Today was my first full day of work in 7 days and I must say I feel like I’m back in America. After 7 consecutive stress free days my drive to work consisted of 4 yellow lights that made me slam on the brakes in aggravation. There was 1 light in Queenstown, NZ. Being back drops me in a routine which I’m used to. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing but to make sense of the situation you just have to look at the word balance. I tell people from time to time that if you want to sound really intelligent just say that whatever it is has to be in balance. It works in so many ways and in this particular one it is describing that you have to work to enjoy your play. Neither working or playing all the time is healthy. There must be a balance. I do have a hint of sadness though that it’s all over and here I am back to this real life instead of fantasy land. It’s hard to really delve into the feelings I have about being back because I saw a world where work was secondary to living life and I liked it. Obviously it isn’t always like that but it was for this particular vacation and that’s where good memories come from. We as Americans don’t take long, extended vacations. Europeans go for “holiday” weeks at a time to experience exactly what I did for a week. What I got to do was step back and look at my world from a macro sense and feel what your money can buy you. Now I’m back trying to make money until the next trip…

This will most likely be my last post for about a week plus. My mom, my sister and myself are heading to New Zealand for a vacation to visit our brother Jeff and his girlfriend Nicole who has stopped updating her New Zealand blog. I have a camera and will take plenty of pictures and will hopefully come back with tons of stories and interesting facts about the kiwis. I’m very excited for a week off with nothing to do but take in the sights of a foreign land and enjoy myself. I believe this would be referred to as “living the life”. I’m hoping that this will be such a good experience that I’ll be apt to turn myself into a worldly traveler. Lose this narrow mind set that the world lies within the United States.

The plane ride is 5 hours to LAX and then 15 hours to Auckland. This is obviously a lot of time on the plane so I’m prepared to finish the Hunger Gamers series and hopefully start the Fountainhead. These are such drastically different books that I’ll start with the teenage ones and work up to a real piece of literature. I’ve felt foolish reading the Hunger Games in public for whatever reason. Tonight will be relatively low key because I have to feel fresh when traveling for all those hours. I don’t have too much else to comment on and will possibly write something mid week depending on how their computer system operates.

This is how car accidents happen. On my way to work today my contact was irritating my eye. While driving, I decided to take it out and put it back in. I’m at a red light and remove the contact. While I’m looking at the contact and deciding if it’s inside-out, the light turns green. While doing this motion the contact falls off my hand and lands right in between the seat and the middle console. Now I’m driving with blurred vision in one eye and my depth perception is horrendous and need to retrieve the contact from the abyss. Contacts dry out after a few minutes so I had to save the contact while I was driving or else i would be a one eyed man for the rest of the day. I start moving my seat back and miraculously am able to retrieve the contact. The contact has all this dust and dirt on it from the floor beneath my seat and this creates major irritation if you put it in your eye. I had a bottle of water (without it I’d have failed) and used one hand to open the bottle, my other hand is holding the contact, and my knees to steer all the while as I can hardly see with only one contact in my eye. I dump the water on my hand and it gets all over my crotch area. I do my best to clean the contact and try to re-insert it back in my eye but its still burns like crazy and that’s a horrible feeling. For some reason if you get something in your eye your nose starts running and I didn’t have any tissues so I’m sitting there half blind with a running nose and still trying to drive effectively. Eventually I found the contact on the right spot of my eye after cleaning it in water again and now things are back to normal. Great start to the day.

Anyone who reads this post I think it would be a good idea to participate in the poll to the right. I was talking about my vacation to New Zealand with a few friends and they were asking if Sam was going. Sam is 20 years old and hasn’t had much experience out of the country. My initial thought was that if Sam wanted to go he could pay for himself and join us on the trip. They disagreed and wondered why my parents wouldn’t pay for him to go. From personal experience, I haven’t taken a dime of my parents money since I was 18. Now I know they paid for my education which is a bill I’d probably still be paying but I paid my rent and any books and random BS since I was 18 without a handout from my parents. I worked during the Summers to pay my way through the year. Now I don’t necessarily agree that my parents should pay for a vacation like this that probably costs about 2,000 dollars. I’m curious to know what other people think about parents paying for their children to take trips? Is 18 the cut off? Is 21? Where does it end if ever? Any thoughts?

Today was the first full work day since last Wednesday. I had mixed emotions throughout as I enjoyed the networking and meeting people of the past few days compared to this daily routine. I don’t think this is too unusual though and it will feel like normal in due time. Obviously I’m pretty excited for a week off to see Jeff and Nicole in New Zealand but I still have to get through this week. If you’ve been reading the last few posts you’ll see somewhat of a transformation in myself but I think it’s just an adjustment period. Meaning that I’ll just have to assimilate these thoughts into my day to day instead of constantly focusing and writing about them. It’s good though to share this type of enlightenment period so that other people can read about things that I experience that alter my life.

