Did you miss me as much as I missed you?

I don’t even actually know how people experience this podcast.

Do you notice when it doesn’t show up in your feed?

Are you like, Hey, there it is again.

Uh, my hunch is that some of you do notice when it hasn’t popped up in a bit.

Uh, and that many of you are like, Oh, there it is again.

I think this is one of the longest breaks I’ve had, uh, since I restarted doing this podcast, but I’m back now and I can explain what happened and what might continue to happen in some ways, but won’t happen in other ways.

Boy, I made that as convoluted as possible.

Theme song, please.

Your daily Lex.

Number one reason why I was going, uh, I’ve been doing fewer releases of the show over the past probably two weeks, maybe three weeks.

Um, has been because of the games, right?

I’ve been, you know, when I have downtime or free time, um, or off time from the normal consulting work I do all day, um, my energy and attention has been going to.

The games.

And when you’re doing either of the two things that I spend most of my time doing on the game stuff right now, which is either coding or writing puzzles, um, that becomes obsessive.

Like it’s my favorite and least favorite thing about when you’re in deep encoding, right?

Like it’s, it’s hard to take a break.

You lose track of time.

You get really focused in on the thing.

You want to get it to work.

Sometimes the stuff that should take minutes takes forever.

And sometimes the stuff that you think will take forever, it goes really fast.

But like when you’re in that zone, you don’t want to get distracted.

And as much as I enjoy doing this show and I do, uh, sometimes like I just run out of time and then I’m like, well, now it’s nine o’clock at night.

Not that I’ve been coding from, you know, 9am to 9pm, but you know, I’ve had a whole work day.

I’ve now gone to join the family and now I don’t want to go into it.

But if I, if I don’t have a good pause point in the middle of the day, then I don’t do it.

Um, I’m working on it though.

I’m trying to, I’m trying to get it all to balance out.

But then I also had college tours this week.

Um, Ani and I drove to Boston on Sunday, uh, and we saw four schools in two days.

Um, and man, it’s first of all, I wasn’t expecting it to be as not emotional.

I wasn’t like emotional the whole time, but it was moving in some ways.

Like I wasn’t expecting that part of like, wow, this is really this stage of life.

Like I’m with my oldest kid looking at colleges.

And, uh, at some point this kid’s going to go to college and then they’re not going to my house anymore.

And how many vacations do I have left with this family unit of five of us?

Um, like it was really getting in my head about like it was, it was powerful that I hadn’t fully anticipated that one of the schools we looked at was Brandeis, my Alma mater.

And I was not expecting that to be quite the nostalgic punch that it was.

I had been there a couple of years ago, uh, when, uh, Lauren and I went to Waltham for, uh, the wedding of our pals, Dan and Kat.

Uh, we took, uh, you know, a few hours at Brandeis and, you know, wasn’t really open.

It was the summertime, but we looked around and went through and saw a bunch of new buildings.

So I thought I’d gotten the nostalgia part out of my system, but then I was there with my kid taking a door and man, the nostalgia just kept punching me in the face over and over again.

I also was very helpfully whispering to Ani things.

The tour guide was going to say right before the tour guide said them.

It’s fascinating though, how much of your, uh, tour experiences tour guide dependent, I guess it’s not fascinating, right?

What else would it be dependent on?

I guess also the school, but we had some tour guides who were really thoughtful and engaging.

We had some tours that were the scripts that they were following or the guidelines they were following really cover a whole lot.

And then we had some tours that were, you know, we had some very impressive tour guides, but sometimes they wanted to talk a bit more about themselves in the school or talk about the school through such a narrow lens that it was harder to really get a full picture.

Uh, it was interesting though.

We had a good time and, um, we didn’t hate any of the schools.

We thought that we being Ani mostly thought that Northeastern was a little too big for Ani’s needs and a little too focused on travel abroad, which Ani does not want to do because Ani is a crazy person.

Uh, but it was a, you know, man, it was weird.

Got to see Dan and Kat again.

This time they weren’t getting married because they already were married.

Got to see their baby.

Uh, and uh, yeah, we, you know, man driving around in Boston, what a pain.

Uh, we got also because of the way our tour schedules ended up going, we would do like, let’s be in downtown Boston and then go to Waltham.

And then the next day I was like, let’s go to Waltham and then go to downtown Boston.

It was as, as chaotic a schedule as possible, but we got it all done.

Uh, it was fun to watch our GPS sometimes really struggle to understand what to do on certain Boston roads.

But we, again, we made it all happen, uh, without any incident other than, uh, insane travel on the way there on Easter Sunday and pretty lousy travel on the way back.

Thanks in part to rain, uh, slash accidents, which were caused by the rain.

Um, I have more stories for you, including stories about spam, but you’re gonna have to wait.

Cause I can’t blow it all on my first episode back after all these days off, uh, but happy Wednesday.

And, uh, yeah, you’re the best talk soon.

Oh, Oh, Oh.

If you do like my games at Lex dot games, uh, I appreciate so much when people send me their scores, that’s fun for me to see, but I also would encourage you at least for your favorite one, like post that score publicly, post it on Facebook or text it to friends, uh, or post it on your social network of choice, uh, with a link to where you played it, because that’s the only way new people will discover the games when you just posted to me, I get to see your scores, but the world doesn’t.

So, you know, for your favorite one, feel free to share it with everybody.

Cause, uh, why not?

You get it.

All right.

Miss you.

Love you.

Goodbye.