Managing "Maycember"

This blog is now old enough to legally drink.  I don't know what that means and, frankly, neither do you, so maybe anthropomorphizing a website wasn't the best idea after all?  Oh well, too late now.  I wonder how Bloggy feels about its own sesquiquattuordecennial?

It's always tough to think of what to write here.  Last year, I noted that May gets "deceptively busy", and this year, it's no exception — but now I know there's a name for the phenomenon: "Maycember".  Even for those who aren't parents, a lot of events line up around the end of the school year and the ramp-up to summer, just like in December, but they're not accompanied by the same "slowdown" in other responsibilities as the winter holidays, so it feels even busier.

Despite busy days, I wish I could say more has happened of note.  There is some positive, to be sure, but a strong undercurrent of malaise, and in recent weeks the accumulated stressors have started causing some physical symptoms I haven't experienced since the worst of grad school.  It's also just unclear how much of that is exacerbated by just the normal seasonal weather changes.  So that's not really any fun.

But I have to find my fun somewhere!  And finding time to find suitable organic bloggy cake mix was its own task, so I guess my goal is to keep the process short and sweet so I can rest.  Thankfully search tools remain reasonably effective when wielded well, so there wasn't a ton of digital slop to wade through.  May that continue to last as long as it can.

Two Decades of Bloggy!

Twenty years ago tonight, I guess I was bored.  You could maybe say the same thing about tonight, just in a radically different context.  There are all sorts of things I could do, but forcing myself to slow down and write a bit, even vaguer-than-usual drivel, isn't a half-bad exercise to engage in from time to time.

I usually save the long-term reflection for New Year's Eve (even if in practice I tend to actually do more of it on New Year's Day), but it's hard not to notice patterns.  With almost any focal distance I choose to look back with, I can see that my life has changed quite a bit recently.  In particular, I've noticed that I've tended to mark this middle part of recent decades with a higher degree of uncertainty and change.  And yet, I've also been reflecting on just how deceptively busy the month of May always seems to get, no matter what else might be happening on a macro level.  Is it something persistent about my social environment, or is it just everyone wanting to do stuff now that the weather's more consistently nicer?

Anyways, I've often complained at this time of year that it's been getting increasingly difficult to find the good-quality, free clipart which is of course the primary ingredient in bloggy cake.  In recent years, it feels like that difficulty curve has spiked.  And this year, it was damn near impossible.  Most anything new worth considering is well behind a paywall, or at least a login.  But I scrappily managed.

It had occurred to me in a textbook "shower thought" yesterday that, nowadays, a bloggy cake could theoretically be baked with a fairly straightforward prompt into a generative image diffusion model.  But there's just no way that the result would taste as good, and besides—all the detailed piping might not even end up being legible.

And yes, despite the em-dash in the last sentence, I've written all of this myself.  It's not at all a sign of outsourcing to a large language model, and if you've been here long enough, you'd know that.

Some things you've just gotta bake yourself.

Happy birthday, Bloggy!

A Quick Birthday Greeting

I'll be honest.  It's been a rough few days of a rough couple months of a rough year.  For a lot of reasons.  Right now, my body, mind, and spirit all are in much need of some solid rest.

But still… it wouldn't be 14 May without bloggy cake, however hastily made.  And at this point, I think this blog is old enough to understand that that's what counts.

Happy nineteenth, Randomness.

Adulting

It's Mother's Day, so I spent some time this weekend with family as usual.  Yesterday's food drive went smoothly and brought in a lot of food, albeit lowest returns in many years.  Economic effects have brought more need to the community, which means fewer able to give, and even those who can giving less.

I also watched my parents perform Mozart's Requiem with the Erie Philharmonic Choir last night, which was wonderful.  Although I guess the lesson is starting to be reinforced on me that I really need to bring my glasses with me to events like that if I want to be able to discern faces from more than a handful of meters away.

