Ad Infinitum

…that ends well enough. I apologize for the mood of my last entry, but it’s still an outlook I deal with every day. Let’s move on to happy thoughts? As always, I’ll try to be chronological.

My father jumped right back into work, as he insisted he would for all these years. “If I get out on a Friday, I’ll be into work on Monday” was his exact quote. This brought him a great deal of ire from my mother, who felt he was getting into things too quickly and not spending enough time at home readjusting. In his mind, he had been sitting on his ass for years and now he wanted to get some work done. We rearranged his office to make it feel more like his, gave him the tour of the office and brought him up to speed on the latest in the company. Since then he had become a very good buffer in upper management and has taken well to his old job duties. It’s also a good opportunity for me to impress him with the things I do around here, but it’s mostly parlor tricks; I know damn well the rabbit was never in the hat the entire time, but for him? It’s arcane magic.

On the sixth, the general public was allowed to purchase .xxx domains for personal or commercial use. The way ICANN handled this was very impressive: either you proved you were in the business of smut by showing your proper papers, and were then allowed to continue to do business with your new sexy URL, or you relented to the secondary category as a “concerned trademark holder.” My company fell into such a category, and I snatched up a few domains to protect our website from turning into the latest place to find hot ladies in compromising positions. This is something that had been on my radar for a few months, the subject of phone conversations with my dad back before he had a sweet new iPhone to call me from, but wasn’t really a priority until I made the purchase. As with many things in life, I find that asking forgiveness is easier than asking permission when it relates to my work expenses.

Last of anyone in my social circle to be invited, I tried out the Diablo 3 beta on the seventh and enjoyed the first chapter of the game with Miles in tow. I had access to it before then, technically, as Garrett was more than happy to share his access but I was waiting to try out the multiplayer aspect of the game. Just as with the Tribes reboot last month, Diablo 3 is “more of the same” but it’s precisely what I was hoping it would be. Blizzard is trying out some unconventional ways to get into your pocketbook with this installation of the Diablo franchise, but it’s all fair play in my eyes. I am hoping that this will be the game that gets me back into playing games at all, as my inclination has been to eschew the genre lately. This is also something I could see my entire family getting into, as well, but we’ll see about that. The nostalgia factor rides strong with this one. SWTOR launched just in time for my bad pun, and for Christmas break as well. Garrett has been on it non-stop since the 23rd launch, it seems, and I really enjoyed these first two weeks. It’s just well done for what it contends to be.

On the tenth, Louis C.K. decided it’d be a good idea to sell his latest comedy routine online for five bucks. The results were amazing, in his eyes, blowing away every expectation and proving once again that good service negates any issue of piracy. I watched it in my living room with Garrett on our television, one of the scant few times we used the device at all. A few days later, we watched the Patton Oswalt special as well, and I had hoped it would become a thing but I quickly ran out of watchable material. Just as I was getting into him, Patrice O’Neal passed away at the end of November, and Louis dedicated his aforementioned show to the funny man. I’ll miss his big laugh, more than anything. We’ll sometimes catch Southpark or China, IL episodes, Garrett and I, but it’s hard to find good comedy in great quantity. I hope to see more from Louis, though: I ordered his show’s first two seasons from Amazon and have been keeping it on the back-burner for a rainy day.

On the thirtieth, our ISP failed at my office for the first time since… well, for the first time. We had never been down for more than a few moments and even then it was a scheduled thing. This brought us down for several hours on what was an especially slow Tuesday, so not much was lost beyond a few support calls. It made me realize how fragile businesses are these days without internet connections, and it rekindled my quest to upgrade our connection from slow copper to fast fiber. The task is slow going but it will be worth it go from 3Mbps to 20Mbps, with room to grow to an astound 3Gbps. I’ve mentioned before how a big download can take my network to a crawl, and there have been many a time where I’ve set a file to download on my home PC so that I could grab it on my lunch break and spare my coworkers a sluggish browser experience. As it currently stands, I should be rocking that new connection some time in February 2012.

Christmas was magical this year. Not in the elves and wizards kind of way, but maybe the Apple marketing kind of way. Literally, in some respects! I really regret not making a list of thank-yous as I did some years ago, but I think you can all be very sure that I received many gifts and all of them were especially heartfelt and well used. For myself, I purchased a lens for my D-SLR camera and some Vibram Fivefinger shoes which I am now convinced are this year’s Crocs in terms of nerdy, awful foot-wear; I use them for running and starting conversations with strangers. From my grandmother, we were given a general budget for gifts and so I chose to spend it on tea as a good British grandmum sentiment; it has kept me awake for several work-filled nights now, and I never thought white teas could be this smooth, this expensive, or this re-steepable. That isn’t a word. I also want to quickly note that my tea reserves had run dry nearing this point, so it was especially awesome to receive more tea from both of my aunts. My parents got us the usual bevvy of clothes, candy, and other effects which make the holiday complete. My dad caught wind of a Chinese jewelry site and has been ordering suspicious items ever since, and thus for his four sons a unique ring each. For Miles, I got some guitar stuff and a gift basket from our local coffee place. He is mostly impressed with candy and food that he could get on the east coast easily but not so on the west. Both he and Garrett received blackout drapes, which are these amazing pieces of fabric that people use to keep sunlight out of their homes, I guess? They work amazingly well, and you can find them at Walmart or (preferably) Target for cheap. With gift cards, I was able to purchase a board game for when we’re up at the cabin. It’s a little number known as Super Dungeon Explore, as suggested by Gabe of Penny Arcade, and it looks pretty fun. I haven’t assembled all of the miniatures inside, but I felt the tesimony given fit right into the Munchkin-enjoying crowd that often gathers at parties. I had no idea it was so chibi.

There was a bit of family drama on my mom’s side involving my aunt and her husband, particularly the opinions held on that marriage as shared by everyone in the family. Long story short, we didn’t see them for the traditional Christmas Eve party, but we did open their gifts. I feel bad having not planned on seeing them, and therefore not planned on gifting them as I usually would. It’s one of those things where the “kids” in the family sort of hold our collective breath while we wait for the parents to sort out their shit. To my knowledge, no real progress has been made, and that’s too bad. If it’s any consolation, the younger generation misses you guys.

On my father’s side, we enjoyed Christmas day at my grandmother’s house before returning to my parent’s place for dinner. David was set to join us in all of this but was in the hospital to treat a particularly nasty brown recluse bite. In the days between Christmas and New Years, my dad did some soul searching. He traveled to a previous home in Silverado Canyon, the first abode he and my mother lived in. We had planned, after my grandfather passed away, to wait for my father’s prison release before we did anything as far as memorials go. We managed to get everyone together up at our cabin on the 31st for a small memorial. It consisted of some reading material my dad put together in honor of his father, spreading some ashes and trekking up to a place he often went called Memorial Peak. We each performed a little tradition he would indulge in, a triumphant yell atop the memorial’s namesake peak. I snapped a few shots with my camera and I really feel it turned out as well as it possibly could. It’s what my dad needed, and I am glad it went so smoothly for him. At one point this month, while standing in his office and looking out the window, I asked him how he felt without gramps around. He said he missed him every day, and I knew he was being genuine. For a lot of people, you’d think that sentiment was forced for someone like my grandfather. I hope that people will understand me when I say the same about my dad, no matter what he’s done in the past. Let there be no misconception, then: my grandfather was my father’s father, and nothing said or done in life changed this affection.

Well, this is difficult to write. By now, you’ll probably have noticed that I made my previous entries public a few weeks ago. I was going to do the same with this and the following entries, but I had to go through and re-write everything a few times. It’s difficult to get everything in one go, without some future context to help with the embellishment of it all. I’ve waited for this chapter of my life for so long that it’s hard to remember what it was like before-hand. In my first draft, it was hard to imagine a life after.

