Hi there

My name is Albert. I’m a father and husband, a software engineer by trade, and a collector of hobbies foremost of which is making music. I recently left a job of over nineteen years at Amazon.com to take a sabbatical. I anticipate that I will find a new way to earn a paycheck in the next year or so but for now I want to take some time to get my head screwed on straight and figure out how I really want to spend the rest of the time I have. This blog is here to share some of what I’ve learned and what I’m thinking about and to kick it off I wrote this post just to catalog the first couple weeks and hint at the road I think I see ahead. As such it may only be interesting if you already know and care about me.

This is the beginning of my second real week of not having a job to go back to. Those days have consisted of driving kids to school in the morning, picking up kids at school in the afternoon. In-between I get about six hours. Since my youngest only started school today I’ve had to spend some of that time coming up with ways to keep her from marinating in her own farts all day long. But otherwise I’ve been at full liberty to spend my time as I please. Right now I feel like an animal sitting in a cage with the door left open; gingerly sticking my head and one paw out the door. I have the idea that there’s lots of big meaty things I want to spend my time on but I also feel habituated to being constantly scrambled by emergent responsibilities to others and varied tasks I don’t really feel any passion for.

(Actually it’s been about 3 weeks now because I’ve been delayed putting together a website to host this blog. Just play along okay?)

So so much paperwork

Speaking of tasks I don’t really feel that much passion for (except for being able to say they’re done).

Amazon has provided both Catie and I health insurance for the last 19 years and both our daughters since they were born. I had a crash course in what the plans in the Virginia marketplace look like and what our spending looks like. To get the latter I put together a Jupyter notebook, threw all our medical and drug claims as far back as the insurance websites would let me download it in, made a bunch of assumptions and guesses about how much the standard marketplace plan would pay for each claim and then summed things up. I freaked out for a full day about the resulting total spend before remembering that:

these prices are based on not getting any subsidies due to me having drawn a salary for three quarters of the year and we would only pay at this rate for the remainder of this year. At open season this year we would sign up for 2026 and use the far lower expected income for 2026 and get much better rates as a result.
that while it’s all entirely too expensive, it’s a good thing that the costs are highest for those most capable of paying them.

Now invariably some of the folks you discuss this stuff with will get a twinkle in their eye and say “Hey, you’re pretty healthy and financially secure, why not get the plan with the highest possible deductible. You’ll still be protected in the case of a medical disaster that could otherwise be financially devastating and you can afford to pay for the rest of the stuff out of pocket and at the end of the day you’ll save money.” As far as I can tell it’s not an option. First off there is a thing called catastrophe insurance. It’s what the eye twinkler expects, very high deductible, very low premium, minimal coverage. You mainly pay out of pocket for stuff you want. I didn’t look much into the particulars because we can’t use it. It’s only accessible if you’re under 30 or can get a hardship exemption. Besides that you probably know that the ACA marketplaces categorize plans using colors. You have Gold plans with higher premiums, lower copays and coinsurance, lower deductibles and at the other end of the spectrum Bronze plans with lower premiums, higher copays and coinsurance, higher deductibles. For our particular situation, the difference between Gold and Bronze premiums is about $3000 per year and once I figure how much we’d pay for a similar amount of care as we’ve utilized the last couple years it seems like it’s pretty much a tossup. One would be cheaper in one year and the other in a slightly different year. It seems to me that the Bronze plan only works out significantly cheaper if our care is extremely limited. basically just seeing the primary care doc once or twice a year. While our medical costs aren’t really that high, that still doesn’t describe us. So ¯_(ツ)_/¯

What I really want to find out is how much it’s going to cost to keep my Amazon provided healthcare under COBRA. The fun fact I learned is that the law allows Amazon and the companies it partners with for this purpose 44 days from my last day of work to get me the info I need to enroll in COBRA. Which, awesomely, means that they have until 21 days after my coverage lapses. Now COBRA will be retroactive so any expenses I incur could be reimbursed but what if COBRA turns out to be an even worse deal then the marketplace? And what about the possibility of being turned away by doctors due to being uninsured during that gap?

Short term health insurance to cover September seems to be purchasable at a surprisingly reasonable price and we might have to do that. What a hassle! I’m keeping my fingers crossed and hoping the COBRA information gets to me this week. My hopes aren’t super high yet given that Amazon still hasn’t given me any information about how I’m supposed to return the equipment I was issued. Optimizing these processes doesn’t get much attention.

Update: After I wrote the words above but before I published, I got the COBRA letter. Keeping my existing healthcare would cost me $700 a month more than the most expensive marketplace plans without any subisidies! JFC!

