The blog home of Jeff Putz

I never really understood what "sensory challenges" were despite having them many times in my life. It wasn't until Simon that I could see what it was, as sometimes certain amounts and kinds of sounds would cause him to cover his ears. In more extreme instances, he would basically melt into a puddle on the floor covering his ears, and boy would that trigger some Papa Bear instincts in me.

After my own ASD diagnosis, I would eventually come to recall instances where I felt the same. In adulthood I have largely developed coping mechanisms to roll with it. As is the case with Simon, I can't easily predict what might be difficult, and even the same circumstances on two different days could yield different results. But now I've had two episodes of being sonically overwhelmed, and I'm angry about the way I feel. I feel like I'm less, and I shouldn't.

I don't know what the experience is like for others, but the best way that I can describe it is that it's the auditory version of being in a room with a bunch of asynchronous strobe lights that never stop flashing. It's like someone stabbing your brain, which is too abstract, but I don't know how else to describe it. Maybe for a neurotypical person it would be like standing in a fire station where the truck is blaring its siren.

My previous situation was only a month ago, on our last cruise. Aboard the Wish, one of the dinner nights is in a Frozen themed restaurant with live music. I've generally enjoyed it, but this time we were very close to the stage, and the lighting was also in my eye line. Despite wearing noise-cancelling ear buds, I found it overwhelming, and I just kind of shut down. Diana saw that I was struggling, and encouraged me to leave.

Then tonight I was out for dinner with an arranged group of people that I don't typically work with. The restaurant was extra noisy, an old building with no soft surfaces on the interior. On top of that, they had loud music, which might be fine if it was music I knew and I wasn't trying to hear people talking at the table. (Also, they didn't have the one dish on the menu that I would eat, and the waiter was kind of a dick about it.) I found myself involuntarily holding my ear, and I stepped out to reset for a minute. I was back in for about five minutes before I just couldn't take it anymore. I apologized for bailing, and I bailed.

I felt embarrassed, inferior and high maintenance, even though I logically know that this was a reaction to the way that my brain processes stimuli. I can't explain why even the night before, I had no issue in a noisy bowling alley/bar/arcade. Maybe it's lighting, sound frequencies... I don't know. My emotional response is that I don't want to be limited in any way, and this felt like a limitation that I should be equipped to handle.

If there is a positive, it's that I recognize the situation. Even four years ago, I would only know that I had an overwhelming desire to run, and I would chalk it up to other feelings of discomfort, like social things, and attribute that to personality instead of something truly physiological. Even being able to give myself that grace, it still doesn't feel good.

Today was designated as a national day of mourning for former president Jimmy Carter. He's the earliest president that I can remember. Nixon was in office when I was born, and Ford was in until I was 3, but the first guy that I can remember seeing on TV was Carter. It's astonishing to see that he lived to be 100, and while history hasn't been all that kind to his presidency, he lived an extraordinary life of public service.

Obviously I was too young to have any sense of Carter's politics or his time in the White House, but I actually did learn a little bit about him in high school civics class. It was a rare education win in a system that rarely gets beyond World War I for history. There really weren't a lot of levers for him to pull to deal with inflation and gas shortages, and I'm sure the Iran hostage thing and the Soviets invading Afghanistan were the last nail in the coffin as far as his reelection goes. It's kind of a shame, because when I see his speeches at the time, he was practical about the times. Americans clearly were not interested in conserving energy or temporarily limiting consumption of everything at the time. Some things never change.

But I don't think you can overstate the importance of the Camp David Accords. We're nearing a half-century of peace between Israel and Egypt, a rare bright spot in Middle East peace, and the biggest win of any president since. He was the only president in my lifetime that was as committed to peace, and aspirational about it in a way that frankly no world leaders are. Any sentiment like that today would be dismissed as weak, and that's unfortunate.

Carter's record on the environment was historic, establishing the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He established the Department of Education. He was the first president to start moving toward employment equality for what we now refer to as LGBTQ folks. He tried to make universal healthcare happen. He always saw potential in the good that government could do, before Reagan did his best to sow mistrust in it.

A lot of his legacy is in his post-presidency life, including diplomacy that was sometimes unwelcome by sitting presidents, especially Clinton. He wrote a ton of books. What always stood out to me is that well into his 80's, and to a lesser degree his 90's, was his commitment to Habitat For Humanity. There are a lot of non-profits that do good work, but few have the dramatic, local impact that Habitat has. He lifted a hammer for as long as his body would allow him to.

More than anything though, what I find remarkable is that his whole life was dedicated to public service. Whether he was after world peace or building a house for someone in his community, he was intent on leaving the world a better place than it was when he entered it. I can't say that I'm even remotely that way, and I certainly can't say it about many politicians. Regardless of policy positions, it's that character, dignity and integrity that we should demand from elected people. This is especially true when it comes to the White House. My visit there last year was somewhat transformative for me, because it really made real the seriousness and importance of the office. I hope that we eventually get back to valuing that seriousness for the highest office in the land.

It's funny how talking things through with a therapist can lead to realizations that were totally obvious, but not obvious enough to spot. We were talking about what it means to be content, in the broad sense of life. It comes up a lot at the intersection of our social interaction, work and identity. Like anyone, I suppose, I want to be content more of the time.

She pointed out that the things that make me feel content are not a mystery. I actually know what they are in great detail. It's just that they are not necessarily things that are easy to come by. Like if your world was riding a bike, you would just get on your bike because it's always available. This isn't bad, necessarily, because if we could really choose what lights us up, we'd all pick the easiest and most common things.

My things are not common. Socially, I enjoy meeting people from other countries and appreciating how they look at things differently. That's not easy to find, especially when you work from home. I like to travel, whether it's to familiar places or new places. Both, however, are limited by having a child of school age. I like being near the ocean, it's where I'm most relaxed. I'd do this more if it were a little closer and I had a place to crash. Cruising certainly helps with that, too. There are a bunch of other things that fill my cup, and I won't bore you with the list, but most are things that just aren't easy to come by, normally.

You have to layer in all of the baggage that comes with societal and cultural constructs that are arbitrary, mythical or otherwise ridiculous. Americans in particular have all of these dumb ideas about hard work, achievement and winning that are not very conducive to living a balanced and content life. And with (anti-)social media, we have an entire category of people who want to show you how awesome they are for the stuff they do, and they just willed it into existence. Yeah, I'm looking at you fitness people. You don't get a high-five because you do something that you like, and other people are not less because they don't share that desire.

Being able to do more of the things that feed my soul is something that is coming more into focus for the long-term. I am excited for that. It does suck that we're wired to fear things by default, for self-preservation. That's why we can't just fart rainbows and unicorns all day. We're basically animals.

For the most part, people talk about weather as a means to strike up conversation. I don't think anyone really cares about the substance of those exchanges, but weather is typically a shared experience. For me though, weather deeply affects me. I didn't move to the Orlando area for theme parks, I moved because I finally appreciated how much Midwest winter messed with me.

I've told the story before, but the short version is that Seattle, despite its winter drizzle, actually has slightly less rain, and less precipitation overall, than Cleveland. And even in winter, there are periodic breaks in the clouds and the sun isn't that unusual, which is also not like Cleveland. Add to the fact that I worked and lived in different elevations, and it was just enough to vary between the two locations. So moving back to Cleveland, in October no less, made me appreciate just how much the weather affected me negatively. And certainly the time change does not help.

