So here I am on a day when I should be in class, but instead I am lounging around in Nashville. This would probably be one of the first “do nothing” vacations I had taken in a long long time. Honestly, when you take a vacation somewhere, you end up sight seeing, or going somewhere where there is lots to do. I don’t know that I have ever taken a vacation where I just got to do nothing. It wasn’t completely like that the whole time, but it was close (and somewhat nice). I did get mired in some school crap. (Group project week was probably a bad time to go on travel) AIU’s website is horrible when it comes to ADA and W3C compliance. Unless you have a PC with IE on it, you’re hosed. My travel computer is a Mac. Thankfully I managed to get through the school stuff and have ample time for visiting and such.

On Friday, Lee and I took Andrew and Damon to the Adventure Zone. It was a discovery type place with a planetarium and lots of cool gizmos. It might have been a bit young for Andrew, but he had fun regardless. We even played a cool mind test game where the person who relaxes their brain functions the most wins. You strap these contact points to your forehead and there is a ball that you have to push with your lack of mind power. I won against everyone, but I am not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. We stayed for the planetarium show (it was just meh). The Planets show was ok, but I think the stars and galaxies show would have been cooler. After that we headed back to the house to relax (It started raining)

Saturday, we slept in. I needed it. I was still tired from the drive down. When we finally started moving, we decided to go to the Opry Mills mall. They have an IMAX theater there that is playing Superman Returns in 3D. It’s not really 3D, there were only 3 scenes in 3D and you had to have the special glasses. The scenes they used were filled with action and almost gave me a head ache. The movie was still as good as it was before. But unless you haven’t seen it yet, don’t bother with IMAX. It is good if it’s your first time, but going to see it again on the big screen was just meh.

Now, before the movie, one of the most phenomenal things happened!!! We were walking past the local sporting store and through the window you could see the climbing wall. I made a comment to Andrew about climbing it and he replied with a “Maybe.”

Maybe??

Rewind to about 6 months ago. Amy, Andrew and I were walking through the Dicks sporting goods and they have a climbing wall there. I had tried to get Andrew to climb it, even offering to do it with him. We argued for about 30 min in the store about climbing that wall and he would have nothing to do with it.

Back to current day, he said “Maybe” and that’s all I needed. I dragged him into the store and we saw it was only $5. Damon said that he would do it too (Damon is only 8). I offered up the $10 for both of them and Damon jumped on it. Andrew was still showing a little fear. This is when Damon whips out the pure gold comment of:
“Come on, you can do it, I am going to do it and I am only 8, you’re 13!”

I about pee’d myself. Andrew was very nervous, but he said he would do it. It probably helped that I offered up a $10 prize if he rang the bell at the top. Damon went first and was up and down in no time. Andrew finally suited up and started his way to the top. He took it slow and was oblivious to everything but the wall.

He did it. I was so proud. This was a huge fear that he completely overcame! You know what he said to me afterwards?

“Maybe when we get back I can try the Dicks one again!”

The rest of the trip was fun with the relaxing and hanging out. Andrew getting over his fear was priceless

Well I am back from Nashville! I went out there for work and made it an extended vacation to visit with Lee and Missy. You know, That’s a long ass drive! I left on Wednesday at like 6:30am EST and arrived there at around 5pm CST. Because I really didn’t want to leave him alone in the house for 5 days, I decided to take Andrew with me. (Thus the reason for driving). We picked up a book on CD and hit the road. We did our best to keep stops at a minimum as we wanted to maximize our time there. The book helped out with that a lot.

We listened to “Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader.” This was really a good book! It talked about the events that happened shortly after EP-III and what Anakin was going through. I highly suggest it. I only wish I had gotten a book for the return trip. I ended up calling people at random to talk on the phone.

When I arrived, I set up house in Lee’s basement apartment. Of course, there was no Internet! Apparently his cable modem was fritzing out. So we spent much of the night trouble shooting it and bringing it back online. This took till about 12:30am. I still needed to get up the next morning for my class in downtown. I zonked out shortly after we got the net back up.

