A Year in Mini Retirement
April 18, 2026 marked one year since I hopped on my horse and rode into the sunset—my mini retirement. It was my chance to slow down, breathe, garden, prioritize my health, and run a long series of experiments—as the world changed quickly around me.
The framework was simple: one new project per month (thanks Pieter Levels), built with friends and family who were interested. The filter was equally simple—does it spark joy? Does it help someone? Is there something to learn? Running quietly underneath all of that was a less-secret hope: that one of these experiments might validate an idea worth turning into a focused, bootstrapped startup.
Here's what happened.
The Year, Month by Month
April 2025 (partial — started April 18th)
May 2025
June 2025
Crunchy Garden Updates
- Stripe integration week ✅
- Start testing modules ✅
July 2025 ✅
House sitting in Colorado — vacation mode
Projects took a back seat to enjoying Colorado, some Crunchy Garden play with the look and feel, feature validation experiments, and getting into 3D printing.
August 2025 ✅
- Political Info Sharing project
September 2025 ✅
Indonesia — Aug 30–Sep 14 — vacation mode
October 2025 🟡
- Pick a Kit maintenance
- New repo with an upgraded tech stack
November 2025
- Pick a Kit cleanup 🟡
- Split Crunchy Garden repo ✅
- Garden Planner ▶️
December 2025
[Kid focus] Build a Gun — Creating a Roblox game with a friend and his son 🤙
January 2026
- Local LLM experiments ✅ (why? environmental footprint and curiosity)
- Transcription Service for Political Meetings (priority project begins)
February 2026
- Transcription Service for Political Meetings (continued)
March 2026 (indoor growing season)
IoT & Robotics Month
- Crunchy Bot IoT (started)
- Something to scare squirrels (a garden necessity)
- Friend builds cat toy
- Transcription Service (continued)
April 2026
- Transcription Service (continued)
Things I've Learned
A month goes by fast. On average, every project we tried to tackle in a month would want to fill three or four. Scoping is the hardest discipline, and the calendar doesn't negotiate.
Life is beautiful. Each moment. Of course we knew this already—but it's been a steady, welcome reminder, day in and day out.
Always go on vacation. Looking back, I can't say I regret a single hour of travel or any new experience I said yes to (and I spent a week with traveler's diarhea in Bali and Singapore). This is empirical now.
It's time to share. It's been peaceful building apart from the world—but the point is to change it. I'll be looking for more feedback, validating these ideas, and finding out whether we can actually move the needle on our placeholder success metric: units of helpfulness.
One thing I'm still working out: knowing when to keep going on a project and when to put it down. No clean answer yet, but I'm thinking about it.
Overall, feeling super blessed ^^