There’s always the last, lingering bit of unpacking to do, but we’ve arrived in Packanack Lake, New Jersey, and were settled enough in the new house yesterday for me to start full-time work again.
I have two months of working remotely for my present Silicon Valley employer ahead before I strike off on my own to pursue “The Venture”, but I’m grateful for the opportunity to tie up loose ends and help gradually transition ownership of my areas of responsibility to other engineers.
Meanwhile, I’ve mostly set up my new home office, and am really looking forward to all that lies ahead.
Here’s the lake, by the way — just a few blocks away and what I expect will be a good “take a walk to clear my head” destination when needed:
More to come as time allows.
In light of the big changes underway, my wife and I have been pretty fully occupied lately dealing with all of the logistics necessary to make it all reality — getting our house fixed up, inspected, “staged”, and on the market, getting rid of Stuff We Don’t Need that isn’t worth moving, etc. Our “To Do” list has seemed endless, and yet I know it’s ultimately finite, and we’ve managed to keep checking things off, day by day, so I feel certain we’re getting closer, right?
To keep myself amply motivated through it all, I turn my mind to the tremendous possibilities this necessary effort is opening up. Day One sitting at my desk in my newly appointed home office, ready to create wonderful things, seems a long way off now, but I’m so charged with excitement about it that it’s getting me through the day-to-day tasks necessary to reach my goal — and that kind of focus is exactly what I need.
I’ve added a new tag, “The Venture”, for posts related to this enterprise of mine. I hope to keep them frequent, concise, and interesting, while also resuming posting on my usual range of topics when time allows again (most likely about a month from now). Stay tuned!
I’m no big fan of meta-posts, so I promise not to make a habit of this. Just feeling the need to affirm that this project is far from over, and despite my apparent shift over to Twitter I intend to post more in-depth writing here as soon as I can find a way to do so.
Blogging has been a hard project to make time for (given my apparently inadequate time-management skills, at least), and becoming a Dad nearly a year ago has ratcheted the difficulty level up another major notch. By the time my wife and I get home from our jobs at the end of a half-hour commute, do the evening dinner, bath time & bedtime routine with our “little guy”, get the kitchen back under control, deal with mail and bills, etc., it’s usually around 9pm and we’re good for little more than collapsing in a heap for an hour or so before bed. Repeat 5x and add 2 days of full-time parenting and it’s a typical week. My best bet seems to be squeezing a bit of writing in before bedtime when possible (like I’m doing now), or during occasional bouts of insomnia, but that approach hardly seems likely to produce my best work. I’m in awe of others, parents among them, who manage to make time to blog with any frequency, let alone on topics that require substantial research and thought. I really have no idea how they do it (but I’m eager to learn!).
In short: It may take a while longer for me to work the logistics out. But the passage of time has only strengthened my conviction that writing here is an important project that I need to make time for somehow. I will trust, as I have many times before in my life, that where there’s a will there’s a way, necessity is the mother of invention, and all that good stuff, and hope that through persistence I can eventually find a way to translate constantly thinking about things into action on writing about them.
Hope there’ll be more to see here soon. ‘Til then…
No need to watch your step, folks … the surface changes are minor and shouldn’t cause any big trouble … but I’ve done a bit of remodeling behind the scenes here to better serve you, our valued patrons.
Specifically, I’ve finally finished porting my heavily customized blog template to Blogger’s newer “Layouts” format. The process was about as fun as it sounds, but part of the payoff is that I can now classify my posts using “labels” (a.k.a. “tags”) for your surfing and post-discovery convenience.
This of course means I have a new job to do (isn’t it neat how that works?) — choosing appropriate tag set, and going back and tagging all of my old posts. I’m only partway through that, with most of 2007 through 2009 left to go, so the categories aren’t yet complete (though “9/11” is mostly there already), but note that you can now discover posts on related topics using the “Labels” links that appear at the end of each post and under the “About Me” box in the right sidebar. (You may now welcome me to the early 21st century. Thank you.)
I’ll of course be tagging new posts as I go from now on, and I hope to finish tagging the rest of the old ones soon.
That’s it. Please let me know if you run into any problems during the bringup, including posts that seem misclassified. — Thanks!
The Management
I just now realized, while looking back through my archives for something, that yesterday was the 4th anniversary of my first post here.
I’m finding it hard to believe that so much time has gone by, and I feel there’s a great deal more writing that I’d have hoped to find time do by this point, but at the same time I’m glad to have started the project and kept it going at least somewhat steadily, if slowly. I still remember sitting in the back of a conference hall taking advantage of some downtime to draft and publish my first post. The feeling of casting out a proverbial sort of “message in a bottle” was a real lift to my spirits, and I suspect is much the same high that so many other bloggers have said helps keep them writing and publishing.
