The River behind my home is conducive of something. It is rapid, noisy and lacks stillness of the rest of my property. Each time I sit out here with a good book, I’m distracted by the noise and action and suddenly get in that mood to write.
Side-note: Why doesn’t MarsEdit for Mac have a full-screen mode? I don’t think this was ever a problem until I discovered Kindle, Reeder, Instapaper or Safari for iPad and learned that single tasks in a full screen mode was actually pretty cool. Today, I edit photos in iPhoto and Lightroom 3 in full screen mode and it’s lovely. At work, I value having multiple monitors and multiple windows but, at home, when it’s time to compose feelings onto digital paper, I’d like to be immersed into it via a full screen mode. Pages.app has this and it’s a joy but the copy/paste from Pages to WordPress often doesn’t work right. Anyway, I like MarsEdit because, as you all know, I prefer to work outside of the web browser. Web browsers are for submitting creative works that were completed offline. Kids these days (can’t believe I’m writing that) rely too heavily on being connected. Disconnecting is a powerful thing. In my late teens, I’d intentionally go to cafes that didn’t have an Internet connection. I was my most productive there. I still am.
My new blog format is great if I was a numbers kind of guy. Numbers are through the roof. Up 100% last month and 120% this month (so far as it’s only April 9th). I blogged more but it was more, “here’s my take on a piece of news that someone else reported on”. I liked the format and it enabled me more time for work which is really ramping up. I enter my work place at 8AM and leave after 5 which seems minimal compared to most startups but man, I have my hands in a lot. It’s easily the best job I’ve ever had.
Speaking of that, well, let’s back track.
So, the new format is great and I’m enjoying the additional traffic and links from other blogs. It also seems that people are generally interested in what I have to say about current events. Seeing a Gizmodo article and adding my commentary within 15 minutes is something people like especially those that don’t have hours to read my writings and are interested to some degree, in the 5 lines that I think about something that’s going on in our tech space.
However, at the end of the day, those thoughtful (hardly) and long-winded opinion pieces on life, me and technology aren’t happening. I could be a coward and blame my recent March travel but I had time to write a lot more and I didn’t. I guess firing up MarsEdit every 3 hours to link to someone else’s work + a few notes from yours truly kind of took me out of that mode of long winded blogging.
In fact, many bloggers do that upon joining Twitter. I’m lucky to have never gotten caught up in that and continued blogging. Now, a link blog is becoming exhausting almost like, “I’ve been blogging all day, why go home and do it some more?” That sort of thing.
I’ll keep up the link blogging for a little while longer. No one has complained yet which is great and I’m sure those that read EVERY post (thank you) appreciate that they don’t have to spend 2 hours a week reading my mostly random thoughts on computers, travel and glancing at my travels and subsequently arriving at the opinion that I’m full of it and bragging about how amazing life is.
I don’t call myself a great storyteller but a few of my friends do and I feel there’re just being gracious. I do think that a great storyteller can be a maid who cleans gyms for spare cash and raises 2 beautiful kids who love gymnastics and loves good music and just being a great mom as a full time job. She can be a great storyteller. Going to Amsterdam every few months doesn’t mean my life is amazing because, even when my life was worse than bland and I was broke and skipping meals and a week away from living in a homeless shelter while in San Francisco, I still managed to tell a good story. Stories and life are everywhere. It’s my job to expose them and share them eloquently.
Moving on and back to what I was going to discuss before, I’ll be traveling again for the greater part of May. I like taking breaks as I traveled a LOT in July/August and then again in October and, for half of December I was home in Florida and cancelled my New Years Eve plans in SF due to bad planning and I took more time off from traveling and spent most of March in the air going around the US and to India.
In May, I won’t be traveling to a lot of places but, for most of March I’ll be hopping around.
I’m absolutely thrilled to be visiting San Francisco May 5th-9th for the first time since leaving Baghdad by The Bay on September 2nd of 2009. Time really does fly and I thought visits to San Francisco would be happening every two months. They haven’t been because I’ve had the option of going to SF for work but chose other locations instead because I lived in San Francisco. What would I do for a 3 day weekend? Ride a cable car? Have coffee with people I see every 3 months at conferences like Blogworld and SXSW? Pfft. I love San Francisco but visiting for me isn’t the same as others going. I would do my work, hit a few cafes that I love, grab a burrito and then get on a plane flying back to New Hampshire.
All that is out the door though because the SF Giants are playing the Colorado Rockies so I’m going to two games while I’m back in town. One up in the cheap $50 seats on Friday and another in the Dugout seats that cost me $250 a piece but I’m going to be eye level with the field nomming on garlic fries and drinking anchor steam beer. It’s going to be a lot of fun! I’ll see a few friends and eat some burritos and enjoy some extra amazing organic ice cream in Dolores Park. I’m thinking about getting a Zip Car and just driving around the bay and enjoying a beautiful May in San Francisco. It’s going to be pretty heavenly. However, it’s only Thursday afternoon through early Monday morning then I’m back to New Hampshire *sad face*.
