Baseline Certainties

This is a pitiful availability
Are you serious?
All you purport is you are a harassed
Overstrained paperweight
All the tearless basics on your agenda
Are unmoved by poesy and embarrassing 
To most commonly unforeseen imprudence
All resolve to evolve into moods specious and disproportionate
And misinterpreting of compromises
Again and again and again and again!
Observations from my spam folder, December 19, 2019

Yeah, it’s been a minute.

I took down this blog in March of 2020. Y’all didn’t miss an announcement; I just got tired of spending more time hitting backspace on my post drafts than I did writing content that I felt comfortable posting. There was a lot going on four years ago … maybe y’all noticed?

I can’t say that I regret doing it. I also can’t say why I got the urge to start it up again. Er, I mean ‘I can’t pinpoint exactly why I feel compelled to do so’, instead of ‘there’s a reason I’m doing this that I am uncomfortable telling you and/or I have contractual obligations not to mention’.

So, what I’d like to mention before I figure out what to blog about:

• Still in Northern Virginia.
• Still in the farmette with internet.
• On job three since 2019. The last two were fully remote, and this one is hybrid 1-2 times a week.
• Finally finished a degree. It’s been thirteen months since I’ve taken my last real course (as opposed to work-obligated training). I feel twitchy about this, to the point where I’ve discussed graduate work with a couple of schools, buuut I don’t think I’m ready to commit to that yet.
• Finally have a dog, as of Labor Day Weekend 2023. We’re not entirely sure why we got him, and even now, we can’t quite figure out how we still have him, though it’s fair to say it might be because our vet finds him entertaining. During the dog’s first week with us, he jumped out of a second-floor window just to chase after some deer. Three miles later, he’d lost me, failed to catch the deer, picked up every burr in this part of the county (surprisingly no ticks), and found a nice lady who was too smart to fall for his charms; she made sure we got him back.
• On the verge of filing a restraining order against ticks and poison ivy, both of which I have been exposed to a lot since getting the dog. I have not gotten Lyme disease or alpha-gal, but I have experienced a STARI-like lesion.
• We all had COVID-19. Mine triggered a flare-up of mononucleosis, and the combination of the two of them still seem the likely cause of my worst Valentine’s Day ever: a ER visit for a 8 mm kidney stone.

Otherwise … things are otherwise. It’s safe to say good, even unreasonably good.