Beehive Behaving in Oakland Hills

I've never seen a wild beehive this big before in all my life! ...Tech courtesy of iMovie

Top 10 Reasons Why Now was a Good Time to be “RIFed”

Wow…looking at the blog, it’s been almost a year again since my last post. I could have sworn I posted since last summer’s Las Vegas open adoption adventures. I guess nothing was really compelling me to write until now.

Right before Memorial Day holiday I was laid off, otherwise known as being part of a RIF, or “Reduction in Force”. But “don’t cry for me Argentina,” for it was ‘that’ time and I was relieved and somewhat happy that it happened. I saw the writing on the wall for quite some time, but wasn’t ready to take my destiny by the horns.

Even though this is the 3rd time I’ve gone through a RIF, I still get PTSD when I think about the first time, where it took 8 months to find another gig. I couldn’t even beg for an interview or get my foot in any doors. That was until a great recruiter hooked me up with a great team in Montreal for a 2 year adventure I will never forget and I hope to go back to Montreal some day.

The past four weeks since my RIF have been a 180 degree difference and a whirlwind of job hunting. My business network has matured greatly over the past 8 years. I have friends & connections in all kinds of places hooking me up with potential opportunities and my skills and track record are now at a point where they speak for themselves. Not trying to sound pompous here, but trying to paint a picture of being calm and not freaked out over having to get a new gig in this economy.

Now while there is never a good time to be laid off, being let go at the start of summertime does have its advantages. So all this long winded preamble only to get to my Top 10 Reasons Why Now was a Good Time to be “RIFed:

10. Finally have time to get to all the “Honey-Do’s” that have been piling up.

9. I can sleep past 7:30 without feeling guilty.

8. Now I have no excuse for updating my blog, as this post proves :-P.

7. Lots of catchup lunches with friends I’ve lost touch with.

6. More time for addictive Facebook social games without any of that pesky guilt.

5. Quality time to noodge the wife about the little things while she tries to work.

4. Catching SF Giants midweek day games like I’ve always wanted…Let’s Go Giants!

3. Get to watch all the World Cup games in my skivvies while drinking coffee. Go USA!

2. I get to have more quality time with the family & be there for all the little things.

and the #1 reason why now was a good time to be “RIFed”…

I finally have a shot at level capping on WoW! :-)

What? You didn’t think it was going to be something deep & spirtual did you? :-P

Las Vegas & “These are a few of my least favorite things…”

So I’m just settling back down at home after our whirlwind trip to Vegas to meet and take home the newest Zwerling family member, Levi.  While I will always think fondly of Las Vegas as the birthplace of my 2nd child/son (and some of my favorite Cirque du Soleil shows), the city has more than it’s fair share of annoyances.  And since Christine will just tell me to blog about is so she doesn’t have to hear about it, you the reader will have to bear with my venting. 

You can try to sing The Sound of Music’s ‘My Favorite Things’ to this, but I make no guarantees that it will actually sound right.  So here are my Top 8 Things That Annoyed Me About Las Vegas (I was aiming for 10, but mind is getting too mushy tonight to think of 2 more):

8:	Tourists & Jaywalkers not watching where they’re going and move slowly doing it…I’ll be nice & blame it on the heat.
7:	Gambling where you least expect it…seriously, does the local supermarket & McDonalds need video poker and slot machines?!
6:	People that have lawns…it’s a desert people, that water your wasting on the greenery could be used for better uses…like more fountains like at Bellagio.  (psst…that was sarcasm btw)
5:	What’s worse than people with lawns?!  People that water their lawns in the middle of the day! I kid you not…at the condo complex we stayed at, the sprinklers were on at 11AM when they temperature was already over 95.
4:	The overbearing dry air…I won’t even get into what it did to my sinuses & hair.
3:	Road construction zones with no warning signs beforehand to allow sensible land merging.
2:	Lack of any kind of organized recycling program. Every time I threw out a bottle I felt guilty; with as much waste as Las Vegas has I’m shocked at their eco-gluttony.
1:	The Fraking 110+ degree heat!!!

No sirree bob, while I won’t mind visiting Las Vegas to see Levi’s birth family or check out the latest Cirque show, you will not catch me there any time soon.

Good night everybody!

Blackout Territories makes MLB.TV Useless!

One of the things I was bummed out about this week being in Las Vegas with my wife and new bambino was that I was going to miss the SF Giants current home stand.  But wait…here comes MLB.com with a free trial for MLB.TV during 7/11-21!  So I’m thinking, “Sweet…I can keep up w/ the Giants and try out online video for the games.”

