For a while now, I’ve wanted to start my own food blog. Having prepared first-post-worthy demi-feast on Sunday to celebrate the Lunar New Year, I figured this was as good of a time as any to do so. You can check out my food blog, the Galley, at http://vikingpirateenterprises.com/galley/.
The following bounce message appeared in a ticket I was working on last night:
This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: Mail quota exceeded
This is the first proof I’ve ever had that people are capable of filling gmail accounts. The last I checked, my own primary gmail account contains just over 1k messages, and has used about a third of my 2800MB quota. I don’t know if this account has the same quota or not, but, even if it’s less, this is still impressive in a highly geeky way.
While we up North are dealing with heavy snowstorms, New Orleans has problems of their own, in the form of a tornado. To quote the article (emphasis mine):
In New Orleans’ Gentilly neighborhood, Stella Chambers died after the twister slammed into her FEMA trailer, ripping it and a newly renovated home apart and scattering debris about 200 feet to the Industrial Canal levee.
This woman was still living in a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer post-Hurricane Katrina. That’s definitely adding FEMA-related insult to FEMA-related injury (or is it the other way around in this case?)
After the staff meeting today, I went outside to verify that my car didn’t have a parking ticket since I’d left it in front of the building all day (I figured it was a holiday so they wouldn’t ticket me, which they didn’t) and it had just started snowing. When I checked later from the apartment window and couldn’t see any snow, I thought it was just another fluke of Indiana weather, and it had stopped. As such, it was a pleasant surprise to see that it was still snowing when I left to take Angela to work, and quite hard, too. The flakes are just small enough that it’s hard to see them from the apartment window without a good light for a backdrop.
For those who don’t know, I love winter, and especially snow. I grew up in the northern parts of the midwest, particularly around Chicago and Cleveland where one encounters lake effects, so my winters were always snow-filled. So not having had any sticking snow until now has been really annoying. I just hope it lasts a while.
In sadder news, my mom put our cat Phantom down. He was eighteen years old and his health had been deteriorating for a while; when I saw him over Christmas he looked almost zombie-esque due to clumps of fur falling out, and he hasn’t been able to walk very well for the better part of this past year, at least, so I understand why and think she did the right thing. At the same time I grew up with him and will miss him.
Goodbye, friend.
Today is my younger brother Gary’s 21st birthday. So happy birthday, Gary. I hope you’re out partying it up. Next time I see you you can be the one buying the alcohol, for a change.
Well, the holidays are officially over, and everything is returning to normal. Apart from doing a bit more driving and spending more money than I would have preferred, they weren’t too bad this year. Highlights included visits to both my mom’s house and to Dad and Irene’s, including home cooked meals at both, as well as the Cousins’ Christmas in Peoria, which involved spending time with my nieces.
A couple New Year’s resolutions:
Those are the big three. I’d also like to try to travel this year if my finances will permit me. It’s been nearly six years since I’ve last been on a plane, and almost as long, not counting the three day excursion to Sault St. Marie, since I’ve been out of the Midwest. I’m also going to try to update this blog more often.
Theoretically my work will be rearranging our pay scales in the coming weeks, meaning a raise for me. If this money can all be devoted to paying off bills or put into savings, this will help with goal three. However, I don’t know when this will actually happen as Dave hasn’t announced it to the company yet: I only know of it because of an IM conversation I had with him.
It’s currently less than 30° outside, and really windy, so we might have a chance of actually getting a winter this year. Alternately, all this wind could bring us warmer air. I’d prefer the former, as we’ve not had any snow worth mentioning so far.
We got snow here Wednesday night/Thursday morning, and, for the first time this year, it was enough to stick. It’s only a couple inches, but it helps make the city look more like December. What also helps is the temperatures in the thirties and below every time I’ve left the apartment recently.
I found out at approximately 1:00 AM this morning that Chris, the fourth night guy, decided he couldn’t cut it and quit without any prior notice. This means that I’m back to working six nights a week, with the short night Monday night instead of Thursday night. This isn’t a problem, except that I was counting on having the Monday night of Christmas off to spend with my family. Fortunately, as I only work three hours and it’s Christmas so we shouldn’t be that busy, Dave’s stated that I can basically skip work that night.
