Bob Wertz

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.

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.

My ❤️8️⃣ from 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣2️⃣

This year was unexpected. Just about nothing went as planned — sometimes better, sometimes worse. Looking back over my photos, I took fewer “artsy” shots and mostly focused on my family. Here are my favorite shots from the past year, starting top left:

Evening snowfall. We don’t get much snow in Columbia, South Carolina. When it snowed in the evening in January, every thing was peaceful and serene… and then it was fun and chaotic, when all neighborhood kids came outside to play in the snow.

Norah’s prom. Our oldest headed to prom and had a great time with her friends.

Jill’s birthday. There are nine candles on the cake. Not the correct number of candles, but the perfect amount of light.

Soda City Market. We headed to our local market and took this picture as we were leaving. I’m not exactly sure what’s going on here — Jill hugs her kettle corn while Ryan proudly presents a giant carrot — but I love the shot.

Ryan playing the viola. Ryan started playing the viola this year and seems to enjoy it.

Sunrise at Hilton Head. Took a trip to Hilton Head with the family and woke up early enough to catch sunrise.

Lizzy’s birthday selfie. Here’s the thing… Our selfies are typically terrible and we have to take a bunch to get anything usable, but I grabbed this shot at Liz’s birthday dinner and we both like it. So it has to be one of my favorites.

Skee-Ball. I love skee-ball, and this beautiful skee-ball machine was at the arcade where we had Ryan’s birthday party.

This is the fifth year I’ve done a Favorite 8. You can see my previous posts from 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 on my other site, Sketchbook B.

Picking out my favorite pictures from the last year.

Back in 2018, Instagram users started posting their algorithmically-generated “Best Nine” — essentially the nine shots from the year that had the most likes. When I looked at mine, the images that everyone else liked weren’t necessarily my favorite pictures from the previous year. I enjoyed the process of digging through all the images from the previous year — many of which I had forgotten about. I curated and built my #Fav8 in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. If you are interested in learning more about the thought process behind Favorite 8, the 2018 post has the most detail.

This year, I’m not posting to Twitter, so I’m ditching the #Fav8 hashtag and just going with “Favorite 8.” Although on Micro.Blog, I’m thinking ❤️8️⃣ might be appropriate.

In the past, several friends have done this too, so this is just a reminder that it’s time to start working on selecting your Favorite 8 shots from 2022. I’ll probably post mine next week.