It’s Been a Year Since My Last Drink

As of yesterday (February 11, 2021), it’s been over a year since I last had a drink.

The reason for that is I have never been one to drink at home by myself. So during the pandemic with being home by myself and not visiting with friends, I haven’t had a reason for a drink.

I’m a wine person 95% of the time anyway and don’t open a bottle to drink it myself. I would prefer to open a nice bottle and share it with friends than drink it by myself. In my mind, wine is to be shared with friends with a meal or whatever.

Last Drink

So on February 11, 2020, I went to the DC wine and cheese group event. Where two good friends were putting on a tasting at the group, we all used to belong too.

There we had, I think it was four red wines and a dessert wine, two kinds of cheese, and crusty bread, all for $25 or was it $30.

It was nice to attend the event and see other’s I hadn’t seen in years.

Other Times Prior

Before that, the last few times I had a wine/drink was Christmas Eve dinner at a friend’s in 2019. Then at Thanksgiving at their place the month before.

Before that, it was, I think, the last week of September 2019, right before my car died at my buddy Tony’s house. Typically on Tuesday evenings, we would get together to hang out. Have some wine, cheese, and sometimes a meal if someone was in the mode to cook.

Possible Next Time

So at this point, I think I’m going to wait until I can safely get together with my wine friends.

Yes, I have wine friends.

Here’s to Celebrating a Good Friend

Where we celebrate the life of my buddy, Tony, who was one of those two friends giving the class. He passed away the week of Christmas 2020.

So here’s to all of us making it through the pandemic and then having a drink with friends when it’s safe for all of us to do so.

My Friend Tony

Today I met on Zoom with 15 or so friends during an hour-plus lunch to talk about our good friend Tony. Who passed away the Sunday before Christmas.

It was interesting when we all went through things about Tony. Some met him at the Maryland Renaissance Faire. Others knew him from a class they took together many years ago. Others met at a wine store like I did pouring wine. Or at the Washington Wine and Cheese organization or through each other. Or they were  invited to his annual pig roast.

I could go on for a few more blog posts about the pig roast and how this group helped put it on year after year.

Even though there were some tears for many. It was happy tears remembering our friend Tony, a kind soul and a wonderful human being.

The best part was how everyone talked highly of Tony and had many stories. But we had to whittle it down to one or two stories. So we could get them all in before a lot of us had to go back to work.

They talked about his knowledge of words. When he was in high school the librarian, I think it was in study hall, used to make him read the dictionary from start to finish. Or his knowledge of wine and great food.

So here is to keeping the memory of our dear friend Tony going with more of these gatherings. Be they virtual for now until it’s safe to gather as a group.

P.S. At some point earlier today, I realized I had spent more time with most of the people on the Zoom call than my family (my dad, brothers, sisters, and their families) since moving to DC 18+ years ago. Make sure to spend time with family and friends when you can, even it’s on Zoom or the like.

NOT Continuing to Work on HoldAnEvent.com for Now

It’s been a long while since I updated you all on how the work on the HoldAnEvent.com prototype is going. The short answer is the prototype is as complete as it’s going to get. The next steps are where the real work needs to begin, which includes the following items but is not the full list of work to be done:

  • Database functionality (currently it’s all smoke and mirrors)
  • Accessible ARIA
    • Error handling
    • Success messages
  • Security checking
  • Payment processing
  • Performance improvements:
    • Minify CSS
    • Minify JavaScript
    • Combine files

The work on Hold An Event has NOT been moving along at all in the last 25+ months besides making some code improvements. The updates were about updating accessibility and some performance items. These improvements will make the pages load quicker by minifying files and  removing necessary code (not needed when using HTML5.)

Part of the reason I have not done any more work on this project is that it is larger than one person or at least for me now with the knowledge I have. I’m looking to work on a smaller project I can complete and learn what I need to complete Hold An Event.

That project is about being able to save information about places you need to eat at while traveling or even if you are staying in town. I’m always asking people where to eat, especially if I’m traveling somewhere new.

The web based application will be simple; in that you store the name of the restaurant and the city at first and can add more information when you have the time or on a computer or tablet.

It’s for when you are in a city or other part of town you can search to find things near you and then sort the results by city, or distance from you, or maybe even food type later on in the process.

If this project sounds appealing to you, please leave a comment. If you would even pay for this service tell me how much a month or year it is worth to you.

 

Project 52 Plans

I’m still working on my plan of how to complete Project 52, but I first want to thank Anton Peck for coming up with the idea to get himself and others to blog at least once a week for a year. Anton at first thought that maybe 25 or at most 50 of his friends would participate and ended up with over 700 last time I checked the list.

When Anton first came up with the idea on his blog I was all for participating, because I didn’t do a whole lot of blogging last. Instead I attended a few web conferences, ran a few (Accessibility Camp DC and BarCamp DC) with help from others, along with starting a monthly accessibility meet-up here in Washington, DC.

Donate to Charity

In the comments of Anton’s blog post about Project 52 I even talked about why not try and do some good out of all this by donating $10 to charity for ever week I miss blogging, creating code examples, making a “How To” videos of either accessibility related items or whatever. So each quarter I will donate $10 per week of missed blogging to a local charity like Martha’s Table or to Kiva.

