Like getting married!

Finally after a little over a year of being engaged Jamie and I got married on September 19th at an amazing ceremony in Butler, PA with both of our families and a bunch of our friends. I can’t even begin to describe how amazing the whole thing was.

Some highlights of the event that I remember, and am pretty sure I’ll always remember.

• Jamie walking down the isle to a guitar and flute rendition of Portal’s “Still Alive”. It was a complete surprise and I remember thinking it was both the funniest and most awesome thing for her to come down the isle to. She loved the song in the game when I happened to play it with her around, and then loved singing it in Rock Band.
• The reception party. My sister and a lot of my family and groomsmen helped her to put together an amazing setting. My mom has since asked me if we would’ve changed anything, and honestly we wouldn’t. The decorations were beautiful, totally our style and everything just looked great.
• Jamie getting a keg of Magners for me. She knows how much I love drinking Magners wherever we are and it was an awesome surprise to come down to the meet and greet before the wedding to find a keg of Magners all for me [and eventually others]. I drank as much as I could of it that night, but in the end we wasted some of it because we just ran out of time to finish it. Nonetheless it was a great surprise and a lot of other people ended up enjoying it quite a lot too.
• Jamie’s dress. My mom asked me what I thought of it and I replied “Boobs”. It sums it up best I think, but really she looked gorgeous and every time I kept looking at her that night I had to smile and remember that she was mine for the rest of our lives. Damn I’m lucky.
• A movie like sing-a-long to “That’s Amore” by everyone, and I mean everyone at the reception broke into song. It was awesome.
• Our vows. We both wrote our own, and mine weren’t really done until about a few hours before the wedding, but in the end both it, and Jamie’s were perfect.
• Seeing Auntie get drunk and enjoy the party. Auntie is awesome, easily my 2nd grandmother but she always hates having her picture taken. I could tell this was a great event when she told me that I could get as many pictures with her as I wanted. You bet your ass I got a ton of them with her.
• Photobooth pictures. We rented a photobooth because it was something Jamie really wanted, and for the longest time I wasn’t sure about it. Thankfully as usual Jamie was dead on and looking at the pictures and the comments people wrote in our guestbook on the flight home was awesome.

That’s about the majority of them that I remember, but really Best. Wedding. Ever. It was so awesome we’ve both said repeatedly since then that we wish we could do it all over again and have that much fun again. I told her in 50 years we’ll do it again and party it up 70′s style!

Now we’re planning for our honeymoon in New Zealand which is going to be amazing, once I get done planning it.

Oh and if you so care you can head to our wedding website and view the whole ceremony here.

Of course before that happened EA released Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 for the Xbox 360 and PS3 that I worked on and it got a lot of great reviews, the online portion I worked on got a lot of praise as well and we got a ton of people playing it still. So that was a great success as well. Overall work has been amazing and everytime I go into work I’m still amazed that one of my dream jobs actually came true.

Another amazing thing that happened, because of Jamie’s connections. I got to spend Tuesday of last week drinking from the Stanley cup! It got mentioned briefly during out wedding that they were going to have the cup for a day and it was a shame I couldn’t make it. Turns out I could because I was already coming back to VA for my 10 year HS reunion on Saturday, so I took a few more days off and drove up to Pittsburgh and on Tuesday hung out with it for most of the afternoon. It was amazing and everything I hoped it would’ve been.

So that’s been most of this year and next is already shaping up to be pretty awesome as well. Sure I’m not getting married again, but I have to say that I’m loving life right now. Can’t believe I married the woman of my dreams and have the job of my dreams. I’m lucky and boy do I know it.

January – Was still at Sapient and just got pulled into doing the godawful Doral site. That was an eye opener because it made me realize I really really didn’t want to be in the advertising industry. I still have some friends there, and they do some good work, but it’s not for me.

February – Most of February was a blur because I was trying to finish up things at Sapient and I believe around this time I started to realize more and more that I needed to find a new job because I was miserable at Sapient. Jamie was still working at the Shelter and doing decent there.

