Archive for Adventures
The long drive back from Tennessee
So, last Wednesday night we ended up leaving for Nashville at about 2 in the morning. Errr, we left for Nashville early Thursday morning (somehow, it doesn’t seem to be the next day until the sun actually starts rising). I drove first shift, and got to see a fabulous sunrise in Kansas before attempting to conk out in the folded down backseat of Drew’s car. There’s enough room for a person to stretch out and sleep, but it doesn’t work so well when the car is driving and I’m used to a glorious mattress. We got to Nashville at 11:00 central time. Unfortunately for us, most of the people there were East Coast elitists, so they had just finished watching the ball drop when we went inside, declared it a new year, and went to bed. New Year’s Central Time went unnoticed, and we were conked out in bed by the time Mountain Time New Years happened.
Now here’s something I’m curious about: New York has the ball drop and all, but what about the other time zones? Seems to be that Chicago should have a ball drop for the Central time zone, Denver for the Mountain time zone, and I suppose Seattle for the Pacific time zone. Don’t let New York get all the glory! I’d suggest more southern cities, but it seems that people have this idea that the holidays should be all gobbed up with snow, even though many parts of the US don’t see snow around the holidays at all. However, I’m open to a ball drop in
We were there 2.5 days, whereupon I received stuff and ate stuff and hung out with Drew’s relations. We decided to split up the drive back into two parts, and ended up getting a motel room in Topeka after having eaten some incredibly delicious BBQ in Missouri earlier. I need to either make or get ahold of some St. Louis style BBQ sauce, as it’s really good. I’m a sucker for some sweet and smoky. We might have driven further that night, but at some point the roads got slushy, then icy, and it would have been a waste. It’s interesting to observe weather driving west. It was really cold in Nashville with no snow, bitterly cold in Topeka with bunches of snow, and the further west we drove across Kansas the warmer it got, and it’s gonna hit close to 50 in Denver today.
Incidentally, next time we’ve got this kind of distance to go, we’re gonna try to fly instead. Driving is fun if you aren’t really familiar with the route so much, but we’ve both seen the 430 mile stretch on I-70 across Kansas waaay more then we need to at this point.
And here’s a few thoughts on hotels. I like nicer hotels, but only if someone else is totally covering it. As Drew and I were splitting the tab, we stayed at a Motel 6. In terms of cheap hotels/motels, it often seems better to choose chains over non-chains. With non-chains it’s questionable as to how livable the room will actually end up being. However, it doesn’t matter much for that chain if whoever stays there thinks it sucks, as they’re just passing through and so repeat business isn’t too much of a concern. So, if they’re sheisty or lazy, they can get away with lower standards. However, staying at a chain place, there’s a possibility that you’ll continue to visit their other locations when you travel. Thus, the Motel 6 was as bare-bones as the price suggested, but had the benefit of being appropriately clean and not being sketchy.
We got back last night around 8:30, and Estha was super glad to see us. We now have giant piles of crap sitting everywhere which we should probably deal with at some point. Also, so much junk food. My goal is to not eat it all today. Incidentally, my New Year’s resolution is to not gain too much weight. Screw losing weight. And screw not gaining weight. I’ve accepted the fact that, every winter, I put on lbs. Conversely, every summer, I lose those lbs. All I want is to not gain so many lbs that my bras stop fitting, as that is a royal pain. Mind you, I’ve got summer bras and winter bras for this precise purpose, but when I start outgrowing the winter bras things start getting really pissy for me.
Anyhow, we scored a giant bag of miniature candy (kisses and teeny Reeses cups and such), which pleases the little Martha Stewart part of me as it means we have stuff to put in our candy dish for the next month or so. Incidentally, we decided that we’re gonna keep our Christmas tree and lights up until the beginning of February. See, I get depressed in the winter. I think the excitement of the holidays helps, but January is generally pretty bleak. So, I shall experiment with leaving bonus Xmas light cheer up, to see if that combats seasonal affective disorder type issues.
And on a final note, today is Drew’s and my 4 year anniversary, yay! Unfortunately, Drew is currently passed out in bed with whatever disease he picked up on this trip. We’ll be hitting the Macaroni Grill later for anniversary dinner, whereupon I will gorge myself on sea life and exciting beverages. Until then, I will hang out with Drupal and try to figure out what the heck to get Drew for our anniversary that he hasn’t already received over this long holiday season.
