Not the end, but also the end
07 Nov 2026
Usually when you read someone’s blog and the front page post says “hey I have cancer” with no other more recent posts, it’s easy to assume the worst.
It was extremely rude of me to post about cancer and then vanish for four years. Here is the four-year-post-last-post update.
I am not dead.
I did chemo and radiation for my throat cancer, and that really sucked. Do not recommend. And then just as I started getting better from all that, I got breast cancer. Cancer II: The Cancering was definitely the sequel I least wanted to experience. So, that was another year of surgeries and reconstruction and scans and multiple other suckass American medical system and health insurance disasters.
I did not need to have chemo or radiation for that second cancer, but I am now on long term anti-cancer meds now that also suck. Do not recommend.
Lots of other stuff happened, mostly good.
During my cancer interregnum I also retired officially from the tech industry, and got out just in time for AI to make my entire career become abruptly obsolete.
We built a house on a farm in Southern Oregon, we moved to the farm in Southern Oregon, and we sold our Silicon Valley house.
We had one amazing cat (Max) pass away, and acquired another amazing cat (Cato), below.
This has been a lot of radical change in a short amount of time, and that has been stressful, but most of it so far is turning out OK.
But about the blog…
Even though I am personally doing fine there is still the ongoing problem of this blog, its past, and its future.
Several times now I have restarted this blog, and posted one or two things before abandoning it again. For this last hopeful iteration I spent a month moving the whole thing out of Wordpress into Jekyll. And then when that was done I discovered that I detest writing in markdown and the new system made it both hard for me to write and also to maintain anything. So that was a poor choice.
I have considered changing the blog software again to make things easier to maintain and easier to write but … I am pretty sure this is less a problem with the right blogging software and more just a problem with me. I am the problem. No software is going to help me here.
I’ve also seriously considered just taking down my entire site and vanishing altogether, because blogs are not really a thing any more and everything here is likely getting regularly scraped to train an AI. But I’m a bit stubborn about that because I’ve been on the Internet for forty years, and put so much of my life into it. It’s not my fault the Internet sucks now.
The end.
So, for the time being I’m just closing the door on the blog and calling it quits. I’m going to leave the site up and available should you ever want to read semi-humorous things about persimmons and Christmas tree farms, but I am probably not going to put any more energy into new content.
I am still posting very regularly on mastodon and occasionally on other socials media. I am not hard to find. Come say hi if you get a chance.
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Posted on 07 Nov 2026 • in blog •