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Its about time!

So I did my update blog reading from the weekend and I am disappointed in two people for not mentioning our road trip (not really, but its fun to call you out ).

Anyway, John, Katy, and I made a road trip to Cleveland this weekend to visit the Seven Floors of Hell. after I had to visit three banks to find an ATM that worked, I met up with the pair at Katy’s. We climbed into the CRV and hit the open road, you know after we stopped at Starbucks so the overly caffeinated and sugar high crazy duo could get more fuel. That car ride was a blast (seriously, I had many good laughs)! We made a pit stop at a rest area on the way up where a veding machine dispensed pop in such a fashion, that it held us spell bound. Robating arms like a skill crane bringing you your cold twenty ounce beverage are works of modern art. We decided to stop off at a TGI Fridays, which was much further from the exit than logic would dictate. On a side note we found out a mall up there has a department store called Ears (ok, maybe the S was burned out on the sign, but then again maybe not). We ended up sitting next to the server station, where Katy pulled her ever popular “I’m talking about him and he’s right behind me isn’t he?” But even worse than that was listening in on the wait staffs conversations, it sounded almost like the plot to the movie Waiting. Kind of creepy. After dinner we headed out to the Haunted House, or 7 houses to be exact. Not being Haunted House N00B5, we brought extra cash, so we could get our hands on the coveted speed pass, or no waiting in line. Some of the houses were really lame, most were pretty good. The 3-d Pyscho Circus was awesome, because the glasses made everything stick out. A very cool effect. Overall I’d have to say the Seven Floors of Hell didn’t live up to all the hype. It was a fun trip still. The ride back was quite eventful. John slept, Katy sang to her iPod as she drove, and I watched the scenery deep in thought.

The next morning I got out of bed, only to realize I left my cell phone in Katy’s car. DOH! So I hope online and shot her a TXT through Verizon’s web site. I waited a bit for a reply, before I decided to make my trip out to Gamestop to obtain my coveted prize, Guitar Hero 3 Legends of Rock. On the ride back, I met up with John and Katy in my complex to get my phone back and waved to them as they headed to the same store for the same prize (great minds think alike). I opened the box, inserted my Wii mote into the Gibson Les Paul, and started to rock it out. A few hours later, I was dueling a demon to a Guitar Version of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”. difficulty beaten, three more to go. The song list in this game is just phenomanal, Metallica’s One, Paint it Black, Welcome to the Jungle, and Bulls on Parade just to name a few. If you have a Wii, get the Wii version of this game!

In the evening I gave Mraz a call, and met up with him for dinner. Following dinner we played several round of Team Fortress 2, before calling it a night.

Monday morning rolls around, and work is work. Not bad, but really busy, so oh well.

L8rs peeps.

Bless me father for I have lived. Its been 13 days since my last blog session.

So I haven’t felt like blogging in a while, sue me. Anyway, here is the run down of things that have happened.

• Friday October 12th -I drove down to Southpoint, Ohio (the definition of a one horse town) for Andy and Jenny’s rehearsal dinner. I meet up with the immediate family at the hotel (Shantel, Mom, Anthony, and Ayla) and we check in. Then it dons on me that I need to pick up my Tux. Enter the following conversation:

Me: Shit I don’t know how to get there.

Shantel: You got the address?

Me: Yes.

Shantel: You want to borrow the bitch?

Me: Mmmmm….Yeah, give me the bitch.

The bitch we are referring to is her Garmin Nuvi portable GPS unit. The nickname was given by my mother who came up with the name the first time she was in the car listening to it give us directions. “The bitch told us to turn left.” I stopped trying to explain the weird quirks of my family long ago.

Anyway I get to the Tux place in back only to have to round everyone up to head over to the church. Anthony and I were in the wedding party, so we had the privledge/curse of having to put up with the most psycho wedding cordinator I have ever met. I knew it was bad when I pulled Andy’s dad, Charlie, aside and told him if he didn’t shut her up I was going to shoot her. The funny thing is Charlie is a retired State Trooper, and offered to help me take her down. Kevin, the best man and adopted son of Charlie and Gwen, is a current State Trooper and he asked to join in on the fun. Needless to say we all (no I didn’t really shoot her) made it out alive and headed over to dinner.

Texas Roadhouse on a Friday night in a small town that has next to no fine dinning establishments was packed. Add a 46 person rehearsal dinner, and you have the recipe for a blocked entrance. Its kind of funny to realize that you are standing next to a Fire Fighter (my Uncle Pat, he’s a Fire Fighter in Northern Kentucky and DJs on his free weekends for fun/money) in an entrance packed so much with people that it has to be breaking fire code. They finnaly seated us, and dinner went off more or less without a hitch.

