vacation

Alright. I gotta make this quick. I only have 24 hours (down to 14 hrs) left now in Michigan.

This past week I was with the fam in Ocean City, NJ. Almost every summer for the past 50+ years my dad and my aunt have gone there for vacation. My grandpa would taken them to visit their aunt & uncle who owned a house across the street from the beach and boardwalk.

So to keep family tradition alive the two families would meet up year...




after year...



after year...




To be honest I'd prefer a little warmer weather (and warmer ocean water, for that matter) but there's something to be said about tradition. When I was a freshman, maybe a sophomore in High School, I don't think I realized what tradition meant. I mean I knew the word and its definition, but to me it all felt like we just did the same thing over and over again. And although I'd welcome some new traditions, there are some that will just always be and for good reason.

Tomorrow (Saturday) I'll be headed out to Binghamton, NY with the Youth Group for Worktrip. So I'm taking today (Friday) to pack up, throw up a new blog post and celebrate the 4th as it was intended - "Pops Go the 4th" on PBS HD with a cheese burger.

So what are you up to this summer? Any plans? Well, whatever ya got planned I hope it's relaxing (to some degree). I hope to post again in a week or so with a (hopefully positive) Worktrip update.

Have a Great 4th!

Pics

So by popular demand ... OK, maybe just by demand ... I wanted to post some pics from the rafting trip. I was holding out cause I was hoping that I'd get a couple more pics of, you know, rafting 'n stuff. But just in case I need to prove to you all that I do get off my xbox, get outside raft and climb stuff, here's some pics.

This is me trying to look cool wearing a gigantic lifejacket, a crevice-invading wetsuit and a plastic hat:



And by the 2nd rapid we were pretty comfortable.



OK, so maybe I lied a little bit on that last picture.

So the next morning go up and walked for about a mile and a half through some wooded area not knowing where we were really going or what we were expecting to see, then suddenly the trees opened up and we found ourselves here:








So I'm not really the most photogenic person after rafting 13 miles, then hiking for 2 miles. But this is the best I could do. Oh, and in the background is the Lower New River where we rafted.

Excellent trip.

So I just finished helping someone out here at work. His response?
"You're smart. You surprised me."

I'll put that in the Compliment section ... I think.

update

May 20th? Seriously? I haven't updated this since then? Wow. My apologies "Buffers". The rafting trip went well. As many of you all know I'm not exactly a thrill seeker but it was definitely one of those things that I wanted to try just to see what my "level" was. Could I do it? The answer: kinda. We went through several Level 4 rapids but when we got to a Level 5 we got a little too close to one of the rocks and our raft went up on edge spilling out the side of the raft that I was on. As a side note: You body seems to not care how cold water is when your own concern is not getting your legs crushed. But all in all it was a great trip! I was a little upset that I only got one quarter-sized bruise. I wanted something bigger to show off that I flirted with deathly sharp rocks.

After rafting 13 miles on the Lower New River, we got up the next morning and decided to go on a 3 mile hike up one of the West Virgina hills (yay exercise!). That excursion was a little more than I was ready for at 9AM, but the view from the top was amazing. It's been awhile since I'd done something like that. I'll post some pics once I get back to the condo.

And life is getting better. Work is still a little rough, but everyone here is in the same boat or at least they understand the craziness the rest of us are going though. According to my co-workers the project that I did for Lockheed Martin was well accepted (score points for JB). So things are getting better.

stock

I wish I had the option to by stock in days from my life. You know, if you get a sense like tomorrow is gonna head in one direction or another, you might buy or sell a few shares.

I would have sold most of my shares last night. I had a good feeling at that point that today would be rough. But little things added up and made bigger things. Works has been rough the past two weeks. This coming after I told my manager that I wanted to take on more responsibility, so I'll take some blame for being given extra workload. The only problem is now I'm re-correcting other people's mistakes before they become my problem (I'm just trying to make a long story short, and not bore you all) but this is not what I signed up to do.

