Brian Fields

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve changed hosts, changed news programs and I’m working on changing the whole site to run on this news program.  It’s kinda risky to put all my eggs in one basket here but It’ll make coding less messy.  There might be some broken links for a little while and I’m still trying to figure out the best way to go about replacing all of the old news files, but it’ll happen.  I have lots of free time. 

I was in NYC last weekend to visit Brownie and had a blast.  I’ll write up a full travel log in the coming days (hopefully) but the pictures ARE already in the gallery.  I didn’t take as many as I had hoped but I guess that just gives me an excuse to go back.  It was overcast for a lot of the weekend which made for some crudy pictures, but I still managed a few great ones.  Lemme know which ones you like…

comments are currently being repaired… just need to figure out how.  :-\

So It’s been a few months since I’ve made a post. The webscript I used for news was great for a while, then they had an upgrade that pretty much sucked. Hard. I backed up my files and everything, but somewhere in there they got deleted or overwritten. I still have them, but the news script was incorrectly listing dates as being in 1970, saying that I had hundreds of comments, all sorts of crazy crap. Some of the posts just flat out weren’t showing up. So I finally decided to say screw it and switch scripts. I’m working on the new one right now. It’s a bit more mainstream so it should work much better. With any luck I can go through my old posts and add them in, backdated. We’ll see. But whatever.

Okay. See ya.

The burden of taking care of a simple website is getting to be a real pain in the ass. As mentioned previously, bot-spammers started abusing the hell out of my photo gallery, attempting to post link to everything from the standard Viagra, porn, and “free gift certificates” and other shit that no one wants. I had to require registration to stop it. Spammers now found their way into my news script and are trying to do the same thing. I really pisses me off. To top it off, some random asswipe thought it would be a fun idea to use an exploit in my gallery scripts and gain access to my database that stored both the information for the gallery and ALL of the data for the forums. They just deleted the whole thing. It would have been one thing if they had just left their mark and considered it done, but they deleted it all for no reason other than to be an asshole.

I’ve seen things like that done to people, and messing with them a bit is funny. I probably would have just fixed the problem and moved on if they had done something funny or left their mark, but their intentions were entirely malicious and now I have to go through and reinstall a bunch of crap. That’s really just not fair.

So yeah. If you are looking for the forums you aren’t going to find them. If you were one of the people that used to hang at the forums and you wanna put them back up, let me know and I’ll set you up with the webspace to do so. But right now I really don’t feel like starting them from scratch and don’t care to put up with the bullshit from spammers and assholes.

This weekend seemed like a big realization of the changes that are about to happen in my life. I’ve been anticipating the eventual move from our current location when Joe gets married and moves out. As mentioned before, Mike, Doug, and I can’t pay for the house by ourselves. Or at least it would be stupid to do so. It’s been made entirely clear that Doug has little to no desire to live with Mike and myself again and that he will be moving in with Kate at the earliest convenience. So I’ve been looking in to the cost of rental properties in the area just to have a better idea of what Mike and I can expect when we begin looking for a place to live come late September or October. Joe and Kristen made an offer on a house this past weekend and it was accepted. The house is pretty much their’s, but there’s nothing that looks like they won’t close on it. I wish I was financially able to buy a house… even a condo. I just hate the thought of moving into a another place where I will piss money away and have no return investment on it. As such, I really don’t want to pay anymore for a place than I am now… hopefully I’ll pay less, but the prices on places I’ve looked up on the internet don’t seem to agree. I’d like to be able to move into a more house-like situation, even if it was a two family or something of the sort, but I think I would be satisfied with an apartment. I think Kristen’s roommates are feeling the same way. Maybe we can find a situation that could benefit all of us, like both sides of a two family or something. That would be pretty cool. &br;&br;The big day of doom is fast approaching for Joe. It’s hard to believe that Joe and Kristen have already been engaged for over eight months and that the wedding is only two and a half months away. It makes me so happy to be around them because I’m so excited for them. &br;&br;Work has been great. I hit a pretty low point a few months back when some foul crap was pulled on me for a reason which still has yet to be made crystal clear to me. I don’t really care to go in to details, but all in all I think someone acted on a grudge against me without thinking clearly and in the process made my job both harder and uncomfortable for a while. But since then things have been on the up and up. I’ve gotten a sort of a “promotion” which is more of a way of saying I won’t be working on the lousy jobs, and that the stuff I that I will be working (almost) exclusively on the big projects. &br;&br;So I’ve been working on a couple of big projects for the past few months and they seem to be coming to an end. They kinda seem like the projects that won’t die. But it’s fun. It’s a challenge, but it’s pretty exhausting. The company as a whole is booming and it’s really exciting to be here for it. I’m kinda worried about what is going to happen when these projects are completed, but as they say, worrying is like a rocking chair. &br;&br;Life outside of work has been pretty dull, house/living arrangement things aside. I’ve all but begged people to give me something to do and it seems like I spend most of my nights and weekends alone and bored. It’s kinda disappointing as a whole. It does seem like my roommates have been around a bit more lately, but it makes a person feel kind of worthless when you get to work on Monday morning and everyone tells you about all the things they did over the weekend and all you have to offer is that you watched shitty second-rate movies on TV one after another. It kinda bums me out when the only person that wants to hang out with me some weekends is my mom. (No offense mom.) I’ve gone to movies by myself, I’ve played so many games that I’m bored with games, I’ve invited people over, I’ve invited people out and it still seems like most nights I’m alone. Hmm. &br;&br;Site stuff… I had to set the gallery to allow comments from registered users only. Please don’t be dejected by this. It takes only a few seconds to register and you can actually post your own pictures to my gallery when you do. Spammers had overrun the commenting system posting porn links and stupid crap and I actually had to hose a dozen or so comments to take some of their’s out. I fucking hate spammers. &br;&br;There. Now you can stop hassling me, mom. Hah.&br;&br;See ya.

