We all slept in a bit after the party last night. I have nothing going on today except for the drive from Greece to Ithaca. The truck was all packed and the apartment just needs its final round of cleaning before we turn over the keys and walk away from Rochester. Josh and Amber had already moved and were done with the place. Andy was heading back to his parents’ house, I believe, until he found another apartment. They aren’t very far away from Greece and just as close to where Andy was working in Brighton as we were up in Greece on Lake Ontario.
Andy was wrestling with his future plans all day I guess. As of this morning his plan was to keep working at the Wellesley in Brighton (right across from Monroe Community College) and to remain in Rochester. Nicklin Associates had offered him a position working on the Waste Watcher project that I was leaving to work on but he had decided that he wasn’t ready for it and didn’t want to move for such a risky project.
But as we were doing the final pack and inspection of the truck and were getting ready to start off down to Ithaca (Andy was driving my Buick down for me while I drove down in the rental truck) he decided that he had had enough of Rochester and wanted to set off on an adventure as well. So he quit his job. I can still remember him calling on the cell phone and getting Esther who was working at the time. She was not happy about having to deliver the message to his boss. We had been working at the same place but I had done my last day on Friday, if I remember correctly. And off we were to Ithaca!
It was dark when we arrived in Ithaca and drove up the east hill on route 13 to look for Nathan Parker’s apartment where we were going to be roommates for the next month. Nate and Bob Winans were there and helped us to unload the truck which was pretty full as I owned, even then, a significant amount of stuff. In fact, I had much more stuff going into Nate’s apartment than he had had there before. Luckily he had a two bedroom apartment but, once again, only one bath.
There was no space at all to deal with all of the furniture and computers that were pouring into the apartment. We ended up using as much furniture as we could in the living room and putting the rest into the dining room and just counting that space as lost to us. The second, smaller bedroom was used purely for storage and everything that could go in there did. I just slept in the dining room on the floor and Andy slept in the living room on one of the couches. For the first time in quite a while we had a place to actually set up my 32″ Sony Trinitron CRT television that I had bought when I first moved in to Greenleaf Meadows and had had no television of my own.
It was a very tiny amount of space for three people with so much stuff but we managed. We had no real plan of how this was going to work long term or if it could at all but at the moment it was purely temporary. Andy and I were only scheduled to be in Ithaca for exactly one month so we didn’t have to make it work for that long. Then Nate would have the apartment to himself with my stuff all crammed into it as that was going to be stored there until we had a better solution for it all.
The apartment was on the top floor of the Gaslight Apartments on Uptown Road in Lansing very near to the Triphammer Mall. The mall was just down at the end of the driveway which made a lot of things extremely convenient. It really wasn’t too bad of a location and the price wasn’t bad at all. Nate was teaching down at the middle school at the bottom of the hill so it was a really good location for him.
Today was the final day of packing the townhouse at Greenleaf Meadows in Greece where Josh, Amber, Andy and I have lived for more than a year. It was a two bedroom, one bath townhouse – not the end unit but next to the end. Josh and I had moved in in late 1998, I believe. At the time it was just two of us and there was plenty of space. It was a great apartment in its day. The two bedrooms and the bath were on the second floor. On the first floor was a tiny kitchen just as you entered from the front door and there was a very spacious living room where everything in the apartment happened. Out back was a small patio. There was a full basement as well with two rooms. One we used for storage and the other we set up as the “computer room” with several computers set up all of the time. The apartment was seriously wired for the time. No one had anything like it back then.
Andy and I were working together and I had lost my driver’s license (too many speeding tickets) and he was driving me to work a lot (Eric was driving me around the rest of the time) so after his roommates, snmnmnm, gave up their apartment on Cypress Street in Rochester he decided that he would move up with us to save on costs. It worked out well because we were able to share a room easily as we had plenty of space and we worked opposite overnight shifts at the same place.
A while after we had been living in the apartment Amber, who worked with Josh at the car dealership, moved in. So we had four of us in the two bedroom place. Had there been two baths it wouldn’t have been so cramped. Having grown up in a house with my own bathroom since I was little this was a bit much for me. It was here that I learned the importance of having more bathrooms that it seems like you would need.
Yesterday and today we were busily packing everything in the apartment. The apartment was empty tonight with the moving truck sitting in the parking lot with all of my worldly possessions on it. Tomorrow begins the adventure but tonight is the “empty apartment party”. Josh and Amber had decided to take a one bedroom apartment directly next door to the townhouse and had been moving in all week as there was some overlap in their leases. So they were already moved out and living over there in the new place. Andy had no particular plans of where he was going but he wasn’t going to keep the townhouse by himself and he hardly owned anything other than his clothes. He didn’t even have a car at this point since he had been driving me around in my white 1992 Buick Regal GS (with the moon roof option and red plush interior) for the past year. We had decided to save money and just share the car.
