Where I’ve Been

So I’ve been on Hiatus for 62 days (as noted by the timestamp on Josh’s last and final communique with me). It’s been a long two months, and things don’t appear to be slowing down at all. Things have just been crazy (inside and outside of work). I had one project that was due right before Christmas. We ended up coming in late on it and that pretty much destroyed my Christmas / New Years time. I still did varying things, but I always had this project hanging over my head, so it was a bit of a downer. I also was managing several projects, including one fairly large one. Two huge projects caused lots of late nights. I even pulled one almost all nighter (I went to bed at 7AM, up at 8:30AM). Now both of those projects are pretty much done and several more have popped up. It’s a never ending cycle, which is good for business, but bad for my sanity.

I’ve also had several side projects outside of work, quizzing, german, and trying to hang out with my family. Writing on my blog has always been on the todo list, but the todo list is so long I find it hard to get motivated to do anything on it. Which pretty much sucks, but that’s where it’s at. I think I need a vacation. I’ve pondered taking another side project for an app involving quizzing, which would be fun, but I think it’s probably a bad idea. So many things have slipped through the cracks over the past two months that it would just add to the stress. It pretty much comes down to I need to learn how to say no. I can’t count the number of people I need to call, write, or communicate with. Thank goodness for IM during the day or I’ve have lost track with everyone.

So yeah, that’s where I’ve been. Hopefully now that I’ve done one post more will ensue quickly hereafter. I think my other problem with writing blog posts is I always want to write about everything, and that takes me 45 minute to an hour to come up with this long post. I sit down to start and I just don’t feel like I can spend the time. So maybe I’ll do shorter posts from now on, and just write about what I had for lunch, or about that crazy dream I had last night where I helped blow up my office building (bizarre I tell you).

Quote Of The Moment 3

So we’re on our way back from our St. Louis trip last weekend and we stopped at Subway for lunch. I love Subway. Anyways, previous to us stopping at Subway, Paul had been randomly screaming “BANG” in the car at the top of his lungs without warning. I guess he has an uncle or a friend that does it to scare/amuse people. He got me the first time, and I think Joe fell for it every time. So we get out of the car and Paul does it to everyone in the parking lot. Not effective by any means since it’s an open area, but funny none the less. At this point I think Joe joined in to try and scare the girls too.

So at this point I’m a little worried they might continue this behavior inside the Subway. So of course I preemptively attack the situation. This is what happened.

Jeremy: There will be no banging in the Restaurant.
Lena: That’s what she said.

This of course led to fits of laughter all around. Oh the youth of today.

All Stars!

Last weekend was the St. Louis All Star Quiz. Our district (Chicago Central) sent 10 kids to compete against several other districts. Several people who read my blog were there. Thus my not writing about it could have been quite distressing to them. If I don’t write about it, did it really happen? :)

Anyways, the trip was pretty cool. We left Thursday night, drove to Springfield and stopped at Steak and Shake for dinner. At Steak and Shake we met up with a bunch of the other quizzers and some other adult chaperones. After Steak and Shake we drove the rest of the way to St. Louis. For the most part the trip was uneventful, however we did start calling my car the “rave car” because of the music I listen to and the streaking cell phones Paul and Joe were waving everywhere. This was done in opposition to Sara’s “party van” which joe and paul did not get to ride in. We split up the boys and girls, because well….they’re boys and girls.

After getting to the hotel, we played a little Mafia and hit the sack. I never sleep well in hotels. I think it’s because it’s not my own bed, and the fact that I’m sleeping in the same bed with someone, so maybe I feel constrained. Either way I didn’t sleep very well and the morning came earlier than I wanted it to. Scott and I, along with several other volunteers spent the better part of Friday setting up for the quiz. We had seventeen rooms to setup, including chairs, tables, and quiz equipment. Sara, Erika, and the rest of the kids headed to the Science Museum where they did some stuff. I’d fill you in more, but I haven’t seen the pictures yet. I hear they’re coming soon.

