DarqByte

As I’ve said before, I’m posting video-game related stuff over at my OMGN blog, Gamer of Darqness. And here’s a post I want to share — my account of the building of Beast!

A local church here in Las Vegas, Christ the King, is hosting a Second Chance Prom that pretty much anybody can attend. I was unable to go to prom in high school with Laura because, well, I was dating somebody else at the time. She didn’t have the kind of prom she’d really want to have. I’m disappointed that I couldn’t go with her.

Well, thanks to CTK we get a mulligan! But I haven’t asked her to prom yet. I want to get one million group members on Facebook to show her that she should go with me! So if you’re not already a group member, join the group and help me out. I may end up recording when I ask her and post that on YouTube. We’ll see. The more people join the group, the better chance of that happening!

Well, in the spirit of the KISS song, “They call me Dr. Love!” Actually, I have been called Dr. Love before. And since this post is all about what people call me, I’ll give you that story too.

So over time it’s occurred to me what people call me on a daily basis. The only reason I’ve noticed is because some of my family members notice when I get called Rob and they can’t believe I’d be willing to be called that. Hell, some of them still call me by my kid name that I continually ask them not to use and to call me Robert (or Rob) instead. And a couple still call me by my really kid name, which is pretty much sacrilege these days as far as I’m concerned!

My cousin is on board in calling me Robert, actually. Thank God. And my Dad will occasionally remember to call me Robert. If you’re one of my childhood friends or family and are still calling me by either of my kid names… Robert works just as well. Trust me. I prefer it greatly.

All of this whole “what do I want to be called” stuff has been interesting to ponder. When I drove down to Arizona for Christmas Eve this last year, I learned that my grandma on my Dad’s side had always wanted my sister and me to call her Gran, not Grandma as we always do. I was completely unaware of this, so I’m making a conscious effort to call her Gran now.

See that’s the thing for me. I want to be called Robert (or Rob). Which is why I don’t understand the unwillingness of some people to call me that. I understand that a lot of my family has called me by my kid names for my entire life and that it’s a big change for them and they can only think of me as those names. I get that. But really, my wish is to be called Robert… Really. Haha. I’m trying to change what I call my Gran after 26 years of calling her Grandma, so if I can make the effort, can’t others?

Yeah, you all know who you are.

Anyway, I always introduce myself as Robert. Ever since the beginning of 9th grade I’ve introduced myself as Robert. And I get called Rob about half of the time, and I find that quite interesting. Laura‘s step-dad, Ron, prefers to go by Ronald (and yet I still call him Ron, I need to work on that) and always introduces himself as such. He says in New Orleans, his hometown, nobody ever really calls someone else by a nickname. They call that person by their real name. I think it’s just a part of culture here out in the western US, and maybe elsewhere. It just happens.

So I get called Robert and Rob a lot, but what about other names? Here are some that I get called on a regular-enough basis that I can remember them:

• Ludwick
• The Lud
• The Spartan (that’s another story entirely)
• Sludgewick (creative)
• Spudwick
• Robbo
• Roberto
• RobZone (sweet!)
• Dr. Love

So yeah, the story on Dr. Love… I’ve always liked that song by KISS. I first heard it in the movie Detroit Rock City. I ended up downloading it. Soon it became a part of jokes for me where I would tell people “They call me Dr. Love.” See my last post if you’re unclear as to why I make jokes like this, haha.

So anyway, I once said this to a coworker back when I worked at Swim2000. He said he didn’t believe me, so I said “Nah, everybody does, even Bruno.” Bruno is the owner. So he went and asked Bruno and of course Bruno denied it. Well two days later I was leaving and he and Bruno were still in the office. I said something along the lines of “see ya tomorrow” and Bruno chimes in “Ok, see you tomorrow Dr. Love.”

Thus, I have actually been called Dr. Love.

[Update]

Late addition to the list: Fludwick

Ahh, the Muddy Buddy. Something I thought I was in decent shape for. But was I? Fuck no. Haha.

Prep

I got up at 6am this morning and got myself and my stuff ready to go. Headed out the door at 6:30. I had with me a full change of clothes, a towel, two bottles of water, my bicycle helmet I just bought yesterday and me. Drove off to Andy‘s place because we were driving together. He had the mountain bike, I had the truck. It works. Haha.

From Andy’s we drove down 215 and hopped off at Eastern to get a small breakfast at Denny’s. I had this new “Slamwich” which is basically their Grand Slam ingredients on a sandwich. It was pretty tasty. We hopped across the street to Chevron and Walgreen’s to fill up the bike’s tires with air and grab some AAA batteries for his helmet-mounted video camera. So cool.

In case you’re wondering, we were dressed in Steampunk attire… Just thought I ought to mention that…

Anyway, we arrived at the race and signed our waivers and got all of our numerical decals. Ran back over to the truck and got our outfits finalized and numbered up. We got back to the stage just in time for the final announcements of some details we needed. Once the announcements were over, we met up with Ginger who took my truck key and my wedding ring and Andy and I scurried off to make ourselves “as light as possible” for the journey, if you catch my drift.

The First Three Legs

Here’s where things got interesting. I thought he and I were in Wave 1 because the waves are ordered by gender and the combined age of the partners… However, we weren’t, we were in Wave 2. Sadly, I told Andy right before they were letting Wave 1 bicyclists go that we were in 1, so he took off with Wave 1 and I had to wait until the Wave 2 runners. I thought he would be way, way ahead of me when the first leg of the race ended and we made the bike swap.