Blog Post Ideas

Some of the things I plan on blogging abut this year are listed below:

  • Accessibility related issues and best practices
  • SXSWi – spring-break for geeks in Austin, Texas
  • Access U – accessibility conference in Austin, Texas, put on by Knowility
  • Accessibility Camp DC
  • BarCamp DC
  • Accessibility DC monthly meet-up
  • Food and wine
  • An Event Apart DC – great web standards conference put on by Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer
  • creating my web application (more to following in a future post)
  • lessons learned from things I have done or from others (friends and experts)
  • book reviews – mostly technology
  • spending more time with friends
  • more writing

So those are some of my ideas for blog posts and plans for the next 50 weeks. Might have to write a few accessibility best practices or code examples posts in advance for times like when I’m at SXSWI for a week and won’t have much time to blog. I already have six or eight subjects with titles and a short outline started from ideas from last year, now to just do the writing and coding required.

Are you planning on doing more blogging this year or just more reading and other work?

Please tell me what you are doing or suggestions for me to do in the comments.

Wish me luck.

Cleaning Up My Life

Don’t worry, nothing like that, I am just cleaning up the apartment (first floor of two family home I rent) and my part of the basement. Kind of was forced into doing this, since the people upstairs noticed bugs. I had seen some over the course of the last year or two when the old tenant and his new wife lived here and thought nothing of it.

The new tenant contacted the landlord about them, which they then had an exterminator come check on it. After looking around I guess they found that we had some cockroaches, while I was at Access U conference. I had lived here almost seven years and noticed the bugs recently and never paid attention to what I was squishing. So the landlord informed me that the exterminator would not spray/treat the house until we got rid of all our (neighbors and myself) cardboard boxes and old papers, since what they eat is the glue and cardboard.

Landlord’s Freaking (just a little bit)

The landlord was a bit freaked out because there were bugs in their rental property along with the fact that the couple upstairs is due to have a baby in like four weeks or so. They want it done yesterday so they can spray or whatever they are gong to do before the baby is in the house.

So for the last two weeks after work and on weekends when I have not had other obligations I have been first going through all the crap, as my mother would call it in my apartment. This has been helpful in the form of having me go through boxes of stuff that I have not looked at in years and tossing, saving, or as much as possible donating things to charity. I have recycled as much paper and others items that I can. I really don’t want fill up a landfill with more junk. No, I’m not a tree hugger, not that there is anything wrong with that, I just want to recycle/reuse as much as I can.

Donations to the Poor

I have donated a ton of clothes (work, casual, jeans, dress shirts, etc.), shoes, ties, and a lot more to Martha’s Table, so they can help out others less fortunate than myself. Even made two trips so far and I might have one more before I’m all done. I ended up getting rid about half of the clothes I owned, since I have not worn most of them in years for whatever reason.

Was at a fairly good point with the upstairs, so spent a few hours Saturday afternoon/evening going through boxes in the basement that contain stuff in them that have not moved or been looked, since I got here almost 7 years ago. I found at least one box so far that contained 5+ year old magazines in it. I had a lot of old magazines upstairs too. Pointer to others once you have read them unless it’s important to you because you, family, or a friend are in it, recycle them or just recycle them once your done reading.

I used to shoot a bunch of model photography back in the day as they say and had boxes and boxes of photos. I ended up transferring them from their cardboard boxes into new plastic containers with lids. Glad Target had 18 gallon plastic bins with lids on sale last week for $6, so I could buy 20 of them. Did not get all the miscellaneous boxes sorted yet since I have to go through to see if there are any important papers in them, like tax form, old bills with bank, or SSN information in them.

Spent Time with Friends

Spent about five hours Sunday(6/14) in the basement with a good friend of mine and her sister helping me consolidate, move, re-box wines. If your wondering why it took so long, it was because I have close to 600 bottles of wine just in my basement. I’m a wine collector, which made one of the landlords request to get rid of all boxes extremely difficult. How am I going to store 600 bottles of wine with no cardboard boxes, without spending thousands of dollars on wine racks, which won’t work downstairs, since floor slopes into center of room? Luckily I have been gathering and saving wooden wine boxes over the last few years, when I could get them.

I finally took my two 47 bottle wine frigs out of their boxes and started them up. Just in case you were wondering the number of bottles they say will fit is incorrect if you are trying to put Burgundy or long odd shaped bottles in them. Now they are loaded with a total of about 60+ bottles, which removes over five boxes from the basement.

Still need to go downstairs the next few nights to finish sorting and dumping the 20 or so boxes I have not looked at in the basement. The slowest part has been going through the old bills and removing the check receipt and bill to be shredded and placing them in one container and everything else  in a recyclable one. Anyone have suggestions to getting rid of old software. I recycled the boxes, but am trying to figure out what to do with all the CD’s and a lot of 2.5 inch diskettes.

A few friends and co-workers have asked if this has helped me feel lighter, less clutter free, and I have told them I will tell them once all of it is done. Right now it is feeling like a second job that needs to be worked on every night after work. I can’t imagine what is like for someone that is a hoarder to have to do a task like this.

Conclusion

If you have  suggestions for doing any of this better or stories similar to mine I would like to here about them.

Hopefully if nothing else you all start, recycling, donating extra stuff, and keep up with stuff on a regular basis so your not forced into having to “clean up your life” all at one time.