But it's been the little things today. From finding out that the yogurt I was ready to eat this morning for breakfast is a month is past its expiration date (what does yogurt turn into after it expires anyway?) to not being able to leave work until 8:30 tonight (again, making up for other people's mistakes). It's more than work related stuff too. Lately I've just been evaluating my direction in relationships: both with God and with other people, and also where to go next in my career. I guess I'm just not used to such a concentrated amount of issues. I'm absolutely sure my burdens are nothing compared to soooo many other people. But you become used to your own environment and way of living that the slightest news or event throws you off your axis for a moment. It takes a fews days to get back your momentum and begin spinning again.



Sorry to make this post a "downer". I guess I'm just using this as way of dealing with it - write it out. I promise to bring it back up next time.

Relatively things are ok. I'm heading down to West Virgina with some friends this weekend to go camping and white water rafting.

Maybe I'll purchase some shares on Friday night and come out on top.

Progression

So why is it that in 2008, whenever we see people on TV playing video games, it still sounds like they're playing E.T. on an Atari 2600?



Is this how the general viewing public still perceives video games? Nothing like that awesome new Xbox 360 game on an HDTV represented by blips and boops...but it's got sweeeet graphics!

Network TV show producers, I think we're all smart enough to know that if two kids are holding Playstation controllers, it's because they're playing video games. You don't need to make it sounds like they're programming a microwave.

Respect

Wow. So delinquency has definitely set in here on "the Buffness". I'd love to chalk it up to the awesome weather but that's not the case (although I have noticed that other bloggers have fewer posts than usual).

Anyway, I had a great time this past weekend in Ohio. Over the weekend I got to see a lot of family that I typically only see about twice a year. Here's just a dew of us at our place (Blogger really messes with pics - click on it for a better image).



I've always been close to my family and this past weekend helped me to remember why. My family has a tradition of going to my Aunt's on the 4th Sunday of the month. On a typical Sunday there would be about 10 to 15 of us there and my Mom, Dad and I would be the three youngest ones. Although throughout Elementary and Middle School I would complain about it ad nauseam that there wasn't anyone there that was my age, I would still get into some good conversations with my Great Aunts & Uncles at least once a month with discussions varying from "How tall are you now?" to "I don't understand this new music in church. Why do we have to sing the same words over and over?". I don't know why it took me so long to realize it, but this weekend I realized that the time I spend with the older generation of my family teaches me respect. It teaches me that no matter how much I've experienced life, no matter how much I think that I know everything, there's someone who has already gone through that phase and has learned from it. I think there's also a lesson on humbleness in there too. Our generation may have the power and the familiarity of technology, but there's something to experience. And you have to respect and honor that.

After reading the words above, I know that I'm hardly doing justice to my family. I can't wrap it up in a single blog entry. It's tough. But it was something that was on my mind while driving back to Michigan last night. Just thought I'd write it out and share.

Hanging it up

Not gonna lie. Today while I was cleaning, it felt good to put the winter coat back in the far corner of the closet. I might open the windows while I'm at it too.

¿Dónde está el cuarto de baño de la Biblioteca¿

Qué un gran día. Yo siempre he admirado a esas personas, típicamente los que trabajan en la televisión, la radio o en el internet que abraza el primer de abril. Así que este año que pensó que comenzaría a contribuir en mi propia manera impar a estas seudos vacaciones. Doy mis disculpas a los que saben realmente español porque estoy seguro que yo lo destruyo. y ahora por añadidura, yo le doy: El perro en un Sombrero



Cuando termino este poste que querría pasar por a usted alguna música inspiradora. La música que ha resistido a la prueba de tiempo, o quizá acaba de ha resistido a los pasados dieciséis años. Espero que este video inspire como a usted como estuvo a mí.

It's the hap-happiest season of all

Let's play "Guess When"! OK, now guess the when I took these pictures outside my front door:



Is it
a) The day I left to go to Ohio for Christmas
b) Right before the first big snow storm
c) A freakin' week after the start of spring

If you guessed "A freakin' week after the start of spring" you're correct! I try not to complain about this too much. I'm sure that there are other people who got more. The only problem is just that it never seems to stop. Maybe the start of baseball will make it end ...

