So... How's it been? How's it going? Happy Holidays by the way.
It's been a bit and I'm totally fine with that. I'm normally not one to jump on the "new year new me" thing but I'll typically write up some goals for the year. The first week of January 2020 I'd started a spreadsheet to help plan out blog post ideas for the year. Needless to say things changed a bit.
Saint Anne the Wife and our two boys are masked up and back to school today following the holiday break. Obviously I'm glad they're getting a chance to see friends/co-workers and get back to things, but below that silver lining is the current world and reality we live in. Positive cases are continuing to go up and to the right and I can't keep writing about it without bashing poor leadership and getting angry. My immediate family is still healthy but this stupid game of Battleship is hitting closer and closer to home each day.
After months of renovations that are somehow still not quite finished, we're finally in our own house. That fancy new bathroom down the hall still doesn't have a vanity mirror – you'd be surprised what it's like to not see yourself on a regular basis – but just being back in our own place again has brought some much needed calm and stability after basically couch surfing with two house fires and a dog since June.
Work-wise I've been swamped these last few months. Seems like it's usually around this time of year when work slows down a bit and I freak out, but again, this nonsense is cyclical and work picks back up. If there is a bit of a lull, I'm hoping to get back to some personal projects.
There's also a pile of books on my night stand I'm hoping to get through. I'm about 200 pages into Barack Obama's A Promised Land and hope to finish reading that mountainous feat before the second volume comes out in the next few years. Mid-December on a work trip I landed at Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi and asked about local authors. The staffer handed me an armload of books and I ended up buying a couple, including Kiese Laymon's How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. Anne and I escaped to New York a couple days after Christmas and we picked up a couple books at Strand, so now I've also got Iain Reid's I'm Thinking of Ending Things impatiently waiting on me like I'm a tourist who doesn't know how to use a MetroCard. Meanwhile, Saint Anne the Wife has been plowing through stacks of books during the break like they're nothing.
Speaking of plowing through things, I ended up getting a QNAP 4-Bay NAS setup and it's embarrassingly fast compared to the tower of external hard drives I've been using for years. I quickly learned I'm not an IT professional so it took me a bit somewhat figure out how to set the thing up. Hopefully I'll have more to share about it down the road, but I'll for sure say it's sped up my editing workflow tremendously.