1076

This past Saturday, a vet came to our home and ended the life on our cat by humane euthanasia. She had been struggling to breathe for three weeks, some days better than others, but on the morning she died, she was struggling so much that she could do little more than follow us into the living room after we got up and lie back down in her bed, pumping her sides quietly. Her passing was, we believe, painless, and was a welcome cessation of the suffering she was enduring as she fought to get enoug...

Our cat has been diagnosed with a rare and complicated disease. The usual prognosis is one of lifelong management through medication, diet, and possibly frequent medical intervention, unless we are very lucky and she responds well to initial treatment. We have gone from having a very relaxed and inconsequential life to having to make life-or-death decisions for our cat every day for the last few weeks. At one point, at the height of our worry and her pain, there was no choice that seemed like t...

So here we are. A decade after college, I realized I wasn't getting any closer to anything. I had given up on several big, sustained projects that were actually very successful by traditional standards: My musical aspirations that has taken me from self-teaching guitar to playing shows in two college bands in 3 years The blog I had been posting to daily from 2009 to 2013 which culminated in an ebook launch Learning the contractor-gig lifestyle well enough to become a 50% owner of a web marketi...

Based on my last article on never being anything other than mediocre, I came up with a bunch of follow up questions, which I will now endeavor to answer. What problems do I want to deal with everyday? I enjoy variety in the problems I am solving. Any problem that I haven't seen before is interesting, but more so if I can see the opportunity for a puzzle aspect to it. I enjoy solving coding problems that I haven't seen before (as long as there isn't too much pressure, like a coding interview or...

I have always believed that I was special. Not out loud, but secretly. Like, I will live an essentially normal life, but somewhere waiting for me is something special. I recognized that statistically speaking, this was unlikely, but perhaps this interchange with my dad when I was a kid will illustrate. In response to me saying I wanted to be an author, my dad said, "It's really hard to become an author. Many, many people write many books, and very few of them get published." I responded, "Yea...

In 2013, I decided to stop writing my blog, which I had been posting to daily since 2009 when I graduated college. I dreamed of being a writer, so I would write every day. And I did. I wrote when I didn't want to write, when I wasn't inspired. I got in trouble for my writing, upset people, embarassed myself (and probably others). But mostly, I wrote about stuff I wanted to write about and others found interesting, and occasionally helpful and inspiring. I developed my audience, built a followin...