Thoughts of Our Dream House…

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I won’t go into the actual dream because it was admittedly kind of boring, but last night I had one about our dream house … which is admittedly both a dream and a conversation that comes up around here quite a bit.

Even though we’ve only been in the house we own now for about three years, truth be told we’ve always kind of thought of it as a starter house. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a nice house and we happened across it at a pretty good price at a time when we desperately needed to get out of renting, but even only having one kid we’re starting to feel some limitations and it gets rapidly worse when we think about having more! 😯

Worst at this particular moment in time is probably the lack of a backyard, both because it leaves Cleo almost nowhere to run around, but also as Christopher starts to get bigger, it doesn’t give us any room if we wanted to put in a play set or a sandbox or even just chase each other around the yard! And yeah, the pool is nice … though its position behind the house keeps it too cold to swim more often than I like … and I don’t think from here on out I’d have a house in Florida without a pool, but it’s hard to deny the HUGE chunk of backyard real estate that the thing takes up…

I think that’s probably our biggest draw at this point, in simply finding a place that has a decent amount of property attached to it, which is also a bit of a challenge in an area that’s predominantly subdivisions with predetermined lots. At this point I’m not entirely opposed to living out in the country, but it’s going to have to be the right chunk of land to really sell it … and it doesn’t help that every time we go to the beach, I still come home and look at real estate prices to see if there’s some magical beachfront gem out there that has gone undiscovered! 😉

We actually thought we found one of these a month ago, but it turned out the reason why the land was undeveloped was because it was mostly conservation area and COULDN’T BE BUILT ON, so … oops.

As for the house itself, we’ve pretty much settled on knowing that we’re going to have to build to get what we really want because with it being the dream house that we want to spend the rest of our lives in, at this stage we can’t really bring it on ourselves to settle! Granted, we’re probably still several years out from being able to really take action on anything, but it’s still fun to think about all of the options and having something built to our exact specifications, every nook and cranny … and game room!

So if anybody has a couple of acres of prime waterfront real estate in the Tampa Bay area that they want to unload cheap, do drop me a line so that we can get this dog and baby a proper backyard, and more importantly get started on my own personal arcade… 😛

The Dream

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Ever since I moved to Florida back in 2003, I occasionally have this dream where inexplicably everything is reversed and I’m back in my job at the warehouse in Michigan where I worked for six years before moving away.

Last night I had the same dream again.

What was strange is that it wasn’t as panicky as it normally is … when I first moved, it was honestly more of a nightmare where I was back up north pulling orders for auto parts and when the thought of Florida would come up, someone would explain that it just didn’t work out and I was back now, and that was it.

But this time it was almost more of a temporary visit, and things were different from how I remember them in reality. We had just gotten bought by our competitor – which did happen in reality – and a bunch of new employees had been brought in from another branch who were presumably going to be replacing many of us who already worked there … something that also happened, but not nearly to the extent that it did in my dream.

And so what was different this time was that abruptly I just made the decision that I was going to quit and go back to Florida – that was going to be my last day – and I told my friends and my boss, and everyone understood.

I don’t know what made things different that time, and it was hard to piece together within the dream what/where/who I had memories of that I was going back to, but unlike most of the other times I’ve had this dream as a nightmare indicative of failure where the one thing I had wanted so much for years had fallen through my fingers and was just gone, this time I suddenly had some control of my own and it was no longer an absolute that I just had to accept.

An interesting evolution after 12 years of living in Florida, indeed, though it does beg one other question – will I ever find myself at a point where I don’t have the dream at all anymore???

Or then again, if I finally do have some control into my own fate, maybe having this dream just isn’t such a nightmare anymore after all…

The Technology Around Us

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I’ve found myself taking notice over the last couple of days – especially with the purchase of our new car – just how seamless some of my favorite technologies are becoming around us, and I kind of like it.

For example in the car – the brand new car that we got just before going on vacation last week is the first car I’ve had with Bluetooth, plus it came with those cool keyless entry key fobs so the car can be started with the push of a button as long as the key is present, meaning that all I have to do is toss my phone and keys in the center console and when I start the car, it automatically re-pairs my phone and connects to Pandora or whatever music I was playing before.