The quiz started Friday night. I started out as a content judge in one room, but after 5 rounds I got pulled to help with stats since I’m computer savvy. I did a lot of running around for the entire quiz, mostly because we didn’t have a working wireless network, so to get the stats from each computer we had to plug a usb key in and manually download the stats. 17 rooms is a lot of rooms, especially when you have to grab stats from each of them every 3 rounds or so. Barry and Bill would have gone nuts if I hadn’t been recruited I think. It was also cool to hang out with Barry (since he wrote QuizMachine - the program we use to quiz) and talk shop with him. Somehow I let it slip that I love COBOL. Turns out he’s a big fan too. :)

So anyways, we had 10 rounds on Friday night and and probably close to 12 rounds on Saturday. It was a long quiz. Originally we were supposed to head back on Saturday, but the weather was pretty horrible between St. Louis and Chicago (lots of freezing rain, ice, and snow) so we opted to stay another night. We got back to the hotel, played some Egyptian Rat Screw, Mafia, and 4 on a couch (though we made up the couch since we didn’t have one. After that the kids played some “bang ahh ahh” game (yes that’s really what it’s called) where you shoot someone in the circle (by saying bang) and they have to say ahh, followed by the two people next to them saying ahh. Then the original person who said ahh gets to shoot someone. I guess the point is to try and get everyone out by making them make mistakes. I didn’t bother trying to play.

Sunday morning we got up, had some breakfast and it the road. We stopped a couple of times, including Subway for lunch (more on that later). We got back to Kankakee around 4 and I was home by 5. I ended up taking a 2 hour nap because I was so tired. You’d be amazed how much driving makes you tired. So that was my trip. I’m home safe (and I’m still safe 4 days later..imagine that!). When Marilyn puts up the pictures I’ll drop a link in the comments so you can check them out.

Guitar Hero and Los Olivos

You got me. I did say I’d post “tomorrow,” but tomorrow is so relative these days. OK, so maybe it’s not, but I have to come up with some excuse. It’s been 7 days since my last post. I haven’t posted for good reason. First off, I was in Arizona and with all the Guitar Hero I simply didn’t have enough time. I was too busy living the moment to write about it. Joshua tried to make me write, but in all reality he’s a panzy. He gave up after like 2 minutes. “Jeremy you should really post….ooh Guitar Hero.” :) After I got home I was pushed right back into work and it’s been fairly crazy. Now it’s Thanksgiving, so I actually have a few minutes to sit down and write something. I should have gotten a lot more done yesterday, but I ended up sleeping half the day because I had a terrible headache. Today I spent some time working, and I had quiz practice. I’m swamped I tell you.

So anyways, now I’m going to write a little about last weekend and fill you all in. Last weekend was a blast. I flew into Arizona on Friday night and met up Josh (who lives there) and Peter (who flew in from Minnesota). Josh and Pete are really good friends from college. I’m sure everyone is familiar with Josh by now as he uses my blog to make fun of people (mostly me) on an almost daily basis. Peter was my roommate my senior year of school, Josh, Pete and I were all in the Computer Science program at Bethel, and I was in both of their weddings. Needless to say we’re fairly close, but we don’t get to see each other very often. Josh moved to Arizona about a year and a half ago, as his wife is almost a full fledged doctor and she’s doing her Residency down there. Peter continued to live in Minnesota after school (since he’s from there). I came home to Chicago, after a brief on again off again living situation in Minnesota.

So now that you’ve got the history, here’s how the weekend went. Friday night we grilled out at Josh and Allison’s house, hung out, got caught up on stuff, got the tour, and mostly just hung out. I think we played a little Guitar Hero too. We pretty much played all weekend, so if there’s missing time in my story assume we were playing Guitar Hero. That game pretty much rocks. I’ve toyed with the idea of actually buying a Nintendo Wii just so I can play it with all of my free time. We also talked geek talk, which would bore most people to tears. However, all three of us would date our computers if we didn’t have wives (errrr I guess maybe I am dating my computer) so it was quite the fun talk about algorithms, programming languages, and .NET versus everything. We ended up staying up way too late as witnessed by my last post.

