Nico’s

So here I am, hours before my departure back to Reno. I sit in the living room of the house I grew up in, while my parents take their almost holy siesta.

It’s been a very long two weeks vacation. I’ve eaten as if there was no tomorrow, and I have not excercised at all. The chubby comments will now come from the people who see me come back to Reno. Oh well.
The break has been quite nice, since I’m absolutely stress-free, and it sure was nice to spend time with my family. In case you haven’t gotten the point yet, I’ve had a great time here, despite not having done a whole lot if you see a vacation as an opportunity to go to fancy places and try new things.

When I get back home, I’ll be spending a lot of time with Dani, whom I’ve missed a lot. I’m very excited to see her. I also hear that there’s a blizzard going through the area as of right now, which will not only make my landing quite adventurous, but should give me plenty of snow to get ready for the Great Ski Race.
Also, after my landing in Reno, I will post another blog with my New Year’s Resolution, since it seems to be the cool thing to do in the blogosphere nowadays. I would post it now, but it has to do with Dani, and I don’t want to her to find out through here, you know?

Things down here are still going well. I´ve been eating a LOT of food, and everyone I meet gives me compliments on my chubby belly. I guess I`ll fall part of everyone who does a New Year`s resolution saying they`ll get in shape.

At any rate, I wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. We`re having a big dinner tonight, since it`s also my older brother`s birthday. We`ll be partying all night, and I hope that you`re having a nice one too.

I can’t believe I forgot to post the news! I’m going home for the holidays!

Home, just in case you didn’t pick up on it, is Mendoza. I haven’t been there in a couple of years, so it’ll be nice to be back home. I’ll be there from the 20th of December to the 3rd, so I’ll get to spend Christmas and New Years there.

One small detail: it’ll be summer! Oh yes, long days, warm nights, fun times. Although I don’t have too many plans other than hanging out with the family, I’m sure I’ll be enjoying being outside, checking out some wineries and the outdoors. There are quite a few things to do in Mendoza, and it’s always refreshing to go home and see things from an outsider’s point of view for the first couple of days.  Not to mention that now that I’m picking up my photography hobby, it’ll definitely be a cool subject to explore!

Let’s start from the beginning here. It was the day after Easter Sunday that my life started changing unexpectedly. Stef wanted a divorce.
I moved out, thinking it’d be temporary, and that we could talk through it and figure out what was going on. My friend Cory hosted me in his living room for 2 long weeks, after which I saw that the resolution of the looming threat of divorce was nowhere near.
I found a small apartment, near UNR, with a month-to-month rent. I was starting to accept the idea that maybe we weren’t going to get back together, and that I better figure out how to be on my own.

During this time, Stef and I went to see a marriage counselor, a pretty cool guy by the name of Richard Cook. Now, I had never been to a marriage counselor, psychiatrist or anything similar, but I must say that this guy is really good. The first thing that he told us after a short introduction was something along these lines: "I am here to tell you that your relationship is over."
At this point, my heart skipped a beat. He continued: "What I do, is help you start your new relationship, because it is obvious that your current one is not working. This is why you’re here." Relief came in, and this answer appealed highly to my logic side, so he had me hooked. The last part of his speech was "Now, this new relationship… it can mean that you’re married, or that you’re not. And that’s what we’ll figure out after a few sessions."
With that mindset in mind, the counseling was very healing and a great learning experience. Guilt was appeased with the understandingn of how the dynamics of our relationship changed, and I went from wondering why Stef didn’t want to be with me annymore to wondering why she was so sure that we couldn’t work on the issues that we obviously had.
I answered that question when chance led me to read about the Walkaway Wife Syndrome. I know, I know, it’s over-simplifying the issue, but it’s pretty damn close to what I felt was going on.
After many talks, tears and days, I gave up on trying to convince Stef to love me again, and decided to stop the wound from bleeding. I agreed to the divorce, we worked out the legalities of it, and I’ve been officially and legally divorced for a few months now.

