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Happy Easter!

Sunday, April 8th, 2012

So it’s the official time of year where you can mark it off as Spring.  Some flowers are blooming, little boys and girls are dressed in adorable (sometimes matching) outfits and everyone is enjoying time with friends and family exchanging excessive amounts of sugar.  I personally consider this to be the Halloween of spring, the only thing missing is a few witches and freaky gools – but hey … everyone has a few quirky people in their families now don’t they?

I woke up extra late this afternoon, I think after all of the productivity and festivities from last night my body just decided it needed a break and boom 10 hours later I woke up.  Did I happen to like that it was at 2pm? No, of course not… but I still have enough time today where I can actually sit down and get a few things done as well.

The bulk of today’s list is primarily taken by prepping dinner for tomorrow night.  As usual my dad is working on Easter, so it’s kind of a tradition (with this, and all holidays really) that everything is either done the night before or the night after.  So instead of cooking all day on Easter, the little lamb leg in the fridge will be marinating until tomorrow afternoon where it will find it’s nice cozy place in the oven.  It’s just going to be the four of us, I’m in no kind of emotional state where I want a house full of people – even though it seems as though that’s always the case.

On the ‘work’ list, I’m waiting on numerous emails so I can proceed with getting everything done and actually bring in a decent paycheck this month to counteract the lack of decent pay for March.  There’s like 4 pending sites to work on and not a single response from anyone in order to even move forward.  I assume that due to the holiday’s everyone has kind of strayed away – but I know I’ve got a big client coming in on Tuesday and that’s going to eat up all of my time – I just want to knock everything out so I don’t have to be bogged down with work to the point that I can’t even get my deck setup as my second office.

We’ve already got the gazebo up, and I’ve started my planting since the weather warmed up to the point that it didn’t seem like such a bad idea.  The biggest issue that we have up here is the lack of shade so I took a ride over to Home Depot last night and picked up some clothes line and tarps so that we could create a curtain feel outside that will not only block out the sun to void the glare on the laptops, but it’s waterproof so I don’t have to worry about having to take them down once a week just to throw them in the washing machine.  A quick $80 later, and everything is slowly coming together.   Now it’s just time to wait for the flowers to start blooming in a couple of weeks and I’ll have my oasis again.

This time of year is proving to be pretty difficult for me, primarily based on the fact that I like to spend as much time as humanly possible outside and this year I don’t have my little buddy to join me due to his passing in November.  I know I’m surrounded by friends and family, but everyone knows that deep down inside you’re still hoping to bring back the ones that were worthy of touching your life.

In any event…it’s time to start cleaning house, it’s been about a week and just my desk alone looks like a train wreck and a half.

Hope everyone enjoys their Easter!

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Rest In Peace Jake

Sunday, November 20th, 2011

As previously posted, my neighbor was hospitalized after we found him in his apartment. Unfortunately, due to circumstances, he’s no longer with us. He was in he hospital for about a week, numerous different specialists came in to look at his charts, run tests, and try to figure out what they can do to help him.  The family found that the reason for his passing out was due to a major stroke on his left side, being as he was under sedation they had no real idea as to how badly this was going to effect him.

They slowly began to take him off of sedation but he was still unresponsive. After a week the doctors said that he really should show some signs of life other than the machines keeping him alive.  They’d taken him off the ventilator a few times over the course of the week but he failed miserably to breath on his own. His daughter noted that he was just lifeless and blank.  They found that his entire right side was paralyzed due to he stroke, and his heart was only functioning at 25%.  The family had to make the unfortunate choice of removing the life support due to this.

Jake wasn’t one of those guys that would be OK living on life support in a hospital / nursing home.  Knowing his personality, and who he was in general – having anyone make a fuss about him was just something he didn’t tolerate. He was surrounded with love and caring people but never wanted to bother anyone, no matter how he was feeling.  I always ran errands for him, and had to make it clear everytime that it was never an inconvenience to me.  Looking after someone is second nature for me, especially considering his closest family was a half hour away.  I believe in my heart if it wasn’t for the fact that I knew his routine, he wouldn’t have been found in his apartment until it was too late.  His family had the opportunity to say goodbye to him, and even though I didn’t, and it hurts really bad, things happening the way that they did were better for them.

I didn’t get the phone call until a week later, which was upsetting but I can’t totally be pissed because I understand that families in that situation have so much more going on.  I’ve spoken to his son and daughter since then, his daughter was up here for two days this past week to clear his apartment out. A lot was left behind for donations/trash but there’s still a few weeks left in the month to clear the rest out.  I know it was hard for her to go through everything.  She noted on Friday that she wanted to knock on the door to thank me for all I’ve done but also said that she’s fine and on auto-pilot until she actually needs to speak with someone.  That’s understandable for me, I personally don’t know where my mind is going to be if I was ever put into her shoes.  I know at some point in the future I will be, but can’t mentally comprehend or stomach that thought right now.  It actually turns my stomach to even think about that.

