Fast year, slow grind.

People live and people die,
The cycle continues 
As the months fly,
Bye.

kicked off the month by celebrating my 10-year anniversary with my wife. She’s a great person, an all-timer. We’ve been through some shit, too, but that’s the way marriages go. Ups and downs. Highs and lows. Hugs and kisses.

The summer is here, and the warm weather is back. Can’t say I’m thrilled to see the cool, cloudy mornings cede all ground to hot weather, but that’s life under the North Pacific High. It’s going to be hot around these parts for a while.

My June was filled with some core memory type moments with the family, little trips and our casual hang outs. Nothing major, like visiting Europe for a couple of weeks, which would be dope, but we still had a good time. At least I did, for sure. It was a combination of those experiences and being busy with work (the day job and the hobby). If a hobby feels like work, is it a hobby? If work feels like a hobby, is it work?

I might as well give a shameless plug for FarFromProfessional.com. The brand is slowly building, but it’s more than I could have expected for something I can only devote a little bit of time to everyday. Not bad for a few low-budget amateurs.

As usual, the month was filled with ugly news. They’re still fighting in the Ukraine. People are still being shot for no reason here in the U.S. We are surrounded by death in our news cycle, and one of the more terrifying stories of death came a week ago when they found pieces of that OceanGate submarine on the bottom of the ocean near the Titanic wreckage they were descending the great below to see.

CEO Stockton Rush gave his now infamous interview about that ill-fated submarine a year ago, and he touted its safety and the innovation behind its design, and it’s all quite sad. It seems like he believed his own lies, and it led him and the people who entrusted their lives to him to a horrible death. It wasn’t his spirit of adventure that killed him; it was his hubris. He admitted to making the sub on the cheap!

A couple of months ago, we became parents to a stray kitten. His mom found a spot in our backyard to be the purr-fect place to pop out four kittens. I did my best to not disturb her. I provided her with food and some towels she could use to insulate the den she clawed from the dirt. It was comfortable. It was safe. She had fresh water and food every day, yet she bailed on the spot after about a week of chilling. She took three out of the four kittens she birthed somewhere else, and she left one poor (lucky) kitten behind.

We took the little dude in that night after he spent the day alone outside in a lonely towel-lined den. I bottle-fed the bastard and even had to do this for a couple of weeks to help him learn how to blow it out on his own, just like this.

It was like having a newborn baby again with the midnight bottle feedings and all the butt-wiping, but we made it! Rufio is just over two months old now, and he’s killing it.