Sparktoblog!

Blah

Long sickly weekend behind - long hard week ahead. This weekend was decent I guess. I got a lot of rest. I was not feeling too well all weekend and took it pretty chill. I got an alpha smartphone to replace the brick of a phone that I broke. It's got the same functionality, is far more stable and agile, and is about half the size. Over all I'm incredibly impressed with it. On Friday night I ended up just going to bed after grabbing a few drinks with Randy and James to talk about James possibly moving on to a new career.

Saturday was just sleepy - I was not feeling well and had a monster headache so I ended up staying in bed pretty much all day until Brien came to pick me up for our dinner. It was nice to see him, although it still really hurts that we are not together. I'm kind of stuck in a weird situation in that I still have very strong feelings for him, but he seems to be very distant, and does not really want to talk about it. I guess he is under a lot of stress and all, but it's still very difficult for me.

Sunday was a little better. My headache had mostly faded and I went out do lunch with Mikba and Tigerlilly. They told me some excellent news - but more about that later. I spent the afternoon on the couch absorbing radiation from my TV and really pretty much made a wash of the day.

Today has been odd. The first day or two after daylight savings always are for me. I woke up early because of all the sleep I had gotten and was shocked by how light it was outside. After getting ready and heading out the door I was glad that I had left early - the traffic was horrible. Once I did get into work of course our Internet was down, so that made a pretty much useless early start. It was also weird getting out of work and walking to my car in complete darkness. Usualy when it's dark when I leave that means that I'm leaving late enough that traffic is not a problem - not the case today. We had a meeting today at work to talk about how our team was not "acting enough like a team" and that we had better start getting along more. It sucked that I had to be there because most of the problems did not involve me, but at least I think some headway was made in that department.

This is going to be a long week, but I can look forward to going home for the weekend. I'll be going back to Walla Walla to spend some time with my family and friends on Saturday and Sunday, and then should be doing a few business meetings in Walla Walla on Monday. It will be nice to have work covering my gas for once - it gets expensive heading back and forth again and again.

Long week of musings

This week has been long, and filled with a variety of emotions. I'm still getting used to the idea of Brien and I not being a couple, but moving along well with it. It's funny - the old saying "distance makes the heart grow fonder" really applies to this.

Aside from that it has been a decent week. I've been busy at work trying to get a bunch of things sown up. I'm playing the role of account manager and finding it a lot more interesting than being a recruitment consultant was. It's more similar to a program manager with business development responsibilities. It's making it a lot easier to deal with being a recruiter, and has made me realize that I might be best off sticking with this for a while longer than I had planned and trying to get my finances squared away before I start a serious job search. I don't really see myself being in recruitment longer than a couple of years - probably another year tops, but for now at least its manageable.

On a positive note I got a Microsoft bluetooth keyboard set and am loving it. It's not only got a longer range than the RF one that I had before, but it's a lot more responsive. The enhancements to Intellitype and Intellipoint are amazing too - the scroll wheel now supports acceleration, and they keyboard has a few predictive features! Having a bluetooth transceiver is a nice thing anyway - I'm planning on getting a bluetooth headset sometime in the near future, as I end up doing a lot VOIP using MSN messenger, and it would be nice to be able to wander randomly around my condo while carrying on conversations.

Well, off to bed - I have a big day ahead tomorrow. I'm going to be doing dinner with Brien on Saturday night, so that should be lots of fun. Other than that I'm planning on taking it pretty easy this weekend. I might end up going home to Walla Walla next weekend, so I'll have to start planning for that.

Young fools destined to fall in love

This has been a rough week, followed up by an even rougher weekend. Work was hard, and long, and there were a lot of tedious little details that I had to deal with. Brien had been very busy and unavailable, so it was kind of stressing me out that he was not around to talk to, but that I can cope with. On Friday he came over and dropped the bomb on me.

Brien has decided for whatever reason that he does not want to pursue a life with me. He broke off the relationship, gave me a slew of the usual cliches and told me that he "still wants to be my best friend". If nothing else I'm left more confused than anything else. Yeah I'm devastated to have the love of my life walk out on me like that, but confused as to why he would do it. He gave me a couple of excuses that didn't really make any sense but nothing that I can really sit down and process.

Saturday was a long day. I ended up spending most of the day with my friend Ryan and just trying to reset my self, and make sense of everything. Most of Sunday was spent in bed still trying to make sense of the world. I'm not sure where things are going to go from here, but hopefully I'll get a chance to talk to Brien and we can sit down and really figure out what went wrong. It's really hard to see the love of your life walk away from something beautiful and not give so much as a single reasonable word as to why.

