Joe's New Blog

Nothing special, this is just my third effort at writing a blog about my life and what goes on in it: Hobbies, cooking, work, maybe the occasional book or DVD review, and so forth. Nothing really noteworthy, but this is sort of a little subset of my world...

Monday, December 28, 2009

Daily Journal: Day 22 of 365

The concert last night was quite fun. We saw the Old 97s at the Sons of Hermann Hall in Dallas. The show began with Murry, the bass player, doing a solo set. He began sort of slow, and it seemed like he kind of lost a fair chunk of the crowd with a couple of ballads. He played a couple of songs people recognized, though, and managed to bring most of them back.

When Rhett came on stage and started playing his solo set, the crowd became really energized. He was all over the place, and as he mentioned himself, he didn’t have a single slow or quiet song in his set. It was all energy for the next half hour.

The whole band played for a couple of hours. They’re playing three more shows, and they said that they’re trying to not play any songs more than once except for “Time Bomb,” which is their set closer. So that means that this particular show wasn’t a “greatest hits” kind of thing, and I didn’t really know many of the songs. I’m sure I’ve heard a few of them before, but the only two I really knew were “Barrier Reef” and “Time Bomb.” Nevertheless, it was a really fun, really energetic show, and the girlfriend and I both had a lot of fun. It would have been nicer if the crowd wasn’t quite so close, but such is life.

The girlfriend was really happy with her birthday present, and that’s the thing that matters most…

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Sunday, December 27, 2009

Daily Journal: Day 21 of 365

It’s a cold, clear Sunday. For the most part, it’s been a lazy sort of day, but that’s not at all unusual for a weekend. The girlfriend’s friend Jason was here last night, but he left for home in Austin an hour or so ago. The girlfriend and I are going to the Old 97s concert in Dallas this evening. It’s one of her favorite bands, and it’ll be my first time seeing them. I’ll have to review the show tomorrow, because it will be well after midnight by the time we get home, despite the somewhat early start to the show. Right now I’m just watching football, nibbling on Christmas leftovers and sweets, and waiting for halftime, when I’m going to take a shower. I should do more today, but I’m just feeling lazy again. Sigh…

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Saturday, December 26, 2009

Daily Journal: Day 20 of 365

It was cold again this morning, with snow still on the ground out in the back yard. Fortunately the roads were all pretty clear, though. There were just a couple of slick areas still left where the sun hasn’t hit for the past couple of days. It was fortunate because we were going to go do some shopping this morning.

The girlfriend had a whole little list of stores we wanted to go to. We started at Hobby Lobby, mostly so she could look for good deals on wrapping paper and such, which we figured they’d likely have at very good prices. Unfortunately, things seem to have been picked over pretty well already, so she just got a few little things. I didn’t find anything I really wanted. There were actually quite a few things I wouldn’t have minded getting, but I just figured that I could live without more kitchen stuff. We already have a shortage of cabinet space, and I should use more of the stuff I already have without buying more.

After Hobby Lobby, it was off to the mall. She had a bunch of stores to go to, but I just headed off to Barnes & Noble, so I didn’t throw off her shopping mojo. They had a lot of stuff in the discount section of B&N, but I once again decided that most of the stuff I could live without. I did buy the unabridged Conan the Barbarian, which includes most of the short stories originally done by Robert E. Howard. It doesn’t have most of the novel series, which were completed by other authors from notes and manuscripts begun by Howard but left incomplete at his death. I probably could have lived without that, too, but I gave away all of my Conan novels when I moved down here to Texas, and I sometimes miss the shallow swordplay-and-sorcery fantasy that I used to have in my collection.

Next stop was Hastings, where we found a couple of DVD collections of Christmas shows at steep discounts. She got the Charlie Brown holiday collection, and I got a collection of the old animated classics including Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, and Santa Claus is Coming to Town. We’ll definitely have Christmas shows to watch next year. I also got a Christmas swing CD, which wound up being only 25 cents. We thought about going back and getting more once we found out how cheap things were, but we decided to move on.