Or with my media collection, now spanning music, movies, and TV Shows – not only can everything play on any device around the house via a simple Plex app, even when we’re out and about I can placate the child with Fraggle Rock or Mickey Mouse Clubhouse that streams to my laptop from our media server back home – all with just a wifi connection.

Even simply with my working space on my computer – a decade ago I had my laptop, and then I had a separate desktop that had some of my beefier apps that wouldn’t run on my laptop, and I would keep my writing and other critical files on a flash drive that I’d shuffle between wherever I was working at the time. Now I just have a MacBook Air that serves as both, and for the first time in forever all of my stuff is properly backed up multiple times to the cloud and my own personal server automatically.

Despite occasional reminders of how dependent we’re becoming on connectivity – such as when I was sitting in iHOP just outside of Disney yesterday and Verizon couldn’t feed me a signal to tweet to save their skulls – I love to see the direction that some of my favorite tech is coming where it’s more and more a common, integrated part of our daily lives without the struggle that came from playing computers a decade ago … building servers that kind of worked, directories of mp3s being a media server, and who can forget those god awful CD-to-cassette adapters that we used to use to pump our brand new CDs into our cars on the go?!

It makes me feel more optimistic for something like NFC, which I didn’t really see the appeal of a few years ago, now that I’ve been using Apple Pay more actively to the point where I get frustrated with retailers that are stubbornly refusing to accept it. Back then when they talked about paying things with just my cell phone, it sounded like a stupid idea that would never take off, and then I got an iPhone and slowly our phones grew more and more from just personal communicators into the ultimate portable computer that we know today.

It makes me wonder if 10 years from now I’ll be ready to truly embrace the automated home that’s been preached at us for years to give us the ability to turn our lights on and off from anywhere in the world, if there was ever a reason that we might actually need to do that. I can already see the appeal for the same keyless entry that my car has extending to my front door, and you can buy a new doorknob that does that today! I think the next steps to continue bridging our devices – cameras, phones, tablets, PCs – are going to warm even more people up to the idea, so who knows what’ll be available in a few years when I’m ready to build my brand new dream house of my own – it’s starting to make that home of the future from the Carousel of Progress sound not just more attainable than ever, but more importantly more desirable than ever, too.

Hey, it’s a great big beautiful tomorrow! 😀

24 Photos from 24 Hours at Disney

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Having triumphantly returned from the vacation that included spending (almost) 24 hours at the Magic Kingdom, it seemed only fitting that I share 24 photos from those 24 hours of fun!

Going into this we wondered how the little guy would take to being up and about for such an extended period, but between taking his own impromptu naps whenever he desired as well as a quite reasonable amount of mild crankiness, overall we both thought that he did pretty well. Probably his most amusing moment was when we rode the carousel with him at around 3:30am – you can see below in the pic right before the one of him trying to pull the sword from the stone, he found himself overcome with this very bizarre sense of euphoria which we weren’t sure it was joy or being overwhelmed or what, but it sure was crazy to stand there and watch… 😉

Anyways, check out my post for more commentary on the 24-hour event itself … given a proper night of sleep myself, I do say that I’d probably try it again, but ooof, is it becoming painfully apparent that I’m certainly not 22 anymore!!!

Grand Theft Whale

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I have not yet played GTA5 yet and typically I would play it on a console rather than PC anyways, however the ability to mod the game to drop whales on your unsuspecting victims is certainly a compelling reason to download a copy for the PC!!! 😯

Everything seems to sing, everywhere I go…

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I found myself reminded of this old tune circa 1983 from the episode of Fraggle Rock that Christopher got to watch after eating lunch today, and it amuses me how whenever I watch these older Muppet works like Fraggle Rock or The Muppet Show or even the classic episodes of Sesame Street just how much Jim Henson himself bled through the characters that he played – with this one, it’s almost hard not to picture Jim himself playing that magical flute down in the Fraggle caves, singing his song of songs to anyone who cared to listen.

In fact, you can actually see some fun pictures of Jim posing and performing this character (Cantus the Minstrel) over on the Muppet Wiki!

