On the 7th I emailed a man who was supposed to be interviewing me and wasn't there. He wrote back eventually: sorry, travelling, meant to move it and forgot. I told someone later it wasn't great, but it was a reply. If he'd stayed silent I'd have spent the whole day fretting. That line ended up describing most of the month.
I spent a lot of October rehearsing the same forty-five seconds out loud: twenty years in B2B SaaS, founder then CEO then consultant, Optimal Workshop and its old clients, how the new role connected every side project I'd ever built. I said it to Dad, to a friend, to the ceiling before bed. It is a strange thing to get fluent at describing your own life in forty-five seconds and still not know, by the end of it, whether you are selling the years behind you or the studio in front of you. When the interview finally happened on the 11th it started an hour late, after I emailed "how about now?" I passed. Somebody told me the salary. Somebody else corrected the number upward. Jas put our odds at fifty percent, which felt about right for a process that had stood me up three times already.
It went quiet after that, quiet enough that by month's end I assumed they'd just given it to someone else. A different door opened instead: a friend asking if I'd come in as his second-in-command if he survived a fight of his own with his board. Two years of building things nobody was quite ready to pay for reliably will make you grateful for any door with a person behind it.
Dad's heart kept getting worse in small, exact numbers. Diabetic retinas needing monthly injections. Then an ejection fraction of 28 against a normal of 55, a phrase I can now explain to other people without looking it up, and a doctor's flat suggestion of a defibrillator. On the 23rd, in a storm that put a tree through our power line, an ambulance came for him after several bad nights of breathing. I stayed at the cabin working while someone else sorted the outage, telling myself the tree would be fixed before the power was. It wasn't really the day for that joke. It was the only one I had.
The house never sold. No bids, one interested buyer who vanished, and eventually we pulled it off the market rather than keep paying to be told no. We started talking instead about renting it out and buying somewhere else entirely, which felt like giving up and making a new plan in the same sentence.
My brother spent the back half of the month on the other side of the Tasman working out that something had to change, and I spent it on the phone telling him to sell the car, rent the apartment, stop waiting for a better moment to arrive on its own. None of it landed until it had to.
In among all that, Fox turned 13. We made drumsticks out of a length of dowel, sanded ourselves, and got through five tacos before a supermarket cake with thirteen candles on it. Dot spent the evening convinced nobody liked her, which had less to do with anyone liking her and more to do with a day that belonged, for once, to her brother.
Jas and I fought about a sandwich. I brought home the wrong one and got told, accurately, that my sense of my own communication skills was more inflated than my actual communication skills. We both apologised, badly. It wasn't about the sandwich. It also wasn't about anything bigger than a month where nobody had much patience left to spare.
I kept building things anyway, half a dozen names for the same idea, telling someone the list had gotten ridiculous, "but I think they all have something to say." Most of them are still waiting to say it.