Since I had to be back in Pittsburgh tonight to get ahead of the coming week, my mother and I kind of explicitly didn't have any plans for the day.  But spur-of-the-moment externalities caused it to be a day full of adulting and similar obligations which, while enjoyable, tired me out more than I probably needed.  So this is all hastily written (and designed!) in the waning minutes of the day with far less planning than I would have liked.

Perhaps having adulted today is more appropriate than blogging, though, now that this blog itself is eighteen years old.  Old enough to be legally an adult; although in blog years, I think it qualifies as "ancient".

But even adult blogs — er, hmmm, grown-up blogs? — want some bloggy cake!  And I won't disappoint!

Transitional

Did I really say 2022 was going to "feel about the same" as 2021?  Oh, what a difference a few months can make!

In fairness, I'd said it would be "long and transitional".  And now that I can see more clearly where the year is headed, that much has been spot-on.  But certainly not in the same sense, no.  Whereas 2021 was transitional in a more gradual way that even seemed stagnant at times, so far 2022 is transitional in the OMG IT SEEMS LIKE LITERALLY EVERYTHING IS CHANGING way.  It's not actually quite that dramatic, of course — but even good and necessary change, when significant enough, can get a little bit overwhelming at times.  Right now, I'm in the thick of that in more ways than one.

Of course, it's fun that my blog's birthday is around the same time as the National Association of Letter Carrier's "Stamp Out Hunger" Food Drive each year, which brings me back to my hometown and, in some sense, the same roots that bore this blog in the first place.  But things are also quite different, since I'm literally double the age I was then.  Now, at the age of seventeen, this blog is just a few short months away from being just as old as I was when I started it.

Maybe it's time for my blog to start a blog.  While it decides whether that's a good idea (it's not), here's some bloggy cake:

Still, while there's usually proximity, it's not every year that 14 May falls on the Saturday, which means both volunteering for the food drive and blogging on the same day.  If that weren't enough, the Eurovision Song Contest has been added to my radar in recent years.  And I have friends graduating at Carnegie Mellon's commencement ceremony tomorrow, so it was right back to Pittsburgh tonight.  And good, novel bloggy cake clipart is increasingly hard to find these days.  Busy, busy.

After that, my mother's spending a little time with me here before I help run a primary election on Tuesday.  Did I mention I'm a local Judge of Elections here?  Been that way for four years.  I'm so bad at this blogging thing.

And then it's right back to what already feels like the busiest summer season I've had at my job, even before adding in the two new full-time staff that have been added to our tiny team in the past five weeks.  (One started just yesterday!)  All of the shuffling, divvying, and expansion of responsibilities that entails — while certainly for the betterment of us all — will definitely take a lot of adjustment in the coming weeks and months.

As far as the food drive, though — since ya know, that's what's already happened — you could indeed consider it a "transitional" year as we got our bearings back: Folks remembering that the food drive exists, letter carriers remembering how and when to best get the food to us, us remembering how best to process the intake, and also getting used to doing it all in the social hall and food pantry area of the new church building, a building which hadn't even broken ground when we had the last food drive in 2019, and which by now has already been open for more than a year.  Today, we took in 3642 lb (1652 kg) of food nonetheless — among our lower totals but still an impressive feat — less a super-consistent 3.58% in spoilage from outdated or damaged foods.

So it's good to see that, despite the challenges of the past few years, and those that continue, the community's generosity hasn't changed.

Another thing that hasn't changed is my "pandemic hair".  Unless, of course, you count it having grown a year longer.

It was already pretty long in last year's post-vaccination photo at the age of just over 14 months.  Today, it's pushing two-and-a-quarter years since that last haircut on 27 February 2020.

I'd kinda missed a good window of opportunity last summer before the Delta variant came roaring through, but now I've got some big things coming up before which I'd like to tame it significantly.  I don't think I'll be going straight back to the short hair of the past, but I've gotta get this stuff out of my eyes.  And mouth.  And all over everywhere.  Just gotta find the time first to get it done right.  (Ya know, 'cause "big things" and "busy".)

And the humidity today, oof.  The result is not so much "unkempt" as "unkempable".  Suddenly all those hair product commercials that once confused me as a child make so much sense.

