Everyone’s Got a Plan

So much has happened recently, it’s hard to pick a logical place to begin..

First, Susie and I are about to celebrate our first anniversary, and I am having the toughest time believing that it has already been a year. I can still vividly remember what it felt like standing at the gazebo holding her hands, fighting back tears and trying to remember to keep breathing. That day was simply magical, and every day since has been just as amazing. Here’s to celebrating another 50, 60 or 100 more together!

In other news, we are moving to California and extremely excited about the opportunity to live in San Francisco (now if we could only find a place to live…). We’ll be in the Bar Area celebrating our anniversary from Thursday through Tuesday, and I imagine the visit will only make us that much more antsy to get out there permanently.

I’m pressed for time this morning, so I’ll summarize everything else quickly. Work is good, our animals are hilarious, mom and dad are coping with the relocation news and Texas has gotten way too hot.

That’s all for now.

Random note of the day:

Apparently, Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan, until they get hit.” Who would have thought that something that profound would have come from Mike Tyson?

Back to Reality

What a vacation. I could not have asked for a better recharge than a 5-day rafting trip down the Salmon River in beautiful Idaho (by the way, who vacations in Idaho?). Some of the highlights were:

1.) Getting snowed on for the first two days of the trip (the water was a refreshing 35-40 degrees)

2.) Flipping the raft on the last day

3.) Private plane (flying commercial will never be the same again)

4.) Quality time with Susie, Mark, Bryan, Adam and Claire

All in all, it was one of the best trips I’ve ever taken. Susie and I both desperately needed a break from work, and the week gave us ample opportunity to evaluate where we are and where we want to be. If I’ve learned anything in my short 24 years of life it is that family is irreplaceable. You can try to fill your life with countless frivolities, but nothing will ever begin to compare with the feeling of being around loved ones.

Beautiful

My wife is a vision. It’s impossible to say goodbye in the morning as we both leave for work. So much has been wonderful this week. Work has been busy, but it seems more bearable knowing we will be on the Snake River rafting this time next week. Susie has been her usual perfect self – she truly is everything I ever hoped for plus some.

Finally got some news about relocating. I have been offered a job in our company’s San Francisco office that I am strongly considering. The more I am able to interact with the senior leadership at my company, the more convinced I am that this is the right place for me to be. Simply put – my company employs some of the brightest and talented people I’ve ever met. Hopefully there will be something solid the week after we return from vacation.

Big Big Day

Lots to report on the relo front today. Stay tuned.

IF by Rudyard Kipling

No time for blogging today, but I did receive this through one of my RSS feeds so I thought I’d share.

[IF]

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!

–Rudyard Kipling

Greener Grass

We had an interesting discussion over lunch yesterday about how common it is for people in the PR industry to change jobs every six months or year. One of the girls I work with mentioned that the main reason that she jumped from job to job for the first part of her career was that she was bored; which would have struck me as odd a few months ago knowing how busy agency life generally is, but now I think I understand the boredom she was describing.

It is no big secret that I’ve been looking for another job within the agency. I’ve met with a couple of teams in the NW, but everything has been pretty slow going to this point. A decision to move could mean a decision to no longer work at my current employer – a scary proposition given how terrible the economy/job market is right now. We have talked about moving so much in the last six months, and now I would be thoroughly disappointed if it didn’t happen. Businesses make business decisions, people make personal decisions. If you want to move cities, no one is going to stop you, but they may not make it easy on you either.

I know that the company a.) values my work and b.) wants to retain me, but also needs people in Austin since the office is hemorrhaging employees left and right. We’ll see how everything turns out, but right now I’m pretty uncertain..

Short Update

A couple of things I’ve learned in the last few weeks.

1.) Being 24 is unlucky (so far).

2.) The inability to eat or drink without pain is more frustrating than scary, but it is definitely both.

3.) My wife is incredible and would spend everyday with me in an ER if she needed too (I learned the first part of that statement a long time ago actually).

4.) Moms are incapable of acting like anything other than moms.

5.) The Yarbroughs deserve a vacation after 2 not very fun weeks.

Dear Stomach…

Shut up please. I’ll feed you when I can, but right now I’m on a conference call.

Tin Cans Before Dinner…

This is amazing – I’m envious of anyone that can write that well….

My favorite part -

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

– from “Leisure,” by W.H. Davies

Let’s say Kant is right. Let’s accept that we can’t look at what happened on January 12 and make any judgment whatever about people’s sophistication or their ability to appreciate beauty. But what about their ability to appreciate life?

We’re busy. Americans have been busy, as a people, since at least 1831, when a young French sociologist named Alexis de Tocqueville visited the States and found himself impressed, bemused and slightly dismayed at the degree to which people were driven, to the exclusion of everything else, by hard work and the accumulation of wealth.

Not much has changed. Pop in a DVD of “Koyaanisqatsi,” the wordless, darkly brilliant, avant-garde 1982 film about the frenetic speed of modern life. Backed by the minimalist music of Philip Glass, director Godfrey Reggio takes film clips of Americans going about their daily business, but speeds them up until they resemble assembly-line machines, robots marching lockstep to nowhere. Now look at the video from L’Enfant Plaza, in fast-forward. The Philip Glass soundtrack fits it perfectly.

“Koyaanisqatsi” is a Hopi word. It means “life out of balance.”

In his 2003 book, Timeless Beauty: In the Arts and Everyday Life, British author John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for beauty in the modern world. The experiment at L’Enfant Plaza may be symptomatic of that, he said — not because people didn’t have the capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them.

“This is about having the wrong priorities,” Lane said.

If we can’t take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that — then what else are we missing?

That’s what the Welsh poet W.H. Davies meant in 1911 when he published those two lines that begin this section. They made him famous. The thought was simple, even primitive, but somehow no one had put it quite that way before.

Of course, Davies had an advantage — an advantage of perception. He wasn’t a tradesman or a laborer or a bureaucrat or a consultant or a policy analyst or a labor lawyer or a program manager. He was a hobo.

Your Pulitzer Prize winner for Feature Writing folks..totally awesome.

Winner Winner Chicken Dinner!

“Passes to the man….and boom goes the dynamite!!”

Well, the so-called Lastros are anything but right now after winning their fifth straight game. Who knows if they can actually ride the momentum to a winning season, but after being predicted to finish no better than 4th in the division this year, they certainly act like they have a chip on their shoulders.

In non-baseball related news, today has been as good of a day at work as I have had in a long time. Susan was off today, so I was able to get home and eat lunch with her over my break, and I also learned that I will be meeting with some colleagues in our Portland office about a possible position there. Good times all around.

Also, today is bring your son/daughter to work day (for the record, the / is supposed to connotate son OR daughter not an ambiguous son-daughter combo). Most of us don’t have kids yet, but one of the ladies I work with brought her daughter to work who literally could be a Welch’s Grape Juice kid (you know, the adorable ones from the commercials) and another girl brought her nephew in – he’s a switch-hitting, pitcher/1st baseman who prefers to use a wooden bat.

All in all, it’s been a pretty good day. Now I get to look forward to couch time with the Mrs. and the Office tonight.. Boo-ya suckas.