Bizarre Bradyisms

Cables

I have a lot of stuff. Those who know me well can testify to this. The temporary room I’ve been living in until the one I want becomes available means that a large majority of my stuff is being either still in my storage unit up in Sandy or has made its way into the basement common area of the house taking up space and looking like clutter. This afternoon I decided to go through some of my stuff to organize what I had and get rid of what I no longer needed. My first “victim” was my boxes and boxes of random cables.

I’m kind of a pack rat when it comes to technology items because it always seems to happen that when you need something to solve an uncommon problem, you remember that you just threw it away after years of not using it.  However, putting that aside, I took all of the random cables I had acquired over the years, placed them in piles according to their function and ended up trashing close to half of all that I had.  It was kind of weird because while doing so I had the opportunity to reflect on the last 4 years or so and think about where I stumbled across these varying cables and why I had decided to keep them.  It brought back some memories of all the people I had worked with at varying companies, clients I had learned to enjoy assisting, as well as friends and family who asked for my help doing what I know best.  Now that I think about it, this is a really weird thought and I don’t think all actually be able to describe how organizing cables turned into a moment of reflection.  Just know that it did and I enjoyed it.

On another note, I went up to Kaysvillewith one of my new roommates because the engine in his Jeep burned out the other week and he needed a new car.  I guess riding his motorcycle in the winter is less than pleasurable so he spent the past day or two shopping for cars and settled on a “beater” car for the time being until he could afford to fix his Jeep.  He needed a way to get to Kaysville and so we went on a hour and half trip up North in my car.  It was fun to get to know him and we talked about some pretty serious things such as how his ex-girlfriend, who is literally quite “crazy” and is making his life hectic, is keeping him away from their baby daughter.  In short, he has had a lot of time to think things over and learn from his past mistakes and I was able to pick his brain and become that much better off for it.  Anyways, he came home $300 less in his pocket and an old 1985 Dodge Aries while I came home somewhat wiser.  Fun times.

The Move

I finally have access to the Internet at my home so I thought I would actually get around to posting pictures of my move from Colorado to Utah. 

Although I would have liked to leave at around 6:30 or 7:00 on the morning of the 9th, we ran into some difficulties getting the truck and trailer hitched up and getting my car tied down.  But in the end, everything worked out well and I was on my way by about 8:15.  Thanks Dad!

I arrived in Pleasant Grove at just after 6pm due to the fact UDOT had closed I-80 Westbound through Parley’s that evening forcing me to take I-84 and adding an additional 2 hours of drive time and about 120 extra miles.  Luckily, everything arrived intact and I had a bed to stay in that night at my Aunt Melanie’s house.  Because I had to turn the truck in on Monday morning and had job interviews scheduled for that day as well, I spent about 3 hours on Sunday unloading the truck at a storage facility in Sandy because they were the only ones open in the area, it being Utah and all. 

So I got my rental unit, but some idiot had parked a semi-trailer in the driveway back to where my storage place was at, so I had to use the secondary entrance, but didn’t have enough room to maneuver the truck around to get it close to the garage door itself.  I didn’t have a hand-truck available to me, so I used the bottom of my data-center server rack, which happens to have casters on it, to move everything between the truck and the storage garage.

Not having a place to live already arranged, I spent the next week living in the basement bedroom of my Aunt’s house while I scheduled and had job interviews and looked for places to live.  I finally settled on a large 7 bedroom house that the owner, a 27-year old guy, was renting out by the bedroom.  Because it was not furnished, I slept my first night there on a love-sac located in the theatre-room until I could purchase my own mattress. 

I went to both IKEA and RC Wiley to look at matresses and found that although I like a lot of IKEA’s stuff, my sleep was a little more important to me than to chance it on a lesser quality matress.  I bought it at RC Wiley in Provo but they had to ship it down from Salt Lake for the next day.  I arrive to pick it up and find that the matress bag is ripped open and has a small dirt mark on it.  They offer a decent discount to take it away which I accept.  Then I find that the salesman ordered the wrong size of box spring (double instead of a queen) and so they offered me a floor model for 50% off.  I accept.  Then I go to get a refund on my card and instead of refunding the difference, she charged me the difference again on my card.  Luckily I caught it and everything was resolved, but I have to admit I was less than pleased with how much frustration I had to deal with during the process.

