Mike’s World

Week has still been a bit tough, but next week will be the real trial. I have been focusing on work, so that has helped.

Last week and this week I have been in Foster City CA helping again with out Digital division. This week I am making more progress on backups. I still need to get NDMP sold, but will tackle that one next week. The last trouble spot is the netapp backups. I have been integrating a DL4200 VTL in to their environment, and it has been interesting.

Yesterday my friend Lisa sent me a text to checkup on me. That made me quite happy that they are still thinking of me. It sucks that I have not been able to see them.

Ok, that is enough random thoughts for one day.

Well, my week long vacation is coming to an end soon. In four short days, I am flying back out to California for 2 weeks. I am looking forward to the work, but I am going to miss home. I am flying my cousin out over the weekend, and I am glad she decided to come out, it will be a blast playing tourist for 2 days.

Yesterday was a nice day. I got my backyard leaves taken care of, but I hope that I get another run at it before it snows. I still need to do a final mowing of the back yard. Yesterday evening my father came over to avoid all of the Halloween kids. It was nice having him over, we ended up watching a crappy remake of the shining.

Today I did the annual car detailing taken care of, and that was my main off-work accomplishment. This afternoon I went to meet up with what I think is a new friend I first met on Saturday. Me and her seem to have quite a bit in common, so I am looking forward to getting to know her better. It was amazing how much in common we have, everything from geek things, to movies and tv shows, to life experiences (or in some cases lack of experiences) to god knows what. What a day.

Well, 2 days in to my vacation and I am enjoying it.  I read an e-mail from my boss, and it looks like I will not have a crapload of PDO to worry about loosing this year, which is nice. Yesterday and today I did yard work, which has been nice because the weather has been in the 60’s.  I will need to continue tomorrow, at which time it will be cooler but that will be ok.

About a month ago I signed up for the pre-screened flyclear airport “express lane” and for the last 2 times I have gone to SFO, I had forgotten to bring my passport. Dug it out today, and with luck I will not forget it.

Not much else going on today, just trying to find a good horror movie to watch.

36 hours and counting - no calls, pages or e-mails from work. I think I am on a streak here.

Man, it is hard for me to think that October has some and gone so fast.  The fall leaves are falling (and in my back yard, the warm late summer has gone to somewhat chilly early fall, and in days Halloween will have come and gone.

I am still spending much of my time in California, and the  time I have been in Minnesota I have tried to keep the house keeped up, relaxing and spending time with my Cosin, which has been very enjoyable.

So far in the past month or two we have gone up north to hang up with one of my cousins close friends, and have gone to a fun pre-Halloween party. It is great being like, social and stuff!

At work I have still been dedicated to my project in San Mateo, CA and have been traveling quite often to CA. I am enjoying the work quite a bit because its a change of pace for me, but the travel also gets tiring real fast.

As I mentioned, yesterday I went to a bar party with my cousin  and one of her friends. I am not normally a bar person, but I do need to admit it was fun. I attempted to dance, which was very embarrassing and my cousins friend was a very nice person, and I enjoyed hangin out with her.

This week I am taking off of work to get the house in order for winter, and take care of some things that have just gone to the way-side.  I am looking forward to taking it easy for a week, and then its back out to CA next week.

I spent last week at home, and it is amazing how busy the week gets when I spend half my time away from home.  All of the little things like mowing the lawn just build up. Kirsten stayed over these last two weekends again, and I am finding my time with her very, very special.  She is such a nice person and we just “click”. It is like the relative I have not had. I miss her when I am out of town, not something I am use to.  It is nice to have such special relatives, who cares for me, and I care for her.

The previous weekend we had gone on a shopping trip to Ikea to get a bed frame, and then off to Sams Club to get a mattress, so I now have a real guest bed. I had gone to her church, and hung out with her after church normal thing, which was a bit of a change for me.

Last week at work was also busy with just playing catchup.  I had done some miscellaneous work on my CA project, but nothing substantial. A good chunk of work as also  just getting back in the loop on some of the normal Minnesota work I had done.

