Now With Seating Options

So I got my couch today. One of my coworkers is moving next week and needed to get rid of his furniture. Sure, it’s not some super swanky modern couch, but it’s big, comfy, and has reclining seats with foot rests. Plus, he threw in a matching recliner, so now I have multiple seating options. Not sure what I’ll do with the recliner quite yet. Option 1 is to put it in my bedroom and make a little grotto in there for reading and DVD watching. Option 2 is to put it in my entryway and do the same thing. The downside to option 2 is that then I can’t have any sort of dining table. I’ll look at more furniture this weekend and see if I can find a nice table.  But for now, I shall kick my feet up, drink a beer, and watch some HD basketball.

Live From Austin

Sometimes I forget how much I love Austin. Cyclists everywhere. Quirky restaurants. Cute girls. Liberals. Cute liberal girls. The river. The lake. The bats at sunset. Over time, I’m slowly more and more sure that I want to live here some day. So far my day has consisted of going to a restaurant in a converted house next to campus for brunch, taking a walk around the garden park taking photos, hanging out at the coffee shop by the river eating some pie, a trip to the local head shop, a stroll around the indie book store, and now a nice break before heading out to eat at the restaurant that overlooks the lake. Yeah, it’s been a hard day. Hell, I bet I’ll even have to go drink on 6th Street. Booooooo.

Don’t make me go back to Plano.

Ahhh Geekdom

So guess what I’m doing right now .  Let me give you a hint: the cable guy came.

That’s right. Sitting on my floor. Typing on my laptop using my hi speed wi fi. Watching HD Discovery Channel. On my 40 inch HDTV. Eating cookies.

Sure, this would be better with a couch or chair, but I’ll take it. I went to Ikea to try to pick up my pretentious Poang chair, but they didn’t have my color wood (booooo). They say a new shipment will come before the end of the month, but I want my chair noooooooooooow. My dad said he’d pitch in for a couch as long as it wasn’t from Ikea. Fine by me. Hello Macy’s.

The One In Which Brian Moves

So I got my apartment after all. I guess the vast conspiracy for the world to shit down my throat decided to take a break. I’m quite happy with my little starter apartment. It has snazzy lights, nice appliances, and plenty of room for all my shit. I spent a good chunk of change today at Ikea getting a beg, matress, and entertainment center. I still need a place to sit. That will come soon, I suppose. Cable and internet gets installed Tuesday, and then I think I’ll be set for all kinds of gluttony (hooray for HDTV and DVRs). My parents are going to be nice enough to chip in on a couch, but in the mean time, I might just get a good Ikea lounge chair for myself.

Some downsides:

• Fuck TXU and their $300 deposit. Motherfuckers are building coal plants and nuclear plants and fucking me int he wallet. Boo to them. Plus you just know I’m never seeing that $300 again.
• Being alone, while nice in some respects, is also creepy. I think once I have TV and internet, that will go away, as I can keep myself happily distracted (or just stay at work longer).
• I totally made an ass out of myself in front of a cute neighbor today. I was holding on to a 12 pack of Dr. Pepper and trying to open the building gate, when I ripped the box, sending my drinking scattering. Not suave.
• The complex is only about half full, and I look out onto a building that is like 10% full. While there are certainly plenty of cars around, it can feel somewhat creepy staring off into a dark night with no windows lit and no movement.

Some upsides:

• Hellooooooo 24 hour rec center. Finally, I can exercise at 1AM with no problem.
• Cute neighbors
• 2 pools
• We have trash chutes in the hallway instead of having to walk down and find a dumpster. It feels so urban.
• Plenty of restaurants to walk to
• Surrounded by corporate campuses that are a cyclist’s dream on the weekend.
• Fox Sports Bar across the street, where I found out today that lots of KU people like to go to.

Work also starts again tomorrow, which I’m happy about. Vacations are fun, and moving is time consuming, but damn if I don’t just love working. My brain needs the constant stimuli. After work, more packing of clothes and other goods and trekking over to my apartment. My goal is to have all of my stuff moved over by Friday.

My Kingdom For A Good Pair of Loafers

No word on the apartment. They pretty much have to tell me tomorrow or give me my deposit back.  We’ll see.

I noticed today that at some point I became a shoe person. I used to pride myself on my lack of shoes. I recall moving to college with a pair of sneakers, a pair of dress shoes, and a pair of boots. Today my shoe collection consists of:

• Brown suede moccasins for everyday wear
• Black hi-top Chucks
• Blue low cut Pumas for biking and light exercise
• Black low cut Pumas for jogging and heavy exercise
• Softball cleats
• Heavy sandals for everyday use
• Cheap sandals for going to the pool or beach
• Ratty slippers for bumming around the house
• Black dress shoes
• Brown dress shoes
• Basic black boots
• Heavy duty brown boots
• 3 pairs of old shoes that I keep only for doing shit like painting or mucking about

Fourteen pairs of shoes. Damn. I had decided they were taking up too much space, but as I got down to it, I actually need more. My brown dress shoes barely fit. My sandals are worn out. On top of that, I’m probably going to pick up some cycling shoes in the next few months.