My father’s release was only a matter of time. Trivial to some, life-changing to others. So many great things have come since he went away, and so many great things have left forever. My greatest fear had always been that this day would never come, snatched from us at the last moment by some judicial oversight or legislative loophole. Or maybe it would be soured by the loss of a close friend, or some other unrecoverable loss. Despite my worries, on November 9th, 2011, my father stepped out of prison and into a parking lot where we waited impatiently. We embraced, the six of us as a family again, and drove home after our first meal on the outside, the first prayer, the first good cry. He entered a world where his only friend from highschool was gone, died in a car crash years before. A world where his father was no longer there to wish him welcome home, indeed all manner of extended family lost without so much as a goodbye. A world where his four sons had grown up, left school (some home), and established themselves as individuals, for better or worse than he had remembered. He inherited several daunting tasks, from strictly business to the petty squabbles of extended family drama. I’d love to list the positive things he came home to, but it would be bad luck in my opinion. This entire time I have feared celebration for the fear that it would be in bad taste, or somehow “jinx” the entire situation. I have lived my entire life these last ten years under this mantra, applying it to everything from parties to graduations to movie premieres. It’s an awful way to be, but so protects me well from disappointment. The other real reason to not list every little niggling thing that begets a wonderful life is that, for my father, everything is better than what he had. Every little problem, no matter how migraine-inducing it may be to a normal person, is a wonderful opportunity for him to exercise his freedom to choose. So far, he has done a tremendous job handling daunting tasks. My fears turn only now to myself, the man who has everything, and how to keep the status quo from ever changing away from such victory. Health issues, job security, home safety; the world is out to get me, and I won’t put up with it.

I will say this about the first day back. My dad immediately wanted a haircut, as it was longer than my own (I am growing it out) and all shades of gray; he looked like a less-balding, not by much, Ben Franklin. After the haircut, we enjoyed a home-cooked meal of steak. Brent had been saving the date to be the first occasion he’d ever drink alcohol. Considering that he had been in college for quite some time, that is an impressive way to be chaste. His first drink was had with my father and mother: he continues to look for an acceptable drink to this day, as beer is definitely not his thing. I forgot how much my dad loved beer, by the way. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, as they say. Acknowledgement of my previous mantra: not a week after my father’s return, two of our cats went missing and never returned. There’s always going to be something.

Earlier in the month, I applied for and play-tested the Tribes beta. The game play is as good as I remember it, with a layer of micro-transaction BS on top that doesn’t do it any favors. If the company can stay afloat off of veteran accounts and impulse buys, however, I will let this one slide. That’s a pun, you can keep it. The SWTOR beta began, for me, on the 17th and I fell into the usual swing of loving a new MMO intensely for weeks on end. I continue to be very impressed with the polish of the game, the fact that they took this wide range of features from other established MMOs and made it work for them very well. Everything is smooth and thought-out, and they have some ideas that every other game to come will surely adopt. Beyond these, there wasn’t much else to speak of as far as games went. I tried a few times to get my dad into gaming, but thus far he has resisted the urge to play anything. His time is mostly spent catching up on movies through netflix.

One of the first things I taught my father was how online shopping worked. The best tutorial I could think of was showing him how to create a repeating order for something from Amazon. My mother spends a fortune on cat treats by driving to Petco every week and grabbing a few bags. I was able to show him how to buy the same brand at a lower price and set a recurring delivery for every two weeks so that a trip was saved, on top of the discounted price. Amazon Prime makes it all free and to their door in two days. The internet is simply amazing and no one seems to praise it often. Since then, he’s purchased all manner of items and I am glad to receive all the curio I can from such orders. He began looking, almost immediately, into wish lists and other items for Christmas shopping.

Cox, the ISP, sent out an e-mail to let its customers know that it was ending personal web-space for members on the 15th. For laughs, I decided to see if the family account my parents set up back in 2000 had anything on it. Just a single picture, some horrible paintshop edit of a Penny Arcade comic that I doctored up in an attempt to make fun of a high school friend. Such a wonderful waste. I also took the opportunity to bring up the poor service for both cable t.v. and internet that they had provided to my parent’s home and, a few days later, AT&T Uverse was installed. They even fixed the especially annoying signal issues in my parent’s room, complicated by the fact that the wiring is very old in the house. Everything is saturated in cat urine, too. Beyond this, I purchased a new television for their family room and suggested a faster connection speed for getting online. Austin should perhaps thank me for that piece the most, as uploading anything would absolutely destroy his chances at winning in League of Legends.

Thanksgiving was hosted at my parent’s house, and we invited the usual crew of people from my mother’s side of the family. Garrett revealed his newly-acquired talent for deep-frying turkeys and the results were nothing short of delicious. I prefer dry turkey but it was succulent in every way. There was a fun ceremony of inserting and retrieving the bird that was fun to watch, as well. Thanksgiving was a good test run for us because it let us gauge how well people would accept that my dad was back. I can’t say anyone had an issue with him, as my dad’s personal beliefs conveniently fall in line with both my aunt and uncle’s, as well as their progeny. This used to be considered a problem when faced with parenthood, but his easy-going nature is now a strength. We reconnected with David Ingram that night, as well, inviting him to future events; he’s made for an excellent drinking buddy for my dad, thus far.

I made the mistake, near the end of the month, of getting impatient with my brother’s future. While enjoying Yen Ching’s with my father for the first time in forever, I brought up the concept of what Garrett was going to do with himself, given that his performance at our company was dipping, all while Austin’s was beginning to tick up. A few plans were thrown out, but the idea of having him move back home was met with a deep depression on everyone’s end. I figured it would allow my parents to micromanage his time, which he has been notoriously poor at. It also hinged on him still working for the company, and that too was in question. Ultimately it made for a sad few days, and allowed me to reflect on how much I appreciate the companionship. The conclusion to this story is that he worked a good plan out with my father, Brent, and our uncle that would allow him to continue his education, working at the office, and boost Austin up to a full-time position. It’s not the end of his challenges, for certain, but it put to bed the topic I brought up that night so many weeks before.

It will take me a long time to understand the gravity of this month. Just as when a person passes on, it takes me weeks to really absorb the concept. In pure contrast to loss, I expect it to be a while before I realize my dad is back and that everything is OK. There comes a legally defined expiration date for his probation, of course, but I am speaking purely of emotions. Future me, past me, here we are am now. I am so incredibly happy for my dad, just as you had hoped. When someone has all of this, they can only wish it will last forever. But I know it’s only a matter of time, really.

Not a year goes by that I don’t say this: October feels like a goalpost month, with Garrett’s birthday on one end and Halloween on the other, with little to nothing in between worth mentioning or thinking about. It’s an incorrect statement, of course, but I will forever equate his birthday to dunking one’s head in water and holding their breath until November has come. To speak to the contrary, plenty happened in October and I’m here to talk about it. But first, a euology: for years I have been visiting the “You’re On Notice!” generator at shipbrook.net every October to come up with a few things grinding me gears at that moment of time, but alas the web service appears to be gone. Instead, here is a short list.

• The DMV,
• “Pre-existing conditions”,
• Managers,
• The pussywhipped,
• Metro-style apps,
• Submetering,
• Train commuters,
• Dresscodes.

Ah, wasn’t that refreshing?

For Garrett’s 25th birthday, I got him a PS3 with the thinking that Dark Souls, the sequel to 2010′s falling simulator Demon Souls, could be played in tandem with a second copy played by Austin. We were wrong, sadly, but the disappointment in not being able to do more together soon subsided in light of the glorious sun the much-improved gameplay. For a week or two at the beginning of the month, the game was of constant conversation and the subject of many jokes. As much fun as the game was to watch, I am not sure I’d have any fun actually playing it. As far as games go, it’s the perfect tag-along experience that allows me to enjoy the story without necessarily needing to play the game. Even though the title doesn’t appeal to me on a level of game-play, I enjoyed the mechanics, covenant system, and graphics. I had a passing interest in the story, mostly to verify whether or not it leaves open the potential for a third game. Not so much, but sales numbers drive stories more than writers ever did and, from what I hear, it sold very well. As for Garrett’s birthday dinner, we ventured to Koisan and then on to mom’s for cupcakes afterward. The occasion gave me reason enough to take along my camera and instilled in me a photographer’s itch I am sure I will be scratching until the new year.

With my dad’s return just a month away, Brent and I have been busy with preparations to see him easily transitioned from a life of dreary television to online interactivity. At this point, we’ve done everything from creating him a new personal e-mail account (using gmail instead of hotmail!) to looking into online services he’d be interested in. Awhile ago, I tried out the trial for Amazon Prime and it has not only already paid for itself, but I keep discovering new ways in which it is worth the annual seventy dollars. One kudos is that I can invite a few family members to partake in the same benefits; this means free two-day shipping for Garrett and Austin in what will most certainly save hundreds of dollars in the next few months alone. With the Amazon Fire launching next month, I can’t think of a better way for my dad to enjoy catching up on old t.v. shows and movies than with the stylish little device dialed into his Amazon Prime account; officially we have the device for testing software, but that wont last for more than a day. There have been a lot of other items to get my Father acquainted with: pieces of software that I have taken for granted, e.g. Dropbox and Steam, have a slight learning curve that I am antsy to educate on. As each day goes by, we add another little piece to the puzzle until finally everything will be ready to go. His cellphone will be the icing on the cake, a device best representing the vast advances of the last decade in technology.

