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!!!

 

Totally Normal Town: Final Roundup!!

 I've finally finished editing the latest batch of TotallyNormalTown videos!!

Here's the "4th Wall Breaker" where I explained all of the buildings in the current iteration of our little sity-under-the-stairs -- what I was going for and my plans for the future:

 

 

The above is a companion video to the series of posts I wrote with explanations of the theme of the town and the various buildings:

•  LeGo Urbanist!! 
• Elsa's Totally Normal Castle 
• Welcome to our Little Japanese Corner! 
• Straddling the Tectonic Plates (again)! 
• For the Love of the Arts! 
• Power and Construction! 
• Time for Space College!! 

Nico has decided that it's time to wrap up the Totally Normal Town story series, so we made one last episode: Forks in the Road!! Here's the trailer:

 

And here's the full video:

 There are a total of six episodes of Totally Normal Town, spanning seven years!! In three of the episodes, the town gets completely destroyed. Here's the playlist so you can watch the whole saga!! 

Time for Space College!!

 

Another beloved character from Totally Normal Town got an upgraded location: Leo Deblin!!

Leo Deblin is a hilarious character created by Roy Wood Jr. for the Daily Show. He's an entrepreneur with a brick-and-mortar barber school in a strip-mall that he's constantly using as a headquarters for new business ventures. At least it was a little storefront in a strip-mall (next to Little Ceasar's) back in 2022. 

 Now Leo Deblin's Space College has a state-of-the-art facility upstairs from his "Institute of Barbering". Complete with a flight simulator for the students to learn to pilot!

 

And there's even a rocket simulator with a cockpit -- currently in use by Leo Deblin himself:

 

In the ground floor of the same building, there's a bakery café:

 

The bakery includes a nice terrace in back where you can enjoy your pastries:

 

There's also convenient access to public transportation, and for fun I included a stained-glass window with a mermaid on it.

I couldn't have this building open up in the usual ways: Since the seilbahn tracks are attached to the roof, I couldn't have the roof come off, and it's not on the edge of the tectonic plates either. So instead I designed the façades of both the bakery and the barbering institute as separate pieces that can be taken off to reveal the interior.

In the "Institute of Barbering" I put up a poster that I constructing by piecing together two screenshots from Leo Deblin's commercials.

So Chewbacca can learn to cut hair and pilot a spacecraft in one place! 

Power and Construction

 I'm going to have to stop working on Totally Normal Town for a while (so I can work on some of my other projects), but there are still vacant lots waiting for more buildings to be built! What to do?

I use my old stand-by: construction sites!

 

As I've said, many of the buildings in this town are new designs for buildings from 2022, but the two cranes you see in Totally Normal Town go back farther in time than that!

 

I designed this crane build in back in 2011!! For a town I built on my coffee table in my previous apartment!

(It's remarkable how much better I've gotten at this since 2011 -- and yet there are a fair number of ideas from that city that I still use today.)

I also built a wind-farm to serve as the power-plant:

 

I'm not really thrilled with the design, though. I like the forest of brightly-colored wind turbines, but I think the grey framework is too bulky -- you can't really see the florescent battery cylinders as much as I would like.

 When I start building again (probably in 2026 or 2027) my plan is to un-build the power plant and redesign a better version of it on the back of the lot (where the construction site is currently). Then in the front lot (where the wind-farm is now) I'll build an improved version of the factory from the 2022 Totally Normal Town.

 

For the love of the arts!

 

The theater is one of the few buildings in this town that is entirely new (not just a new version of an earlier building). Since my objective is to make a toy version of a great place to live, I asked myself what I'd like to have right in the middle of the town.

The answer was obvious: a theater! Especially considering what fun we've been having as members of a local theatre club ourselves.

I added a sculpture gallery upstairs to help make it a fun cultural outing for tourists and locals alike:

Tickets are sold from one corner of the façade, and the main entrance is at the other.

 

And you can enjoy a refreshing beverage at the rooftop bar during intermission or any time!

 

Straddling the tectonic plates (again)!

Totally Normal Town is built on a set of three separate serving tables -- each on wheels -- which we jokingly call the "tectonic plates." This allows easy access to all of the buildings -- despite the fact that the town is shoved into a corner under the staircase.

