…You Are a Tree

I was in San Diego earlier this week (Sunday through Wednesday morning) and have a number of observations to make.

• There are a lot of homeless people in the city. We noticed this when we were in San Francisco, too. I know we have them in New York City, but they just seem more obvious in California.
• The city, itself, is a mix of very new right next door to rundown, shuttered, graffiti covered buldings.
• I was astonished by the amount of garbage I saw just laying on the streets. Granted, Monday was Cinco de Mayo, but this was present through Wednesday morning when I was leaving.
• The Gaslamp District is cool.
• I couldn’t find a goddamned breakfast place at 7:30 AM Monday. Tattoos, yes, as I saw probably ten different open shops, but no breakfast joints. I’m spoiled living and working in New York, where there’s thousands of places within walking distance.
• San Diegoans apparently allow themselves to be medically experimented on a lot. In the pages of the San Diego Weekly Reader – their version of the Village Voice — I saw page after page of ads looking for people with every possible problem imaginable for test groups on new drugs.
• There does seem to be a vibrant local music scene.
• I love palm trees. People sell healthy ones that grow on their yards for up to $20,000. Who knew?
• The Red Bull Air Races look cool and I wish they came to NYC; I’d go. I only saw a little from the cab. The planes were flying over an aircraft carrier in the Bay and it was very, very cool.

I’m in Boston today and can’t wait to get home. It’s been a long, long week.

This week promises to be full of fun. I leave shortly to fly to San Diego for two days of work; I fly home on Wednesday, only to turnaround and fly to Boston for Thursday and Friday. Ugh. I’d just as soon stay home, but the overtime will be nice, especially today for all the time in the air and going to and from airports.

Catch you all later.

Not only is he an amazing player and agitator, but, it turns out, he’s a fashionista and is going to be an intern at Vogue once the playoffs are over.

How classic is that?

Avery, who makes $2 million a year with the Rangers and has cavorted with starlets since his days with the Los Angeles Kings, initiated the contact with Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

“He is ridiculously obsessed with fashion,” Avery’s publicist Nicole Chabot told ABCNews.com. “He loves it more than anything in the world. It’s something he has always wanted to do.”

Chabot admits Avery is an agitator in the “old-style” of hockey and a “blabber mouth,” but off ice the player is “surprisingly articulate, creative and savvy,” she said.

He’s also charming, she noted. “There is not a woman that doesn’t fall in love with him in five minutes.”

Though his assignments are “evolving,” Avery will go to Paris Fashion Week with international editor-at-large Hamish Bowles, according to Chabot.

Avery, who never earned a college degree because he was drafted into the NHL right after high school, has said he wants to be a fashion magazine editor.

Rangers’ fans are well familiar with Avery’s fashion sense. He may be the first hockey player ever to sport a pair of trendy glasses in the Rangers official yearbook.

“He is serious about learning the fashion industry and to that end, we are happy to give him a chance,” said O’Connell. “He certainly has a demonstrated history. It makes sense.”

Rangers/Penguins starts Friday. Let’s Go RANGERS!!

…or close enough for horseshoes, hand grenades, and nuclear weapons. Around this date, six years ago, I started blogging. Those original posts are long gone (although you can get a taste of it via the Wayback Machine….wow, that was a hideous design, eh?)

Blogging was so different back then; I actually read a lot of blogs compared to today and it was all about getting links. Granted, when I worked at Condé toward the end, I had plenty of time and it wasn’t uncommon for a dozen posts a day to come flying out of 4 Times Square. Now, I read the friends I made back then and not much else. I finally dumped all the pure-politicos like Atrios and Kos, simply because it was overload.

But I still do it because it’s fun. I enjoy writing, even if it’s a lot less than it used to be. Which reminds me, I’ve been feeling the writing itch and have been percolating the odd story in my head. We’ll see if that goes anywhere…

So, six years old. Happy Blog Day to me! Did anyone order a pony and clowns? If so, scratch the clowns, as Kim has this thing about them. Some fine beer and Railroad Earth playing in the yard will do fine. Kthxbai!

