Anyway, the Redondo Beach team house shut-down process that I mentioned just under two weeks ago was a surprising success—so much so that we finished everything up early, and Ed got to leave early on January 24 to make it back to the Chicagoland suburbs in time to spend Chinese New Year with his family.

Upon first arriving at the team house, the task in front of me looked next to impossible, but along with Ed’s help and the assistance of maids and other Tempo Storm employees and contractors, we were able to overcome the house full of garbage that was the PUBG team house.

I also took advantage of the fact that I was in California with a rental vehicle (I got a RAM 1500 Classic this time) by meeting up with various business partners and employees who I don’t regularly see. One of which was our branding and merchandising manager, with whom I met at the Spectrum Center in Irvine.

My home city of Las Vegas is obviously very artificial-feeling with very little green, and even Redondo Beach was mostly just misty and gloomy the whole time I was there, so it was quite the sight when I arrived at Irvine and everything was glowingly green and full of life. So much so, that I intentionally went all the way to the rooftop of the parking garage at the Spectrum Center just so I could take this photograph with the nice view.

The restaurant we picked was a Cuban restaurant called the Habana. Although I’m sure I’ve had Cuban food before, I had never been to a restaurant dedicated to Cuban food, so it was somewhat of a new experience for me. I actually don’t remember exactly what dish I ordered, but it was pretty good; the only complaint I had was that the rice was strangely salty, and I would’ve preferred the corn not on the cob.

The following day, I met up with one of my good friends, Doug Wreden, who goes by “DougDoug.” We met up in Beverly Hills so I could give him a tour of Tempo Storm’s new content house, then we headed down to the north side of the Santa Monica Mountains to a nearby sushi restaurant.

One of the final meals of this California trip was an order I put in through Uber Eats while I was at our production studio, where I dropped off the final load of computer and electronics equipment. If you know me, you know that I like trying new and interesting foods, and when I browsed through this Italian restaurant’s menu, I noticed a meat I had never tried before: wild boar.

I ordered some wild boar gnocchi. Unfortunately, I could barely even tell what the boar tasted like, because the sauce was way too salty, the seasoning was way too strong, and the gnocchi was a bit strange (it was the first time I ever had gnocchi, and I am not a fan of the texture at all).

I’ve noticed a recurring theme where, when I order some strange and unconventional meat, it’s usually prepared in some extreme way that completely drowns out the true taste of the meat, so I can’t ever actually figure out what it really tastes like. This happened when I tried alligator, where it was breaded so thick and fried so crisply that it just tasted like popcorn chicken, and it also happened when I tried rabbit, where it was drenched in so much strong gravy that I didn’t even realize there was meat underneath.

After handing everything over to the Redondo Beach team house property manager, I concluded another successful trip to California. As expected if you know my affinity towards early flights, I woke up at 4:30 AM to take a 7:00 AM flight back home to Las Vegas. It coincided well with the sunrise, so I tried to capture a photo from the plane, but unfortunately my phone decided to focus on the dirty airplane window instead of the sun.

The best part of traveling is coming back home.

It probably comes as no surprise that I’m back in California again… this time to close down Tempo Storm’s Redondo Beach team house. That house is the one for the PUBG team that I set up last year, and now that the National PUBG League is dissolving, we no longer have a need for that house.

Ever since Tempo’s recent staffing changes and undertaking of new projects, I’ve been pretty overwhelmed with work, so I contracted one of my friends to help me out with some of the tougher labor. If you’re a long-time follower of my blog, you may recognize him—it’s Ed Lam, known online as Grainyrice.

We both flew into Los Angeles because my truck is in the shop for, yet again, another transmission repair. Ed’s flight was scheduled to land at about 2:30 PM PST, while mine was scheduled to land at 2:51 PM PST. I told Ed to deplane and wait for me so we could take a shuttle together to Enterprise Rent-a-Car. Naturally, I beat him to Los Angeles, and I was the one who ended up having to wait for him.

Thus ensued the immediate difficult work of trying to clear out the disastrous mess that was what the players left behind in the Redondo Beach team house, as well as driving all over Southern California from Beach Cities to Beverly Hills to Hollywood to transport valuables from the team house to our other properties.

On our way back from Los Angeles to Beach Cities, Ed and I stopped by the Santa Monica Pier. I had visited the Santa Monica Pier once before during the night with Jordan Kelly and Jordan King, but this was my first time seeing it during the day.

The deadline for complete shut-down completion is January 28, 2020, and we’re just now starting.

… It’s going to be a long two weeks.

The part that I apparently suck at is traveling to new places. I feel like I’m always on the move, driving all over the place and constantly getting on and off planes. I have a folder of screenshots of electronic boarding passes that has nearly fifty files in it just from the past few years, and that obviously doesn’t include all the paper boarding passes I’ve used. I’ve become such an expert at traveling that I know how to streamline and optimize each step of the process, making sure I maximize my comfort and waste as little time as possible.

But then I went to actually map out my travels on a map of the United States of America, and it looks like I’ve barely been anywhere. Apparently, I just travel to the same locations over and over again. The place where I go to the most, Southern California, is actually a place where I’ve literally lived before, so on a map, it doesn’t really look like I’ve “traveled” there much at all.

The map is pretty self-explanatory, especially considering there’s a legend, but here’s a quick overview. The house emojis represent locations where I’ve lived, and the graduation cap emoji represents where I went to university—these two locations take the place of a ton of destination pins simply because I naturally move around those areas a lot due to the fact that I live there.

The destination pins are actual instances of travel where I went to a par­tic­u­lar location away from my home. The pins can be associated with a par­tic­u­lar event or convention, which has been labeled. The pins can also just be locations where I’ve gone to just to spend time in that area, like when I go to visit friends for no par­tic­u­lar reason.

And finally, going through a state or stopping by a state still technically counts as visiting that state, so I have car and plane emojis. Car emojis mean I drove through that area; I count it as visiting because I usually take very regular rest stops and get local food. Plane emojis mean I stopped at that par­tic­u­lar location on a layover; I usually take non-stop flights, so the only state I’ve visited purely off a layover so far is Utah. I do not consider flying over a state as visiting it, so that’s not included in the map.

As I sit here waiting for the clock to strike 2020 (and falling asleep while doing so, because I usually sleep pretty early), I’m thinking that visiting more new places could be a new year’s resolution… but then I think back to the time when I was a little kid where I made a new year’s resolution to never have another new year’s resolution again, because new year’s resolutions encourage people to wait until the new year to do some­thing new and consequently be lazy towards the end of each year. I was, and still am, under the philosophy that every day is important, and if you decide that you need to do some­thing good, you should set an immediate goal and do it right away, rather than wait for the new year.

So I’ve decided that it’s my goal for the foreseeable future to try and go out and experience the country some more. I recently went to DreamHack Atlanta for no particularly important reason simply because I wanted to see what Georgia was like, and I think it will be valuable for my growth as a person to keep doing more things like that.

I doubt that I will literally book completely pointless vacations to completely random places just for the sake of visiting more states, but I’m hoping that I will get more opportunities to attend conventions and other events being hosted in states I have not yet visited.

Happy almost new year.