This design also allows another strategy to build complete buildings (with all four walls) and still have the interior easily accessible:

 

Like in an earlier Totally Normal Town, I put the supermarket on the ground floor of the split building (again with the Joyce Bysers MiniFigure at the cash register).

 Unlike last time, though, I didn't put "Chez François" upstairs because in this town François got much nicer digs:

So this time I put my own family's apartment above the supermarket:

 

Also on the ground floor, on one side, I added a pharmacy and a post office. On the interior side, I gave the pharmacy and post office both counters that face the interior of the supermarket, so people can pick up their prescriptions and mail their packages while doing their grocery shopping:

I put a cash machine in the post office because of course the post provides banking services:

Of course our apartment has a nice large balcony full of flowers and a nice table for outdoor dining -- and of course I added solar panels on the roof:

 ... with nice interior decor as well:

 

Welcome to our little Japanese corner!

 Like most of the builds in the current incarnation of Totally Normal Town, our Japanese corner is a new take on a build I did for the 2022 Totally Normal Town.

 

The dojo I had built back then had an imposingly large façade -- it was quite wide and tall -- but it wasn't deep at all -- it was ridiculously narrow from front to back. This was largely due to the constraint of the the shape of the lot -- too much real estate was devoted to roads for cars.

This time, I wanted to take advantage of a full corner lot to create a dojo with a square footprint -- so it's actually possible to practice martial arts inside.

Both the top and bottom floors are both square and both have sliding doors (the back of the top floor has window panes that don't slide, but the front panels do):

 

I surrounded it with an entire Japanese garden with a torii gate and flowering fruit trees and a stream with a little bridge.

 And in the corner I added a little shrine:

 

The one thing I miss most from the earlier version was the little lava monster that was integrated into the build. It has nothing to do with Japan, but it was cute.

Elsa's Totally Normal Castle!

 One of the complaints I got when I first built the funicular is that once you ride it to the top, there's nothing up there. This was one of my motivations for building a very tall Hogwarts next door:

Now I've increased the number of buildings you can reach from up there by building a tall castle for Elsa right next door to Hogwarts...

... complete with an extendable-retractable footbridge so that Elsa's castle can be accessed by crossing through the divination balcony of Hogwarts.

 

The objective of this build was to make it look like the castle is built right into the rock of the mountain. So I followed a similar design to the mountain castle tower that I had made for an earlier incarnation of Totally Normal Town, complete with a waterfall!

 

I'm pretty pleased with this build because I think I "made it look easy" -- as if I had just snapped together some pieces that were designed and intended for a Frozen castle:

This is not at all the case. Yes, the pieces with the sparkly stickers on them (in particular the balcony pieces) were from an Elsa's castle set. However, the set I have is a very simple children's play set (as you can see from when we rebuilt it for our Christmas village) -- so I had to start from scratch with a completely different design, piecing together whatever crazy/random pieces I could find in my bins with the right color scheme.

 

I added some interior details for Ana and the snow creatures, and left the back open since this build is essentially always up against the back wall.

 

 

Totally Normal Town 2025: LeGo Urbanist!

The objective of this current incarnation of Totally Normal Town is to create a toy version of a city that would be an awesome place to live!

 To that end, I've narrowed the roads and eliminated private autos -- the entire downtown is accessible through walking, biking, and public transportation!

Designing original Lego builds is incredibly time-consuming, so a big chunk of this town was built in 2024. In my earlier post, you can see that the Seilbahn (cable car) in the center of the town was the first thing I built. This build included the large, top-heavy central building with the train station on the bottom floor, two floors of Totally Normal Town's fancy French restaurant ("Chez François") in the middle, and the upper station of the Seilbahn on the roof. 

This initial build also included the two ground-level Seilbahn stations, as well as the open-air market. You can also see in that same post that Nico's "Freddy Fazbear's Pizza" was also one of the original buildings, followed soon by my build of Hogwarts.

Then, after a pause of several months, I started building again this past Spring.

(As you can see from my earlier posts, many of these buildings are actually new versions of buildings from an earlier incarnation of Totally Normal Town: Chez François, Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, Hogwarts -- even the fruit stand in the market!)

I'll follow this post with some posts about the new buildings!

