State of the Me: 2025-2026 edition!!

Back in January when this year first started, I expected that it was going to be one of those "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times" years, but it kind of ended up being a "just keep swimming" year. Here's why:

Why was it the best of times?

With my current job, I think I've finally triangulated upon the role I want to play. You may recall that I'd thought my earlier job was the best one I'd ever had -- and it was, until it stopped being wonderful. This new job, however, is better. It has a lot of the same advantages of my earlier job, without some of the disadvantages.

I don't want to go into too much detail about my job on a public-but-not-professional blog, but I'll just say that it's a job that requires a very particular and unusual set of skills, and that I happen to have a particular and unusual set of skills that matches amazingly well. Not to pat my own back too hard, but they were also lucky to find me. They'd had people resign from this position during the trial period in the past, and my predecessor (who did the job for 3 years), had only ever intended to do the job temporarily.

If this coming year goes well too, I'll post more details about it in next year's "state of the me". 😁

Why was it the worst of times?

With Trump's re-election, the US's descent into fascism is dropping to horrific new lows, with people getting randomly rounded up and sent to gulags with no due process, etc. and the hegemony and military might of the United States makes this bad news for everyone.

And how were these pillars of good and bad tempered over the course of the year?

Regarding my job -- even though it's what I want to do, it's really hard work, and it has cost me more time and energy than I would like. I've gone back up to working 80% -- and I know that I have one day off per week -- but it hasn't been enough to get the projects done that I want to get done.

As I said last year, the #1 thing I wanted to do in 2025 was to get back to work on my comic book again. I really want to be spending my free time on artwork again, and -- while I did succeed in laying some of the groundwork -- I still haven't succeeded in getting to a place where I can wake up on a Wednesday morning and just work on the drawing some new panels. I'll explain below what I ended up doing instead. But really getting back into drawing my comic book is now my #1 personal goal for 2026.

The "worst of times" was tempered in a different way.

As I wrote back in 2016, I had hoped since the days of G.W. Bush that people would react to the terrible job that he did by working to turn things around. Instead I learned that there is no rock bottom, and that no matter how incomprehensibly broken the US political system seems at any given point it can get worse.

When G.W. Bush and co. faced no consequences for war crimes and extreme incompetence, that paved the way for Trump to take it to the next level in terms of stupidity and just openly looting the country. Then, after a brief pause of the Democrats thinking that things could just go back to normal by pretending like everything is normal, that monster got elected again on promises to do worse than he'd done the first time.

But the weird and unexpected part is that I think the US finally did hit rock bottom. I have absolutely been avoiding an "accelerationist" strategy because I didn't believe in rock bottom anymore -- but it actually looks like after watching this past year of Trump and the billionaires take a chainsaw to what's left of the US, the tide may be turning and the pendulum may swing back in a real way.

That may just be my social media bubble telling me what I want to hear, though, so I'm not counting any chickens yet....

But Trump has succeeded in ending America's dominance over the rest of the world. As I said earlier, Trump is so dumb that he doesn't realize that he's throwing away something valuable. His ego depends on his skill at deal-making, but his only deal-making strategies are trying to charm or bully people.

By taking the mask off of kindly old Uncle Sam, Trump has shocked the rest of the world into realizing how dangerous it is to cede so much power to the US. And by picking a fight with every country at the same time (aside from an handful of fellow despot/criminals), he has given other countries the motivation and ability to reclaim some economic and military sovereignty.

So I guess that means that instead of "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times," I was in "just keep swimming" mode. I actually thought I had used this phrase before in a "State of the Me" (to describe a year of just trying to make incremental progress on my goals for the future), but this post is the closest I could find.

But now that I'm in my 50's, I'd like to mix up my metaphor a bit. My new motto is more in line with the famous saying:

Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water,
After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.

Naturally I want to stay goal-oriented, but one of my intentions this year has been to appreciate my day-to-day life more.

Every morning I get up at 6 and do my "morning chores" -- which is usually just making tea and loading and/or unloading the dishwasher on days when I have to go to work, but also includes laundry, prepping the garbage/recycling, and light gardening, depending on how much time and stuff to do I have. This is a time of quiet reflection and of physical activity that gets me going, and is almost meditative. (Coincidentally? there's a word in Japanese the means both relaxation and doing laundry...)

(If you're wondering where my wonderful husband is in this picture, he generally does other chores, like loading/unloading the dishwasher in the afternoon and making dinner.)

To that end, one mini-project that has eaten some of my project time this past year was to make compilations of old songs that I wanted to listen to -- ones that take me back. In the beginning of the year I made a set of "hits by year" (which still needs some work, but it was a good start), and then more recently I made a database of all of the tracks of all of the Christmas albums I've collected over the years. I had last done this in 2002 (back when we burned the compilations onto physical CDs). It was getting to be time to do it again (just copying collections onto a hard-drive this time).

The problem with Christmas albums is that they invariably have a few tracks on them that I do not like -- and more commonly it will be that an album has a handful of good tracks but the rest are unlistenable. And, no, I do not trust any streaming service to do this for me. To any reader who is mentally screaming "No!!! I hate Christmas music!!!" -- I hear ya. I hate a lot of it too, but I love a lot of it because of the variety of musical genres represented, and especially because of the connection with the past.

Anyway, I made a database of all of the good tracks (of which I have about 350), including tables of the songs (about 130) and artists (more than 160), plus language/instrumental and a rating system. I then wrote a quick algorithm to mix them up by song/style/artist and automatically copy and normalize them into 31 sets -- an "advent of music" as it were -- so I can listen to them all without hearing a track I don't like.

Maybe sometime I'll write out an update to my long-ago post about the carols that I like. My current list has been influenced by my kids -- we also have a special family Christmas song compilation which is mostly funny Christmas songs that we've all found over the years.

Then there were a couple of other projects that I hadn't really planned to spend as much time on as I did.

First on that list was Totally Normal Town -- as you'll know if you follow this blog (if anyone does...).

I did not anticipate how many months it would take me to make all of those buildings. And it's still not done!! See here and this video:

 

But focusing on Totally Normal Town was partially inspired by my new "Chop wood, carry water" viewpoint because this time in which my kids are available to do creative collaborations with won't last forever. And Nico had done such a clever job of writing and directing the Totally Normal Town story series, that I didn't want to miss this opportunity.

Both Nico and Leo have been working on some amazing creative projects of their own -- I can't link to them because they're not public, but you would be impressed!!

Then there was the whole Japan thing (which I will fold into my usual "language learning" category).

For a few years we'd been planning a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Japan, which we took in March. Emmanuel was the one who most wanted to do this, but of course we all have stuff we love from Japanese culture: sushi, video games, fast trains, Totoro, etc., so we were all happy to make the trip -- and we had a fantastic time!!

It was so much fun that Emmanuel wants to now do it again -- which we're planning to do in 2027 (but not take the kids this time). Emmanuel also made a lovely set of photo albums of our trip as a family Christmas present. I just wish we'd been making photo albums more often for the past 25 years. My kids have (ironically?) seen way fewer photos of their memories growing up than I did of mine as a kid, back when photos were physical objects rather than data sitting on some filesystem...

We also spent a bunch of time learning Japanese -- and didn't stop after the trip ended. I actually thought 2025 was going to be my year for really making progress on Schwitzerdeutsch, but the problem is that this little Renshuu app for learning Japanese is so much more fun to do while lounging in bed (sometimes before, sometimes after my morning chores) than any of my Schwitzerdeutsch materials. But 2026 will be my Schwitzerdeutsch year for sure!! (Or maybe 2027)

Speaking of the past 25 years, we had two lovely weekend celebrations for our silver wedding anniversary -- one to see an opera at La Scala in Milano, and another in which we visited friends and family in Paris. 

As usual, I haven't done a lot for Main Street Plaza this year, but I'm pretty psyched that a major ExMo podcast has been promoting the Brodies this year, so I hope we'll have a really great year for awards -- and maybe even get some good conversation going again.

