Where the hell did today go? Feels like I just got into the office a few minutes ago, and I’ll be out of here in just over 2 hours. I guess I’ve been busy all day learning some stuff since I’ll be filling in for my boss next week while he is on vacation. Woohoo! :|

We have a great concert lined up for tonight! Better Than Ezra and Pomeroy under the stars in Westport. I should be recording the show too, something that I haven’t done in a long time. I hope I still remember how all of my gear works. Anyway, we are heading up there with at least Joel, Amanda and Mike. I’m sure some others will be up at the show as well. It should be a great night!

As for the rest of the weekend, we’ll probably spend some time lounging around a pool. We might also take some time to build those cornhole boards I keep talking about. We should have ordered some bags online so we would have them for this weekend, but we forgot. Guess we can take a couple days to get the boards ready though, and start playing next weekend! Have a great holiday weekend…

We have a meeting with a Big Brother Big Sister person in a couple Tuesdays. I guess we’ll find out then what situation will work the best for us. Speaking of meetings, that pretty much sums up my last few days. We had a full staff meeting on Wednesday to hear about a conference that some of the big guys went to. We also learned that that the company is going to match 50% of our 401K contributions from last year. This is down from the 100% they matched the year before, but still really good. Note to self: invest more in 401K. They are also supposed to put some sort of profit sharing in or something. We’ll see how much is added in the middle of May. We also learned that we would be switching health insurance companies. This brings me to my next meeting on Thursday with a lady from the new company. We had choices between 3 different plans that would all deduct the same amount from each paycheck. I won’t bore you with the details, but I found out today that the amount taken from each check is going to be close to double what it was before. Why the hell did we switch then? Oh well, either way it isn’t much for a single person on the policy.

We haven’t done much with our nights, watched TV mostly. Today I sat in two meetings before lunch, just had a long lunch, and now it is almost time for me to leave and head back to Cincinnati. I got a whole bunch of nothing done today!

Good news, we have an official Pig-Fest date and it is August 13th. Hopefully everyone who wants to go can make it, I know I’ll be there.

The emails keep pouring in today, everyone is taking a sick day. This is crazy. Margaret is out sick again today and according to Steve, “she is on medications now and doctor has told her to stay home.” I guess both Doni and Phil are sick as well. There is something bad going around, I’m just glad the worst of mine only lasted a day. Kim is immune to everything that is out there and I’m extremely jealous…

I was able to play hockey last night, and that about sums up the excitement of our Sunday…

I’m doing something I never do, making a post during the weekend. It has been one of those weekends though. Friday was great! We went straight from work to Brio for some dinner and a bottle of wine. Everything was very good and I hope we can go back there sometime soon. We thought about staying out for a movie or something, but instead we opted to watch a movie at home. We still had a ton of movies from Doni and Phil, so we decided on A Mighty Wind. Pretty funny “mockumentary” about folk bands. I think we both fell asleep watching it, but it was decent enough from what I can remember.

Saturday I woke up feeling a little groggy. It got worse as the day went on however, and by the end of the night I was miserable. I blame this completely on work. My boss Steve left at lunch time on Friday, and Margaret (the lady I share an office with) was out sick as well. Something is definitely going around the office, and unfortunately I caught it. We spent most of the day in front of the TV. I believe it started with episodes of Sex And The City followed up by Addicted To Love. Not a bad movie at all. I was thinking it was going to be some sort of chick flick, but it was actually pretty funny and entertaining. We then watched Collateral, yes another Jamie Foxx movie. This was a thriller type movie that kept us both awake, so it must have been pretty good. We then attempted to watch another movie, but the DVD player was getting all messed up, it must have been overheating. So with nothing left to do we watched the end of Animal House on TV and called it a night.

Nothing too exciting yet for today. We have some errands to run in a little bit and I have a hockey game tonight. I hope that I feel good enough to play…

I just got a raise! Had a very short meeting with the owner Ed, he’s happy and now I’m happy too. Off to Brio to celebrate, have a good weekend!!!

Well Kim got off work at noon, totally unfair. I’m still here at work, but hopefully I’ll be gone within an hour. I did glance out the window while in a meeting just a bit ago and saw a car in the ditch in the middle of the highway. The roads do not seem to be any better, in fact they are probably worse then when I drove in this morning. It hasn’t really stopped precipitating at all today. I think it switched to snow for a while but soon moved back to the sleet and freezing rain. Oh so much fun!

