We live on a quiet street, in an old neighborhood, where I walk to an amazing coffee shop once a week or so. There’s a tiny little play kitchen tucked under the stairs inside this place, where I can sit and sip a fantastic cappuccino while watching my son start to make sense of the world.

That world is a more confusing place than it was seven years ago. I’ve always been a skeptic and a cynic, but somehow also an optimist. Emotionally, it’s a tough place to be these days. I’m not always sure how I’d explain things to him, if I had to. And yet, there’s no ‘if’, because I’ll spend the next 20+ years doing exactly that? I mean, the words that will come are sometimes obvious, but then the inevitable “But if that’s the case then why are they/it/we like that?”. I feel like I came into my skepticism organically. The idea of instilling a distrust of authority via the medium of parental wisdom seems… comical at best.

Forgive me; digressions in this space are as old as the space itself.

So how do you recap seven years?

Clare and I married. I finally got my bachelor’s degree and became a software engineer at a large tech company, and then moved on to a startup of all things, which was then acquired by the previously mentioned tech company. We bought a house in Esco, made numerous gardens, had a child, and said hard good byes to both of our cats. And that’s just a few things, just in my own life. I’ve lost track of the loaves of bread I’ve brought into the world.

Any one of those could have spanned multiple entries, but life has a mind of its own. I have it on good authority that writing is hard, but I was under no illusions otherwise. But I think it’s time to do the hard thing again.