(Maybe my hair should get a blog?  Nah.  Besides, it's "transitional".)

The Agitation After

Do sixteen-year-old blogs care about cake for their birthday?

I don't know, but mine does, I guess.  And if not, I do.  Besides, looking out at the world today, it's a time for celebration.  Well, kinda.  It definitely feels like it ought to be, but it also definitely feels like it ought not to be.  Feelings are weird, man.

Vaccination against Covid-19 accelerated so much just over the course of April that late March and early May really have seemed like they were two different worlds.  It's hard to understate just how hopelessly things felt to be plodding along, and then — BAM! — suddenly, there's a lot of hope in this new reality.  So much, so fast that it's difficult to suspend disbelief.  I suppose psychological trauma, in whatever form, will tend to do that.

Each of the last 6 weeks or so has brought rapid change: Just in the last three days, emergency use authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech BNT162b2 vaccine was extended to children as young as 12, and CDC recommendations were updated to reflect that fully vaccinated individuals no longer need to wear masks in most situations.

Of course, broader society remains complicated.  Knowing for sure you're actually in one of those safe situations is impossible, and while it becomes more likely over time, it's nowhere near a guarantee now.  We know that folks need time to adapt well.  Just as March and April 2020 were a sudden shock to the system as we came into this pandemic, it seems that May and likely June 2021 are shaping up to be similar as we come out of it.  So, while the light at the end of the tunnel is ever clearer, true celebration does still seem a bit premature.  For now, anyway.

But I did my part and got my (Pfizer) jabs on 12 April and 03 May.  The first one, I think, was not administered particularly well and my left arm even still has a little stiffness around the injection site today after having been quite sore for the first 10 days, but the second one (in the other arm!) was quick and comparatively painless.  After having helped run two elections in 2020 under pandemic conditions, I am incredibly thankful that I will be just past the 14-day post-vaccination threshold considered "full immunity" before the upcoming municipal primary election on 18 May.

There will be more public excursions to come, of course.  At the present moment, all have me anxious, albeit to varying degrees.  But all in due time.

In the meantime, while we work our way up to getting ready to gather again, have some bloggy cake.  It's just as shocking that this blog is that old.

The Calm Between

Words fail.  But we try anyway.

By this point, it's cliché and a bit trite to say that we're in unprecedented times, in the midst of an ever-changing situation, living through history… but it's absolutely true.  There were certainly jokes early on, when we were comparatively uninformed, but no one really expected at the start of the year that we'd be in the midst of a global pandemic a few short months later.

Locally, we've come a long way. In just a few minutes, the "Stay at Home" order for Pittsburgh and many surrounding areas, which has been in place since the evening of 23 March, will officially be lifted.  Fifty-two days and four hours in total, just shy of one-seventh of the entire year.  A lot has happened since then, and a lot hasn't.  Events postponed or cancelled.  Plans scuppered, classes virtualized, and goals deferred.  But there's also a long way to go: more testing and tracing is needed.  There will be future flare-ups in our epidemics and, inevitably, more resultant deaths.  May we have the collective and individual strength to face that challenge and keep it manageable.  For now, I'm trying to savor the occasional liminal moment of calm in between all the uncertainty, doubt, fear, and anxiety.

In work and in life, it's been easier than ever to lose sight of my direct impacts.  New patterns continue to emerge, and on average, I know I'm doing okay and contributing positively.  But on any given day, the reality is that everything is, at best, just a little harder.  And the thing about everything being harder is that every thing is harder.  And those things add up.

So it was with great relief that I found another piece of purportedly-free clipart without too much trouble so I could bake another bloggy cake for a special birthday blog.  With 2020 so far being a year replete with almost every cancellation imaginable, it's important to try to keep the easy streaks alive.  It's already digital; no further social distancing is required.  ;)

Random tangent: If this blog were to be anthropomorphized even further and ascribed a female gender, I suppose you could say it's celebrating a quarantinceañera.  That is a portmanteau that exists now.

