Posts Tagged ‘Work’

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Holy Wind Batman!!

Monday, April 9th, 2012

When I went to sleep last night I knew it was going to be relatively windy, but I certainly did not expect the extreme zipping that was going on while I was asleep.  I woke up this morning and went outside with my cup of coffee to start my day and noticed that the gazebo now has a huge hole where the support bar was supposed to be.  Other than the initial “Oh shit” reaction, I jumped back in the house and was trying to figure out ways to fix it.  Dad’s idea was to drill holes through, the bar that’s still there and brace it, but of course the drill is half-dead so now we’re kind of waiting for it to charge.  In the meantime, the roof and the cap are completely off and inside, I don’t need those blowing down the street considering we just bought them a few weeks ago as replacements to the ones that originally came with the unit 3 years ago.  I’m also thankful that all of my outdoor lighting and table torches are still in tact.  I don’t know where all of this wind came from, but mother nature can gladly take it back.

On today’s agenda there’s plenty of emails to follow up with.  I’m still waiting on responses from the actual ongoing work, but getting the potential clients out of the way is always a good idea.. gotta bring in the benjamins after all.

Hope everyone is enjoying their Monday!

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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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I finally did it!

Sunday, April 8th, 2012

After almost a year of “I need to buckle down” mentality, I finally sat down this week and began the next chapter of Krissy.nu.  Not only is there finally a nifty new theme, but I’m also bringing on a guest blogger to keep things moving forward.  There will be no more months-on-end of absolutely no posting on my part.

So what’s been going on since NOVEMBER?! Not much really, life has been it’s usual constant up and down, things have been pretty busy – work wise – and my personal life in general isn’t really bad at all.  I’ve purged a lot of excess baggage and drama out of my life and am now moving forward with a more positive attitude, and much left aggravation in my life as well.

It’s my goal for the next couple of weeks to go full force into regular blog entries and updates, plus I’m bringing Muir on for some interesting news for all you ladies out there interested in properly taking care of your skin.  She’s not only a dear friend of mine, but a consultant for Rodan & Fields – the creators of Proactive.   I also recently hired her as a lead consultant and manager for AGn Designs.

Needless to say…things are gonna pick up 🙂

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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

It was.. my dream home.

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

So yesterday we looked at the house. The realtor was right, it does show nicely. From what we saw, there are anywhere from $15,000 to $20,000 worth of things that need to be done on top of the initial purchase price of the home. It’s primarily cosmetic, there’s a few cracks in the ceiling from the house settling, and some issues with having to remove a lot of tacky wallpaper, possibly purchase a new water heater, and almost definitely purchase an AC/Heat unit being as I was unable to locate one on the parameter of the house. It’s 2500 square feet, and the rooms in it are beyond huge, with this we’d need some kind of a high powered air unit to make sure each room is properly heated/cooled during the course of the year. I see that costing somewhere in the $3,000 range. While the carpets LOOK clean, the previous owner had pets and there’s a few very dark spots throughout the house so I would personally prefer to just remove them all together and have new ones put down. This would be after all of the wallpaper was removed from the walls, everything was painted and fixtures around the house that were missing would be purchased. The remainder of the money would be to furnish the home, obviously you can’t live someplace with nothing.

The setup of the house is as follows:

Living Room – When entering the house there’s a small living room, large enough for maybe an L-shape couch and a TV, possibly coffee table – nothing extreme. There’s a large gas fireplace in the living room as well, and a large 3-window picture window for plenty of light.

Master Bedroom – Right off of the living room is the master bathroom to complete the ‘split floor-plan living’. The room itself is 13×18. However, the walk-in closet it 10×10 – this would instantly void the need for us to have excess dressers/bookcases in the room. The closet houses pull down access #1 to the storage space above. We could honestly get away with one dresser and maybe a small entertainment unit for the TV, that doubles as storage for under garments and what not. Per the realtor, the closet could be used as a nursery in the future based solely on the size. I personally wouldn’t want the baby sleeping in the closet so that’s a hell no right there, heh. The bathroom has a nice size soaking tub, double sinks and a decent size glass-sliding door shower with two sections for shelving.

