I’m doing everything I can to work myself back into a proper routine.  In the past few days I’ve finished up a couple of sites, and based on my inbox there’s at least 4 projects that need to be completed no later than Monday morning.  With that I’m setting myself into “Get it done and get it done NOW” mode.  It’s a little difficult being that I’ll admit I’m a little rusty, but it’s also helping my ego to know that a man whom Sean’s been working for, for about a year now, loves my work and wants to take me under his wing as well.  This instantly has me stepping up my game, there’s absolutely nothing that I don’t want to learn to secure my spot on that team.  Right now everything has been heavy graphics work, AND a lot of WordPress jobs.  I’ve already knocked out about 4 of them, two more to go at this moment in time.

On top of all of this I’ve been drawing up a few template ideas to merge acidgloss.net and krissys-portfolio.net, there really is no need to have to separate domains, however – I do still wish to utilize acidgloss.net as a business/technology blog.  I’ve been going back and forth with a few people in reference to product reviews, so this will help to bring more content to the site itself.  I’m sure you’ve also noticed a few sponsored entries popping up here and there on this site as well, it will be a regular occurrence, however I will be back to properly blogging on a regular basis so you shouldn’t see any major flow of articles that are 100% sponsored… I actually take the time to work them into a real life experience.

My only NEED right now is a proper chair.  I’m sitting on a wooden chair with an absolutely horrible cushion, no matter how many cushions there are – there’s a major lack of support which means that half way through the day my back is absolutely killing me.  For the time being I’m going to deal with it, it’s my goal within the next couple of weeks to pick up a proper desk chair, I’m not looking to spend any more than $100, I don’t need bells and whistles, I just need something with some padding.  I’ve already added cushions, even tried pillows – nothing works. I need a decent amount of foam for comfort, there’s no way of getting around it.

I’m going to have to head over to Staples to pick something up, there are also a few ‘office’ supplies that I could use but thanks to my wiping out my desk at my previous job, I do have enough to get by for the time being.  OH! That reminds me of other crap that I need to take care of.  I’ll be utilizing my post-its more than I thought. LOL

This post brought to you by TwoOfUs. All opinions are 100% mine.

Things have been pretty hectic lately. I’m so overloaded with work that I’m close to losing my mind. The biggest goal for my leaving that horrible office job was for Sean and I to be able to spend more time together. This hasn’t really been working out for either of us considering we’re BOTH so bogged down with work we’ve resorted to chit-chat whenever we pass each other. We have a lot of goals and dreams that we’re working hard to meet, but I’m hoping it doesn’t put a permanent strain on things in the meantime.

I’ve been floating around TwoOfUs.org, it’s a site specifically for relationships. There are different columns for advise, and tips on keeping your relationship fresh. It starts in the Dating category, and works its way from Dating to Exclusive, Engagements, Married couples, and even parents. Obviously being with Sean for as long as I have (6 years in July) we’ve pretty much lost the ‘category’ in which we’re in. We’ve skipped the exclusive stage, we’ve spoken about marriage, life dreams and children and already know that we’ll be together forever, but even without the ring we’ve passed the ‘engaged’ stage. We’re more like an old married couple than anything else. So I found myself reading through multiple categories. Even though we’re not officially engaged/married – we still live our lives as though we are. All of our finances are joined, everything we do we consult the other person, both of our names are on my SUV – there’s no separations there. While I did enjoy the articles and found a few areas to be informative, I’m still having trouble locating that ‘grey’ area that my relationship is in (not that Grey is bad in this case, there’s just no special category name). Life isn’t black and white, the grey tone areas are where people LIVE, I wish there was more about the grey areas on Two of Us.org, but the information on the page itself is helpful.

I think the one thing that caught my eye was the article about over sharing. I find that I do over-share with certain people, but at the same time I know that Sean also knows everything I’m volunteering. There are more personal and private aspects to our life that I don’t blast out all over the internet, or even with close friends. There has to be some kind of separation to insure that you don’t leave your relationship vulnerable.

