2025 Weeknote 30 : Winning in the bottom of the 10th

July 21 – 27

My weeknotes capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, often focused on work, but with home life stuff, too. Learn more about weeknotes here.

Professional weeknotes

• The looming April 2026 deadline for local governments to comply with ADA regulations on digital content accessibility got some high-level attention this week. We were able to score a meeting with county leadership and the lawyers to discuss it. I gave an intro presentation to get everyone up to speed on what’s ahead of us and to advocate for (a) hiring outside consultants to help with assessment and planning, and (b) creating new permanent roles to “own” accessibility leadership and technical support across all our agencies and the mountains of digital content they generate each year. There was an immediate and positive reaction (thankfully), so I’ll be pushing things forward this coming week. Even with a tacit green light, though, it’s going to be a fight to get this stuff actually funded and moving forward. The county does not like to spend money on new things that bubbled up from the bottom (or from regulations) rather than started as “fresh” ideas at the top. I’m crossing my fingers we can pull this together fast. The only question? What’s my role in all this? We shall see.
• Following up on the GX Foundry discussions on culture improvements, I realized we need some kind of weekly check-in to figure out whether our culture is headed in the “right” direction or not over time. Folks want the negativity to decrease, and that’s great — but how do you know if you’re succeeding? Well, you ask. So I’ve started a weekly survey to collect very high-level sentiment on whether we’re moving the culture in the right direction. It will likely need more work. But at least we’re starting.
• There were a lot of other catching-up things going on, and people were out sick, traveling, or otherwise just not around so it was an odd week. And I’m working on yet another schedule redesign, trying to capture the 1:1 meetings, the professional development discussions, the team meetings, the work reviews, and more. It’s a game of Tetris, as usual.
• Meanwhile, I have resolved to end my paid subscription with Medium, the blogging / writing platform. It’s only $50/year, but I’m not using it enough and moved to WordPress some time ago. I like Medium, but I have to admit so much of the writing there is now just clickbait stuff. A lot of the mojo has jumped to Substack (like it or not!), too.
  • For the record, all the posts I created at Medium are already copied and posted to this site anyway, so no content will be lost.

Professional links

British govtech genius Matt Jukes recently gave a presentation across the pond on working on the open, and the video was released this week. Great to see/hear him and it’s a topic I wish more folks would learn about.

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Personal weeknotes

• Until the very end of this week it was looking like my father and mother would move to a nice assisted living facility in Tennessee in a couple weeks. But by Sunday night the tide had shifted and my father’s cold feet were solidifying. He’s had a week or two that has gone fairly well with my mother, so in his mind, why move and why spend the money? Totally understand the trepidation, since his generation only knew of the old stereotype of “putting someone away in a home” and he had never emotionally planned to go into assisted living. So the move appears to be off. At least until the next crisis, the next hospitalization, etc. Us kids are… not happy. This just means we’re all waiting for a fateful call one day that will lead to instant chaos for everyone. While I understand the emotional component here, I can project out what’s going to happen, and the consequences will be far more intense than the consequences of moving now. Nothing I can do about it, however. Or at least we haven’t figured out what to do.
• However, the silver lining in dealing with the family stuff is it has highlighted for me a nagging worry that I just have too much stuff in my life, and it’s time to start cleaning things up. I am in a new phase of life, with revised interests and simpler needs. I need to dump a bunch of stuff. So I started that this week. I took a ton of backpacking gear to the local REI and traded it in for over $500 in store credits. Everything REI wouldn’t take I dropped off at Goodwill. And I have some fun stuff to take to work this week and see if I can pawn stuff off on colleagues (that are likely to be excited). I want to keep purging through the rest of 2025 and really enter 2026 in a simplified state.
• Speaking of backpacks, I’m still dialing in the packing list for our 40-mile hike on the coast of Northern California at the end of September. And that’s just a practice for the 170-mile hike in Portugal and Spain in 2026 on the Camino Portuguese. The list pretty solid now, so far weighing in at below 15 pounds without water, and I have 2 backpacks that can work. Plus I ordered a third backpack (I have a problem!). Now the wife and I need to knuckle down and get serious with prep for the first trip, starting in under 60 days.
• And this past week I took in a Columbus Clippers game, as the header photo and photo below shares. I won’t name my 3 colleagues, as I didn’t get their permission to mention them here. But it was a great evening to hang out. And win!

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About this week’s header photo