Work has become stressful again. I don’t have enough time to do everything I have to do—not just work, but taking care of my family and house, too. I’m taking my wife and kids to the beach tonight to just hang out, which is wildly irresponsible, but may be the thing I need to clear my head.

After over twenty years as a coffee drinker, I am now the owner of a drip coffee maker for the first time. Its make and model are nothing special, and it doesn’t actually brew better coffee than my AeroPress or French Press or Chemex ever did. In fact, the coffee it produces (with far less manual effort) is actually a little worse. Strangely enough, that is the whole point. I want coffee to be less enticing to me, because I am trying to wean myself off caffeine and maybe even cut coffee out of my diet entirely.

I think my (modest) coffee habit is causing me some health problems, and I finally came to a mindset where it seemed possible to do something about it. So far, in the few weeks since I drastically reduced my daily caffeine intake, I have noticed digestive benefits, which I expected, and also, unexpectedly, a decrease in day-to-day anxiety—which is something I didn’t even know I had until it was gone. Up until this week I worried about removing something pleasurable from my daily routine, but I am finding that there is something pleasurable in being even keeled, and, of course, in not being dependent on a drug, albeit a socially acceptable one.

Last night I told my wife I was going to go entirely to decaffeinated coffee starting today. After one look from her, I chickened out, and revised my goal to “quarter decaf”: half decaf in the morning, and full decaf in the afternoon. I still plan to eliminate (almost all) caffeine from my diet, but I am not sure if I will just drink decaf coffee twice a day, to preserve my warm beverage habit, or if I will forego coffee altogether. The latter would probably simplify my life a little bit, and is attractive, but I might go crazy drinking only water day and night.

Today I, along with a small team, gave the biggest presentation I’ve done in years: a webinar for my company’s clients. We did an outstanding job. Now that it is over, I feel relieved and exhausted.

I spent several months earlier this year gearing up for this day. I decided early on to level up my presentation skills, which I thought were already very good. I took the learning process very seriously. I watched hundreds of hours of video: other people’s presentations, TED talks, Apple keynotes, lectures on speaking and communication, and instructional videos about visual design, slide decks, and PowerPoint. I made prototype slide decks in which I tried different techniques, and also tried to make some of the new techniques I liked work with my company’s PowerPoint template. I threw out and revised every slide I created several times. I practiced the entire talk out loud and made revisions to the visuals and to my script to communicate my ideas more succinctly. In the revision process, the true message of my presentation became more clear, and I was able to focus more on that. Lastly, I wrote almost the entire talk down in the speaker notes, to preserve the best part of my presentation, even though I had nearly memorized the entire thing while working on it.

This is all probably normal stuff to professional presenters, but I’m not one of them. For the past ten years or so, I have typically presented only once or twice a year, and most of those presentations were to my coworkers (sometimes the whole company, but it’s a small company). Before this year, I didn’t rehearse my talks, and my slides, while uncluttered, were usually not visually interesting. Now, after having put in so much hard work, I think I can present very well. I have gained confidence in myself for future presentations, and feel proud of myself for what I have achieved.

Sometimes when I’m working, I want music playing, but I don’t really know what I want to listen to, and I don’t have the patience to think about it. In these situations, I have tried listening to classical music, jazz, and lo-fi (hip-hop/trip-hop, etc.). Over the past week, I gave Endel an honest try, too.

While I enjoy classical music in a live setting, I don’t like listening to it in my headphones. Its wide dynamic range makes it so that I can’t hear some sections of it, and other sections are too loud. That doesn’t work for me; I want something that is not too loud, but is completely audible, all the time.

Jazz (especially classic jazz) was what I listened to almost exclusively during my senior year of college. It got me through reading and writing hundreds and hundreds of pages of text. However, I find my engagement with jazz to be all over the map. I love some of it and I hate some of it, and the kind of jazz you can just have on, not listening to—smooth jazz, I suppose—is just bad. All in all, I find jazz too distracting to listen to while I work, unless I listen to a single album that I already know and love.

Lo-fi hip hop is my favorite background music at this point. I appreciate its nearly constant beat, somewhat consistent tempos, and there appears to be a never-ending supply of it. My wife hates when I play it in the house when I am doing chores or writing, though, which means I can only really listen to it via headphones when I’m around her. It works great on my headphones while I read on my iPad, or through my loudspeakers when I work.

Over the past two weeks, I tried to get into Endel, which offers an AI-based soundscape that constantly changes and continually evolves as you listen to it. I like the idea a lot more than the reality of it, though I think it has a lot to do with my tinnitus. Endel is extremely treble-heavy and bass-light (really, there is no bass at all), and only one of its scenarios, Focus, has a beat. I would not describe the sounds as shrill, but they aggravate my tinnitus instead of helping me ignore it. Last week, I listened to Endel exclusively through headphones (my B&O H9s and my AirPods) while I did chores like the dishes and laundry. This morning, now that I am back at work, I tried listening to the Focus soundscape for a few hours through my loudspeakers. It drove my wife and both my kids absolutely bananas. Each of them yelled at me to stop playing it, even though it was not playing loudly, and they were on a different level of the house. After that experience, I think I will not be buying an Endel lifetime subscription.

Tomorrow I plan to listen to Lofi Girl for much of my workday. That is the best bet for me, when I can’t make up my mind about music and need to focus on my work more than what I am listening to.

