Working Hard for the Money

As it turns out, it’s hard to keep up with a blog while out of town and away from most Internet and phone connections. Over the next few weeks, I will try to get a post or two up while I am out of the area, but there are no guarantees.

This past week was mostly filled with prep for this coming trip. On Friday, we made the decision to go out of town (only an hour and a half away) for one of the guy’s birthday. Seeing as I needed to be at the airport at 0730 the next morning, I made the decision to go up there and drive back instead of staying the night. That made the next morning a little rough because I had to wake up early an pack. All said and done, I got about 30 minutes of sleep before heading out.

That meant I was asleep before the tires left the pavement on the first flight.

Upon arrival, I found out my roommate (yes, we have roommates here) is a guy I went to school with. We knew we were both going to be here together but we figured it would be one of those things where you hang out together and go to your own room in the afternoon. Nope, there is no escaping this guy. He’s going to be my closest (literally) friend here for the next few weeks.

Tron

I had a mental health review for work which typically is not that big a deal. Basically, you go in, see a psychologist (I think; those are the thought doctors, right?) and they sign a piece of paper that says you are still capable of doing some parts of my job that are more sensitive. This time, it was with a different doctor that I’ve never seen before and it took more than an hour and a half. I didn’t realize there were so many questions people could ask. I’m no stranger to long sessions of being questioned (our job makes that more common than you would think) but this one was intense. I walked out exhausted and craving something sugary.

We had a gigantic pile of stuff on our Ops Floor that we have been meaning to take to Goodwill for a long time. When two of the roommates moved out to get an apartment all their own, they decided to make the pile bigger with the things they didn’t want to take or didn’t want to pack. One of my roommates and I finally took it to the donation center and realized that removing two people’s desks and an enormous pile of clothes from the Ops Floor clears up a TON of room. Who would have thought?

One of my friends is headed out next week so we took him out to the dance hall for one last night of dancing and fun before he leaves us. We had an AWESOME time out there! It was a typical night out except for one thing: there was a girl out with her friends at the same place (we didn’t know her and had never seen her before in our lives) and she may have had a couple of drinks before we met her. She decided I was something worth looking at and pulled me out on the dance floor. No big deal, I’ve danced with plenty of people I didn’t know before. It turns out dancing/walking/remaining vertical was a challenge for her. Dancing turned into me basically carrying her around the dance floor for a few songs while she slurred mostly incomprehensibly. When I took her back to her table and delivered her back into the hands of her friends, they looked at me and mouthed “I’m sorry”. Anytime someone has to apologize to a person you ‘danced’ with, I think that’s very telling. We got a good laugh out of it though and a couple of pictures!

There was a sale online for a fathead (basically a giant wall sticker) of a Tron character. It now lives on our wall next to the NERF wall.

Thor

We went and saw the new movie Thor this week because we are all kind of nerdy and thought that would be great fun. It turns out it is actually a great movie and even those among our group that had never read the comic books and knew nothing of the story found it to be both entertaining and funny. That is my kind of movie. We’ve been to a couple movies where it is quite obvious someone who has no idea what is going on is not having a good time at all. It also had a lot of great quotable lines that I’m sure will be coming up in conversation throughout the next few weeks.

One of the guys at work has been looking forward to a hackfest we had this weekend at the house for weeks. He has been looking up various hacking challenges we could do and doing research online about hosting various puzzles and seeing how many people he can get excited about joining in the fun. Our group is actually geeky enough that this is something we plan and get excited about. The funny part is not the fact that we had on of these, it’s how complicated we found it was to describe the concept to people outside the computer or technology industries. I turns out not everyone understands what a hackfest is and gets slightly perplexed when you tell them it is kind of like all those bad intrusions you hear about on TV but we are doing it for fun against people who either know it is coming or are fine with it happening. It ends up simply being easier to say, “It’s nerds getting together to talk about computers.” Most people either stop talking or their eye glaze over at that point.

And finally, it is Mother’s Day today! I sent my Mom flowers at work so all the ladies there would see them and be jealous of her and her wonderful (that is subjective) children. To all mothers out there and especially the one out there I call Mom, just know that your kids don’t stay irritating and troublesome their whole lives. Look at my siblings, all of them turned out decently. Mom, three out of four ain’t bad.

Camping

I went and saw the movie Limitless with one of my friends. His girlfriend was out-of-town and he was just sitting around, so we headed out. We figured it wouldn’t be that crowded on a Sunday night, but the theatre was all but full. We had to sit on the very front row and watch the movie staring straight up. Why do they even sell seats that close to the screen?! It was borderline uncomfortable but the movie was actually really good. I was kind of expecting something that wasn’t as good as the previews made it look (I don’t really have a reason why I thought that) and the movie delivered quite a good time. It was a pleasant surprise!

This week I got Portal 2 via Steam (I am pro-content downloading no matter what the file is) and my roommates and I played it. It turns out it is might confusing to only have one copy of the game on one computer and expect more than one person to be able to save their progress in the game without causing mayhem when it comes time for someone else to play. It ends up causing a lot of loads and restarts when you first sit down. I wish the game provided some way to rename save points, but two of the four of us have finished the game already, so it shouldn’t be that bad in the future with only two people playing.

This past week we had dinner at a new pizza place in town (new to us, not new to the town) and found out it’s about 100x better than where we usually go on Wednesdays. We were one of three groups there and there were plenty of table outside for us to use. The pizza was great, the beer was cheap and the weather couldn’t really have been any better. It’s closer for the two people who live farthest away and it’s about the same distance for the rest of us. We’ve been looking for another place to go because our typical location can become PACKED which makes getting a table darn near impossible unless we send a liaison there immediately after work to gather a table and fend off the people with a stick to keep them from taking over the table. We’ll hit it up a few more times and see if it’s something we can make permanent!

We went camping this weekend on pretty short notice. It was one of those times where someone said, “Hey, let’s go camping” on Wednesday and Friday afternoon we were headed out to a great time in the woods. The weather really cooperated with us and we met some fun new people and had a lot of really big laughs. We need more of these, people!