Today is April 12th, 2026. As I write this, I am thinking of what has happened recently and my plans for the future.
On the home front, my health is stable if not exactly good. I need to lose weight and exercise more. I need to eat healthier. I was in good shape in my mid 20's but poor eating habits, a lack of sleep, and not enough exercise have caused me to slowly decline since my mid 30's. Now I fear that if I don't take these things more seriously what was a slow but steady decline will start to speed up as I approach my mid 50's. There's still time for me, if I can muster the will to power.
I feel that I've finally fully adjusted to living in Lansing. It's weird because in many ways it feels like a small town, but yet it's the capital of the state and also a college town so there's much less here than was in Grand Rapids, yet in some ways more. It's also more liberal in many ways, which is a nice change.
I am fortunate enough to have found some new friends in Lansing. They're good people and together we've been playing a lot of board games. I tried to get back into table-top role-playing games a few times but the amount of effort compared to the reward just paled when I compare that to cooperative dungeon-crawler campaign board games. I am sure I'll run some TTPRG again but I don't see it happening soon and I'm ok with that fact.
My work is going well. I've picked up several new clients and they're good people. I've been more open to using WordPress for some projects, now aided by an assistant that is very talented with WordPress visual design. Together we've been able to work as a good team - she makes things beautiful and I step in when she needs help with the harder coding projects.
I've been kicking around the idea of starting a board-game themed streaming channel for awhile but this might be the year I actually do it. I have the hardware and I've been talking to a fellow that's been streaming for years. He's promised to teach me some stuff to help me get started. Fingers crossed.
As always, my personal website is a labor of love that I am always tweaking and changing. Right now it's in a state of flux as I'm upgrading everything to use PDO instead of mysqli(), OOP instead of procedural code, and PHP 8.4. I'm also trying to finish a tool that will pull data from the boardgamegeek.com API to make my system's game data dynamic. I have big plans - check back later to see if I actually completed any of them.
To all of you that actually read all this, even you bots that had no choice, thanks! I know I'm just shouting into the void as I type this, but the void evolves and maybe someday this will be read by someone or something. If so, I wish you the best.