robglazebrook.com

Hello, dedicated stalkers! Here’s a list of cool things that I have to report since you’ve last peered into my window:

We have a date/location for the wedding.
Our wedding will be on Saturday, September 12, 2009 at Jester Park Lodge, which is a very pretty, rustic lodge on the western shore of Saylorville Lake. Our plan is to get married and have the reception in the same location, thus cutting down on commute times and whatnot. Plus, that way we can get to drinking straightaway, which is pretty important. Anyway… save the date. And if any of you already have pressing commitments 13+ months from now, well, that’ll actually probably work in our favor. Amanda has just informed me that she has over 100 aunts, uncles, and first cousins in her family, and we’re really trying to keep the number of people at the wedding/reception to around 150 people. So I think that means that I get to invite half a dozen friends, my parents, and probably my grandparents. ;)

I have an iPhone.
Probably not as cool as my wedding news, but still pretty fun nonetheless. I’ve been craving an iPhone for a while now, and needed a new phone regardless, but I couldn’t really justify the cost. But when the new 2nd-gen iPhones came out, I scored an old 1st-gen model off of someone who needed the latest and greatest. So I got an iPhone, and at a really great price. Score.

Friend Anne is back in the States.
Admittedly, this one didn’t happen under the best of circumstances (but that’s none of your business, thank you very much!), but my friend Anne is back in the United States. She’d been living in Amsterdam since around the 1st of the year, and while that worked out great when we were visiting Europe this spring (free room and an excuse to visit A-Dam), it sucked not having her around more often. So now she’s back in the good ol’ U-S-of-A. Of course, she’s living in Minnesota for the time being, but it’s a start. And Amanda and I are going to see her this weekend (we were already heading north for a camping trip with her family this weekend), and I think I have her convinced to come down for the state fair, as well.

My dad is out of the hospital.
This is another one of those “silver lining” things that I’ve been so fond of as late. My dad is out of the hospital, which is pretty great news. Of course, that meant that he had to be in the hospital first, but I’ll take what I can get. He’d come down with MRSA, which is an antibiotic-resistant staph infection, and it was spreading through his body. But it seems to be under control now, at least to the point where he can leave the hospital after a 3-day stint, and I’m choosing to see that is good news. :)

It’s been a busy couple of weeks at work. It makes me miss Jeremy all the more, I can tell ya. Admittedly, a good 80% of what I’m doing now would have been my projects anyway, but that extra 20% on top isn’t doing me any favors.

Nor did it help that I caught myself a case of strep throat last week, and had to spend a couple of days at home. Well, a couple of half-days. I couldn’t afford to take full days off with as much as I had to get done, so I just quarantined my cube and talked to people at a distance. I wasn’t the most productive guy those days – web development is hard with a 102+ fever – but it was certainly better than had I stayed in bed all day.

Point being, I’m really starting to look forward to this coming weekend. I could use a break. Amanda and I will be heading down to Kansas City for the weekend, visiting friends and family. It should be a good time. And that of course means that Miles will be spending the weekend with the grandparents, which I get the impression that he loves and they tolerate surprisingly well, so it all works out.

In case you hadn’t noticed yet, I’ve posted a few of our eurotrip photos on Flickr. So far I only have Paris posted, but I’ll work on getting Amsterdam up there in the next week or so.

In a few weeks, Amanda and I will be heading to Kansas City to throw a bit of a graduation/going-away party for a couple of our (married) friends. We’ll probably drive down Saturday morning, spend the afternoon with my extended family down there, spend the evening at the party, and then crash at the uncle’s place. Our friends graduating from medical school, and will be leaving their home in KC for warmer waters: Austin, Texas.

It has to be a fairly stressful time to move, with the housing market as it is. Amanda and I were hoping to put our place on the market next spring, but we’re not sure we’d get our money back out of it that soon – especially considering there are already two houses for sale on our block at the moment.