I ran for most of the first leg, about 75% of it, and climbed over the climbing wall obstacle that was there. I looked for the bike in the bike drop area and… Not there. I stayed around the area for about 5-10 minutes, looking over the bikes a few times and asking a couple of the attendants what I should do. I actually thought that Andy was disqualified for leaving out a wave too early and I didn’t know about it. Just as I was about to talk to one of the coordinators, Andy showed up.

It turns out that Andy had technical difficulties with the bike and didn’t end up getting it ride-worthy until Wave 3 went out, so I had a head-start on him and didn’t even know it. So anyway…

The second leg was marked by a lot of damn uphill hiking with the bike. And a big, big puddle of water that I wasn’t expecting and couldn’t power through on the bike. The obstacle at the end of it was a balance beam, which was initially difficult for me to overcome because my legs were feeling a bit shot at this point. There was a lot more hiking to the race than I anticipated, so I wasn’t fully prepared. Grr.

In addition, the bike was having chain slippage issues. The chain kept slipping between the chosen gear and one below or above it, and it was making life riding it difficult. I ended up stopping trying to ride it uphill because it was damn-near impossible and required an enormous amount of physical exertion that way.

The third leg was me walking about 75% of the way. I just didn’t have any juice to really get it going until the last quarter of the leg when I jogged in the rest of the way. The obstacle at the end here was a crawl underneath some netting. I wandered off to find the bike, only to see Andy hadn’t leapfrogged me, so I waited and talked to some random guy.

Andy showed up and gave me the bike. Off I went…

The Last Two Legs

The beginning of the fourth leg was already a doozy. There was a big stretch of mud. I don’t mean watery mud here. This stuff was like wet clay. Very, very thick and gooey stuff. The further you got, the deeper and thicker it got. And to top it all off, the second half of this stretch actually did have a big puddle on top of all of the mud, so… Holy crap. About 75% of the way through the non-puddle stretch, I almost lost my balance. In attempting to keep it, my right foot kept sinking deeper and deeper, and once I steadied myself, my left sunk deep as well. I was very worried I was going to lose my shoes and have to ferret them back out. Thankfully, I yanked my right foot and got moving again.

The bike was monstrously difficult to maneuver through all of this. For a little bit of the non-puddle I carried it. Once I got to the puddle, I decided to just plow through the puddle. There was a bank on the right side that looked just like the non-puddle section I got through, but it was tougher to get over there initially and also didn’t seem like it was supposed to be part of the course. I picked up the bike and kept it on my chest and sloshed through the puddle section. It was quite fun, I had a good time making a mess and big splashes. I hadn’t gotten that muddy and dirty in years, it reminded me of when I was a kid. Loved it.

At the end of this stretch was a small hill that was giving people fits because they couldn’t get traction thanks to all of their mud, so I helped a couple people up and was off on my way.

Most of the beginning of the fourth leg was uphill with a few downhill and flat spots, so I actually got to use the bike a bit. I climbed up this massive hill to see a nice, long, downhill slope for about three or four tenths of a mile, so I was looking forward to coasting, using the brakes a bit and just gliding through to the fourth obstacle and the fifth and final leg.

Sadly, this didn’t get to happen. About a fifth of the way down this nice downhill slope, the back tire on the bike popped. Big, loud pop. After I got off and started walking it down the rest of the way, some people expressed dismay that it had happened to me. It happens. It sucked, but it happens. I eventually got to the obstacle, which was a cargo net on the side of an inflatable slide. Said slide was the way back down on the other side.

I started walking off on the fifth leg and figured I’d jog it most of the way, but stopped and headed back to the obstacle area so Andy and I could walk the remainder together. It was a good walk, we got to talk about random shit and see if we were going to be dead last in the race. This leg took awhile simply because we absolutely had to walk it the whole way.

We got to the end and then had to deal with the final mud pit. My God, what an interesting way to end an already muddy day. We had to crawl through a big massive mud pit that had small hills and obstacles that kept us low and in the pit. Once we got out, out entire fronts were just massively covered in this light grey mud. Most of our backs were too, and mud had gotten inside both my shirt and my vest. We looked like we’d slept in the mud.

The Aftermath

Our official race time is unknown because we were supposed to leave in Wave 2 and I didn’t know what value the timer had at that point. And since Andy didn’t leave until Wave 3, who really knows. The race started at 9am and we got in at 10:57am… So we took a few pictures and meandered over to the “shower,” which was really just a massive water pipe and about 30 hoses all spouting out some really damn cold water. And it was only mid-50s and overcast for the race, so it wasn’t entirely pleasant, getting the mud off of us. We collected Andy’s bike and headed back to the truck.

We had Ginger and one of Andy’s friends there with us, and they helped us change, mostly by helping us get our shoes off and holding up towels so we could be modest. The interior of my truck doesn’t have much mud in it at all, but the bed does. It actually looks like it’s been used as a truck, haha!

I dropped Andy off at home and drove home myself. Took a nice, long, long shower, got some pho with Laura and read a chapter for my economics class. And here I am, writing this insanely long post that almost reached 1600 words. Maybe some photos in the future, or perhaps Andy will post some on his blog soon.

