stripethree

Last weekend was another trip to the midwest for a wedding in Manhattan, Kansas, and a visit to the Severin farm in Nebraska. Thanks to Frontier airlines, there was also some extreme shopping for formal wear, since our luggage with missing in action when we arrived in Kansas City with no indicators of where it was and when it would arrive. This is also after probably the worst flight I’ve been on, Summer and I both nearly got sick on the Tucson to Denver leg. I did not take any pictures of the wedding, and only a few at the reception; the camera was mostly put to use on the few days spend in The Good Life State.

As I said, we flew into Kansas City and stayed the night there. Summer’s mom and younger sister drove down to join us and ended up running us around to a department store to find something to wear. The next morning we drove to Manhattan for the wedding, and stayed the night there. The next morning we drove to Lincoln where we stayed up flying out of Omaha Wednesday.

Bridesmaids making nice with the Kansas State mascot

The farm looked quite a bit different than last November. Corn!

This is Rocky, who adopted the farm and family, and Monkey’s evil twin.

We visited the zoo where Summer used to work.

The botanical gardens adjacent to the zoo.

We went fishing in a lake near the farm, and didn’t catch much of anything. Summer’s dad caught two small catfish not worth keeping and also snagged some weird kind of turtle.

We also visited the capital building, which is the second tallest in the United States.

All the pics are here.

This time last week was probably about the time that Summer and I were trying to figure out how to get to Omaha. See, we got to Dallas after waking up at 3:30am to catch a flight out of Tucson only to be greeted by the cancellation of our connecting flight to Omaha. The first person we talked to wasn’t all that helpful and we walked away on standby for a 3:30pm-ish flight and booked on a 9:40pm flight. Speaking with another American Airlines person, we found that there was literally zero chance we’d get on the earlier flight. There was enough room for our bags, but not us. We ended up getting on a plane to Chicago (where it was snowing as we landed) and then running through O’Hare to make the connecting flight to Omaha. We got there and our bags did to, just an hour and half later and mine missing a wheel. Then off to Summer’s parent’s house south of Lincoln.

I always through Summer was exaggerating when she said their nearest neighbor was a mile away. She wasn’t, as her parents live on farm land that has been in her family for over 100 years. Her Dad still works the land and because of weather the last few months, he was still out there on a daily basis the first few days after we arrived. Summer, being the Maid of Honor in the wedding we were going to, had to tend to all sorts of things before the wedding, so much of the first two days I hung out with her Mom, her older sister Betsy (both of whom I met when they visited Tucson), and her younger sister Melanie who is currently at UNL. We had lunch, they showed me around Lincoln, we did some stuff around the house to prepare for the Thanksgiving and Christmas we were going to hold, and we traded stories about our families and the very different parts of the country we were from.

Friday night was the rehearsal dinner and I got to meet some of Summer’s old friends including the bride and groom. Saturday was the wedding and reception, the third we have been to in three months, and we stayed in downtown Lincoln overnight. Sunday I met some more of Summer’s family as we did an early Thanksgiving followed by an early Christmas. It was very nice, and actually very new to me, since I’m usually on the other side of things in this respect. I’ve brought guests to my family’s Thanksgiving and Christmas before, but never the other way around until this trip. Her family was very generous and it was a lot of fun, and a LOT of food. We spent a good deal of the night playing bowling on the Nintendo Wii Summer’s parents got us for Christmas.

On Monday, our last full day on the trip, I got a good tour of the Severin farm. Her Dad showed us the last Volkswagen Rabbit he has right now as well as his ‘78 Cadillac Eldorado, which is absolutely huge, sitting in a barn. He talked about how old some of the equipment and what he still uses – two tractors pushing 50 years old and still running! I also got to see somethings from Summer’s childhood like the horse tank they used to use as a swimming pool and the ‘Cabin Cruiser’, which was basically a pickup truck bed turned into a homemade RV that can sleep 5. They used to take road trips as a family and tow it behind the Cadillac, I wish I had a picture of that!

After the farm tour we went into Lincoln and Summer showed me around to the places she’d talked about that she worked at or spent a lot of time at. We strolled through the UNL campus and over to the football stadium where the flag line and band would march into games. We went by her old job at Paint Yourself Silly and got ice cream at Avana Cone.

I forgot to mention the food on this trip and it was a pretty important part, Summer was insistent on getting me to Runza, Valentino’s Pizza, and Amigo’s Tacos as well as the Indian Oven on this trip, and we manged to take care of all of them. We went to lunch on campus with her sisters on Monday and had dinner with friends Monday night and Tuesday afternoon in Omaha before we headed back to the desert.

It was a fun trip and we’ll probably be back next year after a wedding in Manhattan, Kansas which is only a few hours drive away. I’d never seen anything close to that part of the country so it was a bit of a surprise for me.

The Maryland trip went by in a blur of party, wedding, bbq, eat, drink, be merry, etc. The wedding was great, as was the after party. What did you learn? Eastern Europe means business when it comes to vodka. It was great to see family again, even if it was only briefly, and I’m glad they all got to meet Summer. The first month of the new job has gone well also; I’m in the loop for the most part, am keeping busy, and am enjoying pretty much every aspect of the work thus far.

The last quarter of oh eight will probably be pretty busy. There is another wedding next month here in Tucson, and one more in Nebraska in November, when I also will meet Summer’s family and friends. I’m definitely looking forward to it. If all goes according to plan, meaning I’m not lazy, I plan to hit seven more autocross events between now and the end of the year. If I do, that will be twenty this year – no wonder I needed tires. I also want to get cracking on a number of the small car projects that have been sitting around for ages.

