Category: Personal

What Life Looks Like, Revisited

There has been a lot of changes since my initial “What Life Looks Like” post. I was rereading it, looking at the goals I had, and the goals I have now, and I noticed that a number of things have changed in the two years since that post. Many of the goals I blew through, others I’m still working towards, and some I’ve put completely on the back burner.

Here’s my current worksheet.

1 Year / Jan 2024

CategoryGoalProgress
CareerPet Store, XXK/Year101%
Blog 200 FollowersI think like 45?
HomeCondo, Owe $204K~208. On pace? by EOY.
New BathroomsCompleted.
HealthWeight: 220#~240.
Body Fat %: 1822.3
CrossFit 5x a Week5-6 times a week.
Occasional WeightliftingEvery Sunday
1.5 Miles Running Daily0 miles daily 😦
Biking 20 Miles biweekly0 miles biweekly. 😦
Finance401K fully fundedContribution on track to max out
After-tax investing $XX/month160% of goal per month
FamilyZoe in College, HappyZoe enrolled at WSU
Lydia driving, some sort of athletics. High School, Maybe a running start?Lydia in Drivers Ed. Aerial Silks 2x a week!
Emerson sports?, High SchoolEmerson fencing and rowing.

I made this sheet in January of this year, and I’ve done fairly well against my goals!

Met Goals

Career – Salary. I am right where I wanted to be at the beginning of the year. I got a decent review, and a solid bump in my salary that tipped me over the edge in April.

Home – New Bathrooms. After 17 years in the condo with 3 kids, 3 dogs, and up to 2 cats (RIP Edgar… we still miss you), the house was in some dire need of some TLC. The bathrooms were the next big thing, and it’s GREAT to have them completed!

Health – CrossFit and Weightlifting. It is just a daily habit now. It is awesome and I love it.

Finance – 401K and investing. I’m on pace to fully fund my retirement plan, and I’ve done a TON of work to REALLY ramp up my investing to nearly 160% of my monthly goal.

Family – Everyone’s doing pretty much exactly where we were hoping they’d be. Emerson has fencing and is rowing in high school. Lydia’s finally started driver’s ed, and does her aerial silks athletics twice a week, and Zoe is enrolled for her first semester at WSU.

Not Yet Met Goals

Blog – Follower Count – Blogs likely get more followers when they don’t get updated for a year. Gotta get back on the horse here.

Condo – Mortgage – I’m on pace to be close here, but the bathrooms were more expensive than I had anticipated. It’ll be a photo finish at the end of the year.

Health – Weight & Body Fat % – I’m headed in a good direction here. I’m down from my heaviest on the year (265… ugh), but even when eating mostly clean, it’s still a struggle.

Health – Running and Biking – I was doing well on this one. I was going about 2-3x a week, and had built up to some real distance. My longer runs were in the 8-10 mile range but I started getting some pretty severe hip pain afterwords. The biking just is not that interesting right now. I might just sell the bike to clear up some space.

Things that Changed Since 2021

When looking back at my old “2024” post, I wanted to be further along in my writing. I feel like had I stayed at the Credit Union, that would be a possibility, but a job change moving over to learning whole new stacks and languages required my research time to get good. On the plus side, I’m a decent Python, Kotlin, and Java programmer now, and I’m not so bad at AWS and Terraform.

I do not really include local travel goals anymore, unless they would require real planning. A trip to Walla Walla or Chelan only requires a little coordination with a hotel or AirBnB that allows for dogs. I would still like to get to New Zealand, but that’s still very much in the 3 years or more away.

I also changed my investing amount significantly. In 2021, I was working on pushing my “months ahead” forward in YNAB. After making a fair amount of progress on it (getting to nearly 4 months ‘ahead’), I started wondering if keeping all that cash on hand was truly necessary.

Now I feel like having much more than a month’s worth of cash on hand seems to be ‘enough.’ We are investing about 15% of post-tax income now.

The three and five year goals look very similar.

