<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?><rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"><channel><title>Fatherhood on ErrorZap</title><link>https://errorzap.com/tags/fatherhood/</link><description>Recent content in Fatherhood on ErrorZap</description><image><title>ErrorZap</title><url>https://errorzap.com/og.png</url><link>https://errorzap.com/og.png</link></image><generator>Hugo</generator><language>en-US</language><copyright>ErrorZap</copyright><lastBuildDate>Thu, 10 Sep 2026 05:45:00 -0600</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://errorzap.com/tags/fatherhood/index.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/><item><title>Still Building</title><link>https://errorzap.com/posts/still-building/</link><pubDate>Thu, 10 Sep 2026 05:45:00 -0600</pubDate><guid>https://errorzap.com/posts/still-building/</guid><description>A personal history of growing up without knowing I was autistic and had ADHD, getting Crohn&amp;#39;s as a teenager, learning technology, running a business, and becoming a dad in the middle of it.</description><content:encoded><![CDATA[<h2 id="a-brain-without-a-manual-a-body-with-other-plans">A brain without a manual. A body with other plans.</h2>
<p>By Justin Fahmie · September 2026</p>
<p><em>A personal history of growing up without knowing I was autistic and had ADHD, getting Crohn’s as a teenager, learning technology, running a business, and somehow becoming somebody’s dad in the middle of it.</em></p>
<h3 id="01--the-short-version-is-that-i-kept-going">01 · The short version is that I kept going</h3>
<p>I’m forty-two years old. I run a technology business in Pueblo, Colorado. I’m married to Shelly. We have a son, Michael. I like computers, networks, old telephone equipment, weird infrastructure, and figuring out what the hell is inside the ordinary-looking box everybody else walked past.</p>
<p>I’ve also been sick since I was about fifteen. I spent most of my life without knowing I was autistic or had ADHD. Eventually I got names for some of the things I’d been dealing with. The names helped. They did not arrive with replacement parts.</p>
<p>That’s the short version. It leaves out almost everything that makes the story worth telling.</p>
<p>Because those things didn’t happen in nice separate chapters. I didn’t finish being sick, go learn computers, become a businessman, and then unlock the family expansion pack. They happened on top of one another. Technology kept changing. The business needed attention. My body kept having opinions. Life continued anyway.</p>
<p>I’m writing this because looking at the finished surface of somebody’s life tells you very little about what it took to get there. You see the guy who can figure out the network. You don’t necessarily see what answering the phone costs him that day, or whether he has a migraine, or how much of his available energy has already disappeared before the actual work begins.</p>
<p>I’m proud of what I’ve built. I’m also tired. Both statements are allowed to exist at the same time.</p>
<p>This isn’t a story with a miraculous final cure. It’s the history of a person who keeps finding interesting shit to learn and useful shit to do while living in a brain and body he has spent decades trying to understand.</p>
<p>There are worse reasons to keep a workbench around.</p>
<h3 id="02--little-lights-at-grandma-anns-house">02 · Little lights at Grandma Ann’s house</h3>
<p>One childhood thing that has stayed with me is a picture on a wall.</p>
<p>My grandma Ann lived in a trailer in Iowa. She had this huge piece of illuminated art above the couch. In my memory it was about as long as the couch itself. It showed an old-fashioned street scene, with buildings, a bridge, and lights.</p>
<p>Except the lights actually lit up.</p>
<p>The streetlamps weren’t just painted yellow. There were tiny real lights. The windows had that little illuminated-world effect. This was before everything had an LED strip glued to it. The lights were dim and warm, and the whole thing felt like a place you could look into.</p>
<p>I loved that damn thing.</p>
<p>Recently I started trying to find out what it was called, or at least find something close. Some of the examples were similar enough to bring the feeling back, even when the scene wasn’t quite right. I’m not going to pretend my memory retained a manufacturer’s label or an exact inventory of the windows. It retained the important part: a little world on the wall, and the fact that somebody had made it work.</p>
<p><img alt="An imagined rendering of the illuminated artwork remembered at Grandma Ann’s house." loading="lazy" src="/posts/still-building/02-grandmas-lights.webp"></p>
<p>Looking back, that feels connected to a lot of what still interests me. A thing can be beautiful because it does something. Light goes through a window. A signal travels down a wire. A small collection of parts produces an effect much bigger than the parts themselves.</p>
