Fun times today

So I like hockey. I didn't really know that until this year, but apparently I do. It's one of the few sports games I'm actually decent at (I've even played it in real life, although I meant I'm decent on X Box). Matt and I went to our second game together this season (the first was actually preseason), and both our third total, again since preseason (whatever).

We actually bought a package of four games (the Coyotes Howliday pack), and the sales rep gave us his personal tickets for tonight that included access to the swank Comerica club up on the middle level. It was awesome. We got the buffet and ate through the pre game/first period (including dessert), and then sat in our really great seats for the remaining two periods. It ended up being a really good game, too, which the Coyotes won. Good times.

It's kinda cool to have different interests now than I had when I was younger, and I think my dad would have been impressed that I not only actually watched the game, but that I was actually carrying on an intelligent sports-related conversation. Not to say that I've made any major life change overall (I'm still a nerd), but it's fun to actually be present at these events instead of feeling like a complete idiot.

Anyway, more later!

Hard day at the job...

As I have said before, normally I don't care for my job. It's not really my cup of tea, and on a good day it can be boring. Not that I'm not grateful for it, and I definitely have learned from it, but I would not choose this as my lifetime career.

However, there are definitely some days that are better than others and yesterday was one of them. It was a very normal day up until lunch, but when Nate and I got back, my boss said we could spend the rest of our day building the gingerbreadhouse for our department's entry into the hotel-wide gingerbread house contest. w00t.

Here is a picture of the beginning.

We had a lot of ideas, so my boss went out to a few stores and bought some supplies-mostly candy. Nate and I did all the grunt work, but it was good times nonetheless, I must say.

It took us about 3.5 hours or so (not including clean up), and this was the end result:

The house from one side...

And from the other!

A close up of our diverse snowman...oy.

My one worry is that they made a "Home Forclosure" sign and put it next to the (chocolate colored) snowman, and since this is going to be judged by our guests, I hope no one gets offended. Not that I'll get in trouble or anything, but I would hate for something to ruin their impression of the hotel. OH well, it's not my problem.

Still, it was fun times, and it gave me an excuse to take all the stuff off my desk and scrub it with cleaner, which I haven't done in about a year or so. Seriously needed. Blech. It's not like I'm a neat freak, but you should have seen how much dust can accumulate behind a monitor in one year! Not to mention all the rubber bands Nate appears to have shot at me when I wasn't looking. Hmmm...

Greetings, one and everyone!

I'm back! After about a month of not posting, I have returned to Blogger-Land. To all my loyal readers (both of you), I can only apologize for my negligence.

So I've been fairly busy at work as usual and I am mostly thankful for that. I'm still not happy in the job, but in recognition of the tough times I'm trying not to complain right now. Jobs are scarce right now (as you know) and having one as opposed to not makes me a very blessed Scott indeed. Abigail graduates in the spring and will be an actual nurse around June, which means financially happy times are (for us) presumably just around the corner. Even if I do stick around in the job for a while after that, it will be nice to have the option NOT to at that point.

In other news... my brother Chris moved out of my parents' house not too long ago so he now lives in an apartment with a friend not too far from me. I have not seen it yet, but I hope to soon. My friend Andrew turns 23 today, and I got to take him to lunch for his birthday. Good times. Recently I got to go with my dad on a "guys night" with our church people. We kinda got separated from them on accident but I enjoyed spending time with him at CrackerJax up in Scottsdale. I still have a bunch of tokens and tickets, so I need to go back soon!

We're pretty much done with our Christmas shopping as of yesterday. I went out with my dad for the day after Thanksgiving sales, which I must say were pretty disappointing compared to years past. You'd think if the economy needs consumer spending, they'd put some crazy sales out there but I guess the companies are doing their best just to stay open right now. Anyway, Abigail is out right now with my mom and Susan, so with any luck we'll be a little closer to done when she gets back and can finish it up online. I hate going out and shopping this time of year; people are nuts!

