This post has been sitting in my drafts for about a month now... This time of the year is hard; my Dad's birthday would have been the 9th, the anniversary of my Mom passing is the 23rd, last year my Dad passed away on April 9th, and then a about a month later we had to put Daisy to sleep, finally, my Mom's birthday was May 9th, always right around mother's day.

So, I haven't been able to finish this post, until now.

My wife got Ella when she was just a kitten, her friend's mom used to breed ragdolls. That was 18 years ago. My wife and I hadn't even met yet, so when we got together I knew up front that it was a package deal; “the dog and the cat have to like you, otherwise this isn't going to work.”

Thankfully, they did like me, and Ella wasn't like any other cat that I had ever met before. Which is why it was so hard having to say goodbye to her.

Quite frankly, Ella was almost annoyingly affectionate at times. She just could not get enough attention, and it didn't really matter who it was. It just happened to be me a lot of the time. Ella was aggressively affectionate, even.

I still maintain that I'm not much of a cat person. My wife has joked about having more cats, but I always put my foot down. Vowing to never have another cat.

SURE, no two pets are every the same, even if you're fond of a particular breed, they each have their own personalities. But I definitely made an exception for Ella. I wasn't the only one either, all of our friends who weren't cat people felt the same way. Ella really WASN'T like any other cat they had ever met.

Before my Mom's Alzheimer's got real bad, I used to go and pick up my parents on Sundays and bring them over for dinner. Usually while I was cooking, my parents would hang out in the living room and have a beer or two, my Mom really enjoyed just sitting on the couch and petting Ella, and I know Ella looked forward to it too. Any excuse to to be loved.

She was never an outdoor cat, but became one when we moved into our house. Daisy learned how to use the doggy door and Ella just decided that was also for her, but she never went beyond the fence of our yard, she never climbed out and explored... Except for one time. A late night wind storm blew open our RV gate. I woke up early that next Saturday morning, and I found it odd that as I was getting my coffee neither of the pets were in the house to greet me good morning. Daisy knew she wasn't supposed to leave, so she was just standing there looking out at the open space.

“Daisy, where's Ella?”

Looking at me, and then back out to the exposed neighborhood, Daisy didn't have to say anything, the sad expression on her face was really all I needed. I somewhat frantically woke my wife to let her know that we had to go search for the cat. For at least an hour my wife was in denial.

In tired exacerbation my wife exclaimed: “She has to be here somewhere, she's probably just hiding!”

Not knowing when exactly the gate had blown open, we drove to the shelter, we knocked on neighbors' doors, we stopped any morning joggers, just about anything you can imagine.

But just as we had all buy given up hope of finding her, my wife made another attempt to scout the neighborhood, and there she was. One house down and across the street in the neighbor's yard

She also used to listen, too. I remember one of those Sundays my Mom got so excited when I called Ella inside from the back yard. I used to have conversations with her all the time.

We think she might have had a combination of different health issues. But really didn't start to show any signs that anything was wrong until the very end. We tried to treat her for hyperthyroidism, but she stopped eating and lost a lot of weight really quickly. Seemed like within just a couple of weeks her health went downhill. So we didn't really have much of a choice, and even if we had, there aren't very many options for 18 year old cats.

I'll say the same thing about Ella that I did with Daisy; I'm really going to miss her, I've never known any other cats with such a loving personality. And there definitely haven't been any other cats who have been such a big part of my life.

Quite a lot has happened in my personal life. Some of it I've shared, other stuff, not so much. The pain of loss is probably the hardest thing I've ever had to go through. But to lose my Dad and my dog in the same month has been an especially terrible to experience. A bit compounded by the fact that last Friday (May 9th) would have also been my Mother's birthday.

It's a morbid and depressing part of life for anyone who has ever had pets, but putting them to sleep is part of the process after they've lived a full life. I have to say that our experience with the service we used was the lowest stress possible... They came to the house and it was really quite peaceful. We were warned that there might be some erratic breathing or other “distress”, but Daisy went with just a sigh. Which was heart-wrenching and bittersweet, because her sigh was something that I was quite fond of. She was always doing it in protest; “No, you can't get on the couch right now.” sigh. “You already have food! You don't need to bug me for mine.” sigh... I'm so sorry girl, it's time. sigh.

We spent the day just feeding Daisy treats, crying, and giving her lots of pets. Eventually the doorbell rang and the vet was there to administer a couple of shots. Daisy fell asleep and that was it.

A couple of images will probably never leave my mind. Ella, our cat, wandering over and saying goodbye, and helping to carry Daisy out of the house. Not that she was especially heavy, in fact I had grown quite accustomed to lifting her in and out of the bathtub over the last year and half. She had gotten to the point where she couldn't stand up to relieve herself, so we were constantly having to bathe her. But more than a few times in just the past couple of months, sitting in the living room and watching TV, I would look over and could see that Daisy was in pain.

Originally we had Daisy scheduled for a visit at the vet's office. When I came home on Friday after work I had to help my wife clean up the house because Daisy had diarrhea again. Wasn't long before I broke down in tears when I realized there was blood in her stool. The earliest appointment they could give us was for Sunday at 8:30am.

We had all day Saturday to think about everything. My wife and I talked about it in bed that night, and we realized it was just time. For me personally, I couldn't see a situation where the vet would let us bring Daisy home with us. She was in really rough shape on Friday night, barely able to walk, and then with blood and a mucus-y substance in her feces, it didn't look good. As she's gotten older, stuff like this has been happening with increasing frequency. Nearly two decades is a long time for a golden retriever.

Daisy wasn't just any golden though, she was a mutt from the pound, mixed with at least border collie, and probably some other breeds sprinkled in as well. To me, she always looked mostly like a golden, but when her ears would perk up that's when you could see the border collie in her, or when she was busy trying to herd my nieces and nephews. It's actually kind of mind blowing to think that Daisy was 5 years older than my youngest niece. Whenever anyone would ask, I usually would just say she was a golden retriever. Border collies being less prevalent as house or family dogs, and much more of a working breed.

Daisy was Skyler's dog first, I came along after, a few years later even. When my wife got Daisy, she was only 11 months old but had already been returned to the pound twice. She was a wild puppy, always chewing on things and lashing out. On top of that she only had half a tail. Very aggressive toward men, but never toward me. We suspect she probably was the victim of some type of cruelty, probably whatever resulted in her half of a tail. She was the best dog though. Such a sweetheart. Skyler refused to give up on her, and I didn't have to do much, but she was pretty rambunctious on walks. It wasn't long after I moved in that I found I actually quite enjoyed taking her for walks and getting her trained to be more comfortable on a leash.

