Hurt Locker, recipient of like 9 academy awards tonight, was a great flick. I remember vaguely seeing some of the promotion for it when it came out but dismissed it as just another opportunistic “Iraq” film. However, this movie rocked. Loved it from start to almost finish (it just sort of ends abruptly I felt). Kathryn Bigelow, the films director, was the first woman to win an Oscar for best director and she totally deserved it. I thought Jeremy Renner was robbed, and was disappointed Mo’ni’Qu’e or however she spells it won best support actress but, whatever.

I also watched ‘The Perfect Getaway’ and it sucked for almost 80% of the film until the very end. It has a good twist, which makes it somewhat respectable.

Next was Couples Retreat, and for a straight comedy I thought it was well done. It wasn’t laugh out loud funny, but entertaining.

Finally, just finished “Up in the Air” which was very good. I like Clooney and I thought that the younger girl Anna Kendrick should have won something for best support actress.

Obviously, i am super excited about the move. For one, I missed my wife and over the past month and a half have felt more like a vacationer up here in Salem than an actual resident. Then there are my dogs. With the passing of my cat, its been pretty lonely. You never really know how much pets enhance your life until you lose one, or are separated from them. I have often wondered if they would miss me, or forget who I was. I guess i’ll find out next Friday when I see them. Really, i can’t wait to just let them maul me when i walk into the door.

It is going to be a little strange seeing my house totally empty. When i left it, it was full of our crap!

Get to grab the keys to the new place tomorrow evening, and that should be cool. We’ll have electricity, gas, water and all the utilities minus internet there. Maybe i should get that set up now? Still have my work furnished apartment for another 2 weeks so there isn’t a huge hurry.

Once Kelly gets here and we start to explore Oregon I am going to make this site (or some other site, i haven’t decided) more visual with pics and stuff.

For example, while I have trained clients on how to use Twitter, and how to integrate that into other communications, I never put it out there that I liked Twitter. My approach has always been, “you know I know a lot about this tool because i have used it for a very long time, and i am happy to show you how to use it, but for me personally, it isn’t all that great.”

Conversely, I am more than happy to teach AND preach the use of Facebook – because it is a site/tool i actually believe in.

I read something today which was absolutely retarded though. I am not going to link to it because I am a firm believer in denying links to sites which don’t deserve them. This post was on ‘content strategy’ and was absolute nonsense. It looked as if someone bought an introductory book to SEO and just stuffed as many keywords into her article as possible.

Now, I see links being published to shit like this all the time. I’ve even been asked to re-tweet or re-publish links to these types of posts. Its a basic tenet in social media – basically, to engage in a circle jerk, in order to build up your own personal credibility. I have seen entire consultancies built on this principle. All i can say is that I am so glad that I don’t have to be part of that world (in fairness to me though, I never was).

Today I had to put Blues to sleep, and it was a very difficult, sad day. It was gut wrenching and I feel genuinely sick about it, still.

Blues was the best cat I could ever ask for. I can’t even imagine wanting another one after her, having had her as a companion for almost half of my life. The ride with her to the vet was the hardest thing i have ever done in my life and if you put a gun to my head and told me i had to do it again, i’d literally refuse.

Having said all of this, i need to move on, be strong and recover. I’ve been able to hold back tears so far (at least for the past 5 hours) so maybe i am on my way to that recovery. I know there will be bad days ahead, but hopefully i will be able to only focus on the positives as time passes and remember her for what she was – dad’s little princess.

Goodbye Blues, your mom and dad love you.

Blues hasn’t been herself since the move. Maybe it even started before, who knows. In any event, over the past several days things have taken a turn for the worse with her and now I am faced with an agonizing decision. After taking her to the vet this morning, and after getting blood work done, its now apparent that she has kidney failure. This has manifested itself in the fact she isn’t able to have a bowel movement, that she is peeing on herself and her bedding, and now, she more or less just lays in her pan. She is lethargic, and obviously in a lot of discomfort.

It is amazing how fast this all has happened. Just a month ago I would have never thought she was sick, or that vital internal organs were basically “giving up.” But, they were.

So tomorrow I will call the vet clinic to discuss our options, but it is clear to me that I am going to need to make peace with letting her go soon. It may not be because of this kidney failure, but it could be from any number of things. The decision might get taken out of my hands if i just can’t afford the treatment. The blood work alone was 400 dollars.

