Between standing for hours on end at the state HOG rally, Jeff and Marcia’s wedding (at which I was a groomsman), dancing at the reception afterwards, having Cody walk on my back and then jump off, and picking up a 21in monitor, I torqued my back somehow. Went to the doctor yesterday, and he gave me some muscle relaxers, but they don’t seem to be helping much. I ended up getting up at 3am to sleep in the recliner with the heating pad.
The Matrix Reloaded opened last night in my neighborhood theater. I bought tickets a week ago when I heard they were having "preview" showings, and myself and 6 of my friends all went.
I also won a drawing here at work where I get to go see it tonight for free, and as a team, we're going tomorrow afternoon to see it as well. Good thing I liked it. :)
In other news, I think I've actually settled on a major. I think I'm going to go for a Psychology major, with a minor in Film and Media Studies. Why Film and Media? I've always loved movies, love the Internet, and find the way the media in general can manipulate the public thought process fascinating and disturbing. That interest should tie in nicely with the Psych degree.
Sarah "graduates" from daycare today. I'm in work early today so I can leave around 9-ish, and go watch the ceremony. Should be very cute, and I hope to have pictures up shortly after (though I'm taking my 35 mm and not my digital, which in itself wouldn't be a problem if Canon would make a flippin' scanner driver for my Mac, which runs OS X. There's another company that has, but they want 50 bucks...but I digress)...
Cody has SOL tests today (Standards Of Learning), which is a nice, 4 hour long test. He then has a game tonight (he had one last night as well), so I imagine by tomorrow he'll be worn out. Gail and I are getting stuff together for a garage sale we're having Saturday. I discovered I have more computer parts and software than I ever thought, so I'm selling 95% of it. Hopefully, once Gail sees how cleaned out the basement is, she'll let me go buy more crap...er...computer stuff!
Once this weekend is over, we have to start cleaning like mad, as my Mother-in-law (queue Darth Vader music!...just kidding Lou!!!!) is coming to town for a wedding, in which Gail and I are in. And then starting Thursday is the HOG VA State Rally, with Rolling Thunder smack dab in the middle of it...
It is going to be a very busy week.
One of the things Gail and I have been dealing with the past few weeks/months now is Cody's lying. For some reason, he's been lying about anything and everything and it's the stupidest stuff he lies about. A lot of it deals with school work, but the truly annoying lies are ones such as him lying about whether he used toothpaste on his toothbrush, used shampoo, silly stuff like that. It just gets SO old. He'd been saying that the reason he missed "Whacky Wednesday" (a free time for the kids that earn it at school) the past two weeks in a row was because he hadn't received a handout that was due. He's telling us that for two weeks the teacher hasn't given him the paper when she passes it out, but that she's been giving it to all the other kids.
Yeah...right.
So Monday I called his teacher and got things straightened out. Turns out that after she passes out the papers, she asks if anyone didn't get one, and then puts the leftovers in a tray on her desk for those that might have lost theirs. After I sat Cody down and confronted him about all this (And one lie just kept leading to another, even while we were sitting there), it turns out he had all the papers in his desk. With Gail's "encouragement" I kept it very toned down (though I wanted to bend him over my knee and spank his butt like a 5 year old), and mostly positive. Encouragement instead of negativity, praising him for the great grades he brought home last week. It's a good thing Gail was there, because she had the right of it. He responds so much better when we're positive, instead of nagging him to get his homework done (after he sits there for 3-4 hours, it gets annoying).
So, on top of regular homework, we had him bring home his class work, which we're helping him through. Only 6 weeks of school left. I really hope next year he gets a stricter teacher. He does so well with a teacher who's a hard ass :)
As for Sarah...well, I have a feeling she might be more trouble. Aside from the "Go faster daddy" when I'm driving to the "play louder daddy" when I'm playing my guitar, she pulled a new one on me last night. I'd just gotten her out of the bath, and was drying her hair with the towel, and with exaggerated motions, tousled her hair. She laughed and laughed and then said "Daddy! Stop that! I'm a GENIUS and geniuses don't GET their hair dried!"
I just sat there with my mouth open, towel in my hand, as she streaked out in the living room giggling her head off.
So, Friday afternoon/evening, we're having power problems. Stays on for 20 minutes, goes out for an hour to an hour and a half. This continues all evening (twice while I was online. You'd think I'd have gotten the hint the first time....).