It’s been said before that I don’t venture outside my comfort zone much, and that’s probably true. I tend to not initiate hanging out with friends, I often let them do so. I don’t just jump at the chance for new experiences that often…

So here I was, sitting at home poking around Facebook and talking to Laura and she started telling me I should do this Muddy Buddy thing with F. Andrew Taylor. I had actually just seen Andy post something on Facebook, looking for someone to run this thing with him, and Laura started talking to me about it, saying I should volunteer to do it with him because he really wanted to do it.

So I did a quick bit of research on what the Muddy Buddy is. It’s a 6-mile course where you trade off every other mile who is riding a bike and who is hoofing it on foot. Every mile there’s an obstacle that the two members must clear before swapping the bike. And at the end is a big mud pit the two have to slosh through.

I sat for a moment and thought “I dunno, do I really want to? Does it sound like fun? It sounds like… Wait, wait a minute. What the fuck. I never do anything different or out-of-character or interesting. I’m in.” Thus, I informed Andy he had his muddy buddy and that I would join him on this trek.

This spur-of-the-moment decision now has me making damn sure I get to the gym this week. Not that I haven’t been hitting up the gym, but if I’ve got things or errands to do right after work on Mondays or Fridays, I don’t make the gym. And I was marginally sick last week, so I didn’t work out after classes, either. So I’m making sure I get to the gym and do a combination of walking/running machines and the bike machines.

On a side note, I’ve also begun my ab exercises. I need them, badly. My gut sucks.

Anyway, so since then I’ve been also looking into just what I’m going to have to wear for the event, and it seems a lot of people dress up in interesting (to say the least) duds for the race. I’m not sure Andy and I are going that far, but I do want to make sure I don’t ruin any of my good stuff and that I’ll be appropriately dressed for the weather. I don’t want to be mega-freezing or dying of heat exhaustion either.

The race is out at Lake Las Vegas, and Weather.com lists the expected high at 57, so I… have no idea what to wear yet. Probably a short sleeve shirt and pants. Maybe I’ll wrap a longer-sleeve shirt around a bar on the bike or something, who knows. The course is here.

In final prep before the race, I plan on taking my bike at home out for a bit and getting used to riding again, on Saturday. Then the race is early Sunday morning, like 9am. Should be fun.

Some people know that I used to co-own a business. It was called Dambert Lush, it was an electronics e-commerce website. My friend Damian Sheets and I owned it. It never really took off, and a lot of the reason for that was that we had no money to start it. Aside from the fact that electronics e-commerce websites are extremely plentiful, we just didn’t have the advertising money to get the name of DL out there. It was running for over a year but we shut it down because we couldn’t ever get it rolling well. I re-bought the domain recently and have it pointed to DarqFlare Enterprises.

Anyway, I bring this up because my MBA courses relate to starting a business. I mean, one of the reasons I’m getting an MBA is because I eventually want to start a successful business and work for myself. That’s a theme I’m sure you’ve seen pop up here on my blog time and time again. I want to work for myself, that’s my ultimate career goal. Even if it’s working hard, I want to work for myself. As I’ve said before, right now my ideal job is working on OMGN for a living.

In any case, my accounting class’ textbook has actually made me more aware that I want to start a business again. There are examples all over that book of people starting businesses, and they’re obviously always in reference to accounting systems to ensure that money is kept track of appropriately. Some of these businesses have been started with very low funds, albeit more funds than Damian and I had to start DL. But it all just reminds me of where I want to be and where I’m at now.

The start-up funds aspect of businesses is what’s staring me in the face right now. To start many businesses, you need to have seed money. There are many types of businesses, but the two that have been covered so far in more detail in the text are service-based businesses and inventory-bases businesses.

Service-based companies basically accept money to provide a service. There’s no inventory costs really and the start-up cost for a business like this is pretty low. Hell, this is a kind of business I could likely start without any funds, but the problem here is that the income from the business wouldn’t be high enough to cover my family’s expenses. Yet another limitation on me right now.

Inventory-based companies typically have to purchase merchandise then sell it back to other companies or consumers to make a profit. There’s a considerably higher amount of money involved in getting these types of businesses off of the ground since they’ve got to get inventory and a place to put it. This was what Dambert Lush was, but since we were a dropshipper, we didn’t have to hold inventory. Still, our marginal profits were really low and there weren’t enough of them. No advertising, remember?

Anyway, all of this introspection on starting a business and going into the accounting of businesses this semester has really told me that, yeah, starting a business is hard work, is more of a crapshoot than it should be and that you’re very likely to fail many times before getting it right. I’m alright with that and I’d be even more alright with that if I wasn’t married. See, I’d be much more inclined to take risks since it would just be me that I’m impacting. But I’m not. I have Laura to think about and the potential for having a family in the future.

A lot of Web 2.0 companies have started with guys living in their parents’ houses. Many of these people starting these new successful companies were single when they started them. They had relatively low costs of living and a lot of time to burn. I don’t fit the bill at all. Now I’m not blaming Laura or using her as a crutch here, I’m just being realistic. I’d have a much better opportunity and chance of success if I were single, didn’t own a home or any pets and had craploads of expendable time to put towards a big project that won’t make me any money for years.