But my biggest goal for 2026 (aside from all of the goals discussed above) is to help my two boys to make progress on their own long-term goals. I don't want to go into too much detail here since it's not my story to tell, but I hope to have some good news about their progress for next year's edition!!

Happy New Year, and here's looking forwards to amazing things in 2026!!!

 

State of the Me: 2024-2025 edition!!

The year 2024 is wrapping up -- which means that it's time for my yearly self-assessment!! (Buckle in, this is a long one...)

I need to start with my job because that is what consumes most of my time and corresponding mental bandwidth. It's kind of a long and technical (perhaps dull) story, though, so feel free to skip straight to the next section (world events), which is probably more interesting.

My Job

Here's a quick recap of the last few years:

For three years I held a job that was my favorite job that I'd ever had. Since the company was a successful and quickly-growing startup, I had the chance to exercise one of my most valuable skills: growing a startup company up to scalable mode (see my professional blog at startup2scalable.com). I was hired as a DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, and I quickly worked my way up to being the Tech Lead of the central DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure team of the company.

I had the opportunity to work with eight or nine dev teams (depending on how you count) -- helping them to get all of their applications running in kubernetes -- with continuous build-and-deployment pipelines tailored to each team's needs. I led weekly workshops and I assisted anyone who wanted help applying new technologies to their projects. And I got rave reviews!

Perfect, right?

Unfortunately, one of the selling points of that job turned out to be a liability. I had chosen the company because I wanted to do something to fight climate change -- and many of the teams I was working with were creating scientific models and other types of projects to help companies reduce their carbon footprint!

...But it turned out that almost all of the money was actually coming from selling carbon offsets. While working there, I learned not only that carbon offsets are questionable in general but that the company I was working for specifically was selling some especially dodgy ones. I learned this from the press like everyone else did. That said, I can't pretend to complete ignorance on this point -- I knew from the list of clients that we were green-washing some of the worst offenders in carbon emissions. But it seemed logical that they should be the ones paying for offsets, right?

Anyway, when the carbon markets imploded and my employer in particular took a thrashing in the press, the money dried up -- which meant throwing overboard all of the ballast such as diversifying their offering with digital solutions, etc. As you can see from my corresponding post from last year, however, I still had hope of some positive resolutions. Specifically, since one of my areas of expertise is helping companies grow from startup to scalable, I have corresponding skills in helping them downsize as well. I could have helped them trim their cloud infrastructure back down to startup size -- while keeping everything up and running.

So, yes, I'm saying I would have kept helping them (at least for a time) after finding out about their business. And the stress and worry of trying to play my cards to make that happen pretty much ruined my whole Christmas season last year. They didn't deserve it, but I had loved that job for three years, and I had the right skillset to really help them in bad times like in good.

The problem is that the top brass showed stunning incompetence, really the whole time. In particular, since they're not a tech company, they didn't have the idea in their heads that maybe the top engineers should be consulted regarding tech & engineering decisions. In their world, there are executives to make decisions and then there are tech/specialist cows to be milked.

Anyway, I could see the wrecking ball coming for my department, and as tech lead, I would be responsible for keeping things running while I didn't have the authority to make the decisions that would allow me to do so effectively throughout the downsizing. So I resigned. If they want to unplug things randomly, then they can explain to the various dev teams why their infrastructure isn't working anymore. I didn't want to resign, but I also didn't think I deserved to be made to take the fall.

A colleague had suggested that I could start my own business, and I thought it would be a good way to recreate the situation I loved -- doing the DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure for a portfolio of teams and small businesses. I had expected that I might get some "garden leave" when I resigned (since others had gotten it). but nope. I had to work right to my last day. So I had with no income while trying to start my new business.

(By the end of 2024, the last remaining members of my team were laid-off -- which meant at least that they got a few months of garden-leave pay plus the right to collect unemployment right away...)

A learned a couple of important lessons from creating my own company:

1. I find paperwork so stressful that a single form I needed to fill out would lead me to waste multiple work days just stressing over it. 

2. While companies do sometimes outsource DevOps and Infra to consultants, they hire consulting firms, not freelancers.

So, ultimately, after several potential clients told me that they could hire me -- but not through my small business -- I gave up. After about two months of no income and no real prospects, I accepted a temporary contract -- even though it wasn't through my small business.

There are a lot of nice things about my current temporary contract, but it's been stressful because it's not really where I want to be long term.

Fortunately, just before the holiday season I found a new job that is right up my alley. I got it and accepted it. I haven't started yet (so I don't want to count my chickens before they hatch, so to speak), but I have very high hopes that this is the right move for me. Here's hoping the "job" section of next year's "state of the me" will be full of wonderful news!

In career-related creative projects, as I mentioned in last year's edition, I've been upgrading my hobby-server infrastructure. I've created a bunch of additional demo projects on my kubernetes cluster this past year -- though, unfortunately, I didn't have time to blog about as many of them as I had planned. Hopefully I'll have more opportunity to write for my professional blog in 2025.

At least I did get a chance to give a talk on kubernetes at the Cloud Native Switzerland Meetup. Here's the video of it:

World Events

The US election was obviously much, much worse than any of my personal worries about my career.

I was actually shocked and surprised that Trump won, and here's why:

Even though we were constantly reminded that the polls showed a statistical tie, I thought they were underestimating the enthusiasm, especially from women. Whenever reproductive rights were on the ballot -- even in "red" states -- reproductive rights would win. And with the fall of Roe v. Wade (not to mention horror stories rolling in about women bleeding to death in parking lots after being refused care), I saw the election as largely a referendum on women's right to bodily autonomy.

When the Democrats responded to the outcry over Biden's age by pressuring him to drop out -- and then when Kamala picked the most progressive person from her list of possible running mates -- I thought, "Wow, the Democrats are finally getting it right and doing stuff that people like!!!"

Trump is a convicted felon who is constantly criming so blatantly that he more-or-less openly ran on a platform of "I will treat the country as my own personal property and sell off everything that isn't nailed down and put the proceeds straight into my own pockets."

The fact that a majority of US voters would vote for that is an indication of a very serious systemic problem. I think the most critical problems are money in politics, misinformation, and election interference. With the media landscape as it is today, it's just too easy for the wealthy to manipulate public opinion. I don't know how to fix this, but I think that unless we can find a solution to this problem, fascism will just continue to rise worldwide.

(There are some additional US-specific democracy issues such as gerrymandering, lack of ranked-choice voting, Supreme Court politicized and open for bribes, other types of legal bribery, etc.)

The political commentators are now dissecting what Kamala and the Democrats did wrong, saying Kamala should have talked more about specific policies than about her middle-class roots. Sure, if she'd been shouting "Medicare for all" rather than campaigning with Liz Cheney, that would probably have helped.

One formerly-progressive news/commentary outlet that has recently taken a horrifying sharp right turn argued that Harris should done more to throw trans people under the bus, and applauded Trump's win as a referendum against the Democratic establishment. :(

If it was a referendum on anything, it was a referendum on the question of "fuck women." Most people were essentially voting on "vibes" (not issues), and there were too many people who just couldn't picture a black woman as president, even when the alternative is a doddering and incoherent criminal who is actively robbing them.

If there was any "tweak" the Democrats could have made that might have put Kamala over the edge, it's that they should have pressured Biden to resign right after the mid-terms. If Americans had had two years of getting used to seeing Kamala Harris as president, it would have made all the difference in the world.

Now I'm kind of at a loss. Up until November of 2024, I had had hope that future historians would view it as inevitable that when Americans had come right up to the edge of fascism, they roundly rejected it. Now I don't know what to hope for or if there is any hope left. We can't even look forward to Trump's unhealthy lifestyle finally finishing him off because is VP is misogynistic slimeball.