Life has changed quite a bit because of all this. I work for myself, I can enjoy doing whatever I want to do, without having to worry about fitting into someone else’s schedule or their mood.* I also have total control of my money, and I am living very comfortably. I can afford a few nice things here and there, and that’s how I got the nice digital camera I posted about a few months ago, and also partly on how I got my new car.
I’ve re-discovered friendships, activities, places and feelings, and I’ve moved on from the sadness to reach a state of being happy again. I’m more than content on where I am and what I’m doing, and I no longer feel like I need to grief. I’ve moved on, and things are looking up.

I had been slacking off on posting because of all this. It’s a "juicy" story, and I felt shallow by posting about all sorts of things without really letting my beloved fans know about what’s been going on. So, now that this is out of the way, I will go back to the usual schedule of rambles, rants and random things.

It’s good to be back.

*Editorial: Well, sort of. There’s this one person I’ve been seeing, but that’s for the next batch of "big news". I gotta make sure I have something to make you come back!

The day after Christmas (that’s December 26th, just to be clear), early in the morning (that’s at 5am, to be clear too!) we left for Oklahoma.
We arrived at around noon, and even though the flight had been without complications, United Airlines had somehow managed to loose one of our suitcases. Admittedly, it might have had something to do with the snow storms that Denver had suffered, and how backed up everything was there. Fortunately, they were able to get the suitcase to us about 8 hours later, which was pretty good service!
We spent most of our time at Stef’s paternal grandparent’s house, in Noble. We also went and spent a night at her mom’s dad’s place in Purcell, and we even got to have lunch with Gary’s dad, in Norman.
The main thing that we did was visit and eat. It was nice
We came back on January 1st, arriving just a little bit before midnight. Luckily, no luggage was misplaced in this trip!

Yesterday (Tuesday January 2nd!), we both went back to work, and have been trying to resume our “normal” lives. I already have a few calls lines up from ComputerTechs, and I’m still working out at the gym consistently.
When I have a couple of hours, I’ll be working on a couple of projects for the website:
1) A plugin that will allow for translation to Spanish, and perhaps even other languages.
2) A long-due update to the picture album.
However, my computer has been acting kind of funky, so I’ll have to figure out what is going on in there before I can really do much with it.

We headed for Antioch, California (home of Wanda, Stef’s maternal grandmother) on Thursday morning. Never again are we traveling on Thanksgiving day, it was a pretty bad idea: We were doing 20mph for over one and a half hours, on I-80 after Sacramento. There was a lot of traffic, and it just sucked.
After we finally got there, we unloaded and had dinner, and nothing out of the ordinary, really.

On Friday, I woke up at around 6am, and I just knew that no one would be up until at least 9, so I went out to see what Black Friday was all about. I went into Best Buy and found out that hundreds of other people felt were doing the same thing, and a couple hundred others were buying stuff. The lines for check-out were horrendously long, so of course I didn’t buy anything. The few deals that interested me were not good enough to stand in line for an hour. I did get to play on the PS3 though! And also got some Guitar Hero action in
I also went by Circuit City, which wasn’t as bad as Best Buy, but was pretty busy anyways. I didn’t see anything worthy of being in line for a long time either, so I didn’t buy anything there.

Friday was also Gary’s birthday, and we went and saw Stranger than Fiction to celebrate. It was a good movie, but not something I would have picked.
Later that night we had crabs, for dinner. We had to crush the legs and all, it was messy but tasty.

On Saturday noon we decided to head back to Reno, and we planned our trip a bit better as to avoid traffic congestions. It also happened to be convenient that there was an Ethiopian restaurant in the way, so we had lunch there And the rest of the trip was pretty short and easy, specially since Stef was driving and I took a nap. I woke up blocks away from home.

Well, we got back from Napa safe and sober. I’ve put most of the pictures we took on a nice little album, here you go: http://www.alfaj0r.com/photos/Napa.