I get everything settled and start moving some of my things into the smaller but temporary room in the house until the room I want becomes available come September 1.  There are no window curtains to the bedroom, so I am able to look out at night a see the lights coming from the small but pleasant city of my new home: Lehi, UT.

Books

This past week as I had been interviewing with a number of different companies all over the Salt Lake Valley, I often found myself with hours of free time between appointments and sometimes entire days with nothing to do.  I went and said hello to a number of friends down in Provo, but they actually had lives and thus were not always available to do hang out with me.  Thus, I decided to go to the Barnes and Noble bookstore one afternoon to see if I could find anything interesting to occupy my mind with. 

I searched around the shelves reading the back covers and dust jackets of all the best sellers and new releases hoping to find at least one that could pique my interest.  It probably took me a good 45 minutes before I found a book to try.  In fact, I only happened to see this specific one because cover mentioned it was by the same author of the book entitled, “The Notebook,” which had fairly recently been turned into a quite popular movie.  I liked the movie, so I imagined I would probably like the book as well.  As I started to read “True Believer,” I realized that there was such a thing “chic-flic” books and this was about as good of an example as any.  Being the type that enjoys most movies of this genre, I stuck it through and finished the whole book in the store that day.  I think I even tried to hide the cover from the store employees so they wouldn’t judge me as some awkward guy reading romance novels.  Overall, it was good and stuck to its genre, but very predictable and kind of “cheesy,” but worth the time it took to read.  Also, because I think I ruined the copy I was reading, I decided it would be best if I actually bought it.

The next day, I found myself in the same situation: nothing to do.  I decided to go back to the bookstore and see what else I found find.  I remembered seeing “The Kite Runner” on the New York Times Best Seller List for months and month and that a prior roommate of mine like 3 years before mentioned how much he liked it.  I picked it up and starting reading not know what I was going to get myself into.  Much to my surprise this book was nothing like I had ever read before.  Although it was fictional, the manner in which the story was interwoven with the true history of Afghanistan was unreal to me.  While I consider myself a fairly educated individual, I had no idea some of the things detailed in the novel had been occurring for so long.  As I read it, I was reminded of the non-fiction book, “When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge,” that I had read my freshman year of college for a class I took.  I was enthralled from the first 50 pages and absolutely loved the book.  Now as a warning, there are number of horrible things described in the book which are not easy to read, but show how horrible life can sometimes be.  Although I didn’t finish this one in the store because they closed at 10:00PM, I bought it and took it home to finish the last couple of chapters at home and considered it a good investment.

The next day after an interview, I went back again to Barnes and Noble and found the next book by Khaled Hosseini entitled, “A Thousand Splendid Suns.”  Although it is not a continuation of the first book, it is written in the same style and covers the same time period in the history of Afghanistan.  Again, horrible people who do horrible things to people are described in the book, but I loved the insight I recieved into how others in cultures different from my own were used to living.  When I was finished, I wanted more and was sad to find out that the author had not yet published another book but when he does, I’ll be one of the first to read it.

I was able to finish the book mentioned above in the store before they closed for the night and thus had a few minutes to find my next title.  About a year or so I go I purchased the book named “Tuesdays with Morrie” which was an non-fictional book that came highly recommended to me by a good friend.  It was about the author’s life experiences with a college professor from years ago and now the author had written another book named, “The Five People You Meet In Heaven.”  While this title was fictional and was just as short as his first, I liked it almost as well as his first.  Nothing spectacular about it, but professes the idea that things happen the way they do for a reason: not always for our own personal good, but sometimes for the good of others.  I’d recommended it as a way to kill an hour or two.

Finally, on Friday, after all the bookstore employees were getting used to me being there in sitting in one or two of the same chairs, I wanted to find a book that had been written awhile ago and that had received an award of some type.  I spent a good hour looking through various titles to find one I could enjoy but would not get lost in the older English that often is accompanied by such titles.  I finally decided upon, “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn,” and had started to read the first couple of pages when I was interrupted by a phone call I had to take.  Something came up and I had to leave the store, so I bought the book and decided I’d read it later, but have yet had the chance  to do so.  I’m expecting that I’ll like it, but I’ll let you know when I get the opportunity to have a real opinion on it.

I know that when I get a job and that when school starts I won’t have anywhere near the same kind of time to read as much as I did this week, but I enjoyed it anyways and remembered how much fun it was for me.  I can only hope such habits can continue.

