Living a Dream

In December, Jenna was between jobs so we decided to go to Costa Rica. Not surprisingly, this was awesome. We got photos of howler monkeys mid-howl, capuchin monkeys trying to get into my backpack, sloths that were awake, and frogs galore. We also saw a few of these guys. First of all, they're giant. This guy was probably six feet long, nose to tail, and I would guess it was a solid 30 pounds (weirdly I was not able to leap out of the boat, swim to shore, climb the tree stump, and hold it to confirm its weight). Second of all, we saw several and noticed that some had back stripes on their tails while others didn't. We learned that this is essentially a sign of age. Young ones are green, older ones start to turn colors. It's not unlike getting colored spots on your skin as you get older...except those are basically just your skin dying. Anyway, going to Costa Rica was awesome and we saw all kinds of cool wildlife which I will talk at-length about in later posts. ...

As the 2016-2017 Cleveland Cavaliers come down the stretch with one of the deepest teams in NBA history (RIP Andrew Bogut), it's fun to look back at how things used to be. We all know that LeBron James is one of the best players the league has ever seen. We also know that he couldn't get over the hump in Cleveland without any stud teammates. He won titles in Miami with a couple of monsters, dragged the Cavs to back-to-back Finals appearances, and won one for his hometown against the best team to ever play (regular season) basketball. So what wins here? Was it the other-worldly shooting in his second title season in Miami? Was it the Herculean effort in the Eastern Conference Finals to beat the Pistons? Was it playing without Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love and damn near taking the 2015 Finals to 7 games? Or was it winning three straight (2 on the road) against the best team to ever play (regular season) basketball? There are lots of options here. So I'm going with the dar...

I've written before that we host people on AirBnB as a way to help us feel connected to the travel community. We still go places but not nearly as often as we did in Europe, so it's fun to have people come and go from all different walks of life. As you might expect, we meet some interesting people. We also meet some strange ones. An experience last week, however, was an entirely new thing for us. We had a guest who had booked a stay with us for Monday night. We'll call him Dave. Dave was a pilot and was coming to town for an interview. Dave booked our room and sent us messages about what time he expected to come and go during his stay. He was to arrive in the afternoon on Monday and I was off work, so I had him call when his flight landed in case I wasn't home. As luck would have it I was leaving home right as he called so I offered to pick him up (our house is about three miles from the airport) because I'm a superhost/was incredibly bored. Dave told me that...

People who don't fly much want to know what it's like to fly on budget airlines. Currently, the biggest budget airline in the States is Spirit, which operates largely how you'd expect: Everything costs extra. You pay to choose seats, pay to check a bag, pay to take a full-size carry-on, pay to have a glass of water, etc. Some other ways that they pinch pennies is by making you print your own boarding pass ($10 or something if they have to do it for you at the airport), baggage fees are way extra if you don't order them online beforehand, and they seemingly shrink the plane - itty bitty leg-room, seats that don't lean back, and more. So let's dig in. Wife and I decided to save $150 per person by taking the redeye from LAX to Cleveland on a Saturday night after a Friday wedding (which was a delight, for the record). The savings, we reasoned, would be worth the flight that we knew would be a nightmare. Our Sunday would be a waste of a day as we'd be too e...

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about hosting people on AirBnB and how it's been really cool to trust people and meet strangers who are moving around in the world. To revisit the topic, it's a pretty eye-opening thing. One of our first guests was a family of four. They had spent the past several weeks at the woman's parents' house in Parma (that's about 15 minutes from our house, for those who don't know) and just needed to get out and be a little closer to the city for a couple of days before they moved to the Congo. To provide a little more insight, this was a girl from Parma and her husband who she met in Madagascar while she was teaching English. They now have two unbelievably well-behaved (and adorable) children who were about to stomach a 24+ hour trip from Cleveland to Newark to Brussels to Kinshasa, which is the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The husband was from Guinea (that's in west Africa) and before they departed, he ga...

I know I haven't posted about travel in a while now, and that's a shame for the handful of you who liked looking at photos from around the world. On the other hand, it saves you from having to read about it all the time. I'm going to try to temper all of that by instituting Travel Tuesdays. I'll post something about travel on Tuesdays and Tuesdays only. In a happy accident, I posted a brief write-up of our honeymoon last Tuesday, but we're pretending that this whole idea starts today. To start off this new idea, it only makes sense to start close to home. Upon returning to the USA, Jenna and I moved to the west side of Cleveland despite how it has almost nothing in common with Italy. She got a job on the far-west side and I followed. While there are ups and downs in Cleveland, we've picked out a couple of favorite, beautiful spots. And then we bought a nicer camera than our cell phones so we could take some cool photos, starting with the Rocky River reservat...

I don't enjoy writing about professional football anymore. I used to. A lot. I think I've had 3 or 4 blogs dedicated to writing about (mostly) the Browns, and there were even occasions when people would read these things I wrote. But I stopped for lots of reasons. The most important reason? Because of the Browns. Years ago I would write about how the Browns were terrible and they were actively putting out a crappy product and telling fans to buy it, so I was done buying it. Time passed and they got worse. Then they raised prices. That is not a consumer-friendly sequence of events. I love Twitter. I get most of my world-news from Twitter by seeing people talk about something and then looking for details about it. Watching a sporting event alone on the couch while refreshing Twitter is more fun than watching a sporting event with two friends who aren't funny. You might think this is stupid, or you might have Twitter and know that this is the truth - it's just more fun...

