Back from the Crescent City

I am home. Sick. Tired. And broke. But, even with the Gators losing, this trip was totally worth every cent. Here is my day by day recap of the trip:

 

Wednesday:

Mint and I left my house a little before 1 pm to drop off his car and then head to BWI. With the time change and everything we ended up landing in New Orleans around 8:50 pm. So, it was a really long day. At the airport we met up with Scott and headed to the W hotel on Poydras St. which is conveniently located right next to Harrah’s casino. The hotel was great, one of the nicest I have ever stayed in and we had a pretty nice view. After dropping our luggage we quickly headed out towards Bourbon St. After all, that’s what you do in New Orleans. As many would expect it was dead on a Wednesday night, there were people in the streets but most bars were pretty empty except for what looked like a convention crowd blowing off steam. After bouncing around for a few hours we decided it was time to hit the casino. Mint and Scott ended up at Caribbean Stud while I played Blackjack one on one with a dealer. By the time I sat down to play I was in that rare combination of drunk and tired where everything felt like a dream. It is entirely possible that I nodded off for a few hands but I still walked away with a few dollars of the casinos money before calling it a night.

 

Thursday:

We woke to overcast skies and lots of rain, the perfect day to just stay in and rest up. Even though we wanted to be out and about we just weren’t willing to walk around all day in the rain. We did make a few stops during the day, hitting the Harrah’s buffet for breakfast and getting a nice lunch at Mother’s. After lunch though, we spent the rest of the afternoon in bed watching TV and listening to the pouring rain outside our window while we waited on the rest of our crew to arrive. The second wave arrived around 6 pm, checked in to their room and settled in. We walked around the casino a bit before heading out to Port o’ Call for dinner. This place had amazing burgers and the look and feel of a place you would only see in New Orleans. It was all wood interior, very cramped and the clientele just oozed with Southern stereotypes, from the older suited gentleman at the corner of the bar to the drunken Cajun who looked like he had been there all week. After eating we headed out down some back streets towards Bourbon for another night out. Again, the architecture of the city was stunning, it is one of those places that just has a feel, a look, that if you were dropped into town blindfolded it wouldn’t take you long to realize where you were. And you don’t even need a landmark to do it, just the looks of the buildings all seems familiar and unique to this city. As the night wore on and our group grew larger, 7 total, we visited many of New Orleans famous bars, spent a couple minutes on a balcony, and drank some of the staple drinks like the Hurricane at Pat O’s. Again, we ended the night at Harrah’s where I won some more of their money before calling it a night.

 

Friday:

I awoke Friday morning to King and Scott discussing the arrival of more of our friends and as I was now awake I volunteered to join the trip. We got coffee and some food from the hotel before heading to the airport to get a second rental car and Shannon. All the while two other friends who had just landed in Baton Rouge decided to drive in for half the day. After meeting back at the hotel our group of now 10 decided to go eat lunch in the French Quarter. We took a long walk on a terribly humid day to the Gumbo Store where we had some of Louisiana’s finest cuisine. Gumbo, Jambalaya, Crawfish etouffee, you name it we tried it. Of course, combining hot sauce with the already stifling heat and forgoing water for beer might not have been the best plan but it did make for a great meal. After eating we headed over to Jackson Square to look at the art for sale and watch the street performers. By this time it was getting on into the afternoon and some of us had dinner plans in Baton Rouge so we had to get a move on. But, we could not leave before stopping at Café Du Monde for beignets. After the beignets, my car with Scott, Shannon and Mint left for BR. We luckily, just beat some nasty traffic and made great time. After arriving at Scott’s brother’s place we were treated to plenty of beer, tilapia and shrimp etouffee over white rice with a broccoli and cheese side. In short it was an amazing dinner, surprisingly cooked by an LSU grad student. Then we went out, which was just like any other bar in any other college town in America I imagine. Though, there were very few cabs in town and lots of drunk drivers, I am not even sure they have enough police to give out all the DUIs we witnessed. Though we did see a pretty entertaining one where the driver was so smashed the cop had to move the kids car off the road. And on that note to end our night we all walked home very carefully, staying as far as possible from the road.

