This has been a really good weekend, and I've done nothing but play squash, do chores, practice dancing, and sit down on the carpet and play Magic the Nerding with friends. Bay and I are ever more busy with wedding preparations, so it feels good to be able to spend a day to sit down and hammer many of those details down. I've done a bunch of other boring shit as well, none of which makes for interesting blogging, as I'm discovering reading back through this paragraph..

I had a good dance session with Steve and Graham this Sunday morning, and that got me revved up and ready to go for the rest of the weekend. Most of the footage that we captured this time around was really dull. Watching someone practice variations of one particular technique over and over is lame, and all watching that really accomplishes is letting people understand that dancing, like anything, requires time and effort to improve upon.

However, Graham has been missing in action from the dancefloor for the past millennium or so, so it's good to see him come out and throw down some moves with us. I'll be editing some footage tonight or during the week, and hopefully I'll have something worthy of putting up by the time the beer festival rolls around (after which I will be completely out of commission until Christmas-ish).

One of the things that is on my "to-do" list now is to go through this blog and give it a little re-vitalization. This sort of thing takes a while for me to actually work up the energy to tackle, but there's one thing in particular that has been nagging me - the archived entries.

When I first started blogging, it was me writing for a very select audience. I passed the esoteric link (at the time, http://fresh.ath.cx/~adam/blog) around to my small group of my friends, and then just continued to write. If people checked it out, that was cool, but I mostly wrote because I made myself laugh. If you go back and look over the old entries, you can pick up on this. Lots of the jokes are sophomoric (that means low-brow, pretty much), but they had enough of my own angle to them that re-reading many of them still gets me giggling. (Can guys get away with giggling, or do we need to chortle?)

Whenever I say something that is meant to be funny, the one rule I abide by is that it makes me laugh. If no one else laughs, then that makes for a slightly awkward situation, but I can't second-guess the way every person I talk to is going to react to me, or the kind of sense of humour that they have. The only thing I can rely on is that I make myself laugh, and, apparently, a lot of other people agree with what I find humorous.

Anyhow, there are a lot of people out there with a great sense of humour, but far more out there with a sense of humour that competes with that of a carrot. I'm not worried about the people with a sense of humour. They may (or may not) go back through my archives, laugh at a couple of entries that I've written, turn their nose up at points when it gets crude, and understand what I was doing. However, the carrots are not so easy to deal with.

My cat literally just spilled beer across my whole computer desk.. So long thirty minutes spent cleaning.. If this cat wasn't so damn cute I would teach him the hard way how to correctly execute the move called cat suplex of doom.

Anyhow, the carrots - those guys (and girls) are the reason that I can't just leave everything wide in the open.

The thing is, I've left my archives fully accesible for the entirety of my blog's existence. I'm not ashamed of how I used to be, who I am currently, nor who I will be as I continue to grow. I'm proud of who I am, and I can look back on the highs and lows of my past years and think "Hey, if it all lead to where I am now, I must have been doing some things right" (as I clean beer off of my computer desk and notice that my printer now prints in "Sticky", rather than "Portrait" or "Landscape" modes).

I like leaving my archives there because they give me, as well as other people, an opportunity to look back and see how I've changed, grown, and, perhaps most importantly, stayed the same. Acting like the past didn't happen, or didn't shape who we are now is a guaranteed way to ensure that we minimize the wisdom that we can gain as we age. I'm all about gaining wisdom (seriously, I would be an awesome paladin or cleric - anyone need some buffs?).

But the carrots.. Damn those carrots! One day, I'll be applying for a job, and one of those damn carrots will think "Hey, maybe I'll Google this joker and see what comes up". They find my site, look through a couple of the archives, and decide that Korglied War Robots isn't the right fit for me.

Anyhow, the best compromise that I can think of is to relegate the archives off to a link. If people want to go back and look through them, I don't want to stop that. Like I said, I think it's important to acknowledge our past and what we've become - however, by moving this off to a separate link, it at least requires a little bit of effort to track them down, and maybe in doing so, they get a chance to read about the person that I currently am.

And I guess this brings me back to one of the main reasons I keep incessantly spouting off into the digital web-a-tron - it keeps reminding me that I'm learning. Squash, dancing, reading, marriage, friendships - these are all things that I do first and foremost because they help me learn and develop. In practicing each of these things, I gain wisdom and knowledge, and better myself as a person. But, in the process of learning, there are peaks and troughs, and sometimes, those troughs are pretty damn deep. Having a reference to look back upon is a good way for me to re-calibrate myself and go "Wow, I'm a fricking genius."

Oh shit, I just spilled beer again...