Me & Tom, originally uploaded by Kyrion.

Over on a private Dead board I hang out on, some folks started posting old photos of themselves, so I dug out a couple of me from the summer of 1980, scanned them and uploaded ‘em.

That’s me on the left, grooving with my Doobie Brothers shirt — I think we’d seen them the night before, if I’m not mistaken. That’s my buddy, Tom, on the right, and we were at his girlfriend Kathy’s parents’ cottage on a lake up in western Connecticut somewhere for a nice, lazy barbecue. We and all our friends were in a community theater production of Carousel this particular summer (I did four summer shows in consecutive summers, culminating in 1981 when I played Riff in West Side Story).

Man, I was thin and in shape back then.

Different days for sure. While I can relate to the me in that photo, it’s so far back in time that it really does seem like a different person.

The past day or so, me and a bunch of other people I chill with online have been getting into it with one another. I mean, it’s happening a lot. Maybe it’s spring fever; maybe it’s allergies (mine kicked into overdrive this morning). It’s definitely not the full moon, though — that’s not for a few more days.

Was it taxes? Is annual review time approaching (mine is)?

Tis a mystery most perplexing.

Playoffs begin tonight, with the 5th seeded Rangers facing off against the 4th seeded Devils at the Rock in Newark. We went 7-1 against them this year, and hopes are sky-high that good things are coming.

Let’s go RANGERS!!

Amazing post.
I guess you will comment our diary..
Thank you again

Umm, no, I won’t comment on your diary about hair styles, or whatever the fuck you’re trying to sell. I hate these spambots. Stop sending them to my sites! I know, I know, little chance of that, but still, it annoys me as all fuck.

I had an enormous training project this morning to roll-out to our Philadelphia and Boston offices, via Global Crossing.  It’s a new firmwide conference room scheduler that’s web-based, which, while it sounds easy, is actually quite a robust, fully-featured, at times difficult application. I’ve been fretting about this for a week, and last night kept waking up hourly in a minor panic mode. This doesn’t normally happen to me with new projects like this, either. Just this one, which has had some serious oversight by management. Even the firmwide rollout I worked on two years ago that saw me traveling all year around the country didn’t leave me all akimbo like this one did — the first week in San Francisco excepted.

I knew this software as well as can be expected. The training outline Norse epic created by my peers in the Curriculum team is forty pages long for two hours of training, and I needed to know it cold, as well as anything that might “come up” in training in the form of questions.

Fortunately for me, here in the NYC office, is a friend of mine who happens to be the end-user subject matter expert (SME) on this product, and he freely offered to sit in with me in our training room while we remoted to Boston and Philly to assist with anything that might come up. All I can say is this: thank you, Michael! We had all sorts of issues in the class — the test database wouldn’t allow creation of new room bookings today, for one, even though it worked fine yesterday — and all manner of questions which would have left me spinning my wheels. As a result, though, the end-users in Boston and Philly probably got a fuller, better training experience thanks to his participation.

This man is also one of my dearest friends, and his unselfish nature simply continues to astound me. I’m completely honored he calls me friend.

I’m on a weekly call for a new product we’re testing out that will help track a young associate’s progress — sort of a checklist application they will fill out weekly that will then go to their supervising attorneys who will use it to assign them to new work they’ve not done before. Written a brief? Check. Sit second chair in court? Check. It’s a career-growth checklist, if you will. Very cool stuff and it’s actually being written around my firm’s specifications.

The manager in charge of this project has a habit of blowing into calls late and hijacks the call immediately, totally side-tracking the in-progress meeting. Even when someone is talking, tough — they immediately begin talking. The call eventually gets back on track, but it’s frustrating and rude.

Every. Single. Call.

And not just calls for this project. Anything they are affiliated with, this happens.

Jebus, save me.