It's great owning your own house. You don't have the feeling that you are throwing your money away with rent. Every now and then I'll check out what the houses in the neighborhood are selling for to see if my house is appreciating. So it's nice knowing you can put holes in your walls and not have to worry about covering them up when you move.
I'm spoiled because I live in a townhouse and have an association. I gladly pay my dues every month knowing that they will mow the lawn every Thursday, pick-up my garbage and recyclables on Friday, and shovel in the winter when necessary (aka over one inch of snow).
In the last months bill we got the "spring time notice". This noticed went on to state little reminders about noise and lawn care. I've never had an issue with noise in the neighbor besides a barking dog every once in awhile so that was no problem. The lawn care is something that I get to handle. My wife and I have a little beagle and she has left our yard mark with little dead spots. In the spring time notice, we were reminded that lawns need to be fixed before June 1. No problem, I thought. I'll buy some sod and dig up the spots and lay down the good stuff.
We decided to go a different route though. We thought that if we seed the dead stuff now we wouldn't have to worry about the expensive sod later. We traveled out to the local WalMart to look for a list of items: guinea pig bedding, dog toys, grass seed/soil, and tropical skittles. Unfortunately, I forgot about the tropical skittles until now. There is more to that story but it's not going to be told now.
My wife and I have never been outdoors/gardening people. We walked up and down the seed aisle getting angry with one another because neither of us knew what we were doing. Finally we decided on the grass seed that came in some blue mulch type stuff. I've heard some people talk about how easy it was to use so that's why we got it. We needed some soil since I was going to be doing some digging. Potting soil, plant soil, Miracle grow flower soil. The back of the seed bag said I needed Scott's Lawn Soil. I have to follow the directions since I want the "Best Results". We could not find anything down the soil aisle that said anything about being top soil, lawn soil, grass soil. We finally gave up and planned to go to Home Depot to find some.
After check out we are pushing the cart out of the WalMart garden center and my wife spots a bunch of pallets sitting out in the parking lot. Sure enough she finds a pallet of the Scott's Lawn Soil that I need for my "Best Results".
April 2005 Archives
It's official. Anabelle is real stupid. Anabelle went to the vet a couple months ago because she had a piece of rope hanging from her rear. Anabelle passed all of the rope right before we went to vet but we wanted to get her checked out to be on the safe side. The vet said she was fine and to keep an eye on her. After that experience we decided to get a fleece toy since they are safer than rope toys.
She was chewing on her "safe" fleece toy on Friday night and Michelle looks over at the dog to see that a big chunk of it was gone. It was a piece of fleece that was 6 inches by 1 inch. Nothing much we could do at that point. The vet was closed so we start thinking of what we could do. The first thought was to try to get her to toss her cookies and make the fleece reappear. We had no idea how to do that, it seems our dog doesn't have a gag reflex. So we decided to wait it out. We stayed up for awhile to keep an eye on her. Nothing come out that night. Michelle got up once during the night and checked on her but nothing. The next morning Anabelle ate just fine. We went for a walk and she was just active as normal. At this point I'm thinking that I'm going to be seeing it coming out the other end in a day or two. This is time that I start getting worried. I looked online and see all these horror stories of dogs that eat foreign object. The objects reek havoc on the intestinal track. I figure we'll give it a day to get through and if it did not then the vet will get a visit.
Around one in the afternoon I hear the dog cough and then hurl. It was odd. Most of the time dogs go through little convulsions when they are going to puke. Not this time she just let it out. She hurled up the section of fleece in a small ball mashed together. I don't think I've ever been so happy that my dog puked.
We've come to the conclusion that the only toys Anabelle can have are chew bones and stuffed toys. She should be alright with the stuffed toys because she does not tear those apart. She just chomps and sucks on them. She's an odd dog. But she's the best one in the world.
