This post is over 5 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
The photograph quality of the kittens aren’t as crisp because Mochi hid them under the futon in the living room with poor lighting. Pudding is the father of the kittens.
This post is over 5 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
When the pandemic first broke out, I had a burning urge to travel everywhere because of how cheap airline tickets were. But, for the sake of the greater good of humanity, I decided not to travel—the United States was not well-equipped to handle COVID-19, and me moving around would only serve as a vessel for COVID-19 to transfer to others. I stayed at home and quarantined, just like (almost) everyone else.
Now that we’re months into the pandemic, people are responding appropriately to minimize the coronavirus’ virality. It is commonplace for everyone to wear masks, hand sanitizer is plentiful, and most people distance themselves from others as much as possible. Even though the wave of cheap airline tickets is now gone (seeing as the supply shrunk drastically to accommodate for the decreased demand, and pricing has readjusted), I figured now is no longer considered a maximum-risk time period to travel anymore.
If you’ve been keeping up with my other blog posts, you know that I’ve traveled back and forth a few times to SoCal to visit Tempo‘s studio and team house, but those were road trips. This was my first flight since traveling to PAX East in early March 2020.
My adventure starts at my condo, where I called an Uber. Usually, I find a ride within several seconds and my ride arrives within a few minutes—one of the perks of living on the Las Vegas Strip. For this trip, I guess there were so few Ubers available at 10:30 AM PDT that it took several minutes for my app to finally find a driver, then an estimated 14 minutes for arrival… which ended up being closer to 20 minutes.
After I got to the airport, the environment I felt is something that I had never experienced before at an airport. It wasn’t completely empty, but it was obviously nowhere near where it usually is.
I received an email from Delta alerting me that McCarran International Airport’s wait times were higher than usual and that I should arrive at least two hours before my flight, but when I got to TSA PreCheck, I was the only one there and I was in and out of screening within a couple minutes.
The best way that I can describe the mood of the airport is “apocalyptic.” People were wearing masks and distancing away from each other, but that definitely wasn’t the reason for the strange environment—most people were doing this everywhere else in Las Vegas too, but nowhere else that I had been to had this vibe to it. It felt almost as if everyone had no more energy left, and everyone was waiting for the world to end.
A vast majority of the stores were closed and barred shut. People on the airport slot machines seemed to have a zombie-like glaze in their eyes, as if they were gambling away their money because there wasn’t going to be anything else for them to spend their money on after the world ends. There was usually a subtle sense of rush in the air, but this time, it felt like everyone was moving at a normal pace, something very out of the ordinary for an airport.
The lounge was still open in Concourse D, so I stopped by The Club at LAS with my Priority Pass Select to grab some free food before my flight. Normally, the lounge has a buffet-style food retrieval set-up, but in order to avoid people from coming into contact with others’ food, they converted it to a restaurant style where employees collect and distribute food on your behalf.
Boarding the flight was also a different experience than usual. Normally, people are prompted to board by group, which generally goes by order of loyalty status and upgrades, before calling the main cabin, and saving basic economy for last. However, this time around, first class was still first to board, while everyone else boarded in reverse order of seat row number, presumably to minimize the number of people who would have to walk past other already-seated people, thus minimizing potential contact.
The flight itself was pretty empty. I had a Delta Comfort+ seat in row 11, and I had the whole row to myself, in addition to row 10 being empty. I took advantage of this by reclining back and stretching my leg out into row 10, constructing my own makeshift business class seat. (I fell asleep like this and woke up with terrible lower back pain, so maybe this wasn’t actually really the greatest idea.)
In-flight service was also a bit different. Instead of coming around for regular drinks and snacks, the flight attendants had pre-bagged kits available that contained some Cheez-Its, a granola snack, bottled water, a napkin, an advertisement, and hand sanitizing wipes. I was in the section of the plane that receives free alcohol (though I don’t drink alcohol so I didn’t actually order any), but I was never offered a selection of any drinks apart from alcohol, so it was ultimately inconclusive as to whether or not standard soft drink service was even available.
After a surprisingly quick flight of about four and a half hours, I made it to my destination, John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. It was a little after 8 PM EDT when I arrived, but the airport was already pretty empty—almost as if midnight had decided to relocate itself four hours earlier on the clock. However, JFK didn’t have that eerie apocalyptic feel to it like LAS did; it just felt like a calm airport with not many people.
And thus was my experience traveling in the middle of a global pandemic.
I realize I’m not setting the best example by choosing to travel for non-essential, leisurely purposes, and I encourage you to avoid doing what I did. However, if you choose to do so anyway, make sure you wear a face covering, regularly wash and sanitize your hands, stay away from other people, avoid making unnecessary contact with unsanitary surfaces, and just be conscious and aware that you do not do anything stupid that may compromise the health of those around you.
