Believe, When I say…

Every afternoon I make a phone call

Listen to the voice that warms my heart

I drag myself through a few more hours

Then head on home to try and beat the dark

Her smile will be right there

when I step through that door

And it will be that way tomorrow,

just like everyday before

It's ordinary plain and simple

Typical, this everyday love

Same ol', same ol' keeping it new

Emotional, so familiar

Nothing about it too peculiar

Oh, but I can't get enough

Of this everyday love

What qualities should love possess to know that it is true and long lasting? This is a debatable subject, but I doubt anyone would argue this simple truth:

You know its love when:

• You are completely comfortable singing with each other,
  
• You are completely comfortable singing Backstreet Boys “I Want It That Way” with each other (and sounding pretty good I might add),
  
• You take turns on solo parts to let the other person have their fun,
  
• And most importantly: There is silence at the climax of the song when one of the guys sings really loud “Don’t Wanna Hear You Say…” because each of you were letting the other person have it.

Holy Moley!

First of all, I wasn’t sure how I wanted to spell Holy Moley, so I Googled it. The site I used my spelling from was http://en.wiktionary.org. This concerns me. I understand Wikipdia. There is a lot of stuff in this world and standard encyclopedia made by one group of people simply can’t come close to covering everything. People out there know stuff, and many times it is useful. Other times, it is not. Some people can get on there and make things up or simply be wrong. Because of this, you need to be careful. This is all understandable, but I don’t know about a dictionary version. I trust that one group of people, say Webster’s can put together a book of definitions and catch just about everything that should be in there. There are other slang dictionaries and such, again understandable, but could be put together by one group of people. I don’t want everyday common people to be able to make up words and change the definitions of words. Not cool! I’m thinking about adding vertichee, it is just a made up word that I think should be in the dictionary. Most of you may not know what that word means, but the few of you that do should hopefully be laughing.

So…. I haven’t bloged in nearly a third of my son’s lifetime…. That’s quite a while. I’ve wanted to, but other things just kept coming up. A number of things at home with being parents and such, but mainly, work has been very hectic. Lots of large, important projects with challenging deadlines. I’ve been working through some lunches and working late most days. I’m not complaining. I like being really busy. The days have gone by very fast. I got a lot of stuff wrapped up at the end of last week and this week, and my white board is finally close to clear. All of this hard work has paid off though. 2 weeks ago the CFO was walking around and decided that I should have an office. Awesome! I didn’t know if he was serious for a while until later he was talking with the HR director, then stopped by and told me to move my stuff. So now I am in an office. I have a door, a fairly large U shaped desk, chairs for others to sit in, a filing cabinet, and windows that go from floor to ceiling that run the entire width of my office. It is so nice to be able to look out the window and have my office filled with natural light. I have my basketball hoop up and even a dock for my Zune with speakers wired under my desk to be able to listen to music all day. It is absolutely great.

What has been interesting is the people that realize I now have an office and stopping by to say hi. Some of them are happy for me, and some are just jealous, and possibly even a bit angered. I’ve gotten everything from “look at you” to how did you get an office?” I just told them that I sucked up to the right people, which in part is true. I do confess that I feel a little bad. I am certainly young and early in my career to have an office. There are also others at work that work very very hard and probably deserve an office, but our office is split up into different departments and therefore has different space availability. I work for a small department and answer directly to the top officers of the company. There is one person who has always been very friendly to me who hasn’t said a word to me (other than responding to a work related question) since I moved. Oh well, I’m living it up in here for now. I’ll try to post some pictures sometime soon.

Thanks for reading.

All This Time, I Could Have Been Seein’ Things!

Have you ever regularly performed an action for a long period of time, and then suddenly realize there is a much easier way to accomplish it? I feel like this is something that happens to many people that use computers on a daily basis. You discover a short cut key, or a much faster way to do something. Especially in Excel as you find new formulas and quick ways to perform tasks. If you have read my blog, then you know I am a fairly advanced user of Excel, but recently I learned something that was so simple, I was embarrassed that I didn’t know about it. If you have a list with 1000 rows of data and you put in a formula in a new column, I used to put the formula in the top row, and drag the box on the bottom right of the cell down to copy to formula. The annoying thing is stopping at the right spot. The page scrolls down and you try to be careful not to scroll too fast, then you accidentally blow past the last row, then move back up, then down again until you eventually control the mouse well enough the end at row 1000. Instead of playing this game, you could just double click the box on the bottom right of the first cell with the formula and it will automatically copy to the bottom of the list. Brilliant! Finding that has time and again saved me significant hassle and time.

