So, what’s the deal?

The Most Overdue & Important Update, For Us.

The last couple of years have been some of the most challenging and rewarding years of my entire life, and that is all thanks to our now 2-year-old son, Elijah! He was born on February 14th, 2022, and it has been quite the adventure ever since.

These years have been packed with tons of learning experiences, bonding with Elijah, visiting family, and just trying to be the best possible parents we can be for the most amazing child we could have ever asked for.

That being said, it hasn’t been easy for many reasons. Life, coupled with having to compress a lifetime of learning into a short period of time, makes it no surprise that things tend to slip through the cracks. Important things like updating this website, for instance, can easily get forgotten amidst worrying about life’s stresses, our family’s well-being, and even our own self-care, or potential lack thereof.

And yet, no matter the stress that comes from it all, Sara and Elijah make it more worth it than anything I have ever done in my entire life. While I am still learning to be the best version of myself for them, and I pray for their patience while I do, in the end, I am so outstandingly grateful to have them in my life.

With that, I thought I’d share some pictures over the last couple of years, sharing a bit of the journey we’ve had with Elijah thus far.

A Small Adventure with Sara <3 

 There’s a lot less to say here than usual, because… well, I thought I’d show it instead. We took a little trip to Sunken Gardens during Valentines week and it’s a place I had been meaning to take Sara to for a little while now, particularly because I saw there were birds. That usually makes it an auto-include on the itinerary. So, I took some of our pics and videos and made a little highlight video. The one random pic of food was from us getting some dinner at Outback Steakhouse afterward…. so good.

“Birthentine’s” Day for Sara

It’s been a while since I’ve given ‘Things for Sara’ an update… and it’s not that I haven’t done anything since the last update… on the contrary, it’s been an eventful few months, but… I think my standards for how big an update should be, might be a little too high, because I’ve been told that I have done plenty of things that were update worthy… so, maybe I’ll do some, retrospective posts here soon. After all, I wanted this site to be something we could both look back on and use to remember the good times.

Now, if you know Sara, you know that I have the very unique privilege of being with someone who’s birthday happens to fall on Valentine’s day. And most of the time, when someone’s birthday falls on a holiday, that usually means, they just lose one… and I definitely was not about that life (or at least I tried).

So, my main thought was “How can I celebrate two separate events in the same day”?

Well, I gave it my best shot. I drew up a plan in Adobe XD where I like to prototype projects I work on and got a series of gifts. Sara isn’t the type to like extravagant or expensive things so I didn’t want to throw a whole bunch of things at her at once, so I decided to start with little gifts each Monday for the two weeks before “Birthentine’s” day.

The first one was a cute little pink two piece outfit that I thought would be super cute on her and definitely seemed right up her alley and the second was a super ‘weeby’ two piece with thigh highs, that still make me face-palm a bit, but I knew Sara would love it and I mean, it’s not like I don’t like it myself. 😛

I had a cute little pink gift bag prepared each time I picked her up on the Mondays prior, and the days before the 14ths I also gave her the little Majora’s Mask necklace that you can see in the main title image and a matching little covid mask to boot… because, it’s 2021 and our masks need to match our outfits, ya’ know?

After that, it was on to the main event. While Sara was home, I (literally) spent the 24 hours before picking her up on Sunday working on cleaning up my apartment (seriously, I didn’t sleep), adding decorations to the walls (I didn’t get to decorate my room the way I intended, but… anime posters seemed like they’d be a Sara thing anyways, so I’m not mad) preparing gifts for her and also getting myself purty, because I also bought myself a new outfit… because presentation is very important to me and I wasn’t going to do a whole birthday night looking like a slob in a poorly decorated / messy apartment.

The main picture for this post, is more or less a picture I took with most of the gifts in one place, but I did separate the presentation into two parts. The living room was basically the first birthday surprise and the bedroom was Valentine’s day. It was the best way I could think of to separate the two… and both days were divided more or less like so:

Birthday (More or less Animal Crossing Themed):

• Rose petals leading to the couch
• Romantic Birthday Card (Because Ily Sara)
• Personally built & programmed photo frame*
• Rose petals leading to the room
• Animal Crossing “Bellionaire” backpack
• Animal Crossing T-shirt =]

Valentines Day (Spa / Relaxing / Pink themed):

• Cute Zelda themed Valentine’s day card
• Pink bamboo luxury bathtub tray
• Pink and comfy silky robe + lingerie set
• Pink microfiber towel set
• Pink(ish) velvet scrunchie set
• Rose shaped tealights
• Handmade bathbomb set
• Lindt Chocolate Truffles

*The photo frame, due to some technical issues, didn’t end up having all the features that I wanted to add to it, but I’m going to build on it a lot more and add a lot of “us” themed things to it. Stay tuned for that ;D

The final setup for the apartment is shown in the second set of pictures I have in this post, I wanted the bedroom to be reminiscent of a night we had a while back with the red ambient lighting and all (I actually bought that machine specifically for a that night too) and I wanted to separate both days even if it was just by having one card in one room and the other in the next… yet the whole time I was setting things up I kept thinking “man, I can do this better next year”. So, here’s to #BirthentineGoals.

I’m pretty sure, I missed some details somewhere along the lines, but this post has sort of become an essay so I’ll wrap things up.

At some point in the night Sara took all of the bath-crack I gave her and enjoyed a very nice bath… and I died, after stuffing my face with some of the chocolates Sara got me for v-day and cuddling up with the new super soft heart-shaped pillow that accompanied them. My day had been somewhere between 26-30 hours long and I needed to recoup. Thankfully, I made sure to take the following days off, so we could spend them together as well and I’m very glad I did. I think for my first try, I managed to achieve my goal for Birthentine’s day and it definitely seemed to have gone over quite well too.

