Six Random Things

Raging Dad has tagged me with an Internet meme, called Six Random Things.

Here are the rules:
1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write 6 random things about yourself.
4. Tag 6-ish people at the end of your post.
5. Let each person know he/she has been tagged.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

So, here it goes. Six random things about the MattDaddy:
1) In 1993, before the internet was really the internet and it was a collection of bulletin boards and text based games, I began playing MUDS and MUSHes in college at James Madison University. One of them was based on the PERN novels my Anne McCaffrey and I played with a group of about 10 people from all over the world. One was a girl in Houston. She asked for my phone number so she could hear my voice before I left school for the summer. I married her on New Years eve 1994, and we’re about to celebrate our 14th anniversary this year

2) I’m into martial arts. As if you couldn’t tell. I started when I was at JMU in 1992 and I’ve been doing SOME kind of martial arts ever since. I have a 2nd degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do and I was a fulltime instructor at our school for 2 years.

3) I grew up on Long Island, and I absolutely hate NYC.

4) No wonder I’m a Boston Red Sox fan. I saw a baseball game at my grandparents house in Braintree Mass in the summer of 1979. I watched Jim Rice launch a ball over a huge wall in left field. I remember the shot vividly. Cool thing is, when they were putting together ballots for this years hall of fame, the video they put together of Jim Rice had the exact shot I remember.

5) In May of 2007, I was driving home from a doctor’s appointment and I got hit by a 25′ truck in my compact Honda Fit. I rolled the car three times, and somehow managed to walk away from it relatively unscathed. There’s some stuff cropping up here and there with my neck and shoulder, but in the grand scheme of things, I have a lot to be thankful for.

6) My son is left handed, my daughter is blond. The Cushing side of the family has Neither. In fact, except for the way he’s built, neither kid looks like me. Keep the wisecracks to yourself!!

And here are the 6 people I’m linking to:
Mike at Unraveling Mysteries
MammaDawg at MammaDawg.com
Tyler at Building Camelot
Mrs4444 at HalfPassedKissinTime
Carol at Ramblings of a Hunters Wife
Uncool Dad at Always Home and Uncool

Office? What office?

Looking into my office:

Damn it's nice to be able to close the door.

Me sitting down in my chair looking out.

Looks like I made it!!

Woo! I’m a featured blog at Alltop.com Go here and check it out man Yes, I’m at the bottom, but who cares!!!

Cool site, good place to find stuff by category without getting confused as hell by the rest of the crap. Like the no ads part too

Wow, that sucked

How sick can one man get?  Man, I sure tried to find out this weekend.  Ugh.  Wasn’t feeling great all week and friday came around and we began the move.  We had to take everything out of the server closet.  I mean everything.  Picture this – a metal cabinet about 7 feet high with servers slid into it with wires going EVERYWHERE!!  We told everyone we were bringing it down and just started unplugging everything.  And I mean EVERYTHING.  Took us about 2-3 hours to pull everything out, and have a pile of plugs, cords, and other nonsense all in a pile about 2 feet round.  And filled into all of that is about 5 years of dust.

Nassssty.  Needless to say, I swallowed about 10 lbs of dust and dirt, but we got everything over to our new offices and scarily enough by 9pm, we had internet access and most services up.  I’m still wondering how the hell we did it.  There are people there this weekend doing other things, but my part was over Friday night thank goodness.

Went to sleep with a super sore throat, woke up with it in spades and sinus pressure and pain from hell.  Ever feel like you have a dagger stuck in your eyes?  Yeah, now heat the the dagger up to a million degrees and then shove it in your head.  Multiple times.  That’s not even close to what it felt like when I woke up.  Needless to  say, I spent all day on saturday in bed, which truthfully, I needed.  Woke up this morning a bit better and a combination of tylenol, my antibiotics, sudafed, and lots of tea helped make sunday at least a human day.

I go in tomorrow and get to set up my office(I’m going to post about that tomorrow), and hopefully spend little time on getting people set up, and just revel in the fact I can close my door

Dad blogs and me…

When I first started my online journey, it was mostly a blog about me whining about what I didn’t have, and why no one would give me the chance, etc etc. Needless to say, I finally grew up. Well, sort of. STOP LAUGHING!!!

When I realized I wasn’t posting as much as I would like, I realized I should, even if it was to just organize my thoughts. Then I started getting comments, and wanted more. So I posted more, and got more comments. It was good. So I started posting on other sites and commenting there, and got more feedback.

So I began trying to figure out where my blog should be. Is it a DadBlog? Yeah, for the most part. It’s different from a lot that I have seen, mostly because a lot of the ‘DaddyBlogs’ were for guys with younger kids – mostly newborns and under 8s. They are interesting, insightful, and well written. I want to try to do that, just at an older age.

So instead of diapers and first steps and things like that – here you’ll get posts about
first kisses
acne
pubic hair
bullies
turning my kids into martial artists and how badly that’s going You know your dad did this to you!
marital status – bliss, doom, lovely, shitty
Not being able to afford a house because of the crappy market
and other things of a soon to be 40 yr old guy who thinks he’s in much better shape than he actually is.