This applies in many other aspects of life. Perhaps you drive the same way to work every day, then one day find out there is a shortcut that is much faster and easier. Maybe you’ve never had the correct form in a sport or game, and if someone just showed you how to properly shoot a basket ball, swing a bat, etc. it would be so much easier. Think about somebody playing wii for the first time. They might swing the wiimote with all their might to hit a baseball, and you could get a better hit sitting on the couch and flicking your wrist. I’d make an argument that it is not as fun to do that, but it certainly is easier. There are even more basic things this applies to. Since I got my drivers license, when I got into the drivers seat of the car, I grabbed the seatbelt with my left hand, pulled it across my body and fully extended my arm reaching to find the receiving end of the seatbelt. If I have had a jacket on, it would be even more challenging. Recently, it just occurred to me to hand the seatbelt from my left hand to my right hand to click it in. I find the receiving end much faster and don’t have to contort my back in the process.

Reflecting on these things makes me wonder… What else in my life could be done differently making the task much easier and less time consuming. Maybe there is a much simpler and faster way to shave or brush my teeth that I never knew about. Maybe there is a trick I am missing to falling asleep at night and sleeping better. Maybe there is something so simple, so terribly obvious that I am missing that could vastly improve my life. Maybe I’ll be 60 years old, and have somebody mention to me, “you breathe funny,” and I find out that all my life I could have been breathing a different way that would have improved my lung capacity for exercise and provided more oxygen to my brain to make me more awake and allowed me to think clearer. Wouldn’t that be terrible to one day found out your life could have been much better?

At the gym, there are trainers you can hire to introduce you to new exercises and give you useful tips and tricks. I overhear trainers giving these tips all the time. “Good job, but if you make this small obvious adjustment, it is easier to lift this weight and will make the exercise more effective.” I try to listen in on these tips because there is a good chance that I am working much too hard to accomplish an exercise that isn’t actually benefiting me in any way. I think we should be able to hire these trainers to give us tips on our daily lives. What if you could hire a professional to spend every moment with you for a week and tell you as your going along how to make everything you do more effective? Hmm… interesting business idea. As Brian Regan puts it, “how could instantly improved vision not be at the top of your to do list?”

Thanks for reading.

Traveling

*Note: this was written last Friday, but I did not get a chance to post it.

I got to take a road trip today at work. Thus far it has been going fairly well. Though our company is headquartered in Mechanicsburg, the top executives work out of an office in Allentown. Typically, the CFO and controller spend 2 days a week in Mechanicsburg, but on special occasions, they summon some people to make the trip to Allentown. Today my boss and I are in there for a meeting. We came up early to add to get some other work done and make sure we were here on time which has left me some free time. Surprisingly, I have accomplished a great deal of work in the hour and a half I have been sitting across a conference table from my boss. She is in the meeting at the moment and I am starting to run out of things to do.

Driving up here got me thinking about some of the driving experiences in my life. Have you ever been in a high pressure driving situation because of the people you are riding with or following? I have been in a few in my time. I got a little nervous the first time I drove with the associate pastor of our church in Lock Haven. I was just taking on a leadership role and didn’t want to show I was reckless in any way. Even the first time I was driving with my mother-in-law in the car added a little bit of pressure. I didn’t want her to think her baby married some out of control guy based on his driving. Today went pretty well, though the pressure did cross my mind. I am escorting about my boss who is an officer of our company. It would be terrible if I made some kind of goofy turn or slammed on my breaks deciding whether or not to make a yellow light and she calmly mentioned “how about I drive?” Luckily, nothing like that happened. You even have to consider the speed of driving. You want to make good time on a business trip, but excessively speeding is bad news, especially if you got pulled over. I kept it pretty close to 10 over, and my boss seemed comfortable. She was working on her laptop the whole time, so comfort was important.