I had hoped to take Susan to see "Twilight" but it kept getting pushed back until yesterday. We were all set to go but I was tired to the point of actually being sick by the time Abigail got off, so the two of them went and I slept for about 16 hours. Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice. I love hanging out with my little sister, though, so hopefully we can do something soon. :-)

Thanksgiving was good times this year. We spent it with Abigail's family and actually stayed the night on Wednesday so she could get up early and watch the Macy's parade with her dad like in olden times. My hope was to sleep in, but alas I was awakened by the cast of "Mary Poppins" singing "A Spoonful of Sugar." I have never wanted to kill British (sounding) people more in my entire life. Aside from that minor inconvenience I really enjoyed the holiday and it was nice seeing their traditions. Up to this point I had spent every Thanksgiving (that I can remember) with my parents, and although I did miss them it was fun to spend time with her family this year. We finally got to play that "Alibi" game Andrew got me for my birthday as well as "Apples to Apples."

I'm kinda out of practice at this, so that's all I can think of for now I guess. I'll put something up as I think of it. Later peeps!

No, really, I'm not dead!

I have been extremely busy the last few weeks! My boss went on vacation on the busiest month of the year (give or take) for two weeks, so I have had two days off (counting today) since the 12th. Nice, huh? The paychecks will be okay, but man I'm tired. It's been kind of nice today to have the house to myself and just be in the quiet all day long. Not that Abigail bugs me or anything, but sometimes it's nice just to be alone for a few hours. After church I cleaned the house up a bit, did some dishes and laundry, and even made the bed, so hopefully that will make her happy. She's not really hard to please.

You may have noticed I haven't posted any follow ups to the diet thing. I've still been trying to eat well, but unfortunately I haven't remembered to log it in and at this point the data would be really messed up if I tried to do it from memory so I'm afraid two weeks are just gone. You'll have to take my word for it that I've been bringing my lunch to work (no, not every day) and generally trying to improve my habits. Something must be working, as this morning I weighed in at 245.8 pounds. Yay! For you math-challenged people (or if you're too lazy to scroll down), that's a net loss of 8.2 pounds since that last post.

Abigail was asking me about running as well as starting a glutin-free diet, the latter because I might feel better in general and not so much for weight loss. I'm hesitant to change things THAT much, but I'm considering it. As for running...grr. Scott does not relish this idea.

Other that that there's not a whole lot going on right now. My friend Katrina is moving back to AZ from WA next week (or this week, whatever) and that's cool. I like friends. Halloween is coming up, so my sister wants to have a movie marathon or something, which is apparently our tradition. By "tradition," I guess she's referring to how we did it last year and all. :-)

Hope all is well for you!
~Scott

Corporate Comments, Continued

From our sales department:

"We have to keep all our ducks in a row even if we're spinning our wheels."

It's like a double cliche whammy!

Health/Weight Watchers stuff

I didn't forget to post the stuff I promised on the Weight Watchers thing, I was just busy (see previous post). Having said that, I decided to change last week from week 1 to "week 0," or in scientific terms, the "control." I realized that I was inevitably going to be forced (ahem) to eat cake and be taken against my will (ahem ahem) to lunch at least a couple times, so I might as well not stress over it. So this table is week 0's results to establish a baseline weight that I can hopefully improve on. This is still better than when we got back from Travis and Kim's wedding!

Hopefully you can read that okay. Basically the most important part is on the right under "results." The other stuff just shows how horrible I was this week. For my starting weight of 250 (yes, I gained 4 pounds!) I am allotted 28 points per day. I was at or under that...3/7 days this week. The data is not 100% accurate points-wise, as I had to fill in some of it (okay, days 4-7) from memory, but that's very close.

In other news, I'm still sick. I never really got 100% better from my cold, so today I finally said enough is enough and left work early. I went to the doctor, who decided I have bronchitis and a sinus infection, neither of which is necessarily bad enough to keep me from work (unless the antibiotics knock me on my butt as they might). Yay team. So yeah, I got the aforementioned antibiotics, and for the first time I can remember an inhalator. It's kinda funny.

Hopefully feeling sick will help me keep my points down this week... lol?

Weekend Recap

This was a busy, fun weekend! Friday I came home straight from work and took Susan and Abigail to see a movie called "Fireproof" that they had both been wanting to see. It was actually pretty good as far as chick flicks go, and not as cheesy as Christian movies can be.

