids I love, I have hobbies, I enjoy most of the parts of my job. Yet I still feel stuck, and I know that I have to unstick myself.

So I'm starting a blog. I'm going to write infrequently probably, about inconsistent topics, with varying levels of commitment to each post. But I'm going to write to talk about the things that make me happy, so that I will be forced to remember that they do in fact make me happy.

I'll probably talk about Emacs, probably too much. I will definitely talk about 3D printing, because it eats up a lot of my free time. I will talk about keyboards (of which I have too many and I've been told they're too small), programming (because I don't want to get out of touch with my career), challenges and successes in managing a team of software engineers. I'm going to talk about the things that keep me going, and hopefully I'll do it enough that I will be able to read it when I'm feeling down and remind myself that it's not so bad

I'm going to do this as a WriteFreely blog, because I recently discovered the fediverse and I think it's neat. Also keeping it to markdown will probably cut down my excuses to procrastinate. I'm also going to try to keep these short, because I'm too lazy for anything else.