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Dear Past Peter,
It’s very rare that I’m actually able to talk to you. But I’m telling you; life goes fast, so hold on and begin to actually internalize the fact that you 100% will not expect nor can you plan for “the next thing”. So, I wholeheartedly advise you to have fun and just enjoy the journey. It’s SO WORTH IT. Stop rolling your eyes. Oh, right… Other people may be reading this as well. 😐

‘Let me back up a bit. I'm an Introverted Engineer. So introverted in fact, that if you've every had a conversation with me, you might need confirmation of whether or not I'm talking to myself or actually conversing with someone who actually is standing in proximity to me... Yet somehow, I manage to interact with people on the daily, and have several multi-dimensional relationships... However, I will answer a question you may or may not be asking... Yes, it's exhausting.‘¹

</prelude>

All right… So I’ve been pretty absent from this blog this calendar year. 2025 has been a very, veRY, VERY long, yet fruitful, year for me. Granted, it was no 2016, but yea, it’s been long. I am truly indebted to my core group of peeps, who I call my brothers, and of course to my beautiful new family. Thank you, to both groups, for your unwavering support, integrity and love.

I started this year off (scout’s honor) with intentions of a 1-post-per-month cadence, however that did not happen. However, this month in particular (December) has proven time and time again (year over year), to be a month of reflection, accomplishments and celebrations; no matter how hard life decides it wants to hit me. So let’s dive in.

I really cannot believe that in this month (December 2025), I will be hitting so many professional, let alone personal, milestones.

Twenty (20) years ago this month… I passed my CCNA. This was my first professional certification. Armed with super limited experience, a non existent training budget and an eBay account… I’m not gonna lie; I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t have an actual post or anything really “official” way back then, but it was done after several attempts and a 12 month period. I have an article that touches on that experience available on my “this_CCNA_Thing#sh version | i ^Uptime|^System|^Reload” post. Feel free to dive into that story if that sounds interesting to you.

Nineteen (19) years ago this month… I started my first “real” out of college job (other than training w/ pops, or doing taxes for my uncle, or side hustling Nextel phone customization and unlocks and unofficially working at DreamVision² ) and boy never did I ever imagine any let alone all of the options I’d have after working to “just work on” computers. A brief overview of this job, and a couple of others is available at my “History (“How, ya doin’ that?”)” post.

Ten (10) years ago this month… I passed my first CCIE. This was a monumental full circle moment that still to this day, I thank my now late-grandfather for his generosity for starting, and his witt… 😏. That excerpt is here: Finally a CCIE! (R&S #51406), and a little more in depth post available here: “Configure Memory “2015 Archive”“.

Six (6) years ago this month… I passed my second CCIE. Now that… was a relief. Well documented in my post: “CCIE Security V5.0 – The Journey“, here: in the post “[Security] is inevitable… And I… am… IronMan [again] (CCIEx2 – Security / R&S)” and of course here: “127.0.0.1 – Where to Start“.

At some point… In-between these milestone dates listed above, I’ve sat for 53 written exams from Cisco, a handful of other vendor exams, 4 CCIE Lab Exam attempts and 2 CCDE Practical Exam attempts. <sidenote>Although I never "officially" passed the CCDE practical exam, I will say it was the most fun I've ever had in any formal testing setting. The 4 scenarios and 8 hour exam literally flew by and was designed really well. So the fact that I actually really enjoined the testing experience (other than PearsonVue "losing" my second attempt and then miraculously "finding it" several days later <newbs>), coupled with the hours of conversation that I exchanged had with both a certain Co-Founder of INE/4xCCIE/CCDE and arguably one of the smartest engineers on the planet w/8xCCIEs/CCDE/etc who was quoted as having "[I] work on stuff not found on google yet" both in unison telling me "um, no" and that I passed it, kind of softens the blow to the confidence I took after the 2nd attempt. 😏.</sidenote>

For all you ‘NAY sayers’… Here’s some proof in a form of a photo taken from our mostly impromptu dinner dubbed “gathering of geeks” (I literally just made that up right now) from late October of 2022. And yes, the streaks of light are from a shattered iPhone camera lens. I know this, b/c it was my phone. LOL 😂

So with that all stuff in mind, in the last 12 months somehow… I’ve also managed to keep my day job, re-certify the 20-ish current “active” of the 45 Certs I have (this number tends to change daily b/c Cisco keeps restructuring and retiring stuff and I’m way too tired to keep up with it) [full list of certs in “Professional Development – Certification & Recognition List aka “The Vault”“, worked as an expert witness (thank you again Mr. H Sir, you know who you are 😏), fully co-located myself, relocated, became a dad and got married. Oh and who can forget… I started to try my hand at programming with Python and Ansible to help automate part of my regular job as well as teach myself something new. (The order of which… MAY SURPRISE YOU!!! 🤣🤣🤣<that’s a super deep cut for my brother>). Ah yes, also have been told by several folks that I’m now bilingual. So there’s that also.

So yea, 2026 will be a much appreciated change of pace for me. Ah yes, and also I am becoming more of a hands on mentor with the 2 peeps who are looking to crack the CCIE in the next 12 months, both of which are damn near family of mine.

So, circling back to the title of this post and the general theme of the song in this post, the question posed was “Will this last forever, forever?” I can with 100% certainty tell you that while I love what I’m doing currently, it more than likely will not stay the same “forever” let alone “forever, forever”. I have some other items planned for 2026 as my priorities have changed, and both my quality and pace of life is now more geared toward the family, some things changed due to broken mother boards, lack of hardware and general loss interest. Throw that in with me having time to re-evaluate what is actually “worth my time”. Some of these things come from good old fashion books and human growth. Thanks for stopping by 🤓

• Mr. Mondongo aka Stark [51406] out…

1. 1- From my currently “Untitled” collection of thoughts… Yea, this may or may not show up in some sort of “formal” collection of thoughts I am RE-writing… Yes, my only copy of that body of work was erased because “the cloud a great file repository” ↩︎
2. 2 – DreamVision Networks LLC is currently in a transition period, but don’t worry we aren’t going anywhere. 🤓 ↩︎