The other day I was posed with the challenge of naming who my creative mentors would be if I were to gather them all around a table for their advice and wisdom, and though I’m probably going to write about the exercise later in greater detail because I really found it to be pretty interesting, I’ve got to say that at the time the very first person to pop into my mind was none other than Jim Henson. And I’m not entirely sure why, but what I’ve pieced together so far is that even though I’m not necessarily precisely where I’d like to be in my writing career at this point in my life, I can say that I’m trying to get there by embracing in these things that I’m the most passionate about and you don’t have to watch more than a couple of minutes of any Muppet act to know without a shadow of a doubt that Jim Henson lived creatively by doing exactly that.

It’s also interesting – and admittedly a bit relieving – to note that as epic as those regrettably short, last twenty years of his life were, looking at Jim Henson’s career, some of my absolute favorite things to come from the legend actually didn’t come to be until later on in his life:

  • Sesame Street first aired in 1969, when Jim was 33 years old
  • The Muppet Show first took roots in 1976 (40 years old)
  • The Muppet Movie hit theaters in 1979 (43 years old)
  • Fraggle Rock first aired on HBO in 1983 (47 years old)
  • And probably my personal favorite – A Muppet Family Christmas – was released in 1987 when Jim was 51 years old (only two years before his death)

I bring this up simply because lately it’s been easy to sort of look around and panic when I see that I’m 34 years old and I’m not exactly where I want to be in life, but I try to think of a guy like Jim Henson – one of my creative mentors – and not only acknowledge that some of his best works came far later in his life, but also – and more importantly – that frankly it’s hard not to look back at any of these moments in his career and not see just a happy, bubbly guy having the time of his life creating these bizarrely charming stories about wandering minstrels and strange, little creatures living just out of sight, and it kind of makes me stop and question my priorities and whether I should really be beating myself up for not being farther in life than I would like instead of simply living in the moment and enjoying every last step of the process along the way.

Hmmm. 🙂

Dream Journal : Random Fragments

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I was staying at this pretty crappy motel with my Mom and sister, and I had gone out to meet up with somebody late into the night. When I got back, the TV was blaring pretty loud and there were other people in the room.

It was an oversized room, but not quite one that had separate rooms, and the other two guys who were there were friendly and all, but still loud and looked like they still had a long night of drinking beer in the room ahead of them. After going over and talking to my Mom, who was mad but afraid to say anything, I found a handwritten note (almost a letter) from the hotel staff sitting on the counter that basically said the room occupancy was 6 people and because it was a busy, holiday weekend, the room would be full regardless of only having 3 in our party…

Mad and tired, I took the letter – along with these abnormally small key fragments that apparently served to unlock the door – and went down to the front desk to complain…

* * * * * * * * * *

The place was kind of a half-diner, half-my-grandparents-house because I worked there, but my grandparents were there too and they most certainly didn’t.

I had just finished waiting on somebody who was getting ready to leave, and for some reason we were calculating the check as well as how much I was making from that particular meal at the same time. My boss wasn’t pleased because I guess he paid me different wages throughout the week and he wasn’t thrilled about giving me $20/hour just because it was a Saturday, but the lady was nice and when it came time for her to go, there was a plate of chocolate chip cookies that she had ordered that were fresh out of the oven and I was told I could have them because she had to go in a hurry.

That’s when it started getting weird!

The diner was also sort of my grandparents house because some of my relatives were gathered, including a couple of my cousins who I don’t get to see hardly enough. While I was waiting for my grandpa to come back, I started talking to my grandma about not being able to bake cookies as good as grandpa because he used some special orange butter that didn’t taste like oranges at all, but made the cookies super chewy and delicious just like when they’re fresh right out of the oven!

It was after she told me that I should just pick up a tub of it for myself at the store and give it a try that something dawned on me and I realized that despite her image being clear as day, grandma had actually been dead for many years.

After having a couple of the cookies with my cousins, the dream began to slip closer to reality when I also realized that so had grandpa…

* * * * * * * * * *

I was walking down this dirt trail that for whatever reason seemed to be ripe with animal life – particularly tiny lizards and snakes and whatnot – and even though it was dark, I seemed to be able to just reach down and more often than not, I’d have one of the little creatures in my hand after I closed it.