Okay, my wife is trying to organize stuff for her brownie troop, and I have distinctly heard the word shit, three times. Accounting major to the RESCUE!!!

Facebook, reality checks, and holy crap!

I’ve been posting a lot to Facebook, finding a lot of friends – mostly from highschool, tho I have recently found some from college too – and getting back in touch with people. If you haven’t tried it, I have to recommend it, it’s really pretty cool contacting people after 20 years or so. It’s neat hunting through people’s friend lists to find someone you might know or remember.

It’s through talking to people and letting them know what I’ve been up to that I realize several things –
I’m feeling old
I have a son who is in 6th grade (that’s the holy crap)
I’m almost 40 years old
It’s not hold old you look, it really is how old you feel, and the aches and pains lately? Dude, I’m 90.

The reality check is that I’ve been looking at other people’s kids and realizing that I had mine a LOT younger than most of my peers. Seriously, I’d say that a good 75% of the people I’ve talked to, have kids under 6. Mine are 11 and 8(9 in Oct). Which I guess is kind of cool. I’ll be able to relax,, sit back, and start paying all those college tuition bills that much sooner

No more crap…

It’s been scared out of me.

Read the summation and view the clip. The clip is the genuinely scary part because you can truly see how NOT ready for primetime this lady is.

summary: Huffington Post

Fenway pics

Wordpress is way too cool. I can link to my flickr account to show you the pics.

In…Freakin…Credible

note:I don’t have the cable for my camera, I will post pics tonight

for those who haven’t been following, I finally realized a dream last night. My 40th is coming up in January and my best friend, who is a diehard Mets fan wanted to remedy a crime in the world.

Would M@ get to Fenway before his 40th birthday?

Thanks to Alex, that would be a resounding YES!!!

We took off yesterday from our office around noon and headed up to Boston. I LOVE Boston. I love Boston more than I HATE NYC. Yes, I’m sorry, I grew up on Long Island, I live in NJ – I HATE NYC! I’ve never liked being there. “Oh the energy, the pace, the people, they’re amazing, electrifying…blah blah blah” The energy and the pace make me agitated and nervous, no thanks. I go in from time to time because Fae loves it, and I appreciate certain things about it. Given the chance, I’d never go in again:)

Boston? Boston feels like home. I don’t know why, but it always has. Ever been to a city that you have almost no connection to and it just feels right? Yeah, that’s it for me. It was really nice yesterday because my buddy went to college up there and lived there for several years, so I got a tour of places around and in the city that I hadn’t seen before.

So we found a place to park down the street from the park and walked back towards the field. Let me just start by saying this – this is a REALLY small park. I mean REALLY SMALL. I’ve walked all the way around Shea a time or two, but Fenway is REALLY SMALL. I’d say it’s about 4 sq blocks in NYC. Tell you what tho, they pack it in. We walked around for a while, I got a REAL Sox hat, got hats for the kids, grabbed a beer(yes, non-alcoholic) that tasted better than it should, and wandered around outside the game for a while. The weird thing is, I was only 4 blocks away from where I spent a weekend in the early 90’s when visiting a friend at Boston Univ. Should have gone then

Then we went in.

Wow man. Everything I’ve watched for so long, all right there in front of me. Our seats were about MAYBE 40 feet from the field. During the game, i heard Kevin Youklis say SHIT! from almost all the way across the field.

The whole experience seems a little unreal to me. I saw the Ted Williams seat (longest home run hit in Fenway – the seat is Red), went and touched the foul pole, saw Josh Beckett smiling and talking to some fans while he warmed up. Saw the Sox stretching and warming up like 40 feet away. One of the biggest differences – I always knew this, but this totally confirmed it….

Big Papi has that name for a reason. Dude, he’s huge. I mean HUGE. At one point, he and Pedroia were standing next to one another. Wow. Pedroia is a short guy, but DAMN, Papi is Big.

The grass seemed greener, the sounds seemed both more real and unreal at the same time. Hearing the players call for the ball, hearing the SMACK as Papi hit a home run. And I mean SMACK like the instant he hit it, no delay. KNEW as soon as he did, it was gone.

I was finally surrounded by people who understood my love for a team, who waited so long for them to finally make it, and then get lucky enough to do it again. I was surrounded by friends who were complete strangers, by people who listened to me go on and on about this player or that player or anything I wanted to talk about.

This one guy behind us tapped me on the shoulder late in the game and said the most profound thing I’ve heard in a long time – “Welcome to Fenway, Brother.” I felt like I was home, like I was finally sitting in a place where I was supposed to be. Like I had been away for a long time and was finally coming home. I felt like I belonged in a way I hadn’t ever felt before.

Besides my wedding and the births of my kids, on a totally Man/Testosterone laden level – the best day ever. And you know what? They didn’t even win

a dream realized

I was hoping to be able to attach a pic of me with my blackberry, but its not happening. I’m here, psyched, and realizing a long time dream.

I was going to post a lot. You know what? I’m going to enjoy this without posting:)

Hope you understand, ill wrap it up tomorrow. For now I’m going to enjoy a game in my ballpark with my best friend.

Thanks Alex