Archive for the ‘AGn Designs’ Category

Life gets in the way…

Wednesday, October 29th, 2014

I’ve been trying to sit down and write for a while now but being overly bombarded with deadlines is taking it’s toll on me.  I’ve had a few major sites that I’ve been keeping tabs on, and pulling 16+ hour days on to keep on top of things. Most recently was disappointed after an 18 hour run to only find that the deadline was missed.  I was so ticked off, you have no idea.

On the Tooth front, with the use of antibiotics it’s fine for now. I do still need to see a dentist to have things taken care of, but the unfortunate waiting list to see anyone down here is starting to turn into the “Story of my life.”  I took 10 days worth of antibiotics, and haven’t really had any aspirin since the excessive use of it damn near killed my stomach.  I’m not someone who goes looking for prescriptions, if it can’t be solved with aspirin there’s something seriously wrong.  So when I mistakenly took more than 10 in a day (because the pain was so intense my brain was literally not functioning) I wound up with some abdominal pains and that was that.  At least those pains took the focus off the tooth for a little while.

This past week was pretty nice though, I’ve officially hit 30 and now it’s just downhill from here.  It’s weird stepping into a new age bracket. My father and sister came to visit. She’s never been to Delaware before and we took some time to hit up as many stores as possible so she could enjoy Tax Free shopping.  She’s the kind of person who has to frequently do laundry because she’s down to her last few pairs of pants.  So, that was the main focus during our shopping trips, I think she got about 10 new pairs of pants in total so hopefully that means she isn’t doing laundry as frequently.  I know she picked up shoes and shirts as well.

I didn’t really go that crazy on clothing, as much as I really do need certain items. I work from home, though. It’s really unjustified for me to pick up nice looking clothes when I literally have no place to wear them. So I did get a few decent looking T-shirts so I could continue my shirt rotation, and even invested in a few jersey knit type of long sleeve shirts because it has been getting a little chilly lately but all of my longer sleeve items were either heavy sweat shirts or just didn’t fit right anymore, so I’ll probably throw the older stuff into the rotation as well.

“Rotation?” – Yes, I wear my clothes to death to the point that they’re repurposed.  Once every few years I stock up on nice looking shirts, mostly tshirts. I wear them to death to the point that they’re no longer acceptable to wear out of the house and then push them to the bedshirts pile. Then I go through the bedshirts, if they don’t make the grade I shred them to use as dust rags, cause that’s really all they’re worth.  I would donate, don’t get me wrong, but feel it would be cruel to donate clothing that is literally holding on by a thread.  This is just my version of recycling.  I think at this point I could do some kind of patch work throw pillow with the remnants of fabric that I have to go through… that requires a sewing machine though – something I don’t currently have. That’ll probably change though, I’ll hopefully be hitting up thrift shops in the future.

So while they were here I decided that since we weren’t going to all be together for the holidays I’d have them come early. I went ahead and did a big thanksgiving dinner in October. Technically speaking I celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving but even that was 3 days late.  My dad is coming back between Thanksgiving and Christmas, but I don’t believe my sister was going to be with him, so I wanted to at least get that out of the way.  As far as actual Thanksgiving is concerned… I doubt we’re doing anything, honestly. We’ll figure it out as we get closer.  I might spend the day setting up for Christmas but that’s because I’m itching to find an excuse for rearranging the living room to put the tree up.  The Den won’t really have any decorations in it though. I may be able to pick up some stuff from thrift shops, but I’m not really going out of my way to over decorate the house when factoring in that at this point in time it’s just Sean and I until we decide we’re ready for children.

So yea, it was nice spending time with my family, nice getting some shopping done, and nice having a few days off from work while they were here so I could relax.  Since they left on Saturday, though, I’ve just been non-stop working which has opened a whole new can of worms.

My sleep schedule is BEYOND messed up.  I woke up on Saturday about 10am after a few hours of sleep because I wanted to be awake to say goodbye to my family.  I then wound up crashing on the couch at a certain point of the night after getting some work done. From there I went to sleep around 10am on Sunday, I woke up at 5pm and then was awake and working until 12pm Monday afternoon.  I got some sleep and woke up around 9pm then solidly worked until 2pm the next afternoon, fell asleep, woke up at 9pm and worked until 6am, went back to sleep and woke up today at 4pm.  Needless to say, my schedule is completely screwed up.  Now, waking up around 4pm isn’t that abnormal for me as I’m accustomed to going to sleep around 7am, but having the freakishly long days kind of threw me for a loop. There really isn’t enough coffee in the day to keep me going anymore AND at the moment it’s taken me a few looks on the taskbar to realize what day it is.

In any event, I have a WooCommerce site to get started on, and lord only knows how many edits for other sites cause I’ve been afraid to look into any business emails tonight.  I just had a cup of coffee and I’m patiently waiting for it to kick in so I can get my second wind.

Move quicker damn it!

Tuesday, February 25th, 2014

We’re still at the mercy of the bank.  We’ve had to add a second co-signer to the loan because the first one (while well qualified) pays rent so they then needed to re-crunch the numbers.  The issue now is the fact that they sent all of this to us on Monday 24th, which is the day when we’re supposed to be letting the current home owners know we’re “good to go” and they can work on getting their stuff out of the house so we can close on Friday. We, unfortunately, have not gotten the green light – all we got was an extra 60 pages of a contract that needed to be filled out and sent back ASAP – now we’re not going to know a damn thing until tomorrow afternoon.

It’s a 50/50 chance that we’ll be closing on Friday, but at this point I’m leaning more towards next week based on how royally we’ve been screwed this entire time. I, personally, could care less about how this is effecting the current home owners because they lied way too much for me TO CARE.  I got this sob story about how they’re going into assisted living, can’t afford their bills, yada yada. Meanwhile, they were just downsizing and moving to a different community.  Why lie? Why even concoct a story? You didn’t need to say a damn thing to us, you could have been honest and said that the house was just too big for you to handle. Why even come up with some bull shit to try to tug the heart strings? You’re not dealing with a native Delawarian.. you’re dealing with a New Yorker who couldn’t give two shits about you at the end of the day anyway!

So by tomorrow afternoon (fingers crossed) we’ll know our closing date. I’m still hoping it’s Friday just because I’m itching to get the hell in there and scrub the crap out of the place but who knows. Either way I have a stock of cleaning supplies already written down that I need to buy and bring over there. I just want start the cleaning process, have Comcast come in to wire the place and the rest is cake.

I haven’t even started packing, it’s not because I’ve been too lazy to get started it’s because the “Waiting Game” aspect of things has lead me to believe that this wasn’t actually going to happen for us. Is there a lot to pack? Sure. Is it something I could knock out in a few days? Yes. That’s the beauty part. When you own the home and you’re not leaving a “Rental” property – you’ve got a little time to get yourself in and settled. So by default the first task is to get the place cleaned up, while cleaning have anything installed by an outside company that needs to be installed (In our case it’s just Comcast).  Then we’ll be heading over to a few furniture places because the only pieces of furniture we currently own are a bed and two desks. Clearly in a 2900 sqft home we’re going to need a lot more.  So, first purchase will be a couch, and then I’m hitting up every Thrift Store I can find to get the rest of the house furnished. I will NEVER buy a ‘used’ sofa from anyone. You never know where the sofa really came from, and I don’t want the headache of scrubbing things down to the point I’m stripping the color off the fabric because it’s just not clean enough for me to have any piece of mind.  So the sofa will be brand new, where as anything wood based (dining room table/chairs, end tables, coffee table, dresser, nightstands, etc) will come from thrift shops and flea markets. Why? Cause I know I can easily scrub them down and I’ll probably wind up stripping the paint off and staining them anyway.

