It appears my six and a half long years of working overnights may be drawing to a close. I accepted a daytime accounting position at the hotel that I've had my eye on for a long time, but just suddenly became available. It looks like everything is set in motion and I should start sometime next week if all goes well. It's going to be a MAJOR adjustment to our life but one that should be very worthwhile in the end. Usually a change like this would be sending me into panic mode, but I feel very excited to do this. It's a good change of pace, certainly.

One day, a student of Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi confronted him at Sokoji, in his office, and said, "if you believe in freedom why do you keep your bird locked up in a cage?" Suzuki Roshi went over and opened the door of the cage and the bird flew out of the cage and out of the window. It is said that then Shunryu Suzuki turned to the student and said "That bird is free - you owe me a bird."

Wow, it's been a month since I've posted already. Time seems to slip away so easily. Anyway, very excited to go on vacation next week to California. In some ways this seems like our first "official" family vacation on our own to me. We did do a road trip to South Dakota, but it was almost it felt like a family weekend getaway more than a "real" vacation, and we went to San Diego before as a family, but my parents were there, too. This time it's just us and the kids. I think it's going to be a blast.

I'm getting over viral bronchitis, which had me laid out last week. I slept 20 hours one day. It sapped my energy completely and I found myself once again with a 105+ fever and in the ER. I'm just glad it wasn't pneumonia like last time, but I haven't felt this sick ever before. Even with pneumonia I felt a little better after a day or too and had some meds in me, but with this junk... ick. It sucked. A lot.

No shot in my ass this time though, so that's a plus.

Work has been trying for the last few weeks, but I think it's finally on track towards normalcy again. They've been cutting the hours of my co-workers, but not myself since I'm salaried. It sucks for them, because the hours they count on have been anything but ensured. And with them gone, it's ben no picnic for me, as I've had to do the work of two people and sometimes even more when it gets busy in the mornings. At one point I was on two phone calls, checking out a line of people at the front desk, and fetching packages for guests all at once. The last straw was last week when I worked 4 (and a half) days out of 5 by myself.

So I finally had enough and talked to my boss about it. I'm a very non-assertive person, and I really don't think I've ever really complained about this sort of thing before, but I talked with him for a good 45 minutes about how things were not working out at all with me flying solo. He seemed to understand, but I wasn't sure if maybe he was just paying me lip service.

Last night he sent me an email telling me to call my co-worker and let him know he could work the two remaining days this week I was scheduled alone. I'm very satisfied with this, especially since I sort of instigated this change of heart. Who'da thunk?

Anyway. Enjoy this video. Conan VS Colbert VS Stewart!

This commercial is friggin' hilarious. Hockey players are the best actors ever!




Pittsburgh Penguins players Colby Armstrong, Max Talbot, Sergei Gonchar and Evgeni Malkin do a commercial for A&L Motor Sales, with awesome results.

Tuesday night Barack Obama stayed at the hotel, which meant there were secret service guys all over the place and the place was packed with his entourage and members of the press who follow him around. Caroline Kennedy was also there, and I rode down the elevator with her without knowing who she was (doh). We were supposed to help get him out of the hotel to go work out at a gym in the morning, so he was all set to come down a secure elevator and just then the fire alarm went off. Then the secret service guys were calling all freaked out ("This is the control room... we are concerned... what is the status of the situation?!") but eventually we got him down and outside. Those secret service guys don't mess around. It was actually pretty cool.

One of our security guards went up to the floor where they were all at and saw one agent standing against the wall watching some guy sitting in the hallway in his underwear with a pile of clothes and a briefcase next to him. We have no idea what was going on there, but we decided it was probably best not to ask.

Now I think I'm getting a cold. My throat is sore as hell and my back is aching.

( In geek news... )

It's been a long time since I last saw my most recent Scrabble adversary, mostly because we work opposite shifts at the hotel and he was being scheduled for a later shift which meant I always missed him. Over the "off-season" he's apparently been practicing non-stop against a computer opponent to hone his skills in the hopes of defeating me. Meanwhile, I haven't been playing much at all, so I've started doing a few games a night against the computer myself. I'm confident my reign of Scrabble supremacy will continue, though he'll likely have more success than he has had in the past. Let the games begin.

PS...
The Scrabble tiles in my user pic can be arranged to play SEXCAR. This is not a real word. If it was, however, I would like to drive that car. Or at least get a ride in it.

A short weekend for me as I worked Friday night to make up for a day lost last week due to the kids being sick. But Saturday was a terrific amount of fun, just all in all a great day. Our Rock Band "band" comprised of funkbunny, steelfox, and myself, took on the most excessive feat of endurance in the game, and possibly in the entire fake-musical-instrument-video-game industry - The Endless Setlist. A 58-song tour de force that requires you to take on every song in the game in one sitting, in our case, at the highest difficulty level. We started around 5:00 pm and finished around 11:30 pm, taking some breaks for food, drinks, and our sanity. The whole thing was a hell of a good time despite the fact that the next day my voice was kinda shot for singing for five or six hours.

