Posts Tagged ‘Cooking’

Let the chaos begin…

Saturday, December 1st, 2012

I’m not someone who’s easily overwhelmed by ANYTHING. The past hour, however, has set my head into such a spin that I feel like I’m dealing with some type of internal tornado.

I’ve been working for a design firm in Manhattan for quite some time now, Sean actually was the one to get me the job with one of the company owners to work on one of their websites and from there was bounced to the other owner who’s the #1 on the Web department. It’s been steady on-going work, primarily in WordPress and after the last year and a half I’m utilizing areas of WordPress that I didn’t even think existed in this world. The way things are morphed and hacked (without physically touching the core files) blows my fricken mind. I don’t think I’ve done one site that didn’t require heavily modified template files to cater to custom posts and custom fields. The repeater field on Advanced Custom Fields just about made my head explode when I was finally able to figure out the ins and outs of it.

All that aside, obviously I’ve been able to keep myself busy with a lot of things to do, the thing that’s kicking my ass right now is the fact that there’s 4 sites that basically need to be done by Wednesday (just for this company) and I have no idea how to wrap my head around the amount of work that needs to be accomplished. I’m not against working a 16-20 hour day in order to get everything done, don’t get me wrong, but the issue now is the fact that I’m needing to figure out how to do this while still sitting in the cancer center on Monday and Tuesday for Karen’s chemo. She did OK for the first cycle (3 weeks ago), she had the typical side effects of nausea, headaches, vomiting but it subsided after a few days and she’s been pretty comfortable since. The woman is eating her weight in food on a daily basis and her newest addiction is potatoes and corn because she’s carbo-loading like a best thanks to the Steroids. Her recent discussion with her doctor, and the fact that she had a very strange reaction with the first cycle (almost immediately) now has her on the path to receiving a different type of Chemo that needs to be administered over the course of two days instead of the one. So on Monday morning and Tuesday morning someone needs to accompany her to the cancer center so she’s got someone with her for the 5 or so hours it takes to get her treatment. Now, if things were a little slower it wouldn’t be an issue at all but having such tight deadlines for four massive sites… I don’t know how I’m going to be able to accomplish it all.

I just really hope that the cancer center doesn’t have restrictions on their WiFi. I don’t mind switching back over to my laptop to get in a few hours of work while I’m there, but the last time I tried to work in a hospital I was quickly shut down because they don’t allow uploading on their network, and it’s not exactly possible to connect to FTP when that’s the case. Sean and I had a shit-ton of bad luck when we were at Johns Hopkins (main hospital for 5 days back in July) because of the restrictions, and we didn’t actually have a hotel room to go back to until 2 1/2 days after we got up to Baltimore so we lost a lot of time on our punch cards in order to deal with everything going on there. We didn’t try it while Karen was in Hopkins (Bayview – for two weeks in September) because we bounced back and forth from the hospital to the hotel multiple times a day and were able to utilize the wifi at the hotel to get everything accomplished.

Now, the Tunnel Center (where she’s getting her Chemo) is local (literally four blocks away) but this doesn’t mean that I’ll have any kind of luck connecting to a network that allows some type of uploading based solely on the fact that there’s lord knows how many offices in this building and they’re all competing with the download time for BeeBee medicals internal file-sharing system that stretches amongst their entire network, including the imaging center right next door.

I guess I’ll just need to figure out everything when it happens, I can only hope that they’re super dumb (compared to Hopkins) and don’t have that kind of restriction because everyone in Delaware is a hell of a lot more trusting than they are in Baltimore.

My goal for tonight is to finish the edits on Site #1, so I can then get a few hours of sleep (hopefully at least 4) and then wake up to complete the remainder of Site #1 being as all of the PSD’s haven’t been moved into WordPress yet. My day tomorrow is completely booked worked wise, but at the same time I still have A LOT of cooking to do. I’m starting the crockpot around 11am, throwing in the meatballs/sausage around 1pm so they can cook for 6 or so hours to be done for dinner. I still have chicken to make before it goes bad, and quite a bit of baking to do because I was very unhappy with the bakery in the supermarket tonight. So with everything else going on I still have to make Fudge, White Chocolate Chip and Regular Chocolate Chip cookies, PLUS a Banana Nut Bread because, as I said, Karen is carbo-loading but I still need to figure out how to sneak some kind of fruits/veggies into her that aren’t just potatoes cause that’s way too much starch.