Do I have it all figured out? of course. Will things go any faster because I have them figured out? Of course not! Sean’s a complete impatient mess right now, but I know he just wants to get this whole process over and done with so we can focus on more important things. I typically will keep the frustration levels to myself, but that’s because I know when it comes to certain things I can handle stress better. I also know I can handle paperwork better, but when you’re exposed to that stuff it’s just something you get used to.

The only thing that I’m increasingly growing impatient about is the fact that Bella’s hair is way too long and she’s been panting like all holy hell because it’s always so damn warm in this house. I spend a lot of time in the bedroom with the window open and the overhead fan on but that doesn’t help her comfort levels. I want to know the exact monetary numbers we’re dealing with for the closing on this house so that I know if there’s an extra $100 in the budget for me to get her groomed just so that’s one less thing to stress about.

A big stress factor right now is work has really, really slowed down to the point that it’s scaring me. I’ve always got little things to do but there’s nothing to really solidly keep myself as busy as I’d prefer. The only benefit to this is it’s given me time to get a new template together for AGn Designs, to replace the “Temporary Site” that’s been sitting there for two years that I freaking hate. I still have like five or six pages to format though, so lord only knows when that will be completed.

Either way, my inbox is showing me that I have a few things to accomplish today so hopefully I’ll be able to get them knocked out and keep my mind off everything with the house.

In the home stretch!

Wednesday, February 5th, 2014

We’re making strides on the “Home Ownership” front.  We’re set on our final sale price, we’re mailing a huge packet containing all information over to our broker, and, per our contract, we’re set to close on Feb 28th, 2014. I’m super excited, I’ve been on a bookmarking rampage for everything we’re going to need for the house. The only thing we’re really waiting on now is the word back from the bank confirming that we do, in fact, have the loan and it’s then full steam ahead.

The owners of the home, being as they had to pay February’s mortgage anyway, set the 28th as their closing date. This gives him time to clear all of their stuff, but it also gives us about 15-20 days to make sure the bank has whatever they need to move forward.

I am a little annoyed with the owners at the moment, but at the same time it’s just one of those “part of buying a home” bullshit things.  We’re given this sob story about how they’re going into an assisted living facility and can’t come down on their price any more than they already have. Okay, as a compassionate person I understand that. But when your realtor (who also happens to be your daughter in law) lets it slip that you’re just ‘downsizing’ and moving to another community… kind of ticks me the hell off. Especially based on the fact that they aren’t fixing a damn thing inside of the house. The roof being replaced is a cost that falls on Sean and I in the very near future, the plumbing issues also fall on us, and lord only knows how much scrubbing I’ll have to do before I’m even remotely comfortable with bringing my furniture into the home.  It’s random things that are ticking me off, but in the end it’ll be something that’s MINE and I should just let it go.  Doesn’t mean I’m not ticked off about it… but I’ll just let it go.

On the work front, it’s the same old shit… different day.  I’m giving myself random 20 minute intervals for getting a new template up on AGnDesigns. Traffic has picked up a little after some SEO changes. The template currently on the site was only meant to be a temporary one so the fact that it’s been there for two years is proof that I just need to get my ass in gear. I’m drawing inspiration from a few different sites. I did find a template on TemplateMonster that I’m completely in love with but the entire thing is flash based and after doing some research the transitions that I was really hoping on just can’t be recreated with jQuery so I walked away from it completely.

That should, hopefully, be something that changes in the future.  School was put on hold for life-shit and hopefully after we’re settled in the house and we know what our bills are I’ll be able to get back into school and get things completed. I, oddly enough, am looking forward to getting into the semester that covers Flash. As much as I like the idea of jQuery, there are just some things where Flash makes more sense (especially when you’re dealing with compatibility issues once you factor WordPress into a site!). So that’ll happen soon enough and things will be smooth sailing again.

So yea, mortgage is under way, hopefully I’ll be handed the keys on the 28th and all will be right with the world.

Back to work I go!

Productive as shit…

Sunday, January 12th, 2014

My sleep schedule has been completely messed up. I’ve been waking up between 7pm and 8pm consecutively for the past week. Being under the weather didn’t really help the situation but there was really nothing I could do about it.  Last night, however, for some reason I completely passed out at about 3am. Surprising to me, of course, considering I’ve been going to bed around noon for a while.  I woke up at 6am, refreshed as all holy hell and could not get back to sleep.  So I basically said “screw it, I’ll just get up” and my day hasn’t freaking stopped.

I finished a HTML to WP conversion, I took down all of the Christmas crap, did 5 loads of laundry and vacuumed the house.  I still need to do the dishes and get the kitchen cleaned up but I just finished closing out all of my email and backing out of databases and I’m a good five minutes from completely falling asleep in this chair.  It’s not even a comfortable chair, that’s when I know I’m dead-ass tired.

I’m hoping to hold on long enough for the dryer to stop so I can at least shift the loads around. If I can get the last one into the dryer then it doesn’t really matter when I pass out… I just don’t like the idea of clothes sitting in the washing machine over night. I just feel like they get moldy faster than one would think.

I’m about to chug some coffee just to hold me over for a little while. :: massive yawn ::

Keepin’ it movin…

Thursday, October 10th, 2013

Even though I have these overwhelming moments of “I haven’t gotten a damn thing done…” I’m still movin, movin, movin. I’m cranking things out as fast as I can, and bouncing from site to site and email to email on a regular basis. I still don’t feel like I’ve actually fulfilled anything I set out to do though. Clearly I’m accomplishing something being as all of the bills are paid and there’s still money left to do what I please… it just doesn’t seem like it’s enough anymore.

I’ve been exhausted lately, it doesn’t matter how much I actually sleep – I just never feel like it was a restful one. I don’t know if it’s the change in weather (constant Hot to Cold extremes) or the fact that the sun hasn’t come out in a few days but my eyelids are insistent on just closing completely and forgetting about the tasks at hand right now.

I’m completely 100% overbooked, the workload has got me shaking in my fuzzy slippers and there’s all kinds of pressure from every direction to just get it done where quality and speed are heavily utilized.  For just one client there’s 4 major sites to work on, each bigger than the last and of course there’s tight deadlines on every single one of them.  With another client, she was MIA for the past year and a half and all of a sudden I’m now supposed to RUSH to cater to her because she’s finally on the ball.  She still owes me like $2,500 from the last chunk of work done for her, but swears she’ll have everything paid in full upon completion. I just wish that “End” was closer.  I did just finish up on Adam’s halloween site – Oct31st.org.  I wish it could have been completed sooner, but with everything going on and the fact that I’m over-scheduled, it really took my time away from it. I feel bad for the delays, but there’s nothing I could have done about it.

