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.

So far, with the latest incarnation of this blog, I've been pretty consistent with posting at least once per month. This is the first time that I've missed that goal since I started Version 4.0. Obviously, I've shared some of what has been going on with my personal life... that being said, I am still writing, even if it isn't going up on the blog. Right now I'm staring at 17 different “ideas” and 17 different “drafts” (or a total of 34 different pieces of writing) in my Personal Knowledge Management system (“PKM”), and those do not include the stories that I've finished.

SO, “why the silence on the blog?” you might ask. Well, I can't publish the stories that I submitted to the competitions that I've entered. Most of the contests have a moratorium as to when you can publish a piece submitted as an entry. It takes a long time to hear back on whether or not you were selected or booted. Of the two competitions I'm in right now, only one of them is “in-process,” meaning someone is actually reading it.

There are other things I've written about; some new recipes, my thoughts and reflections on the much needed vacation that we just took... That stuff should be up sooner rather than later, so you'll get to read about my experience down in Mexico before too long.

In a way this post HERE is as much of a re-calibration for me as it is just a generic blog update. We've been back in the country for a couple of weeks now, but with my wife's birthday and other things going on, it seems like we've kind of been going non-stop and have been busy since before we left. So I haven't really been motivated to write.

Not going to lie, it was a little jarring to leave the country, but it was something that we planned around the end of last year. We even put the money down for the tip back in January. I was actually looking forward to being able to share all of our pictures and everything with my Dad, but that obviously didn't happen. There was a part of me that didn't want to go, regardless, I felt like I had an obligation to take the time off. It wasn't just my wife and I going, it was also her sisters and their significant others. My vacation request had also already been in for a several months leading up to the trip... More on that later though! It should hopefully be an entertaining read on its own.

Anyway...

Both the short stories that I wrote and submitted are in the same shared universe. I would call it speculative fiction, but the stories also take place far enough into the future to still be considered science fiction. While getting published by someone else would be awesome, in the event that doesn't happen, I'm working myself up to be able to compile all my short stories as a collection to simply publish myself, or maybe try shopping it around to an agent.

There are also a couple of other competitions I have my eye on, with deadlines coming in the next couple of weeks and throughout the rest of the year. Worst case scenario, I've got a bunch of short stories that should be coming back to me by the beginning of next year (at the latest) that I can periodically post and could probably put the blog on autopilot for a few months if I stayed with the same posting schedule.

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.

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.

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.