Either way. Jake was a wonderful man whom was a dear, dear friend of mine and he will be truly missed.  He was there for me when Lucy passed away and remained in my life for a few years there after.  His spirit was always there, unfortunately his body was holding him back.  I catch myself talking to him when I’m outside having a cig, in my head things haven’t fully set in being as the memorial service is not scheduled until the end of the month. I believe after that point, and his apartment being completely cleared out – things will finally hit me to the point that I have the breakdown that I feel coming on.  I’m not on auto-pilot by any means, I’ll admit I’ve been out of it, and weapy for the past week.  Today is really the first day I’ve sat down and got my feelings out.

I know I don’t blog very often, and when I do I tend to complain or have some major life changing event going on.  Regardless, I’ll still use this as my outlet because I tend to revert back to old habits when the shit hits the fan.

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Posted in Daily, Family, Friends | 4 Comments »

Woah there!

Wednesday, November 9th, 2011

It’s been a pretty eventful couple of weeks, some good events, some bad events.

We finally got back to NY very early on Wednesday (26th), we were so busy with everything in DE that we just didn’t have the chance to come home until then. We left at like Midnight on Tuesday, and got home about 5am.  We stopped along the way because 4 1/2 hours in a car is just annoying without some kind of a release, which is probably why I’m not thrilled about the idea of going across country in an RV.

We came home and found that there was little to no work and began to worry considering we need to come up with anywhere from $35k to $50k in order to even truly consider moving forward with purchasing a home in DE.  There’s too much debt to pay off before we throw a mortgage and utilities on top of it. So we figure, just continue to work our asses off and go from there. We were at a complete and total stand still for about 4 days and now things are slowly beginning to trickle in. Today, I was finally able to write things down and I have 8 projects to work on over the course of the next 7 days, which means its great that I was finally able to get AGnDesigns.net up and running 100%. Hopefully this will help us to get closer to our goal. At this point, whether the house is still there or not, is irrelevant. Of course to me this would be a sign that it was meant to be, but if not – I’m OK with that because I know that when it does come to the right time, we’ll be 100% financially stable to do it.

After a few days of being home my neighbor, Jake, finally poked his head out. I was told that the reason I hadn’t seen him was due to the fact that he was in the hospital for 9 days and only came home on Monday night (before we got home) so he was resting until he could gain enough strength to come out for a bit to say hello. From that day forward I made it a point to check on him on a daily basis. I spoke to him on Sunday evening to make sure he was doing OK and if the house was warm enough for him (the thermostat for all of the apartments is in our apartment because its baseboard heat that just does the whole top floor. I don’t know why it was setup that way but things happen).  He noted he was fine, just a little sleepy and said he was going back to lay down, did his usual smile and told me that he’d be outside tomorrow since it was supposed to be nice out and he wanted to tell me everything that was going on. At this point I still did not know why he was in the hospital, but figured I’d leave him alone until he was ready to tell me.

So Monday comes around and there’s no sign of him.  His apartment was closed up and I personally didn’t sleep the night before because my stomach was telling me that something is terribly wrong.  About 7am or so I did hear some noise in his apartment, figuring he’d dropped the remote or something I didn’t think anything by it. I went about my day as normal, wondering when he was actually going to come out of the apartment to relax for a bit but that opportunity came and went.  At about 8pm I went outside for a cigarette and saw that his light was not on and instantly started to panic, I had this overwhelming feeling in my stomach telling me that I needed to get into that apartment to check on him. I rang the bell and knocked on the windows – no response. I waited a minute in the chance he was sleeping and tried again. With no answer I ran back into my apartment to get the keys (we have the master set as we’re acting landlords when the store is closed downstairs) and then proceeded to his door with the assistance of my father cause I’m never comfortable with going into someone elses apartment alone.  So we banged on the windows a few more times, rang the bell again and all I heard was a faint groan coming out of the apartment.  We opened the door to find Jake on the floor.  He was breathing, but he was blue.

So we called the police, the ambulance showed up and brought him out of the apartment to the hospital. I noticed while he was on the stretcher that his arm was sitting in a weird direction and instantly knew that he’d had either a stroke or a heart attack.  I went digging around his apartment in search of his phone only to find it in the garbage can with two numbers recently dialed – both of which were to his son.  I don’t know if he’d tried to call for help, or they were just the last numbers he spoke on, but either way I knew that I needed to call his son right away.

