Another month has rolled by in a time of COVID-19. It was a fast month. Not really much has happened to or changed. Neither myself or Nicole have come down with any illness nor are we aware of anyone close to us catching the Coronavirus. We remain in our apartment almost all the time but with our supply of masks we've really begun getting out there ( Read more... )

At the beginning of August, Nicole and I took a one-week fifteen-hundred-mile road trip around Washington, Montana, Idaho, and eastern Oregon. My workplace had a one-week shutdown so we spent the whole time visiting friends and rolling around the Northwest. Right off the bat, we visited Nicole's best friend who recently moved to Montana. It was a ( Read more... )

Rhythm games have been around for decades but over the last ten years, the peripheral-based guitar simulators like Rock Band and Guitar Hero have rules the streets and been quite a time-sink for my friends and family. I remember countless tunes being strung out when I first got to play the very first Guitar Hero way back in 2005. Since then, the ( Read more... )

Nicole and I are about a week and a half into our two-week-and-three-day odyssey of dog sitting for Nicole's best friend. It's been exhausting. In my last entry, I talked about how having the dog here at our tiny apartment was grating on our nerves and that was only two days in. In the nights following, we couldn't get any sleep because the dog ( Read more... )

All of last week, Nicole and I were in central California staying with her parents. This was my first opportunity to meet them and once I got all the nervous anxiety out of the way, the trip was actually really nice. It was the kind of short sweet vacation I needed. The added bonus of Nicole's immediate family and friends being fun and engaging was ( Read more... )

I'm back from my short four-day mini-vacation to visit Jaci in Sioux Falls, South Dakota! It was a fantastic opportunity to get away from Portland and my normal life to simply recharge my batteries. We'd been looking forward to it for months and it feels strange that it's already come and gone and all that traveling was over in the blink of an eye ( Read more... )

The person who trained me on the machines I certified on a few weeks ago has become, I think, a frenemy. Maybe I move too slow for her or maybe she's still sore about that minor tiny accidental almost accident I had four weeks ago. Whatever the deal is, the bottom line is that she never talks to me. We're supposed to be a tight group who ( Read more... )

For anyone who missed it in my last entry, here again is a link to the short film I made as a Christmas present for my brother: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ianz0puWRR0So it's the end of twenty-ten and the beginning of twenty-eleven which means I need to do another one of these increasingly self-reflective and somewhat tedious year-in-review ( Read more... )

Last Thursday to Saturday was my third week at Maxim, and one of my short weeks as the Wednesday shift alternates every other week. It was my best week so far. Thankfully, most of our machines were finally working again and we were able to get to work. The backlog of work from my second week when those machines were down kept piling up but during ( Read more... )

Jaci's been in South Dakota for about four weeks now. From what I hear, it's been quite a harrowing adventure. To sum up, it sounds as if her sacrifice of giving up her job, house and friends in Boise is going unappreciated by her family even though it was their idea to have her move home to the midwest. It seems Jaci has become some kind of nanny ( Read more... )