The main reason I bring up travel is to share 2 quick and fairly funny things I have seen on the road in the last week. There are many times I just don’t understand what people are thinking when the drive, but these instances are so odd that they deserve to be mentioned.

Number 1: The Bad Advice Lady. Yesterday while driving back to work on my lunch break, I came to a 3 way intersection with a light. My road was the non-dominate road and I got to the intersection just as it turned red, so I knew I would be there for a while. There was a long line of cars to the right and to the left and teenage boy standing on the corner to my left waiting to cross. The cars on my right got to go first because they had a green turn arrow onto my road. The kid saw that cars were turning his way and waited at the corner. When the arrow went away, the right side stayed green for going straight and the left side got a green light. It was at this moment that the kid decided to walk. It was the absolute correct time for him to go because he was going parallel to the green light traffic. The first car in the line of cars to my left was an older woman driving her brown Buick. She started moving just after the light turned green and nearly hit the kid crossing the road. He was walking at the correct time, and pedestrians always have the right of way anyway. Not only did this woman come close to severely injuring an innocent kid, she felt that it necessary to tell him that he was in the wrong. Despite the long line of cars and dangers of the intersection. She stopped right in the middle of everything, cranked down her window, and gave the kid a piece of her mind. I did not have time to get my window down to hear what she had to say, by I venture to guess it was something about his incompetence, blaming it on rap music, and told him to go home to his mother. I felt bad for the kid who did nothing wrong, and was very tempted to role down my window and give the lady some advice, most important of which was to get out of the intersection before she caused a wreck.

The 2nd story is even more surprising. Liz and I were on our way home from the movies last weekend. There has been a silly amount of construction on all the roads around the theater. The main road to the theater is normally 4 lanes, but has been reduced to 2 lanes on one side for a while, then 2 lanes on the other side, and now back to 4 lanes. There was a line of cars in the left turn lane waiting at the light, and I went up the right side. I got to the light and was looking to go right on red. There was a single car coming down the intersecting road, so I waited for it. The driver put on a turning signal; I waited until they started making the turn to be safe, then started to make my turn. While making my turn, Liz and I noticed the other turning vehicle taking the turn much wider than expected, and going surprisingly slow. I can understand their mistake. They didn’t know it had been reopened to 4 lanes, and they were looking to turn into the slot as if it was still 2 lanes which put them facing oncoming traffic in “their right lane” which was actually our left turning lane. I understand the mistake and the slow driving due to confusion, but here is what I don’t understand, the car kept moving! There was no speeding up, slowing down, or turning off the projected path, just slow constant speed head first into a car that had been sitting at the red light for some time with headlights on in the evening and honking their horn! We were completely amazed at the spectacle we just saw. Using my deductive reasoning, I suggest this happened: the driver was confused and slowed down to the pace her car drove when not applying pressure to the break or accelerator. At the moment the driver realized they were in the wrong lane, they panicked and froze. Being froze, they made no effort to prevent what was about to happen, they just sat there in shock for a few seconds as their car ran head first into a parked car. I can think of no other reasonable solution, though it is entirely possible that the driver thought they were right and the cars waiting at the light were wrong. Liz and I didn’t stick around to listen to the conversation following the accident, but I imagine it was unpleasant.

Time to get back to work. Thanks for reading.

A Post To Pass Things Along

I don’t really have much to talk about today. I’ve been wanting to post all week, not because of anything specific going on, I just knew it had been too long since the last post and I was tired of seeing the same heading anytime I happened upon my own blog.

I’ve been fairly busy at work for the past couple weeks giving me much less free time on my computer. Even if I had some free time, I didn’t think I had any blog worthy writing. Instead of writing out a full post, I shall make a brief list of things going on.

I’ve been working out quite a bit and making good progress in the distance and speed that I am running. I have also been lifting, and noticing some progess there. These are all good things, except my weight has not changed at all. That is just frustrating. Hopefully I can keep progressing and my body will actually react.