But hold on there baseball fans, it turns out in Las Vegas I’m being blocked from seeing the games because I’m in a blackout territory for one of the teams playing.  I’m thinking, “How could Giants be blacked out all the way out here?!” So I did some research and I came across the 2009 MLB Blackout Territory Map:

So being in Las Vegas, I’m screwed from seeing any games this week.  If you can’t tell what’s blocked from the Technicolor rainbow above, MLB blacks out the following teams in Las Vegas: Anaheim, Arizona, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego, and San Francisco. 

I would subscribe to MLB.TV if I knew I could watch a game outside the San Francisco/Oakland area market.  But how can you call an area in another state & over 550 miles away in the same market?!

So thank you MLB.com for the MLB.TV free trial.  I will definitely not subscribe after the free trial and will suffice with just audio when I’m out of town.

Yes Virginia, Erik does change diapers

Here is the positive proof that I do in fact change diapers. Please refer to this video in the future if there is any doubt :-).

My Cyborg Name

Just had to share my family cyborg name:

Get Your Cyborg Name

New Son on the Block: Levi Tilden Zwerling

Long time, no write everyone…sorry for that (if you even care :-P).  But I have 2 good reasons while I haven’t been bitching…uh, I mean blogging, for the past 6+ months:

1. I was working on a new project: MySims Agents (Wii)…coming to a game store near you in the next few months
2. My family and I were on our 2nd open adoption journey to add another child to our family. (Xander also joined our family through open adoption.)

While I can’t share many details about the former, I’m happy to say that we have almost completed the latter :-)!   Levi Tilden Zwerling was born on July 6^th at 10:49 p.m.  He’s a big boy – born at 9 lbs 15 oz, 20 ½ inches long!

For those of you who don’t know what  open adoption includes birth and adoptive parents meeting one another, sharing full identifying information, and having direct access to ongoing contact over the years. In open adoption, birthparents and adopting parents select each other. They have control over all critical decisions in their adoption, including the amount of ongoing contact.
Open adoption has been the subject of intense study in recent years, and it has been found to be psychologically the healthiest form of adoption for birthparents, children, and adoptive families. Research has shown that the more open an open adoption is the healthier it is. (Courtesy of the IAC website).

Levi was born in Las Vegas, where we are currently.  We will need to stay here (in a nice rental condo) while we wait for Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC) clearance so we can cross state lines and head home (approximately one week).  My apologies for the technical Nevada state law stuff :-).

While we love spending bonding time with Levi here in 108+ degree weather waiting for clearance to leave the state, Christine and I both miss our other ‘big boy’, Xander, dearly.  The X-man is staying with Grandma and Grandpa Zwerling (grammom and pop pop) while we’re ‘picking up’ his baby brother.  According to Xander, “mommy and daddy are on a ship getting my baby brother, Levi.  I’m a big brother!”

So now that I’m a new dad again, be prepared for nauseating baby stories. But no worries, I’m sure I’ll be back to my bitter self soon enough :-). 

Until next time…

How does staying open 24 hrs help stores bottom line?

So there have been stories reported this week that Macy's is staying open around the clock and JC Penny is staying open until midnight. This isall in the hopes of getting every sale they can and help the bottom line in this worst shopping season since tracking started in 1969.

Is it just me or is there a major problem in their thinking? First, if the customers are not coming out during normal hours, what makes them think they will come out in the middle of the night? Yes, maybe they are lowering prices even more, but are they spending more on advertising to let folks know?

Second...for all the money it costs to pay for the building utilities (electricity, lights, heating) and salaries, are they actually selling enough to cover the extra costs and help the revenue bottom line?! I can't think of how this is possible. It seems like they are just making things worse for themselves.

I'm not an economist, so if anyone can explain the logic to me on this one, I'm open for an education on this one.

Happy Chrismahanakwanzikah Folks!

Survivor Finale Gripes

So I'm watching the Survivor Finale and it reminds me of some gripes I have every season:

1. The fact that the Internet news media reports the winner before the West Coast have finished watching the show! (I found out who won 20 minutes early)
2. The Walk of Memories they do before the last challenge. It's cheesy and a waste of 15 minutes and I really don't care to relive who the losers were.
3. When they burn their huts down before the leave for the last council before the jury. There's enough out of control brush fires in this world without creating one on purpose. Did you see how close the fire was to the trees, where animals are living?! And then they walk away and leave it burning! I'm sure there's a Production Asst. there to watch it, but how do you put out a fire like that safely in the middle of the jungle?!

On something specific to Sugar in this final episode...she let her remorse over her dad's death control her decisions and make her worst decision in this game. I'll say no more...you need to finish watching the finale, like me!