In the empty apartment with nothing but folding chairs we threw our farewell to Rochester party – or at least my farewell to Rochester party. We had a pretty good turn out although now I can’t remember who all was there. Andy, Josh, Amber, Eric, Amanda, Dana, myself and definitely several more people were there although everything is very fuzzy as I write this almost eight years later. I remember very clearly that Amanda and Dana were there (Amanda had come with Dana) because it was the night that Eric and Amanda first met (they were married some years ago now.)
The party went late into the night and almost everyone slept over crashing on the bare floors. It was a brisk night but not so cold that people weren’t out on the back patio smoking much of the night. I remember people going in and out the back door a lot back when people actually still smoked cigarettes.
One thing that I do remember was Andy and I sneaking over to Josh’s new bedroom window with a can of “spray on window ice” that makes windows look like winter and we made a smiley face on his bedroom window that remained for as long as he lived in that apartment.
Today is marked as one of those turning point days in my life. At about four in the morning John Nicklin called me from Hawaii (the time different is enough that he didn’t really think about what time it is here) to let me know that the medical center that we visited in December had liked our presentation and wanted to move forward with the Waste Watcher project. We are scheduled to begin the project on March 20 in Pittsburgh. That means that I am leaving Rochester and doing it soon. Probably long before March because there is a lot of prep work to be done.
Andy was sleeping on the couch and I ran down to give him the news and to discuss the project with him. He wasn’t nearly as impressed as I had hoped with the news but he was pretty groggy.
Later, after some sleep, we discussed the project during normal waking hours and Andy admitted that it sounded like a really cool project. We had talked about it some before but we didn’t think that it was very likely to actually move forward as an actual project so we hadn’t taken it too seriously.
Now architecture and technology discussions actually begin and some serious inklings as to the long term outlook of the system begin to take shape.
Another New Year’s Eve party that will live on in infamy. If you read what happened one year ago today, you know that last year I was hosting a New Year’s Eve party after getting the day off from work and then because the person who was covering that shift (cough, cough, Andy) wasn’t able to complete that shift due to all of his drinking, I had to leave my own New Year’s Eve party and go cover the shift losing my party night and not getting in a whole shift. So this year I ensured that things would be different.
One housing update since last year. At this point Andy and Amber had both moved in. Andy and I were sharing a bedroom because we both worked at the same hotel and worked opposite shifts so we never really overlapped and sharing the space saved a ton of money while really having no other impact on our lives. I didn’t have a driver’s license for a lot of the year, so being roommates helped with that, too. Amber had moved into Josh’s room and had been there, along with her cat, most of the year. The house had a lot of cats at this point.
Andy and I had started our consulting firm in February of this year and were working hard in our overnight management jobs so that we could fund our consulting startup out of pocket. We were doing whatever consulting work we could pick up. Nicklin Associates had snapped us up in June and at this point I was working as the Director of IT for Nicklin Associates by day, and managing a hotel at night temporarily till all of the company stuff was worked out. I’d be quitting the hotel in just a few weeks from now, but we didn’t know that yet. But just a few days ago I had gone to Pittsburgh with John Nicklin and pitched a huge project to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center network to totally revamp their management systems and build the first software as a service for the industry. It was a huge moment for me, pitching a massive multi-million dollar project to a huge hospital network out of nowhere just assuming that I could reinvent the industry with no company behind me, no support network. Just me and, presumably, Andy. Massive gamble and leap of faith. That was just days before this party! So I was riding high, it had been one whirlwind of a year… started my first successful company at twenty two, got my first executive job at twenty three, and gave a great design pitch for a ground breaking product all in the last ten months. And I had been working for Wegmans as their corporate guitarist as well! I was never sleeping this year, but it was all worth it.
They tried to schedule me to work the overnight this year, acting like I had gotten it off last year, if you can believe that! I was not happy. I reminded them that I busted butt to save their bacon last year and they decided to only make me worth the second shift, the one from three to eleven in the evening which would give me just enough time to make it home to my own party, that I would miss the first part of, to at least see the ball drop. A bit ridiculous given that I was the party host both years and got completely screwed the first year, attempted to get screwed the second.
