Had a lot going on lately, so I thought I'd finally get around to posting an update on what's going on.
On the job front I found out last Friday that Robert is actually going to return. I mean, good for him and his career, but it was pretty unexpected. I had thought the last extension was his last extension. Which by the way was an extension (March) of an extension (February) of an extension (January) of unpaid medical leave for all of Fall 2007 after he has already been out for 21 months prior to that. Yes, it's as ridiculous as it sounds... 27 months give or take out of the office and just when I think March was the cutoff and my loyalty would be rewarded, bam... he comes back. Oh, but not until another extension until mid-April.
Anyway, I should be (and I am) happy for Robert - he's been in a lot of pain the last couple years and hopefully he really is feeling better. But from emails I've read that he's written recently, that's probably not the case. He sounds optimistic about new treatments and doctors, but at no point does he say the pain is gone - it more or less sounds just like what he always used to say. So I'm picturing Robert returning (assuming he does still) at far less than 100%.
So, needless to say, I've begun looking for other jobs. Going to brush up the resume and start sending out some applications. Having options is never a bad thing.
Looking forward even more now to my trip up to Michigan in April. In fact, my first day back at work on the 15th is supposed to be Robert's first day back also. Should be interesting. Still, a week off work for me is just what I need.
Besides work I've just had little projects here and there. I cancelled my Sirius radio subscription last weekend. After getting XM in Christina's new car, it didn't take me long to find out how much better it is than Sirius. So, for a good number of reasons I switched. Pulled the whole antenna, wiring, FM modulator, and Sirius radio out of my truck and then had to install all that stuff again only for an XM radio. Bought the XM XpressRC radio:
It's a nice receiver, full color display, 10 preset favorites, pause and rewind of up to 60 minutes... love it so far. I found a pretty decent place to mount it in my truck also, when I get a chance I'll post some photos of that setup.
The bigger project I have going on right now is trying to do something with the gameroom in the house. I'm going to finally take care of that "bar corner" that's basically just been a wine rack and microwave cart on the sides of a mini-fridge. Also going to replace the shelving up along the ceiling where I have the liquor bottles displayed.
First step in the bar corner was getting rid of the wires running up to the TV in there before trying to put in a bar. I ran the low-voltage wiring for audio and video up through the wall and used two cable run face plates, one pointed down, one pointed up in to the wall.
Then I added a pair of in-wall speakers so that there wouldn't be speakers sitting on the bar when it's built. The speaker wires, audio and video cables, and satellite lines will all run into a small shelving area in the bar I picture in my head where the receiver and the satellite box will sit.
Below are some of the first photos of the mess I made and the progress of the project. Only thing I have left to do is run an electrical outlet up behind the TV mount in the corner next to where the A/V cables come out of the wall. That run will take a little more effort though because I'll need to jump horizontally through one stud to get there. I may just cut a bit of drywall from around that stud and then patch it or I may go up or down a floor to the attic or garage and then over and then back up to avoid going horizontally in the wall.
Anyway, here's the pictures so far:
I'll post new photos as the bar and shelving continue... no rush on the work, so I see it being an ongoing project for a little while.
Saturday before we headed over to Kristi and Tim's for dinner, we had a couple of huge thunderstorm cells roll through Columbia. We thought we even saw swirling clouds out the back windows... well, it turns out we probably did:
Green/black dot is approx. where our house is, the F3 tornado's track is maybe 5 miles tops from the house, probably closer than that.
Everything was here and gone though pretty quickly, by the time we got down the road heading West about 5 miles or so it was clear. And no damage thankfully!
Ended up at work tonight until 7pm because Christina's group had a grant going out last minute that she stayed to help with. Of all the days to ride in with her. But, there were things I was able to work on and it means tomorrow will be a short day. We need to go get our passports tomorrow anyway so there's plenty of time before a trip to Germany sometime in June.
Would have been nice to get out in time so I could take a muscle relaxer sooner than 8pm though. Pulled something in my neck Tuesday in the gym and it's been hurting since. Last couple of days I've only gotten probably 4-5 hours of sleep each night. Wasn't even lifting anything heavy... the neck was sore from this last weekend, not really sure why... but the warmup sets at 135 and 185 on the bench really aggrivated it, so we quit there. However, the first dose is kicking in a little already so things should be better tomorrow morning.
