Broke Down U-Haul

Oklahoma must really want to keep me. After nearly three days of loading a truck in the snow, we get on the road.

We get three miles from the condo and the damn Uhaul dies and we're stuck on the side of the road for going on three hours now.

Tulsa bites.

T Minus 4.... DEGREES!

Today's Mood:

Of course, Tulsa had to throw the final mean gesture and decide to drop down to teens and snow before we get out of town. Just like Tulsa. 70 degrees for much of this winter, and the day we move, it'll be snowing buckets I'll bet. Time to go west, time to go west!

Today should prove to be the craziest day in a very long time. I will have to make a bunch of stops, all over the place, get last minute packing done, do the cleaning of the condo, load the "Mom's Attic" part of the U-Haul, and at some point, attempt to get five to six hours of sleep to do it all again tomorrow up until we escape.

At least a little calm before the storm, we're going to have dinner at our favorite restaurant, Fuji, tonight. I'm definitely going to miss that place. I hope to find one worthy of comparing to Fuji when I get to Phoenix. :)

Packing packing packing

I don't want to see any more boxes. Or packing tape. And last night, the final panic of "How are we going to get all this done in time? Who's going to help us move it?" has set in. The book boxes are really small, but they're heavy. One thing to say, between the two of us, I think we could restock the Library of Congress. Books are definitely the majority of my purchases.



Since most friends are either out of town or already busy, we went ahead and reserved two movers for three hours on Saturday morning. This will at least ease our mind, and help us get on the road faster on Saturday. With that help, we should be able to hit the road by 1pm at the latest, I think. Now if I could just forward time to 1pm, I'd be all set. I'm so anxious to get on the road, how fun! (Watch -- four hours of flatland later, I'm going...."Uh...what was I thinking?")

T Minus 4 and Counting

Four more days in Tulsa. Just four more! I'm so ready to get out and get on the road to Arizona. I've been in Tulsa WAAAAAY too long.

Hey, check this out -- a bird's eye view of Disneyland, right from your browser!

I spent a couple minutes surfing around the planet...well, more like surfing around amusement parks in the US. :) Pretty neat, you can distinguish individual rides and everything. I miss Disneyland, I'll have to make a trip out there some weekend this year.

I also got a little tip on more skiing in Arizona, this one only two hours away, and due east of Phoenix called Sunrise Park Resort. *squeals* I can't wait to hit the slopes some weekend in March, what a blast!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy V-Day everyone, hope you're having a great one :)

I'm stuck packing boxes, so not very much in the hearts and flowers here. But oh well, it means moving onward, so at least I have that to look forward to. Chuck made a nice dinner, pork chops and green bean casserole, and then back to the packing, yippeeeeee!

Looks like escape hatch is set for Saturday instead of Sunday. I wish it were today, although that would mean I'd have everything boxed and loaded up. Not the case right now, heh heh.

Picked up a neat book today, looking forward to digging into, it's called "Designing Interfaces" by Jenifer Tidwell.


I'm finishing out the week here at DTAG, getting some tech specs finished before I leave, and furtively sneaking peeks into my new interface design book while I'm not working. ;-)

Looks like the plan now is to leave Saturday, drive to Amarillo, overnight there. Sunday is the drive to Gallup, NM. And then on Monday is the final leg into Phoenix! That should put us in Phoenix Monday afternoon to pick up the condo keys and begin the U-Haul unload. Suddenly a 2nd floor walkup on the fairway of the greens sounds like more work than I thought..... boxes, boxes, boxes, up up up!

Heck Week

It's going to be a crazy week. This is the last week at work for me, and we're leaving Tulsa most likely on Sunday. I don't think it'll be hell, so I've downgraded it to heck.