Tumult

Last weekend, I visited home as I tend to do this time of year, and my mother gave me a crossword puzzle which contained the clue "Teen turmoil", five letters.  After conferring with the crossing clues and determining that the answer was, indeed, "ANGST", I reflected a bit on where I am in life right now.

Much like my teenaged years which launched this blog, it's recently been a tumultuous time.  Of course, it's different — it always is.  A lot of big projects and initiatives at work are just kinda… up in the air.  This is normally the time of year we'd be figuring out answers and solidly charting a course to get through as much of the list as possible through the upcoming summer months.  This year, though, there happen to be a lot of externalities, and so many details remain largely out of our hands, at least for now.  Which certainly brings up some anxious feelings, but also, at the same time, maybe is a good thing?  It's important to focus one's efforts on what can be controlled, after all.  But it is an adjustment, and one that's still in flux at least for a while yet, so that all has left me a bit unsettled.

Meanwhile, my personal life just seems kinda disorganized.  My mother came down to my place 22–25 March for a long weekend to help me start the process of reorganizing the physical manifestation thereof (read: cleaning my apartment).  The intent was that that could have been a launching point of sorts, the catalyst required to overcome inertia, but alas, life has had other plans.  It seems many of my usual amusements just feel like they're adding to the mental to-do list rather than creating calm.  And I don't feel like I have the time I need to step back and assess why.

Ironically, earlier tonight, I actually only got halfway through a podcast episode about millennial burnout before I found my attention turning to "more pressing" matters.  And that's exactly the kind of "mental load" framework it was discussing.  I'm hoping there are some coping strategies in the second half, because I need them.  And perhaps a little more separation from the busy-ness of the school year might help, too.

In the midst of it all, I am at least trying to take time to enjoy myself, but it's getting tough to balance.  It's unclear to me how much of that is the uncertainty and how much is just executive dysfunction rearing its ugly head, but I'm definitely in a weird funk these past few weeks.  For now.  This, too, shall pass.

But at least I can cross one thing off the to-do list: Bloggy cake number fourteen!  Digitally baked and served!

Teenaged Blogs for Bloggy Teens

Thirteen years ago, I was a teenager… And now, my blog is, too.

Dearest Bloggy, I've surely neglected you, but you've always been there, a faithful archive of… well, something.  Those close to me know that the first trimester of 2018 has been a fairly rough one in terms of all sorts of life stuff, and that has coincided with some increased responsibilities as well, which has kept me far too busy to write here.  A lame excuse, as ever, I know.  But I'm still proud enough of you that I'm still taking a little time to bake some bloggy cake.

And it's surely a sign of adulthood, but noticing when the people and things you love are old enough to do something is an interesting experience… Like when kids you knew as toddlers are graduating high school, when a friendship would be old enough to be in middle school, or when your mortgage is old enough to drink.

Maybe not that last one… Another sign of the times is noticing how your sense of humor, ahem, matures.  And observing the slight cringey feel of each tweet from the "Feeling Old?" bot on Twitter.

But to think: Even this blog is old enough to have its own angsty blog.  That's so meta.  And back in 2005, blogs were cool.  Everyone had one.  Now it seems more quaint than anything.

So, Bloggy, though I'm not sure what else to write you on your thirteenth birthday, I'm pretty sure an angsty teenager like you wouldn't want to hear it from me anyway.

A Dozen Years of Bloggy!

It's a time for celebration!  "Randomness" is twelve years old today!

I've baked the traditional bloggy cake for this inarticulate pre-teen, and all is well.

I've been back in my hometown of Girard for the weekend, to help out again with the National Association of Letter Carriers' "Stamp Out Hunger" Food Drive and to celebrate Mother's Day with my family.  The Girard and Lake City community donated 4676 lb (2121 kg) of food, which we were much better equipped to handle this year than last.  Mom and I went to see the University of Notre Dame Concert Band, who happened to be in town putting on a local benefit concert, and then the family had dinner with my grandparents and my now-103-year-old great-grandmother.