When I was younger we owned a few dogs, but we never had them long enough to see any of them put to sleep. I think the longest we had a dog was probably Prince—he was a short-haired collie of some kind—but he was only around for three or four years total. So, with Daisy, twelve years was quite the length of time for me to bond and grow old with a dog.

In a way, Daisy's declining health sort of mirrored my Dad's. For probably two years now she had been on carprofen (basically doggy ibuprofen), and we've had to administer it a couple of times a day for her back and legs, just so that she could get around. Plus we had to give her special eye drops. My wife did it in the beginning, at some point I took over, so that was part of my daily routine before and after work, and a reason to get up early on Saturdays and Sundays. Even if I just woke up and then went back to bed; I would give Daisy her pill and eye drops in the morning.

There were probably a couple of Saturday or Sunday mornings that I forgot, but I could always see the pain in her when she would move around. The pills definitely helped. It got bad in the end though. Just this last week, and periodically throughout the last few months, she had some serious senior moments; signs of dementia, falling down, being tired all the time.

I had secretly been hoping that she would just go in her sleep. However, there is the very serious question of quality of life versus quality of care. She was getting to the point where it would have been cruel to keep her alive. That was one thing that Skyler said she didn't want, for Daisy to suffer just so that we could keep her around.

We did have a scare several years ago, when we both thought that would could lose Daisy. It was during COVID, she had a fairly large growth on her chest, and the vet wasn't sure whether or not it was benign or cancerous. Daisy was absolutely mopey for like 2 months. She also hated it when you touched the bump, and she was noticeably very self-conscious about it. Wouldn't you know, as soon as they did surgery and got rid of it, Daisy recovered very quickly and was like a little puppy all over again.

It was maybe another year or several months later that I learned what reverse sneezing was. Yes, dogs do it, and it's very scary if you've never experienced it before. She woke me up around 4:30-5am on a weekend. I promptly woke Skyler up, “you gotta listen to Daisy!”

When a dog reverse sneezes, it sounds like they can't breath, or are having difficulty breathing. We took her to the only vet we could find open, which was nearly on the other side of the city, at least a 30-45 minute drive with no traffic. The veterinary assistant who was working at the time didn't seem concerned at all, my wife and I were still half-asleep and freaked out waiting for the vet.

I don't remember what the vet said, I just remember replying with, “what the fuck is a reverse sneeze?!?”

None the less, she had stopped sounding like she was going to die, and was breathing perfectly fine... Probably because we had driven her far, far away from the source of her allergies; whatever weed was growing in our backyard that caused her to start reverse sneezing in the first place.

I'm really going to miss her, I've never known any other dogs with such personality. And there definitely haven't been any other dogs who have been such a big part of my life.

Some people have things in their life that they regret. Sometimes I feel like some of us are more full of regrets than others. My dad was never one to regret anything. A very storied past. I still know all the stories too, and anyone who ever met him would never deny the legend of Jim Kane. “Jimmy Lee!” or “Seamus!” if my Mom was slightly perturbed, or very angry with him, respectively.

There were times I tried to poke and prod him—maybe in the last 5 or 6 years—about telling me all his stories again. Part of the reason being that I wanted to see if he still remembered them, and if they were the same as I remembered. More often than not though, I feel like he would just respond, “you already know all my stories, what am I going to tell you then?”

One of the first things that I noticed when I walked in and saw my Dad's lifeless body on the floor was that he had been holding his phone. In the moment, it stuck out to me as purposeful. Even though he was declining I would see patterns throughout the house. Things setup on the counters for regular use, or oddball items place in specific locations to help an aging mind remember to do the routine thing, whatever it was that needed to be done.

He rarely ever called me, despite my encouragement and reassurance that he was never bothering me. I used to tell him, “Dad, if I can't answer, I won't, but I'll call you back as soon as I get a chance.” That didn't really seem to sway him. My Dad was pretty fiercely independent, even in his old age.

As part of his morning ritual (and especially after my Mom passed) he would listen to music. He told me that he would use his phone in the mornings, read the news, sit and have coffee and just listen to music.

When I left the night before his passing, I told him to make sure that he had his phone on him. I don't know why I thought he might call me, though I suppose I had my suspicions... and whether or not it was his specific intention, I'm going to say that the playlist of music he left me was his way of writing a last will and testament. The songs are very reflective, and I see a lot of his love for my Mom in the lyrics, as well as the sorrow of his loss of her.

He also left me a few swigs of some Dewar's 15 year old scotch that I bought him one Christmas several years ago. Nice and smooth even at room temperature. And I'm thankful that he left it for me, because it was almost as if he knew I was going to need it.

Both of my parents were signed up as full body donors. Part of the medical donation process is an interview with the next of kin about the deceased. The interview for my Mom was relatively quick, and I let my Dad answer those questions. She drank in her youth and smoked weed a couple of times (one of those times was with me), so she was pretty much a “no” for every question that they asked. My Dad, on the other hand, had a laundry list of things that happened to him in his life, or shit that he did with (and to) his own body.

It was hard to see him in pain at the end, but I'm sure he had that one moment looking back, just as the light was taking him, where he would have agreed that the pain was worth the journey. Eventually I'll tell all his stories but they'll probably be mixed in with my fiction so that I don't upset anyone, or have to explain too much.

Has the deceased ever been incarcerated? Have they ever done methamphetamine? How much did the deceased drink? How much did they smoke?

The answer to all of those questions being a resounding “yes,” by the way. He would have been a great one to play “Never Have I Ever” with. Jim was a bit of a caricature at times. He was also the protagonist of his own story, and there were plenty of times where I felt like I lived in his shadow growing up. But he was always just “Dad” to me.

Sex, drugs, and rock n' roll, then prison... Then he met my Mom. They were both in rehab together. They had a pretty tumultuous relationship, before and after my Mother had me. She never said that was I was a mistake, instead I was “the best thing that ever happened” to her. But my parents hadn't planned on having any children. So after I came along there was an adjustment period of about 5-8 years for my Dad while he figured out what it really meant to be a father. Some of my earliest memories of him were seeing him behind a pane of prison glass, having to talk to him through a telephone with a metal cable, and having the time we could visit cut short quite abruptly... If you know, you know.

