So it’s been like… 6 months since I’ve had a real entry and it’s partially because too much has happened to do any of it a great justice in a single entry. I’ll do my best to summarize and see what happens.

I spent the remainder of my summer busy as ever at work only to have it die down once the weather started getting colder. I’ve had my assignment move from Fabric Care, to Home Care & Fabric Care, to Home Care exclusively, then to Oral Care. As that progressed, the assignments got more and more mundane. I worked on some neat projects with Home Care, but a lot of them were short “by the book” sort of things. Now that I’m on Oral Care, it’s really boring. It seems like they had craploads of work to do, assigned me to it, and it immediately died down. Most of the pieces I get to work on aren’t exactly challenging, in fact the only real challenge is dealing with the way files must be saved and proofs must be printed.

The past 6 months has seen drastic changes outside of work, too. The wedding came and went and the newlyweds are doing well. They closed on a house in the middle of September and spent much of the time between the day they closed and the wedding moving in. The morning of the wedding was actually spent moving a few more items before we had to start getting ready. Joe spent the weekends before the wedding tearing up the garden of weeds, bramble and random concrete that someone called a backyard, conditioning it and laying fresh seed. By the time Summer comes he should have a decent lawn back there! His (and by “his” I mean “our”) project for the summer is to add a fence and bring the grass up to the property line. Now they’ve mostly settled in and are really just down to a lot of small projects here and there to help make their home complete.

The wedding itself was fantastic. It goes without saying that it’s the highlight of 2007, and probably one of the greatest days of MY life. It was somewhat stressful planning the bachelor party because I didn’t have much experience trying to coordinate the efforts of 30 people and keep it a secret to Joe, but he loved the whole day, which makes me happy. We started off with flag football at Oakley Playground. We had about 12 people show up, if I remember correctly. We had a lot of fun but I think we wore ourselves out too early in the day. I know that I was already sore by afternoon and we were barely halfway through the day. After the game and some quick showers, we headed off to the Claddaugh Irish Pub at Newport on the Levee. We added some people to the party here and we all enjoyed some beers and excellent food. I had never been to the Claddaugh before so I didn’t know what to expect, but they definitely did not disappoint me. After this, we walked from Newport to Great American Ballpark for the Cincinnati Reds’ last game of the season against the Chicago Cubs where we sat in style on the Riverboat Deck. The game was pretty much a bummer as the Reds had a terrible season and the stadium was filled with Cubs fans, who were just downright assholes. After the game, we took the Ferry across the river back to Newport on the Levee and went to Gameworks for a couple of hours where Joe was bought plenty of drinks and was driven to the point of zig-zagging out of crowds of people playing darts and other games with a coconut tucked in his arms like a football, striking the Heisman Pose at every opportunity. After we determined that Joe was in no shape to keep drinking, we took him back home and then promptly out to a bar where we made him keep drinking. Long story short, after drinking more than he’s ever consumed before, he winded up getting us kicked out of the bar and while we went home, everyone else continued the night for a little while.

By the time we hit October 20th I think we were all ready for the night to come, but once it came we didn’t want it to end. The wedding went as smoothly as it could. Nobody fainted or tripped but there were plenty of tears. The reception was a blast and despite being really nervous, I didn’t botch my speech. Aside from the Bachelor Party, it was the first time the E-Men had been together in a few months. Being surrounded by so many friends and so much love being shared overwhelmed me with joy, but as the night neared an end it sort of hit me that from that point forward, everything was going to change. The bachelor pad on Drake Avenue was splitting up and the life we had grown accustomed to in the past two years was changing all at once.

Mike moved to Kansas the weekend after the wedding to be with his family and pursue career opportunities out that way. He moved in with his parents and is hoping to be out ASAP, but so far he hasn’t had much luck finding a job in tune with his career. He’s mentioned a couple of times to me that he feels he needs to change career paths because he’s not all that sure of what he wants out of the marketing field. I miss that guy. He actually surprised us and showed up in Ohio for Joe and Kristen’s Christmas party, which made me realize exactly how much I miss having him around.

