Revelry Reverie

Auspicious is one of those words that I don’t know the definition for, but I know what it means. I’ve learned about it from context clues, rather than looking it up (which, I did today to make sure I was right). The first thing I think whenever auspicious comes into play is “not suspicious,” as…

Eleanor is constantly asking “What is your favorite…” whatever. “What’s your favorite character from Wings of Fire?” “What’s your favorite color?” “What’s your favorite book?” “What’s your favorite food?” It never ends. She asks for the same favorites over and over – she’s probably asked me my favorite color a couple hundred times. I think…

Sometimes, the only way out of a tricky problem is through another problem. I don’t mean re-assess and approach the problem differently (though that can certainly help), I mean focusing on a totally different problem for awhile. It is counter-intuitive, if you have a big thorny problem, to put it away and think about something…

Periodically I brag about my house. It’s really amazing. It was built in the 1890s for a very fancy family, and it’s been really well kept ever since. The woman who owned it before us updated everything (like, furnace/ducting and electric) and kept it immaculate. Today I was riding my stationary bike (which we are…

I’m going to treat myself, and uninstall Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Maybe not forever, but for a while. I want to reset. I have my home on the world wide web right here, and something that I miss is having all my content start from here. There’s some on Instagram, some on Twitter (I don’t…

Something that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is the onboarding experience for our new hires here at Automattic (we call them newmatticians). I’m working on a project to create a new onboarding program for all newmatticians, and I think it’s going to have a really positive effect on all the new folk we…

Grant has been evolving. Not quite into his final form (and, who among us could claim that?), but evolving nonetheless. One very visceral example is we’re listening to music on Alexa this morning, and when “Black Hole Sun” (Soundgarden) came on, he said “Alexa volume up!” and he’s singing along. But it’s more than just…

This week, my daughter Eleanor has been doing things without her twin. It’s kind of coincidence that everything’s coming up Eleanor right now, but Henry is feeling a little bit left out. On Monday, Eleanor went skiing most of the day with Bob (no school that day). On Wednesday, Ele had her first theatre workshop…

A few weeks ago, a colleague shared this Wikipedia page on the XY problem. This part in particular struck me as hilarious: The concept of the problem itself, however, was known long before it received this name. In operations research scholar Gene Woolsey’s[5] 1980 text Applied Management Science: A Quick and Dirty Approach, he described…

I have been to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. I’ve been at Gobbler’s Knob when Phil was taken out of his roomy crate and held up to the sky to prophecy over the believers. It’s the coldest I’ve ever been. Exactly twenty years ago today, while I was in college, the outdoor adventure club I was co-president over…