Steve Jobs passed on at the beginning of the month, just after Apple announced their latest iPhone. It is the same device I will be getting for my dad and, as I stare down the price sheet for a dozen different Android tablets, I have to laugh at just how much that company of his influenced the technology sector. He may have been a right prick in life, but in death he leaves behind a tremendous amount of progress. Work has required me to pick up a few tablet computers, ranging from overly expensive Xooms to cheap Chinese knock-offs that are barely worth the shipping from Hong Kong. We hope to expand our company’s software to the mobile device market in full, and part of that requires us to actually own those devices before we can go anywhere legitimately. All of this, because Apple managed to jump-start the tablet culture out of what was a dying PDA market in the wake of a booming smartphone industry. More than anything else, I am looking forward to the ubiquity of tablets in everyday life and I have Jobs to thank, in part, for stomping on all of those asses to see it along.

I mentioned Amazon Prime, so I may as well confess to all of the neat things I’ve bought this month without ever having to leave my home. The new PS3 called for an HDMI cable that I did not have, so I grabbed twenty of them for ten dollars. Pull that off at a Best Buy or even Fry’s and I will buy you lunch. The light-bulbs in my kitchen are not uniform, and in fact conform to no logical standard that I can find anywhere in stores; I was able to get a bunch of them online for relatively cheap, and we’re currently experimenting with bulbs that emulate sunlight. I don’t know if it’s going to made me happy or give me a skin disorder. Slickdeals alerted me to a beef jerky deal awhile ago and it returns with such frequency that I decided to try out a few pounds of this Damn Good stuff. I intended it as a gift for dad, but it’s quickly turning into a commemorative, empty box affair. Brent gifted me a new kettle for my tea, though it eventually encouraged me to bring it to work where I plan for it to help me bring better break-room accommodations (espresso!). There are many other items I purchased, mostly for work and not worth bringing up (printers…), but we discovered a type of coffee creamer at 7-11 one night while on a Slurpee run: it is called Stok (Stoke), and isn’t meant to be a replacement for creamer so much as a replacement for sleep; the stuff is nice when you want to add a jolt of caffeine to whatever it is you’re drinking, but the stuff is bitter as hell and I don’t recommend downing it on its lonesome. My steady march into bankruptcy continues unabated, online and in the living-room. Oh, the want for things.

A day after my grandfather passed away, we took to his personal belongings in an attempt to untangle all of the things that the head of a household has to worry over when they are alive. Disabling accounts, making phone calls to banks, finding hidden codes to forgotten things. One major wrench in the process, his personal computer crashed that very next morning and would not come back. He had his computer set up in RAID0, and one of the disks had crashed. This is perhaps the worst case scenario when it comes to data redundancy, and it took until early this month for us to decide what to do with the drives, elect a data recovery company, and retrieve whatever important information we could. Migrating his workstation at work to become the machine my Father will use when he returns to work next month, I had a chance to sit in the newly bequeathed office and reflect on the state of the company. With our other senior manager leaving, the entire structure of management is going to be reworked with Brent, my Father and my uncle at the head of things. On my whiteboard are many thoughts on what to discuss when the time comes, but I know that presentation is going to be a big part of getting any of it across. I was livid when, early one morning in August, I was told to explain all of my problems with the company directly following a meeting I had requested to discuss some issues with one of our business platforms. I had no time to organize my thoughts, running off a few hours of sleep I had stolen from the night before (where I was in the office doing more work), and many of my observations I was not comfortable discussing with everyone in the room. It was a mess, to say the least, and made me look like some sort of Charlie Sheen act. Focusing anger into intelligent discussion for the sake of progress is something that takes time and commitment. Now that I have the time, I just need to commit.

There are only a few annual traditions that have to be upheld every year, in Garrett’s mind. I agree with them, really, and it’s obviously gleaned from our upbringing. Every Halloween, for example, you must carve pumpkins. Failing to do this by the end of October means you missed out and depression can soon follow. A few years ago, we carved pumpkins with Cory and I am glad that we got to do so again this year. I enjoyed chatting while stabbing into gourds, not only because I love pumpkin seeds and it had been awhile since we’d seen or heard from Cory, but because it seemed to boost Garrett’s spirits too. He had been in the dumps for awhile before trying out new meds, and seeing an old friend combined with spending more time around home (due to aforementioned prep-work for dad) seemed to cheer him up a lot. There’s a lot of uncertainty in his life, moreso than with the other three of us, so making sure you’ve got a clear mind and a smile on your face is the best first step in tackling anything. Cory has a pretty lousy situation right now, but I wish him the best. I have this ridiculous dream of him legally growing for us up at the cabin, with a few wild pumpkins right there alongside.

Well. My next post will be made after my dad has been released from prison. It’s been a long, sad road and now the finish line is in sight. This, of course, comes with an overwhelming sense of caution. It would be just my luck for something bad to happen right at the end, but that is not positive thinking and it is henceforth banished from my mind. I took the opportunity to visit him twice in October, on the 15th with Brent and my uncle to discuss work-related issues (and football, oy!), and on the 30th which stood as the very last visitation he was allowed. I feel bad for not having seen him more, or written him more, but these feelings are inevitable as the final days approach. We’ve all failed him, in some ways, and he doesn’t hold it against us at all. The very notion is perhaps ridiculous to him, and he will be overjoyed to be home again. I don’t know if I can properly express how many people agree with that sentiment.

Last year, the convenience of having Brent, Clenshaw, Jauregui, and Cody around all at once meant an inevitable D&D campaign. I spoke of a follow-up campaign for this year, continuing the loose-story of their character party, but it was sadly not to be. With Clenshaw gone before Cody touched down from nipply Germany, and Jauregui’s peculiar ability to not be in my life without the other two, this year’s visit from Mr. Cabarello was a quiet affair. Oh sure, he got his nipples pierced and he spent many nights over playing League of Legends, but I didn’t see much of him outside of mental theater when people would describe whatever drunken shenanigans he had managed to get into the night before. It’s not all bad, as I really had no content ready for him to enjoy even under the best of circumstances. Cody still got to hang out with his close friends quite a bit before the uneasy transition to a new base in South Korea. I believe everyone ventured up to the Lloyd cabin before he left, as well.

So while Cody was busy getting his drink on, I was busy attending an ill-fated class on Windows Server 2008. It eventually bore me to such tears that I stopped attending, but it seemed to coincide with a great urge to pursue video games each time I went. Was this some sort of strange memory attributed to my first year of college? I have no clue, but each night I got home was met with some gaming experience. I played Dungeon Fighter with Garrett and Miles, content with a new character that the latter helped me out with. Warhammer put out a really nice looking game early in the month, but I was waiting for Dead Island to arrive. When it finally did, we spent many nights beating in zombie heads and losing weapons after throwing them right before loading screens. Brent surprised me by taking an interest in the game as well, his fervor for it being greater than our group’s. I think I was more glad that he finally got to put his gaming laptop to use, no longer just a heavy symbol of my gratitude. Moving further into the month, I played around with the browser-based Quake Live one lonely Friday night while stuck at work. It gave me a chance to test out the mini laptop I purchased for my father, its Sandy-Bridge Intel processor offering up an impressive play experience. My shooting skills were less than satisfactory, however. If you think Quake is a bit old-timey, the other main waste of time this month was a rehashed version of Doom 2 played through a system of servers known as Skulltag. Mods include such titles as Brutal Doom (gorey chunks and kill animations) and Shotgun Frenzy (Tower Defense fusion). It reminds me much of how Tribes 1 evolved in the later years, with a small but dedicated group of players using extremely modified flavors of the game that no developer could have anticipated. Finally, there is World of Warcraft. I took a much-needed hiatus while waiting for the next world event, Brewfest, during which I got the “What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been” achievement and “beat the game.” If only. I have been logging in daily since then to collect items and level characters (and all before the anticipation that came when they announced the next expansion!) Not even Battlefield 3′s beta at the end of the month could hold my interest over the allure of doing the same beer-related tasks every day.

