Not since the Outlaws left Kansas City, less than one year after forming, has there been a hockey game of the caliber you could see this weekend. Well there was that one “NHL Rules” game a month ago, but luckily the action this weekend is completely free. The weekend for the 2006 Midwest Adult Classic is finally here and my team, the Moose, are hoping to win it all! If you want to find me this weekend, there is a good chance that I’ll be at the Pepsi Center, 135th and Quivira.

• Tonight: 6PM
• Tomorrow morning: 9:30AM
• Tomorrow evening: 5PM
• Sunday morning: 11:30AM (hopefully)

I’ll see you there. If you are still in need of a little encouragement, there’s a bar at the rink!

I added some pictures to the site from our weed picking event at the nature center along with a few from the Royals game later that night. That’s about the most productive thing I did last night. I was hit with a little “stomach bug” about halfway through my work day and I never really recovered. I’m still feeling a little bit off today, but hopefully that will change soon.

While navigating through a newly opened route in the Triangle this morning an Elton John song came on my Sirius radio. After that song was over my “artist alert” immediately indicated that a different Elton John song was on another station. I tuned into that one as well and it finished up just as I was pulling into work.

What’s my point? Well I also have Billy Joel saved into my radio and I receive an alert every time one of his songs is on any channel. Typically I get more alerts for Billy Joel than I do for Elton John, at least at the times when I’m in the car. Does Sirius favor Billy Joel over Sir Elton or is it just coincidence? This led me to a little debate with myself over whom I thought was better. I know that Kim would obviously say Billy Joel, since he’s her favorite performer of all time. Although I enjoy various songs from each of them, I give a slight advantage to Billy Joel. It seems that he has created more songs that I enjoy than Elton John has. Regardless I’d love to see either one (preferably both) of them live someday.

Last night we made the scenic drive out to Shawnee, Kansas to our friends Joel and Amanda’s house. As I mentioned earlier Amanda’s birthday was over the weekend, and the girls had planned to get together this week for a “girls night.” I guess the crappy weather from the past couple of days spoiled their plans and they decided they were just going to hang out at their house. Well Joel found out about it and invited me over as well.

Anyway, Joel cooked up some food on the grill while we ate appetizers and had a few Corona’s. After stuffing ourselves we watched last night’s episode of American Idol. I don’t mention it very often but I haven’t missed a week of this show in quite some time. Imagine that, a live music freak such as myself watching a pop music competition. My one saving grace is that I don’t vote, I never have, and I never plan on doing so. I’m a sucker for entertaining television I guess, and besides how can you go wrong watching a crazy Paula Abdul.

The show’s theme was love songs but I think very few people actually loved the contestants’ performances, well besides Paula who was in tears at one point. A couple of the male performances were probably the best of the night but how could you not be a huge fan of Katharine McPhee, especially when her performance includes a wardrobe malfunction. Now that’s what Ed calls TV!

We had a meeting this morning with an HR representative from our new parent company. I should have known that this meeting wasn’t going to be beneficial once I found out the representative is a graduate from Xavier (GO CATS). I was hoping to have the answers to all of my questions like how many vacation days do we get? What will my new salary be? What about holidays? Etc. Instead we got a generic overview of how the company works and what benefits they offer versus what we currently have. Basically everything that was said was pretty much a given.

Officially the acquisition is not final and won’t be for another week or two. At that point we will get some brochures and paperwork to fill out, but from the sounds of it still will not know how it truly affects us. It will not be until shortly before we merge into their benefits system that we will understand how things will be changing. At the earliest this is scheduled to happen on July 1st. Until then I guess nothing will be changing here at the office, which is both good and bad.

I’m happy with the way things currently are/were here but as I mentioned earlier I’m excited to see how certain things can be better when working for a much larger company. At the same time things could be terrible after we merge into their system and therefore I should be thankful that I get a few more months of things they way they currently are. I think I just gave myself a headache…

Kim and I had dinner and a couple drinks at Jazz after work on Friday. I was still a little stuffed from lunch, so I just ordered some fried pickles. Kim ordered her favorite dish, the chicken cacciatore. Since the servings are fairly large I was able to eat a little of her food in addition to the pickles. We even had some left over cacciatore to take home with us. Later in the night Doni and Phil came over to play some cards. Euchre was the name of the game and the guy team had no problem claiming victory!

Saturday started much earlier than a typical weekend morning. Earlier in the week Kim had volunteered our services to the Lakeside Nature Center for a couple of hours. Big Brothers/Sisters was having an Earth Day event there so we took Bianca and her younger twin sisters along to help out. We were put on weed picking duty around a little pond since we had little kids with us and probably shouldn’t be using any dangerous tools. I worked hard for two hours while Kim took the twins on a nature hike.

After stirring up my allergies at the nature center we dropped the kids off and headed back to Loose Park to play some golf. We got stuck playing behind a guy and his son, who was at most four years old. Perhaps this helped us relax though because we both played some of the best golf that we’ve ever played. I’m finally starting to hit the ball pretty consistently and my putting was much better than it has been recently.

As if that wasn’t enough time spent outside in one day, we then met up with some friends and headed out to the Royals game. Before Saturdays game the Royals were on an eleven game losing streak including a loss the night before to Cleveland. We must have brought some good luck with us even though Mike was wearing his Indian’s shirt. The Royals actually won again last night and are on a two game winning streak!

After the game everyone came back to our place to play euchre and to celebrate our friend Amanda’s birthday.