Another article that caught my eye was to Discuss Finances Before Marriage.  I’ve completely screwed the pooch on this one.  Our finances have pretty much been merged for the last 5 1/2 years.  The upside is we’re fully aware of how much money is needed to get our bills paid, and how much we have left for personal spending.  I’ll admit that I’m the big spender in the relationship, he’s more of the “I can’t justify this” kind of person.  It does take a lot of effort on both our parts to balance things out… but it works.

I’ve taken the time to look through a few of the videos, the one that stood out the most was an interview with Hill Harper, where he discusses the importance of The Conversation. He noted that the world is too involved with technology and no one talks anymore, except through Facebook email and twitter. What he does is he has a get together with friends/family, each of them bring a few cards with different questions on them, they’re pulled together and anonymously the questions are asked for members of the opposite sex to answer them. As an example, mine would probably be something along the lines of “Why do men hold onto underwear when it looks like a skirt and the elastic is holding on with a piece of string?”, this question would be answered truthfully by the men in the group. I’m sure it would bring up a heated discussion, but at the same time – you’re TALKING, it’s not a Facebook thread going back and forth, you’re actually looking at the person in which you’re talking to.

All in all it’s a pretty decent site, lots of tips and tricks, the video’s give you an “ah ha” kind of an effect after words as well, and after watching “The Conversation”, I think I’m going to have to put one of these parties together. I went ahead and marked like on their Facebook page as well.

What questions would you ask?

I don’t think I’ve stopped in the last week.  I’m doing really well with bringing in some new clients, and in return I’ve created a few sites that I’m very, very pleased with.  Of course it also helps that the people I’ve been working for are sweet as pie and detail oriented.  I couldn’t ask for anything better!

I’m taking ten minutes to throw an update on here just to show that I’m still alive and as active as possible.  I haven’t yet been able to balance blogging and clients but I think that has a lot to do with my environment.  Unfortunately I don’t have a proper work space at this moment in time.  I’m working on a “Table Mate” in the corner of the living room until I can get a desk.  Sean has kind of taken mine over with the Mac and the other PC we have (my old Windows desktop).   As usual I’ve already designed an office in my head, everything from the desk to the color scheme (which closely resembles the current pink/grey/black/white template here heh.  For now I’ve found that throwing on headphones to cut down on the background noise is helpful.

My sleep schedule is all kinds of fucked up.  Now that I’m completely working from home I’m going to bed around 4am and waking up around noon.  For me its like I’ve wasted the day considering I got so used to waking up early and finishing my workday at 6pm at the office.  I’m working to get myself back on track but with everything required of me during the day its hard to get myself on track.

Right now I’m balancing three clients, I feel really bad because I haven’t been able to give everyone the full attention they deserve.  I really don’t like not being able to start one job and finish it, now I’m doing two different accounts a day so its screwing with me big time.  Either way I’ll work on getting things on track and should be able to then schedule the day accordingly.  I know what needs to get done, and how it needs to get done.  Its the matter of implementing it, and the sleep schedule plays a HUGE role in that.

In any event, time to get cracking in Photoshop.

It’s been one hell of a week.

When I was finally home on Thursday after a very long weekend at my aunts house, Bella was picked up by her groomer and things have been – interesting – ever since. I’m not sure if something happened while she was with the groomer but to be blunt, the dogs been crapping liquid for the past 7 days.  We’ve finally gotten it to solidify but its taken a lot of different food ideas and quite a few days of bringing her out every 3 hours, and let me tell you that waking up at 5am when I no longer have to was kicking my ass.  Last night after giving her some pepto (who knew?) her and I were both able to sleep the entire night for the first time in almost a full week.  I think my body was confused because I wound up crashing until about 1pm this afternoon.  While she’s been very clingy today being as she’s still not 100% (and the storm to roll through scared her a bit), there’s still a dramatic change in her.  She’s eating more, drinking more, playing with her toys, and not scratching on peoples legs every 20 minutes to go outside.  It’s been peaceful.