Around this time, readers might be reminding me that I don't live in the US. While my kids and I are still US citizens, we're also citizens of France and Switzerland, and we live in Switzerland. As far as France is concerned, they've got some problems too. We got the opportunity to participate in the center-left action to block the fascists in the French legislative elections, but all over Europe it looks like the far right is gaining. I hope that is a wrong impression.

Here in Switzerland, we recently defeated a massive nationwide highway expansion proposal. Thanks heavens I have the right to live in this island of sanity where people are rejecting the inefficient, dead-end path of car-centric transportation. Switzerland also serious issues, but at least on my one favorite issue, I got one bit of joyful news.

Creative Hobbies

My participation in ZEST (Zürich English-Speaking Theatre) continues to be a great creative-social component of my life.

Since I didn't learn my lesson from last year, I agreed to act as head of set dressing for the Spring production "Communicating Doors". I'm half joking -- it was a great experience and I'm glad I did it -- but I feel like it was sometimes more stress and responsibility than I had the time and energy to handle. I'd like to take on another "head of"-level role in some future production -- but not any time soon.

I really enjoy doing backstage work, though. It's a fun and not-terribly-stressful way to help out and be part of the production. As I mentioned, last year Nico and I volunteered to be on the stage crew for their November production of "The Lieutenant of Inishmore", and this year I worked backstage on the costume crew for "Dogfight", which was fun.

Due to a series of scheduling conflicts, I haven't been able to go to improv for about 6 months. The cool part is that Nico has been going by himself -- which I think is a good sign.

My other hobby organization (Main Street Plaza and MAA Books) had some cool developments this past year! Chino Blanco (of the exmo reddit) organized a panel at Sunstone that was intended as a reprise of a panel I had organized more than a decade ago. I even got to participate virtually! Monya Baker represented Main Street Plaza in person, and met some up-and-coming authors.

I'm really pleased with how the Sunstone adventure has livened up our little community! As of this writing, we're currently in the middle of our awards season -- the big yearly event hosted by Main Street Plaza. The voting for X-Mormon of the Year has been pretty lively, not to mention the many nominations for the Brodie Awards!

In family creative projects, Nico and I have been rebuilding Totally Normal Town, and I've got plenty more awesome original builds planned: a new mountain + castle for Elsa, a Japanese garden + temple & dojo, and some city buildings to flan the tracks of the seilbahn.

The only thing that's stopping me from building the next planned items is that as soon as I start on an original build, I get kind of obsessed and can't work on anything else for about a week. I don't have time to do that between now and our trip to Japan (see below), so I have to set it aside for now. But these planned builds are on my 2025 creative project goals list!

Then, to put this awesome city-under-the-stairs to good use, Nico took the lead in directing a new "film noir" murder mystery episode of out Totally Normal Town video series. This was fun for the whole family -- including some memorable performances by Léo and my husband. It also helped me get more practice with video editing. And Nico has got some great new episodes planned for 2025!!

I also succeeded in one of my personal goals of learning to make animations in Unity!! I had wanted to make some Pokémon Go videos for my channel, but I felt like I wanted a cool, animated intro for them. So I created the following:

Then I used it in two initial Pokémon Go videos: in Budapest and Scuol. As you can see, my video-creation skills still need some work, so that's another of my creative goals for 2025 -- to improve my skills with some new Pokémon Go videos.

I'd actually also like to try to make at least one more animation in Unity (so I don't forget what I learned about how to do it). And I'd also like to finally complete my stated Unity goal from last year which is to create a minimal Unity game that contacts a server (and collaborate with my kids on a corresponding game project).

Then the #1 thing that I'd really like to do by the end of 2025 is to pick up work on my comic book again.

It took me 7 years to illustrate the first volume!! That's why I set it down -- I felt like it was keeping me from working on all of these other projects. But now that I've made some good progress on a lot of my other projects, I feel like I want to work on my comic book in parallel. I have some good ideas for imagery, and I'd like to get back into the fun of world-building.

So my comic book goal for 2025 is to have the second and third volumes completely blocked out -- all pages filled with (empty) panels and text -- and I'd like to do any necessary technical updates/upgrades so that I have drawn at least a few panels before the end of the year.

In addition to my main creative goals, I have a list of smaller things I'd like to get done:

• Review the computerized music creation I'd done a couple of years ago -- see if I can squeeze anything good out of it.
• Update Mormon Alumni Association Books (add more books).
• Blog about my garden -- I learned a lot in 2024, but skipped blogging about it for some reason.
  
• Maybe another hobby website...

Family and Languages

I've grouped my family situation and my language learning goals this year! Here's why:

My husband has been wanting to take a trip to Japan for years -- and this coming Spring we'll finally be going on our trip-of-a-lifetime to Japan!! All four of us!

In order to get the most out of our trip, my husband has decided to try to learn Japanese. For the past few months, he's been using this Renshuu app to practice reading and writing Japanese on his tablet.

After learning French in grad school, I got the idea that I'm a person who likes learning languages. I got a bit of a start on various languages -- and in particular my husband and I had fun learning Italian together back before we were married.

My Italian is still pretty decent because we listen to a lot of Italian opera (and I learned the words to a number of arias). Plus it was just a fun thing to do together. We still have some little catch-phrases we sometimes say to each other from the "40 Leçons pour parler Italien" book that we read together:

• "Gli spaghetti italiani sono sempre al dente!"
• "L'Italia è il primo produttore mondiale di vino."
• "Ma è fantastico imparare una lingua straniera -- soprattutto l'italiano!"
• ...and some expressions from operas: "Poverino!" and "Eccomi!"

The difficulty I've had learning German in Zürich has kind of put me off of the idea that I'm "good at learning languages" lol, but when I saw my husband doing his Japanese lessons, I started to feel tempted. ...Especially after he found me the recordings for "40 Leçons pour parler Japonais" -- the Japanese version of my favorite language-learning series that I've used for both Italian and German.

Anyway, it's been very fun and even kind of romantic to learn a new language together like we did way back in the honeymoon phase of our relationship.

I've actually also improved on my German this year because in my current (temporary) job I have to speak German all the time. And my new Japanese-learning hobby has taught me some tricks that I can apply to my Swiss-German lessons after we get back from Japan.

Our kids are doing well and making progress in their studies. I don't want to go into too much detail because it's their story to tell, but I'll report any new diplomas that they earn. :D

So I guess that's where I'm at in a nutshell! I hope things will go according to plan -- and that things will get better and not worse for us and the world in the coming year!

State of the Me: 2023-2024

I guess my overview for this year is that I've made good progress, but long-term goals remain... long-term goals!

So let's dig into my usual set of goals and where I'm at with them!

Job and Career-Related Projects:

Regarding my job, the company I work for has had some significant issues over the past year that have shown up in the news! The CEO/founder actually resigned after The New Yorker wrote a (rather negative) profile of him!!

So, since this blog is technically public, I don't want to say anything at all about it. Anyway, there are a lot of things still up in the air -- hopefully there will be some positive resolutions to write about in next year's state-of-the-me!

That said, I'm proud of my progress in career development projects outside of my immediate job:

I'm in the process of upgrading my hobby-server projects!! I have some virtual machines in the cloud that I set up years ago with a bunch of fun applications: blogs, minecraft, version-control, etc. And this past fall I finally started upgrading them to running on kubernetes!!

I hadn't started on this upgrade earlier because there were a handful of issues that I needed to resolve in order to make them work. The good news is that the solutions I've found will provide some new content for my professional blog!! Getting everything up and running on kubernetes -- and reviving my tech blog with this new material -- is my big career goal for 2024.

Creative Projects and Processes:

I got a Windows laptop as one of my two big birthday presents (along with an awesome trip to London for me & Léo in which we finally got to attend an in-person Pokémon event -- so much fun!!!)

