Daily Journal: Day 7 of 365

Today was at least a borderline productive day, even though I didn’t get everything done that I wanted to. I woke up fairly early for a weekend and checked the e-mail and such this morning while having my morning coffee. After that, I started taking some boxes upstairs to clear out the living room so the new landlord’s carpet guy can do his magic on Tuesday. I still have a few things that need to go up, and I need to take apart the electronics and get those put away tomorrow, but it’s a lot better than it was.

I also cleaned out Kala’s litter box, which really needed it. Unfortunately, I think all the dust from the kitty litter may have aggravated the girlfriend’s allergies, but her sneezing and snuffling settled down a little once she medicated herself.

On the computer and blogging front, I downloaded a new free HTML editor to use for creating my 2010 New Year’s resolutions page. It’s called PageBreeze, and it seems to be a fairly decent piece of software, although it does seem to be pretty advertising heavy. The company has some commercial software and hosts a system for creating online forms and retrieving the data, so it makes sense that they’d have this kind of adware. It doesn’t detract from the use of the free software, though. I used it to create a page for the resolutions and to revise my homepage and a couple of other pages on the website, to make them look a little sharper, I think.

We made pork chops on the grill for dinner. We haven’t used the grill for a few months now, and the girlfriend was saying that maybe it was kind of a wasted purchase. We just need to find more friends and invite them over more often. Maybe once the repairs are done on the place, or whenever we find a new place to live, we’ll be able to become a bit more sociable…

See more progress on: write in my journal daily for a year

Daily journal: Day 5 of 365

It was another very quiet day at work. I had one ride, picking up a lady from about three miles away. And today I didn’t even have as many cars to bring up as I had yesterday. So, I wound up spending most of the evening working on creating my list of New Year’s resolutions and getting them organized. Now I just need to get them all typed in, figure out some way of displaying my progress in some kind of organized way, and post the result to the website.

After work, my sweetie and I carpooled home. I did the dishes before she made something for dinner. It was supposed to be sort of a shrimp scampi kind of dish, but it wound up being a sort of thick fish stew with shrimp in it. She didn’t like it very much, but I had my whole bowl. I thought it was pretty decent tasting, although the texture certainly left something to be desired. After having dinner, I vacuumed the bedroom, so hopefully her allergies won’t have so much effect on her.

Now I’m just sitting watching hockey. The Stars just tied their game against the Sharks. We’ll be going to see the Stars play live next weekend, which is nice. If they win, we’ll get tickets to another game. It was kind of a special deal that the Stars had going on. We are at least going to five more games this season, and if they win all five, we could theoretically be going to a total of ten more games. That’d be cool…

See more progress on: write in my journal daily for a year

Another day, another dollar...

I had three pickups and a drop-off on a cold, wet day of driving at work. I was a bit annoyed this morning. We carpooled in today. Yesterday, I walked over to the reception area to pick up the girlfriend for lunch just a little earlier than I had planned, at about 2:20 instead of 2:30-2:45. She was kind of annoyed at that. So today I had a couple of things to do in the file room, so I was busy until about 2:30. And she calls me to find out where I'm at, because Kathy, the other receptionist, wants to leave early. If that kind of thing is going to happen regularly, I guess the whole carpooling thing might not be such a good idea. I guess we'll find out as time goes along, though.

Before leaving for work this morning, I got a reply back from the new landlord. He's going to come by tomorrow and take a look at all the things that we've told him we'd like fixed in the apartment. I doubt that everything will be taken care of, but maybe we'll at least get some of the major stuff done.

Got home from work and watched a hockey game while eating leftover curry for dinner. The game was the Blackhawks hosting the Blue Jackets, and it was a pretty good game. Went through overtime at 3-3, and it took them 11 rounds of a shootout to determine the winner. Wish I had the luck to see a game like that live. Now I'm watching How the Earth Was Made on the History Channel. I suppose I should probably head off to bed now. It's getting late, I'm getting tired, and I still have to do the dishes tomorrow morning so we have the house a little cleaner for the landlord...

Working and grievances...

Boring first half of the day at work. The girlfriend called the new landlords at lunch, and he gave us his e-mail address to send any of our grievances to. Apparently, the old landlords told him all this stuff was going to be fixed before they signed the actual sale papers. We've drafted and sent off a large e-mail to him this evening, detailing all the shit they said they would do and some of the other stuff we gave to them over a year and a half ago.

