What I'm doing now

January 2, 2026

I am a full time Sr. Business Analyst at Charter Communications where I work as a subject matter expert in their internal ITSM tool. My team is actively migrating tools from Cherwell to Ivanti after their recent merger. I'm responsible for the conversion of over 4,000 processes. As I transition into an architectural role, I am actively making an effort to delegate and trust my team to accomplish the technical tasks that I have done in the past. I am steadily getting better at this, but letting go of all those interesting tasks is proving more challenging for me than I expected.

Perhaps the most consistently productive aspect of my life is due to the fact that I work an hour away from my home... so during my commute I listen to a lot of audio books (see the books page for my recently read books). Since the beginning of 2022, I have had a goal of reading 50 books each calendar year.... not just to hit that number, but to read 1,000 books ("a library" of books) over my lifetime and to generally be a well-read individual. I managed to achieve that yearly goal for the first time by finishing 60 books in 2025! I do have really good excuses for not completing my 50-book goal until this year (2022: grandaughter was born and i went back to college... 2023: completed degree, started a successful business, started Wheel of Time... 2024: expanded business, completed Wheel of Time) I'm starting 2026 with 307 documented books read... so far!

I spend time at our family's Coffee House during the rush before work every week-day and all day every Saturday. I thoroughly enjoy the time I get to spend participating in the growth of our little community. There are a lot of moving parts behind the scenes. This year we purchased the building we operate from and just hired our first (unrelated) employee. We're spinning up the our next business venture by making take and bake pizzas!

In my free time, I'm either spending time with my family, maintaining our farm, overhauling this website to expand my programming capabilities, or incrementally reading thru a book (I've not read many paper books this year).

In 2025, I added writing poetry to my daily activities... Initially it was all Haiku. I wrote about this in a previous blog post. in April I participated in a "30 poems in 30 days" challenge I stumbled upon after I began writing haiku. I do enjoy taking the time to look for, meditate on, and capture a moment from my days. It's a practice that enables me to slow down without feeling wasteful of my time.... I've recently found another style that fits my personality. I've found myself writing 'Two Word' poems, it's a style that forces me to limit each line to only, well, two words. This limitation helps me to trim out the fluff and focus on brevity. In fact, I really appreciate these form limitations (haiku, two word, even the sonnet) because they enable me to condense my topic to it's essence.

Mariah and I recently accomplished a few major financial goals, and took some time to discuss, plan, and celebrate with our children. We've since been putting more focus on some of our other financial goals that we had to sideline (e.g. we paid off our car)... I'm thinking about sharing some of our plans and execution in detail on this site, but am not yet willing to commit. Some are purely financial, some are more like life improvements... needless to say, we're making positive traction in ways that we are VERY exited about....

First life-improvement I'm willing to share: we've nearly completed replacing the deck on our home. It was OVER 30 years old and desperately in need of repairs, so we decided to replace it with a bigger and ( ~~hopefully~~ definitely) better version. The deck itself is completed, but we still have some finishing touches to complete.

I have placed my ITSM coding project on hold... And I've discovered multiple other coding projects that I would like to start... There has just been so many more important things for me to be doing. I'm sure this winter I'll be spending more of my free time working on these "indoor" projects while I don't have any daylight after work.

What is this?

This is my "Now" page. It contains a description of what I am doing "right now". I stumbled across the idea on Rico Trebeljahr's website and really liked the idea. Turns out this is part of the nownownow project by Derek Sivers I'll attempt to keep it updated regularly-ish.