We're going through a cold spell here right now, and today we're going from 78 to an overnight low of 38. That's a 40 degree swing! But overall, I've been so lethargic and tired and not particularly engaged. I feel like I did back in the day during those Ohio winters. I don't like it. I hate that it's not something that I can control, that it's apparently chemistry. And mind you, I'm already taking bupropion, the drug often prescribed for seasonal affective disorder. I imagine I'd feel even worse without it.

Fortunately, these cold streaks are short lived. Last year we had overly hot streaks, so yay for climate change or whatever. I just want my disposition to be as sunny as the sky again.

My brother-in-law and his family visited this year for Christmas, which was fantastic. Knowing my enthusiasm for mixology, he brought me a clear ice contraption that makes perfectly clear cubes. They don't make your old fashioned any colder, but they sure look cool. It's an insulated thing that makes "throw away" cubes at the bottom, and clear cubes in the top inside of a rubberized (silicone, I assume) compartment. The insulation is open on the bottom. Because of the way it freezes, it pushes the rubberized part, with a cover, up, but it means the rubber bits are touching all sides of the cube.

Naturally, I wondered what the physics were here. Unfortunately, the Internets are mostly wrong, as most people insist that this somehow forces the "impurities" out of the water. This is one of a hundred myths perpetuated by bartenders who don't really get into physics and chemistry. In fact, a bartender recently insisted that carbonation causes alcohol to be absorbed faster into your bloodstream. (There have been small studies, and while there is possible correlation for a subset of drinkers, there is not causation because the studies do not control for sweetness or rate of consumption. You can infer why that makes me skeptical of causation.) Anyway, a significant portion of "impurities" are already gone from my water, because it's filtered where it enters the house. If it was more "pure," logically my regular ice cubes would be clearer. They are not.

Getting deeper into it, these insulated gadgets cause the water to freeze more slowly, and if I'm reading it right, that means the gases inside of the water are forced in one direction away from your "perfect" cubes. That makes more sense to me. If there were significant impurities in the water, I think it would be cloudy as a liquid as well.

This isn't the only neat trick though. On our last cruise, they had drinks on the menu that included spherical ice, hollow in the center, with a hole, that they would put part of your drink in. Then you got to break it with a little hammer. Neat. The spheres are made by using round silicone molds. After a certain amount of time, when only the outside is frozen, they peel open the mold, run those very same hammers under hot water, and push a hole into the sphere, allowing the unfrozen water to pour out. Then they go back into the freezer.

So yeah, craft ice is a thing.

I think that there was a time when I found "home" to be a place of comfort, a place to retreat to. A place where you could find hygge and it was all good. Weirdly, I recall feeling like this the first time in my college dorm room junior year. It was uniquely my space even if I didn't really own it. I felt it now and then in my first house, too. Once it was obvious that I was getting divorced, and especially after moving cross-country, the feeling was far more elusive. I remember it briefly in winter in Snoqualmie, and a little bit once we moved into our current place, but that's kind of it.

It's hard for me to even think about what home means anymore. I mean, sure, it's the place you live most of the time, but if I had to change it tomorrow, I can't say that I'd be particularly nostalgic about it. I don't know if it's because I also work in the same place or what, but it kind of bothers me. I mentioned at the end of my annual retrospective that sometimes I feel like I need to escape, but where do I escape to? For the most part, getting away for me means traveling where I can turn off my brain.

When my brother-in-law's family was here last week, we compared stories about our houses, built by the same builder 2,500 miles apart, and the things that have not aged well. While they're not likely to have the HVAC challenges in the Pacific Northwest, they've had other issues like the worst possible carpet ever. The crap that Pulte used has matted, bunched up, wrinkled and looks like a dozen people have lived here for 30 years. There's nothing cozy feeling about it. We have a chair that for some reason has been destroyed by one of the current cats, which is weird because I've never had a cat that messed up furniture. The cheap cabinets are showing wear after only seven years. We still hate our bathroom that we're not going to renovate.

I realize that my first mistake is measuring home comfort by way of how nice things are. Home is at its best when my little family unit is here, but with staggered work schedules and school (and my kid being a teenager), that's not always possible. I remember when I was truly living alone for two years that sometimes I had to go out of my way to feel comfortable. It generally involved the fireplace, blankets and movies or video games, but as much as I got used to flying solo, I was never in any hurry to get home.

If you ask me where I feel most content, it's usually near the ocean. I still can't shake the feeling of the Vrbo we rented about four years ago, in Melbourne Beach. But I also felt it in some of the ports we visited in Europe. I always feel it aboard the ships. I haven't figured out how to feel that in the place with my name on the title.

Regardless, I guess we have to replace the stupid carpet.

My ADHD has gotten the better of me as I've tried to dive into learning Vectorworks, the CAD program used by pros for lighting design. Sure, there was the chaos of December, but also I tend to push toward practical and applied learning, struggling with the abstract. For that reason, I thought, I want to use my own lights in the software. Unfortunately, the profiles that I have for the lights crashed Vectorworks. I have an open ticket with them, and that sure is disappointing for expensive software.

Still, the nagging problem is that, instead of approaching this systematically a component at a time, I've been looking at the world as a big ecosystem. One of the things that makes all of this stuff interoperable are a couple of standards called GDTF (General Device Type Format) and MVR (My Virtual Rig). The idea is that you can create the profiles, the technical description for how a light fixture works, and use them in all the software. Then you can combine those with stuff like trusses and stages and 3D people, and import the whole lot into grandMA3 or ETC Eos (the two biggest players) and it all just works. This even includes all of the addressing of the fixtures, so there's no manual patching to do when hooking up the real rig. You just have to make sure that the fixtures you hang are set to the ride addresses. For my purposes, it also means imagining a big virtual rig, and being able to control it from the console. In other words, I don't need to actually be at an EDM event to mess with a huge show.

The biggest problem is that my cheap(ish) lights are more targeted for DJ's and small clubs, where they'll probably run off of sound or some other kind of automated thing. What I'm trying to design for is shows running on the fancy consoles. There was a profile for my first two lights that kind of worked from the GDTF share, though it's four years old and kind of janky. The pan ranges were wrong, some of the functions were grouped together in goofy ways, there were quirks. Then the four lights I bought after that were a new iteration, and their pan center changed, along with the order of the colors in the color wheel. So I adapted the janky profile to those.

Tonight I spent a couple of hours refining the profiles, a lot, so they would work as expected. Fixing the pan range (-180 to 360 degrees on the old ones, -270 to 270 on the new) made the most immediate difference, because now what the lights did in the real world matched what they did in the visualizers on screen. I also adjusted the beam tilt -5 degrees, because when they're centered, the beam does not go straight down. Then I reorganized the color wheels and strobe groupings, and finally, I arrived at a profile that worked the same in both MA3 and Eos. And I could import them into Vectorworks and it didn't break!

It could be argued that this was a waste of time, but there were some other benefits. It forced me to better understand the Eos product a bit, which I'm still pretty weak on. This is what's in Simon's school, and even the venues at DPC (which I don't think I could touch anyway, because unions). It also reinforces the way that MA3 "thinks" about manipulating the data that defines state for the lights. This, by extension, makes me think about how I would write my own control software, if for some reason I though that was a good idea. And for the record, I do think I could write something useful, as long as I don't have to get into the geometry of pointing lights at specific points in 3D space. I still find both MA3 and Eos super weird in their UI approaches.

Also, it's cold outside, and the lights warm up my office.

I can't believe that I'm writing one of these again already. This year did not feature the travel and habit variety that last year did, which I assume is why it felt shorter. Did it measure up to the last two years? Definitely not, given this year's challenges, but it was not without its high points. I'll run through the usual subheadings...