March – Had another birthday and I seem to remember right around that time is when I started to get a 1st, then 2nd interview with the Zeta people in Vancouver. By the end of the month I had an offer on the table and put in my resignation on the day of my birthday at Sapient. That was a fun birthday mostly because of the prospect of starting a new job, and also because the party Jamie threw was awesome. Though in true ‘good’ party fashion I remember everything up until a certain point, but damned if it wasn’t good before that point.

April – In the beginning of the month I started to get into the groove of working from home, which turns out I liked, or at least liked then. I think somewhere in the middle of the month Jamie lost her job and was put in limbo because the Zeta job was only supposed to last a few months before we moved up to Vancouver.

May – Jamie and I took a trip up to Vancouver to visit my coworkers and also look around the area in the hopes we could find a decent place to live in eventually. It’s also where Jamie had a little rough time our first day over there. Otherwise the trip was awesome, and we even got to meet up with an old friend of mine in Seattle and his then gf/now fiancee. At the end of the month we went to Jamaica for Jamie’s little sister’s wedding in Jamaica and man was that awesome.

June – This month was somewhat of a bummer simply because not a lot happened. I worked, Jamie started working part-time at the gay paper [I think it was around this time] and that was about it. I think also around this time I might’ve started to realize that working from home was fun, but it also wasn’t conducive to me being productive.

July – This was a huge month. But only right at the end because it’s when I proposed to Jamie finally after a long time of knowing she was the one, but not having the right moment + ring to do it. Thankfully by this time I had both things set and popped the question while we were up in Pittsburgh for my family reunion. The rest of the month however, went by with not a whole helluva lot of fanfare.

August – I just remember that now is when we started to try to go crazy finding dates and venues to have the wedding in, even though we had both promised ourselves we wouldn’t go crazy right off the bat.

September – By now the 3-month trial period at Zeta had long since lapsed and I was starting to figure they weren’t in that much of a hurry to get my work permit and move me up there. However Jamie and I did the necessary paperwork to try to start the whole process of getting a work permit. Turns out that it wasn’t nearly as easy as we thought and we’d find that out. We heard back from the Canadian Embassy about my work permit and were informed that we needed a lot more information. Most of which could be provided by Zeta but we weren’t sure how to proceed. While we were trying to figure out what to do an old work buddy informed me of the fact that they were looking for some help up at EA in Orlando. I didn’t think I would actually get the job but figured I’d be stupid to not try for it at least. Jamie’s birthday was at the end of the month but instead of being able to really celebrate it here, we could only go out for a few hours because we had to catch an early flight up to Pittsburgh to look at potential venues that weekend. Thankfully by the end of the weekend we found an awesome venue, picked out a date and were a helluva lot happier and less stressed out than before.

October – By the first week in October I had gotten an official offer from EA and while it was a bit of a paycut from Zeta I knew I had to take it because making videogames has always been something I would jokingly put in the ‘If you could do any job, what would it be?’ list. I put in the 2-weeks at Zeta and started a whirlwind process of finding a new place to live and eventually starting work there by the 20th of the month.

November – Was spent mostly getting used to living in Orlando and everything that came with it. Work wasn’t too crazy but that was because I was still trying to get a real understand of just what I was doing there. Right before Thanksgiving I got a call from my mother about my dad going into the ER, turns out he had gotten two subdural hematoma’s and needed to have surgery to relieve the swelling in his brain. It was a bit touch and go in the beginning, but thankfully by the time the month was over he was better, but still not back to 100%. Thanksgiving was a low-key affair that Jamie and I spent at our new place in Orlando just hanging out because frankly after hearing what happened with my dad I wasn’t in much celebrating mood.

