Phew. December. The most hectic month. End of year celebrations, wrapping up work projects, wrapping up presents, another round of last minute shopping, credit card charges ballooning, decorating projects, transcontinental road-trips, shipping logistics, finding a dog sitter, dog sitter falling through, what about the sick cat, where’s the iPad charger, eating hundreds of cookies, getting sick, advent calendars, anxious kids pondering presents under trees.

But we made it.

The minute we finished building the kids’ trampoline and my work obligations spun down, my immune system collapsed. Apparently “let down” is a real thing where you get sick on holidays because your body was hanging on by a thread while obligations remained. This happens every year, to the extent that my wife’s family used to think I was faking a sickness to avoid them, but no, I actually like them, it’s my body giving up when work stops.

It’s weird.

Christmas this year was an interstate affair. After realizing flights cost $3200, we resolved to drive to Nebraska to celebrate with my family this year. It’s about ~1000 miles each way. The payoff is seeing my enormous divorced family, brother and step-brothers and their wives, aunts, uncles, cousins, their kids, and 11 of my 23 nieces and nephews. There’s something special about kids playing with their cousins, calling the same people grandma and grandpa has magical properties. Endless screaming, yelling, video games, and snowy mountains of Ready Whip sprayed atop mini-waffles.

Good times.

Hauling Christmas across America isn’t my favorite thing, by air or by land. But driving across America is a neat rite of passage and it’s also the thing that will make me run for public office so we can get some bullet trains in this god forsaken country. Seeing family and celebrating the great magical fat norseman are special times, but I don’t feel super “restored” coming back from vacation.

Lord, I’m tired. I’m weak. I’m worn.

  • 🚙 Drove: 1,890+ miles
  • 📖 Reading
    • Disciplined Entrepreneurship - A quick and easy startup bootcamp with a 24 step process. A good listen, but probably need the actual book for visualizations to hit hard.
    • Saving Capitalism - Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and I get upset about the same issues. This book outlines some of the structural problems in regards to wealth generation in our capitalistic democracy.
    • Project Hail Mary - Science’ing shit in space. Another wonderful page-turner book by Andy Weir.
  • 📝 Blogging - I wrote a lot but published little.
    • Sustaining Maintaining - a thinkpiece about how there’s little education in open source beyond setting up repos and installing CI/CD; without education everyone learns the hard way, leading to burnout.
    • Five good feelings - a short dissertation about books
  • 🎙 Podcasts and YouTubes
    • Shop Talk is inching closer to Episode 500
    • I took part in the Frontend Horse Holiday Snowtacular where we raised money for TeamSeas to remove over 5 tons of trash from the ocean. I talked about blogs. Brief but fun.
    • YouTubes - After a month break due to surgery and general busy-ness, ShopTalk managed to cut two episodes.
      • Astro - 20 minutes of playing with Astro, I used a VTuber skin because my nose was still fucked up.
      • Play video onscroll - Intersection Observers and the HTML Media Element API, sorta my wheelhouse.
    • Listened
      • Rabbit Hole - a NYT investigation into algorithmic radicalization (YouTube, Facebook, etc). A must listen, IMO.
  • 💪 Fitness: Not successful