So you might have noticed I’ve been out of it for a bit – aside from yesterday’s note about Apple, my last blog entry was on December 14th. So let me start off by wishing everyone a belated Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy New Year, Happy Birthday to those who had them and whatever else I’ve missed along the way. Life has been crazy here, and I have been away from home for various reasons, so rather than attempt to detail everything that has been happening over the past month I figure I’ll toss out a bunch of random stuff. OK? Here goes …

Young people are a wonderful thing: on my big interview trip I stopped in Charlotte NC, where my niece (wife’s sister’s daughter) is a sophomore at Davidson College. My wife and her sister had lost touch for ~7 years, so they didn’t know our kids at all and we only knew theirs as little kids … until just after her father’s death a year ago. That allowed the sisters to try again, and while both are estranged from their (abusive) mother, we have all come together and worked to know one another since – and visited each other every few months. The relationships have been a nice addition for all of us – so when I knew they were flying me to Charlotte I had to check in with my niece. She is a wonderful girl, and it was nice that it worked out that she wasn’t done with finals and I was free the night before my interviews (unlike trying to see momGamer on a recent interview trip!). I had flown in a bit early due to an impending snow storm at home, and I drove up to Davidson and we got to tour campus before going out for dinner. She was totally stressed about finals and I was totally stressed about the interview – and both of us were sleep-deprived – and what we both needed was a break. So it was perfect – we got to just chat openly and freely for a couple of hours, learn more about each other and have a bunch of laughs. She brought me to her favorite coffee hangout for a mocha, and then I dropped her off to resume studies while I went back to the hotel to fine-tune my presentation for the next day. It was a perfect break and a great opportunity – and a highlight of a very busy week. No need to weep for the future when there are great young people like this around.

Holidays are what you make of them: we have built up loads of Christmas traditions through the years. They integrate the religious, commercial, charitable and other things into a family-based time that is always filled with fun giving and sharing. This year we decided to take a vacation over the entire holiday school vacation. Unforeseen when we made that decision, I got laid off from my job of 15 years and was in the throws of interview-fever, including flying around for a week two weeks before Christmas and then starting a new job I knew to be short-term the week before Christmas. This put enormous time pressure on the whole family, and many of the traditions we cherished got squeezed. Our kids normally sing in the church choir at Christmas, but since we wouldn’t be there they couldn’t do that. We normally spend the better part of a weekend baking and enjoy the fruits of that throughout the rest of the holidays … but since we were going away we spent only a half-day doing a minimal amount of baking. We are typically integrated with the local charity organizations to do what we can to help those less fortunate during the difficult holiday season, but again were very limited in what we could do. We worked our hardest to give our boys the best Christmas that we could, and I honestly believe that had a memorable one – but both said that they missed many of the things we usually did.

Use care when sharing someone else’s holiday … As I mentioned we did something different this year – we went to Disney with my wife’s sister’s family. Our boys are 4th and 5th grade, and her kids are freshman and sophomore in college. Unlike our array of traditions, their family seems to have a single tradition – conspicuous consumption. That might sound a bit harsh … or maybe it doesn’t, I really don’t know. All I know is that aside from decorating the house there is nothing else that happens aside from loading up on ‘stuff’. There is absolutely no religious connection, no family sharing, no charity, just a mother and father running around crazy. But we had a very nice Christmas celebration before we flew to Orlando – getting up, opening presents, and having a relaxing day. It was not what we would have done, or were used to, but we all made it work and had a good time – a sign of things to come.

… or taking someone else’s vacation: we had an opportunity to buy a timeshare a couple of years ago and didn’t – because we like to rent a house in a different area each year that exposes us to non-tourist areas … like Jamestown, Rhode Island last year. We typically buy plenty of food, have breakfast at home daily before packing lunch and heading out on an adventure for the day. Sometimes we eat out, other times we eat in … but sitting for a couple of hours in a chain restaurant is never something we desire. If we can find a quaint local place we will make it part of the experience. My wife’s sister’s family, perhaps not surprisingly, owns a couple of time shares and makes full use of them to leverage their way into big flashy vacations in all the usual tourist spots and tend to eat out for all three meals daily. That isn’t meant to be a slight – it is just that we approach vacations differently. They have gone to wonderful places through the years. So when it came about that we go to Disney with them, it was because they had availability with their time share to get a two-family condo close to Disney. The week was all about compromise – my wife and I had been put in charge of coordinating the Christmas Eve and Christmas Day stuff, so we spent Christmas Eve at Magic Kingdom, had loads of fun, saw the fireworks, and left completely exhausted. Christmas Day was at Epcot and the centerpiece of the day was the ‘Olde English Dinner’ in England followed by Gary Sinise reading the Nativity Story along with the Disney Orchestra and Chorus. It might be easy to predict that there were two distinctly different reactions to that experience. The rest of that day felt more like chasing another family around who was always just ahead of you and not waiting … and our kids were not too pleased by the end. After that evening, my wife and I talked and we decided to make sure that certain things we all wanted to do happened before we left. I told her that I was certain that her sister didn’t feel like their needs were being met, so that working out ways of separating for a while here and there would benefit all of us. As an example – we knew our younger son wanted to see the High School Musical show at MGM, but their family steered us towards another section of the park even as I made clear the timing and so on. Rather than get upset, we gave our older son the option of which to do and he stayed with them while my wife and I went with our younger son to see the show. Everyone got what they wanted and we all connected up without an issue. Similarly, our kids wanted to spend time at Disney Quest, but their family had dragged through Downtown Disney until it was too late to be worth spending the money for a day pass. In fact, the younger cousin told our kids ‘oh well, we didn’t do it, too bad, get over it’ … yeah, great for a 19 year old to deal with kids 10 years younger that way … So later in the week we decided we’d spend the day at Disney Quest and they decided to go to Universal. This worked out perfectly – for both families. We got home early enough to spend a couple of hours in the pool and playing around. Overall it was a good vacation – less relaxing than even the normal stressful Disney vacation, cost gobs of money more than we would have usually spent, but it was a good time … and we will NEVER do that again!

