Week Four of Unenjoyment

The layoff announcement landed on April 15th. We’d already booked Disney, so I went to Disney. I came back, opened a fresh Obsidian note titled “Adventures in Unemployment,” and started a daily plan. This is the fourth full week of what I’ve been calling unenjoyment which is unfair to it, honestly, because it’s been pretty enjoyable.

I have a 4th/5th round interview lined up that could resolve the whole situation in a hurry. But in the meantime, I have something I haven’t had in a long time: open space on the calendar and a list of things I’ve been waiting to do.

The list, predictably, is too long. Home projects that have been queued up since we bought the house. Being a more present domestic partner and father. Job search. An LLC I want to dust off. Two book ideas. A handful of product concepts, including a Clam Tycoon game. There’s a homelab I keep promising I’ll do something useful with. There’s a personal site at adambraun.dev that needs to exist again. There are skills to sharpen.

My ambitions are bigger than what one person can deliver in a day. So I’m leaning hard on AI tools for drafting, for rubber-ducking, for keeping me honest when I drift, for compressing the boring parts of a task so I can spend the time on the interesting parts. The daily plan is the scaffolding. AI is how I move on more than one thing at a time without everything turning to midden.

Some of the most rewarding hours so far have had nothing to do with any of that. My friends who run a schooner charter had a surgery right before her daughter’s 13th birthday party and right when they needed to uncover the boat and get her hauled. I was around. I helped. There’s a photo of me on her deck looking unhinged that I’m pretty sure captures the spirit of the whole month.

That’s the part I didn’t expect. The runway isn’t just for resume-tuning and side projects. It’s also for showing up for people in ways a packed calendar never let me.

So this site is going to be where I chronicle the rest of it. Expect dispatches on:

• What the daily structure actually looks like (and how often I detonate it)
• Home improvement projects, including the water heater saga currently unfolding
• The job hunt
• Whatever the entrepreneurship thread turns into
• Book progress, including the messy middle
• Product ideas, prototypes, post-mortems
• Homelab experiments
• Drupal, Astro, and whatever else I’m building this site with

Some of it will be useful. Some of it will be a mess. I’d rather chronicle it honestly than wait until I have a tidy story to tell.

Stick around, or I might just clam up.