The hobby business

Last year was so terrible that the bar for this year was awfully low. Ad revenue hit rock bottom. Almost any change would be an improvement. A few useful things happened though, starting with Google going to a CPM only model. That means if an ad is displayed, you get paid for it even if no one clicks on it. The other thing is that Google is now legally a monopolist, and there will be some kind of remedy that's supposed to help publishers like me.

The change in revenue started to ramp up in April, and it was a slow burn. In the end, revenue for the year was up 18%. That's an improvement, but I still took a loss most months. The traffic changes were completely weird. CoasterBuzz was up another 12% in users and page views, on top of last year's 35%. PointBuzz, on the other hand, was up 40% in users, but down a staggering 19% in page views. The timing couldn't be worse, as CPM's finally started exceeding a dollar. The math isn't hard for PointBuzz. It's a Cedar Point fan site, and the park's new ride ended up being closed basically all year. I think people just got bored with the situation. It was a strange year.

Operating cost didn't really change, but revenue really needs to get better next year. The shortfall isn't killing me, but I miss the days when it paid my mortgage, and on less traffic.

Career

I'm hitting a new milestone in a few weeks, reaching three years at the same job. I won't write about all of that again, but it's new territory for me. Tech is not a great place for job security unless you're willing to work at a stodgy old company like IBM. But this one has generally gone pretty well, and I enjoy working with the people that I do. This year has been more challenging, in part because my boss left the company, and the follow up wasn't there for very long either. I get pulled into a lot of things not in my immediate sphere of influence, so it helps to have someone a level up who can help with that. But my team has just delivered on things over and over, and I'm so proud of them.

Meanwhile, I think I've come to realize that retirement isn't what I used to think it was. If I stopped working, I think I would be bored to tears. Instead, I'm viewing that stage of life as the ability to still work, but with little risk to do specific things that I'd like to try without having to rely on it to maintain a certain lifestyle. I've written a lot in the last two years about my desire to get into lighting, and I made a lot of progress on that this year. In April I finally scored a grandMA3 lighting console, and I break it out in spurts trying new things and visualizing basics with the six real lights I have on a truss in my office (because who doesn't do that?). Just a few weeks ago, I also got a dongle to unlock the software-only ETC EOS platform, which is used more in theater situations, where as MA3 is more concert oriented. And if all that weren't enough, I'm also trying to learn Vectorworks, a CAD program that does lighting and stage design.

The lighting pursuit could lead to a fun third act, or it could just be something I enjoy doing. It doesn't matter which. It fits with my maker desires.

Oh, and a significant sidebar on the topic, Diana's career turned to full-time at Dr. Phillips Center. She's worked there since it opened, ten years ago, but only part-time. This is the first time she's been full-time since before Simon was born. It makes me happy to see her happy in that special place.

Making stuff

Let me just get this out of the way, so I can hang my head in shame. I didn't work on my documentary at all. Not even once this year. I'm pretty sure this is the most self-inflicted harm I've engaged in, because it doesn't feel good at all. All of the footage is now a year and a half old, and it's just sitting there on my hard drive. I feel extra bad about it when I think about the money I spent on production thus far. I understand the reasons. It started with not getting the things that I wanted to shoot last year. Despite working the network and cold-contacting various people and companies relative to things I wanted to include, I just kept getting blown off. That sucked.

But I also was deeply dissatisfied with some of the things I did capture, and it wasn't even what I'd call a lot of it. So then I got overwhelmed with what I had, layered in work and home life, and I just couldn't start editing. There's also a mind block around music, which I think it needs, but can't accept that I have to cut the thing before I can even approach someone to write something. If I could sit over someone's shoulder as they edited, like a director in the traditional sense, I suspect little of this would be an issue. Anyway, hopefully next year I get somewhere with it.

Meanwhile, this was not a big year for making overall. I did just barely squeak in a POP Forums release, but it's not a big feature-packed thing. It's mostly performance and bug stuff. I even made some tweaks to my personal music service, MLocker, implementing dark mode. Most of this happened just a few weeks ago. I want a new open source project to dive into, or even a product that someone might buy, but I don't have a lot of ideas. I did write some code to control lighting, the basics of which were not as hard as I expected. It was the subject of my Code Camp talk this year.

The lighting was a big part of my making year, as it came in waves. My MA3 command wing came in April, after a very long eight months of waiting (at least saving for it was easy!). My collection of moving lights totals six, and they're sitting on a truss in my office, as one does. You can't do a ton with six lights, but it's a good number for the purpose of understanding how to create certain looks. I recently decided, with a Black Friday deal, to subscribe to Vectorworks, which is CAD software that does lighting and stage design. With that, I can design more complicated things, import it into MA3 and see what I can do virtually. I also got the student kit for ETC's EOS software, since I have a student in the house, and I want to learn how to use that, even if I don't have the control surface. I'm hoping Simon will get into it as well, since it's what they have at school.

Health

I'm still chasing high-ish triglycerides, but against my doctor's orders, opted not to try yet another drug to moderate it. I don't think that treating the symptom is going to work, and it has to be the underlying cause. I can correlate with data low triglycerides with high activity, because duh, that's how the body works. But psychologically I struggle to be consistent. I hate, loathe and detest exercise for the sake of exercise. I do go in spurts walking a few miles in the morning, but I'm inconsistent.

I do realize though that otherwise, age really isn't taking a huge toll on me, at least not yet. I feel my knees hurt a little in certain weather. My eye sight this year really doesn't like things closer than 20 inches these days, but it's really interesting how fatigue plays a huge factor in that. When my eyes are well rested, things near to my face (i.e., my phone) are so sharp. I recognize this only because they're not when I'm tired. I could probably use reading glasses, but I'm stubborn. I have no issue with any vision beyond that minimum depth of field, fortunately.

This was the year that medical marijuana entered my scene, and it has been a game changer. Diana started before me to help with some chronic pain issues. I was looking for some way to deal with insomnia, which I'm sure was brought on by anxiety. Sometimes, when I was really exhausted, I'd take lorazepam, for which I had a very small allotment of the previous year. That stuff is nasty addictive, potentially, so I wasn't crazy about it. Edible weed does the trick. I do 5mg of THC gummies, which makes me tired, slows my brain just a little, but doesn't get me "high." I've never taken enough to get high, but trying to land the right dose, I didn't like the way that 10mg made me feel.

That said, if we're being real, med weed is still a giant scale experiment, since it's hard to do the right scientific research given its federal classification. I wouldn't describe this as a worry, but regular pharmaceuticals are deeply understood before they're put on the market. THC lacks the same rigor in terms of treatment for any specific thing, or risk of side effects. I am very thankful for the relief it offers in sleep, but this has gotta change.

The mental health situation got better in a lot of ways. I still take bupropion for depression, and it's still working. I feel like I'm responding to anxiety in positive ways, remembering to listen to some music, finding a quiet moment, just being present. I don't respond to toxic behavior from those who direct it toward me. I have reasons to like myself without it being vain. I'm even getting to a point where I don't feel bad about not being able to improve bad things outside of the scope of my influence. And let's face it, a lot of bad things happened this year.

My online engagement has dramatically been reduced, and I'm better for it. I don't doomscroll anymore. I'm kind of a write-only guy, mostly, using it as a diary of sorts. I read enough news to be informed, but don't labor over it. I walk away from, or limit participation in, conversation that I would once insist I had to be in. Indeed I've reached a point where I want to feel well more than I want to feel right, and that's kind of a breakthrough.