At one point I had to stop the woman from the medical donation place that was conducting the interview, and just say straight up, “look we can talk about the man's life all day if you want, but that'll take a while. Let's just say that he was a moderate drinker.”

A lot of the problems that my parents had probably could be attributed to my Dad's addictive personality, in particular his drinking, though later in life if would be a predilection toward opiates. Throughout his life, he would go through stints and he had long periods of sobriety. And over the past decade or so, him and I hadn't sat down and had a few drinks with the exception of sharing a beer when my Mom died, but I'll talk about that more later.

It seems pretty surreal that he's gone because I don't have my Mom to commiserate with. My wife is here with me, and she's been amazing through all of this, but she just doesn't know my Dad in the same way that my Mom did, and as I do.

Thankfully the last thing that Dad and I said to each other was, “I love you.” I know that was important to him because his father never said it to him.

I see a lot of myself in him, and I'm not very vocal about my feelings. So, making a playlist of songs is something I absolutely would do to express myself. I know that this was my Dad's way of doing that. Most of these songs I would have never picked out for him. Especially not for his last moments on this plane of existence, so in a way they're also deeply personal songs.

My Dad hadn't really drank since before my Mom passed. He was too busy trying to take care of her, as her alzheimer's progressed it required more and more of his emotion and attention. The way he was able to cope with her decline was with all of the opiates they prescribed for his back—it was a work injury that happened in the mid-2000s. He had been on some form of prescription pain killers and muscle relaxers since then, or for at least the last 20 years. I tried to get him off that stuff, but I could never convince him, so I just let him take the shit. His dependence on the pain killers wasn't as bad as it was toward the end though.

Alcohol doesn't mix well with opiates. As a consequence, I don't think him and I had gotten hammered on a bottle or two of whiskey and a case of beer since before my wife and I met. My grandma had also been living with my parents while my Dad was still working and before he retired.

You can't exactly go to grandma's house and get blind drunk listening to music at full volume in the middle of the night. Which was probably for the best, because my Mom hated it. Nevertheless she did tolerate it when I was younger and it was just the three of us in the house. She'd let my Dad and I bond and have guy time.

Getting trashed with my Dad is something that goes back to when I was 16 or 17. More specifically though, my senior year in high school he let me get drunk with him and his friend, Harold, during the NBA playoffs. We'd drink beers and watch the Lakers with Kobe and Shaq... Used to have to take a drink every time Shaq would miss a free throw. If you know anything about Shaquille O'Neal's free throw percentage, then you are probably laughing about how many drinks that was.

I remember very distinctly being hungover in Mrs. Robert's English class, because my Dad only let me drink if I got my ass up out of bed and went to school the next day. That's what real men did. If you get too drunk the night before, you just have to suck it up and go to work the next day. It was a very clear lesson. In a way, learning that early on has really helped me in life. Addiction and alcoholism can be hereditary, so learning to understand how to navigate that from an early age, and not having to struggle with it as an adult, has been a bit of a blessing, and has made me much stronger willed. I was a straight-A student in high school and graduated as our salutatorian, I even got to give a speech standing in a Masonic hall.

In any case, I hope you've been listening to the playlist at the top of this post while you've been reading along! My Dad picked some really good songs. I knew he liked John Denver, but we mostly only listened to the more popular tunes. “Back Home Again” appears on his original playlist multiple times, “Drift Away” by Dobie Grey is another one, it shows up a few times. Then he puts the Uncle Kracker version on there too! I know for a fact that was NOT a mistake.

“I think he did a great job covering that song!” My Dad would exclaim. Usually in a bit of a drunken stupor.

We used to talk about music a lot. It was a big part of who we were as father and son. My love for music is a gift from both of parents, but even my Mom would have told you, she was terrible about remembering names and dates for songs and musicians. Every once in a while she would remember one, and be very excited about it. My Dad, on the other hand, could name-that-tune in just a couple of notes sometimes.

Last year, or possibly even the year before, I remember picking him up and I was driving us to go get some Jack In The Box or something to eat, and I put on “Summer Breeze” by The Main Ingredient. I thought it was the original version of that song, but he was super quick to correct me;

“Nah, that's not the original. The original was Seals and Crofts. Look it up. You can pull it up on your phone? Look it up.”

Sure as shit...

I do regret not staying last night. By the same token, I don't think he would have wanted to drink, and that's how we would have ended the night... Honestly that probably would not have been a great 911 call. The last thing he would have wanted was for me to get arrested for elderly abuse. I don't think every police officer who shows up to that kind of situation is going to be sympathetic to behavior like that. But who knows.

Unlike with my Mom who went to a hospice facility, my Dad had in-home hospice care. The staff wasn't 24/7... We had been working toward being able to have a full-time caregiver, but we just couldn't make it happen in the time that he had left. That being said, the company we used is the only one that I've ever come across with a 5-star rating, and not a bad review anywhere that I could find. If anyone is interested, feel free to reach out to me privately and I'll be happy to provide their contact information.

I do know that he called the overnight line and a nurse did come out to check on him after I left around 8:00-8:30. I was told that the nurse was there around 11:00-11:30, the nurse probably would have stayed with him for at least a half hour. I don't think it was even 9am when his morning nurse came back to check on him and maybe a little after 9 when his nieghbor called me to let me know that he had passed. Based on what I've been able to piece together, the 3 hour playlist that he left started around 2:30am and continued until around 5:49am. That's when he played Afternoon Delight.

I know he knows that he was loved. Toward the end I had to erect some adult barriers between us to make sure I was handling my own shit, and still able to pay all of his bills at the same time. I also didn't approve of the fact that he let himself get so heavily addicted to opiates, so that may have complicated our relationship, but I don't think it ever soured it. If anything I think he enjoyed hearing about my wife and I spending time together. Or any of the mundane stuff that I had to share about my week. Even if it was only for an hour or two on Sundays, we still sat with each other. Sometimes we talked politics. Other times it was just a series of random thoughts that we would share with one another. I didn't always enjoy having to trek to the other side of town to bring him groceries, but it gave me a damn good reason to go see him at least. So as much as I didn't like it doing it sometimes, I'm going to miss not having to.

This last month and half has been a lot of me working on a D&D adventure/campaign that I wrote for my birthday. In years past I've talked about wanting to make my friends and family get together and play DnD with me. Usually I back out because I figure no one actually wants to play. This time my wife took me seriously 🤣.

