It's been a while.....

Feel free to listen to this while you read, it will set the mood

Yeah, it sure has been a while since I updated this thing, too many times I've sat down at the computer to write a quick entry only to be sidetracked by something else. Quite a bit has happened since my last update so here's what I have been up to.

***Disclaimer**** this is going to be pretty long and I will more than likely ramble on for too long but whatever it's my blog assholes!

It's been two years. Two years since I first put up my Facebook status of "This job is going to kill me, I can't take this place much longer." That very day is when Perks sent me a Facebook message telling me that he works for an awesome company up in Vermont and that I should check it out. Two days later I was emailing him my resume, I'd had enough of Connecticut and decided that I could finally make the move to Vermont I always dreamed of. Next thing I know I have a phone interview, and I must not have sounded like too big of a dipshit because they invited me up for a sit down interview. There it was, the chance I was hoping for, the chance to get out of Connecticut. Let me just give you a bit of a background about why I was so ready to get the hell out of there.

First was my job. While I worked with a few great people for the most part I was really unhappy. I was forced into a transfer to a branch I did not want to go to, away from a branch that was very successful because of the great team we built. I had a 50 minute commute daily, so the little bit of money extra they gave me for transfer went right into my gas tank. Ever hear of the term paycheck to paycheck? Yeah that was me. Not only was I living paycheck to paycheck, but I was often times scrounging for change under the seats in my car so I could buy a dollar whopper junior from Burger King. Next was the social life, or lack there of. I had my best friend Matt (who worked with me at the successful branch, nothing like working with your best friend) and my roomate FatMike (his real name is Joe, but it's a long story)but he had a real bitch of a girlfriend who somewhat turned him against me toward the end of our time living together. I was about a year removed from one of the more serious relationships I've ever been in. It was very difficult to get over due to the fact that the girl lived a mile away from me and went to all the same places I did, so it wasn't easy to avoid and forget. I was basically trapped in the same never ending cycle. Work like a fool for 50 hours a week and get paid for 40, drive home and either go to the gym, go eat some chicken wings at Archie's or come home lock myself in my room and play video games. I needed a change.

So, I pass my phone interview (which I didn't mention was in the closet of my old job as I was at work at the time) and got invited for a sit down on Sept. 7th. I drove up for a long weekend and spent the night over at Perk's house. The first thing that I realized was, "holy shit this place is far from Connecticut". We were driving up 91N and as we finally merged onto 89 I thought we were close, little did I know we still had another hour plus of driving to get to Burlington. The sights of a mid September drive to Burlington are beautiful, just cool enough where some of the leaves are starting to change and the air has a crisp smell to it, I knew this is where I wanted to be. The morning of the interview Perks took a long lunch and we had a hamburger downtown to discuss how it would play out. I didn't mention that day was a particularly hot day in Burlington and the result of us walking around was me sweating like a whore in church and not because I was nervous, but because I am a walking carpet. Finally after sitting in the waiting area for 10 minutes I was walked up to the interview and knew I had to really kick some ass to get the job. The interview was with the director of the department,the three team leads and a woman from HR. Lets just say I was nervous and as I drove home to Connecticut I was lying to myself saying that if I didn't get the job I wouldn't be upset.

That following week was miserable! I was texting Perks every hour asking him if he knew anything, asking him if he had any updates for me and he of course had none. I was told when I left I'd receive notice on that Friday whether or not they wanted to make me an offer. Fast forward to that Friday at 3:30pm, I'm standing in line at the bank to make the daily deposit and an email hits my phone. I saw that it was from the HR woman and my heart almost jumped out of my chest. I didn't even know if I wanted to open it because I was scared it was going to say sorry pal you're a dipshit have a nice life. I decided to open it while I was waiting in line, I literally had to read the line "We'd like you to come work for us, there is an offer included with this email" three times. I had one of those moments, I'm sure almost all of you have had at least one of them in your life where you felt like you had just won at the game of life. I started shouting,"YES YES YES I GOT THE JOB." I guess i didn't realize that this is not the typical bank behavior (the bank just had bulletproof glass installed at the teller's windows because it was in a very bad part of Hartford) because the security guard walked over to me grabbed me by the arm and told me that I needed to calm myself down or I'd be escorted out of the building. I don't even remember making the deposit or driving back to my store because I was so caught up in the fact that my life would be changing. I made a quick call to my mother, she gave me her blessing telling me to "Go be happy, there's nothing holding you here" and that's when I really came to the realization that I was on my way. This was on september 15th, I had the choice to either start on Sept 21st or to wait until the next training class which was October 30th....I wasn't waiting a month to get the hell out of Connecticut. I let HR know I'd be there on the 21st six days from the date I got the acceptance letter. I put in my week's notice, used a week's worth of vacation for my second week and packed my shit inside my Accord and was on my way. I still can't believe that I had it in me to literally pack the stuff I could fit in my car and leave the life I knew for something completely new.


