Quarterly Update Q1 2025

Fun

I flew to Jackson Hole to ski late January with a bunch of friends. Other than the snow the highlight was sitting on saddle at the cowboy themed bar in town. 🤠
I travelled to Sapporo and Niseko for another ski trip with a bunch of friends. I love visiting Japan. Had a ton of fun and visited the onsen six times.
A lot of friends visited to ski in Washington with me and Roslyn. Dan (twice), Austin, Megana, and Zach. We love hosting our friends and showing them the local mountain!
I took Roslyn and her friend Ellie to Taneda Sushi for omakase for their birthdays. We’ve been trying to get reservations for this place for years and I was lucky enough to get one just in time to celebrate.

Fitness

I promised Roslyn that I’d run a marathon this year so I started my training for a half in May and eventually a full in October.
I’m feeling the training fatigue but I’m also feeling my running improve week over week.
I’m glad I’m running more. My cardio has been seriously lacking the past few years and I’m starting to enjoy the routine of running in the mornings.
My skiing ability really took off this season. I’m comfortably doing blacks and I broke 50 mph here at Crystal Mountain. Catch me skiing 15+ days a season from now on.

Career

I’m about 4 months into my new job at Databricks on the Money Team! Everyone is so smart and athletic. It’s inspiring. I’m really happy I made the switch to this new job.
I’m carving out a good chunk of work to call my own already. It’s impacting almost every team at the company which is really cool.
Free food from uber eats and boba is amazing. I’m consistently amazed that I get this perk at work. I’m eventually going to get tired of poke and rice bowls but not anytime soon!
Databricks did another series of funding about a month after I joined the company and the stock price basically increased by 25%. So, the next few years are looking really good compensation wise 🤑.

Life

We had a home invasion while we were in Jackson Hole. Someone broke into our house and stole things from our closets. Thankfully it wasn’t anything too valuable (<$2000) compared to the potential loss. I set up a home security system now so I feel a lot better. I was pretty angry when I found out but I’ve come to accept the loss.
I started walking to the local cafe once a weekend to read and enjoy my morning. It’s a really nice ritual I’ve started and it makes be really happy that I can take time to go through everything I want to read about!
Life seems to be getting busier and busier but in some sense I’m glad my life is so full. I’m doing so much more with my life than previous years. I feel proud when I start to feel overwhelmed. One lazy day a month seems to be the sweet spot to recharge me.
I’ve been really interested in the term “Abundance” and the “Abundance Agenda”. It’s basically a vision for America centered around making it easier to build things and provides guidance to raise material standards of living. Two books on this are “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and “Why Nothing Works” by Marc J Dunkelman. I’ve been telling everyone about this and it’s a political philosophy that I really resonate with.
Related to Abundance I’ve been interested in housing policy for the past few years. I started to attend local community meetings and city council sessions to advocate for the city (Kirkland) to facilitate more housing and transit development. I’ve run into a LOT of NIMBYs and mean old people trying to stop any sort of change. Despite the vocal pushback the city leaders seem to be thoughtful and competent enough to enact through a lot of needed reforms.