Back in the Fight (Recovered from LiveJournal)

I guess it's been longer than I realized. Honestly, I'm surprised my account's still active around these parts. Life seems to have a tendency to carry on either with or without you, though, and that's the case with my long lost LifeJournal account.

2003 was an excellent year for Autumn and I, in retrospect. I maintained a steady job from start to finish, working at GravityFree where my position was upgraded from "Senior Designer" to "Art Director," even though my responsibilities didn't exactly change all that much. Actually, now that I think about it, my role within the company actually did morph into a more mature, self-reliant position. I'm no longer under Ray's constant supervision, as he's been spending more and more time in meetings with the Sarasota Chamber of Commerce while I've taken over the reigns of GravityFree's creative direction. I'm still nowhere near happy with most of my work, but I'm also modest enough to step back once in a while, compare it to the vast majority of the rest of the sites on the web, and tell myself "you know, this doesn't really look all that bad." My HTML, especially, has really improved over the last year and a half, to the point that I catch myself snorting in disgust when I see a bit of bad or unnecessary code. I've also been acting as our Marketing Manager, which translates literally as "the guy who writes up Press Releases when a new client is landed or a new site goes live." Naturally, I don't enjoy that nearly as much as I do designing, revising and integrating web sites, and the powers that be seem to be ready to hire a salaried copywriter in the near future so I won't have to worry about it any more.

Autumn spent the first half of the year working for AE Design Group, where she felt constantly overstressed, underappreciated and insanely aggravated and appeared to be counting the days until she could leave for a better job. As luck would have it, our good friend Carol offered her a job completely out of the blue one day, working for her creative firm BleuShift. Autumn's been there a couple months now, and I couldn't be more envious. My best friend, Joe, also works in the office, and he's occasionally brought up the possibility that the four of us might work together some day. I'd love it, but I also have a lot of loyalty to GravityFree at the moment and can't see myself leaving them for some time. Joe, Carol, Autumn and I hang out after hours pretty regularly, usually out on the bay aboard Saltay Momma's fishing boat.

I see that I mentioned the new car in an earlier post, so this journal can't be THAT outdated. The Civic Hybrid is still running, though it's not getting nearly the gas mileage it advertised. The sticker claimed 45 city and 43 highway, but it does noticeably better when I'm on the interstate than it does when I'm making the five minute commute to work. My accumulative MPG at the current 8000 mile mark is 36.7. Not awful by any stretch of the imagination, but not quite what I expected. I've also had it in for an unscheduled maintinence a couple times, as its original converter went bad and had to be replaced. It was covered under the warranty, but I'd be lying if I said that didn't throw a couple red flags up on the back of my mind.

No question, the best news of the year came on July 8th, when I proposed to Autumn on Siesta Key Beach and she accepted. It was an eerily coincidental night.... we took in a crazy-colorful sunset, I proposed, she accepted and freaking FIREWORKS went off. We saw a rainbow and a puppy, too, but if I mentioned those I'd be setting off gay-dars across the country.

Autumn's just arrived home with a feast from Taco Bell, so I'll cut out for now. Here's hoping I can add more than three or four entries before we're into 2005.