I know, I haven't done many updates to this blog in while, and the DnD Campaign is not the only writing I've been working on. My goal for the year was simply to write more. I have achieved that and I have been consistent in writing every single day; whether it's writing a legal pleading or working up and formatting a draft of a brief for work, or just an entry in my journal or “daily notes.” This has been the most prolific year of writing for me in a very long time... Probably since the semester in college where I had both PoliSci and World Lit back to back. Both classes were effectively just a steady stream of producing essays and papers.

“Charley Crockett, anybody can pray for rain. You best get busy digging a well, boy!” ~James Hand

Mini Rant:

You may see me casually use the terms “D&D,” “DnD,” “Dungeons & Dragons,” and “Pathfinder” interchangeably. Without getting into ALL of the details about the different versions or editions of Dungeons & Dragons, any casual observer would not be able to tell the difference between any of the various editions. So with that in mind, I would say that my favorite version of D&D is Pathfinder.

The first edition of Pathfinder is effectively an unofficial 4th edition, or a continuation of the 3.5 edition of the rules. And probably more like a 3.75 edition. My evidence is the fact that Monte Cook (one of the authors who worked on the official 3rd Edition of D&D) wrote the introduction for the first edition of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook. It's not a perfect role playing rule set, but it's an extremely functional one.

Turns out that a month and a half of writing works out to approximately an 8-hour adventure. Even though I hadn't really wanted the adventure to be quite that long when I wrote it, I also did not want any of my players to be bored, and I didn't want to be grasping for straws or tying to come up with story content on the fly while we were playing. So, I buckled down and started to come up with a story that I knew I was going to have fun writing.

Building a Campaign

None of the people playing had ever played before, so it was imperative to ease them into the experience. Players have to build the skill of mentally visualizing the actions that their characters are taking, and also getting comfortable rolling their dice. While there isn't a specific definitive starting adventure or campaign for D&D, there are some common themes that reoccur in most of the beginner adventures that I've read through. If you're familiar with the various Starter Sets/Beginner Boxes out there, then you have a general idea of how I went about constructing my adventure.

I opted for the “festival” or “carnival” games instead of an ambush. If you have an especially theatrical crew of thespians, this is also their opportunity to play around and find their character's voice, or play around with mannerisms, find the idiosyncrasies and peculiarities that make their characters unique to them.

To start the journey I made some handwritten notes that I passed around to everyone. They were written from the perspective of one of the main NPCs, Hooli, an accomplished alchemist who has recently passed away. As a player he's your friend, and the reason why you're giong on this journey. The letters establish that the players know Hooli, and through his bequeathment, the players are incentivized to have fun at the Drac's Fall festival. Effectively all the letters were the same, with the exception of a single paragraph which detailed a unique event that can be used by each player to get to know the other players.

This is Hooli ^. I had AI generate him. In fact I had AI generate most of the assets that I used during the adventure, and I even asked each of the players to give me a prompt to describe their characters. Hotpot let's you select a style, so there's a way to control the visual tone enough to where you can generate several images and they're (mostly) visually consistent with one another. And the things that it gave me which were off, I attempted to explain them away with in-game lore. For instance, I wanted Hooli to be entirely green, he is a half-orc after all. But alchemists are always using potions to change their appearances, or alter their bodies in one fashion or another. So it's not inconsistent with the character that I've created, and it makes the piece much more fascinating.

This guy here is Choncobar, a loyal follower of Iomedae, he's an ancient halfling at eighty-three. Also a good friend to Hooli. Choncobar was chosen as the executor of Hooli's estate. He meets the players at the docks of Freeport, and he can either be taken along with the party for his useful abilities as a Cleric, or simply be used as a guide to answer questions about the world around the players.

Best Laid Plans

Originally I started to build a random generation engine, whereby I would have a bunch of tables to consult depending on what the players wanted to do. The problem with players who haven't played before is that they don't know what they can and can't do, so there's a real problem with decision paralysis. Once the creative juices start flowing, it's a lot easier for players to start improving. So it was a mostly linear endeavor where the players are sort of funneled along down a pre-determined story. Until you have players who really want to flesh out their characters

Lost Mine of Phandelver and Black Fang aren't particularly fascinating fantasy stories, IMHO. That being said, the mechanics and structure are solid, so I spent quite a bit of time studying the design of those starter adventures while working on writing my own story elements. I also didn't use the default setting of Golarion (the one provided by Paizo, the publishers of the Pathfinder Core Rule Book). Instead I set the story mostly in Freeport: The City of Adventure—a phenomenal campaign book by Green Ronin Publishing.

I told everyone that the session would be Lord of the Rings -meets- Pirates of the Caribbean. That wasn't entirely accurate, I leaned much more heavily into my experience with the Elder Scrolls and traditional D&D, where all the different races are much more common place. I feel like Tolkien fantasy relies too much on humans being the “special” ones. In my game, we didn't have a single player who was a human, so there were no human NPCs either.

Venturing Forth

Once everyone was comfortable and we were done with the festival games, I introduced a natural disaster that sets up the main quest of having to track down an evil drwaven wizard who has captured a Time Dragon. Our evil wizard, Grakus, lives in the Darklands or Underdark, and so the players need to get underground somehow. A sewer dungeon seemed the most plausible in a somewhat urban setting, and it works as a nice starter dungeon. Most of the monsters for that type of an environment are pretty simple; ghouls, goblins, rats, giant centipedes, and creatures of that nature. It isn't just any sewer though, it's a magical dwarven sewer, and the entrance to the place the players need to go is heavily guarded by two gargoyles... Primarily to keep all the dangers that lie in the underdark from wrecking the sewers. Dwarven magic was chosen because they're always the best stone masons in any traditional fantasy setting. Also gargoyles are protectors, dwarven magic just works twice as good for these things, so the gargoyles try to prevent anything from entering or leaving.

My wife and her sister came up with the idea to fashion a trip-wire and use it on one of the gargoyles. That wasn't exactly what I had in mind, but the end result was the same. And that was about as far as we made it. Approximately 4 hours worth of gameplay.

If anyone is interested, I'll be happy to post more of the adventure. But even running it just the one time, I saw tons of areas where I want to improve my notes and change subtle things. I also want to build in some optional stuff for more experienced groups to use. Overall though, I think it was a success.

I originally wrote this in April of last year, shortly after my Mom's passing. This was something on the previous incarnation of my blog. I felt it was worthy of re-posting and preserving. Today would have been her 73rd birthday. When I think about her, I can still hear her laugh. Happy Birthday Mom!

