So... I'm married.

Jessica and I had a beautiful ceremony and are now officially off the market.

Home Sweet Home

Auld Lang Syne

I can't believe that I'm actually taking time to write something here. The past couple of months, or more specifically since I've started my new job, has been extremely busy. I will be surprised if I'm able to keep this up throughout the year; however, that hasn't really stopped me in the past.

Just to remind everyone, around the end of October (about when I stopped posting) I changed job roles within my company. So far it's been interesting and challenging, but it's a return to actual engineering so I'm starting to get some use out of my degree. Unfortunately, it means more meetings and less time to get work done, which in turn reduces the time I take for myself. I've let this site fall to the wayside, but I did take small steps to counter it at the end of last year by finally signing up for Facebook. I felt like I was missing out on the best opportunity to keep in touch with friends from my past, since I am no longer using any instant messaging service, nor do I have time to write emails or posts. This way I can quickly interact with those who are no longer around.

I can't say that I've been doing too much since my last postings. November and December were filled with the usual holiday festivities. The one exciting thing that did happen was being able to dance in Bakersfield again. One time was with my company's holiday party where Big Bad Voodoo Daddies (as seen in the movie "Swingers) performed, and the other was when Royal Crown Revue (as seen in the movie "The Mask") came to town. I've had numerous people come up to Jessica and me asking where we learned how to dance or if we were dance instructors. Aside from that 2007 ended with the usual parties and hanging out with people who were in town.

2008 started out with a bang as Nate and I went to the Rose Bowl to see USC play Illinois in football. It was an amazing opportunity and we both had a lot of fun, plus enjoyed a great game put on by USC. Here's a picture I took towards the end of the game.

As for new year resolutions.... Well, I might have to post about that another time if I can remember any. So this is my new life, and we will see how 2008 treats us all!

Today Is The Big Day

All the work that I had been building towards has all been leading up to this week. We met with auditors today to discuss what we do here at my work site and showed them around a bit. Unfortunately, the big project that I had been working on for the past several months wasn't even mentioned today. I'm torn because I spent all this time updating and validating information when I could have been doing other stuff, but on the other hand I'm relieved because we don't know what they would have expected and there's still a lot of work to be done on it. In the end, it's not like a complete waste of my time, since this will be looked at in the near future and be the target of even more data manipulation. The good news is that after this month, I will officially be in a different engineering role within the company and won't have to deal with this sort of stuff any more! This is a relief because these past few weeks I've seen potential workloads start to balloon. So I'm getting out of this job just in time to avoid correcting years of past work. Today went well, and I think so will tomorrow and soon I will be free from all of this! Just thought you should know....

Bogged Down

So I suppose I should update this thing. Hey everybody! I’m back… well at least for now. It seems that I have been enjoying a month long vacation away from personal correspondence, though not entirely by choice. I will admit that there have been times when I could have written a web post in those waning hours of my work day between me and freedom, but for the most part those opportunities have come few and far between in the last couple of weeks. To put it quite frankly, times are busy! Going all the way back to July, I spent time getting ready for my brother’s wedding, following that I spent my time in August getting ready for some European traveling, and it would seem that upon my return I would have nothing to hinder me from getting back to the updating. That is, nothing except my job.

September and now October are “crunch” months typically for me and my position – no real surprises there and I had prepared myself before traveling to expect as such. The only problem is that I underestimated the situation for this particular year. The workload has seemingly doubled and now in the midst of everything, I am change job roles within the company. Soon I will be a fully functioning Facilities Engineer (meaning that I get to install new equipment now), but until that changeover happens, I will be sitting between two job positions while preparing for a company audit. That can only mean fun-times!

So I’ve changed my culture to deal with the overflowing workload and trying to keep up with it all, thereby letting my communications to all fall to the wayside. It hasn’t just been this weblog, but really all my correspondences with friends outside of phone calls. For those of you who have written me emails that I have not replied to yet, I’m sorry for my silence. I will also admit that I still get stricken by the lazy bug and I thought that getting internet at home would help deal with these situations. Unfortunately, I don’t even want to look at a computer once work is over, and the notion of sitting at a desk and typing a letter/post out falls to the bottom of my list of priorities.

That said, I will spare you a few updates to feed your curiosity before my next update (whenever that may be now). September was full of lots of traveling (another possible reason for not writing more) as Jess and I spent the first week still in Europe. Once we returned, I left the next weekend to fly to Oklahoma for Bryan’s funeral. The weekend after that was Natalie’s wedding on the beach in Santa Barbara, and this past weekend my family went to the USC football game for my dad’s birthday. My mom had shoulder surgery to fix an old muscle tear and will be down an appendage for the next several weeks, so I’ve been trying to spend some time at their house to help make dinner and do minor tasks. I’ve also been trying to coordinate meals around Jess’s evening class schedule, as well as instituting Hitchcock Movie Night every Friday night for the month of October.

It doesn’t stop there because I’m going down to USC again this Thursday to do some company recruiting. Things keep piling up and I keep trying to knock them down. Maybe soon I can get back to posting more, but don’t have too high of expectations.

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

Jessica and I returned safely from our European travels on Thursday. We had so much fun the entire trip and everything seemingly went smoothly, which was nice to see happen after all the effort put in to planning. Give me a couple days of catching up with life before I update with pictures and stories from the trek.

