Introducing Myself to Holidailies 2010

Welcome to another year of Holidailies!  You don’t know what Holidailies is?  It’s kind of like NaNoWriMo, but with blogging.  You blog every day for 31 days and hope to make it to the end of the month without missing a day.  I did it in 2006 (8 days before losing the momentum) and 2007 (32 entries in 31 days, and managed a trip to Anaheim in there, too!).  This year, in an attempt to get back on track with blogging, I’m going to write a post every day and hopefully make it to January 7th with at least 31 entries.

I know what you’re thinking: Holy crap, man.  You just won NaNoWriMo with 92,000 words and now you’re going to blog every day?  Are you crazy?  Uh, yes.  Yes, I am.  If you didn’t know that I was already crazy, then you don’t know me as well as you think you do.

For those on Holidailies: Who am I?  Well, I’m nothing more than a simple support engineer trying to make his way into the world of creative writing.  I don’t know if I’ll ever make it, but that’s not going to keep me from trying!  I live in Silicon Valley with my wife and our two cats.  I love baseball to such a degree that it has displaced organized religion in my life; I worship at AT&T Park in San Francisco starting every April and ending most Octobers (except this year! World Series Champions, baby!).  I typically rant and rave about stuff going on in my life, so hang on to your hat if it’s especially blustery. I’ll be sure to mark my posts accordingly.

Anyway, thanks for reading and I hope to read everyone’s posts this year and get to know this awesome community.

Two 3-Day Weeks

A lot of people at work took advantage of the fact that Christmas and New Year’s allowed for two three-day weeks in a row. The director of my department is taking this whole week off and won’t be back until the 2nd of January. I, on the other hand, opted to take the 2nd and the 3rd off for when we go down to Anaheim and check out the Disney scene during the New Year’s. So, I’m looking forward to that. But this also means that I’ll have about three days to close as many cases as I possibly can before the end of the year, so the group’s statistics won’t be too horribly skewed when they do the month-end (and year-end) reports. I already did a poll of the report right now and if they closed it tomorrow, I would have like twenty-one cases open and that’s not good.

I kind of wish I could’ve taken a two week vacation, but I haven’t really accrued enough time off. One of the crappier aspects of starting a new job is that your balances are pretty much zero. By the time you need to take off, you’re going to be owing time off to the company. Or seeing if your boss is generous enough to let you slide off the books and then make up the time later, which is what I’ve done in the past when I had ultra-cool bosses that I worked for. Unfortunately, my current boss is quite by-the-book when it comes to PTO, so I can’t really skate with time owed or under-the-table time. He wants it to be all documented, which is fine, considering that this is his first managerial gig ever. I can empathize with his need to keep to the regs.

In other news, I enjoyed my Christmas at home. I got to hang out with my wife and Tap, and I wish every Christmas were that much fun.

Regrets, I Have a Few/But Then Again, Too Few To Mention…

Today’s Holidailies prompt is: “Things I once thought I’d do that I now know I’ll never ever do.”

  1. Shortly after my first marriage fell apart, I thought I would never get married. I’m married to my second wife, Julia, right now.
  2. I thought I would have kids. That will never happen; by choice, not by circumstance.
  3. I thought, as a child, that I would become a bus driver. This, my parents are thankful, has not (yet) come to pass. Nor will I ever hope to become a bus driver.
  4. I thought I would join the United States Navy. This will not happen, because I’m too large. I’m definitely 4-F, for sure.
  5. I thought I would die before I hit the age of thirty. I’m thirty-one, now… so that’s definitely not going to happen. I must be on borrowed time.
  6. As a child, I thought I would fly a fighter jet. I’m pretty sure i have to fit in the cockpit, first.
  7. I thought I would sail around the world. Again, I don’t want to sink the boat by looking at it.
  8. In college, I thought I would live in Japan. I’m pretty sure that’s not happening, but this one might happen someday.
  9. In high school, I thought I would play professional baseball. Well, the Giants might sign me for third base.
  10. I thought I would not have any regrets. The truth is… I don’t.

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Now playing on iTunes: Frank Sinatra – My Way