 

Saturday:

Game day!!!! So this is what we made the trip for. Everything leading up to it was just an appetizer, an amazing one no doubt, but just a warm up. Our crew by Saturday had actually swelled to 12, but we were split up, with 4 of us staying at Scott’s brothers and the rest staying at another house. In this scenario where I stayed at sophomore’s apartment and slept on a reclining chair, I got the kind of sleep you would expect. But, I really didn’t need much. Mint and I woke up early, as did Shannon, so we strolled out while everyone else was asleep and got the best breakfast you can find without looking very far, McDonald’s. We also got a laugh out of the drunk drivers car from the night before still being in the same spot. We ate our breakfast and before we knew it we were on our way to the middle of the LSU campus right behind the Gameday set. On our walk wearing our Gator colors we really didn’t run into too many obnoxious fans. We hear Tiger Bait a lot but nothing really cruel until later in the day. Our first stop was at a Fraternity tailgate which was actually pretty impressive, a large tent in the middle of campus with a DJ and a bunch of kegs. This was even more impressive given that in Gville, kegs are not even allowed on campus and the fraternities do all of their pre-gaming in their respective houses. So, for what its worth I found the LSU set up much more enjoyable, obviously there are drawbacks to this but I think there are plenty of positives to having everything out in the open at a central location. Anyway, after spending some time at the tailgate we headed out to meet up with our Gator tailgate at another great location. We had a tent, a couple coolers and plenty of food. During the day, we drank, met friends and enemies, ate, and walked around. It was a beautiful day out and I don’t think any of us, especially those of us with tickets could have asked for anything more.

 

 

The Game:

At night we finally got to take in Tiger Stadium. This place seemed enormous and when they wanted to be the LSU fans could be insanely loud. We had seats very close to the field which were great but also made watching the game a bit difficult. Still, sitting in the Gator section and cheering on our team while they put up quite a performance was an awesome experience. I am now 2-2 on the road in the SEC and hope to continue going to games at new stadiums. But right now I have to say that the LSU experience will be hard to beat. Alabama was great, Tennessee was fun, but LSU was just a monster of a trip. Even with the loss it is not something I will soon forget.

 

Sunday:

 

Another long travel day. We left Baton Rouge early for New Orleans, had our final lunch and headed to the airport. Then I spent the rest of the day sneezing, coughing and blowing my now from one airport to the next and then on the long drive home. A day that started early in Baton Rouge ended very late in Northern Virginia. And now I think I will need at least a week to recover. Thank the scheduler for a bye.

Haven’t done this in a while

A couple of years ago I was working on the road over St. Patrick’s Day, when it also happened to be the opening weekend of March Madness. At the time I was alone in a hotel room watching games and had a lot of things I wanted to write about but nothing longer than a paragraph or two, so I just wrote about all of them in one monster post. Since, I have not been posting very regularly anyway; I figured why not try that again. So here goes. Feel free to skip to something you like.

 

 

On A Somber Note

I didn’t even realize it until I woke up this morning but it is the 6^th anniversary of 9/11. Granted I have taken a pessimistic view on the subject since day one but it has changed the country and it has resonated for some people for a long time. I prefer to listen to Colin Powell on the subject when he says that terrorism is not the biggest threat we face as a nation because acts of terror will not in themselves change the American way of life. Only we can do that, and hopefully we are strong enough to not let outside stimuli force us into giving up the tenets that we live by. Still, I doubt I will ever forget where I was that day, the way I felt and how the rest of that week unfolded. The mood that day in Gainesville is one that I have felt on very few occasions and it will stick with me for a long time.

