I decided to start putting up some of the video I shot during the past year.

I flew up to Boston—the first ever trip planned and executed entirely on my own—in mid-July to attend PodCamp Boston 3 on the Harvard Medical School campus. Probably the highlight of the entire weekend was the moment all the attendees were gathered in the lobby for a group sing-along. Oh, the sessions were great too.

I fell in love with the city of Boston from the moment I arrived.  The “T” made it incredibly easy to get around town incredibly cheaply, and there was history at nearly every street corner.

from C.C. Chapman’s Flickr feed—”iPhone around his neck running his demo reel since he is in video production. Very cool idea.”

Since Magic Kingdom was turning people away because the park was full, sending everyone to either Epcot or Disney’s Hollywood Studios, I spent my New Year’s Eve inside Epcot.

I regret to write that this moment at EPCOT was one of very few high points of the past year. For a lot of us, myself included, 2008 was not a good year. So many of us ended the year on such a low note that the only direction we can go in 2009 is up, given that we end 2008 flat on our backs.

I lost everything in 2008—my home, my family, my job (twice), my savings (I had to withdraw my entire 401(k) account to live off of during the five months of this year that I was without work). Nearly all of my friends were in Celebrate Recovery®, so when I was forced by my work schedule to drop out of the program I also had to leave them behind. I look at the state of things at the beginning of the new year and realize that things will get worse before they get better, both personally and in the greater economy.  I do listen to Bloomberg Radio on a daily basis.

Vondalee & Me on Christmas Eve in CA

In the process, though, I gained a new and passionate relationship with the person I should have been after in the first place nearly twenty years ago.  I guess it takes that long sometimes, along with one or two broken relationships along the way, to learn the lessons we have to learn to be ready for the relationship we should have had in the first place.  I just wish it didn’t have to take place from 2,500 miles away.  Christmas week in California was one of the best holidays I’ve had in my life, and I can’t wait to go back “home” to where I grew up, in Orange County.

There is a lot of work to be done this coming year. The priority is finding a new job, as unemployment only pays for so much, while trying to preserve as much in resources as possible to make the move back to Southern California sometime in the coming year.  The path ahead will be rough and difficult to walk, but there is a light at the end of it that I can see all the way from here.

So here’s to the new year, and to its hopes, challenges, and potential rewards.

Snopes.com is an urban legend reference site. You know those e-mails you get from friends and/or family with some strange story or outrageous claim that is “supposedly” true, like the latest special dial code or the e-mail that is allegedly being tracked and will result in a huge payout if you send it to 25 people? Usually about 30 seconds on this site with a simple search will let you know if the story you’re about to send out is true or not.

Also, a request: If you have such a note that you’d like to send out to all your friends, please don’t send it to me. I do check them out, and if I find out from a simple search of snopes that it’s wrong I will send a “reply to all” with the snopes link, potentially causing you great embarrassment (in hopes that you won’t do it again without checking it out first).

If I get multiple such notes from people, I usually end up simply blocking their e-mail address, sending all their e-mail (legitimate or otherwise) directly to the spam bin. I’m that sick and tired of such notes in an already overflowing e-mail inbox.

…on the second anniversary of her “ICiNG” fashion and life blog!

If you have not checked this young and fashionable New Zealand ball o’ pink fire yet, do it! One of the many fascinating people around the internet that I follow online.

http://www.galadarling.com

This is what my calendar looks like right now. Nothing. The 19^th of December, my final paycheck from the job I lost on the 5^th. Then it’s living on $275 a week in unemployment assuming the State of Florida approves the application (they usually deny it if the applicant was fired, which was my case)—just over a quarter of what I was grossing before I was fired. The next item on my calendar is the first week of February when my folks and a very close sweetheart come down to central Florida to visit. At least there is something to look forward to.

Just because the calendar’s empty doesn’t mean I’m not busy. There are résumés and cover letters to send out, phone calls from potential employers to return (so far, only two, and one is for an opening in Pennsylvania (wonder which part of “I’m planning to relocate to California” they didn’t understand?)), and my weekend appointments with Uncle Walt (and sometimes a weeknight one when I’m really down in the dumps and frustrated with the job search). There are the visits to Universal and Busch Gardens sprinkled in there from time to time also.

Last year at this very same time I was looking at pretty much the same thing. An empty calendar, save for my group on Monday nights, which I was forced to drop out of later because of the demands of the new job I had started and the fact that it was heavily weighted toward Monday project deployments. The then-spouse and I were separated, and I haven’t seen my boy since.

So, just as I was at this time last year, I’m looking at this “blank canvas,” thinking about the possibilities of what it might be filled with in due course. There’s the new relationship with the love I should have gone after in the first place instead of marrying the wrong one; there’s the move back “home” to California; there’s the new job that’s bound to come along (if past is pattern it’ll be right about the time my financial resources run out).

So here’s to new things in 2009—new love, new life, new places—and good riddance to the year from hell.

Shiekra @ Busch Gardens (this picture is right-side-up)

In August 2005 I wiped out on my Yamaha Vino 125 on my way to a motorcycle event (note to self: grabbing a fist full of front brake is a very bad thing). In the process I torqued my left knee quite badly. While nothing was broken or seriously hurt (just bumps and scratches), it took a couple of months before I was walking without a limp again.

As a result—and I would guess that a tendon on the inside of the knee didn’t heal properly—my experience walking around various places can be pleasant or extremely painful depending on what I’m walking on.  I can walk around Walt Disney World all day without a problem, but spend five minutes inside Busch Gardens (where there are a lot more sloping and deep-textured surfaces), and I start looking for a wheelchair because the pain in the knee is nearly unbearable.  My main doctor has offered to do an MRI on the bad knee, but I figured as long as I wasn’t a cripple from it, it wasn’t worth it to me. I’ve learned to live with it.

On a hunch though, I dropped into the local Walmart for a knee stabilizer. It’s basically a black elastic sleeve that slides over the knee (with a convenient hole to expose the knee cap and also give me a good idea which way it’s to be worn) with some springy steel strips in each side.  The strips are designed to permit the knee to move only one direction at a time and prevent lateral movement.  It’s comfortable and discreet.

I visited Busch Gardens again for the first time in a number of months, and with the stabilizer on, I had zero pain for the entire day.

Now, maybe one of these days I’ll have the courage to ride Shiekra.

Tweetwasters – Hall of Fame – Wastin’ Time Tweetin’

Originally uploaded by swbuehler

I’ve apparently wasted five days of my life using Twitter. #34 in the TweetWaster’s Hall of Fame.

See http://tweetwasters.com/swbuehler.