Saturday I had a bunch of errands to run, but I got to sleep in which was awesome. I picked up Abigail's anniversary (October 21st) present, so let's see how long it takes her to notice this post! Then Saturday night I went to a preseason Coyotes (hockey) game with Matt, my dad, and Angela's brother Jeff. It's been a while since I had a proper guy's night out and I definitely enjoyed it. We were in row six, which curiously made it all seem smaller. Matt stayed until the wee hours of the morning playing Soul Calibur IV with me, which definitely got him in trouble with the wife but it was fun times nonetheless. Lesson learned: even if your wife is asleep, send her a token text message at least so she'll know where you are!

Sunday was my birthday celebration at mi casa. We had a lot of people show up, and so good times were had by all, possibly excepting the cats who are scared of balloons (yay Dad!). Hopefully pictures are forthcoming; I have none yet that I know of. We had 13 people total, I believe, so that was: Matt & Angela, our parents (4), 3 of our siblings, Andrew, and Nate. If I forgot anyone let me know! I made off with some great swag, including the new 360 from my wife and a few games for that and the PSP, as well as some movies (including two copies of Iron Man, LOL). Andrew got me an interesting board game called "Alibi" that we had too many people to play, but rest assured we shall some time. Thank you to those of you who texted or called, you rock!

I'm doing a separate post for health/WW stuff, should be up in a few minutes...

Scott is tired!

So yes, I really did have special plans on Sunday; I wasn't being flippant. I went to church, then came back and took on a project of monumental proportions if I do say so myself. I decided since my wife has been working so hard on finals and such that I would do something nice for her so I (with some unexpected help from my mom and my sister) shampooed pretty much all the carpet in the house (minus the bedrooms, which no one but us sees anyway). That required moving a lot of furniture, and I don't mind telling you I am still pretty sore. I'm not used to exercise anymore, so I was tired by the time we were done. Luckily that was still over an hour before Abigail came home. I also managed to do quite a bit of other cleaning as well so when she got here I was rather pleased with myself, as was she.

Matt and Angela came over that afternoon (just before Abigail, actually) and we had good times. Matt began a weight loss competition at work last week that involves measuring his total loss of poundage as well as body fat, so he is unofficially doing Weight Watchers as well as exercising. He went through how it's going with me and showed me how he is doing it, so I decided Monday would be Day 1 of my new diet. While I failed miserably (I had a cheeseburger at our restaurant, and regret nothing), I have taken to the project with much enthusiasm. I designed an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of everything, and so I've decided that in lieu of going to the meetings I will be posting the results here once a week. This is Day 2 (which has gone astronomically better, by the way), and I am really excited about it. The problem is Day 3 is my birthday, and Day 8 is my birthday party, so those two days I'm pretty much screwed. Oh well...

Anyway, it's the end of the month (EOM) at work so I have been super busy and stressed. I ended up getting off at 6:45 today, eep! Hopefully this will get better as the week goes by. My boss had talked about taking us to the movies tomorrow in honor of my birthday (and his 3 free movie passes that we gave him for HIS birthday last week) so we'll see. I'm still not sure we're going but it's a nice thought. I'm not planning on making a big deal about the day at work, but I don't know if it will be up to me. We'll see...

Fun times!

Today was a fun day. I've been looking forward to it for some time, and it did not disappoint. Abigail took her final exam today (she starts clincals next week), and then we went to the Diamondbacks game with our friends Matt and Angela. We had tickets for the "experimental" all you can eat section. They had unlimited hot dogs, popcorn, peanuts, nachos, and sodas/bottled water. You could only take four items at a time, but our seats ended up being in an incredibly convenient location so we all made several trips. My friend Andrew was also at the game, although in a different section. I finally spotted him around the 7th inning. It was a good game, too; they got the win although Webb didn't get the 23rd that he was looking for. :-( Brandon Lyon ended up getting credit for the win.

Well that's all I have to report at the moment. I'm sure if Abigail hasn't posted about her finals in detail she will soon, so no point in me doing it here. Suffice to say she passed both, and ended up with B's in both classes so yay! I have some big top secret plans for tomorrow; so secret that if I told you now, everything would come crashing down like a ton of crashing things. :-P

Corporate Speak

I used to keep a book of quotes called Random Jottings for instances like these. Actual quote from Nate (other Accounting guy) on the phone with a client:

"We process those using the processing process."