 

On a lighter note

September is still my favorite month of the year and 1/3 of the way into it September is living up to the hype. After going for months without much activity in the DC area I have spent plenty of time going out, not making it home at the end of the night and just doing my usual drinking partying that comes with football season. Unfortunately, the Gator bar makes it really hard for me to watch games at all; I mostly just sit around drinking and talking to people until I lose my voice. After Labor Day weekend my voice was completely gone, after the Viking game on Sunday it was only half gone, thankfully the NFL is not all that exciting or I would have been done for.

 

Summer, what happened to you?

I don’t mean that in the sense of where did it go, it was definitely here, it was definitely hot and I did get to enjoy parts of it. No, my question is more about how summer has gone from my favorite time of year to my least. My childhood ranking system looked like this:

1. Summer
2. Summer
3. Summer
4. Summer

 

Adult ranking system

1. Fall
2. Spring
3. Winter
4. Summer

 

How the heck did this happen? I have two theories on the subject. The first being that as I grew up a Floridian the only seasons I knew of were Hot, Hotter, Hurricane and rain at 4. The second theory is what I like to call Summer Camp syndrome. To this day I will bump into people who will bust straight into summer camp talk. It happened on Saturday, it happens all the time, and the conversations are always the same, people talk about what camp they attended and what cabins they were in and then begin playing the name game. But, that has nothing to do with my theory, at least not directly, no; Summer time without summer camp is simply hot, rainy and bad TV. But Summer time with summer camp is the outdoors, new friends, lakes and kickball and if you go on to be a camp counselor it also means remote locations and drunken nights. Every June I seriously consider quitting my job to go work at sleep away camp, but every time I realize its not the best idea and decide to suffer through another boring summer with bad TV, bad weather and bad movies.

 

I am a bit of an introvert

I think I have always known that to be true, though I am not sure people who know me understand. So if you care, read this little article that I stumbled upon. I am not as bad as the description it gives but there are some definite similarities. I don’t consider myself anti-social as I do need social interaction as well as time alone but I definitely get that feeling sometimes of being overwhelmed by too much face time. This summer when I spent 5 of 6 weekends out of town either visiting family or working I was constantly with people. When I finally got back to being home for a while all I wanted to do was decompress and spend some time alone. So, I did that until September started.

 

I could keep doing these short things all day but I will stop here

I am going home tomorrow for Rosh Hashana. I have not been back to Florida in six months and I am really looking forward to my trip home. My mom ordered challah and is making homemade chicken soup and brisket and I just can not wait. It has been far too long since she has made me a home cooked meal, so I will forgive her for making me cook as well. I am also really happy that the holiday lines up perfectly with the UF-UT weekend so that my cousin and I can drive up and see our beloved Gators in person. It is sort of becoming a family tradition as we attended the game last year in Knoxville.

 

 

And on that note I am out, maybe I will put up some pictures after the game or something, it has been a long time since I have posted pics. I actually do not think I have put up any pics of myself, maybe I will. I can guarantee that if we barbecue you will see pics of what we eat and probably a bottle of Jim Beam.

It is Finally Back

Nine long months of waiting came to an end last night when the college football season officially began. Thus we are entering my favorite time of year, September, when fall is approaching and Saturdays are all for the Gators. It is the time of year when Orange and Blue are the only colors that really matter, when vacations mean taking a long weekend to a road game or heading back to Gainesville. I have already begun my preparations for tomorrow’s kickoff and have begun looking even further down the road. Flights are booked for Tennessee, rides to the game are being finalized and tickets are being searched for. Emails have actually been circulating for weeks amongst my friends in preparation for the season; we are already planning our tailgate on the first weekend of October. Some of us have flights booked to New Orleans for the UF-LSU game while others like me have made arrangements for Tennessee and FSU, but am waiting on a friend before finalizing my road game.

 

So what does a Saturday look like for me?

