Halloween 2006 Party!

Its that time again! Come out and have some fun!





Message me to RSVP or if you need the details. Surprise us all with a fun costume!

Veni Vidi Vici

Blame it on the silly lil bulletin I posted earlier, or the bottle of homeade hard cider I've been drinking tonight, or my hyperactive imagination... But an interesting concept fired off the synapses this evening.

At what point do the actions of a person quit being the result of that person, and become something that defines that person? When do actions quit being the means and start being the ends? We see it in movies, television, books, etc. where a person starts down the slippery slope, hits the bottom, only to come back in the end and show the world that they are still the wholesome hero that they started out as. Is it the slippery slope that defines us? How far down we go? Maybe its the dramatic recovery that hooks viewers but that's not life.

I see it all the time where we judge the person by what they have done. I try to maintain the objectiveness and not judge a person by their actions, but I am just a man with all his beautiful flaws. I jump to conclusions, judge the book by its cover. No matter how much I try to seperate the emotion from the logic, I still have the gut reaction that condems the subject by whatever few actions are shared with the public. I say all of this is just trying to predict the nature of a person by their actions.

While it is true that the universe follows patterns, there is so much more that we cannot comprehend. That's why there is the rule that every forecast is wrong. No matter how well we can identify the pattern, there is still the wild card that nobody can put thier finger on. Coincidence, fate, serendipity... The little bit of chaos that we cannot contain. But yet we look at the past to give us some kind of insight into the future.

So how do we look at a person; a collection of actions, circumstances and appearances; and decide that person is good or bad? How can we say that the ends define the means? I don't want to do that. Even more, it bothers me when other people do that. Yet I still work my ass off. I create all kinds of positive actions to try to define myself as a good person. Is it just an attempt to throw the scales in my favor? Offset my negatives with some kind of goodness to over-compensate and make me look good? All I can really say with any real conviction is that I have to do it with every bit of force I have.

Whatever "it" is... good or bad.

...And then the papa tomato says "ketchup"

OK, so it has been a score since the last time I actually sat down and dumped my brains on some paper. It's technically been 0.015 score, but folks are terrible at math these days. So here's the abridged version of the summer with all my news that's fit to print, granted I can print it in 30 minutes or less.

I finished my spring semester at WSU, two A's and a B 'cause I'm a friggin' genius. The 17 and 18 year old freshmen don't have nuthin on me, except the hope of a boundless future and smart decisions.

A big company up in Montreal, Canada flew me up there for a nice weekend and a job interview. I got a job offer on the spot, double my salary but I would have to cut ties with everything here (family, friends, house, job, school) and start all over in Los Angeles. At least I grew up on gangsta rap so I'd know the native dialect.

While I took two weeks to make my decision, I got an interview and job offer for a promotion at my current company. It was for a different kind of job as the other offer, so I was at a career crossroads. I was not ready to pick up my roots quite yet, so I pushed my luck and asked for a fat raise along with the promotion (that's phat loot for you west-siders). Since my only true skill is applying pressure to said luck, I made out the best I could.

Amidst all these easy life changing decisions, my friends and I went to Lake of the Ozarks for Memorial weekend. My buddy has a house and boat right on the lake so we spent a long weekend drinking beer, cruising around the lake, watching pretty women, cliff jumping, my poor atempt at water skiing, and yet more beer drinking. For as much as I avoid the sun, I had an amazingly fun weekend.

So back to school for the summer... this time it was Business Statistics and the Information Systems lab. In other words, the joy of charts and how to make them in Excel. Lucky for me, that's what I do at work since noone else can seem to understand the cryptic symbols they call "numbers". Once again, a two wonderful A's again. See, I told you's I's a friggin genius. (sorry, that sounded much better in my head).

Now it's been a few weeks at the new job. My stress level has been reduced to almost nothing. That has been by far the hardest adjustment I have had to make in my career. for the last 12 years, I have worked in high stress environments. The steady pressure has always been a fire that has tempered me with a valuable hardness but luckily hasn't burned me out. Without that fire to keep me motivated, I'm having to figure out how to deal with work the way the rest of you folks do. I can tell you that normal is not normal for me. We shall see how this hand plays out...

So this past weekend, some more friends and I headed up to Hays and Wilson lake for a peaceful weekend of camping, swimming, drinking and conversations. I've made it through another summer with two trips to the lake and no sunburns this year. Gotta tell ya, it's been one of the best summers ever.

