shambles

I'm a bit OCD and I hate it when my house starts to take on a state of disarray. It's really not that bad, just a few clothes that need to be folded and put in the right place and minute cleaning. Looking forward to being off the next few days so that I can get the house picked up and observe history taking place Tues, Jan. 20! I'm headed to church soon for the first time this year. I think I'm going to set a goal/resolution of going at least twice a month. My fulltime work schedule has me working three Sundays, then being off for five, but usually one or two of those 5 Sundays are taken up by part time work. I guess we'll see what happens.

Why type a few paragraphs when you just post a video :-)

A few happenings going on. Went to a thing called a Rail Jam a few weeks ago. Still trying to get Gus to stop playing with his water. I'm so over this cold weather too! Sheesh, it was 35 degrees this morning.

Too much to say?

I've come to realize that I have so much I want to blog about that it often times is overwhelming, thus leading me to abandon post all together. It's ironically that I'm blogging about that. Since I do have things I want to say, I'll provide headlines so that my friends being the great individuals they are will nag me so that I'll elaborate more.

Items to talk about:
1) Vacation to Boston. I had a few days off from work so I flew up to Boston to hang out with some friends up there. I also managed to make some new ones, interesting ones as a matter of fact
2) Election. Why not? everyone else is talking about it, and I have a specific incident to discuss
3) LSU vs. Alabama game this weekend. The first and probably only game I'll get to attend this season
4) Birthday planning & festivities. Maybe, maybe not. It's on Thanksgiving this year so any sort of activities would take place before or after the actual date.

I think that about covers it

Conference with the boss

My supervisor called me a little before lunch time today to see if I wanted to join him for lunch at a mom & pop deli around the corner from the fire station. It's not often I get to eat lunch with someone other than myself since I work by myself. We eat lunch and afterward he comes back to the station to pick up paperwork which is turned in at the beginning and middle of the month. When we get to the station he pulls out an evaluation sheet. The sheet consisted of various questions such as "Does the employee begin work promptly at 7am", "How is the employees performance at fires, first aid calls, etc". My supervisor informed me that he was supposed to fill that out with my assistant, and handed me another sheet which would be "annonymously" (There's only 2 of us that reports to my supervisor) turned in to his supervisor and used to evaluate him and his performance. I didn't have any below average check marks on my sheet, with approximately 2/3 of the check marks being average and the other 1/3 above average. Some of the average ones I don't have any control over, and the supervisor did mention that he would like to see me take on extra projects around the station, which is ironic since I'm the only one that does anything outside of the daily duties at the station and am constantly finding different projects to work on. I guess we'll see how it works out.

iPhone entertainment :-/

So the grass at my hose has finally been cut! I don't remember the exact date, but it was before Hurricane Gustav the last time it was cut, so at least 6 weeks! The new lawnmower performed well (For DSD I'll switch to a solar powered or electric mower when they become more efficient and cost friendly...or I become rich). A while back, I accumulated $95 in BestBuy Reward Zone points. Well over the pst week, I went to BestBuy 3 times to try and figure out what to spend the points on, with no luck. I should mention that they expired Saturday, Oct. 11. Well Saturday I received a check from one of my part time jobs and that combined with, the BestBuy $$$, and a $25 AmEx gift card I found in my wallet, led to me deciding on upgrading my original 8GB iPhone, to the 16 GB iPhone 3G. Being eligible for upgrade and the other discount brought the cost from $399 to $198 and change including tax! I'd call that a deal especially since the 8Gb 3G model list for $199. Thank you BestBuy for satisfying my nerd needs. The purchase didn't take place until around 7pm Saturday night and was actually a bit of an ordeal. While meeting with the Sales Rep prior to purchasing the phone, he informed that my ATT account was past due and he couldn't complete the transaction until it was taken care of. Not wanting the $95 in BB points to go to waste, I proceeded in attempting to get it taken care of. The balance due was only $230(I say that sarcastically). Ironically it was due the previous day. Well I'm still part of my parents family plan, so I call my father to see if he can take care of the balance so I can get the phone. As soon as he answers I remember that he's at another universities homecoming game acoss town. Long story short he convinces me to go ahead and pay the pill, and that he or my mother will reimburse me (still waiting...). I go to one of the computers in the back of the store, log on to ATT and pay the bill. I'm sure my identity was probably stolen by about 15 people, since I'm sure those computers are monitored and not the most secure! It's funny how I saved money on the phone, but end up paying more due to all the complications.

Well while all this was going on, I was attempting to watch the LSU vs. Florida game in the store. My sales rep was a Florida fan and apparently had $200 riding on the game. It wasn't much fun hearing him, talk crap. After finally leaving BestBuy I headed over to my friend Matt's place to drink and finish watching the game which was quite ugly. I'm a pretty big LSU fan, I don't remember the last time we lost as bad as we did Sat. night. Hopefully it was a good wake up call. I brought my laptop with me and during the game, attempted to "restore" my new iPhone with the information and settings fro my old one. Apparently, transferring 8 gigs of information takes some time, and it wasn't able to finish. The depressing nature of the game, led to me going straight home after leaving Matt's. I hd originally planned to go out somewhere. I was pretty tired and pretty much crashed when I got home.

