This year’s Wildcat was by almost all measures a smashing success based on preliminary feedback. Even with Cody breaking his foot skanking on carpet Friday night, attendees and organizers were frequently remarking how smoothly everything went and how much of a boon it was to have a venue not change at the last moment–shocking, I know.

I had some learnings to integrate and will be reflecting on them to carry them with me throughout the coming months but it reinforced a pattern I’ve noticed that I need to be careful with in guarding my energy and stress.

Background

Just got back from an overnight bikepacking trip — me, Mabel, and the trailer. One night out, nothing ambitious. I’d been meaning to do a little solo trip like this for a while and finally just went. Loaded the dog up, packed the bags, and pointed the bike out of town.

It went really well.

Three hours, ten people, and roughly seventeen open questions about the pool situation. That’s a Wildcat planning meeting. It looks like chaos from the outside — and honestly it kind of is — but there’s a structure underneath that makes it work. This year I’ve been trying to make that structure more visible, without killing the thing that makes the room feel alive.

I don’t really do resolutions, but I think there’s something useful about writing down what you actually want before the season gets away from you. Summer in Minneapolis is short enough that if you don’t show up for it, it’s October before you’ve noticed.

Last summer I had a broken nose and nasal strips and a lot of time sitting still that I didn’t ask for. This summer I’m coming in with both nostrils working and a decent amount of motivation to make up for it, which feels like a good starting position.

Background

As I come up on one year since the accident that broke my nose, I’ve been reflecting on what’s changed. I think it’s important to take stock sometimes — to give yourself a yardstick for what you’ve done well or not so well, even if I’m not always great at actually doing it. One saying that’s been stuck in my head lately: “life happens to you, or you happen to life.”

The Accident

I honestly haven’t been into biking that long. A former housemate got me into it — I’d always been vaguely interested but never bothered to invest in something quality, something that was actually a joy to ride. I’m deeply grateful to him for selling me his old bike and “bike-pilling” me, as he liked to say.

The Problem

There are things I want to know about my mom that I’ve never asked — not because I don’t care, but because the moment never quite arrives, or I assume there will be more time, or life moves fast enough that I forget until something reminds me again. I suspect most people have a version of this problem. The questions pile up quietly, and the people who could answer them get older, and at some point you realize the window is shorter than you thought.

So I built a small tool to fix it.

What It Does

Reich Memories sends questions to family members on a randomized schedule — a few per week, via email (hopefully Signal eventually as well) — and saves their replies to a private searchable archive.

Why This Site

I’m not a developer. I’m a business analyst — I spend my days mapping workflows, writing test scripts, sitting in rooms where eight stakeholders need to agree on what a button does. So when I set out to make a personal site, I wasn’t trying to make a statement about web design. I wanted the thing to work, and I wanted to be able to maintain it myself a year from now without re-learning a framework.

Brutalism, for me, is mostly a utility argument. Left-aligned text, system fonts, real links. If I want to add a page, I copy an existing one, change the words, and put it on the server. That’s the whole workflow.

It also matches how I think about my home infrastructure. I run my own stuff — calendar, tasks, media, a Loomio instance for a group I help organize — because I want to know where things live and how to get them back if something breaks. Own the data, prefer local over cloud, choose tools you can still run when the company behind them pivots or folds. A personal site should follow the same logic. One folder. Plain files. If the host disappears tomorrow, I move the folder somewhere else and I’m done.