New political email filter just dropped.

I haven’t seen sleep like this in two months. HVAC and sea level agree with me.

I have struggled to change my coffee habit into an at home thing. Sure, I’d save money. But there’s something about the stupid little walk, small talk, and brown noise while I sit and sip that settles me and helps me think.

The moment I realized that wine from 2003 is 20 years old. 💀

Last haircut, December 18th.

New haircut, today. I can’t see the difference. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Today was mostly a bad day. But I did have 3009 day old mole at Pujol and it didn’t disappoint.

Last week’s letter

Good Morning Jason,

what room or project are you most proud of?

The office was my top priority (my partner had different ideas) as I spend 3-4 days a week working in there and I’m very proud of how that turned out. I built the desktop and matching shelves myself from scaffold boards because finding something in the exact size I wanted turned out to be fairly difficult. This was a project that took a few weekends of lots of sanding, glueing, and staining but the final results is something I’m very proud of. Here’s an in-progress shot and the final result in situ. I also did the faux wood-panelling in our bedroom which we’re both very pleased with.

The work I do is primarily focused on property reports for tenants (inventories, fire risk assessments, etc) so there isn’t much crossover with renovating the house but I what I did learn is that planning is key. We wish we had spent a few weeks planning what we wanted to achieve before jumping into the renovation. There were definitely things that made our life a bit more difficult because we did some work when we should have waited for another job to be finished first.

That sounds like an interesting job but it must be difficult to work with organisations like schools that can be slow and unwieldy to get new tech implemented. How long have you been doing that?

I saw you posted yesterday about being ill, hope you’re feeling a bit better today?

Speak soon,
Robb

Hi Robb,

Luckily, I am feeling better. Note to self, when you order a steak medium and it comes out just barely rare just send the damn thing back. The day of suffering that followed was not worth it.

I’ve done some more work in my office since this last photo, but this is a not-terribly-inaccurate representation of where things are. I also use the IKEA pegboard. I did not quite get as fancy on the desk itself– which is an IKEA Karlby 98" top that I had a friend cut to 80" and then added some really cool metal legs from an Etsy shop. When the pandemic hit we went 100% remote, which meant tha this room got transformed into an office. I probably have 6-10 scattered blog posts about the process that landed on the setup linked above– most of the changes by now are additional plants and things hung on the wall (plus some equipment changes).

I think it’s pretty natural for the office to be the place you’re most proud of– it’s one you get to call your own and the spot you’re probably stuck spending the most time in.

We’ve been thinking about doing a similar paneling look either behind our bed or possibly behind our TV. Maybe that’ll be a project for when we return home. It’s hard to have a big wall behind a TV– it looks bare without anything, but most things we could put there would be distracting.

I’ve been working at my current company nearly 9 years. Before that, I worked at a university research center working with school districts on early warning systems, and before that, I worked for the state department of education. I think what’s most challenging is that everyone is well-established. There aren’t new school districts popping up building their systems and processes from scratch. The people, organizations, culture, and work processes are all fairly fixed. So we have to do things much more completely and better than most companies to even get in the door. Then we have to get a large set of folks on board so that we can deliver on our promise. We’re a small team and we’re supporting billions of dollars of budgeting and monitoring. There’s a lot of technical/systems and cultural debt that we have to work with to succeed.

That said, the opportunity for improvement is huge, and it’s very satisfying when someone gets it and we can make their work so much easier and more effective.

Looking forward to next week,

Jason

Sign of the times— the restaurant I’m in has TV screens up for the music it’s playing. The playlist is Top Songs for 2022, and Billboard, Spotify, and TikTok are the listed sources.

Happy New Year

Pretty solid ramen for CDMX

If I took a picture of every sign I loved in CDMX, I would never get to my destination walking. Here’s a few I stopped and snapped, but far from the “best” or only ones that I liked.

Bookshop in a park on a lake with crepes and coffee.

Walking around La Condesa.

Puebla is quite the city.

I did finally leave the house today. It felt nice. I’m back in bed recovering though.

Ladies and gentlemen, the weekend.

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

Look, if your taco place doesn’t have an assortment of salsas and pickled veggies and chilis toreados to zhuzh them up, it’s not any good.

Three years ago today we ate this for dinner and it was great

We leave behind pieces of ourselves

like clay shavings

in the places that shape us.

The only sticker I’ve ever put on my laptop.

Today I felt almost normal. Pretty sure it’s the first time I’ve closed all three rings since surgery.

Old Preferences: Software Updates list the software and release notes. New Settings: Click More Info. Click on the only update listed to highlight it. THEN you get release notes.

This sucks.

Eight years ago today, 6 months into my Allovue journey, I came down to Baltimore for a party in our small office above a bar. The party started at 6, and Ted and I still hovered over a laptop at 6:15pm. We excitedly called Jess over to show her– we just fully loaded our first set of general ledger accounts and transactions into Balance. It was, I hope, her favorite birthday present that year.

I’d be lying if I said that I knew that day was a key milestone in a life-defining adventure and partnership. It just seemed like a cool problem we solved.

Watching TV together.