I have spent most of my adult life building things. Software, companies, products, teams, systems and, occasionally, elaborate technical solutions to problems that probably began as a poorly managed conversation. Building is familiar territory. I know how to take something incomplete, understand how its parts relate and keep working until it becomes useful.
It turns out that rebuilding a life works differently. There is no architecture diagram, no clean migration plan and no moment when everything is officially deployed. You make a series of decisions that seem ordinary while you are making them, then look around one day and realize those decisions have created a life you can finally recognize as your own. That was 2025 for me.
2025 felt like the year I got my shit together and started taking up space in my own life again.
That is the blunt version. The more complete version is that I spent years allowing myself to become smaller than I was. My previous marriage left me feeling isolated and contained, as though the acceptable version of me had to fit inside somebody else’s increasingly narrow definition. Leaving did not immediately undo that. Freedom can arrive before you remember what to do with it, and this year I started remembering.
Building a home together
Andrea and I officially moved in together near the beginning of 2025, into a tiny apartment that was enough to prove we wanted to share a life and not nearly enough to comfortably contain it. Two grown people acquire an astonishing amount of stuff before antiques enter the equation. Add three grown, very small dogs and the apartment began to feel less like a home than a carefully managed storage problem with a kitchen.
In September, we moved into a house that was actually suitable for all of us. The difference was more than square footage. We finally had room for our lives to exist beside each other instead of being stacked on top of one another. Andrea could bring her things into the same space as mine without either collection feeling temporary. The dogs had places to settle. We had room to cook, build, restore and slowly decide what kind of home we wanted to make.
Harley and Sable are both nine now, despite the fact that Sable was apparently six for several years in my mental recordkeeping. They are Havanese, sweet and affectionate, with the occasional unruly conviction that rules are merely suggestions intended for larger dogs. I ended up with both of them after my marriage ended. The circumstances were shitty, but the outcome never has been. They are mine, I am theirs and I would not have wanted that part to happen any other way.
Roxy is Andrea’s 13-year-old Min Pin and a tiny old lady with strong opinions about how the household should operate. Combining three dogs has required more thought than simply putting everyone in the same room and hoping friendship happens. The goal has been to keep Roxy happy, comfortable and healthy while giving Harley and Sable the attention and spoiled little lives they have come to expect. It is not always graceful, but family rarely is.
Collecting things with a history
Andrea and I have continued building an antique collection that is becoming increasingly specific to us. We are drawn to objects that were once useful: old books, machines, instruments and pieces of everyday technology from a time when technology was heavy enough to leave a dent in the floor. A Bell candlestick telephone, an Underwood typewriter, old prescription bottles, an Edison cabinet phonograph, early arithmetic books and other survivors now share the house with us.
I like the evidence of thought inside these objects. Somebody had to decide how they should work, how they could be repaired and how long they were expected to last. Their mechanisms are often visible. Their materials have weight. Even when the original purpose has disappeared, the object still explains something about how people once understood work, communication, medicine, calculation or entertainment.
Collecting them eventually led to wanting to care for them properly. Cleaning a hundred-year-old object is not the same as cleaning something purchased last week. Aggressive improvement can erase the patina, damage the material or remove the evidence that made the object interesting in the first place. The work rewards patience and restraint, two traits I possess in highly situational quantities.
The largest project was a roughly 95-year-old cast-iron bridge lamp that we found for $55. Comparable restored lamps often sell for around $200, and this one was priced accordingly because it was an absolute disaster. We stripped it down completely, rewired it, protected the iron with a new coat of paint and replaced the shade. By the time it was finished, it was safe, useful and still recognizably the same lamp.
The old books required a different kind of attention. I restored the spine of a century-old copy of Robinson Crusoe and worked on my great-grandfather’s Dutch Bible. Several other books had bindings held together with Scotch tape, the well-intentioned enemy of paper preservation. Removing old adhesive without taking the book with it is slow, slightly nerve-racking work. It also creates a particular kind of satisfaction: not making an object look new, but helping it survive as itself.
Restoration is less about erasing age than making sure age is not the reason something disappears.
Small rooms inside the larger one
We also built a series of book nooks, miniature scenes that sit between books and open small worlds inside the shelves. Ours largely share the visual language of the antiques around them: a library, an astrology lab, an antique shop and a Sherlock Holmes-inspired office. They are detailed, slightly mysterious and exactly the sort of spaces we would probably occupy if either of us could become six inches tall.
