Happiness among insanity

I had a hard time coming up with a title for this one. I wanted it to sound more poetic but eh.. anyway...

So my career and work is still completely insane. I'm not even sure at this point I want to stick around till after lunch... sometimes I wish my boss would fire me so I can collect unemployment while I find a new job. Well if my boss runs this place into the ground like I think hes doing I'll get my unemployment check that way too I guess. But enough about all the craziness.

For now there is some good stuff going on in my life. I'm buying a house! An opportunityI couldn't refuse came by a few months ago. I made it through a few weeks of nail biting and wondering if the low low price was going to stay low. Only by unique circumstances have I come across this opportunity. My neighbor's parents unfortunately had to move into an assisted living facility quite quickly. This left their house empty and needing to be sold so that they can afford the cost of living in a home. They had lived their for over 60 years. My neighbor (their son) does not have the time to fix the place up for regular sale with a real estate agent and all that jazz. Therefore the price is staying pretty low. We are also excluding and involvement of an agent. Its being sold as is with some contents. Also no matter what they get for it, the money will pretty much all go to the assisted living facility, so why make them rich? Again all keeping the price within my limited means. This weekend I finally got to see the house and settled on a price.

The place is definately a fixer upper. Which being an architect, woodworker, and all around handy man is a dream for me. I want to do some research into the house but from what I know it was built in the early 1900's. It did not have a bathroom (outhouse) or a kitchen. These were added as afterthoughts so they aren't perfectly executed. My neighbor who grew up in the house told me that when they first moved in these things were there but not original. The bathroom has a tiny wall hung sink and only a bathtub, no piping for a shower head. It has a fairly new roof and a practically brand new oil fired furnace and oil tank. The electrical service is in sad shape. Because indoor plumbing was an afterthought most of the pipes are outside of the walls. The floors are 8" tongue and groove planks that have shrunk so much that they have 1/4" gaps between each board. It has a beautiful staircase. The attic is heated and "finished" however to serve as a usable space the finishing would have to be redone. Excluding the attic its only a 2 bedroom. The 2nd bedroom being quite small due to the bathroom taking 1/3 of the original room's size. The kitchen is small but cozy. Definately not an eat in. It has the old porcelain unit type sink with an old stove. The refrigerator is quite old too. No dishwasher. The cabinets and counters look to be from the 40's to 50's. It has a one car cement block garage off the service ally that I plan on using for a workshop. All apliances, including a brand new washer and dryer, some furniture and miscellaneous tools and junk will be sold along with the house.

I can move in and really only have to add a shower head to live comfortably. However being an architect my head is spinning with renovation ideas out the wazoo. Initial information suggests my mortgage is going to be even lower than my current low ass rent. This should free up a lil bit of money to invest in renovation. I'm going to be doing it one room at a time doing as much work as I can handle on my own.

I have to keep myself from thinking about it too much. I get way overly excited. It is so nice to have some news to be happy about and think about instead of how much I hate my job. Ugh and as this day moves forward I am getting more and more things to hate about my job. But anyway... YAY for me I am buying a house!

What the hell am I doing?

Ugh, I wish I knew. Last night I was reading a book on architectural business plans. It got me thinking about my career. Then I read V's live journal. Which made me contemplate my life's direction even more. The worst part is after all that crap that I posted about my shitty boss and this shitty job I came to realize why this job is good. Well sort of. Ugh so confusing. Like V said in her blog one second you know what you want to do the next you don't. I go from one extreme to another on a daily basis. I just don't know what I want out of life I guess.

Last night I realized that this job, despite all the ridiculous fucking bullshit I deal with everyday, is good in some ways. Most improtantly it is good for the reason my last job was bad. My last job was at a big firm where I fealt like nothing more than a lil cog in a big machine. I did the same thing every day. I had no impact on how things were done. I simply did what I was told. I wasn't feeling challenged anymore and I wasn't learning anything new. If I was it was too little to satisfy the forward movement of my career. Simply put I was stagnating there.