And of course, I can always improve upon it next year. ;D

Happy Birthentine’s Day Sara

<3

A Promise for Sara

When I first met Sara, one of the most peculiar things about that encounter was the fact that, I felt like… I had already met her before. There was this weird sense of familiarity, as if we had already known each other for some time before. What’s even more interesting is that, this wasn’t something I had actually shared with her until some time later after she mentioned describing that particular encounter in almost the exact same way: as if we already knew each other before we met. It was one thing for me to feel that way, but finding out that the feeling was mutual, just made the whole thing even crazier.

On top of that, I think we can both agree, we’ve shared quite a lot of different experiences together, in a very short amount of time which has definitely taught us a lot about each other and even ourselves. Throughout all of this, we’ve talked a lot about building a future together… and I guess, maybe I’m kinda sentimental or corny, but I wanted to do something that represented that desire to one day build a future together, in the meantime.

I kept things simple, in large part because I know that’s what she prefers (and I really had to fight my inner bougie bitch here), with a silver setting and little hearts with our respective birth stones: an Amethyst & Aquamarine. I wanted to subtly add a little more meaning to it though, so I went with our initials engraved on the inside of the ring.

Finally, I recently got a 3D printer that I’m beginning to learn to use, so we can work on different projects together in the future and I wanted to try and use it to print a little box to hold the ring in. I won’t lie, I definitely wanted to do more with it, but the overall design at least came out decently and I cut up a little cushion to size to put inside it and hold the ring in place… and after that, I surprised her with it by placing it alongside a bunch of other 3D prints I had brought for her to check out and never said a word about it until she opened up the box to look at it and found the ring inside. =]

Overall, I feel like my mission was accomlished and just want to reiterate: Sara, you’re an awkward nerdy try hard, that I love and hope to build a future with. <3

Matching Switches for… us <3

Do you know how, sometimes you go out and you see that one couple that has perfectly coordinated, matching outfits and is probably sitting on the same side of the booth at the restaurant you’re trying to eat food at, and they’re just sitting there making you sick with the amount of PDA they’re displaying?

Me neither, cuz that’s probably us. Except we don’t have matching outfits, instead, we just have matching Switches… for now.

What more can I say about this? I was originally going to go the Atomic Purple route, but then I wanted to fix up Sara’s switch too, we looked over the colors and settled on Red for me and Pink for her… but then, we had to mix em’ up a bit so we matched… and after about a solid 5 hours of work (look, it was my first time opening up a switch, don’t judge me.) now we’ve got matching (complementary?) Red and Pink Switches! Found some Red and Pink Pokeball analog stick covers and just had to throw those on there too, definitely completes the look and brings out the “nerd” in our eyes, don’t ya think?

Bonus ‘me’ being reflected in the window taking the shot.

Retro Games for Sara

This one was pretty straightforward and is only part one of multiple gaming related projects to come…

Wait, if we’re considering Pokemon Skarlet, does that make this part two?… Is a Tamagatchi considered a game? Uh…

So, moving on, there’s definitely more to come after this, but in this case, I wanted to build Sara a little retro console with a lot of the classics that we played when we were younger… and some I didn’t play, but other’s did… (Spyro? Really? >.>)

But, aside from setting up the games and stuff, it needed to have a little corny touch to it, so I made a little custom splash screen with some cute pics of ours. (It’s mostly her being cute though, I just happen to be there. ;D) Of course, no retro console is complete without a proper retro controller, so as you can see in the little photo I took while I was testing it, I made sure to include the 8bitDo N30 pro, which I then realized connects to the Pi via bluetooth! (Look, it’s been a while since I’ve messed with retropi, back in my day, we had wires.)

Here’s to spending many nights playing retro games like a couple of nerds. ;D

Evatchi & Things for Sara

One of the quickest gift decisions I’ve ever made… as soon as I saw that there was an Evangelion Tamagatchi being released, I knew what I had to do… of course, at first all I could find were like $200 imports (for like a $25 toy) but eventually, some more reasonable import prices started coming about and bam, pulled the trigger.

I also picked up an Evangelion lanyard, because… I mean, you can’t have an Evatchi without an Eva lanyard, you know?…

But, that just didn’t feel like enough? So, that’s when I decided to include a project that I had been thinking about for a while, but was too embarassed to actually make… and that project was Things for Sara.com

After asking a whole bunch of people what they thought about my weird ass idea, I got mostly positive reviews. Occasionally I’d get the (expected) *facepalm*, but you know, I thought I’d take those as a positive review too, because you know you’ve done a good and proper corny thing, when people’s first response is to facepalm.

So, I bought the domain, worked on setting up the site you see before you and put everything you see in the above image in a little gift bag and facepalmed so hard and so long, that by the time I delivered the the bag I had to have my hand surgically removed from my face.

… Why do you make me do such corny things?

Oh, right. Love.

Fun Fact: This little gift inspired something pretty interesting for us to work on afterwards… Not telling yet, but definitely can’t wait for us to share it with everyone. =]

Pokemon Skarlet

Ah, the beginning of it all… after much contemplating (and tons of discussion with friends) on how to ask one particular question, I came up with a bunch of different ideas, tried to find the simplest option and then completely scrapped all of that and went with this instead. Something that I also mentioned in-game as well.

So, after a good solid day of non-stop development (and a slew of highly entertained buddies coming in to see the updates), I came up with this: Pokemon Skarlet

Admittedly one of my favorite projects of all time and it’s technically on version 2.0 now, because if you recall, the first time around Bulbasaur was kind of invulnerable and handing out free cans of whoop-ass… so I turned it up a bit. 

There’s even a version that works on PC too ;D