If you know me, you know I'm a server-side engineer and hard-core command-line Linux user, so Windows is naturally an anathema to me! But... my kids are both programming video games, so if I want to be able to collaborate with them, I needed a Windows machine.

Some game and content-creation software can technically be installed on Linux but doesn't really work on Linux, in particular: Unity and DaVinci Resolve. Installing them on my Windows machine made all the difference.

Regarding Unity, my kids and I were all able to install the Unity version control system, and hence I was able to run one of Nico's projects on my own machine! so we're set up to collaborate, and I look forward to some collaborative projects in 2024. Naturally, I'm hoping we'll make some sort of multi-player project so that I can focus on the server-side myself. :D

Regarding DaVinci Resolve, I'm thrilled to announce that I'm finally learning to edit videos!! This has been on my list of goals for some time. I'm really glad Nico has taken the initiative to direct some more Totally Normal Town videos so we can practice and improve our craft. Here's the latest -- and, yes, we demolished our Lego town again!

For our next incarnation of Totally Normal Town, I've already set up the street layout, and -- as I'd been planning for some time -- I've narrowed the roads make this a walking-biking-public-transit urban paradise!!!

So, in 2024, I'm planning to sink my teeth into some great video and video game projects with my kids!!

One final project wrap-up from 2023: I finally did a complete print run of my comic book in both English and French. As I mentioned last year, I had completed the illustrations (and did one small English-language print run), but there were some non-trivial corrections and improvements to do before doing the real print run. And I didn't get started until Summer -- for reasons I'll describe below. Now I have a beautiful set of complete prints of the first volume that I'm very proud of.

Creative + Social:

Remember last year when I said I was planning to join the local English-speaking theater club? Well, that has turned out to be everything I was hoping for and more!! Nico and I have been participating actively, and it has been a fantastic framework for meeting and spending time with fun, creative people -- locally, in person!

In the beginning of the year, I volunteered to be head of costumes for the production of "Steel Magnolias". The production was a huge success!! For me, it was a lot of stress and responsibility which ate up essentially all of my free time for the first half of the year -- but it was absolutely worth it!!

We've also been regularly participating in the monthly improv, and Nico and I also volunteered to be on the stage crew for their November production of "The Lieutenant of Inishmore". Léo and Emmanuel also joined the club and have participated a bit, but not as much as Nico and I have.

Now that my kids are in their early 20's, I'm just so pleased with how all of our family relationships have developed and deepened. I'm glad that I have fun leisure activities that I share with each of them so that I get to spend extensive one-on-one time with each of them. Léo plays along with me and my Pokémon Go addiction -- we have so much fun going all over town together curating our awesome collections of rare Pokémons! Sharing the theater club activities with Nico has been equally fantastic, and all three of us have had a great time working together on Totally Normal Town!!

With my adorable husband Emmanuel, I have various shared interests, especially travel and entertaining. We love throwing parties for our friends, with all of the entertaining conversation that entails! Currently we're getting ready for our big family trip to Japan that is planned for spring of 2025. This trip is something Emmanuel has been talking about for years, and we're all psyched to make it a reality!

This is the thing I've been most grateful for in 2023: my wonderful family!

The four of us have shared fantastic projects and adventures, and I feel like our mutual bonds of love and respect have only gotten deeper. I feel lucky to have this family because these types of bonds are the most important things in life. And I'm looking forward to things just getting better in the years to come!

Other Odds and Ends:

Since I had so much fun with my garden this past Summer, I'm planning to grow some seedlings this year starting in February. I haven't done indoor seedlings in a while -- in 2023 in particular, my Spring was entirely taken up by "Steel Magnolias" -- but I'm ready to try again!

Regarding Schweizerdeutsch, I really like the book I mentioned last year ("Züritüütsch isch aifach schön"), and I'm slowly learning from it, but with all my other projects, I haven't really had time to focus on it as much as I'd like...

Conclusion:

There's never enough time to do everything I want to do, but I will continue plugging along for as long as I can -- and enjoying the journey with loved ones all the way!!

Gardening Survival of the Fittest!

 

This year I was feeling lazy with respect to gardening, so I didn't plant any seedlings indoors in February to prepare for my garden.

Then, when mid-May rolled around (time to plant stuff outside!), I was still feeling a little lazy. So -- aside from my usual ten tomato plants for the year -- I didn't buy any new plants.

Instead I thought it would be fun to play "survival of the fittest"!!

Basically, I decided to just plant all of my expired seeds -- without any regard for following the planting instructions -- and see who wins!

And I learned a number of interesting lessons that I will apply to next year's garden!

I'll go through them pot-by-pot, starting from the shady side of the garden. This balcony faces due west, so the shady side is to the south. As you can see from the photo above, the wall of the neighbor's apartment casts a shadow on the south side of the balcony whenever the sun appears to the south of us (which is most of the time).

Against the south wall, we have the mints. The mints have already won the "survival of the fittest" challenge years ago, so nothing new was added to that pot this round.

This pot is the only one of the long trough pots that I haven't ever dumped to chop up and rotate the dirt. I just planted some mint plants once, and they thrive every year. I just remove the old stalks, occasionally add some more dirt and fertilizer, and they're good to go.

I feel like I might need to change their dirt at some point or maybe add some worms since the soil must be really compacted by now. But the plants are still thriving, and I'm not planning any intervention until they show signs of distress.

The small pots in the foreground are various herbs (mostly perennials) that I've bought over the past few weeks.

The first pot in the row of pots was also excluded from the "survival of the fittest" experiment. This pot had been used for raspberries since the beginning of this garden.

My parents had a shady raspberry patch for the 25-or-so years that they owned their house in Edina (and it was probably there long before and after), so I decided to plant raspberries in this shady pot.

The raspberries were very successful for many years. I had a number of real bumper crops, and they reseeded themselves for years (they're biennials).

But the past few years they'd been doing increasingly poorly. I bought supplemental raspberry plants and added them to the pot for the past two years, but they all died out. This year, no new plants grew, and the ones from last year (that are supposed to grow the berries) were all dead.

I just left the pot alone in mid-May to see if anything would recover, but they didn't. I figured that probably this dirt is just done growing raspberries, and I'm kind of bored of them as well. So last week I dumped out the dirt and chopped it up and put it back to start over.

I looked up possible shade plants to put in this pot, and I hit upon "Alpine Strawberries". Since we're near the Alps, that seemed like a good, local choice. So I bought some strawberry plants that I think are Alpine strawberries (I didn't really check), and planted them in this pot. So far they are doing well.

I finished off the pot with basil and cilantro/coriander (purchased plants) because those also like shade.

My plans for this pot for next year: Fill it completely with Alpine strawberries.

The next pot was the first one to get random seeds.

In this one I planted seeds of tomatoes and parsley. And what came up?

Mostly weeds. There's one particular plant that is very aggressive and ugly and unuseful. I don't think it's a native plant, but either way, it's not welcome in my garden because it keeps crowding out all the other plants.

I waited until the plants had all grown a number of leaves to confirm that it wasn't the parsley before pulling up the weeds, and I think some of the plants I planted got off to a slow start due to competition with these weeds. But after weeding, the plants have been fairly successful. Here's what grew:

Of the five tall plants against the railing, three of them are tomatoes. This impressed me because these started from seeds on May 15th, and they're already growing flowers. They won't grow as many tomatoes as the tomato plants in the other pot, but we'll see some.

Additionally some parsley grew (I've never had a lot of luck with parsley), plus a lot of clover (not sure what to do with that), and a single stray basil plant. I later added two (purchased) hot-pepper plants (they're plants #1 and #4 from the left), and bunch of dill because there were some yellow swallowtail caterpillars in this pot. One of them is currently a pupa attached to the left side of this pot (not visible in the photo).

