The house move is sucking up all my time lately (as you can tell from the lack of posts)... the worse news is that it will take me 3 weeks to get DSL hooked up in the new house. Which will make it much harder to stay on top of things. I don't even own a modem, but hopefully I can get everything setup and maybe the DSL company will even give me a dial-up line that I can use while I wait...

Anyway, in the immortal words of Arnold - "I'll be back"

Next tuesday is moving day. We sign our paperwork tomorrow, but the escrow company didn't tell us how much money we need to give them... kinda troubling... Finishing up the final preparations to move... will have a long couple of days packing...

Amazingly enough I came back from Vegas with less money than I went with. Stayed at the Treasure Island and spent a lot of time walking the strip, hitting cheap casinos and playing craps. Went to Gallaher's in the New York New York and had a great dinner, followed by the Blue Man Group in the Luxor.

On the way back we did the cheap "at the gate" upgrade to first class... very nice way to end the trip...

I'm bringing no laptop... no camera... the most "scheduled" thing that I have is dinner and a show on Saturday...

Vegas Baby!

Apparently i've been using "I" in a lot of the posts talking about the upcoming house purchase... I spent some time thinking about that...

Obviously the first answer is that i'm just that egotistical. Given that I have a blog, and we know that only ego maniacs have blogs, this is self evident.

So, are their any secondary reasons?

I'll give my philosophy of relationship discovery.

When you talk with people and you want to refer to someone else, you have many choices. Lets say I want to talk about Erick... I can say:

• A friend of mine
• A coworker
• Erick
• Erick Ellis

I will choose which of these based upon the context we are in and what I want to convey. If I say "Erick" then I have to know that either you already know Erick, or that I am willing to make the investment in your and my relationship to teach you about my relationship with Erick, so that you now know who he is.

So, back to Megan... I can do many things when I want to refer to her:

• My best friend
• My wife
• Megan

Again, how I choose to refer to her indicates my relationship with you, at some level. If I say "Megan" than I am making the assumption that you care enough about me (and I about you) that you can be expected to know and remember that Megan is my wife.

At work you can often see this dance happening all the time... It isn't just about significant-others, but also about friends, other people on the team, etc...

And this isn't a simple "if I use 'Megan' then I like you more"... it has to do with do I think that I play a big enough part in your life that you will actually remember my wife's name... I mean hell, I can barely remember my own birthday, let alone everyone that I meet's family ;-)

How does this all fit with the "I vs. We" question.... it's a stretch, but here it goes.

I believe that (subconciously) I treat my blog as a communication from me, to a bunch of people that I kinda know. I don't expect that I have much of an impact on their life, so I feel compelled to always explain my relationships with other people (like with "Megan, my wife, ..."). I think this puts me in a pattern where I am disinsented to refer to Megan.

... nope, this is all BS... I'm just egotistical.

For the past couple weeks I've been working a lot... probably been home for dinner 1 out of 5 days during the week... This Friday I finished up a chunk of the work, and so my wife decided to get me a little present... the new Zelda.

I find this shocking for a couple reasons... First, when we were dating she went with my family (without me) on a trip to Ocean Shores (a beach here in Washington) where my dad and our exchange student proceeded to play Zelda 64 for 4 days straight. Apparently the console was never off for the entire vacation.

Second, given that I have been gone so much, I'm suprised that she wouldn't have slashed my tires in celebration of my insane hours being over for a while... instead she gave me something that will suck up even more of my spare time!

Anyway... on the topic of video games...

I have played video games for as long as I can remember. The first console that was in our house was a Fairchild. I have owned an Atari 2600, 8-bit NES, 16-bit Sega Genesis, 16-bit SNES, 64-bit N64, Playstation 2, Dreamcast, XBOX, Gamecube, GameBoy, GameBoy Advance... I used to work at a video game store, so I also played on 3DO, Jaguar, Saturn, 32X Genesis, etc... So, I like video games.

Don't get me wrong - they are a tremendous waste of time. But, man, are they fun!

So, Megan (my wife, for those of you playing along at home) has a philosophy... it goes something like this... "You have played video games on consoles and computers your whole life. You are now a fairly successful software developer. I'm not gonna mess with the equation."

Which means, that even now I am given "permission" to continue to waste my time playing video games, hanging out with the guys, drinking beer, and talking trash like I was still in high school (or maybe a bit younger).

Life is good.