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. …

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. …

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. …

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