What a week…
It all started on Monday night when we had a really bad storm with heavy rain for hours on end. Our basement started to flood, mainly because our basement windows are worthless and when it rains really hard, the water comes in. I drove to my father in laws house to pickup his wet vac and got drenched in the process. I filled up and emptied that 16 gallon wet vac 3 times sucking up the water in the basement. The three season porch was filled with water also but I waited until the next day to clean that up.
We were lucky and didn’t lose power but alot of people did, including my work. When I went in to work the next morning we still didn’t have power and Consumers Energy was saying it might not be back on until Thursday at 10pm! I stuck around for an hour and a half calling clients and letting them know what was going on and then head home. A couple of hours later the power came back so I headed back in to work. Unfortunately, our DS1 for the phones appeared to be down, along with our point to point DS1 to our Wealthy Street location. Our phone system was also saying that all of our licenses were invalid. After putting in several calls with AT&T we determined that the DS1 for our phones was fine and that the problem was with our phone system. Our second DS1 circuit for our point to point connection was indeed bad and they found some bad coils - and they didn’t get it back up and running until Wednesday night. To make a long story short, the main brains of our phone system blew up and we had to replace it (even tho it was on surge suppression and battery backup). The good news was that we were able to swap most of the parts from the old box into the new box, including the very pricey DS1 interface card. The only good thing about this week at work was that my good friend and ex co-worker Aaron came in to visit with his girlfriend. I was hoping we would be able to get together some time this weekend but he’s only in town for a short amount of time and his schedule is quite full, including being a groomsmen in his buddies wedding.
Friday night I got to relax a bit and laugh my ass off watching Clerks 2 with Ryan. It’s a great no-brainer laugh riot and was definately the right movie to end the work week with. After that I went back to Ryan’s and threw back a few Killians while we watched some crazy Japanese dubbed to English movie (I HATE when they dub films, give me subtitles anyday) that I can’t recall the name of. At one point I went to use the bathroom and while standing there, I had that feeling you get when you’ve drank way too much and feel like your going to either throw up or pass out. I only had two beers so I don’t know what that was all about. After drinking a glass of water I felt fine tho. Very weird.
Today I slept in until 10:30am and then spent 2 hours mowing my lawn. Marie, Ethan & I went out for lunch and then to VI Pets to visit our friend Dave. I ended up buying a Dwarf Gourami and got suckered into helping Dave move this afternoon since he only had one other guy helping him. Needless to say, I spent a couple of hours sweating my ass off moving his belongings (including a 125 gallon tank and about 30+ fish) to his new apartment. We didn’t get done until around 9pm. Dave, you owe me big time.
And if things couldn’t be bad enough this week, my home computer decided to crap out on me today. Looks like the motherboard is shot. It was getting time to upgrade anyways so now I have a good excuse. I just wish I could afford to plunge into the land of OS X and buy an iMac with a 20″ screen. Damn are those things sweet!
Tomorrow we are heading up to the lake and I don’t plan on doing anything except for eating some good food, finishing off the rest of this 12 pack of Killians, soaking it up in the lake and doing some fishing. Sounds like a good way to end this crazy week.
And to end the entry with some good news, my friend James and his wife Terry had a baby boy, Luke Joseph, on Monday. This makes 3 - and all of them are boys! My best to you two and I hope your able to get some sleep the next couple of weeks!
10 months old
Lately I’ve been so busy with everything that I haven’t been ‘in the mood’ to update my blog, hence the month gap since my last entry. Ethan turned 10 months old today and the darn kid gets cooler every day. He’s starting to associate words with actions, like if I say “patty cake”, he starts clapping his hands together. The kid has 8 teeth, four on the top and four on the bottom, including his two front teeth! He’s kinda starting to crawl, tho it’s more like he pushes himself backwards. When he is on his stomach and trying to crawl, he flaps his arms and legs and looks like a fish out of water. It’s quite hilarious.
I can’t believe he is going to be a year old in 2 months. Before I know it he’s going to be in grade school and making me feel really old. Speaking of old, I turned 32 last month. Marie & I went to Rio Grande for my free birthday meal, tho the food was quite disappointing this time around. We should have went to our new favorite restaurant, O’Charley’s. They just need a better selection of beers on tap. My fellow aquarist Dave gave me 2 Sterba’s Cory’s for my birthday and they are doing great. They get along quite well with my 2 Juli cory’s, which are twice the size of the Sterba’s.
I joined Dish Network a couple of weeks ago because I was sick of Comcast and there refusal to offer me a comparable HD package in price to the Dish. I got a free HD receiver for my 42″ HDTV and a standard DVR for the bedroom, which lets me record up to 100 hours of television. I signed up for the DISH HD Silver package and I’m loving it. Marie & I find ourselves watching Animal Cops every night. We get about 160 standard definition channels (including alot of crap I’ll never watch) and 30+ HD channels and they look amazing. My new favorite channel is Monsters HD, which plays horror movies 24/7 in high defintion! They recently played the restored, uncut version of From Beyond, which looked and sounded amazing. I’m watching The Abominable Mr. Phibes right now. Another one of those classic horror films I’ve always wanted to watch but never got around to it.
And with that I’m off to finish watching the film…