The ambulance was here for a while, they were working on him in the back. The second they put the tube down his throat I saw that it just became more severe than originally thought and scrambled to get in touch with his son. I called the house twice, the cellphone like four times. I didn’t get a response until a half hour later.  I went to the hospital to try to get in to see him but they wouldn’t allow me in since they were working on him. His son showed up an hour or so later and we all just sat there feeling helpless until the doctors could come out to see us.  They said that there’s a lot of fluid on his lungs, and around his heart. I learned from his son that the reason he was previously hospitalized was due to congestive heart failure, my stomach knotted up knowing full well that based on all of this I’d probably never see him again.

Over the course of the past week we’ve learned that he was borderline pneumonia when he was released from the previous hospital, and all they did was provide him with a water pill and antibiotic. I then learned about all of the excess fluids that they’re draining from him as his lung was almost collapsed.  After numerous catscans and blood workups they noted that he suffered a major stroke to his left side, they’re unsure if when he comes to if he’ll be paralyzed on that side of his body or not.  We noted to the son, and the doctors, that before the EMT’s showed up he was in and out of consciousness and he was trying to pick himself up off of the floor, so the only reasoning behind him being paralyzed is the reaction to him being a medically induced coma for as long as he has.

As it stands, right now, his condition is stable. They still have him under being as he needs the breathing tube, they’ve also put him on a feeding tube on top of all of the other tubes to keep him somewhat healthy.  Either way I don’t personally think I’m ever going to see him again. I’m not permitted in the ICU to look in on him, and being as I’m not the official form of “Family”, they won’t permit me anywhere near his room.

My father, being a hospital employee and knowing quite a few people, did take one of the nurses aside and just asked if they could give him any information.  The only response is that he’s in really bad shape and will be in the hospital for a very long time.  I haven’t heard from his son in a while either, but I’m taking it as no news is good news for this moment in time.

It’s breaking my heart, honestly. Not only is he a dear friend of mine, I’ve considered him family for quite some time as well.  He’s always included in holidays, I always make sure that he has a plate whenever I cook something big (which, as an Italian, is frequently).  He’s always outside for BBQ’s with us, I’ve always gotten him something for his birthday or Christmas because to me that’s what you do with Family.  It’s upsetting that I can’t get into the hospital just to see him, and equally upsetting to know that I could have checked in on him sooner and maybe the result wouldn’t be so bad.

The hospital ran some tests on him and informed his son that he wasn’t on the ground for very long when he suffered the stroke. If we didn’t check on him until the next morning he unfortunately wouldn’t be with us anymore, but we’re to find some peace with the fact that he wasn’t by himself for very long.  This makes me feel a little better only because I can’t help but think to myself that I could have found him sooner.

We’ve had quite a few people in the apartments up here over the years. I can honestly say that only two have really touched my life. This one is hitting me the hardest though, it’s not like he’s moving out just because he found some place better.  He’s leaving because of medical reasons.  It’s just hard to look at his truck every day and his ashtray on the table next to his seat and not want to break down and cry.  When it comes down to it though, as I haven’t heard from his son I’m treating it as no news is good news (for the time being).  I’m going to continue pushing until I can get some kind of answers.  It’s heart breaking, and very, very hard to deal with but hopefully over the course of time things will work themselves out. I hate the thought of him laying in the bed in a coma, but I guess that’s just what happens to numerous people.  He’s only 66-67 years old, he’s got a lot of time left. I just hope he gets to see it.

Minus all of that, there’s really not a lot going on other than having to keep up with work.  I’ve taken a bit of a break just to clear my head as I haven’t yet been able to type everything out. I’m just hoping to get some kind of news soon. This whole situation is distracting me from productivity and the only way I know how to clear my head is to go full force into things – but I literally do not have the heart to do it right now.

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Posted in AGn Designs, Daily, Delmarva, Family, Friends, Home Ownership, New York, Stressed, Work | Comments Closed

Mondays….suck!

Monday, August 8th, 2011

So I’m up bright and early, as usual, and I’m experiencing some trouble with getting myself moving. My day typically starts with a drive to my aunts to check in on my uncle and make sure he’s actually ready for work. Unfortunately he’s getting worse so its been increasingly difficult taking care of him. On top of his down syndrome we’re now battling alzheimers and heart conditions, needless to say its been difficult. I’m slowly watching him slip away and its taking its toll on me considering I’m here five days a week to care for him.  This has increased to six thanks to the recent Verizon strike.

How could that possibly affect me?  Simple really.  My aunt is one of the managers for the NYC office and is now working six days a week, 7am to 7pm as only three offices are open in NY at this time.  She’s back in her old office out east. So there’s my connection to that.

My back is still pretty bad. The spike in humidity is making it difficult to get around, my allergies are also full force today, thanks to the cat hair at my aunts. I made the dumb mistake of rubbing my eyes and now I’m pretty much screwed for the rest of the day. Hopefully a nice shower when I get home wll do the trick on clearing things out, we all know there’s a hige difference between outdoor humidity and pure shower steam in the fight against allergies!

