Started a new job after taking the risky decision of leaving the previous secure one. This first week went very well! The team is super welcoming (and similarly introverted), passionate and healthy (compared to my previous toxic manager). I feel like I’m going to learn a lot, without burning myself, and it’s very exciting :)

Took my lady out for a 1 month anniversary dinner and she spent the night for the first time. We are giddy with each other and feel like kids again (we’re in our 50’s).

It’s Friday… Icarus with the boys tonight, Destiny 2 with cousins tomorrow, and a wonderful D&D session on Sunday. And no work all weekend.

I wrote my first ever bash script to make my job less tedious and I'm happy. :) Time to refine and expand it now!

It’s midsummer’s eve, and they’re selling delicious freshly roasted almonds which are always popular around here. We as a group have gone and danced around the midsummer pole, eaten delicious waffles, drank homemade strawberry drinks and munched on roasted almonds. Now we’re relaxing in the shade of oak trees and talking about positive events, sharing funny images and tidbits from our various social platforms.

Finished the rough draft of a book six months in the making.

I left home 15 years ago for work. In that time I've traveled to dozens of countries and lived in several places in the USA, but no place has the diverse, welcoming people as home, and the natural beauty on display.

This week, work took me home. I've gotten to work with organizations that I was a part of as a child, eat at restaurants that I loved and worked at, and visit old haunts. Today I drove by the house I grew up in and parked outside to take a selfie to send my mom, and a lady stepped out, and I (awkwardly) approached her and had a lovely conversation about the house. They've fixed it up so nicely, and we laughed about how weird it was (originally built as a single story partially underground, and then had a second story built on top and turned into a duplex, and then once again lived in as a single family home).

I'm home. And I can't wait to come back when I quit this job, and bring my family here and move back into the same neighborhood I grew up in, and live in joy until I die.

Figured out some CAD stuff yesterday that has been bugging me for two weeks. I should have a printable model tomorrow or the day after.

Trying to make stuff nicer than a simple rectangular box can be hard to do right. I had never tried mentally inverting my spaces in CAD and modeling all complex voids between shells as objects too, but that allows me to navigate more complexity now. Basically I discovered I can do a bunch of operations, then merge objects up tree at an earlier point in history to apply all of the later operations to both objects in useful ways.

It was surprisingly challenging to think about a hollow rectangular hourglass inside an oval at the waist of the hourglass, and then how wires, connectors, and a circuit board cross between the asymmetric voids in the center. It is not just hollow spaces to pocket out. I need print orientation based mounts and clips that grow from all faces in different directions because it is all one monolithic print and I never use printed supports.

It is a silly thing to describe, and to do, but it is my silly thing.

I did not smoke for over 24 hours! Since weed and tobacco were running out at same time I decided to take the plunge and not buy more. I made so many unsuccessful attempts at stopping recently, this one feels different. I finally managed to feel comfy being single and it starts feeling quite good, this being gloriously and forcefully myself.

I also scored some freelance work projects again, very surprisingly, since the AI hype there had been nothing for over a year. I didn't even have a Windows machine at home anymore when the jobs came in and had to scramble to reinstall the stupid thing again (of course my laptop didn't want it back and it took some effort). So I guess having to have Windows again is the only bad thing in a pretty good week.

I had a really good day yesterday! I trained, got loads of work done, watched an episode of Patrick Melrose which I quite liked and my friend texted unexpectedly about meeting for lunch next week. I felt really good all day