This post inspired by a series of recent events ranging from a visit home, attending a friend’s wedding and seeing people I went to elementary school with, random work happenings including another self assessment, as well as a similar entry from a Suspect friend of mine.

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.

Where have I been? All over the place, seriously. Over three of the last four weekends I have taken seven flights to four different cities (if you include the stop over in Atlanta) on four different airlines, attending two weddings and seeing in person what I have looked at in pictures for months. Las Vegas, Detroit, and Smyrna (Tennessee, near Nashville). Wedding in Vegas, visiting people and a car in Detroit, and another wedding in Tennessee. What follows are lessons learned

- The house always wins. I should have quit when I was ahead, but thanks to a dealer nicknamed Mr. Clean and another who was telling mother-in-law jokes, I ended up going home in the red. Not by much, it could have been a lot worse, and I’m hopefully somewhat wiser in the ways of casino Blackjack.
- Planned weddings in Vegas are fun! It certainly helps when you are on a first name basis with the bartender at the open bar within the first hour and when your table at the reception is that table, the one thats just loud and rowdy enough and no one is allowed to not have a drink in hand. It was fun and congratulations to Rebecca and Chuck (I promise, I havent forgotten to send the pictures!)
- Acrobatic maneuvers when intoxicated are not as fun. Stardust 1, my right knee, 0. Still sore from this act of stupidity, I thought I could be slick and hop a 3 or so foot barrier after the above described reception and open bar. Apparently not.
- Coupe Quattros are not for me. Moving onto the Detroit leg of my journey, I learned that as cool and dare I say, new age classic, as they look, a CQ is not a car I’m going to have fun with. A sad realization, but alas, it’s for the better.
- There are parts of 8 Mile Road that are not ghetto as hell. True story.
- Running through Detroit International Airport is not my favorite thing to do
- Tennessee is, well, Tennessee. How are we getting to the wedding? Take a left after you see a Mexican in a cowboy hat on the corner, then a right at the Wedding sign. Awesome. Self serve kegs, and a groom that says “Yes Ma’am” and then gets uppercut by cake courtesy of his new wife. Thats just how they roll.
- Drinking with your girlfriend’s parents can result in massive amounts of hilarity. I was called “one of the kids”, referred to as “Kharissaa’s husba… boyfri… ah, whatever husband”, and was told they only had one daugher left to marry because “awww honey, shes sure smitten with you”. Hahaha. These guys are awesome.
- Best t-shirt of the weekend goes to Kharissa’s father: “I traded my wife for this new gun best deal I ever made.” Awesome.
- Best Western isnt much in Tennessee, but the hot tub in the room was clean and worked and Dominos delivered, that’s all that mattered.

So thats all about the past. I think I;m good on airplane travel for a while. No bad experiences, just had enough of airports, planes, and the shitty rude people that tend to populate them.

The present, well, near present, will include Kharissa changing locations and moving in with me in Columbia. I’m very excited, but still somewhat nervous, mostly because I have not yet lived in sin. I’m sure it will be fine, and I can’t wait until August. Plans for a BBQ at the place are in the works, probably sometime around my birthday when its cooler and weve had time to get the place in order.

The big part is the future, this is not news to a lot of you, but come January, I’m picking up and moving to Arizona with Kharissa. Next August we will be relocating again to California. Again, I am madly excited for this, even though it’s still months off. Maryland, you’ve been good, but its time to try something new. My masters will be nine tenths complete, and the last class can be done online. I am working on the work situation, which hopefully will result in my ability to stay with the same company. Hopefully.

No blog after this long would be complete without a car update. As you may have guessed with the CQ experience, the R is staying, for now. I have not decided what to do once we move across country; driving two cars seems silly, shipping it is expensive, and then theres the inevitable issues of when the time comes to register it in Arizona and probably even more hassle in California. I have to get cracking on some research to see what will fly. So yes, the idea of selling it is not completely out of the question, but the opportunity to keep it and track it at some of the awesome venues SoCal has to offer (Laguna Seca anymore?) might be temptation enough. Theres still two Audi Club events to be had in the area, one at Summit Point in Ocotober and VIR in November. Theres finally a hope for fixing the Celis headlights which I hope to get to this week, and then hopefully I can whittle down the list of projects and pile of parts that I need to either use, put away, or sell off.

Then there’s our fat ass cat who becomes more of an attention whore every day. With the exception of last night when he acted out on being left alone all weekend, and not in a positive way, this guy is awesome. He’s feisty (yeah, well see what happens when he gets that manhood taken away), and playful, and generally entertaining. His acrobatics are awesome; making the name we have bestowed upon him an excellent fit. I am not around him enough on a daily basis to notice, but apparently he seems lonely during the day, enough that the suggestion has been brought of whether to get another kitten to keep him company. This makes me kind of weary because I think hes still young and crazy and should calm down and that effectively doubles the things that need to be taken care of with regards to pets. Sure, its not all that much, but, is it really merited to get another one? I don’t know. We’ve agreed to see how he is once we move in together and are not away on the weekends as much and then see if he will get a little brother or sister. Also in mind is that were going to have to cart these guys across country, spending over 30 hours in a car. Hmmm.

Well, that’s all I got, and its about time to go to class.