<p>I don’t need to turn that picture into some grand origin myth. I wasn’t a tiny systems architect standing on the couch, planning my future enterprise network. I was a kid looking at something cool.</p>
<p>That is enough. Sometimes the honest beginning of a lifelong interest is simply: look at that. How did they do that?</p>
<p>Apparently I never got done asking.</p>
<h3 id="03--growing-up-without-the-explanation">03 · Growing up without the explanation</h3>
<p>The autism and ADHD explanations came much later. Childhood happened without them.</p>
<p>That matters because you still have to live inside your own experience before anybody gives you useful language for it. You still have to deal with people, expectations, noise, attention, and whatever the day requires. You just don’t necessarily understand why your experience is different.</p>
<p>I’m not going to invent a perfectly remembered classroom scene or put a cruel speech in a teacher’s mouth to make this story more dramatic. I don’t need a fictional villain. The real issue is that I grew up not knowing something fundamental about myself.</p>
<p>When I look backward now, I have a different set of questions. Which difficulties were about attention? Which were about sensory overload? Which were anxiety? Which were ordinary human problems? Which got worse because I was physically sick? Those aren’t questions I could sort neatly at the time.</p>
<p><img alt="Justin searches for the missing instruction manual to social interaction." loading="lazy" src="/posts/still-building/03-missing-manual.webp"></p>
<p>It’s tempting, after a late diagnosis, to explain absolutely everything with it. I don’t want to do that either. Every awkward moment wasn’t necessarily autism. Every unfinished thing wasn’t necessarily ADHD. But leaving those two things out of the explanation for my life was also a pretty significant omission.</p>
<p>I know now that I do better with clear words, concrete expectations, and fewer unnecessary layers between the problem and the solution. I prefer text. I want the actual information. I don’t want to spend my energy decoding what somebody might have meant when they could have just said it.</p>
<p>For a long time, I had the experience without that understanding.</p>
<p>Imagine troubleshooting something for years and then discovering you were missing a substantial part of the documentation. The machine has not changed. Your understanding of what you’ve been looking at has.</p>
<p>That’s about as close as I can get to explaining why learning about this later in life matters so much.</p>
<h3 id="04--then-crohns-entered-the-picture">04 · Then Crohn’s entered the picture</h3>
<p>I place the beginning of my life with Crohn’s at about fifteen. That’s young enough that being sick becomes part of growing up itself. There isn’t a long adult life before it to compare against.</p>
<p>An old post of mine from April 2006 still exists. I was twenty-one when I wrote it. In that account, I described getting sick during high school, losing a frightening amount of weight, and dealing with school bathrooms that offered very little privacy. Teachers noticed how unwell I looked. After local appointments failed to explain it, I went to Children’s Hospital in Denver, where Crohn’s was identified. I described a long wait for answers, followed by the strange mixture of relief and concern that came with finally having one.</p>
<p>There was also a nurse who got me a laptop. With internet access, I could learn about the disease and find people living with it. That detail survives in <a href="https://crohnsforum.com/threads/kcs-story.77/">my original account</a>.</p>
<p><img alt="A symbolic teenage scene representing the beginning of chronic illness." loading="lazy" src="/posts/still-building/04-fifteen.webp"></p>
<p>Of course there was a laptop.</p>
<p>There I was, trying to understand what was happening to me, and a connection to information gave me something useful to do with the fear and uncertainty. I couldn’t repair my intestines with it. I could at least stop being completely in the dark.</p>
<p>That’s a more important technology story than a specification sheet. A person brought a sick kid a way to find answers. I still think that counts for something.</p>
<p>Knowing the name of an illness does not make the illness small. It changes the questions. Instead of wondering what is wrong, you start wondering what this means for the rest of your life. What will work? How much will it interfere? What can you still do?</p>
<p>I was supposed to be figuring out how to grow up. I was also figuring out how to be sick.</p>
<p>Those two educations ended up running together.</p>
<h3 id="05--technology-was-a-world-i-could-investigate">05 · Technology was a world I could investigate</h3>
<p>My interest in technology wasn’t something that appeared after I had a polished career plan. The old internet left enough pieces behind to show that I was already making things a long time ago.</p>
