I Swear One Day We'll Get the Money Straight

After having four days off in a row last weekend, and spending them pretty well in my opnion, I've begun another three day run.

Staci's new job starts today at Ulta Beauty. I hope she likes it. I'm probably taking her to work in the morning. I might go to the college afterward to see what kind of hoops they'll make me jump through in order to attend again. I'm undecided, but I may not go back this fall if I can't get financial aid. I just don't see how we could do that again. But I don't really know yet. I would really like to go back. Maybe I'll just deal with the money stress in order to do so. I don't know. I want it real bad, though.

Last Saturday, we went to the water park over in Alma that almost nobody around here has been to or even knows about, it seems. It's both surprising and unsurprising, really. It's only got four water slides, but I think they're well worth the five bucks it costs to get in. I really did have a blast going down the toilet bowl. We immediately called it the toilet bowl, feeling all proud of our wit, and heard, pretty much right away, from the kids running past us in line up the stairs, "hey, are you guys going down the toilet bowl?" Supposedly, based on our answer, they would run past us, thinking it was okay to do so. I didn't really care. But I still thought it was hilarious when Casey sort of confronted a not-so-small boy about it.

I've been walking and jogging for the past two weeks. Last night, I jogged for the longest I've been able to do so for quite some time. I'm pretty proud of myself. It took two weeks of fairly consistent walking for almost an hour a night for me to get to this point. I still can't jog far, obviously, but if I were to attempt something like that a few weeks back, there would have been a good chance I would have ended up in the hospital. I have been feeling a lot better about myself lately, though. I think less negatively, I think.

Next up on the agenda towards being more active is to fix my bike, which is incredibly hard when every last bit of your money, and then some, is spent before you get it. It's also incredibly hard to spend money that a pending transaction at a gas station has kept tied up for almost 4 days. How the hell is that legal. And I'm asking this in all total and complete seriousness. If it isn't posted for the correct amount soon, I'm approaching somebody about it. Though I can't imagine the kind of wall I'd run into there.

Oye, I should'nt be up this late.

Growing More Nerdy Every Day

Nothing too special today. Had a long day at work. 1-close. Didn't do much there, as usual. Well, I did what my job is. Only today it felt like I was teaching entire lessons about computers and televisions to people. It's actually pretty amazing how much people do not know about these things. It's even more amazing when people are adamant about something being true, when it is completely false. I didn't even want to bring up, to this one man, how Monster cables were ridiculously overpriced - and for no good reason. He just knew that he was right already. He knew that Monster cables are the best ones because they have "speed ratings". Yeah, okay. Doesn't an HDMI cable have to be a certain speed to even be called an HDMI cable? Isn't the "speed" processed within the units you are connecting? Don't tell this man that.

Or don't tell this other lady, looking at laptops, that 2 gigs of ram for a laptop that she will only be using for school and internet is more than enough. But she just had to have at least 4 gigs. I didn't stick around for long. She gave me the "wife of Tom Peters" vibe. You know, that terrifying woman on Tom Goes to the Mayor. Oh well...

We're closing in on a new season of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, and I'm excited. I can't wait to experience some new underlying quirks, meanings, and subtleties. Boing Boing once called them 'Connoisseurs of Fine Funny'. I like that, and I think its fitting.

We had spaghetti (with meat!) tonight. Staci was worried that she burnt the meat, but it turned out delicious.

We made a new friend who lives in CA on Animal Crossing tonight. I'm going to get his friend code tomorrow.

Oh man, I'm excited. I purchased a 'lot' of M:TG cards tonight on ebay. I bought a Lot containing 500 cards, no fillers (lands), rares and uncommons included, and no more than 4 repeaters (if any, it says). Sounds like a pretty good deal. You can only have 4 of any certain kind of card in your deck anyway. And I also bought a Lot of 200 basic land cards, so that I can actually build decks when I get them. These were all extremely inexpensive. Considering theme decks and stuff only have 40-60 cards and cost 10 bucks. And I spent 15 for 500 cards. I can't tell you how nerdily excited I am. Just to touch them. Smell them. Remember them. I hope I get a lot of my old favorites, but I don't really know if I will or not. I'm going to be such a n00b player for so long. I just love to play. I'm hoping to have a decent collection together and maybe understand a few things better before we go to Akon this year. I want to see if I can join in on some of that. Maybe even enter a tournament and get slammed.

I can't wait.

Things are looking up. Or more like... things are starting to look very fun.

The Forced Work Rant. And a Telescope.

It was fairly cold this morning at 4am. I didn't get to see it, of course, but while working early this morning it snowed outside. And it didn't stick around long enough for me to enjoy it. Work itself was fairly boring, fraught with all the usual stress-related side effects. Including a perpetual grimace, work-worry related butterflies (will I get this done in time?), and telling yourself that it doesn't really matter anyway. Believe me when I say that almost 100% of the time, I really could care less about how Sam's is faring given the economy and how much profit they are losing to the gas prices being the lowest since when I was in high school. I really could, most of the time, care less about whether or not they are satisfied with my work, because in truth, it's just not my bag, baby.

And yet, I still get all of those stress-related side effects. The grimace is almost impossible not to get. Some of it is probably related to sleep deprivation involving getting up at 4am every day. But most of it is having a full task list, and then having to welcome an entire new one from a different manager with open and smiling politeness. Does that make me a good employee?

But, on to much cooler subjects. I have a pretty little telescope with the ability to capture astro images that I obtained as an early Christmas and birthday present from my grandmother-in-law. I haven't gotten to see much of anything yet. This is really just due to our backyard being the least accommodating to telescopes of any location. There are trees surrounding the entire yard. Next door there is an extremely bright night lamp. And, even if I could see most of the cosmos, they would shake uncontrollably due to the only possible base being a tiny bit of a wobbly deck that takes up most of the yard. That causes any images I can render to perpetually draw tiny bright circles and footballs in the lense. I just saw Venus doing this a few minutes ago.

So yes, a fairly uneventful day, really. It has forced me to write about work. I hate that.