As the man said, “Life moves pretty fast.”
At the start of the year, I had a planned eye surgery that sidelined me for a couple of weeks and then kept me somewhat limited after that. During that recovery, I was further sidelined by a respiratory illness. Five days after getting the all-clear from my eye surgery, the retina in the same eye detached. That kept me mostly sidelined for 60 days.
Life moves fast indeed.
The thing about eye surgeries is that the recovery involves very limited activity. Anything that raises your blood pressure also raises your eye pressure, which is to be avoided during the recovery period. That was particularly true after the retina, which involves putting a gas bubble in the eye to act as a splint for the retina. That means no strength training (or lifting anything more than five pounds), only very slow walking, no sleeping on my back, no flying, no ground transportation over 4,000 feet of elevation, and – most impactful to me – no running. The gas bubble takes about 60 days to go away and my vision in the affected eye was blurry for the first few weeks, so I also couldn’t drive.
Pretty much, I was allowed to sit still at home for the better part of 60 days, after I had spent a couple of weeks doing that from my planned surgery. Needless to say, I’m sitting here in mid-May feeling like my 2025 is just getting started.
I’m lucky to have a supportive family, access to great health care, and a good backlog of consulting work. I shipped a lot of work product while I was restricted, but I’ve had to press the pause button on a number of more strategic things I was hoping to work on.
Life can slow you down while it moves fast.
So I’m looking ahead to the rest of the year. There’s TUGIS, which I’ll be attending in partnership with New Light Technologies. In the early 2010’s, I was doing some consulting work for GeoIQ (of GeoCommons fame). They used outside consultants for a number of non-core activities and, in doing so, helped support the local tech community by “spreading the wealth.”
That experience was meaningful to me and New Light Technologies has picked up the mantle. They been hugely supportive to this one-person consulting company, and others I’ve talked to in the area say the same about them. So I’m looking forward to TUGIS.
I’m also helping to organize FOSS4G-NA, which will be in Reston, Virginia in November. I’ve written in the past about how supportive the FOSS4G community is and staying involved with the events has been a lifeline while I’ve been sidelined.
As for the things that have been on pause, I have a couple of other ventures in the offing that I’ll be getting going now that I can. In doing my work, I have come to realize that I am a workaholic and that it is my superpower. I enjoy what I do and I want to do as much of it as I can. That is how I am wired. It’s not true for everyone and that is okay. I have come to realize that the times I have been least effective have been when I have tried to fight against it to adhere to some societal expectation. I’m not doing that anymore.
Additionally, my physical fitness has taken a big hit during this time. Now that I’m released, I am working on getting it back on track. The “war on cubicle body” has resumed, but without all the social media posts. I’m currently 13 days into a 90-day run streak of doing at least three miles per day. It’s high pollen season here so most it has been on the treadmill so far, but I should be able to move outside in a couple of weeks.
So, yeah, it feels like the year I envisioned for myself is finally getting started. We’ll see how much of twelve months I can cram into the remaining seven. Happy New Year, everyone!
