Home Sweet Home

Hello everybody, i am back from Europe, and still in relaxation mode, hence not writing sooner, i got home wednesday evening, but i had to catch up with the Lost episode i missed and watch the new one and then go to bed. You have all watched Lost liked i asked, or rather demanded, if not there is still time, RENT season one at least and just give it a shot . . . . . . . . . . . . please. But anyways, i am sure you are all far more interested about my many adventures in Europe, and in due time i will certainly get to them, as well as the many photos i took, the final count was 9,787. Obviously there are alot of touristy snapshots, and photos just to show how various places look, but hopefully there are alot of nice artistic ones as well. I am half excited to go back and go through and edit all those photo's and half dreading the immense and tedious task it will be, Mark i am sure you understand and don't envy the task that lays ahead, ohh and HAPPY BIRTHDAY you big lovable lug, or rather you svelte lovable lug (actually i just looked up lug cause i was unsure what it means and the definition is ~ an awkward, clumsy fellow. Then i looked up the definition for svelte ~ gracefully slender in figure and movement. You're not particularily ackward or clumsy, but still i think its a great description, so happy birthday again you gracefully slender in figure and motion, loveable, ackward and clumsy fellow) Sorry for the digression, but that's the way it goes since i enjoy writing in a stream of consciousness form, and since i obviously have just a little bit of ADHD. Anyways, back to the trip, as you can imagine it was amazing, just so much fun, excitement, wonder, beauty, and walking. I met so many interesting people, it is pretty cool that when you are in a foreign land, surrounded by a foreign language, and you hear someone speak english, you instantly gravitate towards each other and begin talking, simply because it is nice to be able to understand what someone is saying, and to be able to communicate fully, rather than trying to communicate through a language barrier. The places i went to were London ~ Amsterdam ~ Hamburg ~ Berlin ~ Prague ~ Munich ~ Zagreb, Croatia ~ Dubrovnik, Croatia ~ Rome ~ Nice (Monaco & Cannes, they are all close together) ~ Paris.

My 5 Favorite places were:
1 ~ Paris - i obviously loved the culture, language, music, and films before i got there, but it was just so nice and livable, of all the places i went i could very easily see my self living here, and enjoying the 6 weeks of vacation a year. The town is not how it looks in the movies, but it's close it more realistic and normal, yet still surprisingly magical.
2 ~ Amsterdam - Obviously. But other than the reason you already know, it is very very beautiful with all the canals, the people are all very nice, friendly, relaxed, and chill. The town and roads are owned by bicycles, and there are way more bikes than cars.
3 ~ Dubrovnik - Simply ridiculously gorgeous. It is mountainous, hilly, rocky, lush, tropical terrain, the goes right into the teal waters of the adriatic. The old walled city is also very beautiful, with the streets made out of marble cobblestones that are over a 1000 years old, yet still amazingly well preserved, especially since it went through a major war 10 years ago. There are also many many beautiful islands just off the coast, on one of the islands, named Lokrum is where i wrote most of your postcards, i waited and sent most of them from the vatican which has it's own postal service, which i did because of the irony, but i don't think their postal service is very good, since my parents sill haven't received theirs and its been about 14 days since i sent them. FUCKING god DAMN VATICAN!

Ohh and that reminds me, when i went to the vatican, which is ridiculously crowded, i had to wait in line for 2 1/2 hours, and once inside it is jammed packed with lots of old people who are literally dying to see the vatican before they die. They are all surprisingly rude, and pushy, and most apparently come just to see the sistine chapel which is in the final room out of 27 that you must pass through first. Well i quickly got tired of this, and i had a refrain from a rap song in my head, i am not sure who the song is by if you remember let me know. So throughout the vatican i was constantly saying loudly to people, "Move Bitch, Get out da wayy!" Sometimes a language barrier is a great thing, cause either they had a bewildered, wide eyed look at me, or they looked at me with a shocked expression, and surprisingly no one talked back to me, in any case it made me feel alot better.