This post is over 6 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
Because the team house is up in the Hills, the parking is naturally a bit difficult. The road leading up to the property is narrow, and street parking is very limited. If we try really hard and none of our neighbors take any street parking spots, we can squeeze in a maximum of eight vehicles, two of which would be barricaded in.
Of course, on one of the days that we had a few producers and writers at the house holding an ideation session, an electrician, the gardener, the pool cleaner, and a pest control company came, virtually all at the same time… and then the landlord showed up to help coordinate and make sure everyone was doing their job.
Needless to say, I was very much barricaded into the back of the garage by two vehicles, and we were still running out of parking spaces, with some cars now just randomly sitting there in the middle of the road. Obviously, I couldn’t go out for my daily food run, so I decided to order delivery.
With COVID-19 stay-at-home orders loosening, the traffic around the Los Angeles area is increasing, so it took about 50 minutes for my food to arrive. By that time, exactly two people had finished their work and left the house. Which two people? The two people who were barricading me in. My truck was now free to exit, and I didn’t have to order delivery.
One of these days, the world will run out of ways to mildly troll me, and then I will finally find peace in my life.
On my drive back home to Las Vegas, I ended up sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic in the middle of nowhere in the California desert, because it’s California and why not.
At least the view was nice.
The day after I got back home, Tempo‘s CEO reynad came to visit Las Vegas for some business meetings. He was staying at the Cosmopolitan and got pretty lucky with a 45th floor hotel room, so I snapped some photos while I was there to meet up with him.
I always say that the best part of traveling is coming back home, and I still believe that… unless your home is about to catch on fire, that is. Of course, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but apparently the Las Vegas Valley was having a bit of a tough time after I got back, first having some massive dust storms coming in from the north, then a massive fire starting in Mount Charleston, later named the Mahogany Fire.
This post is over 6 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
In March 2018, a little over a year after moving from the Chicagoland suburbs to Southern California, I moved, by myself, to Las Vegas. I rented a minivan with lay-flat second and third row seating from Enterprise Rent-a-Car, packed it literally to the brim with my belongings, and drove from Corona, CA to my new apartment in Summerlin South, a census-designated place in the Las Vegas Valley.
Two months after I moved, I wrote a blog post titled “Re: ‘Why did you move to Las Vegas?'” where I addressed… you guessed it, why I moved to Las Vegas. In that post, I pointed out why I decided to relocate, then busted some myths about Las Vegas. A lot of what’s in that post still stands, but I decided to do a follow-up post, now that I’ve been living here for over two years.
In those two years, it’s become a meme among my friends and co-workers that I am one of the most avid proponents of the greatness of Las Vegas. To be clear, that being a meme is well-labeled. I definitely do not think that Las Vegas is objectively the greatest city in the world. In fact, I think it could very well be one of the worst cities for many, many people to live in. Obviously, the greatness of a city is highly subjective, and my belief of Las Vegas’ greatness is subjective to my own unique situation.
With that being said, Las Vegas is what I believe to be my best place to live, and I decided to list off some of my personal favorite things about the city.
It’s the perfect combination of a city and a suburb.
I hate the unnavigable congestion of packed cities, but I also don’t want to live in the middle of nowhere like the small village where I grew up in the Chicagoland suburbs. I don’t want to be in a bustling city of millions where I’m constantly shoulder-to-shoulder with other people and have to pay to park at the grocery store, but I also want things to be accessible.
I think Las Vegas is a perfect combination of both a city and a suburb. There are no stretches of forest or empty land separating things, but things also aren’t so packed that it’s excessively dense. I value the fact that it feels like I can get from place to place without having to traverse through nothingness, while also feeling like I can drive somewhere and I can actually get there faster than just giving up and walking.
I can live in luxury without paying luxury prices.
I currently live in a studio on one of the upper-most floors of a high-rise condo on the Las Vegas Strip. My building has dedicated security and all amenities you’d expect from a luxury hotel. Depending on your preference, this is basically one of two living situations that you could classify as the “best” in this city, the other being a mansion on the outskirts of the Valley by the mountains, if you like that over high-rise living.
My housing expenses, including rent and all utilities, total less than US$1,500.00 per month. I personally have an unbelievably great deal, but literally anyone, even the worst negotiators, could live this lifestyle in Las Vegas for less than US$2,000.00 per month. Search for something comparable in Los Angeles and you’re looking at an absolute minimum of US$4,000.00 per month.
