Erik 2014

There is a wonderful chill in the air. People are laughing and enjoying themselves as the new year approaches. I have had a very interesting year so far and I’m excited to see what the new year will bring!

This year, I spent most of my time working at my new job, Leads On Demand Inc. It's an internet marketing company where my dad works. I work in quality controI. I've learned a lot and it's been a really good experience. I've also been able to pay off my student loan from my first semester at law school last year. I had originally planned to be in law school but unfortunately my GPA was not high enough to continue. I passed all of my classes, so that was good but there was a certain GPA cutoff for students at the school and I narrowly missed the cutoff. I was very disappointed in myself that I missed the cutoff. I spoke with all of my professors though and had some great conversations with them and they recommended I come back to law school after a few years, which is what I plan on doing.

Working at Leads On Demand has been great on so many levels because I have been able to gain more work experience in the business world, become more responsible and as a bonus, I have also been able to work with my dad everyday because he works at the same company!

While working, I also volunteered again with the Orlando Predators of the Arena Football League.

This season with the Preds was completely different than last season but in a good way. The team moved from the Amway Center, where they played their games last year, to CFE Arena at the University of Central Florida and the team had new coaches and many new players. This season was great for me as I was the only returning intern from last year and I had a lot of experience and because of that experience, I was given a lot more responsibilities on gamedays. Having these new responsibilities was great for me as I learned a lot more about everything that goes into making sure every gameday promotion, or anything that was gameday related, went smoothly.

I think that having these new responsibilities made it more fun for me this year! I also continued my role as the "Pizza Guy." Every game a sponsor (Domino's this year) gives away a pizza druing one to the TV timeouts. I dress up like a pizza deilvery guy and deliver it to a random fan. The jumbotron follows me and the crowd goes wild anticipating who is going to get the pizza. I taunt the fans by almost delivering to one person, then another and so on until I finally pick someone. It's really a lot of fun. Sometimes I have to run across the field with the pizza and jump over the boards...one time I nearly crashed!

Since I've been the Pizza Guy for two years, people are starting to recognize me which cracks me up. I'll be running around doing this or that and someone will holler out, "There's the Pizza Guy!" A couple times fans have asked me for an autograph...I'm not sure if they were kidding, but I gave it to them anyway. Ha!

For a week this past summer, I got to visit Connecticut, New York City and Boston for a few days when my mom and Annika were away for the summer at Annika's ballet camp. I have been to New York City before but I enjoyed myself a lot more because I had seen many parts of the city already so it was great to come back and see places I was familiar with.

The highlight of the trip though was visiting Boston with Mom!

I am a big history buff, particularly with the American Revolution and Civil War and because Boston was where the American Revolution really began, it was very exciting to be there! Boston is completely different city from New York as the streets in New York are laid out like a grid but in Boston, streets are coming out at every single angle so it’s kind of difficult to navigate. Mom and I had a tough time at first trying to figure it all out but we eventually did.

We rented bikes there so we rode throughout the whole historical part of the city checking out all of the historical sites like Paul Revere’s house, the Old North Church and many more. That was very exciting for me because I had read about these places many times and now I was finally getting to see them! When Mom and I were leaving we also drove through the Harvard campus and it was very cool to see such an old campus and how much history surrounded it. Seeing the campus definitely made me even more motivated to go back to law school.

This past week, my dad and I went to a Green bay Packers game when they played the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Tampa. I bought the tickets back in November as a surprise for my dad and he definitely was surprised to see them! When we were at the game, both of us thought there might be decent number of Bucs fans there since it was a home game but when we got there, it seemed like it was a Packer home game! Out of everyone in the stadium, 60-70% of the people were probably Packer fans! It seemed like everywhere we would look we would see Packer fans. It was an awesome game and I had a great time with my dad! Plus the Packers won!

So all in all, this year has been a blast and even though there were some ups and downs, I wouldn’t trade any of it away as it has helped me grow into a wiser and better person.

See you next year!

Erik

PS. Keep up with me at my blog: StartingAtThe17. I plan to start podcasting about the Packers in 2015. Look forward to cool interviews with players and fans as well as people from behind-the-scenes.