Thanks to my lovely wife, she pointed out that an adjustment may need to be made to my "Working late" Not Dork entry. She pointed out in a very nice way that what I was working on would fall into the Dork category. Until recently my job title had been Associate Systems Analyst. Yes, it is a slightly dorky title. I then got news during the annual review process that I was receiving a promotion. The timing was somewhat odd because I had just asked my supervisor about a different job opportunity. She told me that I would be getting a promotion, but she didn't have the review finished. I had to wait a couple more weeks before it was all official and I received my new job title. Systems Programmer is my job title as of April 3. There is no question about the title, it definitely falls under the dork category. The department I'm part of is in the middle of going through and revamping job titles/responsibilities. So unfortunately I was one of the first to get a new updated title. The job title for Systems Programmer before was Systems Analyst. Systems Analyst doesn't sound as geeky but I guess I can make due with Programmer.
Well, I've finally entered the real working world by having to work late. It's not that great but since I'm still hourly the time and a half pay is pretty good. A project came into work and I was the one that it was dumped on. We got the specifics Wednesday morning and they said that they needed it by Monday of the next week.
I work the first day on it just to get a feel of what is going to be needed. Some questions popped up as I started working on the project. When I talk to them it turns out that they really won't have any data for these reports for another week. So the rush job that they said they "needed by Monday" is really something that they needed by a week from Monday. I was offered the overtime so I took as much as they would give me. I stayed until 7:45 one night and was amazed at how much work I can get done once everyone is gone. I can turn up the music and focus on what I'm doing. I put in a good three and a half hours that week. When I got my paycheck for the week I noticed that I was missing all the overtime I worked. I shot an email off to HR to see what was up. I was surprised by the quick response and it ends up that I missed punching in after lunch so it messed up my hours worked. I put through the fix so I should see the revised amount on the next check.
I got the project done by that Friday, but I received a call on Monday saying that the people wanted some things changed with the reports. As of today, I think I'm done with them. At least I hope.
This week though is another week of overtime. My boss 2 up (my boss's boss) said that overtime is always an option for my department. This is a good thing for me because I had always thought that I couldn't put in any. I have a roll out happening next week so I'm in the midst of trying to make sure the application is working and locked down so no one can mess it up. I put in an extra hour and half on Monday and probably another hour today. This extra $$ will be nice, I have some bills to pay off. I just need to make sure that I stay under that limit of the higher ups complaining about too much overtime.
I've become a fan of RSS feeds lately. I've started using them one I started using Firefox. It has a built in RSS reader so I'm able to keep up on Slashdot, Slickdeals, Techbargains, and some other blogs all with one click.
I noticed that my blogging software automatically created the RSS feed for my Dork or Not Dork? site, but for some reason the On Going Life blog didn't have the option. I figured that the problem was that the On Going blog has be through many upgrades of software but I'm never revisited the blog's layout. I took some time to find out how to get the blog exported and reimported. So I just did a quick export, created a new blog, and import the entries. That solved the problem of the RSS feeds on the On Going portion of the site, or so I thought.
I got an email from my asking if I could fix my RSS feed because it was not up to standard. I was a little confused because I've never had any experience working with RSS feeds. I know that they were XML based and I've done some work with XML but that was dealing with skinning a media player. So I started digging around trying to find out what I needed to update. I found this nice little site Feed Validator where you enter in the feed address and it will tell where a feed is bad. After a little digging I found that the blog software was automatically creating a RDF, 1.0, and 2.0 feeds. I ended up just ditching the RDF and 1.0 feeds that the software created. I thought that would solve the problem, but no. The validator was telling me some gibberish about the dates being out of format. I look through Feed Validator's help and I found exactly what I needed. I told me that MoveableType RSS feed templates do not create 2.0 compliant feeds. The site had a link to the page at MoveableType.org where I could download a new template to make it 2.0 compliant. I took a look at the new template to see where the dates were wrong and it all came down to a colon in the date. I got it changed and it's working
My brother contacted me because he is putting together a website that will grab all the RSS feeds from the Motylinski family blogs. Everyone in my family has a blog except my mom. I think my brother is working on her to get one going but I don't think that it's going to work anytime soon.
