After a short detour filling in extra details I didn't want to add here, we come to the Main Event: in which I read and comment on an email my past self has written to my self of now before I repeat the cycle. Let's not waste time and get on with it.

Dear FutureMe,

Hello from an interesting time in your past. As I write this, you and Kayla have thrown yourself into the throes of getting a new house and moving to a new state. The theory goes, when you receive this letter, you'll have been living there for around half a year. The mountain of work ahead of me to get to you seems a little daunting: finalizing new house things, packing, selling the existing house, and actually making the move. Hopefully, the Portland area and Oregon has lived up to the hype I'm hoping for; delightful outdoors for activities for myself and the fambly, the quaint suburbs of Beaverton, and some other third thing. From my vantage point, it'll be by far the biggest thing to have happened in the year.

For things in closer range, the Disneyland half-marathon is two weeks away. I don't have too many doubts about completing it without getting swept, but there's nerves regardless. Hopefully you did indeed complete it, hopefully all had a great time with Morgan and Ilona doing all the Disneyland things, and hopefully you all had a great time doing the 10-miler at Disney World in spring.

Of course, there's now the continual project of keeping a child alive and raising him to be a reasonable member of society. At this juncture, Evan just passed six months and is mobile, but still hasn't figured out how to crawl. By the time you read this, he'll be walking and mildly talking and you will have gone on amazing Oregonian adventures. Also Hawaii, because supposedly that's where Thanksgiving will be next year. But, as the year closes out, Evan won't be the only child?

(Author's note: Trying to maintain the correct tense of writing to your future self is hard... I want to give up.)

Rounding out some other thoughts:f I anticipate still being at SurveyMonkey, but hopefully you've been able to make the pivot to authoring or content engineering and that that move has had the results I'm looking for. I'm anticipating 2024 to be a political dumpster fire and is by far the thing I'm looking forward to the least. Maybe some people will be disqualified/jailed/die and change the playing field... at the very least, I'd like there to not be Civil War 2 or World War 3. As far as hobby projects go, I have no expectations but some dreams. You know what they are...

Good on you for making it another year and please enjoy a nice toddy on the deck for me.

As was mentioned in the previous post, 2024's defining feature in terms of life was leaving California and resettling in Oregon. There were a lot of factors that prompted the move, but now we're here, living in a house that didn't exist when this letter was written. I'd like to elaborate more on that process at some point, but it was a carefully crafted dance, woven between living our lives and moving our lives. At times it was very daunting and I just wanted it to be over, but everything went probably smoother than it should have.

Actually living life here has been pretty great. There are a lot of options for outdoor activitites, between the neighborhood trails that are only going to be expanded as the neighborhood does, the seemingly endless parks and playgrounds for Evan to stretch his ever expanding levels of energy on, and that third thing turns out to be food. Maybe I knew somewhere in the recesses of my brain that the Portland area was Foodieville, but actually beginning to explore that has been exciting. There's local beer and coffee everywhere, sure, but a delicious German restaurant nestled next to the coolest bridge? The best Mexican food I've ever had? A food cart pod at a brewery serving up one of my top three spicy chicken sandwiches to delightful outdoor seating? These are things that hadn't occurred to me, and now that my eyes have been opened, I want more. And none of that is to mention that we're surrounded by wineries, one being a three minute drive down the street. And the Oregon Zoo is a dope as hell place. And it's cold out right now, feeling quite seasonal. I could go on, but I won't. There's more letter to comment on.

Both Disney race weekends went fine, and we had a great time hanging out with the devbuses. Kayla and I are actually looking down the barrel of the next races in a few weeks. This time I'm doing "the challenge", which involves a 10k and half marathon on sequential days... I've done maybe ten miles of running in the last two months... should be fun.