First Bedroom and Second Bedroom – There’s a blue room (first bedroom) off of the living room at the beginning of the hallway that’s 13×11. We originally were going to use this as either Sean’s office or Mine, however the room next to it is much larger and can be utilized as a very large office for the two of us. The first and second rooms are merged together with a Jack & Jill bathroom. It’s a decent sized bathroom to be utilized as the private bath for the two rooms, basic shower, toilet and sink area with some storage underneath. The two bedrooms offer decent sized closets for storage/clothing as well. The second bedroom, however, is a whopping 13×21. I shit you not when I say this room is HUGE, go measure a 13×21 area and tell me it’s not big? I could park my freaking truck in there and still have room for two desks and a couch!

Bathroom #3 & Laundry – Off of the very large room all the way at the end of the hall there’s a relatively small ‘public’ bathroom which is at the back end of the original structure of the home. Very basic , but obviously was an external wall because there’s a cut-out for a window that used to look to the outside. It’s a basic room, not much to talk about – directly across is a nice sized laundry room that has a pull down access point for the storage space. It’s not a stand-up attic on this end either, it’s a good height for boxes but the realtor noted she’s never personally gone up there being as there’s currently no electric in the home and she didn’t want to bump her head with no lights. (perfectly understandable). Either way these two rooms were the original “end point” of the home, however they’ve added extensions.

Den / Garage / In-Law Suite – A decent sized den with a gas fireplace, this would be utilized as “Lep’s Lair” as I’ve been calling it. More of a media/game room than a living room, this way if he’s playing games at night, I’ll be on the other side of the house in the master bedroom and it wouldn’t really bother me. This has a lead-out sliding door to the backyard. Off of the den there’s access to the two car garage, which shares access to the In-Law suite that was also built in this 3-part extension. The in-law suite offers a small kitchen, stack-able washer/dryer, and a private full bath. The room itself is about 13×15 so it’s relatively small but could be used as a small studio apartment if we ever chose to rent it out in the future.

Kitchen / Dining Room – These were the two that really blew my mind.  The kitchen is HUGE, and houses a nice corner wood burning fireplace, above it has a small cabinet to hide the TV (the hookups are already there).  There’s a large fridge,  nice stove, dishwasher, plenty of storage, and even room for a nice eat-in area.  From there there’s also a lead off into the backyard.  Moving forward (in the direction of the living room), there’s a nice sized dining room, it could fit a 10 person table and a hutch and there’s another lead off to the backyard.

Backyard – The yard is the size of the house, at least.  More than half of the yard is the in-ground pool and while its a little dirty, it could be absolutely gorgeous when cleaned out.  There’s also a small ‘pond’ area that has a pump and lights but since the power is off its just freestanding water filled with frogs.  There’s a separate small area that’s fenced off for the in-law suite so they have a private yard as well.  Every aspect of the fenced area is cement block so it doesn’t require any maintenance whatsoever. On the outside of the fence towards the side of the house there’s a lot of grassy area that includes a decent sized shed, it would require some clean-out work but its a decent enough size where we could extend the existing fence and give Bella, or any other dog we get room to play in the grass. There aren’t many trees in the backyard, so there’s A LOT of sunlight for tanning and enjoying the backyard in general.

Front – The front of the house has a large wrap around drive-way.  The side has a 6 car driveway past the two car garage. There’s a small island with some shrubbery and a nice sized porch on the front of the house that I can utilize as my usual relaxing area for a cig or even just relaxing outside for the fresh air.

