Random

Well I made it to work, and my day so far is pretty much half-over.

I thought I’d make a quick entry to catalog my vehicular endeavers, for the sake of your comic relief, and perhaps some day mine (upon reflection).  But I’m really starting to get the hang of driving the stick.  First some numbers:

Places driven to: Sam’s apartment, the doctor’s office, back to her place, then to Silvermine Subs for lunch, then over to HP (basically going from the west end of Fort Collins to north, then all the way East of FC)

# of Stalls: 1 – it happened when I picked up Sam, then was backing the car out of the parking spot.  Put the car in reverse, let up on the clutch, not enough gas.

Strange/Funny Incidents: When we were coming back from the doctor’s office, turning form Lemay onto Prospect, I tried to shift from 2nd to 3rd, but could not find the third gear.

Also after I got Silvermine to go, I got a drink and put it into the cup holder  in the front.  When I turned onto Harmony and shifted from 2nd to 3rd my hand went forward and jolted the cup as well, got pop partially all over the dashboard..  NIIIIICCE! Note to self: no more "to-go" drinks for 2 weeks.

Ugh, today turned out to be a pretty long and frustrating day, especially in the evening. First off, tonight will be the last night in my apartment for quite some time, as I will be spending the next two weeks in Loveland house sitting for my family once again.  Just when I finally started getting used to sleeping in my own bed – to my sister’s old room I go!

But for the next two weeks I am no longer the proud owner for a Ford Explorer, but rather that is going to New Mexico with my family.  Now the escapade that is me driving a stick begins.  My last practice session with my family tonight did not go well at all..  I ended up stalling out, and while it was on this back-road I still felt really stupid.  I did however take a quick lap around Loveland and reclaimed my confidence, and my first time solo (driving back to my apartment) went well.  We’ll see how things go tomorrow though – with traffic (ugh)…

Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.  I’m taking Sam to the doctor’s in the morning, then I’m supposed to have lunch plans (which I’m not sure if they’re still on or not – a lot going on).  Then I’m working the rest of the day.  Then the fun part comes…  I’m going over to Bethany’s for dinner (she’s cooking for me – too sweet!) and then we’re going to go see Batman Begins!  I’m really excited to go see the movie.  I’ve heard a lot of great things about it.  We’ll see how Christian Beale stacks up.  Personally my favorite is still Michael Keaton – we’ll see if that changes tomorrow!

Just a few random thoughts at the end of a long Thursday:

1. I ended up having to wait up for my sister tonight.  I’m kinda pissed at her too.  Last night we made plans for me to take her to dinner after I got off work today.  I felt bad because even though I’m technically responsible for her this week, I haven’t really spent as much time with her as I should be.  So I wanted to take her out.  So I come straight home after work today only to find that she wasn’t here.  I waited around all evening, but she never showed up.  She finally called me around 10pm, and came home around 11:30pm, but she totally forgot our dinner plans.  So I wasn’t very happy, especially with the fact that I came home and didn’t know where she was.

2.  I had another reason for going straight to Loveland after work rather than back to my place for a while – mowing the lawn.  Before my mom left for Orlando she asked me if I could have the lawn mowed by the time she’d get back.  Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal at all, except that the grass hasn’t been mowed for two weeks.  Typically our lawn needs to be mowed every three days, so you can imagine what two weeks of not mowing does to the lawn!  So it’s been a daunting task that I’ve been putting off all throughout this week.  But tonight was going to be different – I was going to go take my sister to dinner, come back and tackle the front yard and half of the back yard.  But as soon as I got home it began to rain here, and pretty heavy.  It ended up raining a good few hours here, so no way to mow the lawn tonight.

3.  So with no dinner plans and not being able to mow the lawn, I was relegated to seeing what was on Thursday Night TV.  I ended up watching Game 1 of the NBA Finals!  Talk about a low-scoring game!  I guess that’s what we should expect being that the #1 defense is playing the #2 defense, but would it kill someone on either team to light it up?  The game was decently exciting, but as a fan of high-scoring pizazz this left me pretty unsatisfied.  Also I hate to say it, but it looks like Detroit *choked*!  There I said it.  Geez, how the heck could they give up a 17-4 lead in the first quarter at one point fall 16 points behind San Antonio and ultimately lost 84-69.  Ugh! This series is going to be ugly!

I’m so glad tomorrow’s Friday.  I’m excited to wrap up an extra project I’m working on, then I’m headed to the drive-in

Today turned out to be a great day!

First off, as I am writing this I am sitting my parent’s living room waiting up for my sister.  This week I’ve been sleeping over at my parent’s in Loveland, while my mom is in Orlando taking a well-deserved vacation.  So to help the family out I am house-sitting here and taking care of my 16-year-old sister.  I’m still trying to keep her out of trouble  . In all seriousness she is really responsible.  Yes she’s been staying out late, but she’s always calling me letting me know where she’s at, who she’s with and when I can expect her home.  When I drop a curfew on her she’s been home at that time so as far as younger sisters go she’s being great!  Right now she is coming home from the Kenny Chesney concert, so I am being a good big brother and waiting up for her.

Work today turned out to be pretty hectic, but also pretty fun. It was hectic because I ended up spending over 7 hours on the phone and we ended up having to do a few installs with one of them failing.  We ended up going home for the day not knowing what exactly has caused our problem, or how we can fix it.  This does not bode well for our decision in choosing to adopt this upgrade into our current migration efforts.

It also turned out to be pretty good because I managed to cut through a lot of my tasks like a hot knife through butter and get everything done.  I’m at a poitn where I’m looking for work to do – it feels great!  It was also funny because as these installs were going on we ended up with a lot of down-time which gave me a chance to have some good conversations with my co-workers.  We talked about everything fromt pets to wines to retirement accounts and social security.  It was pretty interesting and turned out to be time well-spent.

I had a great dinner + dessert tonight.  I got to make dinner for a really amazing girl, and then we went up to Horsetooth to enjoy dessert while watching the sun set over the reservoir.  It turned out to be an awesome night, and I found out I’m not such a bad cook after all.

I just wasted half a day here at work because of one stupid character.  We’re in the process of upgrading to a new platform and while I’ve been doing that I was updating my component of the application when I realized it wasn’t submitting.  It wasn’t returning any error messages at all – it just plain wasn’t working and reloading the form.  I went through and broke down the 80 different fields in the app and verified they were all doing the right thing.  Then I went through and debugged 1600 lines of code..  Only to find that one of the fields that I’m relying on was depending on my input to be 5 characters, when I was feeding it 6 characters!  Turns out it’s always been that way, but now the field isn’t as forgiving!

So I wasted four hours of my work day for a stupid character limit of 1!  How lame!!  More to come….