Around 11:15 it comes back on again, and something happened to the neighbor's home security system. It starts going off on its own accord. Nice, LOUD annoying "BREEEP BREEEP BREEEP pause BREEEP BREEEP BREEEP..." and so on. I could not get to sleep until about 4:30am because of that damn thing. I even took a walk up the road at 3am to take a look and see if I could disconnect it, because, obviously by now, there was no one home.
Turns out the homeowners had dropped the security service that monitors the alarms, but kept the alarm hooked up. And, naturally, the homeowners were out of town. Friggin' wonderful.
It didn't get shut off until 4pm Sunday afternoon.
I'd better get a nice bottle of beer from them or something.
I had to take Sarah to the doctor's office yesterday for her inoculations. The last time she needed shots, I had to take her as well, and that just killed me. Two nurses had to pin her down, with me holding her shoulders and telling her it would be OK. By the time they were done, I had tears in my eyes. I sure didn't take well to seeing my little girl getting scared and hurt like that. So I told Gail that next time, she had to do it.
Naturally, she scheduled the appointment in the middle of the day when she's at work and can't get off. So I was the lucky one who got to take her in to get shots again. Sarah had told me she was worried, and you could tell during the exam. She was jumping and running and all over the place.
When the nurse came in to give the shots, Sarah was going to sit on my lap. By this time, she'd ceased jumping and laughing and was crying. Hard. And hiding behind me as well. Eventually it took me sitting her in my lap, wrapping both arms around her, with one hand holding both of her hands, and I had one leg wrapped around her legs to pin them down. Poor thing was so scared, and screaming to raise the dead. Two shots in one arm, one in the other.
Gail owes me big time.
For some reason, I got a wild hair and decided to make the site here W3C compliant. I validated both the HTML code as well as the CSS. I had a ton of things wrong in the HTML, mostly stuff I'd neglected to take out in the Greymatter templates, and it probably took me about a half hour to get straightened out. The CSS was error-free, just some warnings that I didn't have certain expected elements in my link classes. Two minutes later, all was fine and dandy.
I was going to change, or was thinking about changing at least, the layout of the site. I think I'll hold off on that however, and instead, go with a different layout under the soon to be opened (I hope) graphics section. Naturally, being a "graphics" section, it is going to be a much more graphical interface, as well as some CSS/PHP eye-candy goodiness. At least, that's the plan. And Lord knows how many plans I've had that have gone astray.
As with many other people, I tend to make New Year's Resolutions every January. Typically, I've forgotten about them by Febuary. This year, I'm actually still focused on a couple of them, which is rather surprising.
Here were my resolutions:
Lose Weight
Get more organized
Work more on getting a small music studio setup
The losing weight is actually going well, though I haven't been doing it the whole time. I've only started dieting in the last week, but at least I'm making a conscious effort to lose weight now. I've also probably worked out more in the past 4 months than I did all of last year. Having a diet buddy helps, someone I can talk to when I need advice or motivation. Although her last journal entry will probably give me an upset stomach. Thong?!? Moi?! icky.
Getting myself more organized is still in the works as well. I've been trying to keep track of the finances with Quicken, and I rescued an older Compaq PDA from the trash heap, fixed it, and now keep track of my appointments and tasks through it. Hopefully soon I'll transfer my address book over to it. It's a neat little gadget, and while it uses Microsoft Pocket PC 2002 and Microsoft's Outlook to do everything, it at least works. While I do like using Linux, and more recently have moved over to the Mac OS X platform, it was nice to have something sync up correctly the first time I hooked it up. All I had to do was download ActiveSync off Microsoft's website, and everything was groovy after that. That's nice for a change.
As for the music studio I want, well, I still haven't forgotten about that. I want to get something like Propellerhead's Reason, a small keyboard, Yamaha Tone Generator, and a nice pair of studio speakers. Unfortunately, this is all very expensive, and just one more expensive hobby for me to start. So, we're concentrating on the cheaper stuff first.
I've never in my life been on a diet. Well, there was this time when I was in jr. high school ("middle school" they call it now...go figure) where my mom decided I wasn't getting enough protein or something and made me drink these hideous shakes that were just the nastiest things. They tasted like chalk.