There's something to be said for a reputation. I know that, and I understand that. Michael Jordan is widely considered to be the best basketball player of all time - a claim which I won't dispute. He is a living god to the city of Chicago, and if you badmouth him in any way, locals will take it worse than if you'd said unkind things about their wives/mothers, etc. In Europe, when someone asks where we're from, Jenna answers Chicago, and if I answer, I say Cleveland via Chicago (or something like that). Invariably, everyone's response will mention one of two names: Barack Obama or Michael Jordan. But Jordan *much* more often than Obama. For the most part, I get it. He was the most dominant player for the better part of a decade. He was the face of the NBA. He starred alongside Bugs Bunny in one of cinema's greatest accomplishments. That's all true and inarguable. But there's a big part that I don't really get. For instance, I have a student of...

Baby, don't hurt me . Sorry about that. This entry should really fall under the "makes you wonder" category and thus the other blog, but it's something that I've been thinking about since moving to Chicago, so it stays here - as this is the Chicago/entertainment world/whatever it is blog. I was on the bus home from the first time I've ever done improv on a stage in front of people who weren't my classmates (went alright, more nerve wracking than I expected) and I got to thinking. Over the last month or so I've had to say goodbye to an awful lot of people. Not permanent goodbyes, thankfully, as I think I've done a pretty good job keeping up with most of them. These people are my closest friends and family and they mean the world to me. So when I tell these people that I love them, it comes as no surprise. They say it back in most cases, and we go on our way. But we never stop and try to articulate it. There were at least two people who I had planne...

Well, I got a job. Far from perfect, but I'm employed. I'm working in the Cavs team shop at the Q...which is cool. It's majorly part time, so I'm still looking into other things whenever I can. The story here lies in my first day. I found out I got the job on Friday and was starting Monday...in the team shop...on the day of a home game. That is to say that I was being tossed into the proverbial fire despite zero retail experience whatsoever (but at least I didn't lie about that in the interview, so I got that going for me). Not as intimidating as I'm making it out to be, but one could understand that it was a slightly tense drive downtown. Anyway, I got to the shop a little before 5:00 and was a little confused with the way things were going, but I got ushered through it all and made sense of what was going on. I was to be the guy in the Witness section; basically I'd just help people get stuff in that section and that was it. Well, the store doesn't op...

Here I sit. It's 1:00 a.m. and I have no reason to be awake. I'm house-sitting, so the dog will probably wake me up around 7, but I'm not even really trying to go to sleep. Why would anyone do something so stupid? It's not like I'm watching something interesting or helping someone through a crisis. I'm not really doing anything. I'm just dilly-dallying on the internet. For instance, right now I have tabs opened to Twitter (holla! @kevinpnye !), facebook, livejournal (so I can read Coke's blog), and google analytics (which can be attributed to Lauren). Before I go to bed I will invariably check my email (guaranteed to be nothing new), refresh Twitter, probably breeze through espn.com (even though I could turn on the channel instead), may find something good on youtube, and then I'll end up watching a movie on netflix.com. The question really becomes "what in the hell did I do before the internet??" . I like to think that I've blocked out...

It's become a funny existence. I wake up, I sit around, I catch up on Ninja Warrior, I eat, play video games, work out, watch the Cavs, and repeat. In between I apply for jobs, don't hear back, sulk, laugh, make others laugh, read things, write things, listen to music and occasionally sell things on eBay for my grandmother. But what am I doing? There are few things that I know are certain, and one of them is that my parents are displeased that I don't have a job - particularly my dad. I can't say that I blame him, but the real problem is that he acts like I'm thrilled about not having a job. I've got a big job fair that the Cavaliers are hosting on the horizon, it's later this month, and I really am starting to put the majority of my proverbial eggs in that basket...problem is, though, that the basket has slippery handles. I'm sick of not doing anything, but there's nothing to do. I can't keep asking people if they want to hire me when I know tha...

I don't really know what to say, I guess. It's been two months since I last posted and I feel like I don't even have anything good to report. The final class session was sorta overrated: we did this goofy little runway show thing while all the parents of the "students" were in attendance. We marched around with an air of self-worth, which some of the gentlemen didn't have going into the experience. From that standpoint, it was a good thing, at least certainly for them. Granted I learned certain things during the experience, but it wasn't a matter of confidence for me; if you'd told me to walk around like that in front of people I didn't know, I would have been able to do it - I just wouldn't have been technically sound in the process. So, again, not much interesting went on there. After that I got the Agency Package in the mail and it included a date for my promotional photoshoot. Blah blah blah. Day of the photo shoot: The shoot took place in ...

It's no secret if you're reading this (both of you who read this, I mean) that I love having an audience, or at the very least, people to entertain. The more I think about wanting to be famous, the more I want it. I've been hearing people on the radio and seeing people on TV and everything they do or say makes me want to be successful...it's really outta control. Anyway, last week I was caddying at the golf course and I was with a pair of gentlemen named Pete and Kevin...easy names to remember, you know, with me being Kevin and my brother being Pete. Anyway, now that I've put space between their first and last names, they were Ditchman and Riley, respectively. Pete seemed to be a little down on his luck as of late; the economy and whatever he had been doing for a living were not a good mix. Kevin, on the other hand, was killing it. He was talking about taking jobs and how he wouldn't move to another city for less than $200,000 per year...which leads one to bel...