Which means Shari works all day during the day, and then packs the night away. It's amazing how much junk one can accumulate. Basically if I haven't used it in the past year, I'm donating or tossing it. Unless it's some childhood thing I can't part with, then it's boxed, heh. The guitars will have to travel with me in the Aztek, I wouldn't subject them to a moving van, that would be cruel and unusual punishment. :)

Job in Arizona starts on the 27th of February, and it's with Bank of America. How long the daily commute will be remains to be seen. Depends on the insanity of Phoenix traffic, I suppose. I'm barely sleeping, because I'm so excited about the move. I'm hating this week of course (packing is eeeeeeeevil), but once I'm past it, then the rest will be fun.

Tram-Ridin' Pooch

Reuters
Max the dog loves trams but has no ticket

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A Staffordshire bull terrier hopped onto the number 6 tram in
The Hague and traveled for 20 minutes before passengers saw he was alone and called police to make him get off.

The 7-year-old black and white dog has a penchant for traveling solo on the trundling trams, his owner Ben told a Dutch daily newspaper Wednesday.

"He got so used to traveling by tram, I always have to stop him from jumping in without me," Ben said. "I'll have to put him on the leash more often."

Police spokesman Leo Maat noted that Max, who did not want to get off the tram, had traveled several stops without a ticket.

==========================

Of course, if this were America, that pooch would be doing commercials for the tram and getting paid the big bucks. ;-)

BrainBench

It's been years since I've played with BrainBench, but since I'm moving to a new fishing pond, it's time to prove myself all over again. We used to all sit back and compete back in the days when BrainBench was free. A bunch of us would race on times, highest scores, best percentiles, best rank in state, all that geeky stuff. I at one point or another was even 1099'd from BrainBench for reviewing and helping on some of their exam questions. (By the way don't blame me if you can't pass the JSP one, that was a long time ago) ;-)



So I thought I'd go play with the C# one out of mild curiosity. I passed, but WOW those questions were wicked. Some of them were on obscure things that I'd never seen outside of a book, stuff that I'd never encountered "in the wild." Weird remoting questions, some multithreaded questions, some other questions, none touching ASP.NET, ADO.NET or any databases. I may have to go play with those tests now. But the C# one was free, so I figured I'd go rank myself. I can't brag that it was a top score or anything, but it was a decent passing score.

Go West

I've been pretty busy this past week, and I'm sure it will continue for the next three to four weeks at least. Things are shaping up well for the move, all but making the decision of "do we drive it?" vs "do we pack it and let someone else move it?" vs "do we burn it?" :) Some days I lean towards Door Number Three.

In other news, I heard Couture retired from fighting. We didn't get to see the fights over the weekend, but hopefully we'll catch them soon. As I casually mentioned to Chuck, "I want Couture to win but Liddell's gonna knock him out." And so it came to pass.

Here is one of the fun things I'm looking forward to doing when we move:


And it looks like we'll be living on the fairway of the Pointe Hilton golf course, with a mountain and golf course view to the front, and backing up to 7,000 acre wildlife preserve with 50 miles of hiking trails. Mega w00t! Duck if you see balls. Golf balls.

Nasdijj - Navajo or Not?

In all the heightened interest with James Frey and "Million Little Pieces," other memoir/biographers are coming under fire for having outright lied about who they are and what life experiences they lived through.

Yet another. This one named "Nasdijj," who claims to be Navajo, but instead has been recently outed as a white man from North Carolina. He completely fabricated stories of having grown up on a reservation, and was also an award-winning author with "The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping." The book was even optioned for a movie until the producers backed out because he was becoming difficult when fact-checking time rolled around.



Here are links to some of the articles and controversy surrounding him:
Doubts raised about Indian memoirist
White Man Writes Navajo Memoirs
Nasdijj Interview (old)

And his own blog, which I found rather obtuse and disturbing:
http://www.nasdijj.typepad.com/

Where's the line? When someone is writing a "memoir," how much of it should be true? Some of it? What percentage? Apparently Nasdijj completely fabricated his. Why is it that the memoir genre continues to sell in gangbusters (although I suspect the bottom has now fallen out of this genre for awhile).