I had a terrible bout with some sort of stomach bug yesterday. It was not good at all.

I had decided to go into work on the holiday for a few reasons…
– Holiday Pay
– I’m up to my eyeballs in un-competed tasks
– I really really really wanted to dig out from under the mountain of paperwork facing me since it’s the end of the our fiscal year.

I arrived at my desk a little before 9AM with a Diet Coke in hand ready to face the day. The entire office was deserted save one person clickaty-claking on their keyboard way down the hall. I logged in to find my email inbox brimming with new messages all having arrived the previous Friday afternoon. At least 25 of the 30 messages were concerning an event I have coming up tomorrow. It’s been a very last minute thing, and I’m praying that all comes off well. It’s a fairly good sized event for an incredibly hard-to-please crowd, so cross you fingers for me.

To get back on track with the story… I spent the better part of the first two hours at work returning emails and digging up various bits of information for folks in need. Then completely out of the blue, and with no warning at all my stomach bubbled and gurgled for about a second and my whole body was taken with a sudden heave. I had little more then Diet Coke in my system that morning, but the whole of my morning beverage found it’s way into the trash can just underneath my desk.

It was the strangest thing I have experienced in a very long time. I didn’t feel sick or strange. It just happened with no provocation or warning. I hung my head over the garbage can for a few minutes while this fit of stomach voodoo ran it’s course. Then when it seemed all had subsided I walked down the hall to get a sip of water to wash the terrible taste from my mouth. I was no more then 3 feet from the drinking fountain (and coincidentally the restroom door) when my stomach made the same gurgling sound. I wasted no time in bolting through the restroom door where I wouldn’t make a terrible mess.

So after that I never made it back to my desk. I had developed a terrible headache and I decided to get to a pharmacy then go home. I spent the day with cold shivers and sweaty naps. It was miserable. Then almost magically around 4:00 I was fine, with little more then the remnants of a headache. It was a very strange day. I spent the evening with a temperamental stomach, but it kept my dinner down…

… very weird. But I’m glad it’s over.

On a happy note, I did wake up in the middle of the night last night and write some more. I cranked out about 5 pages before I even knew what was happening. It’s kind of fun 🙂

So my dear sister sent me an email yesterday that started something like this.

Okay, so we’re ready for another update to your blog!!! It’s been almost 2 weeks! So do it!!!

So here you go Jac… I’m going to try and be on the ball and get this damned site updated.

I took a short day at work today since I have to go in over the weekend for a quick b-roll shoot for our friendly press and publicity folks. This particular event is all too much like the whole of my September events in that they have all started with seemingly very small ideas, and ballooned into big fat events. So what began as a plan to tackle a month of a larger number of smaller parties has turned into a plan to execute list of large very involved events. As much as I would like to go into specifics, I’m afraid that’s not info I can go into online. But the coming month holds some very challenging weeks for me, and I’m going to be leaning on everyone around me to keep me sane. …so what got me on that little tangent? Oh right… short day at work today.

So anyway, I will be checking on the set installation tomorrow then going in for the shoot and event on Sunday. There is also some atmosphere art going into some of the common areas of the resort to announce Sunday’s events, so I will be just checking in with my stage managers most of the day. Not a bad gig at all, I just have a feeling we’re going to get several last minute requests to make things happen (this is a very normal thing) that will keep me on my toes.

Here on the home front there is some big news as well. My wonderful girlfriend has a pretty little cat named Sadie. She’s a funny little tabby that sometimes drives Janey to the brink of insanity with midnight pillow urination and sleeping on the clean laundry. But she’s a part of our little family so we have to make sure she is healthy… to that end yesterday we took her to the vet for her last round of shots and various other tests. She’s came away with a clean bill of health and an appointment to be spayed. So early this morning Janey, Sadie, and I ventured back to the Vet to check her in for her big operation. The place we took her to is very nice and feels like a real live doctors office. It’s clean and the people are always very kind. But with all that TLC comes a pretty good sized price tag, so Janey and I teamed up on the bill for this visit. In the end I always remind myself that the peace of mind that Sadie is being well taken care of is worth the few extra dollars. We’ve been to a few other Vets in the last year or so, but we always end up back at this place.

Around 2:00 Janey started to worry about Sadie. When we checked the cat in this morning they told us the operation would be completed around this time and we should get a call confirming that all went well. She waited till about 2:30 and decided to call them. Sadie was still in surgery but all seemed to be going well. By about 3:30 Janey had spoken to the vet once again and all was complete and Sadie was doing just fine. She has to stay overnight, but we will be picking her up around 9:00 AM tomorrow. I’ve never been much of a cat lover, but things are pretty quit around here without Sadie to bug. 🙂 It’ll be nice to have her back.

