So the exams are done, summer showed up, and I'm in that weird dead stretch where nothing is due and everything is still coming. Call it the off-season.
I've been building. Mostly. There's some couch in there too, I'm not going to lie.
I finally started setting up my homeserver properly and I forgot how much I love this. You spin up a service, it works, you feel like a god. You spin up the next one, it flatly refuses to talk to the first, and suddenly it's 3am and you're reading a post where some guy has your exact problem and the thread just ends with no reply. Rest in peace, king, your sacrifice was not in vain.
Every service I pull onto my own box is one more thing I'm not renting from a company whose entire business model is watching me use it. My data, my hardware, my rules, my downtime for when the whole thing inevitably shits the bed at midnight. It's about the closest you can get to owning your own corner of the internet anymore, and I'm a little obsessed.
The projects are not getting finished this summer. Not even close. But I have finally started actually working on them, and after months of them living as nothing but a list in my head, that by itself feels like a win.
I've also been going to the beach, which, revolutionary concept, involves leaving the room. Turns out sunlight is real and my skin had genuinely forgotten what it was. You sit there, the sea does that thing where it makes your problems feel correctly sized for once, and then you go home and open the laptop again like nothing happened. Ten out of ten, would touch sand again.
I have to lose weight and I have to lock in for the September exams and I have been very busy pretending neither of those is real.
Not this summer, though. I'm not going to sit here and promise you I'll fix my body between beach trips and half-finished projects, because I won't and we both know it. Summer is for the projects. The weight comes off when the new semester starts, on the same switch as everything else, because apparently I can only do the hard things when they all land on me at once.
The exams are the bigger monster of the two. September sounds comfortably far away right up until you count the weeks, and then it is not far away at all, it is basically breathing on the back of my fucking neck. So the plan is simple and stupid: milk every last drop of this summer, then flip the switch the day the semester starts and lock in so hard it becomes embarrassing to watch.
Beach now. Suffer later. Balanced.
Anyway. Back to the server, which is, as of writing, on fire.