Old Navy had jeans on sale for $15, but I couldn’t find a pair that fit me and didn’t look way too big. So I settled for getting a few T-shirts, also on sale, and the girlfriend got some sweaters and some wrapping paper. We cut the trip short after that because we were both tired and hungry.

Once at home, I turned on the brisket, filling the house with a lovely smoky beefy aroma. It took a while to finish, but it was well worth the wait. Her friend Jason came up for her birthday, and we had dinner and watched some TV with him. Now he’s off to bed, and I’m about to head the same way…

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Friday, December 25, 2009

Daily Journal: Day 19 of 365

It’s Christmas Day. I just finished smoking a brisket for the girlfriend’s birthday tomorrow. The smoking process didn’t go as well as I would have liked, but I think I got enough of the smoke flavor into the beast. We’re going to pour some cola over it and bake it low and slow in the oven tomorrow to finish cooking it. Hopefully it’ll come out tasting delicious, but I guess we’ll see…

We got up a little later than we wanted this morning, which seems to be a pretty familiar situation for us. The girlfriend made corn casserole and cookies to take over to her aunt and uncle’s place for Christmas. She didn’t want to roll out the cookie dough in the fridge, mostly because of the hassle of rolling them out, cutting them, and trying to get the cut out dough off the counter without demolishing the shapes. So she made some cookies with chocolate, peanut butter, and butterscotch chips as well as pecans and almonds. They were pretty good, but we wound up leaving most of them over at her aunt and uncle’s.

The drive over was much less harrowing than the drive home last night. There were still a few slick spots, but for the most part, the sun had burned off most of the ice. Between the drive home last night and the drive to Plano this morning, I counted at least 10 accidents or cars off the road. I’m quite sure there were plenty more that we didn’t see. It’ll be a busy day at the body shop on Monday, I’m guessing.

The actual Christmas lunch was fun. Most of the girlfriend’s family was there, as well as a few extended in-law type people who I met for the first time. I don’t remember most of the names, but that’s not really unusual, and I doubt that I’ll see most of those folks again for another year or more anyway. But the company was nice, and the food was good. We brought home a bit of food, but for the most part we decided to pass on leftovers.

On the drive home, we actually watched an accident happen. Two or three cars continued through an intersection right in front of us after our light turned green, and when traffic on our side started going, one lady who was turning across traffic was pretty much forced to stop in the intersection and the car behind her hit her from the rear at a fairly decent clip. The girlfriend thought there must be something wrong with the traffic signal or something, because too many cars were continuing to turn after our light turned green. I’m not so sure, but we’ll never find out. We weren’t effected and were already pretty well turned onto the freeway frontage road by the time the accident happened. It seemed like no one was really injured, and there were plenty of other people around, so we headed on down the road.

Tomorrow, we’re going to do a bunch of shopping. Looks from the girlfriend’s list like it’s probably going to be nearly all day, so I should probably go get some sleep now…

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Thursday, December 24, 2009

Daily Journal: Day 18 of 365

Christmas Eve. We went down to the girlfriend’s mom’s house and had dinner with that half of her family. Actually, not the full extended family. It was her mom and stepfather and her brother and sister-in-law and their three sons. Overall, it was a fun time and everyone enjoyed dinner and the gifts they received. It was snowing most of the day, and it was frozen solid on the roads by the time we were leaving, so it took us nearly an hour to get back home, when it usually takes about 15 minutes. It’s pretty late now, and I’ve been up since about six this morning, since the girlfriend had to open at work and then I had to work a half day, too. So, I think it’s just about time for me to head off to sleep. More details on the presents I got and such tomorrow, as well as some snow pictures once I get them off the camera…

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Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Daily Journal: Day 17 of 365

So, snack day went all right at the dealership. Someone asked for the recipe for my stuffed Brussels sprouts, despite the fact that I didn’t think they turned out as well as they did last time. And my sausage bread thing didn’t come out looking like a pinwheel at all, but I sliced it up and it was consumed, mostly by the techs, I think. They’ll eat pretty much anything you put in front of them, it seems.

