Exhausted in a Good Way

I'm glad my blog's birthday is in May, because it's an excuse to force myself to update this blog.

It's been a busy several months, filled with new and old, deadlines, projects, friends… you name it.  In case you couldn't tell already, I think one of the most revealing things here was that I didn't get to write anything here on 29 February this year.  (I was pretty upset that a few major deadlines kept me busy right up until midnight that night.)  I guess my thoughts from 2008 and 2012 will have to suffice.

Today was no exception to the busy nature of 2016 to date.  Last night, I borrowed a friend's car and drove up to Girard for a little-more-than-24-hour visit wherein I spent 8 of those little-more-than-24 hours volunteering, as every year, with the National Association of Letter Carriers' "Stamp Out Hunger" Food Drive.

And this year, the food… Did. Not. Stop. Coming. In.

We blew past our previous record and ended up taking in 7436 lb (3332 kg) from the Girard and Lake City community — which will all go right back out to those members of our community in need of it in due course.  But while things usually die down in the sorting and shelving effort after 16:00, there was no real end in sight for us today.  We decided to stop shelving at 17:00 like normal, and just get everything else we could out of the way for volunteers to continue processing on Monday.  (Pictured here is about half of what was leftover when we stopped.)

But exhausted as that left me, I had to drive back to Pittsburgh, because I have a couple good friends graduating from Carnegie Mellon University tomorrow morning.  And although at the start of the year, I alluded to hoping to post more often here (and I always wish that can be the case!), for now I've been "posting" more to them personally, in real life, and that's been really great.  So I wouldn't miss the opportunity to celebrate this milestone with them for anything.

But I still made time to bake some bloggy cake.  Eleven!  Today really is a day for big numbers.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm really tired and need to go to bed.