The Other Name is Manhattan. I'm in New York. I flew out here on January 1st and started a job here the next morning. I work for a startup company called Kubisys that is based in Pearl River. (Read more...)

The original deal was that I'd probably only be here in New York for about a month, after which I'd be able to return home to Arizona and telecommute. If they want me here for more than a month, then they have to find a place for me, Jen, Abby, Zig Zag, Lodi, and Spot to live. Even in that case though, we should not be here for more than six months. I'm still rooting for the one month plan. While I'm here I'm staying in the corporate apartment. Right now I'm the only one there, but I may acquire some roommates in the future. It's a fairly nice place that is about a 15 minute drive from work. It's probably about 900-1000 square feet. I also have a company car that I drive. It's an orange metallic Honda Fit and it sure is easy to find in a parking lot. I work on the second floor of a 21 story building that is supposedly the tallest building between NYC and Albany... but who cares. I spend my days in front of a computer, and my nights... well... also in front of a computer. A lot of evenings I spend playing "Team Fortress 2" which is the latest and greatest first-person-shooter (a computer game where you go around shooting people). The thing that makes TF2 great is that it's played online with other real people. A lot of my friends from Insight also play, and most evenings I can find at least a couple of them online as well. Because we also have headphones and microphones that are connected through the game we can plan, talk trash, connive, threaten, and insult each other all night long. I've also done some genealogy while I've been out here since some ancestors (the Gurnees in particular) are from this area. I took a drive a couple weeks ago to St. Peter's Cemetery in Haverstraw, NY and found quite a few Gurnee gravestones. This last Sunday I spent about 5 hours doing some genealogy work online and found the connection between our Gurnees and the rest of the Gurnees, adding at least 200 names to my genealogy work. I also found tie-ins to several other large families of this area including the Coes, Snedekers, and Knapps. At this point, if I took the time I could probably discover fairly easily how every single person buried in St. Peter's Cemetery is related to me. The driving here is horrible. The signage is sparse and invisible until the last possible second before the turn you need to make. I'm seriously considering buying a portable GPS for my car, but I don't think it would be extremely useful after I leave NY because roads in Arizona are so straightforward. The first two days after I got here the weather was terrible. It was freezing cold and extremely windy. Since then, however, it has warmed up quite a bit and it's not too bad now. It's supposed to get really cold again this weekend, but I'm coming back to Arizona for a few days so hopefully it will be warm again by the time I get back. I miss my wife and daughter terribly, as well as my dogs and cat. Jen sends me pictures every day of Abby and sometimes of the animals, and that helps a lot. I also talk to her and Abby and they talk to me (Abby mostly squeals). This weekend while I'm home we're going to give Abby her first real food and I'm really looking forward to that. I am told that Abby is deliberately rolling from her back to her tummy and back again. All in all it's been a good experience being out here, but when Jen and Abby dropped me off at the airport I realized that if I'd known ahead of time how hard it would be to leave them I wouldn't have taken this job.