Also, I spent a lot of time seeking validation this year. I can't even tell you how many times I wrote about it. I've gone most of my life not really requiring it, since I got so little of it growing up and in college. But with all of the reflection the last few years, between middle age and the ASD and ADHD diagnoses, taking inventory in my life reveals that I've accomplished a lot. Would it hurt to get a high-five for it now and then? It's a weird feeling, because this doesn't come out of insecurity. Quite the opposite, it comes from the confidence that I'm worth it, and dammit, why don't you recognize it? (You, as in the royal you, not anyone in particular.)

Parenting

Parenting this year has been very hard. We survived middle school, in no small part because his principal was awesome. High school has been extra challenging, however, and the idea that we've got at least three and a half more years of it is not a great feeling. Also throw in the teenage aspect, which involves acne, shaving and liking girls but not sure how to express that. Raising any kid at that age I'm sure is difficult, but add ADHD and ASD, and there's another layer of complexity.

We did have Simon evaluated more deeply for more quantifiable developmental measures, which I think is useful for the school to some extent. Not really big surprises there, but he's in the bottom percentile for processing speed, but at the top for visual spacial perception. He was also above average in the working memory category. Combined, these put him in the average band of intelligence, which is what I would expect. The problem is that the processing speed is a drag on learning in a typical academic environment, and that's really hard to navigate. Intelligence tests are designed to be relatively stable over time (my IQ tests came out the same at age 20 and 48), but developmental delays mean there's still a little room to grow.

There has been some growth on my end. I often see similarities in the way he operates in the world to my own childhood experience, but I'm learning that there are limitations to those similarities. Still, I find myself empathetic a lot of the time because I get his social struggles in a non-trivial way. His academic challenges are similar in some ways, but not others. For example, we both struggle with engagement by way of ADHD, and I totally get that. On the other hand, I had an almost instinctive way of writing and understanding science, even if my grades didn't reflect it. He finds it hard to turn thoughts into text. This made me pretty useless at helping with parts of speech, because I never understood what they were by name, I just "got" the right structure.

I'm also getting better about yelling at him, which is probably because I've had more practice with Diana working more evenings. Still, he pushes my buttons because he wants to litigate everything that you tell him, and that's just a teenager thing, regardless of neurological profile. We hired a tutor for math, which is good because I don't understand it, and I don't react well to him not engaging.

I am fairly honest about my shortcomings at parenting, but I have to remind myself that I am deeply invested in his success and happiness, and most importantly, I am present. I'm doing my best to be more positive, but the rest of life takes a lot out of me too. That's an explanation, not an excuse. I can do better.

Travel and entertainment

Our travel was not nearly as cool as our Northern Europe trip last year, and I kind of regret not going back. We definitely want to get more quality time in the UK, Norway and Denmark, and we're open to a Mediterranean cruise as well. That really was an awesome way to nation sample without losing a lot of daylight hours to travel, not to mention a great opportunity to make new friends (even if most were from our own neighborhood).

We did end up doing four cruises this year, which hasn't happened since 2019. We did the 3-night Wish itinerary to Nassau and Castaway Cay three times, one of them concierge for our anniversary. In June we made our third trip on the Fantasy for the inaugural visit to Disney's second island location at the tip of Eleuthera in the Bahamas, at what Disney calls Lookout Cay at Lighthouse Point. Really rolls off the tongue. We did that one with the Rogers family, which I've known for years and encountered a few times in the parks, but it was a solid outing. Working the network, we were able to get a cabana on one of the two new island days, and we shared the cost. It was a really fantastic week, and second only to the Europe cruise last year. The new island location is superior in almost every way, with coral reefs that you can walk up to, and actual waves and rays swimming around.

Spring break brought us to Washington, DC, a place that I somehow managed to never visit. My friend Ken works for the feds there, with an awesome condo half way between the Capitol and the White House. Having a local tour guide is fantastic. In fact, he was flying in from a work thing at the same time that we arrived, and he had pre-paid metro cards. We stayed in a fabulous hotel in the middle of everything that used to be a bank. We met up with a former Orlando theater friend while walking among peak cherry blossom foliage. The highlight, to me, was getting to visit the White House though. What an historic, sacred place in our nation. You've seen it hundreds of times on TV, and it's exactly that. How many historical photos are there of that place? Granted, you don't get to see the Oval Office, but I remember Simon standing in the main doorway to the East Room, and thinking of the various addresses that various presidents gave standing in that spot, especially Obama announcing the bin Laden raid.

I played a lot of video games this year. A. Lot. I'm unapologetic about it though. I felt like I needed the escapism and something to keep the anxiety away. I started the year playing Against The Storm almost obsessively. I played through two of the big Bethesda RPG's, Fallout 4 and Starfield. After loving the TV show, I played through The Last of Us and was really impressed, even having seen the show first. We're ending the year with the recent release of Planet Coaster 2 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

This has been a weird year for shows. The second half of last season was a mixed bag, with Moulin Rouge being a great spectacle but sounding like a teenage remix. The shockingly amazing surprise was Jagged Little Pill. You'd think those Alanis songs were always in that show. It was so good that I scored a solo ticket to see it a second time while Diana was working. Mrs. Doubtfire was better than I expected, and we bailed on Peter Pan at intermission. Clue was entertaining, and one of the rare non-musicals. This season is full of jukebox shows. So far we've had Girl From The North Country, which is Bob Dylan stuff, and it was meh. Book of Mormon was hilarious as always, and that was the third time I've seen it. The Cher Show was entertaining, but it's Cher. Some Like It Hot saved the end of this year.

There were other shows too, the highlight being Lindsey Stirling. She does a proper rock and roll show, only with a violin, dancing and aerial acrobatics. I'm a huge fan now. We also saw the Cleveland Orchestra in our beloved Steinmetz Hall, as well as the Orlando Philharmonic. The big tenth anniversary donor event featured Katherine McPhee Foster, which was awesome.

It was a much better year for music, but you can read more about that in the playlist post.

Fiscal condition

I am very proud of myself for sticking to the retirement saving plan again this year. I contributed the max to my 401k at work, max to my Roth IRA (and Diana's), and made substantial ad hoc deposits to my brokerage account. If I can keep this up for seven more years, I can "retire" early. Though as I explained above, retirement is less about not working than it is choosing to work on only the things you want.

We annoyingly had two big hits this year where we had to dip into the savings jar. The first was the time that a Disney maintenance truck tagged Diana's car in a totally empty part of the Epcot parking lot. The Model 3 was six years old, but mechanically that car could have lasted for who knows how many more years. The battery was still tip top after 62k miles, the brakes were still essentially new, and most importantly, it was almost paid off. So that was a double hit, because we had to shell out a down payment for a new car, and have a payment for the next five years at a shitty interest rate. Also, I need to call Progressive and figure out if we have to sue Disney to get the deductible back. What we will not do is sign the check they sent for $40 to cover an extra rental day, which would force us to release them from further liability and adhere to an NDA.

Just this month, we almost got away with not having a single repair to our HVAC this year, but alas, the upstairs system failed again. The repair would have only been $250, but we've spent thousands in just seven years, and that's not counting the warranty repairs. Granted, it did get hit by lightning, twice, but this Lennox junk is done. We decided to replace the whole system. Fortunately there's a $2,000 tax credit for the energy efficiency, but it's still money no one wants to spend.

Perhaps the biggest change in our situation was that Diana went back to work full-time, for the first time since before Simon was born. It wasn't because part-time plus my job wasn't enough, she just really wanted to go back to work at a venue that we love. It has made it much easier to reach those savings goals.

