It’s the end of the year, so like I’ve done previously, it’s time for the big dumb summary of the last 365 days. I’m actually doing this a day early, but I don’t expect much to happen in the next 24 hours. Anyway:

• In January, I went to Norway for my birthday. I liked the city, but January isn’t the best time to go, obviously. Had a really good dinner at Mikael Svensson’s two-Michelin-star Kontrast; met a former employee from India I’d never met face-to-face, and wandered the snow a bit in the short winter days. Oslo was a wonderful city, but you might want to go in like July.
• In April, I went to Cambodia. This trip was an extreme mixture of awesome, traumatic, confusing, and amazing sights, all juxtaposed in the most random way.
• In June, I went to Cleveland for a quick weekend and a book reading. I read from a book I still haven’t finished, which I was supposed to finish in 2025, but here we are.[
• In August, I went to Mongolia. I also tacked on a few hours in Hong Kong on the way back. Ulaanbaatar and the nature around it was interesting and strange and a mix of central Asian remote nothingness with a very Soviet-looking city. Had a couple of long trips to the middle of nowhere, and unfortunately got sick halfway through. This was probably one of the most out-of-comfort-zone trips I’ve taken.
• In September, Squeak died. We had her for almost 18 years, and she’d been in a slow decline for a while. This was the first time I’d gone through this experience, and it was incredibly hard.
• Then in November, Loca died. Her decline was rapid and painful to watch, and she was “my” cat, so this one really hurt.  Also having no cats anymore is a huge emptiness for me.
• I also lost my oldest aunt and a second cousin this year. It’s amazing to me that I had 13 aunts and uncles, and now I’m down to three.
• I got my Part 107 drone license. I also got a second drone, a DJI Mavic Air 3s. Of course, now the government has banned new DJI drones from coming in the country, and I’m very paranoid about crashing one of my drones and not being able to get a replacement.
• In December, I went to Wisconsin and Indiana. Pretty uneventful and painless trip, except I lost my DJI Osmo Pocket 3 camera at the University Park Mall and am still pissed about that. (I bought a replacement. I now need to use it more.)
• I started the year working on a sequel to Rumored to Exist, and added this subplot that got far too plotty, so I removed it and set it aside to make another book out of it. I ended up finishing neither of those.
• I shifted to a sequel of Atmospheres I’ve been trying to land for ten years now. Every month, I thought it was close to finishing by the next month. In about September, a confluence of bad things completely shut down my writing, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to escape that.
• I started working on a short book, built around some already-published stories from zines. This was intended to be a quickie thing I could publish by the end of the year. That didn’t happen, but I did keep writing all year.
• All in, my net new total writing in Scrivener this year was 154,288 words.
• I kept up the weight loss. When I started this round in October of 2024, I weighed about 230 pounds. By December of 2025, I was 162. My body fat went from like 35% to 19%. I found that this makes winter somewhat excruciating now, even when “winter” in SF is like 47 degrees.
• I still don’t know how to get any quantifiable data out of Apple Health to say how many steps I took or whatever. I did walk or work out every day. I didn’t regularly meditate. I know my numbers are down, but maybe I should stop tracking this entirely.
• I flew 38,876 miles, 7 countries, a total of 3d 13h in the air. (My record is 2023: 9 countries, 69,316 miles.)
• I took 9,019 pictures, which honestly is way more than I thought. I only took 3,384 in 2024. My high is 2022 at 12,604.
• I had no resolutions last year, so 100% there.

I don’t know what resolutions I have and I sort of don’t believe in the pressure of that, but maybe it’s time. Here are some vague things I want to work on in 2026:

• Finish this “quick” book and get another big book out. And more writing in general.
• I either need to cancel subscriptions or start using them. I have a bad habit of subscribing to self-improvement things and then never actually doing anything.
• I say this every year, but I seriously need to throw out, donate, or sell like half the stuff I own. I’ve slowly been working on it, but I need to make more progress on this. And it would probably help if I got rid of stuff faster than I bought it, so maybe I should slow my roll there.
• Take more pictures. More film. I bought something like 20 rolls of 35mm film for Mongolia and ended up not taking a film camera, so that stuff is just sitting here.
• Fly more. I only flew a few times in March, then did as much as I could in spite of weather in November/December, and that was something like 22 total hours of total flight time. So, more.

I recently moved this site. It’s still at rumored dot com, of course. And it’s hopefully somewhat of an invisible transition. But it was pulling teeth there for a bit. Let me explain.