Priceless. :-)

Blaaaaaaaaaaaaarg.

I hate being sick. While it is nice to be home in the middle of the week, the fact remains that all I want to do is just curl up into a ball and not live. I have the cold that many people at work as well as my sister and my friend Matt all got. On the bright side, I am here on my couch writing in my blog instead of at work writing some report. Go germs!


I had to give Matt his X box back, so while I still have the PSP and the Super Nintendo, my video game experience has been cut down by a lot. I have a big screen TV so even when I don't feel well it's not too bad to play the 360, but playing the PSP would give me a headache. I don't feel like leaving my comfy couch at the moment to go upstairs (where the Nintendo is). I spent the first few hours of this morning browsing randomness on the net. I love my random Wikipedia searches. :-D


So anyway, we had a good weekend. I hung out with Matt for a while on Saturday, and then Abigail and I celebrated her mom's birthday with her parents, her brother, her grandpa, and his friend. Good times. Sunday was similar except I hung out with Chris (my brother) and my dad, and then we all got together and celebrated my sister's birthday. I lent Chris TFU on that day; he's already beaten it as of yesterday afternoon (he took yesterday off sick). It's a rough life; playing video games all day. (sighs)

Anyway, check out my updated links to see pictures in my Picasa album. I know there must be a way to use them here but so far I am having issues. Nonetheless I am sure I will triumph eventually. That's how I roll.

New stuff

All right, good times. You may notice a couple of little changes. Hopefully there will be more tomorrow, time permitting, but the most important thing is I found out I can put my Gamertag on here! Yay!!! I've created a few albums on Picasa, but I still haven't quite figured out how to link them to here yet and I have more pictures to put up anyway so that should be tomorrow.

Right now my 360 is probably FUBAR so I have spent the last couple weeks playing off of other people's consoles when they didn't need them. My brother lent me his one week, then Matt lent me his last week when he was otherwise occupied. The next couple of weeks should be "dry" weeks, which makes me sad, but at least I managed to beat The Force Unleased last night. Abigail kinda freaked out last night when I explained I had already finished the $59.99 game, but apparently she does not understand replay value well. :-)

So I had my first day as a reservations person on Friday, but my boss's birthday is today so he decided to take Friday, a payday, off. What I didn't know was that would by default leave me stuck helping people distribute paychecks and paperwork, as well as giving change to every single employee (or so it seemed to me) of the hotel! I had come in early since I had two meetings to prepare for that day, so I went from 8:30 until about 2:45 before I was finally able to take a lunch break. Sheesh. All things considered it was actually a good day, and I got to learn a lot of things that I will get to apply next week. I ended up working until 6:45 and probably could have gone much later, but I ended up having the opportunity to have dinner with my friend Andrew which is something that had not occurred in some time.

Friday was also my little sister's 17th birthday. Today is my boss' (as mentioned above) as well as my friend Matt's mom's birthdays, and tomorrow is Abigail's mom's, although we celebrated it today. We will be celebrating Susan (my sister)'s tomorrow (Matt will be doing the same with his mom, strangely enough). My birthday is the next one in my family, I think, so mark your calendars for October 1st, people! (LOL)

Okay, so be excellent to each other, and party on dudes!

Update!

I know you're anxious to find out, so a couple of quick updates before I go to work. Maybe more later, we'll see:
* I am officially back to 40 hours per week. They're doing some position changes at work, but rather than hiring/firing any admin assistants they're just giving me more work and more hours, in the reservations dept.. I should probably be annoyed with this but it's an entire one day more I wasn't able to work before and it was something I wanted to learn how to do anyway. Pad the resume, baby.
*One of my friends (my friend Matt's wife) got the position as the new Sales admin at work. Yay Angela!
*I did get TFU game, but I didn't go to the party. I'm turning 23 in a couple of weeks and I'm married. I decided it would be better to spend the time with my wife, so that's what I did. She studied; I ironed some shirts. :-) w00t.
So that's the update...gotta go to work now!

~Scott

I'm back!