Oddly enough, I only have 2 belts that fit.

The Ups and Downs of Apartment Renting

So today I drove over to my apartment complex of choice, checked the availability, and found out that if I signed today, I could pretty much move in by the end of the week. Sweet.

Not so sweet. Let’s take a trip back to the Fall of 2004. Due to some random craziness of life, I ended up living in the basement of a house next to Yello Sub. My landlord was pretty much a slumlord. She broke my lease on multiple occasions. She never fixed the holes in my wall. There were mice. There were leaks. There was her crack dealing brother in law living above my head. So when Jack was going to study in DC for a semester, I gladly took that room in the Bungalow. I forfeited my deposit, cut off my utilities, and told my landlord she could sublease it out. Since she knew she had broken my lease multiple times over, she accepted that as the deal. Since that time, she has been run out of Lawrence and sold her various properties to other people.

Flash forward. My background check should have revealed 3 places I’ve lived in the last 2 years: my parent’s house, my friend’s house, and the Bungalow. The slumlord’s place showed up as 4. So they need contact info. Trouble is, she doesn’t seem to exist anymore. Her company is gone. She’s gone. All because she said I moved out in March instead of January. Bitch.

So now they have to call everybody and make sure I wasn’t lying. Here’s some problems: 1) Hammill has no idea who I am. I never signed a sublease. I just paid my check and he didn’t say squat. 2) My friend’s landlord in Plano hates him because when we moved out, we left a bunch of shit and he wasn’t pleased. Now explain to him I was living their without a lease or paying bills.

So my living history for the last 2 years looks like this:

1. Slum that I wasn’t actuallyliving in.
2. Sublease that I never signed at the Bungalow
3. Paying somebody I met over Craigslist to bum at their apartment while they were gone
4. Lived with family friends
5. Lived with friends for free
6. Lived with parents.

So it looks really fucking bleak that I’m going to even be allowed to rent an apartment this month, let alone anytime soon. Fingers crossed that something good happens to me tomorrow, but I don’t have that sort of faith left in humanity. The only way out of this is for my parents to sign the lease (not co-sign), and me live there and pay the bills, which they’re not going to do.

Life lesson: you make a shitty choice and it can fucking stay with you for years. In the meantime, it looks like I’m going to live in my parents’ house until I’m 40, because apparently I did something to piss off the universe.

And I Might Be a Tad Bit Competitive

First off: vacation!!!! Woooooo!!!! All of our hard work and energy over the past few weeks has paid off. Our demo is going to the publisher next week, and that means that my team gets the week off. Seven blissful days to de-stress and enjoy life. I plan on getting my apartment situation taken care of (especially due to random factors that have cropped up recently), and to spend the rest of my time doing all the things I never get time to enjoy. Cycling. Photography. Jogging. Watching movies. Sleeping late. Ahhh sweet bliss.

I’ll also be hitting the batting cages because it’s now officially softball season. We had our first game last night and lost 18-6. That’s actually a huge improvement for us. Normally we get the slaughter rule called on us. This time we actually got to play the full 60 minutes before time was called. Unfortunately the my coach’s bat that I had been using was declared illegal, as well as my friend’s bat that had also been using. So I went out and got my own bat today. The total cost for softball is now approaching $300 (registration, jersey, glove, bat, bag, misc gear, workout clothes, etc). As it turns out, I tend to get overly competitive, and since my only at bat ended up in a ground out, I’m determined to get my swing back to form and start hitting some line drives to the outfield. I also figure once I get back on my bike and start jogging, I can get my running speed up again. Overall, it was a really fun game. The other team took it way too seriously until they realized we were nice guys who were going to lose, then they loosened up. After the game, you could feel the anticipation: we might actually win a game this year. Dear god, we would go bat shit insane if that happened.

In the mean time, I’m going to keep enjoying this as a source of exercise and putting in my time to get back in top physical shape. I’m up to 170 now, which is a shocker even to me. I went through all of high school weighing 125-130 and all of college weighing around 135. I’ll be the first to admit, I’ve gotten a bit doughy over the winter, so for probably the first time in my life, I’m going into the beginning of my spring workout season with a goal to lose weight instead of gaining weight. Weird, but encouraging nonetheless.