I first registered this domain on November 16, 1998. Prior to that, this blog (which wasn’t called a blog yet, because that term barely existed) lived over at Speakeasy, the hosting provider that was previously an internet cafe in Seattle. In 1998, I registered for a hosting account at Pair dot com, probably because Michael was using them for his site. I also registered the domain rumored dot com. The site went through various iterations of a static site, eventually using a static site generator I wrote before static site generators were A Big Thing, and then eventually it ended up in self-hosted WordPress.

That was going okay for decades I guess. I’d get a big bill every November, I’d pay it, and I’d have somewhat average service for the next 12 months. Pair was never blindingly fast or very leading-edge on their offering, but it worked reliably, and there was little fuss. Using some new wiz-bang hosting thing like Vercel or whatever would give me one-click whatever and the latest stacks and toys and apps and whatnot. But for just straight-up Apache/PHP/MySQL and no complications, Pair worked.

For a while, this was slightly frustrating because I was working with Ruby on Rails, then learning way more PHP, and I had grandiose ideas of doing the Next Big Multimedia Thing somehow, writing a database-backed CMS that had some weird image component or collaborative wiki something-or-other. And I’d write Rails stuff on my home machine and then not really have a way to deploy it to Pair. Or I’d come up with some PHP behemoth and then copy it over, and it would constantly time out on their machines. I gave up on that eventually. Wordpress more or less worked. I thought about moving to Ghost or some real CCMS system, but once you get well past a thousand entries into a WordPress blog, moving it elsewhere is like moving houses when you have more than 20,000 books. You can’t do it on a whim.

So life went on. And then this year, my annual bill went up like 75%, to $455, and was promptly autocharged to my card without me thinking about it. My fault for not paying attention, I guess. But then I went to dig into exactly which plan I had, and it turns out I was grandfathered into an ancient plan that didn’t exist anymore, and was stuck on some old hosting system or something. Like I was paying something like $42 a month, and a $5.99 a month plan on their pricing page touted like ten times the disk space and bandwidth I was throttled down to. Also, $42 a month isn’t your annual bill. These are GrubHub prices; order a $5 hamburger and a $5 drink, and your total after all the chickenshit fees is $47.

Pair used to be a great independent company, and they got bought and then sold and bought again, and they’re now owned by some Dutch company who has an About Us page that looks like it was written by ChatGPT. My billing inquiry was answered accordingly, and instead of any attempt to work with me or give me a slight discount, I got a big cut and paste of a press release or something, and was informed I could move my stuff to another hosting system, which see above about moving a giant site. And why should I reward this place with my business for running in this fashion?

I told S about this and she mentioned working on a marketing project for a large bank who shall go unnamed (they have “of America” in there somewhere) and when she asked why people would stay even thought they planned on screwing up rates and terms, the bank’s one-word answer was “inertia.” I felt the same way when a savings account I had for twenty years was suddenly paying a fifth the interest as an account that any new customer would get. In that case, I just opened a second account and moved my money over. But that didn’t involve a maze of redirected URLs, byzantine scripts I wrote ten years ago and have completely forgotten about, and a gigantic MySQL database.

Anyway. I looked at my options, and chose the path of least resistance. I went over to AWS and spun up a Lightsail Wordpress instance with something like 40x as much disk space and who knows how much faster for $7 a month, and the first three months were free. I exported the old WP instance, imported it to the new one, and after maybe a few hours of futzing, I had it more or less working the same. So I pointed the domain to the new one, and that’s that.

There are a few things that did not make the move, which is fine. I had a bunch of loose pages outside of WordPress for books that aren’t even published anymore, and those are gone. The old Paragraph Line web site that has zero traffic is dust. I think there are some little theme-based things that may be off, but it’s all mostly fine. HTTPS was a brief bump in the road, but it’s now working. The Lighthouse score is about 5 higher, and the rest of that is the fault of WordPress. And if I ever decide I need another site or a CDN or any of the other 863 things AWS does, it’s a click or three away.

A side note I almost forgot about: email. Pair has a system for putting a bunch of email addresses on the domain. There’s a largely useless webmail page and a completely useless spam filtering system, so I was just routing all of it to a free gmail account. Setting up an mx rule at the domain level to send all of the email to Google was a problem (I forget why) and shopping for some other place to handle my email was a nightmare. I could definitely throw fifty bucks a month at some SaaS Solution For Your Enterprise Email Needs. It was far easier to hold my nose and sign up for a Google Workspace account and point Rumored at that. I ran into some circular argument auth crap when I set this up, trying to keep jkonrath@gmail alive and point jkonrath@rumored at it, but I eventually got that figured out. This $7 a month is $7 more than 0, but it increased my disk space from 15 to 60GB and added a whole suite of Google apps I will probably never use.