Right now I’m looking down at my Thunderbird icon on the dock and it’s showing over 135 emails. Knowing that I already did the usual daily spam clean-out, I’m scared to see the requests I have waiting for me.  I need to put in about 8 hours to complete one site today, and then there’s another site that should take me about 15-20 hours that needs be done by Saturday – I just hope I have the strength to get it all done.  In theory it’s just 3 8-hour days and everything is fine, but when you’ve got other things to take care of as well, those 8 hours turn into 16 and then your brain fries and it’s time to crash.  There isn’t enough coffee to keep my eyelids open anymore.

Excitement Note:  We’re looking to buy a house!
Tomorrow (Friday 11th) is going to be beyond hectic, I’ll be on the phone all morning to get appointments setup, and get some banking needs taken care of and then at 2pm I have an appointment with a realtor to do a walk-thru on a house that I’ve been eyeing for a little while that only recently (like three days ago – recently) went back on the market.  Sean and I went to TD Bank to try to get a mortgage on our own, but since it’s a manufactured home and not on it’s own land TD didn’t approve us for the mortgage. The lady was very surprised that the pre-approval didn’t come right up considering she saw our proof of income and said “If someone who’s making $30,000 every 5 months can’t get a mortgage – something’s seriously wrong with our systems!”  So we’ll get that “This is why you weren’t approved” letter in the mail in a few weeks, in the meantime I called around to numerous banks in the area to find out who actually would provide the funding on a pre-fab home, and I found ONE bank, out of fucking 12!!  Since I just took an 11 point hit on my credit for even applying for a loan (which is something TD should figure out how to reinstate since they should properly train their employees prior to them completing an entire application knowing that this house isn’t on its own land), I now am well into the “Poor” rating for credit scores.  Sean took the same 11 point hit on his credit, but his was in the higher 690’s, so he still falls under the “You’re OK” mark.  His father, very graciously, has offered to co-sign for Sean, and since his score is in the high 800’s, there should be absolutely no doubt that the loan will be approved.  He recently sold a house, and when they ask about ‘savings accounts’ he can say that he’s got a few hundred grand in his, and even though Sean doesn’t have anything in his – I’m sure the numbers will balance out.

Now the rush is that we’re trying to bring as much money together as we possibly can.  Between closing costs, downpayment, and the initial “Get it all hooked up and turned on so we can LIVE in the house” aspect of things – we’re gonna need about 15 grand.  We’ve only got 3700 right now, so needless to say the next two months are going to be a hectic dance of “Work, Deal with Broker, Work more… keep working, working, working, working and working!”.

I’m just crossing my fingers that we can actually accomplish it.  We’ve spent so long living under someone else’s roof during the entire length of our relationship (to date) that it’s time to just start the next chapter. It’s a jump that we absolutely need to take, we’re both scared about it (obviously) but we’re going to do it together and no matter what happens we’ll always have each other to lean on.

In any event… time to get back to work. :: head desk ::

This is just killin’ me…

Thursday, September 5th, 2013

I unfortunately needed to put the Little Boy back outside. While he is generally a really good cat, he’s also an animal that’s spent the last two years on the street and wouldn’t adjust very well to permanent indoor life.  A certain time of night he would be itching to go outside, and then he wound up lashing out by attacking Bella and Meow-Meow.  Typically I wouldn’t care about the playful aspect of his personality, but when it goes from playing to claws, and his eyes completely change. We all decided it would be best to keep him as an outdoor animal to ensure that he’s getting the frisky side of him taken care of in his usual environment, and then also making sure he has a proper place to relax.

So the bench outside has a nice warm blanket on it, and he’s got a little feeding station.  He doesn’t stray far from the house, and it’s kind of funny to watch him follow Bella and I whenever I take her out for a walk.  Usually he’ll get to a certain point where he stops following, but this morning he completely went around two blocks with me and her, and even used the bathroom when he needed to.  Not many people can say that they can walk their cat and dog at the same time, so it’s nice to be unique once in a while lol.

Work has been hectic, I’m working on 6 different sites at once and of course they’re all due at the same freaking time.  There are projects that I’ve had to leave pending because I just don’t have the time to transfer over to them and no matter how many times I post something on Twitter/Facebook/Freelancer I can’t freaking find anyone who knows what they’re doing in order to help me out.

I need someone who understands proper HTML5/CSS3 compliance, who also has some type of a jQuery backend. Even if they don’t write it themselves, they need to know how to work with existing scripts (which I can actually provide to them anyway).  From there, that same person would need to know how to code for WordPress.  Anyone can turn any theme into a WordPress theme, but I need someone who understands that you need to have EVERYTHING inside of WordPress as clients are not to touch the actual .php files themselves.  So the use of Widgets and Advanced Custom Fields (primarily the repeater fields) are required as well.

Now, while that may not seem like very much – you’d be surprised at how hard it is for me to find someone capable of handling the load.  It’s driving me absolutely crazy.  I don’t understand how there seems to be NO ONE around who can do it.

Help? 🙁

Took ya long enough!

Tuesday, July 30th, 2013

It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally got a new theme up on k.nu. The previous one was nice and all but I needed a change. I was waiting on inspiration, and oddly enough I got it from a damn game on my Tablet.  There’s a game called “Fashion Story” that I’m absolutely sick of playing but the color scheme for the game itself inspired me. When I showed it to Adam he said “OOH SUPER CUTE” and I told him to build something for me. He sent me a PSD with a base template, I added to it and went crazy with little tweaks and mods here and there and BOOM = New Template!

I mirrors templates that I’d done in the past. Everyone now, sticking with HTML5/CSS is going for the centered layouts with muted, but bold, colors. I wanted something completely different. There was a theme I created when I was on dork.com (over 10 years ago) that really reminded me of the theme that Adam started for me. Back then my coding skills were no where near what they are now, I think I tried to figure out what DIV tags were for that template because I’d previously used Tables and multiple frames to get everything to load. God, do you remember coding with FRAMES, that had to be the absolute WORST way to build a damn website – but no one knew any better, they just wanted to get as much information as possible onto a single page and that was the only way to do it.

I’m actually very happy that I was able to get this up and running. I know it’s not an extravagant WOW type of template, but I’m happy with it and that’s what matters.  I’ve been so busy working on numerous other things that having the downtime to get it done is really what mattered to me.  I started putzing around with it about a month ago, and was able to put the final touches on it for the last few days. I’d finished up a site that I was working on with Adam (for Kimberly J. Brown – remember her from Halloweentown?).  The site itself is ready to go in a Development folder we’re just waiting on the GreenLight to go live with it. It’s a fantastic change from the design she was previously using. It’s more hip, modern, and not located on blogger. This chick has been fully upgraded to WordPress and I’m hoping she’s super happy with the site.

My issue now is I’m at a ‘low point’ with work. So this means I’ll be working on random odd-and-end jobs to help Sean out, but I don’t have anything to personally handle on my own.  I know I’m helping him out with a site tomorrow, but then I’m jumping onto the total revamp of AGn Designs, it’s in desperate need of a facelift and I have quite a few sites to add to the portfolio.  It really sucks that I have so many NDA’s with clients, there were numerous sites that I’ve worked on that I’ve been so proud of but don’t have the ability to list them in my portfolio. One day I’ll get those kinds of sites for my own doing so I can joyfully display them, but for now I’ll just keep chugging away.

