Lost In Haste

I’ve become horribly sloppy about updating this blog, much to my regret. I have an absolutely terrible memory, therefore blogging was a way to keep track of everything. As its been so long since my last relevant entry, I suppose all I can really do effectively is to give a brief summary of the events in my life since March…

• Love
  As of tomorrow, MJ and I will have been together for exactly nine months from the day I asked him to be my boyfriend. By this point, we’re completely living together, most (if not all) his worldly positions are sitting in my tiny apartment.

  Its a bit funny how it all happened… MJ’s parents are going through a divorce and as it turns out, they have to sell the house. Matt was officially living with his mother (even though he rarely went back there) and when he heard this was extremely upset. Of course, most of his worries stemmed from his parents, but he was also concerned he would have to move back into his condo (which he and his ex-boyfriend own equally, however that is a story for another time).

  As he was saying this, the idea to ask him to move in just kept bouncing around my head…so I did. He was shocked, just as much as I was. After all, we had only been together for a little over six months. We talked back in forth about it while cooking, eating, and cleaning up from dinner. It just seemed to me fate had directed so much of our relationship and we had come so far, why not let it guide us some more? In the end, he said yes and the rest is history.

  I know it is far too soon to be saying this, but I can really see spending a very long time with this man (if not the rest of my life). That is if I don’t f**k it up first…

• Family
  There are only two things to mention about my family…

  First, my Grandfather died back in the spring. Despite the fact he was (to quote my father) a narcissistic son of a bitch, he was still my grandfather. He’d been sick for a long time and everyone was prepared but I still feel a bit apart when I heard the news. Being that I hate to miss work, of course I came in the next day, which proved to be a horrible idea…

  The funeral was rather interestingly, to say the least. It was raining the whole time and of course every time there was a story mentioned during the funeral mass, there was a burst of thunder and lightning…we all joked that was Leo telling us we were doing it all wrong…because that was the type of thing he would do. After it all was said and done, and Leo was in the ground, the grandchildren got drunk. My family has always loved alcohol (it is the French in us), so naturally we drank the entire day away. Toasts were made, curses were flung, and we all mentioned how much we missed Grandma, saying we wished she hadn’t been the first to go (that is another story for another time).

  During all of this, my cousins asked me about who I was dating. I was shocked they knew (one of them had looked at facebook) but started to volunteer information. They were actually interested and wanted to meet him! Of course, the funniest part of the entire thing was when my littlest cousin Liz (who was 18 at the time) asked who was the pitcher and who was the catcher!

  This of course, leads into the second noteworthy mention: my immediate family finally meet MJ. We were both very nervous about the entire thing, as my family hasn’t been the most supportive of my lifestyle. Our worries were completely unfounded; my family was impeccably polite. MJ had meet my Grandma earlier (we had dinner with her a few weeks prior) and had meet my father (he came over to pick up the bunny after they came back from vacation), so my mother and brothers where the only surprise. My mother was charming, my littlest brother was actually civil (he was the one who told me I was going to hell for being a fag) and my other brother actually seemed eager to meet and talk with MJ. I just about passed out from shock.

• Friends
  The only noteworthy event to happen with my friends has been a trip to Tennessee to visit one of our college friends. The first night ended up with me consuming far too much alcohol, puking out the window of the car on the way back, and ended with my head in a trash can. Of course, I didn’t end up with a hang over the next day (sadly, Tammy did and felt like $hit the whole time). A visit to the mall and then pancakes the next day rounded out the whole trip. All in all, it was far more boring than last year but I think I enjoyed this trip a bit more…
• Work
  Other than my boss leaving for another position and my manager being promoted in his place, work is pretty much the same as it was before. Granted, I’m not longer solely working in the legacy system from hell, but other than working with a new custom framework, the job is pretty much business as usual.
• Computers
  The only really interesting, noteworthy event would be my purchasing a new computer. Due to complete stupidity, I ended up spilling water on my Dell XPS notebook. I immediately cleaned it up but the damage had already been done. While it would start, it would randomly freeze, sometimes durring start up, sometimes after a day of usage. Frankly, the situation wasn’t improving, so I bit the bullet and decided to go computer shopping.