So most of this morning was at the apartment getting ready for tonight’s party. Then early in the afternoon I went down to Brighton to go work for the day. Three until eleven is my shift today. It was a weird shift, weird enough that I remember that there were all this abnormal traffic going on years later (I am writing this update in 2020!) I know that a few younger people came through and ended up getting invited to go up to the apartment for the party. One girl, whose name escapes me, who was a college student at the creepy cult “college” in Lima was there and ended up actually going to the apartment for the party!
Andy came in to relieve me at eleven and I raced up to the apartment. I made good time and was there around eleven thirty. The party was well into full swing. Eric and Amanda were there, not yet together. Dana would likely have been there. Emily Farina was there. The girl from Lima was there. There were actually a fair number of people, but I can only remember with any certainty so many of them. Mark was probably there, as likely was Mary. It would have been weird for them not to have been there.
This is, I am pretty sure, the party at which Eric and Amanda met. They would hang out again at Andy and my moving out party two months later. But they met tonight. They would be married a few years later.
The television was on and we were watching for the countdown. Since everyone had been drinking, and I was way behind, they had a handle of Johnny Walker Red set up for me in the kitchen along with a “can” of Rohol. Now the Rohol itself warrants its own story…
https://i.imgur.com/ZMEYySx.jpg
I have no idea when it appeared or what the original source was. But at some point around 1996 or, more likely, 1997, Andy and my liquor collection acquired this thing that looked like a cheap can of motor oil called Rohol. The liqueur was a solid 70 proof which makes it similar to a lighter than average whiskey. Stronger than an aperitif, but not as strong as a standard whiskey which is normally 80 proof or higher. But really high for whatever it was.
https://i.imgur.com/JFK0SGE.jpg
It is completely possible that the source was the collection of the country line dancing bar that closed down in conjunction with the Days Inn in Henrietta. For the life of me I cannot remember its name back in the 1990s, but the structure is used for Nashville’s today (in 2020.) But it could have come from almost anywhere, but it had become this bit of a legend as this nasty, overly strong, herbal, thick, black liquid that no one but me could drink. It was a little like Jager, but way stronger. Too much alcohol and too much herbal flavour for most people.
https://i.imgur.com/W3BsFxd.jpg
It looked like, and we gave you the impression of being, motor oil. We all referred to it as “liquor in a can” and it was a running joke for years that this even existed, let alone was in our liquor cabinet and absolutely no one (except me) would venture to even try it.
https://i.imgur.com/Rbnqbwd.jpg
Tonight was the night to really drink it, though. I had very little time before the ball was to drop, so I started doing shops of Johnny Walker, followed by chasers of Rohol. An odd choice, of course, as a chaser is not normally nearly the same alcohol content as the thing being chased. It was more just alternating shots.
https://i.imgur.com/e5AurWp.jpg
I have no idea how much I had, but it was a lot. Most of a handle of Walker, and most of a “can” of Rohol, all before midnight. Probably in about 20-25 total minutes. It all went by really quickly.
I hung out with everyone between my shots, which didn’t leave very much time. I still remember standing in the kitchen, the light, the curtains, how it was all set up. I remember doing the shots. I remember walking out just in time to be in the living room and watch the ball drop signaling that it was midnight and the year, decade, century, and millennium and just rolled over. I remember that the pending Y2K end of the world didn’t happen.
I remember waiting just a few seconds and getting an odd feeling and knowing that I needed to get upstairs. I told everyone good night, I had worked all day, drank enough, and was done. I went to the stairs and started walking up.
At the bottom of the stairs I was one hundred percent stone cold sober. Totally with it, no buzz, no nothing except for a rumbling stomach. By the top of the stairs I was lucky to be able to keep walking. Each step up the stairs I felt the warm, fuzzy rise as the alcohol hit my blood stream. I have no details now, but I am guessing that I had little or possibly zero food in my system with all of that alcohol. It didn’t exactly hit me fast, just all of a sudden. Like a brick wall.
At the top of the stairs I knew that it was all over. The world was starting to spin and I started to lose sight. I had never been really drunk before. Barely ever been buzzed before. My tolerance levels were (and still are) so high that getting drunk is rare and somewhat hard. But being so tired, having no food, and putting away so much strong liquor so fast sure did the trick.
I went straight for the bathroom. It was a straight shot up the stairs, then a ninety degree turn to the right and the bathroom was right there, just across the hallway. My bedroom was on the left and Josh’s on the right. His had the slightly larger room with the view out the front into the parking lot (not as scenic, but I think that it was nicer) and mine was slightly smaller, with the private view out into the woods. I stepped across the hall and barely got my feet to the bathroom door and I felt myself black out. I went down collapsing into the bathroom.