Drupal, the holidays, etc
I feel like I’ve cracked a major milestone, or something, regarding Drupal. I finally figured out how to write a basic module, and it works. Still needs a lot of finessing, but it gives me confidence that I can finish this project I’m working on without that pesky guesswork of knowing what I needing to do, but having no clue how to do it and no clue how difficult it is to do it. I’m really hoping that I can clean up my module and make it more user-friendly, so I can publish it with other modules and future people could find it useful.
I think I might go ahead and convert the Salami Day website to Drupal. I was originally using it as my CakePHP learning experience, but since not getting the job that I originally tried to learn CakePHP to impress, I feel like Drupal is just a better direction to go in, for now at least. That was an unfortunate job experience, anyhow. It’s really crappy when you go to an interview, find out that there’s something they really want you to know that they never bothered to tell your recruiter about, or bothered to mention in the telephone interview you’ve already had with them. Then, when you mention you’ve been thinking about learning it and can pick it up in the next week, they give a dismissive comment, as if they don’t believe you. Pretty much my entire design/development career has consisted of “Hey, I need to learn this program to do this thing. Guess I better do it.” I mean, that’s how you learn, right? Mind you, I didn’t have any sort of fabulous grasp on CakePHP, but after a week I’d rebuilt Salami Day and had a decent enough understanding of it’s structure. The job looked pretty nice, too. Oh well. Considering how many applicants they might have had who actually *knew* CakePHP, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I didn’t get it. Nonetheless, I wish I could just jump up and down and flap my arms and scream that I’m a hard worker and love deadlines, and have them listen and fall in love with me and give me a bucket of dollars. If only!
In other news, I’m getting sick of ham + salad. We did Christmas with Drew’s aunt Pam, and as she was fortunate enough to get invited to a friend’s timeshare in Hawaii for the remainder of the holiday break, we got to take home all the food that Drew’s cousin Travis wasn’t going to eat. So, we have this gargantuan bag of salad, along with a nice pile of ham. Thus, ham salad! Goes great with Ken’s Steak House honey mustard dressing! Also, mmm, Christmas latkes. They went fast. We also have a metric ton of chocolate. Pacing issues with that, of course. Also, a post Christmas present – me finding a workout machine for free on Craigslist! It’s some sort of step resistance machine, nothing too fancy, but it’s free, and that’s the important part.
We leave for Nashville in two days. Drew’s family reunion and all that stuff. I get my sewing machine back, which shall be glorious. My butt will also get numb and fall off from the driving. Less glorious.
Also! On the 6th, I go in to take an application to become a Census worker. Could be fun! I have been spending waay too much time playing Oasis, which is this fabulous “Civilization meets Minesweeper” type game, which came out a few years back and I’m playing on my computer and is really cheap through the Amazon game downloads section. Andrew has been similarly productive, in that he just finished reading all of Dragonball. Which is a godawful quantity of manga.
Hmm, about time for another infamous ham salad. Hope everyone has a Happy New Year!
Chick-fil-a, snow, my car, and other miscellaneousness
For those not in the know, I had an adventure this past week. Drew and I, having entirely too much free time and no money to eat out, decided to camp out in front of a Chick-fil-a to get 52 coupons for free combo meals each. Incidentally, there was a blizzard going on at the time. It was….cold. And sometimes it was fun. I wrote a big ole description about it (plus a few pictures) at my food blog, and I’ve got the rest of the pictures available to view on facebook.
My car is still in the shop. The repair place called me the other day and informed me that it’ll be around $3500 to fix the car. Which is quite possibly more then my car is worth. However, the insurance company should be covering it, so all is good. If they weren’t, I’m pretty sure I would have heard back from them by this point. I’ve not really driven the rental car at all. Part of that is the blizzard, and part of that is that it’s bigger then I’m used to and a bit clunky and currently covered in snow. Well, I can’t really say “clunky” I suppose. It’s clunky in the way that cars covered in doohickeys that are super spacious for larger people are clunky. So really, I’m just used to driving a cheap small car, and feel weird in this nicer large car. I also want more visibility. The Kia’s got me spoiled on that, I just don’t care for super-slanted windshields and rear windows.
Nanowrimo starts in two days. Need plot soon. Going to super exciting Nanowrimo launch party tomorrow.
Also, and this is important, if you dress like a burrito tomorrow, you can get a free burrito from Chipotle. You can just wrap some tin foil around your arm, it totally counts. Guess what I’m planning to eat for dinner tomorrow? And for the next several nights, if all goes well! Mmm, nothing tastes better then free.
