Dilligas.com HomeMarch 8, 2009 - Pictures are down My hosting company, in their infinite wisdom, decided to take down my picture galleries last week "because they used too many resources".
While I work on that and try to figure out what the heck they meant, the long and short of it is that my pictures don't work. Sorry about that.
January 29, 2009 - 2008 retrospective
It's my once-a-year post! Instead of a lame cop-out like I did last year though, I think I'll actually talk about the year that's just passed, mostly because it was quite the doozy. My memory is far from perfect, but I hope to at least hit the big events, in roughly chronological order. Be warned, it's long, and the first two-thirds might be kind of boring. I ask that at the very least, you skip to the big break and read everything below that. That last big section is important.
Here we go:
For the winter of 07-08, some friends and I got together and decided that we should learn to snowboard. So we got season passes up to Snoqualmie, reserved season rentals, took some lessons, and spent the rest of the winter weekends scraping our way down the hills very slowly and cursing profusely. By the end of the season (which wasn't until May!) our swearing had subsided a little bit, and we were moving a little faster and a little more gracefully on our boards. I prefer skiing, but that's mostly because I'm better at it. Snowboarding was certainly fun, and something that I'll gladly do again in the future.
In February, a couple of us from the old ISU Scuba Club went on a ski trip out to Winter Park in Colorado. Myself, Kristi, and Megan were the Scuba Club folks, and we were joined by Kristi's friend Jeremiah. We had a blast skiing all over the place for four straight days, although I did have an incident that finally convinced me to buy a helmet. Skiing through the trees at the end of the day, I tried to turn right... Unfortunately my left ski turned, my right ski didn't, and I plowed right into a tree. No serious damage done, but since I can definitely see myself doing that again, I figured that grabbing a helmet would be the prudent thing to do.
Also in February, I went back out to Iowa State to help represent Microsoft at their career fair. This is something that I've done before, and I always enjoy it. It's fun to talk with everyone, and it's especially interesting to delve into their motivation for looking for a job with Microsoft. I took some time out to meet one-on-one with some grad students studying under my favorite senior-year prof, and those were especially interesting. The biggest downside of the trip was the minus-35 wind chill. That reminded me of why I don't miss the midwest, but at least my rental car had remote start and heated seats.
Sometime in March, I took a bad spill on that snowboard that I mentioned earlier. I can't pinpoint exactly when it happened, but there was one day of boarding that was particularly rough for me. A couple days after that, I noticed that my entire left leg, from the top of my thigh to the bottom of my calf, was a giant bruise. After a little bit of freaking out and a quickly-scheduled doctor's appointment, we figured that I had torn my hamstring. So I got to experience the joys of physical therapy, ultrasound massage, and electric stim, all focused on an area that basically counts as my ass. Weird sensations for sure, but after about six weeks of that, I was good as new and was able to get back on the board for the last few weeks of the season.
While this physical therapy was going on, since I wasn't allowed to be boarding anyway, I got Lasik surgery! The preliminary appointments were very easy and everyone was very nice. The actual procedure was a little strange, and it's not for the easily spooked. Having your vision just kind of slowly vanish along with a feeling of inconsistent pressure on your eyeball, all while you're laying underneath a huge machine equipped with multiple tissue-burning lasers, surrounded by four people, and knowing that you're one of about twenty people in an assembly line for that day... Well, that's a weird experience. But the procedure was good, the results are spectacular, and I can see again! Not having to lug around glasses or fiddle with contacts is amazing. I can't recommend the procedure enough. If you've ever even thought about having it done, you should definitely pursue it. It may very well be the best decision I've ever made.
The March-April timeframe was busy for me. Another thing that I did during that time was take a bartending class, on a whim and alongside Jill and Pat. So I'm now a licensed bartender in the state of Washington. Everyone who hears that says "great, so you can make me a (whatever their favorite drink is)!" Well, unfortunately, I probably can't. See, they don't actually teach you the drink recipes in the class; the thought is that you'll either learn them on the job or you can read a book on your own time and memorize them. The class is more focused on techniques (how to pour shots, shake drinks, etc), "social management" (dealing with drunk people), and regulations. That makes it sound really boring, but it was quite a lot of fun, actually.
During that same busy timeframe, the relationship that I'd been having during the previous few months with Amy ended. I wouldn't say it ended well, but I wouldn't say it ended horribly, either. It had been awhile since I'd dated anyone, and we had a lot of fun. I find it difficult to summarize beyond that, so I don't think I'll try.