I kind of likened it to working at camp, and there were all sorts of other kids around me who just thought it was the coolest thing.

I started catching some of the more provocative ones, taking a particular interest in some lizards that glowed neon colors, and after I had nabbed a couple of them with plans to keep them in jars to watch them, I heard the camp ranger grumbling from the other side of the fence we were walking along and he was none too happy for me to be abusing the wildlife like I was apparently doing!

So I did what any teenager would do in that sort of situation – I jumped into my space ship and took off, hoping that he couldn’t chase me through the sky … although in retrospect it’s not like the truck that he drove could fly or anything. But for whatever reason, my ship while flying happened to go very slow, meaning that he could still close distance between us until I started putting altitude between us as well, and after going higher and higher, I knew I was finally safe just before being ready to leave the Earth’s atmosphere.

I decided to do one more fly by over the camp before leaving to see if things had calmed down, but all I could really see from my height was the shape of the landmass of Michigan and an approximation of where the camp resided many miles below.

“I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass…”

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I don’t know what it is about this movie because it’s really just awful, but there’s something about its awfulness that makes it ideal for turning on at 3:00am when you really should just call it a night and go to bed already!

And it’s funny because I don’t think I actually discovered the full movie until a couple of years ago after having seen bits and pieces online and finally searching out the actual name of the thing, but I’m pretty sure that I did first hear that “classic” line from the likes of Duke Nukem, even though as terrible as it was, I do think it was still better delivered by Roddy Piper.

Fun Facts: Apparently Roddy was also a fairly successful professional wrestler, and now he has his own podcast! 😕

“…either put on these glasses or start eatin’ that trash can!”

I think I need a new theme for this site … I think…

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So I’ve been doing a lot of pondering about my writing career as a whole and how do I quantify all of this suffering via keyboard over the weekend-ish, and one of the ideas that’s been kicking around inside of my head is that maybe it’s time for me to spruce this particular site up a bit to better highlight all of the writing everywhere that I’m presently doing.

Mind you, my first thought was that maybe I needed to create an all new site to give me a place to feature special content that feels like it belongs somewhere bigger than just my blog, and then I realized that I already have too many other dwindling sites that one more might not be the best idea at the time…

The whole point of this site is really supposed to be two-fold:

  1. MY BLOG, which is just me rambling on about whatever in that classic style that I came to know and love from LiveJournal, circa 2003
  2. A COOL HUB SITE, set to feature writing everywhere – as it happens – which right now pretty much consists of RSS feeds on the front page and that’s it…

The thing is, I don’t know exactly how in depth I want to make this change because I don’t want it to take up an exuberant amount of my time and there are actually certain parts of the site that I already like quite well. Still, this theme conglomerate that I’m running now was slapped together some 4 years ago, and it’s 2015 now and responsive design is all of the rage, and there’s a part of me that likes to think that for some of the prettier posts that I’m writing with photos and whatnot on the other sites, I should somehow be able to pull those in here to make this one look all swanky and awesome and more enticing to your random clicks to those other sites, too!

…somehow…

Anyways, I guess I need to start flipping through magazine themes and see if I can find anything that jumps out at me because that’s probably the direction that I should be looking. For what it’s worth, I really like the theme that I ended up with for Just Laugh and it didn’t cost me a fortune, so I’m definitely open to paying for themes if I can find one out of the box that fixes more problems for me than it creates.

It’s tricky because there’s a part of me that likes the simplicity of something like Medium and is intrigued by the idea of a site that’s more centric on the writing than other flashy stuff … BUT I also have books to promote and I do a lot of photo posts about Disney and whatnot, so in the end I don’t really think that a one-size fits all solution is going to work for me here. Not to mention the fact that it somehow needs to incorporate posts from all of these other sites like they were live on this one … I have a feeling that might be tricky and what I don’t want to do is start importing posts from all over the place just to have them populate on my hub site correctly.