However, I’m not in that situation. So I have to wait. Wait until Laura and I have more money stowed away for me to start a business with. Wait until we have fewer monetary obligations than we do now (i.e. vehicle payments and student loans). And if we have kids, then that’ll impact the likelihood of my starting a new venture. I’m just trying to figure out if it’s ever going to be a viable thing, me starting a business.

As I’ve said before, really the biggest thing keeping me from working on OMGN full time is the fact that I have to go out and earn a living. If I could pipe all of that time towards the site, I have no doubt it would grow and get bigger and better in stature as time went on. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. All of the responsibilities and obligations I’ve built into my life make it impossible to spend the kind of time and effort required to build OMGN into what I want it to be. Sure, you can say “work on it a little each day and it will grow!” but it won’t ever grow enough. Sites like OMGN require constant updating, which isn’t something I can do and it isn’t something I can expect people to do on my behalf for free or very, very damn cheap either. It’s just not feasible.

So here I am, wondering if I’ll really ever be able to start a business anytime soon. Sure, when I’m in my 40s sometime we’ll probably be in a much better financial position to take a risk like that. But let’s say for example I’m 48 then. I imagine by then we likely won’t have big money-draining kids with us by then, or at least we’ll be charging them enough in rent to make up the difference (haha). I’ll be 48 with about 25 years generated in my 401k and plenty of time in Laura’s IRA. Other financial retirement accounts will likely have money for us then as well. At the end of my 40s, would I rather just bide my time until I can retire, which may be very soon in my 50s, or put a bunch of money towards a business that may jeopardize my family’s financial well-being?

I may need to adjust my priorities. I do like my life as it is now. I love my wife, I’m enjoying my pursuit of higher education and I know I’m fucking good at my job. Sure, I want to move up there as well, that’s another shorter-term goal I have for my career. But maybe this whole starting a business thing just isn’t in the cards. Maybe I should just look at my life, adjust my priorities and be happy. But then again, that’s not my style now, is it? I’m a bit like Laura in this regard. I want bigger and better things for my family, for my career and for me. I want to achieve things and leave my mark on this world. I don’t want to settle, I don’t want to sit stagnant and watch other talented people in the world shape this world. I want to take my place with those people. I just hope I can reconcile my desires for grandeur with reality.

I’ve never really worked out on a regular basis. I’ve tried in the past for different stretches of time, but ultimately I’ve never been successful at it. The only times I’ve ever lasted any amount of time is when I got to work out with Laura. But with her early-morning schedule of working out conflicting with my work hours, I can’t join her in the morning.

So this month I thought I was making decent enough progress on losing weight that I might actually hit 175 pounds by February 1st. That’s not looking like it’s going to happen, with only even a couple of days late last week that killed some progress I’d made. Apparently my margin for error on losing weight is very small now, so there’s almost no way for me to continue losing weight with what my willpower looks like.

Couple that with the fact that I do generally want to be in better shape, and you’ve got the recipe for me to attempt to work out again. Now keep in mind losing weight via a proper diet and working out are two separate things. You can work out and not really lose weight. But in combination, they can actually work to help you lose even more weight and to get into better shape.

I started working out again last night at the UNLV gym. Being a student I can use the facilities for free, so I gave it a shot last night after my last class ended at 8:15pm. Yeah, that’s kinda late, especially since I get up for work at 6am and only have any kind of a break from 4pm-5:30pm, the time between when work ends and my first class begins. So it was a long, filled day.

But it went well. I’m a bit tired and slightly sore today, which means I pushed my body a bit, which is what you need if you’re trying to get into better shape and lose weight. All I really did was this elliptical-type machine, I don’t know what exactly it was. What I do know is that it required a bit of endurance and some leg strength in muscles I don’t normally use. I was sweaty and tired afterwards.

I’m going to vary my routine up, hitting different equipment at different times. I do want to do some weight training as well, but I need to figure out what muscles I want to focus on and when. In weight training, I’ve learned that you need to leave a day between times when you work out the same muscles, so if I do my upper body one day, I shouldn’t do them the next day. I think this’ll work to my advantage, since I want to combine cardio and fat burn with strength training. Oh, and I need to make sure I work out my abs, since that’s where most of my fat is.

Basically, my workout routine will be on weekdays. I can’t see myself heading up to UNLV on the weekends to work out, since Laura can’t go there, it’s far enough from my house that driving there to work out isn’t palatable, and I’d be taking up time I could be spending with Laura. My schedule will be:

Monday: After work ends at 4pm
Tuesday: After class ends at 8:15pm
Wednesday: Indoor soccer
Thursday: If indoor soccer starts 9pm or later, then indoor soccer. Otherwise, after class ends at 8:15pm
Friday: After work ends at 4pm

All of these times are pretty convenient for me in terms of distance from my last activity of the day and not overlapping with potential Laura time much. I get off of work before Laura does, so working out immediately afterwards doesn’t impact seeing her much. Indoor Soccer overlaps with her church choir practice. The only day that gets impacted much is Thursdays.

So today is day 2. Not sure what exactly I’ll be doing yet. Probably some weight training of some sort and maybe ending with a small dose of cardio.

34 inches? I know what you’re thinking about but no, I’m not talking about that. 34 would be selling myself way short anyway.

