Happy New Year!

Just wanted to wish everyone a happy new year. May 2008 be a great year for everyone. I’ve not made any resolutions this year, yet. We’ll see.

New Years Eve was fun. My old college roommate Charlie was in town with his girlfriend Lauren. He had some people over and it was good to catch up with both of them. Made me realize how much I miss college and hanging out with the group of people that I used to be close with. Charlie is hopping around the country in a Med School program. Lauren is still in Springfield, but the rest of my friends from college are spread around the country, most being in Kansas City, but some in Chicago. For those still in college, don’t take these years for granted. You’ll meet some great people while you’re there and will miss them when you part ways. Enjoy it while you can. Live those moments to the fullest.

Someone in the Habari IRC channel said this today and I think it’s perfect, so I’ll say it again here:

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

Gifts Galore

Well, Christmas has come and gone. It was a good one. I was given seasons 4-7 of The West Wing. I love this show so much. It’s such a smart, funny, well-acted show. I also got a bunch of Best Buy gift cards. I spent those today when I went to buy an external hard drive. I got a 500gb MyBook. I reformatted it and partitioned it so both the pc and the Mac can use it. The Mac partition will be used with Time Machine. My Christmas prank on my sister was great. She got me good as well and gave me this really cool picture of the first pitch on opening day of the first Cardinals game at the new Busch Stadium. It’s very cool. Can’t wait to hang it somewhere. My other sister got me a cool Cardinals baseball (well, it was from my nephew) and the Wii Zapper which I am using to play Medal of Honor: Heroes 2 and, of course, Link’s Crossbow Training. It was a great Christmas. I hope everyone else had a great holiday as well.

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Traffic Spike

These past few days I’ve had a huge influx of traffic. The reason behind it is someone stumbled upon an article I posted back in 2005 and liked it and thus it was shared with thousands upon thousands of people around the internet. On Tuesday I had about 900 visits, Wednesday went up to 7,110, and today so far I’m at 2,243 and it’s not even 9 am. WordPress is known for not handling large traffic spikes, especially on shared hosting (which is what I’m on). Luckily, after Tuesday’s small influx to 900 visits I decided to download and enable WP Super Cache. It has worked quite well and my site has been loading fast and the server seems to be handling all the traffic quite well. So, we shall see how long this traffic spike will last and how the shared hosting of HostGator handles it.

Twas the Week Before Christmas

and all through the school, kid after kid were acting a fool. The teachers were grumpy and pulling their hair, with the hopes that winter break soon would be there. Today I had to remove a kid from ISS. He couldn’t control himself any longer. On top of that, I also received four new visitors today. The teachers are giving me early Christmas gifts it seems. Or should I say they are giving themselves early Christmas gifts? The n00bs are actually working and aren’t talking, so that’s good. What’s also good is that tomorrow I lose three of my more talkative kids. I have no doubt that their vacant seats will be filled by the end of the week. The excitement of Christmas and two weeks off is building in these young kids and they just can’t control themselves. One of my favorite sayings is The sweet just isn’t as sweet without the sour, because without the sour you really don’t know what sweet is. I love this quote and it strikes true for this week. This is a sour week, but it’s going to make my break that much sweeter.

(the second line in the poem was written by Trix)

Holiday Parties

This weekend was a busy weekend. Friday night was happy hour with people from work. A couple people who don’t usually show up came out and it was fun. I really enjoy the people I work with, even though I never get to see them throughout the day. I’m with the kids from 7:15 until 2:15 without a break. I eat lunch with the kids in the classroom. I never deal with any teachers. The only people I deal with on a regular basis are the hall monitors and the lunch ladies. Needless to say, I really enjoy happy hour as it gives me time to really get to know my fellow co-workers.

After happy hour on Friday I went to my sister Lisa’s party. Her and Kevin were having people over to show off the new floor and the wall they knocked down in the entryway. It looks really nice. They had quite a few people stop by their place to check it out, as well as enjoy some tasty food (except the meatballs), beer, and friendships.

I woke up on Saturday to about four inches of snow. For once the weather people were right. It snowed off and on all day. Why couldn’t this happen during the week so we can have a snow day? I would really like one right about now. The snow did put some extra stress on the day as we had plans to go to my Grandma’s house for her holiday party. We made it out there, but it took about an hour longer than it should have because it was snowing heavily again and the roads weren’t in the best shape. Coming home was even worse since it snowed another two or three inches while we were at the party. None of the roads looked like they were plowed recently. It wasn’t until we made it back into St. Peters that we experienced decent roads. Good job St. Pete! Anyway, I had fun at my Grandparent’s place. There’s some pictures on my Flickr page if you want to check them out. No, we weren’t opening Christmas gifts. We did a white elephant thing and all the gifts were items from our homes.