Been a while since I last posted. Here’s the quick version of what’s been happening:

• I am no longer employed at The RealReal since end of July 2025.
• At time of posting I do not have another role lined up.
• There’s a lot of things I was doing at TRR that I can’t really talk about as I don’t have clearance from TRR’s communications team. However it’s nothing that isn’t being done elsewhere in the Mac Admins Community.
• There’s been a significant series of family issues that may involve travel back to the UK for an extended period. This is not confirmed yet and may change.

I don’t really want to get into the end of my time at The RealReal but those I left behind have my best wishes for the future. I am still in touch with some of my colleagues there.

Family: now that’s another matter.

September 2018, I’d just finished two and a half years working for Swiss banks and woke up to find out that my father had a heart attack. We think it wasn’t his first, but it was the first time my mother had seriously noticed. Since then, there’s been various “adventures” involving being on prescription medication for too long (like two plus years instead of six months), noticing some behaviour changes, the fact I moved to the USA and so on.

Earlier this year after much effort by my mother, he got a diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia. I won’t bore with details, but look up what happened to Bruce Willis and be aware he’s following his symptoms progression and is probably a year or two behind him. I was told this morning that he’s already got sundowning , has disrupted sleep cycles and the ability to do various tasks like turning on a computer are eluding him. Which is really awful when you consider that frontotemporal robs you of your ability to function but without robbing you of your intelligence to understand what’s going on.

So yes unless I can land another role, I’m seriously considering doing a long duration (about a month or so) trip to the UK just to help wrap up certain things and give my mother a needed break.

I’m ok. Myself and my mother have been wrestling with this since 2018 in some form without actually knowing what it was. It’s just something to finally know what it is, so we can actually research and deal with things other than being the blind leading the blind.

Anyway that’s the last few months for me. I do have more exciting stuff I’m trying to work on that’s far more fun and interesting. I took advantage of Fleet DM’s generosity and did their free Fleet Certified GitOps Administrator course. I also discovered Stop The Bleed and signed up for a free course in just over a week’s time. The kind of stuff it’s handy to know and hope like hell you never need.

If you’re feeling generous then I recommend using Charity Navigator and making a small donation to a dementia charity of your own research. Or other cause close to your heart.

It’s been a bad year all round, too much to go on. People we know in the Apple world being let go or getting unexpectedly sick and so on. Let’s try and keep some positivity going, something I’ve not been the best at doing.