My plans for this pot for next year: I would like this pot to be my caterpillar sanctuary. So this pot will be full of parsley and dill. I'll try again to grow them from seeds. Plus I'll put a row of hot pepper plants (the caterpillars don't eat them, but the caterpillars do like the shade). But for the hot-pepper plants, I'll grow some from seedlings starting in February because the shops didn't have a good selection of hot-pepper plants this year.

In this pot, I planted lettuce and pumpkins and tomatoes. The lettuce came up immediately and drowned out everything else.

Two pumpkin plants have bravely poked up leaves in this sea of lettuce, but I don't have much hope for them. (I think you can't even see them in the picture.)

What I learned from this is the following: Don't try to plant any other seeds at the same time as lettuce. The lettuce will win. There were probably some of those weeds trying to grow in this pot, but the lettuce grew thick and fast and drowned almost everything else out.

The most surprising thing is that I've seen pots of this same lettuce for sale at the plant nursery. Considering how fast this stuff grows from seeds, I'm not sure why one would buy it already grown.

The other lesson I learned was to only grow one pot of lettuce. Even eating salads as often as we can, this pot is growing way more lettuce than we can possibly eat. I don't know if you can see from the picture, but we've already chopped bunches and bunches of the lettuce out to eat.

(Also note that there's a butterfly pupa on this pot as well. You can kind of see it in the photo -- it's the dark spot on the right-hand side near the bottom.)

My plans for this pot for next year: Plant all of the different varieties of lettuce seeds and let them duke it out amongst themselves.

On either side of the lettuce pot are my two apple trees. This year has been their worst year yet as they did not even begin to grow a single apple between the two of them. Usually they grow at least a few, and one time they grew enough to make an apple pie without any supplemental purchased apples.

I'm not sure what went wrong this year. They only grew a few flowers -- which were covered with ants -- and didn't produce any fruits.

Maybe I need to fertilize them more or add some worms to break up the soil in their pots. Maybe the marjoram that has decided to grow as a ground-cover in their pots is taking up resources...? Maybe I should poison the ants...?

Or maybe it's just a fluke and they'll be fine next year...?

Next we have my prized tomatoes! Growing beautifully as always! Covered with flowers and ripening tomatoes.

I bought these 10 plants from Migros. They had a good selection this year, so I actually got 6 different varieties.

I planted some basil seeds in the pots with them, but the basil hasn't done great. I think planting basil seeds in the pots with already-mature tomato plants blocked the basil's sunlight too much.

My plans for these pots for next year: Plant the basil seeds earlier so they have a bit of a head start. Plant tomato seedlings in February instead of buying the plants in May.

In this pot we have the star winner of the "survival of the fittest" challenge: the peas!

I had planted peas earlier (last year?) according to the instructions and got only one or two sad little pea stalks. So I intended to give up on peas. But I still had the rest of the packet of pea seeds, so I thought I'd give them another shot.

This time I dug a trench along the west side of the pot and just poured the whole packet of pea seeds in. And boy did they grow! And they're covered with pods of delicious, sweet peas! (I harvested them a few days ago, so you might get a wrong impression from the photo of how many peas there are.)

The peas were the only seeds that were able to hold their own against the lettuce seeds. They had a bit of an advantage since they had the whole row along the sunny side of the pot.

As you can see, I also planted lettuce in this pot -- a different kind than in the other pot -- but it also came in thick and fast!

The other plants you see pictured are ones that I purchased and added later. The one with a little vine growing along the ground is a plant of mini-cucumbers and the one with the larger leaves is some kind of round, yellow zucchini. They're both making some progress towards growing some fruits. (or vegetables, I guess...? But I think that botanically it's the fruit of the plant...?)

I wanted to grow some ground-vine plants in the two northern-most pots because I had good luck with that strategy last year, growing some melons. There's more room and more sun in that part of the balcony, so one way to take advantage of it is to grow plants that will grow vines along the floor of the balcony.

The yellow zucchinis are not making any such vines, so I'll probably skip them for next year. We'll see how the mini-cucumbers do.

My plans for this pot for next year: Peas again!! Plus I'll grow some melon plants from seeds in February since I couldn't find any melon plants for purchase this year. Maybe also mini-cucumbers, depending on how they do.

Then, as a ground-cover for the rest of the pot, maybe some annual herbs like cilantro and basil.

The last pot is the pot that had the most adventures.

I filled it with seeds of dill and hot-pepper plants. The problem is that I didn't know what the hot-pepper plants were supposed to look like when they're small, so a whole field of this one week grew thick and fast -- and I assumed it was the peppers, so I let it grow.

This weed is very similar to the weed in the other pot (identical tiny flowers), but it has a different leaf configuration than the other one, so I didn't recognize it until the mass of weeds was practically a bush. (I later also planted the same cucumber and zucchini plants in this pot as in the adjacent pot.)

So I had a bush of this weed battling it out with some brave dill. Then a yellow swallowtail butterfly (at least one) spotted the dill and decided that it was a good place to lay her eggs. At least 5 eggs were laid (one of them was probably laid in another pot).

The caterpillars hatched and made short work of the dill. I recognized them as butterfly caterpillars (we'd caught one on our dill a few years ago and brought it in), so I bought a butterfly/caterpillar cage and another pot of dill to put in the cage and brought three caterpillars inside.

While the three caterpillars in the cage were busy eating and sleeping and digesting and pooping and growing, etc., I noticed there were two more caterpillars still outside. I decided to just leave those two outside and see what happens. (They both successfully transformed into pupae, as mentioned above -- the first three are currently pupae in the cage on my shelf.)

Anyway, around this same time, I wised up and figured out that the bushy plants weren't hot-chili plants, and were, in fact, a variety of the same weed that had been choking out my parsley in the other pot. So I yanked them all out. There were two tiny hot-pepper plants, but I don't think they'll grow big enough to grow any chilis this year.

Once I noticed the remaining caterpillar, I planted another few pots of dill in the pot for it, but without the weeds, the pot was too sunny. So the caterpillar made a long trek along the edge of the balcony and joined its sibling in the second pot from the end. (These two became the outdoor pupae.)

Since I was at the plant store, I also bought a pot plant out of curiosity and planted it in the right-hand corner. Now I'm regretting it a bit, though, because I have a strict policy against planting perennials (other than mints) in these long trough planters because it's a huge pain to dig them out if they get big and don't work out. I think I will dig this plant back out while it's still small and plant it in an individual pot. I think I'll need to buy a new pot for it.

My plans for this pot for next year: Along the west side, I'll probably grow either peas or hot peppers or maybe something else. I'll probably fill it with ground vines and some small herbal ground-cover plant like the adjacent pot.

In conclusion: my early-year laziness inspired an experiment that was interesting enough to re-energize my interest in my garden! I'm looking forward to some beautiful fruits, vegetables, herbs, and butterflies this year and next!!

State of the Me: 2022-2023

This year's "State of the Me" is probably going to be the most positive one so far in this whole series! I'd just like to remind readers that I started this series in January 2010 because I was depressed about moving from France to Switzerland and really needed to make some long-term changes to get my life in order. So if this post looks at all like a brag-fest, it's that a bunch of goals I've been chipping away at for the past decade or two have actually wrapped up successfully in 2022!!

First and foremost: I actually finished illustrating book 1 of my comic book!!!

To recap: I wrote the script for the 3-book series during a fantastic vacation in Paris in 2014. By the end of 2015, I had the main concept art done. By mid-2016, I had finished illustrating part 2 of book 1. By mid-2017, I had finished illustrating part 1 of book 1. And then part 3 of book 1 -- which was supposed to be easy because it took place in mostly the same places as parts 1 & 2 -- took me until midway through 2022.

I need to do a bit of last-minute cleanup/corrections before printing a batch of copies of the comic book, but I expect to have it ready to go before the end of my Christmas vacation.

My plan had always been that I'd look for a publisher once book 1 was done, but I feel like I'm not quite ready to do that yet. Since it took me about five years just to draw these last 16 pages, I need to ensure that if & when I find a publisher, I'll be in a position where I can reduce my work hours and do whatever else it takes to draw the other two books as quickly as possible.