Work went better this month than it had in a while. It may have something to do with the raise I strangled out of them, but I put more time into getting a handle on my projects and my position in general. Garrett helped me mount some monitors on the wall in front of my primary workstation, which allows me to keep an eye on various network services (via Centreon) and makes me look like a total geek. My cellphone has become a part of my pocket-ensemble, though I use it much less than someone with a smartphone does with theirs. I am content, for the most part, in having a low powered Palm WebOS phone that will let me get emergency texts. Angry Birds is best enjoyed on an iPad anyhow. I made a push for cloud services through Amazon, but the interest is nonexistent elsewhere in the company. I was given the opportunity to do some pricing research on Android tablets, after one of our customers asked a question that we could not feasibly answer without a similar device. I found a good deal on a Motorla Xoom one night on Woot, and a week later it arrived. I also pre-ordered the Kindle Fire, a move which spurred me to invite my immediate family to Amazon Prime. I foresee my dad using such a device in conjunction with the Prime service to watch movies and t.v. shows. Netflix is nice, but I have hopes this will be even better.

Miles had a bad experience, long ago, when he went to a Chinese buffet in New York. Jellyfish was on the menu and it did more than just tantalize the taste buds, we’ll say. Since then, he’s had a bit of an aversion to Chinese restaurants, Panda Express not included. Confident off the success of the last new place I introduced him to (Buca for his b-day), I decided to eat out at Yen Ching’s, the cozy little multi-course diner we used to visit often before my Dad went away. It’s one of those places where the staff remembers you, even if it’s been a long time. Which is to say, their staff has been working there for years. Watching four boys grow up to be four adults will stand out to your memory in that way. Overall conclusion? Excellent. In other food news, Esther’s Tacos was introduced to us not long ago in 2011, and it’s become a Friday tradition to head out there for lunch among those at work; I am eager to share this experience with my Dad, as the type of Mexican (or any) food they serve in prisons is subpar. I was happy to be able to spend some meal-times with my Grandmother, a matter of convenience with my Uncle was taking her off to do business related to my Grandfather’s estate; we met for Polly’s a few times, Indian at Tandoori on Katella once, and even Esther’s. These meetings are almost always followed-up with a curious question from my Dad, who is glad to hear she’s in good spirits and with healthy appetite. Near the end of the month, Austin spent some time with Grace and they baked us some turn-overs, a type of pastry food I wasn’t familiar with up until then. Overall, a(nother) good month for food.

Windows 8 launched a developer preview build on the 13th, available to anyone with an internet connection and the give-a-damn, and I gave it a shot on an old testbed machine I had in the office. I can’t say I am too impressed, treating it with perhaps an unfair amount of scrutiny but not a level I consider unfair after the horrors of Vista. I will say this often: going from a phone’s OS to Windows 8 will be an amazing step forward; going from Windows 7 on a PC to Windows 8 is a leap backward. My stance on Metro may change in the future, especially alongside the other reported benefits of the new OS, but for now it lies in the same spectrum of “fancy but useless” platforms. Kind of like putting Jollicloud on an old netbook, the Win8 testbed collects dust until Microsoft makes that threat go retail.

Austin’s friend (and my friend too!) Dillon came out for two weeks in July, one of which overlapped the festivities of Valcon 2011. I did not get to see him too much because of this, but I am overjoyed that we got to spend a bit of time together after all of my internet friends parted ways. It was something to look forward to after the mental peak that was having everyone over and whipping my bank account into destitution. I mention his visit late, you may notice, as he was gone before the end of July and before Austin’s birthday at the very beginning of August, but there’s a week-long period of time in there where we got to go out to dinner and hang out. I am bequeathing that week to the eigth month just because it was mostly boring shit otherwise. Back to Dillon: he is a bit of an internet celebrity due to his skills in art, and he’d like to put them towards making games as well. In fact, he’s been working on a project for awhile now similar in theme to Cave Story, an undertaking that has had Garrett jealous of the Dill for as long as we’ve known him. Like so many people I know with talent but no college education (e.g. Dabe), I hope that he won’t be crushed under the ridiculous requirements one must pass in order to achieve success these days. Still, he is young and time is on his side. I am hoping that he will come out from his native Milwaukee to visit us again sometime soon, but he is a recent highschool grad and there’s a great big scary world out there to be tackled first. Seeing he, Austin, and Grace together is as satisfying as when the Val people are united. Online friendships aren’t just for punchlines or the 11 o’ clock news anymore.

Tay left us a few days after Dillon flew home, traveling south for a brief stint at the San Diego Comic Convention (she being one of the few people to actually secure a ticket), so her leaving was truly the last event to mark the end of our summer festivities. The night before she left, I DM’d a short game of D&D for her to learn the basics. Out of the dozen or so people I have taught D&D, she picked it up the quickest and did remarkably well. Garrett assisted with explaining the character sheet and potential powers, pointing out the benefits of an AOE fire spell over a direct-damage lightning bolt. Cort video-called via Skype to lend some commentary and otherwise revel in the fact that he could participate from a country away. At the end of the night, her sorcerer/bard character (based off a Val character of hers) had saved a wizened architect’s life, navigated through an illusory forest, and defeated a succubus in a game of wits. Or tits, whatever, same thing. It was said many times throughout July by many people, including my mother, but I will reiterate that Tay is the fifth Lloyd kid. I have no objections. Dropping her off at the Ontario airport, I was met with the same sense of sorrow as I had last year when we finally said goodbye to Cort. The last to go, the first to return.

Before I dive into August in earnest, I will mention Austin’s birthday celebration(s). On the 30th, we went to the Roge’s to celebrate both his 23rd birthday and our cousin Ashley’s 13th birthday. I don’t know why I’d never paused before now to reflect that they were ten years apart, but I suppose becoming a teenager is a milestone. This last year has seen a lot of good things for Ausbro, but I trust there will be even more milestones to speak of when I summarize next year. As has been tradition for the last few get togethers, Rich made his special shrimp on the BBQ and we enjoyed some amazing cake from, I believe, the Cheesecake Factory (courtesy of Marissa). Aside from Valcon, this is one of the few events I have photographed this year. There is hardly any evidence that we met the following night to celebrate just among the family, but we did just that.

I reached another boiling point at work, fed up with a myriad of things but, as many people will tell you, mostly mad that I was working additional hours and not seeing much of a reflection as far as pay goes. The conclusion to all of it was me opting for a cellphone to show that I was eager to do more and be a more available resource, but that I had a lot of problems with the way the company ran and that I’d write them out for review. I did a lot of thinking on that issue, and ultimately I chose to wait it out until my dad got out of prison and for a few other key employees to leave by the end of the year. I see no point in trying to fix a system whose problems lie with people who will take said issues with them when they retire. As with many of my grudges, this is a brilliant example of outliving my problems. I have no doubt that the problems I have won’t go anywhere until this time next year, but change at any pace is for the better. One positive change has been the addition of a Flame Broiler across the street from the office. I realize this isn’t exactly a company achievement, but it’s something that we all enjoy on a weekly basis and one of the food options I had hoped was available in time for Valcon. Alas, change at any pace may be for the better but sometimes the timing is awful.

August itself had a few key events, and was much less boring than I had originally recalled. I guess if you’re still reading this, you’re bored enough to commit to a bit more. Hang in there. Garrett was invited by Brent and Pricilla to Las Vegas for a weekend of gambling and buffets. He went and had a good time of it, his feeling that a vacation was in order after a vacation the magnitude of Valcon. There is also a sentiment that Garrett spends too much time cooped up at home, perhaps at the behest of me, and that he needed to experience new things on his own. My interest in the matter stemmed from the potential that Las Vegas would make for a damn good meet-up location for next year’s summer banana-slam and his reports more or less confirmed this. I had them take a good amount of pictures, with both Mike and Myke in attendance, and no one lost over 601 dollars. You see what I did there.

A few days after the Las Vegas trip, Clenshaw drove east for the semester. I took he and his driving buddy out to dinner at Koki’s the night before, and decided to lend him a gaming laptop I had just purchased with the very last of the money I put aside for such toys. I felt kind of sorry for him, as he had bought a new laptop a year or two ago but failed to select one with any sort of video card. This meant he couldn’t play his precious (read: aggravating) League of Legends as smoothly as he’d like. I also took the opportunity to load maptools on the machine and show him how it worked, in the (now considered failed) attempt at getting him to participate in one of my online D&D campaigns. The two sessions he participated in were especially lively, I must say. Finally, as if to give my bank account one last punch in the gut, I spent the next night picking out an electric-acoustic guitar for Miles birthday present. He, Garrett and I celebrated by going to Buca di Beppo, a restaurant whose caliber he had never experienced in New Jersey. It’s weird to think that he’s a smidge younger than Austin, but I think it’s mostly an odd observation for someone in my position alone.