However, there are always two sides to every market, and it’s a fantastic time to buy a house. The real estate agents in Austin must have had a heyday showing our friends around their fair city. The options are nearly limitless if you’re looking to buy (presuming you have a decent credit rating, I suppose).

So it will be sad to see our friends moving even further away, but hopefully the market let them make the most out of their move. Oh, and moving their careers forward has to be a nice big plus too, I suppose. :)

Hmm… I suppose I should make a point to get hold of my uncle this week and verify that we can actually crash at his place.

I managed to survive my first week of teaching! In fact, I happen to believe I more than survived it — I kicked its ass. Or maybe that’s a hyperbole in the other direction. At the very least, we’ve come to some sort of a ceasefire: all of the students that showed up for the first class also showed up for the second, suggesting they’re willing to weather me for three weeks at least. And when I left class on the second day, I came to the surprising realization that I had honestly and actually enjoyed myself during class. Revelation of revelations, no?

But I’m considering that a good sign: By the second day of class, my jitters were gone and I was enjoying myself. Now I have just four more class periods before Amanda and I head to Europe!

Which… well, we’re thinking we should spend a little more time thinking about this week. We still don’t have bus tickets between the cities, so we should probably get on that. And I sorta intended to re-learn a touch of French before we left (not sure if that’ll really happen, though).

In other happy news, my mom celebrated the 19th edition of her 27th birthday last Thursday. She has officially had as many 27th birthdays as she had regular-type birthdays before I was born. This August, I’ll finally catch up to her, and I fully intend to pass her by in early August 2009. Pamela Glazebrook remains the oldest surviving member of the Forever 27 Club. She resides in Johnston.

Whew! My life continues to move forward at a breakneck speed, whether I’m ready for it or not.

I start teaching my first web design class in five days. I have my course packet written and sent off to the coordinator, who will make me copies and make sure they’re in my classroom on the first day. Last time I checked, I have 14 people signed up, and since the class is currently capped at 15 students maximum, that’s a pretty awesome number to have.

Of course, I still have some details to work out for the class. For example, I’m going to be teaching my students how to upload their files via FTP to a server, so they can see their pages live on the web. But I have no idea where that space is going to exist. And I’ll need to have code examples for most of my classes that don’t yet exist (although Justin pointed out that the code is simple enough, I could probably write it on the fly without much of a problem).

And then there’s the class that starts in April. I’ve barely even started planning it. I have a general outline as to what I want to teach each day, but I don’t have specifics laid out yet, and I haven’t written a single word of the course packet yet. And if the last course packet is any indication, this one will probably be around 30 pages long. So I should really get writing, is what I’m saying. Especially considering we leave for Europe three weeks from tomorrow, and I have to have the whole class planned before then. Yeesh.

CSSnewbie is still taking up a lot of my time, as well, but at least that is fairly rewarding work. Not monetarily rewarding yet, by any stretch of the imagination. But it’s personally rewarding. And I guess that’s something. Happily, I’ve found a couple of people willing to write me a couple of guest articles for the site while I’m on vacation, so I won’t need to worry about generating a boatload of additional content in advance.

ICanHasHope has sadly fallen by the wayside. I haven’t updated that site in like a week. It doesn’t take up all that much time, but I don’t have a lot of free time regardless, and I just can’t justify spending that time for the amount of traffic (or lack of traffic) that it’s pulling in. Sadly, it’s actually gained more steady traffic since I’ve started ignoring it. Although, I’d still encourage anyone and everyone to submit images, and I’ll post them. :)

Non-web-related life has also been busy. I spent a good portion of last week (and a bit of this week) sick with the flu, or at least flu-like symptoms. My grandfather has also taken a (momentary) turn for the worse, health-wise, so I’ve spent a bit of time over the last couple of evenings visiting him in the hospital. You can read more about that on my mom’s site.

And there’s been other stuff taking up a bit of my free time that I’ll probably talk about real soon. But you know what? I think I’ve already spent enough words and minutes talking about working. :)