Weā€™re getting over our third bout of strep in as many months. Shabbats together havenā€™t been happening at all. Two family get-togethers for grownupsā€™ birthdays had to be delayed until a health window opened. Kidsā€™ birthday season is about to begin, and we might get to stick to the schedule if the weather changes soon too.

Our in-home weather has lately been cooler and calmer. Whether the wind is blowing one way or the other, one can always attribute the trend to many possible causes. As not-always, the current effect is more consistently pleasant time together.

I know better than to think the wind wonā€™t change direction, but the new way things are going gives me a new (and decidedly sunnier) feeling about my chances of reestablishing myself professionally. This is helpful in absolute terms, and also relative to my new job. Itā€™ll require a tiny bit of travel, but mostly Iā€™ll work from the home office. Iā€™ll say more about it once Iā€™ve started.

In the meantime, as time permits, Iā€™ve been doing my usual Open Source work. Somewhat unusual: Iā€™ve been holding weekly-ish meetings for notqmail developers to rebuild momentum and ship our next release. Weā€™re quite close.

The last couple weeks of my available technical attention have been hijacked by dealing with intended and unintended changes in Appleā€™s latest developer tools. I had promptly and semi-naively updated, only to find quite a lot of broken pkgsrc builds. I say ā€œsemi-naivelyā€ because as I see it, whenever I have a dependency on anything, keeping my foot on the gas is part of the deal. It doesnā€™t usually take a couple weeks to deal with the fallout. Iā€™ll write a post about what I found and how I worked around it.

Compensating for this unpleasant surprise, I also got a pleasant one: ikiwiki has gained some more maintainers and weā€™ve shipped a new release! I had been hoping for some time that new energy for ikiwiki would appear, because my bandwidth for such things is being spent on notqmail. Et voilĆ !