Thursday, November 10, 2005

One Year Ago...

Yeah I just posted something similar, but I did start this blog shortly after my birthday last year, so you will all have to suffer some of my wistful remembrances.

I figured the one-year mark was as good a time as any to change up the look here at your Friendly Neighborhood Blog o' Stuff. I was getting a little bit bored with the orange and white and felt like going for something blue.

So what has happened since I began this thing last year? Probably the biggest was buying/moving into a new house and selling our townhouse. This provided a great deal of stress to lives of Mr. Blog o' Stuff and myself, as selling a house without a realtor, whilst cheaper, is somewhat frustrating. Still, I like the idea of not having to pay a realtor thousands of dollars for something I can do myself. That took up a couple months of my life and after putting a nice amount of work into the new house to bring it up from repair work to simply maintenance work, Mrs. Blog o' Stuff and I are growing much more comfortable with the idea of this being our home. As if on cue, I received a call from informing me the tax assessor came for her scheduled visit.

We had some very good memories of our first 5 years of marriage in the townhouse. We shared our first Christmas there, after all. As much as we wanted a house with land, it was still a little sad to leave a place with five years of memories.

My parents also moved, too. They just moved to the other side of town. This was odd for me, since the house they moved out of was pretty much the house in which I grew up. My parents bought the house when I was 3, and I lived there up until I married Mrs. Blog o' Stuff at the age of 25. Sure, I spent 4 years on and off living in New Brunswick, but this was the home where I grew up. Still, it is odd for my parents to be in a different house than the one they were in for 30 years and I don't think I'll ever drive down their old street. I don't think I want to see how the new people there changed it.

SFFWorld has continued to grow, with the expansion of our forums to include the OFFICIAL forums of several authors. (Gary Wassner, R. Scott Bakker, Matthew Stover, Steve Savile, Madeline Howard, Caitlin Sweet, Kevin Radthorne, Alison Croggon, Richard Tuttle, Samit Basu, Glenda Larke, Marienne de Pierres, Richard Harland) We recently started expanding our coverage, on the Web site as a whole, to encompass graphic novels and comic books. People in the world of FSF are beginning to take notice of our presence, I'd like to think, especially with more blurbs of our reviews appearing on or in published books.

The Yankees failed to make it to the World Series again, the NHL returned, and it looks like my alma mater may actually make it into a Bowl Game for the first time in many, many years.

Lastly, I suppose this is a mild case of serendipity, the Web site for Superman Returns went live yesterday.

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