2025 Weeknote 20 : Life and death

May 12 – 18

My weeknotes capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, typically focused on work. Learn more about weeknotes here.

TL;DR

This was a wild week. Perhaps the wildest week I’ve included in my weeknotes to date.

• I spent most of the week on Ocracoke with my wife and our dog. We were there Monday through Thursday, then left Friday morning (a day early). In theory we were on vacation, but it didn’t feel that way.
• I spent hours over the weekend and more time on Monday finishing the first cut of my teams’ 2026 budget requests.
• I stressed a bit over our website launch, scheduled for Wednesday morning, and took time to ensure all the various bits under my management (mostly the redirects) were in place.
• Wednesday morning—literally 10 minutes before we initiated the website launch—we got word from our vet that our 17-year old cat, Ophelia, had died.
• Setting aside the personal news, I worked with our GX Concourse team to launch the all-new “countywide” website, taking down more than 20 individual websites in the process. (This actually went quite well.)
• With the stress of work more or less resolved by Wednesday afternoon, we tried to restart our vacation in place, getting some relaxation in. But it didn’t take. We were disillusioned with this “vacation” and exhausted from… well… everything. So we decided to leave Ocracoke a day early to head home.
• We took the ferry from Ocracoke to the mainland Friday morning, then drove partway home, stayed in a hotel, and finished the drive Saturday afternoon.
• To top off this weird week, we discovered our house + pet sitter kept our other cat alive but made a filthy mess of the house. We immediately had to re-clean the house before we could settle in. (Never had that happen before.)

So yeah… a wild ride, and not an entirely pleasant one. We also had thunderstorms on the island that scared the dog and kept us up at night. And there is the Thai restaurant on the island that has policies that would make the Soup Nazi say, “Whoa, take it easy, lady.” But there were nice moments, too, including long walks on the nearly-deserted Cape Hatteras National Seashore, and one nice meal out (and two “meh” meals).

Nevertheless, matters of work and life weighed on us, and we came home wondering if we’ll ever return to Ocracoke and thinking differently about how to approach vacations in the future.

From here, I’ll address just 3 topics this week: life, death, and a quick look back at this year’s Ocracoke visit.

LIFE: Launching the new franklincountyohio.gov

This was the week that was 2 years in the making. I’m sure we’ll talk about it at length in an upcoming GX Foundry post, but I will attempt to briefly summarize the accomplishment here, and you can go see the new website for yourself anytime.

Credit where credit is due

Before I get started, I have to point out the vast majority of the credit for the site launch goes to our GX Concourse team, and specifically to the team’s fearless leader Sarah Gray. She’s been driving this bus for nearly 2 years and has done all the heavy lifting—organizational and emotional—on behalf of Franklin County and our little agency.

And yes, I meant to say emotional. I cannot overstate how much of this site overhaul work was not about content, not about technology, not about skills-building, though it had elements of all those things. This was an effort that required a delicate but firm touch, an eye on the calendar, the ability to wrangle a sometimes-distracted vendor, and relationship-building skills that encouraged over-worked and under-staffed agency teams to participate in a project that most felt was more distraction than core function. I would never have been as successful as she’s been in coordinating and collaborating with sooooo many people on a complex goal like this.

What *IS* Franklin County?

Perhaps a month or two after Sarah started, she stopped me cold in a meeting and asked me the fateful question: “So… what IS Franklin County?”

For those outside our walls, that may sound like a dumb question. But it’s not. It’s a keenly observant and smart question—one that gets at the most pernicious problem we face when attempting to get collective action organized across the county. What’s that problem? No one is in charge.

Yes, there’s the general fund budget topping $2B every year, and there are 3 elected Commissioners that have a lot of sway over where that budget goes. But that’s not the only budget in the county. And they aren’t the only elected officials. There are pockets of money and a pantheon of elected across the county. So to build a service-focused, resident-focused website encompassing all of the services provided across more than 40 different agencies is… daunting, if not literally impossible in the strictest terms.

Nonetheless, Sarah took the challenge, kept her eye on the prize, and coordinated action across a very large set of disconnected entities. I just helped around the edges.

So what happened?

On May 14, 2025 we launched an all-new franklincountyohio.gov as a centralized, unified site and for the first time the site had real content from lots of real agencies. Prior to the 14th, there was a website there, but it was a postcard with links to go elsewhere, and not much more. Post-14th, there are more than 20 websites that went dark and were redirected to new pages in the new site. A complete list of domains affected is in the table below (including future domains we hope to absorb into the central service).