I am planning a Man’s Weekend and it is going to be amazing. I’m really hoping we can 12-15 guys to join in for a trip to my cabin to blow some stuff up and do some other really dumb man things.

It is time to start doing taxes! I am a nerd, and that has already been defined. Because of my nerdocity, I actually look forward to tax time. I already know to the penny how much money I made / contributed to 401k / paid for benefits / paid for taxes. Now I get to show the government those numbers and make them give me back the money I overpaid. Good times.

Finally, I bought a new computer. Yes, in these tough economic times I a swimming in new items with the zune, grill, and computer. I’m doing my part to boost this economy, why aren’t you? Anyway, this computer is amazing. I did a ton of research and waited patiently for the right deal. It all came down to a decision between 2 models of the same computer that were on sale. There was a $200 difference, but a significant processing power difference. With all the video encoding I do, I opted for the speed and celebrate that decision every day I look at the computer. I am converting files and making dvd’s like a mad man. I am also greatly enjoying Windows Vista and all the other features of the new computer. Here is a picture.

It is a Lenovo Y530. This puppy is blazingly fast with it s 2.2 ghz 8400 processor, 4gb of ram, and other features. Aside from being able to covert a movie in about 30 mins (work computer would take 2 hours, house computer would take 8 hours) I downloaded a video file last night and hit 1.8MB per second! I downloaded an office episode in like 4 mins. I was drooling as I watched to bar go across the screen.

That is what is going on with me in a nutshell. Thank you for reading.

Please Do Not Read

Before you venture down this path, I ask you to heed the warning of the title of this post. Should you choose to continue, then you walk that line at your own risk. I ask you please not to pass judgment on me for I am about to use my blog, which has served as an outlet to relay my thoughts and my life to all the world, for the silly and useless purpose of cursing the weather.

I know that is ridiculous because it is something I have no control over, and there is nothing to do to make it better. I know I should just deal with it and it may even be sinful to shake my fist at the climatic circumstance that God has chosen for me to be in. None the less, I bite my thumb at thee Weather. Honestly, what the heck!?

If you are still reading this, then you must really care about me since this is a significant waste of both your time and of mine. On the other hand, maybe you care about me, but not enough to take my advice in the title seriously. That is an odd thing to ponder. I am just going to assume that if you have read this far, you have also read much of my blog and therefore must care about me. If that is the case, then you probably know that I like snow. I am not so crazy about snow that I want to move further North and get blasted by snow on a weekly basis throughout a long and cold winter, but I great appreciate 5 – 7 significant snow falls a year. When it is snowing, I get excited. I love to sit and watch the snowfall. When it is dark outside, I step away from what I am doing once every 20 mins or so just to flick on a light and see how much as accumulated, how hard it is snowing and simply admire the event for a moment. Beyond watching it, I like playing in it. Even in college I would suit up and make some homemade sled and go out and play, or jump in my truck because I love the fun of driving in snow.

Here is the problem with all of that…. I submit that there has not been a truly decent snowfall in the location that I living since December of 2005. There is one small exception last winter when we got 2-3 inches and Liz and I attempted to go sledding. Beyond that, crap, pure unadulterated crap! My frustration has been building for over 3 years, and it is time to come out. I remember in November and December of 2005 when we got 2 good snow falls in Lock Haven and a few friends piled in the back of my pick up and ventured over to a huge parking lot where we strapped a rope and crappy circular sled to my bumper and pulled people around for the time of their lives. It was crazy and fun and I loved it so much that I asked for snow tubes for Christmas. My parents pulled through and I got 2 adult sized extra strength snow tubes and I could not wait for the good snowfalls I expected to hit us in the beginning of 2006. Every time the weatherman predicted some snow might hit, I waited by the window with eager anticipation only to have my spirits crushed by a measly 1-2 inches. The winter passed by and the snow tubes remained in their original packaging. The frustration had starting building then, but I was able to put it aside until the next year.

