Life - B E Hoch

And Thus, Like a Self-Conscious Phoenix …

brian@brianho.ch (Brian E Hoch) — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Image by raquelraclette https://unsplash.com/photos/red-flame-MYjFOiVWWT8

I poke my head up from the ashes and look around to make sure I won’t look like a complete fool as I try to rise again.

Death with Dignity

brian@brianho.ch (Brian E Hoch) — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In just over a year, my mother-in-law has lost both of her parents. They were wonderful people and we all miss them. My wife’s grandfather died first, last year, not long after the lockdown started. It was sudden, but not a surprise either. He’d been declining steadily over the past few years. He fell at home and just never recovered.

After he passed, my wife’s grandma moved up and lived about 20 feet away from my in-laws. She seemed to be doing very well for a little while, apart from the deep sadness of losing her husband of over 50 years.

Permission to Breathe

brian@brianho.ch (Brian E Hoch) — Sun, 11 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A little while back, I posted about my commitment to posting on this blog. But it’s been a couple of weeks and I haven’t posted. I haven’t abandoned my blog, though. I have been working through a lot that’s been going on over the past few weeks, and I needed to scale back on what I was doing. There simply wasn’t enough time in the day to take care of everything.

Keeping Quotes

brian@brianho.ch (Brian E Hoch) — Sat, 26 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

When I was a young man, I started writing down quotes that I found interesting, inspiring, or funny. I think I was probably inspired by a book my grandpa published when I was twelve, 1001 Great Stories and Quotes. It’s a habit I’ve kept up over the years, though with waxing and waning consistency. When I hear or read something that sparks my interest, I try to record it for future reference.

Doctor StrangeVirus or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the COVID-19 Pandemic

brian@brianho.ch (Brian E Hoch) — Fri, 18 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

COVID-19

On Halloween 2020 my wife was getting ready to visit her sister in Idaho who was going through an awful divorce and I began to feel a tickle in my throat. I knew it wasn’t COVID because I had been so careful; I never went anywhere without my mask, I hadn’t been around anyone who had it, and I washed my hands religiously whenever I returned home.

Since my wife was flying, though, I went to get tested first thing the next day just to be safe.

Changes

brian@brianho.ch (Brian E Hoch) — Sat, 18 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by Michal Balog on Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/@mikbutcher

The past 9 months have been full of changes. I received a promotion, adopted a daughter, remodeled a bathroom and a kitchen and accepted a new position at another company. And there are more changes coming in the next couple of months, selling the house and moving across the country.

Ideation

brian@brianho.ch (Brian E Hoch) — Sat, 30 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

As I tried to come up with an idea for this month’s blog post I started thinking about ideas themselves. Where do they come from and how? In short, how does ideation happen? I want to think grand and lofty thoughts, so how do I do that?

I think we are all familiar with the phenomenon of the spark of inspiration. It comes unexpectedly and often at the time when we are least prepared to accept it. For me it always seems to come with my hands are wet, so I can neither write nor type. We can help steer these ideas, I propose. We are not slave to their whims. While what I suggest may not guarantee the thoughts and ideas we want they will be more likely to arise.

On the “Benefit of the Doubt”

brian@brianho.ch (Brian E Hoch) — Sun, 28 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by Andy Holmes on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/@andyjh07

Having four kids at home, I find myself having to constantly explain to them the concept of giving the benefit of the doubt. The result of which is that the idea has become very near and dear to me. I see so many conflicts that could have been avoided if those involved understood it.

What I learned from NaNoWriMo

brian@brianho.ch (Brian E Hoch) — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This year I had wanted to write 30,000 words in the month of November. I’ve failed horribly this year. But in some ways, I’ve succeeded.

I have indeed written more this month than I usually would. I have written a few thousand words (many in letters) and I’ve remembered how much I like to write, so in those ways it’s been successful.

Especially since my goal at the start was not as much about word count as it was about building a habit of writing and a desire to do it. (Though I suppose the goal itself testifies to the pre-existence of the desire).