 

We have friends visiting DC for the holiday weekend but that hardly changes my weekly gameday routine. I plan on getting up early Saturday morning so hopefully tonight will not be too crazy. I will have my breakfast and drink my coffee out of my blue Gator mug. I actually used to have two mugs, one orange for away games and one blue for home games but the orange one broke. I also used this method at times when deciding on which Gator shirt to go with, but have since changed to going with the HOT shirt, so I will wear the same shirt to every game until we lose, then switch to another one. I am still unsure of which shirt I will be wearing when we kick off tomorrow. I could go with my grey Gator football shirt, that’s what I was wearing in the desert for the National Championship. It will just come down to feel and of course in two weeks when I am in Gainesville I will have to make a stop at the campus bookstore to purchase more gear, maybe a MNC T or a new coffee mug or a sweatshirt, heck I will probably buy one of each. You can never have enough Gator gear. Back to the topic, after I have finished eating I will probably hit the gym, I get too antsy before games and usually like to do something to keep my mind off it. Since the game tomorrow is early, 1230 kick, I will rush home from the gym, shower and throw on the chosen gameday outfit and head out for the Gator bar. Once at Baileys in Ballston I will order the greatest chicken fingers and extra honey mustard ever served followed by numerous buckets of beer. We will eat, drink, the Gators will win and then we will celebrate. Because its an early game most people will head home to relax after and then go out later. If it were a night game or a later start there is a good possibility we all head out in gameday apparel and annoy the rest of DC in our blatant obnoxiousness that comes with being Gators. We are after all the champs at just about everything. So, there you have it, a typical Saturday not spent in the Swamp.

 

Here is what I am looking forward to during my favorite time of year:

 

9-1: Kickoff of the 2007 season enjoyed with great friends

9-8: A relaxing tune up before the SEC season starts.

9-15: My first trip to the Swamp in over a year, tailgates, family and Jim Beam

9-22: No watching, no eating, no drinking, its Yom Kippur and some things are actually more important than football

9-29: Round out the great month watching UF get revenge on Auburn (hopefully)

 

And then one week later we kick off October in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. This fall is going to be great and it all starts tomorrow.

Pack, unpack and repeat

It seems that’s all I have been doing lately. I pack my bags, leave town, return, unpack them and then a few days later I am packing again. Of course, I also get to do laundry in between. At this point, after 6 weeks of this I am really ready to have an extended period of time where I don’t have to pack a suitcase. I doubt that will be possible for more than two weeks though. Anyway, last weekend I drove up to Atlantic City for a good friend, they were having a memorial of sorts for her Grandfather who passed away earlier this year. And since I am such a good friend and I got to spend a lot of time with her grandpa during my trips to Florida I felt like it was the right thing to do. I also had never been to AC, so I had to see what all the fuss was about.

 

I left last Friday around 1pm and arrived close to 5 pm. The drive was not bad but the hotel was an absolute dump. As you would expect of a summer weekend in the Northeast most hotels rooms were booked as people leave the cities for the beach. On Friday night we headed out to dinner and checked out the Casinos with my friend and her sister. The casinos were alright, though a big disappointment compared to Vegas. But, what really compares to Vegas? That is actually a pretty unfair comparison so I will overlook it, both Friday and Saturday night we did manage to have a good time at the places we went and I even won some money. Granted it wasn’t a lot but winning is always a lot better than losing. That and getting absolutely wasted on Saturday night after the memorial service Saturday afternoon. My friend and I basically drank all day, so I was a mess when I finally sat down at the tables around 10 to play; I am a bit shocked that I won at all. And after a long day of drinking that did not end until at least 4 am I decided it would be a good idea to leave AC to head back home at 8 am.

