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Since I’ve posted anything, sorry ’bout that. But if your life is so lame you actually look forward to reading my latest posts to see what has been happening in my life, well, do I have to even say it?
In any case, I’d love to say tons of cool shit has been going on, but that’s not gonna happen.
Really my life has gone even more down the crapper. Work is really good, relationship stuff is good, the kids are good, that’s about it. But I’m so far behind financially I don’t know how or if I can dig myself out this time. Like three months behind in the mortgage, I finally start working, and I’m gonna make my first payment. I go to check my bank account online last week and it’s MINUS four thousand dollars. Like what the f**k? How can that be? I call up my bank to see what’s up…
Well, turns out I owed Sears two grand from like four years ago, things were going to shit in my life, out of work, and other stuff, so I chose not to pay them. Keeping a roof over our heads and some kind of food on the table was, in my mind, a little more of a priority than paying Sears.
So, they went and filed a judgement against me, and then they went in my bank account to get what they’re owed. Well since there wasn’t enough to cover it, my account is frozen. For a week now… Yup, that means no access to any funds, at all, so things have been really tight. They turned my cell phone off, but it was only 48 dollars past due so I got it turned back on. The internet is getting turned off any day now, and they already stopped picking up my garbage. Oh, and to top things off I’m almost out of fuel oil and I owe them money too.
I don’t know what to do, and the main part is I’m geting tired of struggling. I’m tired of trying to keep that house, carrying it all by myself, and every year and a half having some catastrophe happen or being out of work and falling behind to this point…
On the other hand, if I sell it I’ll walk away with practically nothing, I have horrible credit and would never get a mortgage again. Plus I like being a home owner, I like tinkering around the yard and trying to keep the place from falling apart. And it’s a really nice chunk of property. I guess what I’m getting at is I’m sick of being in this situation, feeling like the whole world is falling in on me and not knowing how to get out from under it…
I think I should be freaking out, but I’m not, I’m almost at the point of being numb. Thank God I can go to work every day and get my mind of all this stuff. You know, I just want to be able to catch up and not have to worry every night what the next thing is that’s gonna be turned off.
I dunno, actually writing this is getting me more bummed out. Lemme get going and I’ll update y’all soon and hopefully something will have changed for the better.
Please don’t tell me if that title got you singing a certain 70’s fluff song, OK?
Hope everyone had a good 4th of July and a nice day off (if indeed you had yesterday off). We didn’t do a whole lot. Like I said, I didn’t have the big barbecue this year. It was just family and then a couple friends came by for the fireworks show.
I had a few things to light off in celebration. Well maybe more than a few! And here’s a shot of the whole gang. Yeah, the girls are getting so big, seems like every time I see them they’re an inch taller… Sam and Danny enjoyed the show big time, as always. I had some three inch mortars we lit and they were incredible, I’m talking a two hundred foot spread in the sky and they climb to almost three hundred feet! I’m definitely getting a lot of those for next years show.
Maggie seemed kind of bored by it all. I guess it starts to seem the same after you’ve seen it year after year. The boys have fun lighting the stuff so they’re more involved with it. Sam is going upstate for a few weeks to work at his Aunts and Uncles motel and spend some time at the lake with his grandparents. I’m going to miss him, the house always feels empty when he’s not there. Even though sometimes it seems like we only talk when I’m checking to see if he’s done his chores or say “yes, you can go out, don’t be too late”. Plus now I have to feed and water the dog every day and mow the lawn, but it won’t kill me to push a lawnmower, I did it for a lot of years when he was younger.
The garden is growing like crazy! I picked a couple bell peppers and a few hot ones to make some home fries for breakfast yesterday. This is the first time I’ve grown “Portugese Hot Peppers” and they aren’t bad. I had a hard time finding any jalapeno plants this year. Everyone was sold out for some reason. I have a whole container full of habanero’s for making hot sauce and that’s it for hot peppers. I skipped the cayennes this year as I really don’t use them for cooking so why bother… I took some pics of the garden and will post them when I get home tonight, a progress report kind of, and I’ll put the pics up next to them of when I planted it so you can see how big everything has gotten.
OK, I need to take a walk around here and see what’s going on. Have a good one.
Whew,
It’s nice to be working again after an almost two month break. Not that I didn’t keep busy with stuff around the house, getting the pool open, planting the garden, keeping my R/C cars running, you know, exciting stuff like that.