NaNoWriMo

brian@brianho.ch (Brian E Hoch) — Sat, 01 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/@patrickian4

November is NaNoWriMo. While I don’t have a plan to write a novel, I do aspire to write more. I enjoy writing and I think it’s important for helping me learn, think and improve myself. But, as evidenced by this blog I’m not very consistent in it. I really want to improve my consistency in writing.

Why I Write

brian@brianho.ch (Brian E Hoch) — Tue, 15 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Sometimes I need to write to know what I think. My day to day musings are generally disjointed and repetitive. I arrive at a decision or opinion, if I arrive at one at all, on a circuitous and meandering neural path. It can be hard for me to reason through a concept internally. I tend to circle repeatedly through the parts of an idea that are most familiar, or least complicated. Like most, I don’t like cognitive dissonance so I try to avoid it rather than engage in the work of rectifying the discrepancies.

It’s Nice to Read Again

brian@brianho.ch (Brian E Hoch) — Thu, 19 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

The past couple of years I have had increasingly less time in the evenings. At my old job I would often have to work in the evenings just to stay afloat, as there was simply too much work for one person.

A Mobile Culture

brian@brianho.ch (Brian E Hoch) — Sun, 15 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by ROBIN WORRALL on Unsplash

There is a fantastic scene at the start of the movie Warm Bodies where the protagonist, a zombie named Z, reminisces about what life must have been like before the zombie apocalypse. It must have been wonderful, he thinks as he walks through an airport terminal teaming with the senseless undead, to be able to talk to each other and have a real, meaningful, human connection with someone else. As he thinks this the scene shifts to a time before the outbreak and the terminal is full of living people, each focussed entirely on the tablet or phone they hold.

Déjà Vu

brian@brianho.ch (Brian E Hoch) — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I only feel déjà vu with negative experiences, almost never positive.

Our first three children came after completely complication-free pregnancies. Not once in those pregnancies did I get a feeling of déjà vu. Why? Because there’s nothing that sticks in the mind when everything goes as it should. But when something goes wrong the mind latches onto it.

We’re now on our sixth pregnancy. Our fourth child, Andrew Paul, was stillborn. After Andrew we had a miscarriage. With this pregnancy I feel déjà vu many times a day. There were so many events that led up to Andrew’s death that I can’t go for very long without having memories forced to the surface.

Live-Tweeting Despair

brian@brianho.ch (Brian E Hoch) — Sun, 08 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I watched a man live-tweet the death of his six-year-old daughter. It was horrific. Not because he was tweeting it, he was crying out in pain. It was horrific to watch it unfold.

She had cancer and he knew it was coming. He held her as she lay unconscious fighting for the last bits of life she had left. She was my daughter’s age. She died on her birthday.

Drinking from the Firehose

brian@brianho.ch (Brian E Hoch) — Sat, 07 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I recently changed jobs. I went from being a web administrator in the medical field, working with SharePoint and ASP.Net to deploying and configuring software on Unix servers for a shipping logistics company. By my wife’s description (“He works with computers”) my job hasn’t changed much. In actuality, the only consistent thing between the two jobs is “He works with computers.”

It’s been intimidating to make such a big change. In some ways I feel almost like I’m starting over, learning all new systems. Fortunately, I’ve been playing with Unix for fun for almost 15 years, so I’m not starting from scratch. But at the start I had a few meetings where the only words I understood were the conjunctions. It felt like drinking from a firehose.

My Misdirection in “ Personal Development”

brian@brianho.ch (Brian E Hoch) — Sun, 23 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been so worried about content production vs. consumption this year. It’s been stressful to look at the minuscule amount of content that I personally create, outside of work. “How am I supposed to develop myself into a better person if I don’t have this cathartic outlet?” I’d ask myself. But, I never really stopped to consider that the thing that is the most important is they type of content I consume, not create. And it’s not been enough Scripture.