Poppa Tomato, Momma Tomato, and Baby Tomato....

I started off my blog year like my ass was shot out of a cannon.  Two posts in the first three days of 2015?  Whoa, son....slow your roll!  Alright, done.  Blink, it's two months later....and not another post since.  Quick update:  The Lions didn't win the Super Bowl (New England did) and as a matter of fact, they didn't even win a playoff game.  Still only one postseason win in my lifetime.  Some other stuff happened too, but that's what my Instagram feed is for.  If it's thoughts or mindless babbling, then it goes here.  If it's something quick and notable that I can use a picture to help explain, it goes there....especially since I need to get at least one pic every day up there.

I guess that part is noteworthy.  I started seriously doing a picture a day challenge on Instagram on my birthday two years ago.  I've stuck with it and taken at least one picture every day, but I did mess up a couple times and didn't post the pic.  I rarely post the pics immediately after taking them, so the posts might not go up for a day or two, or even longer.  As a matter of fact, I'm a little over a week behind at the moment, and hope to get that updated later this morning.  I fell more than a month behind early this year, and have since updated all those.  I found a way to note all the pics where I won't mess it up now, which is really two-sided for me.  On one side, I don't worry about forgetting what pic is for what day and know I'll be able to keep track of it as long as I need.  On the other side, I have a little less urgency to get the pics up, so I fall behind more often.

On a somewhat related topic, Instagram, and my pic a day challenge there, is a big reason my blog posts are so infrequent nowadays.  With Twitter, Facebook, and the Gram there are a lot more places to share different things, all in the palm of my hand with my phone.  Add to that the limits imposed on what I can see/hear/do nowadays with my crazy work schedule, and another super cold and snowy winter....and there's really not much to say here, or time to say it.  It's somewhat disappointing that this blog is on life support now, but things are constantly changing in this world, especially where technology is concerned, and leads to situations like this.

While it's on life support, I doubt this blog will ever completely die....at least not in the foreseeable future.  I'll always have something churning upstairs, and will need an outlet for it from time to time.  If that need arises while I have a quiet moment to just bang away at my keyboard, it's probably going to end up here.  And, of course, there will always be the periods of time I try and MAKE myself get some posts up on a relatively consistent basis....but, then again, I'm someone who hasn't been able to remember to cut my fingernails the last three days.  And those are always well within my grasp....at my fingertips, even.

One thing I will try my damndest to blog about this year will be our anniversary trip in June.  We did pretty well documenting last year's trip through pictures, but I think if I took 15-20 minutes at the end of each day to write about what we did that day, it would add another level to our memories of the trip....and I want to remember as much as possible about the trip.  These places very well could be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and getting something down on paper about it while it's still fresh will really be nice.  Even with how tired I was at the end of most of the days during our last trip, I can still identify plenty of days where I could have typed something up about what we did or saw and added that to our other forms of documentation.  Oh well....live and learn.

Hopefully, I will be back here sooner rather than later to make another post....one that will undoubtedly be infinitely more interesting than this one, but I obviously have no idea how this all goes anymore.  At least for now, I have gotten to....ketchup.

The Slant to Calvin is Always Open

If we're only ever looking back
We will drive ourselves insane
As the friendship goes resentment grows
We will walk our different ways
-Bad Blood, Bastille

Heard this today, and it stuck in my head for some reason.  I've got no bad blood for anyone or anything at the moment, as a matter of fact just the opposite, but it stuck with me.  I've actually learned the hard way that harboring bad blood can have some pretty terrible effects down the road.  I lost a really good friend brooding over some stupid shit as a young teenager.  It's one of the few things in my life I regret, and I know it's had a lasting impact on my life.  I never had an easy time making or keeping friends as a kid.  I was a bit of a shit, in a much different way than I am today, and friends were kinda disposable to me for a very long time.  The world was a much smaller place back then, and the friends made at school would still be around to try and rekindle a friendship with if I did in fact dispose of my friendship for one reason or another.

