March 2026

Spring has officially sprung. The weather is fluctuating from the 70s to below freezing. Daylight Saving Time went into effect, which is something I abhor--it really messes up my internal clock. "Madness" happened, and baseball is here.

I own/use one of those "sunrise alarm clocks". Sometimes I question if it actually helps me get up. I don't know if it does all the things it allegedly claims it can do but I can tell you for certain that it does provide some value.

The monday morning immediately following the Daylight Saving Time change, I woke up for work and school in complete darkness. Dazed. Confused. What time is it? Why is it so dark? It was lovely. All the things I love about the clock change made even worse by my sunrise alarm clock not faking the sunrise.

Apparently, my router went down over night and because the clock lost internet connection, it lost what time it was. Why a clock needs constant internet connection to tell time, I don't know. I appreciate the hyper connectedness and convenience of our modern lives but boy, oh boy, have we gone too far.

I've decided to let the AI bots do their thing and continue to access this site. It's not much bandwidth to serve up the content and they're not consuming too many of my server's resources. However, I am annoyed that the em dash has become everyone's indicator that AI wrote the content. I just started using the em dash in my writing before the AI explosion and now it's almost something you can't use. I used it above anyways--deal with it.

Early this month, my oldest participated in a Fine Arts competition with his school. He had a full plate! He performed a solo piano piece, did a duet with a peer in his grade, and did his own humorous speech. Everything memorized and meticulously rehearsed. The piano music was wonderful and for his speech, he had the crowd captivated and received perfect scores. I'm super proud of him and the amount of hard work he put into everything. He really worked his tail off and was rewarded for it. A great life lesson. He's been asked to perform his speech for a much larger audience for his school's spring program. He's super amped up for it. It is not something 13 year old Ben would be amped up for.

I've been enjoying March Madness and March Mad CSS. This year is the first time in a long time that I did not create a March Madness bracket. I didn't have the energy and was fighting off one of the worst colds I've had in recent memory. Watching the games without a bracket takes away a little of the fun of the whole event but I still really enjoyed gorging myself on basketball.

March Mad CSS is such a cool idea and has been really enjoyable as a web developer. If you're a developer, you should check it out on the Syntax YouTube channel. I try to avoid YouTube these days so I understand anyone's hesitation. Watching top developers come up with CSS solutions is a lot of fun. I'm rooting for Josh Comeau to come out the champion.

In truck news, I replaced the stock speakers with some much better sounding Infinity Reference speakers. I'm very happy with my upgrade and it was pretty easy to replace all 6 speakers. I have moments where I can't believe I'm driving a 3rd Gen Tacoma with a manual transmission. It's a truck I wanted for a long time, so long I had nearly given up on being able to get one. I'm really looking forward to more warm weather and cruising around in the truck with all the windows down and the tunes up. There haven't been any new earworms this month. My truck's speakers have been playing all my favorites.

My youngest has a pinewood derby coming up in April. We have been working on "The Green Flame." Designing and getting it shaped. Followed by lots and lots of sanding, painting it in glorious green and adding in the flames. We just finished the final adjustments and getting it race ready. It's fun to be out in the garage working on something physical and passing on some knowledge.

March means baseball season is officially underway! I watched almost all of the World Baseball Classic (way to go Venezuela!), the MLB season has started, and both boys' baseball teams are getting ready to start practicing.

I'm assistant coaching for both boys this year and have been working on getting ready. I am lucky that the scheduling worked out! I'm a little nervous, I want to be a great coach and help all the boys grow as players and young men. It's going to be a fun and memorable baseball season!

- Ben