The next morning I woke up and headed out to downtown Nashville. I met up with Dave (one of the guys from work) and we hit up the doubletree lobby to find where we needed to go. We were there for the VM-TechEd class on some new VMWare technology. It was only a one day class, but was supposed to be really good. I say supposed to be because it never happened. Apparently they had canceled the class with the hotel, but never bothered to contact any of the students. There were about 10 of us wandering around the hotel trying to find it. Needless to say, we were a little miffed. No one could get a hold of the people putting on the class (even today, I have not been contacted). We called our boss and explained what happened.

With a little spare time to kill now, Dave and I headed out to find breakfast. This is apparently quite the chore in Nashville. The area we were in didn’t seem to have many places open at 8am. We settled on the Hilton hotel and ate our $12 buffet. Afterwards we hit up the Country Music Hall of Fame. Dave has this uncle named Joe Maphis. He had a nifty little display in there that Dave wanted to see. Aside from seeing a bit of Dave’s heritage, this place was NOT worth the 17 bucks that we dropped to get in. He was able to pick up 2 CD’s of his uncle that he wasn’t able to find anywhere else. Just wish we had done that without spending the entry fee. After that we went into a little guitar shop on 4th street where Dave spent a lot of time drooling and speaking un-intelligibly. Without anything more exciting (and it only being 10am), Dave decided to head to the airport and try to get back early.

I dropped Dave off and met up with Lee for lunch. I got to see around his office and meet a bunch of his co-workers. We went out for Mexican (which I learned afterwards that Lee doesn’t like very much). It was a fun time, but I was really starting to get exhausted. I finally bowed out and went back to take a nap. And with that I will say, to be continued!

This was the first full week that Amy way gone. I have to admit that by the time Sunday rolled around, it was a little lonely in the house. Andrew and I did a bunch of stuff over the weekend together. We had to get up really early on Saturday to take the truck in for service. Thankfully I didn’t need new brakes (I thought I did). The mechanic just did an oil change and checked the engine over, then said I was good to go. $37 later and we were done. This, of course, left us the entire Saturday with time to fill. A lot of this was my homework of course. We did get away for a little bit to pick up the latest run of comics. When I finally finished my homework, we sat and watched Monty Python Quest for the Holy Grail.

Sunday we woke up late and decided that we needed a good breakfast. It was off to the Silver Diner for us! After a hearty place of French toast and bacon, we both came back to the house and laid down for a bit. After a while I got up and started work on Andrews’s biker scout costume (like father like son!) We have just about everything we need to finish it, just a few little tweaks and it will be ready. I will, of course, be posting pictures as soon as it’s done.

Speaking of pictures….. Apparently, those bastards over at myspace.com are stealing images from my website! I took a look at the logs for my site and noticed a large number of myspace profiles pulling images directly from my website. Basically, they are adding a link to a picture hosted here so that it displays there. This is a bad bad thing. First of all, if I notice it, I can very easily swap out an image with something else. Secondly, they are STEALING bandwidth. This is very typical of the myspace pieces of crap. They can’t handle making their own site, they have to infringe on others. I could care less if you want to take an image and host it, then display it yourself. Have a blast, it’s the internets! I will find a way to stop you. (I already enabled hotlink protection, apparently the myspace mafia has found a way around that).

I have noticed in the last few days that I have a little more free time on my hands. Yesterday I went out to a local bar where they do Texas Hold ‘Em tourneys. They hold them every Wednesday and Saturday. I think I posted a while back where I went to one on a Saturday. Well, I met up with my upstairs neighbor and we got there at around 7:20pm. We were allowed in with pretty short stacks. He got one table and I got another. So the first few hands I was delt were all crap. Thankfully I came in right after the dealer so no blinds had touched me yet. I get about 5-6 hands in and have folded everything when I get a tap on the shoulder. Don had gone out already! I hadn’t even bet anything yet.

I kind of felt bad, but kept on playing. I got blessed with about 4 good hands in a row and built up a huge pot. We lost a few people at the table because of this and got redistributed to other tables. This was bad for me. I got sat right under a fan AND an air conditioning vent! I was freezing. This apparently was very distracting to me and I had trouble remembering what calls I was making. I got down to short stacks really quick. Finally I got a good hand, Ks and Jc. The flop came out with 2 kings. The girl next to me goes all in (she was shorter stacked than I.) So I follow suit and go all in as well. The guy across from me calls me on it and we flip. He shows the 4th king and a queen. I don’t even remember the turn card, but the river was another queen for the full house and I was done. I lasted a good hour and a half so I felt good about how I played.

