The Michi & Lilou set started with an attempt to bring out the killer instinct in Andrea’s cats with some goldfish in the bathtub. Turns out the kids are scared of an inch of water. There’s also a few nicely composed pics of Llama and some shots of the snow (yes, snow!) the house saw weekend before last.

Michi and Lilou	Monki and Llama	Arizona

I got a three bedroom, one and a half bath house in the north/central part of the city; actually a bit southeast of where I am now. It’s pretty nice, the third bedroom is small and will make a perfect office so I can stop killing my back sitting on the futon or the dining room chairs while I work. There’s a nice backyard also and while I probably won’t do much with it, it’s nice to have. I can do nothing more than have a space for the grill and be perfectly happy with it. The place also has carports, enough for two cars actually, and plenty of room to wash ‘em up. The inside is nice as well, it’s all one floor, the layout is nice, and there’s plenty of space. What else can I say? I’m stoked and can’t wait for mid-November.

My point is, I was a little amused that this is what qualifies as front page news for a major Tucson newspaper. The article doesn’t say anything about the privacy (or lack of) concerns that people have had about Streetview, which maybe would have merited the article being on the front page. There are plenty of comments on the subject from readers of the online article. Really, it just seems that the paper had nothing else to print besides, ‘oh look were on the Google maps!’ on its front page.

Interesting, yes. Front page news? C’mon, are you serious?

On Wednesday Mom, Dad, and I drove up to Sedona for the day. After grabbing lunch at a small, local deli (which was really good), we drove around the area and took lots of pictures. We went and saw the Chapel of the Holy Cross, which is a church built into the side of one of the red rocks.

We walked through ‘downtown’, did some window shopping, and took a bunch of pictures. We saw a lot more of the area then when I’d been there before. The sunset was awesome and we got dinner at another local place, again, it was very good.

Thursday we headed up to the south rim of the Grand Canyon and since we got there earlier than check in, headed right into the National Park. The first couple hours of our amazement were dampened (no pun intended) by the rain, but eventually it cleared up.

We drove down one of the rim-side roads and stopped at a bunch of of the viewpoints, walked around, and again took tons of pictures. There’s no way to fully describe the vastness and enormity of the canyon, even looking at the pictures I took still don’t represent it well enough. It really is unbelievable. We could drive maybe a mile or two, stop at another view point, and there was a completely unique view of the canyon. We drove 25 miles out to Desert View Watchtower, the highest point on the south rim.

On our way out of the park, we stopped with a bunch of other people because there was a heard of elk eating by the side of the road. I got a bunch of picture of them (on the real camera, they are coming…) from way up close, 20 feet away give or take. It was oddly comfortable how they just ignored everyone near them taking pictures; they are probably used to the people but at the same time, they are big animals, and who knows what they’d do if they got pissed. We made sure to stay far away from the calf, and definitely get no where near in between it and it’s mother. There were no males around, but my Dad went back later on and saw a couple and said he got some good pictures.

Friday morning we hiked Bright Angel trail down into the canyon. It was a moderately difficult trail and we hiked about a mile and a half before we decided we would be wise to head back.

A mile and a half doesn’t sound like much, but the elevation change is unimaginable, and hiking back up was definitely a challenge.

After that we had lunch and took a shuttle to some of the other viewpoints on the other side of the south rim, including Hopi Point, which is the highest natural point on the south rim (only the Desert View Watchtower is taller, as far as I know/remember) and the best place to see the Colorado River snaking through the canyon.

All in all, it was impressive and awe inspiring. It weird to know that there is no where else in the world I can or will ever see anything like that, and apparently the north rim is even more spectacular. Maybe next time.

I am definitely going to move again in November but just somewhere else in Tucson (sorry Maryland folks if I got your hopes up…). This place is nice, but I keep seeing 2 bedroom townhouses in the area for about the same rent. This equals a real ‘office’ for work, perhaps a car port with some room to get small car things done, and generally, a more comfortable place to live. Plus, I’m absolutely fed up with the construction across the street. Every weekday morning at around 6:00am, sometimes earlier, the ridiculous amount of noise starts. If it’s not the actual construction noise, it’s the music the workers are playing loud enough to hear across the street. Seriously. I want to go annoy the hell out of them at an inconvient hour everyday for a few months straight. Trucks are constantly parked or moving slowly across the stretch of road in spanning the two entrances to the complex and the road itself is just tore up. Knowing that this construction would continue through the entire time I’d be here through a year’s lease just doesn’t make me very fond of living here. So come November, a change of dwellings for the third time this year. This also leads to a tentative goal for ’08: no relocating, enough is enough!

