Sometimes things don’t go as planned. Sometimes tragic and painful things happen to us, or to the people we love, and we’re at a loss to fit such awful tragedy into our narrative of outrageous optimism. Sometimes we have setbacks. Sometimes we lose people we love.

Earlier in my career, I was a cop. People generally fall into one of two camps when it comes to the police: They’re monsters, or they’re saints. The truth is that all cops fall somewhere in a spectrum between those two extremes. Regardless of what you think about law enforcement, most people agree that doing the job requires (or should require) a certain degree of integrity.

I am a pretty optimistic person. If you read this blog regularly, I think you’ll find that I’m generally focused on the positive more than dwelling on the negative. Lately, though, I have found myself struggling to maintain a completely positive outlook, as progress has been quite slow, and we’ve entered a bit of a lull on the path to FIRE.

It was a bit of a quiet month for both the blog and for us, but not for lack of progress! This month, we laid more foundation for improvements in income and net worth that we expect to pay off in the next couple of months.