I had one interesting run today, picking up a lady here in Denton. I didn’t call first, since she had just called the dealership. I was stopped at a guard station when I got to the location. They had me wait while they called the lady. I asked her what kind of place it was, and she just said that it was a government building and that they were a little particular over who comes and goes. I didn’t press her any further about what the place was, and she didn’t offer any more information. The girlfriend thinks that it might be the FEMA office, or it might be some other government agency using the proximity of FEMA as a front. We’re not sure, and there sure wasn’t any kind of plaque or anything advertising what agency ran the place.

I got presents shipped off today, but it doesn’t seem likely that they’ll make it there by Christmas. And, from what the guy at FedEx said, it looks like they don’t have Saturday delivery at Mom’s place, so stuff probably won’t get there until after Irene and Bryan have gone back home. As the girlfriend said, next year we’ll have to make it a priority to get stuff sent off earlier.

Anyway, that’s about all that’s happened today that’s really of a lot of interest. It’s about time to head off to bed. Got up early today to do the final touches on food, so now I’m pretty tired. Should be a short day tomorrow, but it’s still up in the air as far as when they’re going to shut down at work. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see…

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Daily Journal: Day 16 of 365

Tomorrow is the snack day in the service department at work. I wish I’d done more work on things yesterday or over the weekend, but I actually was busy doing other stuff, so everything got pushed to the last minute. And accordingly, just about everything came out much worse than I would have liked. I gave up on the cookies, since doing them with the cookie cutters is such a major hassle. I think if I do the same ones next time, I’m going to skip the step of chilling them and use the spritz gun instead. Rolled cookies are just a pain the the ass, really. Then the stuffed broccoli didn’t turn out anywhere near as well as it did the last time I did it. I tried a little experiment with the bacon, which I saw on TV a while back. I tried boiling it for a while to cook it, then seeing if I could get it to crisp up in the oven. Unfortunately, boiling makes it much less elastic, which makes it much harder to wrap around the broccoli. So, next time I know to go back to raw bacon. And the final thing, which is still in the oven, was supposed to be sausage and cheese pinwheels. Instead, it looks like they’re going to be something more like a sausage and cheese bread loaf, cut into slices. I think it should still taste all right, but it’s certainly not going to be as pretty as I would have liked. Hopefully it’ll still get eaten tomorrow. I feel like my cooking and baking skills are at a low ebb. But the second loaf will be out soon, and then I can just sleep it off…

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Monday, December 21, 2009

Daily Journal: Day 15 of 365

Today was pretty much the average Monday at work. I expected there to be a ton of pick-ups, since there was an entire sheet of take-homes when I got there, but instead it was an almost dead day. The girlfriend’s friend Jason and his new girlfriend got to the apartment while we were still at work. His girlfriend April is a nice young lady, quite smart. She’s a biologist. I’m guessing that she’s going to the University of Texas, but I’m not sure of that. She’s catching the bus back home to Minnesota for Christmas.

The girlfriend made potato and cheese soup for dinner, so no cooking for me today. And, since we had company, I also didn’t do any cookie baking today. I guess I’d better do a bunch of stuff tomorrow, though, because I told all the people at the service department that I was going to make my stuffed Brussels sprouts, cookies, and sausage pinwheels. That’s plenty, methinks.

For now, though, it’s off to bed with me…

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Daily Journal: Day 14 of 365

Today was mostly a cleaning day around the old apartment. I did make a batch of cookie dough, too, but it wound up being a type of dough that needs to be chilled for a couple of hours, and by the time the chilling was done, I really didn’t feel like rolling out the cookies and baking them and such. So now I have a batch of cookie dough in the fridge, which I should roll out and cut tomorrow. I also made dinner tonight. It was pretty simple. I sauteed some scallops in butter and garlic and served them with some Uncle Ben’s rice. It wasn’t bad, and took only about ten minutes.

