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.

Am I still alive?

Yes.

Are things rather different now?

Also yes.

I live on a 10-acre ranch. As I type this, my neighbors are doing their regular Saturday target practice (pistol-calibre from the sound of it). I have a nearly 2.5 Year old Toyota Tundra, a tractor, a chainsaw, and two rabbits.

I bought, raised, and sold (for a terrific tax-writeoff loss) 4 Aberdeen steers.

I’m somehow still married with diagnosed mental-health issues that are okay with medication (more on that later). We’ve been through 3 Texas ICE/Snow events and managed to survive.

If I add up all the maladies/mishaps/accidents I’ve had in my life, I should be:

• Functionally blind
• Half-deaf
• Missing half my teeth
• Dying of Colon Cancer in 2019
• Dying of Skin Cancer in 2012
• Lying dead under a crashed car somewhere in Eastern Kentucky in 1996 or so.
• Decapitated by a drainpipe in a creekbed in 1984

That’s just off the top of my head. Modern med’cine has been good to me. The rest is, variously: Probability, Luck, Fate, or Divine Providence. Take your pick.

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” - 1 Corinthians 13:11 (KVJ)

I’ve had a subscription to some sort of car magazine, blog, etc. since I was ten years old. I used to covet and read car magazines like more well-adjusted boys used to secret Playboy magazines. (November 1994 was a classic of that particular tome, but I digress.)

Poor sleep last night.

So the Daylight Savings Time switch was this weekend, so everyone felt fully capable of staying up until midnight watching movies. This weekend we watched Raya and the Last Dragon on Friday, the final episode of Agent Carter and the first in the Hobbit trilogy on Sunday.

I’m uneasy. I have my second (well, final) cataract surgery on Wednesday–as luck would have it St. Patrick’s Day. I went to bed before Whitney and Maria and when they went to bed I woke up with my mind swimming from flashbacks from the last cataract surgery: The immense anxiety. The claustrophobia of being draped with just your eye poking out. The general fear of the smells of a surgical center.

Today (well, tomorrow) makes it a year. On 3/13 last year I left my office, picked up my kids from Grace Academy for Spring Break…and the great upside down world of CoViD 2020 happened. Example: WFH Day 2

I was a reliable journalist for awhile, then in June I just…stopped. Overwhelmed didn’t really cut it; I was paralyzed by how much the world was changing.

The 2015-era computer I wrote those blogs on is gone, replaced by another coporate laptop from my employer after the battery decided to die. The house I wrote those in is gone, replaced by a 10.11 acre rance property with cows, rabbits, a tractor, and a new (LEASED!) Toyota tundra.