Trump is really, really bad at the "art of the deal"...

I've been on Facebook lately -- perhaps a mistake, but I've been posting my Japan photos (which I may copy here as well). Following all of the latest crazy news makes me want to write out my own analysis. I'm not sure anyone is particularly interested, but I know that there's one person who will be interested: future me!! So I will write my thoughts here on my blog.

I just want to start with the obvious: Trump is really bad at negotiating because he's really dumb. I'd like to explain a bit because I've read a lot of analysis, but I haven't seen quite this angle:

Trump wants to believe that he's a good negotiator -- it's important to his personal identity -- but he's bad at it because his view of deal-making is too simplistic.

Trump sees deals only in one-dimensional terms. When he's the buyer, he wants the price to be as low as possible while the seller wants it to be as high as possible. If he gets the price down, he won, otherwise the seller won. And the only tools in his toolbox for this are (1) trying to charm the seller, or (2) trying to pressure/threaten/bully the seller.

A smart negotiator can see deals in multiple dimensions. The various parties in the negotiation don't necessarily want exactly the same thing, and in any negotiation there are typically more than two interested parties. To get the best deal, you find someone with a common interest or with a reciprocal interest.

A reciprocal interest would be when I have something that's more valuable to you than it is to me, and you have something that's more valuable to me than to you -- so we both win by trading. A common interest would be like "Trump is threatening my economy and he is also threatening your economy. Let's protect both our economies by finding which things we were selling to / buying from the US that we could trade between ourselves instead."

Having a reputation for being trustworthy is valuable because people are more willing to make deals with those they can trust to play fair. You get a reputation for being trustworthy by being trustworthy. Having good friends and allies is also valuable. You help them when they need it and they help you -- that's essentially been the basis of human society since the beginning of human society.

The US has invested heavily in its reputation and alliances for the past century or so -- and has reaped huge rewards in terms of influence and good will -- not to mention the incredibly lucrative position of having the primary reserve currency of the world. Sadly, America's reputation and alliances have been on kind of shaky ground for a while, and Trump appears to have flushed them down the toilet because he didn't recognize them as valuable.

Right before picking a fight with China, Trump did the dumbest thing possible and terrorized America's most loyal friends and allies -- not just threatening them economically but threatening their security and sovereignty.

No country has had a better friend and ally than America's best friend Canada. And out of the blue, for no reason besides stupid arrogance, Trump threatened to break Canada's economy in order to forcibly annex them. Maybe he didn't really mean it (if something he tries to do isn't possible, then it was just a joke, eh?), but Canada is taking the threat very seriously.

And Europe's big security fear at the moment...? Putin's territorial ambitions could lead to full-scale war. Ukraine is holding the line. America's military might dwarfs that of Europe, and Europe's dependence on US military aid gives the US huge leverage over Europe.

Apparently, however, Trump's plan to "end the Ukraine war on day one" was to hand Ukraine over to his buddy Putin by cutting off military aid. Now that Europe knows they can't count on help from their friend anymore, they're in emergency mode scrambling to build up local military might to make up for the loss.

This destroys America's leverage. I've seen it likened to shooting the hostage and then asking for ransom. Threatening to annex Greenland also doesn't help. If Trump decides to take Greenland through a military invasion, what's Europe going to do?

This is how Trump decided to lay the groundwork for his trade war with China. Xi has read his Sun Tzu -- he knows that the enemy of my enemy is my ally. Trump opened the game by handing Xi a lay-up of being able to credibly say to America's best friends "Let's stand up to this bully together."

These are countries that normally would prefer to help pressure China to be less authoritarian. But when your big best friend suddenly morphs into a big deadly-dangerous bully, anyone who can help starts to look good by comparison.

I'm actually starting to see friendly memes about cooperation show up in my Facebook feed -- from the Chinese embassy in the US (and I don't think I did anything to encourage them). My feed is also drowning in pro-Canada memes and in AI images about the beautiful friendship between Canada and Mexico. I haven't been actively "liking" them -- I think I'm getting them because I once googled whether there are any new bilateral trade agreements between Canada and Mexico, and I clicked on some articles about how they're increasing trade between themselves and with China. (Curse you lack of data privacy!)