The latest chapter in my whole “make myself look and feel better” thing has arrived. I’ve been putting off getting new clothes mainly because I wanted to complete my weight loss first. I didn’t want to have to buy a bunch of clothes in a stopgap fashion. Unfortunately, my last two pairs of jeans bit the dust, so I was forced to replace them. They were Levi’s, and they were built rather well. The only problem was that it was tough to find 38-30s that weren’t below my heels. They weren’t truly 30s so I kept stepping on them and wearing down the bottom of the pant legs. For the record, I really needed 37s, not 38s. They don’t make 37s.

Now I’m in 34s! 34-30s and they aren’t too long. This makes me a very happy person. I’ve lost at least 30 pounds and 3 inches off of my waist. Good stuff. I’ve recently begun making progress again and I anticipate hitting the 175 mark by the end of this month or early February. That would be 35 pounds off since I started nearly a year ago. I think my target is 160, but I won’t really know until I get there.

I recently looked at photos of me when I went to just the mustache, the Robstache. Wow I’ve lost weight since then. I do look better. Still got further to go. Additionally, I’m going to try to start running in the mornings with Pepper (and potentially Laura). I was supposed to start this week, but being excessively tired when my alarm went off put the kabash on things. Hopefully I’ll start tomorrow.

And if I do start tomorrow, wow what a day it will be. Today I start my next semester of MBA courses. In 50 minutes, actually. I’m in Lied Library right now. But because my classes are on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’ve signed up to play soccer on Wednesdays. I was originally waffling on the decision, but Laura’s support for me switching days and the fear of getting really out of shape spurred me to sign up. In any case, tomorrow’s my first Wednesday day of soccer on a new individual coed team, and for some odd reason we have two games tomorrow… What the fuck. Two games? A doubleheader? I’ve done it before, but by choice not by facility scheduling. Running in the morning plus two soccer games in the evening. Wow.

And that’s not the end of it! I told my Thursday soccer team I’d make the games if they were late enough, which is basically 9pm or later. So the 9:10 game this Thursday? Yup, I can make that. And I’m hoping to run on Thursday morning as well. Which would make three runs (Wednesday, Thursday and Friday) and three soccer games from Wednesday morning to Friday morning. Wow. See why I think I’ll hit 175 this month?

In other news, I wish I had endless time to do everything I want to do. Not only am I trying to find time to work on OMGN 4, I want to write a memoir about my video game life until, well, now. I think it would be very interesting because I don’t think there’s much of anything like that out now. And I’m a pretty good example of someone who gamed a lot when they were a kid and make the transition to being a responsible (well, at least I think so) adult with a married life and a job and other normal responsibilities.

This brings me to another subject: video games. Specifically, the original Atari joystick. See, my friend Jonathan recently got a tattoo in Elvish from Lord of the Rings. He loves it and I’ve always wanted a tattoo and I’ve always loved video games. I wasn’t 100% set on what tattoo I wanted but I knew I wanted a video game-related one, especially after seeing Anne’s roommate Ed’s “Mario 1up” tattoo he’s got. See, I didn’t want a tattoo that was system- or franchise-specific, I wanted one that represented video games as a whole. Now I know the Atari joystick is still Atari, but it represents so much more than that these days. And I’m asking Jonathan to give me a nice illustration of it so I can verify I indeed want to get it permanently marked on my body.

Laura’s been making sure I really want one, and I do. I am, however, curious to know what you all think of it…

Anyway, that’s it for now. Chat at you all later when I know more about my spring courses and I can let you know if I think I’ll be on track to continue my pursuit of a 4.0.

I’ve been in a bloggy mood lately, so here we go with another round of updates in my mundane life. Maybe I’ll post something other than “here’s what happened!” soon, but who knows. Occasionally I like to have posts like my PHP Soap Timeout post, so maybe I’ll come up with something awesome like that soon. But for now, all you get is life updates.

Arizona

I didn’t mention this before here on my blog, although I did mention it on Twitter and Facebook, but I decided to head down to Arizona for my grandparents’ Christmas Eve party. My grandfather had some health issues this year and I didn’t want to miss a guaranteed time when I’d be able to see him around Christmas. I don’t know how much time he has left with us, be it a few months or fifteen more years (I hope it’s even longer than this!).

In any case, Laura was unable to accompany me on the trip. I took off a half-day on Christmas Eve to make the drive down after I got off of work on the 23rd. My work only had a half-day scheduled for the 24th, so I only had to take off 4 hours. My Dad met me here at work when I got off at 4 and we set off for the Phoenix/Mesa area, replete with gifts and items we’d need to survive the harsh Arizona desert… Rather, clothes and toiletries.

We decided to pit-stop in Boulder City to say hello to Laura. She wasn’t expecting us to drop by before we got out of town, but BC is literally on the route to Phoenix from Vegas, and the diversion from the US-93 to her office isn’t very far. She was happy to see us and we chatted for a bit before finally heading out.

The drive was mostly uneventful. We got held up at the dam for awhile because there were quite a few people driving out south on US-93 and there are security checks at the dam. It took us about 20-25 minutes to get through the checkpoint, then we were off to the races. We didn’t end up behind very many slow people.

