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| Monday, December 17, 2007 |
| Climbing Up The Walls |
I took today off. I needed a mental health day. I went to Sweet Tomato's with a lot of people from Bookman's (Dani, Nyssa, Nature, his daughter Michaela, Rhys, and Danielle) and Sami. I filled two plates with the cafeteria-style salad stuff, a cup of soup, a bit of pizza, and a brownie. I ate the whole thing. Given a litle more time I probably could've kept eating, actually.
Afterwards, everyone but Danielle and Sami went to Rocks & Ropes with me and Nyssa. We've been going there for about a month now. I'm now regularly climbing "8's," which is fairly challenging. I am definitely still relying on my arms too much, and my hands can't quite keep up - but I'm getting there.
Anyway, Michaela is 11 and adorable; Nature is about seven feet tall and so was able to do some pretty ridiculous climbing. I took pictures on Nyssa's camera and am still pretty pissed at myself for not bringing my own camera.
Dani also wants me to take Yoga classes from her. We'll see how good my sense of balance really is, I guess.
I needed a day like today.
Edit: Big kudos to my boss, who called me up and, basically, that he was glad I took the day off because it meant I was trying to take care of myself. Seems like there weren't many bosses I've had that had that kind of grasp on reality.Labels: Bookman's, climbing, friends, ITP, Nyssa, Sami, work, yoga |
posted by Steve @ 11:35 PM  |
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| Friday, September 14, 2007 |
| Parties & Progression into Perfection |
Last weekend, Rachel and I hosted a party.
When we were in college, we had a house shared with a few other people and it really was the perfect party house: huge living room, a pool, decent kitchen, and a patio. We didn't have any money at all, so our preparations were always sparse, but people brought alcohol and we had cards and a stereo system.
As far as parties go, they were fun, but Rachel and I were never really big into drinking -- and she always cheats at cards.
Now we have an awesome little place of our own that's not unlike the place we used to have, expect of course that it's a one-bedroom instead of 3. Naturally, after an absurd amount of clean-up, we wanted to have a housewarming party.
We didn't quite finish cleaning, and I jumped the gun a bit probably since the party was scheduled a week before Rachel's vacation (she had to work the day after a party; that was my bad).
~-----~
 We invited most of Bookman's and all our friends. We had few people come, though: Sami, her friend Camille, Nyssa (briefly), and Sean. Sean's friend Justin and his wife made a brief appearance in which we watched their wedding video - and Sean's best-man speech. It was very good and included this memorable line (paraphrased from memory):
"[Justin's parents] have nothing to worry about from this guy. He'll take good care of your daughter his whole life until he's dead. After that, I can't promise anything."
~-----~
 I'm actually quite glad that the party was small. It was made more enjoyable, and fit our style. We had S'mores, even though the fire was a bit smoky. We played 2-on-2 basketball. Sami beat up Sean like a boxer. Sean was surprisingly nimble. Camille was a regular baller. I was much worse under pressure than I should've been, given all the practice I've had lately.
We played some video games - Rachel and Sami were playing a lot of Mortal Kombat, and we hardly touched the absurd amount of alcohol Sean and I split. I do however have a pretty awesome alcohol cabinet all of a sudden:
- Blue Sapphire gin
- 1200 Silver Tequila
- Bailey's Irish Cream
- Kahlua coffee liquer
- Captain Morgan dark rum
- Bacardi light rum
- Finlandia vodka
- Triple Sec
- Grenadine
- Lime juice
~-----~
The party culminated in a pretty intense girls-versus-boys water gun fight. Thankfully Sean and I realized that the first place one should go when starting a water gun fight is the hose, and we fought off the girls' attacks in general. Eventually they (with 3-on-2 odds) managed to raid and wrestle control of the hose, and by the end it was a big, drippy mess.
It was awesome.
 The survivors - Sean, Camille, Sami and I - went to Grill afterwards. It was certainly memorable, and I'm hoping to throw that kind of celebration more often.Labels: friends, house, party |
| posted by Steve @ 10:26 AM |
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| Tuesday, August 07, 2007 |
| Music & Life... with Rests |
Rachel's birthday is on Wednesday, and so of course everybody - and I mean everybody - wants to see Rachel and I. It's nice that we're popular, but I'm pretty sure she's going to want to sleep for the most part.
Finding a balance is proving harder than we thought, especially since we have different weekends. Hopefully, when we go to the libraries around here to apply for a job for her, we'll have some luck and eventually have the same two days off every week.
We also weeded and pruned a ton this week. I'm pretty sure we've cut, pulled and otherwise removed about 300-400 pounds of foliage, branches and weeds. Sad thing is that we're not even really close to finishing. We're still excited about our new place, but boy it's a lot of work getting it up to where we want it to be.Labels: birthday, family, friends, house, Rachel, vacation |
| posted by Steve @ 12:52 AM |
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| Sunday, July 22, 2007 |
| Endings and Beginnings |
I had a lovely 27th birthday party, and have come to understand that my favorite kind of get-together/party involves about 3-10 of my friends. I'll have to remember that when we have our housewarming party in about 3 weeks.