Doug, as expected, moved in with Kate following the wedding. He seems to be doing well and he seems happier than he had been in a while. We had made a routine of getting together to watch some of our favorite TV shows, but once the writer’s strike started and the shows stopped, that stopped. We should really find a night to go out and hit the bars. Doug, Joe and myself are going to take a trip at the end of February to St. Louis, where Mike is going to meet up with us, so I’m definitely looking forward to that.

As for me… well… I managed to find a one bedroom apartment on the opposite side of Oakley Square from our house on Drake Avenue. My time away from work was more or less devoted to do my research for a place to live and I found the place on only the second try. The first place was disgusting, and my dear mother would have had a heart attack if she came to visit me in a place like that. I actually lucked out because the apartment I moved in to was owned by the same landlords that owned the house on Drake Avenue, so I didn’t need to waste time with credit checks and such and they gave me the keys right away, they gave me the month of October free so I’d have plenty of time to move in before vacating Drake, and have pretty much left me alone since. hah. I’ve had plenty to occupy me since I’ve been living alone but I still seem to feel bored most nights. I’d be great to be sitting on the couch vegging with Mike, Doug, and Joe at nights again.

So I’m making progress slowly but surely on the site. motivation is the key factor here because it’s not easy to just dive right in, make a couple of changes and stop there. So we’ll see how things go and hopefully I don’t wait another six months to make a post.

Not much going on this week.  Work has been a bit slow, although there are some signs of life.

I finished playing Twilight Princess.  Great game, but a little too “lather, rinse, repeat” in terms of the Legend of  Zelda series.  After I finished that up I jumped right in to Super Mario Galaxy.  It’s pretty sweet.  It’s soooo damn cute.  It basically seems like the scraped everything they did with Mario Sunshine (since it sucked.) and started back at the basic ideas behind Mario 64.

That’s more or less been the highlights of my week right there.  You can see I’ve been too busy for my own good.  Winter sucks.  Despite the fact that I’m more or less a nerd, I still want to be able to go outside or open the windows and get some fresh air.

St. Louis with the E-Men in 2.5 weeks.  Woo-hoo.

I hadn’t visited YTMND.com in a while, but I was bored tonight and went on and noticed that I had a message.  I opened it up and after reading it, a proud smile like a father who’s son just scored the game winning run in little league ball crept over my face. 

Another user had seen the site I made forever ago regarding the E-Men’s getting screwed over on the Halloween contest as the A-Team ( http://wegotscrewedonthecontest.ytmnd.com/ )and convinced some coworkers to follow in our footsteps and use the idea for their office contest and they WON! ( http://catg.ytmnd.com/ ) A small slice of justice has been served to the A-Team costumes.

So this weekend was pretty fun in comparison to the bore that the rest of the week was.

Friday was still a little boring… and cold, but at least I was able to relax a bit.  Joe and I have started a weekly habit of going to Skyline on Friday nights at midnight since we’ve been fasting through Fridays since the start of Lent.  So I started walking there a few minutes before midnight even though it was cold and icy… I thought the news reports on how icy it actually was were a bit overblown and just walked anyway.  Before even reaching the end of my driveway, I nearly busted my ass a couple of times, and a couple times more just crossing the street and a parking lot… and a couple more times walking up Skyline’s sidewalk to the door, only to find it locked.  A sign on the door told me that they had closed just minutes before I got there due to the weather.  What suckage.  So I walked down the street a little bit just for the hell of it and then took a path home where the sidewalks were a little bit more devoid of ice.  When I got back home I cooked a steak.  It was awesome.