I guess from all of this I learned a lesson. I can take comfort in the fact that we are still friends, and figure things out for myself later.

675 miles and 500 photographs later

This has certainly been an exciting week. Last weekend Elliot's birthday party was a blast. The who BMC crowd was there and we drank some drinks, hit some pinata's, and had a merry old time. I got an allergy attack and was not feeling too well so I ended up going home a little early. I got fairly sick last week on Tuesday but other than that had a pretty good week. It was nice to kind of kick back and relax a little bit at work. This week I'm going to have to kick things into overdrive and get moving on a couple of things though.

Come Friday I had the day off and took off for Idaho to do a photography cruise down the St. Joe river with a photo club on my friend Tye's houseboat. It was a fairly uneventful drive over, but fun nevertheless. I had burned 6 new CD's on Thursday and that helped the trip go by fairly quickly. Once I cleared the mountains it was very bright, sunny, and yellow, and that helped my feel quite a bit better. I get some SADS from time to time, so spending a day in a warm car, surrounded by bright yellows and greens really helps. Once I got to Idaho Tye, Tish, Jan, Bill, and myself all got together and went to go have some dinner at a local bar/resturant called Shooters. We all got to share these giant 128oz drinks called 'Sinkers' with massively long straws. After a nice meal we all headed back to the boat to rest up for the day ahead.

Saturday morning we woke up in time to shoot the sunrise and then after a brief pause were off to go in search of great photo opportunities. We cruised down the lake while eating breakfast and headed for the mouth of the St. Joe river. We had a chief of the local Indian tribe along with us to give us information about the area, and we also had John with us, who is a professional photographer who is very well known in the industry for his wildlife work. The weather was somewhat overcast, but that helped bring out the colors even more. I would have preferred a but more light because when wildlife was spotted it was hard to keep the camera steady for the longer exposures while extremely zoomed because of the slow shutter speed.

We stopped mid morning at an adorable little park called Cherry Bend Park where there was some very interesting plants, as well as a great dock and roap swing. Had it been a warmer day I probably would have insisted on stopping to take a quick swim. We then headed on and stopped at St. Marie for lunch and to go shooting in an old train yard. It was filled with lots of cool textures and patterns, and I had a field day. I love the tight shots that are more abstract than anything else - zoo in on some interesting detail and expose it to the world. After a couple of hours we had to head back because some of the people had to be getting back to their homes or headed off to other engagements. On the way back we got some incredible wildlife shots - we saw 2 groups of deer and some raccoons. The second set of deer was amazingly docile and tame and stuck around for a good 3 minutes while we took pictures. I'm usually not drawn to wildlife photography, but I thought it was a very interesting experience to be that close to a large animal with a zoom lens and really be able to shoot it.

Once we got back to the dock to drop people off Tye and I headed back to the Marina to park the houseboat for the night. We wound up driving into Spokane to hit some bars before heading back to the houseboat to crash. I had a classic case of alcohol induced insomnia and did not get to sleep till after 4:00 in the morning. Upon waking at 9:00 the trip back was filled with a tired cranky me. It's a long 4 hour drive, and really pisses me off - but the fun times, and good pictures more than make up for it! Once I got back to Seattle I took care of some errands, then promptly fell asleep and a good 10 hours later was ready for my week!

More drunken madness

This was a long week. It had some frustrating moments, and a couple of really good things happen as well. I'm getting really tired of working as a recruiter, but weeks like this do help. I managed to close three deals, which means that down the road I might have the money I need to get the camera I've been wanting - the Canon 300d. All three of my deals were full time hires so thankfully I won't have to deal with the hassles of contracting for a while.
The first couple of days of the week I was very tired and drained, but making the deals really helped cheer me up. I'm missing Brien because he's out in New York to visit some friends of his and go to a SPF party. I wish I could have gone with him, but I don't have the money for a plane ticket right now. We also had our end of quarter party on Friday and I would have liked to take him with me to it. The work party was a drunken orgy of stupidity at a local sports bar. I had a lot of fun, got really drunk, and ended up coming home at like 10:00 to pass out.
This morning I woke up fairly hung over. After a few phone calls for work to finalize a few things I had a nice leisurely breakfast with my friend Ryan. We walked up to Broadway and he got a WiFi access point so that he could use his laptop at the new place he's staying. I'm really glad that he's fitting in well there and enjoying his new job. Tonight I have to go to my friend Elliot's birthday party. He doesn't know about it yet, and let's hope he does not read my blog in the next 4 hours.
More to come. Please continue to hold and we will be with you in a minute.