I haven’t really made resolutions since I was a teenager. I learned early on that the pressure and stigma attached to them was basically a recipe for failure, and, for most people, declaring a resolution at the stroke of Dick Clarke (or Seacrest now, I guess. Creepier) actually just provides an easy out.

“Oh, yeah, I didn’t quit smoking like I said I would. It was a New Year’s resolution, and nobody sticks to those”

So at that point, why even bother? Why automatically set yourself up for a level of disappointment that’s even higher than the amount you give yourself for your daily failures and flaws?

However, just because you don’t stand on a table at 12:05AM and slur to a crowd of beparty-hatted revelers how ‘This year, I’m gonna stop pirating porn, for serious!’ Doesn’t mean that the New Year can’t bring with it some kind spirit of self-improvement and positive change.

That’s why I do something a little different than resolutions. Rather than having my mouth (or blog) write cheques that my lazy(ficient) ass can’t cash (which it already does too often, ie: every time I announce a new comic that doesn’t end up getting posted) I choose a more general approach, to thinking of things in my life that I can work on, and spend more time focusing on. Instead of “I resolve to lose weight!”, how about, “I am going to focus more on improving my eating and exercise habits.”?

For me, this kind of passive goal setting is less intimidating, and feels less like I’ve failed before I’ve even begun, if that makes any sense. I would love to be the kind of go-getter who sets determined goals and stops at nothing to achieve them, (and if those people have the audacity to make New Year’s resolutions, they should be punched in the face for rubbing in the rest of ours) but let’s face it, I am NOT that kinda guy. At least not yet.

I have just recently thought of the term “New Year’s Focal Points” to describe this kind of non-rigid, low pressure, achievable self-improvement January 1st goal setting idea. I think “Focal Points” is a just buzz-wordy, and douche-baggy enough phrase to catch on, so I’m sticking to it.

And with that, here are some of the things I would like to focus more on in 2009 and beyond:

-Health and fitness
-Doing fun, cultural things with the wife
-Family and Friends
-My webcomics misplaced and Imaginary Enemies
-My video webcast idea
-My music blog www.downloadablecontempt.com
-Blogging in general
-Helping my wife build her business
-Making music
-photography
-Pirating less porn

There are probably others, but those come to mind right now. I’m curious to know how many of you make resolutions, how often you follow through, or what kinds of things you hope to focus on in the new year. Don’t be shy, leave a comment!

I hope you all have a happy and healthy 2009, and achieve whatever you either resolve to do, or focus on in the next 12 months.

-Now let’s get drunk and blow on a wizzy retractable paper snake coily thingy! Wooo!

C.R.

With the help of something a good friend of mine once said, I have come up with a formula.

[Laziness] + [Cleverness] = [Efficiency]

While I suppose there are some people out there who are efficient for other reasons, for me, and probably a lot of people, laziness is the true mother of that invention, and that kind of efficiency (which I have now dubbed Lazifficiency, because I think made-up compound words are awesome) has helped me quite a bit in the past.

Back when I worked for Chain Video Rental Store, I had every element of that job down to it’s simplest, quickest, and most effortless, from prepping movies for the rental shelves to counting out my till at the end of the shift, I had a system for everything that could rarely be improved upon. When I became the assistant manager (youngest ever, at that time, which is one of my many inconsequential lifetime achievements) of that store, if staff had a closing shift, they knew that I could get them out of the place within 5 to 10 minutes after locking the last customer out, when any other shift supervisor would usually take a half hour to an hour.

In other jobs, I would devise checklists, organize workstations, and invent little systems in my head that could achieve everything I needed to do in the least amount of time possible.

My motivation? The down time, baby. If you get everything done quickly, you can spend more time not having to work.

And that’s great, if you’re always going to work for someone else, but it can kind of cripple you when you’re trying to do something on your own.

