Every year I get a notification that krissy.nu will be no-more sometime in May and every year I pay my $30 to make sure I keep it mine. Why? I honestly don’t know. Even though I really have nothing to do with the ‘blogging’ world anymore, I still feel that this is a big part of my own history and can’t personally stop myself from renewing it.  There have been numerous times where I’ve just wanted to let it go and walk away, but that’s primarily because I don’t get to ENJOY the Internet the way I used to. Everything is work related, or Facebook (not gonna lie) and by the time I get down to wanting to work on something personal, my brain is completely blocked and I have no inspiration to come up with ANYTHING.

The upside? The few games that I play on my Tablet have given me a small amount of inspiration – completely referencing color schemes.  I do know that the next template on k.nu will be a little darker, but bright at the same time (if that makes any sense). I handed the color pallet over to Adam to see if there was anything that he could come up with because I was fresh out of ideas but wanted to do something with pink/black/white (in a different manor than I’d ever done before) and he’ll be playing in Photoshop to come up with something for me.

Hopefully there will be some time this summer where I can actually sit down and get something done that isn’t work related.  Thankfully the Internet is being slow-as-sin which is causing me to have to let the FTP programs run in the background while I find something else to do (ie: the reason I’m blogging).  I should be working on my old laptop to wipe Windows 7 out of it so I can hand it off to my sister, but that’s the reason the Network is so slow right now because I’m transferring 20 Gigs of files from the old laptop to my Macbook this way I at least have a back-up of all of the important stuff. (Files and Photoshop crap primarily). I could personally care less about making a list of “Important Programs” considering if it was important enough to be part of my every day life than it’s already on this thing anyway.

The only annoying thing is the internet is going to remain slow for about 5 hours.  I really do wish that I had some kind of a flash drive up here with me, or even a USB-to-USB chord so I could just drag and drop instead of heavily depending on the Wireless in the house to get the job done.

I think it’s about time I start digging through my old laptop bag to see if I even have a drive like that.  I’d rather wait 20 minutes than 5 hours.

At least I’m on a mission now.

I’m not really sure why, but I’m having a lot of trouble concentrating today.  I’ve actually been having trouble concentrating for almost a week now. The last thing I want to do is open up Photoshop and actually get some work done.  I think it’s based on the fact that I’m just stuck in a rut that I can’t seem to wiggle my way out of.  I always want to find something completely different and unimportant.  All of the laundry is done, the kitchens clean, I’ve cooked dinner every night and even did some shopping with Karen this past weekend. As far as actually sitting down in Adobe and physically getting some work done – my brain just can’t seem to grasp it.

Even now I’m holding off on things and I have like six sites to work on and haven’t started a single one.  All I can do is think about how I need to put tonights dinner away and get myself set to watch the Monday night shows on CBS. Since those are on in 8 minutes I have the feeling they’re going to take the priority yet again.  I’m not really sure what’s wrong with me, but I can tell you that it’s completely unlike me and really not going to work in my favor.  There are numerous bills to pay, emails to answer and sites to start and my brain is just all “Nope, bedtime right?”.  Coffee doesn’t even work anymore and I’m up to over a pot a day just to hold me over and it’s still not working.

To top off everything else, I’m still looking to build a new template for here because this one is officially driving me crazy. I’m tempted to just change it over to a basic default one just so I can get by. I also know that won’t work for long because I can’t stand anything ‘Default’ that comes with a script, no matter how much customization is available its still not enough to keep me happy. I wind up spending more time on changing the temporary template than I do designing a new one.

I’m sure I’ll figure something out at some point, for now I’m going to sidetrack myself with TV until I can finally hunker down and get something done.

Being 4 hours away from everything I’ve ever known has started to take it’s toll on me.  I miss my family, I miss my friends, and I’m always reminded of the friends I’ve lost over the years, especially in March being as this is when I lost two of the most important ones.  I’ll mope around quite a bit and it’s just a funk that I can’t seem to get myself out of.  But then, there’s that ray of light when you realize that you have one of the best of friends that anyone could ever ask for.

Colin and I met in middle school and maintained a friendship for 15 years, there were times when we didn’t speak to each other for years at a time but that bond has always been there.  That bond grew much stronger after Lucy passed away a few years ago, and since that point we’ve been a regular part of each others lives.  To make things even better, he and Sean are pretty much BFFs.  It’s to the point with them that I consider it more of a bromance than good friends, but either way the three of us are always happy spending time together and you can imagine my surprise when Colin says “I’m coming to DE for a few days”.  He did that this past weekend and I have to say, it’s gotten me out of my funk.

