the year we make contact?

Sadly, pathetically, impossibly, a whole year just passed since my last blog entry. I was on a roll, dutifully posting weekly for the first couple of months of 2009, and the creative juices were really beginning to flow... and then CRASH -- my entries disappeared as fast as they came (and the words you hear don't mean a thing).

A lot can happen in a year. A quick update:

- I did get singled out for promotion, just like my fortune cookie promised (see my blog post from Feb. 14, 2009).
- I finished my MPA and can now forever bask in the glow of my scholastic grandeur.
- I joined the band Elements of Addiction as bassist, to supplement/complement/augment my ongoing work with Anti-Social Club and other musical projects.
- I coached my younger daughter's soccer team through the spring and fall seasons, with mixed but respectable results.
- I became a grandfather, at the ripe old age of 36. (!)
- I traveled to Los Angeles for my cousin's wedding, visited my brothers in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, and hung out with my friends for a long weekend at Cape Hatteras.
- I ran a 5-mile race with my wife and brother-in-law. I also signed up for a half-marathon that is just 2 weeks away and am filled with doubt that I'll be able to compete since I haven't been training much at all.
- For the first time in ages, my wife and I actually started climbing out of debt.
- We experienced the snowiest winter ever recorded in Washington DC, including two major blizzards.

I also realized that the future is really here now. I was a starry-eyed pre-adolescent boy when the movie 2010: The Year We Make Contact came out in the theaters in 1984. I remember being fascinated with some of the imagery, particularly the "futuristic" on-Earth segments that included shots of Roy Scheider working on the beach on a laptop computer, of him running alongside the road while some non-gasoline powered car passes by, of the field of satellite dishes (probably the Very Large Array) out in the desert.

As a boy, these images of a distant time to come (but which I would likely live to see) filled me with a measure of hope and optimism for the future. Now the real 2010 is upon us, and while we haven't yet found alien civilizations (although we have started identifying exoplanets by the dozens), the technological reality of today is in some ways as exciting and breathtaking as it was in the imagination of 25 years ago.

Despite all the challenges we face, I still remain hopeful and optimistic for the future. And I will do my best to recommit to posting in this blog, if not weekly then at least somewhat regularly.

Outpost 420 is back online.