Today is my first full day of living in Ithaca, New York for the first time. I have always loved Ithaca ever since Nate and I first came here on a church camping trip back around 1989. We had camped at a boy scout camp on the west side of Cayuga Lake with our youth group from Brick Presbyterian Church. We had gone into the city and got caught during a tornado up on the Cornell University campus and had to take shelter in the vet school until it passed and had gotten a tour from our youth group leaders who had both graduated from the school. I remember being in a small 1980s Dodge Omni driven by Earl Hobbs. Some kids opened the side windows and all kinds of debris just threw straight through the car. It was crazy.
I came to Ithaca several times from 1994 until 2000 without having lived here. Nathan Parker moved here in the fall of 1994 to attend school at Ithaca College. I was able to visit fairly often during those first few years because our school schedules were so drastically different. I had talked about moving to Ithaca for some time but hadn’t had a strategy to do so until this new project started and I no longer had to live in any particular location when not working on site at the client facility. So Ithaca it was and a momentous decision it was in many ways.
Today we tried to get the apartment into some sort of order although there was little to be done. In addition to all of my furniture I also had a giant Compaq Proliant 5000 quad Pentium server which took up all kinds of space and would move from apartment to apartment with me until many years later it was taken off of my hands by John Stephens (the Surfing IT Wizard.) It was the prize piece of my collection at the time though. In 2000, owning a real enterprise class Compaq Proliant was no small thing and it was quite an impressive line item on my youthful resume. Even though I had started my IT career in June, 1994 – six years before – and had been the Director of Information Services for Nicklin Associates now since June, 1999 I was still building up my resume and laying the groundwork for my career and every little bit helped.
Additionally I had several desktop machines that I kept as “learning” machines – mostly running Caldera OpenLinux or Windows NT 4. This list included by 1995 Digital Starion Pentium 75 computer that I bought to take with me to my second year at GMI (now Kettering University), a PentiumPro 200 Compaq DeskPro that we loving called “Oscar” and ran Windows NT 4 Server, three old Intel 486 machines (all Compaq DeskPros) that all ran Linux and a Gateway 2000 Intel 386 desktop that attempted to run Linux but did so very poorly. I also, of course, had my Compaq Presario Pentium II 350 128MB which was my primary desktop that ran Windows 98. I had received that computer and my main colour inkjet printer from Paul Binderman for whom I had done some consulting and he paid me by giving me the computer. It was a fair deal at the time. We were both very happy.
So there were many computers in the apartment and no Internet connection other than our AltaVista dial-up connection that was “free” dial-up Internet access that displayed ads to pay for itself. I had my two paprika coloured leather Natuzzi couches which by this time had already become a bit famous amongst all of our friends. Nate had the big “Emily” couch so named because it came from Emily’s house in Perry. We had my stereo which, at the time, consisted of a Rotel pre-amp and processor, two Marantz MA-500 monoblock amplifiers, an Adcom line controller and a pair of massive Paradigm Studio Reference 80 speakers. Nate also had his own stereo system which included a pair of B&W 250 mini-shelf speakers and an Adcom integrated amplifier. We both had laserdisc players as well. My laserdisc collection took up no small amount of space either with about 350 titles amassed by this time. (The collection was roughly at its peak here.)
Nate put his old television/VCR combo unit into his “master” bedroom and we put my Sony Trinitron into the living room. The apartment had a nice deck too that we stored some stuff on. We had NO space at all.
I remember very clearly how awful the shower was there. It had some sort of “high efficiency” shower head that totally atomized the water and created a very dry feeling mist that shot out at you when you attempted to shower. The mist had so much forced that it swirled as it came out but no actual water ever hit you. It was very annoying. I have never seen its like again.
The apartment, I also remember, was an absolute cleanliness disaster. Nate’s cousin Mandy had moved out from it some weeks or months before (his cousin Becky had lived there before Mandy did) but food that she had cooked (pasta) was still sitting on the rangetop and the fridge still had her old food in it. We ate what we could and over several weeks the place improved slightly.
The main pastime was watching the extensive laserdisc collection. Nate owned a few of his own but having my 350 titles there was a big deal. People came over all of the time to watch them.
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.