Enthusiasm

Been a long time since I blogged and I think that I will start doing so again more often. It’s a great way for me to get things off my mind and recently I’ve been very stressed out. Fortunately I’ve had a good avenue for channeling my stress… WoW. Of course WoW has it’s own stresses, especially since I’m managing HILYMI again (thanks to my guildies who pulled me back), but overall I think I’m taking a more stress free approach this time and enjoying the game.

The holidays were good and my niece, Ms. Rachiepants, has been growing sooooo much. The little tike is already running around and being a trouble maker. I love seeing here every week when I go over to Rays. It seems like every week she’s doing something or saying something new.

Kerrie and I have been doing quite well. Thanks to some assistance with a counselor, we’ve been more focused on quality time with each other and balancing “me time” with “us time”. We’ve also been exploring more and more things to do together including painting, more and more cooking together, and our latest new activity: geocaching. Expect a lot of blogs soon about geocaching, painting, and of course HILYMI. We also have several camping and other trips scheduled in 2010 so it’s going to be a very eventful, thankfully in a good way, relaxing year for us. 2009 was very stressful and it will be nice to enjoy 2010.

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Friday drive in the storming rain
Friday ceremony
“Always Ready”
Saturday, Hurricane Ridge and the drive there
Sunday, Mt. Rainier, Mt. St. Helens, Packwood (jo jo’s), Hood River, Mt. Hood, Timberline Lodge, homeward bound

So I don’t think I can begin to write everything that’s happened in the last two months so I’ll keep it short to a bullited list. To sum things up, we did a lot, many things were accomplished, we got very tired, we are just now catching up to a semi-normal (for us anyways) way of life.

• End of April / beginning of May made offers on the Pasadena house we were renting
• May 15th, found out that it was a no-deal with our x-landlord, started searching on our own for a new house
• May 16th, got a realtor (Lynn Cumberland, refered from Brad Hansleman who was refered by Mark Nortman), did drive-bys on the first huge set of houses
• May 17th, did walk throughs of the first set of houses
• May 18th, made a deal on Derry Lane house
• May 20th, no-deal on Derry Lane, went on to search for more
• May 21st, through drive by’s and other things shortened 3 lists of 50+ houses down to 12
• May 23rd, saw all new houses and fell in love with Cougar Place, made an offer
• May 24th, we had an accepted offer
• May 27th, home inspection
• June 3rd, had appraisal
• June 6th, we got boxes and the packing begins!
• June 11th, FHA docs to sign
• June 15th, notice to Pasadena landlord
• June 22nd, my 30th birthday
• June 23rd, conditional approval
• June 26th, final approval
• June 29th, signing
• June 30th, closing and got our keys at 7:30 PM PST
• June 30th – July 4th, move-in of delicate items
• July 3rd, our fridge arrived
• July 4th, rewired / upgraded our ethernet in the house
• July 5th, the big move in thans to UHaul and A+ Student Movers
• July 6th, our washer/dryer arrived and comcast got us setup
• July 6th, my final term of my Bachelor’s degree begins
• July 7th – July 11th, move of final items including plants
• July 11th, final cleaning
• July 13th, move out inspection
• July 16th, saw Dave Bixel, a tax professional that works with Mark Nortman (our financial advisor)
• July 18th, went fishing
• July 19th, painting in Kerrie’s office is compelte
• July 20th, life returns to a semi-state of normal

Mission complete… very tired right now… to be filled later…

Historic villages, frozen custard, family all together including Kerrie’s Mom (minus Brian), pictures, good byes.

Jersey 5 & 10, driving around town, Atlantic City, The Taj, Rockin’ the Caspa, Sights, Smells, Sounds, driving down Ocean Drive, seeing Kerrie’s old stomping grounds including driving by Breonna’s old house, walking the board walk, nothing is open damnit!, finally went back to Kirk’s Pizza for steak & cheese hoggie, finally spent several hours in the eve with Kerrie’s Grandparents, saw Aunt for a few minutes.

More Wawa, goddamn toll money, Jersey Diner, pork roll, meeting family: Grandparents, Aunt / cousins, chineese food, Dad, Brother

Ray decided to pick up Gears of War 2 at Circuit City’s closing sale. So we decided today to finally polish off the orignal Gear of War. I have to admit that the story leading up to the end of the game was very good, but the storyline of the final chapter of the story didn’t really make sense at all to be frank. What my big complaint about the end of Gears of War was that the transition into the final chapter and the final chapter itself didn’t seem storyline rich enough. It was almost like they planned for more of a game originally, but ran out of budget and the final chapter suffered for it. Also the final boss fight was frankly pathetic. There were 2-3 other boss fights in the game which were much more epic in nature than that final one. In fact the whole train section of the game just seemed… I dunno… lame. We played the first chapter of Gears of War 2 and I have to admit, I’m very pleased with the storyline. I especially like the little bits from the point of view of the aliens. We’ll see how it goes, I have high hopes for Gears 2.

Work has been seriously draining on my as I’ve moved into my role as manager of software development for ecoAsset Manager. Many things including learning more about the product to leadership training and in general getting more used to the big corporate processes and procedures of IHS. I’ve been really deeply involved in the migration of all of our code from the Mountain View office as well as Salt Lake City from their old source control onto TFS. On my product specifically, I’ve been doing a mix of prototyping different technology stacks including WCSF with MVP vs .Net MVC and LINQ to SQL vs LINQ to Entities.

Family and health have been ok, family more so than health. I’ve been really stressed out recently and that’s really affected my health a lot since Chron’s flare ups are more likely during times of stress. I’ve been learning how to deal with the stress better and started recently going to the chiropractor which has helped with shoulder and neck strains from stress.

While Warhammer has been fun, I really haven’t had nearly enough time to play it because when I get home I’m so tired / stressed out that I can’t think. The good news is that I love my new boss more and more every day which helps with my stress level. My team is really starting to come together and become more integrated and used to working with each other. Overall while things have been stressful and insane, I see them getting better and hope that things will improve over time.

NOTE: Posted some backdated blog posts which I kept in emails to myself.

My dad is an excellent photographer. I would call him a hobbiest, but his skill in digital and traditional photography is on a professional level. He’s been featured a couple of times in magazines and has received several awards for his photos. His best work (IMO) has to be nature (still life and active nature shots) and city scape shots, although he’s getting better and better at capturing people.

When I chose this theme for my blog I told myself that I would replace the default seashore image at the top with one that my dad has taken. So last night, after asking his permission, we looked around at his photos and cropped one appropriately for the scene you now see at the top of my blog. If you are interested in more of his work you can find him at RayLaurencePhotos.com (which is also linked to in my blogroll).