Fast forward a month or two, when suddenly things started getting crazy again. My second-biggest news of the past year is that in May, I switched jobs! I still work for Microsoft, but I moved from the Dynamics business (large, enterprise-scale business software) over to Xbox. I'm part of Xbox Live Primetime now, and I switched from being a developer to being a tester. The new group is a much better fit to my interests and my general disposition. The people are generally younger and more similar to me in terms of hobbies and personality. There was quite a learning curve for a little while, and it's still very challenging. It's been a fantastic move for me though, and I'm very happy that I took the opportunity.
I also managed to make it out to Iowa to attend Kristi's wedding. It was a fun trip, and I got to spend a couple extra days with Emily in Omaha, hanging out, going to the zoo, and shopping for all the things I forgot to pack. The only problem is that this was happening right alongside the epic flooding of last summer. Cedar Rapids, where the wedding was, was particularly hard-hit. The weather didn't affect the actual ceremony, but it kept lots of people from being there and caused lots of other headaches for folks as well. Fortunately for them, Kristi, her new husband, and both their families escaped from the weather relatively unharmed.
Forward again, this time to July. My dad managed to grab some time off of work and fly out to Seattle for the now-annual tradition of taking a big backpacking trip into the mountains. We spent a day or two in preparation, then packed our bags (and Shadow's pack) and headed up. Last year we got rained out and had to cut the trip short; fortunately, this year our luck with the weather was much better. But of course, every upside comes with a downside; in this case, it was the windstorm and massive rain that the area had been hit by a few weeks before. The road to our trailhead was blocked by a huge avalanche, a dozen or more downed trees, and a few large sections of washed-out road. That added about three very steep miles each way to our already ambitious hike. So we didn't get to go as far back in the woods as we would have liked, but we spent a couple good days up by an alpine lake and never saw another person. It was fantastic.
Remember how I mentioned that my job switch was the second-biggest news of the year? That was pretty major, but I have something that can top that. On July 12th, I closed on and moved into my house! I spent a couple months learning about the various nearby areas, determining what I could afford, and looking around at houses. It's an overwhelming experience for a first-time buyer like myself. I looked at over two dozen houses in person and way more than that online. By the end, I felt like I had a pretty good idea of what I liked and what I didn't, and at least some vague knowledge of what I wanted. I wanted to get away from the idea of the cookie-cutter suburban neighborhood where each house has the same lawn, the same perfectly trimmed trees, and one of the three available ridiculously-named floorplans. I chose an area of Woodinville that's a little older, and has custom-built houses and lots of old, large trees. It's got a very Northwest feel to it, which I like a lot. My actual house is pretty large, with four bedrooms, 2.75 bathrooms, and a fully fenced back yard for Shadow. I've got one roommate and I'm actively looking for a second one. I really enjoy the place; it's fun to be able to do things to the house, and living with people again has been good for me as well. Packing, moving and unpacking were less pleasant, but with any luck, I won't be doing that again for quite a long time.
Just a few weeks after the craziness of moving in to my new place, our family cruise happened. For their anniversary, my grandparents decided that they would like to bring the family with them on a week-long cruise to Alaska in the summertime. In the end, there were twenty-two of us on this cruise, which left from Seattle and made several port stops up in the southern part of Alaska. It was awesome to see many of the family members for the first time in eight years, and the cruise itself and the shore excursions were a blast as well. It was my first cruise, and I went in not knowing exactly what to expect. The cruise was a very interesting experience; it's half Disneyland, half country club. It was very, very nice, and I can definitely see why people like taking cruises. I think that I personally prefer vacations that are a little more "do-it-yourself" and a little less "cater to your every whim". But the net result of the trip was a ton of fun, some phenomenal pictures of some very gorgeous parts of Alaska, and...
Because the cruise left from Seattle, it gave my parents a convenient excuse to stay in town an extra week or so after we got back and check out my house. We spent several days hanging around town, showing off the house, and tracking down some of the new essentials for it. As always, it was good to hang out with the folks for awhile. And as an added bonus, they were in town during some of the best weather we'd had all summer.