December – Jamie’s dad visited the first week of the month and that was nice. It was also one of the few times in my life I’ve seen two men over the age of 40 smack-talking with some 10 year old kids at a Go-Kart track. Work got better and better as I started to find my groove. Our final trip of the year was the trip to Pittsburgh and Ohio to visit the family for Christmas. This year was a bit different because I wanted to spend a few extra days with my dad since work was completely closed for the annual Christmas break period. In the end it was a good thing because Christmas Eve my grandma had to go to the ER because she could barely hold herself up. Seemingly like dad she took a turn for the worse, before seemingly doing a 180 and making a surprising recovery. As of this moment I believe she’s still in the hospital, so I keep hoping she’ll make more of a recover but she’s 96 so who knows.

This was a year filled with two new jobs, a new hole in my dad’s head, a new ring on Jamie’s finger, and a new town to live in. If that doesn’t make for a crazy year I don’t know what does, and 2009 looks like it’ll be even bigger and better!

All of that went out the window when we saw our initial complex, while they didn’t have the 3/2 layout open for viewing [the previous tenants had literally just left the day before and there were workmen cleaning/touching up the place] she did show us to a 2/2. We did a walk through and then went back into the leasing office to talk about specifics of if/when a 3/2 would open up.

I was due to start work on the 27th and ideally wanted to move into our apartment during the week of the 20th so that come the 27th we’d be completely settled into the apartment. Some of that went out the window when the women in the leasing office told us that there was one 3/2 opening on the 19th of the month and it was within our price range. This seems good, however the downside to this was that we had to take the keys from her on the 19th, which means we’d be moving this weekend which was a bit sooner than expected.

We figured we’d look it over until we went to the complex literally next door since a friend of mine who lives in Orlando had recommended it to me saying that a lot of his friends lived there and really liked it. Well we looked at a few of their 3/2′s and really, they weren’t that good. Sure they had some nicer amenities but the actual units themselves weren’t near as nice as the ones we initially looked at.

After realizing that we quickly went back to the initial complex and told them that we’d take the 3/2 that was opening on the 19th. So now we’re in get-shit-packed mode and trying to pack as much as we can now since Jamie is busy working most of the week. We’ve managed to get a lot done today and I figure as the week goes along I’ll pack up more and more of the electronics stuff since right now that’s most of what’s left unpacked.

If anyone has extra boxes and packing materials, feel free to send ‘em my way!

Well this is another one of those, except this one has even bigger and better news than usual. In the past two months a few major things have happened.

• I proposed to Jamie in July
• We’ve since figured out a date and venue
• I just recently [as of yesterday] accepted a new job to work in Orlando for EA Sports on the Tiger Woods series of games

As you can figure from those almost all of them are big huge momentous things. Most notably the marriage thing. I’ve known for a while that Jamie was the one for me, and knew I wanted to propose to her in a neat and special way. That way was during my family reunion in Pittsburgh and thankfully she said yes.

From then we started to look at venues in the Pittsburgh area since it’s really important for my Grandma and Aunt’s to be at the wedding and they’re on the older side so they can’t travel too far. About a week ago now we took a mini-trip up to Pittsburgh to try to find one after narrowing it down between a few online. Imagine our surprise when after going up there we end up picking a venue that we had initially written off because their website was so terrible. So let this be a lesson to people with businesses out there, make sure your website isn’t terrible so you put your best foot forward for people!

We had just gotten that settled when I was informed last week that after going through a few rounds of interviews at Electronic Arts in Orlando that they did indeed want to bring me on board the Tiger Woods team as a UI developer/designer. So it seemed as if last week everything was turning up aces because I couldn’t believe, and still almost can’t, that I get to actually help make videogames. Sure it’ll be hard, and the hours can be long at times, but it’s something I’ve always said I wanted to do and never really thought I could.

Hell it was only 5 years ago I was waiting tables endlessly and somehow I went from that, to making videogames. Pure. Fucking. Insanity.

So now we’re in the process of getting a move up to Orlando sorted out and are heading up there this weekend to stay with a friend of ours and look at potential apartments. It sure as hell is exciting times over here.