Howdy y’all, this past month saw us doing a whole lot of NOTHING. At least from an outsiders perspective. But first I must mention that Emily visited her family in Utah and she met the new little rat dog named Moose. Emily likes dogs in case you didn’t know. 
She also likes llamas 
Emily works at a company which sells accessories for people who drink wine. One of the new products in their line is a purse in which you can store wine. It has a spout so you can get your fix anytime. It’s for alcoholics basically. This thing has kind of gone viral, they have a couple of videos featuring this bag for alcoholics, and they’ve gotten over 100 million views and counting, and the orders have been rolling in. This is a small company, so needless to say Emily has been very busy at work. She’s also going to be getting 2% of the purse’s sales! Hope you people are taking notes, that’s a good way to motivate your employee’s. My paternal grandpa passed away about a year ago, and during my sister Megan’s wedding a few months ago, I happened to sit across from his wife and we got to talking about music. It was funny to hear her describe my grandma’s intense love for music. He knew all the back stories of the composers and the compositions, and it sounded a little bit, well, like me I suppose. As it turns she has been wanting to find a good home for my grandpa’s record collection and offered them to me. How could I say no to that? We went to her home in Flagstaff a couple months later, had lunch and picked up the record collection. It consists mostly of classical, jazz, big band, and…opera *clears throat nervously*. I’m unfamiliar with most of it because I’m a uncultured punk rock loving cretin, but believe it or not, I’m a fan of most music - as long as it’s not cheesy or pretensious (VERY IMPORTANT). This has made my record collection kind of weird. Now Mozart and Glenn Miller are sitting on the same bookshelf as Minor Threat and the Ramones. I’m pretty sure my grandpa hated rock music and I can’t decide if he would be horrified that someone inherited his records with such a deep love of all things raucous, or happy that I’m experiencing the classics. I’ve been slowly making my way through each record. My favorites so far are James Galway, aka The Man With the Golden Flute. That’s right, he’s a killer flutist, and it’s actually really good. I also quite liked the Dukes of Dixieland, which was an early New Orleans jazz band. Maybe it’s the ska fan in me, but I really enjoy them brass instruments. 
Emily recently completed a DNA test and here are the results. We confirmed that she’s very white. 
I’ve been reflecting on the past few years and how far we’ve come. in 2014 I completed 98% of my college courses, with the exception of some research paper thing. We uprooted ourselves moved to Arizona entirely because it just sounded more appealing than where we were living. Emily had a part-time admin assistant job and I ended up getting a part time “internship” making 10 bucks an hour. We were barely scraping but we were able to make ends meet. Unfortunately, I learned very little about up-to-date, real-world programming in my Computer Information Technology college classes, and so I visited my code mistress every night in order to learn a marketable skill. I spent every moment of my free time learning and practicing coding for a year. I Eventually got a much higher paying job as a developer, Emily went full time, and we were able to become completely debt free. I continued to visit my code mistress, and a year and a half later I landed a sweet remote job working in my favorite coding framework(!). Emily now has an even better job, and it’s safe to say we’ve been very fortunate and blessed. I hope I’m not being ungrateful by having more ambitious plans for the future ;) That’s it. I’m kicking around the idea of doing short, weekly blog posts. We’ll see. 