A beginning: our time here in this apartment is coming to an end, and we're doing it the right way: giving ourselves a week and a half to move. The new place is a duplex with covered parking right outside the door, and enough room for a basketball hoop and a garden in the back yard. It also has laundry machines, thank God.
An end: I picked up the seventh and final Harry Potter book at midnight on my birthday. I didn't go to sleep - I stayed up until about 10am reading, slept for four hours, and woke up to finish the book. I'm still recovering, a bit, but my impression is favorable. Before judging it properly, though, I'm going to re-read the entire series once we've moved (the other books are packed up already).
A beginning: I bought an expensive PDA/phone, the Treo 755p. It replaces my old phone, a Sanyo SCO-7200, which I will honestly miss (still have to donate it to a recycling service). It was a beast, and survived more falls than I care to think about. I'll have to be much more careful with my new phone. The idea with the new phone is that I will be able to keep myself organized, and also have directions on me while traveling (it has Google maps).
An end: we're not slackin' anymore, and finally starting to keep proper records. We're going to take an inventory of everything we have for our insurance. Believe me, it's amazing how much stuff one has, especially all the ancillary stuff. Imagine how much it would cost to replace just the stuff you use in the bathroom (razors, shampoo, scrubber, toothbrush, toothpaste, etc.). This also involves keeping track of important receipts and warranties.
A beginning: I'm about halfway through organizing my photo archive. Once I'm finished, I'll be posting them onto various stock photo websites and hopefully I'll make a couple bucks here and there.
An ending: the process of getting the truck all fixed up is basically over, now that it's re-wired, if Saguaro Auto gets the thing to pass emissions (we'll find out tomorrow). At this point, we've pretty much redone everything. Of course, there's a lot of glaring problems: the passenger door doesn't lock, the dash is completely torn apart, and it needs to have the rust blasted out of the bed. But these things don't have any effect on how it runs, and that makes me very happy. Or it will, if it passes emissions...
A beginning: Rachel and I now have full insurance (dental, visual, medical) and an active 401k from Bookman's. It's the first time I've had that since I was a military dependent, and even then, because I had no car, I never took advantage of it because I couldn't get clear across town. I'll be getting a physical soon, and go to the first dental appointment I've had in ages.Labels: apartments, birthday, friends, Harry Potter, insurance, moving, party, photography, slacking, Treo, truck |
| posted by Steve @ 11:26 PM |
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| Monday, January 01, 2007 |
| Things to do before the 8th |
This is a list of things I need to do before I go back to my 12-hour-a-day jobs. I wanted to start in on them last week, but spent most of it working or being with my family. Set up the stereo so that it has a line going to the bedroom speakers, for night-time music as well as wake-up music.
Finish sorting paper. I have a box full of mostly financial files that need to be sorted and filed. Finished in May
- Find a new host for my homepages.
Empty out the 401k from my old school.- E-Mail and/or find a bunch of people I've lost touch with:
Marla, Stephanie, Dave, Eric, Jen, Chris, and Joe at the least.
Do some credit card balance juggling. Yay?Call PrivacySource; they have good services (relating to one's credit rating) but they charged a full years' service at once when they said they'd do it in increments. Turns out it's because of the way I signed up - but they were very nice and arranged to have it set up in payments and to refund the money. Yay for corporations that take care of their customers!Update and/or dispute various information on my credit report. Done in May
Re-enter a few years' worth of financial data from the Discover card into Money. Done in May.Look into getting the truck's gas tank cleaned. Performance Radiator does it for $85, but I'll have to detach it myself. 3-5 day turnaround.
Fix Leelu's clutch cable and starter.- Record the vocals for the song Caravaggio.
- Record the vocals for the song Heathen.
Pick up the basketball game and holiday photos from Walmart.
Make a maintenance schedule for both vehicles: when to replace, fill or otherwise maintain everything in both cars (brakes, oil, as well as a list of all pertinent phone numbers such as tow numbers, insurance, et cetera). Finished in June (!)
- Post and sell/give away our
filing cabinet, ceiling fan, printer, and monitor. Sold!
- Record our old cassette tapes into the computer.
- Sell the cassette player, refurbished chest, small white chair, and large blue chair to Bookmans.
Use Bookman's trade to buy Rachel's computer.
Put on the VW's white seat covers.
- Get at least 90% of my homepage set up.
Get my Impulse Designs page set up.
Update Outlook to include my friends' and relatives' birthdays.
- Go through the boxes of sentimental stuff in the closet and purge.