I could reiterate what I've done in the past two years that I've been here, or instead you could just read my older entries and relive those moments while they were still fresh within my head. Right now I'm just going to compare what life was like before I got up here to what it's like now:

Work- Work truly is amazing. I work for one of the best companies in the United States, we actually have awards to prove it. How many of you can say you can wake up, go to the gym within your work building, take a shower, walk down to the cafe get some breakfast (Cheese omelette with bacon and homefries is my favorite) then walk over to your desk get some work done, take a 15 minute break to play some basketball at our indoor gym, or maybe some tennis on our indoor tennis court, tennis not your thing? You can play a game of ping pong then on one of our three olympic pong tables. (Watch out because nearly everyone has a mean ping pong game, I get my ass handed to me daily) There are so many perks of working for a company like mine I don't have time to name them all, let me just tell you though this place kicks major ass. I have recently moved departments and could not be happier. I work with a lot of great people and am excited to learn more advanced skills associated with what I do. So yeah the comparison between jobs from then until now is night and day. I have never been so happy to go to work.

Living - I have an awesome apartment that is less than a two minute walk to work. Probably the only thing you can complain about at our company is the lack of parking spaces. We have satellite lots, but when it's raining I'm sure the last thing someone wants to do is walk five minutes in the pouring rain. Well, I don't have that problem, I could literally run to work and be through the door in 30 seconds if I had to. The apartment itself is great, two bedrooms, an pretty spacious living room/dining room area and a nice kitchen area. The bathroom is small but it works. The only thing that sucks is that it get's pretty warm in the summer and we only have two windows in the entire place the way that it's set up. Other than that I have 0 complaints. My girlfriend, who will be discussed further down is my roommate, and she's pretty easy to live with.(My apartment feels a lot smaller since she moved all her stuff in, but I hardly own a thing so most of it's needed.)

Friends - I have a few good ones up here. That's been one of the harder things in moving up here. Leaving your good buddies behind.

1. I miss Matt and Ash and our wing nights at Archies and mine and Matt's skateboard trips that mostly ended up with us sitting around shooting the shit.

2. I miss playing video games and eating ridiculous amounts of food with Fatmike and that friendship and roommate bond we formed. We lived together for over eight years of our lives and while I left with some bitter feelings, we have repaired our friendship after he dumped that terrible bitch of an ex-girlfriend of his.

3. Most of all I miss being able to easily see my mother, I love her very much and miss her terribly. Hopefully we can get her up here to stay for good soon. She was the one who told me to get my ass out of Connecticut and I'm glad I listened.

Being almost 30 years old finding a new group of friends has been a bit of a challenge but thankfully we 500+ people working for our company and they are all pretty awesome. I've managed to make some great friends and am better for it.


Lastly and most importantly I have to talk about finding the girl I'm going to marry. It wasn't an easy feat, I had to tell a little white lie in order to break the ice and talk to her. (our company door locks after 5pm, I went to the corner store to grab a snack and there she was sitting under the tree out front. I wanted to talk to her but I didn't know what to say, I had to say something. So I pretended that I didn't have my keys on me and asked her if she could let me into the door, she gladly obliged and laughed as I thanked her and called myself a dipshit for forgetting my only way back into the building. All the while my keys were in my pocket, but she didn't know that at the moment, sneaky but effective.)I couldn't be happier, we've been official since April 20th 2010 (yeah our anniversary really is 4/20 too bad neither of us are big pot smokers)and I can honestly say this is the last girl I will ever date. I've never felt a connection to a person like this, I've never been able to be around someone for this long and not need to get away from them. We have a lot of the same interests and the same humor, I'm much funnier than her though. I feel so lucky meeting her, her in my life is the icing on the cake.

I am happier than I can ever remember being. The move to Vermont was the best decision I ever made. I urge all of you to think outside of the box, if you aren't happy with your life take the steps to find that happiness. My best friend Matt put it best "If your life sucks, you suck." I don't think he realized how deep that quote of his hit me. To me it means if your life sucks you suck for not making it better. We all have the power to get ourselves out of a shitty situation and after the things we want, you just need to not let the fear of the unknown hold you back. Look at me for example, I took a chance and now my life is great. Life is too short to not take chances.