So here we are at today, a few weeks from the start of the fall semester. On the menu this time is Management and Organization, Marketing and the coup de gras... Oceanography. Not exactly my most wanted choice, but you gotta do some silly stuff when you are chasing that paper. It should be interesting at least, and that's always appealing. On the homefront, things are peaceful. The cats are terrors, but they are my lil terrors. The family has been patient with me and that's always nice since I'm hard on most nerves out there.

So there's my ketchup. Hopefully most get the Pulp Fiction reference and hopefully I will be able to maintain this a bit better. God knows I need to speak out more

Sad to say, it is a fact

Everyone is always saying that Wichita sucks. Well it turns out that for young single folks it does. Ranking 79th out the 80 cities surveyed (We only beat out our neighbor Kansas City) does kinda show that it can suck here. Check out all the numbers and other cool stuff here. The study was done by Axe Bodyspray and Spearling's and it came up with some interesting facts.

I wonder if this has any correlation to the fact that we have one of the highest divorce rate in the country too. Last I heard it was up around 65%. Maybe we get into bad relationships due to the lack of options. We should import a bunch of hot women as part of a city improvement project

Yeah, I Read 'Em! What's It To Ya?!?

Horoscopes are funny. I've been restless for the past week or so for a number of reasons. Then I get something like this:

As a free-spirited air sign, Wenke, you find it difficult to handle restrictions. If you are confined to a desk all day, for instance, you get squirmy. Or if you are limited by a tight schedule, you soon long to stretch your wings. Find a way to experience greater freedom. Go somewhere fun for the day, like an amusement park. Or plan a vacation that will inspire and uplift you. Don't stay stuck in your usual routine. It's time for the bird to escape his cage.

Yup, it's time to make a change... Maybe something big this time...

Fate and Destiny

Fate is not like a road whose path you have to follow, or a set of choices that your are waiting to make.

To me, fate is like an ocean. As it crashes on the rocks of the shore, it will slowly wear away anything that is put in it's path. Whatever we place in the sands at the edge of it will quickly be washed away. When it is peaceful, it gives us the most beautiful sunsets at the end of the day for us to enjoy together. When destiny is stormy, however, it comes at us with a force so overwhelming that it might kill us if we cannot figure out how to weather the storm.

But if we keep to the shores of fate, all we can do is wait for the next time it comes at us. For us to control our destiny, we must set sail on that ocean. We can chart our own path and force our journey across it's waves. Or we can set ourselves adrift and let the currents of destiny take us where they may. Either way, there are chances for storms that may sink us, and chances for calm winds that will empty our sails to slow our journey. We must learn to ride these waves and navigate the storms.

While it might be treacherous, we must set out across the water to find what we can. Otherwise we are forced to be content with what destiny washes up on our shores.

The Cops Got Me Drunk

I try to volunteer for the community as much as I can. Last year I tutored a nice lil 4th grader. I'm on one of the action teams for Young Professionals of Wichita. So when my cousin called and said that the cops need volunteers for the cadets to run sobriety tests on, I felt that it was my duty to my community to help out.

Well last night was the second time we got to go down to the training station and have to PoPo booze us up. It was a whiskey sour night so we reeked from cheap whiskey. Lucky for me, I have a mutant metabolism and in the course of 1 1/2 hours, got my BAC level from 1.26% down to 0.99%. Of course I was still way over the legal limit of 0.80%. I did fool one of the cadets, which I didn't do last time. So I would call it a victory, even though 4 out of 5 cops would have taken me to jail and gave me a DUI.

Back to the bar for some more practice.

So I'm Smarter Now, Right?

As some might have noticed, I haven't been here to update much. But I've had a very good reason. I went back to school to finish my degree (you could almost say start my degree for as much credit they've given me). I have been takin 3 classes this semester and it has made my life busy. However, tonight I finished my last final and I'm offically out of school until mid January. From how it looks right now, I probably got an A in Business Calculus, an A or B in Financial Accounting and a B in Intro to Psychology. They may not be the greatest, but it's damn good by my standards. Plus, work only says I got to get a C for them to pay for it. Suckas

The Russian Mafia Already Got Me

OK, So i joined the whole MySpace thing and got half-way literate on the ins and outs. In less than 48 hours, I get a message from some Russian chick in the worst broken english I have seen. It was so bad that I really couldn't make much sense of it with out getting a headache. It said something about nobelmen relatives, some cat, how she's going to send me photos of her fine Russian ass, and I think there was something about potatoes near the end. Whatever... If Roman's silly ass would ever add me, I'd have him check her out in person. That would freak the spammer out. Of course if she was for real, Roman would probably pimp her out before I could even see her.

Respect

Today I received an award for a project I was part of at work. The award is a Chairman's Award of Excellence for Raytheon's Supplier Diversity Program. As in Chairman of the Board... The big one.