This is by no means anywhere near my top priority, but as I try to get myself posting regularly everywhere in the second half of the year, I’d like to have something that can better showcase all of my thoughtful writings. 😀

We’ll see…

movies thoughts … Avengers: Age of Ultron

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Avengers_Age_of_UltronWent and saw this a week ago because apparently that’s what you do when someone offers to play sitter for a night! And although I’d argue that it wasn’t necessarily as good as the first one, it was still nonetheless enjoyable…

I mean, I guess that should really be expected – the two movies are three years apart and after the second round of movies, pretty much all of the characters … except Hawkeye … are pretty well-rounded out at this point, and we even got to learn a bit more about him during this group sequel to even the odds a bit, too.

I think if anything, watching this movie makes me really wonder what to expect from the next couple of Marvel films – particularly Captain America: Civil War, as well as both parts of Infinity War which I’m really looking forward to because I’ve kind of taken in interest in seeing all of the stones coming together and I’m sure when Thanos finally gets his hands on the complete set, it’s going to be pretty incredible!

But more speculation … how are we going to see the team change as the Marvel Cinematic Universe continues to evolve??? I really loved the glimpse at the end of Cap and Black Widow preparing to train the next generation of Avenger, which I don’t think that I was really ready to wrap my head around 5 years ago but as we see the stories and personalities – both on and off camera – beginning to intertwine, and especially when you consider how pretty much every plot imaginable was attempted at one point or another in the comics, maybe change could be good after all.

Except for Ant-Man, because he just looks stupid.

Sorry, Paul Rudd… 🙁

But think about it – there have been rumors about Robert Downey, Jr. being ready to move on from his role as Iron Man, in the comics Captain America went through an arc where Bucky actually picked up the shield and took his place after Cap’s death, and now more than ever you’ve got more stars – and good ones, too – competing for screen time. I didn’t think that I was really going to care for Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch when I saw them in both the trailer as well as the teaser at the end of whatever movie that was, but they both really stepped up to the plate.

I think I’ve even finally gotten used to Don Cheadle as Rhodey in the War Machine armor, and I kind of hated how he booted Terrance Howard out of the role back in Iron Man 2.

And Paul Bettany’s Vision was just plain awesome … you don’t need to be able to wield Thor’s hammer to agree with that!

Anyways, the movie itself was everything you could want from an action movie – upbeat, exciting, with plenty of humor that the entire series is known for … the only problem I saw was simply that the first movie left such Hulk-sized boots to fill, this sequel – as bad-ass as it was – still couldn’t hold a candle. That first Avengers movie was a whole different kind of epic because we got to see all of the superheroes come together for the first time when they really hadn’t interacted with each other at all in their individual stories up until that point.

But the second wave of movies changed that because they had to – we’d already seen everyone fighting together once before, so it made more sense to bring Black Widow into Cap’s story and make Rhodey a bigger part of Iron Man 3, and so on and so forth.

If anything, I’m admittedly a little bummed because after Ultron kind of creeped up on us because I frankly hadn’t even realized that it was coming out this spring – fatherhood will do that to a guy! – the next couple of years are going to be kind of slow in building to the next movies in the series that I’m personally looking forward to seeing…

  • July 2015 – Ant-Man – couldn’t possibly care less
  • May 2016 – Captain America: Civil War – I’ve really taken to Cap, so hopefully this will be better than Winter Soldier
  • November 2016 – Dr. Strange – I don’t know a lot about this one…
  • May 2017 – Guardians of the Galaxy 2 – the first one actually surprised me, so I’d look forward to this
  • November 2017 – Thor: Ragnarok – I’ll see it, but Thor’s movies haven’t really done much for me so far
  • May 2018 – The Avengers: Infinity War, Part 1 – SO FAR AWAY – MY SON WILL BE FOUR YEARS OLD WHEN THIS FINALLY COMES OUT!!!!!
  • May 2019 – The Avengers: Infinity War, Part 2 – don’t even get me started on these multi-part movies again…

I’m sure if I looked back at the schedule that got us to this point, one good movie a year is probably about right considering that believe it or not, the first Iron Man movie actually hit us all the way back in 2008 – how’s that to make you feel old?! The MCU has been around for the entirety of the time that I’ve been married to my wife … whew! 😯

So in summary – great movie, Vision is awesome, not as epic as Avengers 1, tip of the iceberg for lots of wacky changes in the films to come. 😉