Childcare is too important to be concerned with profit — I am very proudly the father of a school-aged child, and am dating a woman who also has a kid in that age range. For much of the past decade, childcare has been a personal concern of mine — along with a professional one. My ex-wife, my girlfriend, and I…

Understanding your true value on Medium — I’m in a few Facebook groups where I share my work on a semi-regular basis — mostly to get it out to a wider group of people. I don’t engage in follow-for-follow and don’t demand engagement — mostly I just want to get my work out to a diverse group…

Planning for urban power outages — Living in the city can be a lot of fun. Whether it is a large diverse city like NYC, a smaller historic city like Dublin, or “just another city” it is hard to beat the combination of activities, restaurants, events, and easy transportation that comes from living in a city. …

I got the data wrong, but it’s not the end of the world — With the end of 2022 also came the official end of a contract that has done many things for me over the past 5 years or so since I started it. As part of my final tasks, I’m doing some updating of older pieces — making sure that statistics and…

They need to be funded as such — I love libraries. I’ve loved them ever since I was a kid. The sense of unlimited knowledge, free for the taking, openly shared with anyone who walked through the doors. As a kid, I could commonly be found browsing the stacks in my little community library. While I started upstairs…

My anxiety suddenly reappeared today — it wasn’t fun — I live with anxiety. Most days I am quite successful in dealing with it and keeping it under control. Today is not one of those days. I can’t even explain why it showed up today, just that it was triggered by an innocuous “can we talk about…” email from a…

Why I blocked an author instead of engaging with them — I work very hard to be thoughtful and careful when I’m here. I know that my opinions and beliefs are formed out of my own experiences, education, and unearned privilege. I also know that my writing is not for everyone, but I work hard to make it accessible — even…

Trying to make 2023 my best year on Medium — This is one of several thousand posts that will appear today about how the author is going to make this their best year on Medium ever. So feel free to skip over it if you’d like…but I need to make this a better year than any other year — preferably…

November 2022 Update — It’s been a hot month since I updated all of you on where this is — here’s where things are at the end of November, 2022. In July, I decided to see how long it would take me to earn enough money on Medium to buy a car…it’s going to take quite a while by the looks of it seeing as I haven’t even been able to afford the front bumper components yet! The Medium-Mobile Experiment Can I earn enough for a car on Medium?matthewwoodall.medium.com