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Xavier H.M.

Journal #17: Life, wife, webdev updates & photo dump

Hi!! :)

Hello again!! I'm alive!

I've had a busy few weeks. Or more like a busy month. I didn't intend to stay away from blogging for so long, but between work (grueling), spending time with my wife (lovely), and building out my website (pathological masochism), I haven't had much time to sit down and write.

I've got a few drafts stashed away that I started while traveling, but I'll be saving those for another day since I'll need to properly finish them out. I just want to post something today⸺I've missed blogging, and I've missed my blog friends! :)


My UK trip

My time in the UK was lovely! I missed England a lot. I spent two weeks at my wife's hometown. I've visited before, but never stayed more than one night. Living there and getting a taste of a proper English domestic life was a very informative experience.

There was a lot about it I liked, and some things I didn't.

The biggest source of friction was how squashed I felt. England as a whole is approximately the same size as Alabama1 in terms of landmass, coming in at around 50 thousand square miles, with a population of 56 million.2 Compare that to America's 3.7 million square miles3 and population of 340 million.4

I tried doing the math but predictably fumbled it, so I consulted ChatGPT to give me the right numbers:

Screenshot from 2025-05-13 14-22-52

And boy, you can feel the difference.

My wife lives in southern England. Given the fact that its nucleus is London, the south is the most metropolitan area of the country, and therefore the most populous.5 I'd spent my previous trips either in London or within its greater metro area. My wife's hometown is between one and two hours away by train6⸺far enough to escape London's outer reaches, but not far enough to outpace its shadow of influence; according to my in-laws, the area has blown up in recent years to accommodate an influx of commuters.

There are people everywhere, all the time. Streets are narrow and often double- or triple-jointed, tangling together at intersections or pinched into severe switchbacks, and jammed in the throat with throngs of cars. Oftentimes drivers have to hitch up onto the sidewalks in order to park.

The streets are buttressed by rows of terraced buildings, commercial and residential spaces demarcated by latitude (my wife's place of work has a tenant growing pot in the flat above, which makes for a fragrant break room downstairs). Green-space spawns in scattershot and random, like someone took a scoop out of town and dropped in a soccer pitch and playground.

The effect reminds me of something a professor taught me when I was working on an important piece in art school: sometimes the finishing details end up looking like they were put in first instead of last. In my case, it was some erratic pencil marks on the last naked sections of a wooden panel I had drawn/painted on with charcoal, oil pastel, and modeling paste. In this small English town's case, it is the brick-and-mortar ecosystem that has cropped up around its inner-city parks, groves, and fields, turning these grandfatherly pockets of nature into footnotes on their own storied land.

We stayed at an AirBNB with neighbors on either side of the wall; late at night, we could hear drunken cheers from the pubs down below; whether popping out to the shops, traversing the high street, or walking back home from work, if you're traveling on foot it is always against a headwind of pedestrian traffic to varying degrees.

As an introverted American with six acres to myself back home, I got overwhelmed every now and again with everyone and everything piled up around me. It felt like I was in some cobblestone meatgrinder.

My wife remarked one day that she realized English socialization is cool and standoffish compared to America for this exact reason. In England, you're forced to be around people all the time; you have to go out of your way to not see anybody. In America it's the opposite⸺we go out of our way to see people. It's also more of a novelty, so we have the means to expend the extra effort to make small take and pleasantries.

Living in an urbanized area has its perks, too, however. Our AirBNB was a mere ten minute walk from the high street7 and seafront both. One night my wife and I went down to the beach with our cameras, studying how the evening light reflected off the receded tide through our lenses. During the day, we'd hoof it up a footpath behind our AirBNB to the high street. This path bordered a field of tall grass and wildflowers that unfurled from the top of the high street down to the seafront. It was one of those ancient pockets of land that, left unmolested over the centuries, bequeaths an aged calm to harried citizens.

I have more I could say about my trip, but I'll leave it at this memory for now!


Webdev stuff

I haven't been up to much since I got back outside of work, which is hardly blogworthy lol. I have been doing a lot of work on my website though! I've nearly got the homepage how I want it, just need to do some more tweaks. Now I've got to do the hard part of adding actual content, which is a lot harder than just making everything look nice⸺and admittedly less fun, haha.

I'd appreciate it if you gave it a look! Please note that it's not optimized for mobile yet.

At some point I'll add a site history page. I've been taking loads of screenshots as I work on things. For now I'll just leave two or three pictures illustrating how far it's come!

909c7acf6bc79145

Screenshot from 2025-04-11 15-01-06

Screenshot from 2025-05-13 15-06-48


Other stuff

More random tidbits from the past few weeks:

My wife and I have spent an entire month together as of today, actually⸺funny coincidence! She's still got a little over two weeks left here in the US. This will have been the longest time we've spent together IRL by the time she goes back home⸺it's certainly a bittersweet milestone. Knowing that we have a plan and the end is in sight helps as well. I just want to finally be together for good. It's cheesy, but the more time we're together, the better our relationship is. Every time I think it's as good as it gets, it gets better. I love her so much!


Photo Dump

Here's some random photos I took on my digicam. I'll post lots more eventually!

100_3567
seafront at evening

100_3546
high street, taken from the top of a double decker bus

100_3531
residential street

100_3460
the start of the footpath, from the top

100_3458
some pidgeons on a wire

100_3771
my french press on my desk :) the text is this blog post! lol


P.S.

Just wanna give a general shoutout to all my friends! I've got some emails sitting in my inbox and some new comments on my guestbook. I'll reply soon!


Posted on — 05/13/25
Last modified — 3 months, 1 week ago
Link — https://blog.xavierhm.com/journal-17-life-wife-webdev-updates-photo-dump


Footnotes

  1. https://www.reference.com/history-geography/u-s-state-comparable-england-size-2e236730e7d98a61

  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_England

  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States

  4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States

  5. Much like the fact that rural country is exclusive to rich homeowners, this is another curious inverse of American phenomena

  6. Which is a far distance by English standards. For perspective, it takes us about the same amount of time to get from Chicago back downstate on Amtrak, and even then we've still got between 45 minutes to an hour's car ride to finally make it back to my hometown.

  7. High street: sort of like a shopping district with pubs, stores, etc; usually stretches down one long street with lots of pedestrian traffic

  8. Interstitial Cystitis; I was diagnosed in 2023, and I've been meaning to write about it for agessss here on the blog lol, one day I'll finally do it

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