Nothing left to hide

April – uh…. so long ago. Company was bought out, that was probably the biggest news of the month. I don’t really remember much of what I was up to at the time.

May – Found out about how I was going to have a new job taking over 2nd level claims software support. I was pretty burnt out on work stuff at this point.

June – Started the newish job so no more taking calls. Had a great B-day extravaganza with my family up in Seattle. We visited the Pacific Science Center for the first time and enjoyed not being at work.

July – If I recall this is when it finally got warm so we started doing BBQ’s again and going out with friends more. Work was hectic as I helped move the desk to 24 hour service. Our 1 year wedding anniversary occurred at the end of the month so we took some day’s off and went to the Oregon Coast with my family and my Aunt Julie/Uncle Dale.

August – Work Work Work…. visited the family and saw phill’s new condo. Decided to get a dog.

September – Merger closed at work so busy working on that. Went through some intense 4 day leadership training. Celebrated Phillip’s 21’s birthday last weekend. Finished my dog research.

I really need to update more so that my life seems less… uneventful as I’m sure things happened but I can’t recall all much… sad.

March – Start full time employment at work and did wedding planning.

April – More and more work. I can’t really think of much else that wouldn’t be me just talking about things at work… which is probably only interesting to me.

May – Work is really picking up, involved in projects and always super busy doing stuff which is great. This weekend is my old Childhood friend’s wedding, so I’ll be back in Vancouver this coming weekend.  I was sick a few days last week and had to actually take two sick days.  I started play through, of all the games in the world, Jade Empire and really enjoyed it.  After going through the first KOTOR and loving it I found that as I’ve matured I enjoy the Jade Empire perspective on the whole Bioware RPG game. Far more fast paced, an intersting active battle system, leveling up is streamline, no items or gear, just a couple simple concepts for adding increased character status.  Only 3 characters classes and plenty of fighting styles to choose from.  The quests don’t branch out too much and they finish quickly and interstingly instead of say KOTOR where you sit around watching some movies for 10 minutes. While I do enjoy a narrative, I find that it’s nicer to be engaged in smaller intervals then the very drawn out stuff you’ll see in KOTOR.  Anyway, I really enjoyed it and it was the last game I’ve actually beaten.

Jen’s brother came up to visit us and his Amtrak Cascades North bound to Seattle hit a tree.  Sounds scary right? It was actually a small sappling that fell down on the track right as they came by. This is only about 45 minutes North of Vancouver so they hadn’t been on the train for too long at this point, but the entire ordeal takes several hours to resolve.  They can’t just check it out and keep rolling, of course not, Amtrak super great service is to sit there for almost 4 or 5 hours. They stay there so long that they have to switch crews because the shift was about to end and god forbid they work more then 8 hours, so they switch to another crew which the whole train has to wait for.  Talk about not taking ownership of a problem… anyway they eventually roll out of their, but they never offer any compensation for basically only moving these people 1 hour north from the first stop and then letting them sit for 6 hours.  They denied the request of a bus to move people out, no free food, not vouchers for tickets.  He left Vancouver around 8 PM Friday and arrived in Seattle at 4 AM Saturday.  With gas prices as high as they are I STILL wouldn’t take Amtrak down to Vancouver, especially after this astounding display of service.

That same weekend we tried to go out to the Seattle Film Festival which I wasn’t looking forward to at all.  Why would I not want to enjoy the SFF you may ask? Well… you think about what this endeavor will take and realize that the fun versus work factor is completely out of whack.  Due to the fact that the Festival is a limited time event that happens once a year, it’s held in venues that don’t really support this level of customers interaction.  These screening theaters don’t have the parking, the staff, the anything to handle this sort of volume.  Standing in line, buying ticket in advanced, only works well when whoever is doing it, does it all the time, like the Paramount, as can be seen by our  crappy experience.  We buy tickets in advance, we show up 30 minutes early, we move swiftly through the very long line, and they over sell the theater.  They counted seats wrong and sold more then they had despite denying festival pass owners seats and only allowing those who bought tickets for the showing to have seats.  Not even single seats were left, and 15 people including us sat in the back and were given free vouchers.  While we were at least compensated in some way, we cannot see the film since the other showings were already sold out, we can’t see any other movies since we don’t have time later in the week… so we have 6 vouchers that are useless to us.

Anyway, my WoW guy is 68 thanks to Jen’s brother and soon enough he should get me to 70… excellent.