There is some nostalgic thing about walking away from something you’ve used daily for 27 years. The Pair account reminds me of the start of my writing in Seattle, and all the years I blogged in New York, and the various book sites and other schemes I ran from that host. It makes me reminisce about the era when PHP was king and I was struggling to learn more about it. It was a constant through many moves and cities and eras and lifetimes. But, it’s just a host, I guess. I’m still sitting at a Bash prompt when I ssh to the new place. I’m still typing into the same WordPress editor as I write this. Everything’s changed, but nothing’s changed.

Anyway. I’m out that $455, which is stupid. If I get time, I’ll start doing more new stuff with the new hosting, maybe. Or maybe I’ll start actually posting here more next year.

So, I’m now officially, according to the FAA, a remote pilot, with an sUAS rating. I just passed my Part 107 exam and got my license in the mail yesterday. I’d had a Temporary Airman Certificate since last month, but I now have the real FAA card in my wallet.

Flying drones in controlled airspace involves a few hurdles, depending on what you’re doing. The FAA is not keen on a few pounds of plastic and metal getting ingested into a 737’s engine on takeoff, so they’ve established rules you’re supposed to follow, and the technology forces the issue a bit. Drones that weigh more than 250g now require something called Remote ID, which broadcasts the drone’s location, altitude, and speed, plus the operator’s position. And drones have to be registered by the FAA, which requires the operator to take a 20-some question multiple-choice test online.

If you do that, you can fly recreationally, which means you can’t perform any commercial missions, like making real estate videos or shooting a movie or anything else. This also (arguably) includes posting content on monetized social media platforms, although this is a gray area. Most people do this anyway, but there was a high-profile case in 2020 where someone was fined $200,000 for repeatedly breaking this rule. They were a high-profile influencer, and were also flying recklessly and breaking a bunch of other rules, but still.

There are a bunch of other rules, of course. You can’t fly above 400 feet AGL; you can’t fly in low visibility; you have limitations based on the controlled airspace above you; you are the lowest level of right-of-way in the sky; and so on. But the biggest one is intent. And I didn’t plan on getting a job doing aerial building inspections, but the whole thing is a challenge, and I’ve always thought I should study and take the Part 107 exam ever since I first flew a drone in 2020. So…

I bought a couple of books on Amazon a while back, and thumbed through them but never committed to studying anything. And after I finished my MSML degree in 2023, I bought an online course at pilotinstitute.com with hopes of completing all the video lessons and then taking the test, and of course that didn’t happen. I’d barely even been flying since 2023, and had a total lack of inertia on any of this.

Back in October, I started flipping through one of the test prep books one night, and decided I needed to just force the issue. I went to the FAA web site, looked up how to register for the Part 107 exam, and booked a date ten days later. Now I’d have to force myself to study, or lose the $175 fee.

The FAA’s Part 107 exam is a 60-question multiple-choice test that takes two hours, and you’re required to score 70% or higher. The test encompasses about a dozen different areas of knowledge, from airspace regulations to reading maps to weather systems knowledge to emergency procedures to those little signs on the side of the runway that tell your pilot where that taxiways are at an airport. The test is in some ways a subset of the Part 61 exam you take as a private pilot, and for both, you study from the Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge, a 522-page behemoth of a manual that covers all of this and more.

The funny part about the Part 107 test is there’s a lot of stuff you’re tested on that doesn’t entirely apply to drones. For example, you’ll need to know about radio communications, but you can’t transmit and don’t need to announce your actions over the radio. You need to learn all about airport operations, but you for the most part can’t operate at an airport. You need to know all about weather and how to decrypt a METAR report, but the bottom line is you’re probably going to fire up an app to take a glance at the forecast, and if it’s anything but nice outside, you won’t fly. A lot you need to study won’t apply to you when flying drones, but I guess if you have an intellectual curiosity around this, it’s interesting to read about it.