The trip was nice, it takes about 4 hours to get there, and it’s really easy to find. We stayed at the Wine Valley Lodge, and from there we went to all the places that we visited. About the lodge: don’t go there. It was pricey, and the shower SUCKED. There was very little pressure, and we only got hot water for about one hour.

Anyways… We arrived in Napa on Friday at around 3pm, and shortly afterwards we were riding our bikes to downtown. Once we got there, we locked our bikes and walked around downtown, which took about 30 minutes. Napa is really small! It sure is cute though, and there’s lots of nice little stores. In fact, most of the shops are local, and not big chains.
Later at night we returned to downtown to have pizza, and to go to the movies. We went and saw The Prestige, which was pretty good. It started off pretty slowly, and I was struggling to stay awake, but after about 30 minutes, I was hooked and the movie got very entertaining.

On Saturday we loaded our bikes in the car and drove to the bottom of the Silverado Trail. We pulled into the first winery that looked good enough, did a little tasting and we got on our bikes. We rode almost 3 miles going North, stopping in a few nice wineries (see the pictures!) until Stef got struck with a migraine. It was a big one, it seemed, so I left her at a winery, and rode to get our car. I picked her up, loaded the bikes, and we headed back to our room. She took some medicine, a nap, and 2 hours later she was good to go

After that we went to Rutherford Hill, because Meredith had recommended us the grill there, and in the way there we stopped at the Robert Mondavi winery. It was one of the nicest places we’d been to, and the wine was quite excellent too.
The Rutherford Grill was really nice, although a bit trendy (too trendy for us). We had some humongous burgers and a nice dinner in the patio as the evening settled.

On Sunday we checked out of the room and headed out to Sonoma. This was the prettiest part of the whole driving experience, lots of vineyards, rolling hills and trees with autumn colors.
We stopped in the town of Sonoma to stretch our legs, and then we were planning on driving up to the Petrified Forest in Calistoga, so we headed North once again. In the way there, Stef spotted the Blackstone winery, so in we went. This was probably one of the best winery visits, because it was such a small place and we were the only ones there, that it felt very private and personal. The wines we tasted were delicious also, and we even bought a bottle of wine of a varietal that is only available at the winery!
After a bit more of driving, we finally got to the biggest disappointment of the trip: the Calistoga Petrified Forest. We paid the entree fee and walked the trail. Let’s just say that it was very . Sure, it’s cool to see these trees that have turned into stone because of the volcano’s ashes, but everything is fenced off and it’s just like going for a little hike in the woods -except for that you have to pay.

We left the forest hungry, so we went to Calistoga in search of a place to eat. We were thinking Mexican the whole time, but as we walked the 4 blocks that is downtown, we ran into a sign that said Gnocchi, so in we went!
After a nice lunch, we set off to Domain Chandon. We knew that the tours start on the hour, and we had 30 minutes to get there. And we got there just in time, if not 3 minutes late.

Chandon was probably the best winery we visited, because it was the only one that actually gave a tour of its grounds and facilities. It was nothing too great, but the place is really beautiful, so that’s the best part of it.
We got to try some sparkling wines at the end, including the newest one, the Rosè. Yum!

After that, we got back into traveling mode, and 4 hours later we were back home Overall, it was a very nice 3-day weekend, very relaxing and quite memorable. I hope we’ll be doing more little trips like this more often!

This coming Friday is Nevada Day.To celebrate it, Stef and I are going to take a little road trip to Napa Valley, in California. If you don’t know what Napa Valley is, then let me just say that it’s basically wine country USA.
We will leave Reno on Friday morning and come back on Sunday afternoon. So far there are very few specifics, but we have already made reservations, and we will be bringing our bikes so we can ride around while we’re perhaps a bit inebriated. It should be fun, and of course pictures will be coming sometime next week.

Also, I’m testing this attachment thing. It’s for the longest and lamest Joke of all time. I hope you enjoy, it’s totally worth it.