Now here, I work with 4 other people. I have a first hand look into the actual business of architecture. I see the proposals, I see the budgets, I help manage the projects, I'm the freakin Computer administrator for Christ's sake. I feel the thingsI do make a difference. Oh I get paid more too. :) My boss (although hes a jackass) does sometimes listen to my suggestions and seems to want to make changes to make things better. However those changes aren't always observed and followed through. The other thing is although I am seeing the proposals, budgets, business stuff, etc... They are all horrible. My boss is simply put, one of the worst business men I've ever witnessed. Now most people would say, well how the hell is this job any better at learning the business if the guys a tard fuck at it. AHA! I have an answer for that. If anything I'm learning EXACTLY WHAT NOT TO DO when running an architectural firm.

The other thing is I'm a natural problem solver. I love it. Nothing like the feeling of fixing something thats broke. This place is seriously BROKE. I like the idea of being able to help fix it and reap the benefits. What can I say I must be a glutton for punishment. The way I see it is some day my boss will need to sell this business when he wants to retire. I know thats probably far fetched but hey, anything can happen.

So here's my current plan...
After I get all my ammo ready, which is a shitload of issues clearly written out and itemized, I'm going to request my review. During this review I am going to lay everything out on the table. Here are my requests.

1. That my boss make serious efforts to address each and every one of my issues that I have brought up. This ranges in everything from how he belittles drafting boy to his unproffesionalism to... well you get the idea theres about 12 major issues so far on the list.
2. That I get a serious ass raise to make up for first, putting up with these issues up till now, second, because when I got here I was only to be a draftsman, not practically keeping the company afloat and running the computer/cadd system, and third because I'm underpaid in the first place for just my draftsman duties. When doing the math it comes out to about a 10% raise.
3. This isn't much of a request as much as an ultimatum. If the above requests aren't met satisfactorally I will be looking for another job. Of course I already am looking for one at this point but I'm going to scare the shit out of him and hopefully get him to comply with these issues if I flat out tell him that I'm trying to bail.

So there it is folks, my career plan for at least today. lol. Any comments would be greatly appreciated especially if your familiar with this blog and if you think 10% is high or low to ask for considering the circumstances.

Told you so!

Ok so if your one of the 2 people that visit this blog besides me, you already know how much of a tard fuck my boss is. You've already read about how his idiocy had almost brought on a nervous breakdown. Of course this was all due to one project. It's a Rita's water ice, a local franchise, in an existing building that is within a historical district. Buildings inside historical districts are subject to regulations that maintain the historical fabric of the district. These are enforced by an Historic Architectural Review Board, or HARB for short. It just so happens that my boss is on the HARB for said historical district. On top of this the client is only the tenant of half the building which is owned by someone else (that just so happens to be the wife of another client of ours). On top of all this Rita's is a franchise and is subject to all the nasty architectural blunders of most franchise's. Cheap easily maintained finishes, cartoony style, etc. which is in turn subject to review by the franchise itself. You can see how quickly this project got to be more and more of a clusterfuck.

Said client is only funding improvements for HIS side of the building. The other side will sit vacant until the owner finds a new tenant for that portion of the building. HOWEVER, and this is the main point I stressed to my boss, the borough, county, and state does not see this building as two different projects as the client and owner do. I also stressed to my boss that we wern't addressing any handicapped accesibility issues at all. His response? Don't worry about it. My two regular readers will be familiar with the usual laws requiring that a building be brought up to code dependant on how much the renovation/addition/improvements will cost as a function of percentage of the total building worth. For those not familiar... In Pennsylvania, if your construction costs are less than 30% only the renovated area needs to be brought up to code. Over 30% you need to do the same and in addition create an ACCESIBLE route (for handicapped people and fire emergency issues) to and from your renovated area. Above 50% and you have to do all that crap I just mentioned for the entire building. Notice I said ENTIRE BUILDING. Not just your clients tenant space. Oh I should also mention building codes are highly subjectable to the interpretation of whichever code official reviews your drawings.

So... after a marathon, nervous breakdown inducing run to complete the construction drawings at the same time as the HARB presentation (yeah thats right if the HARB didn't pass on our ideas that means I would have to redraw a lot of said construction drawings) my boss goes to a meeting with said client, the zoning officer, and code official to discuss our construction drawings and the results of our previously submitted land development drawings.