Only A Few More Days Until The Breakdown

Working on the weekend might be a poor choice. It’s one thing to come in on a Saturday or Sunday and put in a few hours on something small, but any longer and it takes a toll. I noticed that those of us at work today began to behave as though it were a weekday. We stopped for gametime at 5. We went on a fast food run at the same time. We played hallway basketball at the same time. It was kind of creepy. Add this to the fact that I left late, thus coming home around 10ish, and I completely fogot this was Sunday. I went about my nightly rituals of TV downloading and news reading to find my schedule all messed up due to it still being the weekend.

I bloody well get my time off soon.

On the bright side, my iPod radio adapter is broken, so I’m listening to CDs again in my car. Bob Schneider is living in my player right now purely for his whimsical folksy Austin attitude that makes me want to sit by the river on a sunny day.

Workin’ 9 to 5 (give or take 10 hours)

So I’m pooped right now. Mentally. Physically. Surprisingly enough, not emotionally. I’ve gone from 50 hour weeks at work to 60 and 70 hour weeks. Last night (which was Friday), I was about to leave at midnight, and then my boss asked me to stay to work with him on the opening credits to our demo. He phrased this as something that would take an hour or two. That might have been a lie. Around 4:30AM, we decided to call it a night. Yeah, you heard me. Four fucking thirty. The sun was about to come up. As I left the building, I heard a car driving through our parking lot. This is fairly normal as we’re on the highway access road and people occasionally think our parking lot is the road that takes you off the access road and on to the main roads (it’s really the next turn). Some people also just like to cut through to save 30 seconds. Since it was 4:30, and I didn’t want to get shanked by some crazy person, I slipped my hoodie on and walked quickly to my car (my boss was on the other side of the building with his fancy executive parking). I heard the car get closer and then I saw the distinctive red and blue lights of a cop siren, complete with boo-bwoop-bwoop sound. I turn around and see the cop slowly pulling up to me. At this point it’s probably fair to say our building is owned by Bank of America, and the bottom floor is a bank. Cops probably don’t like to see people in hoodies hanging outside of banks at 4:30AM. Let me tell you, when you’re that tired and have compensated with half a dozen red bulls and some espressos, it’s surprisingly hard to convince a cop that 1) you really did just get off of work at 4:30 on a Friday night and 2) you’re not a crackhead. I had to pull out my building key and office key since my workplace is too cheap to actually give us business cards to prove our employment. I will say, the cop felt kind of bad once he figured out that I was no threat to anybody and quite a sad sack.

On the brighter side of things, I only worked until midnight tonight. So there. It’s actually pretty cool because we’re in super-crunch mode and things are coming together. For the first time in a long time, our game feels like a game. You tend to not notice when you work on it so long, but when our execs come in to look it over, they sort of flip when they see cool shit like fences and walls exploding from bazooka blasts, soldiers running from you and jumping over walls to hide, and other neat details. Plus, the opening title credits now look fucking awesome. The entire process is turning into a game of one-upsmanship. Everybody wants to have that once cool thing that makes peoples jaw drop when they see it. Plus, if the demo goes well, we get a huge marketing budget and can do cool things like have a trailer play in movie theaters. More marketing = more sales. More sales = more royalties. More royalties = complete and utter financial security for the near future. Sounds good to me.

Red Bull Gives You Wings… And The Need to Pee

I used the phrase “burning the midnight oil” today, and it was actually an understatement. Technically, I burned the 1:30AM oil. Then again, I showed up at work at noon, only to turn around and go to lunch. God bless flex hours. The next 4 or 5 days is going to be hellish. We’re bringing our prototype to our publisher in France next Wednesday. That means we need a stable, polished version by Monday night / Tuesday morning. So there goes Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday. On the bright side, I should get like a week off afterwards (which should provide a good window to sign on my apartment and move in). Luckily, I get a lot of work done at night. Most of the people at work are gone, except for the people who are like me and like to work late. Those of us that are left spend time trying to one up each other with cooler game features. We also tear around the office on our minibike, play basketball in the hallway, and generally create havok. This is all fueled by the glory that is an unlimited supply of Red Bull. Unfortunately, around 1 or 2, you get to the point where you’re too wired to think straight. That’s about where I am. It’s going to take a while for me to get 4 of them out of my system, but I’m still better off than my coworker mike who had 8 since 7PM. He’ll get to sleep around 5.

In other news, I rewarded myself for working so hard by buying a TV. I’m now the proud owner of a 40 inch Samsung LCD 720p HDTV. I’m quite happy with it, even if it is just going to sit in a box until I move. Oddly enough, among my coworkers, most still thought a 40 inch hi-def was “small.” Go figure. When the game ships and I get royalties next year, I guess I can buy a 55 inch 1080p TV to replace it.