It's Birthday Season!

Some people dread birthdays and view them as annoying reminders of their mortality. Then there are people like my husband who can't be bothered to care one way or the other. I, fortunately, don't fall under either of those camps; I'm one of a minority of adults who shamelessly celebrates birthdays with the enthusiasm of an 8-year-old.

My birthday is very special because it's not just my birthday. The day before my birthday is the birthday of one of my oldest and closest friends, so this birthday thing isn't just about me and hasn't been for a long time. Last night we celebrated our birthdays together for the 10th consecutive year, which is a pretty awesome thing. 10 years of birthday shots (even the year we had to do it over the phone because I was in San Diego) and trips to Bubs and mega parties. It's really a pretty sweet coincidence.

A quick rundown of the birthday celebrating thus far:
It all started a week and a half ago when my doting husband got my present and couldn't wait til the day of my birthday to give it to me. He gave me a second fondue pot and one of my favorite movies, so now we can have chocolate and cheese fondue at the same time while we watch the Big Lebowski. Did I marry an amazing man or what?? The birthday celebration continued with an almond-flavored pound cake made by my mother-in-law (yum), pedicures and martinis with my birthday partner in crime, and an office covered in confetti and balloons. My colleagues also left a note saying they had hidden eggs in my office. Of course I had a moment of Gilmore Girls induced panic and thought they meant REAL eggs, but fortunately they're of the plastic variety and contain candy. The bummer is that I have only found 5 of the 6 eggs, so my productivity has suffered as I go on Monkesque fits of OCD searching. (My colleagues find this hysterical, by the way, so you can't accuse me of being selfish with the birthday thing -- this is very clearly for them.)

And the best part? It's not my birthday yet! There are 3 more days until it's time to celebrate for real! Man, I dig birthdays the most.

They Gave Me an Inch

Check out my company's blog. It's highly entertaining and occasionally even educational. BTW, I'm a contributing author and have been given free rein to write regular columns about all the spelling and grammatical errors that get under my skin (insert evil laugh here). So if you come across anything particularly asinine that deserves a public flogging, send it my way!

This post has nothing to do with moving day

Tag teaming off of my lovely wife, I've decided to pop on here with some of my own news! Unfortunately, Uncle Scotchy couldn't join us today, as he's napping quietly in a box for the new house. Also, it's not even 10:00 yet, so there's that. At any rate, there has been a small flurry of media activity around my company recently, so I thought I'd share some of it with all of you!

First off, there's a cross-promotion going on regarding the Dexter iPhone game, which isn't a huge deal, but I thought it was kind of neat: http://kotaku.com/5185951/check-out-this-bloodspattered-iphone-case

Secondly, X-Play apparently interviewed Lee (our lead designer) while he was up at GDC this past week. It's a pretty standard piece on our game, but it's more exposure than we've seen (or at least I've seen), so I think it's pretty cool: http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/694364/GDC-09-Fallen-Earth-Preview.html

Anyway, I don't have anything really funny or witty or insightful to add, but I took this opportunity on today of all days to share that with you.

--Ak out

It's House Packing Day!

Last night, we had a lovely date at Olive Garden, in part because our waitress exploited our wine knowledge and made us sample things and report back to her. Being exploited is not always such a bad thing! Came home, watched some ball (GO HEELS!), got good and grumpy so we went to bed, and then... we didn't sleep. I have no idea why. The cats slept. It was dark out. We were tired. And yet, I was awake at 3 so I got up to get some water and check the scores. Then I was awake at 4:30 when a friend from Cali pocket-dialed me. And I was awake at 6 when the cats woke up and started to play.

But I can't be upset... not on house packing day! In a little while some friends are coming over to help up pack pretty much the whole house. For our next meal, it's paper products all the way. It'll be weird to go a week without our cooking stuff, wine glasses, etc., but it's just for a few days. A week from right now, there will be movers putting our stuff on a truck to cart it to our new house!

So without further ado, I'm off to do my morning chores so the packing party can commence!

One Step Closer to Hippietown

I was all set to post a quick update when I logged on and saw that it has been exactly one month since our last post! Now I feel pressured. Well, since I'm concrete-sequential to the max, here's the down and dirty on life right now. Ak is working for the man to the tune of 58+ hours per week, and I'm still showing up everyday and learning the ins and outs of office politics. We're T-7 from closing on our house and T-10 from moving! Now, don't you feel bad for judging us? Oh wait, no one was judging? My bad. Add paranoid to our list of flaws these days.

