Operation: Reunite The Family
As I’ve been reminded by everyone from my Mom to Sarah Pauling, I’ve been slack about updating this over the last month. It’s partially due to the horrible internet speeds here at the hotel at night, which make doing anything on the internet painful, and partially due to the fact that I feel like I’m just going to work, coming back to the hotel, and waiting for the family.
But Operation: Reunite The Family is now underway! The moving truck pulled away from Rolesville Thursday evening with a house full of stuff, bound for San Antonio. Today, I picked up the keys to the rental house and took a load of my stuff over from the hotel. Tomorrow, Holly gets on a plane and flies into town. Our stuff arrives on Tuesday or Wednesday, and then on Saturday, my Mom brings the girls to town. At that point, this ordeal that began on April 4th will be over!
I don’t tend to blog much about work, especially since Rackspace is in the quiet period, but work’s been fun so far. It’s quite a bit different than what I’m used to – I’ve been in small-ish IT shops for most of the past decade, generally having to do a little bit of everything. Now I’m in a 2000+ person company, and focusing on specific technologies. But the corporate culture is a lot of fun, and it seems to be a good place to work so far.
One thing that has happend that I suppose would rate as “interesting” is that I’m performing improv regularly. The former-ComedySportz club in San Antonio (now a National Comedy Theater group), which was on semi-hiatus for a number of years, is ramping back up, performing regularly and adding new players. As I’m one of the few people in the group with any serious ComedySportz experience, I’ve been offered (and have accepted) a leadership role in the group, helping to train players, work on the show format, and provide guidance. It’s a lot of fun, and challenging as well. From working with an owner in another city, to dealing with the friction that comes with “Hey, here’s a new guy. He’s going to be telling you what to do.”, it’s a different set of issues than you get by showing up to work the mic a couple of times a month. I think it’s working well so far, though.
So now that the family is starting to come back together, maybe I’ll be more motivated to write and take pictures. It’s been a hard time here alone, but it’s almost over.
Contract Killing
Our house in Rolesville is, as of this morning, officially under contract and off the market!
Switching realtors seems to have made a difference. We dropped our old realtor after a month of very weak showings, picked up Jennifer Spencer, and a little over a week after hitting the market, she had us three showings and a great offer, which we accepted last weekend. The paperwork and earnest money checks were completed today!
If all goes well (fingers crossed) we’ll close in mid-late May, and then Holly and the girls can join me out here in San Antonio!
Weird Things About Texas: Volume 1
I’ve survived my first week as a Texan. It’s been alternating between a crush of activity at Rackspace, getting acclimated, meeting people, setting up my workstation, etc., and very quiet loneliness back at the hotel, missing my girls. So I’ve been trying to keep busy with the former to avoid the latter.
As a guy born and raised in the Mid-Atlantic (VA/NC), there are some thing about Texas that are somewhat weird to me. They include:
- Frontage Roads – I mentioned this earlier, but it’s still something to get used to. For those (like me) who don’t get out much, I’ll explain. In Virginia or North Carolina, when you exit the interstate, you tend to take a cloverleaf or ramp off of the interstate and onto another road, which generally runs perpendicular to the interstate. The ramp is very short, and you’re quickly onto another primary road. In Texas, though, they have these “frontage roads,” where to exit the interstate, you take a short ramp to the right, and you end up on this one-way road that parallels the interstate. This road can go on for quite a while, and it’s the road that intersects the other primary roads that you may want to get on to, while having turns into parking lots, etc. as well. So when I want to exit onto Huebner Rd., for example, I’ll take the exit, drive about a mile on the frontage road, and then turn onto Huebner. It takes some getting used to. And on a related note..
- IH vs. I – Back east, people generally refer to interstates as I-number (I-95). In Texas, it’s more common to see them referred to as IH-number (IH-10). And beltway-like roads that circle a city are generally called “Loop-number” (Loop 410).
- Short Trees – While North Carolina’s no Pacific Northwest, we’ve got a lot of pine, and pine grows very tall. Even the oaks and other trees shoot up quite a ways. It seems like most of the trees around here are very short and scrubby. Maybe everything isn’t bigger in Texas?
- Sweet Tea – I kind of knew about this one going in, but it’s very hit-or-miss as to whether you can find sweet tea in restaurants. I don’t really expect it in the Mexican restaurants, but it’s somewhat jarring to go into a steakhouse and get told “No, we don’t serve sweet tea.”
On the whole, though, it’s a nice place so far. The weather’s been great, the Mexican food is amazing, and there appears to be plenty to do. I’m hopefully going to catch a game or two at the AHL San Antonio Rampage this weekend.
Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad
I participated in three Yahoo! fantasy hockey leagues this year. I won a league back in 2002, but haven’t done much since then.
This year, however, I cleaned up.
Jack Spencer Invitational League
This is a small league set up by Jack Spencer for folks who sit up in section 328 of the RBC Center. I ended up finishing third in that league, and missed out on making the championship game by losing a tiebreaker in the semifinals.
Let’s Go Canes League
This is a league for participants in the Let’s Go Canes message board. I finished with the #2 seed in the regular season, and won the playoffs!
