robglazebrook.com

It turns out, I have a birthday coming up. In just seven short days, I will be 26 years old. I know: it kinda boggles my mind, too. I didn’t see this one coming.

I don’t remember the age at which my birthday stopped making me all excited, giving me butterflies in my stomach and keeping me awake at night with eager anticipation. It seems like it was quite some time ago. I think I was vaguely excited to turn 21, but even that wasn’t anything all that special. As I recall, I stayed in with my best friend and my girlfriend and had a few drinks — inadvertently missing a family party I wasn’t anticipating in the process. But that was the extent of the celebration.

As a kid, of course, I got excited like everyone else. I made lists, both in my head and on paper, of presents I was hoping to get, people I wanted to see, and things I wanted to do on my special day. There was always a cake, and usually homemade ice cream, and family would gather and sing “happy birthday” and I would blow out the candles at the end. Classic birthday stuff. I would open presents while people watched and ooh’d and aah’d as the boxes were opened.

And this stuff excited me. I often tried to pretend like it didn’t, play cool and all that, but it really did. And then somewhere along the line, I guess I quit pretending so much. Nowadays, I usually don’t even remember my birthday is coming. Was it not for our Spanish teacher having us write out our birthdates in Spanish last week, I’m not sure I would have remembered until a day or two prior. One of these days, I’m worried I’ll forget about it altogether. Many of my friends think this is strange: they start preparing and celebrating weeks in advance of the day, and are childlike (in a good way) in their enthusiasm.

This year, I’m making a concerted effort to ensure my birthday is something special. For starters, I’m taking the day off work. That’s pretty special already. Amanda and I are going to be spending the weekend in Minnesota for a Wurzinger family reunion (I seem to travel a lot right around my birthday) on Saturday. Sunday, we’ll hang out with her parents, and then get dinner somewhere in the city and go out for drinks. On Monday, we’re going to the Valley Fair amusement park for the day before heading home that evening. It should be a good time. A memorable time. Perhaps it will inspire me to look forward to my next birthday with a bit of that excitement I seem to have lost somewhere along the way.

For those of you who are in to the present-buying thing, but aren’t in to the coming up with your own ideas thing, my Amazon wish list is decently up to date. In case anyone was considering a scooter-themed gift, be warned that the scooter doesn’t look like it will happen until next year now. I know… it breaks my heart, too.

I’ma mess with my presentation of the stats a little bit. Because I can, that’s why.

Weight: I am 2 pounds lighter than I was a week ago, a pound lighter than I was yesterday, and half a pound heavier than I was four days ago. It’s been a frustratingly irregular week, in other words.

Exercise: I swam for an hour and a half last week for a distance just under 3/4 of a mile. I jogged just under 11 miles at around 6mph (or for around 110 minutes). I walked the dog a little over five miles at just over 3mph (100 minutes). That works out to around 300 minutes of exercise, or just over 40 minutes exercise per day on average.

Intake: I consumed a little over 8000 calories last week, or around 1200 calories per day. Over 11% of those calories were from sushi, another 14% from Mexican food, 8% from pizza, and 8% from alcohol. I have a sneaking suspicion the alcohol percentage will rise a bit this coming week.

Eight weeks of the diet down… hopefully, not too many more to go. My goal is to be around 175 at the beginning of September, which is cutting it close but not entirely out of the realm of possibility.

I had an exciting revelation this weekend: I pulled some smaller-size shirts out of the back of the closet which I’d given up on ever being able to wear again years ago… and they fit! I’m wearing a shirt to work today that I last fit into prior to grad school. This excites me. :)

Our dog, Miles Davis Standish Wurzinger Glazebrook as he’s called when he’s in trouble, or just Miles on rarer occassion, is a connoisseur of life. At least that’s the term I’ve decided to use, because Amanda shoots down a lot of terms that I like to try and apply to our dog (“stupid,” “smelly,” and “imminently replaceable,” to name a few). She’s picky about the naming of things sometimes.

“It’s called a kennel, Rob. You can call it a kennel, or even a den.”
“Whatever. Go to jail, Miles! Go to puppy jail!”

So what makes Miles such a little connoisseur of life? Well, he likes to try things. As in, he likes to try eating them. And he usually succeeds. That makes him a connoisseur in my book. But he doesn’t really limit his intake to things people would normally consider edible, and therefore, I’m going to call him a life-eater or life-destroyer… except I’m probably not allowed to use those phrases. So we go with the connie-one.

