Nine months have passed since my last update. Where am I at now? I guess everything is working as expected. I’ve taken a break from much of this tech project as I feel like I’ve accomplished most of what I wanted. There are still hiccups, and most of my WordPress sites are slow. My next issues are power related: first streamlining my power usage, and then streamlining my power-down procedure in the event of an outage.
I’m just going to say it, winters are hard on me. I’m not sure I really noticed much in the past, but this winter was long. Even now in May it’s only in the low 60s and rainy. We’ve had bouts of nice weather, but it hasn’t switched to summer yet.
To combat this issue, last year I started a garden. It was mostly happenstance, and in fact had a friend of mine not given me some seeds, I’d probably still have a boring ‘renter’s yard’. This is the project that consumed much of my time last year, and has consumed basically all of my spare time for the last two months or so. I can’t wait for nice weather. The gardening keeps my outside and engaged with my neighbors. It has also really beautified my space, and probably given me a few more years in this apartment that seems to get increasingly smaller.
The garden also has revitalized my interest in this website. I turned it off many months ago, mostly because the experiment had run its course, and also I’m perpetually plagued by fears of hackers. (This fear was reinforced when I check my login limiter plugin to see 800+ failed attempts before I turned off the site.) But now, I take so many photos and have so many stories to share that they have to go somewhere. Social media has been out of my life for a while, save for browsing Reddit. I rarely contribute, and my Instagram pages surely have cobwebs. My only outlet now is texts to friends and family and they’re all too nice to tell me to turn off the tap of garden photos. So now, dumbleigh.com is probably going to be a repository of projects stories, or maybe even just a general blog of my life. That was the original goal: start a blog to see if I would keep it up. And here I am, keeping it up only after a short hiatus.