Some 36th Birthday Thoughts & Life Updates

Hey all. It’s my birthday! And I have a bunch of random thoughts swirling in my head, plus it’s been a minute since I’ve shared a proper life update.

This one will be a little more extemporaneous than my previous newsletters. I’ve spent somewhere between days and months on each of the newsletters thus far. For this one, I’m starting and finishing it today (June 5th). And in fact, I have two other newsletters partially written, but they’re not ready just yet, for different reasons.

Onto some life updates!

A couple weeks ago, we took a family trip to New Orleans. I mentioned this last time, but Heather got referred to a specialist that is THE specialist in the United States on Asherman’s syndrome. He has the reputation for being a “miracle worker” for women who have been told fertility is out of the question for this disease. So needless to say, our expectations were (cautiously) high! And mercifully, he was as advertised. He did an incredible job of listening and teaching (including directly contradicting some previous “expert” advice we’d gotten) and after the hysteroscopy procedure, he said everything looked really good and hopefully safe to try to conceive again, without needing to do IVF (for now at least).

Literally the best news we could have gotten, and finally some unequivocally great news after a year plus of punishing bad news. We are incredibly grateful and hopeful.

We used the appointment as an excuse to explore New Orleans for a couple days. It’s honestly a really weird city. Some insanely beautiful old homes and awesome parks, but also a ton of blight (the effects of Katrina are still very obvious), and things like the French Quarter are just not geared for families, to say the least. But two standout highlights specifically for traveling with kids:

On the way home, we also stopped by Dauphin Island for some beach time. We were dodging rain the whole way, but we ended up getting a perfect window for wading and sand castle building. It was a blast!

It was also our first big road trip with an EV. We’ve had a Volkswagen ID.4 for 3 years, but the furthest we’ve gone with it is Chattanooga, which only required one quick charging stop. This was a proper road trip, with 2-3 charges each way. And…it was shockingly easy! Pretty much every interstate exit has at least one EV charging option. And the ID.4 has relatively “slow” charging relative to other EV’s, but each charge still took less than 30 minutes, which was how much time we would have taken stretching our legs, taking a bathroom break, and getting snacks anyway. And any time we’re not on a road trip (which is, ya know, all the rest of the time), we charge in our garage for like a couple bucks each time. It rules. I highly recommend it, especially now that we have dumb wars causing gas prices to spike! On that note…

Electricity is expensive! And we have a pretty large house that is expensive to keep cool in the peak summer months, when there’s also a Georgia Power surcharge above a certain usage amount on the standard Residential plan. So I did some digging, and Georgia Power has a plan targeted specifically to EV owners. It’s all about when you use electricity, with different rates for different times of day. I’ll spare you the detailed math here (happy to nerd out on it if anybody is interested).

But basically, on this new plan we signed up for, electricity rates are 5x cheaper (~free) from 11pm-7am versus what they are during the day. And then in the 4 months from June through September when power is in highest demand, there’s a “peak” rate from 2-7pm which is 3x higher than normal daytime rates; 15x(!) higher than the overnight rates. This will take some tiny sacrifices and behavior tweaks, but we should end up saving a bunch of money.

I’m loathe to give Georgia Power credit for anything, but I gotta say they have some cool usage metrics available on their site. And those show that so far, this is working great. We’re using almost nothing between 2-7pm, and we’re spiking between 11pm and 7am when we charge the car or turn the AC down for cool sleeping temps. The important caveat is that Georgia has been unusually mild for the past several weeks, so we’ll see how this goes once it gets back to standard Georgia summer heat. I’ll share any interesting findings in future newsletters if anybody is interested!

Edit: I was going to include a screenshot, but their usage metrics are currently down (lol) so actually, I take back any credit I gave them.

In my efforts to reduce distractions and time wasting to make sure I’m present with the kids and can be hyperefficient with projects I’m working on, I’ve (mostly) quit social media and have tried to leave my phone in the other room as much as possible.

However, my primary Gmail continued to be an absolute black hole…until the past few days. I consider myself to be pretty good at email. I respond fast, I read what comes in, I keep things organized. But I had let things slip on the personal side, just with life busy-ness, work keeping me slammed, etc. This week I finally got around to cleaning things up.