Other than that things are going pretty good.  I’m at a point where I’ve got so much on my plate that I don’t even know where to begin. It would help to be able to properly sit at a desk so I can concentrate but thanks to ms. Sciatica that’s just not an option. So I’ll continue to use the little bed/lap laptop tray Sean picked up for me until I can sit up straight for more than ten minutes. It kills me to be in bed all day but I’ve got no choice at this moment in time.

Todays goals are to get to the halfway mark on a site I’ve been tampering with all weekend, draw up a PSD for the hotel site I’m contracted on and get a few write ups completed for two other sites. On top of that my portfolio still needs to be completed and I’ve got to get acidgloss.net up and running cause there’s like $600 worth of pending articles.  I really need three me’s!

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Getting there…

Thursday, June 23rd, 2011

I’m doing everything I can to work myself back into a proper routine.  In the past few days I’ve finished up a couple of sites, and based on my inbox there’s at least 4 projects that need to be completed no later than Monday morning.  With that I’m setting myself into “Get it done and get it done NOW” mode.  It’s a little difficult being that I’ll admit I’m a little rusty, but it’s also helping my ego to know that a man whom Sean’s been working for, for about a year now, loves my work and wants to take me under his wing as well.  This instantly has me stepping up my game, there’s absolutely nothing that I don’t want to learn to secure my spot on that team.  Right now everything has been heavy graphics work, AND a lot of WordPress jobs.  I’ve already knocked out about 4 of them, two more to go at this moment in time.

On top of all of this I’ve been drawing up a few template ideas to merge acidgloss.net and krissys-portfolio.net, there really is no need to have to separate domains, however – I do still wish to utilize acidgloss.net as a business/technology blog.  I’ve been going back and forth with a few people in reference to product reviews, so this will help to bring more content to the site itself.  I’m sure you’ve also noticed a few sponsored entries popping up here and there on this site as well, it will be a regular occurrence, however I will be back to properly blogging on a regular basis so you shouldn’t see any major flow of articles that are 100% sponsored… I actually take the time to work them into a real life experience.

My only NEED right now is a proper chair.  I’m sitting on a wooden chair with an absolutely horrible cushion, no matter how many cushions there are – there’s a major lack of support which means that half way through the day my back is absolutely killing me.  For the time being I’m going to deal with it, it’s my goal within the next couple of weeks to pick up a proper desk chair, I’m not looking to spend any more than $100, I don’t need bells and whistles, I just need something with some padding.  I’ve already added cushions, even tried pillows – nothing works. I need a decent amount of foam for comfort, there’s no way of getting around it.

I’m going to have to head over to Staples to pick something up, there are also a few ‘office’ supplies that I could use but thanks to my wiping out my desk at my previous job, I do have enough to get by for the time being.  OH! That reminds me of other crap that I need to take care of.  I’ll be utilizing my post-its more than I thought. LOL

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Slow down!!

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

I don’t think I’ve stopped in the last week.  I’m doing really well with bringing in some new clients, and in return I’ve created a few sites that I’m very, very pleased with.  Of course it also helps that the people I’ve been working for are sweet as pie and detail oriented.  I couldn’t ask for anything better!

I’m taking ten minutes to throw an update on here just to show that I’m still alive and as active as possible.  I haven’t yet been able to balance blogging and clients but I think that has a lot to do with my environment.  Unfortunately I don’t have a proper work space at this moment in time.  I’m working on a “Table Mate” in the corner of the living room until I can get a desk.  Sean has kind of taken mine over with the Mac and the other PC we have (my old Windows desktop).   As usual I’ve already designed an office in my head, everything from the desk to the color scheme (which closely resembles the current pink/grey/black/white template here heh.  For now I’ve found that throwing on headphones to cut down on the background noise is helpful.

My sleep schedule is all kinds of fucked up.  Now that I’m completely working from home I’m going to bed around 4am and waking up around noon.  For me its like I’ve wasted the day considering I got so used to waking up early and finishing my workday at 6pm at the office.  I’m working to get myself back on track but with everything required of me during the day its hard to get myself on track.

Right now I’m balancing three clients, I feel really bad because I haven’t been able to give everyone the full attention they deserve.  I really don’t like not being able to start one job and finish it, now I’m doing two different accounts a day so its screwing with me big time.  Either way I’ll work on getting things on track and should be able to then schedule the day accordingly.  I know what needs to get done, and how it needs to get done.  Its the matter of implementing it, and the sleep schedule plays a HUGE role in that.

In any event, time to get cracking in Photoshop.

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Posted in Career, Daily | 1 Comment »

Woah!

Friday, June 10th, 2011

It’s been one hell of a week.

