Marvelous March

Alright, alright, alright… you can close your mouths and overcome your shocked astonishment at the re-emergence of my blog.  I do appreciate the support from folks to pick up my keyboard and dive back into writing.  It’s just tough at times… Maybe the best analogy is: writing an entertaining blog post is like the scene in Wedding Crashers where the little kid demands Vince Vaughn make him a bicycle out of balloons.

“Make me a bicycle, clown!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llA81OKUuN0

But the good new is that I did find my motivation, even if it was in the most unlikely place.  I was inspired to write now versus holding off a bit longer to increase the suspense and really craft an amazing blog.  My mom is hosting a baby shower for one of my cousins this weekend and I got the impression that is getting a little tired of trying to explain to my extended “relies” (for my ESL homies, “relies” is short for relatives) why I haven’t updated my blog recently.  Regardless, I am back with a variety of stories from good to bad; from a classic to a fad; and from funny to …err… funnier.

 

Marvelous March!

I had to invent my own scale to assess how amazing March was.  Simply put, March was three Shamrock shakes out of possible 3 Shamrock Shakes.

Yes.  Those are the three shamrock shakes I enjoyed over the month of March.  I wish I could have had more but after doing Whole30 in February my body had strong opinions about dairy (though, Adrian was quick to point out that there probably isn’t a lot of dairy in McDonald’s milkshakes!).   Regardless, my Shamrock Experience was less enjoyable than years past.  Typically,  I’d have half of the Shamrock Shake and then my stomach would put me in “Shamrock timeout” where I had to lay on the ground and think about what I did.  Regardless, I still love them!

Why was March so Shamrock-ing? There is no way I can pack all of the amazing stories into this one blog, but I’ll hit a couple highlights .

Birthday Celebration – ­After a relatively chill weekend to celebrate my 31^st birthday, I decided to organize and host an epic 32^nd celebration.  Between a big night of dining and dancing on Friday, an emotional, hockey-filled viewing of Miracle on Saturday, and a series of gladiatorial dodge ball sessions at the House of Air on Sunday … it was rewarding and exhausting.  I am not sure when or why, but there is an odd inflection point where things that are awesome when you are a kid become awesome again when you are an adult (specifically, dodge ball and naps; well, maybe naps were always awesome).

Playing dodgeball was amazing except for how terrifyingly good the kids were.  I wish I had taken some photos so you could see these kids… wait, no… nevermind, I am glad I didn’t take photos of random people’s kids.  Suffice to say, our opposition were like child-size Terminators with non-lethal projectiles.

One kid, who looked identical to a Japanese cartoon character, not only threw so hard it felt like getting hit a by a cannon ball; but, he was 100% willing to talk trash.  At one point, he looked at Jenn Kimbal and remarked, “You are twice my age and I smoked you!” Jenn, distracted by the fact that he thought she was 22, failed to notice the crazy gleam in his eye.

New Arrivals – Some close friends had a baby at the end of the month.  I don’t want to give it away who, but the new baby definitely takes after the dad.

 

So I learned to make websites …

While I realize I just finished a graduate program focused on business (pause, when I say “just” I am rounding down by almost two years… which seems crazy).  Moreover, that magical MBA experience required student loans so large that could have alternatively been used to purchase an above-average size home in an above-average neighborhood in Minnesota

BUT…

I figured scratch all that learning focused “bid-nass” and teach myself some super practical HTML, CSS and Javascript skillz.  I’ll save you the super boring details of how and simply share the outputs of my efforts.  Click the link below for a magical adventure through the website I designed for the leadership camp I volunteer with:

http://district5580ryla.org/

 

I’m sure the websites you frequent most regularly are better, but the RYLA 5580 website is at least on par with an “average” website and in some cases far exceeds the average.  While I am tooting my own horn here, I’ll just point out real quick that the website is mobile-friendly which actually took quite a while to figure out how to do.

Note: If you have paused here to draft an text/email/letter stating how there is some sweet program out there that does it for you; let me save you the time and say, “I know”.  I like stick to the age old adage of why do it the easy way when you can do it the real time-intensive and overly complicated way”!
When push comes to shove and someone asks “how long did this take”? I can lamely approximate, 100 hours..ish?  That being said, I have almost no ability to gauge how long this effort took and history (ie, the infographic) has taught me that I usually need to double or triple the number to get a better reflection of effort.

 

I’m not running for the North Dakota State Auditor …

But if I was I’m sure I would be awesome at it!  I’d have first learn what an auditor does, but then.. watch out, there’d be audits everywhere!