4 ~ Munich - or actually just Oktoberfest since i only saw about a 5 block area, from the train station to my hostel, and from my hostel to the festival grounds. Oktoberfest was by far the best festival i have ever been too, the whole point is to drink as much beer as humanely possible and have as much fun as possible doing it. Everyone is in such a nice friendly mode, and the beer was the most fresh, ice cold, refreshing beer i have ever had. And a 1 liter beer mug is the perfect size glass to drink from. The most beer i had in a day was 11 liters, had 6 in the morning and early afternoon, went pack to hostel, took a 3 hour nap, came back and had 5 more before it closed at midnight
5~ Nice - The town itself is decent it has a french, small town feel. But once you get to the beach you look around, and up and down the coast and you say to yourself, "Wow, this is so nice, it is simply just very, very nice. And for all my male readers, French beaches are by far the best i have ever seen, for one simple reason - Boobs, and lots of them. About 75% of the women at the beachs go topless. Are they all young beautiful models? No, some but not all, but boobs are boobs and they really do make any beach better.

Guten Tag

i am currently in hamburg, germany, the town is nothing special, pretty typical. Tomarrow i leave for berlin, previously i was in amsterdam, as you can probably guess it was amazing, but not for the reasons you assume, yes the coffeeshops are alot of fun, and they smell much better than the coffeshops in america, but also the city is gorgeous, the city is built with a canal every 3 or 4 blocks, so there are tons of beautful canals. Also the city streets are owned by bicycles, there are way more bikes then cars and everyone just rides there bikes everywhere, the atmosphere to the whole town is very relaxed and chill, lots of outdoor restaurants on the canals, and most of the people are very friendly. Before Amsterdam i was in London, and boy does london suck, the town is very very americanized, it felt very very similar to chicago, there are also way more foreigners than british people in London, they are alot more fashionable than us though.

This is a pretty awesome/weird experience, my days are spent wandering foreign places just looking, i am not sure what i am looking for, generally nothing specific, i am just trying to see as much as possible, generally on days with lots of wandering i walk about 15 - 20 miles, the most i walked in a day was 22 miles, other day are usually 7- 15 miles depending how much mass transit i take. This trip also puts you in such a weird place mentally, 90% of my day is alone with my own thoughts, the other 10% is generally spent talking with another traveller going through the same experience, often i have found they are very talkative, and don't want the conversation to end and they keep talking and talking, not that i don't enjoy talking with these fellow travelers, i do, it just seems like they need it more. I did have one amazing conversation with a Russian man named Andrei, we meet at la Chouffe a bar in amsterdam, the bar was perfect i had been roaming amsterdam all day looking for a bar or coffeshop that was right, that had the right vibe, that i could finally stop roaming and relax, i was also having a very bad day cause my new beautiful 60gb ipod fell in the amsterdam canal while i was fiddiling with the shitty key to my rented bicycle. This bar also had varda, a beautiful airedale terrier, a type of dog i want to get on my own, the place was perfect, anyway Andrei was the first person so far that i really enjoyed talking with. At the end of the night when we said goodbye, he told me that before tonight he did not like America or Americans, but after he met me he now likes America and Americans.

Europa Bound

Well it's official, i have my tickets and i will be in Europe from September 6 till October 11. Of course the first reservation i made was for a hostel in Munich during Oktoberfest, after that i got around to finding a flight. Currently i am planning on visiting London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Munich, Zagreb, Split, Interlaken, Venice, Milan, Nice, Barcelona, Bordeaux, Lyon, Paris. If you have been to any of these places let me know what you liked and didn't like, and if you have any recommendations. Or if there are any other places or cities you have visited that you would recommend.

In worse news, my explorer was broken into again. This time they used some device to knock out the whole lock part of the driver door(where the key is inserted), then they ripped a bunch of cables from the dash to cut power to the car and turn off the alarm, then they broke open my locked glove compartment, and stole my ipod, cd deck and face plate. Oh and the car was parked right off north ave, by Ma Fishers in a very well lit, well travelled area. i basically felt like Jodie Foster in "The Accused", only less sore.