When I was finally home on Thursday after a very long weekend at my aunts house, Bella was picked up by her groomer and things have been – interesting – ever since. I’m not sure if something happened while she was with the groomer but to be blunt, the dogs been crapping liquid for the past 7 days.  We’ve finally gotten it to solidify but its taken a lot of different food ideas and quite a few days of bringing her out every 3 hours, and let me tell you that waking up at 5am when I no longer have to was kicking my ass.  Last night after giving her some pepto (who knew?) her and I were both able to sleep the entire night for the first time in almost a full week.  I think my body was confused because I wound up crashing until about 1pm this afternoon.  While she’s been very clingy today being as she’s still not 100% (and the storm to roll through scared her a bit), there’s still a dramatic change in her.  She’s eating more, drinking more, playing with her toys, and not scratching on peoples legs every 20 minutes to go outside.  It’s been peaceful.

On Monday I officially started back up with AGn Designs, spending a lot of time on numerous freelancing sites.  By Tuesday morning things were beginning to worry me being as I hadn’t heard from anyone.  Tuesday night was a whole different story, I wound up picking up three projects which is bringing in a decent chunk of change for what’s going to be three days of work in total.  I’m almost finished with one site, it’s the matter of loading it onto her server and tweaking the wordpress widgets so that everything flows right, and the others I’m waiting on a few responses from.  Either way things have been picking up, and so far everything is going beautifully.

I had to spend some time tweaking my template on krissys-portfolio.net because the Lightbox script I was previously using was very obviously out dated so I needed to upgrade to Lightbox 2.  That solved the issues I was having with the images, the bigger issue right now is how horrible the template looks.  However, that’s going to be a long drawn out process to change. I want to some-how merge krissys-portfolio and acidgloss.net.  I was thinking of coming up with an over-the-top template that would work on both sites to just flow everything together. I have the idea in my head, and some doodles in photoshop but nothing has really stuck yet.  I don’t just want AGn to be a blog, I want to bump it up but I don’t want to lose k-p.net… either way I’m sure I’ll have something figured out within the next couple of days being as the creative juices are flowing.

I have to say, and don’t want to admit it, but Sean really kicked my ass this week with a revision to one of the sites he’s been working on.  Whatever script the idiots from India came up with was NOT working when trying to recode the site for the WordPress template.  There were like 7 DOCTYPE tags, numerous HTML and BODY tags being called for absolutely no reason.  When running it through the validation check it was coming up with over 600 errors.  I just about shit my pants when I saw that!  I’ve never seen so many errors on such little output in my life, and that’s including a time years ago when I actually started to care about validation and recoded everything I had!

In any event, I have a few more emails to respond to and a bed that’s calling my name.  I missed staying up until 1am, but it’s kicking my ass – that’s for damn sure!

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Finally finished…

Saturday, June 4th, 2011

It took a little longer than I would have liked it to, but I’ve got everything up and running.  There are a few sub-pages that still need a little bit of work but if you’re reading this it means that k.nu has completely transferred back to its old server.  I moved it to dream-host for about a year and hosted it under Sean’s account there but their server sucks major, major ass. When going through my WHM I realized that I still had the complete site still located on my own server so after a few modifications, things are back.

It’s been a pretty crappy week, even though I’m no longer dealing with my hell hole former employer, I’ve still been sick as a dog which is giving me very little to work with when moving forward in the design world.  I’ve got a few projects that I’ve started on, and I’m going to spend the bulk of my weekend working on them but for now the larger of the projects (getting this back up) is completed.

Tomorrow is going to be a relatively busy day.  I’m going out to purchase a new washing machine AND dish washer.  The dish washer has been broken for a while, we’ve just converted to hand washing, but being as I plan to do a lot more cooking now that I’ll be home at a more reasonable hour, the lack of dishwasher will 100% get in the way.  PC Richards has a few for under $200 that look pretty decent so we’re going to go with them.  And as far as the washing machine is concerned, that completely died today, PC Richards will save our asses on that too.  We wish that the washer crapped out last week while everyone was having memorial day sales but there’s nothing we could have done about that.  So since Dad has a 20% discount since he’s a hospital employee, that’ll drop a lot of money off the final cost.

Once all of that is squared away it’ll be time to start cooking the Sunday 3-course meal.  This week will be a glazed meatloaf, garlic mashed potatoes and some variety of veggies that I’ll figure out tomorrow. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but I never had the time to properly cook anything in the past due to the work schedule.  Now that I’ll have more time at home, I’ll be able to move forward with regular home-cooked meals as opposed to whatever is convenient to pick up before I come home from work.

In any event, I still have a lot of other things to work on so I’m going to hop to it.

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Too Hot!