With all these personal projects I want to do; webcomics, blogs, music, writing, etc, the time I have to spend on them comes out of that precious ‘down time’, so my brain is reluctant to do anything that I don’t HAVE to do, if it means impeding on that time. Why do I work so hard at working smart, to give myself all this extra relaxing time, if I’m then going to use it to do more work? Often, this causes my brain to become a petulant little shit when I want to get it motivated to, for example, try filming a webcast on the weekend, or work on a novel outline, because I’m cutting into precious ‘do nothing’ time. Even if these projects are things I love to do, honestly, I still love to do nothing even more.

But here’s something that occurred to me this morning: I’m not looking at the bigger picture, because if I did, I would realize that my lazy-assed brain was actually going against its tendencies.

You see, rather than applying lazifficiency on a small scale, to individual tasks, or just my job, or just housework, or just shopping for underpants, I need to look at my LIFE as the task to optimize.

I work a job that takes up about 44 hours a week, a job that I will likely have to do (or one just like it) until I am in my sixties or beyond. How is that Lazifficient? There is a fucking OCEAN of downtime that I am throwing away on this poorly organized task called existing. I need to optimize my time on the earth, and a ‘job’ in general, even when made extremely efficient, is still time spent in a place doing things you would not be doing if you had complete control over your time. Before today, I had never zoomed out of my life and thought of it quite like that.

Could be a breakthrough. Which would be nice.

However, as an elite group of military cartoon people used to say, knowing is half the battle. What I need to do now, is figure out how to blend this new revelation with my lazifficiency skills, and come up with a plan to optimize my life.

-I need to start making some lists…

C.R.

I’ve mentioned it a lot recently, and it’s only because it has been the most predominant thing on my mind for the past two weeks; this “video game concept” thing. I mention it again today, because it’s a good example of how easily distracted I can become when I come up with the Newest Great Idea.
Earlier this month, I did this crazy week-long road trip, 20 hours of driving, and 6 customer visits, in five days. I do so much driving for my job, and all that time alone with my thoughts is most often where the ideas that fill the bottleneck originate.

So I’m driving along a mountain pass in B.C., when I have this vision. I remember reading something Stephen King said about his idea for the novella The Mist. He said that he was at the grocery store, when he suddenly had this image of a pterodactyl crashing through the window and flying down the aisle. The story he wrote just built upon that.

That’s kind of what I experienced while behind the wheel, this vision of a scene from a video game, and by the time I finished that 3 hour leg of my journey, I had most of the game ideas figured out. The rest of that week was spent mentally refining those ideas.

The whole time this is going on, there’s a part of my brain, that ounce of common sense mixed with inner-critic, telling me, “You realize that you don’t have any experience, resources, or contacts in the game development community, right? This is the biggest waste of time, considering you DO have the resources and tools at your disposal to do any of the other projects you want to work on. Why aren’t you putting more effort into your webcast idea, or writing scripts for your comics, you dumb shit?”

And that voice is right. However, I always get irrationally obsessive about the Newest Great Idea, and it almost invariably affects everything else I want to do.

Cut to this past Saturday. I feel like crap; frustrated, grumpy, I want to work on something creative, but nothing’s happening. Mentally constipated. I was trying to find some kind of project planning software, where I could start putting all the pieces together for my game idea, on the off chance I can flesh it out to become a real pitch that I can take to a developer. Nothing that I found was quite what I wanted, and I was letting it get to me.
The wife needed to get some supplies from Office Depot, and I needed to get out of the house, so off we went. On the drive there, I told her about my frustrations, and she suggested, “Why not put all of the ideas down the old-fashioned way, with a pen and paper?”

She’s thinks she’s so fuckin smart. And that’s because she is.

I looked around the Orifice Depot, and found a 5 subject notebook, and some of those elementary school workbooks, the kind where only the bottom half of the pages are lined, and spent the rest of the day mind-mapping my ideas into one of the workbooks.
By Sunday morning, I found that the game was not pushing nearly as hard at the front of my cortex anymore, and I was actually able to work on comics without the Newest Great Idea interfering. It was magical, the most focused I’ve been in a long time. All thanks to a 99 cent workbook, and a wife with a Great Idea of her own.

