You gotta love the crust

Rambling ahead; nothing worthwhile to see here.

This weekend I did something that I rarely, if ever do. Certainly never on my own. Before I describe to you what the past 2 days were like, allow me to describe the month of August.

August: 3 shows. 5 cities. Nearly 20+ hour days on the average including the weekends. I promised my parents a trip to NYC for their birthday months ago (May) and I barely squeezed it into August. How did you squeeze it in Vlad? Well, after a long week I packed the bags on my birthday and flew to NYC with my son (2 years old) on Friday morning, returning Saturday after midnight – just to be back at the airport less than 8 hours later to go to another conference to deal with a product launch and vendor integrations. Yeah, that was the slow week that included – technically and I’m sticking to it – a 2 day New York City vacation.

Now this kind of lifestyle is not for everyone. Here are the pictures of my little monkey, passed out hours apart on the subway, cruise to Statue of Liberty and Bowling Green:

People always plead with me to take some time off. My wife (used to be) one of them.

So this weekend I “unplugged” – I went out for drinks with my staff on Friday. On Saturday we went to downtown Winter Garden market where Timmy rode a pony. Then we went to downtown Orlando where, in 100+ degree heat, we attended a huge BBQ festival at Timmy’s church/school. I got punked into going to work, where my office got turned into a Kim Possible theatre and my wife passed out in the lounge on the new sectional we got a few weeks ago. I – literally – slept most of the day away. Went to Target, printed a bunch of pictures for the parents and for Timmy’s grand-grandma, bought a 6 pack of Samuel Adams and and I think woke up twice this weekend. Watched an ungodly amount of Hannah Montana, Suite Life on Deck, Phineas and Ferb or whatever else was on Disney channel, even cracked open sealed DVDs of Darkwing Duck and He Man. I spent nearly all of Sunday asleep. I left the house once, to buy hot dogs, and that was it. The only productive thing I think I did all weekend was rebuilding a Hackintosh box – tip: the Intel GMA 950 chipset doesn’t have 64bit drivers so if you’re installing Snow Leopard and want anything beyond 1024×768 add arch=i386 to your Boot.plist as a key/string. On the bright side, I found some donut holes last night. Locked the dog out to dry off before letting him in the house – he went back to the pool to cool off thus starting a vicious cycle of wet-dog, dry-carpet battle that we’ve been fighting all summer long.

In closing, I’ve been the most worthless human being on the planet and I felt a strange sense of inner death.

Earlier this evening, as I woke up from my 5 hour nap, I asked my wife the following:

“Seriously… how many days like this one would it take for you to leave me?”

Her half hearted laugh made me think it wouldn’t even take a week. 🙂

The Point Being..

Embrace who you are.. because that’s the only thing that’s going to make you happy in the long term. I know so many people in their 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and beyond who wonder – daily – what they are going to be when they grow up. Most are not doing what they want – and the whole “grass is greener on the other side” stuff is just an endless demotivator.

Find out who you are and what makes you happy. And do that.

For me, it’s my work and my family. Sleep, nah. Beer, nope. Relax and take it easy – maybe when I’m dead.