Because we didn't feel like we had quite enough going on, we decided to try something new this year -- we joined a CSA! CSA, for you grocery store purists, stands for community-supported agriculture, defined by Wikipedia as "a socio-economic model of agriculture and food distribution." Nobody panic, I think that makes it sound much more extreme than it actually is. Basically, we pay a local farmer, who in return provides us with weekly produce and meat and bi-weekly cheese and eggs. I'm psyched about this on so many levels. Assuming nothing crazy like a drought happens, this will save us tons of money on food. I'm also pretty sure that local food will taste better than stuff that was picked weeks ago and shipped in, and the environmental side of me likes buying local. I'm also a pretty big fan of Durham, thugs and all, so I like that we're doing something tangible to support the Durham economy.

Now, those of you who know what I do for a living may be scratching your heads a bit here. Yes, it's true, my day job is promoting the biotechnology side of an agribusiness giant, so perhaps there's some irony that I choose to get my food from a CSA. Honestly, this wasn't so much a political choice for me as a general distaste of food that is supposed to be fresh but was grown in Chile or California. I'm too tired to going into all the ins and outs of this... so let's just say eat local, but feed your cows and hogs genetically-modified corn!

House Buying And You

Hi kids, it's been a long time since your uncle Akbar sat down and talked to you, but me and my friend Scotchy would like to take a moment to tell you about the joys and perils of house buying. House buying is a perilous journey, fraught with... well, perils... Some of those perils are obvious: financial ruin, humiliating exposure of one's ignorance, getting shot at while you shop for houses in the neighborhoods you can afford.

But less known are the other burdens you'll face: erroneous MLS sheets, lackadaisical bankers, and best of all, inconsistent sellers! But despite all of these, there are benefits. Shocking, I know!. Uncle Scotchy tells me I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the key benefit, which is that you get to be a home-owner. Landed gentry. To quote an incredibly wise man, "you ain't no kind of man, unless you got land." So true. So poignient, yet so true.

The long and the short of our current situation is that we've got a signed contract in on a house. We recently had said house inspected by a licensed inspektor general, which was pretty cool. He found lots of things that didn't sound so bad when he found them, but read like a laundry list of things that are about to condemn the house once committed to his inspektor's report..en...stag. Ok, I may give up on making the house inspector sound more german. He wasn't really germanic at all, to be honest. All the same, the inspection was pretty cool, we got to see all of the things we'll need to work on, and a few things we'll need to have fixed before we can move in (one in particular will be a requirement for our loan to be approved).

Needless to say, things are pretty exciting over here... Court's been talking to our bankers, and generally being a really good people person (networking, making sure things move on the financial end of things), and I've been trying to coordinate with vendors (inspectors, other kinds of inspectors, our agent) and make sure we have all of our bases covered for the impending closing (April 1, no joke!).

So while we're busy, and a touch stressed, I think we've both calmed down a lot, as we approach home ownership with glee and the utmost readiness. Oh, and the afore-mentioned scotch.

--Ak out

Cattywampus

Cattywampus is a great word. The first time I heard it was in the description of a young horse that was trying to figure out how to carry itself. If you've ever ridden a two-year-old that's trying to figure out how to balance itself and your weight while loping, you get why it's such an apt description. The horse is trying to figure out where it's feet are and appears to be having some issues staying upright, so you just try to stay out of its way and keep one leg on either side of the horse.

Cattywampus is the best way to describe our lives right now. We have completely lost our groove. Our previous lifestyle involved waking up somewhere between 8 and 9, me doing most of the house and animal chores while fitting in my freelance work, and more spare time than we could shake a stick at. We had lunch together everyday, and generally spent our weekends in blissful nothingness. It was really not a bad gig.

Things are a little crazy around the Beck house these days... we knew it was going to be a change for me to start working full time again, but I don't think we had any idea how to prepare for it. Now, we have to get up much earlier to do animal chores, we pay someone to walk Marty for us and weekends are spent either running errands or blankly staring at the TV. My new job already involves some working from home after hours as well as business travel. It's definitely a shift from being a freelancer/stay at home pet owner.

For extra stress, we're in the midst of house buying! We fell in love with a house last week, and now we're working on an offer. We keep telling ourselves that life will slow down soon, but I'm wonder if maybe that's just a cosmic joke? More updates soon, but for now, we're pretty slammed being cattywampus.