On the way home I got an interesting call from a friend of mine in the garrison. He was looking for info on the hotel people are staying at for DragonCon. I informed him that they are most likely sold out already but boy howdy did he call the right guy! Given the fact that Amy was now not attending DragonCon, I had a room reserved, a double, that I was only using ½ of! The bastards at the hotel wanted to charge me con rates for the nights of the con, but the Thursday night had to be the corporate rate of $240! (con rate is $150 per night) So alone I was looking at $690 for the whole trip. Because of this I was looking at canceling the Thursday and just doing the $450 for the 3 nights. But now that Vader Roger is on board and covering ½ of the costs, I can keep the Thursday, take my time getting down there, and only end up paying $345 total!

Take THAT fate!

No, this is not a bad thing. One of the main things I have been stressing out over the last month is the impending move of Amy. Family issues flared back up again back in Texas and we made the decision that she needs to be there and not here. Her kids need her a lot more than I do, and more than she needs me. It was a tough decision, but over all the right one. We have spent the last few months preparing for this. She has wrapped up everything involving her school and work.

We packed up her little 93 Honda civic hatchback to the gills and she left Sunday morning to make the long drive. The plan is to drive from here to Nashville and take a rest stop at Lee and Missy’s place. It makes for a good halfway point. She stayed there on Sunday night and all of Monday to recharge. Then she headed out for Wichita Falls Tuesday morning. Her poor little car is doing all it can under the load it has. She has already called saying that on some hills she has to pull all the way to the right and the pedal is floored.

Where does this leave me? Well, I am still in VA where I plan on staying for quite some time. Amy and I talked and we will be trying out the long distance thing. We both realize that it’s going to be about another 2-3 years before I am ready to leave here, and I just can’t afford any place that would be big enough to support anything beyond me and Andrew right now. She has the issues back there that are going to take a very long time to deal with as well. I still love her dearly and plan on doing what I can to support her emotionally and mentally. She has a great support structure and friends a-plenty.

In the meantime, I find myself with a little more free time and a little more space in the house. This week/weekend will be spent straightening up and re-arranging things. I will be able to focus on the homework thing and maybe even get out for a little poker during the week. There is a bar down the street that does hold ‘em tourneys. For the most part though, Andrew and I will have the chance to do some more father son stuff and try out that whole bonding thing.

Due to the potential for reading by the wrong people at the wrong time, this post was written on Tuesday and will be posted with Tuesday’s time, but won’t be readable until Friday. Sorry, just trying to not spoil the surprise.

Within the next week I will finally be able to post about something that has weighed heavy on me for a few months now. You may recall me mentioning a number of stressors that have been keeping me near that anxiety/depression mood. One of my many releases for this type of emotion and feelings is to write about it here. I know there are a few of you out there in the internets that read this, but to be honest, I don’t write this for you. I write this for me. This is a way for me to vent out my feelings on whatever I want and then 2 years later I get to look back on it and say “Wow, I made it through that.” This is going to be one of those times.

But, before I get too down, I do have some great news.

We Won!

Pitching Lucas has won the George Lucas selects award AND the audience choice award!!!! This is the first time ever that a film has won BOTH awards. Shane has been rumored to be out in San Diego at comic-con partying his butt off. I am so happy that I was able to be a part of this. How cool is it to see people watching this film at cons or on their PC’s and point and say “No, really, that’s me!”

Outside of that, it’s been an average week. I have done my best to get my math homework done in a reasonable fashion. With lots of help of course. The downside is, I can’t just go to a website or read a book to understand this. I really need someone to explain it to me. I tried to attend the live chat session with the teacher last night but he was having mic issues and all I heard was static and volume fluctuations. It was impossible to follow. With Doc’s help last night I was able to finish the main assignment. I will work on the discussion board this evening. Thankfully, only 3 more weeks of Math!