Yesterday was a very lazy day. After going to Planet Sub for lunch and enjoying $2 turkey subs, I didn’t leave the apartment for a couple of hours. When I did leave it was only to hit some balls at the driving range and then a quick trip through the grocery store. All of that laying around made it hard to fall asleep last night which has led to a sleepy Monday morning. I’m hoping the coffee will carry through the rest of the day.

Things have started to slow down again, at least back to a somewhat manageable pace. Here’s a list of things that I’ve been doing recently along with some random finds:

• “My son and his girlfriend live in Kansas City. A group of 30 family and friends went out for the game on New Year’s Day. Here is one of the many shots that were taken. The whole city knows the ‘Bengals Growl’ because we sang it where ever we went! Who-Dey!” Check it out, our story is on bengals.com (second one down).
• UMRSigEp.com is now live, although I’m still waiting on content in a few places. As a reminder, I’m always looking for new and exciting website projects! Perhaps I’ll even release edpaffjr.com v2 sometime soon.
• A link to my blog has been spotted on the finance.google.com page for Harris. At least one of my fellow coworkers has already found my site. I guess I better watch what I write. :)
• TrustEdDesigns.com now points to this website. In the future I’m hoping to put up a separate page for all of my web design stuff. For now, welcome to TrustEd Designs!

After work yesterday I played tennis with a couple of fellow coworkers. We did not play any matches since we are all at different skill levels, but it was fun to get out and just hit back and forth for awhile. We are hoping that this develops into a somewhat weekly outing and that more people coming along in the future. I know that I would benefit greatly from playing on a consistent basis. I know the fundamentals of the game and now I just need to get more practice.

From there I went home to eat dinner and watch TV with Kim for the rest of the night. Our DVR was quickly filling to capacity, so we attempted to free up some space. I think that we deleted enough shows to account for another day or two of recordings. Perhaps we’ll have another TV night ahead of us tonight. To those of you with DVR equipment, especially those from cable providers, how much space do you have? I believe that our ReplayTV has a capacity of around 40 hours of record time. I’m considering my other options as we move into our new house.

Yesterday was not only my brother Tim’s 24th birthday, it was also the three year anniversary for Kim and I. We celebrated just like any other normal day, I made an excellent dinner and we shared a couple of drinks. We thought about going to a movie or something, but I figured it was better if we saved our money for the upcoming house purchase.

Speaking of the house, I think we have officially signed the last paper before we close on May 11th. The pressure and anxiety has died down a little and now we are just wishing we could move in sooner. T-minus 22 days and counting…

One reason that work has been so busy lately is that our company has recently been acquired by Harris. It’s a case of “if you can’t beat them, join them,” since we had previously been picking away at their client list. Now we’ll have the opportunity to convert all of their broadcast clients to our software. That means busy times for us in the very near future, and it has already somewhat started.

We’ve been promised that we won’t lose our small company feel, even though we are now among 13,000+ other employees of Harris. I hope this remains to be true, but at the same time I’m pretty excited to eventually have a big company benefits package. Only time will tell, I guess.

Other links:
Lee’s Summit company will sell for $32M – Kansas City Business Journal
Harris Acquires Traffic Vendor – Broadcasting & Cable

Sorry for the delay, but a busy weekend has fed right into a busy work week…

We flew into Cincinnati and arrived about dinner time on Friday night. My dad and Tim picked us up and we drove downtown to our hotel for the night. My mom is/was on a cruise with her sisters, but she kindly reserved a couple rooms for us. The first stop with Ed Sr. and Tim was for some food at RockBottom Brewery. It seems like I always end up here for dinner when downtown, but who can go wrong with good beer and good food!

We then made the nearly two mile walk over to the Beer Sellar. Originally we were going to take a cab over but since we ended up walking there we arrived at the bar a little later than we wanted to. Weeks earlier we had sent out an evite to friends and family to join us at the bar to celebrate my dad’s 50th birthday. We kept it a secret from him, and when we walked into the bar about 50 people we had invited stood up and shouted, “Surprise!” In the end I was glad that we were late, the surprise was great.

We spent the rest of the night at the Beer Sellar and it was a great time. Our friends in the band Greenstreet were there to provide some great music and of course the 60 beers on tap did not disappoint. Be sure to head there throughout the summer when Greenstreet is playing again. I know I will if I’m in town.

Saturday was spent out at my parents’ house relaxing and recovering from the night before. Later in the day I took a couple of rides in my dad’s new Mazda 3. I even rode on the highway in the car! Remember that my last car was an almost identical Mazda 3 and that I no longer have the car because it was totaled on the highway just outside of St. Louis. Anyway, my dad and I hung out at the Hais’ house for a few hours after dinner and from there I headed to bed knowing that Sunday would be an early morning.

I awoke to the sounds of banging pots and pans on Sunday. I guess that Kim had convinced some of her family that this was the best way to wake me up. I then began searching their house for my Easter basket and found it a half hour or so later. The Easter Bunny gave me all sorts of weapons (aka tools) that airport security would have loved. Everyone then got ready and before too long many of Kim’s aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. started showing up for their annual Easter party. The good thing about west side Cincinnati Easter parties is that you can still play cornhole! The party was a great time and it was good to see all of Kim’s family again. Just as things were wrapping up, we got a ride down to the airport and flew back to KC. I’m still a little exhausted from the weekend’s events, but I have my first full week of work in while to rest up.