I’m unsure as to how it happened but I’ve managed to throw my back out.  For the past couple of weeks it’s been increasingly sore.  Yesterday it felt worse than usual and after laying down for a little while my back completely locked up and won’t unlock no matter what I do.  It’s still bothering the hell out of me today, but that’s more mental than pain.  Yes, I’m in a hell of a lot of pain but I also have a lot of things to accomplish that I don’t see myself getting around to anytime soon.

I have to clean the bedroom, it’s been a week since it was last dusted and when you’ve got black furniture – dust is very noticeable.  I need to do my laundry but that can wait until tomorrow, Sunday is typically Karen’s laundry day.  The kitchen is a wreck, I’d like to do something about that but even standing takes a lot out of me right now.  I’ve got myself propped up in the living room at the moment, I can’t stay in bed – it’s too soft and offering no kind of support right now.

I’m itching to get into the office but with absolutely no chance of lumbar support with my office chair – there’s no way in hell I could sit there long enough to accomplish what I need to do.

This really sucks.

Since I spent so much time trying to get acidgloss.net back up and running, I decided that a little theme alteration was needed here. As far as I’m concerned, March is over. There are only a few days left and I already show my Irish pride with a tattoo so having the theme up for as long as I did, just proved I’m not into it anymore. I was also getting sick of the green. It reminds me of something I don’t have, money.

Today I was accepted for a contract/freelance position and once I can get all of the paperwork sent back, I hope to be able to get the ball rolling. I’m also still patiently waiting to hear something from the Interview last week. I assume it’s going to take a few weeks and that’s fine, it’s more the waiting that’s getting to me than the actual choice they make. I just want to know – you know?

I’ve been up since about 7am, so I’m basically vegging out on the couch at the moment. I’m too tired to move and hope to be able to crawl into bed soon. There are a few more things that I’m going to need to accomplish before that happens but it shouldn’t take me a lot of time.

The weather today was absolutely gorgeous! Sean and I spent some time down on the beach enjoying the 77°F (25°C) temperature.  While it was a pretty windy day, there was still an over-abundance of sunshine keeping us nice and toasty.  It took a while to get down there though, with such a hot day the beach was absolutely swamped.  I had to go over a few blocks to park because my usual side-street was packed to the max.  I was close to pulling into someone’s drive-way but I wasn’t going to take that route, I finally did get myself into a spot so that was good enough for me.

For a while I convinced myself that I’d be spending a lot of time at the beach this summer.  However, considering the way it was loaded today, and it’s not even summer yet, I think I’m going to setup a nice set of chairs in the backyard and tan that way.  It’s my hope to be working through the summer, so my weekends will be filled with downtime in the yard, that’s not such a bad plan as long as I maintain my regular weekend schedule, right?

Another goal for the summer is to pack enough cash away so I can get myself into school this Fall.  I know I’ve said this a lot but it’s a big goal of mine and at this point, nothing is going to stand in my way.  Maybe I’ll get lucky and I’ll get back to my $5k a month income and be able to accomplish it a lot sooner than I’d originally planned.  I can handle two full-time jobs, I have a laptop for the at-home stuff so that can come out to the yard with me!

Moving along…. After the beach we made a quick run to the grocery store, we were close to completely being out of food so we picked up the essentials and they’re going to have to last for a while.  I’m breaking my diet and going to live on pasta for the next couple of days, only because that’s all we can afford right now.  I don’t like being in a hole, but if $1200 a month wasn’t going out to bills it would be easier to maintain things.

In any event, it’s knocking on 11pm and my eyes are close to almost completely closed, time for bed!

For the past few hours a few different phone numbers have been calling the house. Originally I thought it was merely a prank but supposedly I’m not the only one receiving these phone calls. If you see any of the following numbers show up on your caller ID, please be sure to avoid answering the phone.

• Quebec (514) 555-5555
• Florida (727) 585-4752
• Florida (727) 683-0725
• California (408) 731-7348

These numbers have been widely known for calling up to 15 times per day, and based on a few of the threads I’ve found in regards to it, a lot of people are effected by it. I’m going to log into Comcast in a few moments and block these numbers from calling. If you’re looking for more information, please head over to 888notes.com and read a bit more about it. They never say why they’re calling, you’re lucky if someone even responds to your saying “Hello?”. Just make it a point to block these numbers before they even start calling you.

On my ID the first number didn’t show up as Quebec, it showed up as “Purdy, D”. I have yet to get any calls from the other numbers, but that really doesn’t matter too much right now. I have to say that I can blame Vonage for this because they tend to allow you to have a phone number anywhere you please as long as you pay them, all VoIP phones tend to let you choose what area code you prefer. For all I know these calls could actually be coming from a man up the block.

Either way it’s a good idea to block the numbers, if you have the ability. Get in touch with your telephone provider before it gets to the point of being utterly annoying.

And with that said, guess who’s phone is freaking ringing again?! UGH!

It’s been a pretty hectic week.  I’m still waiting on word from my Interview last Friday.  I called on Monday and was told that they’re still conducting interviews so I should try back in a few days, I just called back about 20 minutes ago and they’re still doing interviews.  I’m a very patient person so maybe if I just wait it out maybe something good will come of it.

