From the ashes of Heaven

Over the river and through the woods…

I’ve missed talking about life for a little while… politics is just too important now. However, life is good an I am compelled to share my happiness.

To start with, Theresa came down for about a week. Before her visit, it would be accurate to say I was just surviving. I thought I had a grasp on long distance relationships, but given how close Theresa and I have become, this is just a wholly different situation so I definitely needed some “face time”. She got here at about 10a last Tuesday. It was my second day of work in my new group at Cisco, so I was a bit uneasy about leaving to get her. I did manage to pick her up fairly quickly though and we had a quick lunch at Quizno’s before I went back to work. I could regale you all with stories of her visit, but to say the least it was good. I will say we did manage to try a Japanese steak and sushi house I found that ended up being quite good. Theresa went home Monday this week after a very enjoyable weekend… and on Tuesday I got to go for a trip.

After 3 weeks in the choice program: 2 weeks going to group presentations, demonstrations, and the life and one week meeting with individual managers and group engineers, I decided on the Security Technology Group (yes… I can year all of your groans and “shocker” comments). One of the interesting things about the group is that they’re actually based out of Boxborough, MA and as part of my introduction to the group they flew me and the rest of the RTP team out to Boxborough for a week. I’ve spent a fair amount of time at Cisco, but the area here is beautiful (I’m actually still here) and I’ve got to go exploring a little bit. Tonight, the director is taking the group to some swanky winery for dinner and tomorrow I get to go explore Boston for a bit (which is only 30 minutes from where I am now). Even better, for the foreseeable future, my group thinks they’ll be flying me up semi-regularly.

I don’t have a great grasp on what I’ll be doing yet. For the near future I’ll be working on bug fixing in the VPN products, but in the long term I might be working on the implementation for IKEv2… assuming the managers decide they want to adopt it.

Archangel / October 16, 2008 / Personal, Work / 1 Comment

I’m still here

Making a post has been hard as of late. Not because I have nothing to say, because it is hard to come to terms with some things.

Living in NC last summer gave me some insights into how hard living away from everything I know might be, but I think the knowledge that I’d be going back home colored the experience and certainly made it easier to cope. Now, NC is my home. It isn’t like I have no hope of ever getting back to Ohio, but I also know I’m not going for an extended stay any time soon. I probably said this last summer too, but it is hard to deal with having absolutely no one around. I have nothing to do when I get home from work, I try to make my errands take as long as possible on the weekends and just in general surround myself with people even if I don’t know them. I’ve tried to (subtly) get some of the guys from the choice program to go out after work or similar but three of them are married and the other is from Raleigh and none seem to interested. I’m sure I’ll eventually meet some people to be friends with, at least I hope I do, but in the mean time things a pretty depressing. Most of all I miss Theresa. I’m sure that isn’t exactly a shock to anyone, but given that this is also more than a year later… It is quite different than it was last summer.

Through the summer, Theresa said I was starting to pay an almost unhealthy amount of attention to the (sensationalist) news… obviously with all the extra time I have that hasn’t exactly changed and I’m becoming as disenfranchised as she is. Power is everything to politicians. Keeping that power seems to be paramount to everything else. Congress has sat on our energy crisis for months. This week the house finally passed a bipartisan bill to allow drilling and provide funding for alternative sources of energy, but all of the pundits say it will be stalled in the Senate until after November 4th for fear that any success on any major issue will give credence to the current administration. Apparently forcing an ultra-liberal government onto the people is more important than solving or at least helping with their problems. Now, Congress as a whole is putting together a $700+ billion package to buy out bad mortgages. Democrats are now beating their drum to both sides of this bill saying it must include money for the millions of Americans who took the loans. On the surface, that sounds like a great idea, except with a multi-hundred billion dollar deficit already couple with several large bank bail-outs, who the hell is going to pay for it? On top of that… Obama thinks that even with this package in place he can still wedge an [effective] tax increase and publicly controlled health care on the American people. I’m veering off point now… but I’m quite sick of this. I know our economy is on bad times and that there are far too many people who don’t have proper coverage… but where do the hand-outs end? More importantly, when do politicians set aside the grabs for power for the greater good?

Archangel / September 21, 2008 / Personal, Political / 3 Comments

Archangel / September 4, 2008 / Personal / 1 Comment

I’m alive!

It is interesting to haul a ~4000lb trailer 550 miles. I thought maybe the move up from Columbus might make it easier to move down here… but not really. There were a few 5%-7% grades to go up and down (much more steep than anything on I-71) that made me nervous. Ironically, it was going up hills that ended up being worse. Somehow, the cruise control in my XTerra managed to control the descent pretty easily, I only seemed to vary about 5 miles per hour on the really steep hills. I say going up was worse because people are idiots. The first thing you should realize when hauling a (relatively) large load is that accelerating up a hill, while not impossible, is not recommended. There was one hill where I was maintaining about 60 up and I was coming up on a Ryder (I think) van that was going about 40 with flashers on. No problem, I moved over and was getting ready to pass. Unfortunately, a vehicle that was going about 50 up the hill was also coming up on the van (it was actually in front of me so I was going to pass both) decided it couldn’t wait for me to go by and cut me off with about 15 feet of space… I had to slow down and even with breaks came within 2-3 feet of the cars bumper (even up hill it is hard to stop [cumulatively] 6000lbs). I was relegated to less than 50 the rest of the 3-4 miles up the hill.

I got to my apartment at about 4 and moving in sucked. It took about 2 hours to unload the trailer and the truck even with a little help from my uncle. I spent almost the entire night putting the furniture I had ordered together (thank God the leasing office put it in my apartment by the way) and eventually put my bed together so I could sleep (read pass-out) at about 10. At about 8 the next morning the TimeWarner guy actually showed up on time and got my cable and internet going (woo-hoo) and I spent the rest of the day running errands (spending more money). Everything seems to be as it should be now. Most everything is put away, I only have about 3 boxes of stuff left that will probably never be unpacked. Eventually I’ll go grocery shopping today so I can stop eating out (which is very expensive).

I like the apartment. Despite its size, it doesn’t feel cramped. That is most likely because the kitchen is open instead of closed which really does open everything up. My bedroom isn’t any bigger than the college apartments I’ve had. I can live with that, although, my desk and computer don’t really fit in it.

I’ll try to get pictures up sometime.

Archangel / September 3, 2008 / Personal / 2 Comments

Signing off…

Obviously not permanently… I’m just a bit sensational.

I’ll be getting everything ready to go over the next couple days and of course I actually move Monday. In the meantime, my online persona will completely disappear until Tuesday when my cable is supposed to be installed since I’ll probably be disconnected my computer and cleaning out my Mom’s office today.

I’ll see you all in a few days.

Archangel / August 30, 2008 / Personal / 0 Comments

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