A few photos from the past two years

A Vermont Sunset

Above the Clouds at Bolton

Burton HQ

Top of Stowe

Homies

Dave

Self hair cuts!

Scenic Warm Weather Stowe

Up in the gym doin work!

New Bicycle

Lebo after taking all Cook's shit off his desk, happy friday!

Daylight Savings time party!

Fresh Tracks, those are mine btw!

Shredders!

Solo lift rides

Me and my lady

The man responsible for my move to VT

Kate and I taking pictures of legos

Statue of Liberty Dunks! Back into the shoe collecting!

Some fresh at Bolton

Bolton during an epic snowfall

When you let your nose sink, you usually end up falling on your face

Some space jam dunk lows, another of the shoe collection

The love of my life

Dumbledore the new guy on the block

My favorite figure from our growing lego collection

Good Ol' Gert

Party hard on the streets of Burlington

Cheech and Chong dunks, one of my favorites in the collection

Dipshit eating out of his bowl, nice technique buddy

Kate and the sunset, life doesn't get much better

Birthday Bash!

So a few people have bitched at me lately to write something, let me just tell you assholes that I have wrote two of these only to have one eaten by the interwebz and the other one autosave a blank page..... Pretty disheartening when you spend like an hour typing random shit here only to have it disappear before your very eyes. Whatever, I'm a warrior I power through shit like that, and well here we are. I've been up to a lot since I last did one of these. This gonna be a long one so deal with it.

First is the snowboarding. The lack of snow up here this year is shitty. There is no other way to describe it. I've taken countless trips up north back when I lived in Connecticut and it always seemed like the conditions were perfect when I got here, not so much this year. I guess it could do with the fact that I am used to riding dust on top of crust in Connecticut, so any little significant amount of snow seemed like bliss, but now that I got my first taste of knee deep pow, I crave for more. It's always on my mind, I think about it when I sleep, I think about it when I'm at work, I think about it in the shower, I think about it while i poop, I even think about it when.... well yeah I think about it alot. So far Stowe has only recieved about 30 inches of natural snow, they only got six inches when we got 30 inches in Burlington..... All I wanted for my birthday was for some fresh snow to fall, and with the 48 degrees we had on Monday of this past week and two days of rain that melted all the snow on the ground here in Burlington things weren't looking good.

Then comes Wednesday and I get an IM from Perks while talking to a dealer

Perks: Stowe got 12 inches yesterday
Me: Holy shit!
dealer: huh?

Remember kiddies, always mute your phone in times of excitement, I then explained to the dealer, who is a really cool guy exactly what I was holy shitting over and he thought it was hilarious. "Never thawt I'd hur anybody be happhe to get sum snow, thought ya'll got a shit ton of it up thar ane wayez." Yeah buddy, I thought the same thing too. Anyways I made sure to watch the weather report all week and stay hopeful that there would be more. Thankfully another 8 inches fell over the course of the week to make this weekends' conditions pretty awesome. The fact that it was only 2 degrees at the base of the mountain on Saturday was no big deal because everyone was pumped on 20 inches of snow in a week. Fuckin A it was a great weekend. The best part was today around 2:30 when the snow started dumping down, turned up my Ipod and hit the jackpot right off the side of spruce. Knee deep, untouched fresh through the trees while jamming some Tribe Called Quest - We've got the Jazz. God it was like one of those religious experiences people talk about. Nothing could make that moment in time any better. As the trees spit me out into the bottom of the trail I saw two little kids watching me ride down the hill, and over heard one of them shout follow the orange pants! (I have a pair of redonkulously bright Orange pants, and a few pals of mine like to give me shit for it) So I get to the lift and they catch up and ask me if I can show them how to ride into the woods, and of course I wanted these little shreds to enjoy the experience that I just did and took them for a mini tour. It was awesome turning the Ipod off and listening to them shout and laugh as we cruised through the trees. At one point I had to unstrap and literally pull one of the little dudes out of snow that was up to his waist, it really was awesome. What an awesome day of riding.