As much as I have to worry about in the coming month, I can’t stop thinking about the wonderful vacation that Janey and I have planned. Exactly 30 days from today we will be on a plane headed for Walt Disney World in Florida. This trip has been a long time coming, and has taken a lot of scrimping and saving to be able to pull it off. We will be staying in Disney Hotels (not the cheap ones mind you, the super cool deluxe ones) and that is something I have never done before. I’m very excited. I really don’t remember the last time I took more then about 2 days off of work… even more so then that, I can’t think of the last vacation I took that was more then a weekend jaunt that wasn’t family centric. Living away from both our families, it’s hard to justify the expense of travel when it doesn’t involve at least a short stop to see the family. This time it’s just not possible though. We both feel guilty, but in the end I hope everyone understands. This is a trip I’ve wanted to take for years and years… long before my move to work for Disney.

Well I think that is about all that is on my mind for now. I will see if I can get some more things down in ‘ink’ before the weekend is over.

Till next time…

For the last several weeks I have become increasingly dependant on centralized web apps to get things done. I remember not too long ago when I scoffed at any product that I could no own or operate from my own web server… my stance has changed oh so much.

• I’ve completely fallen in love with Gmail. I have gotten to the point that my old primary address at this domain is almost never used. I see a few messages here and there, but almost all the regular daily traffic has moved over to my gmail account. I can get a full featured interface from home or work, unlike the old and clunky squirrelMail that my host uses. Very useful, I highly recommend it.
• Many of you already know that in addition to my Disney gig, I do contract consulting work. Accounting and invoicing is something that I hate with every bone in my body… but in recent days it has become strangely enjoyable thanks to Blinksale. It’s not an accounting system, it just does invoicing. I tried to get QuickBooks to just do invoicing, but it has a million other useless (to me) features that I just couldn’t understand and kept getting in the way. Blinksale actually makes me look forward to sending and receiving invoices.

As of today I have spent two wonderful years loving a wonderful girl.

In my last post I talked about how cool I was for fixing my air conditioner… well, as it turns out, I’m not so cool. I spent many hours under the hot California sun lying on the passenger side floorboard ripping my knuckles up on tiny little japanese screws that are exposed under the dash board. My legs flailing out the door in a dance choreographed to the grunts and groans I uttered on each turn of the screwdriver or ratchet or wrench.

I got all the parts in just the way I thought they should be (yes I followed instructions), then traveled to my local air conditioning shop to evacuate the air and refill the refrigerant… this is where things got bad. I actually wanted to make a quick run to the shop on my lunch hour. I was possibly being a little overly optimistic on the schedule… but after all the work I had done I felt invincible. So at the stroke of 12 I raced for the car and headed off to “Tom’s Radiator and Air Conditioning”. This place had been highly recommended to me by a co-worker.

I must have angered the gods that day… or maybe Mickey Mouse simply knew I wasn’t going to make it back from lunch in time… so he cursed my car with that freaky Fantasia broomstick voo-doo magic. anyway, to make a long story short I heard a quiet pop then hiss, then the temperature gauge went ski high. I think I knew what was wrong before I even opened the door, and my suspicions were confirmed when I stepped out of the car into a giant green puddle. My radiator had sprung a leak.

Lets fast forward now past the tow truck and it’s corresponding bill. I finally arrive at my original destination “Tom’s Radiator and Air Conditioning”. My choice of establishment seemed perfect since both my problems could be taken care of in one super expensive stop. I’ll try and get all the details of that visit into this paragraph… to make it short. The radiator couldn’t be patched, but needed to be replaced. It would take at least the rest of the day to even get the car in the shop. And the air conditioner has some sort of problem that this shop didn’t have the ability to fix. They couldn’t even diagnose it.

While I waited for all that information I spent a delightful day in down-town Orange California. I had lunch at a little sidewalk sandwich shop where I talked to a wonderfully kind fellow who loved to talk about Disneyland. He was imparting all kinds of “inside information” to me (I left the fact that I work for Disney out of the conversation). I also found a pretty little park to lie on the grass… the same park I was in a little while later when a passing train nearly sent me into cardiac arrest with it’s air horn. But… moving on.

So then next day I used some savings money to pay for the brand new radiator (thank the lord they had one in stock) and I drove off in my extremely hot car being no more ahead then where I was when I started the whole project. Gotta love it eh?

Well my friend Ray is in town this week, so I hope we have a good time.

I will try and do another update soon.

Well I am LONG overdue for a little update here on this blog. I hope there is somebody out there still checking this site… cuz I really do have things to say 🙂 But really I have to make and update to make sure my family knows what the heck I am doing.

Let’s see… where do I start? I would talk about work, but there’s not much that has happened that I’m able to talk about in any detail on the internet. I’ve been doing some interesting VIP events for special guests of Disneyland. It’s been fun, and it seems it’s only been the tip of the iceberg. As soon as one event is almost planned the next one is hot on it’s heels so my to-do list is growing every day. No matter how hard I pick at it, it still seems to grow. I really am so far behind right now that I don’t know how I’m going to dig out. I just have to take a deep breathe, relax, and remember they are just parties. Granted, they are parties with guests that would be nice to impress… but just parties nonetheless.

