Fully Vaccinated

We did it! The Glanzer household adults are all fully vaccinated as of yesterday. I had my second dose two weeks ago, as I wrote about on this blog, and now that those two weeks are up, they say I should be fully protected. Lauren got her second dose yesterday. I feel like 80% or more of everyone I know who plans on getting a vaccine has been able to get one already. I was very worried I wouldn’t get one til late in the summer.

Video Games

With the cord pulled on my favorite game, Mario 35, the 35-player battle royale of the original Super Mario Bros., I had been going through some withdrawal. Bowser’s Fury, which came packaged with a re-release of Super Mario 3D World, has suddenly become my go-to game on the Switch. I like to break up the workday with a couple 15-20 minute game sessions, and have really gotten sucked into the open-world style game, where there are no timers, no lives, and a wide open map for Mario to explore and look for stuff. John is also playing the game on his account and we are battling to see who can solve the game first. Highly recommend!

Baseball

It has been nice to have something on the calendar again… something to do outside the house after school hours. John enrolled in coach-pitch baseball for the spring season at Balcones Youth Sports, our nearest Little League option. His team, the Blue Jays, is 4-3 on the season with 4 more games to go. John got off to a hot start, at one point going 15-for-18, but his last two games have been pretty rough. Yesterday his team lost 4-3 to the Rays, and John struck out feebly three straight times (as did most of his teammates). In coach pitch, just making contact is almost always good enough. 90% of the balls put in play wind up hits (or errors).

Remodel

We’re getting a little further along in our home remodel plans. The architect-builder has been hired. They have come out and taken preliminary measurements. We’ve been to their offices twice for design meetings. Our initial idea of putting a second story over the living/dining area has been met with pause from the designers, who say that while the idea isn’t completely implausible, we would blow our whole budget on the roof removal and replacement. The better plan to achieve our goal of adding 3 rooms and about 800 sq. ft. to the house is shifting towards pushing backwards into the backyard and constructing a two-story addition where our covered stone patio currently is. This would add a guest room and office downstairs and a new master bed/bath above it, while completely opening up the kitchen to the rest of the first level. The area that is currently the master bedroom would at least partially become part of the upstairs landing, which would become more of a kids’ room or sitting area. We will get some new drawings of potential plans this week!

Remodel Displacement

Another thing we will have to consider is that the remodel will probably displace us for some amount of time this summer or whenever, depending on when they actually break ground. I doubt we would be able to stay in the house while they are removing an entire wall and tearing out the kitchen. Something we will have to keep in mind! I keep saying if construction was happening already this summer, we could just go back up north and work remotely. But remote or not, Lauren’s job calls for her to be available locally, so we’ll probably just have to rent a place here.

MLB

I still live and die every day by the outcome of Twins games, and this year that has meant a prolonged stretch of added stress to my daily life. The Twins have gone 2-10 over the past 2 1/2 weeks after a COVID outbreak and as a whole aren’t even competitive most games. At 7-12, they have the second-worst record in the AL at the moment, a game ahead of the Tigers. As horrible as they have played, I still hope I can see them play at some point in person in 2021. Maybe up in Arlington at the Rangers’ new stadium is most likely.

Work

My email team has put together 3 straight record revenue months. The key to our success has been a pretty basic idea… sending more. I was always very protective of our email list, really worrying about landing in spam during our migration to a new ESP. But sending 4-5 more emails per subscriber per month has had no effect on unsubscribe rates or sending reputation. Maybe for my next project I will write a book on email marketing. I doubt there are too many other people with 15+ years experience in this somewhat niche field.

20-Year Reunion

Lastly, I am traveling back to South Dakota over Memorial Day weekend to attend our class’s 20-year high school reunion. It isn’t hard to believe that was 20 years ago to me. As you may know, the graduating class had just 22 kids. Unlike a lot of other Willow Lake High School classes, our class dispersed across the US. By my count, in addition to South Dakota, there are people living in Michigan, Utah, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Arizona, Washington, North Dakota, and Nebraska. Yet it sounds like we should be able to get at least 15 back together for the occasion, which will be held in Carpenter. Thanks to social media, I feel like I have kept in touch with everyone pretty closely. But it should still be fun to see the old crew in-person again and see who has gotten the fattest and baldest!