Saturday I woke up, chilled out for a bit them went and got the Skyline that I missed out on, watched a movie and chilled out a bit.  Later that evening I went to my cousin Mike’s place in Kentucky to hang out with him, Greg, Chris, Nick, and of course Joe… and uhh… to summarize my drive there, Google Maps fails to give the alternate name of a road… a road that just happens to have another road by the same name half a mile away.  When I finally did make it there we had a blast.  We were up until like.. 6am playing video games.  It was a great way to just let go of everything for a night.   In the morning I got home around noon and tried to take a nap, but that didn’t go so well.

Aunt Jean was in town for a short while and Mom decided to host a party for the Langguth family so Joe, Kristen and myself left for Franklin around 2:00 or so.  We had dinner, planned a “group trip” to Chicago in the summer, and socialized a bit before coming back home around 8pm or so.  Since I didn’t get much sleep the night before, I made sure things were in order around my place and hit the hay early.

All-in-all, a pretty good weekend.  Of course, any weekend I don’t spend bored and alone seems to fit that qualification for me.

The past month and a half has been a little weird. I’ve been occupied with plenty of things that could keep me from updating frequently.

At the beginning of March, Joe found out a pipe behind one of his kitchen walls was cracked and leaking. So I spent a few of my weekends helping him both tear a hole in his wall and repair that hole after the pipe had been fixed. It was a great experience to learn how to do some of this stuff with a little more than blind ambition, the advice of parents, and a book. Seeing as his house is roughly 100 years old, tearing it down and repairing it was somewhat awkward. The first layer of the wall was drywall, which would have been no big deal to replace if it was just that, but underneath was about 5 coats of ugly green paints, plaster, and lath. We kind of had to improvise on repairing the hole to ensure that that drywall we laid over it would be flush with the rest of the drywall. We couldn’t replace the lath because the replacement section of pipe stuck out too far. So essentially we got a piece of plywood that was the exact same thickness of the plaster, laid it into the hole as close as we could size-wise, and fit the drywall in. One edge was a little “distorted”, but after mudding it and painting it, it wasn’t even noticeable. Joe was really thankful for all the help I gave him in the process, and I offered to help him tear holes in his walls anytime he wants.

During the course of working on Joe’s kitchen and talking with him, I came to the realization of how much I want a house and how possible it is for me to have one by this time next year. I really spent some time thinking about it and I knew that my first course of action was to be in good shape financially. I started off figuring out my monthly budget rather than just blindly spending money. I closed most of the credit accounts that I never used and never really had a need for. I had a shell card that I hadn’t used in like… 5 years… I had a Dell account that had an APR of about 30%… thank God I wasn’t dumb enough to keep a balance on that… and a few other stupid accounts that I knew I didn’t need as long as I had one credit card.

Step two in my budgeting process was to see where I could cut the most money. I stopped eating out for lunches. To not see a new transaction on my account everyday was a big relief. My energy bill had been plaguing me all winter and even after programming my thermostat I was still paying about $100 for gas alone. (the furnace was the ONLY device using gas in my place.) I decided to just turn it off and see what happens. I was really surprised when the temperature never fell below 60. I could deal with that. I’m fine with bundling up… mom bought me an electric blanket back in January so I should be fine. I’m under the impression that because the doors in my place are really thin and there are lots of gaps in them that other people’s heat is keeping my place warm. Which explains both why my place stayed decent with the heat off and why it costs $100 to heat a 1 bedroom apartment. I’ve also been turning my computer off… I removed a light bulb from a socket in the basement that was wired to my electric line and the other tenants ALWAYS left on… that really annoyed me. My previous energy bill had fallen about $75 through all of this to a shade over $100… which only included 3 weeks of these methods. Hopefully the next one will be well below the $100 mark.

One of my other big costs was my car. It is by no means a gas guzzler, but my insurance was about $110/month, and with gas prices going up, that was another $75/month. I only have to fill up a little less than every two weeks, but that’s still a decent amount of money. The first thing I did was shop around for different insurance prices. Paying $1200 per year for car insurance on a car worth just about that is stupid. One company gave me a rate that would come out to about $120 every SIX months… so I took this rate and called up my insurance agent. I talked with him for a little bit and he helped explain things to me a bit better than the other site could. Joe recently left him when he got joint insurance with Kristen and I think he got the impression I was trying to do the same. His final rate was higher than the other guy, but he gave me better coverage and has never been a problem for me, so I stuck with him and essentially cut the costs of my insurance by more than half. Nothing but success so far.