Monday, May 30th, 2011

It’s memorial day, parades and barbeques are taking place everywhere across the US. Unfortunately for those of us in the northeast, we’re all sweating our asses off! Today is a very sticky 85° and it’s NOT a good time. I woke up freezing this morning because the AC is right next to my head. I thawed out almost instantly when going outside. It shouldn’t be in the 80’s at 9am but I guess that’s how things go.

I took a little trip to Walgreens this morning, the cat decided to destroy my brand new flipflops by using them as a scratching post while I was asleep last night. I did NOT appreciate that at all but really didn’t appreciate the fact that they no longer had the same pair, even though I’d seen a whole rack of them two days ago. I didn’t like any of the other ones either. Again, not a good time.

While browsing around the store I picked up a 10 pack of solar lights for my aunts house, they were on sale for $10, I couldn’t pass that up. The front of her house is hit with beautiful sunshine all day long but at night you wouldn’t even know the house was here without the driveway light being on. So, I picked them up and spread them out in the front yard. Thankfully they’re getting a full 9 hours of sun so hopefully they’ll be nice and lit up tonight so I can see how everything is going to look, the spacing, and can adjust things from there. It should be at least 10 to 15 degrees cooler tonight so I’ll be able to tolerate being outside for a little while, instead of dripping with sweat like I was when setting everything up. I was hardly moving, it’s just way too damn hot.

After the little bit of dressing up in the yard I made lunch for my uncle and then conquered the dishes in the sink that I was too tired to take care of last night. Of course it’s never simple for me, I was getting a little sick of the stuff piling up on the counter so I wound up just completely cleaning up the kitchen, scrubbing the counters and clearing some of the dust out. It’s not my house but considering I’ve been here for the last four days I finally had enough and just went ahead and cleaned everything.  Once I’ve gotten some rest (I am still dealing with a cold afterall), I’m going to tackle the bathroom.

It was my ultimate goal to sit down today and just complete the new template, I just have so many areas to focus on I honestly have no idea how to even begin to tackle it. I should probably just roll through the categories but even there I don’t know where to start.  The one thing that I always was good with at work was my problem solving. I think the fever has officially screwed with my brain.  Starting on Wednesday I’m going to create a daily to-do list.  Why Wednesday? Because it’s my first official “I can do this now” day. Tuesday is the get my shit together and go home day.  Wednesday at 9am will be the start date/time and I’ll go from there.

Time to lay down for a few minutes and then tackle that bathroom.

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Slowly but surely….

Friday, May 13th, 2011

In just a few weeks I will be closing the book on a major part of the past 3 years of my life. Today I sat down with my manager and informed him that I will be leaving the company. I’m no longer capable of working for a company where having a conscience is considered a handicap, where employees and vendors are used up and then spit out. I’ve been blessed with friendships that I hope will last for years to come, but I can no longer physically have anything to do with the company. The corporate office can go fuck themselves as far as I care, the ladies in the east coast office… I’ll miss them deeply.

So where do I go from here? This should really be titled “Guess Who’s Back?” I’m going full force back into the world that I left so abruptly. There will be no begging for money, no bull shit internet dramas. I will be solidly working in the code/design world and am spending the evening, and the next few weeks getting myself back into the swing of things. Unfortunately the position I was previously in required the ability for me to retain as much information as humanly possible. With this, I’ve lost a lot of the key skills to be successful elsewhere. I’m doing everything I possibly can to get back into things and hope that with just a few weeks of a refresher course, and a lot of reading (HTML 5?) I’ll be able to get myself back into it with absolutely no problems at all.

This will not just be a personal domain, I will be working with sponsors and frequently updating for just about everything. Twitter will more than likely overload, projects are in the works (in my head) that have yet to be put on paper (err… Photoshop). I purchased a new laptop in September that I haven’t used more than twice. It’s fully loaded and capable of handling everything I could possibly need. I just need to get my hands on a copy of Microsoft Office Outlook. I’ve been using it for the past three years and the functionality really fits where I’m looking to go in reference to mailing lists, contact storage, calendar dates, etc. If there are two things that I picked up in the past few years it’s my love of Outlook and the ability to bite my tongue.

Obviously with my personality the ‘bite my tongue’ will go out the window the second I punch out for the last time. Thankfully I will be leaving on good terms with just about everyone, if there’s a big ‘ol fuck you coming out of my mouth it’s primarily targeted to the corporate office.

In any event, it’s going to be a few weeks but a new template is coming up (well, recycled old one that I was in love with) that will be compliant for whatever standard is the norm these days. Alternate sites (AGN Designs, Health Blog and other stuff in the works) will be popping up as well. I’ve got a lot of space just sitting here and little time to fill it up, but bet your ass I’ll get it done.

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Darn it.