It started off okay, but as the day goes on it really adds up, and the amount of stuff you need to know and remember, well it gets a bit overwhelming.  I got a job doing Tech Support at the Safeco campus in Redmond, it’s a pretty sweet gig.  The campus is awesome, definitely big time, their own Starbucks, salon, and everything, I make a good dollar amount and the hours aren’t so bad.  Lots of passwords, names of people, procedures, training videos, ID Badges, appointments, and other things swimming through my head, and I’m trying to remember why people don’t have energy to do anything else with their lives.  However, I did manage to make it out to eat dinner and buy Bully, since Jen is on a business trip to Spokane.  I predict I pass out during Friday Night Lights, which to me is funny, because it airs Tuesday.

End of September is here and my last day at the Microlab was today. Not really eventful, looking back at the situation I suppose there’s no reason it should be, I came in to help put on the new authentication system on the computers but it wasn’t ready quite yet so I never will get to see the whole lab with a log in system. However, the affects of it have been felt, the freaky weirdo people who were doing drugs in the bathroom are gone, the scary teenage kids who rocked out to people’s myspace profiles and stole our head phones are gone, creepy weekend rape porn guy is gone, etc etc. The new version of Deepfreeze lets desk staff message the entire lab when we are about to close so they have no excuse not to save their work, making the only painful things about the job completely eliminated. Even the monthly computer updates we did have been modernized, no need for us to go through, we actually used the computers to do the work for us… I know what a concept computers make less work to do!

This ending, of quite a long time at the lab, was sad, my first real long job that was great for school since I could study and had flexible hours and for the most part did nothing, I know many people are familiar with that aspect of the job. This summer was slow as molasses the first half but in the end picked up to be almost like a full time job with the amount of projects we were undertaking and it was great. I made sure to say goodbye to the 2 or 3 people still left in the Library Staff worth talking to, and while that made me sad they were all happy for me.

I was a bit apprehensive at first about being done working and not for sure having any particular interviews lined up but yesterday I lucked out and have an actually promising interview coming up so things are not so bleak. So this ending spawns a new beginning for us, the end of September was officially the end of me being a Student, and now a fully employed adult, waiting to take on the world. Thoughts of finally getting out of Northgate, moving to a better place, new job with better pay and benefits, things are looking forwards and upwards.

Time flys when you are… doing more or less nothing at all. Let’s see if we can sum up the past few weeks in a few quick posts, because right now off the top of my head… all these August Days have blurred together.

Well most notably my brother did come up to Seattle and stayed with us at some time in July or August, we spent alot of money at Blue C-Sushi down at U-village. We also had something of a book club going on between us but it sort of dissipated when we all lost interest in the book we were reading and no one but me had the fervor to keep our bi-weekly discussions alive. (more…)

A news update on my life from most recent (easiest to remember) to some point in mid June.

This paragraph is about World of Warcraft.  I’ve been raiding too much, and I need to find a way to duck out of some of these raids so I can just do something else.  Their are rumors of adding a 4th raiding night which make my head hurt to think about it.  I haven’t gotten any new loot on my rogue. Naxxramas makes me realize how much my other guild members actually suck.   We’ve cleared Anub, Raz, Noth, and soon Grand Widow, and the loot has been boring.  My hunter is doing well, he might start picking up some Dragon Stalker, but right now I’m just waiting on an epic ranged weapon.  I’m mostly just farming on my rogue for various potion reagents and consumables.  I try and do it during work so I get paid to do something not fun in the game.

This paragraph is about my brother.  Phillip graduated a while back, and is now looking for a job, much like myself.  We both aren’t pursuing the issue as well as we should be, and thinking towards the future is just something we’ve never trained ourselves to do very well at all.  He’s been up here this week, hanging out, hopefully realizing that Seattle is a better choice for his future than Vancouver, although I haven’t been making a very convincing argument of the matter.  I was originally hoping to have some plans for proving my point, that he needs to get away from his parents just for a while so that he can feel freedom, and not get stuck in that home town drudgery that my former high school companions have.

This paragraph is about proposals.  I asked Jen to marry me a few weeks back after my parents came to visit us for the 2nd time in the history of me living in Seattle.  She said Yes, so I am in-fact engaged.  We have no specific date set although this Winter when things calm down a bit for everyone we might be looking more seriously at specific times.  My parents are ecstatic and constantly calling about different ideas and plans they have for the ceremony.  I am constantly being reminded of how little I know about what a modern wedding entails, and how stupidly pompous they are, so obviously I’m finding the whole situation troublesome.

This paragraph is about my family. My Grandmother’s health is declining, and like the line in too many films “she only has a year or so to live.”  I wasn’t shocked, to be honest I was expecting this for some time after my grandfather passed away.  She hasn’t had too good of a time since, and I could tell she wasn’t as healthy as she used to be.

And lastly, no new job on the outlook, and lots of nothing happening at my current job.