Saturday we woke up at about 10, had some breakfast and then headed to Sedona. Sedona is about 2 hours north of Phoenix, and I can honestly say it’s gorgeous. I’m going to say it’s one of, if not the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. God pulled out all the stops when it came to designing the landscape. Everything there is very red from the red rock that makes up most of the landscape. The plateaus and mountains were just stunning. I have lots of pictures of the Sedona trip (and not much else actually) so check them out in my gallery. In Sedona we hit up some lunch at an awesome barbecue place and then rented some mountain bikes and headed to the hills. Mountain biking was a ton of fun, but not without a few adventures of it’s own. I’m amazed at how some of these mountain bikers do it. I probably walked half the trip along the trail because if I had ridden it I would have fallen in a precipice. We were actually stopped at one point and watched a mountain biker (who was obviously a pro) scale up a 45 degree incline (which included very uneven ground) on his bike with no problem at all. Pete tried it of course, but in the end all of us proceeded to walk up the same path.

A little later I lost my footing and fell. Luckily I wasn’t on my bike, and luckily the fall was only about a foot difference (OK 7 feet if you count my height). I tried to catch the bike which had slipped, but gravity is a harsh mistress and she brought me down quickly. Luckily I was able to stop my fall with my funny bone on my right elbow. This in turn caused me to lose feeling and movement capabilities in half of my right hand for about 20 minutes. That was a bit scary. It was sore for a couple of days, but since then I’ve been fine.

After recovering for a bit we continued on, only to find out a few minutes later that Josh’s bike had a flat. We spent probably 20 minutes trying to figure out how to take the tire off unsuccessfully, only to realize that if we did get it off we’d be unable to remove the wheel from the frame since the back wheel didn’t have a quick release. That put a damper on things, since you kind of need a wheel to go on. We called the mountain biking place, who told us that if we re-inflated the tire it might stay inflated. I guess there’s some cool goo inside the tire which hardens around any holes in the tire. Luckily my bike had a pump (neither of the other two did), so we tried that, but to no avail. In the end we ended up heading back. Josh ran back most of the way with his broken bike, while Pete and I stopped to take pictures. We made it back safely, and the guy at the shop even gave us Josh’s rental for free because of the trouble. After we had turned in our bikes we took the long way home so we could see more of the scenery. All I have to say is “simply gorgeous.” We didn’t go into flagstaff, but the area right around it is really pretty.

part of Sedona…taken right after mountain biking…beautiful no?

After we got home we headed straight to one of Josh’s favorite Mexican restaurants where we had dinner. It was really good Mexican food. Better than here, by far. I guess it has to be with it being so close to the border. After dinner we headed home, played some more Guitar Hero, and then played a rousing game of Risk. Pete destroyed us, but then again he’s the world dominating type, so it fits. I got knocked out first, and since it was 3 in the morning, I opted to take a quick nap on the floor. That was a mistake. :) After some more Guitar Hero we headed to bed.

Sunday we slept in since we had stayed up so late, got up and had some awesome egg bake Alison had made. It was yummy. Then we watched some football for awhile, hung out, and talked some more code. At about 1PM my friend Suzy showed up to pick me up. She recently moved to Arizona, so I hadn’t seen her since Eric’s wedding. We hung out at Los Olivos (another great Mexican restaurant!) and she shared some exciting new things in her life with me. Then we walked around downtown Scottsdale as she gave me the tour of her childhood. Then we headed to her place where I got the tour there. Her place is really nice. It’s pretty big in comparison to condos here in Chicago. After that we headed to The Sugar Bowl (where I did not order a bowl of sugar against my better judgement) and we had ice cream. I ordered the Banana Split and Suzy got a sunday. I actually finished the whole thing too. :) Once we were done at the Sugar Bowl, Josh and Pete picked us up, we headed back to her place to say goodbye and then Josh, Pete, and I headed back to his place.

After getting to his place we had pizza from Papa John’s (which as of right now I realized I never chipped in for. If you want some mulla for the pizza Josh you know where to find me.). We finished the entire pizza, including almost 4 slices by yours truly (I didn’t finish the crust on one piece). After that we had another rousing time playing Guitar Hero and then we watched Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (probably one of the funnier Will Ferrel movies to come out as of late). After that we decided to play a little poker for about an hour, which we had to quit when Josh went to bed (something about getting up early to work…pffft :)). Pete and I of course jumped at the chance to play some more Guitar Hero. :) Sadly we went to bed soon after.

