Yesterday we picked up Jameson from an extended visit with his father, whom had plotted and planned this long weekend after he was informed that Jameson would be going to preschool 5 day per week after the first of the year. His father very quickly hatched the plan to have the long weekend fearing lost time with his son. On the ride home he asked us twice if we felt good. Strange, but he repeats a lot of strange things, so not really out of character. Then this morning the father calls to inform us of his wife’s positive Covid test. ...

Old dog here. Just learned a new trick! Found out today that you can use systemd to mount NFS shares. It was easy. I have a network-wide downloads folder shared to 3 computers. I disabled the NFS mount in fstab, enabled it in systemd and did an fstab bind to put it where it was with the NFS mount. Neat!

This is the first Christmas that our bleneded family has lived under the same roof. I’ve been stessing a little bit. I’m not usually the spiritual type, but tonight felt a little different. At about 12:30 I felt like I should go outside, and I did, only to find it was snowing. Not only was Christmas my mom’s favorite holiday, she also loved snow on the day. So I take it as a sign that I’m doing things the right way when I go outside and see snow on Christmas Eve when I’ve recently made some family moves with regard to Susie and Jameson. It feels really nice deep down in the soul. ...

Back in November I decided to move away from Ghost, and in doing so experimented with Nextjs. I liked the look and feel, but it was super slow to respond, as I was running in develop mode, because I couldn’t get build to work; it just kept throwing errors. So I’m back again today, happily nestled up with Hugo. I think this might be where I stay for the foreseeable future. I had some hiccups along the way, but today I persevered and the ol’ blog is up and running, fast and smooth! ...

Here it is! The best time of year! The Holiday Season! So I’m not a huge holidays person. Christmas was my mom’s favorite holiday. She went all out with decorating, baking, music. The works. And after she died it was always a hard time for me. When Mason was little, and he believed, it was easier. I enjoyed the season. But then he turned into a teenager and the spirit vanished! I had a few rough years where I was sad around this time of year. ...

Jost got news today that a friend of mine is on a ventilator. She has covid. My ex-mother-in-law sent me a message this morning, informing me of this sad, sad news. I’ve known this woman since high school. They took her to the hospital in a helicopter. Admittedly I haven’t spent much time with her, or her husband, who is also a good friend, since the pandemic started. I’ve been a homebody, cautious. But that doesn’t change the fact I care about these people. I feel terrible. They are truly good people. They have adopted all 5 of their children, and fostered many more. ...

If you noticed, there are some changes around here. I decided to move away from Ghost and try this blog with next.js and markdown. I had to manually recreate all the blog posts, but I think it’s ultimately worth it. I have been less and less impressed by Ghost recently and their move to monetization, as I obviously don’t monetize this beast. And Wordpress is much more easily compromised with plugins. Also I had a Wordpress site get hacked once and I’ve been skeptical ever since. ...

Sonuvabitch! Caught a cold. And from one of my guys at work. Thanks John. And on my birthday no less. Dumb!

It’s a hot vax summer???

So, it’s official. I’m the new team lead for the PM crew. Another small bump in pay and some more responsibily. Excellent!