Today is my first day back at work after my vacation. I have found that, now that I consume less caffeine, I am finding all of the catching up, surprises, and unexpected requests to be less stressful than in prior years. Let’s see how I feel (maybe tired?) later this afternoon and evening.

My wife and I are unpacking and cleaning house after our time away from home. I always need this buffer day after a vacation to reset the house and, most importantly, the kitchen before I return to work. (I wouldn’t need a buffer day if we ever got back home before midnight. 😀)

My day will be all about packing and driving, and a visiting my mom for a little while, too.

I have been lowering my caffeine intake over the past month or so. While I don’t drink that much coffee, but I think that my two (strong) cups per day allotment is causing me some minor health problems. I am at the point where trying to quit (or at least drastically lower) caffeine consumption seems like a reasonable approach to try to improve things. In retrospect, it is embarrassing how long it has taken me to even consider lower caffeine intake as a possibility.

It has not been easy. I am trying to step down my caffeine intake by substituting decaffeinated coffee for some of the normal (good) beans in my brew. That experiment failed a couple of times; the normal ebb and flow of work-related stress led to a couple of relapses, all for a mid-afternoon boost. I restarted it when I started my vacation. I think I have been drinking about 25-30% of the caffeine in had been consuming. After a day or so I legitimately went through withdrawal symptoms: chills, headaches, and depression. I am perfectly fine now, but, from what I have read about caffeine withdrawal, I can expect even worse symptoms when I drop from some caffeine to none. I plan to stay at half-decaf levels for the next week or more, to delay that pain to a more manageable time.

I am at the point I my vacation where I am contemplating how I can be a better person after I return home.

I am not able to attend Micro.camp due to vacation travel-related reasons. I wish everyone the best. 😀

This afternoon at Burns Lake in Whitefield, New Hampshire.

Lake Winnipesaukee is a fun, low-key place. We spent an afternoon there with some old friends yesterday.

I’m driving to Lake Winnipesaukee today. We are going to see one of my wife’s college friends who we haven’t seen in years.

One of the lies I told myself when I packed for vacation is that I would spend more time writing and coding (for fun) each day. My MacBook has sat in a box in the closet, unused for all but one evening. I did not expect:

1. My kids going to bed at 10:00 or 11:00 PM
2. My RSI to make typing in the MacBook quite painful (at home I use an external keyboard exclusively these days)
3. Me taking up reading through the prose of James Joyce (I recently started Ulysses, after reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners) and all sorts of related background material

I am OK with this. I am resting and recuperating. I am also studying James Joyce fairly seriously late at night, which is something I would not have attempted during non-vacation time. I don’t have to churn out essays and source code to be productive.

Today’s activity was blueberry picking at a nearby farm. My kids really loved it. We have a ton of blueberries now, and plan to bake something yummy with them: a blueberry buckle, perhaps.

We found a new lunch spot today at Moore Resevoir, and had a conversation about the Connecticut River (the river I lived near my entire childhood) while we were there.

We spent the afternoon at Echo Lake in Franconia State Park. It is a great place for the kids to swim and play. They made sand castles, lakes, and swimming pools for their toys on the beach.

Here is a view of “our lake” in New Hampshire. We spent the afternoon there a couple days ago. The kids played in the sand and water, the adults chatted, and I took pictures. More recently we went on a couple short hikes and spent an afternoon at Santa’s Village, a theme park.

My family’s plans for a picnic lunch and an afternoon of swimming at Echo Lake, in Franconia State Park, were cut short because tickets for the lake were sold out. Echo Lake is one of my family’s favorite spots in the White Mountains. The mountain views are beautiful and there is a large (artificial) sandy beach to sunbathe and play on.

We went to the nearby Profile Lake instead, and ate our lunch at the Old Man of the Mountain viewing area. Because the Old Man rock formation fell down in 2003, you can’t see it anymore. The park set up clever “steel profilers” that you can line up your vision with to create an optical illusion of what the old rock face looked like.

Today I drove the family to a tiny park in northern New Hampshire that consisted of a picnic area, a waterfall, and a couple of short trails. We ate a picnic lunch when we got there and then explored the place. We enjoyed experiencing the roar and spray of the falls and had multiple great vantage points to view it from. It was a great time.

It’s day three of my vacation and my sleep schedule is already completely messed up. 😬

After a sunny, exciting day at the fair, today was overcast, cool, and low-key. We took the kids to a playground (with a view of a mountain) and to the bookstore/toy store in nearby Littleton, New Hampshire. The kids had great fun, but we had to cut our visit to down short due to rain.

Ironically, for the warmest year on record, this has been the coldest stretch of days that I have ever been in the mountains. It is a welcome respite from the heat in New Jersey, but it feels like I have traveled back in time. Nighttimes feel crisp, like late August/early September when I was a child.

We plan to go to a lake or to a theme park soon, once the sun returns and the temperature rises.

My family and I very much enjoyed the North Haverhill fair today. We had perfect weather, and I lucked out with the fair food (my wife and I shared the best fried Oreos I have had in years). My kids loved seeing the animals (one thing we saw was a goat obstacle course contest) and enjoyed the rides. I find that I enjoy fairs—especially the agricultural aspects—a lot more as an adult than I ever did as a kid.

My vacation starts today. My family is going to the North Haverhill fair in New Hampshire. We always have a fun time there. My daughter is mad for rides and I am looking forward to fried Oreos. The rest of the family gets ice cream (maple soft serve) there.