A fresh start

Time is a luxury.

We have two children. Preschoolers, full of energy and questions and drama. Our younger son, the baby, the sweetest kid in the world, turned three years old last month. How did that happen? How did I turn around and my infant was three?

Done with bottles and diapers, we decided something else needed to be potty trained and adopted a puppy last week. A ridiculous little terrier mix currently torturing our four cats—all of whom thought this house was their safe haven—and requiring constant trips to the yard every day.

I’ve been running a business for more than seven years. Project management, design, engineering, taxes, payroll, meetings, testing, taxes, billing, contract updates, sales, taxes—if I get even a fifth of my daily todo list done each day it feels like a victory.

Every night there are litter boxes to empty, a dishwasher to load, a dog to walk, kids to feed and bathe and get into bed. There’s no getting ahead.

Days are a loop of our own design.

And yet I can’t stop thinking about putting words on a website. I wrote my terribly-named blog Maniacal Rage from 1999 until June 2015. Sixteen years of posts, ranging from the awful ramblings of an 18 year-old to the awful ramblings of a 25 year-old to the slightly-less-awful ramblings of my 34 year-old self.

Two summers ago when I stopped posting¹ to Maniacal Rage it wasn’t planned—work and home life became so hectic I simply couldn’t find the time, and when I did I felt shackled by the constraints of the content archive and the Tumblr structure. The bite-sized content design of Tumblr had me posting more links and videos than written material. I became a link log for a tiny audience, most of whom probably followed the same blogs I did. What purpose was it serving? I knew if I were to write again it would require a fundamental re-think of the site.

My desire to get back to regular writing hasn’t waned in the past two years, but to make it happen I needed free myself of the archive and the format and start over.

Welcome to Karbon Based.

This time, as it was in the early part of the last decade, I’m doing this for myself. Instead of trying to write about things I hope people will reblog or favorite or share, I’m going to write about the things that interest me. I’ve spent a majority of my fleeting free time in the past year building mechanical keyboards, playing video games, and taking photos. I expect to document a great deal of that here, as well as my experiences while running a business and raising a family.

If these things interest you, I hope you stick around, subscribe to the RSS feed, whatever floats your boat². This is a fresh start and I’m excited to see where it goes.