My Mom's passing came quick. There's another post that I wrote but haven't published (yet, or ever)... It was written in the weeks leading up to her final moments, and it's pretty intense, and just a long rant. It was also completely devoid of the thought that she might not have much time left. We were under the impression that hospice would be able to sort our her medication and be able to place her in a nursing home. I just assumed that she would be around for a while and that her dementia would continue along a predictable path. It felt like we were close to getting her placed, somewhere she would have been looked after around the clock and taken care of. Not that my Dad wasn't caring for her, he was, and was doing a good job, but it was definitely wearing him down.

I think my Mom knew that she wasn't long for the this world, or maybe she just didn't want to be here any longer. She was talking about death on Valentine's Day. I drove my parents to my Father's doctor appointment because Dad was afraid to go to his appointment, he didn't think he could manage to watch Mom in the waiting room, and he knew that he wouldn't be able to just leave her at the house alone.

So there we were, in the parking lot of the doctor's office, Mom and I sat in my truck listening to a random selection of 60s and 70s tunes. She had moments of clarity her last few months, but they were far and few between. It was hard to know when to take her seriously and when the neurons hadn't quite fired right.

“I know it's going to happen, and soon.” (I'm not sure if that's exactly what she said, but it was definitely something along those lines.)

“What's going to happen, Mom?”

“Death.“ 

So... I put on Norman Greenbaum's Spirit in the Sky and said to her;

“Nah, you have plenty of time left.”

It was only about a month later—March 15th—that Mom went back into hospice care. I went and saw her that evening after work. She was definitely drugged up. The Andy Griffith Show was on the TV in her room, but she wasn't paying any attention to it... Although, that type of behavior wasn't new. I thought, “maybe the drugs they have her on would help her focus?” Though, even without all the drugs, my Father had said that she lost interest, or couldn't focus long enough to follow along to a half-hour sitcom. 

My Dad had to watch her pretty closely in the final months, she would have episodes like you would expect someone who has schizophrenia to experience; seeing and hearing things that weren't there, having full on conversations with people who didn't exist or weren't in the room with her, etc. So they had her on some serious anti-psychotic medication, among other things. I'm still not entirely sure what the full cocktail was. Any time there was a new medication, I would ask Dad, and he would always tell me the name and the dosage, and let me know that he looked it up online and read about it... But I don't remember what any of the drugs were. Seemed like she went through damn near fifty different pills and liquids the past couple of years. It was fine when it was only the lowest dose of Prozac, and she wasn't on anything else. But once the doctors started adding on to the laundry list of pharmaceuticals I admittedly disassociated a bit, and just let my Dad handle it.

The doctors tried to get my Dad to administer the recommended dosages, but he couldn't do it, because my Mom had never really taken drugs in the past, and she was a lightweight when she did—she could very easily fall asleep from a cup of camomile tea—her body just couldn't handle the necessary dosages of the medication they were giving her to control her mind. Both my Father and I know instinctively, that's exactly why she didn't make it. 

In just a short week she was gone. I shouldn't have been so busy with work and everything else. I should have spent more time with her that week. But I didn't. And by the time I did make it back there, it was too late.

On March 22nd I went back down to hospice... On the white board above her bed where the doctors and nurses mark their rounds, there was a section called “Today's Plan” and underneath it just read “Chaplain Joe.”

The nurses told me that she was unresponsive, I said, “I know.” But, I really didn't know what they meant by “unresponsive,” it was a nice way of putting it, I guess... I could go into details, but those details aren't really necessary. I balled my eyes out. I tried playing Spirit in the Sky again and I heard myself mutter, “a little over a month, she should remember us sitting in my truck, right?” She didn't have much of a reaction to the song. I tried playing some other songs by other artists too; Heart and Jim Croce, I was scrambling trying to find something that would wake her up for at least one more minute so I could tell her I loved her and that it was okay. The songs didn't work though. I've been telling myself that even though she didn't give a reaction, she could still hear it. Mom always had very acute hearing, even as she got older.  If nothing else it was better than the Henry Mancini bullshit they had playing in the room before I got there.

Skyler showed up. She stayed with me in the room with my Mom. I probably only gave it about ninety minutes before I realized that I wouldn't be able to stop crying, or be able to calm myself down, and Mom simply wasn't going to wake up. Her face didn't even look the same. The vessel was still hanging on to a whisp of her essence (or soul), but I could tell she was on her way out. Whatever was left inside was being hindered by a body and physical mind that wasn't functioning anywhere near within normal specifications, and that must have been incredibly frustrating.

Around 1 a.m. on the 23rd is when hospice called to inform both my Father and I that Mom had passed.  It was a bit of a slap in the face and a punch to the gut all at the same time.

“Well thank you for letting me know...”

“We can only keep the body for four hours, you have to have it off the premises as soon as possible, we don't have a way to preserve it. Which mortuary is it?”

The logistics and practicalities of death are not things that go through your head when in mourning, they're shocking and offensive things to hear, but I didn't react angrily, instead I heard myself meekly respond with something like;

“Uh, it's not a mortuary or a funeral home, it's one of those 'donate your body to science' places.”

“Do you know the name?”

“No, I'm sorry... I'll have to get the information and call you back... I know. Four hours.“ 

My eyes were beat red and bloodshot, and the inside of my nostrils were swollen from sobbing off an on all night, going on eight hours. I was trying my best to hold back the tears if only just to save myself from the discomfort of my entire face being utterly raw.

I feel terrible about the way that everything down, but I have started to realize that her condition had been progressing for six or seven years, and probably well before then. It's an abysmally slow decline. The threads of her memories were like the ends of a frayed sweater of her mind, with one string being pulled that was slowly unravelling the whole garment. I had been trying to stay optimistic and not let myself go through any of the emotions that I was feeling at the time, but the result from that at the culmination of her death meant several years of pent up and unwrought feelings that hit me like a ton of bricks. Sheer helplessness.

One of the things that my Father said has rung true, Mom hadn't been the Mom that we remembered for quite some time. Her condition snuck up on all of us, and before being able to do anything constructively proactive, it was too late, she had already started to descend. And I'm not really sure what we could have done. From what I understand, dementia isn't preventable once you're in your old age, because no one knows exactly what causes it, or rather, it isn't caused by anything specific. Doctors just have a broad range of recommendations; eat healthy, don't smoke, stay a healthy weight, get exercise, drink plenty of water, etc. It's not an honest recommendation, it's just a list of things we pretend keep people in good shape and alive longer than others. There are plenty of people out there who don't do those things; eat terrible and unhealthy foods, smoke excessively, abuse their bodies in more ways than one, no hobbies, they don't read, etc. And they live just as long if not longer than the people who do everything the doctors tell them to do.