Monday morning we woke a little earlier than Sunday, mostly because my phone annoyed the heck out of Peterman with it’s incessant beeping letting me know I had a text message. The text message was from my friend Melissa (another friend I was hoping to get to see while in Arizona). Melissa came and picked me up for lunch and we headed to the Macaroni Grill. It was great to reconnect with her as well since I hadn’t seen her since Eric’s wedding either. She used to live in Chicago, but moved down to Phoenix about a year and a half ago. Lunch was great. We got to reconnect, talk about old times, eat some food. After lunch we headed back to Josh’s place where the boys were playing guess what…Guitar Hero. We had talked about going hiking up a mountain, since I had missed out on a hike with Pete and Josh the day before when I was hanging out with Suzy, but I opted not to do it, since I was tired, and we had only about 3 hours before we had to leave for the airport. So instead we finished our poker game (which was mighty fun I might add). Then it was off to the Airport, with a quick stop at the In and Out Burger for dinner and so Pete could buy his lovely wife a t-shirt. Josh dropped us off about an hour and a half before our flight, we said our goodbyes and that was it. Vacation over.

I was actually really bummed on the flight home. I really miss those two guys. I get to talk to them online or on the phone from time to time (and Joshua is a regular here of course), but it’s not the same. To be able to hang out with guys you love, that you can be real with is awesome. We talked about making this a regular occurrence (a once a year guys trip), so I’m hoping it comes sooner next year rather than later. Maybe next year we can make it longer, though Peter is having baby number two in February so that may be difficult. I guess we’ll see what happens.

Wow, this is pretty long. It actually took me two full days to write this off and on, what with Thanksgiving, and the various things I needed to do over the past two days. Was it worth the wait?

The gallery of my pictures can be found here. The pictures Joshua took can be found on his flickr page here.

The Wild West

I got to Arizona safely. It’s 3:11 in the morning (4:11 AM CST), so I really should be in bed, but Josh is forcing me to write on my blog before we can go to bed. So here we are.

I landed at about 7:30 PM tonight and the weather is absolutely gorgeous. I’ll post more details later, but basically we ate, played some guitar hero, drank some vault, and introduced Peter to Facebook. In fact here’s his new profile picture…

More tomorrow…

Only One Hug

The third quiz of the 2007-2008 quizzing season was this past Saturday. Our team (Chicago Northside) took 13th out of 17 teams. So that’s an improvement of 2 places. We still didn’t get very many jumps, but my girls seem to be getting better. I didn’t actually coach them this time as we needed extra quizmasters. Luckily I have a rock star volunteer from Moody Bible Institute who helps out with my team. Mary coached them for the day and I was able to quizmaster. They were in my room once, and I was able to see half of another one of their quizzes when my room finished super early. I did miss my team for most of the day, but I also got to quizmaster which I had been missing over the last two quizzes since I had been coaching. Quizmastering was fun. I was a little nervous for the first coupld of quizzes, but I quickly settled into a groove. It’s like riding a bike I tell you. :)

All in all it was a good day. I was able to reconnect with some of the kids form other teams I hadn’t been able to hang out with and I was able to hang out with my team for lunch, some of the quiz, and of course on the way there and back. The ride back was pretty interesting, in that Angel (one of my quizzers, a 6th grader) wanted to go to a pizza place before I dropped her and her sister off. She had been asking for it all day and I had already told her no several times. By the time I dropped them off it was almost seven pm, so I wasn’t going to ruin their dinner by taking them out to Pizza. This is the quote she used in the van before we got back to the church (I’m sure you can all relate)…

>”I like it when I get what I want.”

Don’t we all….don’t we all. Mary and I had a good laugh at that one. She asked again when we got into my car so I could take them home and I again said no. She then proceeded to tell me she got mad when she didn’t get what she wanted, and she wouldn’t talk to the person who made her mad. So I tried to explain to her logically what she was doing and how that wasn’t a very nice thing to say, but just as my sister doesn’t get my logic, neither did Angel. Normally when I drop them off I get a hug from both Agnes and Angel. Yesterday I only got one from Agnes. One can only hope that Angel won’t remember this very long. It didn’t really bother me, but I couldn’t help thinking if parenting would be like that when I have kids who are that age. I guess I’ll have to wait and see.