All that has left this weekend pretty jam-packed.  So this blog post is short, in part because I had to keep my daily streaks in Pokémon GO alive before midnight, as well as the usual race against the clock to finish this post.  Busy, busy!

I should write about my actual life here, too, soon, because it's actually pretty good lately.  (A welcome change!)  But for now, happy birthday, Bloggy!

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.

A Decade of Bloggy!

Ten years ago today, I started this little blog.  What was I thinking?

As usual, I've baked a bloggy cake to mark the occasion, fighting through pages of Google results yielding clip art cakes that either aren't very good or that I've already used.  (Come on, clip artists!)

Much like previous years, it's also an opportune time for reflection.  Graduate school is almost done, but over the past year I've been suffering burnout so severe that, at times, I find myself needing to spend more time simply working myself out of the resulting anxious-depressive cycles than I could possibly devote to my actual studies.  This has, in turn, drawn out the process and left me longing for a change.  Despite that, I successfully taught another group of students and recently received my best set of teaching reviews yet, which truly warmed my heart and made that part of my struggle seem all the more worthwhile.

To help me through the rest, I've found myself spending more time at nearby Carnegie Mellon University, both as a physical and a social escape.  On some days, I simply find a place to peacefully exist and attempt to achieve productivity with a higher-than-usual probability of success.  On others, I've gotten involved in several social groups to keep my spirits active.  In so doing, I've not so much abandoned my original intention to "not try to relive undergrad" as I've been incrementally tweaking it, eventually resulting in something resembling: "Screw that; I need friends."

And insofar as that's a need of mine, I think I can honestly say I have some now.  Increasingly, I find myself actually and actively welcomed in these communities, which — due in part to the magically nerdy weirdness that is CMU and its people — has been inspiring to me in both a personal and an academic sense.  Since I haven't been feeling as connected to many of my colleagues at Pitt in a long while (there are a very few exceptions), this has been an invaluable resource as I work on building a successful transition into the next phase of my life.

For now, though, I'm in the midst of a week-long retreat of sorts (helping my aunt with accounting again), taking a step back and looking at what's coming next.  From this juncture, any way I try to slice it, it's going to be a busy few months.

Enough with the mixed metaphors.  Onward.

Random tangent: The Unix timestamp reached a count of 1,431,655,765 seconds past its 1970 epoch at 22:09:25 EDT today.  This number is significant because, when expressed as a 32-bit binary number, it consists entirely of alternating 0s and 1s.  (In hexadecimal, this is 0x55555555.)  How appropriate that this occasion happened within mere minutes of my blog turning ten at 22:05 EDT. And how equally appropriate that I, a self-proclaimed super nerd who actually gets excited by stuff like this, didn't even know this was happening until it was already a few minutes too late.  Oh, well.

Bloggy is Nine!

It's cake day!

Yes, this oft-neglected blog has, in fact, survived another year of existence.  Believe it or not.  Bloggy is nine now.

And so, faithful as always, I'm celebrating the ninth cake day of Randomness by baking it a bloggy cake.  (And unlike some years past, this one was actually really quick to bake.  All of the necessary ingredients were pretty easily located this time.)

With the passing of time, it's increasingly difficult to tap into what my goals for this blog were way back when I started it in 2005, but recently I've had a couple of hours-long conversations with a friend that have got me thinking about the last nine years of my life as a whole unit, a single story arc.  And a lot of the things that really threw me for a loop at one time now make much more sense in that broader context.  I'm not sure if I want this blog to take on a "memoir" role... but I can see how much I've left out over the years, either because I didn't feel comfortable sharing it at the time or because I didn't understand it myself.  I can also see that I actually have some life experiences now that might someday be worth contributing to society at large.  But for now, those will remain topics for another heretofore undetermined day.

In any case, though, I suppose I should at least take this opportunity to give a brief life update, since it seems all I do here anymore is show off my not-that-impressive Photoshop skills every few months, then write about how I'm too busy to write, and leave without having offered anything of substance to the readers.  (Yes, people still show up here from time to time.  You are reading this after all, right?)