See, Colin is one of those guys that can be counted on no matter what the situation.  He’s always just a phone call away and will do just about any and everything for you.  Him coming down here for us proves that no only is he missing the crap out of us the way we miss him, but that he’s ideally one of the best friends you could ask for.

He got here on Friday night, we had a nice meal/trivia night over at Buffalo Wild Wings. He and Sean were on their XBOXs the rest of the night because it was pushing after Midnight by the time we got back to the house so of course it was a little too late to really venture out into the town being as we knew there was a pending tattoo appointment the following day for him.  Saturday was spent at Applebee’s, two tattoo shops, the arcade (with a super hyper cashier that was all over Colin) and Dover Downs because it was time to teach the guy how to use a slot machine lol.  He was enjoying himself until the Casino had taken the money he walked in there with but it’s the luck of the draw.  Sean did well, he managed to leave with the same amount of money he walked in with and that’s good enough for him.  I lost $100, but I can’t argue because I enjoyed my time there and that’s what counts.  We also hadn’t been up to a Casino in almost a year so the itch was there and all it took was telling Sean he could walk around Best Buy as the stipulation to even stepping foot in the Casino.

Sunday afternoon was spent with a quick lunch at home (He’s a sucker for my Mac & Cheese) and some video game play for the two guys.  I, for some reason, completely passed out after he left around 3:30 and then saw that it was after Midnight on the clock – my system has pretty much been messed up since.  I did get another couple of hours between 4am and 8am (tossing and turning, but I’m sure there was a substantial sleep in there somewhere), so at least I’m back on the normal schedule.  I’ve managed to completely flip mine, I’m no longer waking up at 5pm and completely wasting the day by only working at night. It also helps to be up early considering Bella’s going in for a grooming tomorrow morning and she needs to be dropped off by 9am.

So yea, while we didn’t really do a lot while he was down here we still all got to spend some quality time together that’s given me a boost of energy to get me out of my funk.

You really can’t ask for a better friend, and I honestly think this is the first time I’ve ever referred to him as a “Friend”, to us he’s more “Family” than anything.

So I just got off the phone with my service manager, he said that there have been some issues with two of the servers overheating and he wound up having to pull out the new dry ice machine in order to get things back up and running. I actually had a good two hour long conversation about how this is beneficial to the longevity of the server and all that jazz. Basically, the newbie in the building had no idea on what he was doing and let a few of the servers go untouched for awhile and since they weren’t properly being maintained, I personally almost had $5,000 worth of clients with no websites because of hardware failure from overheating. Yes, everything is backed up but even the back-up was looking a little grimy so John decided it was time to let the lil weenie go. Peace out weenie!

He got everything all nicely cleaned up so everything is now back up and running and I’m surfing the internet to figure out why exactly this dry ice stuff makes a difference, I always assumed it had something to do with dust buildup, in which case it made sense to have a few areas with air condensers, but this is supposedly the more beneficial solution. Google brought me over to icetechworld.com who has a fairly decent sized site informing everyone of the pros of utilizing ice blasting. I honestly thought it would wind up being too harsh on the system due to excess build up of water but it’s more of a ‘vapor’ effect so I don’t have to worry about something carrying over, and cleans just as effectively as someone going in there with some horrible chemical that will corrode the systems over time. You can view a little more information on them if you click here.

For now, I’m happy that things are back on track and clients don’t have to worry about any downtime. I’m just annoyed that it even got to that point. I’m going to have to think long and hard about allowing newbies anywhere near my systems. I’d lose way too much money every month if I didn’t have the right ducks in a row to keep everything up and running as smoothly as it is.

Things slowed down dramatically for a little while, but out of no where things have picked up to the point that I have to remind myself to breath. The few sites that I’ve been working on for the past few months have finally completed, but in their place numerous other ones popped up.  Right now I’ve got three pending and I don’t know how that even happened.  To top that off I added remodeling krissy.nu to the list because there’s been an increase in advertising inquiries and the current format doesn’t really allow for anything extra on my sidebars. I thankfully have a few drafts sitting in folders but I do need to ultimately decide which route I’m looking to take and then going from there.  I want to brighten things up dramatically and really dive into the CSS3 formatting that I’ve been using on other sites. I’m sick of generating all of my borders with Photoshop slicing up the images for me so it will be nice to build a very CSS heavy template that isn’t image heavy at all.  On top of that, Adam was sweet enough to build a template for me on AGn Designs so I’m going to code that one in the near future as well. I need to add him to my list of pending projects as I’ll be coding his new portfolio template for WordPress for him as well.  I also repurchased curvy-chick.net to utilize as a fitness/wellness blog so that’s going to take up some of my time as well.

I think I need to hire a personal assistant who just wants to sit in Photoshop all day while I code things.  Anyone interested?

Needless to say, things are getting fricken crazy.