With great pride and joy, I would like to formally announce the newest notch on Jeff Sauer’s bedpost.

Last night I was out to dinner with my parents at Cody’s Roadhouse in the Tyrone mall near St. Petersburg, Florida. Wednesday night is 2 for 1 fajitas night, and we were on a mission to eat fajitas at a heavily discounted price! Apparently, so was the rest of Florida, because when we arrived at the joint (in its classy strip mall location), we were greeted by a 1 hour, 10 minute estimated wait time. Sifting through a sea of geriatrics, white trash with wispy stouches (my word for mustaches… it’s fun to say, and implies the person has a stache and is a douche, hence stouche), and all other kinds of depressing circus freaks, we had to decide whether or not it was worth waiting over an hour to get discounted fajitas. We ultimately decided yes and chose to wait it out in the bar area, and I am glad that we did.

That’s when I saw her. The prettiest darned thing I had ever seen in my life. The yin to my yang, the love of my life. I am now a believer in love at first sight. Every cliché about love and romance that I have ever read culminated in this one precious moment. Magically, the 70’s rock ballad “Dream Weaver” started playing in the background, and I glanced across the bar and saw my one and only. Amazingly, my parents were kind enough to document this moment with a photograph.

That’s not really what happened. As excited as it would make me to announce to you, blog readership, that I met and fell in love with this prune, I can’t tell that to you in good faith. But there is a story behind this blog post, oh yes, there is a story.

And that story may be even better than the prospects of locking lips with the Florida Raisin above.

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On November 16th 2003, Google commenced an update (the Florida update) which had a catastrophic effect for a very large number of websites and, in the process, turned search engine optimization on its head. It is usual to give alphabetical names to Google’s updates in the same way that names are given to hurricanes, and this one became known as “Florida”.
Source

Since I am a nerd who does search engine optimization for a living, when I decided on a title for this post, all I could think of was to call it my Florida Update. It just stuck in my head and even though it’s not completely on topic, I knew it had to be the title of this post. Fortunately, unlike the notorious Google Florida update from years ago, my Florida update has no negative implications or repercussions. In fact, it’s generally rosy on all fronts for Jeff Sauer.

For the past 4 years, my parents have rented a condo down in Florida. For the past 4 years, I have visited for 1-3 weeks. For the past 4 years, I have completely thrived in the situation.

Florida in February is my escape from the outside world. My escape from the harsh Minnesota winters. My escape from the ghost of “relations” past. My escape from working in an office or from home. My escape from day to day responsibilities. My escape from a poor diet and below freezing temperatures causing a lack of exercise. My escape from the little things in life that are either taken for granted, or over analyzed. It’s me time baby.

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From October 3rd through October 15, I will be traveling in Europe. After working my arse off over the past 6 months, I decided that it was time to get the f*** out of Dodge. I will be traveling with my long time buddy, roommate and all around good guy Tyler. Here is the plan. If you have any input to give me, I would greatly appreciate it.

Leave October 3rd for Brussels, Belgium. Tyler’s girlfriend is student teaching in Brussels, so we can stay with her if necessary. We will be arriving in Brussels on the 4th.

The plan is to stay 1 night in Brussels (a Thursday) and then take a train to Munich on Friday night to experience Oktoberfest. This is something that I REALLY excited to do, and it will surely be the highlight of the trip. Most of my heritage is German (5/8 German… 1/8 Irish, 1/8 Belgian, 1/8 French Canadian) and I have been DYING to go to Oktoberfest for the past 4 years. The problem is, it’s really expensive to stay there overnight! It’s like $400 a night for a small hotel room, and another $100-200 just to get there!

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Happy 4th Anniversary of the time I went to Kenya for a week and shot a documentary film with 6 of my classmates from the University of St. Thomas, along with the greatest camera man of all time, Brad Jacobson, and my arch nemesis of a professor, Mr. Old Skooley (intentionally misspelled).

As you can see, I decided to start this post with specifics in order to let my speed reading friends get the gyst of this post without wasting too much of their precious time actually reading the entire story. For those of you who are more inclined to read my verbose ramblings, I encourage you to enjoy the rest of this post.