Anyway, I'm still doing the grad school thing, with taking classes and teaching being my two main priorities and serving the Computer Science Department as president of its Graduate Student Organization filling in a lot of the cracks.  Since most of my friends from my undergrad years have moved away (and I miss you all dearly), and this has left me feeling isolated at times, I've also been trying to branch out socially and am pleased to have found a couple groups which I'm feeling more a part of each week.

That said, managing all of this while still trying to maintain composure and achieve personal growth is a tough task.  As a result, at many times over the last two years, it's felt as though I've been working myself into the ground in all sorts of capacities — as a student, as an educator, as a professional, even as a friend — and in many cases, that's been true.  So, while I've still got work to do this summer toward finishing my degree, since the spring term wrapped up, I've been taking some much-needed time to myself, just to regroup, rediscover my inner strength, and recharge for what lies ahead.  It's very easy to lose one's self-confidence when there's a near-daily chipping away, which makes times like these all the more important and worthwhile.

And so, over these last couple weeks, I got to spend some quality time with lots of family, including my great-grandmother, Esther, who turned 100 on 4 May, which is just incredible!  Here we are together on the big day!

(I probably should have baked her a bloggy cake or something.)

I also got to spend time helping out my aunt and uncle a bit with accounting-related stuff for their business, participating in my hometown's collection for the National Association of Letter Carriers' food drive, and actually writing a somewhat substantive post on this blog for once!

All in all, I'm doing pretty well.  Thanks for asking.

Eight... But Great?

Eight years.  That's how long this blog has been around.  Eight years.

And I've not really written much here lately.  Like, at all.  It's pitiful.  I mean, the seventh birthday post still fits on the homepage.  I'm sorry, Bloggy.

Part of me has wanted to change that for quite a while now, but it would likely mean a major shift in the overall tone of this blog.  Not that that would be a bad thing; on the contrary, it's just about expected that a 25-year-old's blog is going to read differently from that of a 17-year-old.  But I've needed to get some things in place in my own life before I'd be comfortable doing that here.  This has been a slow but continual process.  Watch this space (just not too intently).

So even though eight has not been great of late (see what I did there?), it's time to bake the annual bloggy cake.  Happy birthday, Bloggy!

Meanwhile, 2013 has been a wild ride for me so far.  The last several months in particular have been especially rough, but I've been getting through it and am making concerted efforts to try to stay happy and content despite the difficulties.  A good part of the difficulty has been in trying to find the right lens through which to view my accomplishments.  According to some of the qualitative metrics I've used in the past to gauge my achievements, I've been failing miserably.  But according to other, newer metrics, I'm experiencing a ton of personal and professional growth.  ("Remind me to tell you about that some time," he says yet again.)

I've never been great at work-life balance, but sometime in the last year, things got way off-kilter, and it's not been fun.  But although not all of my efforts to bring things back into an equilibrium have been successful, I'm still working on it.

Starting with a slice of bloggy cake.

Seven

Dearest Bloggy, despite my continual neglect, is seven years old today.  Per tradition, the annual bloggy cake has been baked and is now present for all to enjoy.

And now, also per tradition, the filler:

Today's been a somewhat eventful day, I guess.  A Monday this year, Bloggy's seventh birthday started out with the geekiness that was the UNIX timestamp hitting 1337000000 seconds since the epoch this morning at 08:53:20 EDT.  Then I went to work (which is another something I haven't really mentioned here (I should update this more often (so says he again, yet he never does (should I close all these parentheses now?)))) and attended the first day of my summer classes, before heading home.

Meanwhile, my cousin Laurel (if it even makes sense to refer to her with that link anymore) spent all day driving to Chicago where she starts her new job tomorrow after having graduated from Michigan State University back on 5 May.  Pretty cool!

I really don't have much of an excuse anymore.  I recently rejiggered my schedule specifically to allow myself more opportunities for non-directly-school-related things, since that is a large part of how I stay sane.  But for now, instead, you have to put up with this tripe which I put off to the last possible minute (literally) and hastily "finish" before midnight.