-I don’t know if this brain-dumping technique is the final piece to the puzzle of enabling me to do more with myself, but I do know I’m going to go buy some more of those workbooks today.

C.R.

So this is how school fucked me up, or at least contributed.

I loved to read when I was a kid. I picked up the skill pretty quickly, and devoured books as fast as Icould get them. Also, I read them. My earliest memory of a favourite series of books were the Charlie Brown Encyclopedias. Do you remember those? They were awesome. Educational and fun, and easy to get into, like sex with a librarian.

By the time I got to the first grade, my reading and comprehension was at an advanced level, and somehow, so was my understanding of math. I don’t know why, I’ve never really had a love of numbers or anything, but math was always quite easy for me.

In light of my super-geniousity, it was decided that I would take grades 1 and 2 in the same year, and effectively skip into grade 3 the next. Apparently the whole skipping grades thing isn’t done so much anymore, but then again, failing kids isn’t done anymore either, so I guess it all evens out.

Looking back, I’m not sure if skipping grade two was a good thing or not. It set me up for a lot of high expectations from myself and my family, took me away from the friends I’d made that were my own age, dropping me into a third grade class full of kids I didn’t know the next year (which was terrifying, I still remember that first day. They all seemed five years older than me). It also probably contributed to my becoming a (mostly self-imposed) social reject in high school.

But at the time, I was just excited. I was getting all this attention. I was “special”, but not in the way that the guy with the hockey helmet who drove around the school looking for sticks to store in the back of his giant tricycle was “special”. I was fucking smart, yo, and being recognized and praised by all these adults for my brilliance.
And all because I liked to read. Not because I tried really hard.

In Elementary school, there never really was an emphasis on homework. As long as you could pass the standardised test for your grade, and showed up, that’s all the government really worried about. Just give the little fuckers enough of a basis so that they aren’t a total waste when they hit high school. Thusly, I was a straight A student all through those grades. I had perfect attendance, and I learned all the stuff the exams required me to learn. Done.

I didn’t start getting lower grades until grade 9, because, all of a sudden, this ‘homework’ shit was actually a significant part of your final grade. “What? Why? If I learn it in the hour it takes the teacher to teach it, what’s the point of spending another hour regurgitating it repetatively? That’s redundant, and a waste of my time.”  So I hardly bothered with homework. I would do the mandatory assignments, papers, etc, and always got great marks on them, and exams were easy, but I became a B student because I refused to waste my time on things I already knew.

My report cards always sang the same refrain. “Chris has a solid grasp on -insert subject here-, is very bright and contributes well to class discussion, but just needs to put more attention into his homework assignments to achieve that better grade”

But my stubborn, spoiled, too smart for its own good brain refused to buy into that. School is about learning, and I was learning perfectly well without having to solve thirty slightly different algebra equations every damn night. It was worth that 10-15% of my mark to basically be lazy. And why not, when you continue to be successful and praised and rewarded and pass all the exams.

Here’s why not, and it’s only recently hit me this simply:

There are no exams in the real world. Nobody cares about what you’ve learned, as much as they care about how hard you work to apply what you know.

Damnit, why didn’t anyone stress that in school? Well, chances are they did, and I was too full of my own awesomeness to pay attention.

So there I was at 17, the youngest in my graduating class, a life full of beliefs that work is for suckers, and that I can do just fine by being smart and a quick learner, reinforced by teachers and parents and the system, only to get dumped into a reality that is somewhere in between where I come from and where someone like my father, the hardworking just to scrape by, old-school work ethic, comes from.

-Uh… shit. What do I do now?

C.R.

Getting things done, follow-through, motivation, hard work.