Today will probably go by fast as it’s the Friday before a three day weekend. I just have to write a couple reports and send them up to the home office, walk around and take some pictures of the progress and conditions, sounds like an easy day.
For the first time in a lot of years I’m not having a big 4th of July bar-b-q… Being out of work so long I’m just too broke and behind in all my bills so I can’t afford to buy all the food and supplies to feed thirty or more people this year. Going to keep it to just family and then have people come up later for the big fireworks show. I hear through the grapevine it’s going to be the biggest one yet!
Last week Grace and I drove down to North Carolina as planned and helped my Dad move into his new place there. Oh my God! What a long miserable drive, only to unload a ton of stuff, and then drive back on the third day. Definitely too much driving for such a short while. We did drive around the town though, Asheville that is, and it looks like a cool place.
The neat thing is they have all these fast food places I haven’t seen since I was a kid living in Michigan. And of course all the gas stations have moon pies and goo-goo clusters on the counter for munchies. I heard they even have Vernor’s Ginger Ale in the markets down there! If you don’t know about it, Vernors is one of the oldest soft drinks made in this country and unlike any other ginger ale you’ve ever had. Go to bevnet.com and read their review, they give it four stars, myself I’d give it five in the glass bottle, 4.5 in the can.
So the nice thing about this job is I’m in the trailer onsite with the government guys, so we have a lot of luxuries you wouldn’t expect on a construction site. Like high speed internet, satelite TV, a Keurig coffee maker, a real bathroom, and more office supplies then your local stationary store, to just name a few things. And of course since they’re with the federales, what they say goes, so they kind of always get their way if they really want it, not a bad thing at all. And the air conditioner kicks in this place. It was 60 degrees in here when I opened up this morning!
OK, I’m outta here, have to make a cup of coffee and walk around the site. My internet at home has been broken but supposedly it’s coming back up today, so I’ll post some pics from down south and take some more this weekend.
-later
If you’ve ever spent a summer in New York, you know that’s not referring to the club Axel Rose spoke of, but instead HOT, HUMID, and HAZY! And that’s what these last few days have been like, the air is mighty thick. And this is nothing, wait until August gets here.
I guess the good part about it is that the garden is growing like crazy. The broccoli have really taken off, and the celery looks mighty healthy too. We have a bunch of little green grape tomatoes, and every morning Grace and I go outside to take a look at it before she leaves.
Yesterday was her day off, so we floated around in the pool and pretty much relaxed most of the day. I went over to a friends new house and replaced a water line that had burst over the winter so he could turn his outside hose on and fill his pool. Then I hooked up his pool filter for him and gave him the quick rundown on how to have a sparkling pool in 5 easy steps.
That’s about all I’ve been up to lately. Hope to start work next week. Going to New Hampshire again this weekend and I’ll take lots of pics this time.
K, gotta run and pick up Sam from school. Try and stay cool…
-Steve
Yup, it was a dreary winter, but the yard is alive and thriving, the blackberries are fixin’ to fruit soon and the poison ivy patch by the stone wall is doing very well! It’s been raining like every day or night and the grass is growing like crazy. And it gets really cool at night (good sleeping weather) so the pool, although it’s crystal clear and looks very inviting, is still freezing. Actually the water was 62 degrees yesterday, Sam went for a swim and said his feet went numb rather quickly…
But it should be near 90 today and tomorrow, hopefully it will warm it up a bit. The garden is starting to look better. The peppers have baby peppers and the grape tomatoes are starting to produce little greenies. When it takes off and starts to look like a jungle, I’ll post some pics.
I don’t know what to do with my gray cat. She keeps killing chipmunks and baby rabbits. And then she brings them in our room and proceeds to eat them. I mean the whole thing, you wake up to the sound of her crunching on bones in the middle of the night! She’s really a good cat, I just can’t seem to convince her that Cat Chow is a sufficient diet! And I really like to see the chippies and rabbits around the yard (long as they stay outta the garden) so I wish she’d leave them be…
Anyway, I took some pictures a week or so ago and made another thumbnail page. These are shots around the yard
. I added some commentary and hope you enjoy. Now you’ll get a sense of what I see every morning when I walk outside. Plus you’ll see my favorite trees.
