Teej's Secret Box

In Southwest Virginia, there is an organization called the Roanoke HANDS Group, also known as Hearing And Deaf Signers.  This group is part of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Services Center organization, and meet frequently for a variety of reasons.  One of such gathering is the Christmas Dinner.  My parents and I have gone to this celebration almost religiously when I was much younger, but that have ceased since I went to college.

In fact, i was not able to participate until this year, more than a decade later.  It was a great bash, with plenty of old faces intermindling with new faces.  Stories were shared, and pictures were taken.  I had the good fortune to take a significant amount of pictures of this gathering, and would like to share them with you, my dear readers.  Let’s see if there are any faces you may have recognized…

(Click on picture to see the album)

Man, I went to bed way too late, and got up with only 6 hours of sleep.  That happens when you meet your old friends.  Hence, I only did the Wii Fit test, and it noticed that I was tired; giving me a Wii Age that was much older than it was (46 compared to 38 the previous day.)

However, I did complete uploading my Utah trip pictures.  You can see them here.  It was a wonderful weekend.  Speaking of which, I will actually be in Utah again this weekend, meeting with old classmates from high school in Salt Lake City.  It will be fun seeing them again after a decade and half.

Please note:  If you want to have a print of the pictures, please do not use the ones here.  Just contact me with the name of the file you want printed, the location you want me to forward it to (CVS/Walgreen/Costco/et cetera), and the name you want it to be printed for.  Just pay for it and you’ll get a nice edited image for your frames.

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Speaking of Maribeth, we had a great dinner at this restaurant, Pink Pepper Thai Cuisine.  The food was very fresh, and well made, and the waitress were very respectful — willing to use what limited sign language skills she had, and was open to learning more.  With enough deaf folks, perhaps she will become a pro at serving us.

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I made some major progress on the testing part for my project, but I still have a long road to go.  I wish my tool does not chatter so much on the internet, because with my client, it goes from their laptop to their VPN server somewhere in San Diego, and then to the actual server in New Jersey.  With so much chatter, the tool slows down in a major way.

So I downloaded a new Oracle database program, and hopefully will find the time to install it tomorrow.

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Overall, it was a very good day for me, but not the best for my work productivity.  Just need to keep plugging at it, and hopefully will have a database set up, and several new tables populated tomorrow.  With a massage that was sorely overdue, a great dinner, chatting with old classmates and friends; it definitely was a good day.

Have a wonderful (and safe!) Halloween!

To celebrate the event, my roommate decided to deck up the cats with some costumes. Enjoy the pictures.

Mroyr.

Edit:  Oh yeah, need to show you this one:

Well, here are the first set of pictures I’ve taken while traveling to New Mexico with my father to see the Trinity Site. It was one of two days every year where that site opened for tourism.

Pie-O-Neer Restaurant in Pie Town, New Mexico.

Trinity Site, New Mexico – Location of the world first usage of the atomic bomb.

Remember the movie, Contact? Very Large Array on US Route 60.

Well, this is not quite US-60, but the rest of the pictures in this album are of the sights on US-60, including the beautiful Salt River Canyon.

For all of the albums added for this trip, check out the following link:

Southwest USA – 2007

We had planned this for months — and Dan took the opportunity to do some advanced reconnaissance. It was our trip to Alaska, mine for the very first time. We flew from Pittsburgh Airport via Minneapolis to Anchorage using Northwest on September 10, 2001.

On that flight, we struck up a fabulous conversation with a pair of Mormons, both admitting to being such bad ones, due to their love for alcohol. It was so hilarious talking with them.

I was rudely awaken by Dan the next morning. He had apparently gotten up earlier, and went online using the hotel’s Internet and hopped on IRC. His co-workers started remarking about bombing and plane crashing everywhere, so Dan turned on the TV, and banged me awake, relaying this information. My first word? “Bullshit.”

My first thought was tragically wrong.

Eventually, we were able to tear ourselves away from the TV in time to have breakfast. As we walked outside, the police started racing around with siren blaring. It turns out that some Korean airline were not quite too prompt with their relay to the tower, leading to evacuation of high-rises in the downtown area (which is not quite that high — 20-30 stories.)

When we finally flew back on the 20th (back then, the best ticket prices were found on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays), we returned to a very surreal world at the Pittsburgh Airport. The parking garage next to the airport was shut off, and a long concrete-barrier-created path led us all the way out to the front of this garage, where buses took us to our car.

Ever since, the Pittsburgh Airport opened this lot, but the route around the back of the airport was shut off for years. US Airways fell down twice to bankrupcy, and in the process withdrew from this airport on a massive scale (they used to fly approximately 500 flights, including Europe, and today they’re down to about 150 flights, all domestic, and a couple Canadian flights.) Southwest and jetBlue both moved in, with little success. Today, Pittsburgh Airport, with its splendid mall, is a shell of what it used to be — which greatly sadden me.

However, Alaska did me some good. It was such a revival of my well being enough to make myself more committed to work, moving up the rank rapidly. In the end, I took the lead on a small tool called DataStage, and mastered it so much that I was brought upon this team I am with now — traveling everywhere and helping multiple clients with their issues.

I have since then moved to Phoenix via Charlotte, bought a house, had several wonderful relationships, earns four times what I made then, and became an Uncle a third time. I have helped funded a business that is starting to take off, and helped many of my peers in the world of consulting. I have had plenty of ups and downs, yet as I think about it — I am having it very good at the moment.

Alaska is where I was reborn. Not religiously, but spiritually. For that, I am eternally grateful to the experience, and to Dan for introducing me to this experience. (Note: The picture on right is linked to the album taken by my friend of this trip.  I still have my pictures somewhere back home that I need to bring online.  Bear with me on this.)