This life is not guaranteed.

The hardest part was not really being able to say goodbye. It sounds so cliche, but it's true...

I love you, Mom. We miss you.

#life #reflections #law #cannabis #pkm

A new chapter has started, in a way it's like revisiting a book series you loved and finding a new entry. I'm on my second week at the new job.

I had a shot at something different (working in the casino gaming sector)... But, I knew that it would involve being awake at all hours, and having to devote an inordinate amount of my time to the company.

The law firm I interviewed with offered me what I was looking for: straight forward expectations and a realistic workload. Law offices can be notorious for having to work overtime, deadlines are critical, and you have to juggle hearing dates and things like that. But every so often you find an attorney who has put in enough time (often several years) and has struck a nice balance. I've never worked with this particular attorney directly before, but we know a lot of the same people from as far back as decade (or longer) ago. So I felt comfortable taking the job.

Thus far the attorney and I are getting along pretty famously. Really nice guy, super knowledgeable. I'm looking forward to not only being a asset to the office and utilizing my experience, but also seeing what more I can learn. Legal research is one of the things I love to do, I also love to write. So being able to do both and get paid for it is a wonderful thing. I suppose I'm fascinated by law because it's an endless journey, especially when you get into researching how certain laws came to be or the history of how certain philosophical concepts are interpreted over time. Law is its own thing, but heavily rooted, IMHO, in philosophy. Understanding how humans interact with one another helps to understand why certain statutes are written the way they are.

In addition to the gaming company, I also heard back from one of the cannabis cultivators that I applied to. I initially didn't respond to the email because it was a rudely written request to schedule a time for a phone interview. But, in the interest of being the bigger person, I opted to craft a response to thank them for reaching out while simultaneously informing them that I took another position with a different company. The response that I got back from that message was much more courteous. Sometimes it just takes being nice to someone for them to be nice to you back. I don't know that I'll ever have the opportunity to work in the cannabis industry ever again, especially now that I've gone back into the legal sector, but maybe the two will cross paths? Unlikely considering the type of law that I'm doing, but anything is possible I suppose.

My pkm has officially been gitted. I was using it merely hosted on my desktop here at home, which was acting a server for it. I decided that I wanted to be able to have access to the pkm anywhere, or on any machine. Git made the most sense for tracking changes and incrementally backing up my pkm. I also like the idea of having another abstracted layer of data concerning my personal knowledgebase. Being able to track changes means that I don't have to worry about deleting anything because in a sense it will still be preserved, just in a different way. This video was helpful and informative. I might do a readme file for the pkm that details how I have everything set up with a basic changelog and pin it at the top here on berkough.com. I'm not sure how many people would find my notes on building a pkm interesting or informative, but I took a very programmatic approach, somewhat inspired by this guy.

Primarily I'm using my pkm to organize my writing and keep tabs on random thoughts or ideas that I have. Like this blog post; it started off life as a markdown file inside of a folder called “ideas” that lives inside my “blog posts” folder, which is part of my “main” vault. Eventually it made its way into “drafts” and then “published,” which is where it lives now.

I started another vault for “work”, but I don't have much in there right now. I'll have to start spending more time during the evenings taking notes on different code sections or statutes, opinions, things of that nature etc. It was also supposed to house notes on my programming and art, and different things like that. Those activities are more akin to hobbies for myself rather than being work though.

When I stopped working in December, I never even tried to apply for a frontend developer job after taking the bootcamp from Promineo Tech. It wasn't that I didn't learn a lot, but the program really works the best if you land a junior developer position with a company before you even complete the course, and that is absolutely possible if you're able to dedicate that much focus to the program. I was still working full time, so even though I excelled at the coursework, I wasn't putting much energy (if any) into the social connections, and actually researching the industry. You have to make coder friends and try to work with people, or find open source projects and dig through issue trackers and see if you can figure that stuff out. That's how you meet people who can introduce you to other people, and that's how you build the ability to work with others in a collaborative software development environment enough for someone to seriously hire you for money. I didn't spend any time on any of that stuff, so when I had the opportunity to work on a commercial project, I knew all the lingo for a scrum board and enough git commands to get by, but I didn't have any real practice with it, and didn't have the proper amount of time to devote to it.

Like anything else in life, you get out of it what you put into it.

(In case you're curious, I have been using AI images to spice up this post. I may continue with that in the future.)

A friend of mine and I meet up every week just to shoot the shit and compare notes. We keep each other motivated to continue moving forward and improving our lives. This week he shared with me a “Life Audit” document (specifically, it was a PDF). I was thinking about doing a blog post with basically all the steps from the PDF and talking about my approach to them. But I don't see the PDF publicly posted anywhere, or it's not easily accessible. I would say that the author is a pretty notable internet personality and “self-help guru.” It is branded content, but doesn't appear to be copyrighted... In any case, I'm not looking to be sued (should more than 10 people read this), so I'll spare you the specific steps that he walks through with his system. Instead I'll summarize the process without also promoting any one specific personality—there are a myriad of them online, you're free to pick the personality you like the best, they all essentially say the same things and they're happy to take your money. Sometimes these people are controversial figures, and I have no real context for this guy other than the title of a book he wrote, and this one PDF that my friend sent me.

For only being a 17 page document, it's not a bad way to approach the task of getting your life in order and pursuing your dreams, however simplistic his approach may be. The main idea being that you take serious inventory of your time and make sure that you're taking steps to fill your time with things that are productive and also fulfilling; emotionally, spiritually, monetarily, etc. I'm not sure if the PDF cost my friend any money, so it's possible that the PDF is just a marketing gimmick to get your buy into a larger course. That being said, simple is not always easy, and that's what is emphasized at the top of the document. So, in that regard, I get it. It would be foolish to think that any system is going to hold someone's hand until they become a millionaire, that's absurd. If it were that easy, we'd all be happy millionaires.