I guess everything I've written here is obvious. It's just that I was flabbergasted to read a few posts by a pro-Trump Facebook friend who argued that the worldwide tariffs (and his later pause on the tariffs) were brilliant moves that served to "divide and conquer" the world, isolate China, and put the US in a position to lead a new global economy. The friend apparently got these ideas from Fox News, but I'm still astonished that anyone could seriously believe any of that.

You would need to (like Trump himself) be incapable of seeing things from anyone else's perspective.

And I haven't even mentioned the thing about rounding people up and sending them (without any due process) to secret and/or foreign prisons -- which should be the worst thing, but it's hard to rank the worst things these days.

In a sense, however, Trump has been very successful in his own goals. Using his charm alone, he managed to convince a multitude of [insert appropriate adjectives here] people to give him the most powerful position in the world -- where he has the opportunity to rob them blind by selling his influence to anyone who will funnel money into his otherwise-failing businesses.

It feels like this has to turn around at some point. Because almost every story has an arc where the protagonists learn something and everything is more-or-less OK in the end. But maybe that's just because stories are told by people who are currently surviving...?

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!

A "Film Noir" murder mystery in Totally Normal Town!!!

 We just got done making a fun new video in Totally Normal Town!! Here's the trailer:

And here's the complete video:

 

Our Totally Normal School: Hogwarts!!

 Now that I've completed our latest building, we can begin filming our next episode!!

The new building is the kids' school -- Hogwarts -- which is accessible from the Seilbahn Bergstation!! (If you don't recall what that is, please see my earlier post.)

I would like to start right off the bat with an apology to the trans community. Hogwarts has been a key part of Totally Normal Town since the first episode in 2018 -- long before J.K. Rowling decided to devote her life (and giant platform) to being the world's biggest spokesperson for transphobia.

At the time of this writing, Rowling is currently being sued for having spread the false claim that a women's boxing Olympic gold medalist is a man (she is, in fact, a cis woman) -- a claim that could potentially endanger her life if vigilantes in her native Algeria believe it.

Also problematic is the fact that Rowling has specifically pointed to the continued popularity of the Harry Potter franchise as evidence that people agree with her bigoted transphobic rhetoric. So, even though I built this new castle mostly from parts from two old sets from 2011 and 2019, I'm still potentially bolstering her claims by including Hogwarts in this new 2024 build.

I would counter that the lion's share of what makes Hogwarts fun is the atmosphere created by the set design and music, not to mention that nearly all of the best British actors have played roles in the film series. Here's an example:

Snape is a good character, but Alan Rickman's Snape is a great character.

For this build, I found that I had lots of spiders and spider webs (largely from various Spider-man mini-figs), so I decided that this incarnation of Hogwarts should start with potions class in the dungeon.

This is the first time I've included a light brick in an original build of mine. I thought it would look cool to add red light coming from the stand under Snape's cauldron, and I was right.

Of course the most important Hogwarts professor for Totally Normal Town is Professor Trelawney -- she's the one who repeatedly (and accurately!) predicts the destruction of Totally Normal Town!

In this build, Professor Trelawney and her sister "Trofessor Prelawney" share the open terrace floor that connects by stairs with the Seilbahn station. They also have owl (and other bird) perches, plus space for crystal balls and tea sets.

For Hogwarts and the restaurant/station next door I built backs that open so that they can potentially be photographed from all sides. Since these two buildings are up against the back wall, this isn't really necessary, but it adds to the fun of the build.

The room at the top of the tower is a common room, including all of the various pets, plus Slughorn disguised as a chair.

We had so many wands that I thought it would be funny to put bins and barrels and chests of them all over the place. We'll see if Nico adds a joke to the script about why there are so many spare wands.

The main floor has a dining hall.

This was a really fun build to make, and I like having Hogwarts as a part of our Totally Normal Town -- even though I already had serious reservations about the Harry Potter universe even before Rowling became the queen of the transphobes.

...But that should perhaps be a separate post.

Let's close with the two trams -- since this incarnation of Totally Normal Town is a transit paradise!!

You can probably see that these two trams follow the same design as the trams from the Christmas version of Totally Normal Town.

All these photos are certainly going to make this post take forever to load, so if you've made it this far, congrats and thanks for your attention!