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Wow! I had so little Christmas spirit this year! Between not working, being by myself so much, and the warm weather, it didn’t feel like Christmas. I didn’t start listening to Christmas music until Christmas morning and after that I was done with it.

Like Thanksgiving, I thought I was going to be spending the day hanging out alone with the dogs. Two days before, my friend Nir invited me to a Chinese dinner and a movie night he was organizing. The day after this I was invited to dinner at my former co-worker Aaron’s house, but I had to turn them down. My friend Jer and a guy named Dallas who I had recently met at a PDX Gaymers event were there for Chinese dinner, as well as some people that I had never met. I knew that people went out to restaurants on Christmas, but I didn’t know Chinese dinner on Christmas Day was a thing. This dinner was an experience. Some people’s orders weren’t quite right. The water tasted bad. I was pretty much told I couldn’t have what I wanted and I was told what I would get instead. After dinner, we saw Little Women, which was really good. I wasn’t expecting to like it as much as I did.

A few days after Christmas, we had a holiday party at Alex and Robert Lee-Olson’s house. It was a great time. I got to see some people I hadn’t seen in while. I’ve been a little bit of a hermit lately and some people’s schedules or location make it hard to get together often.

I don’t care what people say, presents are one of the parts of Christmas I still enjoy. What did I get this year? I hope I’m not forgetting anything.

• dog treats for Max and Reese
• a book on dog massages
• Yooka Laylee and the Impossible Lair
• The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl by Theodora Goss
• a Black Panther build a bear
• Astral Chain
• a cross
• Thor, Dr Strange, and Tony Stark pop vinyls
• Reese’s candy
• A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George R.R. Martin
• many wonderful cards
• some stuff I treated myself to
  • a web camera
  • board games Pret-a-Porter, Ecos, 7th Continent, Shadows of Brimstone, Anomia

2019 was a tough year. Two of my closest Portland friends moved away, Xander and then Cody. I don’t think I ever wrote about Cody leaving. I lost my job a few months after being promoted. I got sick with a bad sinus infection in October and have been sick pretty much since. I’m feeling the effects of not eating well and not exercising. Sitting here at home all day has taken a physical and emotional toll on me. I remember writing about how optimistic I was earlier in the year, but all that optimism left for a while. I’m feeling optimistic again about the new year, but if things don’t change soon, I could be right where I was.

I decided to set goals for next year. Since I successfully completed every goal the last time I did this, I think one reason I stopped doing it for a while was so I wouldn’t fail. Here’s my list.

• Lose at least 30 lbs
• Go on at least 1 date
• Arrange at least 1 dog play date
• Leave the state of Oregon at least 3 times
• Beat at least 3 video games
• Learn at least 1 new board game
• Attend at least 1 Meetup I haven’t been to before
• Buy a new bike and ride it
• Go to a convention or festival that’s new to me
• Arrange a photoshoot so I can put my photography equipment to good use
• Don’t be so self conscious about how I look. Post at least 12 pics of myself on social media

We enter a new decade tomorrow. This past decade has been great to me. I spent the first 2 years in Starkville and last 8 years in Portland. Deciding to take a risk, uproot my life, and move to Portland was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. This decade has had some struggles: heartbreak, unhappiness with health and career, and some bouts of loneliness and depression. But overall it’s been great. Don’t they say your 30s are the best years of your life? So far I can’t disagree with that. Some of things I’ve done in this past decade:

• moved across the country
• met a lot of online friends, traveled with them, stayed in each other’s homes
• became a social butterfly
• traveled out of country for the first time
• did a lot more traveling than I did before
• became a leader at work and in the community
• became a dog parent for the 2nd time
• started podcasting
• worked for one of the top tech companies in the world
• dated a guy for the first time
• started going to conventions
• took up new hobbies
• made many great local friends

I hope everyone has a happy New Year and a great decade! Take care of each other!

The first weekend in October my friend Matt A. from California came up to visit. I know Matt through podcasting and I met him in person at the Twin Peaks festival a few years ago, but hadn’t seen him since. He had presented the idea a few weeks earlier of him coming up here and traveling to Seattle for the GPB Festival. I was all for it.

Matt flew in from Denver (I think) on that Friday night, where he had attended another festival. From what I understand, Matt works for a chain of stores and helps decide which beers and how much they stock. So this is like work for him. We watched that Stephen King movie In the Tall Grass, which had just debuted on Netflix.

We got up pretty early Saturday and got some donuts from Voodoo Donuts before heading to Seattle. We stopped at a brewery at met someone Matt knows, I think it was the manager. We then went to the festival which was a lot of fun. We drank sample after sample of pumpkin beer for hours. Since Matt knew some of the people there (I think they worked for one of the breweries), we got extra drink tickets. There’s a giant pumpkin beer filled with beer. Later in the day they had a costume contest near this giant pumpkin and later on a parade. After the parade they tap the pumpkin and served beer from the pumpkin. Leading up to them tapping the pumpkin, the excitement is building up. They had music playing. People (including Matt and myself) were holding cornstalks, dancing to the music, and chanting “TAP THAT GOURD!” It was kind of crazy, but fun to be a part of. After we left the festival, we had dinner with Jonathon Pope, a Washington resident who I know from podcasting but had never met before.