I wasn’t blacked out for too long. Of course I have really no idea, time was irrelevant. But I know that I got myself to the shower at some point and turned on the cold water and knelt by the side of the tub with the cold water on my head to help me cool down and not feel so sick. I’m completely certain that I was sick, but I don’t actually remember that. I know that Eric checked on my and got my shirt off so that I didn’t get all soaked. And the majority of my memories for the night involve laying on the bathroom floor unable to move. I know at some point people were stepping over me to use the bathroom.
One weird story from tonight is the Lima girl, that we never saw again, lost her shoes in the woods because she was drunk and outside in the woods peeing in the darkness. That was pretty weird.
I think that at some point I recovered enough to come hang out with the party, but that seems unlikely given the state that I was in. But I was only 23 at this point, so my ability to recover quickly was pretty good still. Most of the people from the party spent the night, so there was a lot of hanging out the next morning, especially after Andy got there around eight.
This was an important party for many reasons, not the least of which being my first drunk experience. This was 1999 so the first big party that we threw after Andy and I had founded Renaissance-West, the company that would eventually become NTG, and the first since I had gotten an executive job. This was the last party with Josh and I being roommates (except for our moving out party.) We had no idea at the time, well we had a little idea, but this was the beginning of the end of the era. Sort of our unofficial wrap up to our wild twenties. Sure, we were only just starting our twenties, but Andy and I were moving on to business and professional lives and leaving this life behind very quickly. There is a wild and crazy attitude that you get when you are that age and I certainly had felt it over the last five years. And this is really where it ended. The wild, crazy, irresponsible age of post high school, pre-career life for me was over. My window had been short. And really, I had barely gotten it at all having mixed in a lot of management and professional work in all sorts of different forms in the middle of it. But now it was just… over.
One wild night, this is a day that I will never forget. Not because it was New Year’s, or the calendar changed, but because it was just an epic moment in all of our lives. So many pivotal things swirling around this date. So many things had been happening just before it, and so many things will happen over the next three months.
Tonight should be a big party for me, I’ve always been the party host for New Year’s Eve going back to around 1990. It’s just kind of been my thing. For a long time it was Art and my thing to host New Year’s Eve together. We often did it at his house around 1990 and 1991. This year Josh and I have this great apartment in Greece, New York at Greenleaf Meadows and we are throwing a nice party because we actually have a townhouse to host it in. None of our friends have a “real” place like this so it is a pretty big deal. Andy lives at the house on Cypress St. in Rochester but hangs out all of the time.
I’m writing this update on New Year’s 2020 so a very, very long time later, twenty one years later, in fact. So my memory of the day is pretty lean. But it does stand out.
At this time I was the overnight auditor and manager for the Wellesley Inn (Prime Hospitality) in Brighton, New York on the south side of Rochester. I had been there since leaving the Days Inn, which had been just an awful experience, which I went to after my terrible experience at Tops Markets in Avon, which was after Burger King, which was after Pizza Hut. I had a fast run of weird jobs during this time, but the Wellesley I stayed with for a while as it was a really nice place to work.
Tonight was my night off, I had gotten it off in advance so that we could plan the party at the house. Andy was scheduled to work tonight as I had seniority having moved from the Days Inn to the Wellesley a little while before he did. So Josh and I planned a party at our “new” bachelor pad. This would be our first New Year’s here, I am pretty sure.
My night got ruined, though, because while I got to host the start of the party, Andy ended up getting drunk at work and sent home and they called me in to take over managing the hotel for the night. So I had to leave my own party to go to work, and Andy got to go to my place to go to the party! And I didn’t even get paid for a whole shift. I spent money on the party at my house, did all the work, and didn’t get to enjoy it, and then when I had to work got a short shift because it wasn’t really my shift. It just sucked all the way around. So I told them that in no uncertain terms I was not working the overnight next year.
So a pretty crappy New Year’s Eve night.
One thing that is amazing to think about is that this party was just under two months before Andy and I would form our first company, Renaissance-West Consulting which would eventually be renamed (among other things) NTG and would last for a very long time (still going decades later as I wrote this.) In addition to working at the hotel at night, I was studying like crazy to get my IT certifications like the MCSE, and doing any consulting that I could pick up during the day, and was playing classical guitar on salary for Wegmans as their corporate guitarist which I had been doing for a while at this point and it was going great. I was at a really weird point in my life where my post-high school “floundering” was just weeks away from ending and I was just about to have the kick off to some of the most interesting adventures in my life begin.