These things tend to go directly against everything that makes me the person that I’ve become, and I’m starting to realize that, if i’m going to be successful at something other than my marriage and a job that pays just enough to get by, then I’m going to have to overcome some pretty deeply ingrained and conflicting aspects of myself.

I was the youngest child in my family by a few years. An accident. Whoops, here I am! By the time I came along, my mom was much more laid back about child-raising, not the stressed out and hard woman my brother and sister had. My dad made enough of a living to provide a childhood for me that was basically middle-classy, but it was a luxury compared to what my siblings had when they were little. I was spoiled, I was ‘the baby’. My sister spent a lot of time looking after me, in the early years when mom was working, so I essentially had two moms. My dad had transitioned from being a ‘company man’ to being self-employed, so he was generally around more when I was a kid.

I never really wanted for anything, never really had to do chores. Life was good, and I didn’t have to work at it.
I don’t know if there’s a man I know with a stronger work ethic than my father. The guy is in his sixties, and is currently building their new house, with little help. If monetary compensation was equal to work ethic, we should’ve been fucking loaded, but I learned early on that life isn’t like that. I saw how asshole celebrities and people who played sports, greedy politicians and corporate douchebags, people who really didn’t seem to have to put in a gruelling 14 hours of work every day, or contribute anything worthwhile, made an obscene amount of money. I saw first hand why hard work is its own reward, because it’s the only damn reward. My dad still has to go work a job in order to pay their bills. I’m not sure if he can afford to retire, and I’m not sure if he’ll know what to do with himself if and when he retires.
Somewhere in my youth I made a decision, that I would not let myself get tricked into a life of working my ass off for nothing. For example, the job I do now, is the most money I’ve ever made, and the most, I don’t know, noteworthy, I guess, kind of position -in that I’m the number-one guy in the country for what I do- and I don’t have to work that hard at it. It’s time consuming, sure, at 40+ hours a week, and I deal with people who make me crazy, and I have to travel a lot to not very glamorous places, but as for actual, real, honest hard work, most days, it’s one of the easier jobs I’ve had. This only reinforces everything I learned from my childhood, and watching what my parents went through.
Now this doesn’t mean I blame my parents for everything that’s wrong with me, (I’m actually very pleased with the person I am, and I largely have my family to thank for that) but how I saw work and reward as a little kid, in my little monkey-sphere part of the world, definitely laid the slacker foundation for the things I now realize I would like to change about myself.
-But nothing fucked me up as bad as school. We’ll get to that tomorrow.

CR

I turn 32 in 53 days, and I’ve decided to do a blog entry every day between now and then. Mostly self-analysis shit, with the goal being that, by my birthday, I have a better understanding of who I am and where I want to take my life. This is something I feel I need to do, and I hope you guys don’t get bored form it, and maybe even get something out of it for yourself. Let’s begin.

I want to start with a couple of my favourite Jack Kerouac quotes, because they sum me up to a certain degree:

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”

and

“My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.”

You see, I have ideas. Oh sweet mercy fuck do I have ideas. So many, so often, and I want to see them all happen. To name a few:

-My webcomics, misplaced, and imaginary enemies.

-Two very different themed video blogs.

-A weekly video introduction on the front page of this site.

-About 3 dozen songs to record.

-About 10 different books to write.

-A dream house to build with my wife. (and some cool ideas surrounding all that)

-An animated feature film that only uses the Nine Inch Nails 2 disk epic “The Fragile”, played from start to finish, as its soundtrack.

-An incredibly awesome concept for a massively multiplayer online game that has (as far as I know) has never quite been done before.

And those are just the ones that currently occupy my mind. There will be more added next week, I’m sure.

While ideas are great, and creativity is what keeps our brains from becoming mere zombie-fodder, I think there is such a thing as idea-overload, and I suffer from it, and it becomes a huge hamper to my ability to follow through. It’s like, all of these ideas make a mad dash to escape my brain, and they all slam into the doorway like some Three Stooges bit, and they just repeat that routine endlessly, which results in nothing happening.