Upon my boss's return from the meeting I should have prepared a huge banner for our office with big bold letters saying "I TOLD YOU SO FUCKFACE"

The verdict from the meeting? Well first of all, since my boss doesn't seem to think codes apply to his projects he failed to realize that there was a PENNDOT requirement for visual sight lines when exiting the driveway. If we would have known this from the start this entire project would have beened shit canned right away. There is no way we can provide adequate walk up service windows without completely disregarding this sight line. If my boss knew this at the beginning he could have recommended to the client that he find a more suitable site for his franchise. Saving said client thousands of dollars in useless construction documentation, and saving me from his bullshit stress. Secondly, yeah there's more, upon initial glance at the drawings by the state, we were told that this building was never on their records. This is common with buildings this old. They responded with the usual outcome when this is the case... The ENTIRE building must be brought up to building, fire, and accesibilty codes. So...

I don't usually like to rub things in peoples faces but.... I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO YOU FUCKING TWIT.

Blizzard!!!

Geez, I have a nervous breakdown and no one even comments... Well I didn't quite have a full fledged breakdown but later that night around 10:00 when my boss was yelling about something I told him how he was stressing me out so much I was almost in tears. Being close to tears was enough to hold back his ranting for about 5:00 minutes. Needless to say I'm looking for a new job. There is nothing I can do to change how my boss acts so... its off to monster.com for me.

On a positive note this weekend we had a BLIZZARD!!! I love when it snows that much. Call me crazy. I just love it when you get to see all your neighbors out shovelling and all the kids out having fun in the snow. Or the big kids in my case. I somehow convinced my friends that the blizzard was a sign that we needed an adventure! The last time it snowed enough to go sledding I tried to get an adventure going and no one bit. So this year was successful. We all got our gear on and loaded up my mom's old wooden toboggen in my truck. Now when I say toboggen I mean toboggen. This thing is old school curved wood with rope handles and even a padded seat. It seats 5 passengers. Its about 6 feet long. Knowing what kind of hill we need for such a serious sled sent us searching for the infamous "Bergey Hill" Park.

After my mom's very confusing directions, a little driving around clueless, and asking some locals for directions we found the place. Before we left my mom warned us that the park had been closed to sledding due to some people getting hurt and to be careful. Well there were a few cars parked on the side of the road since the park entrance was blocked off and of course who else is there but the freakin pig ass po po with his lights on sending people away. I hate fuckin cops. Like there isn' tsome serious ass accident due to the snow that would be time better spent for this schmuck. So we drove off and around for a bit only to come back to find the cop and everyone else gone. Sweet, hill to ourselves. We didn't come all this way to be sent packing by some pig with nothing better to do.

So we figure we will get at least 2 runs in. We all clambor aboard and realize how hard it is to keep the thing from flying down the hill before everyone gets on. I'm in front of course because it's my sled damnit. And away we go... boy was it fun... for the first half where we were cruising in snow that was packed down a bit. Then we hit the powder. The front acts like a snow plow and throws tons of snow up in my face completely blocking any visibilty for the first 2 people on the toboggan. We came to a halt when we ditched the thing sideways since no one could see anymore. We were cracking ourselves up. The snow all over my face hurt like a bitch but boy was it fun. We made one more run... The walk up the hill is what really kills ya. I need some serious cardio exercise.

We went back Sunday a bit more prepared and made 3 runs. More people were there and I got wacked in the shin by some less courteous tobogganeers. Didn't even get a sorry or much inquiry into if my leg was still attatched to my body. But overall it was a great adventure and I'm hoping the snow on Wednesday is enough to cause me to stay home from work and go sledding instead.

And here it is folks...

My nervous breakdown is upon me. It is now approaching 7:00 and I'm at work. I'm trying to complete the previously mentioned project that my boss promised within an impossible deadline. I have been simultaneously completing working drawings AND a presentation for the same project throughout the whole day. I told my boss that I'd be here till 12:00 tonight and he laughed noting that he thought I was joking. Here it is 7:00 and I don't see the end anywhere in sight. To facilitate my mental breakdown my boss has decided to finally CHECK some of my drawings only to notice that the neato company logo that I worked on and started implementing on all our title blocks on all our jobs (not just this one) and all the title blocks on all the presentation materials which I spent the entire afternoon printing... has the word "architects" spelled "archictects". Yeah read that one again its hard to catch. If that isn't enough to make me weep right there that I can't even spell the name of my proffession correctly, I also spelled "principal" like that of an architectural firm like "principle" at a school district. As I said both things very hard to catch... no one else did, including my boss, for months now. We have printed it out hundreds of times. Of course my boss catches the mistake at the worst possible time. Again to make matters worse instead of saying oh shit we got a mistake lets figure this one out like professionals my boss explodes in a fit of rage. So as I sit here and type this waiting for some more check sets to plot out... my head feels like its literally going to pop off my neck at any second right now.