Bracket

I love this time of year. No, not the start of spring - the NCAA Tourney! The sports fan that I am just loves to engulf myself in basketball to almost an overdose level. At what other time during the year would I care about a game between Stanford and Cornell (also known as the "GPA shootout")? What other reason would I have for watching CBS 4 hours straight?

How's your bracket? I've got my multiple brackets filled out and ready to go. But what seems to happen every year is that I play it safe and one of my choosen teams that I have going to the Championship game in a few weeks ends up loosing in the 2nd round a few days from now. As a result, the rounds to be played in the coming weeks on are wrong calls for me and I go down in the bracket ranks.

I guess there's a life lesson here. How many times have I told myself what will happen in the future? "I'm going to find a job here" "I'm going to meet this person" "I'm going to have my schedule empty so that I can do this or that". When in actuallity what happens is that a more recient event plays out, one of those distant plans ends up taking a different turn early on and a whole new path is laid. Don't get me wrong. This isn't a bad thing. But many times I psych myself up for the Championship when I need to instead focus on the 2nd round game.

So here's to enjoying sports as entertainment and treating life with respect. By the way, I've got UCLA winning it all.

Comedians

Hope you all had a great weekend. Friday night I went to one of the local churches here for Comedy For A Cause, a benefit that helped to raise interest and funding for an area home for abused and neglected children. About 5 minutes before the show started they announced that they had to open up some overflow rooms because the 2500 seat church could hold the crowd. The 3 hour show(!) featured 2 clean comedians. The opening act, as usual, was decent. But Tim Hawkins, the headliner, was great. I really like a comedian who can be funny and raise a valid point at the same time, without being overly offensive (e.g. Seinfeld). I encourage any of you who love stand-up to check him out the next time he's in your area (Tim Hawkins, that is...not Seinfeld. But if you can get tickets to Seinfeld by all means do that too [tangent anyone?]). If there is such a thing as edgy clean/Christian comedy, Hawkins be one of the best. Check out the clip below. Enjoy!

I'll take one with extra stupidity

Looking for a way to impress those potential clients at your next sales meeting? Nothing says "Professional" and "Classy" better than taking your laptop to the meeting in a pizza box.

But before you judge. Keep in mind that it's made using "genuine italian-style pizza boxes for maximum authenticity". That's pretty authentic people!
Still interested? You can get one here. But will it be delivered in 30 minutes or less?

plastic ninja

My Living Room is a mess right now. To some that have been at my place before – that may surprise you. But it looks like I’m having a walk-through Garage Sale at my condo right now, but that is not the case. Having my first place, Mom and Dad are recognizing this fact and whenever I’m home in Ohio they’re constantly trying to get me to go through old boxes in our basement. These boxes are pretty much a gigantic collection of stuff that I’ve acquired from birth to High School. Now that I have the space, it’s now my responsibility to take the contents of said boxes back to my own place and store them somewhere. Well, needless to say – they’re beginning to pile up. So much so that it’s tough for anyone to hang clothes if they come and visit since the boxes are overtaking the 2nd bedroom’s closet space. So that has been this week’s project: go through all this stuff! If a Jonathan Botkin museum were to ever open, this would be the stuff that would be left in the warehouse and never shown to the public for the simple fact that it means nothing to anyone else except Jonathan Botkin.

Among one of the boxes was a smaller box. I remember going through this box after I graduated from High School and I remember purposely putting things inside of this smaller box because they meant something to me. The contents: a denim dew rag, a plastic set of joke glasses with a nose and mustache, a half used bottle of cologne, and many other quality items. Another item that the box contained was a 1” orange plastic ninja. This is the one thing that surprised me the most. Why the crap would I keep this? It just seemed like the most irrelevant thing in the whole box. But as I thought about it, I realized that it was kept for a reason because I don’t consider myself a packrat, but rather a nostalgic person. So for some reason High-School-Graduate-Jonathan though it necessary to keep small plastic ninja guy because it reminded him of something. And whatever that was, it was import to me at the time and I needed to be reminded of "that". Whether I got it on some High School band trip, a meaningful Youth Group retreat or it was because it was given to me by someone that I wanted to remember for being funny/stupid/crazy. Whatever the reason, back then I need that memento to bridge High School familiarity into the unknown environment of College. I guess it’s just interesting how on rare (albeit important) occasions, God places items into our lives for a split second and really, that’s all that was necessary. Whether that item was a person who helped us through a rough time, or an event that taught us a lesson - the purpose was served and the bridge was crossed.

