Monthly Recap: May 2025

Posted • in life

Tagged: personal now site updates

What’s going on, Internet? I’ve been missing in action again across April and March so I’ll use this post as a way to catch you two up on everything that’s been going on while I sit at the airport waiting for my flight back home(?) after a week in Sydney for work.

Since the last update back in March I shared the news that we were on the move to Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland). We’ve since moved the kids and my wife up there with the intention of me having moved up last weekend, but have been unable to due to working arrangement circumstances that have left me staying behind in Te Awa Kairangi (Lower Hutt) a bit longer. This isn’t the ideal situation but is what we have to do in the mean time to make this move work.

We already had a road trip up to Tāmaki Makaurau over Easter and we continued to do that. We drove up and spent a night in Rotorua before continuing north and spending four nights over on Waiheke Island. It was nice to get some beach time during April. Me and Mr Four spent a lot of time on the beach building sand fortresses. So, these weren’t just sand castles, but villages of sand castles with moats and walls and everything else. The cool thing was that when we were done people came after us and added to the fortress. The construction was so large, it existed well into the next day, surving the tides, and all the dog walking.

Speaking of dogs, we were all saddened by the loss of our last remaining goodboy, Angus. His health caught up with him during his fourteenth year and we discovered a tumor that had existed for a while and explained some of the symptoms we’d been observing over the past year. Once the vet had identified the tumor, and it’s spread through his body the situation developed rapidly.

We took the best care of him as we could and made sure his last couple weeks with us were as comfortable as possible. It was so sad for me and my wife, and our friend who we originally adopted him. It was especially hard with Mr Four who is now at a age where he was well aware of what was going on.

The house was quieter (even with the kids, lol) after we said goodbye to Angus. It’s taking me a while to come to terms with not having a dog around after having them around over the past fifteen years. We have gone from three dogs to no dogs over the past three years 😭 it hits hard.

Back to Waiheke, once we’d finished at the beach it was back to Tāmaki Makaurau for a couple nights and we were able to check out the new kindy and daycare for the kids. Based on the quick placements, this accelerated our plans quickly.

So back to Te Awa Kairangi it was packing time. I took the kids to Martinborough to stay with my parents one weekend while my wife, her sisters and our friend started the house packing. I’m so grateful for that as I would have no idea how to even begin that mammoth of a task.

The following week my wife started her new job, so she headed back up to Tāmaki Makaurau by herself while I stayed back with the kids for their last couple weeks at the current kindy and daycares.

Two weeks later the first moving truck arrived and half of our stuff was moved up north. My wife and kids headed up on the plane while I drove the car with a car load of stuff. That weekend was spent unloading, half unpacking and getting our space set up for the next couple of months. I stayed on for the week to help the kids with their settling visits to their new schools before heading back to Te Awa Kairangi at the end of the next weekend. I had to get back to work.

During the down time between work and not being around the family I did a bunch of golf lessons, worked on my swing, packed up some more stuff around the house and get everything ready for the move to storage.

This past week I’ve been in Sydney for work. We spent the week together as a team and celebrated the past quarter and started to look forwards to the next quarter. We did the usual social activities and dinners, I got to catch up with a bunch of people I spend so much time with over video calls during the year and just had a really good time.

With the back and forth between (old) home and Tāmaki Makaurau life has been a blur. I’m really keen to complete the move and fully commit to Tāmaki Makaurau and be with the family full time again. This should allow me to get back some focus time and give some attention to my favourite hobby, the web.

Aight, let’s see what has, or hasn’t been going on across the website.

Blogging

Yooooo, apart from these recap/now updates, I wrote a single post across all of April and May. The post Video Guides, came about while I was in the middle of building a new media server. Video guides and tutorials are great for getting a quick overview of a process, but they’re hard to go back to for reference. Follow up your excellent video guides with a useful blog post people!

Reading

I read a bunch of great books over the past two months. The standouts for me were Better the Blood, and Return to Blood by Michael Bennett and Northbound by Naomi Arnold, both kiwi authors.

April

May

Music

I finally picked up a long time favourite album in April, Devil’s Night by D12. This isn’t a repress or rerelease, it’s an original pressing and will sit nicely next to my original release CD copy.

Gaming

Gaming has come to a halt as we started packing up the house. I’ve pretty much finished with The War Within Season 2 which I’ll post about seperately. I hit two of the three goals I set back in February, but not sure I’ll get the third. We’ll see once I get my PC back up and running after the move.

Bookmarks

I did manage to catch up on a stack of open tabs that I’d been collecting over time, sat down, read them and here is the list of ones I found interesting.

Website

So, while up on Waiheke over Easter I spent my evenings while everyone was asleep rebuilding my Recordshelf after reading Creating connections with music and technology by Damian Walsh.

I liked what he’d done with his music collection and jacked some ideas and methods for myself and was pretty happy with the results.

The Recordshelf is still powered by a JSON file and carefully curated album art, but the supplementary data is pulled from Discogs where available. I love the extra ways for displaying the records in different ways like artist, genre and release year. Let me know what you think.

Happening around the web

Lots of great stuff happening across our corner of the web these past couple months.

Shellsharks started a new post series called Scrolls, a nice recap of things happening across the independent web. A few of my previous pieces of work have shown up in a few issues, definitely check it out.

Over/Under is an ongoing post series by Hyde, the Lazy Bear started out as a solo effort pondering whether something was over or underrated. Since #11 they’re now doing it in collaboration with other webmasters and bloggers. I was humbled enough to be included in #19, go check it out Over/Under #19 with fLaMEd Fury

My favourite internet person xandra has released the first issue of Good Internet Magazine. You can view the digital edition right now, and if you ordered a physical copy, they’re shipping soon. I’m waiting until my physical issue arrives before getting stuck in.

Another project that recieved the physical treatment as well as a digital releaase is The Internet Phone Book. If you were lucky enough to get an order in before it sold out then you’ll have your copy now. I unfortunately messed up and missed out so I’m sad about that, however, I’m happy to know that fLaMEd fury is included amongst the pages. Check it out.

Looking forward to more focus time once we get this move out of the way. Sweeet, catch you up, laterz 👋

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