I managed to get all of the stuff upstairs from the living room, and I even managed to weed through about half a dozen boxes, sorting out the tools and writing utensils and cross stitch stuff from all the rest of the crap. Of course, all the rest of the crap went back into the same boxes, and I still haven’t weeded through all of that. It’s definitely going to be an ongoing process. Who the hell knows how long I’ll be digging through boxes of cables?...

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Sunday, December 20, 2009

Daily Journal: Day 13 of 365

Another one of those days when I’ve technically missed the date, but I’m still considering myself to be within the spirit of the thing. I’ve been moving stuff back upstairs in preparation for one of the girlfriend’s friends, who is going to be staying with us on Monday night. He’s bringing his girlfriend, so my girlfriend wants to make sure the place is spic and span. And there’s no time like the present to try to sort through all my boxes of crap and try to get a bit more organized.

We went to the hockey game today. The Stars managed to pull out a 4-3 win against the Red Wings, which I wasn’t expecting at all. We purchased our tickets as part of a special deal, where we get tickets to another game for each game that the Stars win out of the five we bought, so we’re going to have tickets to at least one more game than we were really expecting. That’s kind of a nice little bonus for the day.

After the hockey game, we ate at Chili’s, since I had a gift card for there and we got a coupon for free chips and salsa because Dallas scored more than three goals in the game. The food was decent. I had the pulled pork sandwich. It certainly wasn’t the best I’ve ever had, but it wasn’t horrific, either. The girlfriend was quite happy with her burger, and we both thought the chips and salsa were pretty good.

We stopped at Hobbytown USA, mostly because we were at least in the general vicinity. I spent far more money than I should have. I picked up one of each EZ-Track piece that they had which Hobby Lobby doesn’t carry, and it came to about $132 with tax. I should probably cut back a bit on the spending and start working on getting an actual layout planned and built.

After Hobbytown, we headed up to Ikea. We weren’t really expecting to spend much there, but we found that they were clearing out a really nice looking bookshelf that matched our TV table. We also found a bunch of other little things, which added up to a fair amount of money. When we got down to the area where we pick up the furniture, we found out that the bookshelf was apparently sold out, which was a disappointment in one way. Namely, we’re still not going to have that storage for books and such. But, on the other hand, it was nearly $300 that we didn’t spend.

From Ikea, we headed back toward home along the tollway, which we don’t usually take. The girlfriend noticed the Christmas lights on one building blinking in a kind of rhythmic fashion, and she wanted to go see what was up. It turns out that the city of Frisco has a Christmas light show in their square, complete with music on FM radio. Traffic was a mess, but we found a parking place and sat and watched for half an hour or so. I took a bit of video with my camera, but I can’t currently find the cable to download it to the computer and post it. In any case, it was pretty fun, despite nearly being smacked by a car on the way in.

From there, it was home and to work trying to get the place in order. And now, it’s off to get some sleep, because I think I have about thirty more trips up and down the stairs tomorrow…

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Friday, December 18, 2009

Daily Journal: Day 12 of 365

It’s the weekend! We have a hockey game to see tomorrow, and we’re probably going to go to Ikea and Hobbytown USA after the game is over. I stopped at Hobby Lobby today after work and picked up a couple of packs of EZ-Track, since they still had all the train stuff 30% off. After I got home, I went upstairs and snapped almost all the track I have together in the currently vacant bedroom up there. I have two train sets now, both the sort of bargain type. One of them is an old steam engine, the other a modern freight train. I was trying to get the steam train working, but it seems to want to derail at the turnouts, but I had better luck with the freight. I didn’t bother to set up any of the other scenery or anything. I’m going to wait until I get some of the foam insulation sheets from Home Depot after Christmas, then I’ll start really trying to set up a small modular layout. I’m not sure how detailed I’ll get, but I’d like to spend an hour or so every week working on it. We’ll see how it goes…