Apart from finding coverage for work, our Christmas plans are starting to shape up nicely. Tentatively, we’ll be here until the morning of the 22nd, then up to Chicago to visit my mom on the 22nd and 23rd. From there we’re taking Gary down to my dad’s on the 23rd, then I get to come back here for an additional night of working. Then Christmas Eve and Christmas day are at my dad’s, with the 26th finding us heading to Columbus, IN, to visit Angela’s family. The evening/night of the 26th we’re driving to Peoria for a family get together on the 27th, then back here in time for work that night. While it sounds like a lot of driving, it’s kinda necessary to see everyone that needs to be seen, and better than going to Arkansas like last year.
On the subject of Holidays: Thanksgiving went pretty well. Angela and I drove up to Chicago Thursday morning to have dinner with my mom, her boyfriend Cary, and my younger brother Gary. Most of the cooking was done when we got there, but we were just in time to help Gary with the turkey. The particular recipe my mom was using included buttering the turkey, then inserting butter under the skin between the skin and the meat of the bird, most likely as a substitute to basting. It turned out really well, but the actual application of butter betwixt bird and skin was a rather interesting operation, and prompted many jokes not appropriate for mixed company.
We started a new schedule at work last night, as we’ve hired more people. While mine doesn’t change a whole lot (still working nights, still midnight to 8AM), we’ve gained two night people (or gained one and replaced one) so I now get two nights off a week. They’re Friday night and Monday night, which isn’t the greatest combination, but at least it’s something.
Also, one of the two new night guys (Chris, who’s replacing Max) also happens to be my next door neighbor. This means that this one entire corner of the building, for three of the four floors, is associated with TS.
In other news, I tried out my bread machine for the first time yesterday. I’ve had it for about a year (got it from my mom since she wasn’t using it) and am just now learning how to work it. I only made a loaf of basic white bread so I could figure out basically how it works, but it was pretty good. Plus, it’s fun having an apartment that smells like fresh-baked bread. I’ve got a book of bread machine bread recipes, which I’ve been skimming through since this loaf turned out a success, trying to decide what to make next.
For those of you who don’t know, I have a really cheap laptop. Said laptop was given to me by my last boss, as it was otherwise going to get scrapped. When I got it, it was running Windows 95, which had to be wiped, anyway, to remove any material related to said previous job. Since the laptop’s 5GB harddrive and 64MB ram weren’t sufficient to update it to Windows XP (the main reason it was being scrapped) I just installed DOS on it and dubbed it the DosTop. While there’s not a whole lot one can do with a laptop running only dos, it was perfect for playing old dos games, like Monkey Island. Two days ago, during a conversation with one of my coworkers, I remarked that I’d put Linux on my dostop instead of there was anyway to still run my dos games. As it turns out, there’s a software package called DosBox that was designed for exactly that purpose. So, as of last night, the DosTop is now a NixTop, running Damn Small Linux because the 64MB ram wasn’t enough to run Fedora. I’ve not gotten a change to play around with it much or install DosBox, but the major step of swapping operating systems has been completed.
My current schedule at work has me working midnight til 8 am five days a week, with Friday night completely off and only working Midnight til 3 on Thursday night/Friday morning. I like the bonus three hours of overtime a week, but it makes Thursday nights kinda weird. Angela’s working so I can’t spend time with her, and I always like if I go to sleep when I get home at 3, than I’ll end up waking Ang up too early when I get up. Her schedule has her get off work at 7:15, meaning, if she can actually leave on time and the trolly’s on time, she’s home at 7:45/8. This would put her going to bed roughly five hours after I’ve gone to sleep. If I actually manage to get a full eight hours sleep, I’m waking up only three hours after she’s gone to bed, and risk waking her up then.
So this leaves me trying to figure out what to do for three-four hours or so. Sometimes I go visit Angela at work (depending on how lazy I am) but there’s a limit to how much sitting around in the office at Shreve I can take (sorry Ang, I know it’s even worse for you). Video games are good, but certain people kinda like it when I talk to them sometimes, so I usually end up reading or surfing random websites. There’s nothing wrong with this, I just feel like I could maybe be better using the time.
Welcome to Viking Pirate Enterprises. There’s not much here yet but this blog post, but hopefully there will eventually be some content. If you’re bored and feel like viewing other currently-contentless pages, check out VPE’s sister site (girlfriend site?) A Barrel of Nelsons, operated by my girlfriend. Right now she’s not got much but a blog either.
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