3 years / Jan 26

CategoryGoal
CareerHappy in my job. Knowing what I’m trying to do, and who I’m helping. Current + 10% a year?
Blog, 2500 followers
1 Book Written (Published? I dunno.)
HomeCondo. Owe $170K on it.
Health210# Maybe down to 1 blood pressure pill
5x a week CrossFit + occasional weightlifting, running for 10-15 miles weekly.
TravelNew Zealand
FinanceRetirement accounts funded to legal maximum.
Investing 2.5x current per month. (Somewhere between 35-40% of income?)
FamilyZoe and Lydia should be in College?
Emerson doing at least one sport

5 Years / Jan 28

CategoryGoal
CareerHappy in my job. Knowing what I’m trying to do, and who I’m helping. XXK + 25% a year?
Blog, 15000 followers
1 Book Written and Published
HomeCondo. Owe $135K on it.
Health200#
CrossFit, weights, and running. Generally quite active.
FinanceRetirement accounts funded to legal maximum.
Investing 50% monthly post-tax income.
FamilyAll kids in College?

The reality is that in the next 5 years, it is going to be a lot of the same. Aggressive pushes on salary goals and investing goals. Ideally, we will get to investing half of our post-tax income within 5 years time.

My health and maintaining a regular active lifestyle is probably the highest priority item. I am continuing a slow burn on the weight loss. I plan on working more on my writing, and within 5 years get a book published, but the health is definitely the higher priority.

Frankly, the blog followers number goal I might just drop entirely, as I cannot exactly control that. I have thought about making a “number of posts” goal to replace it, but I have yet to pull the trigger.

Finally, the family goals are very fungible. For example, Zoe seems to be interested in health care (specifically and oddly, mortuary science.) That requires a degree of some sort, but if the other kids wanted to join the military, or go to culinary school, or work to be an apprentice welder or plumber, I could not object.

The ten year goals are even more unspecific.

CategoryGoal
Career2 Books Written and Published
Advanced Degree?
HomeNot living in the condo. Mount Vernon / Bellingham?
Health180-190#
Generally active.
Still living with the same heart I was born with.
FinanceRetirement accounts funded to legal maximum.
Investing >50% monthly post-tax income.
FamilyHappy and Healthy

The big thing to notice is the drop on the salary goal. I don’t expect a drastic change from the 5 year goal in terms of an amount (although that could happen?), I’m just not pushing for it as hard.

I have been thinking about persuing an advanced degree, so that is a new goal development.

Paying off the condo remains on the 10 year goal, although with the Seaview property not available, we will likely look north. Heather likes Bellingham, and always has. I’m more fond of Mount Vernon, but something in Skagit / Whatcom county area of Washington seems like the most likely location.

The health goal adds a pretty heavy goal, and one that largely reflects something that happened a long time ago. Assuming I keep things going, and keep up the healthy habits, it should be attainable.

Those are my updated goals. The nearer ones are again more specific, and more easily actionable, and SMART folks will notice each of them generally has a number associated with it so I can figure out whether or not I’ve achieved it.

I hope this post inspires you to think about your own goals!

Lullabies

When my children were small, I was the one who put them to bed. I did so with a lullaby I had invented for them.

The lullaby:

One, Two, Three
It’s time to say goodnight.
One, Two, Three
It’s time to say goodnight.
Goodnight to the stars, and goodnight to the moon.
Goodnight to <<child’s name>>
And I love you.

To save a little face, I will not sing it for you.

The kids adored this song. Even if I was tired at the end of the day, and just wanted them to go sleep they demanded it, usually loudly.

I would start bedtime with silly versions of the song, pantomiming being a rockstar, a big-band leader, or a lounge singer while I sung. I embraced every opportunity to be the ham.

But it always ended up flowing into a slow, sleepy, cuddly version that allowed my kids to fall asleep gently.

My wife created a photo book with the lullaby lyrics printed in it. Photos of my kids pushing their hands together and ‘sleeping’, pointing to paper stars, a paper moon, and eventually pointing to the camera for ‘I love you.’