Then Labor Day weekend came around, and it was time for PAX again. I repeated last year's duties as an Enforcer, and worked about 50 hours in three days helping the attendees have a good time. And this year, I recruited Drew to work alongside me. PAX is very difficult to summarize, and the Enforcers are even more so. It's a very unique convention, and an awesome group of people. After this year, I think I understood why some of the Enforcers were such a tightly-knit group, and I made some new friends among their ranks as well. PAX is among my very favorite things each year, and I'm very glad that I'm able to continue working with it.
One last fast-forward, this time to December. I was lucky enough to be selected to volunteer at the Child's Play dinner, which is a fundraiser put on by the charity arm of Penny Arcade. This was a new experience for me, as I'm not the kind of guy who regularly goes to swanky dinners and socializes with people in tuxedos. As with all things Penny Arcade-related, it ended up being a huge amount of fun, and something that I'm very glad I was involved with.
And lastly, the big year-end event was affectionately referred to in Seattle as Snowpocalypse. This is a region that shuts down when it gets an inch of snow, which generally happens once a year or so. So imagine the reaction when the city got about a foot of snow, along with a new inch or so every day. Streets were blocked off, businesses shut down, schools were closed... At one point a couple buses even slid down some icy streets and nearly fell onto the freeway. All things considered, it wasn't a catastrophe, as there were very few deaths or injuries for the magnitude of the storm. But it sure made things messy, especially up in my little corner of Woodinville. At one point, I measured 19 inches of snow on the ground, and that wasn't even the peak of it. I was snowed in for a total of seven days, although they weren't continuous. I was even forced to shovel part of my roof. If you believe all the locals, this was a once-in-a-hundred-years event. Crazy.
Busy year, am I right? And while the biggest news of the year was the house, and the second-biggest news of the year was the job, I'm afraid that neither of those was the most interesting. The most interesting is something that I'm a little reluctant to discuss, as I tend to stick to myself and be pretty reserved and private about some things, so this is weird for me. Some of you might think less of me for posting this, but I don't really care. Hopefully the majority of you will realize that this is difficult for me to write about, and respect that I'm sharing it.
The most interesting thing about this last year is that it's the year where I started to get over my depression.
Yeah, I thought depression was an excuse too. I thought it was one of those overdiagnosed quote-unquote-"conditions" that didn't have a basis in reality. Maybe it's still used that way, or maybe that's exactly what it is and I'm just weak or something. But in any event, it's been quite a journey the last couple years navigating through this. Probably compounded by the part where I never really told anyone about it; that goes back to that whole sticking-to-myself thing.
The background for me goes something like this: In November of 2006, I went to see my doctor because I was tired all the time. Not in the way that you're tired when you need an extra hour of sleep; more like when getting off the couch and cooking yourself dinner is an impossibly large amount of effort. More like when you spend hours just sitting there, zoning out, because you can't summon the energy to do anything at all. More like when you can't concentrate for five minutes on an important job-related conversation because it's too much mental work. You get the idea; hopefully the point gets through here that this was not just normal tiredness. This was seriously impairing me at work, at home, and everywhere else, and it had been happening for quite awhile now. The doctor said there are three possibilities here, and all of them are equally likely. One, there's nothing wrong, or we'll never find out what it is. Two, there's something physically wrong with you. Or three, you've got depression in the chemical-imbalance sense of the word.
We did blood tests, sleep tests, a physical, and all manner of things to try and find something physically wrong. No luck. This may be the only time in my life when it was unfortunate to get test results back that indicate there's nothing wrong.
So I was recommended to a therapist. Sorry, "counselor" is the right term these days. Boy, did I feel ridiculous. Here's a guy who, when you look at the whole of it, has pretty much everything going for him. I had a good job in my chosen field of study; I had good living arrangements that I had chosen. I had friends, I had family, I had Shadow. Nothing traumatic had happened recently. So here I marched into the therapist, whose office should be reserved for people with *actual* problems, not whatever petty little complaints I had.
We started meeting once a week. A few weeks in, I described how I felt at work on some days. I remember telling him that I felt like a caged animal. I didn't have any place to go and I didn't have any immediate threast to me; matter of fact, work is where I was supposed to be. And yet I felt suffocated, trapped, like I didn't have an out, and at times I would actually get up and pace in my office. He suggested that I would benefit from some of the standard antidepressant/anti-anxiety medications. Again, I thought, come on. Those are for people who have legitimate problems, who are described as "troubled", who can't function without them. Therapy is one thing; I'm not too proud to go in and start some therapy. But medication? That's a whole new level. But in the end, after fighting it for a couple weeks, I agreed to it.