I am one tired Scott, yes siree. That one 5 hour shift spawned another 5 hour shift on Tuesday evening that went until 11:30. I just barely missed being on time the next morning. "Turn-around" shifts are a pain, but this variety is better than when I would work until 11:30 and then come back the next day at 5:30. Those were much less than fun. You had to be 100% at 5:30, too, there was no wiggle room some days, as people had pre-ordered breakfast and would be calling down for things. I am not a morning person so IMHO I think it was a truly amazing thing that I was able to work those shifts for so long. Anyway, I had a good week. Workwise I got 40.25 hours (15 minutes overtime, w00t!) and so that was pretty good.

We left for family camp with our church Friday afternoon. I went up much earlier than most with my wife's parents. Having them around provides an interesting dynamic to my life. I am a very family-oriented person, and have been taught all my life that "family is family." For example, I have five siblings, but three are technically half-siblings and two are adopted. I am the only natural child of my parents. Not once have I ever been called a "half-brother" by my older brothers and sister, and although we occasionally mention the adoption of my younger siblings it's usually only in context because my brother looks so dissimilar to the rest of us.

So having two new parents is really great, but I'm still not at a stage where I can call them "Mom" and "Dad" yet. They're wonderful people, but it's still weird right now. I don't know if I'm alone in that; my sister's husband was doing it pretty much immediately. I don't know about my brothers as I rarely see them interact with their in-laws.

Anyway, camp was all right. I love camping. I really enjoy being in nature, especially in the fall, and it was gorgeous. It rained before we got there but not while we were there to my disappointment. I would imagine that most everyone had been praying for it not to rain, however, so I suspect my wishes were overruled. We had a good time overall. I was only moderately comfortable there as although I have gone there for a few years there are still a lot of people I don't know. I spent the time between my arrival and the rest of the clan (after unloading the van) on the porch of the cabin with my feet propped up on a stump, alternatively reading a book (Summerland, by Michael Chabon) or watching a video ("Mr. Monk buys a house") on my iPod. The mom in law had to take a picture; apparently it was rather impressive. I got a couple of remarks from passersby to the effect of, "There's a guy who knows how to relax."

We participated in some activities (i.e. the scavenger hunts and the field games) but not others (the family movie nights), choosing instead to spend time together in the cabin. We played Phase 10 for a few hours (I lost, but not too badly), and then Apples to Apples later than night (twice, won the second game). Then this morning we all got up in time for breakfast, followed by the morning church service, after which I suffered through the first of many group pictures.

While my parents helped with the campwide cleanup, I was tasked with loading the truck so we could get on the road not too long after. Luckily I have inherited my dad's strange gift of being able to pack things (cars, moving vans, boxes) with extraordinary skill so by the time he arrived we were nearly ready. Thankfully we managed to get out with precision, and I only had to say good bye to a few people right at the end when I was walking across the courtyard and mom in law yelled out our names. Grrrrr........

So now I'm back, sitting in my armchair. Life's pretty good. Tomorrow I will be heading down to GameStop circa 10 PM to attend the pre-release party for "The Force Unleashed." I realize I will be far out of my normal circle of nerd-dom, but I happen to have a SW T-Shirt from the pre-release of another game (never bought it but I worked in a video store at the time and the shirt was free). So I hope to fit in, although there will be a trivia game throughout (the actual release isn't until midnight) and a costume judging at 11... (shudder). Judging by the post-Halo 3 release night memories, I should be pretty tired on Tuesday morning... maybe I should take THAT day off instead and go in on Monday. :-)

Hope you are well. I know I have a couple of readers now so join Blogger at least so you can leave me comments, okay? Later!

~Scott

Well, this is weird...

"Normal" for the accounting position is a 40 hour week, roughly 9 to 5. The hours are somewhat flexible, but the amount of them was definitely 40 unless I needed to take off for a doctor's appointment. So when we hit slow season this summer, I still had 40 hours while other departments were getting cut...until about 6 weeks ago. Now I get 32 hours a week if I plot for it, but at least I get Fridays off.

So I'm going into work today to help out with a weird scheduling conflict. I'm working a mid shift in my old position but at my current pay (score!), which means I don't get the extra day off but I will get the normal paycheck (pretty much). With my birthday coming up and The Force Unleashed coming out sooner than that, a little extra cash is not a bad thing to be had. I don't buy my own gifts, but my wife has a list. :-) Hey, she asked for one!