That book is the most important one I have.

Fast-forward to the present. Specifically mid-August 2023.

My oldest prepped the bulk of her belongings into boxes. Her plan is to study health and biology at Washington State University. 300 miles away.

We travelled to Pullman on Saturday, her move-in day, and unloaded her into her dorm. At the hotel that evening, I had an idea.

I called my voicemail, and pressed ‘2’ to send a message.

I recorded myself singing the old lullaby, saying goodnight to my daughter, and subsequently sent the message to her.

The next day while dropping her at her dorm, I asked “Did you get my voicemail?”

“What’s a voicemail?”

I have taught her many things in my life: how to drive, how to hit a softball.

I got to teach her one more thing before I left, how to check her voicemail.

And specifically how to save a voicemail. To play it later. Should she need it.

It’s Only Embarrassing If You’re Embarrassed

I recently got an email from “Tony” asking if he could write an article on my site. He wanted to write up an article (“no charge”, he assured me) about entrepreneurship and tools.

An ad.

My immediate thought was a bit of shock… has my blog gone viral? Do I have enough traffic to warrant someone thinking they could successfully advertise on it?

A graph showing my blog's views and visitors per day in bar form, over the month of July in 2023. It is NOT impressive, showing a max of 6 views on July 14th.
Blog stats clearly showing it has NOT gone viral.

After looking through my old blog posts, I revisited that old recognizable feeling of “wait, didn’t I used to do this?” And frankly, I was embarrassed.

Once again, had I let something that I love to do fall off the planet.

In my old job at the Credit Union, I used to write an all-engineers email every Friday morning. I would start it on Wednesday and then spend hours Thursday evening finishing it.

Yet once again, I couldn’t seem to break away for 20 minutes a day to write down what’s happening.

I do best in routines. I eat the same foods for breakfast / lunch, and only change up dinner because my wife doesn’t particularly appreciate eating the same things every day. I go to the gym on the same cadence every week: 4:30pm on Monday / Tuesday, and 11:30am on Wednesday through Friday, Saturday 9am, and Sunday 11am.

If something I love to do is not in my list of habits, I lose track of it.

Now, it seems I have fallen out of something I once identified with. Something that shows me to be a fraud, or not what I claim to be.

Even worse the shame remains because even while writing this I fear that I’m attempting to, once again, restate the lie that I am something of a creator. A writer.

As if doubling down on it as an identity will make blog posts happen.

I mentor folks in my job. Every day. Literally my favorite part of being a Staff engineer.

I would allow absolutely none of the people I mentor to be as harsh about themselves.

No negative self-talk: a rule I read and remember from Pete Carroll’s Win Forever. A rule I demand entirely from my mentees.

I’ve never been so much of a rule-follower.

I choose to NOT be embarrassed by these things.

Did I fail to document my learnings while working at a pet store? Yep.

Have I failed to document much of anything while working at the pet store? Yep.

Do I still have the voice I once had? Of course I do.

I’ll tell Tony that I’ll pass on the free article. I think a DYI approach to blogging might be a better way to go.

New Things

A big part of my career has involved change. Part of being a developer over the course of the late 90s to now involves a TON of change.

Technology change: The code I write, and what tools I do it with has changed drastically. I started coding professionally with C++ and Visual Basic. I got VERY good with C#, and made much with it. I made a fair amount of noise in F# and now I’m currently working in Java, Python, TypeScript and Kotlin.

Methodology change: I mean “how we do the code we do.” Test-driven development came up in the development community just as I did. The ubiquity of containers. Agile work patterns.

Personal change: What used to drive me was the feeling of being ‘the guy.’  I LOVED being the guy you needed to make and fix the things. Now, I love being ‘the guy’ who helps people grow.

And now, a job change!

I’ll have to update my goals, because at this point, I no longer work for the Credit Union! I now work for a well-known an online pet store! I get to work with data scientists trying to make your search and product discovery experience better.