<p>There are surviving pages under my amateur-radio callsign, KC0EKS. My old QSL.net web presence reaches back to 1999. A <a href="https://www.qsl.net/kc0eks/repeaters/repeaters.html">Colorado repeater page</a> is still there, preserving a version of me who was already collecting information about how people and equipment connected across the state.</p>
<p>That is pretty funny when you compare it to what I’m interested in now. Apparently the obsession with Colorado communications infrastructure has had a fairly long development cycle.</p>
<p>The old web felt like something you could get your hands into. Pages, links, forums, radio information, little personal corners somebody had built because they cared about a subject. I’m still attached to that kind of internet. The one where knowing something and sharing it was a good enough reason to put up a page.</p>
<p><img alt="Justin investigates a retro computer and radio workbench." loading="lazy" src="/posts/still-building/05-retro-curiosity.webp"></p>
<p>I like old computers and phone systems for related reasons. You can follow the decisions. You can ask what the designer was trying to accomplish with the parts available. You can see the compromises. Even the annoying limitations have a story behind them.</p>
<p>A computer problem gives me something to investigate. What changed? What still works? Where does the behavior stop matching the expectation? Can I reproduce it? Can I narrow it down?</p>
<p>That doesn’t mean computers are always logical in the comforting sense. Anybody who has worked on Windows for long enough has seen behavior that makes a haunted toaster look well documented. But there is usually a trail. Something to check. Another useful question.</p>
<p>I like being able to follow the trail.</p>
<p>And when the rest of life is complicated in ways I can’t neatly resolve, there is real satisfaction in getting one thing to work better than it did before.</p>
<h3 id="06--apparently-this-was-becoming-a-business">06 · Apparently this was becoming a business</h3>
<p>By 2004 and 2005, the surviving record shows me working on online stores under KCSales. There were projects such as allgardenfurniture.com and time4neon.com, built around osCommerce. Hosting, checkout problems, product catalogs, images, and all the other little details that stand between “I have a website” and “this thing actually works.”</p>
<p>It’s easy to flatten that into a résumé phrase like “early e-commerce experience.” That makes it sound tidier than the actual kind of work involved. A store is a pile of dependent systems. The page has to load. The information has to be right. The checkout has to function. Making one part pretty doesn’t excuse breaking another part people need.</p>
<p>The business history runs into KC Computer Services. A business-directory record places its start in 2005. By 2007, I was publicly describing myself as running a PC repair business. In 2009, there’s a surviving client-server troubleshooting thread. In 2011, I was looking for a tablet-based way to get client agreements signed.</p>
<p>The dates are useful because they show continuity. I wasn’t suddenly interested in using technology to improve work last week. There’s a long trail of me trying to make some inconvenient process less of a pain in the ass.</p>
<p><img alt="A repair bench becomes a business, complete with an oversized service ticket." loading="lazy" src="/posts/still-building/06-business.webp"></p>
<p>Over time, the work expanded: computers, networks, Wi-Fi, cameras, phone systems, backups, access systems, software, documentation. Different equipment, same basic responsibility. Someone needs something to work, and I need to figure out what’s keeping it from doing that.</p>
<p>I still care about the actual result. Can the person use it? Is it reliable? If it fails, can we recover? Did the fix create another problem we haven’t noticed yet?</p>
<p>The repair is only part of the job. There’s also explaining it clearly enough that the person on the other end knows what happened and what to do next.</p>
<p>That turns out to be its own technical skill.</p>
<h3 id="07--being-capable-and-being-sick-simultaneously">07 · Being capable and being sick, simultaneously</h3>
<p>The difficult part of combining a business with chronic illness is that both can make demands on the same day.</p>
<p>The customer’s problem is real. So is the pain. So is the fatigue. Neither cancels the other. You don’t get to tell a failed phone system that your body has already used the day’s available troubleshooting capacity. The phone system remains broken. Your body remains your body.</p>
<p>Owning a business gives me room to shape how I work, and it also means there are responsibilities attached to the work. I care about doing it properly. That doesn’t manufacture unlimited capacity.</p>
<p>That distinction gets lost very easily. If somebody sees you solve a complicated problem, they can assume that you must be doing fine overall. They saw competence, so they inferred spare energy. Those are different measurements.</p>