As I was reading through the steps, it's really sort of what I'm already doing. I'm doing it by building a personal knowledge management system though—or, interactive journal—which is a great way to organize bettering your life. The PKM stuff did come up for me when I started journaling last year and keeping a physical notebook. But, I never dove into PKM because I didn't feel that I really had the time to devote to it, after getting a recommendation from a friend for Obsidian, I decided to dive in with the new year. I still like the feel of a leather cover, cotton pages, and fountain pens—but digital is much easier to navigate and revisit things you've written. The major trade-off being that you really have to think about what you're writing when you put pen to paper. Digital is much more ephemeral. The documents you write can be heavily edited, and whatever the finished product is might not necessarily reflect what it is that you sat down to write in the first place. It's easier to edit your emotions.

Stage six of seven is taking action. This is where I'm at, and that has to do with finding a job. Something to finance this website and let me work on other projects, but also something that gives me some purpose.

Not sure what I was expecting, I had a really short interview for a law firm earlier this week, and I couldn't get a read on what the woman interviewing me thought of me. I almost got the impression that she didn't want to be interviewing me. It's not a particularly large firm. Personally, I know that I am much more comfortable with someone in-person than I am over the phone, or even over a webcam... The one thing I did like though was that she gave me time to write out answers to some interview questions rather than having to come up with answers on the spot. Obviously, if you're reading this, you know that I like to write. I'm not always a good verbal communicator.

One of the cannabis jobs that I applied for, they had me record a short one minute clip to add some “personality” to my profile. I noticed that she was using “Breezy” which is a an HR software platform that companies can use to find candidates to fill positions. It's actually really interesting. I would love to pick her brain about the types of information that she has to keep track of in the software for hiring decisions to be made.

The one portion of the frontend web design course that I took—where I did not focus a lot of my energy—were the things they wanted us to do on LinkedIn, and to promote the weekly videos we were doing for our projects. I was afraid that if I did, my employer—the one I just left—would have not acted in a supportive way. So I never really engaged and built the content that headhunters and recruiters could use to fill their HR software suites with.

More and more people are relying on software and algorithms to make those types of decisions anyway. One of the jobs I'm really interested in is as a cultivation technician. I'm dying to see what they use, I know some of it has to be tech-driven. If you haven't seen some of these grow closets that people have built, hooked up to raspberry pis to control moisture and nutrient sensors and such, then you just don't realize how sophisticated this shit can get.

Ideally, cannabis is the business I want to be in. However, I do know how to work in a law office, so I've been applying to those jobs as well. So far the first actual interviews that I've had have all been law offices. We'll see if I get any traction with any of the cannabis companies out here. But if a good offer comes along I'm going to take it, regardless of where it comes from.

I had another phone interview with a different law firm, and it was much better energy. By the end I was thinking that I probably have the job. Just a matter of waiting out the three-day weekend until I hear back on Tuesday for when they want to schedule an in-person interview.

Everyone has their own winter rituals. Either you make them or you follow what has come before, or you choose to ignore them all together, we're all acutely aware that it's something that a lot of us do every year. Figuratively, symbolically, or astrologically, everything in the human condition is a cycle of some sort, like a series of a million different Venn diagrams creating infinite combinations of various overlapping factors, perpetually in motion like celestial gears; these cycles dictate a number of things related to our lives. Or, the cycles at least preside an influence over our perceptions, emotions, and actions during certain times of the year, or periods in our lives over the course of several years.

Today we simply use dates to covey that information, but the vestiges of our ancestors' attempts to delineate time in relation to the sky (or celestial overlay) for personal, cultural, and societal events are still with us. Whether or not you believe there is some sort of ancient purity to the older traditions or whether current traditions have been tarnished by commercialism and capitalism... that isn't really relevant for the point that I'm trying to make. Arguably, the fact that commerce and capitalism—as extensions and systems of civilization—follow the ebb and flow of celestial patterns is probably more telling than most would agree to admit.

I find the annual cycles are pretty benign—until the end of a larger cycle slaps me in the face.

From what I understand, it was Rudolf Steinerwho popularized the idea of cycles of seven years as delineations for major life events. Seven year cycles have definitely been true for me over the past 21-28 years. Major life events don't always fall exactly every seven years apart, but generally every seven years or so there is a definite paradigm shift for me. This time around, I'm rediscovering some of the things I used to like about myself, but either buried or forgot about. That isn't to say that it's entirely a peaceful growth.

Today was the first time since quitting my job that I feel like “ah shit, I fucked up.” I wasn't expecting to feel that way. But those feelings are part of the greater cycle, I need a little bit of that foreboding fire because I've been numb for so long just going through the motions. Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I confirm to myself that I couldn't have stayed at my job... And my wife agrees. A wave of anxiety washes over me just thinking about the place. I'm reluctant to use the term “mental health” because I don't care for how I see that term being defined by the people who commonly use it. “Emotional health” might be a more adequate term, but even then I wouldn't really classify my disposition or attitude on life with a label like that. Realistically, it has just been really gloomy outside this week, and that has been negatively affecting my attitude. Vegas is so sunny most of the time, when there is cloud cover I retreat into my cancerian shell. I often joke with my wife that I wouldn't be able to live in the pacific northwest.

With some of this new-found free time that I have, I wanted to work on building an online storefront, and I was going to use my own personal comic collection to do that. Actually go through the process of setting up a functional online store... I might still complete that project just to prove to myself that I can do it (Square has already sent me a debit card and they are eagerly awaiting me to publish my inventory). But my engagement with that project is weighted by the fact that I only have approximately $5,000 worth of single issues and trades that I could sell as inventory.

Certainly more than if I were to take my collection to a shop and try to dump it for some cash... There I'd only make maybe $500 bucks—provided the shop owner thought they could at least break even on the purchase in a month or two. The real problem with a comic store/shop is not acquiring inventory, it's moving it. I don't really have any super rare books in my collection, even though I have books that mean something to me (e.g. pictured above, X-Men Vol. 1 (1990), Issue #1 signed by Jim Lee. When I initially thought of the idea, I didn't stop to inventory everything or think about how much I could realistically could get out of my collection if I were to sell it issue by issue. Five thousand is assuming that I could sell every single book, and I know that I wouldn't. If anything it would be a good functional portfolio piece for getting a web development job, but there are other code projects I'd like to work on that won't take up that time.

Earlier in the year I set the goal for myself to finish my Tarot application and write its companion book. That's a project with far more income and growth potential than selling my comic collection and trying to parlay it into a full mercantile. I'll have more about the Tarot application in the near future.

It's probably been at least 4 or 5 year since my father-in-law has made his world famous eggnog. It only takes one glass. But it's absolutely worth it ever year. But because he hasn't done it in quite a few years past, this year was kind of special. It was nice that some new people got a chance to try it as well.

