Sorry I Haven't Written in a While; I Had a Baby and a Near-Death Experience

7 Jun 2024, 10:15 p.m.

Or did death have a near-me experience (GNU Terry Pratchett)?

Either way, things have been Busy over in my little corner of East Anglia. My ambitions of documenting a fastidious journey towards technical excellence and buckets of hard cash didn't come to fruition and this site has been laying dormant. Now that I'm back at work in the factory, starting to write fiction again, and relatively healthy, it seems like a suitable time to have another go at this blogging thing. Perhaps with a loosening of focus, though. I'll keep my horror fiction elsewhere under a site with my pen name in the URL rather than my real one, but otherwise I'll write about anything on here that I feel like opining on. Lots of open source tech stuff, probably a bit of lefty politics, a dash of philosophy, maybe a tediously long entry with a little bread recipe at the end if I'm feeling spicy.

Speaking of tediously long blog posts, I suppose I should expand on that title a little.

The Baby

Little Jacob is just perfect. Born in December '22, he's got incredible energy and only 40% or so of my personality flaws. He's been keeping me very busy, which is half the reason I haven't been working on this blog or anything else related to me switching careers to tech (a thing which hasn't happened and probably won't for a while; a hobbyist I remain). I love being a father and I risk all of my friendships by bombarding people with photos of him. I won't put any online for paranoia related reasons, but trust me the photos are awesome.

The Near-Death Experience

The other half of the reason I haven't been up to much. I knew I wouldn't get a lot done during his first year and I was fine with that. What I didn't anticipate was ending up in a head-on collision while travelling to work on my motorbike one Thursday. The other party didn't stop and I damn near bled out. Among the various entertaining little dreamscapes I found myself wandering through, such as cliche out-of-body experiences and telling the light to piss off repeatedly, I woke up intermittently and called for help. Some people who lived nearby heard and came to investigate. Air ambulance, loads of surgery, a month in hospital before discharging myself to spend Christmas with my wife and son, months of rehab, and here we are.

Not quite good as new, it has to be said. I'm over six months out from the incident now, and I hurt. I've had a lot of other people's blood, a synthetic bone graft, and thirty-odd titanium implants. Scars all over the shop. Still, despite all that I'm bloody thrilled to be alive. While some sort of spiritual insight would have been nice, a little gratitude isn't a bad thing to take away from veering dangerously close to becoming a statistic.

The Awkward Ending

I've said everything I wanted to say today, I think. I'll come up with something more interesting to write soon (just so we're clear, I'm not operating under the illusion that anyone reads my website. I'm an utter nobody on the web and this is basically my journal. That said, nothing wrong with having standards for myself, eh?), but for now I'm going to mess about with my Emacs config on my Thinkpad T430 (running FreeBSD, which I'll probably write about at some point) and wait for the kiddo to wake up so I can give him a cuddle.

Toodles.