My biggest regret so far is not having continued the project of recounting key parts of my own life, and exploring the ways they have influenced my worldview, that I set out to begin. I wrote a first
[awkwardly self-conscious and not highly recommended] post in the intended series in September 2005, and didn’t get any farther than that. I still have hope of picking that project up again and making something interesting of it, if I can make the time. Soon, I hope (eternal optimist that I am)!
There are also many thoughts in the realm of economics, entrepreneurship, cultural self-perception and self-doubt/confidence that have struck me over the years and continue to nip at my mind, waiting impatiently to be written down and developed, and I’m hanging onto the mental, electronic, and paper notes where I’ve jotted bits down, hoping to get to those someday too.
Meanwhile, I have greatly enjoyed the past six months (amazed that it’s been that long already!) of meeting and conversing with so many amazing, interesting, insightful and devoted fellow freedom-lovers and America-lovers on Twitter. I highly recommend giving Twitter a try, to those who may feel as ideologically isolated as I do. I find the Twitter experience has been a great complement to blogging, rather than a replacement for it — a suitable place for fragments of thought that don’t require lengthier exposition, or that I haven’t yet found the time to develop into something in-depth enough to be worthy of a blog post. The blog, meanwhile, has served me well as a more permanent-feeling structure of sorts, on which to hang my expression of love for the American Idea and way of life. I aim to convey in these pages, not just concerns and gloom that have tended to occupy my thoughts at times, but also a sense of celebration of who we are and the way we live. I hope that comes across in the design as well as in the content.
My sincere thanks to any and all who have popped in now and then to read the pages here. Please do stop by again; I intend to keep this project going and have more to offer in the future!
It’s the start of a wide-open day off where I have nothing previously planned, and as usual my mind is racing a bit with a completely infeasible number of ideas for things I might do. Picture the bits of debris whirling around in the Wizard of Oz twister; it feels a bit like that.
You might think a bit of simple rest and relaxation would be high on the list, and in a very real sense it is (I might even get myself to sit long enough to watch a movie), but in general I need something for my noggin to engage with. Creative projects of various kinds, and even simple “getting my life un-cluttered so I can feel relaxed and focus the next time I sit down to a creative project” projects are things I always wish I had more time for, and they come to mind on those rare occasions when the time actually becomes available.
The danger with a day like today is always that I’ll try to do a bit of several things here and there, and then wonder in the end, as I usually end up doing, what I actually did or where the day went. So today I’m thinking I’ll try to avoid the possibly inevitable, and start the day by prioritizing and choosing one or maybe a very few things to try to do or accomplish.
This would be the time when I fire up Things on my Mac or iPhone, and try to skim the cream off my To Do list. (Brief product endorsement here: I love Things, and rely on it as the place where I dump all the miscellaneous “I should maybe…” thoughts that would otherwise clutter and worry my overactive mind. I’ve become a big fan of “ubiquitous capture”, for the stuff that’s worth capturing at least.)
Thoughts for today: catch up on my blog/news reading (I’m days behind, and I miss it!), do some of the blog writing I’ve been wanting to get to (lots of ideas saved up, but never the time), go through our pictures from this weekend’s Big Sur / Pacific Grove / Monterey trip and post some, work on finishing one of the 2-3 books I tend to be in the middle of reading at any given time (right now it’s “An Innocent at Polebrook” and “Atlas Shrugged”, and I’m looking to start a book on getting a pilot’s license that I got for Christmas), organize the virtual mess of project files on the home computer that I never tend to since I spend my days in front of the work computer, do the same for my paper files (not so much the boring bills-and-receipts stuff, but the project folders where I’ve collected ideas and notes over the years), work on the office redecorating project we started a couple months ago (the walls are bare, and pictures need hanging), get a voltmeter so I can figure out whether the cordless drill needs a new battery or a new charger, and then get what the drill needs so I can run the wires for the surround speakers under the house to the back of the living room, fire up GarageBand for a little guitar or keyboard practice, etc. And those are just the things I’d like to do for fun. I’ve also got our baby shower to help plan, and probably a variety of other things that need doing around the house.
Of course, all this “meta” stuff of taking the time to blog about what I might do is taking time away from, well, what I might do… The hope is that sitting and taking a moment to reflect on the possibilities before launching right into anything might help me to make better decisions about how I’ll spend my day. Whether this pans out remains to be seen, but I’m feeling good about it so far. Pause to take a look around from 30,000 ft. before committing to a destination — yeah, that’s it. If nothing else, I will have written at least one blog post today, and even if it’s devoid of interesting content that somehow still feels good.
Happy vacation, to those who are on one! — May you have a much easier time simply enjoying it than I do!