  I ended up going to NewEgg as I usually do when in need of anything computer related. As it turned out, I found the perfect computer for the grate price. It had the same amount of computing power as my Dell with a slightly smaller screen and a noticeable weight difference. I’d never purchased from Asus but all the research revealed it to the a good product, so I took a chance. Needless to say, it paid off and within days of my order, Apollo (my computer) was up and running again!

  On a side note, yes, I’m still using Linx as my primary machine. However, I do have a new (as of four or so months) windows desktop at home running XP.

• Politics
  I’ve been following Indecision ‘08 (thank you John Steward) with an alarming enthusiasm. In the beginning (don’t you just love it when people start out with that) I was a Hillary Clinton supporter. As it stands, I still think she would have made a great president (or for that matter, a great vice president). However, she hasn’t motivated and drawn people into this race as much as Barack Obama.

  My friends have never been interested in politics before. In fact, they’ve avoided talking about the political arena around me for as long as they’ve know me. However, they are now so involved in this presidential race they can’t help it. The reason: Obama. No other politician in years has drawn so many people into politics. His enthusiasm and charisma is the driving force behind his campaign and is perfectly coupled with his message of change. In the current economy, with the current president, and the current war, individuals are just drawn to this message.

  The moral of this isn’t my political views, but of what all this means. They say you are a reflection of your parents. I have always firmly protested this, as I hate most of what my parents believe in and stand for. However, it seems I’ve misjudged the old saying. While I am not a closeted republican posing as an independent (an accurate description of my father), I am just as much a political pundit as my dad. It just turns out I follow politics just as much as he.

Well there you go, my life wrapped up in a few paragraphs. I hope from now on I’ll be come active once again with posting here, for how else will I remember?

Its been a while since I’ve written here…and it will be a bit longer.  However, I’ve decided to shift priorities in my life, so hopefully I’ll start blogging again.

I had originally planned to write a post a day about my vacation but you know me, I got lazy. This was the first time I had been off work for an extensive period of time (excluding the time off for Christmas and the sick days a couple of weeks ago) since I started at my job, so I was determined to stay away from the computer. Instead you’ll have to settle for one giant post with a couple of pictures.

Day 1: Car Ride

This really was a day plus one hour. We started on the road at about 11pm on Saturday, taking two cars (my brother Sean and his friend were in one, while my father, myself, and my littlest brother Nick were in the other car). I immediately passed out and slept until we hit some little town in Kansas. I ended up driving until Denver and then switched again with my father. After stopping for some Starbucks, we headed into the mountains and didn’t stop until we hit the condo we were renting.

Unfortunately we couldn’t get into the unit until 4pm so we had to kill some time. My brother needed to get his snowboard bindings fixed, so we headed to

Day 2: Keystone

The night before my father decided we needed to have a warm-up day, so we decided to head to Keystone. We have skied these slopes more than any other resort in the area and were prety sick of it, so it seemed perfect to waste on the warm-up day.

Don’t jump to conclusions, I don’t hate Keystone. We’ve just been to it so many times there really isn’t any joy in skiing its’ slopes. Add the fact there is one run full of people you can’t avoid and it just isn’t a very good time anymore…

It was just like we remembered, down to the last run. Flooded with people, you really couldn’t go anywhere that wasn’t insanely difficult to ski without running into people. Even that could have been avoided if the snow was good…but of course it wasn’t. It was just icy enough to make skiing a bit more difficult that usual… Out of all them all, Day 2 was the most disappointing.

However, the view was completely amazing…

Day 3: Breckenridge

The first time we came out to Colorado to ski, we stayed at Breck. At the time I thought the place was absolutely amazing. It still is but it has two major flaws. First, you have to be willing to wait in line for a ski lift. At the bottom of the mountain, the lines can but over an hour long. No, I’m not kidding…

Second, the resort is insanely hard to navigate. In order to get from one mountain to another, you usually have to take a slope to the middle tier of the resort, if not down to the bottom. While the lines on the middle level aren’t as bad as at the bottom, you can still wait a good thirdly minutes to get on the lift.