<p>I can know what needs to happen and still have a rough time getting through the day in which it has to happen. I can be interested in a project and need rest. I can care about answering somebody and find the interaction difficult.</p>
<p>I don’t want illness to become my entire identity. I also don’t want to edit it out of the story of my work, because that would leave out part of the actual cost.</p>
<p>Remote access, clear documentation, sensible systems, and reducing repetitive work matter to me for practical reasons. If I can solve something without an unnecessary trip, that can preserve energy for something that actually requires being there. If instructions are clear, the customer gets a better answer and we may avoid three additional rounds of confusion.</p>
<p>I’m interested in efficiency because wasted effort is expensive when you don’t have an unlimited supply.</p>
<p>There is no award for choosing the most exhausting possible route to the same useful result. If there is, somebody else can collect it. I’d rather have the energy back.</p>
<h3 id="08--noise-people-and-the-price-of-ordinary-things">08 · Noise, people, and the price of ordinary things</h3>
<p>Misophonia is part of my life. Certain sounds are much more than a mild annoyance to me. Breathing sounds, mouth sounds, and other repetitive noises can become intensely difficult to tolerate.</p>
<p>I know the person making a sound may not intend anything by it. Knowing that doesn’t automatically switch off my reaction. That’s part of what makes it so frustrating. Understanding something intellectually and being able to ignore it are not the same ability.</p>
<p><img alt="A quiet center surrounded by the pressure of sensory noise." loading="lazy" src="/posts/still-building/07-noise.webp"></p>
<p>I prefer quiet environments. I prefer text and email to phone calls. I like clear steps and direct information. These preferences are connected to how I function. They’re useful information about how to work with me.</p>
<p>Text lets me look at the actual words. I can reread them. I can separate the question from everything around it. A phone call requires me to handle the information as it arrives, alongside the sound and the social interaction. Sometimes that’s a much more expensive way to do the same thing.</p>
<p>I also tend toward late-night work. I like the quiet. The reduction in interruptions. The sense that I can stay with a thought long enough to do something useful with it. The morning doesn’t automatically feel like a fresh start to me just because it looks nice in somebody else’s motivational photo.</p>
<p>There’s a social complication here too. Wanting less noise and less interaction doesn’t mean I never want connection. I can want a friend and find socializing difficult. I can love somebody and need quiet. Those things fit together inside my life, even if they look contradictory from outside it.</p>
<p>I’m still learning how to explain that without turning every conversation into a presentation about my nervous system.</p>
<p>Sometimes the useful explanation is short: please send it in writing. Please be clear. Please give me a little room.</p>
<p>That can be enough to make the interaction work.</p>
<h3 id="09--adhd-interest-is-not-an-on-demand-service">09 · ADHD: interest is not an on-demand service</h3>
<p>ADHD is another part of the picture. I can become deeply interested in a technical problem, a piece of history, a new tool, or some infrastructure question that refuses to leave me alone.</p>
<p>The list gets long quickly. Networks. Radio systems. Old telecom sites. Software. Cameras. Retro computers. A building downtown that looks unremarkable until you notice the equipment attached to it. An idea for a better way to handle customer work.</p>
<p>My curiosity does not have a small operating budget.</p>
<p>The practical problem is turning that interest into work I can manage, preserve, and finish. I want the research saved somewhere I can find it. I want the notes to be useful later. I want the task written down instead of floating around in the enormous conceptual parking lot of things I meant to get back to.</p>
<p><img alt="A difficult technical task gets attention while an ordinary email waits." loading="lazy" src="/posts/still-building/08-attention.webp"></p>
<p>That’s why I keep coming back to tools for notes, task queues, summaries, documentation, and automation. I’m trying to build support around how I actually operate.</p>
<p>It’s tempting to describe a person who can focus intensely as if they must be able to summon that focus equally for anything. My life doesn’t support that assumption. The fact that something is simple on paper doesn’t tell you how much friction there is between me and starting it.</p>
<p>Autism and ADHD also don’t arrive as two neat personalities taking turns. I’m one person. I want clarity and useful structure, and I also have a lot of interests competing for attention. Add illness and fatigue, and the neat productivity diagram starts looking optimistic.</p>
