Business Trip

So for my work, for the first time in my career, I will be making a business trip. The trip itself is pretty bland. 5 days in a small town in West Virginia looking over financial documents for an audit on one of our properties. I will be going with my manager to sort out their accounts in one week. It has to be done too, so we'll be working long days. We're staying in a Best Western where we have our own rooms, so that's cool, but I'm not really looking forward to it. It's not like I'm getting away from anything except maybe the office, but I don't like to leave my wife behind, and there's nothing really fun to do in the few off hours we will have.

My manager looked it up and apparently found a horse racing track within a couple miles, and that was the only real entertainment. I might like to see a horse race, but I'm not a gambler (which seemed to be the draw for him), so I think I'd much rather spend the time in my hotel room on my computer playing WoW or talking with my wife. The hotel room comes with a king sized bed. I guess that's a plus, but I like to think I'm not king size, so it's actually a lot of wasted bed.

I'm thankful that we have a dog now as she can keep my wife company while I'm gone, and with any luck, we'll finish early and I can catch a stand by flight home on Friday. Some people like to travel, but I'm not really one of them unless it's with and for family. Here's to hoping I don't have to do these new business trips very often.

Congratulations Sis

We just got back from a long weekend trip to the west coast where we went to visit family and see my sister graduate from college. She is now a fully educated nurse getting her degree from Northwest University of the Assemblies of God. I had actually spent a year there when it was still Northwest College and it was fun to see the campus again.

We got to spend time with my Grandparents and my mom's family in Oregon before trucking up to Seattle to see my sister graduate. I love Oregon, and seeing it again made me miss it again, but I'm sure I'll forget about that in the next few weeks as I get back into my groove here in Boston. We did a lot of hanging out, visiting, and eating. I swear. From the first place we stopped for lunch after leaving the airport, to the last meal we had the eve of our flight, I was full.

While in Seattle we had time to visit Pike Place Market which was a pretty cool place, and my sister and wife graciously allowed me two whole hours of gaming at Gameworks to rock the arcade games. Even with that much time I still have a ton of points on a gameworks card that need to be used. The other cool thing about going to Seattle was that we got to spend two nights in a sweet hotel. A friend of my sister and me works there, and got us a good deal on a weekend stay. Apparently it's a business hotel, so they are busy during the week, and light on the weekends. The rooms were really cool, and the king size beds were amazing. Nicely decorated bathrooms, clean facilities and free apples too. If you're ever in the Kirkland, WA area, check out The Heathman. The hotel is located where my favorite arcade was when I was in Seattle, Quarters. It's not there anymore, and that made me sad.

Wedding Gift

My wife and I were married in June of 2005. She put a whole lot of work into it and it was really a beautiful wedding. At the time I had been working part-time for a web design and CD business card company. The owner did a lot of video work and he offered to video our wedding free of charge. After the wedding, we honeymooned in Scotland and then promptly moved to Boston so my wife could begin her master's program at Harvard.

A few months went by and I asked my former boss about the video. He said he hadn't had a chance to edit it yet, but he would get to it and send it to us. A little more time goes by and I ask him about it again and he says he still hasn't finished. I tell him to just send me the raw footage and I'll get it edited or do it myself. He says okay, and that's the last I hear of it for awhile. So again I email him and he replies that he sent it months ago when we last talked.

So now I'm pretty upset. It's the only video of our wedding, and now it looks like we're never going to have it. I regret having him do it, but there's really nothing we can do about it, except hope that it will show up one day.

Fast forward to last week. A day or two before my birthday, my best man, and best friend from high school calls me up. He had just gotten married in Hawaii, (sadly, we couldn't make it) and he tells me that he finally was able to get the video from my bachelor party on to a DVD. He was sending it to me along with video and pictures from his own wedding. A week or so later I get the DVDs and I pop them in the computer to watch the video.

The footage from the bachelor party was fun. We didn't do anything too crazy. Just a few guys being stupid, hanging out, and having fun. But when that stuff was over, the video cut to our wedding. Apparently, my best man had given the camera to my mother who video taped the entire wedding! We got to see the dancer at the beginning and all of the vows and ring exchanges and all of our groomsmen and bridesmaids on that wonderful day. We were thrilled to put it mildly. We had thought we would never be able to watch it again, and here we were seeing us get married all over again. It was really exciting. My wife insisted I call and thank my best man right away, and I agreed.

So props to my best man! Mad Dog, you know who you are! You're the best, and now it's on the internet so it must be true. I'm really going to make an effort to see you sometime soon as it's been too long. Blessings on you and your wife for years to come.

The First of April

Today is my birthday. No joke!

I was born at 12:01 AM on April 1st. I sometimes suspect I was born on March 31st at 11:59 PM, but the doctor couldn't resist writing 12:01 to make me an April Fool's baby. I don't know if I will ever be able to verify this.

Surprisingly, I can't remember having very many April Fool's pranks being played on me personally. Nothing that really sticks out anyway. I mostly get the response when I tell someone when my birthday is, "Oh, guess your birth was a joke!" or some variant. But I've never had a prank or joke played on me.