My friend Aarik was one of the front office managers in my hotel, and he died on his birthday this year, so it will be really weird to go back to work on a busy day without him there. He was one of those people that energized the room whenever he was in it, and we still get repeat guests asking about him. I guess I'm just preparing myself for a weird day in general because it will be essentially the same job but with an entirely different group of people.

Anyway, gotta get ready!

The first post!

Greetings one and everyone!

Thanks for coming to my blog. It's pretty nice, I know. Take a load off, sit on the metaphorical bean bag chair. Or rather in it, I don't know. My imagination can be thrifty, so those chairs need some more stuffing, I guess. (shrugs)

Anywho, my name's Scott and I'm just your average guy, in some ways. Average in a socio-economical sense; otherwise I'm pretty off-kilter. I don't know much about sports except for baseball and golf. I'm lousy at both in real life, but I can probably kick your butt on X-Box 360. That's right, I'm a nerd, but I'm ahead of the curve as I'm married to a real, non-virtual woman. She's awesome.

I work in a hotel in the accounting department, and if I had to choose between that and sitting on my butt playing video games all day I would do accounting, but only because it allows me to buy more video games. Oh, and pay rent and stuff. I seriously don't care for my job, but that's a whole other posting right there.

That's probably good. Unlike my wife, I'm not used to prolific blogging, so it will take me a while to get used to this, I expect. Peace Out!

Okay, okay, so I'm not a good communicator...

I suck at keeping in touch. I'm not totally sure why that is, but it's something I've discovered in the past year or so. I'm sure most of you who will read this will have discovered it much sooner.

I moved around a lot as a kid and didn't have many friends until I got to high school, so keeping in touch wasn't something I thought much about. My older siblings were much older and kind of abandoned me when I was still pretty young (stupid getting older and living their own lives).

I have always thought of myself as being a pretty dependable person, but now I'm not so sure. I think I'm still a good go-to guy in a crisis situation, but I've noticed I really don't do too well in day-to-day things. For example, I essentially got fired from teaching my small group at church after two years. On the surface this is so I can find a new job and finally have some personal time (they probably shouldn't have even asked me to do it in the first place), but still. I've never been fired from anything before and it's kind of sad.

I'm the first one to recognize the fact that in a lot of ways I've been lost for a few years as far as my self-identity goes. I think that happens to a lot of us. I was talking to someone not too long ago who wanted to go back to high school because of how much more things made sense then. I disagreed at the time, although it was kind of nice how compartmentalized our world was then. Everyone we could conceivably want to see or speak to was most likely encountered in the span of 1st to 6th hour, or at least at lunch. It was a lot easier to keep in touch.

As far as identity goes, though, the person you were in high school died once you graduated, or at least they should have. You're not allowed on campus anymore for the most part and there's a very good reason for that. There is a whole world out there that you're a part of now for better or worse. Adulthood isn't compartmentalized into 1st through 6th hour (well maybe college for some, but after that!). It's unpredictable, and completely insane, and it constantly tests you. It is still easy to stay in touch, but only if you're in the habit.

I am still really fortunate, and in a weird way I think God likes me. (shrugs) My family is amazing. I have the benefit of being married to my favorite person, even though hobby wise we have absolutely nothing in common. Between her parents, my parents, and some of my friends', I have a few great moms, and a couple of awesome dads. There's always someone to take care of me, which is handy since I frequently seem to need it. I also still have a handful of good friends, some of whom I actually still talk to when I remember.

That brings me to my original point: I suck at communicating. Don't hold it against me too badly and keep me in prayer (or whatever you do). I really want to work on a couple of things in my life, and one of them is my dependability especially to my friends. So don't give up on me, okay? And if you have, and you're reading this, maybe give me another chance. I'm feeling pretty down lately and I could always use another person around to lean on.

sometimes I get the feeling

that I won't be on this planet for very long

I really like it here

I’m quite attached to it I hope I’m wrong

all I really want to say

is you're the reason I want to stay

I loved you before I met you

and I met you just in time 'cause there was nothing left

from Ben Folds, "Don't Change Your Plans"

Stay cool kids, and remember to floss and all that other important stuff. Have a safe Labor Day weekend!