As mentioned above, Evan is quite capable on both legs now, and figuring out new ways he can get himself into trouble every minute of the day. He loves going to parks and has really recently been getting into crawling around the playgrounds. I think those as a concept have finally clicked for him. Him learning how to talk has been more fun to get involved with than him trying to destroy his body and everything around him. The games of "what does X animal say?" is somehow entertaining, if only because the voice that responds is so stupid cute. Can't wait until he starts picking up on my more colorful vocabulary.

Thanksgiving in Hawaii happened, as mentioned in the previous post, and there's not too much more to say. We hung out with Kayla's family over the holiday itself in Maui, then took a vacation from that in Disney's resort on Oahu where I learned lazy rivers and I can hang. We can hang as long as possible. (There are lots of rivers I can be lazy on around me. It's on my list.)

SurveyMonkey, yes. Almost made the team switch (it was officially in the cards), and then it didn't happen. Many reasons for that, none of which I'll share publicly though I've talked with my boss about ad nauseum, but it's good. I can't complain too much about work.

I could complain lots about the political dumpster fire I called out, but I'd rather not (I'm still salty about the difference two inches could've made). Overall, I'm at an uneasy truce with how things are (i.e. I stopped paying attention to national news), and for my mental sake, I'm staying there for now.

And what kind of annual blog post would it be if "hobbies" (i.e. SNESbox) wasn't mentioned? I didn't make no progress on this. Did some wiring, started writing some code for the RP2040 and really code needs to be finished before I can take that further. This is fairly easy to do with a toddler running about in the background. But, in general, hobbies have taken even more of a backburner position with my life going into boxes and being generally crazy for over half a year. But, those things have been coming out of boxes slowly and becoming available. Managed to eke out a few lasered Christmas gifts, so that's a start.

So, too, is this blog post a start to the year.

And an end to my month long sabbatical :(

It's not often I preempt my annual commentary of my annual email to myself, but there's a particular thing related to a particular elephant in the room that would be better addressed on its own: that is, the absolute insane amount of travel that we did this year. Much of that was either in service of or related to our move from California to Oregon, but there was plenty unrelated. Let's get down to it. (Keep in mind that most all of this was done with a 6-17 month old baby toddler.)

January

Yes, we're going by month (at least until I realize that this doesn't make sense). The year started out with our return from Portland. What had originally been a trip to see what the area was like and tour some houses, ended with a contract signed and a lot of work ahead in getting ready to move. But that wasn't before we made a trip to Disneyland, joining up with the devbuses for devbus and I to run the half marathon just two weeks after our return. Rounding out the month, Kayla flew back to Portland to select and finalize all the trim stuffs for our house. I Facetime'd into that one from home with the wee baby.

February

Chill month, just a trip to Disneyland for our "last" trip before our annual pass lapsed... which we subsequently renewed, so y'know.

March

No travel this month, mostly because we're in the throes of trying to sell off our old house at this point. Packing, cleaning, and open housing took precedence over flying and doing fun things...

April

Except in April, where we went to the other American Disney park to do a different run with the devbuses and also drink the world. In that, I succeeded pretty hard. Upon our return to the Bay Area, we basically turned right back around to Portland for the framing walkthrough of our house in progress.

May

May is where things start to get interesting. Now free from the shackles of home ownership, we started our life as wandering nomads by spending two whole weeks in a hotel across from Disneyland. This entire time, I'm still working full time, and I did spend a couple days working from the park. Finding a quiet area with good wifi is kinda tricky, but for the SEO purposes here are the good spots: next to the capitol model in the Lincoln building, the Hyperion loading area, and between the bakery and chocolate shop in San Fransokyo. I did much running around Disney and we managed to go into the park every day, though being senior nights season was a real bummer. I don't like teenagers in the base case, so this was a little bit of hell.

But living at Disneyland was only the beginning of our May escapades. We took the opporuntity of being unattached and my ability to work remotely to gallavant across the country to visit some friends and family. In May, that included a stop in Grand Rapids and my hometown in Bartlesville, which crossed over into...