Wash and waxbothvehicles; they haven't had a good wax in forever.Leelu
Make a cathouse for the kitties out on the patio.
Clean the patio.Do the dishes.Do some serious grocery shopping.Vacuum the apartment.
Do the laundry.Post my previous blogs to this blog. Finished in June (!)
Labels: cars, chores, credit, friends, homepage, money, music, To-Do |
| posted by Steve @ 9:17 PM |
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| Monday, April 03, 2006 |
| Exciting Event no. 12: Return of the Beeb |
| BB, my computer, has been resurrected. That, in of itself, is good news since it had my whole freaking new album as well as my old design work and my gigantor music collection. Some of those bits were backed up, but not really organized. But the circumstances surrounding this rebirth warrant bloggage. I had a program called Stellar Phoenix recovery software. Very nice stuff, didn't have the full version. Sean had tried to recover a hard drive of his by bringing it to Best Buy and giving them a bundle of cash. They got about half of it. He and I decided to go in and buy the program ($130). Worked great - we fixed my drives, and he got his working again to an extent Best Buy didn't touch. Okay, fine, but why the blog entry? Because I hate messing with computers at this point. I can - I know how to - I've just been the go-to guy among my friends for years on this kind of stuff and it's a 'plumber's pipes are leaky' situation - when I'm done fixing others' computers, I don't wanna do mine. In this case, I handed it to Sean - - and he learned what he needed to do and did it. I feel vaguely parental pride, and some serious relief I didn't have to do it. I have therefore bequeathed the majority of my computer junk to him - a half dozen hard drives, another half dozen CD drives, cases, etc., etc., that I didn't want to toss ('cos they really were useful for testing) but Rachel wanted gone and I didn't really like having ... especially cluttering up one of our rooms. And yet all of this doesn't really justify a blog entry. What I'm most happy about is that Sean is finally getting into this stuff - taking the networking classes that pretty much gaurantee a $40k per year job, and generally getting his life together. And it's good seeing that happen to a friend.
A random thing - it's a good thing that I don't live near AZ and Tasha anymore, or I'd always be playing the Sims 2... as it is it can only be a one-hour fix every week or so, which is on the whole a good thing.  | Currently playing :
The Sims 2 |
Labels: computers, friends, games, money, Sean |
| posted by Steve @ 10:20 PM |
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| Friday, February 24, 2006 |
| Others' work no. 1: Bono on weakness |
"The blessing of your weakness
is it forces you into friendships ...You rely on your lover,
you rely on your friends, and
finally you rely on God
if you want to become whole ... On your own, you're
that old fucking Zen idea.
You're the one hand clapping [laughs]." Labels: Bono, friends, philosophy, zen |
| posted by Steve @ 11:46 AM |
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| Tuesday, September 20, 2005 |
| Exciting Event No. 3: HOLY F.&%^!! S*%.!! |
So, once upon a time I went to Brophy, which is a private all-male high school in Phoenix. Next door was Xavier, an all-girl private school. In my freshman and sophmore years, there was a girl I hung out with name Catherine Kresge. She was very nice, a bit quiet, and way out of my league (at least, that was how I justified never working up the nerve to talk to her except amongst that small group of friends).
She went to the U of A the same time I did, and went into the theater. I didn't see her a lot, but went to her shows (though often she never knew - I never did work up that nerve) when I could and have always suspected she'd do well. Since I've been looking up my old friends and aquaintences, I looked her up.
And she's been on "The O.C.", and "That 70's Show", and she's got a new movie. Awesome?! YES! Go Catherine! Woot! I wonder if I can even still contact her.
I also found Steph, whom I also had a terrible crush in my early years at UA, but hung out with me and introduced me to more super cool things than I could properly list. This is fun. I just hope they'll remember me.
 | Currently reading :
BLACK SHRIKE
By Alistair Maclean |
Labels: Brophy, college, friends, movies, nostalgia, school, stories, true, TV |
| posted by Steve @ 3:14 PM |
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| Thursday, September 15, 2005 |
| Exciting Event No. 2: Aaron |
I am at work, being bored about half a week ago. I find out, through eavesdropping, that most of the staff have Myspace accounts. I wonder if pretty much everybody my age has a Myspace account. And so I type in the names of two people I haven't seen in forever: Jamie and Aaron. Two friends from Boy Scouts and grade school, respectively.
Turns out, Aaron does. I haven't seen him in a decade - over a third of my total life - and it's a bit odd seeing a picture of him drunk. Of course, I've been drunk too but ... having last seen him just a little while after our voices changed it's a bit weird. But then again - I'm married.Labels: friends, MySpace, nostalgia, true |
| posted by Steve @ 4:48 AM |
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| About Me |
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Name: Steve
Home: Tucson, Arizona, United States
About Me: I like to think about things, and I occasionally like to write what I think.
See my complete profile
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