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...

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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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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