so much has been going on lately that just thinking about trying to blog about it seems overwhelming, but right now things are calm and i thought i’d bring things up to speed.

last saturday i picked up a moving truck, loaded it up with all my stuff and me, eric and ben drove it all to texas. it turns out texas is pretty far away. we hit the road at around 3pm on saturday with a goal of about 500 miles per day over 3 days. unfortunately, traffic was slow and the budget rental truck was pretty unstable, so we were cruising at only about 55mph most of the way. i spent most of the time following in the s2000, which turned out not to be a comfortable cross-country driver. by around midnight on the first day we ended up in chandler, arizona, only a little bit east of phoenix and about a hundred or so miles short of our first day’s goal. i spent the night in the truck and the guys slept in a motel, but we all only got about 4 or so hours of sleep before we were back on the road.

on sunday, we had an extra 100 miles make up, so we headed out early. figuring we had plenty of time, we made plenty of stops. we stopped at best buy for a while while ben bought a new dslr, we stopped at hat shops, steak houses and other random places. well at about 10pm (we left at 8am), we were about a hundred or so miles east of el paso and exhausted. these roads had no light and there was nobody anywhere. the guys started to get worried about me since i was just alone in the s, by myself and obviously weary. we had walkie talkies and i told them to just keep pushing on, but they insisted i take a break. when we pulled off in some town called kent, i imagined they were gonna say lets just crash here for the night and make it up tomorrow. turns out they just wanted to switch cars and let me take a break riding passenger in the truck for a while. you would have had to have been there, but there was something about us all being that tired and deciding to press on for another 170 miles that was just kinda an amazing show of will and strength. we finally made it into odessa a little after midnight and crashed at a motel 6.

finally on monday we were caught up to our schedule of 500 miles a day but i had to be in the leasing office by 6pm to get the keys for the apartment. it seemed that we had plenty of time, but we had the same thought about the day before so i didn’t want to take any chances. i left at 7am in the s2000 (speed limits on these roads were 80mph) and had a good, fast, uneventful drive all the way home. the guys showed up an hour or two later in the truck, we unloaded, dropped off the truck and went out to get some bbq. the guys flew out at 6am the next morning and i spent the next 2 days unpacking.

so now i’m back here in LA on baby watch. we’re due on tuesday and have been taking lots of walks and playing wii fit trying to get this baby action going. the doctor said if she doesn’t naturally start having the baby by the 26th that he’d induce labor, although at our appointment tomorrow, i’m going to ask that he induce on the 23rd if nothing’s started yet, because 1. i bet the hospital staff is going to be thin over the 3 day weekend and 2. i need to be back in texas by june 1st so i want to spend as much time with the wife+baby as i can.

so lots of things going on. once i do go down to texas, i’ll probably fly back at least every other weekend until taka moves down with the baby so i’ll still be around for a while.

i’ve had lots of things to blog about but i’ve been too busy to write about it, but thought i’d catch my blog up now that i have a few moments of downtime in the hotel. since i announced i was moving, i’ve been going out to dinner with friends and family pretty much every night, and i’ve been slammed at work transitioning out. taka and i’ve been packing up the apartment and might move as early as next week.

taka’s going to be staying at my mom’s house through the pregnancy, and after this week, i’ll be staying with her there too, and will come down here for good either the 25th or june 1st, depending on when the little one arrives. i finally met the group of people i’ll be working with down here and i’m really excited. these people are friendly, young and smart and a totally different atmosphere than where i was. the offices are also very fancy high tech with doors that unlock as you walk through corridors and very trendy designs. everyone i’ve run into since i landed here has been really polite, it’s all very surreal.

things have been happening so fast that big things seem like small things in comparison. we’re due in like 2 weeks!!! we had the family baby shower on sunday and it was really nice. almost all of my family and eric and tina (the god parents) came down, and we really received almost everything on our registry, with gift certificates to buy the last few things that we still need.

amazingly, eric and i sold the boat in just a couple of days! we sold it for $1000 less than we bought it for, so not a bad return on investment on something that we got so much use out of over 4 or so years. while it was sad to see it go, it was the second happiest day in our boat ownership. not to mention my mom was happy to have her driveway back.

i imagine it’ll be a while before i’m back to my regular blogging, but i plan to make a correspondence post here and there. i’ll also keep up on the twittering, so you can follow me there.

kentomatic on twitter

today eric and i took our boat out for one last fishing trip. we hadn’t even fired up the boat since last december, but luckily everything ran fine (well for the most part). the fishing was pretty pathetic and we were really just going through the motions to say that we did it. we probably had lines in the water for less than 20 minutes total before we decided to call it quits and head back in. for all the effort we’ve put into deep sea fishing over the last few years, we really don’t have too much to show for the time and money we put into the sport/hobby, other than a few huge fish and of course a lifetime of stories and memories.