And it’s not like I have to make “sacrifices” for it being in Las Vegas. I live on the northern end of the Strip with a north-facing view, so I’m not constantly bombarded by the flashing lights and ground-shaking music of Las Vegas Boulevard. There’s occasionally a loud train horn, but otherwise, it’s just the basic hum that you’d expect from any bustling city.
A vast majority of anything that I would possibly want to do is within a half-hour drive.
Las Vegas is built as a tourist hotspot, and as such, it has pretty much anything and everything you could possibly want to do. Of course, a lot of it feels forced or artificial (because a lot of it is), but I’m not too picky, and something that feels fake will still often meet my relatively low standards of satisfaction. (To be clear, I am known to have unrealistically high standards for things I truly care about, but for everything else, I’m mostly indifferent because I take all the “care” that I would allocate to those “other things” and just hone them in on a few select important things.)
There are also nature-y things to do in and around the Las Vegas Valley as well, with Red Rock Canyon, Mt. Charleston, the Hoover Dam, available on the outskirts. A “desirable” thing that is obviously missing is the ocean, but I go to California enough already, and I personally am not really too compatible with big bodies of water anyway.
In a similar vein, actually getting to all of these unique things you want to do isn’t a pain. My central location on the Strip means that everything is relatively close-by, but even if it wasn’t, Las Vegas traffic isn’t that terrible (at least not yet). Even when traffic gets “bad,” you still feel like you’re getting to your destination, albeit a bit slower; it’s not like California where you just feel stuck in an endless stretch of jammed freeway.
There is little to no risk of natural disaster.
I’m a bit of a control freak. I like to account for everything that could go wrong and minimize any risks that could be a consequence of unattended or unexpected variables.
As you can imagine, this means that I particularly do not get along well with natural disasters, and specifically, with earthquakes. It makes no sense to me that you would willingly put yourself in a scenario where your living situation could be thrown completely off balance by something you cannot predict and something you have no control over. I don’t think I will ever understand people who choose to move to Los Angeles voluntarily (meaning, they don’t already have family there and it’s not for work), then proceed to pay inflated prices to purchase real estate, only to be at perpetual risk for your overpriced property to collapse without notice.
Las Vegas occasionally gets earthquakes, but it’s only when the actual earthquake itself happens elsewhere, and the magnitude of said earthquake is high enough that Las Vegas is within the affected area. Las Vegas also takes the concept of avoiding natural disasters a step further by not really having natural disasters or severe weather effects in general.
A lot of tech companies are moving their servers to Las Vegas to minimize the chances of their data being lost to something unexpected. I obviously value my own life more than tech companies value their data, so I think it’s only reasonable that I think the safety of the Las Vegas Valley is one of its big pros.
I save money by not paying state income tax.
This one is pretty straightforward. The state of Nevada doesn’t have state income tax, so that is literally money that I pocket each tax year just because I decided to live in Las Vegas.
The impact of this can be made a bit more obvious with a mathematical comparison. Someone filing taxes as a single individual living in California who has an annual salary of US$100,000.00 pays over $6,000 in state income tax. If that individual instead chose to live in Nevada, they would pay $0. That means that they would pocket an extra $6,000 every year.
Of course, that’s oversimplified, because if they lived in Las Vegas (a city with a lower cost of living), then their annual salary might be adjusted down. Or, the same kind of high-paying Californian career opportunities might not even be offered in Nevada. However, for someone like me who works full-time remotely, this actually literally functionally becomes a “free” $6,000 every year.
McCarran International Airport provides great accessibility to the rest of the country for business travel.
I travel for business quite a bit. If it isn’t going back and forth between Las Vegas and Los Angeles to take care of in-person work with Tempo, then it’s usually flying to random places across the country for events, conventions, and meetings.
Because Las Vegas is a tourist hotspot, the airport has a great selection of affordable, non-stop flights from a lot of destinations to incentivize people to come visit. That’s obviously good for me as well, because those tourist flights can be the same flights that get me where I need to be for business.
I like the hot weather.
I think snow is a magical thing. Waking up one day and seeing everything covered in a pretty blanket of white sets you up for a great day.
That is, until the snow keeps falling, day after day, foot after foot, until you’re sick of seeing white everywhere and you can’t get where you need to be because everything is buried in snow. Living in the Chicagoland suburbs dumped too much of a good thing on me (often continuing on into the spring), and it took away the magic of snow.
Ever since moving to the Pacific Coast, snow has become magical to me again. It’s so rare in the Las Vegas Valley that seeing it after waking up in the morning brings back that childhood awe and that feeling of knowing that it’s going to be a special day.