Unfortunately both snow tubes popped while using them to travel down the Yellow Breeches a few times over that summer. When winter hit again, all I could hope was for a good snow before mid December since I was going to be leaving Lock Haven and the people that originally joined me for those wonderful days in late 2005. Alas, the frustration mounted even more as we got jack by the start of 2007. By then, I thought the frustration would go away. I started working and wouldn’t be able to enjoy snow days anyway, but then things took a terrible turn for the worse as a new age came upon us: “The Season of Ice.” Seriously, what is going on with this ice malarkey? From Jan of 2007 to March 2008 I have only seen light dustings and freezing rain. In that time period I completely obliterated 3 scrappers trying to pound my way trough the ice that was mounted on my car. I got a little more frustrated because I missed snow, but even more so at the hours, yes hours I spent chipping away at ice on my car in the 3-4 ice storms we got in that time frame. The only glimpse of joy I got during that time was the one snowfall that we got 2-3 inches of snow followed by enough freezing rain to harden the snow to the point that I could jump on it and not fall through. That was some crazy fun sledding. By this time my frustrations were starting to become vocal to the poor people that accompanied me in those harsh times.

This winter has been the last straw. It has been a little different than before, instead of small dustings OR freezing rain, we have only got some small dustings followed by freezing rain followed by rain. I have no idea what is going on, but there has been 3 separate times this winter that I have had to work hard to chip away ice on my car in the rain. I doubt anyone would disagree, that is the worth weather imaginable. 32 degrees and raining? With ice on everything? Just awful. I can’t take it any more. I am giving Mechanicsburg one more winter, and then I am out of here! I had so much hope for this last snow fall. The weathermen, if they can actually call themselves that, predicted “significant snowfall.” The next day they said 3-5 inches, but it will most likely turn to freezing rain. Finally, the eve of the storm brought the correct prediction, 2-3 inches, then freezing rain, then just rain. Why is it raining in Pennsylvania in the dead of winter?? I don’t understand, but I am frustrated! I think other people are too because I kid you not, I saw kids sledding through this painfully icy mess IN THE RAIN. Kids are so desperate to play in snow that they will put aside reasonable thinking to slide around on ice in the rain. My friends have been planning of a ski weekend this weekend for the last 2 months. We are still going to go, but this weather has tried to stop us. Ski resorts around here are so desperate that they have resorted to making their own snow that covers the entire mountain. They used to make snow to help the popular areas of the slope not get too icy and stay open, now they have to make snow for every place on the mountain because we don’t get any natural snow anymore. Then after they spend all this effort making fake snow, the weather goes and rains on top to make the conditions terrible. We would have been better off getting nothing over this crap we got this week. GHA!!

Ok, I am done. That was much longer than I thought it would be. I’m sorry if you did indeed waste your time reading all of that complaining. I think I feel a little better having that all out. I can now move on with my life and hope for a darker snowier future.

Arrgh! Hear The Man-Cries of Zackery

Upon this Christmas past, I have acquired through gracious gift by the ones who bore me, a possession of such great magnitude that it will take me much more than one full sentence to introduce. This gargantuan item is so magnificent that I would venture to say it has expanded my manhood by a great multiple. In fact, this item has induced such levels of testosterone that I ensure you the very hairs upon my chest have grown to a richness known only to the likes of David Hasselhoff and others of his enormity.

Yes ladies and gentleman. I have obtained…. A Man’s Grill!

I have at last ventured away from my pubescent state of before, and shot forward in a blaze of glory to manhood. I must warn you before scrolling down to feast your eyes upon this object of splendor that you should back away from your computer screen, as the picture may educe salivation or possibly even seizures.

You must also know that this picture does not fully do it justice. For this grill stands taller than a man. It has 4 glorious tube burners heating below a field of porcelain coated cast iron grates. It has such depth that it could surely cook a slain wild boar whole. It is accompanied by a side burner, table, drink shelf, and even a bottle opener. This puppy can burn at 40,000 BTUs and will straight up kick you in the crotch with awesomeness.

So at last, here it is.

Drink in its majesty.

I have been required on more than one occasion since its installation to call the authorities to clear out the crowd of people that have gathered to kneel before it and lay herbs and spices at its legs. If you feel the driving need to come and visit it to experience its magnificence, then please, come. You are all invited to revel in its grilled goodness.