Five days later, I’ll be boarding a KLM flight from Boston to Amsterdam and, at 6AM on Sunday, I’ll be on a train down to Ghent Belgium for a week of work with our team there. It’ll be an awesome time mostly because I’l get to work with some of my most valuable team members in person. We’ll be doing a day trip to France as well before I head back to Amsterdam for 3 days of work with our HQ people and then getting on a plane back to Boston. It’s a 12 day trip (I think) followed by 5 days in San Francisco. I’m very excited to be going back to Europe for the 2nd time in 6 months. The amount of work I get done there is not really measurable. It’s just easier being there for what I do.
For the remainder of May (all 10 days of it), I’ll be back in New Hampshire, spending my afternoons by the river, bird watching, setting up bird feeders, tilling my new garden that was setup before the snow fell last year and helping with more cleanup of the cabin that burned up next to mine. June – August are going to be phenomenal months. I don’t have any travel plans other than the possibility of my father visiting me up here for a week and I’m sure we’ll spend our time training, reading, studying, going on hikes and gardening. Summer break means my friend Ben may come up here for a few weeks. That will be pretty grand as well.
As a note and i hope no one reading this quotes me on this despite how easy it would be to copy and paste this post but, I hope to stay in New Hampshire for a while. I love my job a lot. I love the people in New England a lot and I love my cabin and the place I live. I want to buy property up here. It’s a pretty incredible place to live. You have to be a certain kind of person to live here. There are those that are born here and never leave and there are a lot of them and then there are the people that come here and can’t stand it. Have you ever taken a friend or spouse camping and they had the most miserable time? Yeah, it’s like that. Some people find black bears and turkey in their yard “annoying” or the cold and snow annoying or the ice or lack of movie theatres annoying. I don’t. I love it. Not having cell phone service doesn’t ruin my day or spur a blog post. I use that disconnect to enjoy some peace and quiet. You have to be sort of engineered for this sort of living. I’m sitting by a beach chair on the river wearing army pants and a trucker hat jamming to techno and sipping a Gin & Tonic. It seems that I’m a bit of everything and I kind of like it here a lot.
I hope that the work I’m doing is important and valuable enough to my employer to stay here for a while. I’d hate to resort to one of those type of people who lives off the land and takes a construction job because he’s tied up in a mortgage and loses his job but can’t move to Boston to find more tech work. I’d do it though because swinging a hammer would be good for me. I loved building decks with my Dad as a kid. I could pick it up again.
A final bit of an update is that I finally bought a real car. Well, I’ve owned real cars before but each of my cars were 15 years old when I got them. Each car I’ve owned has had 200K miles on it when I got it and I’d spend an equivalent to a car payment on maintenance each month. It was a rough cycle. You’d put 2 grand down on the table and walk away with a car and spend $400 a month paying for repairs. I got tired of doing that.
Next week, I’m picking up a brand new, never driven Toyota Corolla. My salary sort of means I could afford any car on that lot and I’m not bragging, it’s just true but, being a first time car buyer who traveled from 17-24, I don’t have much credit so I had to get a cheap car to prove that I can pay payments on time.Believe it or not though, I kind of love the car. I don’t need a huge SUV (nor do I want one) but I’d love to drive a Mercedes off the lot but my credit said no to that. So, this $21,000 Corolla with leather trim, bluetooth, upgraded sound system, larger engine, extra bod kit and all kinds of features like a mooon roof and steering wheel car controls is mine. I’m paying for it over 36 months and I got a great deal on it considering I’ve never had a car before or a credit card for that matter. I got my first credit card 2 months ago believe it or not. I remember a boss, when I was 21 asked me, “just put the plane ticket on your card” Um, I can’t do that. I don’t have one. He was amazed but everyone, every boss, friend and even my friend Abbi whose wedding I attended in India said, “I can’t believe you’re only 24. You’ve already seen the world but you’re just now getting your first credit card.
Yup.
So, I’m excited about the car. It’s in a price range that, if I have to downgrade my career a bit to building decks, I can keep making payments and it gets 36 miles to the gallon assuming I drive it without a lead foot and and it works beautifully with my iPod which it’s the first car I’ve had where I haven’t needed an FM transmitter to get music from iPod to car stereo. Actually, my last car that I bought for $1,000 was a ’95 Maxima and the stereo didn’t work at all. That was fun. I promised myself when I moved here, I’d buy the cheapest car possible that would survive me the winter. The day the last snow fell on my yard, was the day my car died on the highway in need of $2,800 in repairs. I instead used that plus another $3,000 toward my Corolla. I started laughing when I saw it only had 70 miles on it. “This is a joke right? This must be the trip odometer?”
I also had my wisdom teeth taken out this week. I can’t talk, eat solid foods or even laugh. I laugh and smile a lot so that’s been challenging. The doctor said, “you’ll be in and out in 30 minutes” but I thought that meant like in total I’ll be done in 30 minutes then back to work. Nope, I was in bed for 4 days recovering. It was and continues to be a HUGE pain literally for me. Oh well. Life goes on.
So, new car, warmer weather, another Europe trip and front row dugout seats at the SF Giants game next month. Life is good and I’m happy. Now, back to watching Elizabeth’s dog play in the river while techno music blasts over my boom box.
Happy Saturday!