This leads into my main goals for the upcoming year:

1. Improve my skills at tools for creative processes. Specifically, I'd like to get better at creating music with the computer and at creating (2d) animations (probably with Unity). Plus I bought a green screen -- and my kids and I tried it out and found that it's quite easy to swap out the green background using ordinary editing software.

I'd like to be able to create at least reasonably professional-looking videos. I have no intention of doing it professionally, but I love storytelling through various media (amateur theater, comic books, puppet shows), and I feel like if I put in just a bit of effort on learning the tools better, I could make stuff that would be cool and that I could be proud of.

Additionally, it's fun doing collaborations with my two (now adult) kids, like our Totally Normal Town series, and I'd just like to get myself into a position where I feel like I have the skills to create a good video whenever inspiration hits.

I'd like to be in that position before I lock myself into another who-knows-how-many years of focusing on drawing the other two books of my comic book trilogy (hence wouldn't have the time to build these background skills) which is why I'd like to do this before doing a serious search for a publisher.

2. Improve my tool set for drawing my comic book. When I first started drawing it, I developed some simple tools in Python for some image correction tasks, and I've stuck with the same toolset and techniques for the whole eight years or so that I've been working on it. Now that I'm at a good breaking point, I think I can use that experience to evaluate how I can improve my techniques in order to create my drawings faster as well as better.

Once I've accomplished those two goals (hopefully by the end of 2023!) I think I will finally be ready to start looking for a publisher for my comic book.

Another related goal I've set for 2023 is that I'd like to join the local English-speaking community theater group (along with my kids). This so completely nails what we need in our lives right now that I'm kind of afraid to get my hopes up too high with respect to this working out. But here's the situation:

My kids attended the French school (Lycée Français de Zürich), so they never learned German quite as well as they should have, and they speak almost no Switzerdutsch. Since they have always been close with each other (plus they're not neurotypical), they didn't really even make a lot of lasting friendships among their French-speaking classmates. And English is the language they're most comfortable in by far.

A few months ago my older son Nico was feeling stressed about various aspects of his life -- including his lack of socializing outside the family. So I made some suggestions: (1) that we take a Switzerdutsch class together, and (2) I recommended joining an English-speaking community theater group I had heard about.

So we took the Switzerdutsch class together (the last class was this past Monday), and we're planning to sign up for the English theater club in January. The Switzerdutsch class was not great for socializing (it was a tiny class), but it was a good opportunity to get out and interact with other people (the institute that Nico is attending to learn video game programming/design is mostly online).

I think the theater club will be better because it will give an opportunity to interact with all sorts of people in real life -- in English -- doing something fun and creative together. I'll try to get my younger son Léo to join as well since improv theater was one of his favorite after-school activities. And we could all use some new friends -- especially locals who might be interested in collaborating with us on our other creative projects. (My husband might also participate a bit, but maybe not since he has his own separate interests.)

Naturally I'm always grateful for my more distant friends and creative collaborators! Here are some who've been keeping Main Street Plaza lively as we enter into awards season again:

• Donna Banta just put out a fantastic murder mystery: Seer Stone
• I really enjoyed Johnny Townsend's recent novel: Orgy at the STD Clinic (which made the Kirkus Best Indie Books of the Year list)
• Holly Welker edited another fantastic collection of LDS-interest essays earlier this year: Revising Eternity
• And I think Monya's book will be released soon!

I have a list of good ideas for more blog posts, but somehow I've been doing a bad job of buckling down and writing them. Maybe this will change now that I've discovered Mastodon (where I post as @chanson@social.linux.pizza). I always liked the decentralized landscape of the blogging world, and I'd been long hoping that a communication network like the #fediverse would come along and replace the for-profit social media platforms. Now I find I'm energized about connecting with people online again!

And now for the latest status on my other long-running goals:

1. Learning German and Integrating:

We're officially Swiss!! My husband and I and our two children now all have Swiss passports!

To some degree I feel like I will always be a foreigner wherever I go, but this step has had a huge impact on my outlook. Now I feel like I belong here -- like I'm a part of this place and a part of this culture.

I'm also happy that I was able to get my name change recognized. When I became French, I changed my first name from Carol to Carole, but I had to jump through some additional hoops to get this name change legally recognized in Switzerland (since my birth certificate says "Carol"). It's a silly little thing, but it's part of my chosen identity as a European.

My German is pretty fluent, but I've been wanting to at least understand Swiss German for a long time -- ever since I noticed that hearing it made me feel excluded. But it's really hard to find any reasonable materials for learning it!! The course I took with Nico was somewhat helpful, but not as helpful as I would have liked.

My new plan/hope/goal is to use the book Züritüütsch isch aifach schön -- which contains the lyrics to 5 CDs worth of clever Züritüütsch songs with transcripts and translations into high German and English. I like it so far -- I just need to set up a schedule to learn new songs from it regularly.

2. Freeing my apartment of clutter:

I've been talking about this one for years, and I think it's finally in a good state. It's not perfect, but I've managed to donate (online) some of the larger items that were still good, and I've recycled and reorganized and thrown away so many things that I now have space to breathe. I no longer feel like I'm drowning in junk!

3. My job:

My career is going amazingly well. Since I've been at my current company, I've had a vision of building a centralized DevOps/Cloud Infrastructure team that meets each tech team where they're at -- providing as much or as little setup/training/support as they need to deploy their projects to the cloud infrastructure (which we maintain) in a scalable and automated way. And I've made it so.

Looking at my team now, this positioning seems expected and inevitable -- but in reality, it took some work to convince various teams across the company to trust us with this responsibility rather than fragmenting the DevOps tasks.

 

I've had the pleasure and privilege of training and collaborating with some fantastic colleagues. My boss has done a fantastic job of helping us prioritize a new roadmap of system-wide upgrades. And the icing on the cake is that I earned a big raise and promotion -- I've been the tech lead of my team for months!

My only goal on this one is to update my CV and my linked-in profile with all of the fantastic successes in this job!!

4. Anything else...?

I've gotten all recommended vaccines and boosters, and we're still masking in the public transport and while shopping. So far none of us has gotten Covid at all.

The protection provided by the vaccines has allowed me and my husband to resume some of our favorite leisure activities, especially travel and throwing parties.

On the very bad side, the world's response to climate change is still nowhere near where it needs to be. But at least in my little micro corner of the world 2022 was a good year. Let's hope 2023 will be even better!!

State of the Me: 2021-2022

This blog is essentially defunct, yet somehow I like to continue using it to keep track of my goals and aspirations from one year to the next...

As usual, I'll divide this into a few major categories: Job, Projects, and Family/Home.

Job

I've passed so many years in which my job has been a constant and massive source of stress that I hardly imagined I would ever get it into a good state. But, amazingly enough, I feel like I've finally settled into the job I want: (1) I'm working of a company that is entirely focused on combating climate change, and (2) I have an expert-level position with a lot of responsibility and corresponding autonomy.

Plus I'm really lucky to be reporting to someone who is great at both tech and management. As I've said before, the #1 factor that distinguishes a fantastic job from a living hell is your immediate supervisor -- and my current supervisor is one of the best (if not the very best) I've had.

I am currently working as a DevOps Engineer and Cloud Administrator with a major focus on Kubernetes. After working in every part of IT, I feel like this is the part of the stack where I most want to be: helping multiple teams get their projects deployed and keeping everything running smoothly.

The Kubernetes certification I worked hard on last year was hugely stressful but it has really paid off: I feel like I know Kubernetes well, I know how to get it to do what I want, and I enjoy working with it. And now in the spring I'll be giving a couple of workshops on it for the women-in-tech club I'm in.

If things continue to go well, I could absolutely see myself staying with this job for the rest of my career. It has been less than a year so far, though, so I don't want to speak too soon.