Sunday we drove back to Portland. We visited a couple of breweries around here. I took him to Powell’s. At this point Matt was feeling sick, probably from all the traveling, and I was starting to get sniffly too. He tried to get his return flight moved to Monday instead of Tuesday, but it was going to be too expensive. Matt wanted to play board games on this trip. We played one game at one of the breweries earlier and we ended the night playing board games with some of my local friends at the Lucky Lab.

On Monday, we didn’t do much. I remember going to a brewery, playing a game there, and getting a tour of the brewery’s expansion. That night we watch Hereditary and Midsommar.

On Tuesday, I had an interview so I had to take Matt to the airport earlier than I would have liked. We stopped at the library in Hillsboro and played a couple of games before heading to the airport.

I’m so glad Matt got to come visit, see Portland, meet my dogs, and play some board games. I wish more people would come visit -hint-hint-. The only negative is that once the sickness he gave me fully kicked in, I was miserable and out of commission for 2 weeks. Oh well, it happens.

In early September, ESPN celebrated its 40th anniversary. I’ve hardly watched over the past 20 or so years, but in the 90s I watched it pretty religiously when I had access to it.

I especially enjoyed SportsCenter. I loved the anchors like Chris Berman, Keith Olberman, and Dan Patrick. I thought it was amazing when they brought on Linda Cohn. There were days when I watched pretty much every airing of SportCenter, even when it was on for hours at a time and they were pretty much just repeating the same stories each episode.

In addition to SportsCenter, I watched Baseball Tonight and a lot of Sunday night baseball games.

I guess it was sometime during or after high school that I stopped watching ESPN. Every once in a while I would come across it and watch it for a few minutes before moving on or if there was a football game I really wanted tosee, I’d watch it on one of their stations. Sometimes I would put a game on just for background noise. I never got around to watching 30 for 30 like I promised myself I would. A few months ago I actually did start watching SportsCenter a few nights a week while I was in bed. That’s how I knew the anniversary was coming up. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Linda Cohn was still doing SportsCenter. My newfound interest in ESPN didn’t last long, however.

Now that Disney+ is out, I have the bundle that also gives you ESPN+ and Hulu. I think I have access to the entire 30 for 30 catalog. I’ll be giving that a try starting in the new year and possibly slipping back into some regular SportsCenter viewing.

Happy belated anniversary to ESPN. You were a big part of my childhood and will hopefully be a big part of my adulthood.

It’s getting close to the end of the year, so I figured now would be a good time to get around to some of the writing I’ve been meaning to do over the past few months.

I signed up for Xfinity from Comcast when I first moved to Oregon almost 8 years ago. I remember planning it out to that the installer would be here the day after I arrived. Over the years, I’ve had very few problems with their service and I’ve barely spoken to their customer service. They’ve increased my speed a few times without any extra charge. I’m the kind of person who likes having a long relationship with companies and won’t switch if I don’t have to. Some people complain about Xfinity, but I know that the quality of service you get often depends on where you live.

Over the years, I may have looked into other services, but I never found a compelling reason to switch. Xfinity was fast and reliable and I couldn’t get matching speeds from the top contender, Frontier, in my neighborhood. A few years ago, however, Xfinity implemented monthly bandwidth limits. They gave customers 2 free courtesy months where we wouldn’t be charged if we went over our limit. I periodically checked my bandwidth usage on their site. I rarely came close to the limit, even when Xander was here and we were both using the Internet. There were a few months where it was really close. Then last November, Xander and I went quite a bit over. I blamed it on streaming more and a lot of new video game releases . After that things went back to normal. Then earlier this year, I believe it was August, I went way over by myself. That was my first month of not going into the office every day after finding out I was being laid off. I was streaming CNN every day, streaming on Twitch a lot, and downloading and uploading a lot of videos. Also, a bunch of new games were released. A few weeks earlier a Frontier representative had knocked on my door with a new offer. They had upgraded their service in my neighbor and for quite a bit less than Xfinity, I could get twice the download speed and over 30 times the upload speed. I said ‘no’ at the time because I didn’t know how reliable Frontier is, but I did keep the representative’s business card. After I went over the 2nd time, I decided I should probably say goodbye to Xfinity. I didn’t want to pay overage fees to them and their unlimited plan is an extra $50/month. Frontier had no bandwidth caps.

I talked to friends of mine who are Frontier customers and posted in Nextdoor asking for opinion. It seems that some people had great experiences with Frontier and some didn’t. Once again, it probably all depended on where you lived. I scheduled an appointment, which was scheduled for around the middle of September. Installation was quick. They removed the old Verizon FIOS box that was left here by the previous occupants. Apparently Frontier had bought all the Verizon lines. Frontier’s service has been really good. There were a few times early on that I lost my connection, but that could partially be because I updated my router firmware at the same time that I switched ISPs. The speed is great. I’ve been uploading videos to YouTube and it’s so much faster. I’m glad that I rook the chance. I was afraid that the service would be terrible and I’d end up wanting to switch back. Luckily, that hasn’t happened.