I’ve been walking on Main Street at lunch this week. Today, I ran into a bunch of friends who were also out and about. Almost had a pre-COVID vibe.

Every time Sticker Mule has holographic stickers on sale, I end up buying some. I love the way they look and $29 for 50 die cut stickers is a great deal. Just got to figure out what I want to order.

My 11-year-old son is cleaning out his backpack after winter break. I’m not sure how he accumulated so much junk and trash.

Getting back into the normal rhythm this morning. My wife has to work today so the alarm was set for the first time in two weeks. Brutally early. Tomorrow, the kids are heading back to school and I’ve got work, but I wanted to get back on schedule so I’m up, too.

The Verge wants us to bring back personal blogging.

2023 was a great year for Star Trek. Strange New Worlds was my favorite new Trek, but lost in the shuffle was Star Trek: Prodigy, which just wrapped up its first season with a spectacular finale. Smart show with a solid arc. If you like Star Trek, give it a shot on Paramount+.

I want to keep a daily journal in 2023. I’ve tried DayOne several times in the past. Love the app, but I’ve never stuck with it for more than a few weeks. Any recommendations for other apps/services/approaches that have worked for you?

Who Wants the Metaverse? An interesting academic look at the history of the term “Metaverse.”

Reset: 2023

Trying to find balance

I’ll be honest, I’m not sure I ever found my footing after the pandemic shut everything down. I’ve been trucking along keeping everything going, but the last half of 2022 was especially challenging. This rhythm and pace is not sustainable and it’s time to reset the balance between family, work and school.

Family is first, as always, but even more so now that my oldest is about to head off to college. I want to spend quality time with her before she moves out and heads to school. Work is going well, but is constantly busy. With graduate school, I’m taking the spring semester off to spend some time getting into a new routine.

For 2023, I need to focus on four areas: health, writing, organization and creativity.

Focus on physical and mental health

I’ve got a list of things to work on — from getting enough sleep to finding time to walk at lunch. I feel like I know what I need to do, but making time for a healthy life has been challenging over the last year. I need to develop consistent, healthy habits.

Write more

I’ve been writing for school almost constantly for the last year. And that’s great, but it’s come at the expense of writing for myself. I’ll still be writing for grad school, and hopefully getting some journal articles published this year, but I want to expand the type of writing I’m doing and improve my skills. Writing on bobwertz.com (via Micro.Blog) is going to be my primary personal writing outlet for the year.

Smartly organized

In general, I’m organized, but there are some areas that are an absolute train wreck. I’m working on some using the tools I have — like Notion and Tot — more effectively. There’s a fine line here, though. Time spent on getting organized is time that I’m not working out, writing or designing.

Rediscover creative endeavors

I’m a designer, but I’m not designing much right now. I have a bunch of projects, from stickers to typefaces that I want to work on. These always end up on the back burner when family commitments and grad school deadlines take priority. I need to carve out some time for visually creative projects that I’ve been neglecting.


I’m looking forward to hitting the reset button and restoring some balance to my slightly chaotic life. In past years, I’ve shared a check-in post at the midpoint of the year to evaluate how I’m doing on my theme and goals. This year, I’m going to try and post quarterly to keep myself accountable.


Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina.

Got word this week that a book review I wrote for New Media and Society was approved for publication. It feels so wonderful to have this finalized before the end of the year.

Just bought some Nanoleaf smart lightbulbs for our bedroom lamps. Setup with HomeKit was incredibly easy and the price was reasonable. I really like them.

At my daughter’s physical therapy session and it’s hard to believe she had an ACL repair just over a month ago. She’s moving really well and her leg strength is improving rapidly.

Merry Christmas from Team Wertz. 🎄

I’m intrigued by Keychron’s Alice keyboard releases. I love my current Keychron K2 and I don’t really need another keyboard. But I’m tempted.

For years, our Alexa was incredibly reliable, but about six months ago, accuracy dropped significantly. I bought a new one recently thinking the issue was with the older hardware, but nope. Still bad. We are having better luck with Siri and our Apple HomePod Mini and I think we’ll start using that more.

Had coffee with a friend this morning and was telling him about Micro.Blog. I followed his Mastodon account and he was able to follow me on Micro.Blog, which worked great. I need to polish up my Micro.Blog sales pitch, though, and my explanation of Activity Pub.