The end of August saw me taxed financially, physically (with a trip to Gulliver’s for dinner one night, I realized the amount of good (bad) food I’ve eaten this summer has destroyed this year’s attempts at weight loss), and emotionally. I am sore to admit it, but I occasionally still check the local pound in the hopes that my cat has been found. It is mostly due to a fear that she will be put down without my knowledge and that giving up on her would mean I’m all the shittier a person, but it culminated in one last bout of madness that I still sigh over. My cat was a gray tabby, the likes of whom appeared just as any other millions in the breed; yet there I was, sitting antsy near midnight, looking at a near-clone of my cat. It had to be here, I figured, and I obsessed over every detail in all of the reference photos I could find. Garrett was so convinced of the likelihood, either of it being my cat or that I had finally snapped, he tagged along for a physical confirmation. The appearance was uncanny, but the stories didn’t match up. Although she was especially playful and took to us well, she did not respond to my voice in the way I knew must and the location of her discovery was too far to be plausible in any situation other than a Disney movie. Oh, and the fact that it had been over a year. As much as I hate to say, and all over something most people consider property (or food), my cat is gone. Conversations regarding adopting a replace haven’t ceased since, but I believe I am over the concept.

July has become a time for both hellos and goodbyes. We’ve made sure of this, crafting the penultimate annual get-together known simply as Valcon. For me, it is a time of reflection, and an overwhelming amount of data to parse in retrospect. So many memories, both good and bad, and no where to start but the beginning.

It wasn’t until March of this year that we began planning in earnest for the 2011 installment of Valcon, where the people I’ve met and made friends with over the past decade on Valikorlia come out to sunny California and enjoy the fruits of our excessive lifestyle. In contrast to Valcon 2010, whose planning consisted of a 2-3 week heads up and then a scrambled last-minute hotel booking to allow a dozen people to meet for a couple days, this year saw me putting a lot of time and effort into the week-long itinerary. I placed the call out on our forums for those interested, and immediately got a handful of interested people, of whom fell into one of three categories: people who wanted to go and who I would have been glad to see, people who wanted to go and who I would NOT have been glad to see, and people who just wanted to talk about the concept. I run into the latter group all the time when planning things, the people who want to be involved in the discussion stages but have no means, or really no intentions, of attending themselves. I got some flak from people closer to me, those assisting with con planning, for even making the event a public one as it invited certain undesirables, or just people who would have made it uncomfortable for the larger group. To be clear, our community is a huge one and, as is to be expected, personality conflicts arise. We were dealing with two friends’ in-fighting even in the days leading up to the con itself, but that sort of thing is not what I mean when I say there were some people who would have really rocked the boat. While we turned away a few bad apples, we gambled by allowing a few people to bring their girlfriends but I’ll go more into that later.

So, planning. Once we all knew this was totally “a thing”, I put together an excel spreadsheet with airfare information, began looking for cheap hotels, and started mentally spacing out the car requirements we’d need. The final number of attendees was something like 18, and we had people not RSVPing until the last few weeks! This irritated me a bit, but such is to be expected given that most of these people are still teenagers and have other life matters up until summer, when their focus is inexplicably turned to the Val community. For the most part, however, planning went very smoothly. I got good rates for people to fly in and stay at the nearby Extended Stay hotel (a mere five minute walk through a parking lot), coordinated fun activities and put reservations in for dinner events, worked with Brent and Garrett to design and create t-shirts custom fit for the occasion, and did my best to stock up on snacks and clean the apartment before everyone arrived in mid-July. I’d like to think that planning saved me a lot of money, on top of the energy and stress it would have required had I just played it by ear. Whether or not that is true, I will probably never know as I shied away from writing down each expense at they arose. It is impossible to foresee every little hiccup that can arise when you put nearly twenty people together for a week, and costs ranged from a few bucks to buy more drinks when the tap ran dry to replacing someone’s glasses who “misplaced” them in the Pacific Ocean.

When the week finally came, well, it’s overwhelming to discuss conventionally. Perhaps an analogy: if Valcon 2010 felt like a juggling act, with Garrett spending more time in the car to escort people between locations than just hanging out with said people, then 2011 was a full-blown magic show. Two days at either end of the week were spent driving people to and from airports, but it wasn’t too much of a chore thanks to plotting it all down beforehand. I was able to borrow my mother’s SUV for the long drive down to San Diego, affording my full roster such niceties as air-conditioning and an interior that didn’t smell like swamp-ass. This year was “Carmageddon” as reported by every media outlet in the county, but Garrett had no issue driving our LAX-bound guests during that time-frame. At all. It was really comical how easy getting to that airport was, in the face of all other challenges. When it came time to head out to dinners or other events, we had plenty of cars to suit our needs, although the addition of one or two more people would have seriously strained that arrangement. Still, there was plenty of time during the week where everyone was content to just hang out and enjoy each others company, be it in a game of Munchkin or singing songs while inebriated or recounting stories of years past. All told, we visited the beach, took a trip to Knott’s, hosted a few “panels” at my company’s computer lab, had a BBQ + Pinata fest at my parent’s place, and went to dinner regularly to enjoy everything from spaghetti to waffles. Everyone has a favorite event, so I wont go into anyone else’s but my own: the least expensive outing was actually an impromptu sushi run as put together by Garrett a mere half an hour before the place closed, on one of the nights I had intentionally left blank for fear of saturating our schedule. I had absolutely no idea how someone could have pulled that off, with that many people, at that hour, and without a huge budget. Pretty much everyone loved it, too, even the people who hadn’t had raw fish before.

I suppose I will speak of my guests now, in no particular order:

• Brent gets a special mention not as a guest but as someone who helped me coordinate all of this, both in driving and with reserving a spot for us at the Newport Beach fire-pits where many people had the highlight of their vacation. He had to forgo dinner with us that night in order to keep the spot and if you read my previous entry on Brent, you’ll know that’s totally in his character to do. I would have been in a glum mood without him.
• Tay was an extended guest during July, her spending a few days before the convention and a week or so afterwards at our apartment, giving me a great opportunity to make use of her eagerness to clean and coordinate; I put her in charge of hotel room keycards and she did an amazing job of it, in between cleaning up after other people and taking a huge strain off my shoulders. At the end of it all, we taught her how to play D&D (with Cort dialed in over Skype) and she took so much of a liking to the area that she is considering moving out here from the east coast some time next year. It’s funny to think that, in 2010, she was a person the primary group was wary of allowing in. Someone who was so central to running this year’s event being labeled an outcast last year just goes to show you how meeting people out in the open does wonders.
• Cort made a repeat appearance, although I have to admit that getting him confirmed to attend was one of the more difficult tasks during the planning phase, as his workplace was doing an awful job of responding to his requests for time off, unpaid even as they were. Cort does well to smooth over the other attendees, as he is generally likable by just about everyone, though you could give the same demeanor to anyone else and they’d immediately be considered an asshole.
• Also returning this year was John Tierney, who brought along his roommate Evan (also a Valikorlian), and Nikky who he fetched from all the way in Arizona. The trio stayed a few days after the crowd had left and we went out to Lucille’s BBQ, which I felt was a thank-you dinner for them being such kind guests to provide driving, not only for themselves but for up to two others. John is one of the rare few whose enthusiasm for Valikorlia is genuinely infectious, and I am glad to know that people like him still play the game with such fervor. Evan more or less came out of no where (in my poor memory) but it wasn’t long before I could tell he was one of us. Nikky, too, previously known only as “one of the girls whose name begins with N” became more than just that in my head, and it was good to see that she could make it out despite the trek involved.
• Nienna and Conor flew down from Canada, one of the few couples that met either through Val or one introduced the other to it, I cannot recall. These people had been around for years in the community, but their presence didn’t even blip on my radar until this year; it’s sort of a mild Alzheimer’s, this condition of mine, and I am constantly happily surprised to learn that we have more enthusiastic players. Although we levied a good deal of teasing towards the couple, the fact that they can take it so well is part of why we admire them. Perhaps its their Canadian blood?
• Adrienne was involved in Valcon last year, tied in closely with Dabe (who made only a short appearance this year). This year she switched Dabe for Dave and the two were like peas in a pod, if the pod were all about League of Legends and also Mike Clenshaw. Although she hadn’t done much planning, Adrienne did pitch in to get us a really cool commemorative sword to say thanks for all of the work Garrett and I did in hosting, and for that I am eternally grateful.
• Dave is a motherfucker, I don’t even wanna talk about him
• Mitch almost didn’t make it, but I am glad he did. Out of all of the people attending, I’ve known Mitch the longest despite many people being as “old” as he in the community. Maybe it’s because we have a similar sense of humor (a terrible one, I should point out) or because we’ve run into arguments a lot in the past, but whatever the case I am happy he made it and amazed that a man that large can move so quickly and without a care for stamina. I would also like to point out that the ocean tore him down just like the rest, and I have added it to my list of reasons why the ocean is a dangerous hell-zone.
• Rustan brought his girlfriend Brittany along for the ride this year and, in all honestly, I was not too worried about the prospect. Unlike Travis, who I will spare further mention for the sake of keeping this retrospective a positive one, Rustan got his girlfriend involved in our community many months before the get-together, if for no other reason than to show her what kinds of goofy nerd shit he was into. If there were a way for both of them to make a better impression on all of us, I can’t think of it.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from meeting people from the scary world of the internet, it’s that things become a lot less serious when you go back to your computer desk. You get a better perspective for the person you’re talking to, and it’s a lot harder (for me, at least) to be mad at someone for something trivial when you actually know them. For all of my guests, I want to say thanks for coming out and chipping in whatever you could (or whatever I allowed you), and for being so enthusiastic about the shit I take for granted every day. Whether it was Asian cuisine or a big body of water full of lost glasses, the thing I enjoyed the most was watching everyone else having a good time. We all made this out to be a good Valcon, no matter what came up.