4 years ago this week, I embarked on a trip to Kenya. As mentioned above, myself and 6 students from St. Thomas went to Kenya and filmed a documentary. The topic of our documentary was following a team of American doctors performing and demonstrating heart surgery and catheterization techniques alongside Kenyan doctors. The doctors went to Kenya as part of a team from a Minneapolis based charity called the Children’s Heartlink Foundation. The result of my trip was a 23 minute documentary that was nominated for a regional Emmy award. We lost to a story about Methamphetamines produced by Jason Davis from KSTP channel 5. We got hosed.

Well, actually, we didn’t get hosed at all. It was naive on my part to think that a team of 6 amateur photojournalists could ever compete with professionals and actually win an award. We were outmatched, and I am honored that we were ever nominated.

Actually, I don’t believe that at all. I think that the documentary we produced kicked major ass and I am proud that I was involved with such a great crew. In fact, while researching this article, I came across an IMDB page for the documentary!!! There is even an entry for Jeff Sauer.

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UPDATE 12/11/2006: I added pictures at the bottom

I don’t like to talk about work on this website for two reasons; 1) it’s not very exciting and 2) I am unemployed.

Well, I guess technically I am employed, but the extent of my employment is debatable. For the last year, I have spent most of my time sitting in my bedroom, chatting on MySpace, and collecting paychecks under the guise of being a computer consultant. It’s freaking awesome.

Awesome as it is, there is a major pitfall to being self (un) employed; no corporate perks. It’s great being self employed because I earn 100% of the profits made by the my company, but at the same time, I incur 100% of the expenses. Naturally, I try to spend as little as possible in order to take home as much profit as possible.

This means that I don’t really get many opportunities to do things in excess. No frills, no conferences, no strippers, no filet mignon, no 18 year old scotch and no staying in the presidential suite at hotels.

I didn’t realize how much I was missing out until my recent trip to Los Angeles.

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Here are some final thoughts on my trip to Scotland:

• Excluding travel time, I spent about 10 and a half days in Scotland. I think that this is the perfect amount of time to spend on a vacation, because it affords you enough time to get settled into a place, but it’s not long enough to get homesick. 7 days is too little time to spend on a vacation, and 3 weeks or more is difficult because of financial responsibilities.

• My 13 day (this includes travel time) vacation cost me around $2000. This includes the flight ($1250), cash withdrawals (~$440 / 220 pound sterling), tour fees ($150 / 76 pounds), and other credit card purchases (~$200). That’s really not bad for a two week trip to Europe, especially considering that it would be closer to $3000 if I had to pay for lodging.

• “Aye” and “Cheers” are my favorite terms that I picked up on the trip. I plan on using these for years to come. I also love talking about Loch’s, Ben’s and Glen’s.

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I’m heading out of town for Scotland today, and I should be arriving in Edinburgh on Sunday.  I’m not sure when I’ll have an Internet connection, so I can’t tell you when I’ll post next.  However, I can tell you that I plan on posting frequently while I’m there, so keep on reading!

Also, I shaved my facial hair after 7 days, and it was very uneventful.  It looked pretty much the same as it did when I posted about it the other day.

Talk to you soon!

In case you didn’t know, I’m going to Edinburgh, Scotland this Saturday, August 5th. Well, I’m leaving on Saturday and with travel time/time zone differences, I’ll be arriving Sunday. I’ll be back on August 17th, giving me around 10-11 days of time to enjoy myself.

I’m traveling to Scotland to meet up with my friend Krime Dogg (real name Ed Kramer), who is visiting Scotland to attend a wedding. He told me that I should come along with him, and that he’d have a place for us to stay. That was all I needed to hear. I figured that I’ll probably never have a chance like this (to travel to Scotland and stay for free with people who are native to the country), and that it would be great to have the opportunity to see Scotland from the eyes of people who live there, rather than as a tourist. Granted, I’ll still very much be a tourist, but at least I will have somewhat of an insider presence as well.

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