Anil's Rubbish

So, today is my birthday.  I guess this is the time that I’m supposed to look back at the last year and figure out something from it.

It was a really positive year I think overall.  Maybe closer to the end than at the beginning, I feel like there’s a lot more momentum.

Socially: I’m definitely more active that I have been. I’ve met some really good people that are fun to hang out with, like the Michigan Alumni group, Red Wings Meetup group, Euchre meetup group, the Ski and Snowboard meetup group, the indian meetup and mixer groups, my kickball team.  While I can’t say that I’ve made the closest of friends yet, it’s getting there.

Dating: My ex definitely set the bar pretty damn low, so there’s no where to go but up.  I’m definitely meeting so many better people now.  I decided to open myself up to meeting anyone, not just Indians.  Nothing has stuck so far.  I’m pretty patient, and I’m not going to rush into a relationship just because…otherwise I end up with someone like my ex.  I know that things will happen.  In the meantime, I’ll have fun.

Work: I’ll admit that in the last year, I’ve been in cruise-control.  Definitely coasting.  On one hand, it was good because I was able to do a lot of things that I wouldn’t have been able to do.  On the other hand, there’s some momentum to get back to the same level of productivity that has been my reputation.  Nothing yet set in stone.  It is Oracle and I have to deal with the slowness here.  But, the desire to advance is there once again.

Health: I don’t know what to say here.  I really feel like things are a little mixed.  While working outside, I think I burned a lot of calories.  But I made that up by not cooking and eating more crap from outside.  For the upcoming year, I will be joining Team-in-Training (injury permitting), which will help me get in shape again (and of course, helping me raising money for LLS).  I always feel like there’s a struggle here, and I just need to keep figuring out how to get that push so I’m not slacking off.

I guess I don’t feel like I have too much insightful stuff to talk about.  I definitely feel old and there’s alot of pressure that comes with age, but I’ll deal with it.  I’ve dealt with worse.  Most people try to come up with goals.  I’ve tried that it with mixed results so I won’t bother trying to set goals this time.  I think that I just want to keep the momentum going and finish up the calendar year with a bang.

On Saturday, a friend and I went up to Vail to do some snowboarding/skiing.  The conditions weren’t very good.  It was really cold, windy, icy.  Visibility was not very good.  But we pushed through to get a decent day in.  As normal, we were done by 2:30 and ready to head back to Denver.  And so we thought we’d be back by the evening.  Instead, it ended up being pretty inconvenient.

I was driving and the weather wasn’t so great.  At some point, a semi-truck changed lanes and caused chaos.  One car tried to stop and hit the truck.  This caused everyone else to freak out.  I was going with the flow of traffic, which wasn’t that fast to begin with.  I also started breaking, but my car hit some ice and skidded.  I wasn’t stopping and it looked like I was going to hit the car in front of me.  So, my first instinct was to look for a way to swerve and minimize the damage.  I was in the left lane so I moved right in the middle of the lane thinking that maybe that I can squeeze between two cars.  But as I was going through that, my friend was yelling “Go right” as in trying to go all the way right to the right most shoulder.  The right lane had more room as well, so there was a possibility that we could slow down.  But, I kept skidding.  And I wasn’t going to make it to the shoulder.  The minivan in front of me never saw me coming.

Bam, hit the minivan square in the back.   First things first, no one was hurt.  Thank god for that.  But the damage was done.  The back of the minivan was completely smashed in and the spare tire from the bottom of the minivan fell out.  The back window was completely gone.  My car, actually, wasn’t as damaged as much as one would expect.  The Subaru Outback is a solid car and it has a high suspension.  So, my bumper was messed up and the hood caved in.  But the air bags did not deploy and no damage was near.

Immediately, there was a tow truck near us, directing us on what to do and pulling us on the bed.  A state trooper came took my information.  I got a frickin ticket because he said that I should have been going slower because of the conditions.  The whole process took forever.  It took two hours just to get from the accident site to gas station where the car was dropped off.  Apparently, we weren’t the only the ones in accidents that day.  It was pretty chaotic at the gas station, which was now a tow lot.  My car was not drivable so, the car was going to have to stay at the station.  Our best option was to get the insurance company take care of the towing.  All we needed to do was figure out how to get home.

Unfortunately, being 120 miles away from Denver, we had no viable way back home.  No shuttles were available.  A cab ride would be almost $500.  We don’t know anyone going back from the area.  So, the only solution was to find a place to stay for the night.  My friend took care of that and found us a place to stay.  Of course, it wasn’t exactly close.  So, we needed to walk to a bus stop and take a 20 minute ride to Avon where the hotel was.  Of course, we missed the bus by 10 seconds, so we had to wait another 30 minutes for the next one.  Luckily, there was a Safeway next door, where we could hang out until we caught the bus.  We took the bus to the Avon stop and then had to walk from there to the hotel.

We did go grab a bite to eat and a beer.  Definitely needed it.   At least we could get a nights sleep and catch the shuttle in the morning.  We were exhausted.  It didn’t help that we lost an hour due to the time change.

So, we caught a CME shuttle in the morning.  Of course, they couldn’t drop us off where we wanted to go, but only at DIA.  And since we were the first people picked up, we had to wait through all of the other passengers getting picked up…that just added an extra hour to our time.  We finally got to DIA, where my friend’s dad picked us up and took us back to my house.  Basically didn’t get home until 2:30pm.  A long day.

It just felt like and inconvenience more than anything.  Everything went so fast at the time of the accident, and noone was hurt.  So, this whole thing has just become an inconvenience.  Just another thing to deal with now.

So, a month ago, I wrote about my resolutions for the year.  So, how’s that going for me?  Well, it’s not been so smooth as I had hoped.  It always seems that something gets in the way.

The first thing that distracted me was a home improvement project I decided to take on.  I bought some new bedroom furniture, and I decided to paint my bedroom before the furniture arrived.  But, of course, I didn’t make it that simple.  One of the things I hate about my house is how thick and sloppy the paint looks on all of the trim.  So, I decided to try to strip the paint off of the trim.  That turned out to be much harder than I expected, especially since this was my first time doing it, and I was dealing with removing about 4-5 layers of paint.  In the end, it took up two weeks of my time and I ended up giving up on trying to salvage the the trim.  That was majorly disappointing because I wanted to keep the original trim, but it looks like that isn’t really going to happen.  And what makes it worse is that it’s impossible to find stock trim that looks like the existing one, meaning that it would have to be custom.  Ok…long story short, I am going to modernize the trim throughout the house.  I did end up painting the room, but I still have to do the trim.  I decided to wait for my parents to show up to help me with that, since I’ve never done that before.  I still have a lot left to do.

So, where does that leave me now?  I have only lost a couple of pounds so far.  I cut out most of my soda intake.  I don’t drink as much beer anymore.  My diet is much better.  I did join a gym, and I actually do go, except for the time I was working on my room.   I haven’t done any yoga yet.  I’m getting involved with some of the classes at the gym, but I haven’t really done the yoga ones yet.  It’s slow, but I still think I can make the goal of 20 pounds by June.

I’ve only been to the mountains once in the last month.  There’s plenty of time still though.  And it’s so easy to get up there.  Leave at 6am, get a good five hours of snowboarding, then be home by 4pm.  That’s not bad.

I haven’t gone anywhere yet, but there are some plans in the works for some upcoming travels.  I really want to get a karma trip in there sometime soon.  What I mean by a karma trip is to go somewhere and volunteer.  Building up the karma.

So, that’s pretty much it.  I still have a ways to go, but I am in a better position than I was before.