I’m not much of a “things” person and minimalism is my preferred state.
There was a not-too-distant time, before I had a family, when I didn’t own a TV for 13 years. While I still accumulated “things” just by living, I used moving as a way of decluttering, often walking away from entire rooms, garages, and apartments by simply relocating myself from the situation.
I once even sold my home and moved overseas, leaving everything behind to be sorted into three piles by a friend who was living there at the time - need to have, might need, and don’t need. The “need to have” items went into a 5x10 unit at Uncle Bob’s Self Storage on 1st Avenue in Asbury Park. The rest was sold, donated, or tossed while I taught software development in Indonesia.
Fast forward a decade and my life bears very little resemblance to my former minimalism. I trip over plastic dinosaurs and Calico Critters that have escaped my kids’ massive playroom, a playroom so large that it takes up over 50% of our current floor space.
I’m constantly stepping on a Lego or around a pile of boxes that were drop-shipped to our house for some business purpose that sit in our living room until they make their way to wherever they’re destined for (or relegated to an overpacked garage or shed for the next 4 months). Our cleaners come through for a full reset every two weeks, but you’d be hard-pressed to notice a difference after 24 hours.
I’m sure anyone with young kids can relate, and despite our best efforts, chaos and clutter seem to be our current default state.
Still, I’ve come to accept that my current life requires some ‘things’, and while that goes against my wiring, I try to stay intentional with my purchases.
Somewhat paradoxically, and after what definitely qualifies as a long-winded intro, here are 3 things that I’ve been enjoying and I like to think I’ve recently (and intentionally) incorporated into our lives.
BeeLink Mini PC
I just purchased my first PC in almost 25 years, flashed it with Linux, and it’s brought me extreme joy.
In the past, I’ve experimented with various homelab setups to run everything from network-level ad blocking to DNS monitoring to our own personal media server we’ve dubbed BretFlix.
These solutions have usually been ad hoc, typically an old Raspberry Pi or even my daily driver MacBook Air. The MacBook worked great until I’d leave for a meeting and the movie my kids were watching downstairs would mysteriously stop.
Beyond media streaming, there were several other reasons behind this purchase:
First, for close to 20 years, I’ve carried around massive amounts of data and media accumulated from current and previous business ventures. For what it’s worth, my proclivity for physical minimalism does not carry over to the digital realm.
Despite maintaining multiple backups across flash drives, accessing and sharing this data remains cumbersome. Dropbox was a solution until the nearly $2000/year price tag to store company photos became unsustainable, prompting us to scrap it for a much more reasonable, yet crippled, $200/year consumer plan.
Secondly, I prefer owning my data, especially as corporate attitudes toward privacy keep getting worse.
This setup gives me a way to keep more of my personal and business history out of systems that I don’t trust. I’ve been working on an in-house file server that syncs with Dropbox for redundancy, but keeps the primary storage local.
That lets me expose certain resources to collaborators when needed while keeping the rest locked down. It’s been a good step toward regaining control over how and where my data lives.
Finally, I started as a Linux hacker years ago.
Back in the late ’90s and early 2000s, I ran Linux as my main OS, until I eventually gave in and became a Mac user. At the time, getting things like networking to work usually meant wrestling with drivers and making a blood offering to the 3Com nework card deities.
These days, building a server is actually fun again, and it’s been rewarding to get back into something that feels familiar but far more polished. I’ve been sharing the experience with my oldest son, teaching him the basics of systems and networks, and giving him a foundation for how phones and computers really work under the hood.
The younger two aren’t quite there yet, but they still reap the benefits, mainly through early access to unreleased movies on our totally legitimate, definitely not pirated Jellyfin server.
Even if I’ve moved beyond the all-night tinkering phase, I still get a lot of joy out of understanding how things work and building tools we can use.
Enjoyment Level: 8/10. I deducted two points for occasional frustrations like spending two hours troubleshooting firewall configurations just to get a web server running properly.
Silonn Countertop Ice Maker
Each summer, one of my biggest frustrations is the lack of ice in our house. Our fridge’s ice machine simply can’t keep up. At one point, I realized about a third of our freezer was packed with extra ice trays that still couldn’t meet the demands of our family. Part of me saw this coming, and one of my lingering regrets from our kitchen remodel a few years back is not putting in an under-counter ice machine.
There’s a perspective I often think about when it comes to self-awareness. It’s the idea of sorting limiting beliefs into the following 3 categories.
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Things you can’t change.
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Things that take real effort to change, and
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Things that you can change for $74.99 and the patience to wait for a same-day delivery between 5 and 10 PM.
Our recent purchase fell squarely in that last one.
Is it a noisy, cheap piece of plastic? Yes.
Does it take up more counter space than I’d prefer? Absolutely.
But despite the massive heat wave we’ve experienced this summer, there hasn’t been a single moment when I couldn’t overpack my water bottle with ice before heading out to Hot Yoga or an afternoon at the Ocean Township Community Pool.
Enjoyment Level: 6/10. It’s eliminated stress and anxiety, but I’m docking 4 points because it’s still a cheap piece of plastic that’ll outlive its usefulness by a few decades in a landfill.
My DIY Garden Project
I’ve always enjoyed gardening and trying to produce as much of our own food as I can. Growing up, even back in the 80s and 90s, we always had some kind of garden, even if it was just herbs and tomatoes, and a compost bin.
Beyond the obvious benefits like sustainability, health, nutrition, and cutting down on waste, I find it all to be a great learning process. It also feels like a connection to an older time, when people embraced seasonality in their diets and learned to make provisions for the winter with the excess.
Each summer and fall, as the garden bounty comes in, I find myself planning our meals around what’s growing. Lunch and dinner often come down to what’s fresh and what we have too much of.
A lot of my weekend time goes into processing the excess into tomato and hot sauces, pestos, infused oils, curries, and masalas that I freeze for the fall and winter, long after the bumper crop has passed.
I grew up this way and rarely ate tomato sauce that didn’t come out of our own kitchen, something I’m proud to carry on to this day.
This year I decided to give our garden an upgrade. I replaced our aging cedar-planked raised beds with brand new galvanized steel containers. I brought in a 10-yard dump truck of arborist wood chips and used them for garden flooring and beddings around the property, all of which will slowly decompose and build ground cover for future growth.
I rebuilt and re-amended our soil with a mix of topsoil, compost, blood meal, and leftover wood chips (I definitely underestimated how much 10 yards actually is) and installed some drip irrigation. Lastly, I built about 100 feet of cattle panel fencing to keep the deer out and added a gate so we can easily get in and out.
As far as plants, I picked up a few bare-root apple and peach trees from Raintree Nursery and planted them inside the garden area along with the galvanized steel raised beds. I’ve meticulously watered them, as they need a lot of attention in the first year, and I’m happy to say that they’ve probably grown five or six times in size since I put them in the ground a few months ago.
I also added some fig trees, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, and asparagus, which I’m hoping will continue to fill in over time. I planted all the usuals in my raised beds, including a variety of Sungold tomatoes for snacking and San Marzano for sauce, greens, cucumbers, herbs, peppers and chilis, fairytale eggplant, and a variety of squashes and melons.
I covered all of my raised beds in a nylon mesh cloth to keep out the early critters and bugs, something I’ve struggled with in previous years.
Was it work? Yes. But it also provides an instant and intimate connection with nature whenever I need it, along with a fresh and healthy meal. It’s a beautiful addition to our property and the neighborhood, and it’s a tool for teaching a variety of lessons on self-reliance and independence to my three little shadows.
Enjoyment Level: 10/10. What could be better than a DIY project, fresh produce, and creating something beautiful in the world.