There was a point in Wickenburg where US-93 ends and that section was totally rebuilt and included two traffic circles. My Dad was leading the way and hadn’t encountered the rebuild before, so there was a little stopped-in-the-circle action before he figured out what direction was what. Apparently, he also needed to fill up in Wickenburg and he’s got a Chevron card, so he was originally going to stop and get gas there. Unfortunately, his regular Chevron had become a Shell station, so he ended up skipping it. Once we were on the AZ-74, he called me up to use my GPS or iPhone to find the nearest Chevron. We ended up hitting up a Chevron at our connection point from the AZ-74 to the I-17.

The rest of the drive was all highways inside the metro area basically until we got to my grandparents’ place. Once we got there, we unloaded a few things, talked with my grandma for a bit, then headed to bed.

Note: I just noticed I’m already over 500 words. I have three topics to cover and I’m only about 1/4 through the first topic… Are you ready for a much longer read?? I sure am!

The next day was obviously eventful as it was Christmas Eve! The day of the party, the day I’d finally get to see a lot of my Dad’s side of the family that I never get to see. The morning started off slow, with my Dad, my grandma, my cousin Cody and myself all talking about stuff and whatnot. Cody’s still pretty young so I guess he didn’t talk much, rather than act like a kid, but hey. I ended up playing a game of Stratego with him, and he’s pretty good. I haven’t really ever played before and he had some good tactics.

My cousin Dani showed up a bit after noon. She’s turning 18 on New Year’s Eve this year, and holy crap she got tall. Not quite as tall as me, but taller than Laura. We didn’t have a whole lot going on at the time because my Dad was puttering around on his laptop and my grandma was cooking up food for the party that evening. She suggested for Dani and I to go catch a movie, so we did. Ended up seeing The Blind Side. Good flick, I particularly enjoyed it.

Even though I had my iPhone and the GPS in the Prius, I decided to just follow Dani to her place so I could see her parents earlier than they would have made it to the party. Mark & Ricki, I hadn’t seen them in quite some time either, so it was really nice to see them. Mark’s lost quite a bit of weight, I’ve never seen him as light as he is now. I’m not sure how much, but I’m fairly certain it’s around 50 pounds.

Oh, did I forget to mention my grandma also lost over 50 pounds? She’s looking much better too. What is it with all of the weight loss in my family? Apparently my Dad is the only one gaining weight, haha. Love ya Dad.

So I helped them load up gifts and whatnot and we drove on back to my grandparents’ place. My grandfather was finally home from work when we got back, so I caught up with him for awhile. It was really good to, since he was the primary reason I decided to take this trip in the first place and miss Christmas Eve with Laura and potentially screw up time with her on Christmas.

My uncle Brad was also finally there, so we got to trade shots and banter around a bit. It was fun, he always is. He’s one of the four of us look-alikes: My grandfather, my Dad, Brad and me. I dare say I’m the best looking of the group!

The look-alikes! From left: Me, my grandfather, my Dad, Brad. Lower-right, my cousin Cody managed to get part of himself in the photo.

From there the party really started. My cousin Matthew and his wife Danielle showed up, and even he’s lost weight! 60 pounds! He officially weighs less than me, the first time in our lives that had ever happened. Unbelievable. He really looks different, being that light. He’s thinking of entering the police force in Phoenix or, if that doesn’t work out, he’ll see if the military will give him a job. I’d rather him be in the police force myself.

I apologize to the rest of the party attendants, but my short-term memory can be bad and in this case, I can’t remember who all else was there! I suck, I know. Oh, my great-grandma Sigourney was there as well. She’s still going strong, I can’t believe it. She’s in her 80s.

The white elephant gift exchange went well, I ended up walking away with three items. I originally nabbed this storage net you can mount to a wall. At one point during the exchange I mentioned that Laura would like this nice carafe that was out there. My aunt Ricki is the one who originally bought it, and she nabbed it at the end with the expressed purpose of getting it for me. She’s awesome. My grandma also had an ice cream bowl & toppings set she opened that never got stolen, and she let me have it because she knew Laura and I would like it and she wouldn’t use it. Interesting stuff. A few other small gifts were passed out and the party ended.

One thing I did discover during the party — my cousin Dani is a nut. She fits in with this family well. Dani and I have been messaging back and forth in Facebook for awhile now and I never realized just how much like the rest of us crazy people in my family she’s like.

Actually, she was my first recruit into getting my family to call me Robert, and she never slipped up once while I was down there. When I was younger, I went by Bob (and even further back, Bobby) and I’ve long been trying to get my family to make the switch and call me by what I want to be called, Robert (even Rob works, although I never introduce myself as Rob… still get called Rob more than Robert…). My aunt Ricki made an effort, so that was cool. My Dad was also making an effort.

Interestingly, my grandma had always wanted my older sister Katie and me to call her Gran. I had no idea until she mentioned it to me during the trip. Thus, I am now calling her Gran.

I got up at 3:30am Vegas time on Christmas and left at about 4:20am Vegas time. Arizona doesn’t participate in daylight savings time, so they share the Pacific time zone during the summer, and during the winger they share the Mountain time zone. So they were ahead at this point. I filled up my car to the brim with more gas before getting out of town, and I was off!

The drive up was again, relatively uneventful, but as I got closer and closer to Vegas I felt the pressure of making sure I got into town in time to shave, change and get to mass in a presentable manner. I was unkempt and didn’t have a change of good clothes with me, so I was trying to avoid driving straight to mass. So I sped, as we did speed going down to Arizona.

