March, 2026
The chaos is finally — but not totally — starting to fade. In early March we moved back into our house, replete with new floors and a sense of something once-deferred starting to materialize. And then, as things do, the process of becoming tangible contains its own bumps. The kid gets sick. The server catches fire. One reality has been true my entire life, and yet surprises me anew each time: these kinds of things do not happen in isolation. You sit down for dinner on a Sunday thinking about how little time and space has passed since the start of the week, and the answer is both "not much" and "everything."
For this and many reasons, I'm grateful for mostly existing on a monthly aperture. It's when I get the chance to zoom out a little and examine the things that have totally escaped my memory that I'm most grateful and proud. At the start of this month, Lucy was a (happy, thrilled, exuberant) shadow of who she is now; Telly had just undergone (successful!) ACL surgery and was sporting a turkey leg with a scar and now he is back at (almost) full strength and speed; our house had no floors and no furniture and now it has them.
On the Buttondown side of things, this has been the strongest month in quite some time, for reasons that I haven't had time nor reason to chase down. The things dreams are made of:
- Registrations went up 30% month over month (and all of the downstream funnel stuff as well);
- Support volume went down 5% month over month;
- Expenses went fairly significantly down;
- Our Linear backlog got decimated twice over.
And, with all that, I even had time to write (as you'll see below.)
A month is more than a daily maelstrom times thirty, even if it doesn't feel that way sometimes.
