“You know, you could take some time off”

“Yeah, but I know myself well enough to know I won’t.”

I awoke this morning knowing I had to make it to work for a 9:30 meeting…in a former life that’d be laughably late, but now it’s early. Maybe I’ve finally become institutionalized to Austin’s “10am at the earliest” culture, or maybe it’s the 45 to 60-minute drive, or just simple burnout. Since we returned to office 5 days per week this year, it’s just been a grind. Having the flexibility to work-from-home even 1 day a week helped. Now: This is life.

Our last bunny, Joe, died suddenly today. He was about 8 years old.

As we were preparing to walk out the door, I went in to feed Joe his morning pellets as usual and he was sitting in his hutch flaring his nostrils and biting at the air. It seeme like he was struggling to breathe. Well, that’s not good, I thought.

Grace came in and picked him up, taking him to Whitney but he seemed desperate to get out of her arms. Looking back on it, I suppose he was smothering. He bounded down onto the kitchen table and hopped a few times. Then Grace picked him up again.

You really don’t appreciate how attached you are to spending money until you can’t.

We’ve been on a financial diet at my house since February. Last year, between salary and stock, I made X amount of money. I paid nearly 30% of X in taxes, which I found funny, since it was more than I was making before I took a job here in 2016.

In any case, this year I’m on track to make about 60% of X. While that will make filing my 1040 easier, it’s made living a skosh harder from a Cash Flow perspective. On top of that add:

Nine months is a long time–Plenty of time for a baby to be born, or for a cow to birth a calf. Enough time for a madman to be well on his way to dismantling the American Republic.

In my case it took nine months for me to feel…anything about Mom dying. I couldn’t call her “Mom” even. Every discussion was “my mother,” or “my mom.” Somehow this arms-length feeling helped me not feel. I desperately needed to avoid feeling.

Many pithy sayings exist about possessions:

• “A Boat is a hole in the water you throw money in”
• “Boat is an acronym that stands for Break Out Another Thousand”
• “If it has wheels or wings, it’s trouble” (There’s another variant, but this is polite company)

To this I’d suppose to add: “A House is a mechanism to kill you, but at least you get to sleep there. That’s why it’s called a ‘mortgage’.”

In many ways, water frames my life. It’s an obsession of mine.

The Weather Obsessive Goes Soft

The winter of 1977-1978 dumped feet of snow on Kentucky. One notable blizzard led to my birth 9 months later.

As a child, the floods throughout eastern Kentucky were just a fact of life: It rained too hard, and the rivers backed-up, usually in the community of Wolverine. People who lived there would get flooded at least once a year for days. Then in 1991, former governor Bert T. Combs died when he tried to drive home. People would drown.

So, we have a new phenomenon thanks to Return to Office: “Coffeebadging”

As the wiki article indicates:

(Coffeebadging) is the practice of employees clocking in for a brief period at the office, typically long enough to grab a coffee, before departing to work from elsewhere. This is done to fulfill office attendance requirements by hybrid and remote workers which arose following the return to in-person work following the COVID-19 pandemic.

So, the US had its first measles death in 10 years yesterday. We’ve had a scare recently with exposure near austing between San Antonio and San Marcos, and now there are cases in Kentucky.

MMR vaccines are good for about 10 years, apparently, so 3 of 4 of us at home are vulnerable right now. It’s airborne transmissable, and highly contagious.

And then, another “_______ night massacre” in the government as 1,200 NOAA Employees got the axe by EOD today.

From time to time, I like to pause and update what’s going on with our car fleet. As of last May, we’re a 100% “Toyota” Family so it’s interesting. For 2 of the 3 I have long-term fuel economy I track via the excellent Fuelly app, so I can represent long-term ownership costs

As an aside, I really wish I had a license plate this cool:

The Hanger Queen – 2016 Lexus GX460

Seems like yesterday we went to San Antonio and picked-up this 2016 Lexus GX460 CPO, then immediately took it on a 3000 mile round trip to Estes park colorado with a Stowaway hanging from the rear hitch and a Thule bag strapped to the top.

As Thomas Paine coined in The American Crisis

These are the times that try men’s souls.

February is near done. Spring comes, but what Spring will that be? The Spring of destitution? The warm rebirth of tyranny?

Paine would be laughing at us now, handing over our country to either side, frankly. To the feckless Democrats unable to govern, or to the bald-faced Republicans governing only for the “Techn-Anarcho-Fascist Oligarchs”–either way he’d be disgusted.

I maintain the second half of February, after Valentine’s day is just…depressing.

Above: the Author’s house back in Kentucky 10 years ago today

1. The Superbowl is over. This year’s was a terrible game in which the Eagles ran roughshod over the KC Chiefs until the 4th quarter.
2. College basketball’s March Madness hasn’t begun. Kentucky men’s basketball has overperformed this year, but they’re going to get slaughtered in both the SEC tournament and NCAA. Every game is usually exciting, at least. Kentucky Women’s basketball are firing on all cylinders and may be in the hunt for a National Championship.
3. The weather is just…awful. Texas veers from 85+ one day to 25 the next. We’ve survived one cold snap in January and it looks like another coming this week. My hometown is underwater for the 3rd time in 5 years. Extesive swathes of land freeze under ice and snow.
4. At work, we’re in the silly season somewhere between layoffs, promotions, and pay increases (if any are forthcoming). The outlook doesn’t seem great.