Car goes crunch!
So Drew and I decided to go hiking with a meetup group last weekend. There was potential bad weather, but other people were gonna tough it out and go, so I figured we could as well. So we get there kinda late, and do the hike with a few other people who also got there late. Take lots of pretty pictures, like this one:
And these ominous clouds:
So we get down from the hike, and slowly make our descent off the mountain. I was driving slow, but apparently 20mph doesn’t cut it in some areas, because I went around a curve, hit a slick patch, and drove into an embankment. Slowly though, so it was a nice fluffy ‘thud’, and as it happened I was dreading the possibility of having to get a tow truck to get my car out of said embankment. Then there was a crunch as the car behind me also hit the slick spot and plowed into my back.
It was a gentle plowing though, no injuries. Well, except to my poor car. It was unfortunate too, as the guy that hit my car was one of the people I’d just been hiking with. And as sad as I was about my rear getting crunched, I felt pretty bad for the guy, as he was feeling awful about hitting me. It was pretty minor though, I could drive home on it (slowly, to keep the back light from flying off).
So I’ve got this rental car now, and my car is in the shop for an unknown length of time, all covered by the guy’s insurance. Rear panel needs to get replaced (if I remember correctly), along with the light of course. I’ll miss my companion cube!
In other news, Drew and I are getting up very early Wednesday to go plant ourselves in front of a Chick-fil-a in Fort Collins in the hopes of being one of the first 100 when it opens. Ah, the joys of being underemployed.
Cross country travel in a ridiculous vehicle, etc
So the excruciatingly planned last weekend seemed to turn out OK, minus the fact that we generally left places about an hour or so later then I’d anticipated. That, however, can be attributed to my being entirely too optimistic about how efficient Drew and I can be in getting things accomplished.
It was nice to see people and eat delicious Thai food Friday night, though in an ideal world we would have had more then just that evening for such things. Saw Carolyn & Todd’s house, which is magical and full of penguins. Spent the night at my parents’ place, got delicious Mexican for lunch the next day with both my & Drew’s parents plus Julie. Next, headed off to Charlie & Tara’s wedding, which was weddingtastic. Hung out with all sorts of OWP-related peoples at reception and ate/drank copious amounts of items (it is indeed possible for asparagus to taste really good, crazy!). Went to OWP Jason’s afterward for continued OWP-related socializing. Then, off to Drew’s dad & stepmom’s place in Chester for sleeps. Get moving truck from Budget the next day, move items from attic into said truck, eat copious amounts of delicious seared tuna. Head back to my parents place, sleep. Get up next day and move my items into truck. Eat bacon, load up on travel sandwiches and cookies, hug Mickey the pigeon goodbye.
We left around 11:00am or so, taking 64W. The trip is the same that we took back in July, except this time in a giant bouncy truck (well, if you consider 10′ “giant”) that costs about $50 to refill the tank. Anyhow, the drive through Virginia was one taken many times before, and the drive through West Virginia is absolutely gorgeous. Giant mountains everywhere! West Virginia is totally underrated. We go through Charleston, which looks like a fun place to visit. Then, the long drive through Kentucky, where we end up in Louisville at Drew’s aunt & uncle’s place around 10:00 pm or so. Stay the night there, eat breakfast biscuits, load up on travel sandwiches and cookies. We drive for forever and a half the next day, all the way to Kansas, going through Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. In St Louis we switched from I-64 to I-70. St Louis also looks like a fun place to visit, what with their fancy arch and all. The worst state for driving through, for me, was Missouri, it was just long highway and terrain not dissimilar to other long highways in VA/NC/OH. I wanted to make sure that last day of driving wasn’t Hell, so we pushed into Kansas, and stayed in Abilene at a cheap hotel, getting there about 11:00 or so. Or maybe 10:00 or so. Or possibly 12:00 or so. Our truck was on Mountain time the entire trip, my watch was on Central time, but my head was on Eastern time because I kept getting sleepy entirely too early. This continues, as for some bizarre reason I am typing this post at 7:30 am, and it’s not from staying up all night!
