I’ve been thinking about the gap between the list of things I want to get done and the things I actually get done. For a long time, my attention went almost entirely to what wasn’t finished, and kept getting pushed back. Recently I’ve been trying to flip that around and look at what did happen. Turns out it’s usually plenty. Writing. Teaching. Following through on things that matter. The list of what’s actually getting done is longer than I give it credit for.

The first time I heard about what would become the Khmer Magic Music Bus, I wasn’t even in Cambodia. I was listening to my colleague Steve describe a rest stop on a long drive through the countryside.

There’s a moment every computer person eventually has, usually more than once, where something gets deleted that can’t come back. Working in the command line for years, I’ve been there. It teaches you, more than anything, that the things you can’t take back deserve a different kind of attention than the things you can.

At the moment, my life is in disarray. A record Arctic cold snap has turned normal routines upside down. The water to the upstairs is shut off. We’re going crazy each night to keep the remaining pipes from freezing. An ice dam is causing water to leak into our house. I’ve injured my knee, not through anything cool like snowboarding, but because the cat slept on it wrong. The new web development class I’ve spent months preparing for has turned into a dumpster fire because of incorrect assumptions, snow days, and a fractured schedule.