I am writing this from Vermont, early, before anyone else in the house is up. We are out here on the summer trip, the kids getting spoiled by grandparents across two corners of the country, Montana behind us and Vermont now, and I have my coffee and a quiet kitchen that is not mine and, for the first time in about a year, nowhere to be.
Here is the part that got me earlier in the trip, when we crossed into Montana. Montana is where college started for me the last try, years ago, back when I was a kid with a baseball dream and school was the thing I did on the side. Those credits are still on my transcript, little fossils from a version of me that did not finish. One year into the version that is finishing, the road trip landed me right back where the last try started. I did not plan that either. The calendar keeps doing this to me.
A year ago last month I was sitting on a dugout floor after an intentional walk, asking the universe why everything was so hard. If you are just landing here, that story is the first post in this series, and everything since has been the answer arriving in installments. The plan from that drive home. The first day of class landing on our fifth anniversary. The winter our second kid showed up in the middle of two programming classes. The spring that taught me what I am actually like when everything runs through me, and what it costs.
So, one year in. Scoreboard time, because you know by now that I am a numbers guy.
Eight courses done in the first eight months, two full trimesters at four apiece. Two more finished this spring on top of that, Programming II and a tech ethics course, right through the hardest stretch our family has had. That makes ten down, and the two database courses running right now just cleared their midterms, which is why this vacation includes a laptop. The degree is not done. I am mid-degree the way this whole year has been mid-everything, on pace only because I keep doubling up, and I have stopped pretending the pace is casual.
The 3.83 is not the number I am proudest of, but I will admit I check it more than a grown man should.
The year built other things too. This site is the newest of them, and if you are reading this close to when I wrote it, you are standing in wet paint. I am only now starting to publish the pile. But the pile is real. The fantasy baseball tools, the data projects, most of what sits in a folder that used to be a graveyard of things I started and abandoned. I used to be the guy with ten brilliant ideas and no follow-through. Something about this year, and I genuinely think it was learning the hard way what my actual capacity is, turned me into a guy who ships. Smaller things, sometimes. But finished.
I picked up rules along the way, the kind you only earn by living them. Reward ship, not motion, because a folder full of started things fed my ego and helped nobody. Smallest, easiest step first, why not, might as well, because the waterfall only starts once the first small thing tips over. You cannot swim until you are in the water, which is the one I need when my brain wants to run every scenario before I ever get wet. And the one that finally got me to enroll, back when two more years of school sounded like forever: time passes anyways. It did. It does. I would rather it pass with me building something.
And the honest column, because this series does not do highlight reels.
My wife is not out of the health fight I wrote about in the last post, but for the first time in a while the fight is trending our way. She is back at work. We still do not have an answer, so the job is keeping the good stretch from sliding backwards. Being out here helps, extra hands and grandparents change the daily math in a way I will never take for granted again, but a trip is not a cure and I am done narrating tidy endings that have not happened. She is fighting. We are managing the account.
What is actually different, one year out, is not the circumstances. It is the operating system. The guy on the dugout floor did not know where his line was and was proud of it. The guy writing this a year later knows roughly where the line is, asks for help before he hits it, most of the time, and has stopped confusing running himself empty with loving his family. That upgrade cost more than any course in the catalog. It is also the only one I would not refund.
Which brings me to what this site is, since this post closes the how-I-got-here part of the story and the rest of the blog is the what-happened-next.
This site is the plan from that drive home, running in public. The coaching writing is the baseball brain that never left. The fantasy tools and the data posts are the new skill set doing what I built it to do. The journal is this, the honest ledger, because the internet has enough guys pretending the grind is pretty. I am going to keep building, keep writing it down, and keep score honestly, the same way I have tried to for five posts now.
One more thing about that backyard at-bat, and then I will let this series rest.
Every kid runs it the same way. Bottom of the ninth, one swing, the hero moment. I spent thirty-plus years thinking the point of the dream was the swing, and I got walked in the only real version of it I will ever get. It took this whole year to understand what the dream was actually for. The moment was never the swing. The moment was that the game kept letting me come up to the plate. The degree, the kids, the fight my wife is still fighting, the tools, this blog. It is all just the next at-bat, and I keep getting to step in.
That is the whole thing. That is how I got here.
See you at the plate.