Home

It's good to be home! Being away, especially in Taiwan, is not that hard for me since I really enjoy traveling and have a wonderful girlfriend in Taiwan. However, being away means being away from home and my family- which IS hard for me. So it's good to be home and to have my daughter with me again. I got in to San Diego around 1:00PM on Wednesday and jumped into life again- headed out and ran errands, including grocery shopping, and then picked my daughter up from school. After not seeing her for two weeks, it was awesome to have her come running off the playground screaming "DADDY, DADDY, DADDY!" Through my totally foggy, jetlagged haze, I was grinning from ear to ear. I forced myself to stay awake and got 3 loads of laundry done, hoping to reset my internal clock a bit, but I had a very hard time getting up yesterday. I spent the day at the office trying to get a little caught up and slightly out from behind the pile of papers and projects that built up while gone. Mostly I just fought to stay awake without my head crashing onto the keyboard... and mostly was successful.

Today, I am taking the day off so I can get back to my life here. I need to clean my apartment, open the mail, finish paying bills and hopefully go for a short ride to get back in the swing of things. While gone, I put back on 6 of the pounds I'd lost before leaving. I'm now back up to 210, but I'm confident it'll drop back off pretty quickly once I get back to riding and eating better. The best thing about taking the day off is that I get to go to a "play" at my daughter's school- this will be the first one I have been to in probably two years. Sad fact... but I'm looking to reverse that trend. I sometimes miss out on the small beauties of parenthood because of my work schedule, the travel and the fact that I am too much of a workaholic. Fortunately, my daughter doesn't yet see that I miss too many of these school functions... and I hope to stop missing too many of them. So today is largely dedicated to her and that makes me happy.

You can see many of the pictures I took while in Taiwan on my Facebook page in my Mobile Uploads and Taipei 2009 galleries. I have a bunch more photos to load to Facebook too, so the Taipei 2009 gallery is going to keep growing. The show itself was a great success and the following two days of factory and vendor visits were also very productive. I love the trips to Taiwan because it always feels like so much gets accomplished while there, as well as the time I get to spend with my girlfriend.

Last night, in another jetlagged haze, I recorded the 10th episode of the Masiguy Podcast... finally. It's another one of my trademarked ramblings. One of these days I'll get better organized and actually have a plan or script to follow when I record one of these things. For those of you who have been trying to download the podcast from iTunes, it IS actually on there now. I have no idea why it took so long to get it worked out, but you can now download my rambling nonsense onto your iPod and take me with you... frightening, I know. This most recent "show" is about 33 minutes long, so the suffering is relatively brief.

Unlike me, I forgot another little recent hallmark; March 4th was the 4th anniversary of this blog. It's been an amazing journey over the past 4 years, to say the least. So much of my life has been lived out on this blog and my life has changed because of it- good and bad. The best thing about the blog has been the community of people I have grown to know and love. Sincerely- it is a blessing in my life to have the friends that I do and to have met so many fantastic people via this blog and the other Social Media outlets that have become a part of my life since beginning this project 4 years ago. I can not thank you enough for being a part of my life and for being interested in the things I have published here. My life has benefitted from this experience and I hope to continue posting and sharing for at least another 4 years!

Alright, it's time to get going on chores so that I can have a little time to ride today as well.

Thank you and I'll be back soon.

Tim