World outlook

Let me first stay that I remain optimistic about many things, because, perhaps naively, I don't know what else to do. And there are some bright spots here and there. Sustainable energy is starting to happen in a meaningful way, if not to the extent necessary to respond to climate change. In my area, it might be accurate to say that one in ten cars, maybe one in 15, are electric. A lot of people are finally seeing the toxicity of social media, which isn't really social, and putting their phones down.

But this is also the year where I've accepted that I live in a racist nation. The election cemented that. I was brought up to believe that lying was bad, that character mattered, but the same generation that taught me that says by their actions that these things don't matter. Whether intended or not, less than a third of Americans weighed in to say that it's OK to hurt people that are not like you. I don't know how to explain to my kid, who has been bullied, how a bully becomes president. If a teenage kid with autism can tell you right from wrong, you'd think grown-ass neurotypical adults could. I've seen all of the "ism's" my whole life, starting as a child in an inner-city school, and constantly felt like it can only get better. Maybe it has in some ways, but it feels like we're backsliding, and it makes me sad and angry. What a weird thing, to be sad and angry about people who are hateful and angry. It's a vicious cycle. I long for the days that, regardless of party, we could expect a person with some shred of integrity and dedication to public service to occupy the White House.

What I can do is double down on the things that I can do. I can donate time and money to things, help in creating joy in whatever ways my talents allow, be a cheerleader for people I want to succeed. It's all I've got.

Am I content?

I think in the general sense, yes, but it felt like there was an awful lot of struggle. I remember sitting in more than one show this year, watching actors sing and dance on stage, feeling the deep sense of escape, with the thought creeping in that if I feel like I need to escape, at some point that becomes a problem. It has taken every bit of will to be on the right side of that feeling and retain perspective.

This was a pretty great year for the playlist, and the biggest since 2018. It ties for fourth place at 35 songs (2014 holds the record at 55, an exceptional year). This was not a single-heavy year though, and in fact I was really pleased at the number of albums that I loved this year. I love listening to albums. Thoughts, in no particular order...

U2 is still relevant and making great music. They released an live EP from 1993, and I included one song here, while they started the year with "Atomic City," released during their Las Vegas residency at The Sphere, which I love. There were a number of reliable single producers, like Death Cab, SHAED, Paramore, Foster The People and Glass Animals. Newcomers that we'll probably never hear again included Towa Bird, Daisy Grenade and Yonaka. I also started the year with boygenius, and yes, that song came out earlier last year, but it was always in my head and I neglected to list it last year.

The first album that grabbed me was Olivia Rodrigo's Guts, and it was delicious despite the gross name. I can't help but think that if she were born 30 years ago she would have been right at home on alt rock radio stations. She's generally labeled as pop, but she's a rock star. She plays instruments, swears like a sailor and talks about some pretty deep feelings. I adore her. There's a subtle maturity to her music, despite her age.

I want to call out Paramore's Talking Heads cover, because it's faithful to the original but very much Paramore. And Paramore has in recent years shifted to a sound that is more unique. It's not that I didn't like their emo stuff, but it was kind of homogenous with other emo stuff. I think they continue to find a sound that is more their own, and I dig that.

We spent a half-week in DC for spring break, and the reason it wasn't longer was that I had to be back in time for the Jagged Little Pill tour here in Orlando. As much as I hate jukebox shows, Alanis is synonymous with Gen-X rage/apathy, and she owned alt rock and pop radio for years around the time that I graduated from college. Diablo Cody wrote a book for the show, and with some lyrical tweaks, you'd think that those songs (not all from Jagged) were made for the musical. We totally loved it, and I went back to see it a second time. Then the cast album dominated long drives and Saturday night barbecue/cocktail hours. It's so good. "Unprodigal Daughter" was a B-side for Under Rug Swept, her third album, and was released on an EP of scraps. But it's so perfect here.

Mike Shinoda has been doing solo stuff with various collaborators since the other singer from Linkin Park died by suicide. It's weird, I always kind of liked Linkin Park, but never bought any of the albums. So between last his solo singles this year and last, and last year's Linkin Park posthumous "Lost," my head was spinning at the surprise new album and video and touring onslaught from the band with new singer Emily Armstrong. She's awesome. It's still Linkin Park, but different, in a good way, and she can scream the classics. "The Emptiness Machine" is the song I needed in the moment, and the album is very, very strong. I promptly bought the Papercuts greatest hits album, and was surprised that I knew most of the songs. After 20+ years, it makes sense.

Billie Eilish, what can I say, the hype is real. Three albums in, she keeps getting better and better. If I'm to interpret her interviews right, she's rolling with her fame in a positive way, and continues to evolve while keeping her head on straight. Hit Me Hard And Soft is richer than any of her previous stuff, and I think part of that is her brother Finneas growing up and getting better in his production skills. I desperately hope she grows up without sex scandals and drug abuse and public meltdowns. I'm in your corner, Billie!

Then there's Aurora, which I've been into for quite awhile, if not dedicated to buying all of her albums. In fact, I bought her debut album and skipped the three since, probably more because I didn't know about them more than anything. But What Happened To The Heart? is everything that I liked about her debut. She has a beautiful world music vibe that I imagine is some cross of Nordic and Celtic (I feel kind of ignorant about that), with elements of pop and rock and electronic, and it's just so fucking good. The two tracks that I included reflect that diversity. Also, she's kind of weird in all of the right ways, and I dig that. And remember that time they stuck her in the background in the 2020 Oscars for Frozen 2's "Into The Unknown?" That was weird.

When I saw Tears For Fears in 2022, all I could think was, shit, they need to make a live album and video from this tour. Well, it turns out that they did. It is missing one song from the tour set list ("End Of Night," in the encore), but they did add four new songs presumably left over from The Tipping Point, which I will argue is their best album, despite the weight and importance of their first three albums. I really like three of the four new tracks, and having a live cut of "Badman's Song," one of my favorite songs ever, is excellent. The accompanying movie had two showings I couldn't get to, and so far, no hint of streaming, which is a bummer.

Just when I thought the playlist was locked, Lauren Mayberry, the singer from CHVRCHES, released a solo album. It is fantastic, start to finish. Didn't see that coming at all. Sure, it has some of the electronic influences of the band, but this is lyrically deeper and the production is more interesting. I haven't been able to stop listening to it the last few weeks. It's so good. She said in an interview that in the band she typically wrote lyrics to existing music, and this was the opposite. It kind of shows.

It might be worth mentioning that this year's Sofi Tukker album, BREAD, was deeply disappointing. Pandemic offering WET TENNIS was so good, and this is... not. And I hate to even say that because they seem like two of the most delightful people you might ever meet. Hopefully it's just a anomaly.

For the visually inclined, I made a YouTube playlist here.