Watch this space.

Start on the Other Hand

Once again, it's mid-May. Whoa.

You see, six years ago today, I started this blog. That means it can't show you its age on one hand anymore...

It's also still worth mentioning that this blog still exists, I guess. I've got some ideas for what to write more of here, but they're all pretty radically different from the existing content. So we'll see if any of them actually come to fruition. (Hint: Probably not anytime soon, if ever.)

Anyway, tradition dictates that I bake a bloggy cake today, but since today was an awfully busy day, I did it after midnight last night. Which still counts. Totally.

It's perhaps worth noting that today was busy in the same way as the day I started this blog in that it was the day of the National Association of Letter Carriers' Stamp Out Hunger food drive, the second Saturday in May. Each year, I've volunteered to help the local food pantry take in all of the donations from the area, which usually amounts to about 2 tons of assorted food coming through the doors in 7 hours.

It's always fun and rewarding, but also somewhat exhausting. So that explains why my first post was so short and uninspired. And it explains why I'm finding it difficult to come up with more to write here now.

I guess I'll just loosely tie things together by saying that we saw various cake things at the food pantry today. But don't worry, for my dearest bloggy's sixth birthday, I baked this one fresh! Enjoy! And get used to counting on two hands...

Quinquennial

Has it really been five whole years since I started this humble blog?

The short answer is yes. Yes, it has.

A lot has happened in the last quinquennium... more than I can ever hope to have written about. And so, as I've done so faithfully in the past, I whipped up another Bloggy cake in celebration of this achievement.

That said, it wasn't that easy. It's getting harder and harder to find good clip art birthday cakes. Yes, I do have certain standards when it comes to selecting clip art cakes, the biggest being that it has to be workable with the black background of this blog (which, much like the title, I've been meaning to change for a long while, but I haven't yet found the motivation to come up with anything better).

And it has to be somewhat professional-looking. I mean, clip art is vectorized by definition. For some reason, people think that the things they draw with the "pencil" tool in Microsoft Paint qualify as "clip art." (Hint: They don't.) As far as I'm concerned, they're just drawings. And while some of them are very nice, many aren't... and in any case, they're not what I'm looking for.

Still, is it so much to ask that new and halfway decent clip art images of birthday cakes be uploaded to the web and make their way to the first 20 or so pages of Google's results at a minimum rate of one per year?

The short answer is yes. Apparently, it is.

Maybe in future, I'll actually use 14 May as an excuse to bake a real cake. But for now, this digital cake is my sincere thank you to the 1160 visitors this blog received during its fifth year. Yes, that's down 53%, but it's completely understandable as I've written 66% fewer posts with 71% fewer words[1]. In my defense, for much of the past twelve months, I've been a senior at university who has neither been traveling abroad nor attempting to blog every day (and even being way too busy to write every other day, let alone more than once in April).

But "I'm not dead yet... I'm getting better...," er, something like that.

Anyway, in addition to the admittedly contrived and self-centered celebration of five years of admittedly poor blogging, tonight I'll be celebrating my friend's 22nd birthday (which was yesterday), and on Sunday my home church will be celebrating its 175th anniversary... both are significant achievements, if you ask me.

Here's hoping I'll see you again soon... whether in person or in the blogosphere!

* * *
[1] I should note that these figures were somewhat hastily calculated/estimated (and obviously do not include this post). As such, they might be a tad off. But they're certainly close enough and I don't particularly care to go back and figure it out exactly.

Four Years

And now, for something completely different...

No, this post has nothing to do with China or my recent excursions there. Yes, I do plan on posting the happenings of our final day (and trust me, it was eventful).

There is something else that needs to be mentioned first, and that would be the fourth birthday of this very blog! That's right, it has been four full years since my extremely lame first post on "Randomness," which was really supposed to just be a temporary name for the blog... I still haven't come up with anything better.