OK, I have to do a little carpentry and tape some sheetrock next door, so I’m gonna start my day. Enjoy the sunshine-
-Steve
K, we got back from New Hampshire ’bout one in the morning. Woke up around nine and did some chores, vacum the pool, miracle-gro the garden, etc.
Decided to have some fun so Sam, Danny and I took my Savage over to a building site near by. It was a little too rocky for real high speed runs, but we had a blast! As usual, I broke something. Seems like it’s the best when you only go all out and beat it, and when you beat it, stuff breaks!
Here is that baby just flyin’ through the dirt and here it is doing a mega-wheelie!! And if you just hit little bumps she wants to go airborne, which is amazing when you consider it’s one heavy truck.
Here it is catchin’ a little air and here it is up on one wheel and pulling like crazy! Notice the angle of that one back wheel that’s grabbing in and trying to pull the truck right over… (sorry it’s a little blurry, so hard to catch this thing on camera)
A cool shot of it flying through the dirt again, notice the rooster trails of dust behind the wheels. A shot of it on 2 wheels, and another wheelie pic. Here’s one where you can see the scale of it compared to some two by fours.
Pretty cool, eh? These things are a blast, I’ve been playing with them for almost 15 years now and it still puts a big smile on my face…
OK, here’s the best for last- a short movie, this is one of it doing a 180 off a wall of dirt, it is kinda fast, so replay it a few times to get the full effect.
Well, hope you enjoyed as much as I did, gettin’ late so I’m gonna go chill upstairs with G and catch some Zzzz’s
Enjoy the rest of your holiday weekend…
OK, so here it is, raining and all grey and I have to pack up the car and also get Sam and Danny loaded up and drive to New Hampshire. Hopefully I’ll beat the holiday weekend traffic.
It looks like I found some gainful employment! Yes, a bona fide J-O-B !! And not too shabby at all. I’ll actually be able to cover all the overhead here at the homestead/compound/commune and maybe have a little left over to venture down to Chinatown for a bowl of pho and some bubble tea on weekends…
As a matter of fact, I’m going to fill out the forms and stuff up there as the company is based out of Mass but I’ll be working in good ole’ NY only about 40 miles from home.
Grace is staying home while we’re gone and she’ll feed Princess and look in on the cats and garden while we’re gone. It was hard saying goodbye this morning and she started crying and I got all sad. Makes me sad to think about not seeing her for two and half days.
Anyway, I gotta run. I’m bringing the digi-cam and an RC-truck to play with so I’ll take lots of pix and post when I get back.
Have a great Holiday weekend-
-Me
OK, I know it’s not for almost a month yet, but it feels like summertime is here.
For a few reasons. Once again, I’m without a job (seems to happen every other summer last 4 years). I have just about given up on ever being a Solaris Sysadmin again. Unix will always be my first love, and the BOFH my hero, but in the NYC metro area, there are just waaay more Unix admins then jobs last few years. Unless you of course are Dennis Ritchie and have 3 or 4 degrees and are an admin/senior DBA/network guru/C++ and Java programmer all in one. Then there are a few jobs out there.
The other reason is it’s been hot and humid and thunderstorming like crazy around here. Guess it could be worse, we could be having tornadoes, eh?
I guess the way the market is they can have a laundry list of very specific requirements. But hey, I think my resume is pretty impressive anyway. Wanna take a look? Wanna hire me? Here is a text version with the names erased to protect the innocent (more like guilty).
What have I been doing? Keeping busy so I don’t fall into a depression and then proceed to be in denial of the fact that I’m depressed.
This morning Grace got to sleep in. So I woke up, vacumed the pool, watered the garden, and took a few pix of my RC cars. Take a look at the thumbnail page I made of the pics. Notice how sparkling clear the pool is. Yes, I’m a Pool-Master, I can make the nastiest green or brown pool crystal clear in a few days.
Yes, I’m getting lazy, easier to make a page of thumbs then to add all the links to the images here in the body of the posting. This blog software is Greymatter of course, and you have to add links and such as html tags and I’m just a little too lazy this morning.
I also put in a vegetable garden this year, it’s been about 5 years since the last time I grew veggies. Have some tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, bell peppers, and bush beans planted. And of cource I grow Habanero’s, Jalapeno’s and other hot peppers in containers for cooking and to make my own hot sauce. Which of course is so hot nobody can eat it.