I do know that my usual boss has about 6 sites to send to me, but he’s been so damn busy with everything going on that they’re delayed at the moment.  I just hope that all of the sites he claims are coming to me aren’t going to show up mid-month in August. Our friend Colin is coming down to visit for 5 days and I really don’t want to be working the whole time he’s here. It wouldn’t be fair to him, and I already have a lot of stuff planned for us. Working would completely cut into that.

The upside to today, other than completing this, is I was able to get outside for a little while and do some much needed lawn maintenance. It’s been so long since I weed-wacked that I couldn’t even see where the bushes began and the grass ended. The grass grew straight up and over all of the trim/separators we have outside. I wacked that down straight to the dirt so I know I’ll have a few more weeks before I need to get out there again. Grass grows so damn quickly this time of year, I hate it. I wish I had a gravel yard … less maintenance.

The second upside – I found a site that makes all kinds of custom stuff for your business. It’s not vista-print – I effin’ hate them. It’s a newer site called BuildASign.com. I ordered a custom license plate, because Delaware is one of those states where you only need to have one plate on the car, so I’m utilizing the real estate that my car actually has (meaning lack of outside decoration) and I got myself a plate with AGn Designs logo printed on it. I did have to partially cancel my order with them because I chose the wrong size window decals – they were way too small for the amount of information that I actually put onto it. That was completely my fault, I know I was paying attention when I was setting everything up but I honestly didn’t even think about it being too small until my Mom had mentioned “Really, 3×5?”.  So now I’m working on getting everything larger so it’s easier to read.  The license plate should be here by the 15th. Hopefully today I’ll be ordering the larger sized decals and have them around the 15th/16th as well.

Anyone interested in a free AGn Designs window decal? I can offer free advertising to anyone interested in pasting it onto their car to aid me in a little free advertising as well.  Shoot me an email through the Contact page if you’re interested.

In any event, it’s knocking on 6am and I have an inbox to clear out so I can get some shut-eye.

I hate wires!

Sunday, July 14th, 2013

I wish I could understand why, even living in a wireless world, I can’t fricken escape them! I just spent the last two hours pretty much ripping every single wire out of the walls/surge protectors so I could properly reorganize.  With the addition of the new computer (had to purchase a Windows machine, clients were complaining about cross-browser/cross-platform crap) I was really crunched for space on my desk, and this is something I desperately need so I’m not stuck with the overflow of paperwork I seem to accumulate for some reason.  I wound up moving the tower to the shelf next to me but that then required the printer being moved to the shelf above me, and then anything that I had on that top shelf needed to move to one behind me (that Sean put up on the wall last night), and then I needed to drag wires from underneath the house so I could move the cable box. Thank god there was extra slack.  But for now, everything WIRE related is pretty much set on where it’s going.  The only issue is having to get all of the daily essentials reorganized since everything else was shifted around.

Even with an excessive amount of shelving I feel like I don’t have enough room to properly organize this room.  I’ll wholeheartedly admit that the bed is just way too damn big for the room, but when you factor in that Sean is in a completely different room for the entire day (his private office space) there’s really no reason why I can’t make things work in here.  The only thing he’s got in here is clothes for crying out loud.  Meanwhile I’m always sitting here looking at wires and crap that just needs to be put away and I can’t, for the life of me, figure out where it all freaking needs to go.

I really need a cup of coffee, that’s got to be why my brain isn’t working right now.  I haven’t even looked at my emails today, it’s Sunday I need a damn break. Tomorrow is a completely different story, I know that I’m already completely overloaded and I also know there’s more stuff coming in.

On the upside… I’m about 50% done with the new template for Krissy.nu, took me a few years but I’ll finally have something new up.  I wish I could go back to a time when there was a new theme every month and the main income was just from sponsored posting.  Can’t do that anymore, there’s just no damn time and sitting at a computer for any longer than I already do would drive me crazy and completely kill my back.

I think it’s time for that cup of coffee.

Busy…busy bee…

Tuesday, June 25th, 2013

Life hasn’t stopped in the past few weeks, I’m honestly surprised I have an ounce of downtime to even sit here and blog but I’m doing it, and the only way to get through it will be numbers…

#1 – A new pet…
While outside for my usual 4am smoke break I couldn’t help but hear excessive meowing coming from the lawn across the street. I believed it to be either a cat in heat, or one about to give birth. So, of course, you could imagine my surprise when there was all of a sudden a little face coming out from under my car begging for attention. Me, being an animal lover by default (one of my weaknesses), I figured she’s super tiny, more than likely a kitten and very thin so she’s got to be hungry. So I threw some of Bella’s food at her – she scoffed it and kind of went away but was lingering because she was clearly feeling us out (Sean and I were both outside at this point).  She lingered so much to the point that she wound up walking around on the deck while we were sitting there.  For an animal this social there was no way in hell she was a ferral cat because if they aren’t socialized within the first 2 months of birth they typically will never like people. Obviously someone was caring for this little thing in the past but lord knows where that owner is now (it’s been 3 weeks, and to date there’s been no one looking for her).  After she hopped up in my lap I instantly knew that this had to be someones cat, even if they were only feeding her outside, she absolutely had to be someones cat.  So all of us (Karen, Sean and myself) continued to check on her during the course of the next few days. She was easy to find, she never left the porch.  Karen and I brought her to the vet where she was treated with frontline and given a distemper. The vet confirmed my thought of her being between 6 and 12 months old, she’s way too tiny to not be a kitten – no matter how malnourished she potentially was.  We kept her, regardless of the fact that Sean’s allergic to her and she was scared shitless of Bella (bull in china shop that dog is, I swear).  We got her all setup in Karen’s room, she’s been overloaded with toys and the luxury of sleeping in a super fluffy King bed with Karen (who has a feather topper on it so it’s extra damn fluffy, like sleeping on a cloud).  There’s no way in hell this cat’s going anywhere, she’s too comfortable… even though none of us are…

Why?

#2 – FUCKING FLEAS
This cats infested with fleas, well – was.  Her time spent on the deck was enough for a few of them to jump off of her and go under the house and then I’ve been playing exterminator for the past three weeks.  My legs are bitten to crap from mosquitos because I was out on the deck every single day scrubbing it down with borax, bleach, dawn (which supposedly kills them) and ammonia.  Thank goodness I was outside considering I was technically making mustard gas just to get rid of the damn bugs.  Nothing I was doing was working and we couldn’t get the exterminator to the house thanks to the absolutely dreadful weather we’ve been having.  Thankfully I did start to get things under control, and damn do we have the cleanest deck in the complex.  Mother Nature, instead of working against us (in numerous different ways) decided to work in our favor this past week and on Friday the exterminator came in and sprayed down the whole exterior of the house. For two days I didn’t see a single damn bug, and they had plenty of opportunity to pop back up. THANK GOD FOR EXTERMINATORS!  The inside of the house was treated a week and a half prior to them treating the outside. The first guy showed up on a day when it was pouring and there was a moat around the house, but he got through it and got us started on killing everything off inside of the house.  It didn’t 100% do the trick because there was still the massive infestation outside. So thankfully with the second coat on the carpet, and the coat put on the exterior of the house and the whole perimeter of the property – we’re good to go… just a bit itchy from all of the bites but at least I know they’re gone!

