I post nearly the same pics every year. A trip to St. George to visit friends. Such a fine place to pass the time.

Portland is exploding. Development everywhere. This sculpture in Lincoln Park captures it nicely. Note the construction in the background, those are the “Two Towers” going up, detailed below. Also, Lincoln Park itself was torn up shortly after this photo and renovated.

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.