The other thing is that I find myself writing more about what’s going on in my life like this is a therapy session and this blog is my outlet. My feeling is that this isn’t the reason people go to my site. Finding yourself is fine but I don’t feel like it’s entertaining material. I guess I find it interesting that I’m more aware of these thoughts currently then ever before in my entire life. Trying to understand the more important aspects of life. No one cares how much money is in your bank account when you die or all the time spent playing video games. I know that I’ve wasted HUGE amounts of time in my life and it’s just trying to keep looking forward and living the right way. I promise this will be my last too personal post and I’ll give some better time wasting material. Till then.

I had a nice 4 day stretch which was a welcomed change of pace from the norm. On Thursday I woke up at 3:30 AM and drove to the airport for a 6:35 flight. I left my car in economy overnight parking and got super lucky getting a spot near the entrance. At 11 dollars a night this was preferred over taking taxis. Everything went smooth with the flight and I arrived in Orlando at 9:30. As I got in a cab at the airport I realized that the hotel I booked wasn’t very close to the convention center where I needed to be for the show. The place I was staying was called Mystic Dunes which was a 4 star hotel and I got a villa for 129 bucks which seemed like a steal. Unfortunately it cost me more money in taxis to and from the convention center that any savings was wiped out. I think this was a good display of my character though because I didn’t let this little speed bump deter me from having a good time. The show was good and I had a really great conversation with a vendor at the Capital Grille in Orlando which was worth the trip itself. After the show I spent the night at the resort which was more family oriented than anything but I still made it work.

On Friday I woke and I did something really stupid. I decided to make some coffee and have never used a coffee maker before in my life. I understood the filter and put some coffee beans in the filter and added water. Problem being was that I didn’t boil the water. To try to salvage the coffee I put the pot on the electric stove and that ended up burning the plastic off of the handle. Another bonehead move but not a big deal. My flight was at 5pm to Fort Lauderdale which didn’t give me a ton of time for anything other than the show. My overall impression of Orlando is that it was really spacious and nothing is close together. This leads to either a lot of taxis or making sure you have a car.

The flight to Lauderdale was about 45 minutes and the Rock picked me up from the airport. We went to his place and then got some Mexican food to eat. There was an unlimited drinks for 20 bucks at a local bar from 8-10pm and we decided to do that. I was drinking Grey Goose and Redbull, at least that’s what they said, and certainly got my money’s worth. At 10 we went to the W hotel where there was a swanky bar that served us these martinis for 14 dollars a piece. The bartender was a dime and we were working some game to see if we could show her an Eiffel tower. After we figured that we weren’t going to get anywhere we went to los olas which had a few more bars we hopped around to. We bought some nice cigars from a local joint and went back to the Blue Martini which is walking distance from his place. The Rock ordered some sort of Patron bomb which absolutely bombed the both of us. We went back to smoke the cigars and I was pretty much kaput. I couldn’t finish the cigar and it was making me nauseous. I think it was about 1 or 2 am but after that we called it a night.

I woke up at 9 the next morning, showered, and waited for the Rock to get up. He was still bombed from the night before but we decided to hit the Gulfstream which was a horse track. I brought 600 dollars to start the trip and was down to about 179 which included everything I did in Orlando. I spent about 100+ dollars the night before and was hoping that the 179 would last me the rest of the trip. At the Gulfstream we met up with a co-worker of the Rock’s and her husband was pretty knowledgeable about the horses. I went on an absolute tear under his tutelage and ended up winning somewhere in the 250 range hitting an exacta box one race and a trifecta (not boxed) in another. This was a crazy atmosphere and we really had a great time. After the track we went to Flannigan’s where I got some awesome ribs. This was at 5pm and it set my nutrition for the night. We called up a friend of ours from high school who lived near by and hung out with him for the rest of the evening. Even though we didn’t do anything all that exciting the conversation was really good and I enjoyed a relatively low key evening. My flight today was at 9:40 am which was a pain to get up for but I made it work. The flights once again were fine and I arrived back in Philly at 1pm which left plenty of time for a nap and some exercise. I ate a nice Dalessandro’s cheese steak for dinner and Ck4 and I watched the all star game to cap off a top notch 4 day weekend.

I know this isn’t my usual entry as I just documented everything I did without going into anything funny or specific but I want to save that for other posts and just keep this exactly what I did.