#3 – WORK SUCKS
I’ve been non-fucking-stop with the tight deadlines. My eyes are burning from staring at the screen all day and each deadline is getting tighter than the last. The thing that kills me, and never ceases to amaze me… Clients will take 3-4 days to get back to you and then decide they want something done in 24-hours or they won’t pay for it. Listen up dickwads… your lack of ability to read your email instead of sexting with your wife/girlfriend would probably make ME less bitchy when you do ask for something… just saying.

#4 – Travel, Travel, Travel
I feel like for the past year I’ve spent more time in my car than I have anywhere else.  While this might not seem odd, for someone who works from-home… it kind of us. Either I’m up in Baltimore, or just over the MD border on Delmarva or up on Long Island… I feel like it just doesn’t stop and I should always be prepared for a long ass car ride. The most recent one was yesterday, Sean and I are up in NY for my father and sister’s birthdays this week.  We’re rushing back on the 30th so I can get Bella to the groomer on the 2nd, and hopefully have enough time to completely clean up the house for the 4th when our friend Colin is coming down to stay with us until the 9th. And yes, there are days in between but this isn’t like driving an hour out east to visit family like we used to do. It’s a 4.5 hour car ride and when you’re dealing with traffic that number has the ability to be doubled at any given time.  Case and point – driving up here yesterday took us over 6 hours. Why? We had a nice storm following us up and major construction on the NJ Turnpike so of course getting to Long Island in a timely manor was completely thrown out the window. To make matters worse, the poor dog is in desperate need of a grooming and it was a super muggy day so it took forever for the car to properly cool off so she could be comfortable.  I felt so bad for the poor thing, she must have had a full 20 oz. bottle of water just for the ride up – she never drinks that much but could not stop panting, and even though we’re in a relatively cool house now (being maintained at 68*) she’s still panting.  I can’t wait to get her shaved.

#5 – Heat Wave…
The official first major heat-wave of the NY season (to my knowledge) is starting tomorrow. Of course I’m extremely grateful that Colin helped me to recharge the AC in the car tonight because the amount of time it takes for the damn car to cool off was pissing me off to no end.  It should not take an hour before I’m comfortable in the car when the AC is running at full blast.  It does eventually get cold, 6 hours in the car yesterday my toes were turning purple because we were absolutely frozen trying to get the dog to cool off. So you could imagine my surprise when I went into the car just after he finished with the booster and it was already cold. THANK GOD FOR COLIN!  I could not have managed getting around while I was up here without that AC being taken care of.  NO WAY IN HELL.

#6 – The week ahead..
I know off the bat that there’s two major deadlines to complete, and to top that off I’ve tacked 3 deadlines onto it that are a little more on the tricky side but at least I’ve got help.  The two major ones are under NDA with the usual boss so I can’t discuss those, but the 3 smaller ones are two personal deadlines and one kind of big deal for me.  The personal ones are knu and agndesigns. I know I talk about that all the time but I’ve finally been getting off of my ass and doing something about it.  Adam, my bestie from the Westie, has created a base theme for me utilizing a few colors that I threw at him and I finally got around to coding it so that should be up on k.nu within the next week or so.  He also created a theme for AGnDesigns for me as well based off of a few themes I fell in love with but couldn’t quite figure out how to place the sections on the page without it looking completely off balance. He took care of both of them for me and I can’t help but thank him for it.

He’s part of my “Help”, we’ve partnered up and he handles the Photoshop stuff and I code everything.  Case and point would be his domain, rockchild.net, he came up with the concept – I made it work. jQuery is in every nook and cranny of that site but it made it flashy and that’s what he was going for.  He throws a few projects my way whenever they require coding – I would love to throw him design based stuff because he can get it done so much faster but when you’re under contract it’s hard to pass things off to someone else when you know you’re the one who’s supposed to be logging the hours and need to have the ability to answer every single question on the fly at any point of the day.

The other help, which is connected to the last project, is actually my Mom.  I’ll be building the Fire Dept. website over the next few days and she’s comfortable enough playing around with just about anything you throw at her so she’s in the process of getting her bearings on WordPress as she’ll be responsible for all of the content that goes up on the site.  I’ve been able to come up with a fairly awesome template for them, jQuery up the ass, all kinds of galleries, custom post types, advanced custom fields, and fancy templates for the mailing lists that will be built into the site.  A lot of people don’t realize how advanced you can get with WordPress. It’s not just a blog, or standard CMS anymore – the possibilities really are endless.  Case and point would more than likely be Dover Downs, that site is 100% powered by WordPress.  Not many people believe me when I say it… but take a look at the source code – you’d be surprised.

In any event, it’s knocking on 1am which (oddly enough) is about two hours past my bedtime. My schedule has completely switched by 12 hours. Usually I was going to bed at 10am but now I’m ready to pass out by 10pm. I’m up by 8am (at the latest) and working all day. The plus side is I’ll be able to get myself to the beach more often this summer, I only live 2 freaking miles from it after all… and my pale ass is in desperate need of a tan.  My arms are nice and dark, but my legs (no matter what I do) are still pale as hell.  I always say that my legs are Irish and my arms are Italian, I’m typically burnt on the bottom and as dark as one of those Jersey Shore fuckers (without the Orange tint, obviously).

Yea… so I renewed….

Sunday, April 14th, 2013

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 really should be working…

Monday, March 11th, 2013

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.

What happened?

Thursday, February 21st, 2013

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.

Valentines Day

Monday, February 11th, 2013

db5391406cb811e28eb922000a1fbc88_7Sean was super sweet this year and bought me a 17″ MacBook Pro.  As much as I absolutely love it, being as it’s everything I’ve ever wanted – I’m also upset.  See, work has blown up and I’m back to working on five different sites at once – trying to pace myself through them instead of rushing through them this way I don’t royally mess something up. With that, I’ve yet to be able to really be able to enjoy this new lil super gadget.  I’m also having one of hell of a time patching some programs, no serial numbers I come across are actually working the way they’re supposed to and it’s driving me nuts to go have to repeat the steps numerous times every time I boot a program.  I even pulled the numbers off of the iMac (which work fine) but can’t have the same result here.  I just wish there was a physical ‘patch’ file the way there is on Windows but I’m sure I’ll figure out a way to get around it in the future.  For now I’ll just deal with it, and usually it only happens when I need to open the programs so just getting past them once and leaving the program open should pretty much do the trick for the time being.

I was very surprised to even receive the gift, honestly.  Our goal for the year was to pay down and pay off as much of our credit card debt as possible so that we can start banking something into savings to be used towards a home purchase later on down the road (yea, we’re back at that step in our lives together). So you can imagine my surprise when I dozed off one night and he woke me up by hopping into bed and pulling the super cuteness of “Guess what I just bought you?” Then the “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you since it’s not V-day yet” conversation.  So I got it out of him, which is never hard cause he loves to blab a good secret and knows I’m not big on being surprised.  (I’ve got OCD and I’m anal retentive about doing things a certain way – bad combo if you want to surprise me LOL)  So he told me that he signed up for another credit card and was approved for financing on the Macbook, and there was still more than enough left over for him to be able to order an iPad for himself.  The company has six months deferred payment and I’m not sure on the deferred interest but we anticipate having everything banked to be able to pay it off in July anyway.  So of course I was surprised, and super happy and I’m still super happy because it’s everything I’d ever wanted and more.  They aren’t making them this large anymore and I don’t care what anyone says – no matter what resolution you put things on the overall size of the screen does make a huge difference.  I’m not just putzing around on Facebook on my Macbook to be trendy – I’m utilizing it for everything Adobe – and it will really come in handy for school in the future too considering all the work I’m anticipating for the next semester anyway.  Next on the docket there is all Flash related.  I’m so into jQuery right now that Flash is probably going to completely throw me off my game but at least I’ll be able to recreate some of the funky flash-based headers I’ve been seeing around the net to be used for future clients – the only upside but whatevs.