<p>What helps me is making the next action concrete. Fewer vague instructions. Less administrative nonsense. A place to put information. A way to retrieve it. A tool that takes a rough thought and helps me turn it into something I can actually use.</p>
<p>I don’t need a lecture about owning a planner. I need a system that survives contact with the person who will be using it.</p>
<h3 id="10--the-diagnosis-arrived-after-the-life-was-already-underway">10 · The diagnosis arrived after the life was already underway</h3>
<p>In December 2024, at forty, I was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, Level 1, and ADHD, combined presentation. The assessment also included social anxiety, depression, and PTSD.</p>
<p>By then, I wasn’t a child waiting for adulthood to begin. I already had a business, a family, years of illness, and decades of experience being me. The explanation arrived after a substantial amount of the story had already happened.</p>
<p><img alt="A late diagnosis brings a more useful schematic." loading="lazy" src="/posts/still-building/09-diagnosis.webp"></p>
<p>There’s something almost absurd about that. I spend so much time trying to understand other systems, and it took that long to get a better description of my own.</p>
<p>I don’t interpret the diagnosis as an explanation for every choice I’ve ever made. I do take it seriously as information I should have had when I was trying to understand why some ordinary parts of life were so difficult.</p>
<p>Looking back with that information changes the questions I ask of myself. Instead of assuming the only answer is to demand more effort, I can ask what is making something difficult and whether the conditions can change. Is the instruction unclear? Is the environment too loud? Is the communication method making this harder? Is the task too vague to begin? Am I simply out of energy?</p>
<p>Those are better questions. They leave room for an actual adjustment.</p>
<p>I can also be angry that it took so long without pretending I know exactly how my life would have gone with an earlier diagnosis. I don’t have access to the alternate timeline. Maybe some things would have been easier. I wish I’d had the chance to find out.</p>
<p>The useful part now is that I have more accurate language and a better starting point. I can take my own needs seriously. I can recognize that being competent doesn’t mean I have no support needs.</p>
<p>And I can stop treating every difficulty as if it came with a simple moral answer.</p>
<p>Some problems need an explanation before they can have a useful solution.</p>
<h3 id="11--the-other-things-in-the-stack">11 · The other things in the stack</h3>
<p>The list doesn’t stop with Crohn’s, autism, and ADHD.</p>
<p>I’ve also described aphantasia and difficulty recognizing faces. I don’t experience mental imagery the way people often assume everybody does. Recognition can be more complicated than somebody looking at me and expecting an immediate response. I’ve wondered about difficulties with numbers too, though I’m not going to turn a suspicion into a formal diagnosis here.</p>
<p>That collection can sound strange beside the technical work I do. But a person’s abilities are not distributed evenly. Understanding a system does not require every other mental task to be effortless.</p>
<p>The physical side has become complicated as well. I live with an ileostomy and a parastomal hernia. Crohn’s has remained part of my adult life. Chronic pain and the practical management of being sick occupy space whether or not anybody else sees them.</p>
<p><img alt="An ambitious project list meets a limited energy supply." loading="lazy" src="/posts/still-building/10-body-budget.webp"></p>
<p>More recently, I’ve been dealing with symptoms I’ve described as POTS-like. I’m careful with that wording because having symptoms and having a confirmed diagnosis are different things. What I can say clearly is that standing and walking can be difficult, and that changes what I can do.</p>
<p>All of this produces a kind of ongoing logistics problem. What is possible today? How far can I go? What needs to happen first? What can wait? What would make an outing workable? What can I simplify before I run out of energy?</p>
<p>I can make a technical plan with a reasonable margin for failure. My body is less cooperative about providing reliable advance estimates.</p>
<p>I don’t want to make that sound charming. A lot of it is just inconvenient, painful, and exhausting. There isn’t a clever joke that refunds the time.</p>
<p>But naming the constraints helps me plan around them. Pretending they aren’t there has never been a particularly strong strategy.</p>
<h3 id="12--migraines-do-not-respect-the-rest-of-the-schedule">12 · Migraines do not respect the rest of the schedule</h3>
<p>Near-daily migraines over years have been one of the most debilitating things I’ve dealt with. That is a fairly serious statement from somebody who already has Crohn’s in the comparison set.</p>
