Revelry Reverie

Next week I’m starting a rotation with Tumblr, acting as COO. I’m super excited about this, because I find Tumblr a little bit (a lotta bit) magical, and it’s an honor to work with the team in any capacity. For the first time in a long time, I won’t have any direct reports – I’ve…

Early this morning, the house shook with some sustained bangs. Turns out, Grant had found a hammer and was bored. He wanted to “make a window to Eleanor’s room.” He has no regrets.

A week or so ago, Grant convinced me to get a cookie sandwich kit at the grocery store. The cookies don’t look quite like the box, but the Ringlets approve!

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…