The Packers have gone on quite a winning run since their midseason slump. We’ve made the most of it. To combat the winter blues, we concocted a tropical menu for the last game, home made tortillas and tortilla chips and margaritas.

tl;dr: Autobiography of Joker so Far is out now get it here

The Day Job becomes Night Work

Regular readers here, of which Google Analytics assures me there are near-zero, know that by day I am an independent software developer. By night however, I enjoy writing, mostly fiction. When I say “by night”, I don’t mean this in the literal sense, unlike “near-zero” above, which I indeed mean in the strictest formal sense of the words. I’m not a natural multitasker. I’ve never really been able to do one thing really well during the day and a different thing really well at night. When I’m really writing software, I’m more or less writing it all the time, waking, sleeping, eating, showering, etc., and the same is true of writing fiction. They are all consuming enterprises that seep inexorably into all aspects of my life. It’s how I function. Fortunately for me, in the world of modern software development, where check writing is like wish granting in the Emerald City of Oz, working this way long enough has gotten me to the point where I have enough stretches of free time to permit myself being all-consumed by writing fiction.

Careful readers may here smell a rat, and they would not be entirely in the wrong. But to that I’ll say this: I’m not independently wealthy, I’m not set for life, I have not founded, bootstrapped and sold a cubic zirconian social unicorn that allows me to lounge about like a nineteenth-century gentleman writer, penning a few clever lines in between my eleven o’clock breakfast and my afternoon salon. In short, I’ve ground away at writing software, like so much unglamorous night work, long enough to get reasonably good at it, to the point where I can charge a decent enough hourly rate for it. Combine this with the fact that I don’t spend the proceeds on stupid shit, and this cannot be emphasized enough, I don’t necessarily have to do so called night work for the entire duration of the year, minus two weeks vacation and eleven federally sanctioned holidays. That’s all I’ll say about that, unless my near-zero readers clamor for a separate missive on the topic.

Halloween festivities.

Our dry summer produced some of the most amazing New England foliage we’ve seen in years. We took a mid-fall stroll through Evergreen Cemetery right by our house to enjoy the peak colors.

It started like these things always start. We found a hornet in the bathroom. Soon we were taking apart the closet and sealing all the seams. Next we ended up removing all the wall hardware and sanding and patching and then painting all the walls. Next we replaced the sink and vanity and all the plumbing. Next we removed the old doors and sanded and refinished them. So it goes.

Another visit to St. George, Maine. We spent A LOT of time on the swing. May made quite a game out of it. Video inside.

Rare is the occasion that my wife joins me on the course. But I’ve gotten her out a few times this season at the local, laid back, muni: Riverside Golf Course, Portland Maine. It can be a bit slow out there, but if the crowd is too thick, you can always pick up and hit the great Riverside Grill. Good taps and good views.

May and I are relative early risers (relative to the rest of the family). We’ll often sneak out to 158 Picket Street Cafe for bagels while the others sleep. It’s quite a tradition. We’ve been going to the Picket Street Cafe since well before the kids were born…maybe 15 years now (give or take).

We took in the fine views of the city at Fort Sumner Park on the East End of Portland. The park is the subject of some controversy of late as the condo building bonanza in the hood threatens to eclipse the view. Given Portland’s present building boom, the situation is unfortunately not unusual.

On the way to an early morning golf tournament, I pulled off the road to watch the sun rise over the Shaker Village in Poland, Maine. It’s a national historic landmark. It’s the last remaining Shaker community in the world and, I believe, it’s currently down to two last living members. Maine Shaker Village