I’ve been learning a lot lately — these days, these weeks, these months.
It feels like I’ve gained a kind of super-focus I didn’t have before. And I needed it, desperately. Because one of the things I’ve llearned: if you want people to find your website, you have to optimize your images. Their size. Their file names. Their alt text.

And I do want people to find my website.
I also want them to not hate me for painfully slow loading times caused by giant image files. So… here we are.

This is a lesson in patience.
I’m slowly reworking everything on this beautiful website. It is beautiful, right? It has to be — because I want it to last for the next hundred years so I never have to go through all of this again.

Now, with this new task, l sometimes lie awake at night wondering how many people never found it.
Maybe Spike Jonze once Googled “strange surreal but whimsical puppet world” and ended up somewhere else. Maybe he never found me. Maybe he was going to offer me a job.
Wait — I need to Google this.

Okay. I Googled it.
That’s… not good. Poor Spike. No wonder he hasn’t made a new movie in a while.

I’ve learned that cats are actually kind of cute. And that I’m good at making toys for them.
Friends invited me over to meet their children — the furry kind. And meeting furry (or feathered) children is always a yes. I’d usually prefer dogs, pigs, whales, or maybe an opossum over cats, but these two won me over. They graciously accepted my handmade toy (now named Claud) and are, officially, my new friends.

I’ve also learned that I’ve learned nothing when it comes to my back.
I’ve been complaining about back pain forever. Now I have a herniated disc, and possibly another one forming. Seems like I really need to learn the language of my body.

I’ve learned that I’m getting really good at making puppets.
When I look at my earlier work and compare it to now, the difference is clear. And I love that. I love progress. That’s how I think of myself too — always in progress. Maybe this is the one space where my “not good enough” thinking actually serves me.

I never feel like I’m getting older.
I just feel like I’m becoming a better version of myself over and over again. Let’s see how long I can keep that up.

Speaking of better versions:
I sent out a newsletter today — a piece about different versions of myself. The ones I inhabit. The ones I create. Like the new puppet I’m building for stop motion. She gets to meet all my creatures in real life.
Well — in her real life, anyway.

If you're here, you probably already know about my Substack. But in case you don’t — that’s where I share the shorter thoughts. More frequent, more immediate.

This blog, on the other hand, will be a slower space.
A once-a-month sort of space. The kind of place where thoughts can stretch out and breathe a little.

Thanks for being here.