Also, just in general, I prefer warmer and drier weather. I hate humidity because I feel like it makes the air feel heavier and more difficult to breathe, and it leaves an unsavory weight on your body where you always have an urge to shower throughout the whole day. The dry air in Las Vegas feels crisp and clean, and I never get that unsettling feeling on my skin.
Nuisances that I’ve had to deal with my whole life, like mosquitoes and allergies, are no longer a thing.
This one is pretty self-explanatory. I can actually leave my sliding glass door open during the evenings without worrying about a swarm of mosquitoes leaving behind 50 red bumps on my skin. When I lived in the Chicagoland suburbs, I had the worst bout of seasonal allergies that would cripple me between August and October, but that’s completely gone in Las Vegas.
There hasn’t really ever been a thing where I would look at it and think “wow, that’s annoying” that was exclusive to the Las Vegas Valley.
I feel like I’m “cheating” at real life.
I have a stereotypical “ruthless businessman” kind of mentality. I have a strong foundation of morals and ethics, but as long as I believe I am abiding by those standards I have set for myself, I often do not show much mercy. This also means that I will do unusual things and employ non-traditional strategies—things and strategies that some people may consider questionable—in order to get ahead in life.
By having a remote job with a company headquartered in Southern California, I almost feel like I’m “cheating” the system. A massive portion of Las Vegas revolves around the service industry, so the “health” of the city is based heavily on tourism. When the tourism industry is prospering, the city prospers; when the tourism industry suffers (like during the COVID-19 pandemic), the city also suffers.
By maintaining a non-service job from outside of Las Vegas, I am able to remain completely financially stable, even through the ups and downs of Las Vegas. This means that when the city dips down to a low, it actually ends up serving as an opportunity for me to swoop in and take advantage of the situation. For example, if real estate prices go down because people are moving out after losing service-related employment, that’s a chance for me to come in and get a property at a great deal, even if I would’ve been able to afford it at the non-discounted price anyway.
I am under the firm belief that you cannot become the top 0.1% in the United States by doing things the traditional, “normal” way. Making net-positive business decisions like this adds up, and with enough of them, I can get closer to joining America’s elite and setting myself and my family up for a great future.
As I said before, these are my reasons why Las Vegas is the best city for my situation. My situation is obviously very unique and unusual, so for the sake of providing clearer information catered towards the general public and presenting both sides of the argument, I’ll be covering the cons of Las Vegas as well in a future Q&A post.
If you’ve read this because you were one of the people who were just curious as to why I rave about Las Vegas so much, hopefully this was a satisfying-enough response. If you’re here because you’re seriously considering also moving to Las Vegas, be sure to keep an eye out for my cons post as well, in addition to doing additional research and collecting information from multiple reliable sources before making a final decision.
This post is over 6 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
I heard that snake plants (Dracaena trifasciata, formerly Sansevieria) were excellent house plants. They have good air cleansing properties, they release a relatively high amount of oxygen, and they’re next to impossible to kill. All of these points are important to me, as I want a plant that’s going to improve my living situation and look out for my health, while also being able to occasionally survive on its own while I’m out on extended business travel.
Today, I decided to buy a snake plant. I searched Google Maps for the closest Home Depot and headed west towards the Garden Center of the Home Depot on the 800 block of South Rainbow Boulevard. I went inside, only to be massively overwhelmed by way too many plants.
After a few minutes of browsing, I discovered a small problem. All the plants out in the Garden Center were potted in flimsy plastic temporary pots, and I would have to move the plant into a better home by purchasing a separate ceramic pot and some dirt.
You may be asking, why is this a problem? Well, I didn’t want to buy a bag of dirt, only to use just a portion of it and have a leftover half-bag of dirt. This scenario wouldn’t matter much for most people, but remember that I live 400 feet up in the air in a high-rise condo. I don’t have a backyard where I can dump the remaining dirt, and I don’t have a garage where I can just store the leftover dirt for future use.
But, for this to even be a problem in the first place, I would have to find a snake plant that I want to bring home. I decided to save some time by asking the Garden Center attendant.
The attendant was obviously wearing a mask, which isn’t too confusing if you’re reading this blog post not too long after I published it, but in case you’re someone from the far future and aren’t aware, everyone needs to wear a mask right now because there is a COVID-19 pandemic. However, this attendant decided to wear her mask so it was covering her mouth… but left her nose hanging out over the top of the mask.
I approached her and stayed six feet away from her like a good social distancer, but she slowly crept closer and closer to me until she was within a foot from my face. From here ensued one of those comical scenarios where two people with different personal space requirements are in a conversation, and one person is functionally “chasing down” the other. I think we traveled literally from one side of the Garden Center to the other while she told me how there were no live snake plants I could buy, but there were some fake ones available, they had a great selection of different plants, and there were also some real snakes for sale if I wanted to go three miles west to the pet store.