So my latest classes are Intro to networks and Contemporary mathematics. The network class is fine. I breeze through it pretty easy since it’s a lot of what I do in work. The last assignment was to explain how to network 4 older computers. I think I was able to do that one in about an hour (most of it was just writing and fluffing the paper up, 2 pages of “Use a switch and 4 cables”). Sadly the class I am having the most trouble with is the Math class. The first assignment was all graphing and parabolic exponential lines and stuff. Lee and Doc and Arik did their best to help me out but all I heard was “X to the nth power minus 5 over Y and that’s the graph!”

Huh?

Yeah, so that didn’t work out so well for me. I called up a friend and got a sit down session where she was able to point at the graph and explain “It’s this because of this!” This process took about 4 hours to it into my head, and I was hurting afterwards, but I understand it now. I got my next assignment and I am going to try and get that done before the weekend so I am not as stressed out about it. Quadratic equations! YAY!

Aside from all of that, the weekend was pretty non-exciting. There are just too many stressors weighing down on me as of late. We did manage to get away to see Pirates of the Caribbean 2. I really liked it. They kept many of the same character types and the story was very well done. There is only one thing that would have made the movie that much better.

SEEING THE REST OF IT!

I feel like I have only seen half a movie! Or like when your favorite show is nearing season finale and they leave a gigantic cliff-hanger until next season. Overall the movie was good. Now I am just going to have to buy it right before the next one comes out so I can re-cap. Damn you Disney!

You ever have a point where your life is in complete shambles?!?! It is becoming so hard to focus on anything right now. I have homework staring me in the face, I have plenty of things going on at home that are stressing me out to no end. Work has maintained its level of constant insanity. All I want to do when I come home is curl up in a ball and crawl away. I just spent the last 20 min driving back and forth between buildings at work in a frantic state because we have some server issues and low and behold I get into a fender scratcher (no bending involved) because the roads were slick and I couldn’t stop. So now I am going to have to deal with insurance issues!

My life is horribly out of focus and I am not sure how to bring it back.

So, shore leave didn’t happen. I ended up being really sick on Friday night. By Saturday morning I was wiped out. It really kind of pissed me off. It’s not that I didn’t try and go, we got as far as the star bucks and I was just so exhausted that I was getting dizzy. Because of this, nothing really exciting happened this weekend. We are still keeping an eye on Charlie, of course. I may bump up the check up from 4 weeks to 2 just so we can be sure he is ok.

Well, a full week of treatment later and Charlie is feeling a lot better. Thanks to all who sent positive vibes and good mojo! He went in for his last fluid treatment on Saturday. I was sitting at home doing my homework and I had a moment of sadness as I was sitting there. No Charlie on the monitor, or under my desk. He wasn’t in the window mewing at the chipmunks, or trying to jump on my shoulders. The house felt very empty without him there. Thankfully around 4pm I went to pick him up and he was extremely happy to be home. He is now on a strict diet of the prescription K/D food. The good news about that is that he likes it.

Sunday we made a special trip out to DC to pick up a visitor to our Garrison. TK-0.5 made his rounds to our area and it was my job to pick him up and show him around for a day. For those who don’t know, the 501st has its own traveling trooper. It’s a 12 inch storm trooper doll that has been mailed, handed off, and driven around to visit all of the different Garrisons. He was last up in Maryland with Old Line Garrison. Bryan from OLG handed him off at the Hard Rock in DC. We took the little guy around a few extra sights in DC and then back home (before the rain hit us). On Monday I took him into work and then to the Pool place where he got to play a few tables before I handed him off to Lori. We’ll see him again this weekend at Shoreleave.

The forth of July was pretty good. We headed out to see Superman Returns. I really thought it was a damn good movie! They did such a wonderful job of bringing the old movies back in spirit and bringing us up to date with this one. Everything about this movie made me remember how much I loved the originals. Go see it!

After the movie was done we went back home and made some picnic lunch stuff and headed out to Fairfax city to watch the fireworks. After getting lost driving around the city and getting blocked because of downed trees from the storm, we finally found a good spot in a shopping center parking lot just behind the place they launch the fireworks from. We had a great view. Of course we got there insanely early so we had to kill some time. We sat and played cards, Amy got to work on her school stuff. Finally around 9pm they started the show. I think the best part was the finale when it looked like the launcher guy just flipped every switch on the board!

Like I said, this weekend is Shoreleave, so expect an update after then.