<p>Pain takes attention. It changes what a room feels like, what a screen costs to look at, and how much patience is available for another demand. When it happens over and over, the repetition becomes part of the burden. You aren’t only dealing with this headache. You’re dealing with how often you’ve had to do this.</p>
<p><img alt="A quiet room during a migraine." loading="lazy" src="/posts/still-building/11-migraine.webp"></p>
<p>I recently wanted to make images about it because explaining it with words can feel inadequate. I wanted somebody to look at an image and understand at least a little of what it means to have your head hurt so frequently that it becomes part of the architecture of your life.</p>
<p>The fact that I still do things doesn’t measure how comfortable I am while doing them. Sometimes it measures that the thing matters enough to try. Sometimes it means I found a way to do a smaller piece. Sometimes the work just has to wait.</p>
<p>I don’t want to teach anyone that ignoring pain is admirable. I’m describing the difficulty of having responsibilities, interests, and a family while pain keeps taking up room.</p>
<p>There are days when the impressive technical solution is irrelevant to the immediate problem. What I need is less light, less noise, and fewer demands. I can be the guy who wants to understand an entire communications network and also be the guy who needs the screen turned down.</p>
<p>Both are real.</p>
<p>This is why I’m so interested in making my environment easier to use. Dark mode, quiet, remote access, clear writing, and automation are connected to daily life for me. They help reduce the unnecessary cost of doing things I still want to do.</p>
<h3 id="13--somewhere-in-here-i-became-a-husband-and-a-dad">13 · Somewhere in here, I became a husband and a dad</h3>
<p>And then there’s the part that makes the whole story more than a history of computers and medical problems.</p>
<p>Shelly. Michael. A family.</p>
<p>It still sounds a little funny to summarize it as “I learned technology, ran a business, stayed sick, and somehow had a kid along the way.” But that’s how life can look when you zoom out. You’re dealing with whatever the next thing is, and then you look around and realize you’re somebody’s dad.</p>
<p>I’m not going to turn Shelly into a supporting character whose entire purpose is to explain my life. She has her own experience of our family. This is my account, and there are parts of it that belong to her too.</p>
<p>What I can say is that having a family gives the practical questions a different weight. Energy isn’t only about work. It’s also about being available for the people I love. Mobility isn’t an abstract equipment category. It’s whether I can go do something with them.</p>
<p><img alt="Justin and his son share a retro game." loading="lazy" src="/posts/still-building/12-fatherhood.webp"></p>
<p>Playing retro games with Michael is one of those things that brings different pieces of my life together. Something I enjoy becomes something we can do together. It doesn’t require an elaborate explanation. Two people, a game, and time in the same place.</p>
<p>That time matters.</p>
<p>Understanding more about myself also changes how I think about parenting. I want to pay attention to what a child is actually experiencing before deciding what his behavior means. Too much input is still too much input, even when the people providing it mean well. A different response doesn’t automatically mean a bad attitude.</p>
<p>I don’t need to publish my son’s private details to make that point. His story belongs to him as he grows up.</p>
<p>My part is to keep learning how to be his dad. I can know a lot about technology and still have plenty to learn about being useful to another human being.</p>
<h3 id="14--i-wanted-to-go-on-the-ferris-wheel">14 · I wanted to go on the Ferris wheel</h3>
<p>Recently, at the time of the Colorado State Fair, I wanted to go on the Ferris wheel with my son.</p>
<p>That was the goal. Something ordinary. Go somewhere with my family and do a thing together.</p>
<p>The planning around it became much less ordinary. Walking limits. Standing limits. Scooter options. Availability. Whether something would fit in the trunk. Whether Shelly and I could handle moving it. Whether it could cope with the ground. Whether the rules would make the whole thing harder than it needed to be.</p>
<p><img alt="A family looks toward a Ferris wheel; the scene represents the wish to participate." loading="lazy" src="/posts/still-building/13-family-outing.webp"></p>
<p>One purchase option sold out. Local availability became its own problem. I found myself trying to solve a small transportation project just to do something a healthier person might decide to do that afternoon.</p>
<p>That’s what accessibility looks like from inside my life. A pile of very practical questions between me and time with my family.</p>
<p>I’m not claiming a triumphant ending where every obstacle disappeared and a perfectly timed sunset rewarded my determination. The point is the goal itself, and how much work can exist between wanting to participate and being able to.</p>