There’s a whole cottage industry of classes, videos, books, and web sites on passing the 107, many of them somewhat dubious, and all of them highly variable depending on how you learn. Here’s basically how I studied:

• The Pilot Institute course was great, but incredibly detailed, and it felt like it would take me months to watch all the videos. I worked on that, but seriously, it’s like 322 videos and quizzes, and I think I finished 40% of them.
• I also watched some YouTube videos that were like an hour long and a total overview. These varied greatly in quality. I won’t link to specific examples, but they’re out there.
• I think I read five or six different books, plus the PHAK, the FAA test supplement book, and the FAA’s Remote Pilot Study Guide. The ASA Test Board guide was the one most helpful to me, and it also gave me a set of practice tests online which were helpful.
• https://free-faa-exam.kingschools.com/drone-pilot is the most helpful practice test site. You can pick how many questions and which of the six big categories they are from. What I did after a week or so of deep study was to take 20 questions a day, then write down every single thing I missed and go back and research them.
• I also created a note in Apple Notes that was basically an abbreviated list of everything on the test, including various mnemonics and things I had to be careful to remember. (I.e. the controlled airspace classes are Above, Busy, Crowded, Dinky, Everything else, and Go for it.) I looked at these notes constantly, any time I had my phone out.
• Although I don’t 100% trust it, ChatGPT was pretty good at answering basic questions or listing information on the test. Like if I had some meteorological question about cloud formation or I wanted an explanation of a symbol on a chart, it was pretty good at giving me an answer.
• Another random tip: when you take the test, they give you a book called the Airman Knowledge Testing Supplement for Sport Pilot, Recreational Pilot, Remote Pilot, and Private Pilot. It’s a bunch of examples and diagrams, so on the test, they can ask “On Figure 20 Sectional Chart Excerpt, what is…” You can buy or download the book on your own. There is a legend at the front of the book which basically describes every item that appears on a sectional chart. I was trying to memorize all of these symbols and lines. You don’t have to; just look them up.

I continued on this, but during my first week, Squeak died, and that threw off the whole thing. Also, I was taking these practice tests and kept getting hung up on questions, especially ones that required a lot of memorization. I pushed out my exam date by two weeks, and kept going on my study.

There’s a small maze of logins and applications you have to do to take the test. You create an IACRA login. You apply for an FTN number. You create a PSI login. You apply for a test date. You pay for the test. I think there was a login.gov step in there. All of these sites are different than the FAA site where you register a drone, the third-party site where you took that 20-question TRUST test for recreational flying, or the FAA site where you request flight authorization in controlled airspace via LAANC. All of these web sites look like a DMV web site from 1997. Bookmark everything, take notes on what logins you used where, and don’t do what I do and use two different emails. Also, check your spam folder regularly, because all of these confirmations get flagged as spam.

I finally took the test early on a Saturday morning. It was at a nondescript four-story office building out by what used to be Candlestick Park. It looked like a typical office park thrown down in the early 80s on the peninsula during that particular tech boom, and the inside lobby definitely had that vibe. I sat in my car and did some last-second cramming on my phone before I went inside. I wish I could have taken pictures, but I was not allowed to even bring in my phone.

The security situation was bizarre. No phone, no watch, no coat, no jacket. I had to take off my hooded sweatshirt, empty all my pockets, put everything in a locker. They checked my glasses, patted me down, checked underneath the cuffs of my pants, and did everything but made me disrobe. I was allowed to bring specific things in; they gave me a copy of the testing supplement and a pencil. I was allowed to bring in a four-function calculator, a magnifying glass, and a clear magnifying ruler. I didn’t know if those rules were from 1974 or if I really needed that stuff, but why not.

This was a third-party test site, and I guess I assumed it was only pilot testing, but I guess they do all sorts of secure exams, like for pharmacists and TSA workers and whatever else. I think I was the only one taking a pilot’s test, because I was the only person with the test supplement and an armful of rulers and calculators and junk. They brought me in to a room of study carols, each with a computer. The test fired up on there, and it was a typical DMV-style online exam thing, with the worst interface imaginable. It also had an insane number of pre-test things you had to accept and calibrate and click OK on, the worst LMS setup imaginable. After what seemed like 20 minutes of prep, I started on my questions.

The test questions were pretty much like the practice tests. Actually, some of the questions were exactly like the ones on the practice test. I read through them carefully, to make sure they didn’t add a “not” or something and change an answer. The other anomaly is you get a few “test” questions that don’t count, like maybe they are trying out a new question. And one of these specifically was wrong. It asked a question about an airport on a sectional, and that airport was completely not on the map; it was a map for a totally different part of the country. On any question, you could report a problem, so I put that in and hoped I wasn’t just looking at it wrong.

