YESTERDAY'S TWEETS

12:32 Thanks to all who stopped by our shindig last night (actually/virtually) and to Glenn (and Cliff by proxy) for being such great hosts. #fb

12:34 Had a lovely sleep-in. About to shower off the stank of 2009 and get ready for the first bacon of the new decade. #fb

01:34 An auspicious start to the Tweens, a relaxing day of French Toast then Target then MarioWii & Buzz!PS3 then Sushi then FroYo. #fb

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DECADE

Ten years ago, I was celebrating the Millennium while living in Orlando, a few months away from opening the biggest project of my career at that point.

The Ooze (as djmrswhite has so awesomely dubbed this past decade) were, on a personal level, pretty much okay for me.

I didn't start journaling until 2003, but the impact that LiveJournal has had on my life over the past seven years is surprising and undeniable. It's allowed me to meet some incredible people, and allowed me to keep an interesting time capsule of my life that I'd never really done before. I've spent this whole morning re-reading all of my posts from the past decade, and it's been a strange, cathartic, and interesting experience.

I had plenty of highs -- professional growth in leaps and bounds, an incredible social life, got to travel like crazy, relished in my job as the Big Gay Uncle, and passed the first decade-and-a-half mark in my ever-amazing partnership with Jason fidgetcub. The low points were equally important -- a few slippery stretches of unemployment & freelance, precarious family finances, re-evaluating my estranged relationship with my Mom, losing my Dad in 2005.

Since online photos have also been part of my life during this past decade, I'm also spending this weekend doing one of those "stuck-in-a-drawer-but-been-meaning-to-do-for-years" projects -- getting all of my online photos up to date. For the most part, my Flickr account has nearly every photo I've shot since 2006 -- but the previous half of the decade is on my old .Mac site, photos from 1996-2000 are all on PhotoCDs (I hadn't switched to digital yet, so I always had CDs made with prints), and actual prints prior to 1996 have yet to be scanned. My goal is to eventually get my existing digital photos (since 1998) into my iPhoto library and uploaded onto Flickr by the end of the first quarter of 2010, with all previous analog photos as an ongoing scanning project after that.

Naturally, I've had incredible waves of nostalgia as I go through all of these photos -- seeing friends I haven't seen in years, seeing a few I've lost, seeing the subtle (and mostly elegant, I think) ravages of time evident in our faces and hairline. The smiles and sighs far outweigh the shocks.

The past decade has been one of progression for me -- some profound moments, but mostly just steady-as-she-goes. I'm going to spend my free time in the next couple of weeks wallowing in the last decade or two, getting my physical and digital memories in order.

I'm a mostly live-in-the-moment kind of guy -- I don't overanalyze my past, and I try to keep my nostalgic tendencies at bay. So I don't predict any overly-maudlin entries here or tear-stained tales of times gone by -- but I do expect some minor recollections to occur here, especially things that pre-date my journal start date in 2003. I have an odd, nagging need to do this, to take a bit of stock of where I've been and where I'm at before I can move wholeheartedly into my forties with wild, mid-life abandon.

I still feel like the same goofball optimist that I've always been. No regrets. The bottom line is, I have absolutely nothing to complain about and everything to be thankful for.