To top it all off (as if being unemployed isn’t bad enough) the transmission went in my Camry, so it’s just sitting at the top of the driveway. I’m driving around in an old Chevy Cavalier that my friend Lissa gave me and I had planned on giving it to Sam to drive. But for now we share it, kinda like a family vehicle.
OK, that’s it for now, I’ll take some pix of the yard and stuff and post them soon. I’m going up to New Hampshire to help my Dad pack for his move this weekend so I’ll take pics up there too. He had a heart attack two weeks ago so he can’t do any lifting or anything. Thankfully he is alright, but it was just bad timing as he’s retiring and moving down to North Carolina next month.
K, later for now….
-Steve
I’m not even gonna apologize for staying away so long.
Just that by the time I get home from work, bla bla bla (or yadda yadda yadda)
The funnest thing I’ve been doing lately is I fired up my RC10-GT which if you don’t know, is a kick ass R/C car. Or I should say 1/10 scale, 2 wheel drive, nitro-powered stadium racing truck to be more exact. Team Associated has been one of the most consistent race winners in the R/C world for almost 15 years now. I started with the RC10 electric buggy about ten years or so ago and graduated up to the gas powered truck a couple years later.
I know most “adults” think they are toys for kids, but they are really impressive. They are just like scaled down cars. They transmission is very complex, the suspension is incredibly adjustable, you have to give them front end alignments, and so on. It takes a good ten to twelve hours to build the kit, and it’s comprised of a couple hundred very small and precisely manufactured components. And the whole setup when I bought it 8 years ago was almost seven hundred dollars, so they are definitely not for kids, or not kids that live in my zip code!
Anyway, my truck had been sitting for about three years, and I wasn’t sure it would even start. Well. lemme tell you, it starts, and still is faster then just about any truck I’ve seen. When I first got it I made sure to get a screaming engine, the fastest one out (within reason, of course) and it makes a huge amount of power. It’s really hard to go straight, if you gun the throttle it just spins out, and it’s hard keeping the front wheels on the ground!
Here’s a quick video I took fooling around in the yard when the kids were up a couple weekends ago. The video is jumpy as I converted it to 10 fps so the file would be smaller, otherwise it’s too big to download. Anyway, here’s the movie of my truck look at how it kicks up a trail of dirt as I go up the driveway, and keep in mind I can’t even come close to top speed as you need a lot of room for that. For the setup I’m running it should go close to 50 MPH top speed!
And here’s a cool page that gives you an idea of the some minor hop ups you can do, the pictures here are great, click on some of them for a very detailed view- RC10-GT bulletproofing
OK, I’m really beat, let me get going and I’ll try and take some before and after pics of my truck so you can see what I’ve been doing lately.
Well, first time for everything, and it’s my first time hurting my back. Hope I just pulled a muscle or something. All I know is putting my socks on or getting upright from bed is near impossible.
But sitting isn’t so bad. So I’m re-installing Redhat 9.0 on my dual P-2 all scsi system. The one that was my “dream system” when I built it about 4 or 5 years ago. It’s still not too bad, but I’d love to see linux on a new super fast machine. I’m wanting to build a new computer one of these years, if I can ever catch up on bills and get my head above water. I even dragged out my Ultra 30 clone workstation, maybe I’ll download the new Solaris beta release and give it a try. You know, in all my spare time.
I finally hooked up that wireless router and moved Sam’s computer to his room over the weekend. So I have the computer room all to myself now. I cleaned it all up and also rearranged and cleaned up the living room also. Here’s a shot of the stereo I just put together, and yes, here’s what’s left of my albums. Just need to organize the dining room and paint it and the whole downstairs is looking pretty good. Todd and I started sheetrocking the upstairs hallway and ceiling last week, and it’s on hold from getting finished until I re-wire all the switches at the top and bottom of the stairs.
All in all can’t complain. Grace is upstairs watching some Charlies Angels made for TV movie, I made us some jasmine tea, and as soon as Redhat is installed and rebooted I’m off to bed. Which gets me thinking, I miss SuSe, has anyone tried it lately? I haven’t ran it in about 5 years now and am curious how it is these days. Why dontcha post in the tag board section if you have any feedback, K?
All right, I’m gonna read some other blogs and be a link whore for awhile…
-nitey nite
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