Sunday went well, dinner turned out OK.  By Monday evening Karen’s sister had come back from her Easter trip to Atlantic City.  Minus getting lost in the casino, and having her two younger kids with her bothering just about everyone, she did at least enjoy herself.  Her and Karen are going back up there on the 3rd, just an overnight.  Sean and I would also like to go this month because I have the entire month comped but I’m not going to stress about it.  My father is supposedly going up at the end of the month when he’s done with radiation theropy, I’d like to meet up with him but I’m going up to NY in June for his 60th birthday anyway – I don’t know if I’ll be able to make those two trips with the way finances are looking right now.

The rest of the week I’ve just been putting in resumes, contacting a few leads and then going from there.  I did spend a lot of time with the Mac in the last few days.  On Monday Sean asked me if I had any kind of attachment to the keyboard that came with my iMac, I personally prefer using everything that comes standard but that’s based completely on my being anal retentive about organization and matchy-matchy things.  However, I also know he uses the Mac quite a bit now that he’s working on Flash related things so for his comfort I went to hook up my old Logitech Multimedia Keyboard.  It hasn’t been touched in about six months so it was looking pretty disgusting.  So I decided to pop out the screws, pop off all of the keys and then clean it.  I had a whole system going, all of the keys were soaking in warm water to melt off any of the caked-on dirt.  It was primarily lotion and then on top of that it was dust so they just didn’t look good.  Upon taking off the face-plate I saw more dust and grime than I’d ever had in any keyboard before – that’s what I get for leaving it under the desk for so long.  So I took about two hours to clean it out, during that process (where it now looks brand new) I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard.  The iMac came with Tiger but it had the upgrade DVD so I made it a point to process that.

My goal after I completed the upgrade was to install Parallels Desktop 3 so I can also run Windows on it.  I didn’t get that accomplished until yesterday, I was having a lot of trouble getting it moving because there’s a hack that you have to run in order for it to properly work on Leopard that they haven’t worked into the program yet.  So I gave up and Sean went ahead and did it for me when things finally worked the way they were supposed to.  I thought he crashed the Mac at some point considering it kept booting in excess for about an hour.  I wound up falling asleep in the bedroom for a few hours, well the whole night really.  He managed to get everything in working order, including the installation of Windows XP.  I then slept the rest of the night and as of 7am, I’ve been wide awake.

I haven’t gotten in there to play around yet, I’m on the laptop in the living room at the moment.  My back isn’t feeling to great so sitting in that god awful chair just isn’t a possibility at this point in time.  I’ll go in there later after I’ve had some time to stretch it out, there are quite a few programs that I’m looking to get back and you can only use them on Windows, hence the dual setup.  The thing I like about this one is the fact that it’s not a dual-boot option, I can run Windows inside of OS X by just having it boot to it’s own little window.  So basically I’m using a browser with Windows inside of it, I like that idea.  In the future I’ll install Vista, I have the serial from the other desktop in the house, I do like the fact that I can have many instances of the Parallel setup so I can run as many different operating systems as the Mac will handle.  I’m going to stop at Vista though, I see no point in running anything else.  I’m even considering setting up a second monitor so I can run Windows on one side and Mac on the other, I think that’ll work out pretty well for me.

For now I’ve got a few emails to send out and a few leads to check on.  Guess I should get my ass in gear.

It’s Easter Sunday and while I haven’t really done anything yet, I have accomplished quite a bit over the past weekend so I can sit back and relax for a while until I start all of the cooking for dinner tonight.  I’m not going too crazy with dinner.  I’m throwing a ham in the oven, and making up a few sides to have with it and that’s about it.  Yea, there’s going to be like five sides and some rolls or something.  While that may seem like a lot, I’m Italian – I’m used to large meals for a small number of people.

I’m still waiting on news about the job interview on Friday.  I assume that since they’re a Monday – Friday service that I’ll hear something tomorrow, or at least I hope.  I’m really anxious about it.  With the way money is going right now I could really use this job.  The interview itself went pretty well, at least I personally thought it did.  I like the environment, and those whom I spoke to seem pretty nice.  The drive wasn’t that bad, I’ll have to factor in summer travel in a few weeks but that just means I’d have to leave around 7am as opposed to 730ish to make it there by 8.  I figure a 20 minute drive will take about 45 minutes when it comes to the summer traffic down here.  That’s what you get living in a tourist town though.  Either way it’d be a Monday to Friday 8-5 position.  I’d get home around 6pm on the summer nights and since it’s year round I really think I could do well there.

As far as my own stuff is concerned, I managed to get the new template up on acidgloss.net, something I’m very happy about.  I really like the way things turned out.  There was a template just like it for sale for about $90 but I was able to recreate it with no real trouble.  The spacing is off on a few things depending on the browser you use but it really isn’t anything that major so it doesn’t matter too much to me.  I’m working on getting a few more link options in order there, hopefully I’ll be able to get some of my lost traffic back.  It’ll take some time but I do have a few tricks up my sleeve, you can only depend on SEO for so long before you have to get back into gear on commenting on things.

In any event, it’s now about 2:15pm and I’m hoping to relax for a few hours before I have to get in gear on the kitchen.  So a quick straighten-up around the kitchen so I have some surface area to work with and the rest is cake…literally – I think I’ll make cup-cakes to have as an after dinner treat.  We’ll see how I feel though, my stomach is already bothering me from too much coffee today anyway -  heh.

So, Happy Easter to everyone, hope you have a nice relaxing day with family and friends.  If you celebrate of course.