On Monday I officially started back up with AGn Designs, spending a lot of time on numerous freelancing sites.  By Tuesday morning things were beginning to worry me being as I hadn’t heard from anyone.  Tuesday night was a whole different story, I wound up picking up three projects which is bringing in a decent chunk of change for what’s going to be three days of work in total.  I’m almost finished with one site, it’s the matter of loading it onto her server and tweaking the wordpress widgets so that everything flows right, and the others I’m waiting on a few responses from.  Either way things have been picking up, and so far everything is going beautifully.

I had to spend some time tweaking my template on krissys-portfolio.net because the Lightbox script I was previously using was very obviously out dated so I needed to upgrade to Lightbox 2.  That solved the issues I was having with the images, the bigger issue right now is how horrible the template looks.  However, that’s going to be a long drawn out process to change. I want to some-how merge krissys-portfolio and acidgloss.net.  I was thinking of coming up with an over-the-top template that would work on both sites to just flow everything together. I have the idea in my head, and some doodles in photoshop but nothing has really stuck yet.  I don’t just want AGn to be a blog, I want to bump it up but I don’t want to lose k-p.net… either way I’m sure I’ll have something figured out within the next couple of days being as the creative juices are flowing.

I have to say, and don’t want to admit it, but Sean really kicked my ass this week with a revision to one of the sites he’s been working on.  Whatever script the idiots from India came up with was NOT working when trying to recode the site for the WordPress template.  There were like 7 DOCTYPE tags, numerous HTML and BODY tags being called for absolutely no reason.  When running it through the validation check it was coming up with over 600 errors.  I just about shit my pants when I saw that!  I’ve never seen so many errors on such little output in my life, and that’s including a time years ago when I actually started to care about validation and recoded everything I had!

In any event, I have a few more emails to respond to and a bed that’s calling my name.  I missed staying up until 1am, but it’s kicking my ass – that’s for damn sure!

It took a little longer than I would have liked it to, but I’ve got everything up and running.  There are a few sub-pages that still need a little bit of work but if you’re reading this it means that k.nu has completely transferred back to its old server.  I moved it to dream-host for about a year and hosted it under Sean’s account there but their server sucks major, major ass. When going through my WHM I realized that I still had the complete site still located on my own server so after a few modifications, things are back.

It’s been a pretty crappy week, even though I’m no longer dealing with my hell hole former employer, I’ve still been sick as a dog which is giving me very little to work with when moving forward in the design world.  I’ve got a few projects that I’ve started on, and I’m going to spend the bulk of my weekend working on them but for now the larger of the projects (getting this back up) is completed.

Tomorrow is going to be a relatively busy day.  I’m going out to purchase a new washing machine AND dish washer.  The dish washer has been broken for a while, we’ve just converted to hand washing, but being as I plan to do a lot more cooking now that I’ll be home at a more reasonable hour, the lack of dishwasher will 100% get in the way.  PC Richards has a few for under $200 that look pretty decent so we’re going to go with them.  And as far as the washing machine is concerned, that completely died today, PC Richards will save our asses on that too.  We wish that the washer crapped out last week while everyone was having memorial day sales but there’s nothing we could have done about that.  So since Dad has a 20% discount since he’s a hospital employee, that’ll drop a lot of money off the final cost.

Once all of that is squared away it’ll be time to start cooking the Sunday 3-course meal.  This week will be a glazed meatloaf, garlic mashed potatoes and some variety of veggies that I’ll figure out tomorrow. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but I never had the time to properly cook anything in the past due to the work schedule.  Now that I’ll have more time at home, I’ll be able to move forward with regular home-cooked meals as opposed to whatever is convenient to pick up before I come home from work.

In any event, I still have a lot of other things to work on so I’m going to hop to it.