Blues has been an awesome companion. She isn’t just a cat. I remember getting her. I was living on my own away from home the first time in an apartment. I was lonely, and I had just broken up with my girlfriend at the time. I went to the pound to look around and saw this odd looking black cat. What was odd about her was the shape of her head, something i don’t even really notice any more I am so used to seeing it. I brought her home, and I remember that it took her a few days to be comfortable enough to come out of hiding.

Back then, Blues had claws and she would use them, frequently. I didn’t have a bed in my apartment. Instead, i slept on an old couch that my folks had given me when I left home. Blues would sleep on the top of the backrest of the couch. I remember she had a loud purr, and it basically helped me go to sleep at night.

How ironic that I am in similar circumstances now. I’m by myself, in an apartment and it is just me and her. Unlike then, I know she can’t lay next to me and purr to put me to sleep.

This was over 12 years ago, back when she started on this adventure with me. We’ve been to Florida, Georgia, Arizona and now, Oregon. She has seen 5 different dogs come in and out of my life – Penny, Brita, Nadia and now Scooter and Danny. Throughout it all, she has been a great, great cat. More than I could ever ask for.

I haven’t cried this much in god knows how long. In fact, I had to take about a half hour break just in between writing the last paragraph.

Maybe in some sort of symbolic gesture (although i have no idea what it symbolizes) I decided to shave off my beard. I’ve been so anxious about her condition, i was literally yanking chunks of hair out of my face. Now after crying so hard I have a massive headache and a long day ahead of me tomorrow.

Salem drivers aren’t as safe and mild mannered as I originally thought. Truthfully, they may rival Arizona drivers for craziness. No near misses thus far, but I’ve noticed there have been quite a few incidents of speeding and pulling out in front of me on roads I thought were supposed to be a little more laid back on (like the one leading into my apartment complex).

Work has gone well so far. It took me until week 2 to get all of my gear, but I am set up really well now. I’m actually typing this blog post on my 17 inch Mac Book Pro. I’ve got all my software, mouse, monitors and even a company issued iPhone 3Gs. It only took – well, FOREVER – for that to happen at my last job. It is really nice to not have to fight with your IT department or justify the software and hardware you need to do your job. So, thats an overwhelmingly major improvement for me.

The highlight so far of my new job was going to visit one of our retirement communities. I had a great time playing bean bag baseball with the seniors there. It put a smile on my face to see so many of them truly happy, not to mention the direct feedback that they loved the staff.

We signed a rental agreement for our new place here in West Salem but so far have not found tenants for our own house. Unfortunately, that is the one thing keeping Kelly from moving out here which, well, sucks. I am starting to feel irritable about her not being here. Of course there isn’t anything we can do about it. We actually had a registered sex offender apply to rent our place. So, it is just a balancing act of finding the right person to rent it. I just don’t feel like i can relax and really begin to enjoy my surroundings until she is here.

Aside from that, a lot of WoW with some of my friends which has been a good way to just keep my mind off being separated from my wife. As works though kicks in I will need to put that aside to focus on other things.

I am sure I got a automated traffic camera ticket on my way out of Phoenix. I literally got one a week living in Phoenix, it is ridiculous. I just remember being blinded by a flash in the wee hours of the morning as I left town – sure it wasn’t God trying to tell me something.

The drive to Palm Desert/Palm Springs wasn’t nearly as boring as it had been in past trips. I think this is mostly because it was done entirely in the dark. But, sunrise over the Coachella Valley sure was nice.

Rain from the mega storm hovering over California first hit me past Palm Desert, near the wind farms. That was pretty much the last time I saw blue skies until I reached Oregon.

LA wasn’t nearly as impressive (from a skyline perspective) as I thought it would be. In fact, the downtown area was downright puny. Stopped in Burbank to visit with my friend Gary.

Rolled into Westley, California sometime around 6pm on Friday. It was dark, I was tired and hungry, and had a cat who had peed on herself in her crate so it was time to call it a day. After washing her blanket I turned in.

Alarm was set for 5am, but i woke up instead to my cat bitchin at me. We got on the road and started the long drive to Redding, which I never thought i’d get to.

Somewhere around Willows I get framed for a ticket (yeah, I said it) by California Highway Patrol. I must be the only person in this WORLD who has gotten a speeding ticket from “behind” a cop. I followed this guy 5-10 car lengths for at least 30 miles. He slowed down and switched lanes after coming up on a semi, waited for me to go ahead, then immediately pulled me over. It was the most ridiculous thing I have ever witnessed.