ComedyWorx Hockey League
The league I set up for ComedyWorx players and alumni. I finished the regular season in 1st with a .600 winning percentage, then won another championship!
So on the season, I got a 1st, a 1st, and a 3rd. A great year for fantasy hockey. If only some other teams could have had similar success.
Until next October!
Still Seeing Mile Markers In My Head
Well, my great interstate adventure has reached its conclusion – I pulled into San Antonio around 3:30pm (Central time, natch) today. Yesterday, I left Rolesville at around 7:45am EDT, and finally stopped for the night in Gulfport, MS at around 8:30pm CDT, for around 14 hours or so of driving. I was starting to get a little loopy at the end of that leg, so it’s probably good that I pulled in when I did.
Once in Gulfport, I was treated to about 8 hours of severe thunderstorms. Now, I like thunderstorms, and can generally sleep through them, but these storms were like bombs going off in the hotel room, and it just….didn’t…..stop. I’m used to a storm blowing up, passing over, and leaving, but when I turned on the TV around midnight to make sure the world wasn’t coming to an end, they said that the storms just kept reforming over the same area. I believe it. And they must have gotten about 5” of rain overnight, as it was coming down in buckets.
Got up early and headed west, going through a little bit more weather as I headed into eastern Louisiana, but then it was pretty smooth sailing the rest of the way. In fact, the only real traffic issues I ran into were I-85 through downtown Atlanta (a parking lot even at 2pm on a Friday), and Houston (where they apparently shut down interstates on the weekends for no apparent reason). I also gained a very visceral appreciation for what programmers mean when they throw out the term $TEXAS – it felt like it took about 6 months to make it from Houston to San Antonio, with the same three trees going by my window like an old video game.
I have my stuff unpacked in the extended stay room, and hit the H-E-B grocery store (and was suitably impressed by it – they even have Woodchuck cider and Karo syrup!). And for the first time in ages, I’ve found a salsa at the grocery store that I like! Score! I can tell already it’s going to take me a while to figure out the Texas system of “Frontage Roads” that parallel the interstate and weave in and out. We don’t have that back East.
Thanks to everyone who left well-wishes on the last post. I’m looking forward to seeing what The Rack is like on Monday!
There’s No Basement In The Alamo
After a couple of months that didn’t really seem real, this morning marks the end of my over nine-year tenure in the Triangle area. I’m up early due to nerves, and in a couple of hours I’ll get in my car, point it southwest, and start driving to San Antonio. I’m going to try to get to somewhere between Mobile, AL and Baton Rouge, LA tonight, sleep, and then power on through to San Antonio by tomorrow afternoon. Monday morning at 8:30, I walk into Rackspace as a new employee.
The hardest part is going to be getting separated from Holly and the girls until the house sells, or maybe early June when my corporate housing runs out. I’m already pretty down about that. We got one showing on the house with our new realtor last weekend, but this week has been very odd in terms of weather, so nothing during the week. Hopefully activity picks up soon.
Aside from that, and the albatross of a house hanging around our neck, it should be a pretty exciting time. San Antonio looks like a nice place, and I keep hearing from people who have lived there about how much they liked it. Baseball season is starting, there’s still a little bit of time left in hockey season, I should hopefully be able to skate a little bit, and finally find some decent salsa in the stores.
It’s been a great nine years here, and whethere I’m ready or not, this morning is the time to turn the page.
Wolfpack Red!
As promised, The JMatt got me the video of the Public Service Announcement I filmed for Fox 50’s What Color Do You Bleed? campaign. So for those of you who can’t watch Fox 50, but would still like to see me say a line on TV, here you go.
And go buy a T-shirt, if you’re so inclined.
Old News
Because I’m apparently as bad at updating the new blog as the old one, this is probably old news to most people, but I have accepted a job with Rackspace, in their “Segment Support” group.
“Wait!” you might say. “Rackspace doesn’t have a Raleigh office!” Well, you’d be right. The family and I will be relocating to San Antonio, TX. I’ve been in Raleigh since February of 1999, and really like it here, but San Antonio looks nice, and the job looks very promising. I’ll miss the hockey and improv, but San Antonio has a lot to offer as well.
That means that we’ve put the house on the water in Rolesville on the market, so if you know anyone who wants to buy a like-new house just minutes from I-540 and Capital Blvd, please send them my way.
I’m Ready For My Close-Up, Mr. DeMatthews
Thanks to a request for bodies from the ever-powerful Jason “JMatt” Matthews, I got to appear in a TV commercial (or, more accurately, Public Service Announcement) tonight. It aired twice during American Idol on Fox 50 in Raleigh, for anyone who will admit to watching that.
The PSA was for their What Color Do You Bleed? T-shirt sale to benefit the Red Cross. I’m in the spot wearing the NC State shirt, and saying that I bleed “Wolfpack Red.” “William & Mary Green” wasn’t an option, but I was the only one of the four who lives in Wake County, so I figured it counted for something. At least I wasn’t the UNC grad who had to wear the Duke blue.
So if you see the spot on TV (it should be airing on Fox 50 for a bit), wave at me.