Five Years

This one's hard to believe.  It was never the intent to be out here longer than it took to get my degree, figuring that, once I'd had my stint at Harvard, I'd be employable pretty much anyway (that last bit's still basically true).  But here I am, and tomorrow, the 11th, is when I rolled into town in a tiny uHaul.

A lot has happened since my last post, nearly two years ago, so let's catch up.

Workplace changes

Harvard was wearing on me after three years, and by the summer after commencement I'd pretty much had enough.  It takes a special kind of person to stick with an Ivy; I'm not that person.   Work was running out, I was doing more content entry than development, my patience with high ed politics was thin enough to read through, and it was time to move on.

I looked at several places, but ended up hitting it off real well with the folks at Velir -- then almost walked away from the offer.  Thankfully they chased me down, because that probably would have be the most boneheaded thing I'd ever done.  Been here 18 months now, and thoroughly enjoying it.  The work's interesting, the people are something else.  I'd never really thought about working in an agency environment before, but I love it -- lots of variety and the opportunity to actually learn from other devs rather than being isolated.

Still, couldn't leave well enough alone at Harvard

While I say I was ready to leave Harvard, I never did get entirely away.  Two months after leaving SEAS, I was TA for one of Jen Kramer's fall Extension School courses before taking on 1/3rd of the instruction for the spring CMS course.  I've continued to team-teach that, as well as teaching a new course, Developing for Drupal 8, all on my own.  So for all those people who stopped assuming that I was faculty when I left Kenyon for Harvard... now I kinda am.  So there.

If you're wondering how this fits with me needing to leave Harvard for my sanity, the Extension School is entirely a different beast from working as staff.  Quite a bit of freedom to run your course as you feel you need to, and you answer to your students first (which is, I suppose, how it should be). 

Down one cat; other went crazy, then un-crazy

We lost Honey between Christmas and New Years of 2015; something went entirely whacked with her blood pressure and she pretty much went into a terminal bloody nose.  Punkin, who'd have you believe he really doesn't care, took it pretty hard -- he truly believed when we got in the car to drive back after New Year's that we were going to find Honey, and he was devastated when she wasn't waiting for us back at the apartment.  About March he started chewing all his fur off and didn't stop until he could double for one of those weird hairless breeds, only really super pink.  He knocked that off late in the year and now he's back to normal... or as normal as he gets.  I looked into getting a buddy for him, but he told me No.  I could actually hear the capital "N" when he said it, too.  Well... I could barely hear it over the screeching, but it was definitely there.

Took up a New Sport

If you notice an awful lot of Facebook statuses with me complaining that I broke something, dislocated something, sprained something, or just generally feel like someone threw me down the stairs, I'm probably not being metaphorical (well, maybe that last one).  A month after starting at Velir, I also took up Shaolin Kempo Karate.  It's a lot of fun, and it's made huge differences in my fitness, balance, and focus.  I'm a late-stage purple belt right now (hopefully be blue very soon, but that depends on nothing else falling off before I test).  I used to call orange belt "the awkward stage", but I've come to the conclusion that pretty much any stage I'm in is the awkward stage (the more things change, the more they stay the same, you know...).  

I'm not going to say I'm good at karate (because for one thing, if you start that up, you should hang up your belt -- everyone still has something to learn), but there are definitely things I'm suited to.  Having always been a little scrappy, it probably goes without saying that I love to spar.  That's also typically where I manage to inflict injury on myself (yeah, no one has caused any of those aforesaid injuries except me).  I'm also just in love with trying to have as big of a mental inventory of techniques as I can -- to the point where I invented a style die specifically to practice recall.  I never do anything by halves, that's for sure.

In Conclusion...

None of this was expected five years ago, that's for sure.  The setter in the city was expected to always be something of a transplant, not so much a city-setter, but that seems to have been what's happened.  Life grabs you, takes you down a path, but it rarely tells you what's coming next (and if it does, bet on that being a fake-out).