Today I turn 25 years old.

25. Wow. That’s a quarter of a century.

Jessica bought me a straight razor and some awesome shaving soap. She also had some caramel/chocolate shipped in from an Etsy seller in Paris.

Tonight we’re going out for dinner with friends to an excellent restaurant. Then my wife is going to take me out to St Louis tomorrow to go birthday shopping.

All in all, a good birthday so far, with lots of promise.

Also, David Hechler informed me that today is both summer and fall (as it turns to Autumn around 5:something PM tonight). That’s interesting, I think.

Sam and Melissa’s wedding was great yesterday. It was awesome to see so many people from school that I hadn’t seen in awhile and also to share with Sam and Mel on their day. Sam was in our wedding and he was nice enough to include me in his as an usher.

I met a couple of his friends I hadn’t met before as well as reacquainting myself with some that I had. The guys all had a lot of fun and got along great.

Jess and I realized that there really wasn’t any need for us to stay in Springfield. It was only an hour and a half drive (for some reason I was thinking it would be closer to two or two and a half hours there) and we easily could’ve driven back home after the rehearsal dinner on Friday and driven back up on Saturday for the ceremony. But it all worked out alright.

I think Sam and Mel had a good day and we may be meeting up with them for my birthday on Tuesday. Overall it was a great weekend.

Today be the day where all good lads and lasses disregard their noble upbringing and embrace the humble words of a pirate. If ye happen across a mate who sounds to be speaking in a foreign tongue, do not shun him. Nay embrace his callous heart with a hearty greeting and loud “YARR!”

It be also me friends Sam and Melissa’s wedding day. And as such I know not how me custom will go over. A pirate in a tuxedo may perhaps be a strange site.

Well now me wife and I shall address the victuals awaiting us on that fair shore called Denny’s fore disembarking for our port of call, the wedding.

YARR!

Don’t forget ye must tweet like a pirate too!

Slides from week 3 of DM250. We were talking about working with clients and making money.

I’ve been sick the past two days. I caught whatever illness plagued my dear wife Jessica over the weekend. It was unfortunate because I woke up Monday feeling so good. This morning I was able to get back to work but definitely did not feel awesome. I’d say that right now, at 7:09 PM I am at probably 85% on a wellness scale. Definitely recovering.

The second half of next week and first half of the following is going to be busy. First we’ll head off to Springfield, IL for our friends’ Sam and Melissa’s wedding. I am an usher and apparently that means I need to wear a tux (is that normal?). So a 2.5 hour drive and a stay in a hotel will be a mini-vacation before all of our favourite television shows come back on the following Monday while I am teaching a class (boo!). Tuesday the 22nd is my birthday (25 years!) and we’ll be going out to a fantastic dinner with friends at Dressel’s in St Louis that evening. Wednesday the 23rd Jessica is taking me out of work for a day in the city. I will probably be getting some new clothing for the winter and generally enjoying a day off with my wife.

Hopefully by then the air in Southern Illinois will have cooled down to a consistent mid-70s and it will actually feel like autumn the way it did a few weeks ago.

In two weeks’ time I should have one of my pending projects done (you can watch progress as it’s made here) and hopefully be working on a second one to be finished in October. Then it’s Jessica’s birthday, Halloween candy to pass out, and finally November shows up.

November means NaNoWriMo. And I am really excited about it this year. Mostly because I’ve had a whole year to loosely and mentally plan for it (as opposed to the -1 day I had last year when I first discovered it). I’ve got a sort-of plot ready and want to get it down on paper. You should totally do it too! If you sign up, let me know in the comments and we’ll all be writing buddies this November.

December means Christmas in California with my family and then in January we’ll be heading up to Portland with the fam for my little sister’s wedding. I guess it’s just busy all the way until 2010 comes around. Hopefully teaching this class will continue to be good as well.

How’s the end of your year shaping up?

These are the slides for my week 2 class. It’s all about stylesheets and how to use them this week.

I’ll use these slides during my class on 07 September 2009.

I haven’t written about any recent favourites lately, and I have a few new ones. So. Here we go.

• Arctic Monkeys – Humbug
  An excellent record from Arctic Monkeys. It’s a bit moodier than their previous offerings and a bit more chill.
• Green Curry
  Not exactly a new favourite, but I’ve been eating it a lot the last couple days.
• Teaching
  I love it. I could definitely see myself going into teaching as a primary career at some point. As long as the teaching was along the lines of web design and new media marketing. Maybe after I’ve got that MA I’m jonesing after. I think ideally I’d like to teach college and do freelance. And that’s all.
• Winston Churchill
  Again, not exactly a new favourite, but I’m hoping to read a lot more about him and his life in the coming months. The HBO movies The Gathering Storm and Into the Storm are excellent.

It’s September now and that means my birthday is coming up. I will be 25 years old. For some reason that has been resting heavily on my mind the last couple of weeks. It’s almost as if I feel like I will actually be a real adult. As if I’ve been playing the grown up game the last four years or so.

And with that feeling the ever-present urge to move on someplace resurfaces with resounding gusto. I don’t want to feel like I’ve wasted my young life in this small town. I want to go and do something different. Even at 25 the notion that life is short has hit me hard and I don’t want to sit idly by watching the years pass as I feel like I’ve done the past nearly three years. Perhaps I need to make things happen. Or perhaps I need to wait and see if any of my leads pan out. I’ve always had a hard time with patience.

Only time will tell.