♪Look at this site, so beaten and so battered♪

Neville/Ronstadt references aside, this place is looking kind of… old. The blog has weathered things better than the rest of the site (courtesy of a redesign in January 2006), but everything else looks like it was designed in an era of internet scarcity… probably because it was. (Just look at how small those pictures are!)

Furthermore, the rest of the site never really got going. And looking at things realistically, they never will. This blog singlehandedly sustains more neglect than any thing should ever have to suffer; there’s no need to spread more around.

In short, it’s high time for a redesign—and high time to officially kill off sections that have been implicitly dead for over half a decade. That said, I have no clear idea of where I want to take my design…. In the interim, I’ve collected a “best of” (better of) group of old sidebars, so I can drink alone and relive the glory of days past.

…

Speaking of the good ol’ days, I recently unearthed my original blog files. (!) (It’s hard to state how improbable this discovery was.) As a result, I am proud to present to you a screenshot of brent//BLOG v1.0: You Are (Not) Alone:

Manalive!

My Christmas was technically white, as a bit of snow fell during the day—only to immediately melt upon reaching the ground.

At Marin’s request, my dad and I carted a Christmas tree to the house; we never quite got around to decorating it fully, though, so it stands in my dining room festooned with jelly-bean-colored LED lights and wearing an Ikea silver star at a jaunty angle. (Its heart is in the right place.) Besides, my family’s favorite part of the tree is its smell—though, of course, this tree hasn’t been all that fragrant.

After significant cussing, I was able to put a string of white lights over my kitchen cabinetry; between that and the tree, we’ve been able to navigate the downstairs without additional light. The outside of my house is completely dark, where most of my neighbors managed to get some lights out—or, at the least, a wreath on the door.

So, uh, I declare this year a semi-Christmas. Next year we’ll do better!

Adding significantly to the chaos of the season has been two kittens that Marin adopted: Maaya, and the Rogue Pooper. Maaya is the black one:

We still need a name for the other, provided she doesn’t wear out her welcome by continuing to use my house as her litterbox.

If it’s not intuitively obvious (it was to me, but not to my sister): kittens are a PITA. Given how much work these two take—and that’s with them entertaining each other a good deal of the time—I have no idea why anyone ever has children.

…

I don’t think I’ve quite realized it yet, but I’ve finally gotten most of my life straightened out. My finances are in order; my paperwork is filed. I can now honestly say that I’ve saved some money this year. (Yay!) My server move is complete, and I’ve upgraded my computers to Leopard. They’re being backed up hourly to an external hard drive, courtesy of Time Machine, which is singlehandedly the greatest thing Apple’s done for its users in years. (Plug in an external drive, tell the computer to use it as a backup drive, and then ignore it—backing up has never been that easy.)

All that remains is putting away a bit more stuff around the house. Thank goodness.

Nobody’s out to get me. Everything is cool. It’s normal for graffiti like this to appear on the dumpster in the next lot over:

Right? (T_T)

At least ninety-five percent of the time my Wii is on, it’s turned to either the Everybody Votes channel or Wii-mail. (Andy’s girlfriend, Julie, has dubbed Wii-mail the Everybody Spams Channel—an apt title, at least for us.) I think I’m doing this Wii thing wrong.

Late-night humor at its finest:

…how did Brian know?

Gifts like this are what remind me of why Brian’s my friend after all these years. (It also reminds me that I owe him a Christmas present… but we won’t talk about that.)

I meant to post this… oh… sixteen days ago. I’m now just starting to get caught up enough with things to feel comfortable posting again. Woo.

Terrifyingly cute.

…but it is something that Charlie Brown might be proud of:

Humorous/horrifying note: the giant black cable you see plugged into the wall is, in fact, powering my Christmas tree’s lights.

In the midst of my Phoenix Wright binge, I managed to get sick. Knock-the-stuffing-outta-ya runny-nose sick. Not fun at all, but it gave me a decent excuse to continue playing instead of (say) going to work. Or updating my blog.

And now that my body seems to (finally!) have decided that it’s expelled everything it needs to, the rest of my life has started to spontaneously combust. I have lots of fires to put out. Does it matter that I’m still physically exhuasted? Nooooo!

…

Also: it’s frickin’ cold! (Am I a pansy? Yes.) What other vague, generic whining can I squeeze in here?

…

So, basically, I’m no longer sick but I have some other things to attend to before I can start spending time typing stuff about my lovely life. The good news is that I have to get some of this stuff done soon. The bad news is that it’s taken me this long, and I am a master procrastinator.

As a mildly humorous peek into how bad things really are, here’s my current news feed status (be sure to pay attention to what’s current, and what’s not):

My “anime” folder would be the equivalent of this blog. The other sites would be akin to paying bills, eating, and sleeping. Okay, maybe “sleeping” is more like the “anime” folder.

I look forward to the day when my anime-based RSS feeds are read and my blog is updated more than twice a month—for that will be the day when I’ve re-attained a semblance of balance in my life.