Blog
I’m capping off a fairly substantial project today. When I transitioned this
blog off WordPress, the old posts vanished. Partially, the reason I left
WordPress was pain in backing up posts. WordPress provides a nice XML export,
but things get tough when you start worrying about artifacts. Unfortunately,
over the years, a few of the transitions over WordPress versions and hosts
didn’t preserve all the data. It was a lot of work, but I’ve restored the
majority of 17 years of blog posts.
Read more →
A while back, Fin grabbed a copy of “The Artists Way” - a self-help book for “blocked creatives”. We’ve both looked at it a couple times, but over the last few months, I decided to actually make an honest go of working the program. The course itself is essentially a reframed “12-step” program for people “blocked” in their creative process. Despite the billing as creativity rehab, the course really shades heavily into the mental health world. After finishing, one of the last “tasks” is to share the book / experience. So, in keeping with that, I’m dropping my review here. TL;DR - I enjoyed it but with some caveats.
Read more →
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.
Read more →
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.
Read more →
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.
Read more →
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.
Read more →
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!
Read more →
It’s snowing today: big, fat flakes that started sticking really fast, even though they are very wet. We’ve got some birds hanging out at the feeder, and it always impresses me when they can fly through that heavy snow.
Read more →
I hesitate to write too much for my goals in 2024. As we round the corner on the first half of the 2020’s (or enter the 48th month of 2020 as I saw one jokester put it), I can’t help but worry that this year will be another rough one. We’re in for another divisive presidential election and multiple potential wars are brewing with a general public that’s completely detached from the realities entering an actual war would bring. At times like these, it’s best to remember that the best we can do is manage the things we can actually control.
Read more →