I was supposed to see Taylor Swift this month. It was planned for a year. It was going to happen in Vienna. It was going to be all glitter and joy and nothing bad could ever happen.

But then it did. The bad. Happen.

I won’t talk about this much more. No, I am not okay. But no, it’s not because I didn’t get to attend the concert. That’s sad. Really sad. But also I possibly evaded a catastrophic event. All things considered, it could have been worse. I am not okay because, and Swifties may hate on me for this, Taylor should have reacted earlier and in another way. There were a million opportunities for basic human decency. None was given. Not even, personal opinion, when she finally did say something about Vienna. And that hurts.

However, in the age old tradition of putting the shitty news first to then stack the awesome stuff: I SPENT A WEEK WITH ASH! We built furniture. We went on a lot of hardware market trips. I walked a dog on my own for the first time in my life and now weirdly kinda sorta think I might become a dog dad at some point? (I will. Just, give me a little bit to let that realisation sink in.)

We also had more time to talk than like maybe ever. Like real life, non-obstructed, sharing the same air kind of talk. There’s healing that can only be achieved this way. It’s been three weeks and I’m still not done processing everything. Which is wonderful. Back in January, our time together was supposed to be like this. Mind you, without a balcony and without the joy and sorrow of maybe having drilled into the perfect new apartment floor a teensy tiny bit. Life didn’t quite want us to get that. It’s on the to-repeat list. I just need to figure out how to bribe Rufus into not interfering.

Beyond Vienna, there were weeks full of work and nice summer evenings. A lot of reading. A little bit of coding. This may sound like I am writing the same update I’ve been writing for the past few months, but no. There was something distinctly different now: I am deliberately choosing to not do too much. I am choosing to finish things.

Did I finish anything? No. Not really. But I made progress. An example: For years, setting up rules to sort my mail Inbox has been one of my most procrastinated-on TODO list items. Did I sit down and write rules for everything now? Far from it! But I wrote some. Tricking myself with the oldest rule in the book. I told myself I will setup at least one rule per week. Of course, the thing with having the trainers on happened. I started running. I usually did 5-10 then. Slowly sorting through the accumulation of thousands of mails in my Inbox and moving it into folders.

So progress is finally happening again. My mind however is still just as restless and it’s often times hard to concentrate on one thing for a longer period of time but I am cherishing the small victories. More automation means less caring about mundane things.

Another thing I more or less finalised in August is updating my web hosting setup All of this here and a lot more things I don’t care to list has been on the same server setup for 8 years and was - aside minor corrections due to upgrades - configured to the best of my knowledge of nearly a decade ago. Obviously, I learned a thing or two since then. And the system setup for Debian changed immensely to systemd and all it’s good and bad qualities. So I set out to move and redo everything. Not only is the new setup up decidedly less maintenance heavy, it is also surprisingly much much cheaper than the old one. That’s a big win.