Just When I Thought I Was Out

Forgive me father, for I have sinned. It has been two years since my last blog post. I realize that's not even a venial sin, but a lot has happened in the last 800 days. In no particular order:

• I took a trip to London in January 2010, and while I was there the entire country was almost shut down by some relatively mild winter weather. Jesus, UK, time to cowboy up. There were severe ice storms during my trip to France in 2007 and they coped just fine. The trains weren't even delayed at all.
• I learned to knit. Took up yoga. Started making my own yogurt.
• I wore a different shirt every day for a year (and then some).
• I lost 30 pounds. Then put 40 back on. And then started losing it again.
• I was the best man in my brother's wedding. I also designed my his wedding invitations, which wound up featured prominently in a big article on the Washington Post's style page.
• I posted a decent finish in a 32-mile bike race with occasional breaks for donuts.
• I dumped my smartphone when I realized that I am rarely more than 100 feet from a computer, and on rare occasion when I am reaching for a phone would also be rude. And also when I crunched the numbers and realized operating a smartphone had cost me a small fortune that I could spend on more important things. Like bacon and cupcakes.
• I designed a couple of t-shirts and CD covers and book covers.. And they were all actually relased! Amazing, I know.
• Oh, and I also fell in love with the most amazing woman in the world. (I should have probably mentioned this first.)

What can I say? Like Conrad Birdie, I got a lot a living to do. And I need someplace better than Facebook and Flickr to record it. (And I also need a testbed for some PHP, CSS, and Javascript techniques but let's not mention that.) So I'm resurrecting this blog. Yay! Let's celebrate with a round-up of my favorite shirts from the last year.

Man of 1,000 Shirts

Now, you may be thinking - "Dave, did you learn anything interesting from wearing a different t-shirt every day for a year?" And the answer is very simple: "No, not really." But I did learn the following uninteresting things:

• If you have crazy friends they will encourage your crazy projects until they are blown all out of proportion. The T-Shirt Project was only supposed to last for 60 days.
• As long as your apartment is relatively dry and warm a pile of 200 unwashed t-shirts will not start smell like your high school locker room. Or you will just gradually get used to the smell and not notice it. Either or.
• Boy does folding your laundry make a huge difference in terms of the volume it takes up.
• Some people seem to think $20 is a reasonable price for a t-shirt and those people are crazy.
• If you are desperate for shirts and don't mind feeling short of breath all day, a large man can fit into a woman's small.
• Those t-shirt-a-day sites are dangerous if you're an impulse buyer, because they're deliberately constructed to shut down any defense mechanisms you might usually have in place to stop you from buying too much.
• If you get one good shirt in a grab bag of three, you did not get a good deal. Unless you are running a t-shirt web site that requires you to acquire a giant pile of t-shirts in a very short period of time.
• Low camera angles are your friend.

Like I said, it's hardly the wisdom of the ages.

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