And it'll be good that I'm getting a good night's sleep... way too tired for my own good. I went to book a flight for a trip back up to Michigan in April and I got on Hotwire to search. They have a flexible dates search and some amazingly low rates on their super saver fares. However, super saver fares have stipulations - you don't know your departure times (any time between 6am and 10pm), you don't know your layovers (though it's 0 or 1 layover) and you don't know which airline (though they pick from a list of reputable airlines).
So all of that was fine by me and the no cancel, no refund, no changing, no anything policy didn't bother me either... you know, until I realized that for some stupid reason I booked the flight for the WRONG week. I have no idea what in the hell I was thinking, but I managed to book the flight two weeks later. So, I call them thinking I just made an expensive $309 mistake or that I'd have to change my travel plans. Reason I went with the fare in the first place is the normal fare was $616, so the $309 was great!
So they said they'd make an exception since I had *just* booked it like 5 minutes prior to calling. BUT - to refund the $309 I would have to book whatever rate they found for the week I originally intended to book. She comes back and says she found one rate for $543 which was what I found while waiting on hold. She then says she found another set of days for $435 and then she found a 3rd set of days that worked with my dates for $284.
Whew... so, in the end it actaully ended up costing me less than the original booking and no fees for changing things. Plus... $284?? Are you kidding me? I would have at least $400-$500 in gas alone to drive up there plus 26-28 hours sitting on the road.
What a gorgeous time of the year here in SC. Temps are between 71-76 all this week and everything is starting flower up including our Bradford Pear and Peach trees. Here's a couple of shots of the flowers on the peach tree:
Finally got around to bringing my truck in to have them look at an oil leak. Been about two or three weeks, but it's such a slow leak it wasn't a big deal. It turned out to be the o-ring in the oil cooler. I was pretty sure that's what it was after looking around online and sending some pictures to Brian, but even though the o-ring was only $14, I didn't feel like messing with it myself, so I just brought it in.
Needed two belts as well and I let them change those also - the engine bay is tight and I would have had to remove the radiator fan and shroud to get at the belts - sounds like a wasted Saturday of messing around in the driveway figuring it out to me.
Work's been better, everyone's back now and we're getting caught up. Over the last two days we've moved 28 more computers to the domain... about 200 total now, probably a little under halfway there.
We're going to finish this move by the beginning of May because the University is finally ready for folks to start changing their email over to Microsoft Outlook instead of Novell Groupwise. We're migrating the third week of July, but Outlook has to be installed on everyone's computers before migration day, so that involves going around to everyone's systems again just after we finish this project which required the same thing. It gets better... after migration day we get to go back around (up to three times for those not counting) and uninstall Groupwise from everyone's computers and move their archived emails in Groupwise over to Outlook. Fun stuff.
Not a heck of a lot else is going on right now though. Had a huge storm roll through last night. At one point we even gathered up the cats and put them in the half-bath downstairs because the wind was howling so much. Power went out and was out for about two hours... talk about boring. Christina's lucky, she has a hobby that doesn't involve power - reading. All we needed was a light source and candles worked for that - though the small lantern looking lights that Nicki got us were much brighter and ran on 4 AA batteries.
Most everything I would be doing involves a computer, a TV, the Xbox or PS3, etc, etc... So I listened to Christina's little MP3 player/radio for a while. Then I decided to go all MacGyver and realized I could use the deep cycle batteries I use for tailgating and the inverter and plug in my laptop, wireless router, and cable modem. All that worked great, except the cable internet was down because of the power outage so the cable modem just sat there trying to connect to Time Warner's network. Another reason to hate Time Warner. Not like Ted cares though... he has billions.
Either this weekend or the next I need to decide what we're going to do about the boat. It was nice having it on the water last summer, but I don't think it's worth the cost right now for how much we used it, so I think we're going to move it back to land storage. The deciding factor I think was that the marina isn't allowing trailers to be stored there anymore. Which is ridiculous - if I have to pay some place to store my trailer, I might as well put the boat on it too, right? So, there's a boat exchange place where they broker used boats (and charge 10% of the sale price) that also sells storage at a good rate, so we'll probably look into storing it there this summer. But that's the easy part... after a year in the water, cleaning the boat up is going to be the real chore.