• "Not Strong Enough" - boygenius
• "Atomic City" - U2
• "The American Dream Is Killing Me" - Green Day
• "bad idea right?" - Olivia Rodrigo
• "Cannonballers" - Colony House
• "An Arrow In The Wall" - Death Cab for Cutie
• "Loving You" - Cannons
• "This Isn't Me" - Towa Bird
• "Thunder" - SHAED
• "Riot" - Daisy Grenade
• "Burning Down the House" - Paramore
• "Levitating" - Dua Lipa
• "Unprodigal Daughter" - Jagged Little Pill Original Broadway Cast
• "Beautiful People" - The Black Keys
• "Stuck" - Thirty Seconds To Mars
• "Already Over" - Mike Shinoda
• "PREDATOR" - Yonaka
• "LUNCH" - Billie Eilish
• "When The Dark Dresses Lightly" - Aurora
• "A Soul With No King" - Aurora
• "Evil Twin" - Lindsey Stirling
• "Eye Of The Untold Her" - Lindsey Stirling
• "The Glass" - Foo Fighters
• "The Emptiness Machine" - Linkin Park
• "Mysterious Ways" (ZOO TV Live in Dublin, 1993) - U2
• "Throw Some Ass" - Sofi Tukker
• "Up All Night" - James Bay with The Lumineers & Noah Kahan
• "Lost In Space" - Foster The People
• "A Tear In Space" - Glass Animals
• "High In Low Places" - Beach Weather
• "Say Goodbye To Mum & Dad" - Tears For Fears
• "Badman's Song" (Live from Franklin, TN) - Tears For Fears
• "Something In The Air" - Lauren Mayberry
• "Sunday Best" - Lauren Mayberry
• "BIRDS OF A FEATHER" - Billie Eilish

This year's Christmas was extra chill, and I am thankful for that. Our Seattle family was in for the week, but this mostly meant sitting around eating, drinking and watching movies. So basically, the same thing we would do otherwise, only Simon got to see his cousins. It was further muted by the fact that Diana tested positive for Covid after we got back from a three-night cruise, though if we're using the five-day guideline, she was already "done" relative to the time symptoms started.

There was some drama outside of our immediate circle, which further makes me disappointed in people I don't want to disappoint me, but I'm over it. I know that the season is supposed to be about, among other things, getting beyond stuff like that, but I'm still in a mode of thinking about the inequities of my human interaction. It's definitely something that I need to work through.

We're turning a corner away from "cold" weather today, and that makes me happy. I am just not equipped for cold anymore, even if it means highs in the 60's.

Oh, and we didn't leave the house on Christmas Eve, so no car accidents.

Long time readers know that I only write reviews for things that are either really bad or really great. While I've enjoyed a lot of games this year, the recently released Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a huge standout. It is stylistically inspired by the original trilogy, very story driven and mostly fun to play. The ending is epic and satisfying, and exactly what you expect out of an Indy movie.

First off, despite being published by Bethesda, it is not like the RPG's that they're known for. I'm not sure how much they influenced the studio, Machine Games (which appears to be Sweedish). It does lean on some of the conventions you'd find in Fallout or Starfield, like unlocking level-ups, and having a ton of side quests available, but it is not an RPG. It doesn't have any of the shooter components either, because you can't shoot your way out of things. In the few combat situations required, there are patterns you have to find so you can beat the bad guy with punches and whip cracks. There's a lot of sneaking around, and when you've reached a specific point, you encounter one of the many puzzles in the game. One similarity is that the producer is also the guy who did Fallout and Starfield.

Puzzle solving is a huge part of the game. Most of the puzzles are not super hard, but they are satisfying to solve. Some of it is the usual, take object, put object here, pull this lever, while other parts are just trying to figure out how to cross a chasm. All of these are set up in beautiful environments that are either real places or heavily inspired by real places. For example, Vatican City is actually a couple of parts of the real thing joined together, but you can absolutely spot the real-life buildings on a map. They also go to the Ziggurat of Ur in Iraq, which is real (but does not likely contain what's in the game!). Nothing is half-assed, and while there are duplicate objects to an extent, there are no repeat rooms. Did ancient civilizations really build all kinds of puzzles to hide things, with traps? No, but that's kinda the basis of the Indy universe.

Humans are starting to get very real in games. Teeth and eyes are still a little weird, but not to the point of being freakish like they were even a few years ago. Interestingly, the principles are all modeled after the actual voice actors. My first clue was recognizing Tony Todd, who is a very large man you've seen in a million things and likely heard in other games. (He unfortunately died just last month, and was only 69.) But then I wondered in a close up of the female lead, how does the designer decide where to put a mole on the neck of a character? Turns out, the actress has one, so that's how they decide. They even got Harrison Ford's scar right, though I imagine they had to figure that out from reference footage since he's at least 40 years older now.

The other striking thing to me was that there is very deliberate cinemaphotography going on in the cut scenes, and even in smaller transitions as you do stuff. The virtual camera work and lighting is not random or by accident. I seem to recall at least one rack focus, and a particularly great scene where Indy is talking to a bad guy through a partition, and as the guy walks away, they switch to an overhead shot that just looks great.

The controls and game play are mostly straight forward. There aren't many infuriating "OMG what do I do?" moments. When you're unsure about where to go, there are probably visual cues, like flowers or a streak of paint across a surface. There was one spot where I had to look up a solution, because I kept dying over and over inside of 20 seconds, and that was annoying. That also might be me, because coming out of a cut scene, I just want to keep moving the story forward, not look for some pattern that will keep me alive. There were a few points where I was walking around in disguise and some rando figures out who I am, with a dozen fascists or Nazis shooting me. Again, you're not going to spend a lot of time shooting or fighting, but once you understand how to block and read characters as they attempt to throw a punch, you'll figure it out.

My favorite action is the boat scene in Thailand (well, Siam at the time). You're fleeing fascists and Nazis again, and you've got a stack of ammo to shoot them. Things get nuts, and at one point the boat gets airborne and catches a guy on the front of the boat. In the video below, the player shoots him too quickly, but when I played, he made the most hilarious face before falling off. And yes, there is a Wilhelm Scream in the game.

I finished the main story, and now I'm going back to do the side quests. As it turns out, there are a ton of places that seemed curious to me earlier, but I didn't have the right things to even enter these places. I've found that there are in-game guides that you can buy with experience, to find all of the quests and items, but that seems like a thing of last resort. The quests are better than I expected, because even the characters in those are pretty well drawn.

My favorite thing though is that the game is filled with Indy-isms and conventions from the movie, right down to the last fedora gag. The dialog feels like the movies. The humor feels like the movies. Troy Baker sounds like he could be Harrison Ford. Nothing is phoned-in. It's a rare game where it feels like a movie but is still uniquely a game. The closest I can compare to is The Last of Us, which was actually a series based on the game, and pretty faithfully. This feels like a feature that could have been released between Raiders and Temple of Doom. I loved it.

Also, kudos to Microsoft for making this a day-one game on Game Pass. Best money you can spend on video games.

The whole replacement HVAC thing happened pretty fast, with it dying again Tuesday night and replaced by late Friday afternoon. Fortunately, I had litigated the pros and cons of various options when it died last year, so I kinda knew what to look for and what I was likely to want.

I knew we probably wanted to go up a half-ton in capacity, and our vendor confirmed that was the right thing given our square footage. Neighbors who have upgraded concurred, so we went from 3 to 3.5 tons. You don't want to go too big, because if it's running in short bursts, it's not good for the equipment, and does a poorer job at reducing humidity. The other option was to consider single or two stage, or variable speed. These operate how the names imply. Single stage works at one speed, two works at two speeds, and variable everywhere in between. Each is more expensive than the previous. Sort of. If we're only gonna be in this house another five to eight years, there's no universe where we ever make up the cost in energy savings. So despite my hippy energy efficiency fetish, variable speed was not gonna happen. Two was a little more expensive, but because it qualifies for a $2,000 tax credit, it was actually the least expensive option. Basically, when it only needs to cool or heat a degree or two, it runs at about 60% normal speed, which is more efficient. It's a lot quieter, too. So that's where we landed.

The physical differences in the equipment are interesting. The heat pump is taller and wider, with way more coil surface area than the old one. The air handler coil has three faces instead of two, and is taller. All of that makes sense given the difference in capacity, but I expected the size difference to be more subtle. The installer did a great job routing the pipes, in a cleaner way compared to what was there.