So… next year? Yes and no. All of these people in attendance, and still there were a handful of others that nearly went or are definitely able to attend if we held something similar next year. It’s one of the reasons why I feel we can’t continue to host at our apartment, given the huge roster lined up for 2012. There are more reasons, and I will touch on some of them. Covering costs for a lot of the people was a sore point, both with those able to cover themselves and those that were not. Some people, namely Cort, feel as if they shouldn’t attend if they can’t pay their own way, which is unfortunate because I feel like missing out strictly due to financial reasons is a failure on my front to host. There were those who were mad that I did not accept their money at the end of a meal or at the end of the convention proper, but the truth is that their pittance would not really have made a difference in the end. I took a few people up on the offer and the amount in their head they had available to contribute was a drop in the bucket in the grander scheme. I felt it more appropriate to let them spend that money at their own discretion (perhaps in buying souvenirs or food items at another event, e.g. Knott’s) than to take from them and not take alike from others. Ultimately, yes, running this thing is not cheap, especially when those in attendance are comfortable with sleeping on floors and eating dollar-menu food as opposed to shelling out money to cover the basics. The other real problem when you ask for more people to attend is that the chance for new comers to not get along with the established group. Under the current model, all it takes is a single person acting up to ruin the good times of everyone else. We took that chance this year with several attendees, and it turned out alright except for one sole troublemaker. The ability to get rid of them easily was impossible, given the length at which we were hosting for everyone (right down to transportation). So, be it social, money or capacity’s constraint, then, I have to vie for an alternative to what we have been doing the past two years if another Valcon is to happen at all. It is for this reason that I began to look elsewhere shortly after the convention ended, something closer to a package deal where each person could be more autonomous and cover his or her own costs, without it being too expensive. My answer so far? Las Vegas.

Flying into Las Vegas is cheaper than flying into Orange County for most, and the distance from the airport to the hotel(s) is a few minutes drive by means of a free shuttle or taxi. This already eliminates the need for Garrett or I to do any escorting, and gives people a wider freedom to go out and do what they want as everything is within a twenty minute walk. Hotel rates are dirt cheap, with three or four star rooms averaging the same price people spent for the extremely reasonable rates that Extended Stay offers; I feel like, with six months or more notice, this gives people a good number to shoot for when saving up for the trip in 2012. Breaking away from the San Diego scene, we are no longer beholden to the July time-frame and can therefore plan the event for when rates are cheapest and/or whatever works best for people. I can think of only one or two instances where a person couldn’t attend due to the calendar date, so that’s less of a perk than it seems. Beyond price, it allows me a private area all to myself because I don’t have twenty-something twenty-somethings in my living space at all times. The drawback to this, and really the only flaw in this plan at all, is the fact that we have no central area for people to meet and hang out. Something I feel is easily remedied either by purchasing a large suite or using one of the many break-out rooms that one can find littered throughout the Vegas hotel complex. Finally, there is just a tremendous amount of activity going on in the area: whether it’s a theatrical show, arcades, fancy dinners, dingy buffets, giant aquariums, cramped pools, or any number of other attractions, I feel as if there’s more than enough to keep people occupied. Ultimately, Valcon is about the people and just hanging out. Sometimes you just want a few hours to sit down and chat with everyone. If Vegas can do that for us, for cheap, without the need for a lot of driving and time lost coordinating then I think we’ve found a good match.

It’s amazing to consider that this, a long-standing joke in the community for years, became reality and then the second iteration saw it double in size. The scope of our next meeting, I can only imagine in dreams. A lot will change from now until then, but there will always be Valikorlia.

This year’s Valikorlia-themed get together felt as one long day, uninterrupted with its fun and its tolls; it isn’t until now, a week later, that I feel I have enough stamina recovered to turn my eyes to what comes next in my life. Nearly all of what I speak was captured on camera, something you can follow by checking out my FlickR set.

Before I speak of what we did last week, which I will save for another entry, I’ll fill in the blanks between the middle of June when my Grandfather passed away to the start of Val Con proper. I suppose it was the very start of June that Mike Clenshaw and Mychael Jauregui drove cross-country from Pennsylvania, through the southern states, to finally reach California. Their involvement in our summer activities was almost guaranteed, citing scheduling overlaps where they were kept doing other fun things. I am writing this now, on the 23rd of July, and already I have taken their presence for granted. In a month’s time, they will be but a ghostly whisper, and so it goes…

I turned 26 earlier in the month and enjoyed a birthday party at Koki’s teppan house with Jauregui and Clenshaw in attendance; Brent was gone, busy in Palm Desert picking up the keys to a timeshare from my aunt, to enjoy that weekend with his girlfriend and the two mikes. I was treated to an especially girly cake (with a mustache) courtesy of Fill in the Hole, a first step in what became a long journey of delicious and fattening foods brought over from that donut shop. Clenshaw, in town long enough to desire some extra cash, took up a job at the humble little storefront and this inevitably brought fried baked goods to the forefront of any get-together. While I was out at Koki’s, Dabe came home and took the last of his belongings in what was a final gesture of goodbye; he is now moved out, struck out on the path of life and hopefully finding good fortune wherever he can. We don’t see much of him anymore, but Skype makes sure that no man is island for long. I had hoped to take him out for his birthday, but that was the very day Gramps passed on. He checked in once or twice during Valcon but not for long, a symptom of his bustling lifestyle now marked with new friends and a special lady to call his own. It’s too bad that it got so wearisome near the end, with me literally packing his bags for him to go, but I am glad he’s self-sufficient enough to make it out in the big world. He did more in a year than I did in the five years after leaving high-school.

At the end of the month, the family paid my dad a visit and we got to talk about Gramps, Father’s Day, and the usual spread of work news. Brent is focused on seeing him as much as he can, with something like only six or so opportunities left; I feel as if my visits with him run the risk of either catching him in a depressed mood or in a state where our normal conversations are just bland. At this point, I am not sure how much more he cares to hear about my bitching regarding the way work is going or to dance around the sad issue of my romantic options. The only positive moments, therefore, are when we get to share meals with him that he cannot otherwise obtain (I laugh at the thought of him marveling at the simple things we eat every day on the outside) and a quick hug and pat on the back. Only 100 or so days left until he is released and, as in the past, I cannot possibly imagine how much or little my life will change by this time next year.

My disregard for work has evolved into a strange, almost nonsensical affair. At times, I feel as if I know everything that is wrong in those halls and yet when I press myself to speak of them, I have nothing to present. One point in particular sticks out: you may recall, I agreed some months ago to take on extra duties in exchange for what was a somewhat mysterious payraise. In my mind, it meant I would be given salary as if I worked full-time; currently, I still only work six hour days, though that is a bit of misnomer given my after-hours work. It was not until a month and a half later that I saw any increase, despite the extra work, and the lack of follow-up on the part of my managers was really disheartening. For a short time in early July, I attempted to jumpstart my interest in coming in every day by purchasing an upgraded workstation to use and attaching VESA-mounts to get multiple monitors in my office. While the boost in productivity is nice, it still feels like I am giving and getting a disproportionate amount while performing my job. With the current “agreement”, I am free to come in whatever time of day and work six hours out from there, on top of handling issues after hours. Ideally, I would like to be given structure, a case like any other normal employee (at any job) where I come in at, say, 8:30 AM and work out from there. Any time after that would be considered overtime, which I currently do not write down given my lax schedule. In this way, they are getting more work out of my while I am able to have the freedom of coming in on my own time, and I simply do not care for it anymore. There are many times in a month where network issues are not covered until the late morning due to my absence that is neither professional nor truly fair to other employees. I am set to speak with my managers next week about this, and I have a lot of mental preparation to do, as I often forget to separate my own issues with the issues of the company at large. I cannot be the champion of every problem, nor does the administration care to hear it. I will be lucky if they are able to parse my personal issues at all.