The little suburb I live near doesn’t have a historic “Main Street” like a bunch of the other cities around us. (Irmo was founded in the 1920s as a railway stop for nearby dam construction.) The weird thing is that they’ve just decided to insert a new Main Street into the middle of the existing community. I’m not sure how I feel about it. I’m sure it will be nice… but instead of leveraging what’s already in the community, you are creating something that never existed.

📺 Rewatching some Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episodes. Such a great show.

Taking all of my index cards from my planning session this morning and capturing it all in Notion.

Hanging out at a coffee shop today and working on 2023 planning. Trying to settle on some goals and themes for the year ahead.

Hitting the pause button

Time to reset the balance

“I don’t know how you do it?”

I get this question a lot. I balance a full-time job, my family and grad school. I’ve been in grad school part time since I started my Master’s program in 2018 and I’ve become pretty good at carefully planning out and scheduling my time.

In 2022, I never really had a chance to achieve a balance. At work, there was a lot of change. My boss resigned in January and I assumed some of his responsibilities. I took over managing photography and videography staff again. We rolled out a new logo, which was — and still is — a lot of work. All of these things were positive developments, but required increasingly more of my time and attention.

At home, things were challenging. My wife tore her bicep in January and then had to have surgery in the summer, right as she was moving to a different school. My oldest started her senior year of high school and is trying to figure out where she wants to go to college, but then tore her ACL in a lacrosse tournament and also had to have surgery. My two youngest each started a new school, which changed our morning routine significantly. Everyone is doing great, but there is always a lot going on.

And grad school has been fine. I’ve done well. I’ve written lots of papers that I am proud of and had research accepted to a conference. I’m trying to get my papers edited and submitted to journals. Classes have been good, but honestly, I haven’t enjoyed grad school for the last year. And that has been weighing on me.

The balance is off.

I’ve been in grad school part-time for 4.5 years straight at this point — 3 for the Master’s and 1.5 for the Ph.D. With all the changes in my job and life, I wasn’t getting the most out of my Ph.D. studies.1  So I’ve decided to take the spring semester off. It’s a tough decision — I’ve been steadily working on my degrees one or two classes at a time — but it’s the right decision. I need to pause and reset the balance between work, home and school. I’m not quitting, just taking a break. I know I’ll start back up in the summer or fall, fully recharged and ready to continue to the finish.


  1. One of my professors told me that by working on my Ph.D. part time, I had the “gift of time.” Most people have to sprint through their program so they can get a teaching job. By not rushing through my program, I could get the most out of it and enjoy it.

Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina.

Post Formatting

Testing out how I want to format my longer posts.

I haven’t had this Micro.Blog site for long, but I’ve written at my other site – Sketchbook B – for almost 15 years.1  Over time, my long form blog posts there developed a pattern. I had a basic structure with headers, footnotes, divider lines and a bio at the end. And I want to replicate some of that here and needed a post to experiment with. This is that post.2

I’ve already been using an H2 as a subhead and I like the way that looks. Like many writers, I often want to add footnotes as I write. Over on Sketchbook B, I used asterisks, but since I’m writing in Markdown, that’s kind of a pain in the ass. So I figured I’d go with superscript numbers, which is more conventional anyway.3  I continue to use divider lines to separate the body of the post from the footnotes, and a second divider line between the footnotes and a bio.

I’m not sure what I want to do with the bio. I found that most of my traffic came from Google, so the reader was dropping in on my site with no idea who I was. For now, I’ve decided to go with the shortest one sentence bio that I could and set it at the end in italics.

One aspect that I haven’t yet decided on is images. On my Squarespace-hosted site, each post had a preview image and I’d include a post image. So far on bobwertz.com, I don’t need a preview image, but I do think I want to create some type of standard post image to include under the subhead. I’ll keep experimenting, but I feel good about my basic post format.


  1. I’m going to keep writing at Sketchbook B, but the content will be mostly Adobe Creative Cloud tips.
  2. I’m using a trial of MarsEdit right now. And I really love the preview engine that lets me see how this is going to look, even before I post it. Looks like I’ll be purchasing a license.
  3. I don’t love how the superscripts mess with the overall line spacing. It just feels wrong. I may try to come up with another approach.

Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina.

📺 Rewatching Hawkeye on Disney+ and I forgot how much fun this show is.