In April / May 2006, I moved across the country to Kansas City. Sadly, the exact date is lost to time. The best record I have is a handful of emails oriented around my job search and the birth of my niece. I’ve never really treated the anniversary as a special occasion. While I have given little thought to it for many years, this year feels different. More concrete and somehow more important. Realizing it’s 20 years since leaving my hometown gives me a new sense of urgency in life. Funny this all happens to land with a self-imposed deadline to evaluate my goals for the year.

Despite my best intentions for 2025, most of my goals for the year weren’t really executed upon. This year, my work-life balance has been a bit out of whack. Large work projects distract from things that matter at home and make it difficult to concentrate on personal projects with little energy left over for hobbies. Adding in the continual flood of near-existential crisis in about every aspect of life right now – and progress on any sort of “goal” metric slows down. I found a local club to engage with and have largely switched back to Linux for day-to-day computing. Those are huge wins, but many of the other 2025 goals were partially met at best.

In the past year, the cost of my multiple “life reboots” has hit really hard. Even a single change in work, change in city, or change in faith community costs friends and acquaintances. In many ways, my social network never recovered after my first “hard reset,” and the handful of soft reboots since haven’t helped the situation. Nor has the increasingly polarized political climate. I’ve found politics in general a cancerous subject that erodes friendships and minds.

When we started this blog - spun off from a Google blogger page - spun off earlier from my own private blog, we wanted to chronicle our adventures in more sustainable and interesting lifestyle. This week I took the time to write some blog entries offline, with the idea of transferring them here. Unfortunately, I managed to misplace said analog entries. That said, the first one (and very belated) one attempted to formalize my goals for the new year.

Where did everything go?

I’ve found that maintaining wordpress (or purchasing a wordpress site) has become less and less about writing and more about maintaining wordpress. That comes with a side-order of concern for accidentally “loosing” content as Wordpress continues to move toward more of a generic CMS and less of a blog engine.

So - I’ve decided to switch things over to another piece of software and “simplify” the overall design to the bare minimum. There’s a lot I’d like to do with this site, and having a SIMPLE setup that I can easily backup (and nuke the hosting server) is proving more important as of late.

The weather here has been really crazy! We got a bunch of snow and really cold temperatures, which we haven’t seen in a while. I realized during the taking care of the chickens part of all of this that I had no warm hand wear. I’ve got plenty of choices for sweaters and I made myself a hat and scarf already so I’m covered there. The hat and scarf were amazing for this super cold weather, I am really glad I had them available. The only hand coverings I have currently are one holey pair of thin wool gloves I got at a thrift store and a pair of (of course white) cashmere gloves I got from an estate sale once upon a time. Those cashmere gloves are amazing, but who wants to wear your nice cashmere gloves to the barn? I mean, I did, but who wants to? They really weren’t up to the task, although better then the nothing I would have been wearing otherwise!