Llama is in the midst of perfecting the habit of stealing bottle caps; Nantucket Nectars juice bottles, Powerades, whatever he can get his little paws on that I leave sitting unattended on an end table. He’s actually become quite good at it, grabbing them when I’m not looking and scurrying off to hide them somewhere. If I don’t notice and immediately give chase, he just parades around the place with his prize in his mouth, basking in the success of his thievery. Sometimes he even climbs onto the coffee table and stares at me, flaunting his conquest, until I appear to try and get the object back at which point he scampers off with it. It pretty entertaining, as long as he doesn’t get in the habit of stealing or destroying anything of any value, like, oh, say, a pair of iPod headphones (yeaaaaaaaaah… my own fault for leaving them out).

Myself, Summer, and what appeared to be half of Tucson went to the Beer Festival last weekend, which was fantastic. Pay your $40, get a 6oz plastic cup, and off you go. Roam from tent to tent filling said cup to your hearts content with beer and the occasional, quite delicious, twisted iced tea with lemonade. There was also tons of food that we sampled from the generic stadium hot dogs to various pies, appetizer samplers from BJ’s, pizza, surprisingly spicy seafood salsa, overly salted sirloin steak and… I honestly don’t remember what else. Definitely worth the price of admission, I know that Summer, myself, and each of the friends we went with downed enough beer to well surpass $40 at any nearby bar. Next weekend: Oktoberfest!

Lastly, is that the last quarter of this year is going to be filled with travel, travel, travel! My parents get into town this weekend and we will be going to Sedona and the Grand Canyon at the end of next week, it should be a lot of fun. It’s been fun just to gather recommendations up for things for them to see or do around here. Then next month I’m making the trip to California I alluded to earlier in this post, to pack up my stuff and get it back to Tucson. November and December I’ll be back in Maryland for the holidays, the 21-28 and 23-28 respectively. I’ve always been the one picking up people at the airports on horrible holiday travel days but this time, this time I get to see how bad it will be all for myself! It sucks that I am traveling the day before each holiday, but plane tickets aren’t cheap (especially three roundtrips) so the dates were dictated as much by cost as they were by convenience.

I woke up this morning in a really weird, mixed mood.

What is next?

Upon reading Maribeth’s thoughts, a scene from Fight Club came to mind, no doubt because I happened to catch some of it on TV the previous week. Brad Pitt’s character talks about his relationship with his father and how his life basically took a set direction. Go to college. Ok, now what? Get a job. Ok, now what? Get married. Ok, now what? And so forth and so on. Then I turned around and found myself at an “Ok, now what?” point myself with no one to turn around and ask. I’ll admit, while I work hard, I’ve been pretty lucky and had good guidance on things to this point. Go back to high school, the wonderous magnet program and falling backwards into Computer Science as a field. Maryland was a natural choice, mom went there, I had friends going, the Comp Sci program was great (although hellish). End up at an intership with Booz Allen through a chance reply to a bulletin I got emailed through the career center arm of CMPS. Graduate Maryland, job is waiting based on the internship experience at the same company. Still have an itch for school for some reason and seeing coworkers experience would lead me to want to do it sooner rather than later. JHU has a good program, no worries about the GRE or a thesis and I was accepted. Seemed like a logical thing to do and I don’t say that to undermine any motivation I had, it was there, even though the program itself did a bang up job of trying to stifle it. I even fell backwards into moving out of Maryland, something I’d always wanted to do, just never felt I had a chance or real reason to other than for the sake of it. So, I’m out of Maryland, done with grad school, doing well at my job with a highly respected company and somewhere on my way to one of those ‘career’ things, and that’s where it gets murky.

