What I am up to now. Check my /now page for the latest update.

Dad Stuff

My daughter is walking! She is almost 15 months old now, and it feels like overnight she transformed from baby to toddler. Crawling to walking took a couple of months, but I think she went from walking to running in an hour. We’re chasing her all over the place now. This is such a fun age.

In addition to walking/running, she’s getting pretty good at sign language and a few words. Her favorite words right now are dada, mama, baby, blueberries (besbes), bees, go (doe), bottle (baba), wheels on the bus (wuhbuh), book (buhbuh), dog (wohwoh, because our dog’s name is Lolo), bye bye, thank you and ball. She’s also gotten very good at shaking her head “no”, and is not afraid to use it. This girl has some sass. It can be challenging, but I am proud that we are encouraging her sense of self and being assertive about her needs even at this young age.

I’m having a lot of fun spending time with my daughter and playing with her. She is sweet and pure in a way that starkly contrasts the messiness and hustle of the world. She loves giving kisses and hugs. I love watching her walk around kissing her stuffed animals, and then offering them up to me or my wife to kiss them too. I want to soak in every moment I can with her.

And yet… if I’m being completely honest, I find myself having a desire to check out sometimes. My wife and I are working to keep each other accountable to not turning to our phones when we’re tired. I know I will be so much happier if I stay present in the moment, but the siren call of distraction can be really strong. I can easily fall into binging articles or videos and justifying it as “learning”, but it’s just my way of turning off to the hard things in front of me.

Creating

I continue to blog infrequently but love it when I do it. It seems li ke my creative energy comes in waves, and it has been on the upswing recently. I went the whole month of July without posting any articles, but wrote a handful last month. Recently, I redesigned the homepage of my blog and am pretty happy with how it turned out. I like just seeing a listing of all the things I’ve written about, and I imagine that’s what others would be interested in too.

A while ago I liked the idea of writing think piece articles where I do a bunch of research to from a novel opinion on a topic of interest, but that hasn’t materialized yet. I think maybe it’s just not my style? So far, my process is that I get super obsessed with an idea of something I want to write, and I need to get it out of my system within 24 hours. Then I publish it with little to no editing. I’m not sure that there’s a right or wrong way, but I’d still like to at least experiment with a more patient approach to writing.

I’ve also been working on Fed Meetup more. I had to update it with the FY25 rates that got posted by GSA recently, and while I was in there I cleaned up the interface. There’s still a lot of room for improvement, but it’s getting better. The worst part about the app right now is the initial load time. It’s atrocious, but I’m still figuring out how to get things to render correctly and lazy load in SvelteKit. That’s the next thing I plan to tackle.

I have ideas for all sorts of other things I’d like to create and put together an ideas page to keep track of them.

Work

My big focuses right now are the NASA Cause Analysis Tool (NCAT) and the NASA Mishap Information System (NMIS). NCAT was the first app that managed from idea all the way to release, and it was released earlier this year. It has been successful so far, and is getting good feedback from the mishap investigator community at NASA. These are the main people using the tool currently, it helps them brainstorm and organize data to determine findings and recommendations as part of their investigations.

NMIS is one of the NASA Safety Center’s oldest applications and I recently to over as the product manager for it. It is the source of truth for all NASA mishap data. It is a big legacy app and has a very different feel from NCAT, which is our newest application. NMIS is going through major changes right now since the mishap policy at NASA is changing, and the software needs to change with the policy. It has been fun getting up to speed on NMIS quickly and thinking about how we will implement major changes that touch most parts of the application.

Faith and Friends

The church group my wife and I are a part of has become completely overrun with babies… When we joined a couple of years ago, there were 0, and now we are well into double digits. We’ve all started going in on childcare together, and that has improved the dynamic of the group a lot. It’s a lot easier to have deep, meaningful conversation when there aren’t a bunch of kids toddling around and screaming.

I feel like my attitude toward my faith has been apathetic for a while, and I’m not sure what to do about it. I believe in Christ as my savior, and I believe God is active in my life and with me, but that doesn’t impact my heart as much as it used to. This concerns me. I feel a dissonance between my mind and my heart. It makes me wonder if I have allowed myself to get too comfortable? Am I settling for a typical American middle class life, concerned more with status and self-satisfaction than with the grand question of why I am even here? How could I not be moved by my belief that the reason I am here is to honor God and share love with others? I am praying for God to reignite my passion and excitement, but I am still waiting. That is okay, it does not shake the foundation of my faith, but I do feel like I am in a dry valley.

And despite all of these existential questions, I don’t want things to change. I really like my comfortable American life. I may be holding onto it too tightly. If I was asked to give it up, I would have a really hard time with that. It puts me in a weird place. I don’t really want change, but I am hoping and praying for it.

Leisure

I finished the Foundation Series by Isaac Aasimov, and now I am reading a couple different books: Ghost Soldiers, Thus Spake Zarathustra, and Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions.

I’ve been disc golfing occasionally when I can and have been playing really well. I played my highest rated round ever couple of days ago.

Exercise

I’ve been doing a couple sets a day of push-ups to failure, and that has been excellent for me. I’ve struggled with making time to go to the gym or even do a full workout at time, and this is so stupid easy that I’ve actually been able to keep up with it. I focus on going slow so that I use not just my arms but also my core.

My wife and I also recently got memberships to our local YMCA. We’ve gone a couple of times, but I’m not sure if we’ll stick with it. The place just has a weird feel. I don’t know if it’s too dark, or has a weird smell, but something is just off. I really want to do CrossFit or some sort of other group class like Jiu Jitsu, but those are so expensive that they’re tough to justify. They also feel like a little more of a time commitment, but I think that would be good for me. I think commitment is what I need.

Home

We’ve been rearranging the house quite a bit. It ended up in a weird setup, so I think we’re going to rearrange it all again soon. We’re trying to figure out how to have a nice adult space that is also kid-friendly.

Also, we had 5 different contractors come out recently to give us quotes for a back patio. We’re looking forward to making our backyard a nice space to entertain friends and let all the kids roam around.