the biggest problem is that we never really got strong at dealing with the ocean’s rockin’ and we usually had to quit because one of us was seasick. we tried dramamine, bonine, ginger candy, acupressure wrist bands and lately even prescription scopolamine, but all either made us too drowsy, or didn’t work well enough. so with me moving out of town, the boat just having been paid off, and us having had a very short fishing trip, we spent the rest of the day cleaning, detailing and getting the boat ready to be sold. it’ll be sad to see her go, but she served us well.

there’s a bunch of lakes in texas near where i’ll be, so maybe i’ll buy a small fishing boat if i find that i have time, money and the space to keep one. i’ve never done much fresh water fishing, but after all of the expensive and difficult ocean fishing i’ve been through in the last few years, it might be a nice change.

if any of you guys are interested in a 2001 glastron 175 sx fish/ski runabout, let me know, i’ll give you a good deal :)

long story short, the ishi’s are moving to texas. i accepted a position at my company’s corporate office in irving, which is in northern dallas county. i won’t go into details online, but i can tell you guys about it over the beers you’ll each buy me before i leave.

i’m gonna be here all of next week and then down there the following week, and then back up here to get the move ready. hopefully while i’m down there i’ll be able to find a place so i won’t have to go back and forth too many times. taka’s going to move into my mom’s house and will stay here in socal for the birth and probably for a month or so afterwards and i’ll try to spend as much time up here as i can. both her and i want to keep things as familiar and easy as possible for both her and the baby. of course we haven’t figured out all of the logistics, but talk about throwing gasoline on a fire.

since we usually have extra christmas cards, the last couple of years we’ve sent a christmas card to the white house (among other random places) and this year barack replied with a thank you letter. While it’s obviously the same card he sent to everyone that sent him a card, and a printed signature, the letter does have the presidential seal pressed at the top, and the envelope has a regular 42 cent stamp.

and wtf, i never got a thank you note from george bush!

thank god mythbusters is back… i was about to start doing my own experiments. so i was watching the first show of the new season tonight and the first thing i noticed was that kari’s boobs were looking bigger. not implant bigger and i thought it might just have been the shirt, but a quick im to boob expert ben and i learned that kari’s pregnant! according to chikipedia, kari byron is married to some lucky guy named Paul Urich.

Here’s Kari’s Top 10 things she’s noticed about being pregnant on the show:

10. When Grant says “Holy crap, run!’ I can waddle at best.
9. My new keen sense of smell is a disadvantage when handling jars of gorilla poo, rotten ballistic gel, or smelly, old socks from fans.
8. My tummy keeps getting dirty, since I have no sense of how big I am.
7. I can’t tie my own shoes very well, and I wear knee-high work boots.
6. I made a ‘Costanza’ under my desk to I can take naps when no one is looking.
5. The baby knicks when I am using power tools.
4. I can’t see what I am stepping in.
3. I am starving all the time!
2. Until it was obvious, everyone thought I was just gaining weight!
1. If I drop a screwdriver and try to pick it up, sometimes i need help getting back up myself.

a few days after the series finale of battlestar galactica aired, i decided to start watching the series. i had always heard from ben and rushubh and other geeks that it was as fun as lost but for whatever reason i never picked it up. it turned out to be a great show, and played like a 60 hour movie (yep, i watched about 60 hours of bsg in 15 days) and just like the o.c., by the time the series finished, i felt like i had real connections (well technically i’m probably related) with the characters and i was sad to see it end. definitely some of the best sci-fi i’ve seen in a long time. i really hope when lost wraps up next year that they do as good of a job.

taka had no interest in battlestar but her and i have started watching one tree hill to fill in our tv watching time together. the more pregnant she gets, the less we go out, so serialized tv shows have become part of our evening routine. i know it sounds like we’re getting old, but i consider this the calm before the storm. things are bound to get pretty exciting and hectic around here soon.

i’ve been really lazy on the blogging lately, wasting a lot of that time instead playing tradewars 2002, the late 80’s/early 90’s bbs game mentioned in the previous post. i’m playing in a modified game that has different ships than the original version, ships that are much stronger and have much higher capacities of fighters, shields and holds. anyway so far i’m owning the game i’m in and got kinda bored. my ship can hold 400,000 fighters and 16,000 shields. in this configuration it was easy to blow up the stardock, so i got cocky and decided to try to take on admiral clausewitz, my 400,000 fighters v. his 50,000. i’d always wondered what would happen or if there was any way you could defeat the federals. well, the answer is no. you can not defeat the federals in tw2002. now to earn back my $230,000,000 to buy the ship again.

i imagine this is nostalgic to ben and costin and confusing to everyone else. we used to waste a lot of time playing this game together in high school. man, when this game was made in the late 80’s, did they really think we’d all live in spaceships in 2002?

what the hell is wrong with the search engine on apple’s site? about 4 results? there are 3!