That’s the update… I wish it was longer, and more in-depth, but I’m still learning the space, so I’m in absorb-mode.

Crummy Paintings

An amateur painting of a mountain and a river.

Back ~20 years ago, I took up painting. Fun hobby.

The problem with taking up painting is that you sorta end up with a lot of paintings you can’t use. I mean, you hang up a dozen paintings and eventually you run out of wall space.

So I started selling ’em. The town I lived in had a pretty great farmers market, and they let near anyone in there, so I set up a small table and for a few weekends, I was pitching my “If Bob Ross had cataracts” style of paintings.

Vivian. Tall lady, with a huge hat that made her look massive. Sparkly thick pink glasses. Had a hoarse laugh and deep laugh lines like she had laughed for years. Sparse red hair and equally sparse teeth. Talked with me for an hour about her kids, her grandkids, her dead husband, and her deadbeat brother. 

To this day, she is only person to this day I’ve ever heard say the word “deadbeat” out loud. 

She really liked this ONE painting that I had not been able to even GIVE away. And I really wanted this sale.

She held the painting and stared at it for what felt like an hour. Told me about her daughter who came by on Thursdays to do laundry with her who’d have loved it. Told me about how it reminded her of Mount Si (a mountain here in Washington) and how she used to pick blackberries by the coffee-can full near the river there, and the river in the picture looked just like it, so much you could hear the constant rush and gurgling of quickly-moving water.

She was going on so much, I thought she was milking me a bit to try to get me to lower the price.

It was one of my last paintings, and the market was gonna close, so it was kind of working too.

“Well, I’ve got to pack up. Did you want to take it with you?”

“Oh no. Wouldn’t match the bathroom at all. Totally wrong colors. My bathroom’s pink.”

And then she walked away. Just smiled and turned away. I was left packing up with a table, my cashbox and the remaining 3 paintings.

2 of ’em I scraped the canvas and painted over. You can do that once the oil dries.

But I kept the one with the wrong colors.

And when you attach a lot of your self worth to what you do, that ‘not fitting’ can hurt. And when you’re not able to see folks in your day to day, that ‘not fitting’ can hurt. And when you’re the only person on your team that can do what you do, ‘not fitting’ can hurt.

Vivian loved the painting for about an hour.

But did it fit? Nope. Didn’t match her bathroom colors. Vivian was right. It’d look terrible on a pink wall.

I kinda like it on mine though. I’ve gotten pretty used to it.

Moving The Goalposts

Goalposts that move are a pain. They feel unfair, like you’ve been duped into working toward one thing, when you should have been working toward something else entirely.

Or worse… that the progress you made wasn’t really progress at all. It was some larger step that you didn’t realize you signed up for.

Here’s the dirty secret though: Moving your goalposts is precisely what you have to do to keep growing.

As you improve, the goals you set will not really be challenging enough for you to keep.

As you learn, you realize the goal you set isn’t really what you actually want.

As you try new things, you realize and say “this isn’t as important to me right now.”

Weight Loss – My ‘I Improved’ Story.

I mentioned having a goal around fitness in a couple prior posts. Check ’em out: Post #1 and Post #2

Specifically, I wanted to lose a fair amount of weight at the end of year 1, with a slowly downward push in 10 years. My goal was to get to 230-235 by the end of the year.

After the annual ‘Fitness Challenge’ contest weigh-in from my CrossFit gym we do every January-March, I weighed in at a whopping 257.7lbs! The next day, I joined Noom.

As of March 6th, I was down to 234lbs!!!

Here’s my Noom referral link, if you wanna try it. I’m really happy with it.

I have already met my ‘annual goal’. Since it was only early March the goalposts had to move.

New goalpost: 220lbs, and once I get there, maintain it for 5-6 months while slowly adding more calories back into the mix.

Retirement Funding – My ‘I Learned’ Story

My retirement funding goals were mentioned same posts as my weight (from above). I was targeting a simple approach: fully fund my 401k and my IRA.