First, I marked absolutely every message as read, to give me a clean slate. The unread messages I had in my primary inbox were super old anyway — I just hadn’t gone back to mark them read, so it led to my inbox showing hundreds of unread emails even though I was actually caught up on everything recent.

Since then, I’ve been ruthless with EVERY new email that comes in. For probably 95% of them, I’ve immediately hit unsubscribe followed by delete. I figure if I keep doing this for the next couple weeks, I’ll eliminate a decent percentage of the noise that I was never going to read anyway.

It is unbelievably nice (for my slightly OCD brain at least) to have that 0 next to my inbox. I’ve also been anxiously waiting for emails on a few subjects (more on that another time) and this helps make sure I’m aware right away, without actually needing to monitor my notifications.

Next step: Gotta do the same exercise with my phone. I’ve already cleaned things up a bit, but I need to get ruthless and turn off basically all notifications. I will be fine without them, and I want to live a life of pulling information, not getting everything pushed to me.

I got to take Lily on a daddy/daughter date to Beauty and the Beast at the Fox Theater. She is extremely into Belle recently, and honestly I had no idea how she’d do — this was her first theater show other than a couple of ballet performances. But she did SO great. She was absolutely LOCKED IN, basically completely emotionless but focusing so, so hard. And then occasionally she would say (way too loudly and with no warning) “Lumiere!” or “Belle!”, which led to smiles from everybody around. She got scared by the Beast’s Act 1 closing number kinda out of the blue, so we had to make a quick exit and then skipped the second act, but that was 100% fine. We got to see the biggest musical numbers (Belle, Gaston, Be Our Guest) and I think a full show would have been too much for Lily anyway. I was so proud of her.

Another privilege of me not working 9-5 is getting to hang out with the kids during the weekdays when we don’t have camp / childcare help. On Monday I took the kids to the Georgia Aquarium, and it was delightfully not crowded. Then we stopped for waffle fries and ice cream at Chick-Fil-A afterward. I know I’m extraordinarily lucky to have this time, and I’m trying to make the most of it.

Lastly, I got to be on the field at an Atlanta United match! I’ve been a season ticket holder since the team’s first year in 2017 (back when the team was good and tickets were like $15/match and you could sell them for $45/match). Tickets are still reasonably priced, and I love the atmosphere and the chance to hang out with friends. Long story short, the team asked a set of season ticket holders if they wanted to hold the flags as part of pre-match festivities. I obviously had to say yes, and it was a pretty incredible experience. I got to be like 30 feet from the players during the anthem. And Mercedes-Benz Stadium feels even more like a massive spaceship when you’re down on the field.

A few things that are coming up…

First, I’m going to the US’s World Cup opener in Los Angeles next week! I am out of my mind excited. And because I have amazing friends with luck/hookups (shoutout Chris and Josh!) I got the tickets and the hotel room for absurdly cheap. Genuinely a bucket list experience. You can be sure I’ll report back here :)

Second, I’ve been running a ton and actually properly training for a race for the first time in my life. The Peachtree Road Race is July 4th, and I’m hoping to break 45 minutes for a 10k for the first time in my life. Let me know if you’ll be there!

Lastly, to get a bit more existential…I mentioned earlier that I have two newsletters in progress, so be on the lookout for those soon. Those are all mixed up with my current semi-crisis about what’s next for me, which I will certainly be writing more about soon. It’s nothing bad; quite the opposite actually. But after almost 6 months of being “early retired”, I’m feeling the former constraints of a life focused around a 9-5 Monday through Friday job being lifted. Yes, I had already made changes to my schedule to take advantage of this newfound flexibility and freedom. But the harder (and much more exciting) change, which I can’t really force, is the one where my entire mindset about how we design our life changes. Who do I want to be? Where should we live? How can we give our kids the most exciting, fulfilling childhood possible?

Those thoughts have been swirling extensively and leading me down a bunch of VERY deep dives, all of which are very much in progress and require more specificity before I share them here.

That’s not meant as a “subscribe now!” hook, but for real, if you want to hear more in the future, please do make sure you’re subscribed!

Thanks for reading!

Brandon