Planned trips for 2004

Sort of a list for sanity's sake.

1. Florida/East Coast Road Trip: Sometime in the February/March time frame
2. Chicago(?): April (not sure about this one actually happening yet)
3. Bar Harbor: Last weekend in June (one of the few firm dates)
4. LA/San Diego: Need to be in San Diego for Comicon, but not sure if I'll go early or stay later.

Those are just the ones that I'm going somewhere. Dave will be here end of January, and the Crew reunion is still tentatively planned for Memorial Day weekend in Boston. Now I have to figure out how much vacation time (not to mention monetary cost) this will use up.

Wrapping up 2003

Well, the hectic part of my holiday season is now over. At work, the new release appears to be on its way out the door before the new year (not without a few hiccups, of course). I'm looking forward to being able to work on some new stuff again, as this release was mostly bug fixes as far as I was concerned. Though we'll still be doing patch releases for the foreseeable future so I won't be getting completely away from bug fixes.

At home, Christmas brought it's own stress to the party. My 90-year old grandmother was visiting for the holiday. Everyone in my family loves her dearly, but she's gotten to a point now where you have to repeat things to her 3 or 4 times. She also made comments about my hair and how someday "I'd cut it off and feel good about it". Who knows that may be the case, but right now my hair is long and I'm not cutting it any time soon, so get over it. Add to this the fact that my father ended up in the hospital a few days before and it was a recipe for disaster. The actual holiday went off without a hitch; everyone got their presents (my nephew Andrew absolutely loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cross-stitch piece I did, and yes, I actually did make it), we had a nice breakfast, and no one killed anyone else. Dad unfortunately had to stay in the hospital for most of the morning, but the doctors finally let him come home in the afternoon.

This week will be pretty quiet work-wise and I'm not really planning on anything big for New Year's. I'll probably end up spending the night with Jen, the girl I've been seeing regularly of late. It's too early to say where this relationship will end up, but we're both looking for the same thing out of it, so it works for now.

A disaster averted

Next Wednesday is the premier of the the final Lord of the Rings movie, Return of the King. Of course, my friends and I planned to be there for the first midnight showing. I modified the script I used to try to find Matrix Revolutions tickets to check for LotR tickets. The script checked two theaters, the Framingham theater and the Fenway theater. Come the day before Thanksgiving, the tickets went on sale, and the script notified me. I was at a bar at the time, and made my way home. I bought 10 tickets (for me and my friends), and thought my job was done. I had obviously had too much to drink, because I accidentally bought tickets for the Framingham theater.

I didn't figure this out until a few days later, after the tickets for the Fenway theater had long since sold out. I knew that sometimes they held tickets back until the week before the premier, so I reset the script and hoped they would eventually be available again. Sure enough this morning around 10:30AM, the script notified me that there were tickets available again. I picked up the 10 tickets that I originally wanted and the disaster was averted. Now I just need to get down to Framingham before Tuesday so I can get a refund on the tickets I don't need any more.

It's that time of year

I've been so ridiculously busy lately. At work, we're trying to get the next release out the door. It hasn't been going particularly well so far. QA is going to be in the office this weekend doing testing, which will hopefully help us catch up. The only problem will be is if they find a ton of problems. With 2 weeks left, too many show stoppers will significantly delay the release, and if the release is delayed at all, it'll ruin everyone's holiday plans.

Speaking of the holidays, I'm quite sick of having to deal with the extra traffic in the neighborhood. All the people going to and form the mall has added 5 to 10 minutes on each end of my commute. I'll be happy when the traffic patterns return to some sense of normalcy, but that most likely won't happen until after New Year's.

This time of year also brings the snows, but that is definitely not a bad thing. We've already had one sizable snow storm this month and the forecast is for another coming Sunday. Hopefully all of the snow will translate into another good ski season. I know I won't be able to get to the mountain as often as I did last season, so I'm hoping that when I do go the conditions will be good. I'll be keeping my figures crossed.

A recap of my time off

So I spent Thanksgiving with my family at my parents place. My sister Sam and her husband couldn't come, but Mari and the kids joined me and the folks for a nice meal of turkey and other yummy goodies. We watched the holiday football games on the new HDTV my parents bought a few weeks ago. I took home some leftovers because as always there was a ton of food left over.

On Saturday, I attended the wedding of my good friends, Michael and Sabrina. I've known Mike for a long time, and we've been friends since our high school days. I didn't meet Sabrina until she and Michael began dating (again, they had dated briefly when they were teenagers) last November, but we became fast friends. It was a very nice, simple ceremony. The reception was in the same building and there was an open bar. It was very nice to see some old friends, some I had not seen in over a year. Somewhere floating around there is a video of me and a few other other guys making asses out ourselves dancing to YMCA.

Unfortunately, the vacation didn't last forever, and I had to go back to work. On Tuesday however, a snow squall rolled in just before the morning commute and turned every road in the Northeast into a sheet of ice. The highways were backed up, the back roads were backed up. I heard a report saying that there were over 200 accidents that day. My normally 20-30 minute commute turned into a 90 minute nightmare, though I had it lucky as some of my coworkers took 4 or 5 hours to get into work. Needless to say, it was not the most productive day.

Otherwise, things have been pretty normal. Though I am sitting here this morning expecting some more snow to drop. The initial forecasts were for over a foot, but as of now there's probably only about an inch or two. I'm hoping for a good snow fall so the ski mountains will open up. I'll just keep my fingers crossed.

3x Thursday: 12/04/y2k+3: Tiz the Season to be Random

We'll start the posting back rolling with a little 3XThursday, compliments of Missy Williams.

1. What do you think of holiday shopping? Do you hate it as much as I do? Why? And, what is your reaction when people ask what you want and you have no clue?
   I live next to a freakin' mall, what do you think I think about holiday shopping? I almost always have a toy or two on my list that I haven't gotten around to buying yet that I'll ask people to pick me up.
2. How do you feel about birthdays? Just another year, or a sign of getting old?
   When I was a kid I used to love birthdays. Now I could take them or leave them. I don't particularly like being reminded that I'm getting older, but there are plenty of other things that remind me of that on a regular basis.
3. Do you like going on trips/vacations? From packing to the plane ride to coming home and unpacking, what are your favorite/unfavorite parts?
   I love car trips, something about being on the road in a car listening to good music with a group of friends is just so appealing. I've gotten packing down to a science such that when I went to Vegas in October I packed in 15 minutes the morning I left and didn't leave anything behind. As far as a least favorite aspect, with plane travel it's dealing with airport security. I had my bag checked multiple times on the way back from Vegas, that irked me.

Bonus: If you had to choose between going blind and going deaf, which would it be? Why?
I definitely think I'd rather go deaf, because at least then I could still do my job pretty easily. It's pretty hard to program when you're blind.

I'll be back soon enough

Not sure why the blog page got emptied... I never asked MT to update, but whatever. I'll be back to posting either today or tomorrow. Got a few things to talk about.