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Thursday, December 17, 2009

Daily Journal: Day 11 of 365

We went shopping on the way home from work today and wound up spending a whole lot more than we’d really expected. It’s about the first time I can recall having a really full shopping cart for nearly a year. The girlfriend is going to make Chex mix, so there were supplies for that, and I’m going to make some snacks for the department’s snack day at work next week, and we just generally wound up getting a bunch of stuff that looked good or was on sale. In fact, we nearly filled the freezer beyond capacity, so it looks like the next week or so should be an interesting week for cooking. Probably have more on that later, but for now, it’s about time to see if I can get some sleep. It’s been a long, long day…

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Daily Journal: Day 10 of 365

Yes, technically it’s past midnight, so I missed the day, but I was working on getting stuff from the upstairs bedrooms down into the living room so the carpet cleaners can do their magic on the upstairs rooms. They were originally supposed to be here on Friday, but the landlord had a doctor’s appointment, so we moved it up a day. During the furniture-moving phase of the operation, the girlfriend pulled a muscle in her back, so I got to finish up moving the bed and most of the rest of the stuff myself, but that’s all right. At least it’s all done now. Not sure how moving it back upstairs is going to go, since we have to do that by Monday night, when we’ll have company coming to stay. Maybe I’ll have to see if someone from work will help out or something. But for now, it’s off to sleep, methinks…

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Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Daily Journal: Day 9 of 365

Today wasn’t too bad a day. Work in the morning was pretty routine. When the girlfriend and I got home for lunch, we found that there was a carpet cleaner’s van out front. And, sure enough, there were a bunch of hoses and stuff leading into our living room. So, did the carpet look “as good as new”? No, not really, but it did look an order of magnitude better than it ever has since I’ve lived here.

While we were talking with the carpet guys, the new landlord came by. He had already looked at the leaky garbage disposal and figured out that we needed a new one. He’d also already fixed the countertop which was separating from the cupboards beneath it. And he had purchased a deadbolt for the back door, although he had to do some drilling to get the thing installed. He said that the chimney was actually clean, but the flue was really hard to get open, so maybe we can start using the fireplace tomorrow. We also showed him the lighting problems with the outside lights, and he said he’d get an electrician out to look at it and see if we can get a switch or something.

As we were leaving, he also showed us where he’s going to put a section of fence to give us some privacy on our back patio. And he said that he’d repair the screens and get them re-hung. That means we’ll finally be able to open the windows without flies getting in and the cat getting out. That’ll be nice.

The afternoon at work was pretty good, too. I had enough driving that I stayed busy most of the shift, but not a lot of really difficult-to-find addresses. Between that and pulling up a few cars for customers, it kept me pretty active all shift. And that’s a good day…

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Monday, December 14, 2009

Daily Journal: Day 8 of 365

Today, I started baking Christmas cookies. The batch today only wound up being a couple of dozen, and the girlfriend is going to decorate them tomorrow. I’m not sure that I’ll make any more tomorrow, since the landlord’s carpet guy is supposed to be over during the day to fix the carpet, and who knows how long all that crap is going to take. I need to pick up some more stuff and take apart the TV system so he can do whatever he’s going to do to make the carpet “good as new”.

While driving back to the dealership with an older couple this afternoon, I was reminded again why I should never talk about religion. I really didn’t bring it up at all, and I tried to sort of change the subject, but it wound up with me being invited to their church and them telling me how wonderful it is and how there are all kinds of groups of people there. I really wanted to just tell them to shut up about it because I wasn’t interested in the least, but I didn’t think that would be all that appropriate a thing to say to customers. Oh well…

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Sunday, December 13, 2009

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…

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Saturday, December 12, 2009

Daily Journal: Day 6 of 365

Today I went out and spent a bunch more money than I should have. I went down to Hobby Lobby, expecting to buy a small something for my prospective future train layout, as well as possibly getting some Poly-Fil for the girlfriend’s craft projects if the price wasn’t too bad. When I got there, though, I found out that they had all of their train and diorama supplies on sale. So instead of buying a piece or two of track or something of that nature, I wound up buying another basic train set, a turnout, and three or four pieces of landscaping supplies. On the plus side, I did get the Poly-Fil and a sketch book, for my New Year’s resolution of working my way through my book on drawing. Just a little more money spent than expected was all…

