I may have been unemployed for the past 6 months, but I was still up to quite a bit! My primary objective was working on my physical and mental health, but I also managed to do quite a few other things.

Physical / Mental Health

I’ve tracked basic health indicators for myself using a number of apps over the years, but one I really pay attention to is BPM. I know from looking at it on a daily basis that my BPM rises to a certain level when I’m at my most stressed, and drops to a certain level when relaxed.

Up until two years ago, my BPM had been pretty steady hovering between the low 60s and mid 70s. In the past two years, however, my BPM has skyrocketed 20-30 BPM.

In 2019, at my most stressed moment, my resting heart rate was around 80 BPM. My heart resting heart rate was at 80+ almost all of 2022 and 2023.

I’ve now gotten my resting heart rate down to around 74 BPM.

My Website

I’d been meaning to redo/touch up a number of parts of my website. I spent a lot of time working on my top priority pages, my art-oriented pages, and touching up a lot of little bugs that I found over the past year.

The biggest push was most certainly around getting my artwork up on the website and presented nicely. My business car art section looks MUCH better now.

Art Portfolio / Solo Competition

Over the summer I managed to get 30 pieces of artwork up on my website accompanied by staging photos, backstories, and other goodies. This was a much bigger effort than I’d anticipated.

If I hadn’t had the time while unemployed I don’t think I’d ever have gotten this completed. The prospect of entering my artwork into a couple of competitions definitely helped motivate me to get it all done.

Swatchify Plugin

A number of years ago I developed a WordPress plugin called Swatchify. It’d a fun little plugin that will generate a swatch for any image uploaded to WordPress. You can see it in the wild on my inspiration page and download it directly on the Swatchify landing page.

Email Template

Something that I’ve been working on the past year has been an incredibly well-integrated email template for use in major marketing automation systems like Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot, Eloqua, Mailchimp, and others.

For some reason the email templates out there are all a little bleh, and don’t accommodate many of the types of emails you would send as an enterprise B2B SaaS company.

That’s why I’m developing an email template for them. I’ll hopefully have this launched in the next couple of months.

Cleo

I was devastated by the passing of Pepper, and I really thought it would be at least a year before I even thought about getting another cat.

Fortunately, my friend Brad must have sensed my need for a furry companion because he invited me to the Animal Rescue league over the summer and I found Cleo.

Pepper left huge shoes to fill, but Cleo’s doing a pretty phenomenal filling them so far. She’s the cutest creature on the face of the planet.

I Traveled

I traveled to Costa Rica for my high school friend’s bachelor(ette) party on the beach for a week. There were bar crawls, hiking, incredible views, catamarans, snorkeling, and all kinds of other fun.

I then went to Utah for the same friend’s wedding, and both the scenery and the wedding were incredibly beautiful. I was truly honored to be a groomsman!

A week later I found myself in Sonoma for my cousin’s wedding. It was at a winery where me, Dave, and Kesley made plenty of mischief as seen above.

Blog Posts

I wrote a number of blog posts about my art, what I’m up to over the summer, and what I’m looking for out of a new role in the future. I have a couple more coming out soon after this post, so stay tuned.