( Our victory pose! )

On a somewhat serious note, aside from just being a damn good time, Rock Band (and to an extent the guitar hero games) has really done a few things for me. I know it may sound ridiculous, but bear with me.

First off, it's gotten me listening to the music I sort of grew up to in the 90's again. All that music when alternative rock was taking off, when it was fresh and exciting. Not that I'd completely abandoned that music, but now I find myself going back and listening to it differently, remembering bands and songs that I had put in the recesses of my memory and putting them back on the iTunes list. Beyond that music, I find myself listening to music I hadn't before as well, hearing the song in one of the games and digging it, then checking out other music by the band and finding out that they are awesome. That's great stuff.

The other thing it's done, which may not have THAT much real world implication, but is important to me, is that in singing all these songs in front of my friends and family, I feel more confident with my voice. Back in school I was a member of the choir and enjoyed singing a lot, but I was always too insecure or shy to really let loose. Now I'm remembering that hey, I can sing, and not only that, I still like it and I think I'm pretty good at it. When we'd go out and there was karaoke going on, for instance, I'd always think that it looked fun, but was way too scared to try it. Now I feel like I might actually be able to step up and do it. Maybe...

The lone fox pauses
Spying through the ambling snow
My own quiet approach
He calmly turns and wanders
Serenity in motion

I don't know why, but I am obsessed with this Faith No More cover/video. Part of it is that it amazes me that this is Mike Patton singing, and part of it is that the guy singing in the video is not Mike Patton but looks like he COULD be singing it (and he's kinda creepy), and part of it is the weird "plot" going on around the song. Anyway, it's cool.



I started reading Thomas Pynchon's latest, insanely dense, 1000+ page novel, Against The Day. I was waiting for it to come out in paperback, and thanks to a gift card from steelfox for Christmas I snatched it up when I noticed it was available. I'm both really looking forward to reading it and also a bit apprehensive of such an overwhelming task. Pynchon is a feast of words, and his paragraphs are incredibly dense, his plots difficult to keep track of and understand, and his characters very numerous. And everything represents something. Something usually strange which is part of yet another umbrella of themes. I've been haunting the Wiki pages for it, and here's a tidbit of what someone had to say of the theme of "light."

Here is where some familiarity with pre-Einsteinian theories of light (the discredited concept of Æther is vindicated) and mathematical controversies around the turn of the last century pays off. Kit, for example is a Vectorist. He will later get cozy with Yashmeen, herself an exotic orphan. She’s a Quarternionist (cf. William Rowan Hamilton’s formula i² = j² = k² = ijk = -1, which somehow, I suspect, relates to the structure of the book, each term in the equation applicable to each of the novel’s five sections) obsessed with the Zeta function of G.F.B. Riemann. In addition, she has ties to the True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys (T.W.I.T.), a covert London group fighting the powers of darkness through Pythagorean beliefs and the tarot.

Riiiight...

Anyway, I love Pynchon and truly I am excited to read this. So excited, I brought the book to work though I usually avoid reading at work (reading at 3 am makes me sleepy unfortunately.)

It's been a pretty whirlwind week. Monday night we went to our night-crew holiday party at Earl's in downtown Denver. They put us in our own little room with a fireplace and a plasma TV, and everything was very nice. The food was good and it was cool to be able to go out with the people I work with and have a good time. I'd definitely recommend the place.

Work has been a bit frustrating. A lot of the front office staff are either not trained very well or are just lazy, and things that should be taken care of are being left for me and my crew to clean up. Communication is a big issue still. Hopefully it gets better.

Wednesday night there was an issue with the plumbing that caused a flood in the telephone and network system room - NOT a good place for that to happen. Luckily none of that stuff was fried, but the water had spilled down gradually for hours and hours to the parking garage level below. It ended up flowing over the front of this guy's car, and it froze. The entire front of the dude's car was completely encased in ice, with icicles hanging down and everything. It was something to see. The guy was pretty pissed, but he ended up being able to get it started. He had just had the car, a Cadillac, detailed. It's one of those bizarre instances where you know karma had to have had something to do with it.

I'm on an unexpected three-day weekend with the kids sick with the flu. I got a lot done around the house yesterday so I'll likely just kick back today, ya know?

On the geek front, an MTV exec hinted in an interview that Rock Band is pursuing Tool tracks for downloadable content. This, I would heartily approve of.

As an added note, I'd just like to say the Alice in Chains album Dirt is friggin amazing. Okay, so I've been listening to it for something like 15 years now, but still. It's really good.