I had two hours to take the test, but I swear they were far easier than the practice tests I took. I think it took me 20 or 30 minutes to go through all 60-some questions, so I went back to the start and examined every question a second time. Then I finally submitted everything, and got up and left. In the reception room, I handed over my stuff, and the attendant went through this big spiel about how if I had any issues I could go to the FAA site and blah blah blah and all I’m thinking is DID I PASS. Finally, he handed me a piece of paper and I looked at it: 93%. I did.

Of course, here comes the fun part. You aren’t immediately handed a license like you’re at the DMV. You are given an exam ID, and you have to go back to the IACRA site and submit an 8710-13 with the 7-digit FTN and 17-digit exam ID. Then you get a TSA background check. Then it goes to the FAA. Then after processing you can log into the IACRA and get a temporary license until they mail you. Problem was: the government was shut down. The FAA was (sort of) keeping flights in the air, but nobody was in the office, so I had no idea how long any of this would take.

That IACRA stuff worked, but I sat and waited on the TSA thing. I could officially fly 107 flights, but it took a total of five weeks end-to-end until I actually had a license.

In the meantime, I ended up buying another drone, the DJI Mavic Air 3S. I had to re-register my old drone and the new one so they had hull numbers I could use for 107 flights. That’s all automated, and wasn’t a problem.

Anyway, no idea what’s next, except I can post video now. I’ve got a YouTube playlist that I’ll start using, and I am posting some pictures and videos in the usual places. Should be fun. Of course, all of this isn’t writing, and I need to get back to that.

My cat Loca died two weeks ago. I don’t even know what snippy trite introduction to say about this post, because the whole thing is so horrible, especially after just losing Squeak, and I’m still trying to get past it, and it’s not easy.

Like I mentioned in my previous post about Squeak, we got both cats in 2007 from Humane Colorado, and Loca was the more outgoing alpha of the two, and a year older. She was a black Turkish Angora, an absolutely beautiful animal. She was very social, vocal, playful, active, and crazy, hence her name. In many ways she was a cat’s cat, and loved to eat, hunt, play, be brushed, and get her way about everything. In other ways, she was very non-cat like, more like a dog. I think because I worked from home so much, she became very attached and would follow me everywhere, and demand everything according to her schedule. She also slept far less than other cats. Squeak would be out for 18 or 20 hours of the day, spending the other time transitioning between sleeping spots. Loca probably slept only eight hours a day, and most of it very lightly, as she always had to be aware of everything going on.

Squeak’s health was a long, slow decline. Pretty much for the last two years, we watched her weight drop and her mobility become more of a problem, and wondered how much time she had left. Loca’s health was never a question. She never got fat, always stayed active, and never had any major issues other than hairballs and general fussiness about food. She did start to have hyperthyroidism and a slight weight drop a few years ago, but medication seemed to stop that. I had a lot of worries that Loca would not be able to cope as a single cat after Squeak was gone, but she seemed to be making the adjustment. I knew this was not going to go on forever, but she was still running and playing and eating, and I thought we had a few more years with her.

This all happened quickly. She was very on and off with her food, and would have these coughing episodes that we assumed were hairball-related, but she’d never throw up and no amount of hairball medication or cat grass would help. I came home from work on a Monday and found she hadn’t eaten at all and was doing more of the coughing and brought her to the ER, fearing the worst.

I don’t want to get into the blow-by-blow details, but it was chronic heart failure, and we thought we had a few weeks to make her comfortable, and I had to quickly change that to a few days. On Saturday, we had Lap of Love come over.

Loca’s birthday was a week before, on Halloween. We have one of those Womb chairs in the living room, and right before dinner, I was sitting in the sun, looking at my phone, and Loca crawled up unprompted, stretched out on my chest, and sat there for twenty minutes, purring and looking at the sunlight. I knew this was a core memory that would be burned into my head forever, even though I did not know it was her last birthday.

On Saturday the 8th, I sat in the Womb chair again and she died in my arms. I cannot put into words how horrible this felt. I am glad it was this and not an agonizing end while I was asleep and she was suffering. I’m glad I was able to take a few days off and spend them with her, even if she was now unable to climb stairs and we had to set up camp in the middle of the living room with pillows and food and a heating pad and a litter box. But this was my familiar, my best friend. I’d spent a third of my life with her, 18 years. I worked from home almost the entirety of her life, and talked to her every day. I’ve had many rough years in the last decade, and spent a lot of time thinking I was completely alone, but Loca was always there. Now she’s not.

