October 2023 Check-In
October was a good month. I spent the latter half of it in Aruba and had a great time. But outside Aruba, the month was mostly quiet.
Aruba
Aruba was gorgeous. I wrote about my trip here and was happy to spend 2 weeks in paradise with my wife for our 10 year anniversary. I spent so much of it just enjoying the rest and relaxation. I was happy to come back home to my own bed though.
Writing More
One of the things I said I was going to do at the end of September was to write more, and to write every day. While I can’t say that I’ve succeeded in writing every day, I have written something almost every day. I only missed 9 days, and 2 of them were travel days to and from Aruba. A lot of what I wrote were either blog posts or draft blog posts that may or may not ever see the light of day. I did get back into writing a story I started back in June. I’m not sure how long the story will end up being, but I plan on spending a lot of time on it in November for NaNoWriMo. Not sure how many blog posts I’ll end up writing, but I’m sure I’ll write some.
Getting Back into Fitness
When I got back from Aruba and weighed in, I realized I had started to slip a little bit with my fitness goals. I have no issue with letting go while I was in Aruba. It’s a vacation and we only have 1 life to live. Enjoy it. But getting back, I have started to buckle down and pay closer attention to my diet and exercise habits. I’m hoping to continue that into November...and...the holidays.
Analog Journaling
I had written a month or so ago about my back and forth on whether I liked analog or digital. I decided that for my journaling I was going to go back to a moleskine-like notebook and physically write about my days. I have to say I like it. Even during vacation, I spent a little bit of time before bed writing about my days.
Monthly Round-Up
🏃🏼♂️ Running & Biking
- Running: Only 12.5 miles this month. Being in Aruba for 2 weeks didn’t help.
- Biking: Nope
🏋🏼♂️ Lifting
- I’ve been slacking off on this, but I’ve started back up at the end of the month.
📚 Reading
Finished
- Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin
- Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson
- On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
- Starter Villain by John Scalzi
- Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It by Kashmir Hill
- Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux
- Black River Orchard by Chuck Wendig
- Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet by Taylor Lorenz
- Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life by Arnold Schwarzenegger
- Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet by Tim Hwang
- The Poison Eaters: And Other Stories by Holly Black
Started
- The Forge of God by Greg Bear
✍🏻 Writing
- Continued my reading logs
- Wrote about
- Staying silent is political too
- How I’m constantly tweaking my site
- My solution for unit testing React Hook Form
- Defending TypeScript
- More Phillies postseason baseball
- The danger of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)
- The stress of being a fan whose team is in the playoffs
- The NHL and Gary Bettman being cowards (to put it mildly)
- My trip to Aruba
- Being busy and needing more time in the day
🎮 Gaming
- Continuing Horizon Forbidden West
📺 Watched
- Finished season 4 of Star Trek: Lower Decks
- Continued Schitt’s Creek
🎬 Movies
- None