Family/Home

This has been a pretty good year for my little family. Léo passed the Bac, so we're done with school. Nico and Léo have both moved on to an institute where they're studying video game programming -- which is nice because now they can focus on what they want to do and are good at.

The other bit of good news is that our Swiss citizenship is in the final stages of being secured. Nico has already gotten a letter confirming that he is now Swiss (his application was processed separately as he was already over 18 when we started this process), and the rest of us are almost there.

Personally I have been spending time trying to learn Swiss German, but it's tough going. It is weirdly difficult to find the one simple best thing I've found for learning a language: a series of audio dialogs with a transcription and translation into some other language that I understand.

The boys have their own projects that they're working on: stories, video games (developing as well as playing), and video story series (for private home screening only, so far). Nico even organized a new Halloween tradition for us -- having each person tell a scary story -- and the first iteration of it went great!

All of the isolation surrounding Covid has been a breeze for us -- we've been so happy in our little pod watching films together, playing games, and traveling when possible. I almost worry that we're too comfortable in our isolation, but I think it's better than the alternative in which we're dying to get away from each other.

And, unfortunately, we're still drowning in clutter. I've marked all of the days of the cargo tram and electro tram on my calendar, though (this is the opportunity to dispose of large objects), and I've set a goal to try to dispose of at least a bag or two of the long-term clutter every week this year.

Projects

The third section of book 1of my comic book is still not done!! But it's close. I basically just need to draw some fantasy machinery and wrap up a little more than a page. Then I want to clean everything up and make a proper publisher-pitch-portfolio for it.

I don't want to rush this (as much as it sounds crazy to say that after all of the years this has taken), but I would like to be sure that -- if and when this gets picked up by a publisher -- I would be in a position to focus on this project and get the other two books done.

Regarding other projects, I worked on a mini-project of writing a python program that would generate music in XML format to be played by the linux program lmms. I think it turned out pretty well, but could have been better -- in part because the free instruments that are included with lmms are not that great. I might try to search for more instruments for it online.

Otherwise, I'm leaning towards maybe taking some online courses on using software for drawing, animations, and music. Naturally, I only want to use tools that save projects in a parsable, text-based format (like xml or json) so I can do my own custom manipulations, but it's likely that I can make more progress if I don't always assume that I have to program all of my tools myself from scratch.

Of course the project I'm most excited about is -- a new comic book script! I honed the idea for it during our pleasant family weekend in Scuol, and I finished writing it last week. It's not related to my current comic book, so I lean towards using what I learned from drawing my current comic book to try to start from the beginning with better tools and improve my style. I think this new one might  work better distributed online rather than through a publisher, and I'm really pleased with it, so I'm looking forward to drawing it when I have time.

Also, Main Street Plaza is alive again. We're actually doing the Brodie Awards again, which is cool. I find it increasingly challenging to write about Mormonism, though. This is for two main reasons:

Firstly, while it was great fun working on Main Street Plaza while it was relatively popular, it was also a huge amount of work to build up even a small amount of interest, community, and name recognition. Blogging about Mormonism was basically my main hobby for about a decade, and -- while I did get some traction (I'm pleased with some personal essays I got published in a book and a magazine) -- it never really took off to the point of being properly famous even in the tiny pond of online discussion of Mormonism. It's exhausting just thinking about it.

I feel like I've said essentially all I have to say about Mormonism. I came up with some really good analysis of various aspects of the religion and culture -- and I tossed it into the grand chasm of the Internet where it was read a bit and then forgotten...

Secondly, I've lost patience with Mormonism. And, yes, I will continue to call it "Mormonism" rather than whatever euphemism the current CoJCoL-dS would prefer us to use, because this movement is bigger than and not wholly owned by the corporation of the president. (Also because they didn't even try to provide a workable alternative.)

Anyway, about my patience, or loss thereof. Over the years that I was writing about Mormonism, I actually had a rather upbeat attitude to the whole thing despite being a non-believer. I felt like it was actually kind of cool to have been a part of this unique movement. And, even more, I felt like the church was more of an obstacle that I'd climbed over -- getting stronger in the process. So I saw it as, on balance, something interesting that we learned from and gained wisdom to pass along to our community.

Now, for reasons I can't state on a public blog, I feel like a key part of that progress and good will has been erased, at least for me. And it makes me feel sad and tired. I'm glad there are people still talking about it and helping the people who are currently hurting from their connection to Mormonism, whatever it may be. But one can hardly blame me for feeling more drawn to the positive items on the list above.

Conclusion

On balance, I'm making slow but steady progress in the direction I'd like to go. I hope to have many years ahead in which to accomplish my goals -- and I plan to enjoy those years along the way with my one true love and our two adorable sons.

State of the Me: 2020-2021

Hello 2021! I've got to admit it's getting better... but I'm not quite where I want to be just yet.

Let's start with my career since that's the facet of my life I've focused the most effort on lately. 

In August, I passed my Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam. I'm proud of this accomplishment because I haven't taken a timed exam this difficult since graduate school, so I was stepping outside of my comfort zone a bit. But I worked hard at preparing myself, and it was a lot of stress, but I succeeded.

It turns out that I was absolutely right to prioritize passing this exam. Engineers with this certification are the hottest, most sought-after group in IT at the moment. Kubernetes is already on its way to becoming the industry standard for running software in the cloud -- so every company wants to move in that direction. But it's so new that very few people have any significant experience with it. Hence this certification takes the place of years of experience when finding professionals with real Kubernetes expertise.

Armed with this credential, I finally landed a new job back in the climate change / carbon reduction sector! I'll be starting on the first of February. Everything about it seems to align perfectly with what I've been looking for in a job, in terms of the type of company it is and the types of projects. I'll even be back to working at Zürich's startup central -- Technopark -- which should be fun!

I just hesitate to take a victory lap before I've gotten a chance to see how it will go. When I accepted my current job (the one I'm leaving), I figured it would be less stressful than my last one since the management and business strategy are someone else's problem. Management can do any crazy thing they want -- as long as I can carve out a comfortable little niche for myself, I'm fine. Yet somehow I wasn't quite able to do even that, for various reasons that I will analyze at length once I have the luxury of viewing it in hindsight.

So, yeah, another year, another job. I guess that's the worry -- if I couldn't make things work out the way I wanted in these last two jobs, will I ever succeed? OTOH, I have high hopes that this time I've triangulated in on the job I had wanted from the beginning, one where I can do work that I'm proud of and feel good about. To be really useful, as all the good little engines want to be.

Then, of course, since all of these career challenges have eaten up all of my attention and more over the past few years, I still haven't been able to get where I want to be with my creative projects. My comic book was supposed to be done by the first half of 2020, and it's still not done. I'm happy with the parts I did this year, but the process is just too slow. I think I can speed it up by addressing some technological challenges. (My tablet is too small and has some problems with responsiveness.)

I think if I can just get to the point where I'm not constantly stressing out about my job, then I can finally enjoy working on my comic book and get energized about some fun, new creative projects that I'd really like to get to work on. And if that succeeds, maybe I'll even have some time to declutter my apartment.

Regarding the world at large, I'm happy that Trump will finally be leaving the White House. As I've said before, I don't agree with the people who said that voting him out is the "right" way to get him out -- he should have been impeached and convicted within the first year of his presidency. Whether the president is above the law is not a question that should be up for popular vote (or some weirdly-derived subset of the popular vote). If the US system can't eject a president for constantly and openly breaking the law, then the system is broken. But this band-aid is better than nothing. The bare last line of defense has held firm against the deadly march of fascism -- when there was no guarantee that it would. Hopefully this victory will help turn the tide and encourage the people to make serious changes and fix things for real.