Leading into July, I had WoW and a slew of new music to keep myself preoccupied when free-time was available. I also spent many a week hosting D&D and those campaigns are now nearly at an end. I had wanted to include Clenshaw, Jauregui, Brent and Cody in another game this year to conclude last year’s storyline but it seems the timing will be off as Clenshaw returns home for the fall semester. Still, his involvement in Valikorlian matters means he will become familiar with maptools and a game may persist with him at a satellite location. Though I put a lot on hold with Valcon, I am now at a point where the end of July must be spent wisely in tying up these last few sessions. Looking at some of the events coming up in the next few weeks, it will be quite the juggling act.

There can be only one thing to talk about when I look back on this month, whether it’s now, in 2012, or for years to come. On June 16 at roughly 4:00 PM, my Grandfather died of a major heart-attack. He had no real health ailments up until that point, which made the all too sudden event somehow more shocking.

In a lot of ways, my grandfather was my least deserving enemy, always there as someone to blame and resent when such feelings weren’t always due. In truth, I owe him a lot more respect than I gave, and I spoke poorly of the man up until the hour of his death. He had the unfortunate position of being both my grandfather and the owner of the company I work for; he served more as a shadowy employer than a grandfather in the later years, and our relationship evolved on my dad’s side of the family because of it. Family functions with the Lloyds always felt like more of a company event than some celebration between those familiar with each other, and that is one of the better reasons why.

My 26th birthday was this June, and I will use a gift given to me by Brent as a good explanation for how my grandfather worked. I feel like there are two ways to approach helping people: one involves effort and the other, less so. If I can open my wallet and give a man 20 dollars and have him appreciate it, that is a good thing. It does not involve any effort beyond the thought and the money lost. It would also be a good thing to help a man move a fridge into his apartment on the second floor, but would I do that? Probably not. Brent’s gift to me was a whiteboard, and instead of just buying and giving it to me, he went through the effort of also installing it on my wall for me. That shows a great deal of effort and says a lot about Brent as a person.

My grandfather, like me, wasn’t the kind of guy that would install whiteboards for you. Thinking on the matter deeper, he used the tools he had to do the very best he could. He was not a social butterfly and he didn’t get along with my mother at all. They were two completely different people. And yet, for ten years while my father was in prison, he paid his salary to her. Not because it was owed to my dad, to her, or to us. Not because it was mandated in a contract, or a “promise” or any of that entitled horse shit. No, he did it because that was his way of doing right by us with the tools he had. He could open his wallet and pass it on, and that was about as comfortable as any of us were with him. He could only get so close, and could only handle such concepts for so long before had to move on. To my knowledge, my grandfather did not have medication for his mental illness and that explains a lot of his mood-swings. Austin will forever hold it against the man for not finding treatment and being open about something that his grandson has to deal with on a constant basis, that his immediate children felt all throughout their lives, but as Garrett pointed out he was merely a product of his time. Not blameless by any stretch, but my grandfather’s mother was also bipolar and did many of the same things that he passed on to his children, in turn. It was merely not socially acceptable to speak out about your problems. You just bottled them away. Taking this and adding it to who he was up until his death, I think Jerry did a fine job, and never made it a secret about how he felt, even if those feelings were wildly influenced. He was proud to have children, and to see them go on and have children of their own, well, that was the pinnacle of his achievements.

So this, the day I had looked forward to, for ages, has finally come. Do I regret my feelings for my grandfather? No. The morning of his death, I sat in bed, not wanting to go into work; suddenly, I opened my eyes and realized this was a day I had asked for: earlier in the week, it had been busy, and this was a day I needed to unwind a bit. Foreshadowing aside, I cannot go back on those feelings now. I feel no ill will towards my grandfather now, and I think he had a very good life. I am glad I was able to see him one last time at the hospital, as it was not a chance I had with other relatives. I think we left off on the same page, and that’s all that matters. Garrett described him as a powerful flame, always burning ahead to wherever he wanted, even if others got burnt along the way. I think that is quite fitting for a man who blazed a trail in the computer industry and provided the means for dozens of people as the years went on. If you have ever been touched by my generosity, financially, then you have that man to thank for instilling such openness in me.

Today is Father’s Day, and if I am at peace with my grandfather’s passing, I cannot say the same about my father’s misery. The four sons met in the hospital parking lot that evening and knew their father had a phone call a half an hour from then, and we couldn’t let my mother break the news to him, in the hysterical wreck she was in. Hearing him react to his father’s death is something that I will never forget, and in that moment I knew that even if I had wished grandpa away, I had never reflected on how much he meant to my dad. He was always someone my dad wanted to redeem, to make things right between Jerry and my mom, and everyone else for that matter. He will never be able to go to brunch, to hike, to speak of football, to do anything fatherly with his father anymore. If the prisons robbed anything from my father, it will have been the opportunity to see things as they were when he left. Our only shared gladness is that he wont have to spend another Father’s Day, another birthday, another Christmas, away from us. I’ve never brokered with death, but oh how I wish it would stay away for at least a little while longer.

I cannot say where the future will take us, but we have been having many conversations throughout the household(s). Brent’s feelings before my grandfather’s passing were mixed, like “being in Limbo” and not knowing how to proceed when things were so murky. This next week, we will have to sit down and reflect on the future. Though June has ten days left to it, I can’t help but jump ahead in my mind. I need it to be then, not now, an almost choking restlessness taking hold over me on that Friday morning at work, following. There was so much uncertainty before Jerry left, with our salesman resigning earlier in the month and more planning on doing so by the end of the year. We need to push forward, or risk losing the legacy that my grandfather left behind. There can be no greater disservice than wasted potential, for my grandfather. We must take flight.

If you are reading this, then the world did not end on the 21st of May. It also means the world did not end on the 21st of October, as I wont be publishing these entries until December, so kudos on living through two near-Armageddons. The willful ignorance of the religious never ceases to amaze me, but I figure you either come out of that a wiser person or a confirmed lunatic.

May saw the end of college courses and the start of Brent coming to work most days of the week. He’s only one more semester from graduating in full, right behind my cousin Marissa graduating from ASU with a similar degree in business management. It’s always good to see him around the office, mostly as a person I can relate to in matters relating to the company itself. He is privy to meetings with administration whereas I have more exposure to the actual grunt-work going on, so there’s an interesting contrast that happens when certain topics are brought up; my outlook is almost always dismal while he is more chipper, but I suppose that’s to be expected. It’s simple for me to give of a list of ways to improve the company, with no real guide on how to do so and without a firm grasp of our expenses. I will argue this point to the grave: our company, in its current incarnation, cannot handle success beyond what it has been used to in the past. We’ve no way to grow our infrastructure and I feel the seams stretching with even the current load of new customers. Something is going to change in the next year or two, and whether or not it is something that will be healthy for everyone is a decision entirely out of my hands. Interesting times, indeed.

Last year, we purchased new workstations for the entire company along with a new virtual server to handle a multitude of processes. The hundred thousand dollars, or something to that magnitude, were extremely well spent in my biased opinion and we’ve reaped the gains on that investment several times over considering the two dozen VMs we are looking at currently. Since then, we’ve made only a few major purchases leading up to this year’s spending scramble; in the second week of May we were given a similar chunk of cash to work with, this time electing to purchase another VM server but for our collocated services. The reasons for this were many: to better facilitate the growth of customers (see my concerns re: that in the above paragraph), to help employees access and work with the data by means of an RDS server, and to allow us some redundancy in the case of data failure. With the left-over funds in our budget, we upgraded our tape backup system to a sixteen-tape bay, upgrading our current single-tape loader.

These hardware matters enthuse me and, as with last year, I spent a great deal of after-hours time in May working on the company network and generally trying to put a polish on the routines I come in and do every day. Whether it’s maintenance or cataloging, I feel the most positive when I am working alone (or with my brothers) where I feel I have more control over the situation of making the company better, if only in one little aspect. I know the truth of the matter is quite far from that, and that it’s mostly in my head, but these delusions make my performance spike and that has to be admired from a managerial standpoint. I was offered full-time at the beginning of the month if I spent extra time at the end of the week working on our ASP sites, and have done well to do so, but no such promotion has actually materialized as of the end of the month; things are slow to change here, especially in regards to money. Looking back at the meeting now, I realize they may intend to put me on duty as a means to bandage a deep gash when instead they should be looking into hiring more bodies. It is nothing new for them to shuffle new tasks to current employees, many of whom see only a rise in work hours and not salary, but I don’t see it lasting long. They will clinch a deal sooner or later that their current handful of men cannot handle, and then the fun begins.

