100th Customer

I took notice a while back that my post count had been creeping closer and closer to 100 blog posts, and I decided I'd use my 100th post to look back on some of the more important events in my life over the last two and a half years.  There's a lot to look at, that's for sure.

I lived by myself for the first time ever in my life when I had lived in Virginia.  I gotta say, it was quite an experience.  I always had either friends or family to come home to after work, but living on my own was eerily quiet at times.  It forced me to grow up quite a bit, mainly to teach me how to keep a fairly clean house, keep a budget, and how to cook.  I actually like cooking now, and I really dislike throwing a frozen pizza in the oven, barring laziness.

There are two other very important events in my life during my time in Virginia that I can't avoid talking about, those being my period of unemployment and my parents splitting for good.  The really tough part was that both events happened within a week of each other, which piled the stress on big time.  I can at least put a positive spin on my unemployment because it made me appreciate my friends and family in all sorts of new ways.  That was the time when I had to call in every favor I had in the book, and pray that one of those favors would pay off.  Fortunately it did, and that leads me to my next highlight.

My new job is just awesome.  I've wanted to work for the federal government going all the way back to my days in college, and I don't have to worry about being squeezed like I was at my old job.  It also led to me moving back to my old stomping grounds in Baltimore, so I could be around my closest friends, my family, and my niece a whole lot more.  My niece in particular is this glowing beam of sunshine who just makes everyone around her smile.  I went to visit my sister a couple weeks ago, and my niece is walking around the house, looking for new ways to get into trouble.  She even likes to play a version of hide and seek by tucking herself inside a storage cabinet at the base of my sister's dining room table.  She's a real blessing.

There's one more important event that I dare not omit talking about.  My girlfriend is someone really, really special.  I'm holding off talking about her and our history until we get to the six month mark, but that's mostly out of superstition.  We have a very long history going back 11 years (!!!!), and it's one of those stories that make my friends and family laugh when I tell them how we had first met.  Don't worry though; that post will be coming down the pipeline in due time.

I don't want to say anything terribly cliche like how I'm older and wiser than I was even two and a half years ago, but I know I'm not the same person.  I used to be a welcome mat and allow others walk all over top of me, and while I'm still fairly passive I'm not lacking in backbone as I used to be.  Getting well into your thirties will do that I suppose, but that's a benefit.  Overall, I have matured as an adult, and I don't feel like I sacrificed much of any fun like I did during most of my twenties.

So here's to the next 100 posts.  May they be filled with as much random thinking, nonsense, humor, and hopefully some deep thought as my previous 100 posts were.