Anyway, that wasn't a tangent I was planning on going off on....nor am I ready to follow through with where it was going to go.  Maybe sometime soon I will be in the mood to talk about it, but not today.  Now, it's not like I had an actual plan of anything to talk about today, but that is surely not where this post is going to go.  Instead, I will slant it toward the football.

Wild Card Weekend starts today, and this is yet another year I'll be stuck at work when the first game starts.  However, unlike the last few years, I won't be able to watch any of it while at work, unless I leave our office.  Our cable is out, and will be for at least a few days, and even though it's usually just on a news station in the background, except for game days, I've come to learn just how eerily quite this office is on the weekend without it.  Luckily, I've now got Sundays off and can check out the Lions @ Dallas tomorrow from the comfort of home, while eating Primo's pizza and hanging out with some friends. 

I'll also get to watch all of the Baltimore/Pittsburgh game tonight as we cheer on the Ravens.  While she says she doesn't care much about them this year, it's always fun to watch my wife during a Ravens game, especially in the playoffs.  While I get a little shit here and there from her about how into football I am, it's quite obvious that watching her favorite team play in big games is a lot like when I watch either of my teams....except her team has actually won a couple Super Bowls in the 2000s, something I cannot say. 

While the football will be nice, just getting away from work for a few days will be nice.  There hasn't been much work to do the last couple weeks because of the holidays, but I've still had some pretty long days, and I'm still not completely adjusted to my new schedule.  While it gives me Sundays off and my weekend now spans 3.5 days, it's hard getting all my hours in within such a short period of time.  When I leave here on Saturday evenings, I feel a huge weight fall from my shoulders.  It'll surely be that way here in a few hours.

Time to end the rambling of the day and finish up my thing.  It's not a perfect thing, but there is now a thing where there was not a thing before.

Happy 2015!

It's not often I find myself here anymore, as illustrated by my lack of posting in the last 7 (nearly 8) months, but today I've found myself back inside my blog.  I don't have a point to make, nor a topic of discussion I want to get out there.  I just wanted to "make a thing", and here I am making that thing.  I used the quotes there because it's something I heard Wil Wheaton say that during his reboot of his podcast, Radio Free Burrito.  That, along with the current book I am reading (The Obstacle is the Way) and the fact that I have had a very distracted day today, led me to this post.  Now, since I used 3 separate links in the last two sentences, you know I'm serious about getting the info out there....even in my distracted haze.  That haze is pretty evident looking at how I switched from using a number (3) to typing it out (two) in the span of 7 words in my last sentence.  That's something I'm normally very mindful of, especially when the words/numbers are so close together.

Hey, whatever.  The point here is that I am making this post at all.  A single post on the second day of the year puts me at 50% for 2015 so far....and after 31 posts in the last 3 calendar years, that percentage is pretty outstanding.  Of course that percentage will fall between now and the end of 2015, for all I know this could be my only post of the year, but I got a kick out of it for at least a couple minutes. 

Now, while I was definitely putting in some more effort than I would in a normal post to include the above links, I did cheat a little with the picture this time around.  I normally would write out the post, then think of a title that fits what I just wrote, sometimes vice versa....but not often, and then do a google image search for what I'm using as the title, and pick the picture I like the best.  It might have absolutely nothing to do with the post, but for one reason or another I really like the image I use at that time.  Today, I just used the pic that I currently have set as my facebook banner.  Yep, I'm getting crazy with the Cheese Whiz. 

I know that Nick Saban would be disappointed in the fact that I didn't follow The Process, but after his loss last night to that team from Ohio, he's got plenty more to worry about with his Process than with mine.  I'm kinda disappointed that I didn't get to see any of the game last night, but the outcome alone, knowing that they won with a 3rd string QB to punch their ticket for the National Championship Game, just goes to show how effing good Urban Meyer is at building a team.  It's something that brings to my mind a scenario involving Nick Saban and a bunch of 'what ifs' that I've thought about a few times in the last few months or so, but haven't talked to anyone about just yet.  I think this might be a good idea for my next post, since I'm running out of time for this one and could always use some incentive to create a little more than I currently do....although that's not too hard at this point in time.  No matter.  This is where I leave it now.

Happy New Year, Douchebags.