Second half of the day wasn't anywhere near as boring. Had a take-home, who was a nice college girl who works at the UNT observatory. Quick run. There was one guy who didn't want to be picked up until around five, so I figured I had time to go get a guy in Double Oak. Got lost, wound up taking about an hour to do a run which should have taken about half that. Got the other guy almost half an hour late, but he didn't seem to mind. Had another nice lady as the end of the day, nice short run to Lake Dallas. She was from New Orleans originally and we talked about weather and the best times to visit the Big Easy. Looks like maybe next October would be good.

Went shopping after work and got home later than expected. The girlfriend made curry. I helped with that and then watched Monday Night Football before drafting the letter to the new landlords. Now I need to go wash the dishes, since I told her I'd do it yesterday...

A useless, depressing kind of day...

I did a little test a few minutes ago, and I found that, unlike with some of the blogging software I've used, Blogger apparently allows you to insert older posts before you're more recent ones, so I don't need to update all of my vacation posts before doing my regular postings. That makes things a little bit easier for me...

Anyway, yesterday after getting home from the Easter festivities, the girlfriend and I lounged around for a bit. Neither one of us really felt like moving all that much after all we'd eaten at dinner. I didn't actually eat anything else except one of her cookies for the rest of the day. Definitely had more to eat at dinner than I'd had for a while...

After we'd rested and digested for a bit, she called Hastings to find out if they were open, which they were, and we headed down there so she could find a book to read during her downtime at work. They were indeed open, so we headed on down. Unfortunately, they didn't have the next book in the series she's been reading, plus they didn't have the book that we're supposed to be reading for our next book club. And they really didn't even have anything else she wanted to read. So we headed over to Barnes and Noble.

Even if it wasn't Easter, B&N would have been closed. It was already almost eight by the time we got there, and they close at seven on Sunday. So we had to admit defeat and headed back home.

After we got home, she wanted to watch Extreme Makeover Home Edition, and I didn't, so she headed off to the bedroom and I sat out here in the living room and watched a baseball game. After the game was over, I went in and watched some of her home shows with her before we tried to get to sleep. It was another one of those nights where neither of us could sleep very well.

She had to be at work at nine this morning, and I should have got up at around the same time, but I didn't. Instead, I drifted in and out until almost noon. I finally decided I'd better get up and do something with the day. When I got up, I saw that there was something taped to the door. Turns out it was the new utility bill, even though we only received the last utility bill last Sunday. I guess the landlady is a little behind in getting the bills distributed. That made me feel even a little more depressed than I already was, because I certainly can't afford to pay even my share of that bill, let alone the whole thing like I've been trying to do for a while. I did finally write out the check for the last utility bill, figured out how much postage it needed, got the envelope addressed, and got it all put together. Now I just need to get down to the post office and mail it off. I also found out that the cost of a stamp goes up two more cents in May. Great...

After I took care of that, I made myself another pot of coffee. I figured I'd at least do something useful with the day, so I emptied the dishwasher and folded the towels that were in the dryer. I dug the classified sections out of the newspapers, but I really haven't gone through them yet. I also went through the musicians classifieds on Craigslist, but I haven't sent off any replies to any of the ads I found interesting.

The girlfriend came home for a short lunch around three. We had some leftover brisket and potatoes from the Easter dinner for lunch, and I again feel like I might not have to eat anything else for the rest of the evening. That stuff's a lot more filling than I thought it would be for as much as I ate.

After she headed back to work, I dragged the top of my desk in from the car and upstairs. I got it attached to the main part of the desk and started getting things hooked up, but I realize that I'm going to have some problems because I don't have a wired network connection up there. I think I'm going to move the wireless card from my music computer to my regular desktop, then hook everything in that room using my wired switch. I don't really need an internet connection from the music computer or any of the project computers, so just having the wireless on the main should be all right...

Now I'm sitting here watching another baseball game, after watching some history stuff earlier. The girlfriend is in the bedroom watching her home shows. I was a bit standoffish when she got home, and I hope she's not annoyed at me. I guess I'll find out when the game's over. Sigh...