Highland games Spring Fling

Last weekend we had a Highland games spring training. This is the first event for many of us in the upper Midwest. We had 15 or 18 athletes come out and I helped host this in our in a park by our house.

We spent all day about 9 AM to 4:30 PM throwing weights, picking up sticks, and generally having a good time. Some of my throws improved others did not improve at all.

It’s always a lot of fun to hang out and throw with these good people.

WP contributions

Through my work I’m able to contribute up to four hours a week to open source projects. Currently I’m focusing on contributing to the WordPress project. Over the last two weeks, I’ve gotten back involved doing documentation for the latest release of WordPress, which is 6.8.

There’s some on-boarding that I’ve done and hopefully I’ll be able to continue to contribute in a meaningful way to the documentation team, and while I’m slowly contributing at first, I was able to pick up a issue for the Query Total block and help out with revising some other documentation.

It’s a great way for me to get started again and get more deeply involved in documentation and eventually WP Core and Gutenberg development.

Sketching and watercolor

Last week I started a free course on loose sketching, and watercolor. It has been really helpful to get my speed up and has helped me conceptualize what I’m drawing. I usually draw more heavy lines and try to be as precise as possible drawing slowly. However this “loose“ style of sketching has been really great for my speed and adding a little bit of “movement” to my sketches.

Here are some of the sketches I’ve worked on in the last week:

They aren’t amazing, but I feel really good about these because they’re a bit different than what I would do naturally and I think that they will lead me in a good direction to be able to do more and quickly sketch subjects whether it’s landscape or cityscape or people or whatever.

I’ve really enjoyed this course(it’s free too!). If you’re at all interested in this kind of sketching and making notes of your life in this way, I would encourage you to check this course out.

Live music

Last weekend, my wife and I had the opportunity to go to see Sierra Hull. I don’t really know her very well, but her ability as a mandolin player and a songwriter is incredible and it’s always good to see musicians that are really amazing at their craft. It was a lot of fun and definitely inspired me to continue to grow in my musical abilities.

Thinking in decades

As of the beginning of December 2024, I am a full-time employee at the University of Madison–Wisconsin. I’m an application developer there with a focus on developing applications and websites using WordPress, Laravel, PHP and JavaScript. The team I work with is amazing and the university is awesome. I really resonate with the mission of the university in the state of Wisconsin and I really enjoy the work that I get to do there.

This has me thinking that hopefully this will be my last job now I’m currently 42 and plan on retiring in about 20 years (Though it would be nice to retire a little earlier if I could 😅). This is giving me pause to start thinking about what I want the next two decades of my life to look like.

I currently don’t have many deep thoughts about this, but the opportunity to think in decades rather than years as far as my career, my life, my family etc., is very exciting to me and instead of hopping from one job to another every few years I have the ability to stay in one place and really make a home out of it.

So those wheels have been turning in my head now for several months and I’ll probably write about that later.