Looking Forward, Looking Back

Some trivia to start out your 2012 with: the month of January is actually named after actress January Jones, who plays Betty Draper on AMC's hit series Mad Men.  For real!

I can't believe you went and double-checked me on Wikipedia!  OK, it's actually named for Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and transitions.  He has two faces, one to look forward, and one to look back.  Because it gives me an easy, lazy post to start the year with, I'm going to take a look back at Look What Danny Made! in 2011, and a look forward at some of what I've got in mind for 2012.

So, things that happened in 2011:

• Got bitten by a spider
• Watched a month of romance movies
• Had a wooden tomato winged at me
• Made the most bitchin' pie in the world
• Ate weird foods for a month
• Got off the couch; lost 50 pounds
• Took in a stray; still trying to get rid of it
• Enraged China
• Took a month of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
• Lost my dad; still getting over this one
• Redesigned this joint
• Watched a month of horror movies (again)
• Did a month of service projects 

I'm looking back at that list right now, and I'm going to have to go ahead and pat my own back a little bit.  2011 was neither my very best nor my very worst year, but it was the year when I decided to do things and I did them.  Sure, some of them were silly things like watching a whole bunch of movies, but I feel like I also managed to accomplish some really positive things, like the weight loss and the service.

I'm still firming up ideas for things to do this year.  There's going to be another Project Valentine, but it's going to be something entirely different this year.  I'm planning two movie projects, the conclusion of Project Horror and one TBA.  Project Gastronome is coming back in April, to see what other nations I can anger.  I'm also going to be doing the Marine Corps Fitness Test once a month between now and December, and reporting the results (and hopeful improvements) here.

But I'm also planning something that is going to be my biggest project EVER, not just on the blog, but in my life.  How big?  This one won't take a month, it's going to unfold over the next several years.  I've shared the details of it with a very few people already, but I need to get a few more details in place before I'm ready to unveil it here.  I'll give you the name: Project Summit.

Happy New Year, friends.  What are you going to do this year?

Look What Danny Remade!

Don't panic!  I know that the page looks different from last time you were here.  But if you remember, I did tell you that changes were in the works.  Let me know what you think of the new design.

The other day, Courtney was telling me about something she'd read on The Bloggess, and I had to stop her to ask if she also reads my blog still.
"Well, yeah, but you posted like two days ago about changes that were coming, and nothing is different yet."
"Yuh-huh!  I have a Facebook fan page now!"

(By the way, I have a Facebook fan page now.  I cannot emphasize enough how personally validating it is for me every time somebody "Likes" my blog.  Please, recommend it to your friends who you think may also enjoy reading Look What Danny Made!)

Little did Courtney know that I was intentionally delaying the unveiling of my new design so that it would coincide with Facebook's unveiling of their truly awful newest round of changes.  By comparison, anything I do is going to look AWESOME!  There are still a few tweaks to be made, and a few more features in the works, but I'm interested in hearing what you think, too.

ALSO!  Your old bookmarks will still work, but you can now reach Look What Danny Made! at our new address - http://LookWhatDannyMade.com

When you register domains through GoDaddy (and probably through anybody else), they try to upsell you with all kinds of additional features for your site, including variations of your address.  For instance, LookWhatDannyMade.org, LookWhatDannyMade.net, and LookWhatDannyMade.info - yeah, I bought them all.  What's funny, though, is that it also tries to sell you domain names with variations of the words in your address.  I actually got a screenshot of it, which I then lost, but here's some of the best recommendations:

• DannyMadeThis.com
• ObserveWhatDannyCreated.com
• SeeDannysFabrications.com

I won't lie - I was really tempted to register Observe What Danny Created, just for the heck of it.  But that ain't my brand, baby.  I'm living the Look What Danny Made! life!

Getting Better All the Time

I wanted to post this yesterday, on my birthday, but Jack's birthday present to me was to royally screw up my computer.  While I was in another room doing something with Ava, he opened it up and discovered how fun it was to press the power button again and again and again.  Sometimes he'd mix it up by pressing the button that launches the computer into Media Center and then pressing the power button again.  After running an hour-long disk scan, I was finally able to get the thing to boot, but I still haven't been able to get it to connect to my home network.  I think I've just now decided that Jack's real birthday present to me will be for me to cash in a portion of his college fund to buy myself a new computer.

The name of this post is "Getting Beter All the Time," a title I chose for two reasons.

First, my family is doing well.  The weeks since Papa's death have been very difficult, but we're healing every day.  September 13th would have been his 64th birthday, and the whole family went out for dinner together to celebrate him.  A generous friend was dining in the same restaurant and bought our dinner, which touched us all.  So many people have reached out to us, and I've heard from lots of folks who have been inspired by Papa's words.