I just hope that the eggs I bought two weeks ago didn’t go bad already, and I really hope that we have butter in the house because I was stupid and didn’t check that when Sean and I went grocery shopping tonight. Crap I just remembered I need oil. I guess while I’m waking up with my first cup of coffee I’ll be dodging through the supermarket to pick up everything just to get back here in time to start the rest of my day.

Lord help me, even Music won’t calm this nerve down.

Time to get back to work so I can go to sleep.

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Posted in AGn Designs, Daily, Delmarva, Family, Work | 2 Comments »

Hittin the fan!

Tuesday, April 10th, 2012

So far things have been relatively productive today, I’ve gone through all of my email, drew up about five mock-ups and now I’m sitting here with a huge list of things to do beside me.  Sean and I are both in the living room this afternoon because we’re watching season 1 of “Shameless”.  It’s one of our newest addictions and unfortunately we were only able to watch it from the beginning of Season 2 on Showtime.  So since there are numerous questions that needed answers, we’re going to watch everything from the beginning so we can catch ourselves up.  By the time we’re in the mood to move forward we can watch Season 2 all over again, in anticipation for Season 3 (which they’ll be filming soon anyway).

Anyhoo… you’ll notice on the sidebar that Muir’s widget has been added to the blog pages, she’ll be posting here soon, so for now her link obviously goes to a dead page, but it’ll be active soon enough.  She just left here a little while ago, the little munchkin was fussy this afternoon but after a nice half hour nap on the couch, and a ten minute doze on auntie Krissy’s shoulder – it mellowed out quite a bit.

Dinner went very well last night.  The lamb tasted pretty good, my only complaint was the fact that I can’t – for the life of me – get the garlic smell off of my hands, no matter how hard I try. I’ve watched my hands constantly with numerous different variations of soaps and wives-tale tricks but nothings really worked.  I’m hoping within the next few days it just goes away naturally.  I can honestly say that the reason us Italians talk with our hands is nothing to do with a social tick, it’s children watching their grandparents constantly try to air out their hands.

So I’m looking over my list and there’s at least 15 tasks to complete (or at least put a dent in today).  Guess the next few hours are gonna be busy as hell.

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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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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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Happy Easter!

Sunday, March 23rd, 2008

It’s Easter Sunday and while I haven’t really done anything yet, I have accomplished quite a bit over the past weekend so I can sit back and relax for a while until I start all of the cooking for dinner tonight.  I’m not going too crazy with dinner.  I’m throwing a ham in the oven, and making up a few sides to have with it and that’s about it.  Yea, there’s going to be like five sides and some rolls or something.  While that may seem like a lot, I’m Italian – I’m used to large meals for a small number of people.

I’m still waiting on news about the job interview on Friday.  I assume that since they’re a Monday – Friday service that I’ll hear something tomorrow, or at least I hope.  I’m really anxious about it.  With the way money is going right now I could really use this job.  The interview itself went pretty well, at least I personally thought it did.  I like the environment, and those whom I spoke to seem pretty nice.  The drive wasn’t that bad, I’ll have to factor in summer travel in a few weeks but that just means I’d have to leave around 7am as opposed to 730ish to make it there by 8.  I figure a 20 minute drive will take about 45 minutes when it comes to the summer traffic down here.  That’s what you get living in a tourist town though.  Either way it’d be a Monday to Friday 8-5 position.  I’d get home around 6pm on the summer nights and since it’s year round I really think I could do well there.

As far as my own stuff is concerned, I managed to get the new template up on acidgloss.net, something I’m very happy about.  I really like the way things turned out.  There was a template just like it for sale for about $90 but I was able to recreate it with no real trouble.  The spacing is off on a few things depending on the browser you use but it really isn’t anything that major so it doesn’t matter too much to me.  I’m working on getting a few more link options in order there, hopefully I’ll be able to get some of my lost traffic back.  It’ll take some time but I do have a few tricks up my sleeve, you can only depend on SEO for so long before you have to get back into gear on commenting on things.

In any event, it’s now about 2:15pm and I’m hoping to relax for a few hours before I have to get in gear on the kitchen.  So a quick straighten-up around the kitchen so I have some surface area to work with and the rest is cake…literally – I think I’ll make cup-cakes to have as an after dinner treat.  We’ll see how I feel though, my stomach is already bothering me from too much coffee today anyway –  heh.

So, Happy Easter to everyone, hope you have a nice relaxing day with family and friends.  If you celebrate of course.

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Posted in AGn Designs, Career, Friends | 12 Comments »