Who am I?

I am James, an American guy in his 30s living and working in Japan.

I grew up in the Southern U.S. where I spent the vast majority of my childhood outdoors. Most of my time was spent running through the woods, building forts, climbing trees, and just generally enjoying the outdoor life. When the sun finally set at the end of the day or the heat of the midday got too bad, I would head back inside where I would enjoy reading and building things with legos or for those who remember them, "k'nex" (which apparently still exists). I was homeschooled for the majority of my school years due to living in a poor quality school district. As part of that, I did not really have too many friends growing up but family, books, and the farm animals kept me company enough.

Once I got to my later teens, I started looking around for a career and what I was going to do with myself. I ended up joining the military, got free college, and somehow ended up in Japan. That was over a decade ago, and I am still living and working in Japan now (and for the foreseeable future).

What is the Purpose and Plan of This Blog?

The main purpose of this blog is to help me improve my writing skills (as part of a larger self-improvement journey I am on that I will write about at some point). Secondarily, I think what I have to write about might be useful to some people, so I thought I might share it on here with others.

I plan to write about many topics on here that will be categorized and tagged (you can see these at the top of the post) so you can avoid any categories that do not appeal to you. am working in IT and maintain a homelab, so I plan to write on IT topics that I would enjoy reading about. I also am planning to write more broadly about my life in Japan. I really enjoy spending time outdoors hiking, cycling, and just generally exploring so these will be topics that come up for sure.

Conclusion

I hope you find some value in my blog (once I start getting some posts written). I have found the setup process of the blog to be very simple, but sitting down and starting to actually write quite difficult. I believe the more I write, the easier the writing will be and therefore my writing rate will increase over time. At the moment, I don't have any schedule I plan to stick to other than I want to write "regularly".

Thanks for reading!