I want to burst into my boss's office flip him the bird collect my things and get the fuck out of this loony bin I call work. I'm not often one to place blame for my mistakes upon others but what the fuck. I'm under so much stress lately its no wonder I can't spell right. Every second of the day I have to keep myself from thrusting my head through my computer monitor in despair. Like today I had to keep about 4 different projects straight in my head while I work on each off and on every 5 minutes. While I'm talking to tourrette's wonder trying to get my explanation to his question out of my mouth before his next outburst I have drafting boy simultaneously asking me a question that he's asked about 5 hundred times already just this morning and that I've answered every fucking time.

So I get the tourrette's guy to work a lil overtime to help me out. On his way out we of course bitch about the boss being so unreasonable and thats why things are so fucked up. I start telling him that I'm not a fucking project architect and I shouldn' t have as many responsibilities as one. Not too mention I'm not getting paid for it. So he says yeah, him being the project architect, and tells me what my boss is payinh him for what he does, which if you ask me is less than what I handle everyday. 53. Fifty fucking three! now I'm not saying my coworker doesn't deserve that, but as an "acting" project architect as I'd like to call myself from now on I think I should be making a bit more than my measly 37. Yes I said thirty fucking seven. Fuck this. After we get this shit out the door tomorow I am requesting my god damn review and telling him I want at least 40. If he doesn't I'll go somewhere else for 37 and deal with the proper amount of stress someone that 37 should have to deal with. Much less than what I am dealing with now. So I'm going to print a few more things and go home and cry myself to sleep or just go berzerk and drive my car off an embankment on my way home. Godspeed everyone, Don't ever get into architecture.

Welcome to my nervous breakdown

Ok people, here it is you have a front row seat to my oncoming nervous breakdown. My boss is fucking killing me! I don't know if its his cow of a wife, or the fact that since he can't rent the rest of our building and he's losing money every month, but this week he has gotten to be unbearable to even talk to. I can barely ever get any work done because he's got me jumping around from job to job every five minutes not too mention the hours I spend daily answering CAD boy's questions which I thoroughly answered the day before. He's a jerk all the time, when any of us make a mistake instead of approaching us professionaly, he berates us like we are children until we point out that the mistake was actually his, then he dumps his overused speach about we ALL have to be responsible and we shouldn't copy everything VERBATIM, that we have to think about what we are doing. I wish he would have THOUGHT about what he was doing when he promised the client that I, ME, KENT, NOT HIM, would have the construction documents done by tomorow. FUCK THAT! I haven't even gotten them to the point where I can print them out to even look at yet. Not once did he tell me that there was going to be any deadline for the drawings this week, and here the stupid tard fuck goes and promises them to the client by friday! Then when I go and tell him that it simply can't be done its physically impossible, he goes "oh it will get done" Well fine then you fuck, do it your fucking self. Is he TRYING to stress me out? Is he trying to fucking kill me? god damnit fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck I'm ready to fuckin punch him in his stupid fucking pie hole. I hate how this fucking asshole takes all the stress that our stupid clueless fucking clients put on him and directly transfers it to me. I'll tell him this shit aint getting done. Its fucking impossible. I am not doing any fucking overtime to get this done by friday. If it doesn't get done by then I don't fucking care, my boss can shove it up his dumb fuck ass. He can't fire me I'm the only one here that has a fucking clue. If anything I'm ready to fucking quit. I need to find a new job. The second I have somethign lined up I'm getting the fuck out of here.