Well, now I'm on a real, honest-to-god diet. I've known for some time that I've needed to lose weight. It just never was high on my priority list. For some reason though, the time has come to make it happen. There was nothing earth shaking that prompted this decision. It's just time to do it I guess. I don't want to be fat forever.
I've got some help this time through. I have my diet buddy who I mentioned before. I have Gail helping as well. She's been reading through different books about the low-carb diets (which is what I'm trying) and is helping me to eat better. We had meatloaf (with lean beef), beans and instead of mashed potatoes, we had mashed cauliflower. Gail chopped and whipped it up, put in some sour cream (low-fat of course ;), and some cheese, and wa-la! Mashed Cauliflower! It wasn't bad at all, but the real surprise was how Cody wolfed it down. He LOVED it.
So here's to hoping the diet works, I lose weight, start feeling better about myself and get all the hot young chicks to notice me without sucking in my gut all the time. Makes my head swell up funny when I do that.
Weather wise, it's been a weird week. Sunday and Monday it was cold and snowing. Wednesday and Thursday, it was gorgeous, high 70s. Naturally, I rode the bike in to work both days. Today, it's supposed to be in the low 70s. Riding to work this morning, it was cold, and there was patchy fog. My cheeks were freezing when I got here. I hope it does get to that promised 73 degrees.
I'm settling into my new role as QA tester type person. On my first "real day" of working as a tester, they gave me some stuff to test (naturally). Real basic stuff, entering difference values for different parameters for our new bug tracking software. I changed a few things, everything was good. Then I thought to myself "well, what if I did this?", and ended up breaking the whole system. I broke our bug tracking system, but not only that, I apparently broke the system it was based off, as well as created some firewall issues for the west coast people.
Man, do I know how to do my job or what?? What's even better is the fact that I get to break it and don't have to fix it. That rules.
Otherwise, it's spring. Flowers are blooming, Cody is in baseball and is starting to count down the days until Spring Break (so is Gail for that matter). Cody's Odyssey of the Mind took second place in their school and we're all headed to Newport News for the State competition next weekend. No one expected them to get placed, as this is the first year for their school, but they surprised everyone. We were pretty damn proud of him!
Sarah is starting to talk about going to school in the fall. I think she's looking forward to it. And I think she'll do well. She's one of those that really likes to please others, and gets very upset if someone becomes upset with her. Guess she might be classified as "teachers pet".
The dogs have been attention starved or something lately. They've been getting into the trash, getting up on the furniture again. So we've been letting them sleep in the room (They're really annoying in the middle of the night. For some reason, that appears to be their preferred time to wash themselves and at 1 in the morning, we're awaken by the sound of dogs licking themselves. Just nasty..). We even managed to all go for a walk last night. Hopefully, now that it's turning nice out, we'll do more of that.
I have a "diet buddy"! A good friend of mine is wanting to lose weight, and as I'm always bitching about how fat I am, she asked me to help her out, and in turn, she'll help me. So we've made goals, and we encourage (read: nag) each other about what to eat, what not to eat, when we've exercised, etc. Hopefully it'll work, and I'll be able to stick to an exercise/diet plan. I seriously need to lose some serious amount of weight!
And other than all that happy rambling, have a good Friday!
It's snowing.
Hard.
According to the weather reports yesterday, we were supposed to get a "dusting". There's about 2 inches on the ground now, with a forecast of 2-4 inches by this afternoon. Since when is 2 inches a dusting? You normally won't hear me say this, but I am tired of the snow. I want Spring. I want the trees to bloom, I want the grass to need cutting, I want to ride my bike on nice weekends. Hell, I'll even take the seasonal allergies that accompany Spring. I am just so tired of the snow.
Gail and I took the kids and Sarah's friend, Olivia, to breakfast this morning. Cody was asking me what the vents were above the cook's area, and that led to a discussion of how hot the ovens at the pizza place where Gail and I met used to get. I told Cody that not only is that where I met Gail, but where I got a crush on her as well. He said "Oh...so you used to body slam her?"
I choked on my breakfast, and I could see Gail hide the smile that was threatening to become an out right laugh. After coughing for a few minutes, I asked Cody if he knew what I meant by "crush". He shook his head, and I explained it to him.
I tell ya, kids sure can be funny without meaning to be.