Tag: summary

December 31, 2024 – Year In Review

December 31, 2024 /

It has been kind of a ho-hum year if I have to say so myself. I am going to look back at the AtF4 highlights or favorites today. One thing that kind of sticks out to me is that I think this has been the flattest year of AltF4 to date. It was a year of long book series, long running projects and fighting cancer. I went through the effort of looking back from my entire year to see what it is I did and what I liked.

  • January – I started out thinking I was going to build a wine cellar. First, I wanted to move the ducts.
  • March – It wasn’t sexy, but it was one of the best projects I should have done years ago. I finished raising the ducts into the stud bays.
  • April – Chemo started. I also started buying some radios. I got my GMRS license.
  • June – I started planning my PCT hike. I also started spotty walking in an effort to get into shape.
  • July – My wife had her stem cell transplant. I spent the entire month away from home.
  • August – I survived reading The Devine Comedy
  • October – Burn out is realized. I took a nice five day fishing vacation with my dad, uncle and brother.
  • November – Family trip to Montana for Thanksgiving. Who could forget the Election results as well.
  • December – The theme of this month was fatigue.

Of course, there is nothing more important than fighting for your life and the business that comes with it. As a result when I looked through the year, I felt like my writing was much more diverse and interesting in the first quarter of the year. It has gone steadily down hill since that time. I had a hard time even finding some highlights toward the end of the year.

Not every month got a mention in my summary because I didn’t see a post that I felt was remarkable or fully inspired for the month. I think that was a combination of my selection for what I was talking about and doing and my personal life. Long running works and little time made a diversity of topics scarce.

The trip to Montana was definitely one to remember. That being said, not everything is for sharing here. It also went by so fast and then we launched directly Christmas that it was hard to get any sort of rest as a result. I would say that I am starting the year at a deficit. I have a deficit of topics and plans going into 2025.

I can tell that because despite not posting for the entire last week, I am still struggling to get this out in time. I keep looking for that dose of Vitamin B and is going to turbo charge that feeling I was getting when I started this endeavor in 2019. Intuitively, I knew that the novelty of my series Pursuit of Happiness that I did in 2021 just has not materialized in the last year. I haven’t really even done any projects that I was proud of since I started the duct work.

I always like to look forward and not just back. Guess what? I think it is going to be another year of the same. Plans are moving forward for my hike which means that most of my spare time is going to be dedicated to training and practice. Things have basically slipped since Thanksgiving. I am hoping that the new year will finally clear up the social schedule (but probably not the weather).

We are also planning on hosting our (former) Spanish exchange student’s family for a week of Pacific Northwest touring June. So that will be a week of my vacation plus a week of hiking and I will be mostly tapped out for the year. We talked about travelling to Taiwan over Christmas but that has not been solidified.

End Your Programming Routine: Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on myself because despite how I feel about my creative output, it was a very successful year from a personal standpoint. My wife beat cancer, my oldest son beat the school system, my younger son beat his exchange and is on his way to his last year in school. That is something worthy of being happy about. So, let’s kick 2024 to the curb to hopefully find a better 2025.

March 18, 2022 – American Dream: Where Do We Stand?

March 18, 2022 /

This was kind of an interesting exercise for me. When I wrote off the cuff about the qualities, I really was reacting to what I thought that I knew. After really digging into the definition of the terms and their applications, I came away with a different perspective.

As a refresher, here were the five properties of the American Dream: Democracy, Rights, Liberty, Opportunity and Equality. In my opinion, the most important one is also the most subjective. Rights are recognized and incorporated into the government, have known boundaries and an expectation of exercising.

When we look at what our founder’s described as rights, properties that we were born with before the existence of the government are not necessarily recognized in other cultures, some examples the right to keep and bear arms or women’s suffrage. The fact that we have an entire category of law and lawyers means that rights are constantly evaluated and not considered static or even inherited before the government.

If we believe in this concept, then we have to be OK that our neighbor is doing something that we don’t like. We have to accept that my dream is not my neighbors just as his is not likely mine. We have to agree that the risk of not living in a Home Owner’s Association is worth the reward of freedom. We have to agree that we have the right to succeed beyond our wildest dreams but that comes with a risk of losing it all. We have to agree that consenting adults can gather together to worship the devil or have sex parties or snort cocaine as long as no one is being forced to do so and no one else is harmed in the process. We also need to understand that there is recourse for damages in a free society rather than attempting to force them to do something by creating laws.

You see, there is nothing wrong with the American Dream concept except we no longer believe in it. At the risk of sounding harsh, the term mental masturbation applies here. We like the thought of the American Dream, but we don’t actually want it. Just as a person could be very happy and thrive in a socialist, homogenous society, it could be miserable if you believe differently. Back to my comment on freedom I said a few weeks ago, totalitarianism is some of the most prosperous and happy conditions when you are on the right side of the ruling class.

I spend a lot of time railing against the fascist left (that’s right you are just as fascist despite what the media says), my religious right friends need to look in the mirror as well. Jesus never required us to legislate morality. In fact for salvation purposes, morality is strictly the responsibility of the individual. When the veil was torn so were the ways of Judaism and the ceremonial laws of sacrifice and circumcision. While I can understand the distaste for sin, judgement and condemnation are also some of those sins. Creating laws of minimum square footage restriction may impact my dream as readily as I am not allowed to own livestock or buying alcohol on Sunday.

In case you feel like I am a bit all over it is because I am trying to get across is that both sides are pinching at the American Dream for their own reasons. Let’s be honest, both sides hope to use the power of the state to force everyone to adhere to our version of the better society. What is the impact? We lose the ability to pursue our dream our way.

End Your Programming Routine: Seems like we are ending about where I started, probably not for the the same reasons though. I assumed the American Dream was dead because the characteristics weren’t being upheld. It is even the case that some of those properties really are only ideals and not actually true, particularly Opportunity and Equality. I now think that the American Dream is dead because the definition of the characteristics change.