So the mac got here last Friday and it hasn’t really left my side.  I’ve spent quite a bit of time in bed with it because I’ve got my fancy tray table to keep it sturdy and give me an actual spot for the mouse pad that doesn’t require it sitting on top of the blanket (not sure if you’ve ever tried to draw a straight line in Photoshop while your mouse is on the blanket but it’s NOT easy).  Sean, a few years ago, bought me a tray table for like $20 from Walmart, and it’s been my buddy every single time I’ve been working from bed because of my various back problems.  In this case, however, working in bed is actually causing the back problems because I’m not properly supported and sitting up the way I would be in a regular office chair.  The issue with that is the fact that my office chair is leaning like a bitch and I might have to actually cash in the warranty and pick up a new one anyway.  So for now, I’m setup in the kitchen until I can knock out a substantial amount of work tonight.  Too much needs to get done for me to worry about how often I need to stand up and stretch before I can jump back into something. That’ll throw me off my game and I can’t afford that right now.

The other upside to the month is a long-overdue client finally paid up and I was woken up yesterday to Sean sneaking around the room and opened my eyes to him saying “Are you super comfy sleeping in our bed?” Of course I was until he started talking to me (can’t function without coffee or a cig in the morning – don’t talk to me unless I’ve been outside for at least 10 minutes).  He went on to say that the client paid up and he just paid off the bed.  GE Credit must be super pissed at me because I’ve never paid an ounce of interest on my purchases before. LOL.  So yea, even though we bought it in November for about $1600, it’s completely paid off as of February and there was 6 months deferred interest on it so that wouldn’t have kicked in for a few months anyway. MWAHAHA!!

So yea, in a nutshell it’s been a pretty good year financially so far.  I’m not one of those people who chooses a ‘health kick’ as a new years resolution – I know my lack of a ‘drive’ and stick with the stuff that I know I can control. Since money makes the world go round, of course that would be the one to focus on anyway. So, our goal for this year was to pay off as much as humanly possible and so far we’ve paid off about $2,000 worth of credit cards since Jan 1st.  My only issue is there is still people who owe us a substantial amount of money and if they would get off their butts to pay us back we could continue to pay down our debt, but they’re pussy footing around and that’s just enough to be annoying for us.

It’s our ultimate goal to only have the car, insurance and the cellphone bill going out every month.  Hopefully by August that will be a possibility so we can start pushing all of the usual money that we shell out every month to bills straight into savings. The goal is to have about $25,000 in savings to put down on a house, and of course I’m super picky about how I want the house to look and the features it has because an in-law suite is mandatory for me.  It doesn’t necessarily need to be a separate dwelling, even the option to setup the basement as kind of an apartment for my dad is all that matters to me. I was looking in the general Rehoboth area, but I’ve found a few down in Selbyville and up in Dover that I fell head over heals for and now at least have a starting point.  The requirements are in-law type of a suite/dwelling – a pool (or room for one) – no HOA cause I think they’re assholes and a gourmet kitchen with plenty of room for huge family dinners because that’s what us guineas do.

Now it’s just the matter of coming up with the money for it, so I guess it’s time to get off of blogging and get back into Dreamweaver.

PS: For the last 6 months I’ve wanted to come up with a new them for krissy.nu, I may wind up just converting to the 2012 WP theme and slapping a header image in there – who knows. But one will be coming soon, I promise!

Blogging while Driving…

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013

OK, so I’m not actually the one driving but today was one of those days where I had no choice but to boot up my slowly dying laptop and bring it with me.  This morning we woke up to find out that Karen wasn’t going to her Chemo treatment today because of super high blood pressure and the lack of ability to breath.  We wound up going to the cancer center so she could have the IV removed from her arm (they leave it in cause she goes three days in a row and its a pain to have to redo the IV every time).  We both went home for a little while to get some food in our systems and now all three of us (Karen, Sean and myself) are heading up to Christiana Hospital up in Newark for a kind of “rushed” visit to her cardiologist.  She’s to a point where she’s no longer going to be doing the Chemo (based on her choice) due to the uncomfortable and concerning side effects.  She’s done 3.5 of 4 treatments, and that’s where things are going to end I guess.  She’s a grown woman who can make her own choices, and she has.

So why am I even online?  Welp, I’m trying to complete a site by the Wednesday AM deadline but still have about 8 hours work to complete, knowing that we’re going to be out of the house for at least another six hours, I had no choice in the matter.  Thankfully my cellphone gives me the ability to “hotspot” myself so it’s been pretty easy to keep the pace of coding and uploading without worrying about anything. Thank god for 4G.

It’s all coming to an end…

Wednesday, December 26th, 2012

With the Holiday’s winding down, I’m finally able to wind down long enough to actually knock out a post. I’ve pretty much been running around like a chicken with my head cut off since Thanksgiving. Work, as I noted previously, is coming in waves, but at the same time the tide hasn’t really gone out. It’s not the luxury of “Ok, I can take some time on this and then bounce back to this.” it’s been “Do it now, and faster!”

@AGnDesigns - Instagram @AGnDesigns - InstagramWhile that can get a little annoying, it also worked to our benefit this year.  All family members were well taken care of for Christmas, Sean and I did spend quite a bit of money on ourselves but it was on things that we both wanted (for a while) and desperately needed.  We know the difference between Wants and Needs – unlike anyone under the age of 16 these days.  We both were in desperate need of new desks.  I had my Mac sitting on a Rubbermaid folding table and being as the 27-inch iMac (2011) weighs about 40 pounds, it was starting to sink down in the middle. To avoid it completely caving in, we went out and got me a new desk.  It’s a super nice one, with plenty of storage and it’s even a little bigger than the previous folding table so I actually got the chance to organize things where I can still completely function without any issues at all. Obviously after Sean spent 7 hours putting this thing together (one warped piece was throwing EVERYTHING off) he gladly took a little nap.  I decorated the drawers with dollar store shelf liner so that they can list a super long time without getting destroyed. There’s more than enough room for the work phone so my boss can stay on my butt too heh. I had it across the room next to the TV because we didn’t have a long enough Ethernet chord, but that was taken care of with the addition of a ZyXEL wireless switch that now sits behind my monitor. It supposedly boosts the Wifi in the house, but turns the Wifi into an actual plugged in connection as well, so I’ve got the phone plugged into it and if I needed to I could plug a printer in to it. It was actually strong enough of a feed to handle Sean’s XBOX 360 for a few weeks as well, so obviously it works how it’s supposed to.