Second, as I mentioned above, yesterday was my birthday.  You know what I love about my birthday?  It's a yearly reminder that I just keep getting better.  All the time.  One of my lifelong friends, Jason, called me yesterday to wish me a happy birthday and to see how I'm doing.  He told me that he was ready to start reading about the latest silly stuff that I'm up to again.  I'm also ready to write about that again.  Look What Danny Made! is a year old now, too!  I launched it towards the end of last September, but I've decided that we share the same birthday.  Just as I keep getting better each year, so shall Look What Danny Made! continue to improve.  Between now and the end of September, keep watching this space.  I've got some improvements lined up for various areas of the site, in terms of appearance and interactivity.  I'll announce the changes as they arrive, and I think there'll be some fun things in store.

And just to whet your appetite, we're only two and a half weeks away from October, which means...

No Such Thing As Bad Publicity

I've decided that since the Jiu-Jitsu class meets on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I'll actually be posting my write-ups on the days following the lessons.  That way I can get home, get the kids to bed after the lesson, and not stay up until all hours getting finished.  I think this will let me write better posts, too.  All in the name of quality, dear reader!

In the meantime, I would like to show you something that aired on Taiwanese national television yesterday.  It doesn't matter if you can't understand the language.  It's only about a minute and a half long, and you'll see why I wanted you to watch it.  I just want you to keep two things in mind as you watch.

1. Oscar Wilde once said, "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about." 
2. This aired on NATIONAL TELEVISION.

There's another quote that's been attributed to everybody from Mark Twain to P.T. Barnum, "I don't care what the newspapers say about me as long as they spell my name right."  Unfortunately, I can't tell if they're spelling my name right or not.

Look What Danny Made: Summer Edition

Hi blog!  I finished Project Gastronome and ended up taking a month-long vacation from you, didn't I?  Where have I been?  I can't say too much; I will simply point out that in the month when I wasn't posting, Osama Bin Laden was taken out...

OK, the truth is that every time I finish one of my projects I have a few days of despair, wondering how I will follow it, and what I can possibly write about in the meantime that will be worth reading.  In this instance, I just let it come out as laziness.  But here I am, with summer in front of me, and a renewed drive to blog!  I don't consider myself to be anything close to a Writer, but one piece of advice that I've always heard Writers give is that the key to writing is... writing.  Write every day, even when you don't want to.  Even if you feel like what you're putting out isn't that great.  The point is that you are staying in the habit and keeping the wheels greased.  I have a few summer goals in mind, and one of them is to be more regular with posting in here.  In the meantime, I've got some catching up to do.

When I was growing up, I took for granted how cool it was to be the child of two educators in the summer time.  I did fun stuff like scout camp and Vacation Bible School, but mostly I just got to be at home or at the pool and do anything I wanted to do.  Courtney and I have always had our kids enrolled in year-round daycares or preschools.  With Blake finishing kindergarten this year, it's the first time we've had to make sure he's taken care of.  The answer is sort of a patchwork of different things.  There are two days a week when my parents are very generously having him over to their home, and we've also signed him up for a few different sports camps, museum programs, and VBS.  Courtney has tried to schedule herself for as many weekend shifts as possible so that she can be home and awake during the week while Blake is there.  I'll be taking some time off during the summer, too, to try and soothe some of this working parent guilt over shuffling my child around so much.

But there are some things that I'm also very excited about this summer!  We are planning to meet up with several of our friends from all over Texas for a long weekend in August, when we will be renting a house at Schlitterbahn.  We've done this before, but I think this is the first year when all of our kids will really be big enough to enjoy it.  Instead of doing swim lessons through the Y this year, I'm taking it on myself to spend that time in the water with each of my kids, and it's been a lot of fun so far.  I'm looking forward to seeing how much stronger they are in the pool by the end of summer.  Ava is already much more brave than she was just two weeks ago.  After nearly a year of having our house on the market, we made the decision to unlist it and stay in it for a few more years.  Although I'm a little disappointed that it didn't move like we'd hoped, I'm also excited at the prospect of doing a few summer home improvement projects.  I've never been especially handy, so it'll be a learning experience.

What I am very excited about right now, though, is that I have another Look What Danny Made! project starting on July 1.  Unlike Projects Horror, Valentine, and Gastronome, this one will actually take me outside of my house.  It's also going to be a whole new realm of experience for me, and marks the first time that one of my projects has received outside sponsorship!  You know me, I don't like to give away the details too soon, but watch this space for more information in the days to come.

Thursday Miscellanea

Sometimes the best you can do is a list entry, and today I'm OK with that.  Here's what's up.