June

Rounding out the cross-country mooching, we finished our run in Oklahoma and made a weekend of Houston, where I melted into my 38th year by way of a 10k in high heat and humidity. Thus ended the fun vacation travel and began the practical travel, for it was in June we transitioned our lives up to Oregon, though our house wasn't quite ready yet. This involved me embarking on two twelve hour drives to relocate our vehicles, a bunch of flights to relocate people, and a lengthy stay at a hotel in our new town of residence.

July/August

After six months of various madness, we were moved into our place and took it chill for a couple months. The only travel that snuck in was at the very end of August, back to the Bay for the baby shower of some friends who were having their first kiddo. Luckily, travel from PDX to the Bay is barely a deal at all, so a pretty chill time.

September

A mere two days after returning from the aforementioned baby shower, we set our tails back around to Disneyland for another series of races. Upon returning from that outing, we to opened up the doors of our new house to welcome guests travelling in from all over the country.

November

We played host to folks from September all the way through October, entering a chill travel period... before starting another crazy bender at the end of the month. Starting Thanksgiving week, I began my long put off month of sabbatical from work, and with it came a bunch more travel. Kicking off the wave was a trip to Hawaii to spend Thanksgiving (the second time we've done this), an eight night affair split between Maui and Oahu. Our island hopping adventure continued into...

December

Upon returning from Hawaii, we basically turned right around again for the annual Disneyland Christmas trip (probably one of the only trips that will survive once we actually stop having an AP). Unfortunately, it was during this trip where my first wave of sickness started kicking in, something I presume that was picked up on the return trip from the islands. However, I was in good enough shape to take the wee lad on a day car trip up to Seattle to visit my brother. Luckily, small child took all seven combined hours in the car excellently (sleeping or watching his iPad pretty much the whole time). Wrapping up the travel madness of the year and for the relatively near future was a trip to the Bay to see some friends and family for the holidays, from which we returned right before Christmas. Somewhere in that last trip, myself and the kid got stomach sick. Kayla managed to get absolutely nothing the entire time, so go figure that...

And, that brings us to now. In writing that out, all that travel amidst the other high ticket items we were up to this year seems even crazier than it did while we were in it, but a lot of good times were had. Through it all, the wee one did remarkably well for all the hours we were in airplanes and cars, though he had some patience testing moments. Before too long, he'll have to get his own seat paid for, which I suspect will dial back our air travel a bit. Also, the potential of a new baby on the horizon. Which isn't to say we don't already have travel plans on the books for 2025.

You'd be an absolute fool to think that we don't already have travel plans on the books for 2025.

2023 was an odd year for this blog. Where it had seemingly become a home only for reflecting on this annual letter to myself, this year saw nearly a solid month of random reflections. But, a 30x increase in blog posts does not mean that the staple content will go away. In fact, here it is!

Dear FutureMe,

How were your final days of being in the DINK camp? Yes, that is how I will open this letter.

Obviously, the big thing coming up in your life is an additional life in your life. From my vantage point, the Wee Baby Evan is scheduled for arrival in June. I hope you call him "the Wee Baby Evan" to his face as much as possible. Or perhaps the NIPT was wrong and it's the Wee Baby Emma? Not a likely scenario, but an interesting one to think about, especially hot off the heels of seeing all the little princesses on the Dream. I'd prefer not to have nail biter hoping for a daughter with #2.

2022's letter was an interesting skip year for a particular recurring topic: employer. Right now, it's still all SurveyMonkey all the time, but that ship is getting old. Most especially the part where you play "learned old man" to all things billing experimentation. I prefer not to entertain the notion of bouncing companies with four months of paternity on the horizon plus that sweet sabbatical just waiting to be used, but it's a thing on my mind. At the very least, joining Tim's team would be a bop back over to product focused development... assuming he's still at the company himself.