Sunday, April 3rd, 2011

So I have this vision in my head on how I want the new k.nu template to look, however halfway through I’m finding that it closely resembles one that I completed two years ago. Now, this is just proof that I have no inspiration due to my soul sucking job. My issue now is the fact that I have absolutely no idea where the OLD template even is. It’s either on the Mac, my old laptop, or hopefully on an external hard drive somewhere. It’s not on my templates archive for WordPress because I cleared that out a long time ago. I have absolutely no idea where it is. This is exactly why going upwards of three years without touching something can throw you for a loop.

I’m at my aunts house all weekend while she’s down in Atlantic City, I wanted to spend the time getting a nice new template up that will last for the next couple of months but that’s just not going to happen today. Back to playing Angry Birds on my phone.

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Posted in Daily, Sitely | 3 Comments »

Yea, that resolution didn’t stick…

Saturday, March 26th, 2011

Ok, so while I told myself at the beginning of the year that I need to add this back into my regular routine, as you can clearly see that’s just not happening. The renewal for this domain is up in a few months and I’m really questioning as to whether or not the $30 would even be worth it at this point in time. I have no drive to do anything, I’d love to bring in some extra cash but I’m so out of the loop on things that it would be a learning curve to start from scratch again. I blame work, honestly. I learn so many new things throughout the day and as anyone would know – when you learn something new, you forget something old. The thing that kills me is that with two laptops, plus the Droid well equipped with the WordPress app, I still have no ability to physically sit down and do something. Hell, right now it’s about 12:30 and I know for a fact I should just be in bed.

As far as life is concerned, things are going really well. I bought a new car during my weekend Valentines day getaway with Sean (05 Chevy Equinox that I’m absolutely in love with), I’ve taken on another region at work that has pretty much doubled my daily inventory and now gave me about 42 people to manage, or micro manage as the company would prefer. It takes its toll on my brain, especially when there are so many different insurance companies involved and cycle times for both the files and the appraisers are through the roof. Needless to say, if you ever work for an appraisal company – make sure they hire someone who’s capable of actually completing a file within 2 days or don’t even bother giving them a second glance. My daily job is to babysit grown men, and while that sounds a little odd, it’s really what the case is. Needless to say, it’s an interesting position.

The alternate job search has had some good leads, but I think I’m so comfortable with where I am (considering I’m knocking on three years), I really don’t know what else I could do with myself. If it weren’t for my lack of ability to be able to focus on learning the estimates I’d get myself an adjusters license. For someone living in NY if I were to work for just about any insurance company I could bring in anywhere from $40 to $65 an hour. The work involved, however, would more than likely kill me so lets keep that on the back burner. For now, however, I’ll stick with what I know and what I’m comfortable with.

I had a relatively busy day, I woke up early (as usual) and got some shopping done. I bought a new dresser for the bedroom, I picked up two new rugs for outside so that my gazebo can come to life again. I’m overloaded on seeds and pots, I just need to pick up a couple of 50lb bags of soil and I should be good to go. I went out to dinner with Sean and my sister – I’ve been craving Bertucci’s for about three weeks and was finally able to get into it so I could enjoy it’s delicious culinary offerings. When all of that was said and done I sat down and booked my hotel room for April 8th-April 10th as Sean and I are going away on a mini-vacation down to Jersey to visit family. It’s good to get away every once and a while, plus having a working vehicle helps out alot too. Sean still has his Baretta, I downright refuse to be in it, let alone drive it. My personal opinion is it would pay good for scrap metal, his personal opinion is “but that’s my car yo, wtf?”, we obviously have a difference in opinion here haha.

So in a nutshell, that’s been my life for the past few months. Working like a dog, have a new toy to drive around, taking a mini-vacation one weekend per month just to get away and working so I can spend the bulk of my summer outside. I’m going to cut out vacations for two months or so after this only because there’s a very dreamy table/chairs set from Home Depot that I’m itching to pick up but my expensive tastes have me looking to spend about $700. Sean needs a new laptop so skimping and saving after we get back is first priority.

Maybe I will need to get back into the sponsored posts afterall. Before things went all bonkers with the google page rank stuff I was able to bring in about $3500 a month, that’d solve a lot of problems right now.

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Unreal

Monday, January 17th, 2011

I woke up this morning in a relatively good mood. It was instantly shot to shit with bad news. An old friend of mine from high school was killed this weekend for no apparent reason whatsoever and its caught everyone off guard. I’m taken back considering he wasn’t the type to get himself involved in anything like this.  He was a great guy with a very large heart and never had any trouble with anyone. Its strange to even hear that he, of all people, was taken so quickly and violently.  He will certainly be missed by all.