Last weekend we had gone shopping at the MOA for a bit, and for some reason I can not remember what else we did. Silly me. All I remember is going to target, but I am sure after some time my memory will come back :-)

This week I am back in CA, and already looking forward to doing home. the folks out here moved to some new office space, and it is quite nice.  I do have some decent projects coming up over the next day or two, which will show some progress at work for this week.

Ok, lets fire this blog up again. I am going to shoot for weekly posts, but we will see how that goes.
Well, first off, I have enjoyed my summer a bit too much, and fallen off the wagon with my weight lost :-(

about 1/3 of my hard work is now gone. My hope is with the correct help and motivation over the winter, I can fix that.

Quite a bit of my summer has been just thinking of the past, and work. I had a very large project at work which was on my mind for most of the spring/summer, which was the design, costing, buildout and now support of an e-commerce environment utilizing solars 10, and solars zones. This has help save our costumer at work some money, as well as hopefully long term, save some manhours on our side.

Right as that project was coming to an end, I started being involved in another project that will go well in to the winter. A business unit in our company has been struggling quite a bit for man power as well as experience, and I was volunteered to help them out. For me this is both good and bad, I am going to California every other week, but it is allowing me to become involved with more of our company. I am learning quite a bit, and I am feeling very useful which is very, very nice. The travel is a bit much, as I am going out to California every other week, but I hope I am providing the help the folks in CA need.

Now on to the outside-work stuff. This summer In spent many weekends in my house, going to <a href=http://www.al-anon-alateen-msp.org/>meetings</a>, doing house work, or relaxing. I have finished 2.5 major projects this summer. The first was to fix my livingroom. I had a mirror wall, which was so seventies. I got rid of the evil wall, and painted the sucker, so it looks a bit better.
The second project was my stupid plumbing, which was a bit more than I was expecting, I had galvanized steel pipes throughout my house which started to rust from the inside out. Some started to drip, and most had started to close up, affecting water pressure. This spring I replaced most of the steel pipes with copper pipes. I am quite proud of myself that I managed to replace most of the plumbing without burning the house down, and I now have water pressure in the bathroom again.
Third is my patio. The patio in my back yard. The patio was built over a tree stump that had been rotting away for a good 20 years, and this cause the sucker to start to sink. This spring I pulled up the patio, this summer I had gotten rid of the stump, and with luck, this fall I will get the patio back down again. We will see if that happens :-)

This summer I continue to struggle with friendships, but on the positive side, I have re-discovered family. It was very, very hard on my loosing my sister to an internship in IL 3 years ago. The only person I had felt real close too had left, and I was all alone in this world, it seemed. This was very hard on me, and I still somewhat can not figure out to do with my sis gone. This summer I started hanging out with one of my cousins a bit more, and have truly enjoyed (and continue to enjoy) her company. She can not replace my sister, but right now it seems like someone I can trust more than some of my previous “friends”

Well, that about sums up my summer in a nutshell, with luck I will update this more than once every 3 months, if for no one else, for myself to reflect someday.

Well I am on day 3 of recovering, and it is going very good. Saturday sucked, Sunday evening I was able to move around a bit, and today I was able to get out of the house a bit.

Sunday I watched some movies (LOTR two towers) and the vikings game, and today I got a bit of shopping done, got my car cleaned, and watched the 3rd LOTR movie.

Tomorrow I better get out of the house, or else I am going to go insane!

About a month ago I noticed funny bump, in a funny place, kind of right below my gut. Now, this is where 1000 thoughts start going throw your head (well at least mine). Thoughts such as:  should I ignore it? Is it going to get worse? Is it going to get better? It is a lump, is it cancer? I hope not! What if I go to the doctor, is it a waste of time? Should I go to the doctor?

In the end, I decided to go to the doctor, and get it checked out. My general physician determined it is most likely a hernia, and referred me to a surgeon to determine the next action that should be taken. So I then saw a sergon, and I walked out with a surgery scheduled, and today was the for-mentioned surgery.

When I saw the surgeon, my mind was still in shock, so I did not ask the normal questions such as how long I should be out of work, or what resreictions I would have with sergery, do I was kind of winging it. Today I needed a distraction big time to get my mind off of things, so I ended up going shopping, getting something for Mandy for her Son and going in to work to deliver it. That killed the 3 hours keep my mind busy:-)

My friend Lisa then came over to pick me up, and go to the hospital with me. I decided to go for a local instead of getting knocked out, and once again I was happy with that decision. This time I had a bit more pain then the last sergery I had, but I was kind of expecting that, I am looking forward to seeing the list of drugs they gave me.

