You want more Brian? You got it.

• Alicia and I had a blast at the Sarah Berns Christmas party. We drank wine (which was new-ish for me, I’m starting to enjoy it more) and went with festive hats. I think we’re going to make that a tradition – silly hats for the holidays.
• I’ve squeaked into sixth place in the Lil’ Lebowski Suburban Achievers Fantasy Football league, which gets me the last spot in the playoffs! Yay! Last year I managed to finish dead last in a league of 12, a pain I’ve felt every day of the year. I’d like to thank Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski for their tremendous season.
• I pulled my muscle last week running, so I’ve been out of commission running for a week. It’s been lame. I think I’m back to 100% and will be hitting the gym tonight!
• I’m super happy with Dropbox, which now houses all of our music, photos and documents. For you non-tech-people, it’s cloud-based storage, which means I can just load files to the internet and they hold ’em for me. It’s $99 for 1Tb for 1 year and there is no house fire or theft that will make us lose our data. Seriously, we’ve got over a decade of photos at this point, plus all our music. Not only that, but we can access all of our files from our phone, too. I’m not usually a sentimental person, but the peace of mind of never losing all that data is really nice.

The holiday weekend has come and gone, here’s what’s up.

• I’ve successfully “hung” the outdoor Christmas lights. One of the big Black Friday scores was these laser lights for the house. They look a tiny bit cheap, but they’re different (which is fun) and just involved putting stakes in the ground, so no actual hanging. It looks okay from the outside, but we can see the lights through the window at night, which is really cool.
• Thanksgiving food was fantastic. Alicia cooked the turkey at her parent’s house for the first round, I helped carve the turkey at my parents house later that night. As always, it’s a gastrointestinally intensive day – but it’s so good to see family.
• Besides the laser Xmas lights, Black Friday yielded a few good deals: Alicia got herself a new winter coat half priced from Macy’s, the cats are loving the new blankets we picked up at Target, I got some new scarves at Forever 21, Alicia got some blank canvases for painting at Michael’s (yes, she’s been painting!),  and we stocked up on tea from the World Market

• We joined a gym together and have been hitting the running track pretty regularly! I’m determined to get a 5k time down below 21 minutes (which is about 9 mph). I’m not very close, the fastest I’ve run thus far is 23:00 5k, and those last two minutes are gonna hurt bad. But then again, I’ve got all winter!

hah! First update done, now just forever to go.

[Insert Greeting]

[Insert paragraph about who I am]

[Insert ambitions about regularly posting]

… Seriously, I think I’ve written this post four times now. You get it, it’s a blog. Expect me to brag about stuff here and share stuff that I may or may not have already posted on twitter, linkedin or facebook. Frankly, twitter is my favorite place to post. I’ll probably even post on twitter every time I update this blog, so no need to regularly check this site.

Why a website? I dunno – journal entries on facebook seem lame. I’d rather practice hosting my own website – all of my previous blogs were hosted on Google’s blogger platform. This bad boy is a bought and paid for website (thanks namecheap.com) where I installed WordPress. So that’s cool.

But I also like the idea that each website reflects a different part of my life. My first site on sites.google.com reflected my undergraduate days in Duluth. Then I was off to grad school with Brian Blogs in Brooklyn. Moving back to Minnesota and entering the workforce, I created a professional and social blog that both went quiet pretty fast.

So what makes the end of 2015 different from the last five years? Nothing major – I don’t have a new house, nor a new job. But I am surrounded by colleagues doing cool things with software. I’m hoping a sexy new website might be just the forum to share fun stuff and let me brag about new side projects. Plus, I miss the semi-weekly updates I used to post.

We’ll see… I’d be skeptical if I was you.