A year ago, the most exciting thing I had to report on for
this blog was my [homelab](state-of-the-homelab-2023-09.html).
Oh wow what a year it's been since then!
While generally the focus of this blog has been tech, it's
been a big year, so I thought I'd make this a bit more personal.
## Life and Love
The biggest life update by far was that my wife Jennie and
I got married in September <3. It was an amazing day and
I feel so grateful to have such loving and supporting friends
and family who traveled to celebrate us. Thank you to all who
came.
As if planning the wedding wasn't stressful enough, we bought
our first house mere months before in June! We were immediately
thrown into the deep end with a leaky roof, an oil tank double
the maximum age about to become an environmental disaster, a
hot water heater with a broken coil flooding the boiler, a
collapsed flue that was a CO risk needing a new liner, and
a fireplace mantle that fell off and almost seriously hurt
our home inspector. 5 months (and a good bit of stress) later,
it's starting to finally feel like home. I'm still glad we
bought the place, but I wouldn't do it again any time soon.
## Hobbies
I've always found that my interests come and go in intense
phases of deep study. This blog partially documents some of
the technical ones; from wireguard to plan9 to gopher to
text editors...
\2023 was notable for breaking a common theme: the tech.
I became interested in Digital Minimalism earlier in the
year. The general idea being to identify the technology
that aids our lives and reject that which is just
distracting and attention-grabbing. I don't claim to
be the perfect practitioner (I reach for my phone more often
than I should when bored), but with that mindset I've
spent a lot less of my off-work hours at a computer
(at the expense of this blog).
Among the new interests were:
- Re-kindling my love of reading
- Learning Chess (admittedly mostly online, but also
some over-the-board!)
- Home improvement (lots to do on the new house: fixing
leaky sinks, upgrading light switches, painting, etc)
- Personal finance / investing / FIRE
In diversifying my hobbies beyond hacking at a terminal
screen I've found some balance I was definitely missing.
There's something inherently satisfying about fixing
something physical in the real world in a way that
solving puzzles in Scheme doesn't provide :)
## Looking Forward
With the wedding and majority of home work (a whole new
type of homework) behind us, I'm hopeful I'll have time
to go back and write about some of what I've learned! If
not, well, know that it's been a great year :)