@leprakhauns - InstagramSean, after my desk was put together, began increasingly becoming annoyed with his desk. After drilling into him that he spends way too much time at his desk and needs a new one…. we headed back to Staples a little over a week later (this past weekend actually) to pick up a new desk for him.  The one he’s been using for years was a typical students desk with the metal legs, the pull-out keyboard and the thin table top. One you’d see in college students dorm, basically.  So it was creaking like all holy hell and we wound up replacing that one as well.  He found a nice wide desk that he was in love with, but it unfortunately was not going to fit in the room so he went with one that was closer to size (in comparison to mine).  He’s in love with it as well.  It’s very nice dark wood with a nice sturdy base, some drawers – finito.

While picking up his new desk we browsed around the store a little bit, and came across the Google Nexus 10″ – Android Tablet.  Of course I was instantly in love, this thing is more powerful than the Droid 4’s that we upgraded to in October.  The $500 price tag instantly turned this item into a “Want”. We’ve been bouncing back and forth about Tablet’s for a little while now.  Sean really wanted to see what the new Microsoft Surface was about, I personally had no interest in it at all being as I’m as anti-Windows as you can possibly get these days.  Upgrading to Mac has spoiled me rotten.  I don’t have to deal with excessive upgrades, daily virus/malware scans and the blue screen of death that Microsoft claims to have gotten rid of , but I’ve seen it on both Windows 7 AND 8 because it’s very easy – when you know what you’re doing – to trigger everything Microsoft claims doesn’t exist.

@AGnDesigns - InstagramEither way, we both were playing with the Tablet for a little while and found out when browsing through the Settings to get all of the stats that it was now possible (with Android – Ice Cream) to have multiple users.  This sparked our interest almost instantly, and we both looked at eachother and I was like “I want”, he said “Go get it” (cause he’s fricken awesome) and while I was pulling the car around (cause he was picking up his desk the same day) he paid for both. Turned into an expensive shopping trip on our parts, but we walked out of there with a want, and a need.

 

@AGnDesigns - InstagramWhile he was in the Bedroom for a few hours setting up his new desk, I was prepping the house for Christmas.  I did more baking in the past few days than I ever thought possible. Everything from cookies, to breads, to brownies – you name it, I probably baked it. I went all out for Christmas this year, because I actually had more room to do it. I know that sounds a little weird but it’s true. A huge living room and a big footprint in reference to the front end of the house, things just kind of happened.  The baking was really just phase two, we’d spent quite some time decorating prior to my even pulling the flour out of the cabinet.  So the tree was decorated, the bulk of the outdoors was draped in white lights and the rest of the house had random little touches here and there.  Thankfully, minus today, there was really no wet weather going on outside so my garland didn’t get all mucky and was nice and clean for Christmas. I was also really happy with the tree in the living room. With the combination of Karen’s ornaments and mine everything kind of came together that worked out really nicely.

Traditionally, families open their gifts on Christmas Day. Around here? Christmas Eve. I think it’s a tradition based on impatience but to each their own. Sean cleaned up this year, outside of the gifts purchased for ourselves of course. New shirts, plenty of toys and gadgets to keep him entertained and the guitar I bought him. I know I usually complain to him about how much noise he can make on his own (without an accessory) but at the same time we’ve both had a pretty rough year, him more than I, and it was something I know he always wanted. So I got him a nice stand for it, and a DVD so he can learn how to play and we’ll go from there.

@leprakhauns - InstagramI also got him some new Happy Feet, this is a brand that we were in love with long before Snooki put it on MTV. I’ve always had a pair, and so has he and his were worn to the point that his toes were going to start popping through the bottom. Knowing how comfy they are I changed it up a little bit and got him the “All Around” ones, they look like real sneakers and there’s about an inch-thick rubber sole on the bottom of them. They’re better than my usual outdoor slippers so of course I’ll have to pick up a pair for myself in the future but for now this was all about him and that’s what he got. So that was one pair, and instead of getting him the standard color variations I decided to take a look under the “Animals” section and got him the most ridiculous ones I could find – and his favorite animal – the Penguins. Watching him walk around in these is more amusing than the slippers themselves, but they bring a smile to just about everyone’s face so it was more than worth it.

I cleaned up pretty well myself. Karen got me the “In-Styler” which is a hair straighter I’ve always wanted. I’ve used a friends before and it was probably the fastest way to straighten my hair that I’ve ever used. Some people have mixed feelings on it, others use it totally wrong and wonder how their hair gets wrapped up in it. As long as you read the directions it works out exactly as it’s supposed to, so I’m bringing it up to NY with me while Sean and I head up there for New Years, and after I get a much needed hair cut (via Mom) and dyed (via my sister), I’ll be using it to style my hair. Mom and I are also hitting up the nail salon, I’m long overdue for a manicure AND I desperately need my eyebrows done it’s been almost six months and I just can’t fricken take it anymore.

As usual, I bought myself a few articles of clothing while I was doing some shopping for other family members and had Sean wrap them for me. There was a jacket at Old Navy that I’ve wanted for a while, and I was in need of new yoga-pants so I threw those into the shopping cart as well. He wrapped everything for me, knowing that he was supposed to actually buy the items for me for my Birthday back in October but never did (I oddly got a Christmas tree instead), so he switched Holiday’s but kept the wrapping paper basically lol.

@agndesigns - InstagramThe thing I was surprised about, however, was the ViewSonic 24-inch Monitor that was under the tree. I’ve been using a 17-inch monitor as my “Email Screen” for the past couple of months and it was working out pretty well for me. I kept my email completely on that window and when I was actually in Photoshop or Dreamweaver I would just load project free TV and watch television right on the desk, no complaints at all. So you can imagine my surprise when Sean upgraded me to a much larger screen. This was one of those items that wasn’t on my wants, or my needs – which then turns into a complete and total surprise. And that wraps up Christmas Eve.

Christmas Day was a completely different story – I was non stop in the kitchen. I was cooking/cleaning for a good 8 hours yesterday. I fired up the crock pots early in the day to get the sauce going, the meat balls and sausage wound up in the pot a few hours later and from there it was just the matter of getting the pasta in the water so I could get everything into the oven. I even managed to get a spiral ham in the oven with everything else going on. As soon as dinner was done, I had a quick cig and was back in the kitchen to clean everything up and start baking the brownies. Why? Cause for the most part the cookies from Friday were already gone and the ones that remained were a little on the hard side. I figured that some time of dessert was required on Christmas and I went the double thick double fudge brownie route – more than half of them are gone which – to any cook – damn good sign.

Then Wednesday comes…..