Of course, with a lot of my bills lowered, the biggest of my bills more or less can’t be touched. $450 a month in rent. Now comes the twist in the plot. Mike came back the Thursday before Easter because he had a job interview. While being here, I think he realized how much he just wanted to come back, whether the job interview went well or not. Lo and behold, a week later Mike is living with me. I haven’t really talked to him about it before he came back, but I think he plans to stay with me at least for a while, and it would be awesome if he paid half of the rent. I have a living room in my place that has its own closet and is bigger than my bedroom. Assuming I could find a door for it, it’d make a perfect room, thus cutting my rent, internet and utility bills in half. We’ll see how that develops, though. So far the big idea here is that Mike gets a job.

So that’s more or less where I stand right now. I’ve been making some sacrifices here and there in terms of buying stupid crap for myself and finding reasons to NOT go out and spend money. Let’s hope it pays off in the end.

The day after my last entry I received the electronic statement for my gas/electric.   I’ve dropped my consumption to $67, (approximately $42 in gas, $25 in electric.)  The electric I’m satisfied with, but the gas struck me as odd because the thermostat had been completely off that whole billing period.  After talking with some people I realized that my hot water heater was probably the source of that other gas usage.

So thinking about this logically… does it make THAT much sense to have like… 50 gallons of scalding hot water in a tank in the basement for the 20 minutes of showers and 10 minutes of dishes daily?  I’m going to turn it down a bit.  I figure that if it has to run from straight hot water for a bit it’ll be fine instead of mixing hot/cold.  My goal is to drop by bill to $50 or less, and that’s also factoring in that there is a second person with me right now.  So yeah.  It’s gonna be a tough goal, but that’s the only kind of goal worth having.

I’ve now done a solid job of keeping track of my finances for a full month without lagging behind and more than a day or two.

I want to get a second job… maybe 2 or 3 nights a week for a few hours and one day on the weekend… a 20 hour sort of deal.  If I do, this money will go directly to my savings and will not be touched unless there is an emergency.  The tough task will be finding an employer that has a need for those requirements right now.  There are plenty of businesses within walking distance of me that would be great, but I think food service would be a bad choice for me right now.  I wouldn’t mind it… but it may be more of a hassle than anything.

I just received my new e-statement for Duke Energy. I dropped the bill another $12 to $54, but I still think I can get below $50. The gas usage dropped from 21ccfs to 14ccfs, and the electric usage dropped from 192kWh to 168kWh. This is the second lowest bill I’ve gotten since I’ve been here, and the lowest was for a whopping 2 or 3 days and cost about $9.

I filled up on gas on Tuesday. I spent the last tank of gas trying to get the best MPG I could. I want to get 37 MPG out of my car. I don’t know how achievable it is. I removed some excess stuff from my car (including completely emptying out the trunk, removing the back seat, and some other stuff.) and I managed to get an extra 2 days out of one tank of gas. I went about 400 miles on less than 13 gallons of gas… I think the MPG I calculated was 33MPG and some change. It’s going to be rough adding a whole 4 MPG, but I’m also considering that the first tank of gas included a trip to Franklin with 4 people in the car and a trip to Aunt Maria’s (where there are tons of hills.) So ideally, if I keep up the methods I’m using, I think I can go 3 weeks on this tank of gas.

