I can’t quite believe it, but the year’s over. Again. I can’t quite figure out where it went. We’ve grown fond of saying “time is fake and homophobic” around our house.

This means it’s time to update my blog again, because I can’t be relied upon to write about things as they’re happening, clearly. Let’s take things one at a time.

LaunchDarkly

As I wrote about, I started a new job working on the Internal Tools team at LaunchDarkly in January. As I predicted, there was a bit of culture shock and adjustment to be done, and I’m learning a lot. I’m spending a lot of time working on automation, but I’m also spending an appreciable amount of time working on process and structure. The team is relatively new, and was small before I joined, and has grown considerably since then. We found we needed to iterate on how we work, and it has been interesting trying to help with that iteration, sharing things I’ve learned in my career, while remaining open to there being other ways to do things than how I’ve seen them work before.

In the last couple of months, we’ve hired my friend Margaret to be the team’s manager, which I’m very excited about.

Pride

At the start of 2022, I got involved with the group of people organizing our local Pride celebration, to put on the first in-person Pride since 2019. Shortly after I joined up, my husband Ethan joined as well. We were operating under a fiscal sponsor 501(c)(3) organization, but were largely just a random assortment of people without much structure. We managed to pull together a week of events, and I’m really proud of what we achieved. I thought with more structure and planning, we could pull off something even better in 2023. People seemed amenable to this, so I started working on it.

Long story short (very long. State/federal/local corporation/non-profit stuff is wild.) with the help of a bunch of the other organizers and the pro-bono support of a local law firm, I managed to get us set up as a standalone 501(c)(3) organization.

Sadly, for a variety of reasons, Ethan and I had to resign our board positions. We’re still rooting for the organization, though, and are excited to see what they achieve in 2023.

Reading

According to my notes, I’ve read 40 books in 2022, all of them fiction. This is slightly below my goal of 52 books, but I’m giving myself grace about that.

I mostly chose 52 as a nice, easy-to-track pace (1 book a week) that felt like it approximated my goal: investing in myself. I realized I hadn’t been saving a whole lot of spoons for my own enjoyment in recent years. Side projects languished and there was always an awkward pause when people asked about my hobbies. It turns out, I was largely giving all my spoons to work, so after work I just… watched TV or a movie, or just endlessly scrolled. I could and did invest in things I enjoyed, but largely as a focused burst. I’d bake pies for special holidays or occasions, or read and bake on a vacation. But I couldn’t keep it up as a practice of making space in my life for hobbies.

So I decided I was going to try and read 52 books in 2022, with an explicit rule that they couldn’t serve double duty. No reading about work topics, no self-improvement. Just reading like I did as a kid, when I could devour a book in a sitting, for the joy of getting caught up in a story.

Counting books turns out to be a fuzzy metric. I read a lot of fanfiction I’m not counting, not because it’s not “real” or is somehow lesser than a book, but because most of it wasn’t book-length. (Some of it, surprisingly, was!) A couple of books I am counting, however, were basically novella length, which feels a bit like cheating. On the other hand, some of the books I’m counting as one are actually anthologies of stories.

Look, it’s fuzzy math, and I’m trying not to get caught up in the math here. The key part, for me, was “does it feel like I’m regularly holding space and spoons for my hobbies?” And I think the answer was “mostly yes”. Some months I didn’t read much as capitalism-work or life-work ate through my spoons. Some months I read a lot more as capitalism-work and life-work didn’t require as many spoons from me.

But in general, I felt like I could say reading was a hobby without feeling like I was lying. Good enough.

What did I read? Mostly queer stories of every stripe: science fiction, fantasy, mystery, romance. Young adult and adult. I don’t think I read a single book all year that didn’t feature a character that was explicitly queer in the text. Shoutout to the fine folks at readsrainbow.com who have filled my backlog for years to come.

If I had to pick specific books I read this year to recommend others read:

• Xenocultivars was the perfect plantpunk queer anthology that I needed to start the year with.
• Red, White, & Royal Blue is a well-done love story about the son of the President and the Prince of England. It’s being adapted into a TV show, I believe.
• Light From Uncommon Stars was… impossible to describe, but an amazing book. Music and aliens and deals with the devil and queerness and a love story somehow?
• All That’s Left In The World was a great love story about the apocalypse and community.
• A Psalm For The Wild-Built (and its sequel, A Prayer For The Crown-Shy) are short but easy contenders for my books of the year. Honestly, if you haven’t read them, stop reading this blog and go read them. Solarpunk queer cozy stories about trying to find meaning in life? What more can you ask for? I want fanart of these stories on my walls so badly.
• The Gravity Of Us was a neat love story with the space program as a background.
• I was late to reading They Both Die At The End, but even with that title, I wasn’t expecting to be punched in the face as frequently as I was. It turns out if you’re already Feeling Things about whether you’ll get to raise kids, hearing two teenagers fantasize about the lives they may have led if they weren’t dying that day is gonna make you Feel Some Things. But honestly, a really well-written love story with a neat premise.
• The Locked Tomb series I… have a lot of feelings about it. Look, Lesbian Space Witches is already in “shut up and take my money” territory on its own. But I didn’t love the books as much as I was expecting to. They’re still a rec, still some of the better books I read this year, I keep talking about them with people. But they fell short of my (possibly unrealistic) expectations because they all follow the same pattern: lead you through 80% of the book from the perspective of someone who doesn’t understand what’s going on, and then explain everything you just read in the last few chapters as one torrent of information. And I don’t even think that’s a bad or invalid way to tell a story! I just really struggle with not knowing what’s going on for so long. You should read these, but you should read them knowing that unreliable narrators are going to be a big part of it.
• Monstrous Affections is an anthology of short stories about monsters and affection. I mostly picked it up for Wings in the Morning, the short story that spawned my favorite book, but I frequently find myself thinking about a lot of the other stories in it. A solid collection, honestly.

