Life

It's perverse, but I love days like this: it's cold, it's windy, it's overcast, it's drizzling—well, I could do without the drizzle, but man do I love the rest.

For one thing, fall has always been my favorite season. What kind of person doesn't like the changing colors, pumpkin pie, apple cider, Halloween, and my birthday?

But the other part is just missing home, for all values of home. I always loved fall in Buffalo when I was a kid (even if I didn't much care for the town the rest of the time), and these cold, windy days always remind me of Rochester. I mean, most of every school year there was cold and windy, so how could it not?

I want to make sure I get out of the house more and really enjoy the season this year. The past coupe have flown by so quickly, because I was so wrapped up in work and everything else. This year, I need to drag my butt out of the apartment more anyway: Erin and I have been holing up an unhealthy amount and really need to get out more anyway.

Unfortunately, it seems like everyone else had the same pan as me today: walk through the cold to get chilled a bit, then warm up in and read in a cozy coffee shop. Every one I checked was packed, so wound up at the cigar bar instead. Still pretty cozy, but not great for reading. 

In my free time, when I'm not watching TV shows or movies—neither of which really count as hobbies—I'm typically reading about, writing about, trying out, or developing (or at the very least, thinking about) web software.

I'm not even sure what my last hobby was. When I was a kid, I read books. I used to ride my bike two and a half miles to the library all the time, taking a backpack full of books each way. In my early teens, I played with model rockets for a few years. There were a number of short-lived collections in there—stamps and coins are the ones that stick out—but that was about it before I got my hands on computers. What started as a hobby well over a decade ago became a career, but has remained a hobby to some extent.

The problem with doing your hobby for a living is that it gets a lot less fun. When you combine that with the fact that I work from home—and thus, rarely leave the house—I've been seriously burned out the past couple weeks.

I'm making a conscious effort to get out of the house more, but I'm also trying to ween myself off of the computer in the evenings. I wasn't always online every waking moment, so I'm sure it's still possible to live that way, right? I've been spending more time with my Kindle and the stack of magazines that have been piling up, but at some point, I need to figure out what it is that I'd like to do with myself while I'm away from the computer.

Because Erin and I are an old married couple, we prefer to do Valentine's Day at home without the circus that surrounds every decent restaurant on the night of. And, since Schmitty's parents raise rabbits and we had a few of them in the freezer, Erin found a recipe for vegetable paella with chorizo and rabbit.

I honestly don't know how Schmitty's parents can kill and skin cute little bunnies, but I'm glad it was them doing it because I am a wimp. The rabbits came to us headless, limbless, skinless, and organless, so all I needed to do was cut the meat off the bones. This turned out to be more difficult than I thought it would be, and I'm sure an experienced chef would have pulled way more meat off that carcass than I managed to. I also made the mistake of buying brown rice, which (apparently) takes a lot longer to cook than white rice, so the final stages of the recipe required a little extra time. Nonetheless, the paella was delicious, and I really wish I had taken a photo of it before we ate, because it actually looked like proper paella.

I topped it off with fresh-baked dinner rolls, and one of Erin's favorite desserts: strawberry Jello pie. Despite cutting my finger while slicing strawberries, burning my arm putting rolls in the oven, and that brown rice situation, it all came out pretty great!

A couple important-to-me milestones are looming on the horizon. Late November marks five years since I finished college and moved to DC. But before that, I'll turn 27 in October.

Both make me stop and think. Five years out of college isn't an important milestone, but I tend to look at things from both directions. For example, I left RIT five years ago. I like to compare that timeframe with the same amount of time before that. So, five years before leaving RIT (and thus, ten years before this November), I was just a couple months into my senior year of high school. When I compare where I was in my life then, in high school, to where I was five years later as I left RIT, there's a world of difference. But in the same period of time on the other side of that placeholder in history - the five years since - I don't feel that I have progressed as much. Sure, I've grown personally, emotionally, and professionally, but I can't help but feel like I should be further along somehow.

I spent the summer before college working at Burger King. That's another good marker on my timeline, because going off to college gave me the chance to change who I was a bit and re-invent myself into the person that I wished I could have been in high school. That was nine years ago now. Even though I worked there less than a year, I still remember a lot of the friends I made there better than people I knew a lot longer in college. But I digress: that was nine years ago. Nine years before that, I was eight years old, probably running around the front yard playing Comic Nintendo (an invented game wherein we pretended to be Mega Man, Spider Man, an other comic and Nintendo characters). Growth from Comic Nintendo to Burger King? Huge. Growth from Burger King to now? Also huge, but I feel that almost all of that growth took place in the first half of that time period, during my college career.

Anyway, I've strayed from my original two points, the second of which was my looming twenty-seventh birthday. 27 isn't usually an important birthday; once you pass 21, the decades are the only ones most people care about (30, 40, and so on). When I was about twelve, though, I decided that 27 was going to be the best age to be, because I would be old enough to do whatever I wanted to, but still young. 27 was, thus, my favorite number.