In more serious, saddening news, my whole family and I are leaving tomorrow for a few days to attend the funeral of my cousin Brian who was killed in Iraq last week. Some of you might have had the privilege of meeting Brian on his few excursions to Bakersfield over the past couple years. He had been serving in the Marines for the past few years and was on the tail end of his second stint in Iraq. Please keep Brian's family and friends in your thoughts and prayers. The funeral will be held this Thursday in Oklahoma.

Vacation

The past month has been a whirlwind of activity, most leading up to this moment. Jess and I are about to embark on our European adventure and we couldn't be more excited or relieved. I've carefully laid all the details out so hopefully things run about as smoothly as they can go. I will not lie and say that I'm relieved that the planning part of the trip is over, as the build-up to this day has been anything but fun. Plus, the time has seemingly gone by faster than either of us could keep up with it so it feels like we are always just one step behind. However, the planning phase is over and we can now coast through the agenda and actually enjoy ourselves for a while. I expect the craziness of the build-up to be worth the wait and we'll have a wonderful time. That's what's exciting.

Let's just hope that time does slow down a bit for us. See you in two weeks!

Wedding Post (at last)

After practically wrapping up a very long project yesterday/today, I’ve taken some time to myself here at work to slow things down a bit and be a little less productive than I have the past few weeks. The whole month of July has just been a blur with the weeks just flying by as work has kept me zipping around. I’m not in the clear yet; in fact it might be getting worse these next couple of weeks, but at least I can take some time to myself today.

I feel obligated to at least recap a little bit about the events that transpired starting about 2 weeks ago. My older brother Paul was getting married the last Friday of July, and so after working briefly that Monday and Tuesday, I took the rest of the week off to help work and celebrate the wedding. Part of this included creating a wedding video slideshow that my parents practically assumed that I’d do, off course without giving me any tools or advise (except a scanner, thankfully). They did, however, provide us with stacks of pictures to go through. I elicited the help of Jessica and we got to work churning out two separate videos – a long version and a short version. With some last minute help from Carly we managed to eke out the two videos to show, which I think we pulled off nicely. I heard nothing but compliments on how professional it looked and how nice it was. I think I even heard that “Disney Don” was impressed.

Aside from working furiously on that project, as a groomsman I was required to attend the bachelor event. I say event, because it was a whole, exhausting day of activity. I woke up the same time I normally would for work to meet people for breakfast before playing a round of team golf. Following this we ate lunch, ran around outside for about an hour (don’t ask why), then jumped into the swimming pool because of course it was well over 100 degrees outside. Then we barbecued steaks for dinner before going bar-hopping to about 12:30-1am. As an assistant DD I had a little say in when we stopped the party because I was exhausted after a non-stop 19-hour day.

The wedding went off fabulously and I think the reception was a big hit with people. I believe the DJ was forced to play nothing but oldies and specifically songs from “Back To The Future”. The problem with being involved with a wedding is all the standing and waiting you have to do. It’s not fun standing still for what seems like hours during the whole ceremony and then waiting around afterwards for the wedding couple photos to be finished. The regular guests were lucky in that they at least got food once they got to the reception hall. We were placed in a separate room to wait with no food and we were starving.

When finally the time to enter the reception banquet came, we discovered that food would be served after every member of the wedding party gave a speech, which none of us (aside from the best men) were prepared for. For the sake of food, I kept my speech short and sweet and it seemed that we’d be eating soon, until my dad got a hold of the microphone. Twenty minutes later he finished and they started carting food out. It’s a good thing the wedding party gets served first because I couldn’t take it any longer.

But the wedding was more than food, or standing, or partying, or videos. I was a wonderful time and I wish the best to the new bride and groom. God knows when the next one of these will be…. *cough*Patrick2008*cough*.

All the Rage

I’m behind on my postings because work has been busy. So I need to write about the wedding week that we went through for my brother and update on the artist of the month for July. All I need is some time from work to post. I would post about one of these two topics today except I have this pounding headache, which I’ve never experienced before at work, but when I think about it is slightly humorous (and grossly painful).

The day after Paul’s wedding, we had family over and played basketball in our pool. I got badly knocked around and had bruises and scrapes all over my body, including a small bump on my forehead. I was almost finished with the last Harry Potter book, so I kept joking about how it was my Voldemort scar. The bump has since gone away, though that spot is still a little tender. Last night I had a strange dream where I was running around with friends and family frantically searching for something. Time was running out and I was searching for a horocrux, which I inevitably found to be five severed fingertips set in a block of ice with different painted fingernails. (Note - This is not so random since I’ve started watching Dexter from my Showtime on Demand, which involves these same fingers in ice). My cohorts and I quickly disposed of the object just before I awoke from my slumber.

Now my head is hurting for the first time like this at work. Coincidence? I can feel Voldemort’s rage.

Hectic

Sorry for the lack of posting going on but it's a busy time right now between my brother's wedding (this Friday!) and with the absolute craziness of work. These past couple of weeks have just flown by and I'm still trying to catch my breath. I hope to return very soon with some more posts and more amusing stories. Until then, however, I just hope that I can survive!