There is something nicely unnecessary about building them. They do not solve a business problem, improve productivity or need to justify their existence through measurable outcomes. They are simply enjoyable to assemble and satisfying to look at when finished. After a career spent making things answer to requirements, schedules and budgets, I have developed a renewed appreciation for making something because it belongs on a shelf and makes us happy.
The nooks also fit the home we are building. The real antiques carry histories we can only partly reconstruct. The miniatures invent histories that never happened. Together, they make the shelves feel less like storage and more like a collection of doors, some leading backward and others leading nowhere in particular.
Getting deliberately lost
Living in Oregon has continued to feel different from merely having an Oregon address. We have spent time exploring waterfalls, forests, small towns and the back roads between them, often without much of a plan beyond seeing what was there.
Silver Falls is as spectacular as advertised, and Silverton is the kind of town that makes wandering around for a while feel like a worthwhile use of a day. We also visited St. Helens during its Halloweentown event, when the town leans fully into its connection to the movie and turns autumn into a civic personality. Those were destinations. Some of the better days were not.
We have driven down random back-country roads with no particular intention except to get lost and discover the places around us. Not dangerously lost, usually, but lost enough that the road stops being a route between two known points and becomes the reason we are there. Oregon rewards that kind of wandering. A normal drive can turn into dense forest, open farmland, a river, an unexpected view or a tiny place we would never have thought to search for.
I spent a long time living according to obligation, where nearly every hour needed a purpose and every decision was shaped by the needs of work or somebody else. There is a quiet kind of liberation in taking a road because we have not seen it before.
Learning my way around the kitchen
I cooked more this year, especially Italian and Spanish food. I am not claiming mastery of either cuisine, but repetition has started turning a collection of attempted recipes into meals I actually know how to make. Pasta alla diavola, paella de pollo and grilled salmon have become reliable parts of the rotation.
I also invented a sandwich called the Crash & Burn, which is grilled turkey with a tomato relish mixed into mayonnaise and Dijon, pepperoncini and melted pepper jack on toasted slices of Italian bread. The name may imply a level of danger unsupported by the ingredients, but naming your own sandwich is one of the privileges of making it.
Cooking has become another way of building a shared home. It creates rhythm, gives us reasons to try things and produces an immediate, unusually honest form of feedback. Software users may tolerate a bad workflow for months without saying anything. Dinner is less ambiguous.
Work remained work
Work was, as always, ever present. Craft & Logic continued to occupy most of the professional landscape, with the usual mixture of product planning, architecture, engineering, client management and translating ambitious ideas into things that could actually be delivered. Haruspex and JARVIS kept pulling me deeper into trading systems, forecasting and the challenge of turning research into operational software.
Artificial intelligence also accelerated hard enough during the year to change how I thought about development itself. The code became easier to produce while judgment, structure and experience became more important. That shift influenced much of what I built and how I worked, but it also reinforced something I was learning away from the computer: speed is not the same as direction, and output is not the same as a life.
There will always be more work. I have never had trouble finding difficult systems to build, failing projects to untangle or people with an idea that needs to become real. The more important change is that work is no longer the only place where I recognize myself.
Taking up room again
I do not want to turn 2025 into a clean redemption story. Life did not become simple because Andrea and I moved into a better house. Old experiences did not vanish because I rewired a lamp, cooked a decent paella or found a road through the forest. There are still complicated relationships, anxious dogs, unfinished projects, financial pressure and all the ordinary uncertainty that follows people from one calendar year into the next. What changed was the direction.
I am living with someone who makes the world feel larger rather than smaller. We are building a home that reflects both of us. Harley and Sable are still spoiled, Roxy is still being cared for like the tiny senior authority she is, and the house is filling with books, machines, miniature rooms and objects that have already survived several lifetimes of change.
I am learning to preserve old things without freezing them in place. I am learning to cook without treating the instructions like an API specification. I am learning Oregon by occasionally having no idea where I am. Most importantly, I am recovering the parts of myself that were compressed, isolated or made to feel inconvenient.
That is what getting my shit together looked like in 2025. It did not look like becoming somebody new.
It looked like having enough room to become myself again.