My wife has never liked it 🤣... I can remember trying to get the recipe from my father-in-law, and him refusing to give it to me. So I asked him again.

“This is Thelonious Monk's recipe, right?”

*chuckles* “Charles Minugs, actually, a bass player.”

So now that I look it up online, and see Mingus' actual recipe, I have a vague memory of him telling me. Obviously though, I was too fucked up to remember it. In the spirit of those evenings as well as an honest effort to preserve the recipe so that it doesn't die in the ether, here it is, Charles Mingus' Eggnog:

* Separate one egg for one person.  Each person gets an egg.
* Two sugars for each egg, each person.
* One shot of rum, one shot of brandy per person.
* Put all the yolks into one big pan, with some milk.
* That’s where the 151 proof rum goes.  Put it in gradually or it’ll burn the eggs,
* OK. The whites are separate and the cream is separate.
* In another pot– depending on how many people– put in one shot of each, rum and brandy. (This is after you whip your whites and your cream.)
* Pour it over the top of the milk and yolks.
* One teaspoon of sugar.  Brandy and rum.
* Actually you mix it all together.
* Yes, a lot of nutmeg.  Fresh nutmeg.  And stir it up.
* You don’t need ice cream unless you’ve got people coming and you need to keep it cold.  Vanilla ice cream.  You can use eggnog.  I use vanilla ice cream.
* Right, taste for flavor.  Bourbon? I use Jamaica Rum in there. Jamaican Rums. Or I’ll put rye in it.  Scotch. It depends.
See, it depends on how drunk I get while I’m tasting it.

–Charles Mingus

I definitely want to to try to make my own variation of it in the near future, maybe next year? I think I'll probably do some substitutions though... The beauty is the fact that he says it all depends on how drunk he's getting while tasting it. So it could be a concoction of a bunch of different alcohols, and I think that was also part of the idea of the recipe, it's never quite the same each time because you're tasting it as you go, so you're getting drunk while making it.

In any case I'm extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity in this life to have a good family. That isn't something that is guaranteed. And while some of us make our families, there is always an inherent default to the people who are always around you by virtue of blood or circumstance. When it works, it's a beautiful symbiosis. When it doesn't, it can be quite unpleasant.

Happy Holidays!

#personal #life #updates #pkm #personalknowledgemanagement

Not sure what's taking me so much time to finish my Nation of Victims review. I keep coming back to it though. Hopefully I'll be done changing things around and rearranging paragraphs enough to post a fairly decent overview and recommendation for the book soon. Right now though, I'd like to talk a little about life and get into some personal knowledge management (or, “pkm”) software that I've been using.

Life has been weird. I think everyone is in tune to a great change that is coming, or a series of little changes that are already happening. I took the plunge and quit my job last week. A series of events beginning as far back as a year to a year and a half ago just culminated in me having to walk out the door. There was some negotiating. I may have been able to stay, but it was clear that the situation wasn't getting better and everything promised me were just platitudes. It was little things that pointed to bigger things, like having never been given another office chair from the time I started the job 8 years ago, and the fact that my chair was already used when I started. I could have prepared a whole list of things like that.

And they may have made accommodations at just the threat of me leaving... if I had energy enough to hold them to it. But I didn't, and I don't. I would have happily dealt with the chair and the millions of other tiny inconveniences, if there had been some sort of an assurance that the things which concerned me about the business were being addressed. Unfortunately the majority of my job was to handle things that other people couldn't handle, or items where the ball was dropped by the person before me, so I was never able to be proactive, I was always reacting. And that was in addition to routine and predictable tasks that I was responsible for. The problem being that trying to get the timing right for all the routine stuff was always fucked because I was constantly getting hit with random shit that would come up at least once a week.

Replacing people and re-staffing roles was a problem. More often than not the decision was made to simply spread out the work of a terminated employee among the remaining staff. I absorbed at least 4 to 5 other positions during my tenure. After nearly a decade of that, I just couldn't take it any longer.

Fortunately, walking away has done wonders for my mood and even my physical health. For a while now I've thought that I might have gout, turns out that it was probably just stress. Don't get me wrong, I've thrived under stress for the past 15 years, but burnout is real.

In any case, now that my overall disposition has gotten better, I reached out to an old friend of mine and asked him if he wanted to get some coffee. It's probably been the better part of a year or two since him and I sat down and talked. It was nice that he agreed to come out and meet me. Part of the reason we haven't hung out or talked was because of the way my attitude has been.

During our conversation he brought up Obsidian. As a matter of fact, that's the software that I'm using right now to write this blog post. Although I've only been using the software for a couple of days, my experience has been good.

You can read about my friend's experience with PKMs here.

While it's not open source software, it is free to use. I could be wrong, but I'm almost certain it's an Electron app (or similar). It is definitely built on web technologies given the fact that the plugins are written in JavaScript/TypeScript. Basically just a super fancy Markdown editor.

Since Write.as / WriteFreely uses Markdown for all it's posts, it makes Obsidian the perfect editor for me to use; it stores a local .md file of my post and also formats my Markdown as I type it in a live-preview style mode, so I can see in real time what my styling, links, images, etc. all look like before copying over the Markdown to be published online. That makes it nice for me, since the programming path that I decided to go down was Nodejs and JavaScript frameworks, and I'm already writing all my content in Markdown.

Obsidian has a .deb package so I've gone ahead and installed it on both my desktop and my laptop. Both run Debian... albeit, “Debian” is just a CHROOT on laptop, since that's a Chromebook.

Additionally, the software just autosaves the files as you work on them. In a way it has a similar application design philosophy to VSCode. What's nice about that is I've chosen my desktop to be my pkm server, so it hosts the folders that I've defined as my vaults. This means I can be working in Obsidian on my desktop and when I move over to my laptop, I can continue where I left off—provided I'm on the same network as my desktop—I can even have the same files open on both systems and work on them without skipping a beat. I could take this a step further and deploy a tiny Linux VPS that is hosting my vaults, but I'll probably just stick to a local solution until I need to be able to access my files all the time from anywhere. This HERE is similar to what I did on my own network. I also tested working on the same file while it was open and loaded in Obsidian on both my desktop and laptop at the same time, it was actually pretty painless. No strange errors.

Should I want to take my laptop to the library or a coffee shop or something to work on stuff outside of the house, I'll probably just set up a “mobile” vault that I can sync into my main vault.

Hopefully I'll be updating this blog a bit more as I navigate unemployment. 15 years is a long time.