I need to get better at writing blog posts.

So, we’re in 2025. I’ve been taking a bit of a social media hiatus, but, I’m still around. I’ve been doing a lot of work at my local makerspace, mainly learning things that are outside of my wheelhouse – ceramics, jewelry making, and printmaking. A lot of folks have been asking for advice on how to deal with things at the makerspace and while I’ve been helping and providing guidance the best that I can, I don’t really want to make the makerspace my ‘second job,’ nor do I want to work on things before I work on things…so, we’ll see how this goes.

I have truly been avoiding the TV recently; admittedly, I am not one who really watched the news every night, but, I did go through moments of my life where I lived the whole “DC Consultant” lifecycle, and usually had a mixture of CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News on at any given point in time just so I knew what I needed to do to counter the talking points I was going to to get into the next time I had face time with a Senator or a Representative. Fortunately for me, those days are done: while I do work in the “Federal-Adjacent” space (e.g., FedRamp, TxRamp, StateRamp), I’m mainly dealing with career information security professionals who can sniff bullshit from a thousand miles away.

I’ve made the decision that I’m probably going to stick around in Dallas for the summer. I know that it’s far from ideal just in terms of temperature, but, I’m getting tired of the constant travel and whole ’living out of a suitcase’ lifestyle, and I say that as someone who’s been an Ambassador Elite at Marriott for the last five years. Part of it is that Hospitality in general has changed and not for the better, and the other part of it is that I need to be in a general place if I’m going to enjoy doing my hobbies (specifically, my ham radio hobby) for a bit; I want to try to do more local and civic events and it’s hard – if not impossible – for me to do that when I’m traveling 100% of the time.

My office in Cincinnati ended up being a complete fiasco – first the building was sold, then they kicked everyone out…and now they’re getting rid of the self-storage units that were under the office. I’m going to head up to Cincinnati in the next week or so to pack up my storage units (three in Cincinnati, one in Chicago) and bring them down to Dallas. My goal for that is to have everything taken care of by June…just so I don’t have to deal with the Dallas summer heat. My hope is that I can have my office/home/etc in place ASAP and work on some of my misc projects that I’ve been wanting to work on.

Aside from that, life is good:

• I am in good health (well, I could probably lose some weight, but, that’s not a new thing by any stretch of the imagination)
• Mentally? I’m doing about as well as everyone else is right now.
• I’ve started to walk more: my goal is to be walking 3 miles three times a week and get a bike for my office.

One of my goals for the rest of this year is to increase the quantity of blog posts and content that I’m creating, so, here’s me hoping that I’ll actually stay on point this year!