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Friday, December 11, 2009

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…

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Thursday, December 10, 2009

Daily Journal: Day 4 of 365

Today the girlfriend and I watched Julie and Julia, one of the movies on our infamous list. It wound up being a very cute movie. Meryl Streep does an incredibly good job playing Julia Child. I wondered, while watching the movie, how many new food blogs were created by people after watching it. Generally, it’s one of those two thumbs up sorts of movies in our opinion. Well worth the four bucks to rent the DVD, as well as being worth the half hour to get the damned DVD player working with the new TV. First DVD played after getting the hi-def…

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Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Daily Journal: Day 3 of 365

Today was another bitterly cold day, barely reaching 40 degrees. At least it was sunny, though. Driving at work was fairly uneventful today. I had one short run into Denton and one longer one out to Justin, and that was about it. The lady on the first (Denton) run works at an accounting firm, and I was talking to her about going into the accounting field. I’m still just not really sure what I want to be when I grow up, but I’m seriously looking at accounting. Other options include getting a degree in library science, getting my certification as a DBA and getting back into the computer geek biz, or heading toward a culinary career. I’m just still really uncertain, though. I guess trying to go back to college would be a good starting point, and it would keep the girlfriend from griping at me about not taking any classes this term. That would be a serious bonus…

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Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Daily Journal: Day 2 of 365

I decided earlier today that I’m going to create another list of resolutions for 2010. I’ve done this too many times in the past and not bothered to follow up on things past about a week. With any luck, this time will be a little better. I’m planning to do three lists: daily, weekly, and monthly items. Actually, there might be a fourth list for bi-weekly items, too. Then I’m going to do the whole thing as a set of HTML tables and post them to my website. My goal for the rest of this year is to get that list created and the HTML generated and posted to the website…

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Monday, December 7, 2009

Daily writing: Day 1 of 365

The girlfriend and I slept in later than we should have this morning, and we barely made it to work on time. It was cold and foggy and a generally dreary sort of winter day. It reminded me a lot of winter in Oregon. I don’t think it got over 40 degrees today.

The morning shift was uneventful. I didn’t have much filing to do, and I had everything done about two hours into my 4-1/2 hour shift. Fortunately I had a little list of orders to try to find during the middle, so I wasn’t totally bored all morning.

We drove home for lunch, which was pretty uneventful. Back to work, and it was pretty much right onto the road. I had a total of three runs today, one take-home and two pick-ups. The first was just to the north end of Denton, but the second was a bit of a pain. It was a pick-up in Flower Mound, so I took the little back route that Art, the morning driver, had shown me on my second day. That all was fine until I got about halfway there, and the road was closed to through traffic. So I wound up detouring about 20 minutes out of the way from where I would have been. And there was more construction on the way, so after picking the lady up, I had to head south and head through downtown Lewisville to make it to the freeway. By the time I’d hit the freeway, it was just about rush hour, and it took about 45 minutes to get back to the dealership. The lady wasn’t upset or anything, but it was kind of a pain nevertheless. Fortunately, the last run was just down the road about five minutes from the dealership. That lady seemed like she would have been kind of fun to go to a party with. She was older, but seemed like the sort who always has fun wherever she goes.

After the last run, I just had to hang out about half an hour before it was time to head home. Some lady called to say that she’d be there to pick up her rental a little after 7:00, but fortunately I don’t have to deal with that. It became even more fortunate when the lady called back again at about 6:50 and said that she was still half an hour away. Hopefully she finally made it. I know that Vickie, the gal who was running rentals tonight, was pretty pissed about the whole issue.

We stopped and got gas on the way home. I didn’t realize I had the 10-cent per gallon bonus at Kroger, but I was pleasantly surprised that the gas was going to be cheaper than I’d expected. We decided not to stop at the grocery store for coffee, since I already have enough for tomorrow. Instead, we just drove home and the girlfriend started making spaghetti for dinner. I started watching Monday Night Football. Dinner was good, the game was decent, and now it’s about time to call it a night…

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