September 2025 Recap

This marks my fourth monthly recap, a writing practice I began in June 2025 as a way to reflect on the month's experiences through organized journal entries. These pieces live on my Now page until the next recap arrives, when they migrate to the blog archives.

🚗 Road Trip to Sonoma County

I drove north to Sonoma County for Labor Day weekend, spending time in Guerneville—a small town along the Russian River that draws LGBTQ+ travelers during summer months. Temperatures reached the mid-90s, which made the pool particularly inviting.

I also ventured to nearby Healdsburg for wine tastings at Rodney Strong and La Crema wineries.

The drive home took me down Highway 1, where I paused at several coastal spots to photograph the landscape and browse for keepsakes.

🎵 Vinyl Collection

My vinyl collection grew to 63 LPs this month. Early in September, I discovered The Plastic Pancake on Valencia Street in the Mission—a vinyl shop across from Clooney's with a well-curated selection of used records at reasonable prices. Most of the classic albums I added this month came from there.

Here are the albums I added to my collection this month:

🌱 Indoor Gardening

I've become quite absorbed in indoor gardening this month. Three countertop Aerogardens now run indoors, plus a larger floor model where I'm cultivating cucumbers, jalapeños, and cherry tomatoes. The cucumber plant grows with remarkable speed, its vines reaching toward light sources in ways that feel almost intentional—watching it adapt and stretch toward illumination has been unexpectedly compelling.

🦁 San Diego

At month's end, Nick traveled to San Diego for his great aunt's celebration of life. While there, I experienced two firsts: visiting La Jolla Cove to observe the seals on the beach.

I also visited the San Diego Zoo, observing bears, elephants, and meerkats. We stayed at The Lafayette in Hillcrest, a recently renovated hotel with a substantial pool and contemporary atmosphere.

👥 Time with Friends

September offered several meaningful moments with friends—exploring new restaurants, attending events, and simply spending time together. These connections and shared experiences continue to feel essential, grounding the month in genuine human interaction.

💼 Work

My work this month has been focused on business switching navigation experiences, micro-frontends for agentic experiences specific to businesses, and visualizations and reports for a novel type of perpetual MAB experiment type being added to our experimentation platform, Hivemind.

I'm also contributing to a core team developing a new perpetual Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) experiment type for our experimentation platform. This work involves UI updates, report generation, and visualization creation for experiment review—offering a balance between technical implementation and user experience considerations.

📚 What I'm Reading

I finished Finding My Humanity by Ryan Ubuntu Olson this month. His coming-of-age memoir explores themes of identity, community, and belonging with remarkable depth. The book resonated on multiple levels, prompting reflection on my own journey and the people who have shaped my understanding of self.

A particular passage from the book has stayed with me, and I'll close with it here. Sometimes a single sentence captures profound truths about human experience.

"But by the accident of birth, we found ourselves fated to our current realities. Yet we were all human. I am because they are."