Anyhow, we left at 11:00 the next day, driving the long haul through Kansas. Almost all of this drive through Kansas is farmland. The first 1/3 or so is full of lots of rolling hills, and it’s really pretty. The rest is really flat. Everyone seems to complain about it being really flat, but I never really got tired of it. I kept looking around and being all like “Wow, it’s really flat!” This fascinated me until we hit Colorado and I started getting antsy for mountains. Also, it was super windy, and tumbleweeds kept flying across the road. As you move across Kansas, it also goes from “hey, it’s pretty green and farmy here” to “Hey, it’s drier, but still farmy here, just with more cattle” to “gee, it’s kinda brown!” and mostly ranches/farms with cattle/horses. Oh, and there are giant wind turbines at one point along the highway, which are really neat to see. I took pictures, and if I find any ambition whatsoever, I’ll try to post them at some point.
So we get into Colo Spgs around 7:00, making good time, eat chicken, and decide to sleep at Pam’s place for the night and drive the truck up the next day, to give Estha the cat one more day of sanity (she was staying with Pam for the week we were traveling). We’ve spent the last two days locating furniture, and today we get to take the truck back. The furniture has been an adventure in itself, and I shall post more when I have more ambition.
The job hunt continues
So Drew is currently on a plane back to Richmond. He’s got his final exam to take, and then he’s all done with school and has his political science degree. Then both of us can be busy not being able to find jobs, yay!
I actually had an interview last Thursday, a nice long phone interview with two different people in the company. I felt confidant about the interview – I had practically all of the skills they were seeking, and even made a point of dabbling in one thing they were looking for that I didn’t have. Everything seemed peachy with Interviewer #2, but Interviewer #1 flung questions at me about things that weren’t mentioned at all in the job description or by the recruiter. Based on the description, the position was pretty straight up web design stuff (html/css/js), but then I’m getting asked about things like weblogic and struts, neither of which I am familiar with at all. So I’m still fuzzy on what happened, if the job description simply was not as complete as it could be, or if they decided that it would be in their best interest to get someone that had a wider range of skill then what they were initially looking for, or if there was simply some miscommunication. In any case I did not get the job, which is too bad as I had rather enjoyed Interview #2 (it went more like a conversation, and I’d thought I’d gotten a good feeling from the interviewer), and the job (based on the description at least) had sounded interesting and right up my alley. Alas. Someone called me today about another position, don’t know all the details yet so we’ll see.
Drew and I went to Boulder last weekend and there was a random art festival going on, which was interesting and entirely too expensive. The downtown area fell into a similar category. Manitou Springs seems like hippies + tourists, and Boulder is definitely hippies + yuppies. There was a large stream with some decent rapids which we walked along, along with 8237982374 people and their inflated tubes. The rapids looked really fun, and I’d like to go back and go tubing there sometime. We also meandered outside the town on some random path or another into a canyon-type area, and I climbed a giant rock. My thighs were all in a way after that, but in a good way. I like climbing giant rocks. There are random mesas/buttes nearby, and I want to pack a picnic and climb to the top of one and eat it.
Here are more random photos for your eyeballs’ enjoyment.
This is from a nearby construction site, dusk was a good time for pictures there!
Andrew poses beside a mighty cannon.
I’m a cowboy…on a steel horse I ride…and I’m wanted….dead or alive!
More random updates from Colorado
Let see, last Friday we managed to hit four Chick-fil-a restaurants. I wore my usual cow blanket plus horns, Drew wore a white plastic bag with holes cut in it and a black shirt underneath, along with some horns. Twas very exciting. They’ve got free breakfast entree Tuesdays going on this month, but the nearest Chick-fil-a is about 25 minutes away, so we’re just not that ambitious in the morning (not yet, at least).
Went to the Colorado Renaissance Festival this past Saturday, it was far more exciting then the piddly one just north of Richmond I went to a few years back. Saw jousting and ate copious amounts of tasty items. Did some hiking at Garden of the Gods yesterday, which is a really neat park full of giant rock formations. Our oxygen levels are still struggling from that whole altitude thing (it’s 6,000+ feet here), but is gradually improving.
And here’s some random photos. Yay field!
Storms out here are really weird. Because of the mountains and lack of lots of trees, you can see much more sky then in VA. Then, because of the altitude, you’re much closer to the clouds then you were before. Thus, you see a storm coming from aways off, and it looks really weird in contrast to the clear and sunny sky beyond it.
These majestic beasts were feeding in a nearby construction site at dusk:
Update on the state of things
Drew and I ventured over to Manitou Springs today, which is this really neat town on the edge of Pike’s Peak. Much barbecue and chocolate were consumed.
