Well, it’s 2025, so we only have 500 years to go before machines rule the earth. I turned 47 at the end of 2024 and it feels like a number that is dangerously close to 50, which feels like a number that is dangerously close to old. At this stage I think it’s highly unlikely that I will end up joining the resistance against the Baileys.
I also still don’t really know what I want to be when I grow up, so that’s confusing. I guess I’m stuck with “DevOps Engineer” for the time being, until something better comes along.
Maudlin middle-aged moaning aside — and putting on some serious blinders to the current state of the world — life feels tentatively better than it’s been. The Covid 19 and post-lockdown era has been a minefield of some major and some minor life dramas that have come at a frequency it was hard to recover from. Things reached a fever pitch during a major work overload / burnout event last year, and when presented with an opportunity to start over as a state government employee, I jumped ship.
I barely remember the period of time when my twins were infants. I just have a fuzzy recollection of constant low-grade panic, severe sleep deprivation, and a robotic adherence to survival mode.
The previous four years were kind of like that, too. We weathered the decline & death of my father-in-law to an aggressive form of pancreatic cancer, a neighbouring building being burnt down through an act of arson in which three people died and we had to evacuate our house for several hours in the middle of the night, dealing with a traumatised child after fallout of said arson, a rampant and persistent infestation of bed bugs, a bike accident in which a car cut me off and I rammed into the car which triggered a frozen shoulder, interspersed with various bouts of fairly severe illnesses, and sustained periods of work stresses and extended family dramas that I’m not going to delve into the nitty gritty of but suffice it to say that the cortisol was very high for an extensive period.
I’ll add the usual disclaimer here that I acknowledge I’m a super privileged person and at no time during all this were we suffering from economic stressors or general lack of stability, etc.
And I’m not cataloguing all the drama just for an attention-grabbing poor-me moment, either. It’s mainly just to illustrate for myself that, all things considered, it was a lot to deal with and no wonder I felt like I was underwater for a few years.
But I kicked off the new work gig in mid-January after a four week break, and now we are a quarter of the way through the year it seems. I do feel a definite shift and have managed to tackle some serious life admin backlog as well as rediscover hobbies and things.
You know that feeling when you have been very, very thirsty for several hours and you finally get a big, cold glass of very clear, clean water and you can just feel all your cells rehydrating?
I feel like my mind has been rehydrating the last three months. I have had lots of big ideas which I’m still a little chicken-shit to commit to black and white here, but at this point I’m just glad I made it to post number two on the blog.
Speaking of which, I’m going to digress here and think out loud about JNGM and ARJLog. Here is a miscellaneous list of things that may or may not happen.
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Blog framework: I’m currently using Astro to generate my blog, and I’m pretty happy to stick with the simple format I have for now, but I will probably extend it at some stage to make use of some kind of CMS for blog posts, instead of just writing up plain text files.
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Comments: I still haven’t decided if I’m going to bother. But if I do add them I’m going to have to deal with some kind of user registration system, because ain’t nobody got time for dealing with comment spam whack-a-mole.
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Portfolio page: yep, it’s there and it has nothing at the moment. I got 75% of the way through creating a brand-new portfolio section for the site several years ago and never finished, the way I do with so many projects. I’ll see how much my current momentum will allow me to resurrect said project.
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Archives: I may at some stage dredge up all my old posts and bring them back into the mix somehow. This may or may not dovetail with the CMS idea.
However my main goal is just to express myself through written words again. Just like Hiccup, Fishlegs, and Camicazi as they hurried back for the conclusion of the Intertribal Friendly Swimming Race, I have only got to “keep kicking.”