We retried back to the hotel room where I introduced Anthony to WoW. Shantel is going to kill me for corupting her son.

• Saturday October 13th – Woke up, had breakfast, and then got suckered into to going to Walmart. At the end of the trip, my cart was full of household stuff for the new apartment thanks to mom.

We got back tot he hotel and started getting ready for the wedding. As I was putting my black vest on over my ivory shirt, I turned to look in the mirror and realized I could Cosplay as Han Solo in this outfit. After a good laugh, I finished getting ready, grabbed Anthony, and headed over to the church. The wedding and the pictures were a blur (though we did get Anthony, Michigan fan he is (I know, how can he go against his uncle/godfather like that), to help us do the O-H-I-O cheer for a picture.

We arrived at the reception, ate, drank, and were marry. There was much drinking, shot buying, cigar smoking, and general debauchery that goes on at family events. The high point of the night was the playing of a song that has become a family tradition for weddings and such, “Family Tradition” by Hank Williams Jr. During my cousin Lisa’s weddin, this tradition got slightly perverted into a drinking binge (it was BYOB and grandpa had a full 1L bottle Captain Morgans at the start of the song). This reception did not stray from that tradition.

Why do you drink?

To get drunk!

Why do you role smokes?

To get high!

Why must you live out the songs that you wrote?

To get laid!

The bottle made it around the circle one and quarter times, and was empty just as the song ended. Grandpa would later remark that the family seemed to have a few extra “additions” in the circle. Thats what happens when you break out free booze. It was a good time for all and I hope Andy and Jenny enjoyed themselves.

• Sunday October 14th – Got up and said my good byes. Drove back home and crashed. Got up and went out to dinner with Nate and Mraz. Afterwards we headed back to Mraz’s place to watch Avatar.
• Monday October 15th – First day of the insane work week from hell. Unfortunately I can’t blog about the fun juicy gossip stuff that goes on at work (either at the client site or HQ), so you’ll just have to take my word on it. Got home that night and had Mraz drive me to meet my parents at the Bob Evans in Jeffersonville (so I could get a one way moving truck the next day). He thought it was kind of humorous that we all ordered breakfast while he ordered dinner. Go fig.
• Tuesday October 16th -The wettest moving day ever. Wayne and I got drenched loading the stuff at my parents condo. I fought with an uncooperative mirror on the truck on the trip up. Unloading was a little easier with Mraz and my dad helping us at the destination. Thankfully mom took the time to unpack the kitchen for me while we setup the bedroom furniture. Wayne and I had finding the place to return the truck. Eventually everyone left and I turned in for the night.
• Wednesday October 17th – More work? Get home and find out Katy has twisted her ankle. I went and bought her a couple of huge bags of peas to ice it down. John met me at her place. I found out later they had and interesting adventure at the hospital. Read what he said and then read what she said. Its good for a laugh. I retired back to the house to meet up with an old friend. After that it was bed time.
• Thursday October 18th – Is it Friday yet?
• Friday October 19th – TGIF! Got home from work and headed over to Mraz’s place. Greg, the drunk Ukrainian, was in town for a visit. We hit up Fazolis for dinner, and then played WoW.
• Saturday October 20th – Mraz talked us into buying Team Fortress 2. I highly recommend you check out the videos for the Heavy, Solider, Engineer, and Demoman. They are hysterical, even if you don’t like video games. After that we hit up the Movie Tavern for 30 Days of Night and the fastest service I’ve ever received at the place to date. Seriously, I ordered a salad with my meal, and it was at my seat within 60 seconds of ordering it. It literally beat my drink order to the table. Now that is service.
• Sunday October 21st – More gaming and Anime viewing at Mraz’s place. So I pretty much blew any hope of getting chores done over the weekend, but I had a good time, so who cares.
• Monday October 22nd – Back to work. Someone shoot me now.
• Tuesday October 23rd- A productive day at work. A weird night. I couldn’t shake something that had started to bother me. A feeling that seems to creep up around this time of year. I’ll learn to deal with it one of these days. Katy listen to me ramble about it for a bit. Thanks! I also setup dd-wrt on my router at home. I love having the power of a business class cisco router for only $50.
• Wednesday October 24th – Another productive day at work. I also found out my boss is moving on to a new company. Good for him, he needs this kind of change in his life right now, and he deserves it. Of course that means work is going to be even more fun for me and my co-worker. I think we’ll live.

So I’ve finished this long winded post and I’m looking at a pile of boxes that I still haven’t bothered to unpack. I hate moving.

It’s been a long time, and I don’t think about the show no more.

I want to go home……I want to go home.