I worked at the part time station Sunday. Not long after getting there, I attempted to finish "restoring" my new iPhone to the settings of my old iPhone. About halfway through the process the guy working at the other station decided to call me on my cell phone. After I hung up, the phone went to the apple logo, and after turning it off & on and try to reset the device, it never made it out of the boot screen. Since my cell phone is primary means of communication and I have no house phone, this made me pretty nervous. Luckily, after about 3-4 hours of searching various forums. I figured out how to basically format the device and reinstall all the software. That took about an hour, but I was able to sucessfully install the software, all my media file, contact/calendar information, and Apps from my old phone. That was a enough work for the day, so I watched movies at the station for the rest of the shift and didn't have to respond to any calls.

Yesterday, I planned on cleaning house, but procrastination got the best of me. I went to Chelsea's for Lunch and had lunch with my friend APC before she left town. I came back home and pretty much crashed on the couch until I was woken up by a text message asking if I was coming to training. I had nothing better to do, and wasn't in the cleaning mood so I decided to go. We trained on "Water Supply" which I must say was pretty boring, but I did learn a few new things. We ended training with watching people put MRE heating packets in plastic drinkning bottles and making them go boom. Luckily we couldn't find any MRE's around the station.

I was supposed to be off today, but got talked in to working. It's only for 12 hours so maybe when I get home tonight I'll be motivated to clean up my bed room some. I was looking at my schedule and realized that this will be the last night I spend in my house for the next 5 days courtesy of work. Enough rambling. I'm tired of typing. The iPhone is performing like it should. I ordered a case similar to the one I had for my original iPhone. I even found a random coupon online that saved me $10 on it!

Rumblings of the week

So it's been a little while. I've had a productive week. Worked Monday, nothing exciting happened. Tuesday, I finally renewed my drivers license which was due to expire next month. Deposited 3 checks that had been sitting in my car for about a month at the bank, had lunch with a friend, and then went and "worked out". After working out, we had our monthly mandatory employee training. It was actually a lot of fun. One of the captains brought a ladder truck from the station he works at part time and allowed us to operate, move it around, and climb it. I think I should metnion that when fully extended it's 104 feet! One of my fellow coworkers has picked up a part time job with an ambulance company so he works all over the area. He asked me to come in at 5 am Wed. morning so he could make it to his p/t job for 6. This is one of those things you can't really say no too, because sometimes when I work in the chemical plants, I have to go in for 6am, which if I'm coming from work requires me to convince the person releiving me in the morning to come in early. Well since hunting season as begun, the guy I was relieveing this morning asked me to come in at 5 also so he can go hunting early this morning. I just need to remember to keep track of the favors. Yesterday, i finally bought a lawnmower, It was a frustrating process however. The Home Depot, I purchased it from was a bit understaffed so I had to go track down a flat cart myself (by track down, I mean find one no one else was using, then knock the stack of boxes off of it). Once I secured the cart, I had to have another customer help me load the lamn mower onto the cart so I could go check out. I visited with 2 friends of mine that evening, and then ended up going to 80's night at a local venue for a little while. Didn't stay out too late due to the need to come in to work at 5.

It's not often that Fridays actually feel like Fridays at work. One of our Rookies who finished completed his FF and was already an EMT found out a few weeks ago that he would be getting shipped off to either Iraq or Afganistan. We work on the same shift, and he's one employee we definitely hate to see leave. So today, had a had a little surprise send off party for him and made jambalaya. His family came, as well as a few of the other employees. The jambalya was good at hte time, but a few hours later I felt really nauseated. I took some meds and am feeling a little better so hopefully whatever it was has come and gone, and I'll be ok for the rest of the shift.

On a side note, I've realized that I have about 5 posts saved that I started typing, probably had too much to say and never finished. This is a frequent problem I have when it comes to writing anything more than a paragraph or two. I guess I made up for it in this post.

Akward conclusions

I dislike when you're on the phone with a special someone and you can sense that they have the "we need to talk" tone of their voice, and that usually only means or leads to one thing... The end of the relationship, or whatever it was was going one between you and the person. Even if you wished for things to come to an end, there's still an uneasy feeling that is experienced.

I had a good friend of mine tell me a few weeks ago that she doesn't think I know how to "Not be Single", in essence she doesn't think I can handle a relationship. I kinda resent that, because I've spent time with particular young ladies and after a certain period of time had and expressed the desire to enter into a relationship. Things however never seen to quite work out. it always seems that those I'm interested in don't feel the same way, and those that are interested in me I am unwilling to commit to. That's life though, I guess it's back to doing my own thing.