<p>I can stand. That doesn’t mean I can comfortably walk around an event for hours. Those are different demands. The usefulness of a mobility aid doesn’t depend on me fitting somebody’s single mental image of disability.</p>
<p>I want something that helps me get out and do more. That’s the whole point of the equipment.</p>
<p>As a technology guy, that makes complete sense to me. Find the tool that reduces the constraint. Make sure it fits the real use case. Try to avoid buying something that creates three new problems.</p>
<p>As a dad, the reason is simpler.</p>
<p>I want to be there.</p>
<h3 id="15--the-curiosity-kept-spreading-underground">15 · The curiosity kept spreading underground</h3>
<p>My interests have expanded from individual machines into the systems around them. Fiber routes. Telephone buildings. Radio networks. Utilities. Water and wastewater. Cabinets on sidewalks. The hidden practical machinery of a city.</p>
<p>Living in Pueblo gives me a place to attach those questions. Who owns that building? Why is that cabinet there? What connects to it? Is there a permit? Is there an old drawing? What did the site do before it did whatever it does now?</p>
<p><img alt="An ordinary telecom cabinet becomes the start of another investigation." loading="lazy" src="/posts/still-building/14-hidden-infrastructure.webp"></p>
<p>I enjoy the moment an unremarkable object becomes legible. A box on the side of the road turns into part of a network. A plain building turns out to have a communications history. A map explains why a piece of equipment sits where it does.</p>
<p>It’s the same basic curiosity as the little lights in Grandma Ann’s picture, expanded to municipal scale.</p>
<p>Of course, curiosity can outrun evidence. A suspicious-looking door is still just a door until you know more. An interesting theory about a building isn’t a verified history. I want records, maps, permits, and sources because those things let me move from “that would be cool” to “this is what we can actually establish.”</p>
<p>The research also gives me another way to build. A useful map. A readable explanation. A site that takes a pile of difficult documents and makes the interesting parts accessible.</p>
<p>I like doing that. I like making the thing I wanted to exist when I started looking.</p>
<p>Physical limits haven’t removed that interest. They affect how I pursue it. Sometimes the investigation happens from a desk, through documents and imagery, instead of through a long walk. The question is still worth asking.</p>
<p>There is a lot going on underneath ordinary life. I intend to remain annoying about wanting to know how it works.</p>
<h3 id="16--ai-showed-up-at-a-very-interesting-time">16 · AI showed up at a very interesting time</h3>
<p>My early use of AI was fairly simple. I could show ChatGPT a picture of a circuit board and get help figuring out what I was looking at. That was useful enough to keep my attention.</p>
<p>Over time, the tools became capable of helping with much more. Research. Writing. Code. Documentation. Sorting through an idea. Working out what to check next. Turning a rough explanation into something a customer could follow.</p>
<p>Now a lot of my workflow starts with talking into my phone using Wispr. I explain the problem in my own words. The AI helps turn that into an investigation, a set of steps, or a draft response. Where the right access exists, connected tools can help retrieve information too.</p>
<p>It is a strange experience to spend years doing work one way and then discover that a substantial part of the friction can disappear.</p>
<p><img alt="Justin dictates a problem and organizes the next steps with AI assistance." loading="lazy" src="/posts/still-building/15-ai-workbench.webp"></p>
<p>I’ve described the feeling as barely doing anything. That’s the feeling, not a literal accounting of the work. I still bring the context. I still need to know what question matters. I still need to recognize when an answer is wrong, when a proposed fix is risky, and whether the result actually solved the problem.</p>
<p>But having help with the space between the thought and the finished work is a big deal for me.</p>
<p>I can speak a messy idea without first organizing it into a perfect document. I can ask for a clear email without spending all my available energy composing it. I can get help making the research readable enough that I’ll actually return to it.</p>
<p>For somebody dealing with illness, attention problems, sensory difficulties, and a lot of competing interests, that has practical value beyond novelty.</p>
<p>I love this stuff. I’m also aware that a confident answer can still be bullshit. Those two positions fit together perfectly well. A tool can be powerful enough to change my workflow and imperfect enough to require verification.</p>
<p>The point is what it helps me do with the time and capacity I have.</p>
<h3 id="17--builder-is-a-word-i-can-live-with">17 · Builder is a word I can live with</h3>
