Now

What’s a “Now” page? This is what I am currently up to, what is occupying my brain and life. This is not a blog, because this is specifically about me. This is what I would tell a friend I hadn’t seen in awhile if they asked me what was up.¹

Winter 2025 House Project

New stair runner carpet, which means stripping the wood stair tops, staining, and urethaning them along with new white paint on the stair backs and sides. They are looking good. I didn’t sand them deep enough to get beyond the lightening from sun exposure, but the new stair runner will cover those edges by an inch on either side. My future self might be mad at present self, but for the next 20 years I will have a nice set of stairs and a carpet that covers up my lack of ambition.

Winter 2025

Recently, the focus of my job as “Director of Design & UX” has shifted to “Director, Experience Design.” For my company, this included a move away from managing designers directly to being a more dedicated individual contributor (IC).

This shift has been noticeable. I feel disconnected from the people doing the work and disconnected from my former team (and they feel disconnected from me, as we built a great rapport). I feel more connected to the work, however, which involves strategy, proposals, occasional deep dives back into UX and research, some analytics and qualitative data wrangling, and even the occasional CSS, JSX, and PHP coding (the latter two in a much more limited capacity).

In those ways, I am more energized. Getting back to CSS made me redesign this site to practice using the latest and greatest CSS declarations and rules, and to dive deeper into structuring a system of variables that work together to make light and dark mode support relatively easy. To this end, I feel successful.

I’ve been dealing with the loneliness less successfully. This has been a struggle ever since COVID, which I blogged about quite a bit (it’s an interesting personal account of the way it rolled out over time). The causes and symptoms are many — low energy to put effort into human contact, high friction in getting out of habits, and the (natural?) shrinking of social groups as I age.

I have also been struggling with the other focus of my role, which is to keep on top of the rapidly evolving worlds of design and digital strategy. Both were always fast-paced, but the last 12 months of AI development has only increased that exponentially.

Overall, good and bad. This change to my job has been just one of many changes we are all dealing with, from both personal and societal levels.