No good slacker

Ok, so in reading my friend V's Live Journal, and Cadmonkey's blog I realize that I'm not the only person with a lack of motivation due to dissatisfaction with my job. Like Cadmonkey I have tried my damndest to focus and get something solid done every day and to avoid coming on here and posting or just cruising the internet all day. But god damn its so freakin hard when your job is so Bleh. Its not that I don't like my job... well to an extent, but its more like a lack of direction. My old job was so easy, someone would tell me what to do, I'd do it give it back to that person and they would give me something else to do. I rarely got an assignment that I couldn't handle or that even challenged me. If no one had anything for me to do, the relatively large size of the company (for this industry that is) allowed me the leisure of being able to sit around and do nothing without really impacting anything too much until someone came around and told me what to do again. Now to some people this is a great thing. To me it got sooooo boring. I didn't feel challenged. Like I said nothing they gave me caused me to think I couldn't handle it. I even got some project management scraps which they thought would help groom me to be a project manager. Well let me tell you that if you only have to spend roughly 2 hours a week to keep the project running smoothly its not really teaching me much or challenging me at all. So I quit and starting working here.

Not sure if I ever explained the wackiness that happened here so I'll sum it up. Its a much smaller firm and when I got the job there was a Principal, 2 project architects, a consultant that only worked on health clubs, and me. That was architectural staff. We also had a part time secretary and a part time book keeper. I should mention my last firm had around 60 employees.
So shortly after I started one PA quit, which inspired the other one to quit shortly after that. Then the project the consultant was working on got cancelled and the client sued us. Needless to say there goes the consultant. So I was the sole architectural staff here besides the Principal that usually spends most his time just doing the business stuff. Since then we have hired some real gems of the mentally disabled community. The hiring practices of my boss will be thorougly documented in an upcoming post.

Now when I came to this job I was looking forward to that extra responsibility and challenge that it had to offer. However I wasn't planning on that much more responsibility. From previous posts you will realize my boss is a fucking doof and has a hard time communicating something as simple as a phone number to someone else let alone complex architectural concepts. So he tends to have a hard time doing what my last job did so well... which was tell me what to do. So I have to take on the responsibility of knowing what I should be doing every second of the day. The worst is when I figure out what I should be doing, spend half the day doing it, and then my boss flips out becuase somehting needs to be done yesterday and I should have been working on that instead but of course he failed to communicate that to me. Oh another wonderful side effect of his inability to talk like a human is that no matter what I do here, its always wrong. It may be the best way to do it, it might be the way I did it at my last job, it may even be the way that building codes dicatate I do it, however it will always be wrong because its NOT the way my corner cutting boss has done it for the past 20 years of his shoddy business. Of course I don't know how to do it HIS way because he speaks some tardish language that nobody else here in the office or this world speaks.

So after all that it leaves me sitting here KNOWING I have a shitload of work to do, just no matter how I do it, it will be wrong and I will have to do it over, which in turn makes me even forget what the word motivation means... Sigh.. on that note I should get back to "work".

Oh before I forget I saw Napoleon Dynamite last night and couldn't stop laughing throughout the entire film. Maybe its because the movie seems to be set in middle school during the 80's which is when I was in middle school and I could relate to so many things. Including being somewhat of an outcast dork although Napoleon is like the king of dorks and I was never that wierd... at least that I remember. Anyway if you haven't seen it go and rent it you won't be sorry.

Can I get anything done? PLEASE?

Ok 4th post because my boss in an ass. HA like thats news. Ok so all morning he has me switching from job to job putting out fires as he recieves phone calls. 15 minutes on job A only to be interupted by spaz'd out boss asking about job B. So 15 minutes on job B then to be interupted by spaz's boss asking if I ever got the data from job A. I say NO! you interupted me and told me to work on job B. Meanwhile the printer runs out of ink while I'm trying to print the data for him. I find out when he "saved a crap load of money" buying ink cartridges at sams club for said printer that he actually bought multi packs that didn't have the right size black cartridge. So we are completely and totally out of ink.

So said spaz boss goes to a meeting. Finally I can get some of the work he asked me to get done actually DONE. So I stop working on job B so I can finish my work on job A. Unlike my spaz boss I like to FOCUS on one job until that work is done. Its much more efficient and much less disorienting. No wonder my boss is so scatter brained. So while he's out client of project B calls and gives more info on said project. I take appropriate notes and go back to working on project A.