At one point, the US-93 was switching between a single road with a dividing line between north and south lanes and having a median between the two. During one stretch of the median, suddenly there was a car coming head-on at me! Thankfully, I was still barely inside a two-lane stretch so there was room around him, but if I had been about ten seconds further ahead, we would have met in a very narrow one-lane spot… Doofus. Needs to learn how to drive.

Getting through the dam at this point was a breeze. I ended up getting home at 9am with basically 30 minutes to shave & change and get out the door. I went a little longer than I wanted, leaving the house at 9:40, but I still got to mass with about 10 minutes to spare. Thus, Christmas had truly begun for me!

Ah, but wait! A note on miles-per-gallon for the trip for the Prius before I start section 2 for Christmas. Going down to Arizona I got about 48 MPG. Pretty good for highway driving in a Prius, it made me happy! But that should have been an omen. It turns out most of the driving down to Arizona is literally down. Downhill, that is. Driving back to Vegas is pretty much all uphill. I effectively got 36 MPG going back to Vegas, which is abysmal for a Prius. I actually had to fill the tank in Kingman to make it all the way back. It sucked.

Christmas

Note: over 1,800 words so far! Wow… Long.

Mass was good. It was a nice Christmas Mass. I got to sit next to Ron & Priscilla, Laura’s stepdad and mom. Laura sang cantor at Mass as she always does and had an excellent solo near the end. It actually elicited applause from the congregation, which isn’t really supposed to happen. Haha.

Laura and I headed back home after Mass to collect the gifts we needed to track back on over to the Waltons’ place and to change into non-Mass clothes. So we did all that and headed back out.

Opening gifts was fun. Laura got to open her new Amazon Kindle from me, which I wrapped in triplicate — I wrapped the Kindle and its cover, put it in a box, heavily taped that box and wrapped it, then put that box in another, heavily taped and wrapped again. It was pretty funny, if I do say so myself.

I had a pretty good haul myself. Got this new component shelf I was wanting for the bedroom so we could put an “entertainment center” in there with the TV I scored from work for $50. Laura got me this awesome new Harmony remote to replace the one downstairs and move the existing one to the bedroom. I need to customize the new one with a background image and a new font theme. Hells to the yeah! Other goodies came my way, such as a Bionicle Lego set, Left 4 Dead 2, The Hangover and more. I also got this nice cube of photos from Katie and my other Parkers up in upstate New York, which was totally awesome. I love hand-made gifts.

We transitioned to dinner, which was excellent as always. Unfortunately, the Waltons don’t get the NFL Network, so I kept up with the Titans-Chargers game online via the NFL’s website. Unfortunately for the Titans and their playoff hopes, it wasn’t a very merry Christmas and they got handled, so no playoffs this year. Maybe next year, we’ll see.

Speaking of Christmas sports, the UNLV Runnin’ Rebels had a basketball game against USC. Unfortunately for them as well, they lost, bringing their non-conference record to 12-2. That’s a pretty good record and I think they’ll make some noise in the Mountain West Conference this season. I think, unless they totally implode, they’ll make the NCAA tournament this year, making it three times in four years. Getting back to where the program needs to be!

After dinner we just sat and talked and watched TV. Ron and Laura read books from their Kindles and Julia worked on her Christmas gift to her boyfriend Alex. Laura and I got sleepy, so we headed home to get some sleep.

Cleaning

We didn’t end up going to bed right away. Our house was an absolute disaster at this point. Neither of us had any time to keep things clean and neat while we were both getting Christmas gifts ready for people and I was prepping to head out to Arizona, so the place was very messy. I ended up doing a little tidying up and organizing and breaking down boxes while Laura read a bit more on her Kindle. Then we headed to bed.

The 26th wasn’t a day for straight cleaning. I still did a bit here and there throughout the day, but we had a lot going on that didn’t involve cleaning. Laura had breakfast with her friend David, we both had lunch with some of my old friends from high school and we had dinner with her parents at White Chocolate Grill. Tasty goodness, I had this great penne alfredo. Afterwards, we came home and I hooked up our new bedroom “entertainment center.” It contains the TV I bought from work, as well as a Blu-Ray player and DirecTV HD receiver I got from Best Buy (using gift cards from both the Tuckers and Waltons) while Laura was having breakfast with David. To mount the component shelf on the wall, I used this new DeWalt 14.4V drill I got with a Lowe’s gift card my Dad got for me. The drill was very nice, but some of the studs in my house are so difficult to screw into that I actually have to use slightly shorter screws…

I got all that setup and reconfigured our old Harmony remote from downstairs for the new system upstairs, and voila! I’m particularly happy about the Blu-Ray player, as it can connect to Netflix, Pandora and YouTube. So we can now also watch Netflix streaming in the bedroom off of the Blu-Ray player, while downstairs we do that using the Xbox 360. We can’t use Pandora downstairs, so that’s a plus. Although I’m sure I could find a way to stream Pandora downstairs if I wanted to, maybe via a laptop or something. Maybe I will…

Thus, the 27th! Cleaning day! Collected all of our trash, including the now-empty boxes from our new components and gifts. Broke down the rest of our Amazon boxes and stored those and the packing materials away. Cleaned off the living room and dining room tables, put all of our new gifts away, stored our wrapping materials (well, what’s left of them). Cleaned some straggler dishes, put the previously-clean ones sitting int he dishwasher away. Tidied up the bedroom slightly, but there are still some straggler clothes in there. Did cable management on the new “entertainment center” in the bedroom. Took the closet door off (we’re replacing it with a curtain, it got in the way of some racks of clothes and was more of a bother than anything useful). Cleaned up and organized both the library and loft. The library had my bin of cables and technology parts strewn about because I needed to find cables for the components in the bedroom, so that was a chore. Vacuumed downstairs and upstairs, dealt with piles of mail, dealt with piles of stuff to shred.