Mike has been with me for 2 months now. He’s starting to consider if he wants to get a place of his own or if he wants to just hang with me for a little while longer. He actually is checking out a place today, but he wasn’t very excited by the location of it. It looked decent in pictures but pictures can’t tell everything. It could be awesome. It could totally suck. I don’t think he has the intention of moving in either way, I think he just wants to get an idea of what his options are. In any case, he’s welcome as long as he wants. He started working at Meijer a few weeks ago… just doing general work… a few days in to it, someone suggested that he apply to be part of the inventory crew. He had an interview for that recently and will be starting next Wednesday. The best part is that the job is only Monday through Thursday, so with that in mind, he got a second job for a valet service that his friend works for and seems to be pretty excited about having 2 paychecks.

I still really want a second job. Now that Mike is going to be working some evenings leaving me home alone, I might just go ahead and get some secondary job for a little extra income. My big concern is that I’m not sure who needs a guy that can only work a few hours in the evening a little bit on the weekends.

Work has been so-so. I’m not too fond of the stuff I’ve been working on lately. I’m learning new things with it, which is good… but at the same time a lot of the work is a bit mindless. The majority of the trouble is the fact that there is a lot of work, not that it’s particularly complicated. It’s really a “lather, rinse, repeat” deal.  I pick up other jobs when I get the chance, but needless to say I can’t really be a part of any big projects for other departments.  We had a lot of layoffs about a month or two ago.  There have been a few since “Black Friday”, but I’d like to think that I shouldn’t be worrying.  Even still, the mood around here has been a bit on the bitter side.  We’re all fairly worried about what could happen, and it doesn’t help that we’re supposed to have a company-wide review next month in which some overdue raises will be determined… makes it pretty hard to negotiate for more money when the company lost a chunk of business and had to let people go, ya know?  If my goal is to be making $40,000 by 2010, I’m in a bad place right now to still be wondering how I’m going to do that.  Maybe this is where the second job comes in.

Anyway, I’m probably going to be giving the site a quick makeover soon.  I just don’t know how I want to go about it… or exactly what I want to do.

See ya.

If for some reason you haven’t noticed that I changed the look of the site to be a bit more graphical, you might notice that some things look a bit disheveled right now. I’m working on it. Hope you like it. Just gimme a few days, right?

Edit: So far so good… I think I have most of the page done, with the exception of the photo gallery (because I have to edit completely different files to change the theme of that page.)  I wanna re-do some of the icons to make them look a little less… crap… but I think that’s going to come after the site functionality is 100% (or close to it.)  I’ve been exploring a bit more of wordpress’s features than I did previously.  In the previous look I spent more time just cutting things out of wordpress so they couldn’t be accessed but now I’m trying to make sure that everything is built in is being used… whether it actually gets used or not.

Edit #2: Still coming along. The written content of the site should be good to go. The photo albums are being worked on and should only be another couple of days while I try and figure out the new gallery software a bit better.

Tags: site

I’m a bad news first kinda guy.  Lucky for me the news could be much, much worse, but it’s not.  We had to go through another round of layoffs at work and our department wasn’t as lucky as it was last time.  I wasn’t part of the layoffs, but nonetheless they left a sour taste in my mouth about my future, the future of the company, and my opinions of some individuals at the company.  Don’t get me wrong, I like it here and I hope the place is around longer than I am, but it’s hard to NOT have doubts about these things when you have to watch your friends walk out the door and stand there wondering all sorts of things.  Like I said, it could have been much worse for me personally, but it’s hard to keep a positive attitude amidst all that’s going on.

I avoided going out people from work because I didn’t want to spend the money at a bar. So after “Black Friday” I went home and mulled some things over all by my lonesome.  Mike was out of town for a wedding and Joe was tied up, so I had a few beers, bored myself with some games and found myself in a staredown with the clock… just waiting for a reasonable time to go to bed.

Saturday was more or less the same.  Kristen called me around 10am and invited me over to have waffles with her and Joe and I hung around there until noon or so.  I loafed around until dinner, went and had a burrito, then went to the Apple store to buy Quicken for Mac.  (FYI: It sucks.)  I really just wanted to get out for a little bit.  Later on Kristen called me and invited me to Don Pablo’s for dinner… I just had desert since I have alredy eaten.  Then we went over to Stephanie’s for a few beers but nobody wanted to do anything but sit around and be tired.

