In honor of my tenth year of blogging, I unveiled a new crappy logo on the blog homepage header. It was almost a full decade ago that the first blog post went live on ryanglanzer.com in December 2003, and though there have been signs of slowing down, it’s still alive and well, albeit as a WordPress blog now.

So today I will discuss ten different things currently going on.

1. Taxes – Tonight Lauren and I went over to Jackson-Hewitt and had our taxes calculated for the year. I tried doing them online and was unhappy with the amount we owed the government, and since it was a confusing year with a home purchase and contract business, I felt having a professional guide us would be beneficial. Even though they charged a sum that had my jaw hitting the floor, we still managed to save about $300 compared to what it showed we owed online.

2. Contract Work – I am just as busy as ever with the Microboards side gig. Since I left them full-time, they have resurrected the Afinia brand name and used it to launch a 3D printer and label printer line, of which they’re having some success. I have been busy doing all sorts of webpages, e-mail blasts, PDF spec sheets, and trade show booth backdrops for these things. I’m also currently redoing the whole product catalog which will feature both Microboards and Afinia products, with the catalog cover upside-down on the reverse side so it can be passed off as two separate catalogs.

3. Full-Time Work – My time at the office lately has been split largely between two projects: creating the company e-mail newsletters and resizing product images for the main website. This means downloading large TIF files and then manually resizing them in Photoshop into dozens of different sizes and saving them in different formats for various usages. It is extremely manual and time-consuming but it’s the kind of thing where I can at least put on some music and zone out for a while.

4. Volleyball – Friday night we begin another volleyball league, this time in Pflugerville at Hanover’s Bar where our friend Bart has launched his own league.

5. Karaoke League – Our team performed very well on Wednesday night at RC Fowlers on One-Hit Wonders night. I chose “Send Me an Angel” by Real Life and then when it got to the chorus, Brian Mego emerged dressed as an angel… actually he was wearing our friend Heather’s Victoria Secrets angel costume. Brian later brought the house down with a rousing rendition of “Come on Eileen.” Our other teammates sang “Toy Soldiers” by Martika and “What’s Up?” by Four Non-Blondes.

6. My 2013 MLB predictions will be coming out soon, so feel free to send over your own for me to post here! I’m still picking the Twins to lose 90+ games, but the amazing play of rookie Aaron Hicks this spring has me a little more hopeful.

7. Our beagle, Baxter P. Glanzer, is being weened off of sleeping in our bed with us. It was fine when he was a teensy pup but now he’s large and sprawls out horizontally and between the three of us we’re making a big H shape with the humans clinging to the sides of the bed. On Tuesday night we tried it for the first time and left the hound on the couch downstairs and put up the barrier at the top of the stairs. From midnight to 6:30am he whimpered non-stop, also keeping us awake. Twice Lauren got up to tell him to go lay down, and he did for five seconds, before returning to the top of the steps to continue crying. When morning came, the exhausted hound refused to eat breakfast and was then carted up and hauled off to daycare for ten hours of running on zero sleep and an empty stomach. What a nut.

8. Lauren finished knitting a pair of socks for me, one of my Christmas presents from last year.

9. I would like someone to come over to our house and show me how to grow plants and flowers in the backyard. Do I need to put in some new soil or will things grow in the hard dirt from last year?

10. Yesterday was the 20th anniversary cast party for one of my favorite movies, Dazed & Confused, right here in Austin. Just about everyone from the original cast was on hand for a viewing. If not for the karaoke league I may have considered going.