All in all I would personally LOVE to own the home, it’s everything I’ve ever wanted in a home and even exceeds my expectations of everything.  Unfortunately it’s just not within our grasp right now as we’re already $30k in debt, we need to get another $10k on top of that to get the closing costs, PLUS we would need a co-signer to even get the loan.  The next few months (if this house is even still on the market) will require us to work our asses off to bring as much money in as possible to get our debts paid down. I look at it this way.  If the house is still available when we actually are able to do this, it was meant to be.  If not? It was something to walk into where we would know what our expectations are, and where we know we wish to be.

I guess, at this point, the future will tell.

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House Hunting Begins

Monday, October 24th, 2011

Sean and I (plus Karen!) are seeing a house tomorrow. We’ve been looking at it for a little while now and finally got ourselves hooked up with a realtor and made the appointment to take a look from the inside. The over-head views and photos listed online have sparked our interest enough to want to walk inside. There’s a pretty big in-ground pool so that’s a major plus for us – we’re like fish in the summer time if there’s a pool around! There’s also a MASSIVE kitchen that offers tons of storage and natural light. I’m excited to get in there to look around. It’s four bedrooms, four bathrooms PLUS an in-law suite, so if we actually do purchase the home, we’ll have someplace to stick people when they come to visit so they can have some privacy as well.

The biggest issue for me is leaving everything in NY. My entire family and all of my friends are there. One of which is kind of giving a guilt trip cause we’re coming down here and not looking in NY. The reason being – TAXES. The property taxes for a home on Long Island are in the $10,000 a year range. This is ON TOP of the $3,000 a month it would cost to OWN the home itself, so we’re looking at about $3,700 a month in outgoing bills. Where as down here, the taxes are in the $1,000 range. This is the more financially sound option for us because it would bring our monthly payments into the $2,300 range, which means between the two of us we have to make $1,500 a month in order to not only pay all of the bills, but general house maintenance as well.

What we’re looking for, as far as a mortgage is concerned, is the ability to ask for about $30,00 more than the cost of the home. We’d utilize this extra money to pay off all of our other debts so we can then bring our ‘outgoing bills’ payment to the same amount without having to worry about whether or not its going to be the car payment or the mortgage payment.

We’re jumping into this, we know this full well. It would be more financially sound for us to try to pay off more of the bills before we even consider a home, but when you just have that feeling that everything is going to be alright… you act on it. It’s the same thing I did when I left my stupid office job. As soon as my notice went in, work came spewing out of the woodwork. And since we’ve been in DE? We haven’t really been able to breath because of the workflow. If this is the sign that everything is going to be OK, then I’ll take it – and run with it.

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I miss my dog and want to go home…

Monday, October 17th, 2011

Sean and I have been in Delaware for the past month. Every time we’ve tried to go home, some major account pops up that requires our complete attention. Due to this, there’s been no possible way for us to hop in the car and drive five hours north to get back to Long Island.

Initially it was the account for Dover Speedway, from there it’s trickled down to numerous small accounts popping up at once that all require some ridiculously short turn around time. To top that off there are still modifications to do on sites that were completed a few weeks ago so that we can launch them for the client.  Whatever the case has been, we’ve just been too damn busy.  I’ve been told (hopefully as a joke) that if I choose to stay down here any longer my dog will be shipped via FedEx so that I can then stay for as long as I absolutely want, as long as they don’t have to deal with her anymore.

Right now I’m trying to complete FOUR accounts at once.  The task would be much easier to manage if there weren’t so many other factors involved. The environment isn’t an issue at all, I actually find myself more focused down here. The issue I’m dealing with right now… EMAIL… each of the clients is kicking over a multitude of emails to follow for changes/tweaks, and to top that there’s a few new clients coming out of the wood work.  Whatever made me think that Sean and I couldn’t afford to purchase a house down here has gone completely out the window.  Now it’s just the matter of actually getting HOME so that we can continue to work and pay our bills and then eventually go for that oh-so-hefty mortgage to get the house that we’ve both decided upon.

