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...

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...

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

So apparently, 15 years ago, I joined Twitter. They wanted me to post about it, but they didn’t say it had to be on Twitter.

I added some of my own typeface designs to my Micro.Blog site. I’m really getting into the idea of creating all of the assets that I use in my designs… typefaces, illustrations… now I need to build my own template.

I took Monday off to be my “retreat” day to plan and set personal goals for 2023. I’ve done it the last five or six years and I enjoy taking the day to focus on what I want to do – and honestly, what I don’t have time to focus on right now.

I’m trying out MarsEdit like all the cool kids.

I’m a fan of limited edition candy and sodas, but fruicake-flavored Mountain Dew is a bridge too far.

I’m really happy with how my Favorite Eight pictures turned out this year. ❤️8️⃣

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 —...