This and That Photographed

Olive Trees

Traveling to a Flatball Tournament

a Wiper Wiping

a random glance down

a present i left myself

red red net(that's pink)

pink green white dandelion

picture of a net with increased color saturation,

picture of a net without increased color saturation.

some grass, some different grass, and some other grass

spooky grass spokes

grass pipe

from sushi restaurant at mall food court

mall art

art at same mall

same mall with similar art

ribbed

camera shaken at playground

midwest and west

where i drank most of my water growing up

...

red light, blue night

night light

Radiohead fan behind me tired of being photographed

light from lighter

hello

terrorrist?

the (Glowing) Gloaming

b burmeister beaming

disgust and disappointment

clearly blurry lights

an excited front row

1

Sorry i've been a bad blogger,
still in an odd funk,
but still having funky fun,
deceided that i am going to backpack in europe yesterday,
currently planning said trip,
feel invigorated again.

good news and Bad news

Well it's been a while since i wrote anything and this is due mostly to my bad news. The Good news is that i will have more time to edit my photos and post them, the Bad news is I got Fired. This happened last week Wednesday, but let me explain some of the events that led to it. 4 weeks previously everyone had their mid year review, i had only been there 2 months, but i still got a review. Out of approximately 20 categories i met 15 expectations, and exceeded 5 others expectations, i thought i was doing pretty well. Then a week later they called me into their office and told me that i was not closing enough tickets each day, we are expected to close 20 tickets(or problems) a day, and i was averaging in the high teens from 15 to 20 closes a day, and that i had 2 weeks to improve and close more tickets. On most days a little less than half the people get over 20 closes and the rest get between 15 and 20 closes. I was no where near the bottom, i was right about average with the number of closes i had, but my managers wanted me to close more ticket, so i planned too. The meeting had the feeling of a coach yelling (they weren't yelling) at me to get me to work harder, they were simply trying to inspire me to do better. So i worked harder, busted my ass, and after that meeting three weeks ago i closed over 20 tickets everyday since, during the 2 weeks after, they did send me at least one bitchy email a day about something they thought i did wrong, and just about every time it wasn't actually my fault and i explained that to them.

For example, one day i was assigned a ticket by one of my managers to call a facility in Pennsylvania, to see if their computers were up and running cause they had lost power but our system showed that we were connected. So i called and they were up and running, all their computers worked, and they were able to connect to our network, but they were running on generators. So i closed the ticket, then the manager that assigned it to me sent me a really bitchy email that i can't close the ticket cause they still don't have power and are running on generators, so she reopened it and sent it to the telecommunications group who originally had the ticket, they then reassigned the ticket back to me 5 min later, but i didn't know what else to do since everything worked but they just didn't have power. So i left it in my queue for the rest of the day, the next morning my other head manager sent me a bitchy email about why hadn't i closed this ticket. So i sent him the email the other manager had sent to me about this ticket, and explained that i wasn't sure what i was supposed to do since the other manager specifically said i cannot close this ticket. I had a situation like this just about everyday, where it felt like they were trying to find a mistake or setup a mistake.

But i kept busting my ass, and doing the best i could and closing over 20 tickets a day like they said i needed to do, my managers even sent me an email a week and a half after the meeting about closing more tickets and said that i was closing enough tickets and doing a much better job. So i thought i was doing a good job, i kept closing over 20 tickets, and the 2 weeks they had given me to improve had passed. i thought i was safe, but on Wednesday of the week after they asked me into their office and said that I was fired. They said i was closing enough tickets, but i wasn't closing tough enough tickets. We then argued back and forth for about 20 minutes in which time they had no other arguments for letting me go. It also seemed like their might be some corporate problem that had nothing to do with me, and the word was given from up high to let someone go. They said my documentation wasn't good, but i know more documentation was longer, more complete, and more explanative than a lot of other people i worked with, so i asked them to show me an example but they would not. They said that i had gotten more training than most, but i informed them that each person who trained me greatly exaggerated how long they trained me, one guy told them he trained me for a whole week, when he only trained me for 2 hours one day of that week. Furthermore, their was another women next to me that started 2 weeks before me that got ridiculously more training than me, but i understand this is since we were an IT company and women are few and far between so there is a lot more desire to have and keep women working for you in the IT field. They also said i should have come to them to ask them each time i had a problem or question after the meeting we had about closing more tickets, but i informed then that was right after i hurt both my legs and it was difficult to walk across the office the ask them a question when i could ask someone in one of the cubicles around me. Basically they kept coming back to the lame excuse that i wasn't closing hard enough tickets, furthermore, i argued if you tell someone you simply want them to close more tickets obviously that will be their main goal, and the only way to close more tickets than you previously were is to try and close easier tickets, and spend less time trying to solve a tough problems.

But i will quit bitching now, go and submit some resumes, and continue having a pity party for myself. It really is staggering and surprising how much this affects your self-worth or self-esteem, since i don't feel like it was my fault at all that i was fired, but yeah that's a whole other topic.