Home, its been a foreign word for me for almost two years. That’s not to say that I did not like or appreciate the places I have stayed since the winter of 2005, its just that they weren’t mine. For those who know me, you know I am a very independent person, and its been a rough two years having to depend heavily on others. It was an interesting role reversal to say the least.

Almost two years ago I had to make a hard decision, live out of my car or go bankrupt renting when I was working a job that only paid $10.26/Hr, or admit I need help and move back down to Cincy to live with mom and dad for a while. I made the trip back with only a portion of the things I had collected over the years, losing most against my will. After a couple of weeks of searching, I landed a job working a 6 month project at Children’s Hospital. I made some friends and had the time of my life.

After the project was over, the company moved me up to Columbus. Still short on case I asked for a favor from my Cousin Andy and his girlfriend (currently fiancee and soon to be wife this Saturday). I asked them to let me “rent out” their spare bedroom so I could move back up to Columbus. Until Wednesday of last week, I’ve spent almost a year and a half as their roommate.

Yesterday, with he help of Katy (a sort of John), I moved the first of my stuff in my new One Bedroom apartment. I was getting the PVR computer system setup, when I flipped on a rerun of Scrubs. The message of the episode was that sometimes things happen for a reason. I am not over the bitterness I feel to the events that happened in November of 2005, and honestly I doubt I ever will be. What I do know, is with out that event in my life, I would probably not be as successful with my career as I have been. I would have never taken the project in Cincy. I wouldn’t have made the friends I did down there. I wouldn’t have ended up working for the same company here in Columbus, which led me to meeting some very close friends. I wouldn’t have received the offer I did to specialize in Information Security with the current company I’m with.

As much as I hate to admit it it took rising from the ashes to be as sucessful as I am today. I did not make this trip alone, so thank you to all who helped get to where I am today. Thank you for bringing me home.

I’ve already blogged about Friday night, so here comes Saturday and Sunday.

Saturday afternoon I visited Misty to play Wii and hang out. She has been having a rough go the past few weeks, so I figured she could use a visit from a friend. We watched this movie called The Quiet. It was about a dumb and deaf girl taken in by a dysfunctional family. They proceed to tell her all their secrets, because she can’t repeat them. The catch is that she has a secret of her own. It was very cool. I highly recommend it.

Saturday night was my cousin Andy’s second bachelor party. We started the evening at Half Time Tavern, watching the Buckeyes. After the game we went down the road to Vanity, hands down the best strip club I’ve ever been to. I won’t go into details as to what happened at the club, but we closed down the club at around 5am. Needless to say we all had fun and are planning on returning to the club every few months.

Sunday I went out to see the movie Seeker with Mraz. Both of us agreed, that the movie seemed underdeveloped and rushed. Wait for DVD on this one.

Well its been back to the work week, but there is one final thing to note. Tomorrow I will receive the keys to my new apartment. Its been two years coming. Wish me luck!

So, Katy John and I went to the Blue October Concert Earlier this week. It was awesome. They had Shinny Toy Guns and Yellow Card open for them. Both bands were awesome. John and I were also checking out the eye candy all night. Short skirts and pig tails always do me in. About the only weird point of the night was these two psycho blonds that kept trying to talk to the three of us, man were they scary.

So the three of us hit up some haunted house tonight. We starting the evening meeting at John’s. John needed to hit the ATM, prompting the longest ATM line I’ve ever seen. Seriously people, it shouldn’t take more than two minutes to use an ATM unless you are a moron.

After that Katy wanted food, so we hit up Buger King. Prompting the longest drive thru wait I’ve ever experienced. How many times can some working the drive thru ask you what you ordered when it was only two things of the dollar menu? Apperentlly about 6 times. The funniest/saddest part was when she asked John what we were still waiting on. The first thought in my mind was, “You are working the drive thru window, you should fucking know.” I bite my tongue, as did John.

Our first stop was going to be the Deadly House of Horrors. Its a new one that supposedly in a funeral home. The big problem here is that its in the getto, and parking appeared almost nonexistent. They also only have a Myspace page and no web site. Thankfully we decided to skip that one.

Next on the list was the House of Nightmares in the brewery district. As always it was very well done. I especially liked when we went thought he clown part, and they made Katy stand on a green dot, where a clown in a harness rig jumped out and scared her good. It rocked.

The last stop on the list was Terror Park at Cooper Stadium. The hour wait in line, sucked. They did a lousy job of spacing groups. The actors need work and they probably need at least 3 times the actors. The only cool part was the clown who kept scaring the crap out of the three girls in front of us in line.

We’re planning on making a trip to some big haunted house around Cleveland on the 20th. Should be fun.