I know they say to never put your eggs in one basket, but this is a home that’s been on the market for almost a year, it’s in beautiful condition and has absolutely everything we want, including a very, very large in-ground pool in a fully fenced in back yard. It’s my ultimate goal to have the keys to this house in my hands before summer of next year so I can literally take three straight days off work and just float in the pool. Meaning, I have no intent of getting OUT of the pool for three days. Who needs air conditioning when you have a float and a nice breeze?

The house itself is $250k, as it’s been on the market for so long I’m offering $175, the negotiations can begin from there.  There’s 4 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, a Florida room, large kitchen, dining room, media room, living room, AND an in-law suite.  What do two people need all of this space for?  Simple really.  The master bedroom will contain absolutely NO computer equipment EVER.  Two of the four bedrooms will be offices. Mine will be fully customized with the same color tones as on this template (White, Black, Grey and pops of Pink). Sean’s will have the more masculine feel.  The other two rooms (in the main house) will be designated guest rooms as I’m sure we’ll have frequent visitors via either friends or family.  The in-law suit contains a small kitchen, large room and its own bathroom. We’ll use this as the ‘guest house’ for the guests staying for more than a few days so they have a bit of privacy.

Regardless, I’ve decorated everything in my head and don’t plan on giving up.  We have looked in NY, the property taxes are absolutely ridiculous so there’s no reason to even continue our search there. Yes, all of my friends and family are up there, but affordability wise – DE is the place to be.

Either way we’re going to continue to work and get our finances in order, the issue really is getting back to NY. We have every intent of leaving tomorrow morning and then working tomorrow night to get caught up. I really wanted to do some laundry and clean up before we leave here but I honestly don’t see the laundry aspect of things happening. I could have spent the last five minutes getting that in the washing machine instead of blogging, but considering I’m still three hours behind on my email – getting up from my computer just wasn’t happening.

I’ve got my fingers crossed in hopes to actually go home tomorrow.  Being in DE isn’t bad, I’m not unhappy in any way, and I absolutely love Karen (Sean’s mom), it’s got nothing to do with her. I just know that we don’t actually live in DE anymore and everything we own (including a more stable internet connection) is back in NY.  I whole heartedly believe that if we brought Bella down with us for this visit – we’d never go back to NY. Regardless, I miss my dog, I miss my friends and I really hope that things slow down long enough for us to pack up and hop in the car.

Meh… forget the emails – I’m doing laundry. :hmph:

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Hello Delaware!!

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011

It’s been a long time coming but I’m finally back in Delaware for a few weeks. It’s been three years since I moved back to NY and I can’t tell you how much I missed it down here. The second we rolled in my eyes lit up to the point I swear they were glowing. We’re staying with Sean’s mom, it’s weird being back in the house but at the same time it feels as though I never left.

Sean’s birthday is tomorrow, I need to get myself out of the house long enough to get up to the store to pick up a few things for him. He already knows he’s getting two video games, “Gears of War 3” and “Dead Island”, I know there’s a third gift in there but I’m going to need to find it first. He knows, in the back of his mind, what it is – but has yet to figure it out so that’s good enough for me, at least there will be some kind of a surprise factor, heh.

So far we’ve hit-up the usual spots where we could be found… “The Roadhouse” in Lewes, “Casapulla’s South” in Rehoboth, and of course we trucked ourselves to the beach because neither of us has really seen one in years. I know that I live on Long ISLAND, but the beaches up there suck major, major ass. It’s not the same when you live on the North Shore. You don’t get the ISLAND feel, you get the “Oh look, there’s Connecticut and somethings floating in the LI Sound again”. So, needless to say, being able to look out and all I see is endless ocean, I’m one happy chick. I fully intend to go back a few more times before we leave.

On top of this being a change in scenery for a few weeks, there’s still some work involved.  Sean and I are both swamped with work, I’m getting mine done a bit more quickly than him, but that’s going to reverse pending a few responses from a client that’s giving us a pretty solid workflow at the moment.  I’ve got a few more sites to add to my portfolio, which is also on the agenda while I’m down here because the change in altitude and the addition of the beach has given me a whole new burst of energy and inspiration.  I’m starting to wish I never left, but circumstances back in New York made that pretty difficult for me.