Here’s a brief list of things Miles has eaten in the last month or two:

• One of Amanda’s sandals (left foot white)
• Another one of Amanda’s sandals (left foot blue… twister time!)
• My only pair of slippers (both feet, he must’ve been hungry)
• The tags off Amanda’s comforter
• 20-some-odd pieces of junk mail
• Amanda’s proof of car insurance (not junk mail)
• Pan’s Labyrinth from Netflix (I had to buy it, and hadn’t even seen it)
• Speaker for the Dead, with which I was 1/2 finished
• Amanda’s car insurance bill
• All the wicker off the legs of our wicker outdoor furniture
• A spool of gardening twine
• Three or four stuffed animals
• The screen door leading to the porch
• My laptop’s power adapter
• Two mice found in the yard
• More cat food than the cats have consumed
• Most of our recycling from week to week
• A basket of pool toys he found under the porch
• His obedience training clicker (obviously wasn’t needed)

We’ve taken some steps to try and curb his appetite. We leave him on the porch during the day (with access to the outside), which helps with the indoor stuff. We jail (kennel, sorry) him at night. We have a baby gate across the basement stairs to keep him out of the cat food. The next step? We’re considering placing everything worth more than fifty cents at least six feet off the ground and buying Amanda a step ladder. Our biggest concern? Really, how long can we expect that step ladder to last?

Diet updates are boring! I’ll keep this one short. :)

Weight: 185.5 pounds, down 2.5 from last week. Again on schedule, though I could’ve been ahead of schedule were it not for the pesky weekend interfering in all of my low-calorie plans. I had a birthday celebration, a dinner out with the ladyFriend, and a dinner with the grandparents. All are great fun, but hard on the midsection.

Exercise: Yardwork and jogging was the name of the game. I also managed to go swimming twice. That’s my new goal: I want to swim twice a week as often as possible, such that by the mid-fall sometime, I might not be so aquatically special-needs.

Intake: 900 – 1500 calories. Sort of all over the board. 1500 calories was due to coworker Jeremy’s birthday celebrations. 900 calories was Spanish class night, and I didn’t have time to eat much.

And that’ll do for now. I’ll give you something more to gnaw on soon.

As promised, I’ve got a few big announcements to make today. Here they go:

Big announcement #1: Changing webhosts.

I’ve been hosting with Linksky since some time in 2002, whenever it was that I finally got fed up with Iowa State’s stipped-down servers. However, that’s about to change. CollegeBuddy Quinn and I are going in together on a (mt) Media Temple account. I have no major gripes with Linksky… I just feel like I’ve outgrown them. I need more databases, and faster servers. I have ambitions, you know.

How this affects me: I’m going to have a lot of work to do.

How this affects you: hardly at all, really. Just thought I’d let you know.

Big announcement #2: Rootarcana go bye-bye.

As part of this change, I’ve come to the decision that it’s time to drop the Rootarcana name. Rootarcana rocked as a name when I came up with it, five or six years ago. Since then, it has grown progressively less cool with each passing year. For the last few years, I’ve had a crises of conscience every time it came up for renewal, and I always ended up renewing because I didn’t have time to get anything else together. This time, no excuses. I’m dropping rootarcana.

However, I’m not dropping the blogging thing. Not at all. Instead, my Blog Of The Future will be hosted on robglazebrook.com.

How this affects me: I’ll no longer have to explain what the hell my domain name means to every well-meaning techie out there.

How this affects you: If you have me bookmarked, you’ll have to update that. If you have me set as your home page, that’ll need to change. If you’re subscribed to my RSS feed… well, you get the idea. Changes will need to be made. I’ll let you know when that happens.

Big announcement #3: New design time.

A new webhost and a new domain means it’s time for a new design. This has been a stumbling block for me in the past: I don’t have a lot of time to invest in my personal website just now, which means no new design, which means no moving to a new host, et cetera. This time I’m planning on just sucking it up and using Someone Else’s Design for a couple of months until I have time to make my own. There are plenty of good designs out there for the taking… I’ll just have to silence that designer-side of me that will inevitably scream, “but… this isn’t exactly what I wanted!” I’ll live, I’m sure.

How this affects me: See above whining.

How this affects you: The site will look different for the first time in a couple of years. Of course, it’ll be a new site, so maybe it won’t bother you at all.

Big announcement #4: Amanda is pregnant!

Just kidding. You should’ve seen the look on your face, though.

How this affects me: I don’t need to find a new apartment in a new state just yet.

How this affects you: Think of all those calories you burned in that adrenaline rush!

Big announcement #5: Switching blogging software.

I’ve been using Movable Type for years now. However, I’ve become disenchanted with their software, and am looking to move away. I’ve decided to move to Wordpress instead. Why? Because I do a fair bit of Wordpress design at work, so it’s what I’m good with at the moment. Two years ago, I probably would have went with Drupal because I was doing so much ISUComm and Habitat for Humanity work. So it goes.

How this affects me: I have to figure out how to convert nearly five years of posts and comments from one platform to another. It won’t be easy. It would have been even tougher had I not lost all my posts from 2000 - 2002 or so, I guess.

How this affects you: Things in old posts will probably look hinky. These things happen.

That’s all for now! Questions and comments are appreciated (if you can get Movable Type’s damn comment thinger to work).