The meds did me a lot of good, once we found one that worked for me. It was a slow, gradual transition, but I found that I had more energy and was more willing to do things. I was able to summon up the energy to move across town, thinking that a change of scenery might help. And the counseling was helping too, albeit not as much. We identified a few of the causes of my mental state: I was unhappy in my job without being miserable, I was detached from my friends while still being friendly, I was shy but not antisocial, I was reeling from the school-to-work transition, I lacked confidence in pretty much every area of my life. I read some books and focused on trying to repair some of these things. We scaled the counseling back to once every other week, and continued it for another several months.
About a year after it started, I felt like the counseling had hit a dead end, so we tapered that off. I stuck with the meds, since by this time I was doing pretty much okay and didn't want to rock the boat too much. That holding pattern continued until March or so of 2008, when several things reached a point where they combined to convince me that I could start bringing myself off the meds. I had become good friends with a couple other groups of people besides my original ones; this let me do more activities, hang out with more people, and socialize quite a bit more. Remember Amy from my bullet points above? She and I had started dating, which gave me a confidence and a general "good feeling" that I'd been without for awhile. I started looking into other jobs, and had a very good discussion with my manager about my desire to switch and how he could help me out with that.
So I went back to the doc and basically asked for permission to wean myself off of the pills. That went well too, so in April or thereabouts, I started skipping one pill a week, then two, then every other day. Things went pretty well, and to be honest, by the time I was completely off of the meds I didn't really notice a huge difference. A couple months later, I was off the meds completely and haven't been back since.
I don't think I can say that I'm 100% yet. Back in high school, I had unbounded energy, did activities all the time, had social events five nights a week, and generally went full-speed for about sixteen hours a day, every day. I'm not nearly back to that yet, although I may never be. I still decline more events than I attend, simply because I don't feel like going. I still spend too much time "wiped out" and worthless. That said, I'm happy with where I am, and I hope that I can continue to improve, as slowly as I need to.
It's been a long couple of years. I apologize to everyone whose events I've bailed on, or who I haven't picked up the phone for. It's been rough, and I haven't been honest with people about why I've been the way I have. That's going to change. It might not change completely overnight, but it'll change. I promise.
And lastly, I'd like to offer myself up to all of my friends. If you've got anything you need to talk about, anything bothering you, any feelings like I talked about here, or anything at all, I'm making myself available to you. I've been through a little bit, and I'd like to do anything I possibly can to help if you need it.
Thanks for reading, and happy 2009!
January 15, 2009 - Yearly update ... coming soon It's January 15th, which means that it's time for my once-a-year update.
Except you're going to have to wait.
This last year was pretty wild, and I've got a lot of typing to do to summarize it up. I'll get on it soon, and yes, there will be an actual update.
Patience is appreciated!
January 15, 2008 - It's been a year Look, here's the deal. I haven't updated here in a year. My POTD is three months out of date. Various parts of my site say that I'm in my last semester, or that I'm looking to get a job when I graduate. It's pretty obvious that this place is in more than a little bit of disrepair.
Why? Lots of reasons. I spend twelve hours a day looking at a monitor. I don't have interesting activities going on much anymore. I don't feel like it's worthwhile to report on the small number of interesting things that do happen. I've got a bunch of personal stuff going on that I'd rather not discuss here. But most of all, I'm lazy. I just don't have the willpower or the motivation to create stuff for the site anymore.
Okay, great. So what now? I'm not sure, to be honest. I'm not going to take this down; I still use it for pictures, and I might come up with stuff to put here occasionally. I truly do have things that I'd like to do, but it just may not be feasible in the near future.
In conclusion, yes, I'm still alive, and no, I'm not going to be any better about maintaining this.
Thanks for reading.
January 15, 2007 - Ski trip: Success! It's been a week, but it's taken me that long to gather pictures from everyone, honest. Astoundingly, twenty-five people went on a ski trip to Colorado (mostly hanging around at Copper Mountain, where I personally skied for three-and-a-half days) and no one came back broken. Heck, there weren't even any horrendous falls, though there were plenty of hilarious falls.
But without further ado, I present the 290 pictures of the trip, accessible via the newly-created photo gallery. The are plenty of my personal favorites of course, but have a look through all of them!
Needless to say, the trip was an absolute blast. Great people, great place, great skiing. I definitely don't want to be back at work.
Until the next update...
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