The one bummer was that my now very old Nest thermostat couldn't control two-stage heat and AC, you had to choose one or the other. Meh, whatever, I just bought the newer one. After being in for this much ($8,600), it is what it is. I wanted to stick with Nest so I could still control both from the same place, and their ability to use a remote sensor is necessary. Our upstairs thermostat is in the hallway near the two-story open area around our living room, so all of the downstairs heat lands there, and so it's not the same temperature as the bedrooms. I don't know why they didn't put the thermostat in the primary bedroom. We use the remote sensor in our room, which is as much as two or three degrees cooler in summer. The same phenomenon happens downstairs in my office, but I only use the sensor when I'm working, other wise the rest of the downstairs is too cold.

I saw a recent interview with Billie Eilish that covered a wide range of topics. As I watched, I kept thinking about how right out of the gate she scored Grammys and Oscars and a lot of attention as a teenager. Now turning 23, she has three albums, and each one has been better than the last. She's taking singing lessons. She's playing arenas without her brother or parents on tour. And mercifully, she seems to remain grounded, which seems to be tough for talented young people who get famous fast. The exciting thing is that, at the moment, it seems like her best days are ahead of her.

Yeah, it's another midlife topic.

When we think about our lives to date, and what may lie in the future, I know that a lot of people get nostalgic. Regardless of the quality of the days and years behind you, can you really imagine a time when your best isn't ahead of you? I suspect that a lot of people are miserable because they don't believe that to be true. If you can't believe it, the feelings in that hole are likely those of resentment, disappointment and anger. You know how people go to high school reunions and say things like, "They really peaked in high school?" It would suck to be that person. (I don't know what people say at reunions... I've not been to one, and don't really care to.)

I am firmly in the camp of believing that my best days are ahead of me. This isn't evidence-based, but it is based on intent. It's hard to define what constitutes a "good" life, and it certainly changes as we go, but by default I can't see how I would not see continuous improvement. We're always taking in new information, doing different things, and hopefully, retain a sense of curiosity and wonder about the world. How could the best days not be ahead?

This is, by the way, one of the reasons that the whole "make America great again" slogan is total nonsense. If we're not our greatest now, when were we? When we had slavery? When woman couldn't vote? People had less freedoms? (Apparently that last one is a "yes" for a lot of people.) If you're pining for a time when any of that was real, cool, but don't force your sad nostalgia on the rest of us.

Billie is gonna have even better days. Be like Billie.

If you're a Pitch Perfect fan like me, then you know the definition of good comfort food movies and you know this scene. In the second movie, the brilliant Keegan-Michael Key, as Becca's Boss, delivers the following in a staff meeting at his music studio when a video screen doesn't work:

Dax... did you call the tech guy? Do you understand that everything else in my life just works? So, I just need everything else here to work too, OK?

I'm not sure why, probably his delivery, but it cracks my shit up every single time. The exhaustion in his voice is relatable no matter what you do in life. And I've been feeling that sentiment a lot lately.

I don't think that anyone is wholly bad at anything. We all have wins and losses in life, parenting, work, etc. But there are times where it feels like the losses are emphasized while the wins are trivialized or disregarded. That's where I am right now, and it's exhausting.

Unlike Becca's Boss, my need isn't so much that everyone around me keep the ship running tip-top. What I need is for others to recognize my value and accomplishments. I need advocates (as I've written recently). I'm not perfect, but I get some great things done. It'd be nice to hear that once in awhile. Maybe not everything, but most things in my life that I'm responsible for are working. I just need to hear it.

One of my heroes once said in an interview that people want to be respected, valued and appreciated. That's not a revolutionary declaration, and it shouldn't be controversial. But how many people do it? I don't care if it's with people you interact with in retail or people you manage or coach. This has to be part of your social DNA. It's not that hard. If I can practice it, despite sometimes lacking the ability to read the room (#ASD), everyone can. This is 100x true for people who purport to be leaders.

When things are working, recognize.

We made the decision today to replace the upstairs HVAC system (there is one for each floor, because one for the whole house would be inefficient, especially in Central Florida). Last night, we turned the AC back on, and the outside unit did not work. It was last used for heat two days ago. This time, as was the case last year, the controller board failed. Over the years, we've sunk a few grand into fixing this thing, and that's not counting the warranty work performed in the first few years. Pulte installed the cheapest Lennox crap they could find, and there was even a class action over the quality of the coils.

The replacement is gonna be $8,600, an expense we were not planning for, but there is a $2,000 energy efficiency tax credit. We just got tired of putting money into something that breaks literally annually. We happen to be in a time of year where demand is much lower (good luck getting a service tech same-day in July), and we'll be just inside the window to not require a different refrigerant, as Congress has put an end to CFC use in these. The newer systems use something just slightly flammable, which requires more safety and makes everything a little more expensive starting in 2025. I know, you'd think I'd wait for the greener thing, but I already hate putting money into something like this.

The bummer is that we had that money earmarked to replace our carpet, another cheap-ass thing that Pulte installed. It has virtually no pad, is bunching up everywhere, and looks like a dozen people have lived here for decades, instead of three people over seven years. I was gonna say that we almost got through the year without a major unplanned expense, but I forgot about The Great Disney Car Crash. Still bitter about that one, and it's not actually resolved. We'd have one less car payment if that hadn't happened.

It's not lost on me that I'm fortunate that the birth lottery put me in a spot where this is not a life altering event. But it definitely messes with my mental health as yet another thing to create cognitive load. I'm so looking forward to the opportunity to turn my brain off in another week or so.

It's hard to believe, but Diana just reached her 10-year anniversary working at Dr. Phillips Center For The Performing Arts. She wasn't full-time until recently, but she has been a house manager for more time than she wasn't. Combined with years of being Broadway subscribers, and then founding donors in 2021, it's crazy how connected we are to that place. While it's certainly not puppies and rainbows every day at work for her, what a privilege to work in a place that so many people have an emotional attachment to, and have emotional experiences in.

Meanwhile, I'm just a few weeks away from hitting my third anniversary at my job, which will be a new record for me. As I'm sure people who are close to me know, working in technology can involve a strangely ephemeral job cycle. Part of that is because of contract work, which I think I've done for about four years out of my career. You know those gigs are finite in length. But I've also worked for countless smaller companies that are financial question marks, owned by private equity or otherwise fickle about retention. The other thing is that it's often difficult to advance in terms of career growth or salary in this line of work by staying put. At smaller companies, it's because there's nowhere to go, and at larger companies, well, they're just corporate machines that get rigid in structure.

While three years will be a new record for me, I'm not anxious to go elsewhere. Work is definitely challenging at times, and sometimes it's not. That's where I am in terms of career. I have ideas about what the "ideal" role for me might be, but they're positions that don't really exist in most places. I do know that I don't think I want to go up to a director level in a company this size, because it's too far from the technology. In a smaller company, I could be a "VP" but still involved in tech decisions, but that becomes less and less so as companies get bigger. For the size I'm at, I've got a solid balance of technology, leadership, mentorship and, sometimes, influence. It's satisfying. Some companies don't even use technical people in management positions (like Disney).

I can't predict how long it will last, but I hope the answer is "years." That's the other thing about technology, is that when things change, they tend to change quickly. A bad quarter, changes in investors, economic shifts, restructuring, etc., can happen at any time. But my former boss was with the company for a decade, through various mergers and changes, so you never know. I've been fortunate even to have most of the same team, and even more fortunate to enjoy working with them because they were not my hires. Here's hoping for more anniversaries.

