Occasionally, mia madre and myself enter into a pact wherein we try to churn out one blog post a day for a month. This is one of those months, as it turns out. Given recent developments in my life, I have lots of thoughts to get out. But, as a warm-up exercise, I'll start with what I generally blog these days: publish and comment on a letter I wrote to myself in the past. A bit over a year ago, I decided that in addition to the end-of-year letter to myself, I'd do a birthday one as well. So, here's that:

FutureMe's persistent push for engagement has worked this time. Writing a letter to yourself twice a year roughly six months apart is an intriguing notion. You do always boast about how you get presents twice a year, why not a present from yourself?

You've been married half a year now, that's exciting. Baby plans have been put (temporarily) on hold for various reasons, which does open up the possibility of squeezing in some additional world galivanting (as "the COVID" allows to permit). Disney this weekend, Bend the next, Maggie visits after that, a cruise in August. Hoping for some Japan action, but we shall see.

You'll probably remember this, but playing pretend boss is no fun. Management track has never had appeal, but you have to try everything once, I suppose. Glad to be doing it on a trial basis, because I would not want to be doing it full time. No thanks, gimme code. (The ultimate irony will be 37-year-old me is a Sr Eng Mgr...)

Hope you open a dope ass Etsy shop with the laser (once that office room gets cleaned up). Thanks and Happy Birthday!

Going off of paragraph one, the middle of the year letter was hardly my actual idea and FutureMe suddenly being very annoying about sending emails. I've since unsubscribed...

It's interesting to read paragraph two, because it all seems so far in the past. The all consuming situation of getting ready for and then having a baby has been... all consuming, and it seems like that's been the mindset for a very long time.

From what I remember, last summer kind of sucked and was the beginning of me starting another wave of burnout, work being the biggest pain. Not only was I playing pretend manager for my boss who was on paternity leave, but I was also filling in as tech lead for another manager who'd bopped to a different team, and also acting as the point of contact in the stead of my director while he was out on sabbatical. On top of that, I was mentoring an intern. That's a lot just on the surface, but it's doing a lot of things that are very firmly outside my zone of comfort. The managerial things eventually bled away, but the tech lead role stuck firmly. A new team was grafted on to ours, doing work that I had a lot of intimiate knowledge of. Unfortunately, due to various departures, I was really the only one who had that level of experience, so was the person everybody continually leaned on... pretty much up until the point I left for paternity leave myself. To be fair, I was also heading up a big project, so was expected to be making some of those calls, but it just felt like continually thinking for myself and my own work, but also others all at once. That's quite a lot...

That was the biggest stressor of last summer, for sure, but even the fun things had their own amount of baggage... which is probably a shitty thing to complain about. Oh, woe is me. We're going to Disneyland. And then we're going on a road trip to Bend to see Weird Al in concert and drink beer. Then my sister is going to visit for a week where we bop around and have fun. Then we're going on a cruise, boo hoo. (A cruise I wound up getting COVID from, mind you.) But, when one's brain is already over-taxed, the lack of down time and constantly having places to be and things to do is just more taxing. Mind you, I enjoyed all those things we did in retrospect, but I recall being very drained at the time. Also, that was when we were ramping up the baby making plans, so that was it's own layer of stress on top of everything else.

Of course, doing all that stuff and being mentally drained didn't leave much in the tank for doing things with my new laser at the time, but I've since made pretty good use of it. It's one of my favorite toys and I'd like to make even more use of it... for, like, a YouTube show about how I make things or something...

Circling back to the emailing myself mid-cycle idea, I didn't this year. Mostly because of exhaustion and prepping for baby. I think I'll just leave that to December me. I've already got enough words I have to type in my future...

One down, thirty to go...