Fresh out of Memorial Day weekend, I can safely say that my sleeping schedule this month was totally screwy. We’ve become quite intimate with the late-diners around my apartment complex, the iHops and the Denny’s, and I find nothing wrong with sleeping from five in the afternoon to midnight. Combine this with some minor dieting and attempting new fads such as apple cider vinegar (disgusting stuff with ambiguous results), and I am going to blame my recent weight loss on the whole shebang. While last year I reached under-200 levels by means of getting horribly sick and nearly dying, this year I hope to reach 190 by merit of my own healthy choices. With tempting beverages and sugar-laden snack options all around me, this has not and will not be a simple task. I take solace in a few delicious and healthy staples, namely cashews, spinach leafs, and dried cherries. Much better alternatives than, let’s say, microwavable bacon, cheetos, and pop-tarts. Oh, but to have a single bite (and then many more)! Despite some coffee-induced headaches, my health has been pretty good this year. How I desperately hope it continues this way.

Terraria landed in the last half of May and it is nothing short of brilliant. Everything we wanted in Minecraft came to us in this, a 2D sandbox game with more of that g-word than Minecraft ever managed to scrap together before it exploded in profit. I wonder if the creators of that blocky game are scrambling now to produce content in the face of better and better alternatives entering the market (editor’s note: nope). The tales of success and company goings-on with that project bored me and, in some way, made me grow to resent them when their attempts at updating their own game were outmatched by the creative community that had sprung up around the concept. Terraria’s Blue has not made mentioned of his lavish meetings with gaming executives or how nice his new office is, while Minecraft’s Notch seemingly can’t keep his mouth shut on the matter. My grumblings will be nothing but piss in the wind six months from now when the both of them have released even more wallet-opening offerings. Therefore, my sentiments are summed up as followed: shut up and take my money. More of the former than the latter, Notch.

I am playing World of Warcraft and enjoying it as much as I mentioned in the last entry. In between days of running D&D (Mon-Wed-Fri, and sometimes Sundays), I sneak on to level new characters or bolster old. I feel I may be burnt out on the game right around when my D&D fancy does and I do not look forward to the combined void left behind. If my guesswork is accurate, this should be around the start of July. Next month’s entry will be a better measure of my interest in these contrasting uses of my free-time.

The problem with considering my annual trek to Ontario as the definitive March event is that I end up perceiving the rest of the month as this endless period that drags on and on. I do the same thing with October, perhaps, with Garrett’s birthday at the beginning and Halloween at the end, taking little care for all of the little things in between. The rest of March had its share of events and then into April, which seems especially fragmented to me now as I am writing this entry in the middle of May.

My Focus on Dragon Age 2 waned not long after I made my last entry; near the third and final act, when combat and navigation were mastered, the story was found wanting. I didn’t do much gaming in both of these months after that, resuming my love interest with WoW only near the tail end of April with the coming of Easter to complete some in-game festivities. I’ve been subscribed since then, playing here and there with Miles and collecting a full set of heirloom equipment which must have been Blizzard’s direct answer to my sagging interest following the release of their last expansion. At the beginning of April, I resumed the D&D campaign I began just a year prior, and by the end of the month I had begun two others born out of some intensive research into the Valikorlian setting; all three take place on that world and consist primarily of that crowd. I did manage to get Austin to play in one of them, though he is fickle at best when it comes time to play. He is moody, combative and somewhat of a slow learner, which is a sad contrast to his abilities to roleplay and add to the group as a whole. If I can manage to finish that campaign with he still among the roster, I will consider it a great achievement. All told, I am not too overburdened by running three campaigns, nor do I feel burned out. I hope to have them finished by late June or July.

Spring break came for Mike and Myke the second week of March, their plans taking them to Las Vegas for a weekend before coming back to these parts for a few choice meet-ups. Brent and Pricilla spent their break doing the same, and everyone reportedly had a lot of fun doing whatever it is to do there. Marissa was to accompany the group, but things didn’t work out, part of a series of drama episodes that seem to follow that generation of my relatives around like a dark cloud; it was about this time I realized Brent really wasn’t all that close to his friends from high-school anymore, perhaps mimicking the footsteps of my father in spending his time with the woman of his life and not his former peers. I did manage to take some pictures of a dinner we all enjoyed together (more bacon-wrapped steak!), uploaded on FlickR a day or so afterwards.

In early April, the decision was made to put down my Mom’s ailing dog, Rosie. It had been discussed for quite some time and I was always hoping that nature would take its course and that she would go on her own accord, but things were getting too bad near the end for it to wait any longer for her caretakers. I chose not to attend the event, something I will probably get shit for whenever it’s brought up in the future, but I don’t see any requirement in watching some stranger shoot up a dying dog with poison. She was picked up on the Fourth of July already an old dog in poor health then, and it’s a wonder she lasted as long as she did. I gave a better memorial for her on the facebook and I have no desire to repost it here. It does add to my feeling that owning pets is something only children, or those with children, should do; it teaches a valuable lesson on responsibility, and the inevitability of death. A bond forged with a pet is temporary, and I don’t see the sad memories being worth the joy along the way.

At some forgotten point in the last two months, Garrett went into my bathroom to take a shower and fell asleep on the floor of the tub. About an hour passed before he awoke, by then the entire mess flooding over on to my bathroom’s wood flooring. It was a pain to clean up, and some of the water actually leaked through to the kitchen below, but there wasn’t any lasting damage to anything beyond his pride. Almost poetically, I ribbed him for his carelessness and then I made a similar mistake a week later: wanting to get an early start on work one morning, I turned on the shower and sat back on my bed to wait for the water to warm. I dozed off and came to about twenty minutes later to a problem less in volume but equally disappointing. All of this was made worse by the fact that I knew the drain was clogged and made no effort to fix it until my bathroom had flooded that second time. They don’t normally do that, after all. Neither do adults let these kinds of things happen. An opportunity to learn, I suppose.

I cannot recall exactly when it occurred, but at some point Dave lost his job at Fry’s, acquired a girlfriend, and has been spending most of his time away from the apartment after letting his friendship with us sour more and more often. I would very much like to see him moved out before our summer plans kick in to have so many people over, but I am not sure that is feasible without leaving him in a bad spot. He’s made efforts to get his license and get my scooter’s registration taken care of, but progress is slow going. I’m not sure where he spends six days out of the week but I’m sure it’s a welcoming place, to accept him for as long as it does. Garrett’s rue is incalculable on the matter.

Easter came so late this year, it hardly felt like spring at all. I am accustomed to the occasion being a time closer to the start of what my mind considers spring, near the aforementioned school breaks and work conference. It is tradition to spend time with my mother’s side of the family, though usually this takes place at either of my aunt’s homes; this year, my mother opted for the Lloyd cabin which, of course, fell to some drama when my grandfather pulled permission to stay that particular weekend. Angry phonecalls and sad, sad things said by people who should know better followed, and eventually we were allowed once more to go. Personally, I couldn’t have cared less about the where so much as the who, but it was something that mattered to others. Garrett and I arrived late that Saturday and stayed over night, playing some party games and doing a bit of writing before sleeping. Breakfast, hiding and finding eggs and the slow process of gathering up trash and luggage were all that could be said of the actual holiday. I’m really not big on the whole mountain get-away thing, but it’s fun in small doses.

Brent, Garrett and I visited my father in Norco late in the month, and it was an OK visit. He seemed especially glum, not the usual talkative type, and this was probably an indication of the stress and uncertainty he was feeling at the time. I’m sure he feels a lot of mixed feelings about the outside world and what his role in it will be, but I felt like we bothered him on the wrong day; it is not often that I regret visiting him, but that was as close as I will probably get. We’ve a dozen or more opportunities left to see him in this state, yet I almost feel as if he’d rather not be caught in this moment. He is at his lowest, the furthest point from a healthy diet, access to proper medical and dental facilities, and thoroughly impotent in the affairs of others. My problems seem small in comparison to his, but I hope some day we will reach a common ground. It struck me a few weeks after the visit that I have been working for the family business as long as he had, and that the notion of him fixing everyone’s problems for them is extremely childish. I think we all realize that now, but at the time it made for a depressing visit.