I think it started to hit when I had to fill in some career goals for my annual self-assessment. Previously, I wanted to get promoted (did so last year), finish my grad school degree, and some other miscellaneous self-improvement items I managed to address. This year, I found myself drawing a blank. A big blank. I found myself staring at that ‘career’ word thinking, “I’m not even 25, is this for real?” My ‘career’ is just learning how to walk and I doubt its ready to start planning its adolescence. Then there’s the trip home. Questions about how long I might stay in Tucson that I did not have answers to. Questions about whether I might come back to Maryland sometime or where else I might go, again, which I had no answers to. Granted the questions were natural, but for someone who tends to always have plans, not having any answers was slightly disconcerting. I was home to attend the wedding of a friend of mine, Joanna, who I have known since second grade. There’s at least two more to attend this year and probably more to come before the end of the decade. That as a next step for me is out of the question now, but it makes you think. It makes you wonder. Then I read Maribeth’s thoughts and I had to breathe some relief in the knowledge that I’m not alone. I also had to write her back and tell her she wasn’t alone.

A big part of me wants to just kind of go with the flow and see what happens in many respects of life. The problem I have with that is two fold. One, that’s pretty much what I have been doing and while it’s done me well, this is pretty much where it ends. There is no natural, logical next step, I have to make this shit up now. Second, I don’t want to get stuck, caught in the Office Space of life and waking up one morning and realize things I should have done years ago when I had the chance. The problem with the alternative of going with the flow is, well, the ‘now what’? I know some of the things I don’t want to do but that doesn’t narrow the field nearly enough. Do I want to stick around this area for a while or do I want to jump around to other parts of the country while I can? Does it go beyond that? While I’m not unhappy by any means, I still feel that uneasiness of searching for what on the green earth is going to make and keep me happy in the long term. In the long term… now I do sound like a consultant. I’ve learned, well, been forced to learn, that making precious plans should be taken lighter than I take them, since they have a tendency to crumble beyond my control. There’s always been some sort of plan, some goals to reach, things to strive for, but now I sit with a blank piece of paper where they used to sit and I have no idea what to fill it with.

It might be the best thing to ever happen to me, it might not. It certainly is one of the most intimidating.

- Visit to Maryland was fantastic, can’t say enough about friends and family and how great they are. Margaritas reign supreme, so do slow Mk3s. I could go on for pages and pages.
- Moved to Tucson and so far it’s great. The new place is nice, I met some cool VW (and non VW) people, found a great shop 2 miles away for those car things I can’t do, and there’s plenty of autox. Will probably go broke furnishing this place, but such is life, I’m enjoying living alone thus far. The cats are cool as well, finding ways to get on top of and into the cabinets. And it’s hella warm. =)
- One more homework assignment and one more ‘exam’ (10 question multiple choice finals rock) from being done with my grad degree. It will all be over by the first weekend in May and I am psyched.

That’s all I got right now, too many things to do!

Yesterday I went and looked at a handful of places in Tucson that I researched online and liked. Three of the four met expectations, the fourth was not bad, but it just wasn’t as good as the others. I put in an application at the last place I visited, a smaller, quiet complex a couple miles outside the real ‘city’. I still have no idea if I want to stay in this area, but I figure, it’s a $30 fee to get approved for a place and I’ve got until almost mid-April to let them know since they have a couple places available. I’ve got to start the process somewhere, and I figured even if I don’t end up there, this place was a good start. The other two nice places I liked as well, but one doesn’t have anything available that fits what I want and and other, while nice, just didn’t have some of the minor details that the place I applied to does.

I previously put my name in the hat for a position with my company in Seaside, near Monterrey, California, but it didn’t work out. It was nice to find out that the folks out there were impressed with what I had to offer and want to keep me in mind for other opportunities out there; just this time around some things that have nothing to do with me didn’t work out with the planned work. A little disappointing, but that’s the way it goes. There are a couple other things I want to look out, still within the company of course, in San Diego and Fairfield. Maybe, maybe not. I figure if I am going someplace new, it might not be a bad thing to get back into an office environment and at least met some people implicitly through work. As I expected, I keep getting encouragement to come back to Maryland, and I have mixed feelings about it. Sure it would be familiar, it would be easier (minus actually making that insane drive again) and would probably be more comfortable, but I don’t want to go back there, get stuck there, and be unhappy with it. Granted, I could end up unhappy if I go somewhere else than Maryland, but at least then I tried somewhere else, and I can always pick up and go somewhere else.

It’s great to have this decision and be able to pick up and go, but it’s also extremely difficult decision to actually make.

Oh, and check out the completely redone Gallery. it’s not 100% complete but I want to show it off anyway.