Today I went to work, and tonight I'm going home, so I'm not doing anything special for my birthday like a party or anything. I really don't mind. I'm pretty content to stay home and take it easy. My wife and I may play World of Warcraft together, which I actually consider a superb present that she plays with me now. I am recording the event in my warcraft blog, Good Morning Azeroth! Which is funny because now that we play together, I play more in the evening to late night than in the morning.

So, Happy Birthday to me, and thanks to everyone that made me possible and has been part of my life these last 27 years. Couldn't have done it without you.

Yet another blog

I finally started my World of Warcraft blog. The link is over on the right. I'm going to use it to write about anything and everything about the game I play the most, starting with the fantastic experience of getting my wife to play it with me just recently. If you've never played the game before, some of the stuff might seem unfamiliar, but it will make sense for anyone who's ventured into Azeroth.

The Golden Compass

I didn't know anything about this book before I saw previews for the movie. It was being compared to The Chronicles of Narnia, but other than that I didn't really show an interest in it. A few weeks later, on one of my long commutes, I picked up a random newspaper to read on the bus and there was an interesting article. Its basic statement was that Christians were up in arms about the movie because the author of the book is an atheist and the movie's plot revolved around the idea of killing God. Add to that that movie's target audience is children and young teens.

I have to admit that this perked my interest. I am definitely not an atheist, but the idea of someone who writes a fantasy book that is seemingly very anti-church intrigued me. What was more interesting though is that I later found out the producers of the movie actually played down the anti-religious sentiments in the screen adaptation. I guess they were afraid of what an overtly anti-religious movie's effect would be on viewers. In just seemed contra to what one would thing Hollywood's position is. I'm not an authority on the subject, but I wanted to read the book and understand what people were saying about it for myself.

All in all, the book is quite good. The action moves fast and keeps you reading to find out what happens next, and a whole lot happens. The protagonist is Lyra, a young girl with a destiny. The setting is Earth, but there are subtle differences such as each person having a dæmon which is a personal pet of some sort that acts a conscience and friend. One of the major plot points revolves around how people are connected to these dæmons. The girl is reckless, spirited, and intelligent, almost to the point of disbelief. She is able to resolve situations that were it not a fantasy book, I would think they were impossible for a small girl. I also thought that some parts of the book the reader is given to little knowledge to understand what is going on. Even when the characters are answering some of the mysteries in the book, I still found myself not quite getting it. This may be intentional as there are two more books in the series; so much is probably left to be explained.

I'll probably watch the movie now to see what differences there are from the book and how they've portrayed some of the underlying concepts. It will be interesting to see how far the sequels go and if the movies continue to down play the anti-religious views or if they begin to embrace them.

The Left Hand of Darkness

Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way..

I first heard about this book from a magazine on an airplane. No, not SkyMall. I forget which airline it was, maybe American, or United, but it had an article in their monthly magazine about good Science Fiction novels. I've probably read many more fantasy books than I have Sci-fi, but I've read a few and I really enjoy Star Trek, so the draw for this type of fiction is still there. This book was listed in that article, and it looked interesting, mentioning a genderless people and political overtones. I took the article out of the magazine to help me remember to get the book at the next opportunity. I think that was a year or so ago, maybe more.

More recently, my wife and I watched The Jane Austen Book Club. The movie itself was really good, but more relevantly, one of the characters, Grigg, was a Sci-fi fan and and a sub plot involved him trying to get a women to read The Left Hand of Darkness. Of course, I suddenly remembered I had never taken the time to read it myself and resolved to do so. I often have time to read now that I spend about 2 to 3 hours each day on the Boston subway and bus system to and from work.

The book was different than what I had expected, but it really was a good book. The plot revolves around an man from a group of planets and peoples known as the Ekumen who is sent to a planet called Gethen where the inhabitants are neither male nor female. His mission is to get them to join the Ekumen to share knowledge, goods, and information. We follow his failures and accomplishments in this mission, and his befriending of the people of the planet, and how he relates to idea of their not being male or female.

The book explores a world where none of the problems or comparisons that we see show up between male and female has ever occurred. Everyone is equal, and able to participate in work, play, politics and life without being hung up on male or female roles. They have their own issues and political powers of course, but they are derived of different natures. It may be of interest to note that on Gethen, there is no word for war, and there has never been a war. There have been fights, skirmishes, assassinations, and murder, but never on a large scale. This may in part be to Gethen being a planet covered in an ice age.

It was a really interesting read, and I don't do it justice in my few words about it. It's been around since 1969, so it's been reviewed and pondered over and over by smarter people that delve a lot more in to its message or meaning. One thing that I had a hard time with is that even though the people have no gender, the pronouns he and him are used extensively to refer to the people. The reason is that 'it' is dehumanizing and 'he' is less identifying than 'she' is, historically. The Gethenians themselves have pronouns that cannot be translated, but using made up pronouns was thought to be laborious for the reader.