A Job

I thought I would mention that I finally received a formal job offer after countless interviews and lots of traveling between Lehi and Salt Lake.  It is for a company called UCN and I will have the job title of “Network Engineer I” which basically means I will be a Junior Engineer in training for the next year or so until I can get all geared up and learn this company’s world and then be promoted to a Senior Level Network Engineer and my focus will be on the VoIP side of things.  I’m quite excited although I won’t start work for almost two weeks until September 2nd so I’ll have a lot of time to kill until then.  The company headquarters is in Midvale which will work out nice because it is only about 20 minutes from Lehi to the south and only 20 minutes to the BYU Salt Lake Campus to north making the travel bearable between everywhere I have to be.  Plus, because the company has most of their equipment in Dallas and Los Angeles, I’ll have the opportunity to travel there every now and then.  It is for reasons like this that I don’t get too upset when I don’t get the job offers I think I want because something better and more appropriate seems to come along.

Goodbye Colorado, Hello Utah

So it is official.  This past weekend I packed up a 15′ moving truck, put my car on a trailer behind it, and drove the 600 miles from Colorado to Utah over the period of about 10 hours.  It was a little different driving such a long and heavy vehicle up through Wyoming and into Utah, but I arrived safely with everything intact and in good condition.  In case you didn’t already know, I did not get the job offer I had flown out to Utah to interview for some two weeks ago.  The truth is, while I was hoping and wishing I would, I was ready to not get the job and was okay with how it turned out.  Then, the apartment in Draper I was planning on moving into required a minimum of a seven month lease I just didn’t feel comfortable signing something like that for $925 a month plus utilities when I was not sure exactly how I was going to pay for it.  I had enough to survive for a about two months, but still, it made me too nervous.  So, I made the move anyways with a job nor an apartment waiting for me. 

My Aunt and Uncle who live in Pleasant Grove were nice enough to offer their home as a place to crash at night until I get myself established.  I arrived on Saturday evening and because I had to return the truck my Monday and had nowhere to put all of my stuff, I spent Sunday morning / afternoon finding and unpacking my truck into a storage unit in Sandy, UT. It was really hard moving all that by myself and without the proper tools, but it got done by around 1:30PM and afterwards I was so tired I took a nap for around 2 hours.  Then my Aunt’s family had a large get-together (~20 people) which had been planned for a few weeks without having any idea I would be around, but they were kind and included me anyways.  Because our families lived in different states, we never really were friends or even got to know our cousins, nonetheless, we remembered each other had a few good conversations. 

Monday, I put my car back on the trailer to drop it off at the rental location in Sandy, and Budget was nice enough to waive the extra mileage I put on the truck (they closed I-80 West Saturday afternoon making me drive up to Ogden on I-84, an additional ~120 miles and an additional ~90 minutes).  That was nice of them because I was quite frustrated with their company after finding out after I picked up the equipment that the left blinker on the trailer wasn’t working, the left rear tie-down chain on the trailer was broken, and the woman at the pickup location had no idea how to properly get the car on the trailer.  So all in all, things turned out even. 

Afterwards, I went up to SLC for a job interview and while that went well, I’m not sure about this one either because it seems I might (again) be over-qualified for the job I would be quickly bored and couldn’t pay anywhere close to what I am shooing for.  Just to note, I’m not really that picky about jobs or salary but I do have a certain level of expectations for myself and for companies, plus, I’ve got to pay the bills just like everyone else.  Right?  I’m keeping my mind open to everything though.

I went to go look at a room for rent up in Lehi in a $600k house that is owned my some 28 or 30 year old that looks really nice.  The rent wouldn’t be too bad and it seems like everyone who lives there is laid back, professional, and mature enough that the drama involved with roommates would be extremely minor or even non-existent.  Plus, it would be a very large room and and very large house and I think it could easily feel like a sanctuary away from the world like a home needs to feel for me. 

Today, I’m going to go and talk to the people at BYU’s Salt Lake Campus to get everything figured out for attending classes up there at night and I was going to go for an in-person interview as well, but I just got a call saying their manager would instead like to do a phone interview instead due to time constraints.  Its sounds kind of wierd because I’m getting the impression they don’t want their own people to know about the job opening and are trying to keep it under wraps.  Maybe someone is even going to get fired?  I guess things just keep on getting more “exciting” as time goes on and things unravel around me.

(PS – I don’t have any pictures about my adventure to put on here yet, but I will as soon as I get settled and my stuff makes it out of storage.)