I still swear the years are going by faster now. Part of me can hardly believe this mess of a blog of mine has been going for 13 years now, but next year will mark ten years in Portland… assuming I don’t move before then (I’m not planning to.) I don’t know why I ever thought I’d have the time to regularly update this when I launched it halfway through my time at Drexel, but it is a choice I’d make again.
While these days this is essentially a mirror backup of my Instagram (this gets full-res images once I replace them manually), I think it still serves a purpose. Being a lot more searchable than Instagram and the platform formerly known as Twitter has made this in to a time capsule of sorts for me. Photos I thought I had lost to hard drives dying have turned up here. Recalling things from my time at Drexel or while in Australia have been a lot easier to refer back to because of here.
But those were times when there was more to talk about, and there is no denying part of that is because I actually got out and did more. It would be unfair to say that was only made possible by having more free time back then. I’d be lying to myself if I said I haven’t just been running pretty much the same routine week after week since at least 2020. It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s been longer than then, but the world shutting down for COVID certainly made it easier to just fall in to an unchanging routine. I think it’s long been obvious that routine has been work on work days, go to Washington Park on my “weekend”. It has been too long that I’ve been generally OK with that.
The Portland Japanese Garden’s CEO announcing his retirement after 20 years and the realization that next year will potentially mark ten years in Portland has made me start to think about the future more. July will mark one year of finally having a one-bedroom apartment that I never really finished organizing. I have no immediate plans to move, but part of that will be influenced by if I continue to stay at Kroger.
There’s no telling what will happen if/when this merger with Albertsons is approved or not. Honestly, I never originally intended to be at Kroger for as long as I have been now; it was meant to be something to keep cash flow in while looking for something better. I never really stopped looking, I just stopped looking as aggressively as time went on. But now that we finally have modernized reporting after four years of backend work, I do think eight years at the same company isn’t an insignificant amount of time, and Kroger certainly isn’t the same company it was when I started.
But, I won’t lie that it would be hard to give up working from home potentially after doing so for about six years. Contrary to popular belief, it has been dramatically more productive than the office was. Here the only distractions are Jiji and my coffee cup being empty. At the office with its open floor plan, it was all too easy to get distracted with a side conversation. Sure, some of them had a business purpose, but the vast majority were just passing the time – especially when we were still allowed NERF guns.
All that said, I don’t expect year 13 for the blog to be much different than it has been. Even on Mastodon I’m not terribly active, granted I blame part of that on being a much harder platform to share content on from another site; it’s a bit more involved that just hitting a Share to Facebook or Share to Twitter X button. But no matter what happens in this lucky 13 of a year, at the very least, it will still be a time capsule I can look back on in the future.
