2023: A New Career in a New Town

So what’s happened on Everything is Oll Korrect! in 2023? Well, looks like I wrote four posts this year, three of them in the last few months. You can take the timing as a good sign - my schedule has lightened up a bit, meaning that, while this blog won’t be on, say, a weekly schedule any time soon, I should be able to manage somewhat regular updates, perhaps monthly or so. Two of those posts happened to be about children’s books, which gives some indication of what I’ve been mostly reading lately. One, which I think was the best of the year, on children’s books generally, and one on Dr. Seuss in particular.

The other two were closer to Everything’s historic norm. I read and wrote a bit about a rather specialised work, Elizabethan Recusant Prose: 1559-1582. The other was on Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. This was also my first Halloween-related post in a few years, so it’s nice to revive that tradition. I already have a couple ideas for what I may do for Halloween next year. In  past year-end reviews I’ve noted which posts were most popular, but I haven’t even glanced at my stats this year and don’t feel like bothering now.

The big project for this blog is that WordPress has got to go. This software’s terminal decline started with the adoption of the Gutenberg editor a few years ago, which I was willing to tolerate since I can just continue using the classic editor, but over roughly the past year I’ve noticed it becoming hopelessly bloated and unstable. The whole blog has crashed four times this year, requiring me to either use WP’s recovery mode or FTP to disable the plugins folder. In each case, WordPress’s own first-party Jetpack plugin has been the culprit. So, my goal for the last week of the year is to convert the blog into a static site using Hugo. A static site should make things a lot simpler, more stable, and more secure, but using a framework like Hugo does give me a few extra bells and whistles without weighing down and potentially nuking the whole site.

On the personal side, it’s been a difficult  year with a big payoff: I’ve successfully started my career as a professional librarian. Though my previous career wasn’t bad and I worked with some good people, a few months in my new position has me convinced this was the right career move. The work itself is more satisfying, and the nature of modern libraries and my specific job title mean that I am using some of my IT experience; in fact, my impression is that my employer more-or-less wanted an IT person with an MLIS degree. I did have to move a few hours away to a new town, but whereas before we’d been a bit isolated from the rest of our family, now we’re in the same town as my in-laws, which has been great.

Now, despite the happy ending, the process of moving was very difficult. The usual stresses of packing, of finding a new house, expenses combined with a long gap between paycheques, a… sub-par moving company, and more! One thing that occurred to me is that, for the fourth consecutive year, I’ve had a new “most difficult and stressful thing I’ve ever done.” Which tells me that 2024 is gonna be lit, boys.

Happy New Year, everyone!