June 5th, I get a spammy looking email saying that I have a fed-ex package scheduled to be delivered in 5 days.

For some reason, I just couldn’t quite relegate it to the ‘delete’ folder.  I did a bit of poking around and it looked like it originated from Oculus. Then other people in different dev forums said they were getting emails too. Then Oculus sent out a tease of a tweet:

Hmm. This could be interesting. I eagerly kept my eye on the tracking, waiting for the morning it said ‘On Vehicle For Delivery’ -at which point I would camp out on my front porch glider; old man style, yelling at kids to get off my lawn until the Fed Ex guy drove up and I’d start running around in circles like Calvin when he finally got his propeller beanie.

Except – that’s when I noticed it was being delivered to another state.

The address was correct, except – it was going to California.

I ran circles, except now it was in a panic. I scanned all over Oculus’ site to see if there was someone I could contact about this and see if something could be done. No one seemed to have any helpful advice on the forums, Slack channels or any other VR related site. Until I remembered an email I got asking about my t-shirt size.

I scanned through my email – I’m a digital packrat, terabytes of old data with multiple copies just lying around everywhere and my inbox is no different. And lo & behold – an Oculus email, with an actual person instead of a automated response. Frantically I fore off a message in hopes that some one can help.

their reply:

Oh my,

I seriously felt like a kid opening the darn thing.

Each little bit was better than the last.

And now my next phase of dev work can begin. I’m hoping I can get my game ported to the Go so I can have 2 headsets running in Sept. when I make my way back to GDEX.

So, dev work has slowed to a  c r a w l  now that kiddos are out for summer break. Which means instead of having to drag them out of bed, throw something akin to clothing on them, forcing breakfast-like items into them and hustling them out the door, they now gleefully awaken at the first chirp of those psychotic birds every morning.

I kid you not, on Memorial Day, having stayed up late to watch Game 7 (and admittedly having an ale or 3 too many) I was greeted by the sounds of my youngest playing with some abomination of toys that chattered obnoxiously in the tune of a British Train.

At 5:50 in the damn AM.

No amount of coaxing, cajoling, pleading or offers to pay for cars, education, stupidly expensive toys could coax the wee lad back to his bed so I dragged him to the furthest part of the house slapped a tablet loaded with games in his hands and collapsed on a couch hoping we didn’t wake any of the others. Yeah, I suck as a parent but I was exhausted and could not think straight.

and its been like that since.

My dev time is in the early hours, when the household is asleep and the cat provides a fairly quiet wake-up service by jumping on my hear (or other sensitive parts) demanding food. I’ll fire up the coffee, check emails and guzzle a cup until I can think in a somewhat logical manner and plug away on my game until people need to get up and go to school or work. Until now. Now they CAN’T WAIT to leap out of bed and demand food, entertainment, attention, and an increasing need to square off against each other in ThunderDome style matches to see who can wake up people in the furthest county possible.

September can not get here soon enough.

Oculus tweeted this little teaser

And sure enough – I got a shipping notice with hints that I’d be getting one soon. Until I saw that its slated to be delivered in CALIFORNIA.

I just can’t get a break, it seems.