Or, like in the case of the two webcomics that finally managed to escape the bottle-neck, I get on a roll, and start having a lot of fun in the making of them, but then I become distracted by one or more other ideas that are still in the doorjamb brain-scrum, and somehow dwelling on those things cause me to lapse in the existing projects, the follow-through brakes get put on, and I give up on all my ideas, deciding it’s just easier to imagine how cool they would all be, then actually attempt to realize them.

With some ideas, it’s purely a logistics problem. I don’t know anyone in the video game industry, and I would be worried that if I told some random someone my idea, it would get taken and used and I would get neither credit nor compensation. (a scenario which I believe actually happened to my brother-in-law) So that idea will likely not see fruition. That doesn’t mean my brain can just throw away the idea, in fact, I continue to keep thinking and building on my impossible video game concept, I really can’t help it.

Of course, the other roadblock, or excuse (which, if I’m being honest, is probably what it really is) is my job.

What I do to earn the money that pays my mortgage is often stressful, mentally and sometimes physically taxing, and has me traveling for often days at a time, and by the time I get home, whether at the end of the day or end of the week, in one way or another I am simply exhausted, and by the time I have a chance to visit with my wife, play with the dog, and wind down from the day, it’s time to sleep and start it all over again. I’m not saying this to whine, it’s just the truth, and I bet there are a lot of people out there who can relate.

I am working on all of this however, as I think is evidenced by my recent relaunch of misplaced, and finally realizing Imaginary Enemies. It’s a start, but at the same time, it’s not nearly enough. Not nearly as much as I know I could be doing.

Tomorrow, I discuss my biggest obstacle. It’s bigger than my job, or the idea bottleneck. More of a stumbling block than money, time, connections, skill or talent.

-It’s me.

CR

Hey there, my blog-reading peoples!

It’s been a while, and I hope to rectify that with more frequent postings. I also hope to rectify my lack of commenting on all of your various internet homes. I have been reading, just, for some reason, not feeling very interactive for the past while. Can’t explain it.

Anyhow, I am very excited, because I have officially relaunched misplaced on its own domain:

http://www.getmisplaced.com

I know a few of you told me I should have done this a long time ago, but better late than never, right?

This time I’m going about it much more ‘professionally’, making the comic RSSable, Diggable, and all that stuff. You’ll see elements like that pop up over the next week or so.

Next week (I’m pretty sure of it) I will be officially putting my new comic endeavour out into the world. I can’t tell the name yet, because I still need to get the domain set up, but you’ll find out as soon as I do. I know I’ve been talking about it for ages, but it’s finally coming together in a way that I’m really happy with. If nothing else, there will be a teaser ‘coming soon’ image up, while I get a few comics ahead.

After they’re both up and running, I’m going to start working hard at promoting the comics, getting some eyeballs on them, hopefully build a decent fan base or something, who knows?

So that’s my big news. I hope all of you are doing well, and I will check in later in the week.

C.R.

My dad sends me quite a few forwarded emails (fewer since I introduced him to snopes.com) and most of them are groaner jokes or interesting conspiracy theories about oil, regular dad-forward type stuff.

He sent me this the other day, and I finally got around to reading it. If you have a chance, give it a read, and then at the end I have a little exercise for you to try.

(more…)

P.E.T.A. is just another terrorist organization, and they need to be stopped.

Aside from their completely absurd agenda, condescending superiority complex, and guerilla tactics, what’s not to like about these animal savers?

How about their latest ad campaign, which is exploiting the recent Canadian bus-beheading incident to further their insane causes?

I haven’t seen it, and I’m not going to link to it. It’s been on the news, and the wife found read me a synopsis. If you really want to check it out, I’m sure you can find it, but I’m not going to satisfy those fucks with so much as an href.

The gist of their fucked-up logic is something like, ‘The way that victim felt on the bus, his fear, is the same way an animal feels right before it’s slaughtered.’