Those are the big items that are top of mind, here's on to the list of personal goals that I'm eyeing achieving in 2023:

• Princess half-marathon is coming up soon and your sweets laden body isn't ready for it. I don't doubt you'll get it done, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous
• Following from the above point, the fact that last years holiday chub never dropped off has been a sore internal point. Working out has probably slowed the scale tipping upwards, but the bad eating habits are kind of negating all that work. Your goal: at least 215lb by the time you read
• You've got that sweet, sweet laser machine. Will you have opened that Etsy store of Disney Cruise related items? Park items? Make videos of lasering things?
• Can't write one of these letters without mentioning the infamous SNES boombox. You realize it will have been six years since you conceptualized that, right?

Obviously, with the Wee Baby, taking time to do things for yourself will be much more difficult, but be sure to do it. Don't expect perfection, just be better than cruise vloggers. The bar is pretty low :)

The obvious big thing looking into the year 2023 from the end of 2022 was the birth of Kayla and I's wee baby boi (who is definitely assigned boy parts, something I'm reminded of multiple times per day). It hasn't been all smooth going, but Evan's by far the most chill baby I've ever been around and I've been around a lot of babies. His self-determined schedule is wonky, but he's mostly been a sleep through the night kid, pretty happy over all (even while travelling), loves taking long walks with daddy, and lately has become mobile and able to get into all the things we've been waiting to baby proof. I love that little dude :D

The SurveyMonkey story became interesting all around me in the year since this was written. My position didn't change and, indeed, the stuff I did was even more of what I complained about in the letter and probably worse. I'm a weird pillar of knowledge for multiple subject areas and it's burning me the fuck out. Everybody leaning on me for answers is not doing anybody else a service, especially since I'm trying very hard to bounce teams into different waters (hopefully waters where I have some betters/peers from whom I can learn from). But to the point of everything changing around me, there were layoffs and the company being taken private, given a new CEO, and a "new" direction. The job is good and I'm very grateful to still have it, but it's time for this cowboy to go play in a different part of the pasture. With the state of the industry, jumping to a different company entirely is a scary prospect, so I'm keeping that in my pocket for a different time.

Alright, let's go down the bulleted list (srsly; I should just do lists every year...)

1. Princess virtual half-marathon was done and accomplished, achieving slightly better than the time I was hoping for. With the Disneyland half-marathon coming up in two weeks, I'll be doing that again but through the parks and with other people. I don't have any hopes for a particular time, just to finish the whole race.
2. I did not hit this weight goal, in fact I climbed through early to mid-summer before finally starting to take some weight off. As of before New Years, I was still under where I probably was when I wrote this letter. Ample consumption of sweets since combined with travel eating, I don't know where I am now...
3. While I didn't open an Etsy store of lasered good, I did a good number of projects, including one that was a complex project with lots of video shot that's stalled in editing...
4. No... no movement on the SNES boombox. My now-famous GBA projects brother says that some other guy is working on a similar idear, so I should probably try a little harder at this...

To the last point, yes. Trying to do any personal projects with a growing baby is very hard and I'm happy to be able to get in my exercise daily. That's a good enough goal for me right now and I'll add more things to that as I can.

Alas, I'm pulling another skip, missing out on the final day. That makes for three total days skipped of the 31 days in August, though I definitely did do some time shenanigans to keep things caught up. I may continue to blog, though. There are things to talk about, like part three in a three part series, electronics YouTube channel things, and how the chicken sandwich is one of the best dishes you can order at a restaurant. Thanks kindly to my mom for pushing me to add more posts to this blog over the last month than I have for last several years combined!

But, on to that road trip thing.

I won't go into too much detail about day four, as it was in pretty similar vein to the day previous, though we started earlier and finished later. The wee babes got to ride Pirates of the Caribbean, Small World, and Buzz's Astro Blasters (playing a laser tag shooting gallery with one arm holding a baby adds extra challenge). Well... he experienced two of those, Small World was summarily slept through, which is probably for the best so as not to ruin his brain with that earworm of a song. Still, anything for air conditioning. The night was wrapped by going to our favorite restaurant in DCA and getting front row seats to their water fountain spectacular... which he also slept through.

