COVID-19 has officially affected my life, and that of many American ex-pats. Some of you may know about my dad’s health emergency earlier this year. President Trump has banned travel to 🇺🇸 from the EU for 30 days. Now, if a new emergency happens in the next 30 days, I won’t be able to go home to be with family.

While my dad is doing a lot better, he is still waiting for one more surgery and that could happen within that timeframe.

I was not prepared for this to be a thing. Museums, libraries and cinemas here in Poland have also been closed down until the 25th. Fortunately, there seems to be a much more balanced response to the news here. There’s still toilet paper in the shops.

A few of the resources that I’ve found helpful have been:

• This post from The Wee Flea as it’s clear about the bad news and the good news. Plus, some additional links to help.
• This video and this video from Ali Abdaal, a doctor in Cambridge.

Yesterday, we decided that it was worth braving the cold and the rain to make the bus journey to the PGE Narodowy. It’s Poland’s national stadium and for the last couple of months, it has been home to a huge LEGO exhibition. 

Some of the events that we’ve tried to go to here in Warsaw have been… well, let’s just say that they were talked  up a bit more than they could really make happen. This event, however, was crazy. I mostly took little videos of the event, but my wife took a bunch of photos.

This was one of the few things that had something for everyone in our family. My wife is a new convert to the wonders of LEGO while the kids and I have always been obsessed.

I’ve been in the process of pulling back from the public social internet over the last couple of years because, to be completely honest, I’ve found it to be almost universally useless. This isn’t simply something along the lines of what Cal Newport talks about, it’s actually as a result of spending time with people who have no use for it.

During our time in Liverpool, we were living and working in one of the most economically deprived parts of the U.K. and that extends to levels of computer literacy. It’s not uncommon to meet people there who don’t have a computer in their home. The only reason why they would have needed one was to check applications with the Job Centre. A good friend of mine doesn’t even have a mobile phone. He has a landline and an answering machine. If he’s not home, you can’t get ahold of him.

We see so much importance placed on things that are said on the social internet that we confuse it with a public forum. So when people complain about their posts being banned on Facebook or getting kicked off Twitter, they cry about their right to free speech being infringed upon. You see this mostly from a particular side of the political divide. What I think they have forgotten, though, is that Twitter isn’t yours. Facebook isn’t yours. When you sign up for your accounts, you grant them the right to remove your content or your profile for whatever reason they see fit.

And it is perfectly within the rights of the organisation to do that because it’s theirs, not yours. You don’t get to say whatever you want when you visit someone’s house. Facebook and Twitter are other people’s houses. Free speech doesn’t really apply when it isn’t the public domain.

While listening to the Unmade Podcast, Brady opened with the idea of a podcast about the tools that people use in their work. This isn’t everything that I use, but it’s the bulk of it. I think…

Organising

One of the biggest changes to my way of working is that I finally found a system for keeping an external brain that has stuck. In the past, I tried Evernote and Microsoft OneNote but found both of them lacking a certain… something. It’s possible that it was purely an aesthetic issue before, but enjoying how something looks goes a long way toward helping a person stick with it. To that end, I’ve been using an enjoying Notion(affiliate link) for the last couple of months.

My family has a lot of travel that will be coming up this year and it’s the best way for me to have all of the necessary information organised outside of my brain so that I don’t go completely crazy. If you use my affiliate link, you’ll get $10 credit toward it and I get $5.

Journaling & Art

I’ve been trying to maintain a Bullet Journal practice, mostly because I’ve stopped enjoying apps like Todoist and Reminders.app. I’ve also been trying to use up the notebooks and sketchbooks that I’ve been hoarding.

At the moment, I’m using a Seawhite Artists Travel Journal as both a sketchbook and journal. It’s been a lot of fun, but it’s filling up fast. I started it on New Years Day 2020 and I’ve already filled 85 of the 128 pages.

In about a week or two, I’ll be moving back into a Traveler’s Notebook.

For writing, I use a variety of wood-cased pencils, mechanical pencils and clutch pencils as well as a Kaweco AL Sport (that I won in a giveaway!) and a Lamy Safari. For painting and sketching, I use the aforementioned variety of pencils, a Pentel Brush Pen and The Sketching Tin loaded with the Earthy watercolour set plus the Van Dyke Brown and French Grey from the Neutral set.

Music

Part of my work as a missionary is leading musical worship for the church we are working with in Warsaw. I use a now-10-year-old Crafter acoustic that I’ve forgotten the name of loaded with D’Addario EJ16 strings. I switch between a Kyser capo and a Shubb capo. My guitar picks are probably the most… fancy part of my setup. Scaling for how much most people pay for equipment, they’re also kind of the most expensive part of my setup. I use Purple Plectrums picks, two primary and then a few that they sent me for free with an order. Due to RSI from jobs working in warehouses, factories and kitchens, I have trouble playing for long with a traditional pick. These are a lot more ergonomic and they have the added benefit of being able to say (in a really posh voice), “I only use handcrafted guitar picks.”

I have some recording equipment built specifically for recording on iOS and I kind of wish I had opted to make it more universal.