I’d write about DOGE and the collapse of our government, but plenty of other people are ahead of me. Seems you wring your hands, threaten revolution, or stick your head in the sand to some degree.

Nic-Fit

I got my first taste of office life when I worked a Summer in the basement of the Breathitt County Courthouse as a gopher/assistant for my paternal Aunt Lena. Her office, like that of my maternal Aunt Lenora, handled paying people. That cigarette-smoke infested basement was so bad that one weekend I had nicotine withdrawl, and I wasn’t a smoker. But, everyone was congenial enough, a group of women who got along on a molecular level. They covered for each other, looked out for people in trouble, and generally had a “work to live” attitude.

It’s certainly been an interesting nine days since Trump’s indoor inauguration on Jan 20th.

There’s been a flurry of executive orders, followed by freezes to federal funding, and gaffes around international relations including doubling down on the idea that Gazans should just abandon Gaza.

Yesterday (still just Januaray 28th, mind) hit the trifecta:

1. Trump offered a voluntary reduction program (read: buyouts) to all 2 million Federal employees, with the goal of reducing expenses by $100 Billion
2. There’s word that “loyalty questions” are part of employment at the whitehouse.
3. Real cancer studies and federally funded jobs (like civil engineers that insepct bridges) are impacted.

No idea where this is going, but we’re still not up to double digit days under this regime.

So this is going to be odd coming from a guy working at a place with a Leadership Principle saying “Speed matters in business”

If I’m doing my job right, I consider myself to be a “slow” developer.

I’ve watched the recent explosion across my social feeds about AI SUPERCHARGED DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENTS! like Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, Claude, and Warp Terminal. They all seem neat, and this seems like a Nova (if not a Supernova) of dev tooling we haven’t seen since Netbeans/Eclipse/IntelliJ battled it out 15 years ago to see who could make IT departments upgrade from 512 MB developer machiens fastest.

All the Leaves are Brown
And the sky is grey
I’ve been for a walk
On a Winter’s Day

My college roommate Chris died last week. He was 46 years old, the same age as me. I have no idea what he died of. I was a groomsman in his first wedding in Orlando, Florida, though I don’t remember what year that was–early 2000’s likely 2001-2002. Chris was a guest at my own wedding in 2005, and likely would’ve been a groomsman if it was a larger affair. Chris & Jessica stayed in contact with Whitney and myself until they divorced, though again I don’t remember when that was…the latter part of the 2000’s.

So Los Angeles is burning. Hurricane force winds up to 100mph fanned firestorms West, Northwest, and Norht of Los Angeles proper, with significant portions of Santa Monica under evacuation.

As of this writing, 10 people confirmed dead.

It seems undeniable, the planet is angry with us.

“The day….the Music Threads…Died”

Zuck gave us a present this morning.

It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Here’s what we’re going to do:

1. Replace fact-checkers with Community Notes, starting in the US.
2. Simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.
3. Change how we enforce our policies to remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action.
4. Bring back civic content. We’re getting feedback that people want to see this content again, so we’ll phase it back into Facebook, Instagram and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.
5. Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.
6. Work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government.

It’ll take time to get this all right and these are complex systems so they’ll never be perfect. But this is an important step forward and I’m looking forward to this next chapter!

Since moving 45 minutes north of Austin in 2020, I drive at least 90 minutes every work-day. Some days (especially if it’s raining), that can total 2 hours. This year mark’s Amazon’s return to 5 Days per week in-office so that will be 10 hours a week on the road, 50 or so weeks a year.

To maintain sanity, I did two things:

1. I traded-in my 2018 Honda Civic 6MT for a fancy toyota (A used Lexus ES300h). Let’s be honest: It’s a couch on wheels and a quiet place to be for those 90 minutes. Look for details on that coming later.
2. I’ve gotten very acquainted with podcasts and audiobooks.

I’ve loved podcasts for a long time. Here’s my list from 2012 They’re the soundtrack to me doing things: Yardwork, ranchwork, driving, travel. In general they ease the loneliness that is modern life–Someone’s voice in your ear, helping you learn or laugh.

So, it was quite a year, of some advances and pain. I’m still here, so let’s get into it.

Professional Life

A Door Closes

Last January was probably the lowest I’d been in many years. I was looking for a new job. I managed 6 people in Seattle from an office in Austin, I’d been converted in January 2023 officially from Software Development Engineer (SDE) to Software Development Manager (SDM), though I’d been doing the job from April 2022. (This will become important later).

My my how things have changed since I first moved this blog to AWS hosting. For one thing, my previous Hugo Theme is no longer compatible, and hugo itself moved from YAML to TOML for configuration language. So that’s been a fun afternoon.

I’ve been following these excellent instructions that should automate the full deploy from checkin to push. Syncrhonizing the Github action will be interesting, but that’s just it–it’s INTERESTING.

Once I get this sorted, look for updates on the regular.