I have not had Superman Ice Cream since I was six

This has been a wicked summer, and I think it fittingly ends with a thud on a cloudy, rainy, devoid of plans Labour Day (for you Canadians). I really cannot top canoe trips with old friends, family visits to Baltimore, baseball games that seem to last weekends, parties in Vegas, ocean side relaxation. This was a standard I only wish I could keep.

It has been one year this week since I arrived in the big crab cake from the metro city. My life in a way is what I always wanted and dreamed of as I grew up and slept through college. I work a job that honestly makes time fly and makes me think. I actually find myself pondering it away from work now, which isn’t a bad thing. In my time off, I do all a 20-something male is ever accused of wanting to do; play lots of hockey, go to the gym, go to the bar, and attempt to get my Xbox gamerscore to catch Bill’s. It is a state of perpetual bliss now that if left unattended will recycle itself over the coming years with marginal ease.

Achieving goals one had spent the better part of a decade attempting to obtain always brings about thoughts and reflections of how, why, and if the goals accomplished what they were supposed to in your greater plan of things; if there was one. For me, I see this as an eye of the hurricane moment. I dragged myself through college and grad school and into massive debt most do not know at this age, but I got where I wanted. Through all of that work and all of the impending unemployment conversations I had, a sense of peace pervaded as I knew I would get here, and so here I am. Now I sit waiting. Now I must decide what happens for the next decade and more importantly, the next quarter century.

I find myself with the goals of a middle aged family man oddly enough. I desire a home, a wife, maybe a little Jackson Lee James (as I have already dubbed him). These are no where near my tasks for this upcoming year or years, but long term goals my compass has set its sights on.

Those will be goals which will throw life into continued chaos again, until that blissful day I may retire; if I even choose to. For now I can sit and play, relax, recharge, and enjoy my idle pond mindset. Sure enough there is a giant loogie lofted in my direction that will create a wake that takes all my stored energy to attend to.

Tracks only wash away in the sand

I love media integration. Web 2.0 is one of the best things I have ever experienced in my life. My blog is the perfect example of this. I am a very OCD kind of person. My CDs are all alphabetized at home, my apartment is usually in a very clean state, and I want to have one (albeit wide) footprint on the internet. I want everything I do to mesh cohesively together. Take a look around.

I have a couple links to the fantasy sports leagues I run and play. I have links to mine as well as all the rest of the 3B guy’s Xbox Live tags. I post my Last FM music tracker. The only things I don’t have integrated are my Facebook and MySpace. The Facebook I toy with adding here, they have a widget much like Xbox has, but as of yet I don’t feel like throwing my full name and social network out there on this, dunno why. On the flip side, this blog is fully hooked into my Facebook, allowing the blog posts to upload automatically to it as well as linking to the blog directly.

This all brings to mind just how rapid a footprint can grow. I started to explain to my Mom over my trip home last weekend that spam can be battled by creating alternate e-mail addresses you never check for things like one time deals and Coke reward points. And that just brings up such a massively important point; your internet footprint is huge.

When I think of everything I’ve been a part of, the list goes on… Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo, Live journal, Absolute Punk, Amazon, Ebay, Gawker net, Last FM, Xbox, ect… Now most of these are defunct and I avoid their begging me to rejoin like the plague, but for those I remain active in, you always feel that anything you do should be relevant to everything you do, no doubt? So the ability of web 2.0 to integrate different internet worlds together through widgets and badges, well that kind of makes the interwebbed world a small place; the same way the internet made the real world a smaller place.

Now the inner OCD in me just has to battle the compulsion to preserve everything I ever create. I still have my earlier web pages saved in a combined 5 MB zip file somewhere in the heart of my computer. This blog? I want to publish it into a table top book so that I may keep it safe if something happens to the internet. The funny thing is, the more I think about preserving footprints and legacies like that, the more I feel it fruitless because after you die, what’s the point? Ah yes, that brings on the next step in my journey, conquering my mortality. It has been suggested I read the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Who has thoughts?

Ode to frequent flier miles

I have not sculpted the thoughts in my mind into word form in quite some time now. What can I say? She has been a busy busy summer. I truly have had a great and blessed one. Friends coming down to see me, family coming to visit, Tigers baseball in Camden, trips to the ocean and camping. All of it has been masterful fun and produced more than a few memorable pics to hold onto. No the giant floating duck is not one of them, but I liked it so there he sits.

This past weekend I did one of the more spontaneous and ridiculous things I have ever attempted in travel. At 3pm Friday afternoon I decided I was going to suck it up and make it home for a very special engagement party I needed to be in. That party was in like 4 fours, and I was still in Baltimore. Well I bought a ticket, rented a car (love teh inets) and hightailed it to BWI. I made it home to Detroit by 730p and found out that hey, that special party is NEXT weekend.

Well that kind of thing does not deter my spirit! Oh no, for my Mother and Brother whom were enjoying a beautiful weekend at the house in Ludington, had no clue I was in the state, let alone venturing through the night in a lil PT cruiser to come see them. Needless to say they were surprised as I walked through the door and a good time was had by all as I stayed for a short weekend.

You and yours? I hope you are well. Me and mine? Well.. me… I going to get lunch…