"But isn't that what you do in your day job?" one may ask. Well, yes, I work in software engineering, but as a manager of people. Mind you, it's a technical management position, unlike what a lot of companies do when they hire people to "supervise" almost entirely in an HR capacity. So yes, my team ships stuff all of the time, but I'm not writing the code. When I ship, it's my open source stuff.

I've said before that I try to ship POP Forums at least once a year, typically at or around the latest release of .Net, which is Microsoft's open source platform/tools later in the year. This is another year where what I'm shipping is not big on user-facing stuff, but v21 is not without bug fixes and a lot of refactoring in the background. It also updates to all of the latest libraries that it depends on, in order to prevent the "rot" that I wrote about a few weeks ago.

Meanwhile, I added "dark mode" to my personal music cloud service, which is the thing where if you have your phone or computer set to render stuff with black backgrounds instead of white. This sounds trivial, probably, but I use it every single day, typically when sitting in bed at the end of the day. I don't need to light up the room and waking up Diana when choosing tunes. How important is this app to me? Well, since I wrote it in late 2020, with my family, we've listened to 70,000 tracks. That's no joke. I've never done a formal release with that app, because there are some little things that are wonky here and there. Maybe eventually.

Shipping stuff is satisfying.

I'm often surprised by the way I can draw parallels between Simon and I, as far as tendencies related to autism and ADHD. My observations on motivation yesterday are an example of that. The bits about being overwhelmed land very squarely on me right now, because life is going to be like that for the next two weeks, until the semester is over and I have 13 straight days of non-work.

The parallels come with a lot of empathy, but also acknowledgment that we are different in many ways. I think the big themes of the way he interacts and interprets the world are similar, though the intensity differs. He's always been far more sound sensitive than I was, but we both had issues walking in sand when we were very little. We definitely have a lot of common experience already socially, and that's heartbreaking. We find it easy to retreat in electronic bliss, though our game preferences are different. We both find comfort in the foods that we like, though he actually will eat more than I would at his age, though it's still limited. (And sidebar... we won't force him to eat things... I think that fucked up my relationship with food permanently.) And of course, we both struggle with scenarios that simply can't be logically reconciled.

So the good news is that I generally feel his pain and his joy as if it were my own. The bad news is that this only goes so far toward making me parent "good." While the empathy runs deep, and I often know exactly where he is emotionally, I don't always react well. And sure, I have my own shit, but sometimes his actions trigger a lot of anger. Some of it is just fear based, because when he says that he can't do something, I rage a bit. I want him to problem solve and self-advocate. Technically I suppose my fear induced rage is a twisted kind of love, but it's not good for either of us. My other big trigger is when he seems oblivious to the impact he's having on our time, even though I know that the amphetamines have long since worn off and a hundred things are competing for his attention.

I have so much anxiety about how he'll do as an adult, and I have to remind myself that a lot of the things that seem like deficiencies have come around, just a little later than what is typical. And I know that his written composition ability can improve, but he needs specific, targeted instruction for that, and I don't think that he's getting it, and I don't even know how to ask for it. I can't even hire experts because there are so few people trained in this area. I'm biased because I'm a writer, and I view the world's opportunity through that lens.

To my credit, I'm getting better about how I interact with him, because it wears on me to do it poorly. A lot of it isn't even about him, it's about my frustration over not knowing how to help him, even though I can empathize. The one thing that I can be confident of though, is that I am at least present. I guess some of my damage is useful.

I hate how much power Google has, and I'm thrilled that they were found to be a monopoly in the ad and search market. I'm skeptical that any resolution will help me as an independent publisher, but dare to dream, I guess.

That said, I have to admit that I'm actually insanely satisfied with their hardware support. When we got hit with lightning (the second time), I inquired on the Twitter to Google directly if you could buy replacement bases for our Nest thermostats, because they got fried. Google thought this was interesting, and replaced them for free, despite being more than four years old. When I had my original A-Series Pixel Buds, and one stopped holding a charge, they replaced them under warranty (unfortunately one broke more than a year after that). Now one of Simon's buds stopped putting out most of the sound (as if it has a woofer and tweeter, and the woofer died), and again they offered a prompt replacement under warranty. After a Nexus phone and four iterations of Pixel phones, plus a Nexus and three phones for Diana, and one for Simon, we've not had any issues with any of those. We have a bunch of smart speakers that were all free or won, and don't use most of them, but they're solid. Last year we added a Pixel Tablet, with the cool speaker stand/charger, to our living room to drive audio via Bluetooth to the receiver, and it's fantastic. Diana got a Pixel Watch free with my phone, and she loves it.

They seem to be totally hosing the Fitbit line, which is unfortunate, but I haven't needed one of those in awhile. For everything that we've purchased, or scored free, we've been totally satisfied. We even use their phone service, Google Fi (referral link for $20 off), which gives us a $25 credit per line every time there's a hurricane.

Google is a lot of things, some of them evil, some of them not. I think their hardware is top notch.

I was having a conversation about Simon and school work, and the other person suggested that he wasn't motivated to do it. For a few years, I also thought that this was the problem, until it was explained that ADHD has a nasty habit of causing the brain to constantly try and decide what to pay attention to. Motivation isn't the problem, it's locking down on the thing that you have to do.

And of course, I know exactly how that works. Acknowledging my "thought spirals" is a fairly recent development, but I deeply understand it from experience. I remember my senior year of college in particular how difficult it was. I remember having to read in American Literature, and write about it, and I can tell you that I was motivated because without it I'd be one credit short to graduate (and also not establish the double major). But I was constantly bogged down in things large and small, whether it be gaming out my next career moves after graduation, or figuring out what the hell I was gonna eat because I was so poor and living off-campus. That book couldn't compete.

This seems abstract and foreign to people who don't experience it. Some people even claim to have no internal dialog, which seems impossible. I can only imagine how well I would sleep if I didn't have that. But it's real, and it affects everything that I do.

Where Simon and I differ is that I've had decades to develop coping strategies, and he has not. These are not deliberate plans, mind you, but rather behavioral action that largely comes out of necessity. High school and college, it was bad. Work requires you to, uh, work, so you can keep your job and get paid. The stakes are different, so you internally find ways to focus on the things. When I was actively writing code, I was not turning out work as fast as my peers, and it was partly because the work happens on a computer connected to the Internet, and also because my skill level made it harder to get to the desired outcomes. Motivation had nothing to do with it. I had an iPhone back then when it first came out, but fortunately you couldn't really do anything with it. I didn't really develop coping mechanisms until I managed more people.

I have two things fueling some degree of focus, my coping strategies, though it's certainly not the hyperfocus I enjoy on certain things. The first thing is that my general empathy for others means I feel a responsibility to them. At work, this means that filling out some simple form for some administrative purpose could be slow going, but a task that benefits a colleague I try to get done as quickly as possible. The second thing is that my anxiety doesn't like me to be overwhelmed, because then I just stop doing everything. The key to combat that is get it done as quickly as possible. That's why I'm inbox-zero most of the time. This translates to home life sometimes, too. When I cook, I wash dishes as I go because I can't deal with the pile. Conversely, I haven't cut my documentary because I don't owe it to anyone, and frankly I'm already overwhelmed by the volume of footage. Motivation isn't the issue.

The point is that you can't assume that someone with ADHD isn't motivated, because there's more going on than you can obviously see. Unfortunately, people still don't like to acknowledge it or get tested as an adult, so you may default to thinking a person is unmotivated. We've gotta change that.