New Mac Ads

My mom just let me know she saw a new Mac commercial from Apple, so I looked on their website to check it out and see if there were anymore. Turns out they just completed 3 new commercials, all of which are pretty funny. They rip on Vista pretty good. Just thought I’d share.

Here’s a link straight to the commercials…

http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/

German For The Tired

German last night was fun. I was really tired though. I was so tired that it was hard to concentrate. Understanding English is tough when you’re wiped, so German was an absolute struggle. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever get good enough to be fluent in the language. We had a subtitute, because Tom, our regular teacher was out of town. She was really great, but she talked really really fast. I also fumbled over her “Warum studierst du Deutsch?” (Why are you studying German?) question (among other conversations she tried to invoke). I think this was mostly because I was tired. I swear. Overall it was good. We studied Personal Pronomen (personal pronouns), which was a good exercise. I guess it’s all about learning a little bit at a time.

After class I decided not to go out with my German buddies because I was falling asleep as we waited for Margaret. They also wanted to goto a pizza place instead of our regular German bar (and said Pizza place was about as far south from school as my house is north), so I went home, watched some TV and fell asleep pretty much right away. Oh sleep. We love thee.

I Need a New Jacket

So I need a new winter jacket. As many of you know I have a large orange ski jacket that I’ve had since maybe college or a little after. It’s been awhile for sure. Anyways, it’s a great jacket for the winter. It has a removable inner fleece which make it super warm and its water proof. The inner fleece has seen better days (the zippers are a bit jacked), but the jacket itself is doing fine.

My main reason for wanting (or really needing) to get a new jacket is not that it’s old or because the fleece needs new zippers. No, the reason I need to get a new jacket is because it’s bright and orange. A few days ago I had a client meeting downtown. This client is a Philanthropy company. The issue is that their lobby is bigger than our entire office suite. They’re simply a high class company. I always dress up when I have meetings with them, simply because that’s the level they’re at. No I don’t think dressing up is in any way a sign that someone knows what they’re doing, but I do believe people base perception on outer appearances a lot, as sad as that may be.

Anyways, I goto my meeting and I bring my bright orange jacket because it’s cold outside. I then realize while driving downtown that my jacket is bright and orange and greatly clashes with my dressy clothes. In a moment of panic I decide to leave my jacket in the car, which at first is an OK idea because the parking garage is semi warm. Once I get outside though, it’s a completely different story. It was only 45 degrees I think, but it felt really cold. It didn’t help that I had to walk 4 blocks to my meeting (and 4 blocks back).

So, in the same realm as the decision I made 2 year ago (where I vowed to wear fleeces and sweatshirts less - the college look as I called it) I’ve decided I need a new jacket, or at least I need a jacket I can wear to client meetings. I don’t really want to spend the money to get one, but I realize I probably need one. I guess little Jeremy is growing up.

I Hate Getting Tickets

I hate getting parking tickets. I really do. Mostly because they’re easily avoidable, and I somehow seem to continue getting them. I’ve probably gotten 6 or 7 since I’ve owned a car, so that’s probably anywhere form 300-500 dollars wasted with the city of Chicago. Stupid Department of Revenue.

I got a ticket in the mail this past Saturday. The thing that gets me is that it wasn’t even a parking ticket per se. It had to have been given to me while I was driving, because I’ve never parked at the address listed on the ticket, nor was I pulled over for the ticket (maybe I can contest it because he didn’t pull me over; it’s probably not worth it). The ticket was for expired license plates (this is probably the fourth time I’ve gotten that one - one year I got two :)). What sucks is that I knew I needed to do it, had just had a conversation about it, but obviously not in enough time. Actually even if I had gotten my plates renewed right after having the conversation it wouldn’t have mattered since the ticket was from 3 weeks ago.

What’s even more annoying is that I just tried to go by the sticker, and the link off of the State of Illinois’ website is incorrect, because it goes to a not found page. Fantastic. Anyways, it’s just annoying and I needed to vent my frustrations. Eighty dollar renewal for a hundred and thirty, that if I could buy it. Gotta love that.