Today was supposed to be a day of packing, working and getting ready to get out of here bright and early tomorrow morning for the long drive up to New York to see friends and my family. Of course that hasn’t been the case at all. Even though I woke up relatively early, I’ve been doing other things (not sure what) but nothing that I had originally set out to do. I do know that a load of dishes was done, all of the laundry was folded but nothing was put into the suit case at all. I also needed to get about 8 or-so hours of Work completed because we’re losing an entire day tomorrow to the drive up to New York and lord only knows what kind of a drive that’s going to be considering the storm sitting over the Northeast right now. Thankfully, in southern Delaware, it’s just rain but unfortunately it’s A LOT of rain and the complex is completely flooded. This was heaps of fun when it came to walking the dog. I don’t mind the drizzle, that wasn’t the problem, the excessive amounts of water just sitting because the complex has absolutely NO proper drainage systems is 4 inches of just mud and twigs to walk through. Poor Bella wound up taking a swim on multiple occasions tonight just because we completely misjudged the depth of the puddles we were going in to. I also found out that my winter boots are absolutely NOT water proof. As soon as I was in up to my ankle, my foot was soaked and of course they’re too big for me so they were rubbing weird and my sock wound up slipping down – needless to say it was not a good experience for anyone involved and Bella only really went to the potty twice (usually she goes about 4 times) but she still wound up having to be thrown into the sink for a nice bath to get her color back to white, she’d turned into a muddy brown fur ball for the bulk of the walk, the puddles did help but it just darkened everything and I wanted her to be nice and clean for Grandpa tomorrow.

We’re hoping to leave here before noon, now no ones gifts are wrapped and I haven’t done any packing but that’s completely the plan for the morning so that we can get up there in a decent amount of time and have the time to stop somewhere on the turnpike to pick up a roast beef sandwich from one of the Roy Rogers along the way for my father because that’s his one and only request for my time in New Jersey on the way to Long Island. I’m also needing to make a stop while we’re down here to pick up some cigs (for peoples xmas gifts) and some fudge from Candy Kitchen as I promised other family members that I would.

I can honestly say… there’s no way in hell we’re getting out of here by noon…that’s for damn sure.

We’re only going to be up in NY for about a week. Sean’s father is staying down here with his mother while we’re up there, she’s got 2 Chemo treatments this week and then unfortunately she’s going to lose a week to sickness because she’s not getting the third day of extra fluids because they supposedly don’t do that on Saturdays around here, and she didn’t go in today – for whatever reason – to start the scheduled 3-day cycle. So now she’s going to lose a day and I just hope that George keeps pushing large glasses of water onto her so that she can stay hydrated enough to get through the nausea that’s going to completely consume her for the next week.

We’re ringing in the New Year and NY and I personally couldn’t be happier. Being down here for the last six months I’ve really missed my friends and family and just can’t wait to get home. Even if that means I’m not sleeping tonight just so we can get out of here tomorrow – I’ll do whatever it takes.

I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be able to get into my Dashboard for a while since the work is still piling up and this is a ‘mini vacation’ for me, so I’m wishing everyone a Happy and Healthy New Year! I hope 2013 is a hell of a lot better than 2012… at least we won’t have to deal with all of the Mayan Calendar bullshit anymore, heh.

Let the chaos begin…

Saturday, December 1st, 2012

I’m not someone who’s easily overwhelmed by ANYTHING. The past hour, however, has set my head into such a spin that I feel like I’m dealing with some type of internal tornado.

I’ve been working for a design firm in Manhattan for quite some time now, Sean actually was the one to get me the job with one of the company owners to work on one of their websites and from there was bounced to the other owner who’s the #1 on the Web department. It’s been steady on-going work, primarily in WordPress and after the last year and a half I’m utilizing areas of WordPress that I didn’t even think existed in this world. The way things are morphed and hacked (without physically touching the core files) blows my fricken mind. I don’t think I’ve done one site that didn’t require heavily modified template files to cater to custom posts and custom fields. The repeater field on Advanced Custom Fields just about made my head explode when I was finally able to figure out the ins and outs of it.

All that aside, obviously I’ve been able to keep myself busy with a lot of things to do, the thing that’s kicking my ass right now is the fact that there’s 4 sites that basically need to be done by Wednesday (just for this company) and I have no idea how to wrap my head around the amount of work that needs to be accomplished. I’m not against working a 16-20 hour day in order to get everything done, don’t get me wrong, but the issue now is the fact that I’m needing to figure out how to do this while still sitting in the cancer center on Monday and Tuesday for Karen’s chemo. She did OK for the first cycle (3 weeks ago), she had the typical side effects of nausea, headaches, vomiting but it subsided after a few days and she’s been pretty comfortable since. The woman is eating her weight in food on a daily basis and her newest addiction is potatoes and corn because she’s carbo-loading like a best thanks to the Steroids. Her recent discussion with her doctor, and the fact that she had a very strange reaction with the first cycle (almost immediately) now has her on the path to receiving a different type of Chemo that needs to be administered over the course of two days instead of the one. So on Monday morning and Tuesday morning someone needs to accompany her to the cancer center so she’s got someone with her for the 5 or so hours it takes to get her treatment. Now, if things were a little slower it wouldn’t be an issue at all but having such tight deadlines for four massive sites… I don’t know how I’m going to be able to accomplish it all.

I just really hope that the cancer center doesn’t have restrictions on their WiFi. I don’t mind switching back over to my laptop to get in a few hours of work while I’m there, but the last time I tried to work in a hospital I was quickly shut down because they don’t allow uploading on their network, and it’s not exactly possible to connect to FTP when that’s the case. Sean and I had a shit-ton of bad luck when we were at Johns Hopkins (main hospital for 5 days back in July) because of the restrictions, and we didn’t actually have a hotel room to go back to until 2 1/2 days after we got up to Baltimore so we lost a lot of time on our punch cards in order to deal with everything going on there. We didn’t try it while Karen was in Hopkins (Bayview – for two weeks in September) because we bounced back and forth from the hospital to the hotel multiple times a day and were able to utilize the wifi at the hotel to get everything accomplished.

Now, the Tunnel Center (where she’s getting her Chemo) is local (literally four blocks away) but this doesn’t mean that I’ll have any kind of luck connecting to a network that allows some type of uploading based solely on the fact that there’s lord knows how many offices in this building and they’re all competing with the download time for BeeBee medicals internal file-sharing system that stretches amongst their entire network, including the imaging center right next door.

I guess I’ll just need to figure out everything when it happens, I can only hope that they’re super dumb (compared to Hopkins) and don’t have that kind of restriction because everyone in Delaware is a hell of a lot more trusting than they are in Baltimore.

My goal for tonight is to finish the edits on Site #1, so I can then get a few hours of sleep (hopefully at least 4) and then wake up to complete the remainder of Site #1 being as all of the PSD’s haven’t been moved into WordPress yet. My day tomorrow is completely booked worked wise, but at the same time I still have A LOT of cooking to do. I’m starting the crockpot around 11am, throwing in the meatballs/sausage around 1pm so they can cook for 6 or so hours to be done for dinner. I still have chicken to make before it goes bad, and quite a bit of baking to do because I was very unhappy with the bakery in the supermarket tonight. So with everything else going on I still have to make Fudge, White Chocolate Chip and Regular Chocolate Chip cookies, PLUS a Banana Nut Bread because, as I said, Karen is carbo-loading but I still need to figure out how to sneak some kind of fruits/veggies into her that aren’t just potatoes cause that’s way too much starch.

I just hope that the eggs I bought two weeks ago didn’t go bad already, and I really hope that we have butter in the house because I was stupid and didn’t check that when Sean and I went grocery shopping tonight. Crap I just remembered I need oil. I guess while I’m waking up with my first cup of coffee I’ll be dodging through the supermarket to pick up everything just to get back here in time to start the rest of my day.

Lord help me, even Music won’t calm this nerve down.

Time to get back to work so I can go to sleep.