I learned that my ability to sustain my reading pace is pretty predictable based on the pacing of the plot and how clear it is. A plot that is unclear (told through unreliable narrators, for example) is hard for me to sustain my pace through, and it takes me a while to get through the book. A plot that is clear but slow (doing lots of world-building) also is going to take me a while to get through. A fragmented plot (anthologies!) are also going to take me a while to get through. I think it’s something about my brain being able to disengage (because it doesn’t understand what’s happening, or there isn’t enough happening to hold my attention without expending effort, or there are reset points where my momentum is lost) that means I need to continuously be investing spoons to stay focused. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, nor do I think it means those books aren’t for me or aren’t enjoyable. It’s just an interesting (to me) observation.

The Death of Twitter

Sometimes I can still hear its voice.

Look, a billionaire bought a thing because he thought it would make him cool and instead he killed the thing. This isn’t a surprising or even novel story, and honestly the only reason I bring it up is because I spent like 14 years there, so it’s an impactful loss to me. I’ve got my tweets archived and backed up, and some day I’ll probably get them up on this site for posterity. You can relive me fumbling around as an awful 18 year old getting traumatized at college, or the cringey early-twenties period of my life. It captures my whole career, the entire time I’ve known my husband. It captures the beginning of my friendship with Dylan, when he replied to a tweet I made.

Some day I’ll get it all online here. Some day I’ll run an analysis of when I tweeted and how much, how much was retweets vs. replies vs. quotetweets vs. tweets. If I find a chunk of time to read through and categorize 57,000 tweets, I may even do an analysis of what I tweeted about.

Not today. Today, I’m just sad I lost a thing, and curious about what thing(s) will fill the holes it leaves behind.

Where will I shitpost and opine at you all now?

Home Improvement

We finally spent some time and energy fixing up our house, after buying it in 2019. It turns out a previous owner installed a fence himself, and did not know how to install fences. It also turns out he didn’t take into account sprinkler positioning when doing so, meaning our lawn was pretty patchy.

We had the old fence torn down and replaced with a new fence installed by professionals, much to the delight of our neighbors. We also pulled down a tree (technically, a tree-shaped bush, Ethan insists) in our front yard that the wind was uprooting. After the fence was in, we had the contractors rerun the sprinklers so the whole yard would actually be hit, then do some reseeding and sodding. Now we’ve got a yard we actually enjoy being in, even if it’s still a work in progress.

Other Stuff

This is mostly skimming the surface of the year. There were some major health things for people I love that happened throughout the year. Some loved ones celebrated major milestones, some loved ones experienced hardship. Some of this touched my life directly, some of I was just a bystander to. But this post is way too long already, and most of these things aren’t mine to talk about, no matter how much they colored my year. So… mind your own business. 😂

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With 2022 in the rearview mirror (I fall back on my yearly taunt: “eat your heart out, 2022, I’m still here and you’re not”), here are some of my hopes and dreams for 2023.

Baby News

We passed 2 years as an active family with American Adoptions in 2022. We’re hoping 2023 is the year our family gets a little bit bigger.

Writing More

How great would it be if I went to do a 2023 recap post, and my last post on my blog was from a few weeks ago, not 11 months ago? What if instead of posting on Twitter or Mastodon or whatever, I wrote things where I own the links and can keep things online as long as I care to?

In a similar-but-unrelated vein, I haven’t actually written any fiction since, I believe, the pandemic began. I’ve got notes for a few different stories bouncing around in my brain, but haven’t made any attempt to flesh them out.

I used to write all the time when I was younger. It would be nice if I could get back into practice. I’d also like to get better at it, and the only way to get better at it is to practice, lots and lots and lots.

I’ve got a list of blog posts I want to write, and notes on stories I’d like to tell. It would be neat if I could make some progress on that in 2023.

Shipping Lockbox

I’ve had an authentication system evolving in my brain since 2014, slowly building up understanding and opinions of the design space. I’ve written lots and lots of iterations of the software to various states of completion, and think I’ve finally landed on one I’m happy with. I’d really like it if I could actually ship a release of it in 2023.

It would be nice to have something to show for all that thinking and experimenting, but it would also unblock a lot of other projects that I want to do. Turns out almost everything needs authentication, so every project ends up scheduled into the imaginary “when I finish the auth system” part of the roadmap.

Finding Another Way To Support Our Local Queer Community

With our departure from the local Pride non-profit, I’m back to feeling like I’m not doing enough for our local queer community. I have some thoughts on what it may look like that I’m not ready to share yet, but whatever form it takes, I’d like to find another way to support that community.

More Home Improvement

I’ve stared into the abyss and am now the abyss domain expert.

We’ve got a long list of home improvement projects we’d like to do. I think gutters and a paint job are the big ones on this year’s todo list, but who knows.

Houses, man. They’re as bad at being done as software is, I gotta tell you. They have fewer bugs if you do it right, though.

Continue To Grow Into My Role At LaunchDarkly

With a year of foundation-building behind us, I’m really hopeful about this next year at LaunchDarkly. I’m hoping I can start to feel more like a force-multiplier.

Don’t get me wrong, I feel like I’m doing good work, and I even feel like I’m helping those around me. But with more domain knowledge and more confidence, I feel like I can do even more. Almost like I’ve got my own oxygen mask on now; I’m excited to see what it looks like when I can help others with theirs.

Feels like some cool stuff is in our future.