Snow

Seriously? More snow? I think it's about time that we ask Al Gore to give back that Nobel Peace Prize. I mean, the weather's been so ice cold that even Hillary's personality is getting jealous.

And Congrads for withstanding my blog hiatus. I hope I'll have some more updates soon. Make it a good weekend.

Is This Anything?

So I don't know what this means. I just think it's interesting. While I was taking a break today @ work, I went on cnn.com. For their main article I saw an image along with a link pointing me to an article talking about how the Republicans were doing down the final stretch before Super Tuesday.

Here's the image (I'll link to it to avoid any copyright issues)

About 20 minutes later I go back to cnn.com and it's the exact same article, but with a little change to the image.

Maybe I just analyze things too closely, but it's just interesting that someone at CNN decided to throw up a picture of some pissed of Republican candidates. I don't really consider myself a hard-core Republican by any means. But I do appreciate consistency. It just seems like whenever we see a Democratic candidate, it looks like they just stepped off of a red carpet. But when we see a Republican candidate, it looks like they just ate some bad grapefruit. Is this anything? What do you guys make of it?

Alright. So I need some accountability. I picked up Guitar Hero last week. My two cousins have it and I made the mistake of playing it when I was home from Christmas their place. It's an addicting game. I just want to make sure that I don’t turn into this kid.

Now there’s the whole debate over spending time learning Guitar Hero vs learning to play an actual guitar. The way I see it, it’s no different than any other game. If it’s ok to stay inside and play Madden on your Xbox, why aren’t people up in arms claiming that those gamers should be outside actually playing football? Why are these people staying inside playing Halo when they could be running around shooting people in the face? My point? Just like everything else – it’s just a game people. Although I do totally agree to the fact that we spend too much time inside. But just like everything else, moderation is key. What’s interesting though is that after playing Guitar Hero for a week, I went to rehearsal for our Brass Ensemble at church and I saw a surprising improvement in how much easier it was to handle more complicated/faster runs on the trumpet. I think I have an idea!


Upon hearing that I got Guitar Hero, a friend at work ran across this picture. Maybe this is some kind of long-lost Heavy Metal twin.

Rock on twin Jonathan. Rock on.

The Message & a massage

So why is it that at church the one couple who give each other mini back massages during the entire service insist on sitting in one of the first 3 three pews for everyone to see? Just wondering. I mean, don't get me wrong - it's awesome that they're there for worship. I just had an inclination this morning to get some hot stones and setup a masseuse table by the alter rail, maybe have the praise band play a little Yanni or Enya (their pick). And how stressed is this couple that they need to rub each other's back for an hour and a half? I'm all for relaxation, especially when it might include a massage, it's just a little distracting during the *entire* worship, that's all I'm saying. Maybe this little pet peeve is just the singleness in me coming out :)

I was starting to get a little worried that there weren't any comments (not that I'm egotistical or anything). But then I notice that I turned on comment moderation. Oops.

Hope you had a great weekend!

My Weekend

It’s weird. There are some weekends when I seem to really get nothing accomplished after all is said and done. These are the weekends where I wake up on Saturday and attempt to find something that needs fixed, cleaned, scrubbed, washed .. something. Just so I don’t go to bed, lie there and think to myself that nothing was accomplished. On the other hand, there are weekends like this past one where the day flies by and I lie in bed at night and wonder if I even ate lunch.