For the drive home, we did Anaheim to the Bay in one go, with extra shitty traffic going through the grapevine (something like thirty minutes to go five miles). Mr. Babyface slept pretty much the entire time, with the occasional request for a bottle. We did make one stop in the middle with the intent of giving him a diaper change, getting ourselves some food, and letting everybody stretch a little. We chose the little convenience store + TBell that I'd accidentally told Kayla I loved her at so many moons ago because it seemed cute.

Bad idea.

None of the bathrooms had baby changing stations, so I was left changing the biggest blowout yet on the passenger side of our new car. In the store itself, Kayla was looking for Ritz crackers as something easy for her angery stomach to calmly digest, but no dice there. When we moved over to TBell, they had a bat flying about the place and were trying unsuccessfully to get it out. (The bat had actually been in the attached convenience store when I was looking for the changing station). "Fuck this shit" was said to the whole situation, and we just finished the drive. The only time baby child went nuclear was when I stopped up the street from our house to get that TBell I missed out on. So, of the seven and a half hours of time on the road, he cried maybe five minutes? As I write this, we've done the usual bedtime routine and he's sound asleep in his bassinet.

Did I mention he might be the best baby?

There's one logistical thing that I don't think I mentioned that really helped make this trip possible. Due to the amount of bottles and milking supplies required on a daily basis, we intentionally sought out hotels that had rooms with dishwashers. This allowed us a full compliment of sanitized bottles everyday without doing a bunch of hand washing that probably would've been done in the bathroom sink. It's quite the array...

Thus ends our little family road trip and the pressure for me to update this blog daily, though I'll still post as I have unfinished things to say.

After all, I don't think it can be overstated how amazing a good chicken sandwich can be.

Day three of our road trip saw no actual tripping on the road. We're at our destination, time to enjoy it.

We actually took the morning really chill, by which I mean we didn't even leave the hotel room until the afternoon. Having an annual pass to Disneyland affords us the ability to not feel like we need to squeeze every drop of enjoyment out of park tickets, so we've abused that notion many times. In this case, the first half of the day was used to take a breather after the journey down from the last couple of days.

Once we did head out, we hit up the Disney employee store that Kayla's travel agent status wound up getting her access to. There was quite a bit of merch there that we'd never seen before, and on deep deep discount. I wound up with a hat and shirt, and Kayla found a few shirts for herself. We walked out of there for less than any meal we paid for in the park today...

Micro Center is still on pause, and we decided to park our car at the parks instead of walk over from the hotel. The 90+ degree heat was the catalyst for that (and also a factor in hanging out in the hotel for so long), and it was nice to have the journey from the parking garage greatly shortened (and more exciting). We only hit DCA today, but actually got in a couple of rides and saw the Captain America musical that's being put out to pasture tomorrow.

Evan handled everything like a champ and basically just raked in the compliments all day. One person even said something to the effect of "there's baby cute, and then there's him", so apparently Kayla and I spawned a particularly attractive baby (don't know how when he shares half my genes). If I were to ask for one thing regarding him, though, it'd be for him to be more willing to ride in the stroller. If he's not fast asleep, he wants to be looking at everything... in daddy's arms. Hence, my arms are pretty tired now. Reminds me of a particular trip to the Tulsa zoo forever ago where one of my twin siblings fell asleep in my arms towards the start and I carried them for the remainder of the trip. The difference between then and now is that I'm twenty years older and less supple...

But, I digress. All in all, even though we didn't hit the parks with our usual vigor, I'd say we got our fill of doing things while experiencing just being there.

Most importantly, I got my Blood Orange Cali Squeeze from Pym's Tasting Lab.