Eight Years

As of the end of last month, I’ve been in Japan for 8 years. Depending on my mood at the time, that sometimes seems like a short time and sometimes seems like a long time. I was only in San Francisco for a bit over 7 years so Japan is now where I’ve lived the longest outside of my family home.

The biggest changes from last year involve moving into a new place and adopting two cats. As a child, I always grew up with cats and especially with a lot of alone time I’ve been really happy to have two cats of my own. I may have been a bit naive on the difficulty of being a single (cat) father, but overall I think it has been a positive addition.

Winter Holiday

At the end of the year, I had some vacation time that would expire if I did not use it, so I used all of it to make a slightly longer break.

The first part of my break was focused on coding. I spent some time working with EventKit and CalDav with a few of my side projects. I then spent some time experimenting with analytics, fluent-bit, and go. Leading on from that, I continued some server rebuilding to upgrade to a newer distro and update some of my projects for a newer version of Python.

Next I spent some time working on my website. I’m currently using Hugo and while I appreciate being able to write in Markdown using almost any editor, I’ve never enjoyed working on the template and theming parts. Because I work in Django the most, I spent some time using yamdl to experiment with a Django backed version that I could build on.

In between some of the coding, I decided to subscribe to Netflix for a month to watch Glass Onion which I enjoyed. Since I subscribed, I decided to watch a few other things for nostalgic purposes and rewatched the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and a few episodes of Star Trek: Voyager. As a kid, I used to watch both so it was fun though at times campier than I remembered. As for new (to me) shows, I’ve been really enjoying Brooklyn Nine-Nine and have been watching a few episodes each day.

Rounding out my holiday, I picked up No Man’s Sky since it was on sale, and spent almost the entirety of the last two days of my holiday playing only it. I knew even before I bought it, that all my free time would suddenly disappear into it, but it was nice to have a few days clean break from other coding/operational tasks as a final quick reset before going back to work.

Back to work

Today was my first day back after break. There were far fewer issues than I expected and things seemed to have been reasonably calm over my break. Today was mostly sorting through accumulated emails and messages and was mostly uneventful. Toward the end of the year I was getting pretty stressed out so hopefully this year I can do a better job managing my stress level. I’m also hoping to be a bit better at writing more for my blog though I’m not sure if I’ll specifically sign up for bringback.blog .