What not to do while standing in line: our older son got a cell phone for Christmas, and managed to pick up a load of bad habits from his cousins over vacation. In all of the times we have gone to Disney or other parks, we never brought anything special – my wife and I would have our cell phones, we’d all have water bottles, and each of us had a camera of some sort. My wife’s sister’s family all brought iPods, books, and flipped out their cell phones with such regularity that you’d have thought they were waiting for Ed Macmahon to call. As a result, standing in line wasn’t all that much fun, and we started letting our kids bring things to occupy themselves. But back to the cell phone – what do you consider appropriate? I keep reading articles stating that cell phones are creating ‘the rudest generation’, and over vacation I saw all the proof I needed. My younger nephew in particular is terrible – note to anyone: if you are mid conversation and flip open a cell phone that is neither ringing nor vibrating, you have just told the other person that they matter less than something that isn’t trying to get your attention. The ‘cell phone flipping’ was incessant. In lines, during conversations, at dinner, and on and on. Don’t get me wrong – I am a clear gadget freak, and have thoroughly enjoyed my move to Verizon last year that put our whole family ‘in network’ with my parents, brother, and wife’s sister’s family. Texting has become a nice option for quick communications – especially when I was visiting Charlotte visiting my niece and I was up early and knew she was a night owl. We have been breaking him of bad habits for two weeks now … made easier by the fact that he has had little use for the phone since our return.

Invasion of the boxes! Boxed sets are nothing new, and each year they become more and more ubiquitous as holiday gift items, but this year seems to be a breakout for games. Sure there have been boxes before – Diablo War Chest springs to mind – but those have been big, clunky collections relegated to specialty game shops, designed extra-wide to take up shelf space and look menacing. But while making weekly visits to game and electronic stores during the weeks preceding Christmas I saw shelves full up with plenty of anthologies and particularly the slick looking Grand Theft Auto Trilogy. I spent more time in game and electronic stores this year than usual, and observed that the video game section was more busy than ever. Seems that video games were on everyone’s list this year – and while I helped with loads of moms with poorly-handwritten lists as references, I was amazed by what happened when the desired game wasn’t in stock. It reminded me of working at Bradlees department store during college back in the early 80’s: every Christmas eve you would get too many men streaming into the store with that deer-in-the-headlights look grabbing things left and right – things that would often be coming back on the 26th. As it got closer to Christmas this year I saw too many people grabbing whatever games were available, and those pretty boxed sets looked great …

Games for non-Gamers: I brought my PSP and DS and a few games for each with me on vacation. The ability of the DS & Wii to bring non-gamers into the fold has been described again and again. Obviously enough, it isn’t the devices themselves – the games I brought represented a fairly broad spectrum: Puzzle Quest, Medal of Honor Heroes 2, Disgaea, and Silent Hill Origins for the PSP; Geometry Wars: Galaxies, Final Fantasy XII Revenant Wings, Dementium: The Ward and Call of Duty 4 for the DS. I played mostly in the airports, on planes and a couple of times while we were all sitting around on one of the condo decks. My kids and nephew were interested in whatever I was playing, but no one else keyed in to the shooters and horror games. Two games got *everyone* involved – Puzzle Quest and Geometry Wars. Puzzle Quest is the sort of game that anyone can pick up – but few can put down. Geometry Wars gets pretty tough, but it has such cool raw gameplay that everyone wants to try it for a while. If we ever had crappy weather I would have been recharging the PSP and DS left and right!

So I mentioned layoffs and interviews … yeah, I got laid off in October, but had a great severance package that would last until the summer. Nonetheless I wanted to get back to work as soon as possible. I was very fortunate to have started job-hunting back in the summer (had decided to leave before they decided for me!), so I got busy pretty fast. After Thanksgiving I got my first job offer, which was with a nice little local startup doing cool stuff in a new area of the electron beam industry. Alas, they couldn’t negotiate everything I wanted / needed … so after negotiating what I could I took the job while telling them I would finish out interviews with the four other companies I was already talking to. One company – a nice instrument company in Nebraska I had dealt with for years – canceled the position they were hiring for, taking themselves out of the race. Then, as I mentioned, I had a busy interview week before Christmas and another just after the new year. Things will pretty much come to a head this week or early next week. I had another offer waiting for me when I returned from Disney, and declined one other. The recent trip is netting me another offer, so it comes down to a final decision over the next few days. It is a crazy and stressful trip – especially the part about working at a new company while interviewing for a new job – but it looks 95% that we will be moving somewhere new … I’ll be sure to update everyone when it all hits the fan.

Well … enough words to get me back in the saddle, I suppose! I hope that everyone had a great holiday and wish you all a happy and successful new year!

Tags: Misc