I will say that Friday couldn’t have come soon enough this week. If one more person scheduled me for one more worthless meeting I think I could have just lost it. I don’t remember where I heard it, but every time one of those damned MS Outlook meeting invites comes my way I think of the quote: “People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.” Anyway… the meetings came and went and now it’s FRIDAY!!

I got most of my playtime activities out of my system after work hours during the week. Janey and I saw “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, and another fantastic movie called “Crash”. Both were highly entertaining. I have no intention of reviewing those movies for you, but if you see only one movie for the rest of the year I would encourage you to choose “Crash”. It was a very powerful and touching group of stories very artfully assembled into a great film.

So since I’m not planning on a movie or anything this weekend, I’m calling it my project time. I took off work a little early today and actually got a lot of things done that I have been procrastinating for a very long time. I first rushed off to the DMV to renew my car registration. I spoke to a very large and very funny black woman at the DMV. Let me give you an idea of how things work down here at the CA DMV. You walk in to what is usually a very long line (this time I was very lucky to only have about 3 people ahead of me). When you reach the first desk you tell them what you have come to do. The give you a little ticket and you are invited to sit and wait for the number on your little DMV FastPass to pop up on one of many TV screens placed around the room. It’s the Disney in me that makes me call this my little DMV FastPass. I got a bonus since I was at the DMV for two reasons. The car registration, and to finally get a CA drivers license. Thats right, I’ve been driving on my Utah license for the two plus years I have lived in CA. But thats another story that I may tell later…. so getting back on track I had two little DMV FastPasses.

I filled out the three foot long form that I was given at the first desk while I waited for my number. I was actually surprised at how fast it came up. I was instructed (by a voice recording in the room and the tv screens) to go to window number 14. When I arrived at window number 14 I was greeted by the only smiling face in the entire building. This woman had to be one of the friendliest people on the planet. She greeted me and the first thing she told me when seeing my form was that she had never been to Utah and she asked what the DMV was like there. I laughed out loud at the question then realized she was totally sincere… she wanted to know what the Utah DMV was like. It made me smile.

So we chatted about how small the DMV was near where I grew up and we compared it to the massive lines of the CA versions and she said “well california has a lot of damn people who wanna drive”

Anyway… she made me laugh and was very fast at getting all the forms done and I was done with my registration about 8 minutes and $83 later. Since my second number had come and gone, the nice lady gave me a new little FastPass and I waited for round two.

When my number was up I was told that I needed a birth certificate to get my license. “Damn” I didn’t have it.

So I ran home… played on the computer a bit… then went back to finish the job. And only about 15 minutes after I arrived at the DMV I was in the exam room taking the written test for my CA license! WHAT!?! A TEST!?! Who knew this was going to happen? In hindsight I realize I should have been prepared, but I wasn’t really thinking about the reality of things. I just wanted to get this job out of the way that I had been letting go for more then two years. So I faked it through the test. It was sort of a mix of common sense questions, and some of those tricky ones that have everything to do with the way the question is asked. things like “Backing up a vehicle is: A) always dangerous B) only dangerous in a large vehicle C) never dangerous. My thought is “well who’s driving” Reversing for me is no problem, but I would dig myself into a little bunker if I had to stand around while any of my sisters reversed. No offense girls, but the time Geina backed into the van while Nick and I were in the back of the car just ruined it for all y’all.

Fast forward about 10 minutes and my test was being graded. Each time I saw the little red marker flick I sunk a little bit more. I hadn’t been careful at all, or even gone over the questions a second time. What if I failed!?! As it turns out a person is allowed to miss 6 out of the 40 + questions. and I missed exactly 6! WHEW. So I got a photo taken and walked out a real live California Driver.

You’d think I’d have called it a day with that eh? No way… I was out to kick ass and take names today. So it was on to the next project!

As you may already know, we are hitting our season high temperatures in SoCal right now and it is crazy hot outside.
In all this heat it just rubs in the fact that the Air Conditioner in my car has been dead for the better part of two years. It actually died when I was on a trip from UT to CA and I’ve just never been able to afford to fix it. Well I decided it was time to do something about it. I still can’t afford to take it into a shop for a what could easily be a $600 AC job, so I’m going to do it myself. I’ve been slowly deducing what the possible problems are for months now so I knew just what to do once I was ready to dig in… and DIG IN I did today.

I spend this evening ripping part after part out of the under-side of the dash in my little Camry to finally end up at the AC Evaporator. I pulled it out and found just what I thought there would be. A big ‘ol hole in the fins that was leaking coolant as fast as it could be pumped in. Now that I know what the problem is I just need parts. everybody says this part is at least 4 days out… that will be past my window of free time, so I’m determined to find this part tomorrow. I’m going to get up at 7:00 and head down to a junk yard I pass fairly often and see if they have a camry I can pull a used one off of. Hopefully this will help with the price tag on the part too… since it is quite pricey.

So thats my week in a really short nutshell.. more stuff happened as you can image, but those are the highlights from today :-)..

so till next time
R.