However, after watching a few lectures about retirement on my Great Courses Plus subscription, I learned there might be a better choice.

The speaker in those videos talked about 401k plans, and mentioned how some 401k plans also offer a ROTH option. I decided to check, and it turned out that yes, my 401K did allow for ROTH funds to be contributed, just as easily as I set the contribution for my regular 401K.

All I had to do was to put in a percentage and voila, the next pay cycle, I’ve got money going into the ROTH option.

So with the new learning, I decided move the goal posts. Instead of ‘fully fund both plans’, I moved to a new goal: Fully fund the 401K, with a mix of pre and post-tax dollars, then fund the regular investing goal, and finally do the IRA with leftovers at the end of the month.

Doing it this way, I mix up my taxable and non-taxable accounts, so that I have more tax options in retirement. Options are nearly always good, especially when it comes to sources of money in retirement.

Do I miss out on the tax write off on fully funding the IRA? Maybe a little, but assuming I don’t fall completely off the savings wagon, I should be good for at least a portion of that tax benefit.

Guitar Lessons – My ‘I Tried’ Story

This one hurts a bit. My uncle made these guitars, and they’re beautiful.

The thing is, the more I looked at it, me taking guitar lessons NOW or LATER doesn’t really have much of a difference in terms of my happiness.

I love my guitars. I play on them often.

I just don’t really care about taking lessons right now.

So, I’m moving the goalposts. For now, I’m calling ‘guitar lessons’ as a within 10 years goal, rather than a ‘do this in 2021’ goal. For now, self taught is good enough.

To recap, moving goalposts is a necessary part of goals. As you improve, learn and try, your goals must change with your new abilities and knowledge.

That’s just life. It moves from out from under you.

When it does, move your goalposts.

A Stupid Little Story

Back in 2011, a friend of mine from high school was trying to push his music career. His band had a local following, and was playing gigs in Seattle bars every weekend.

He wanted to fund some studio time, and that’s expensive as hell, but he didn’t want to beg a-la “GoFundMe”, so he put up a post on his bands’ Facebook page, offering to write and sing custom songs for donations to his band’s studio time fund.

Most of his friends are weirdos, so some crazy ideas came out of it. I remember a great acoustic version of ‘Safety Dance’ he did (soulful as hell). The dude is crazy talented and has been forever, so I had to get in on it, and I sent him a couple bucks.

Here’s the MP3 he sent me (OneDrive share link). A 22 second song called ‘Christopher Brown is the greatest guy ever.” I asked him to do something that I could use as a professional wrestler theme. The horns at the end represents me taking a steel chair to the face (my interpretation.)

10 years later. A podcast I listen to sort of fell off the map. A young couple posting a weekly finance and goals podcast while living an adventure in an Airstream sort of stopped posting for a bit. After about 2 months of seeing/hearing nothing, I sent them a note.

(What follows is the general gist of the note, because I don’t have it anymore.)
(Yes, I delete emails once I’m done with them now.)
(After going through 15 years of Gmails that I kept, 99.996% were minutiae that I should never have archived.)
(They were stupid, and only served to have Gmail send me more and more personalized ads.)
(I stole this multiple parenthesis thing from the opening essay in Shea Serrano’s 10 essays about Scrubs.)
(I know it’s weird but it’s charming and I love it.)

“Hey, your stuff is awesome, but you’ve fallen off the map. I wanted to let you know that if you think nobody’s listening, I am. I know it’s lame for someone to complain about something free, but I’m risking looking lame because you’re doing a great job and it’d be a shame for you to stop. If you’re running out of ideas for topics, here are a few:

1) Houses are a ton more work than an Airstream
2) How to separate your money from your feelings of self-worth.
3) Christopher Brown is the greatest guy ever.“

(The topics are sort of inside for the podcast listeners, but now that you’re reading this, you get to be the inside on the last one.)

It took another month, but episode 39 came out in March… and you’ll never guess who’s mentioned in the first 2 minutes. And again at the end near minute 32.