With all this weather excitement, I forgot to mention that today is my workaversary. That’s right, I have no officially been employed at OSI for one full year. Next up a raise, well at least I hope so. :)

I would like to apologize once again for the downtime. I have been messing with my network a bunch the past couple of days. The good news is, I think I fixed it! That’s right, I have a router installed and all of my servers are functioning correctly. I ended up taking the D-Link back to the store and getting a Netgear. After an hour or so I was up and running with my server working perfectly. We also took some time last night to setup ReplayTV. Looks like it will be working perfectly on this network. We even set it up to record Oprah for Kim everyday. Looks like my networking troubles are finally over. That is until we move across the hall, haha.

An ice storm hit yesterday afternoon. It really isn’t as bad as they were making it out to be. The hardest part about getting here to work today was thawing out the car. The roads are mainly slushy and there is less than an inch of it there. I think I averaged about 45 on the highway coming in, so it just took a little longer. I wish it would have closed down the city, but we weren’t so lucky. Looks like I’ll be here all day…

First of all, happy new year to you all! Can’t wait until the first time I write 2004 and then have to somehow find a way to change the 4 to a 5. Always an adventure…

I can’t really remember all the way back to Thursday night. It seems like forever ago. I bet that we just went to the gym and worked out, then went home and cooked a meal. Wait I think it’s all coming back to me. We had dinner and watched the movie Terminal. We also watched Twenty First Dates at some point in the weekend.

Friday we headed down to the plaza Panera for lunch. We meant to go down for breakfast, but by the time we got there we were ready for a sandwich and soup. From there we had our day of shopping with gift cards we had accumulated, and also exchanging a few things here and there. I was pretty tired of shopping by the end of it. Throughout the day we had many conversations with Joel and Amanda about what to do. We had gone back and forth with the all inclusive Uptown Theater idea or the cheaper Pomeroy show at the Lucky Brewgrille. We eventually decided to try and save some money and do the Pomeroy show. We found out that if we went and had dinner at the restaurant that we could get in for free to the show (a $25 ticket) so we went early for dinner. It wasn’t bad, but the fact that we got in for free made it all worthwhile. We had the closest booth to the stage, so it was like we were VIP for the night. It was an excellent time, and we even got free mini bottles of champagne. All in all I think we spent close to the price of the Uptown, but I think we had a much better time! I put some pictures up, so head on over and check those out…

Saturday we headed to Todd’s place once we finally got moving. He had a few different bottles of premium bourbon whiskey that he wanted me to taste. We made some skyline dip and the 4 of us (Phil stopped over as well) destroyed it in no time at all. The football games were entertaining throughout the day. Doni eventually stopped over as well, just in time for the pizza dinner. It was a nice relaxing day!

Sunday we had Chipotle for lunch. I’m so glad that I got so many gift certificates there, it was excellent! From there Kim and I decided to clean the apartment. We mostly concentrated on the floors since I think we had only done them a couple times before. The apartment looks pretty good, but I’m still holding out for the one across the hall. Hopefully we hear something about that this week…

I’m starting a new project at work today. I am automating many of the test scripts that we run occasionally on the software. We should run them more often, but don’t have the time to do so. Hopefully once I get this done, we can run scripts on the software frequently so that we can catch problems before the clients do. :)

Steve is letting me leave an hour earlier today so that I can get an even bigger head start on the drive home. I’m hoping that they have most of the roads cleared now, especially since the snow has mostly stopped and I won’t be in the snowy areas for at least 6 hours from now. With any luck I’ll be in Cincinnati early enough to meet up with some friends or something…

Happy Holidays to you all!

Sorry about the lack of updates yesterday but I got infected with sars24 (what the OAR message board calls the illness that everyone seems to get when we get together). I took a sick day yesterday and slept for most of the morning. I woke up feeling a little better but still wasn’t ready to head into work. I mostly took care of some computer stuff that needed to get done. I got a little more done for the sonic site. Joe wants to get it all finished by the end of the year, and I should be able to do that. I just need to figure out what we should do for the menu. As always feedback is welcome…

Today I feel 100x better than I did the past couple days, so I’m really glad I took that day off. I can now go to Denver feeling good and enjoy our time there! I had my first job review today with my boss Steve. It went well, nothing too unexpected. He is pleased with the work I’ve done, and we basically talked about my goals for this next year. The financial meeting will come later in the month with the head honcho, let’s keep our fingers crossed for a raise!

We are off to Denver after work, so have a good weekend!!!