I was talking with someone about the difference between a pacifist and someone who practices non-violence. In some ways, there isn't much difference, but I try my best to follow non-violence towards all creatures, but I don't really consider myself a pacifist. My choice to not kill or harm other living things is a somewhat recent one, and I think I have a pretty balanced approach to it. If I can help it, I'd rather not squish a spider, and I certainly will make every attempt to not physically harm someone unless it's a matter of self-defense. But I don't have any immediate plans to become a vegetarian (though I've thought about it), I'll swat a mosquito that's on me to avoid being bit, and I do realize that the act of brushing my teeth or cleaning my toilet causes the deaths of thousands of living creatures and I'm okay with that.

I don't really consider myself a pacifist, though, because I don't aspire to some global ideal of peace. I'm a pretty cynical guy, really, so I definitely won't expect the same level of compassion from anyone else, let alone try and make the argument that war is unnecessary or that it's even possible for humanity to avoid violent conflict. Obviously I don't want someone else to injure or kill me, but I think that realistically we live in a turbulent world and violence is a part of it. There is suffering because of it, and I have chosen not to add to this suffering if at all possible and nothing more - I've made a personal commitment respect the (assumed) wish of every living creature not to be hurt.

Nothing like a six hour Rock Band marathon's worth of singing to make your throat feel like someone scrubbed it with a toilet brush. Still, was good times. Good times. At some point I'd like to record our awesomeness for the world to see and post it up on YouTube or something. Yeah, yeah, I know it's not like we have a REAL band, but you'll just have to humor me on that one...

So far it's been a very relaxing weekend, but I feel like I wasted yesterday just goofing around and now I have a lot of things I want to get done before I go back to work tonight. The weekend is just never long enough. Blah.

I'm going to make an attempt to start LiveJournaling again as the year turns fresh. It's been like eight months since my last post, but I've realized I need to get back into it if for no other reason than to get some stuff out and vent from time to time, in addition to making a habit of writing again.

So much has happened in the last year, and I once again find myself grateful for everything I have and everyone I love.

* * *

New Year's Eve working at the hotel was pretty mellow for the most part... except for one incident. After everything was settling down, at around 4:30 am, some guy came to the desk accusing of us of having his shoes and keeping them from him. He got very angry and started slamming the counter and swearing, so we told him to calm down or we'd call the cops. He then started threatening to kick our asses, so we called the police and security to the desk. To make a long story short, the cops took a long time to get to the hotel (being New Year's Eve downtown they had a lot to on their plate), and the guy got more and more excited/annoying. He continued to threaten us all with a beating, and finally he came up to the desk and slapped me across the face. It didn't hurt, and it didn't even leave a mark, but it did shock the hell out of me. He then tried to come behind the desk, presumably to "get" us, and my co-worker Jeff pushed the guy hard down onto the marble floor, where both of us jumped on top of the guy and held him down for another five minutes or so until the police got there and arrested him. In six years I've never had to get involved physically with someone, so it was definitely a unique experience. It was only after the guy was knocked down that I realized he was just wearing socks. We never did find the shoes.

* * *

This is awesome:
Conan O'Orien Rock Band Clip

Today our realtor was over at our house helping to get it looking nice for showings. We have moved our bookshelf downstairs, and in the spirit of making the house look more "showy" have removed roughly 80% of our books from it and put them into storage, replacing them with useful items like fake plants and metallic bowls filled with rocks. It was a somewhat difficult endeavor for me to whittle down the books to a small selection, which is a peculiar since I don't really read any of them on a regular basis. The realtor decided there were still too many books on the shelf, and reduced the number even more. So Milton and Dickens were packed away, along with the Odyssey, books on philosophy, sci-fi selections from Gibson, the best of Poe. I couldn't really watch her cut the number down, and I found this a bit surprising. I definitely haven't devoted my time to reading much these days, so why should it bother me to see them boxed up?

She noticed me sort of cringing in the background as she plucked the volumes from the shelf, and asked me if I really even used all these books. I told her I referenced them from time to time, and she asked me if I was a student.

I replied, without hesitation, that I was a writer.

The instant I blurted out the words, I found myself caught in a bit of a lie, and started making excuses for myself... well, I mean, I went to school for writing... I don't really write at the moment but I hope to one day...

But there it was. I had said it and though for her it likely held little meaning, the moment continues to strike a chord inside my thoughts, so much so that despite the fact I haven't written in my journal since last year, I'm here now typing this.

Now to have a cup of coffee and figure out what's on my mind.

No cool stories from work this year. It was really pretty uneventful for the most part. Good for me, bad for stories to remember and laugh at. Oh well...

In the year 2007 I resolve to: Frag more n00bs. Get your resolution here.

I haven't really posted anything of substance in, well, a long time.

My Scrabble stuff included. My Scrabble buddy at work is quitting, so then I'm gonna be SOL until I find a new person to play against. I've hit up shinkuru and I know another guy at work who plays for money with his friend and his girlfriend who happens to be my favorite English professor from back in college. I'd hate to get all rusty and sucky. Sigh.

God I wish I wasn't working tonight. Having a week off really makes coming back a lot harder...