Post-Vacation Reflections

It's been a while since I last posted here.

I recently spent an interesting week with my family in Chicago.

I also had the most terrifying afternoon when my BF ended up in the Emergency Department. That afternoon put a lot of things in perspective.

I kind of taught myself backward crossovers at the skating rink today. I fumbled around with the three-turn and the mohawk--to moderate success in the counter clockwise direction. Ice skating is hard work.

The things I've been happiest about since February probably mostly revolve around settling into a new team at work and actively taking charge of my own learning as a software engineer. Starting a reading group with a few friends, keeping a side project to experiment with all the technologies I use at work, and having + spending the extra time to research and understand our tech stack has been incredibly worthwhile. I really enjoyed the company of everyone that's in it--it's been an awesome part of every week that I'm able to make it.

The past three months have not been without its challenges. There were new teams, tech stacks, and business areas to get used to. There were tight deadlines and challenging projects. There were the logistics of life itself, random poisonous bug bite + food poisoning + trips to the ER, and planning a family vacation. But all in all, it's been a lot better than my first 6 months. I've learned many valuable lessons, acted upon them, avoided repeating previous mistakes, and settled into a more sustainable pace and place.

On the subject of non-career-related life goals, I happily checked off publishing my first short story and visiting Chicago / Illinois on the bucket item of visiting every state in the US. I gave up pole dancing due to vertigo (being upside down triggers vertigo for me, sadly), but was lucky to have picked up ice skating. I read the book "Thanks for the Feedback" and it has actually been somewhat life-changing. I started talking openly about depression, what it was like, how I got out of it, and how I deal with recurrences day to day. If that's a subject that resonates with you or conversation you'd like to have, I'm happy to grab coffee.

In the upcoming weeks, I'm hoping to continue ice skating (maybe exercise a bit more than once a week though), paper reading, and learning. I'd like to try to have more conversations with friends. To that end, I'm trying to revive poker and conversation nights on a monthly-ish basis. We'll see.