In other news. I’m still actively searching for a new job.  I’m doing as best as I can at my current one to stay on my toes and get everything done. Thankfully with a drop in inventory I’m able to keep things moving with plenty of time to spare during the day.  With this I’m actuallt getting out at a reasonable hour too so that’s always an upside. I was getting sick of eating dinner after nine at night.  Tonight my goal is to get out of here by six thirty (half hour late today) and then ill get some grocery shopping done so I can go home and enjoy the usual Monday night line up for cbs with the addition of a special epsidoe of jersey shore tonight. I have no idea why that stupid show is my new addiction but I’m definitely hooked and its scaring the crap out of me lol.

In any event. Almost time to punch back in from lunch. Time to suck down two cigs and get my ass back in gear.

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Posted in Daily, Randomage, Work | 5 Comments »

Happy New Year

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

So it’s officially 2011 and so far things haven’t been too bad. I’m working very hard to get myself on track as there are a lot of things I’m interested in doing this year that require a lot of attention to detail, and stamina to get through them. I’ve actively been searching for a new job, working hard to try to get myself up to speed with the new requirements as far as web design are concerned. Over the course of the next few days it’s my goal to have a new hand-made template up, as opposed to the freebies I’ve been using for the past year. My links list is very short, so I’m also working on finding some new interesting sites to push into a regular routine as well. Another big thing for me is to throw myself fully into the paid blogging world again as I haven’t been into it for so long that my resources are limited. Once I can regain some traffic to any of my sites I’ll work on getting the financial aspect of things back on track as well.

Sean and I are doing great, we haven’t argued and are finally in the relationship we’ve both wanted for a very long time. We veered off a little and now we’re back on track and couldn’t be happier. We went away for new years weekend and enjoyed every minute of it. It made us realize how badly we need to get into a better place with our relationship and we’re both working very hard to get there. This is exactly why I’m feverishly searching for alternate income and really working on finding a better 9-5 so I can be done with the shit hole I’ve been in for the past few years. I’m actually taking a break from searching through job sites just so I can update here since I hadn’t done it in so long.

I changed back to an older theme for the time being as the Christmas season is over. I had a wonderful Christmas, Sean picked out a gorgeous necklace for me that I’m absolutely in love with, I’m also overloaded on new clothes and DVD’s, even older items that were on my amazon list for god knows how long. The biggest YAY moment for me was unpacking my new Kureg Coffee Maker, I’m head over heals in love with it as I’ve wanted it for so long! I already picked up a 24 pack of my uber favorite French Vanilla blend and can’t wait to try out all of the other ones. I’ve been addicted to flavored coffee for quite some time now, and now I have the option of doing it all from home instead of dropping money in random coffee shops around my house, and my job. It’s great for iced coffee too by the way, there’s even iced tea mixes and the lovely hot chocolate flavors which should just be a requirement considering the weather lately. Ugh, even talking about it here is making me want a large cup of coffee lol.

I’m taking even more of a break from reality by hanging out at the train station people watching. I have my netbook in my purse and thanks to our local internet carrier, wifi is pretty much free no matter where I go, the strongest feed is down at the train station for some reason, but I’m sure that has something o do with all of the metal on the ground in front of me. A few people floating around down here are amusing the living hell out of me though. I’m amazed at how dumb teenagers have become since I was one, I know my friends were stupid, don’t get me wrong – but they were never this bad. One of these pricks watches way too much jackass and is looking to see if his tongue will freeze to the tracks, or at least boasting that he’s willing to try it. The sadistic person inside of me wants to see him get his tongue stuck and run over by a train. The “mom/cop” in me wants to zap him with a tazer and watch him squirm in the grass safely away from the rails. Damn me and my caring nature, lol!

In any event, based on my little word counter I’m up in the 750 range which means I’ve been hard-core typing for a good 10-15 minutes and have no idea what my initial point was for even starting this entry.

Hope everyone enjoyed their holiday season!

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Goin’ Nuts!

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

I don’t like this change in weather. Its seriously got my system completely out of wack. Its hard to concentrate and stay on top of everything at work and everything outside of work is pure chaos at this moment in time. I just can’t wait for the damn weekend to start and have to wait three days to get there. So unfair!

I’m havin trouble finding another job cause trying to get onto any freelance contract these days is like pullin teeth for me being as I’ve been out of practice for so long. I don’t know what to do anymore. I just need things to start making sense again and unfortunately I don’t see that happening anytime soon. I need a major mental break. Or a really long nap!

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Posted in Annoyed, Daily, Work | Comments Closed

Weird changes…

Saturday, October 30th, 2010

OK so I finally updated the theme to show off some kind of an autumn feel.  The issue is I’m sitting here freezing my ass off as though it’s freaking winter.  Why is it only 40* outside?!?  I can’t get the Twitter widget to work for some reason, I’m sure I’ll figure that out but for now Twitter is shut down.  There really is no major update other than this, honestly.  It’s time to start cooking dinner for me and my uncle, my stomach is rumbling and I’m starving!

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