 

I made it back home around noon on Sunday and was able to settle into my house for a few days before having to pack up again. And that is where I sit now, getting ready to leave town tomorrow for Minnesota. I am both looking forward to it and dreading it, which is what happens with the bittersweet times I go to Minnesota.  This time we are going for my Grandmas unveiling, last summer it was for her funeral, before that it was my Grandpas unveiling and before that his funeral. So, on the one hand the occasion is somber but on the other I enjoy seeing my family and spending time with them. After this weekend I hope the next occasion we get together will be for a strictly happy one. I have actually spent this entire week in a bit of a funk because of the prospects of this weekend with this nagging feeling of regret that I never got to know my grandparents well enough. I have found myself looking for books to answer all the questions I never asked about their holocaust experiences that they never volunteered to me. I am sure I could have had 100 years with them and still felt there was more I wanted to know and that is something that the living will always have to harbor about the dead. So, we move on and live our lives, we try to honor their memory and I can not help but feeling that somewhere, somehow they really do watch over us. Unfortunately, all they get to see me doing lately is packing or unpacking my suitcase.

Time is the Master

Tick, tick, cuckoo, tick, beep, tick, tick, tick

 

And then the guitar kicks in. Pink Floyd certainly knew what they were talking about when they wrote this song. Of course, they were probably on LSD and time was not moving at the paces we are used to. But, as I sit here listening to Time and trying to write my first post in a week the words seem appropriate.

 

“You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today”

 

The week since my last post has just flown by me. I worked a hellish day before hopping in my car and driving the four hours or so back to my place in Northern Virginia. I then spent the next two days working from home before leaving town again. After working through a weekend and spending two out of ten or so nights in my own bed I became totally disoriented. Making matters even worse was my not so successful apartment hunting over the weekend in Manhattan. It was probably a bad idea to wait until the last minute to find a place during the busiest time of year in the busiest real estate market in the country. This has made my previous second guessings even harder to ignore.

 

“And then one day you find ten years have got behind”

 

Sometimes it seems that I am just coasting in neutral through my own life. Days fly by and nothing significant seems to happen. I know I am not the only one who wonders why there doesn’t seem to be more than this. But, I really want to know what I can do about it. Since, we can’t stop time; we must be able to at the very least control how we spend it. And that is where I find myself a bit blocked on what to do with myself next. Sure, I keep myself entertained easily, I read a lot and play video games and watch TV and ultimately enjoy my life but whenever I get to thinking about a song like this one I feel that my pursuits are balanced too heavily toward the frivolous and less towards the important. Now, I just need to find some worthwhile pursuits to pair with my many less important ones so that I won’t look back on any of this with regret.

 

“Every year is getting shorter; never seem to find the time”

I left town and forgot to pack myself

After a crazy day on Thursday where I had to finish a task for work, get a root canal and visit my doctor I packed and headed out of town. Not for anything fun, no, I left town for more work. So, here I am in my hotel room in Newport News, VA getting ready to pack up again and head back home. I really don’t want to pack right now; I didn’t want to pack when I left either, so I did that in a hurry and forgot a ton of things. One of those thing being my normal everyday self. I have not eaten the way I normally do, I have not been functioning the way I normally do, I am just totally off my game here. At night I have found myself driving around aimlessly in hopes of finding something to do only to return to my hotel room and lie in bed reading. Now, the reading thing is not so bad, I have three books with me that are enjoyable. But, when I go two days without so much as turning on a TV I get a little concerned. I have still been working out on this archaic gym equipment that makes me laugh while I am doing my workout, plus this tiny little gym is just full of mirrors, too many mirrors. I like looking at myself when I workout as much as the next guy but it’s a bit much. Plus, the only non mirrored surface of the room is an open view straight to the pool, so people enjoying their weekends, having drinks and going for swim get to watch me sweating my ass off and making funny faces. And even that isn’t really all that bad, but this whole trip has just thrown me off a bit. I am forgetting what day it is, what time it is, being down here these 4 days is just one big blur. Thankfully, there is just one more to go before I can go back home, unfortunately I think I am going out of town again next week, for fun at least but still. When will I ever get back on a routine?