Mom and Dad came up, which is always nice. I get along with all of my family, so I never think of it as a hassle or burden or anything. Dish Network came out and hooked up an HD DVR which rules the world with truth and grace...oh wait. No, that’s God. But it still rules regardless. So now I can finally watch 17 straight hours of Law & Order in HD if I so choose – but I’d rather not. I think after the 4th straight hour I’d get sick of that "blunk blunk" sound when they transition between scenes. I seriously think that I need that sound though in real life:

I go out to my car after work, sit down and hear "blunk blunk". Then somewhere a black title card with white letters appears:


         Jonathan’s Car
Monday, January 21, 2008


But wow...I digress. Saturday night the company I work for had their annual party. Or as they called it the "Holiday Celebration Dinner". As to exactly which holiday we were celebrating on January 19, I'm not sure. I guess they were trying to give more respect to MLK Day than in previous years. It couldn’t have been Christmas – that was a month ago. For the past 3 years I’ve played in the company band which is always fun. Hopefully I can post some pics. There’s usually a youtube video that surfaces too. Nothing like rockin the trumpet with a little guitar behind you.

I have some other stuff, but I’ll save it for a later post. Hope you weekend went well.

My Hobby

Sometimes when you do ice breakers, the question comes up "If you didn't have to work, what would you do with your time?" For me I really love to do video editing. As geeky as it sounds, I've enjoyed getting out some old Botkin family VHS tapes and putting them on DVD for family members to enjoy. I really think it helps to rediscover events from the past that might have been forgotten. Since many of us don't have that flashing 12:00 VCR player hooked up any more (I made sure ours never flashed 12:00 - it drove me nuts) it really helps to rediscover these old tapes in a new way on DVD.

Until recently, I've simply just converted VHS to DVD. But about a year or so ago, I put together a video for our annual vacation that celebrated our family's 50th year on vacation to Ocean City, New Jersey (as kids my dad and my aunt would go there to visit their aunt & uncle on the East coast shore). Dad and I dug into the old photo albums and I got together over 150 pictures for the video.

Well, since I got a new camera for Christmas, I thought I'd take the next step and use some new equipment and software. I was inspired this past week and as a result I've put a new (albeit short) video together. Sorry about the quality. I'm still trying to figure out some good settings for this. Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think. Comments are always welcome.

I hope your family had a Merry Christmas. Enjoy!

"Go Go Involuntary Reaction"

So I've found out that I have a Pavlovian response to Fire Engine sirens. Whenever I hear one, I get the sudden urge to sing the Inspector Gadget theme song.

Just thought you should know.

Well. Here we go...

After being home Ohio for Christmas, I’ve come to the realization that my personal connections are becoming more wide-spread. I have family members who I’ve known for 27 years, friends who I’ve known literally since birth (a debate on “knowing” someone since birth could follow). Then in addition to that I have new connections that I’ve made up here in Michigan over the past 5 years – and many of them are now spread out over the state. I say all of this to give some justification on starting a blog. Welcome to my head. Call it trendy, call it entertainment, call it a necessity, call it whatever ya want. In many ways I’m just curious to see what comes out as I’m hoping many of you do too. A “Digital Epiphany” if you will.

A lot of times I feel like I never know what to say on a serious side (which is why I’m more prone to camp in a social corner and snipe quick remarks) So maybe this blog will give me a platform to be serious – although I highly doubt I’ll keep up with an “all serious” blog with a name like “Unnecessary Buffness”. And in all honestly, I hope that future posts have a less serious tone to them. But with this being my first entry, I fell like a serious tenor is justified.

Now for the disclaimer, printed in regular-sized, normal font, not found on the back of the box or quickly said after the “Common Symptoms” part of a commercial (seriously, who talks that fast…again, maybe more on that in the future). Oh yeah – disclaimer…I am not an English major. The End. No, really. I’d like to think of myself as having a technical mind and therefore composing my thoughts in any other way is kinda difficult. So I apologize in advance for the most comenest mispelings and grammar usages.

So there ya have it. My first blog entry. Write it down. Link to it – enjoy! Hope to have a real entry soon. I'm thinking tomorrow - depending on how "serious" I feel.