Also in case you guys didn't read the fucking title, Saturday was my birthday. I pretty much celebrated my birthday the entire weekend, stayed in Friday night because I really wanted to get to the mountain early so I could shred, and well Saturday was awesome, rode all day with Taylor one of the new friends I have made after the move up here. We got a lot of riding in, the highlight of the day was Taylor's 7ft ass drop from the lift to the ground after some kinda ski malfunction kept him stuck on the lift. I'm sliding down the lift exit and homeboy's ski is like right next to my face, I look over and he's falling slow mo style to the ground. I tried not to laugh, but it was pretty funny. I of course asked him if he was ok before I really started laughing. Showed him some off trail riding on the greens and he got his taste of snow up to his knees and I think he liked it! We left the mountain and headed to "The Shed" which is an awesome place in downtown Stowe and had a feast. It was my birthday so I decided I was going to eat whatever I wanted, got the appetizer sampler and an open faced turkey sammich with smashed potatoes holy shit it was amazing. To top it off Taylor pulled out his card and paid, happy birthday to me he said. What an awesome dude. Unfortunately yesterday's fall kept him from enjoying the day with me and Perks today, but he got a good day in. Back to saturday however, I get home and take a two hour nap, telling Perks if he doesn't hear from me by 7:30 to call and wake me up. 8 o'clock rolls around and he calls me to tell me to get up, it's my birthday and drink are in order. So my roomate Dancin Dave and I head out to start the night, one of our co-workers was starting early at Pub and we go there to meet him. As we drive down the road there are fire trucks and police cars everywhere. Apparently some underground explosion shot a manhole like a million feet into the air and it was dangerous to be anywhere near the scene. The scene happened to be right in front of Pub, which made our walk there quite difficult. We try to head in from the North, and the cops say sorry dudes can't go that way. We attack from the west only to be turned back again by the 5-0. Finally we decide that we needed to think like ninjas, we snuck across the green, down a back alley and snuck in from the west. The first embarassing moment of the night comes when I order a beer, and knowing full well they only serve house ales, I asked for a Bud Light like a dumbass. The barkeep, a surly middle aged woman goes, here honey take a look at this and get back to me.... Yeah way to go dipshit. A few beers in we get some intel that there would be a large number of people congregating at Metronome that evening, and we decided that would be the plan of attack for the night. Around the stroke of 11 we headed out, and like a country stream we meandered on our way to the destination, which included a stop off at Das Bierhous or however the fuck you spell it, anyways some German place with hot chicks in traditional german beer wench attire, where we enjoy one beer, mine tasted like squeezed a gym sock after a long soccer game, but Perks' selling point was "it's got like 8.9 percent alcohol" lol yeah one of those kinda nights. I blink my eyes and somehow we are are at Metronome, a ton of co-workers on the dance floor, drinks flowing and what do you know, Jordan the dancing machine made an appearance. After a few shimmy shakes, a few cosby shuffles and tony yayo hands across the face I noticed we had a sweet little circle going. Everyone was cuttin' it up, was a great show, and by great show I mean a shitshow, but it was a great shit show. There is plenty more I could write about the rest of the night, but some things don't need to be completely spelled out, so here are some key words. Boobs, nipple, kicking a girl out of my cab because I didn't want to go to her house in colchester, Mr. Mikes Pizza, 20 dollar cab ride and of course the disappearing roomate. What a night. One of the best birthdays in a very long time, right up there with the TV and Wii birthday of a few years ago.


So many great things this weekend I am thankful for. Everyone who made them happen I am really appreciative and thankful for everyone and everything. Especially to my awesome mother who still managed to get me my favorite ice cream cake delivered to me, even though she lives 275 miles away. Fucking awesome, you are the best mom a boy could ask for!

There is plenty I left out but this has already taken like a fucking hour and I'm tired of typing. So here's some pictures. Enjoy




Snow outside of our apartment complex, for some reason I really like this shot.


This is Bolton, one of the local mountains in Vermont. The frozen trees is a result of a weather phenomenon called "frozen fog" according to the milkman who was mentioned in previous posts.

The infamous snowbank fo doom, that blog was eaten by the internet, I don't want to retype it because I couldn't stand to relive that horror. Just think of frozen wet feet.


Up in the gym workin on my fitness, muscle milk fucko!

Ninja masks are a must when the temp his single digits, plus you look like a ninja, which is a bonus.

Today's storm at the base of the mountain, thats only the bottom 1/4 of the mountain, pretty scary/intimidating.

Spruce side yesterday morning, Spruce holds a lot of secrets.

More Spruce goose, one of the secrets is in those trees to the left of the picture.

The mountain this morning from Spruce parking lot, again there is more mountain above the cloud bank.



Thats about it, there is more, maybe I'll do an edit later but I am done for now. This was the song I listened to in the perfect moment of my life today. It's an awesome laid back TCQ jam. Check the horns, they are awesome!