Conrad Blog:

What I've been up to

It sure has been a long time since this sucka has seen any activity, and all of my matt-good-fanboys are all like, "why hasn't he written, that pansy-sailor!" Okay so real life hasn't been anything nearly that interesting (nobody's called anybody a "pansy-sailor" lately), but nevertheless there ARE a few items of note that may explain why the blog has seen such little activity as of late.

1) Well - um, I packed.
Kristin found this awesome cool bigger nice-looking apartment a few months ago, and we had the sucker locked in for a long time. While we were anxiously waiting, it sort of became a fairy-tale, or myth, or something. Like something that "one-day" would be nice, but will probably never happen. Well, it started happening. We packed up stuff in our kinda junky small one-bedroom apartment and headed for the nice two-bedroom. Lets just say that there was a lot more crap in that tiny place than we thought would fit. Good times....

2) Moving
We moved - parents came and helped, saw the new place, visited nashville a bit. that was neat-o. Thanks to my very good greenville friends, Seth and Ian, we got everything moved in without any major incidents. In-CREDIBLE. Thanks, guys.

3) Car trouble
It had to happen. Car trouble. The dreaded plague of american life, the bane of my existence. We had bought a new (to us) car - nissan altima - for kristin, and it was having some problems starting - turns out its the alternator... and its not that hard to fix. But at the SAME TIME what has turned out to be sort of an old junker Toyota Corolla has this demon-possessed wiring problem that prevents it from starting, and spins up all the engine fans in the car WAY fast and you can't shut them off, draining the battery. Anyway, it was sort of a lot to bear all at once, and car problems really bother me more than they should. On the upside, I changed my own alternator and that was kinda neat. If not a little scary.

4) New Furniture / IDIOTS
Well, we have an actual living room now, so we got some new furniture. The idiots who came to deliver it - well, as I mentioned before, they were IDIOTS.
Kristin notices that the finish is a bit irregular on the coffee table, and these guys, being the rhodes scholars that they are, say "no problem! We've got a MARKER! Yes, a marker. So they get out this thing, color on our furniture, and subseqently leak ink-nasty all over our brand new carpet. Uncool. Then they ask us to use our soap and towels to clean it up, getting ink on our towels - unprofessional and uncool. THEN they rub so hard into the carpet that it is no longer just stained, it is ALL MESSED UP. The pile is not... piling. Unprofessional, uncool, and just plain destructive. so anyway kristin's upset and I'm in the middle of all this between the rental complex, kristin, and the furniture store. yowza. But I stick it to the man and they replace the carpet. w00t. they're still going to be replacing/fixing a lot of the furniture.
Of course, they didn't actually bother to call us and let us know when they were gonna replace the carpet. No. Instead, these workmen randomly showed up at the apartment, and (not speaking very good english) said "Carpet?" Kristin, a bit confused, asked if they were there to replace the carpet. They repeated, "Carpet?" Kinda odd. They were also really confused as to why there was stuff like A COUCH, TABLES, CHAIRS, A BOOKSHELF, AND A TV in the room that they were supposedly going to recarpet that day. It was an odd experience for her, I'm sure. But it all worked out

5) Revenge of the Car Trouble!
I'm an idiot. I left the lights on in the Altima for a while and it killed the battery. I had jumper cables, I thought "no problem." Well, they were short, scary cables - one was sorta um... frayed?? Well anyway, it didn't work, because as soon as I made the final contact, the alarm started going off... I didn't even know we HAD an alarm. so i'm pissing off the neighbors late at night - anyway, we're getting into really boring minutiae here but.... we eventually got it jumped, but man I felt dumb.

6) The antidote to feeling dumb is...
...Getting a promotion! w00t! Had my annual review, nothing even remotely negative. I had sortof weaseled my way into doing the job of somebody more advanced than my position for a while, so they eventually realized that, and gave me a new title and a fairly hefty pay raise. I went from being a Web Developer (which really means "some guy who can lay out a site with tables and photoshop and dreamweaver") to Programmer (which really means "we would make you a software engineer, but we'd like you to have a little more experience first"). Personally, just by the sound of it, I think Web Developer has more prestige. Programmer sounds a little.... "code-monkey"-ish. But - its a bit step up, and I'm gonna keep kicking butt and try to hit the SE mark next year, after I get my MCTS cert and maybe take some classes, and roll out this dang project we've been working on. GOOD THINGS.

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oh... and I soaked my cell phone - I'm blaming Sonic, but that's another story altogether. Its toast, so until I get another one, email is best, or call kristin.

But that's my life in a nutshell. Been a kinda good, kinda stressful month or so. That's why I haven't really put out any new songs or anything. Please forgive me, I hope to resume that soon, and with a vengance.