I haven’t posted here in a while. Not because I ran out of things to say. Not because the work stopped. I just wasn’t standing at the microphone.

The last couple of months were spent doing the unglamorous things I should have done much earlier—working on the admin side of the site. Fixing broken links. Noticing design holes. Wrestling with UI and UX issues that don’t announce themselves until they’ve already annoyed someone. It’s the kind of work no one sees unless it’s missing. MoM will probably never be perfect, and that’s fine. It doesn’t have to be. It just has to function. It has to breathe.

During that time, I was also drawing—freehand, unplugged, no project waiting on the other end. I forgot how much goes into making something visual. How close it is to writing. How every line, finished or abandoned, belongs to a world that didn’t exist until you put your hand to paper. That realization landed hard because it reminded me of something simple: creation isn’t output. It’s participation.

And yes—that shit is fun.
But not in the way people usually mean.

Nothing about what I’ve been doing fits neatly into the idea of fun. There’s no leisure glow to fixing broken infrastructure or reworking something for the third time because it still doesn’t sit right. I grew up believing you work first and earn play later. That belief wasn’t wrong. It kept the lights on. It built discipline. It mattered.

What I learned later—much later—is that sometimes you have to loosen the grip to get real work done. Sometimes cutting up a bit isn’t a distraction; it’s how momentum returns. Play, when it works, isn’t escape. It’s engagement without judgment. It’s moving within the work instead of standing over it, asking if it’s good enough yet.

My girls taught me that. I remember wiping water from my face, surrounded by water balloons and modified water guns. No strategy. No efficiency. Just laughter and chaos and the immediate reality of being there. The shit was real—real fun. And somewhere in that mess was the lesson: not everything that matters announces itself as productivity.

Writing here started to carry weight. Expectations—mine more than anyone else’s. Analytics whispering. The quiet hum of Is this good? Will they get it? I wanted to be a writer so bad. I wanted people to take me seriously. I needed my work to mean something.

The funny thing is, I was already a writer. People do take me seriously. And I’ve written meaningful things. Right? The platypus story. The one about the kid with the long tongue. Those didn’t come from force or strategy. They came from showing up and letting the work breathe.

Drawing doesn’t carry that baggage. No audience. No scoreboard. No version of my name clearing its throat in the corner. Just contact. Just presence. But it does give me a sense of contentment—of peace. That charge that comes when an idea starts to take shape. Especially when it was nothing more than a passing thought you managed to grab before it slipped past you for good.

Some ideas are like that stranger across the room who catches your attention. You hesitate. You circle the moment. You try to summon the courage to speak, knowing you might never get another chance—until finally, you go for broke.

At the same time, I spent more time reading—really paying attention to what others are doing. Old friends still sharp. New voices doing interesting, thoughtful work. That matters. It pulls your head out of its own echo chamber. It reminds you that the work isn’t a closed loop.

The evolution of Quote of the Day taught me something I didn’t fully understand at the time. It started small, almost casually, and over time became the most stable and consistent thing I do here. Not because it was optimized. Because it was allowed to deepen. I no longer believe posting every day is proof of commitment. I’d rather create something real than post just to stay visible.

So this isn’t a return announcement. It’s not an explanation. It’s just evidence that the work didn’t stop—it shifted. Maintenance counts. Attention counts. Learning counts. Silence doesn’t always mean absence.

No promises.
No schedule carved into stone.
Just honest work, moving again, because it never really left.