Finally made it to Redding and got my snow chains. The weather looked bad there (very gloomy, rainy, icy). Fortunately, I didn’t need the chains and the mountain drive through Mount Shasta National Park took a few hours. Once I made it out I was in Oregon.

Beautiful drive through Southern Oregon made me realize how blessed I was to get this job and have this opportunity to move here. Arrived in Salem around 4pm in the afternoon on Saturday and got about half of my stuff moved in.

Now, time to get some sleep!

In 3 days, I’m moving to Salem, Oregon.

My journey to the Pacific Northwest has been years in the making. Even before I got laid off from High Tech Institute, a job I worked at work 7 years, I was actively looking for positions in Seattle. Then, after I got laid off, I was interviewing, mostly by phone, for jobs in Portland and Seattle. It became obvious to me that finding a job up there was going to be hard – things like not having an address in either state, or knowing anyone who lived there. Of course, it didn’t help that companies for the most part were not hiring at this time and the economy had just gone to shit. We were also saddled with a mortgage and a house which we couldn’t get equal value for.

So my dreams of moving had to wait. It turns out that in the grand scheme of things, they wouldn’t have to wait long, and that what came next would put me in the best position to finally close a 10 year chapter of living in Arizona and the southwest.

I was incredibly fortunate to find a job at a great advertising agency in Tempe called Off Madison Ave. I had known about these guys from my work at High Tech, and immediately developed many great personal and professional friendships. The job was incredibly challenging – something that High Tech didn’t prepare me for. Whereas the client side of marketing was a more laid back, political exercise (in my experience) the agency side is a frantic, deadline oriented world where shifting gears daily and spontaneous creativity is the norm. Over the past year and a half, I developed a lot of different types of skills – organization, project management, leadership and training. But what was probably most important, were the friendships. It was one friendship in particular that has gotten me packing my car for a cross country trip on Friday.

I’ll be leaving quite a few great friends behind, but I know we’ll stay in touch. Whether it is my good buddies Andrew and Eric who worked with me those long seven years at HTI, or my friends Cori, Holly, Ruben, Amy, Chris and others at the agency who shared so many of the good and occasional “tough” times. I’ll especially miss my creative family (Cori and Holly) who actively sought my perspective on so many different projects, and who tolerated my random farting noises (made by mouth, i swear) and demands of going out to lunch daily.

What i won’t miss is the 100 degree days, or the bad allergies. I won’t cry over speed cameras every mile on the interstate or the joy of living in a “red state” where its perfectly legal to walk around with AK47s – in public. And surely, I won’t long for 12-14 hour days and sleepless nights (although I know my new gig will present new challenges as well).

Some say the grass isn’t always greener, but I can say that after visiting both Oregon and Arizona, it truly is. When I moved to Arizona I was in awe of the mountains, and cactus and well, the mexican food. With Oregon I’ll be in awe of the climate, and trees and natural beauty of forests, rivers and wineries. It will be different, but “different” is what I need right now, so I am looking forward to this change.

Over the next few days I’ll begin my journey in earnest. First up is an 18 hour drive from Phoenix to Salem which will take me through California. I’ll post pictures, videos and recaps of the trip. Check back if you’d like to see.

Come on everyone! You need to CRUSH IT!

Kidding. You won’t read any bullshit “shamwow” speech here about making it rich with a 200 dollar flip cam and a YouTube account. Truth is, the power of social media is including everyone else and using their collective creativity to build something new – not just talking about yourself. Being a self promoter doesn’t make you a social media expert. No, it makes you a good self promoter.

It kills me how many people just don’t get it. However, when your follower count on Twitter approaches the 500k mark I could see where it would be easy to get a big head about yourself.

But, but – all it takes is transparency!

Not really. Not only are there lots of things that companies should NOT share (or individuals for that matter) but there are lots of things that just aren’t really that important to share with the public. Raise your hand if you care that Tony Hsieh accidentally filled his car with premium gas instead of plain old unleaded? I like Tony, but that tweet didn’t sell any shoes, nor did it really make him or his brand any more interesting. Transparency like that is really fucking boring.

I still rarely if ever see anyone actually using the creations of others (or even ASKING fans/customers) to create something on behalf of a brand. Today I read that Flickr had its 4 billionth photo posted this past weekend. How many business owners have gone to Flickr and looked for interesting photos that fans of their brand have taken. How many have you commented on, or asked for permission to use in your own online or offline marketing? If there answer is none, you really ought to go out to sites like Flickr, Vimeo or even YouTube and see some of the AMAZING things ordinary, non blow hard people are creating daily. I think you might be shocked at what you find.