The next morning I went to church and almost immediately went up to Mom and Dad’s place for the day.  I got to see Yahtzee again.  She’s getting so big!  I think mom said she’s up to a whopping 16/17 pounds.  Dad taught me how to drive a stick shift.  I was getting pretty good at it, I think.  I stalled more times than I could count, and still need some practice, but I could do it by myself if I had to.  After a nice delicious dinner and a little bit of television I went back home.

Here it is Wednesday and I suppose I’ve cheered up a bit since Friday, but it’s really just a matter of my thoughts being shoved to the back of my mind so I can do my job.  Monday was a pretty confusing day as the layoffs left pretty much all the teams missing people.  I’ve had work but it’s been pretty stale around here.  We’ve been told that the company is at a “sustainable” point with our current business level, but I think it’s best to prepare for the possibility of the worst, regardless.  Hopefully things start shaping up soon to lift the cloud over us.
See ya.

Tags: cars, home, work, yahtzee

… and all I got was a fridge full of spoiled food.

Last Sunday (the 14th) Cincinnati had a huge windstorm leftover from Hurricane Ike.  It was really quite unexpected as the most we’ve ever really gotten from hurricane leftovers was a fair breeze and some rain, so nobody really thought that we could get winds reaching up to 60 MPH.

While watching the Bengals blowing just as hard as the winds that day, the power flickered a bit at Joe’s for a bit, then went out a short time later.  I went back to my place to see if it was just his street/house or all of the area and sure enough, power was still on at my place.  I called Joe and Mike over so they could keep watching football and about 10 minutes after they came over, the majority of Oakley lost power.

Trees were down all over the place.  A tree on Drake Avenue had fallen the length of the road and taken out two telephone polls, nearly every other street was closed off because of downed power lines, and of course everyone on the roads became a total idiot without traffic lights.  FOR REFERENCE… if a traffic light is out, you treat it as a stop sign, you don’t just assume that you should keep going through the intersection because you’re already driving 10MPH over the speed limit.  (I kinda hoped that someone would just nail my car as a result of this so I could laugh in their face as I get a new one… I know, I’m a bit twisted.)

So anyway, with the power out there wasn’t that much to do.  As I said previously, it was really unexpected.   Joe, Kristen, Mike and I really just sat around watching trees be torn apart and half napping until the evening, when Joe and Kristen went to a party where the electricity was still on.  Mike and I eventually went to a bar down the road that amazingly still had power.

Monday morning I got a call from Lindsey saying that the power was out at work, but I figured it would be smart to at least show up and not assume that I wouldn’t have to work.  As expected, I arrived to find out that there was nothing we could do about it and that the building was too pitch black to even do some manual labor.

I went home and decided to take a walk to see how torn up Oakley was and to check what time the library opened. (they still had power.)  On my way back, Kristen saw me and picked me up.  She was going to check out the house of some family friends that were on vacation and make sure everything was okay.  I went back to Joe and Kristen’s place afterwords and we started cleaning up their yard.  Their neighbors have a huge tree that reaches over into their yard and it left some larger branches for us to clean up.  We started a fire and just ended up burning a lot of it for the sake of getting rid of it.  Around lunch time, Joe and I went to my place and tried to recover as much food out of the fridge as we could, then we used his grill to cook some of it.  Unfortunately I still ended up throwing away a lot of delicious stuff, but it’s good to know that it wasn’t entirely wasted.

Joe and Kristen’s power came back around 2pm on Monday, but our power didn’t come back until around 1pm on Wednesday.  The showers by candlelight were starting to grow on me. (Thank goodness we still had hot water!)  My parents just got their power back yesterday around 1pm… just shy of a full week without power.

So after a really miserable week in general I’m hoping things will be back on track this week.

Tags: Oakley, power outage, weather, wind storm