<p>Recently, “builder” came up as a way of describing me. I liked it more than I expected.</p>
<p>It fits a thread that runs through all of this. The old web pages. The repair work. The networks. The business. The maps and research. The systems I keep trying to make more reliable. Even the effort to arrange my own work so I can function better inside it.</p>
<p>I’m interested in understanding things, but I also want to do something with the understanding. Fix the problem. Make the guide. Build the tool. Preserve the information. Help the next person avoid the same stupid difficulty.</p>
<p>There is satisfaction in leaving something more useful than I found it.</p>
<p><img alt="Justin returns to the workbench: still building." loading="lazy" src="/posts/still-building/16-keep-going.webp"></p>
<p>I don’t think that requires pretending the hard parts were gifts. I would happily have skipped a substantial amount of pain. I don’t need Crohn’s or migraines to be secret blessings in order to value the life I’ve made while dealing with them.</p>
<p>And being a builder doesn’t mean I owe the world constant output. Some days the right thing to do is rest. A person doesn’t become less valuable because the project didn’t move forward that afternoon.</p>
<p>What the word gives me is a description I recognize. I’m a husband, a dad, a nerd, a business owner, and a person with a complicated set of health and neurological realities. I’m also somebody who still gets excited when a new tool makes something possible.</p>
<p>At forty-two, I’m still learning what works for me. I’m still finding out which assumptions were wrong. I’m still interested in the next piece of technology and the history inside the last one.</p>
<p>I didn’t get a clear manual at the beginning. I’ve had to assemble a fair amount of it as I went.</p>
<p>There’s more I want to understand. There are things I want to do with my family. There are projects I want to finish and questions I haven’t answered yet.</p>
<p>Find interesting shit. Figure out difficult shit. Build cool shit. Keep going.</p>
<p>That feels like a reasonable plan from here.</p>
<hr>
<h3 id="about-this-edition">About this edition</h3>
<p>This memoir was written with AI assistance in Justin’s requested voice, drawing on his shared recollections, previously documented history, and surviving first-person posts. The reflective passages are a reconstruction of his perspective, not a verbatim interview transcript. Childhood dialogue, precise first-computer details, a courtship story, and other unrecorded scenes have not been invented. The sixteen illustrations are AI-created interpretations and visual metaphors, not documentary photographs or exact depictions of relatives, rooms, equipment, or events.</p>
<p><strong>Chronology note:</strong> Justin currently recalls Crohn’s beginning at fifteen. His April 2006 account says “about 16” and describes a prolonged diagnostic process. This edition follows his current recollection for the approximate beginning and leaves the exact onset-versus-diagnosis timing unresolved. The December 2024 autism/ADHD assessment timing and present-day health experiences come from his shared personal history; this is a memoir, not a medical-record review.</p>
<p><strong>Historical trail:</strong> The early-business chronology is drawn from the August 2026 <em>Justin Fahmie Web Archaeology Report</em>, with surviving source links below. Directory business-start dates and later legal formation dates describe different milestones; they should not be treated as interchangeable. Legacy pages may be unavailable or change after this edition.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://crohnsforum.com/threads/kcs-story.77/">KC’s Story — Justin’s April 2006 Crohn’s account</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.qsl.net/kc0eks/repeaters/repeaters.html">Justin’s surviving Colorado repeater page</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.qsl.net/kc0eks/chs.html">1999 QSL.net page</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.oscommerce.com/forums/topic/110772-please-check-it-out-put-it-through-the-test/">2004 storefront discussion preserved in the historical research</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.bbb.org/us/co/pueblo/profile/computer-repair/kc-computer-services-0785-19000227">KC Computer Services business-directory record</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.geekstogo.com/forum/topic/144908-a-problem-with-xp-after-random-times-things-stop-working/">2007 Windows XP repair-business discussion</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.technibble.com/forums/threads/server-2003-and-explorer-exe-problems-blank-desktop.5161/">2009 client-server troubleshooting</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.technibble.com/forums/threads/android-app-to-have-clients-sign-agreements.31355/">2011 tablet-based client agreements</a></li>
</ul>
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