Now, tradition states that I must bake a digital cake for dear old "Bloggy," and so I did, but not without some hangups. You see, I don't have Photoshop on my laptop. Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a problem, but the family computer at home has been having its own issues. To make a long story short, the OS was just reinstalled onto a newly wiped hard drive. So the really old version of Photoshop we had at home is no more.

So this evening, I quickly downloaded GIMP, installed it, and figured out enough about how to use it to cook up this yummy cake. All in about an hour. Pretty good, if you ask me!

Last year, I'd been lamenting having not written much. But this year, between a half-victorious BEDA and my trip to China, I've been blogging a lot. So leave some comments in celebration, and here's hoping that (within reason, of course) it continues!

I will be writing about our final day in China shortly, but to pass the time you can read my posts on past birthdays: 3, 2, and 1.

Bloggy Cake!

Egads! My blog, Randomness, is three years old! Yes, this very blog!

And, to celebrate, as has apparently become a bit of a tradition on this blog, I baked a delicious little bloggy cake. By which, of course, I mean I went to the computer lab, found some clip art, and then Photoshopped it a little.

The best part about bloggy cake is that it can be whatever flavor you like. It's digital, so it doesn't matter. Dig in!

It's hard to believe that for three whole years I've been here, sharing the nonsense that my life so often is. Personally, I'm proud that I've persevered for that long, as I've never been able to stay focused on a project for as long as this. I don't know what I envisioned when I wrote that first post in 2005, and I don't even know what I envision now for the future of this blog, but I really like what I'm doing here. It makes me happy.

Now, I acknowledge that I haven't written as much here as I would have liked to over the last few months. And that's understandable. Academics come first. However, I'd really like to get back into the habit of blogging more often. Even though this little exercise here is done for nothing but my own benefit, I have to remind myself that I do have an audience, and that they do care about my life, whether I write about it or not. In the past year, 2803 hits have proven that to me (down 11%, if you were wondering, like me; oh, well).

And so, to my blogging friends (many of whose blogs also turn 3 this summer), consider this a little nudge for you to continue blogging as well. Because I'm part of your audience, too, and I certainly care.

Here's to a wonderful fourth year of blogging...

Happy Birthday, Bloggy!

Yup. Randomness turned two years old today.

It's almost unbelievable that it's been two whole years, but when I think of all that's happened in my life since my first post, it makes a lot of sense. So in celebration of this wonderful day in the life of my precious "Bloggy," I've cooked up a little cyber-cake for everyone to enjoy. Dig in.

Now that people beyond my family actually read this regularly, it makes blogging more worthwhile, at least for me. Randomness received 59% more visits during its second year compared with its first. Not that readers are all that makes me blog (although each of you is special). But it definitely helps, since this is the longest-running journal-type thing I've ever had. Ever. And believe me, I had tried countless times before this. All it took was a little nudge to get me going, and a few more to keep me going. And it didn't even have anything to do with Laurel's blog, which is six days older in terms of the date of the first post.

Anyway, here I am, continuing the tradition of writing posts that have "nothing to do with anything," or at least very little. Honestly, go back and look at some of my posts from the first few months and see how much this blog has changed. There are reasons for some of the changes; others just happened. But I'm still here, and I intend to stay for quite some time.

And since it's my blog's birthday, it's about that time of year when everyone else's comes up, too. At least the original four of us: Andrea's blog will turn two on 03 June, and Jay's will on 18 June. Laurel's blog already passed the two-year mark since its first post on 08 May 2005, an anniversary that conveniently became Andrea Day in 2006. I wonder if anyone noticed that before... not that I'm accusing anyone of foul play, because I'm sure it was accidental. I mean, there're only so many days in a year...

So celebrate, because the birthdays of blogs in this somewhat close-knit circle means one thing: summer is near. And with summer could possibly come a rebirth to some blogs, no?

Looking forward to posts and comments in celebration...

Random tangent: Tuesday 15 May is the primary election here in Pennsylvania; I must remember to vote. Also, no word yet on the job front, but I'm definitely making some phone calls Tuesday.