I’m on the war path though, I’m looking on both Long Island and in Delaware for places to live.  My heart will always be in NY, but for some reason my soul is happier in DE.  Financially speaking, of course, DE would be the way to go but the few prospects that I’ve found don’t really thrill me too much.  One lady down the road (same complex as Sean’s mom) is offering a rental on her house for $750 a month (which is 100% doable, and a pretty good deal), but then when I showed a little interest she noted she’s actually looking to sell as soon as possible because of all of the problems with the house that her husband has been feverishly working to correct. I took a few minutes to take a walk down to the house to see if it would actually be worth it for me or Sean.  It’s a relatively decent deal but I could see exactly what she was talking about the second I walked up onto the property.  It does need a lot of work, and based on the fact that a mortgage would even be required, I’d prefer to take on a much newer model home without as many issues.  I’ll weigh the options for a little while, going back and forth between NY and DE, but for now – until we can pay the bills down quite a bit – I’m going to stay put until the opportunity to make the choice, with the financial stability, comes to the surface.

Based on how much I missed it down here, however, I do see myself coming back to visit a bit more. Yes, it will continue to be a ‘workation’ being as we do need to work in order to continue living, but having the luxury of working for yourself means you can pretty much work anywhere with a laptop and a wifi signal.  We already know that we’re coming back down in November for Punkin Chunkin but that’s something we saw advertised quite a bit while we were down here but never took advantage and actually went to enjoy it in person. It’s a three day event, I don’t see myself going all three days. But even going up to just enjoy the festivities for one day would make me pretty happy.

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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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Seriously?

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

Today is one of those days where the only thing I can really think of saying is “WTF Mate?”.

I’m working on converting a site from tables to divs.  Now, while this may seem like an easy task (and typically is), I’ve found myself wanting to rip out my hair because I have absolutely no idea on where to start other than completely from scratch and implementing the remainder of the code.  Even ‘from scratch’ is proving to be difficult considering its a custom script where the creator obviously has NO idea on how to do anything.

The other “WTF” moment was a comment that I deleted from my pending queue, someone named “Mark” left a bit.ly URL for his website and what appears to be a valid email address noting that they’ve been here before, but lost the link (bull shit, bull shit, bull shit…yada yada) and informed me that my SEO is not up to par.  Dude, it’s a fucking personal site, are you serious?  #1, I could care less about SEO, and #2, if you type “Krissy” into Google I’m already on the first page, my PR rank is a 3 (no idea how I got that back), and I hardly ever, if at all, update…. so what’s the freaking point?

On a side note, I’m slowly coming along with My Portfolio and AcidGloss.net.  I’ve decided to keep ‘krissys-portfolio’ but the redirected domain is AGnDesignsNET.  The reason for this is it makes no sense to push everything to acidgloss.net when I do still wish to keep that as a blog.  So, agndesigns.net was available, I paid my $10, and now its just a matter of working in the content.

I’ve been working on some high profile clients, which would always look good in a portfolio, I’m also dumping all of the little BS templates that were in there for the longest time and really do not show off any kind of design skill other than my ability to whip something up in Photoshop in ten minutes and not think twice about it.  That’s bad for business, and a portfolio should utilize your best…and that’s what I fully intend to do.

The major rush behind getting everything back up and running is the pending write-ups that I need to do. I have at least 15-20 articles to write and have absolutely no ability to concentrate on my own stuff to get it done.  I’m hoping that within the next few days I can buckle down and accomplish that but it seems that every time I get some down time, someone kicks some work my way so thats an instant “nope, not gonna happen today” kind of downside.

Either way I’ll figure it out.  I also just needed to post here because it’s been well over a month, and while I do update twitter regularly, it’s not the same as sitting down for ten minutes and actually posting something here.

So now I’m off to continue working on the monstrocity that is client #3 for the day.

I need a cig 🙁

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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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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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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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