The blog post one year in the making

A new car, new job and the Steelers won the Superbowl. 2006 was a pretty good year overall.

It all started on January 1, as every year does. The Steelers had clenched a 6th seed in the NFL playoffs, and worked their way to the big game doing the unthinkable, winning three games on the road. Sometimes not only playing the opponents but the opponent’s fans’ emotions, Refs and thin air.

And yes, I did grow a beard to match Big Ben.

Sometime in that final week of January I ventured to my local Saturn dealership to look at new vehicles. With interest rates on the rise I settled on a Black 2006 Saturn VUE. However with the Superbowl only days away I had apprehension about trading in my native Pittsburgh car, so I told the guys at the dealership that I would not drive off the lot without my brand new Pittsburgh Steelers License Plate holder attached.

They even played the Steelers fight song for me as I got in the car.

Then came the Superbowl. If you haven’t noticed I’m a bit of a fan. So much so I DVR every game, and play on a delay with the sound muted and listening to the Sirius Satellite Radio broadcast of the game featuring the Steelers announcers. Now this made watching the Superbowl interesting. Wanting to see the commercials we would switch audio feeds on my TV to hear the best part of the game, the commercials. The NFL really needs to get rid of that Superbowl bye week and put the game back in January where it belongs!

The team in Black and Gold won and I broke the dress code by wearing my Hines Ward jersey to work on Monday. A coworker asked, “If they lost would you have been unbearable today?” I said, “No, I’m more unbearable because they did win!”

In April I said goodbye to my work home of more than five years. It was time to move on and I’m glad I did. I left Cardinal Health for Xcelerate Media. It’s a small e-learning company. How small? We’re located above a Starbucks in Dublin.

It’s almost a complete 180 from corporate America. I show up in Jeans, or shorts, sandals… well whatever I’m comfortable in. The people I work with are great. And Stephen Correll has nothing on our office.

We pass the football around the big room all the developers work in. We developed a random number generator with a list of restaurants attached to the numbers just so we can decide where to go to lunch. This is negated by the fact that we go to Donato’s about three times a week.

We have a Consultant who comes into our office every so often, and is compiling a list of things we do that would get him fired at his office. I guess calling out “not it!” when the phone rings is frowned upon elsewhere.

There was one black mark on the year, and that was the passing of Grandma. She was a fighter a feisty one and stuck around longer than we expected. But she is missed. But not necessarily at 7am on my birthday when she liked to call me to remind me what day it is.

Finally at the end of the year I gave into my friend Kelly’s request to write movie reviews professionally. Yes, you heard me right, I am now officially a professional movie critic. She is an editor with the online newspaper USAvoice.org. She said that since I’m already writing reviews I should do it for them and get paid. So there may not be as many on my blog, but there will be more reviews in the paper.
Well that’s the blog post that took a year to write, well only about a half hour in reality. But you get the picture. 2007 looks to be even better, of course it would be depressing if I didn’t say that. Who wants to look forward to depressing stuff anyway?See you in the New Year!