Domains Moved on 14 May 2025	Future Domain Moves (we hope)	Domains Unlikely to Ever Move
dogs.franklincountyohio.gov commissioners.franklincountyohio.gov budget.franklincountyohio.gov everyresident.franklincountyohio.gov rise.franklincountyohio.gov risetogether.franklincountyohio.gov support.franklincountyohio.gov development.franklincountyohio.gov building.franklincountyohio.gov fcfoodbusinessportal.franklincountyohio.gov and fcfoodbusinessportal.org datacenter.franklincountyohio.gov officeonaging.org fleet.franklincountyohio.gov hr-boc.franklincountyohio.gov bewell.franklincountyohio.gov jfs.franklincountyohio.gov jpp.franklincountyohio.gov casa.franklincountyohio.gov and casacolumbus.org reentry.franklincountyohio.gov equity.franklincountyohio.gov facilities.franklincountyohio.gov purchasing.franklincountyohio.gov cleanwater.franklincountyohio.gov	franklincountyauditor.com cbcf.franklincountyohio.gov clerk.franklincountyohio.gov cocic.org makefccount.franklincountyohio.gov report.franklincountyohio.gov coroner.franklincountyohio.gov and octf.franklincountyohio.gov fcemhs.org and alertfranklincounty.org lawlibrary.franklincountyohio.gov probate.franklincountyohio.gov defender.franklincountyohio.gov prosecutor.franklincountyohio.gov recorder.franklincountyohio.gov sheriff.franklincountyohio.gov treasurer.franklincountyohio.gov vets.franklincountyohio.gov	vote.franklincountyohio.gov fccs.us fcbdd.org myfcph.org metroparks.net adamhfranklin.org guardian.franklincountyohio.gov franklincountyengineer.org drj.fccourts.org fccourts.org tenthdistrictcourt.org franklincountymunicourt.org and municipalcourt.franklincountyohio.gov

What’s the point?

The point of the new site is flip the script on how we communicate with the public. Our intention is to serve the public by meeting them at a central spot and making all the county’s services available in that one spot—easily searched, easily understood, and (in time) easily accessed. Up until this launch, the 20+ sites we shutdown were siloed away from one another, with no central search, no consistency of language or design. Our front door was Google because God help you if you had to find something and didn’t know the proper terminology.

Additionally, we want to make sure we can gather public feedback to improve all this digital info and ultimately the digital services we want to connect from the site. And we now have a centralized feedback mechanism—which started working within the first 30 minutes of the launch.

What’s next?

Next up we must refine the content already launched. We must also expand to other agencies and services. And we need to start creating real digital services, rather than sticking purely to information pages. That said, we are concerned that budget shrinkage predicted for 2026 may delay our dreams of expanding to more of the county’s agencies. But we’re hoping the public’s engagement with the content will encourage more investment of time, talent, and resources to keep this train moving down the tracks. There’s so much yet to do.

DEATH: “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember…”

In Feburary 2009 my wife and I went to the animal shelter in Anchorage, Alaska and we met Ophelia (my wife named her, not the shelter). We took her home to join Angus, our Cairn Terrier. Our prior cat, Arcadio (also named by my wife), had passed away a few months prior at a young 11 years old. Arcadio had made the move to Alaska from Louisville, Kentucky, after having been born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. But Ophelia was an Alaska original. We never knew her real birth date, but we believe it was sometime in 2008.

Here are a few photos from Ophelia’s 17 years (click any photo for a bigger view and caption):

In the past year Ophelia had been noticeably declining in health, with weight loss and increasing kidney problems, then high blood pressure, incontinence, and… it just kept getting worse, especially in the last half of April. Her health had failed badly enough in the last several weeks that we didn’t feel comfortable leaving her with a pet sitter at home, or taking her on a long car ride, so we opted to take her to our vet for “medical boarding” where they pay attention to a cat’s health in addition to well-being.

I was concerned this was a one-way trip to the vet, even though we didn’t want it to be. We hoped to have a few more weeks after we got back from vacation. But no. She had one seizure during our first week away and then sometime in the night of Tuesday, May 13 she died at the vet’s office, no doubt due to complications from all her end-of-life maladies. I suspect she was alone at the time, which was a double-gut-punch to realize the morning of May 14 when the vet’s office called to let us know.

Here, less than a week from losing Ophelia, I’m still sad, of course. But I’m also so happy she got a lengthy 17 years and had the adventure of being born in Alaska, traversing through Canada, and having 3 different animal companions over the years in Alaska and Ohio. She had a good life, to be sure. I just wish we could have given her a better death.

I still remember holding our former cat, Arcadio, when we took him to the vet for the last time. Feeling him instantly fall limp as the doctor applied the euthanasia drugs was both a relief and awful at the same time. But I know it was the best we could do for a cat that had a painful and debilitating cancer that was getting very close to ending his life horribly.

Though I didn’t want to repeat such a difficult experience with Ophelia, it may actually be worse not having been there.

The last of Ocracoke

And so that’s the stuff that was coloring our 2 weeks on the island of Ocracoke, at the southern end of the Outer Banks.

Unlike the more-developed islands of the Outer Banks, Ocracoke stands alone in being semi-developed, but also isolated and preserved. There’s no development whatsoever on the ocean side of the island—everything is either inland or on the waters of Pamlico Sound. We’ve visited for 1 or 2 weeks in 2020, 2021, 2022, and again here in 2025. We’ve loved this little hidden gem.

But I’m not sure we’ll go back.

In part, that’s the grief talking, from losing Ophelia and losing so much vacation time to pressing work matters. But also… we’ve now been out there 4 times, so… I’m not sure we need to go back anyway.

As we get older, we’re looking for new places and new cultural experiences, and we think this may draw us mostly overseas, or at least in big cities we don’t frequent. We like food tours and using public transit. We enjoy feeling a little “alien” in a city that speaks another language and has strange products in the stores that seem so unusual because they’re new to us (even though they are quite ordinary things).

So we’ll see. We might go back to Ocracoke. But it may also be time to move on and focus on what we can experience in the time we have left. After all, we’re now passing middle age and are increasingly aware of our own mortality, especially when our pets remind us our time is limited.

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About this week’s header photo