So, next year has much to live up to. Twelve year-old Brock already decided that it would be my best year, and twenty six year-old Brock has decided that things have stalled a bit. There is great distance to be covered, but first I feel that I need to orient myself and make sure I know where it is I'm trying to get to. I'm not exactly sure how to go about doing that, but I have two months to figure it out before my birthday.

It's hard to believe that Erin and I celebrated our six-mothiversary last week. We were married on September 19 near her parents' home outside Detroit, Michigan. It's almost surreal to look back on it now: after spending 18 months planning and preparing for the biggest day of your life, it's a little disorienting when the day comes, and just like that, it's over and behind you and holy crap, has it been six months already? I've been writing and editing and re-writing and re-editing this post ever since, but I've come to realize that I can't possibly write every thing about it that I might like to, so this little re-cap will just have to suffice.

So, to start: it was a beautiful and amazing day. We had an outdoor ceremony and totally lucked out on the weather - it was perfect. There was a lot we didn't do the traditional route - like the whole thing where you're not supposed to see each other before the ceremony. We slept in the same bed (with the dog!) the night before, and did photos before the ceremony. Our photographer insisted that I not see her while she was getting ready so she could get some shots when I first saw her in her dress all ready to go, and I'm glad she did because Erin looked incredible. We took some photos at the house, at a couple locations downtown in Detroit and a park before going to the reception hall for a few more pre-ceremony photos. Thankfully, we got half an hour or so to try to calm each other down before the actual ceremony.

The ceremony itself went by pretty quick. It was about two months later when we got the video, and there was a lot of "I don't even remember that, I was so nervous," and, "Did I really keep kissing you when I wasn't supposed to?" Aside from an errant golf ball from the country club next door (it landed pretty close to the bridesmaid, Angie, during a reading by the maid of honor, Erin's sister Meghan), it went smoothly according to plan. And then we had a big party.

It's kind of hard to say much more than that. We agreed a long time ago that we weren't going to let ourselves get stressed out on the big day, because you only get one chance to enjoy it and we were going to do just that. And it was an absolute blast, between the pictures and the party and the pirate outfits (it was Talk Like A Pirate Day, after all, so Meghan picked up some pirate gear for some photos). It was an exhausting day, but a whole lot of fun, and we got incredibly lucky that the weather was great, that people had fun, that the vendors we worked with were all incredible, and that nothing really went wrong. Well, except for that golf ball, but no one was hurt, we kept the ball, and it makes for a good story.

A couple days after the wedding, we came home to DC for a week before our honeymoon: a Caribbean cruise out of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Neither of us had ever been on a cruise, and I hadn't been out of the country any further than Toronto, so it was really exciting. The ship was amazing - just freakin' enormous, with shops and restaurants and a Ben & Jerry's and an ice rink and two pools, and seriously, I still can't believe how big those ships are. We hit five islands over the course of the week-long trip:

• Barbados: Went snorkeling with sea turtles. Erin touched one, and accidentally kicked another one in the head, and I came home with a bright red back because I foolishly believed that we wouldn't be in the sun that long and didn't bother with sun block.
• St. Lucia: Our favorite of the islands. They seem to be making a big push to increase their tourist appeal, because everyone there was really friendly and encouraged us to come back and spend more time on the island (without being pushy like people on some of the other islands). We spent the day doing a bus tour of the island and a nature hike to a mineral spring and waterfall.
• Antigua: Our excursion here was a boat ride, kayaking, and more snorkeling, and met a parrot named Sweet Pea. I'm not going to lie though, this place wasn't too appealing. We had to get past scores of pushy taxi drivers just to visit the stores and shops that were just outside the port area, and it was definitely the dirtiest of the islands (and yes, I'm well aware that these islands are all pretty poor and rely on tourism for a good deal of money, which makes it all the more surprising that they don't do more to clean up the town with the port).
• St. Maarten: This excursion was one of my favorites: an ATV tour of the island, with a stop at a beach in the middle. I expected an ATV ride through a forest or something, but no, it was just a line of about twenty four-wheelers tooling down the main road for like half an hour. But it was a cool way to see the island, and we did do some off-roading. We spent about an hour on the beach, and the tour guide just plopped down on a bench and lit himself a joint right there.
• St. Croix: For the final day of the cruise, we got a couple's massage on the beach. Erin found a couple that will meet you somewhere for a massage, so we agreed to meet them on the beach at this resort. I was a little nervous because we paid ahead of time and couldn't really do anything about it if we couldn't find them, but they were all set up on the beach waiting for us when we got there (along with their part-Shepherd Chihuahua, Goliath). The massage was a great way to end the cruise, and we got one last swim in the Caribbean. If you ever make travel plans to St. Croix, do yourself a favor and get in touch with Ambrosia Body Care.

And now, it's six months later, and I'm in that weird position where it feels like it just happened but also feels so far away at the same time. This is part of the reason that it's taken me so long to post anything about the wedding: it feels like it just happened, it seems like it was over so quick, and it feels like there's just so much to say about it that I couldn't fathom boiling it down without losing so much of it. So, if I may offer a summary:

I married an amazing lady and enjoyed a week in the Caribbean with her, and now I get to spend my whole life with her. Pretty rad, amiright?