On things going well

Things feel like they're settling into a comfortable routine. I'm sleeping enough, for the first time in a while. The house is warm and dry, and all of the lights but one is working. We have a television, and we watch The Great British Bakeoff every Tuesday night at 8 pm. I get home at a reasonable time thanks to a new car, purchased for £350, which ferries me reliably to and from my work, which is only some 10 minutes away. I feel comfortable, capable, and confident at my job. The house is clean. I read for an hour before bedtime, every night.

The bank account isn't hurting. We're frugal but we're not really denying ourselves anything. The car was cheap and we're taking advantage of its relative affordability to learn to do proper (low-stakes) maintenance and repairs. Sam is a mastermind at cheap kitchenwork. But we can afford to go out to a fancy restaurant for our anniversary, and we're doing well enough that I have one nice bottle and one cheap bottle of whisky on the counter.

Planning for the wedding continues apace. We're probably a little behind but not so much that we need to worry about it. Sam worries more than I do. She's doing a lot more of the work. I'm trying to pick up the slack.

But we're doing comfortably. I'm not struggling. I'm not really challenged by much at all right now, which, hmm. I'm not sure how to take that. On the one hand, this could be read as some sort of doldrum malaise, looking to be stirred up by some controversy. On the other, it might be seen as the construction of a strong foundation from which to springboard towards greater things.

I feel like it's more of the latter. Like I've just come up a steep hill through trees and mire onto some big dusty plateau. There are hills ahead of me that will require navigating. But I feel amply prepared to scale them because the weather is fair and the air is clean and clear. I'm not going to sit here on the plateau. We keep moving forward.

I'm planning to take back up where I left off with those Wes Bos courses. I started the React/Redux one when I first moved here but never finished. I'm taking a look at React Native for building apps for mobile devices. I want to build an app for keeping track of everything we own. Shouldn't be too hard.

In the meantime, I've been unsuccessfully meaning to post a few more guides on Mountains of Hokkaido. Not that the site has been particularly busy, but I just want to get up everything that I know about those mountains. I spent as many weekends as I could in those mountains, and I can tell that day by day, I'm forgetting them, forgetting the things I knew about them. So I need to get that data up on the Internet is a more lossless format than my own faulty electrochemical memory.

In the hills of this country, however, we've also gotten back on track with the Mountain Bothies Association. We attended a the Northern England & Borders regional meeting last weekend. It really firmed up my feelings that these are the sorts of people that I want to become. Hardworking, honest, committed to 'wild and lonely places.' Probably not particularly enthusiastic about being talked about. We're no where near prepared for it at the moment, but in the future I'd like to take over management of one of the bothies around here, if we could. We'd probably have to move to Northumberland. As if that's any sort of a chore.

All of which is to say nothing of the list of new Internet technologies I want to try that seem to be piling up in my todos. This is sort of unstructured and dateless, and honestly as time goes by it's probably better for me to just let it lapse and let the rest of the after-work tech adopters weed out the projects that just aren't worth it.

This is a short picture of my life as it is, right now. Up on the plateau. The wind and the air all about me. Breathing light and easily. Things are going well.