I’m 28 Years Old Today

It’s hard for me to believe, but I can no longer rebuke the fact that I am in my late twenties. Today I was asked “How do you feel?” I paused and quickly reflected over the past year of my life and then responded “I feel my age.” I love my life and am grateful that I’ve been blessed with another year on this Earth, and what a year it was. This post is all about taking a good hard look at myself in the mirror and reflecting on the good, the bad and the ugly of being 27.

So many things have happened to me this year that I know that I’m going to leave things out, but here’s my best attempt at grabbing some of the more memorable events (Remember: You’re memory tends to go as you get older too) that happened while I was 27. I just know I’m going to have to edit this as things start coming back to me…

Being 27: The Good

• I’m Engaged

  By far, the best thing to happen to me over the course of this past year is that I decided to take the plunge. My lovely fiancée, Laurann and I have been together for almost 4 years. The engagement went exactly as I had planned, and I’d love to tell you about it all here, but you’re going to have to wait for a future post for all of the details. I can honestly say that getting engaged was the happiest moment of my entire life and I cannot wait to move onto the “Us” phase of our life.

• Project Management at Work

  As you may have seen in my July post, I’m now a member of the Project Management team at my company and am loving every second of it. There’s a lot of growing that I have to do in this position and I’m facing new challenges daily (Who would have ever thought that coordinating everyone’s schedule for a meeting would be one of them?), and I cannot wait to see what opportunities and challenges come my way this year.

• Building Relationships

  This past year has been all about building and maintaining relationships for me. You never know when fate is going to step in and take someone that you love away from you, so why not REALLY make the most of the time we have? This past year made my family my best friends, and my best friends have become family. I’m still not sure why I’m surrounded by so many wonderful people in my life, but I’m going to take advantage of this blessing.

  I have also decided to let go of the past. People who have previously wronged me are forgiven. It’s time to move on. After all, everyone deserves a second chance. Right?

Being 27: The Bad

• PMP Certification

  I have been wanting to get my project management certification for about 2 years now, but I’m still not there. My initial goal was to obtain it this past summer, but the seasons have changed and I’m still without that ever important piece of paper that validates the knowledge and skills I possess. I remain undeterred and am currently on track to obtain it before the end of 2009.

• Personal Trainer Certification

  Physical fitness is a large part of my life. If I don’t make it to the gym at least 3 nights a week I start to feel a tad grumpy. I wanted to become a certified personal trainer immediately after receiving my PMP certification. Unfortunately, I still have neither. Let’s hope I turn 29 with both of them under my belt.

• Poor Mr. Connery

  Lastly, in the early hours of a cold winter morning I bounded head-on (very slowly) over a rather large curb in my Lincoln MKZ (Mr. Connery). All 4 tires popped upon impact, and I continued to hurdle down a grassy hillside into the drive-thru of a Kentucky Fried Chicken. My wintery adventure came to a rather abrupt halt with the MKZ’s passenger side window parallel to the drive through speaker. KFC’s are not open this early in the morning so my resting place was of no benefit to me. My little offroad excursion ended up costing me 5 hours of missed work and $1200 in repairs, but it could have been much worse. No major parts or pieces of the car were harmed and I narrowly missed hitting a traffic pole as I bound over the curb by less than a foot. Had any of that happened this would have landed in the ugly section.

Being 27: The Ugly

• Truebluetitan

  I’m a bad blogger. Plain and simple. There’s about a million things that I know I want to write about, but it seems to take me forever to write a post so I usually end up not writing them and feeling bad about it later. Over the course of this past year I gave Truebluetitan a new snazzy coat of paint in hopes that it would stir my creative juices, but unfortunately, it didn’t. The result? I wrote a measly 9 posts for Truebluetitan while I was 27. Now I know that many of you are probably reaching for your unsubscribe button after reading that, but I’m giving myself 1 last chance to raise TBT from the ashes. It was once a site worth visiting. It will become that once again. Either that, or it’s plug get’s pulled. I have a year to prove to you, and myself, how important Truebluetitan is to me.

• Being an Entrepreneur

  Life sometimes behaves like a pendulum. At least that’s what mine does. A little over a year ago, being an Entrepreneur was my only job. I lived solely off of the income from my projects. I didn’t make a lot, and it was incredibly stressful, but, my God, was it fun. Nowadays my projects sit on a shelf. Some are revived and some die (ArrivalAlert).

  At the core of everything that is me, I am an entrepreneur, and though some days go by where I may not act like it, I cannot deny the fact that it’s who I am. Though this past year doesn’t do a great job of reflecting that I have a feeling that it’s all about to change.

I’m 28 Years Old Today

When my father was 28 years old he grew into the man that he is today. It was the birth of his rags to riches story which is what continues to inspire me every day. And while I love this life of mine, I am not yet the man that I know I was born to be. This year changes everything.