# Day 1, 2023

I've committed to writing three blog posts for January 2023 as a part of Bring Back Blogging. You can learn more about this here (opens new window).

As much as I've gotten out of the habit of writing yearly retrosectives I can very much see the value in them and if I'm going to try to support bringing black blogging, I should start out the way I've started so mayn blogging years in the past.

Professionally, I'm still at Dotdash. I've been here longer than any other job I've had ecept Halliburton where I worked before getting my first programming job. It was also my first full year as a team lead. I have some thoughts on team leadership that I might go into at some point but for now, suffice it to say that I'm lucky to work at a company that trusts me as much as they do.

My personal projects were a bit hit-and-miss last year.

• I made some keyboards and they generally worked as expected.
• I hand-wired my first keyboard, a tenkeyless for my wife, but I haven't finished building the case.
• I started desks for my younger two children in 2021 but didn't manage to finish them, despite making decent progress. What remains is building drawers, which means setting up a dado stack and cutting boards in a quarter-quarter-quarter (opens new window) setup.
• I want to make a parquet-style desktop for myself, but it will have to wait until I've finished the kids' desks
• I've started a whole bunch of writing projects, bouncing off of anything longer than a couple thousand words, though I've managed to stick to the current WIP, a sequel to the last novel-length piece I finished bck in the fall of 2020.
• My cross stitch projects moved ahead, if slowly. I completed a small piece as a Christmas present for my in-laws. It was supposed to be a team effort between my middle child and I, but they over-committed on a couple of fronts and I ended up tackling the whole thing, minus a couple of back-stitches.
• I started another monster stitch (around 64000 stitches), despite not finishing my last monster stitch (around 12000 stitches). I've made decent, but slow, progress.
• Speaking of progress, I added some good features to a cross-stitch-making program. It's almost at the point where I'm ready to share it with the world, but I need to add some documentation, and rework the menu which is both disorganized and ugly.
• With the demise of the atom text editor, I'm interested in putting together my own. I'm very interested in having a terminal-based text editor that has traditional navigation controls like CTRL or OPTION + left or right to navigate by word, and shift + left/right to select characters for copy/paste. But I'm also interested in a de-centralized collaborative writing tool - kind of like scrivener but with the collaborative editing features of google docs. Not that I write collaboratively anymore, but it would be nice to have the ability if I wanted it.

The kids are no longer kids. The youngest is a teenager now, while the oldest is a grown-up, older than I was when I'd moved out, moved back in, then moved out again to go to university. Jobs, money, buying things, owing things, they're all on the horizon. Welcome to capitalism, kids!

It was twenty years ago (yesterday) that I met my wife (for the second time, unbeknownst to me at the time). Sometimes that doesn't make me feel old, but sometimes thinking about the passing of the years makes me feel like I'm falling to dust.

We have dogs. I was originally going to say we have so many dogs, but we only have one more than we did back before pandemic times, when we were regularly going out and doing roller derby or other fun things like working in the office. Instead, I'll say we have so much dog. I think/hope it's because of the ages of the dogs we have that makes them occupy so much time, attention, and energy.

It feels like each one of these things could be expanded out into its own post. I might just do that. It'd be good to share some progress on the projects I've been working on, and maybe give the ol' site a face lift. I'm definitely interested in introducing a dark mode, so that might occupy some cycles over the next few weeks, but even if I don't do much else, you can expect at least two more blog posts from me over the next month.

Happy 2023!