I’m trying to do a fair bit of biking, because a.) The weather is fabulous: sunny, rather warm, and when I sweat it immediately dissipitates, b.) it’s an excellent way to get to know the area, c.) We’re currently located on the edge of suburbia, right beside fields and country with horsies and such and it’s really pretty, d.) the suburbia is a lot more bike-aware then Richmond’s suburbia ever was, and e.) If I continue to eat copious amount of barbecue and chocolate, the biking will be highly necessary to ensure that I don’t have to go spend entirely too much money on new bras. It’s interesting, the suburbia here is so much friendlier then what I’m used to. Mind you, it’s still rather inconvenient if you’re trying to walk to the grocery store, and there is excessive use of strip mall-age. We’re in an area where there’s a lot of newer housing, and it’s nice looking smaller houses. I’m used to seeing either new giant McMansion type buildings, or cheap and crappy new buildings. There’s a lot of nicer looking 2-3 bedroom houses, with interesting architecture and rock gardens and such. Mind you, the architecture might just be related to the fact that I’m used to seeing colonials and whatever else they use all over the Mid-Atlantic, and here everything has more of a western feel. Also, there’s sidewalks! Lots of sidewalks!
Jobwise, there is slight advancement. My resume is being submitted by a recruiter for a position doing web stuff with Barclay Card. It would be working with table-less design (and hand-coding at that, yay) and trying to make all their websites standards-compliant, which I’m decent at, so the job itself sounds interesting. I need to go look at YUI and see if it’s in any way similar to Jquery, and either way I should try to learn some, as they’re interested in having that as well. One downside is that it’s located in Colorado Springs, and I was really stoked about being in Denver. However, I’ve explored next to none of the area, and I’m pretty sure I’d be fine staying in CS for awhile for a decent job. I’m just a sucker for giant cities with nightlife and such. I am also a sucker for mountains and paths that allow me to climb all over said mountains, so either location should work just fine for that.
I will now end this with two excellent pictures of Andrew. The first one shows him gliding majestically up a hillside:
The second shows him being, uh, less majestic:
Running off and such
So Drew and I are off for a lovely week in beautiful humid Florida, whereupon we will camp and hike and sprawl out on the beach and hunt for good Cuban food. Hope everyone else has a superb week!
Firefox, keyboards, diving for goodies, and my beloved Steelcase chair.
So is it just me, or has Firefox been really slow since the last update? It takes for-freaking-ever to load pages. I’m paranoid I’ve gotten some sort of weird virus on it. I’m hoping that maybe it’s some sort of issue with the latest version instead, though, mostly because viruses are a huge pain. Chrome works fine though, and for all I know IE might work fine too (though whether I’ll actually check is debatable). In the process of being frustrated, I defragged, so my C drive is feeling much better. Also found out that Steam, which I used for Portal-related purposes and have barely touched since then, was taking up multiple gigs of space. Not completely sure why, as, though I had several random trial downloads, none of them were in any way fancy. Nonetheless, it got uninstalled.
My computer area is now oolong-flavored. Yesterday I had the fabulous fortune to whack my still-too-hot-to-drink cup of tea with my elbow, thus giving some things a bath. Nothing too important though, lucky for me there is apparently some serious indentation going on in the middle of my computer desk. Though, the left arrow on my keyboard is sticking in a rather unfortunate way. I feel lucky that the keyboard works at all, though, given my luck with spilling things on keyboards. Which I suppose is the price one inevitably pays for keeping beverages at one’s desk.
So this past Saturday! Diving madness! As Christine is unemployed and I am a lover of Free, we both went up to the U of R for their moving out day to check out all the detritus the students were leaving behind. At first I was disappointed due to the lack of VA-friendly items, but in the end all was well. Drew and I now have about 25+ packets of microwaveable popcorn (butter lover’s, to be precise). Someone had a great big box of the stuff and had chucked it, with barely any used at all. I also have a hula hoop! The best find though was a super sweet jacket. It’s made by Diesel, and is cut and designed in a really interesting manner, with joyous zippers. Once I’ve washed it I’ll post a picture of the awesomeness.
On a final note, I essentially have had a free drafting chair for the past several years. Back when I started doing contract work for OWP, I bought a really nice used Steelcase drafting chair from Hull St Outlet for $100. It was a really high-quality chair and was amazing for my posture. I used it constantly for two good years, and then when I went to work in-house, it just kinda sat around. I finally decided to suck it up and sell it. As much as I liked the chair, I liked the money more, and I feel bad if I own something and never use it, I feel like that item would be happier if it were owned by a person who appreciated it more then me. So I sold the chair on Craigslist – for $100. Yay!