 

 

If anyone has made it this far, wow was that a rant. I am not even sure if it makes sense or it just comes off as crazy man gibberish. As I wrote that last sentence above about craving a routine I remembered a post I wrote back in the early days of my blogging about how much I hate my routine. I believe I called it a prison. And now here I am lamenting that my routine is all out of whack. I wonder if that means I have changed or if I just need a bit more of a balance between the routine and the random? After all isn’t life about balance, moderation, nothing in excess? I’d like to think so and on that note my crazy man rant is done.

Upstarts in a Blowout

Have you ever woken up and just known it was gonna be a bad day? That is exactly how my day went last Thursday. Wednesday night I was supposed to go down to Virginia beach but everyone cancelled so instead I spent the night in my hotel room watching movies and resting up for another day of work. Everyone apparently had decided that Thursday night would be a better night to go to the beach, I did not agree and went to bed with my mind made up not to go the next day. When I awoke the next morning I went to the hotel coffee maker like I had every other morning but this morning I found that no coffee was there to make. Anyone who knows me also knows that I do not handle the lack of coffee very well. Still, I pressed on, began getting ready for work and picked up coffee on my way in to work. But, before I could get too far into my day I realized my sunglasses had gone missing, this time it seems they have been lost for good. With two mishaps so early in the morning I knew there was something left on the horizon but still I had a job to do and I could not let a few setbacks ruin an entire day. When I got to work everything went as usual, I bantered with clients, talked with co-workers, solved a few problems and let everyone know I would not be joining them on their trip to the beach. However, as the day wore on so did my resolve and eventually somehow not only did I get wrangled into going to the beach, I was driving.

 

In anticipation of driving to the beach we all made sure to get off post as fast as possible and by about 4:30 we were all ready to go. My car was full of beach things, one coworker was lying down in the backseat, and another was in the passenger seat resting her eyes. Everything seemed fine and then 2 miles from my hotel I decided to change lanes, a harmless act that I have done countless times. But, this time was not the usual. I hit some debris in the road and immediately heard my left front tire go boom. I instantly knew that Anya had just lost a tire but I was not going to do any more damage and quickly got the car to the side of the road. Of course I was upset but I had to get my car off the small shoulder of the highway. Thankfully, a VDOT truck came up within minutes and offered to change the tire for me as this particular stretch of highway was very unsafe. There had apparently been 5 deaths recently changing tires and I did not want to be number 6. After the donut was on and the car was ready to roll, we got back on the road and returned to the hotel where I took about 20 minutes to collect myself and decide whether or not to take care of the tire or head out to the beach. I called my mom, cracked open a beer, then another beer, then hopped in a car and headed to the beach. All in all, we lost an hour of sunlight, but we did make it and we had a great time.

Travelling, testing, and that summer camp feeling

I promised to write more but work always seems to get in the way of doing just that. I’d much rather it be the other way around but I’ve got bills to pay so I think for now this is the way its going to stay. My project is actually extremely chaotic right now, most of us have been working long hours or straight through weekends. I am looking at two weeks straight as of this coming Friday. But, right now it is not bothering me so much. Mainly because where I am feels so much like summer camp.

Summer camp, you say, how can work feel like summer camp? Well, for starters myself and about a dozen other team members have all checked into the same hotel near our client site. At night we go to meals together, we drink together, and in the morning we all meet up for breakfast together before carpooling into work. Work that just so happens to be located on an army base. Now most people wouldn’t equate an army base with summer camp but I spent most of my summers at a camp that was previously a military base. So, when I get on Post I get the feel of that camp. From the style of the buildings to the look and feel of the grounds it is all very familiar and welcoming. And thankfully we are only here for a few more days.

Over the next fews days my coworkers and I will be testing our system in hopes of having it ready to go live next month. Work, of course, is not all we will be doing. We already have trips planned to Virginia Beach and Williamsburg. Field trips? See this really is more like summer camp than work, right down to the very summer-like weather. And possibly the best part of this little trip is that when we return to our local office it is 4th of July week and no one will be in the office anyway. July is already shaping up to be a good month.