1. My wife Courtney has been promoted!  She is now one of the charge nurses in the surgical ICU at UMC.  I'm really proud of the recognition she's getting.

2. My friend Kyle gets double props in this entry.  First, because he has completed a very funny spec script for the TV show "Parks and Recreation," which I think you ought to read.  Second, because he forwarded me this, which is pretty much the perfect union of Projects Valentine and Horror.  (If you can't read it, click the picture for a bigger size.)

3. Do you ever buy stuff on Craigslist?  I've sold some things (although my business has dropped off ever since they dropped their Adult Services listings [which I shouldn't have to clarify is a joke, but I will anyway]), but never bought anything.  My friend Misty's husband has created a very fun to use program called Net Notifier which I downloaded tonight; it lets you set up notifications whenever items that match your search criteria are found.  That's really a small description of it, though, because it's got some other tools that make the whole process of Craigslisting easier.  The trial is free - check it out!

4. If you have been reading the blog for a couple of months, you know that I don't shy away from sharing my gross medical issues with you.  Today I had a medical experience which I will spare you the embarrassing details of, except to say that if you had looked what Danny made, it would have scarred your brain.  But I will share with you what my doctor said: "Congratulations, Danny.  You have reached the age where your body will start doing things that can best be described as 'alarming.'"

5. I'm actively planning the next Look What Danny Made! project, but I have a little bit of shopping ahead of me first.  I'm hoping to unveil the project in April.  Stay tuned to this space and to Facebook, because I'm planning the first Look What Danny Made! live event as a part of it, and you may just be one of the lucky participants!

The ones that didn't make the cut

This is actually the third time that I've attempted to keep a blog, not counting blog entries that I made on MySpace (back when I had a MySpace) or notes on Facebook.  Before we get too far into the shared experience that will be Look What Danny Made!, I'd like to take a moment to solemnly remember those who went before.  (Also, this gives me a good way to test my subscription feeds for those who have signed up, without giving them a post full of "Ummm, testing.")

Ocean Size: The closest I ever lived to the ocean was College Station, TX, which is still a good hundred miles from the coast.  Fellow fans of Jane's Addiction will recognize this as the name of the second track on Nothing's Shocking.  Here was my thought process in choosing the name:

What to call this thing?  Well, I like Jane's Addiction.  I'm a big guy.  And that song Ocean Size has the lyric, "Wish I was ocean size / they cannot move you, so no one tries..."  That is deep.

I think in Helvetica block quotes, by the way.

I started this one when I was still pretty fresh out of college.  I'd just moved back to my hometown and started my first job as a programmer.  It was exactly as exciting as it sounds.  There just wasn't much material to write about.  I think I made about three entries, mostly about how I was sorry for not writing more.  Then it sat untouched for a year before I deleted it.

Dispatches from the Western Front:  My friend Laura has kept a LiveJournal since like 1999, and she's great about posting this really honest, funny, searing stuff.  This was back in the day when you needed an invitation to join LiveJournal, so she hooked me up with one and told me that I should try starting a blog, too.  My thought process in choosing this name:

I don't really want to make this blog about any topic in particular, just kind of occasional updates.  I live in Texas, which is West of many spots in the US, or at least still considered as part of "the West."  I have recently seen Patton for the first time, and love it a billion, so I will also try and tie some kind of military reference in to the name.

Voila, Dispatches from the Western Front.  This was the early 2000's, when I was learning how to use CSS.  For non-programmers, that's Cascading Style Sheets, a method of giving your website a very uniform and attractive look across all of its pages without having to code it into each individual page.  It's also very easy to irreversibly screw-up your entire site, as I quickly discovered when I tried to customize the CSS on my blog template.  Goodbye, Dispatches from the Western Front.  I'm sorry you never got a single post.

I can promise you this - in these two instances, you're much better off for not having looked at what Danny made.

Look at the what now?

First things first, right?  Why did I choose the name Look What Danny Made! for this blog?  This isn't a craft blog, and it's not like I really "make" anything outside of dinner or the occasional ridiculously attractive child.  Actually, the ridiculously attractive children kind of play into this.

My favorite kind of joke is the running joke.  This is why regardless of what the fortune in my cookie at a Chinese restaurant actually says, I will always, always read it out loud as "You will be eaten by tigers!?!"  After the birth of each of our children, as Courtney and I left the hospital, I would hold their tiny little bodies up above my head, Lion King style, and call out to anybody within earshot, "Look!  Look what I have made!"

It took a while to think of something to call this site, but once I burned through all of the faux-deep and annoyingly cute names I could think of, that one stood out to me.  My family is a huge part of who I am, and I'm sure they'll make the pages of this blog pretty often, so it seemed to fit.  Although it's still kind of in development, I hope you'll stick around for more of what I made!