Two things happened at the very end that were quintessentially Loca. When the doctor came on Saturday and Sarah went downstairs to let her in, Loca got up from her bed, went to the bowl, and pigged out on Churu, her absolute favorite food. It was hilarious that we spent all this time worrying about her food and getting her to eat, and here she was, two minutes before her end, chowing down on this smelly chicken goo in a tube that she loved so much.

The other thing. When they do this, they give a first injection of ketamine, and then after a few minutes when the cat is calmed down, they give them the big shot. With Squeak, Sarah was holding her when she got the ketamine, and she just stayed in her arms and relaxed. With Loca, the vet came over to her on the floor and gave her the first shot. And instead of sitting there waiting for me to pick her up, she had to get up, do a lap of the room, then go under the kitchen table and stare at me, telling me that I had to come to her. She would do this diva stuff all the time: beg for attention, then when you came to give her attention, she would walk away and say, “No, you follow me.” I absolutely love and cherish that she had to do this one last time. She was Loca until the end.

I am suddenly not a pet owner. There has been this awkward transition because now we realize every piece of furniture we own is either cat furniture or has been damaged by cats or is covered in cat hair. And I can’t bear to do a full sweep of the house and dump it all in the garbage. The food and the medicine all got donated. The litter boxes are gone. Her favorite toys are sealed in plastic and packed away. But it’s so absolutely quiet now. I wake up in the morning to feed them and… fuck. It’s been hard.

I know there will be others. I think we’re waiting until after the holiday travel and then we’ll find two more. But we got damn lucky when Loca came in our lives, and it’s a monumentally huge hole to fill.

Been a while. Various things have been up, and I’ve completely lost the thread here. I always feel a need to get back to the blog and start posting regularly, but getting the first post down after a month or so sets the tone, and I have no idea what the tone is, so here goes.

First major thing was that my cat Squeak died. We got both of the cats 18 years ago in Denver, and she was maybe six months old then. So she had a good run, and she’s had various medical stuff for a while. She kept going a lot longer than expected, but the last year or so has been rough. It was still an incredibly hard decision to let her go, and a month and a half later, I’m still upset about it. This was compounded by the fact that I spent most of that 18 years working from home, and a heavy part of my routine was seeing what was up with her during the day. I was going to write more about this, but I can’t. Extremely grateful for Humane Colorado for the start of her journey and Lap of Love for the end.

Second… I guess writing got away from me for a bit. My next book is possibly too political, and I now have many fears about publishing this in the current climate. Aside from all my other fears about writing and publishing, I also don’t want to suddenly not be able to get back in the country on my next time I go on vacation.  So I lost maybe a month there before I was able to get back to it.

There are a lot of various concerns about persona and the type of writing I will do in the future. I think I waver between wanting to do something “serious” or complex, like some David Foster Wallace magnum opus. Or I want to do basically a performance art piece of wild and crazy absurdism. And I think whichever one I do, I have to sort of “become” that person to the public. I think of how I was always posting over-the-top memes and crazy stuff ten years ago, and how that dovetailed with my writing at the time. I ran into a wall with that whole thing, and I don’t know what the answer is here. (And I’m not looking for one.) This is probably the subject of another essay. Regardless, I’m writing, and that’s all I really care about.

Third (why am I still counting) - I have been busy trying to get my remote pilot license, the FAA Part 107. I’ve been hemming and hawing about taking this test pretty much since I started flying drones in 2021, and I’ve bought numerous books and video courses and flash cards and whatever else, but never got it together to take the test. Finally, I said screw it, went to the FAA, and registered for an exam last Friday. After a week or so of cramming, I realized there’s no way I would be ready, so I pushed it out two weeks. I’m still working through a course, flipping through flash cards, and trying to remember when you use CTAF versus UNICOM at a towered airport after hours to self-announce traffic advisories. (And that whole thing is stupid, because I have to know all of this stuff for the 107, and then the very last rule is, “sUAS PICs cannot communicate on CTAF.”

Aside from writing and studying, I’ve been wasting a lot of time building book nooks. A book nook is a sort of diorama about the size of an unabridged dictionary with a glass front and a very detailed scene inside. I have built four of them now, and the one that got me hooked was the Kowloon Walled City 2049 kit. Of course I feel a need to customize these things and have fallen down this rabbit hole of paints and plastics and accessories and lights and scratch-building new details. All of this is questionable because the one thing I don’t have is shelf space. But it’s been a fun distraction.

Work is work. Had a brief staycation because I canceled a trip due to all the Squeak stuff. My only other travel plans in 2025 are Christmas and the Midwest, although I’m thinking about another crazy trip for my birthday. More on that when I figure it out.