Boss comes back from meeting. I continue on project A. Shortly after he gets settled, spaz boss asks did client from project B call. I answer yes she did however I'm working on project A and I want to get this done before we discuss the phone conversation. He looks at me puzzled and then gets distracted with something almost immediately. Not 5 minutes later he asks me again... Did Client from job B call? I respond yet again. YES YOU JUST ASKED ME THAT 5 MINUTES AGO, AND AGAIN, LET ME GET JOB A DONE FIRST BEFORE WE DISCUSS THE PHONE CONVERSATION! And what does spaz boss then say? Well what did she say? UGH I almost lost it. I was about to start screaming did you fucking hear a word that just came out of my fucking mouth not two fucking seconds ago you fucking numnutz mongoloid? Do you have the fucking cranial capacity to even process the words that enter your ears quickly enough before you spout nonsensical demands out your fucking piehole? I ended up having to quickly summarize the phone conversation and try to explain the resulting clusterfucks from said conversation to said primate like tard fuck of a boss. So I have gotten absolutely nothing done today especially when I have to vent my problems with such retards on my blog. Ugh

I'm on a role

Ok I'm on a role with actually posting shit here so I figured I'd make it three in a day. Maybe more if I come up with something else to say.

So I should comment that after seeing a few negative things in a married couples relationship I did hang out with my friend M and his wife J this weekend. M is a much better person that my friend A so I think that's why his marriage seems much smoother. He's honest with his wife. They are really good together. She also seems to keep him motivated on projects. Something I could use a bit of help on. She's trying to get us to finish the poker table we started building. Its a prototype kind of. I had great visions of building these things quickly and cheaply and with the huge market of celebrity poker TV shows and home Texas Hold'um tournaments

I'd have lots of orders for them. The drawback is it requires some upholstery which is not my strong point. So it was definitely a learning experience and again... A prototype. I think in the end we will have a respectable poker table but not quite what I envisioned. The sequence we followed was a little backwards and we ended up having to ditch the cupholder idea that we had and now I think they are only going to be decorative wood accents separating the player spaces instead of cup holders. We also realize we should have went with high density foam padding instead of low density. Not sure how comfortable the padded arm rests are going to be. Also I need to figure out a better way to make upholstery folds. Also if anyone knows a good way to make upholstery piping with vinyl (faux leather) leave me a comment. We realized we have some joints to cover up and the piping seems to be the solution.

Of course our motivation only seemed to last while his wife was around. We ended up making a hardware store trip that turned into a lunch trip too. We ate at a pizza shop with a really cute waitress. I was trying to guess how old she was when I asked M what he thought. Apparently we are both terrible at judging age. He said anywhere from 20-22 and I was trying to be overly conservative and said 16-18. I guess I could have asked her to confirm our stupidity. My anxiety put a nix on that. I figured if she ened up only being 16 I'd feel like a perv checking her out. So I didn't ask her. So we got a little bit more done on the table. Still not nearly finished. Even ate dinner there. It was nice to not have to eat alone. M let me borrow the movie About Schmidt. I had let him borrow Requiem for a Dream earlier. We sat down and went frame by frame to figure out what the third JUICE requirement is. Be excited, Be Be excited! Lol that infomercial is so funny. Of course the first two are No red meat and No refined sugar. The third is never actually said and its only written on a white board on the screen for a flash. At first I thought it said No Grease. Then we went back and we had no clue what it said... It definitely wasn't grease. Then AHA... No Orgasm. No wonder those JUICE (Join Us In Creating Excellence) are such wierdos, if I didn't do any of those things I'd be a chanting retard too. Anyway if you never saw the movie you have no idea what I'm talking about. It's lunch time I'm hungry...

New Years!

Ok, so my friend A (I'm starting just to use letters so I don't get in any trouble revealing to much private stuff about people) saw me in my shop and invited me yet again to his party. He tempted me with numerous types of beers and well I guess that was about it. I declined for previously said reasons of hating New Years. So later that night I was sitting around when I thought fuck this, I've finally been invited to a New Years Eve party, it might be with people I'm not great friends with but why be such a negative Nancy. So I sucked it up and went.