Despite all of these problems, I actually had a good time at Breck. Sure it was crowded with people and we had to wait forty-five minutes to get up on the mountain…the snow was amazing and more than made up for it (it had snowed the night before). Even better than that, there was an area of the resort full of black runs (green = easy, blue = harder, black = hardest) I could actually ski and were almost entirely deserted. It was perfect!

Days 4 & 5: Vail

There really isn’t much to say about Vail other than it was the best two days of skiing I’ve ever had in Colorado. It was a bit more crowded than Brek (at least on the front side of the first mountain) but the snow was great and the runs were even better. I think I skied better on day 4 and 5 than I ever have before.

Day 6: Home Again

The night before we’d (and by we, I mean my father) decided to cut our trip a day short. I had been arguing for leaving on Friday night after we got back from skiing, so this plan made perfect sense. Unfortunately, not all of us felt that way (*cough* little brother *cough*)…

To be quite blunt, the trip back sucked! Of course, the worst one revolved around my laptop. Every trip we’ve ever gone on, Nick has always wanted to play with something of mine. In the beginning, it was my Game Boy. In recent years, it was my Playstation (I have a newer one with a screen attached to it). This time, he wanted my laptop.While I was driving my father finished his book. I offered to let him read mine but he said he was sick of reading. I then offered to let him play the original Zelda on my computer. When he heard that, his eyes lit up…as did my little brother’s… So after I set him up (not an easy task while driving) and he’d played for a while, my little brother began whining that he wanted to play. I told him no and then all hell broke lose. Needless to say, my father stopped playing, shoved the computer in my direction (I was still driving), and turned around to deal with the little monster…

Day 7: Final Review

All in all, I’d say this trip was a success. Sure my littlest brother was a huge pain in the a$$… Sure, my other brother was a condescending prick at times… Sure my father almost went homicidal… But come on, it was skiing!

I’ll never forget my first day @ Infuz. I was still living at home with my parents so I woke up at 5:30 to be on time. I showed up overdressed and after being introduced to everyone, I barely remembered anyone’s name. I had Starbucks for the first time and ended up getting sick and leaving early after vomiting twice. Ah, good times…

I’ve been here for a year now. Its kind of scary to think about how fast it went. I came to Infuz nearly fresh out of college and really didn’t know a thing. Oh sure, I’d taken classes, written applications, created websites, and even had an internship. But what does that mean in the real world? Almost nothing.

And now, a year later? I’m no longer naive enough to believe anything gets done the proper way. In college time lines are almost non-existent and you’ve never even heard the work client. Even worse, I no longer believe all my fellow employees are good or even competent at their job. I’ve seen some people how shouldn’t have ever been hired, much less entrusted with any responsibility.

I think it is a fair trade to exchange idealism for skill. I’ve been forced to learn about systems and processes I didn’t even know existed when I was in school. I’ve been given opportunities to work with different types of technologies. I’ve also had the chance to work with some amazing people.

All in all, its been one hell of an experience. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I don’t’ know what this year will bring but I’m looking forward to it.

No, I’m not saying good bye to the blog…although that might be a possibility and one I’ll be writing about in a later post… No, I’m instead saying goodbye to some colleagues who I’ll no longer be working with due to layoffs. I can’t go into specifics (I really don’t want my boss to have to call me into the office tomorrow) so I’ll be as general as possible.

I was getting ready to take off a little early today (MJ and I are going out to a new bar tonight) when Sheila caught me and told me to wait a second. It soon became apparent why I had to wait as most of the company was heading to the cafe. The Executive Team came in and made the announcement: we lost two of our accounts. One of the accounts was expected and wont be missed as they were horribly demanding and we didn’t make much a profit. Unfortunately, the other client is one we actually liked and paid us well.

After that sudden announcement, we were then informed several employee’s were being laid off. Even more surprising was the number of people. I had no idea one client could have such a profound impact on our company.

Some of the people I’ll really miss. I’ve been at this company for almost a year (next week will be my year anniversary) and I’ve become close with some of these individuals. Some of them didn’t deserve to be laid off, the circumstances have just fated it to end up this way. Its sad but I suppose its just the way of things…

Good bye friends, I’ll certainly miss you.

P.S. – Ok, I lied and went into specifics…