Swear it. So where to start? How about some comments on the weather?

Seems like winter wasn’t ready to be over with. Just as soon as things got nice and warm, we dropped back down to 30 degree temperatures for a week. Now that the temps are starting to come back up, we’re hitting the part of Spring where it’s windy and rainy. Bummer. Guess we’ll be waiting until mid-May for some casual weather. Probably be too hot by then. :-\

Work Stuff: Been keeping busy at work. I’ve been picking up that spare overtime here and there but it seems like the work we are getting just doesn’t want to quit. I got handed a couple of rough projects on Thursday that pretty much tied me up until today. I’d get to a stopping point on one, the other would come back and need some work, and then right back to the other. In between I’d eek in some time with UDF. We’re doing okay with UDF this month, but the easy part is over. Somehow I know that train is going to derail and screw me over somehow. At this point it should be entirely out of my hands. Whatever. Friggin’ nightmare. I feel bad for Tonia because she’s been tied up with the same project for over a month now and it’s beyond ridiculous. I don’t mind if I have to stay every now and then because most nights I just have an empty house to come home to, but other people in the department want to see their families. They hired someone new, but it seems like kind of a crock that it took this long. I don’t know. I don’t run the place and I get paid either way, so I guess it’s pretty fruitless to waste my time worry about it. I just wish that people would realize we don’t just press a few buttons and the work is done.

House stuff: I’ve been getting really upset the past few weeks. Ever since we had our BIG IMPORTANT ROOMMATE MEETING back in November or December, it seems like I’m the only one that has given a rat’s ass about anything that was said. It’s really disappointing that we could all sit there and attest to how big of slobs we are, and yet no more than a day after I clean the kitchen up (which is at least every other day) there are dirty, greasy dishes in the sink, the same clean dishes in the washer waiting to be taken out, countless pieces of trash and recyclables left on the counter… It’s apparently way to fucking hard to open up the back door that’s 4 feet from where people set their beer bottles and other crap and toss them in the bin that’s literally RIGHT OUTSIDE THE DOOR. Who am I kidding? I mean, why make the effort of opening a door to toss your trash in the garbage can when you can leave it sitting around? Okay, I get it, I’m not the best and cleanest person in the world. I have my bouts of laziness but if there is one thing I can’t stand it’s living among piles of trash. Chips in the carpet and on the couches, wrappers and beer bottles sitting around… you pass the damn trash cans at some point, TAKE IT WITH YOU. Again, I know it’s mildly hypocritical of me to complain, but I’ve been doing damn good since our wasted meeting. I’ve cleaned at least one room in the house every weekend. Nobody else can say that. Then I’ve been let down when I clean that room and it can’t be kept that way for one damn day. It’s aggrivating. Why should I bother?

Roommate issues: So in the quest to figure out what we were going to do come October when Joe moves out… we hit a few rocks. A couple weekends ago, I talked to one of my cousins who might be interested in taking over Joe’s end of the rent and really had no complaints about the price, situation, etc. Then the very same night I find out that Doug is “90% likely” to move in with Kate when Joe moves out. That really, really sucks. Regardless, I’ve decided that if the situation with cleanliness doesn’t improve by the time Joe moves out, I’d rather pay a little more a month and live by myself than spend all sorts of time cleaning up other people’s messes. To me, it’d be worth it to spend an extra $100 a month on a nice apartment than to live in a filthy house. So yeah. There it is. I’m not living with anyone that can’t clean up after themselves. Sucks, but if I wanted to live in slop, I’d go spend my nights in the street. We have a great house and we’re slowly destroying it by not being pro-active about things. Whatever. I’m going to end up giving myself an aneurysm about it if I don’t change the subject… because it sure as hell doesn’t seem like things will change soon.

I think I just need to hang out with other people more often. I need excuses to get out of here for a little while. I mean, its obvious to me that I’m the most different of the 4 of us. Whenever I want to do something, they always kinda roll their eyes at my ideas or shoot me down, but then they get upset when I hang out friends who do want to do those things. Whatever. I’m going to do what I want to do so there’s no point in getting worked up over it.

See ya.