Reading

There are three kinds of reading that I do.

1. Entertainment reading
2. Work reading
3. Bible reading

The entertainment reading is normally done on my Kindle Paperwhite. Were it not for that device, I would probably barely ever read. I also try to make use of the local library wherever I am living.

Work reading happens on paper because theology books and commentaries feel better on paper. At the moment, my main work reading book is Calvin’s Institutes (the Banner of Truth edition which is more concise than the Battles translation). These books are the ones that make it hardest to move around.

Bible reading happens in three different Bibles. I have a small 2011 NIV that I got while I was in Liverpool. This is where I do my regular reading plan. Bible study happens in the ESV Single-Column Journaling Bible that my wife bought me for our anniversary. Extended reading time (and possibly reading through the whole thing over Lent) happens in my ESV Readers Bible. It’s the single-volume version because, again, big heavy books makes it difficult to move.

There is a certain amount of freedom that is afforded to people who don’t live where they are from. For the last couple of years I have found myself a part of neither society. I’m an American but I’ve been in a long process of disassociating myself with that particular part of my identity. I wasn’t British when I lived in Liverpool. Even now, living in Poland, I am not Polish. I am here, but I am not of here.

Which leaves me living between cultures. I am guilty of completely ignoring the local news here in Poland. Part of that is because we’re kind of just passing through and part of it is that I barely know enough Polish to figure out what I’m buying at the grocery store.

That aside, what am I to do with the politics of my birth country?

It’s an election year in America and the overwhelming thing that I see is that both sides are having two different conversations. While I have my sympathies with one particular side, it’s clear that neither side is talking about the same thing. There is no defining of terms. There is a refusal to acknowledge anything but the worst example of either argument.

And being on the outside, being an ocean away affords me this privilege to look and see that neither side is worth following. I can see that if I want to stay true to what I believe in, I have no choice but to withhold my vote because there’s nobody there worth supporting.

I have friends who would disagree vehemently, who would say that it’s better to choose the lesser of two evils. And I get it because I am a bit of a pragmatist. I want things to work. The trouble here is that the system is completely broken so until the voting system changes, there’s just no way that I can take part.

For more writing about being an expat and figuring out what home is, be sure to sign up for my bi-weekly newsletter Fake Suede, which launches Friday, 21 February!

When we moved to Warsaw, I started to wonder what this life is that my family is living now. I don’t live where I’m from and neither does my wife. This is kind of a third place for us.

Fake Suede is a bi-weekly newsletter where I will be writing about what it’s like to live where you don’t expect to be and how to be curious when something as simple as grocery shopping is mentally exhausting. It’s also going to be about raising a big family in cultures where they’re kind of… unusual.

The plan for the moment is to keep the length of the newsletter between 500-750 words. I thought about posting them here to the blog, but somehow it doesn’t feel like it fits here. It feels more like letters written to someone. And so it’s a newsletter.

As readership increases, I will be introducing a paid option but the base newsletter will always be free. When I start to charge, it will be for something on top of the regular newsletter, not for the regular newsletter.

All of that to say, the first one goes out in a couple of weeks. If any of this sounds remotely interesting to you, I hope you’ll join me as I write about this. Oh, and it’s called Fake Suede because my surname is the same as a certain luxury textile used in the automotive industry and on some computer keyboards.

You can subscribe by visiting the sunset below.

When we enter a new year, we go into it full of hopes and dreams. We have all of these plans for the new and for the better.

Midnight had struck in Warszawa. The new year. My wife and I could hear the fireworks booming in the distance so we went out onto our terrace. Our flat is at the top of the building and we have a 250 degree view of the city. Our view is north, toward the city centre.

And the entire skyline was lit up like magic. We stood out on the terrace, watching in silence. Nobody had told us that the city looked like this on New Year’s. In our hearts we thanked them because not knowing that this would happen made the night perfect.

Except things aren’t perfect. The previous day, my dad was airlifted to Lutheran General hospital in Chicago. Subdural haematoma. Our American family a huddled close, as we all pray that he recovers. We know not to pray for a swift healing because this is going to be a long journey. For now, we pray for safety. We pray that I don’t need to get a last minute flight to Chicago.

I’ve had to learn to hold fast to small graces over the last couple of years. The transforming work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer is as slow as it is sudden. So when we are discouraged, when we are lost, when we can’t find hope, we must look at the little things.

Every small grace is minuscule on its own, but they add up. They grow and they act as breadcrumbs that lead us back to our only real Hope in life and death.

A surprise, panoramic fireworks show is a small grace in the shadow of the burden of my hospitalised father. But it’s just one of a million reasons why I believe that God has been good to me.

First quick sketch of the year. My wife and I are doing Cal Newport’s Analog January challenge. My make part of the challenge is to complete four paintings this month. They have to be done on paper, no digital painting allowed. For me, that means sketches like this count.

Learned the hard way that Stabilo fineliners are not water-proof so the index in my bullet journal is a bit of a mess now. I also learned some of the limits of Seawhite’s cartridge paper.