Excuses, excuses…

I apologize for the lack of updates recently. I have a few posts in the works, either already being written or at least being tossed around in my head, which will eventually get posted, but right now I have some more important things going on for which this isn’t yet the proper medium. Once some of this is taken care of, I should, hopefully, return to a more regular update schedule.

Once again, I fail at blogging

So I realized it has been a month since my last update, mainly due to busy schedule due to work and the holidays. I have a couple longer posts brewing that will be up here if I ever finish them, but figured I’d post a brief one in the meantime.

The holidays went rather well. Angela and I visited her family the weekend before Christmas, and went down to my dad’s in Indy on Christmas day. I had to work that morning and night, off at 8am, back at midnight, so we could only go down for the day, but we still got to see my family and have Christmas dinner with them. I didn’t have to work on New Year’s, since I’d previously requested the shift off, so we went up to Chicago for a party with my friends from high school. Every time I’m up there I’m reminded of just how much I’d rather be living there than Lafayette.

Other things are mostly fine. I received a raise from my December eval, so am almost making as much money now as I did when I first started at Bell. I’ve also re-activated my WoW account to play on one of the new servers with Artie and company. I quit playing previously since there wasn’t anyone on Horde-side Durotan, so this should be more fun.

More to come later.

Apperantly, my damning worked.

First snow.

It’s finally snowing. There’s not much, but it’s enough to cover everything in a thin layer of white. This town always looks better when snow-covered, especially when no one else is around, as happens at 4AM. When I was out walking, I think I saw only two cars out, plus heard a snow plow plowing streets to the North of me which I didn’t see. I also enjoyed the opportunity to be the first to leave footprints on the snow-covered sidewalks.

This first snow also gave me the opportunity to continue a four-year old ritual I have. The primary component in this ritual involves wearing my kilt. While one might think that this would cause me to get cold when walking around outside, it doesn’t. Due to the clouds and snow and lack of wind, its relatively warm outside (30° as opposed to the 14° wind chill two nights ago). Unfortunately, there isn’t enough snow on the ground yet for snow Scotsmen.

I haven’t heard Craig’s opinion on the snow, but Jason’s complaining about it and Nick and Mike (who took the above picture) both are talking about doing doughnuts in it. Before Josh left about 2AM, he made a miniature snowman (about 8 inches tall) complete with arms made from the tines of a plastic fork. It’s currently sitting in the freezer here at work.

Snow, damn it.

All the weather reports for this area keep talking about how we’re supposed to get snow tonight, or last night, or tomorrow night, or last week, or whatever. So far, we’ve not had a single flake. Sure, we’ve had plenty of rain, both freezing and regular, and even what could almost be considered sleet, but no snow. Apart from yesterday when it was 58° outside, the temperature’s been cold enough to snow (hanging around 40 each day) it just hasn’t. Of course the cold temperatures also makes my nightly walks that much more fun. I may need to get my hat out of storage, as 14° with wind chill (like it was an hour ago when I went outside) is rather chilly.

Get back in the box

It’s Caturday, so I’m posting a picture of my cats.

Like a junky falling off the wagon

I was bored at work the other day and had nothing better to do, so I started skimming the Games Workshop website to see what’s new since the last time I looked. This was good, since it got me thinking about the unassembled and unpainted Dwarfs lurking in the second bedroom, but bad since I saw some of the cool new minis, like this lord and standard bearer and the new plastic miners. While I can’t afford any of the new minis yet, I dragged one of our card tables up to the second bedroom today and dug out my extant dwarfs to see what I had. They’re definitely not ready for display yet, but expect some pictures once they are. Now if I could just find someone else around here who plays …

Click.

The cats must have spent too much time playing with the laser pointer, as Awilda apparently thought that the little red light on my power strip was also a toy. Either that or she was taking her revenge on me for clipping her claws earlier today.

Walking it off

Recently, I came to the realization that I’m walking less in my current town home than I was in the apartment downtown. This may sound odd, as I now have to leave the building to go to work, but I have a garage now so no longer have the mandatory two blocks each way to park the car.

Having come to this realization, I’ve started taking steps (no pun intended) to increase how much I’m walking. Primarily, this takes the form of making sure I leave my desk at work and go walk around outside. I don’t have much time for too long of a walk, but I can at least walk around the block. I’d gotten to the point of making it around the block (four tenths of a mile) without too much difficulty, so tonight was the first night I’ve expanded my circuit to walking around two blocks (six tenths of a mile). I know six tenths of a mile doesn’t sound like much, but I let my back and leg atrophy too much, so have had to start low. As it is, I was already aching by the time I got back to the building.

I’m thinking my next step on this recovery is to add additional walking at home to my stretches and the walking I do at work. As the town home is located on the edge of a subdivision, I should be able to find plenty of room to walk without having to worry about too much traffic. My short-term goal is to be able to go a mile without any difficulty, but that may not happen for a couple weeks.

VPE 2.0

New! Improved! Potentially updated with items other than just pictures of my cats!

While I considered just wiping out this blog and starting fresh, I’ve chosen, for now at least, to keep my previous posts for archival purposes.

Like the subtitle says, I will try to update this new! improved! blog more frequently than the previous incarnation. I won’t make any guarantees, but at least some of the posts will include content other than pictures of my cats.

An update!

So I’ve managed to get WordPress working again on this blog, so there should hopefully be more regular posts from me now.

While not the best way to break my hiatus, I’m going to do so with the following snippet of a chat that was sent to our staff mailing list by one of my coworkers:

Nate: Hello, how may I assist you?
fred: I want to chat with the girl in the picture
Nate: So do I. Is there anything I can assist you with?
fred: https://server.iad.liveperson.net/hc/5213942/ ?cmd=repstate&site=5213942&&ver=1&category=en;woman;5
fred: no, have a nice day

In other work-related news, we’ve finally got a fourth night guy (who should hopefully stick around longer than the fourth night guy we had the last time I made a post like this), meaning that starting 1 April, I’ll have two nights off a week again. Even better is that they’re two nights off in a row: Thursday night/Friday morning and Friday night/Saturday morning. This means I’ll have more opportunities to actually go places if I wanted to, or at least to feel like I actually have some time off. With the current one night off a week, by the time I’m actually rested from the previous week, it’s time to go back to work.