Introduction
At the end of 2024, I left my role as a systems engineer at Butlr to take some time off, rest, and contemplate my next steps. (I'm really grateful to my colleagues and leadership at Butlr for their support and encouragement in my taking this sabbatical!)
I originally planned the sabbatical as a four-month break, with flexibility to extend. For a variety of reasons (travel, illness, marriage, honeymoon), I'm now approaching 1.5 years of time off. But now I'm finally starting to seriously search for my next role, and so I thought this would be an appropriate time to do a sort of retrospective on my sabbatical.
This post is part 1 of 3, and covers the first four months of my sabbatical. Part 2 is here, and part 3 is coming later.
December 2024
Friday 12/20 was my last day at Butlr. I spent my last afternoon in the office scrambling to finish setting up some test fixtures so they could run over the holiday break in my absence and generate data for the team to pick up in the new year. In many ways, it didn't feel real that I was actually leaving.
I drove back down to Walnut for the holidays. There, I rested with family, caught up with friends both current and past, and spent a while organizing my personal files in my computer.
January 2025
The beginning of the new year was marked by major wildfires in Los Angeles, which I wrote about here.
Back in San Francisco, Sharlene and I had our attention caught by an interesting pair of houses for sale with an underground tunnel connecting them. I toured the property and we seriously considered buying and starting a friend compound. But ultimately, getting financing for these unusual properties proved too complicated for what we were prepared to take on.
Sharlene and I drove up to Seattle for a two-week stay, taking a scenic route via Crater Lake and Bend, Oregon. Our goal was to experience the worst of Seattle gloom and decide if we could live there long-term, but unusually, it hardly rained the whole time we were there. So we just enjoyed lots of quality time with our friends there: eating, painting, touring Seattle, riding the ferry, and playing pickleball.
On my birthday, Sharlene set up a sweet and elaborate surprise for me, featuring "performance reviews" written by many of my friends.
Finally, on our way back to SF, we took a scenic detour through the rainy coastal redwood forests of northern California.
February 2025
Sharlene had a weeklong work trip in NYC, so I tagged along. It was my first real visit to NYC post-college, and I enjoyed the chance to really appreciate the city as an adult and spend time with our friends there.
Then, our friend Henry visited us in SF for a week! Unfortunately, Sharlene was pretty ill with some digestive system problems for much of that time, but Henry and I got to enjoy roaming around the city a bit.
After Sharlene recovered, we filled a couple of weekends doing fun stuff around SF, like rowing a boat on Blue Heron Lake, going out for dinner, and playing arcade games at Round 1.
I also did some organizing of our apartment and dabbling in hobbies like guitar.
March 2025
Early in March, we attended the wedding of our friends Sing and Hayleigh! Auspiciously, Sharlene managed to catch the bouquet at the bouquet toss.
I then spent most of the month working intensively on my proposal plans. (We had agreed on the date I would propose, but the means of proposal would be a surprise for her.) Sharlene graciously stayed late at work most days so I could have more time and space to complete my planning.
On March 20th, on our nine-year anniversary as a couple, I proposed to Sharlene!
I made her do an elaborate scavenger hunt around some of her favorite places in the city, culminating in the actual proposal:
Afterwards, I took us across the water to Sausalito, where we stayed at the Inn Above Tide. The next day, we had a nice lunch and then visited Muir Woods for the first time.
April 2025
After getting engaged, we visited my family in Walnut for a bit. I sold the Volt to my sister Joanna and took the Miata on some drives, including a weekend trip with Frank to Pismo Beach via SR 33 and a drive with Corey up Glendora Mountain Road.
Around this time, I realized that I didn't actually have health insurance because I had missed the COBRA enrollment period. This started a stressful scramble to figure out my coverage. Thankfully, it seemed like Medi-Cal would be able to cover me.
After returning to SF, I spent some time on errands mixed with slow explorations around the city. We started wedding planning; we visited the Exploratorium; we attended the opening of Sunset Dunes Park. On one random Tuesday, I dropped off some e-waste, washed the Miata, then sat on a bluff in Fort Funston. I felt a little bit rudderless, but I didn't mind, yet.
In the third week of April, I traveled for Corey's birthday trip, which involved renting a houseboat on Lake Powell. It proved to be quite adventurous and a lot of fun—we experienced a small hailstorm, crashed our boats on a shore (and then recovered them), and made use of the waterslide. I hadn't realized how much I'd missed that feeling of outdoor adventure, or how how much I'd missed the landscapes of the American Southwest, so this trip felt really rejuvenating.
After the Lake Powell trip, I developed a weird pain in my lower back, side, and chest when breathing deeply. I still hadn't fully settled my health insurance situation, so this was extra stressful. When I went to an urgent care clinic, the provider diagnosed me with a bruised rib and prescribed me some NSAIDs and rest, although the diagnosis was a bit murky because I hadn't had any obvious trauma on the trip.
I didn't know at the time, but this was the beginning of several weeks of health issues for me.
The pain seemed to be manageable and maybe improving slightly, so one week after the Lake Powell trip, Sharlene and I proceeded with our planned travel to Tokyo.
During our flight there, a couple hours before landing, I suddenly felt extremely cold, struggled to think, and felt much worse pain in my side. With some difficulty, we made it to our hotel, and the next day, a doctor at an urgent care clinic prescribed me some antibiotics. She didn't have a clear diagnosis, but suspected some kind of pleural infection. Movement was often painful, so I stayed in bed most of the time.
Thankfully, over the next few days, my pain and energy improved until I was able to walk around and do normal tourist things again. The pain was replaced by a bad cough which made it difficult to speak, but I hoped the cough would go away in time.
Aside from my illness, Tokyo was amazing! This was our first visit, so everything felt new to us. I felt like I was in a movie set the first time we walked down a small side street. The urban environment there is so dense and human in a way U.S. cities are not. We were also surprised by how tourist-friendly it was. A lot of our time was spent shopping, supported by the favorable exchange rate and the gigantic department stores.
Fortunately, we had kept our trip planning simple and contained within Tokyo, so our plans weren't too impacted by my illness. We still had a great time and experienced Tokyo the way we hoped to, and we returned to SF in early May feeling satisfied and happy.
Reflections on these first few months
Looking back, I think these first four original months of the sabbatical were pretty fruitful. I didn't really have concrete plans going into the sabbatical; I mainly just wanted a break from my daily work routine, and to be free to explore whatever seemed interesting to me. The travel we did was fulfilling and memorable (especially since I'd avoided flying for a few years for environmental reasons), and proposing to Sharlene was a challenging and fun project to pull off.
However, the months ahead would prove to be a bit more challenging for my physical and mental health.
