I’ve been learning some valuable post-college lessons in the last few months. Some of this stuff may seem obvious to some of you, but my personality has resisted learning a few of these until recently. I’d be really interested to hear what other post-college lessons the graduates among you have learned. Here are mine:

• Be prepared to accept short nights on weeknights.
• Get 8 or 9 hours of sleep every night. Try not to make exceptions to that.
• Take joy in your work. Get into it.
• Don’t take your job too seriously.
• Have a couple hobbies that remind you who you are.

I’ll be at WWDC today, so if you’re there, email me or drop me a line somehow, and maybe we’ll be able to chat for a few minutes.

Someone decided to express their views on the brick walls of my parents’ church sometime between Saturday night and Sunday morning this weekend. These were the messages that were left on the church.

GW + (Cross) = (Swastika)

400 THOU MUSLIMS KILLD

15 MIL INDNS KILLED BY (Cross)

I went into the bathroom at Arby’s, and checked the soap levels before using the facilities. So that’s the secret to their sauce! I think that’s the last time I’ll go to Arby’s.

I’m so tired.

I’ve been doing 50 or 60 hour weeks for the last month or two, and the project I’ve been working on is finally coming to a close. It’ll be really nice to, sometime in this next week, take a breath of fresh air, come home at a reasonable time, and just sit and watch TV.

Steph has noticed that lately I’ve been really drawing inside myself. Getting quieter in social situations, only speaking when I absolutely must, preferring to sit silently and listen to my friends talk instead of talking to them. I’m becoming a wallflower, and it’s really unlike me. I don’t know if it’s because I’m overworked, or if it’s because of some other thing. But I hate it, and I hope it goes away.

I just realized I never posted a link to the CAA website I finished last month. That’s one of my most-recent creations. I didn’t do the look-and-feel of it. Cook Design did that, and I worked with Cook Design and the Director of the CAA to translate the design idea into web form. I think it turned out pretty well. Those curved menus weren’t easy for me at first. It took some thinking and some learning.

I really enjoyed having a designer do a large part of the visual thinking for me, too, because I was presented with different challenges and opportunities than I would have been had I done the design myself. There are pluses and minuses to working with a designer, I suppose. I think for now I’d like about half my projects to be designed by me, and the other half to be designed by a pro.

Besides the menus, I’m the most proud of the fact that the site looks different depending on what time of day you visit it. The background changes from a regular “sunny day” sky to a sunset if you visit it in the evening or at night. We’re thinking of adding a separate nighttime theme, too.

The other day I went to the dentist, and they had me fill something out that, amongst other things, asked me if I had a history of nail biting, mouth breathing, hard swallowing, or biting hard objects.

What the… why yes, sometimes when I’m stressed, and I just need to get rid of some of that tension, I like to sit around and breathe exclusively through my mouth. There’s just something about bypassing the nose that really lets me relax. If that doesn’t quite do it, I swallow my saliva for a few minutes. But not just a normal swallow. A really hard one.