Much has happened in the gulf of months since my last post.  In terms of my web presence, Robservations has, as you can see, found itself a new home in my long-languishing domain name.

I started Rob64.com ten or eleven years ago (in middle school, if memory serves), not content to wait around for Facebook to be invented in order to have a presence on the tubes.  The site has enjoyed various states of neglect over the past decade.  I’ve decided to overhaul/update the site and combine my blog with the sort of online portfolio my site has traditionally been.  I spent some time trying to create a site completely from scratch within the Wordpress system, but I just don’t know enough about CSS and PHP, so I modified a theme, which is what you see here.

Beyond the cosmetic and the tubular, my life has undergone a bit of a tumult since last we spoke.  Namely, I broke up with my girlfriend and moved back home to Jersey.  This tectonic shift in young adulthood was the impetus for my absence and also part of why it’s lasted so long.  By that I mean, my reason for starting the blog in the first place was to share the experiences and epiphanies of living on my own for the first time.  Since moving back under my parents’ roof, it just hasn’t seemed as though I had much worth sharing.

Plus, though I prefer to be open and sharing on my blog, for a while the dominant theme in my life was the fallout from the breakup, and who wants to hear about that?  I don’t even want to hear about it.

But enough excuses and preamble.  My life has actually changed in many ways since we last spoke.   For starters, I was hired to fill a graphic design position through the good graces and connections of my best good buddy, AJ.  As I’ve observed before on this blog, the loss and gain of employment has a far more profound effect on one’s mental health than I had considered.  In unemployment, every shadow seems like the onset of a long night; employed, they seem more like shade.  (I’ll leave you to evaluate the success of that analogy on your own.)  So in the last few months I’ve enjoyed the contrast of crippling depression and fanatic optimism, and I’m pretty glad the pendulum is swinging the other way at the moment.

In other news, the family and I took advantage of this summer possibly being the last to see all four of us under the same roof by taking a trip to Disney World.  This was more or less hilarious given how bad my family is at vacationing, at least in the conventional sense.  To wit: my mom couldn’t sleep in, even if she tried; my dad packs a day pack for a day at Animal Kingdom as if we were actually on safari in the Serengeti; my brother avoids sunlight almost to the point of vampirism; and as if overcoming my tourist’s guilt isn’t normally enough, I had a cold for the first half of the trip.

To be fair, none of this really got in the way of our enjoyment, but it did make for an interesting vacationing experience (see: drunk guys coming back from the bar and hitting on mom as she’s out searching for some pre-dawn coffee).  Otherwise, Disney was pretty much as awesome as I remember it.  I rode the Tower of Terror for the first time and loved the atmosphere and the silly Rod Serling intro, even if I was underwhelmed by the ride itself after all those years of being afraid to get on it.  And of course, all that time spent looking at an endless succession of Mickey Mouse images resulted in the designing a Disney World flag (which is what that is).

Shortly after we got back, it became pretty clear to all of us that our dog, Missy, a fourteen-year-old golden retriever, had reached a quality-of-life threshold and we made the hardest decision a pet owner has to make.  It’s hard to say more than that without being trite, so I’ll keep it to this: we got Missy shortly after we moved to NJ, and I’ve been saying for a long time that when she died, so too would my childhood.  That’s a little melodramatic, but the truth is our house doesn’t feel the same without her.

In a related story, I saw Toy Story 3 twice, once before we put Missy down, and once afterward with my young cousins.  I got a little misty at both viewings, I must admit, but for completely different reasons.  Emotions can be so odd.

The occasion for my cousins’ visit (along with my aunt and uncle) was to spend a little quality time together before we all hit the road for the great state of Iowa, my grandpa’s birthplace and the location of a massive family reunion.  The trip was replete with water slides, go-carts, barbeques, familial bonding, and genealogical discovery.  It’s going to merit a post of its own, so I won’t preempt myself any further.

I’ve been occupying the rest of my time with a burgeoning (and briefly neglected) business venture on the handmade craft site Etsy.com, selling LEGO jewelry I was inspired to make while in the LEGO Store at Disney.  I’m just starting the process of actively promoting it, so we’ll see where it goes.

That’s the last four months in a nutshell.  If you’ve read this far, thank you for your patience.  On the immediate horizon lies a cross-country road trip with Mr. AJ, who is pulling up stakes and striking out for LA.  I’ll be working from the road, so I’ll try to blog from it, too, so I don’t lose bloggardly momentum.  Stay tuned!