Well I saw a bunch of people I didn't expect to see. One girl from highschool M, that sat behind me in senior year social studies that was quite hot and of course in turn popular. We used to chat in class every now and then. Well when I was "reintroduced" to her (apparently she lives in California now) she was like nice to meet you. I simply said, Yeah, seeing as it wasn't the first time we met. I think M took that as me being rude and didn't say much to me the rest of the night. Which was A ok with me. A few others that weren't friends in highschool but not as bad to talk to as I thought. Looking back I realize that I didn't really do much talking to people. I must have been too busy getting drunk. My friend A apparently lied to his new wife S about quitting smoking. Apparently S can't hold her alcohol too well and she started getting rambunxious. I walked out onto the porch and she yells "Kent did you know I married a lier?" I was like uhhhh So then things calmed down a bit then a few minutes later she bursts out... "what else have you been lieing to me about?" I fealt bad for her. She's really sweet and A really is a lier about some things. I wouldn't call him the most upstanding person. Then again I fealt bad for him to because it seemed quite embaressing. Also I caught one of the other wives nagging her husband about something. So shortly after midnight (I think) we were all out on the porch again. I was probably just sitting there in a drunken stupor while everyone else was talking. Or everyone else was also in a stupor. So everyone goes inside, I started to go inside when I was like you know what, I'm tired, drunk, and I'm done for the night. I'm going to make a quiet exit. So I just walked off the porch and started walking home. Perfect timeing... I puked a few times on the way home. Ahhh the sign of a succesful New Years Eve. Jumped in bed and passed out. So no the "Jew Broad" was not there, and I didn't "hook up" for New Years.

To tell the truth after seeing the problems with the married couples at the party it helped me realize that having a significant other isn't always all peaches and cream. So maybe I should be more appreciative of what I have instead of what I don't have.

So since I had the most succesful New Years Eve in a loooooong time, I figured that its time to start working on a few things. Now I'm not going to call them resolutions because if I do that they are most definately doomed to failure. Also a few of these ummm we'll call them self improvements have been kicked around and even worked on a bit already. As a person I've been trying to get more organized and disciplined. Those are sort of the overall tasks but they are actually made up of many many self improvements. The best way to tackle a problem is to break it down into manageable problems. I figure these new self improvements that just so happen to coincide with New Year's are just a continuation of all the changes I've already been working on. So we will see how long they last. The important thing to realize is that even though I might not meet the goals completely any improvement is better than none at all. (see thats me keeping a positive attitude) I also have to say that so far I've been feeling pretty good this year lol. Well I should mention overall I was feeling much better until that lil bump in the road called the holiday's. Now that they are over... well you know.

So one of the improvements is to get to bed, wake up, and leave for work all on time. I've created record logs scotch taped around my house to keep track of this one. I have a log for lights out, one for getting out of bed, and when I leave for work. So far... good results. Went to bed an hour late, got up on time though and got out the door by 8:00. Got into work before anyone else but the secretary. Now if I could keep this up for a while I might start to try to get up a bit earlier so I can spend a little bit more time doing household chores before I get to work. It's always a drag to come home after a long day at work and have to get right into doing dishes making dinner blah blah you know all that crap. I never seem to remember to take meat out of the freezer or stick it in a marinade before I leave for work. That one little step makes cooking dinner so much easier.

Ok this ones starting to go off topic. I'm really good at that. Anyway I hope everyone has a positive personal outlook for the year. I realize having a positive outlook for the rest of the world seems kind of dim in these harsh times. And remember if you come up with any ideas on self improvement there is no reason to wait for a new year to get to work on them. Get started on them TODAY! nothing is stopping you except yourself.

People Suck!

Ok this is a quick follow up to the last post then I'm going to post a new years post. Anyway I was leaving work when I realized where my down cycle starts with the loneliness and depression. Well I sort of spotted it with the Holiday's but I realized what it really is. Its other people. I get to a point where I'm happy with myself, even if I am alone. Then Whammo the holidays come around and I start seeing more of my family and people I don't actually see too often. When your mom starts asking you when are you going to get a girlfriend. Your best friend constantly asking you if your looking for a girlfriend. Hows the girl situation... shit like that. Its like stop fuckin asking I'm not lookin for a girlfriend I'm trying to be happy with myself first. Once I'm not so freakin depressed, if a girlfriend should come along well so be it. If she doesn't thats fine too because I'll be happy with myself.