First of all, what a weak fucking thread of a connection to make for your sorry-ass and insane propoganda.

Secondly, shame on you fucking people. Actually, shame isn’t even close to what you people deserve. Shit in your open wounds, you fucking people. If you lost a loved one in a tragic random act of madness and unthinkable horror, and some group of big-titted vacuous celebrities fronting a group of overzealous fuckholes decided to use your loved one’s murder to further their assault on the rest of the world, I’m guessing it wouldn’t do much to ease your grief and suffering.

Not that I wish any harm to anyone, but I can’t help but wonder, if one one of Pam Anderson’s kids died in a car accident, do you think she’d be okay with her beloved PETA turning it into some kind of Anti-Veal statement or something? “See the way his limbs were torn off when he went through the windshield? That’s just how chickens feel when the drumsticks and hot wings are removed.” Fuck you, you disrespectful cunt-whores.
Speaking of overzealous fuckholes, apparently, that baptist ministry that seems to think picketing funerals and other tragedies in order to blame ‘the gays’ for all of the bad things in the world instead of doing something more constructive with their time and money-like, I don’t know, feeding the homeless or committing mass suicide-are planning on bringing their holy bullshit to this kid’s funeral too. I don’t care if this beheaded young man and his family were puppy torturing inbreeding drug dealers who like country music, I would still have nothing but the utmost sympathy for them right now. As if losing a son wasn’t bad enough.
And third… what? What the fuck are you talking about, ‘This is how an animal feels when it’s slaughtered’?
I’m not saying I’m an expert on meat preparation, but I’m pretty sure they don’t put ipods on cows, and wait until they’re asleep at 1 in the morning before coming up from behind and jamming a hunting knife into the back of its neck. It just doesn’t seem like a very efficient technique, at least, not from a mass production standpoint.

I’ve seen fields of cows, I live in beef country, for fuck’s sake. those dosey bastards wouldn’t survive a decade as a species if we set them ‘free’. My retarded Sheltie could take down a half-dozen of those lumbering lunch-mobiles on his worst day, not to mention the buffet all of those liberated bovines would make for wolves and bears and cougars.

Let’s assign feelings to animals for a minute, because that’s how PETA wants you to think of them. I’m no animal empath, so I’m not sure one way or the other, but let’s just say they have feelings. Which is a life more enjoyable, one where you live in a peaceful, protected setting, with all the food you need, enough mating to keep you satisfied, all of the naps you could ever need, until one day, you’re led into a small pen and BAM, it’s all over.

or…

You live in the wild, where you may not see your first steps, because a natural predator may just raid your family and eat your soft little body, and assuming you get to adulthood, life is a constant struggle of scrounging for food, fighting off competition for procreation, and running your ass off when those same predators appear, hoping like fuck you aren’t the slowest one today, hopefully Jerry’s ankle is still sore from that rock slide the other day, oh no, Jerry’s outrunning you, and they’re getting closer, it feels like your heart’s about to explode, but just before it does, you feel the jaws sink into your ass, and you stumble just long enough for another one to get up beside you and latch onto your throat, bringing you down, and as you cry out in pain and fear, suddenly there are six of them on you, tearing and ripping you apart, and you feel every tendon and piece of meat being chewed and pulled off of you, your eye gets stabbed out by a vicious and misdirected fang, and then, maybe, you finally are allowed to die, and your family gets to come back the next week to find your bones starting to bleach in the sun.

My point is, Animals don’t treat animals or people ethically, so PETA’s entire acronym is ridiculous and senseless, their motives are dark, and their tactics are insidious and thoughtless. If you think otherwise, you’ve gotta do your research, these are not nice people, not by a long shot.
As people, we have to figure out how to treat each other ethically first, and that includes NOT exploiting the grief and loss of a family for our own gain. Once we get that figured out, then we can start worrying about the cows, okay?