I’m trying to make a point here. Two, as a matter of fact.

First one, I’m awesome. The greatest guy ever. Multiple people confirmed, including a soon-to-be nationally awarded podcast. I have like 25 Twitter followers and everything. Total up and comer.

Second, don’t be afraid to put your stuff out there. The fact that you are trying counts, even if you don’t make a mint. You are learning by doing, and learning and doing are the best things a human can do. Even if what you make isn’t for everyone. Even if it’s just a blog that only a dozen folks read.

The Imposter

I have teenagers. I hear about how much I suck on a regular basis.

But when my teenagers tell me I suck, it’s usually for something I’m pretty proud of: making them eat vegetables, do homework, save up their own money to buy something rather than buying it for them, ad parental nauseum.

The problem is, it isn’t usually the teenagers that have my ear.

Imposter syndrome is a helluva thing.

Imposter syndrome is what they call the feeling that you don’t belong or deserve the things you have. That your social status, your job, and anything else you have is completely and unequivocally unearned.

The feeling that you don’t deserve it.

That if the rest of the world only knew, they’d call you out as a fraud.

What if they knew that I pass off feelings and intuition for facts, like constantly. (You now know this, so read on with a critical eye.)

What if they knew I was a hick from nowhere. (Palouse region nowhere, thank you!)

That my “knowledge” was all off-hand bullshit I got from having not enough to do, and mostly came from being too lazy to get up from the computer.

Some say the best way to deal with imposter syndrome is to remember your empathy. That ALL people have similar self-doubts.

Frankly, it has never been a comfort for me to know that.

That only way I know how to combat imposter syndrome is to admit what I don’t do well, and hold myself to task on it. To shit, or get off the pot. Decide the priority on fixing it, and then get busy fixing it, or let it be.

Fundamentally, it comes down to giving myself permission. It’s perfectly acceptable to suck at some things. But the things I don’t want to suck at, I’ll work to improve.

A peach is a terrible apple, but both make wonderful pie.

In that vein of holding myself accountable, here’s a list of things I suck at.

I have a degree in English, with a concentration in creative writing from Western Washington University. With said degree, I have published nearly nothing. I don’t even blog all that often.

I still have pages I wrote twenty years ago. I recently read some, and it all sucked. It was preachy and self-important and one time, rather than using the world “mental” to describe a process happening in the mind, I made up a word.

“Mindic”.

In my word processor, there’s a red squiggly line that shows me that even my personal dictionary doesn’t include “Mindic” quite yet.

In tech, I suck at just about everything. Nearly all networking stuff. Kubernetes. Go and Ruby. Most programming languages that aren’t in my standard wheelhouse. Certificates. A lot of security stuff. Game development.

I do CrossFit five times a week, and after three years of doing it, I still suck at the following: double-unders, a pull up without a band, running faster than a 10 minute mile, Turkish Getups, Snatches, and pistols.

I am not a great boss. I’ve had many people report to me, and only a scant few of them are happy for it. Most simply tolerated it. Some had marked contempt for it.

I have 2 guitars that my uncle custom-made. I still can’t play anything beyond Mother from Danzig, or a slow version of Blind Melon’s No Rain.

I suck at cars, beyond checking the oil.

My wife rechecks the dishes after I wash them, to make sure they’re clean.

I’ve been told I need better aim in the bathroom.

See, the thing is, even after writing all that stuff out, it really isn’t all that bad. It ain’t my best work, but it’s honest.

If my boss (Hi Brian!) reads this blog and notices I’m not great at Kubernetes, well, I can work on that.

If my wife reads this and notices how the bathroom and dishes stuff was relegated to the bottom of the list, I’m sorry, and I’m working on it.

If my teenagers read this: Get back to your freaking homework! Eat more vegetables! And for the love of god stop begging for things and save up your allowance if you need it so damned much!

Photo Credit: Bobby McKay from Flickr
Used with permissions from the Creative Commons License 2.0