I thanked her for her help and left Home Depot.
I don’t get discouraged that easily. I decided that my next stop would be the Garden Center at Lowe’s Home Improvement. I made it there to find that there was as equally of an aggressive selection of plants there as there was at Home Depot. However, I managed to actually find a snake plant. Now I had to go back to resolving my problem of not wanting to buy a bag of dirt.
I flagged down another Garden Center attendant and asked her if I could just pay someone at Lowe’s to move the snake plant from its plastic container to a ceramic pot. She was a bit confused as to why I needed someone to do that, and insisted that the process was very easy and that I could do it myself. I then had to go through an extended conversation where I explained that I live on the Las Vegas Strip and I don’t really have a place to do home gardening, let alone a place to use leftover dirt.
The relieving part about this conversation was that this attendant appeared to know how to wear a mask. … The unfortunate part was that she removed her mask every time she was talking, then placed it back on her face every time she was done talking.
She may or may not have ultimately proposed a valid solution to my problem during our conversation, but I was so confused at how a country could possibly be so incompetent at using personal protective equipment during a global pandemic that I don’t even remember what she said.
The only thing I recall is thanking her for her help and leaving the store without a snake plant.
…
So yeah, I still need to go buy a snake plant.
This post is over 6 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
Living in a high-rise on the Strip with a vast, unobstructed view of the city, suburbs, and mountains has its perks, one of which is the fact that I can always see what’s going on in almost a third of the Las Vegas Valley just by looking out my sliding glass door.
Today, the interesting event of the day was a house fire at 224 W Cincinnati Ave, Las Vegas, NV 89102. This is a small, run-down house on the south side of the Gateway District, in an area formerly known as “Naked City” because it was the area where show girls would sunbathe naked in the 1950s. This blog post with a clip of a garbage truck accidentally dumping trash all over the road is dash cam footage from Naked City.
Today, Naked City is just a low-income neighborhood between the Strip and downtown, behind the Stratosphere. When I say “low income,” I mean that in the most extreme way possible—Naked City is often perceived to be the most dangerous place in Las Vegas, and rent prices for apartments in the neighborhood can be as low as US$500.00 per month for a unit.
Now, the perception of danger isn’t completely unfounded, but the area has gotten tremendously better recently. This area was a hotspot for illicit drug transactions and prostitution, but with government assistance, the streets are much safer now.
This all probably sounds incredibly underwhelming. Why in the world would I be blogging about a random house catching on fire? … Well, it’s because this house is $7 million.
Something probably doesn’t add up in your head, and I don’t blame you. How can this house—a house that looks like it’s about to collapse—in an apparently terrible neighborhood go for $7 million?
First, I guess it would be prudent for me to demonstrate that I’m not just making this up. ABC 13 KTNV Las Vegas ran a story almost four years ago about this property, and you can check for yourself in the price history on the Zillow page for 224 West Cincinnati Avenue that it was indeed on the market for US$7,000,000.00, originally listed by Simply Vegas, then later taken over by Keller Williams Marketplace, with momentary representation by Platinum Real Estate Professionals.
So, why $7 million? The easy answer is that it’s not about the house; it’s about the land.
Remember how I said earlier that the government has been assisting with cleaning up Naked City? The downtown and northern side of the Strip is under rapid development right now, and many people are projecting that the area will flourish and prosper very soon. The owner of that plot of land is probably expecting the area to explode in growth so much that there will be some entrepreneur who will want to snatch up that “premium” plot of land to get a head start.
There are some substantial flaws with that thought process:
With that being said, if it wasn’t already just about the land and location… now it definitely is. The Clark County Fire Department and the Las Vegas Fire & Rescue Department responded today to 224 W Cincinnati Ave to reports of a fire. I observed the firefighters hard at work tackling the problem.
I guess they had trouble gaining access into the property, because they started climbing on the roof and bringing out what sounded like chainsaws. Eventually, they put a hole through the roof, and billows of smoke started coming out from the opening.
It reached 106°F (41°C) today, but this was captivating enough and standing in the shade of my balcony was tolerable enough that I watched for about half an hour. I was watching this from over 500 feet away, so I obviously couldn’t hear anything they were saying, but what I was able to make out just from my observations was that the house was vacant at the time of the fire, someone else called to report smoke coming from the house, and the firefighters had to force entry to ensure the property was clear.
Shortly after they put the hole through the roof, the smoke poured out then stopped, so I imagine they were probably also able to gain access through the back as well to extinguish the source of the blaze.