Update the second: One more thing I learned is that once you’ve decided on the marketplace and fill out an application you get the option to give them information about your income. If your income ends up low enough you and/or your kids may end up eligible for medicaid. Wonderful! The state is willing to give you health insurance for free! Wonderful that is until you find out that doctors that you really want to keep being able to see won’t take it. So you may find yourself in the position, perhaps if you’re an early retiree, of wanting to increase your documented income enough to fall off the medicaid cliff so that you can gain back additional options. Now I’m only complaining about this but so much, I understand the dynamics that led it to be this way and that I’m complaining from a privileged position and that it’s hardly a catastrophe. The takeaway from all of this is just that healthcare is entirely too complicated and stressful in this country

Besides healthcare there’s other gaps left by me leaving Amazon. For example all the monthly money moving to pay things like the mortgage and school bills that are all based on the assumption that I have a paycheck coming in each month. So I’ve been making and documenting decisions about where to keep cash and where to get more cash if needed. Which led to rethinking and documenting our asset allocation based on the current state of things and implementing the decisions in our retirement accounts.

There’s also a whole category of non-offboarding-from-amazon related paperwork tasks that I’ve let languish for literal years in some cases. Most egregiously we setup a family trust in 2015 and I still haven’t properly transferred all the accounts into it that need to be. So this is the kind of stuff I work on now when I just want to do busy work and listen to records for a while.

Music stuff

Way more fun. I finally got my new EP launched.

I spent a couple days getting it into CDBaby for distribution and posting it to all the indie platforms like Bandcamp, Bandwagon.fm and Mirlo.space. As always the experience has so far been like taking this thing that I invested a ton of time and effort and emotional energy into and then chucking it into a bottomless pit. Consider that I’ve totally lost objectivity on this material due to being way too close to it and perhaps you can see why this part of the release cycle can be pretty dark. The experience makes me feel like this music I’ve been making isn’t any good and trying to get better is futile.

Have I really done any promotion at all? No, and that’s something I’ll be working on in the coming weeks and months. I will say that feeling down about it makes it challenging for me to promote.

I’ve also been starting to work on new stuff. So far it’s pushing both in a slower, more complex, more epic direction and a quick, simple, and vicious direction at the same time. I’m not really at the step where I try to finalize lyrics but what I’ve got so far is a lot about the feelings that led me to quit my job surprise surprise.

Eventually I’d like to setup a place for friends and collaborators to hear the state of progress on the various tracks I’m working on or anything else I want to get out there as a demo. Maybe I can coerce faircamp into doing it.

House stuff

Check out this rain chain I put up.

Sure looks nice. Does it move water as effectively as the downspout I took down to put it up? Absolutely not. Does it move water effectively enough to avoid causing issues?

Remains to be seen.

There are less pretty rain chains with bigger cups and no little twinkling bells, that claim to be better for heavy rains but I’m skeptical about how high the ceiling for rain chain performance actually is so for now we’re observing and waiting.

Inside the house there’s a doorway where I had to remove the jamb to remove our old couch a few weeks ago (several years after I removed it to get that couch in). I took a couple days to put the jamb and its trim back up. I feel like I did a much sloppier job than I did last time but once it’s caulked and painted noone will ever notice or indeed even look at it. I have put so much wtf behind the walls of this house for future owners.

There’s also gardening to be done, a lawn to be overseeded, some ladders and hoses I want to hang on the side of the house, a path with crappy gravel that I want to replace with nice gravel, rotten boards on our front porch and flaking paint that need to be fixed etc etc etc.

Unlike the creative works I put on the internet, doing this stuff does not feel like throwing my baby into a bottomless pit. The people closest to me get to enjoy and appreciate it and there’s tangible change in these small parts of the universe. These tasks also don’t make me feel like I’m shirking my duties to others.

Reading and Writing

But to speak of things that do make me feel like I’m shirking my duties: I’ve been trying to make a little time in each week to just sit and read stuff. My work buddy Wes gave me a couple books as a going away present. I’m making my way through Think Again by Adam Grant. So far I’m being good about spending time periodically to write down what I’ve learned from what I’ve read.

And these words in front of you are what I hope are the beginning of something that feels really important to me. I’m a believer that I don’t know much about a topic, including how I feel about it, until I’ve written it down. And I’m at a point where I feel like I’ve got a whole lot to figure out. It’s been a long time since I’ve kept a regular writing practice outside of work. About 20 years with small fits and starts since and I feel like it’s well past time to get back to it. A lot of what I’ve got to figure out is really personal such as how my time at Amazon was and why I left, what I learned while I was there and how it changed me, what I want to accomplish and what holds me back. There’s also a small but growing list of topics outside myself that I want to delve further into and maybe have an impact in. The underlying infrastructure of modern human communication and how to reclaim it for the people is one such topic. I hope that diving into and exploring will ultimately lead me into opportunities to come back to gainful employment in a way that feels meaningful to me.

Thanks for reading if you’ve gotten all the way here. Until next time!