We still haven’t gotten the empty boxes and non-food trash bags out of the house. Our trash days are Tuesday and Friday and our trash bins were already 100% full, so there’s nowhere outside to put the new trash. We’re taking it to the curb tonight, thankfully.

Hmm… Anything else? Might be, but trust me, that list I just gave you took quite a long time to do. We ended up having people over in the evening, so we were happy we got all of that squared away. We still need to do hard floor cleaning and some dusting and have a new, smaller stack of things to shred, but other than that I think our house actually looks good again.

Anything else you want to know about my four-day weekend? Oh, I’m pending some more CD/DVD/BD jewel cases because we’re really low and I’ve got paintable cable covers for the bedroom coming soon so that’ll look better. Phew. And I need to cut down our coaxial satellite cable, because it’s too long and it’ll look bad because I can’t figure out how to make it look goo otherwise.

Hmm… I do still have a Home Depot card to use…

Over 3,000 words! WTF!

So it’s the end of the year, and you know what that means! Yes, it means final exams at the end of my first MBA semester and self evaluations at work!

Food Poisoning

Unfortunately, it also means I got food poisoning… Not that it happens every year around this time. The last time this happened, Laura was either a Copy Editor or the News Editor for The Rebel Yell back when we were both in our undergrad studies at UNLV. That time was really awful, this one was just as bad.

To be truly honest, I’m not sure 100% that it was indeed food poisoning, just as back then I’m not sure what it was either. All I know is that I couldn’t keep any food or water down for very long and there were times (specifically, when I wasn’t keeping said food or water down) that I felt I was going to die. Not the most remarkable experience ever. Thus, I had to stay home from work yesterday, which I didn’t want to do, but hey… Not much I could do about it. I was pretty incapacitated.

Hell, I even considered playing some Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 that Laura got for me as a just-because surprise gift (She rocks! Love her!), but I couldn’t focus or concentrate enough to even do that. So I just laid on the couch, intermittently sleeping and “watching” TV and trying to eat and failing.

Today, though, I’m mostly back to normal. Still don’t feel quite right, but I can eat & drink and operate like a regular human being again. I anticipate tomorrow being 100% again.

Final Exams

So enough about food poisoning! Let’s address final exams. Rather, final exam. Just one this time around.

My Organizational Behavior class was structured with an optional final. This means that if you ended up with a decent grade, you shouldn’t take the final simply because if you do worse on the final than the grade you had going into it, you could seriously damage your grade. Thus, I checked my grade. Yeah, with that big beaming A staring me in the face, I’m not taking the final. Boo-yah!

So I only have one final then, and that’s Stats. Ugh. Not the class I want to be taking a final in. I’ve been doing alright in there and I have a shot at an A, it seems, but my group project needs to be pretty solid and I need to get roughly a C or so on the final to get the A. I think I can do it, and I really want to. I’m aiming to have the best grades of my educational career in the MBA program. So far I’ve accomplished bettering my grades at every level, having gotten a 3.4 (unweighted) in high school and a 3.56 in undergrad. If I can better that getting my MBA, then you could say I get better with age.

Self Evaluation

So it’s the end of the year and self evaluations are floating around work. That doesn’t really make me the happiest man on the planet, as I get to sift through an entire year’s worth of work to figure out what I’ve done well, what I haven’t and to note any accomplishments. That, and I’m not particularly good at being assertive and promoting myself very well.

These are things I’ve been working on improving in myself lately, with some mixed success. I figure this self evaluation will be one of my first opportunities to be more assertive and sell myself better within the company. I still haven’t moved up and I want to, so this is a prime opportunity to voice that.

I’m also never really sure how to rate myself. I never have been, really. Like when asked what my level of experience is with different technologies, such as HTML, CSS, PHP, Java, etc. I never know what to say beyond Intermediate. I want to say Expert, but when I say Expert, I take that as meaning I’m leaps and bounds better than your average programmer with those skills and technologies. When I say I’m an expert at something, I intend to convey that I’m THE FUCKING MAN.

Indeed, that feeds into my assertiveness and self promotion. I really should give myself more credit than I usually do. I know that I’m an integral, vital part of my department here at work and that a lot of the stability here is due to me (and my tremendous boss Randy Kochis, to be sure).

I do feel that since I’ve got such an effective boss that I’m a bit overshadowed and get pigeonholed too easily. I just feel that it’s difficult to really shine in my department here at work because Randy is so good at what he does and can take on more and more responsibilities easily. He’s actually one of the people I’m trying to model some of my career after, not a bad example if I do say so myself.

So yeah, my whole point here is that self evaluations are around again and I just hope I don’t over- or under-value myself too much this year. The first year I did these I undervalued myself pretty badly when compared to my superiors’ evaluations of me, and last year I overvalued myself just slightly…

Maybe I’m just destined to be a code monkey the rest of my life??