I think I was in for about an hour, and they made a cut about 5″ long, fixed whatever they had to fix, put in a  mesh thingie to heal the wound, and then closed me up. I remember looking at a clock, and seeing it was 2:30, my procedure started at 1:00pm.

The pain this time is quite a bit more than my last surgery. On the way home we stopped to pick up my prescription, to find that it would be a  4 fscking hour wait for my pills. We then headed home, and THANK GOD I had some left over vicodin from my last procedure. I was in and out, just rested up and talked to Lisa while watching tv and movies. I could not move at all without feeling pain, so it was very nice of my friend to stick around, she even spent the night which I was not initially expecitng at all. In the end, I was honistly not sure how I was going to be in the morning, so it was nice having her stick around.

We will see how I am doing tomorrow, but man does this pain suck!

Today was a great day, I must say. I had to tie up some loose ends as I am going to be out tomorrow, so it was quite hectic today for me, in between trying to get things taken care of and meetings. Today is also the last day I was going to see a friend at work, and half of the team is out tomorrow, so we had a nice going away lunch for her and another coworker. About 20 people showed up to wish them farewell, which was nice.

After work I visited with my friend and her family, and it was very nice. Her son was not in the best of moods, but I have seen much worse. First we went shopping, then hung out for a bit, being entertained by their Son, then went out to dinner. It was very nice, and I now feel better that we will still be able to maintain a friendship with her moving on to another job. I think it will also give me the opportunity to get back in touch with someone I have known for years, that I have drifted apart from, as she will now be working with someone I was good friends with.

Today was exactly what I needed to pick my spiits up, and I can now concentrate on my fun for tomorrow, you can read more about that next :-)

Today was an interesting day. This morning a friend from work called me to see if I wanted to go see the Body Worlds exhibit at the science museum of Minnesota Saturday evening. I was up for it, as I have heard lots of good things about this exhibit. We looked in to going, and we found out that advanced tickets are only sold in advanced, and a set number of people can attend during any given time period. We went on-line to see that the only openings at 3:00am and 4:00am. We talked over it a bit, and decided why the hell not, and got our tickets for 3:00am.
I went over to a friends house for Saturday night movies, and we watched Team America. I had forgotten how offensive that movie was, but what else do you expect from trey parker. After movies, I went to meet up with the work dude for the body worlds show.

We started off going to Mickey’s Diner in Downtown saint paul for some food. This is the first time I had gone to Mickey’s, and it was very interesting, a old school dining car with good food. After eating we made it to the science museum by 1:00am or so, and walked around a bit to some of the exhibits. It was amazing how busy the place was at 1:00am!

We then went to the Human Body omni theater show. This was a  show on how the human body functions, from how cells develop, to things how the brain functions and how the body reacts to the environment around it. After the omni show, we went off to the Body Worlds exhibit. I was very impressed with what they had on display, it is amazing how much work went in to putting this together. I know that all of the body parts are real, but I just do not want to think about that.

We went around Body Worlds until 5:30am or so, and had left the museum by 6:30am. I then dropped my friend off, and grabbed a bite to eat before heading in to work. Today we had to upgrade a production server from AIX 5.1 to AIX 5.2, and overall it went very smoothly. We ran in to one problem with the backup, but overall it could have gone worse. This morning I worked with the coworker that is leaving us later this week, so it was nice to have the time to hang out as well. The team at work is changing quite a bit, and I think I am going to miss the great team we had spent so much effort to try to build. It is hard seeing people go, but they all have their reasons.

After the work, i got back home at about 1:00pm, and laid down for a short nap. I was up by 4:30pm, and was able to get my car cleaned up a bit. Headed out to the gym, then headed out to the MOA for some christmas card shopping.

That wraps up this weekend. I thought this was going to be a real rough weekend for me, but getting to the wild game on Friday, then going to Body Worlds on Sunday morning and being able to spend a bit of time with my friend Sunday at work made the weekend bearable.