Finally the Time of Rain has returned

So we're finally getting some much needed rain here in the SF Bay Area & Northern California. I think we are working on our 3rd drought year if things don't start turning around. But as sure as rain here means snow in the mountains, it will only be a few days of rain before people start to complain about the rain. Whether it's the weather media, folks that need a daily intake of sun, or the peeps that built a house too high and too close to the edge of a cliff that's been burned by fire and is now a mudslide hazard (very niche I know); they will complain enough with the rain.

Sorry to put a damper (pun intended) on your complaining folks, but we need more rain than we can almost imagine to get out of this precipitation deficit we're in. Like it or not, California's lack of rain has begat the following Cycle of Rain (or lack thereof):

• Lack of Rain means drier vegetation longer in the year
• Very dry vegetation & weather helps to lead to brush fires
• Brush fires mean bare hills with nothing to hold the ground together
• When rain does come it causes mudslides
• Brush finally does regrow though with the rain
• When the drought returns, the cycle starts all over

So this may not be a real logical cycle (so does that mean it's an illogical cycle?), but this is how I perceive how rain and it's effects are viewed here in CA when it doesn't have to do with snow pack, runoff, or agriculture irrigation.

But the point I'm not making very well here is that we need the rain very badly folks. Until cheap industrialized desalinization plants become part of normal life materializes (will it ever?), we need every drop of rain we can get. Yes mudslides suck, but maybe you shouldn't have built your house or moved into a house at the bottom of a hill, on a hill, or close to the edge of a cliff. That's one of the risks you need to just suck up when you have a house there, like earthquakes is a risk of living on a fault my family has had to accept. (BTW, that was the un-PC part of this rant.)

Back to the main point, we need months of never-ending rain to get back into the black. To get there we will have to live through the negative aspects and suck it up. To the weather media: stop tryig to report on the bad all the time. We need the rain so just keep reporting that rain is good for us. To people that just need their daily sun fix: get a UV lamp and go grow yourself :-).

That has been your Sunday report by your friendly neighborhood crumudgeon who loves the rain and hope we have it for days to come. :-)

Have a great week!

New Batman series a major downer

So I've always been a huge fan of almost all TV shows about Marvel or DC heroes. Actually, right at this moment I can't think of any I flat out disliked...until now. Batman: The Brave & the Bold (Cartoon Network) is a weird mash-up of the 60s Batman live action show with Genndy Tartakovsky (Dexter's Laboratory, Star Wars: The Clone Wars) style animation.

On paper the concept may sound nice, but the cartoon is too kitschy for its own good and doesn't have the edginess of the most recent Batman incarnations (Justice League, The Batman). Dietrick Bader as new voice of Batman is no Kevin Conroy, and the stories are like watching a Little Tikes version of Batman. I could only stomach the show for a few minutes before the mix of Superfriends Aquaman with the machismo twist forced me to switch it off.

There has been a dearth of comic based TV shows this season, so I had high hopes for the pseudo-flashback Batman interpretation. I guess my search will have to continue. Know of any cool shows or movies out there, please ping me.

Blog Launch Take 2

Happy Sunday!

I've been thinking this past week about starting a blog, for no other reason than have a place to vent as friends & family can sometimes get sick of my rants. So I came onto Blogger this morning to create my blog, only to remember that I had a failed blog start over 2 years ago (but coincidentally the 1st Sunday in December).

So consider this the relaunch of my blog. The description above will tell you all you need to know about what you will find here. But don't expect me to bring you anything newsworthy; unless my mind dump of peeves, complaints, quirks, and the infrequent compliment is considered news.

So now that I have stated my 'manifesto' so to speak, I'll give a quick rundown of the only thing really bugging me this past week: the Big 3 Bailout. I'm not thrilled that there has been no discussion of increasing development into hybrids and other more economical/'green' vehicles. In fact Bush & Pelosi are thinking of dipping into the 'Green Funds' already established for the auto companies as a way of paying for the bailout. I will say I'm glad they are being more cautious about the bailout and being strict on it's use; I only wish the government was this strict with the use of the $700+ billion in the bank bailout. And before you say, "Well you should contact your congress reps," I already have. :-P

Must be a good day today...can't think of anything else to bitch about today. So I guess I'll be off to have a fun day with mi familia.

If there are topics you think I should mention here, or if you want to give me some feedback on how to write a better blog, feel free to ping me.

Have a great week!
-NS

Greetings & Salutations!

Hello, Hola, Bonjour, Ma Nishma, Pryvit, Sawatdi, Nîmen hâo, Konnichi wa,

This is what I hope to be the start of an interesting, and hopefully funny, diatribe. I'm new to the blogosphere so please be kind :-).

Want to recomend a new game, book, song/album...hell, whatever, please send them my way at NeoSquonk@gmail.com.

Hasta pasta,
NS