Until then, I plan on having a medium rare steak tonight, happy knowing the cow was not killed in a brutal and frighteningly ‘natural’ way, but humanely for the nurishment and enjoyment of myself and many others, and then I’ll be sending my thoughts out to the family of that murder victim, hoping that they have the strength to move on past this tragedy, and all of the ensuing bullshit artists who’ve selfishly connected themselves to it.

-Fuck you, PETA. Here’s hoping someone dumps a bucket of fake heads on your organization’s doorstep.

C.R.

My wife and I used to watch Tech TV a lot when it first came to Canada, but it wasn’t long before G4 bought the network out, and slowly, most of the personalities we watched regularly (Martin Sargent, Leo Laporte, Kevin Rose, Patrick Norton, and others) were let go, or left the place. Leo managed to come back in a couple of iterations; Call for Help, and The Lab, both of which I followed pretty closely.

A few months ago, I went to the website for The Lab, to get one of the free files mentioned on the show, and discovered that the show had been canceled. In the ensuing enraged comments, someone mentioned that he had a podcast network thing called TWiT. I Checked it out, and now I can get my fix of the wisdome of Mr. Laporte, and his many cohorts and guests.

From the TWiT site, I stumbled on a mention of Kevin Rose, and learned that he had founded Digg, which I didn’t know, and that he was also a founder of an internet TV channel called Revision3, which features shows made by a lot of the former Tech TV people, and a few new ones.

Ever since these discoveries, I’ve been following both the TWiT casts and the Rev3 shows, and it’s been like the old days all over again.

About a month later, I start seeing ‘trailers’ on the Rev3 shows about a new show debuting on the network, called Wine Library TV, featuring this crazy, hyper, New Jersey guy named Gary Vaynerchuck. I’ve never had much interest in Wine, so I didn’t really think I would have anything to do with this new show, but I thought I would check out the first couple of episodes when they started airing on Rev3.

And now it’s one of my favourite things on the internet.

If you’ve never seen Gary’s show, this article does a better job of describing him than I could. Basically, he’s a knowledgable and passionate wine expert, as well as a ‘web 2.0′ networking and marketing madman, who is trying to bring the whole idea of wine back to the masses, and out of the hands of snobby, condescending wine douchebags.

After watching his show for a month or so, I got the wife into it as well, and we’ve started trying wine more often, and it’s becoming a hobby I’m starting to really get into. I once went to a microbrewery beer tasting event with a buddy, expecting just to get hammered, but we also learned about how to taste for the different flavours, and train our palates to appreciate the differences between ales. Of course, now that I’m a gluten-free-guy, that whole beer thing is pretty much out of the question, but now I can enjoy that same experience with wine, with a little help from a crazy dude in Jersey who constantly references 80’s pop-culture and old-school wrestling.

Last week, I saw that there was some big news coming from Wine Library TV. It turns out, Gary has reserved half of a huge cruise ship for his fans and friends, and is hosting what he calls ‘The Thunder Cruise’, a seven day sail through the Bahamas, with a bunch of amazing wine tasting events along the way. The wife and I have been thinking about going on a cruise for a while now, so when I heard about this, and saw what a good deal it was, I called the wife, and she said, ‘Let’s go!’

(A Sidenote: This is why I love my wife. First, she doesn’t find it too odd that I get practically obsessed over this guys videocast, and actually enjoys it herself, and then, I suggest we go on his cruise, and she barely has to think about it. She’s awesome.)

The cruise officially went on sale yesterday, and we booked our cabin, and the rest of the details like flights and all of that will be taken care of this week. It’s been almost seven years since my wife and I met, and we’ve never been on a serious vacation like this, so I am extremely pumped. The fact that it is hosted by and I will get to meet one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever seen is just a pile of icing on that cake.

So if you like wine, or need to get inspired about how to be a succesful internets person, I couldn’t recommend Gary’s websites highly enough. And if you’re not busy in April, and want to come cruising with us and try some amazing wines, I believe there are still cabins available, go check it out!

-CR