In my own little family, things are basically on track. The four of us are closer than perhaps we've ever been. Now that the kids are adults, or nearly, we can share ideas and have conversations where we're on essentially the same level. Nico is doing well in his game development studies, and Léo is planning to apply to go to the same school as Nico next fall. Hopefully by then they'll be able to attend their classes in person and have more opportunity to meet other people their own age, but I think it has actually been helpful for Nico to start his studies without the extra pressure of socializing.

And we're all on track to become citizens of Switzerland soon!

So I guess I don't have a lot to complain about this time. It's good to take the time to write it all down and remind myself of the big picture while I'm stuck sitting around the house feeing annoyed about getting older (and all that entails) as I approach 50. But I'm far from done with what I plan to do in life -- and if I've succeeded in getting my career back on track and if I can finally dig into my creative projects productively in 2021, I do believe I'll be OK.

State of the Me: 2019-2020

Since this new year is a nice, round number -- and I'm hitting 20 years of marriage and 20 years of living in Europe at the end of this new year -- I'd like to give a two-decade review this time.

The three main axes are home/family, career, and creative projects.  All three have had some significant ups and downs.

Let's start with career since that's the simplest one.  It's been a mostly upward (if bumpy) trend since I started as a software engineer around twenty years ago.  Overall I think I've done a pretty good job o treating setbacks as "crisitunities" that ultimately led to gaining good experience. 

Some highlights include the time I had the opportunity to take a product from slides to production as the sole engineer in the company, and another where I served as CTO for more than two years.  Plus, I've written three books on Java programming and have given numerous lectures.

From this past year, I'm especially proud of the three lectures I gave for Climate-KIC the Journey -- including one where I was invited to speak at the Community Summit in Hamburg.  This was a great follow-up to the Climathon in 2018, where I had a great time assisting as an invited expert.  I also gave a talk on building a career through startups (at the Impact Hub).  This was a follow-up to some of my earlier writings for The Startup.

I have just started a new job, and so far it looks like it's going to be an exciting challenge.  I'm doing straight-up engineering (no management), and the project is one that's up my alley.  Of course leaving my previous job was something of a disappointment.  I really wanted to make it work, but I learned that -- while I can fix a lot of things -- there are some big factors outside of my control, even as CTO.  Ultimately, I had stop banging my head against the wall and move on.

Maybe at some point I'll be CTO of another tech startup (hopefully something related to addressing climate change!), but I will have to make sure that I'm really on the same page with the others running the company before accepting this level of role again.  I have learned that agreeing on the grand overarching goal just isn't enough to make all of the other components fit into place.

The path of my creative projects has been a bit bumpier.  Through the first decade of the current millennium I built a beautiful dream -- a work I poured my heart into and am still proud of.  But over the years I found that I couldn't make it take off.  I couldn't get it to soar.  It was devastating to watch that dream die.

I took up blogging around the same time.  It was amazingly fun at first because I could write essays on a variety of subjects that I'd been thinking about -- and people would read them.  But over time that became frustrating as well because the amount of time and effort it took to build any kind of audience and community (here and at Main Street Plaza) was so wildly out-of-proportion with the size of the community I could build.  I've found myself slowly giving up.

That said, I've had a great experience working with people and making friends within the Mormon Lit community.  I loved giving talks and panels at Sunstone.  (See this roundup post for links to some of my publications and presentations.)  The Brodie Awards (which I built) are still going, and there's an exciting new project in the pipeline at Mormon Alumni Association Books -- so hopefully in the upcoming year I can rekindle some of the projects I started.

But for my personal creative/artistic work, my biggest breakthrough came in 2015 when a new story came to me.  During a magical 3-week vacation in Paris I wrote wrote it out and figured out how I could actually draw it in my favorite story format :  la bande dessinée (as a comic book).  Now I've drawn more than 2/3 of the first book (of three), and I love the results!  I'd be done already if it weren't for work.  My new goal is to have book one done before the first half of 2020 is up.

Regarding family and home -- well, I'm happy with what I've built.

I started the millennium on a high note by marrying my true love and starting my new "happily ever after" life in France.  (I recounted act one of this romantic adventure in an essay for the book Baring Witness, 36 Mormon Women Talk Candidly about Love, Sex, and Marriage.) 

It was challenging to start a new life in a new country at the same time as starting a new family -- with two babies who arrived shortly after we installed ourselves in Bordeaux -- and no support network of family and friends there to help us out.  But it was a wonderful, magical time.  I finally felt truly at home living the life I chose for myself.

Moving to Switzerland in early 2008 was hard.  I think that challenge was the main impetus for starting this "state of the me" series, as I explored how I felt about starting over as a foreigner in a new place surrounded by a language I did not speak -- it was as though all of that life I'd built as a person integrated into French culture had been erased.

But, over time, I learned the new language.  I've learned a new city -- Zürich -- which I love now probably as much as I loved Bordeaux.  I became a citizen of France years ago, and we're all on track to become citizens of Switzerland.

My children were so young when we moved that they don't really remember living anywhere except for Zürich -- specifically this one neighborhood of Zürich where we've been living since 2010.  It's a great environment for kids, teens, and young adults because it's so easy to get around on foot, on bike, and especially on public transportation.

I'm glad that my older son passed the Baccalauréat exam this past year and my younger son is on track to pass it as well in a couple of years.  Both boys are very bright, so I had expected them to both be at the top of their respective classes throughout school, but that didn't really happen.  Maybe I should have pushed them harder and run a more disciplined household. 

I think what really stopped them from becoming high-achievers in academics was lack of effort (and lack of motivation to make an effort).  And I think that problem stems in part from each one having a best friend at home and feeling secure and content.  They have all sorts of projects that they collaborate on, and they should be able to build careers in some sort of informatics engineering, so I think they're doing fine the way they are.

My relationship with my husband has grown deeper and more loving over the years.  He is my best friend in the sense that he is the one person I can completely count on to have my best interests at heart -- and vice-versa.  I think that's key to a successful relationship -- each partner cares deeply about the other's happiness and well-being.  Partners, not competitors.

The one home-front area that needs some work at the moment is our home itself.  It's a beautiful apartment that fits our lifestyle well, but the clutter is starting to take over.  One of my goals for the next couple of years will be to sift through all of our junk in the basement storage and in the apartment.  I want to get rid of everything we don't need and organize the rest.  I hate to devote so much of my time to piles of consumer goods, but they're starting to crowd my space, and I don't want to just throw them all in a landfill.

The first part of my organizing-stuff program was to get all of the Legos in order (see this video).  And I made a beautiful Lego city  which has been a super fun project to share with my kids:

Now I'd like to clean up the rest of my stuff.  In particular, I plan to sign up for some online portal to sell or give away anything that's not useful to me but might be useful to someone else.

As for the world at large, it's hard to be really optimistic or hopeful.  The devastation we humans are wreaking upon our environment (that we need to survive) isn't slowing down, yet it needs to turn around and reverse immediately if or species is to survive past the next few generations.

On the bright side, it's encouraging to see worldwide climate strikes -- led by young people who aren't OK with the future that's being passed along to them.  And it's good to see that US democracy has enough breath of life left in it to impeach that criminal.  But US democracy is still on life support and it's not clear it will pull through.  We need to wrench out this kleptocracy and rebuild the civil, democratic institutions and social infrastructure if we are to make the changes necessary to save our world.  Specifically we need to stop the use of fossil fuels pronto, in addition to addressing the related problems of worldwide exploitation of people and resources, and the corresponding wars.  Can we build sustainable, just, and democratic systems to replace our current mess?  I hope so.

I hope Elizabeth Warren will win the US presidency, as I think she really has the skill, passion, and knowledge to take down the current stranglehold that the ultra-rich have on American society.

And I guess my biggest source of hope is the rising generation (from millennials on).  It looks like they recognize the kind of mess we're in, and I hope they are becoming galvanized -- learning down to their cores how dangerous authoritarianism, corruption, and runaway inequality really are.

Here's looking forward to 2020 -- good luck to us all!