The Cat's Nuts

Wow. 200. That's pretty impressive. For anyone that knows me, you'll realize that I get obsessed with something, spending every waking moment on it, but then a month later, I'll be onto the next thing. That's just how I work.

I feel pretty good since I have gotten up to my new home in Orange County. Things are pretty quiet here, but at the same time, it's nice to be in the sticks again. I've missed it quite a bit. I know that in a month or two, I'm going to be yearning for the city and to go out in the metropolis that is New York, but at this point, I'm just enjoying the soliude.

This week, I'm not assigned to any projects, so I'm considered to be "on the bench". What that means, is I have pretty much the entire week to do as I like, while waiting for someone to contact me. If I hadn't moved up to my parents house, this would be a terribly boring week, but seeing as I have so much to do anyway, it's kind of nice to be able to get everything taken care of in one week.

Scott is going to be moving from the suburbs of Boston into the heart of the city tomorrow, so I am going to go up there and help him move. Seeing as how yesterday I was able to take care of most things on my list, I don't have a whole lot to do for the rest of the week. I figured that I would be nice and go up and lend a helping hand. I'm looking forward to getting my RSX on the open road and heading up there. I was planning on going up tonight, so I should really take some time and burn some CD's to listen to.

I got my Sub installed into the car, so that is pretty sweet. I'm pleased with it. For being a little 10" sub, it packs quite a punch. It's way more powerful than I need, and hits quite hard. For the $80 I paid for the stuff to install it, and the 3 hours that it took to do so, it was well worth it. I tried to put these vinyl red-outs on the tail lights of my car yesterday, but I was less than successful. I'm going to give it another shot today and see if I have any better luck.

I think the only other thing that I have to do is get a haircut, retun this crappy phone that I bought from BestBuy, and then head up to Boston. Sounds like a really packed day, doesn't it?

Posted by Michael at 05:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Okay...kidding, but it's the same TYPE of car. :)

Posted by Michael at 03:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I hate the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail… it’s terrible. Okay, well I don’t REALLY hate it, but at the same time, when it makes me almost miss my train and have to stand out in the cold for 20 minutes because they can’t stick to a schedule….it kind of pisses me off.

Today was the 4th installment of Business Objects training and it was a pretty good day. I felt like I kept myself focused for a majority of the time and even though we were getting into some pretty heavy material, I kept a good understanding of it all the way thought. Nice pat on the back for me.

Other than the training, things proceeded pretty much as expected. Laura was working from my parents house today and had to go and get a U-Haul trailer for her trip to Texas tomorrow, so she was freaking out as expected. Around 3:00 I got frantic text messages and a call from her.

I ducked out of the training and gave her a call to find out that her friend, James, who was going to be driving down with her to Texas, was bailing on her. Turns out that he and his boyfriend went snowboarding last night and he fell particularly hard on his butt. While that noramlly wouldn’t be cause for concern, when he woke up, his leg/s(?) were black. Yes….black. Apparently it took James and his boyfriend 30 minutes to make it down the stairs because he was in so much pain. James was freaking out and pretty much told Laura that he needed to stay at the hospital. James offered to drive down to Texas a day later, but Laura declined. Hopefully they will find out what is wrong with his leg/s by tomorrow morning and at that point, James will be able to go with Laura. If they can’t solve the issue, I have I told Laura that I would take the road trip with her.

Over the past few weeks, I have been reading over the RSX boards that are all over the internet and have found one that I like in particular. It’s called ClubRSX. It has a large following and has lots of good articles about modding your RSX. Of the various things that I have learned there, I think that I’ve decided on doing a couple of mods. The first one that I’m going to be doing…and had planned for this weekend, was installing an amp and subwoofer into my trunk. I got an amp and a sub from my brother, so the cost is minimal, but I have a feeling that it’s going to be a time consuming endevour, especially if I have to do it out in the cold of the driveway. I think that I’ll probably try to move the car into the garage and work on it in there…cramped as it may be.

The other mod that I was really interested in doing was changing out the red LED lights that light up the dash of my car and installing blue ones. I have a whole instruction manual with pictures about how to go about doing it. Again, I don’t think that it’ll be hard, but I have this sneaking suspicion that I’m going to be a bitch to do in the cold.

I also want to get the windows tinted out, and get some of the larger dents taken out, but I think that kind of stuff is going to have to wait until summer time.

I could go on and on, but I’ll save you.

Posted by Michael at 05:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After a long and argeous weekend, it’s finally finished. I am now no longer a resident of Brooklyn. After 7 years of living and working in New York City, I am now an up-stater again. I don’t really feel “good” about the move, especially because now I’m a 24 year old single male that’s living at home with his parents. Kind of makes me sound like a loser, but that’s okay…when I see the few grand that I’ll be saving every month, it’ll bring a smile to my face. 

The move itself wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. The last time we moved, it was from a 5th floor walkup, so I guess in comparison to that, even with the 70 miles of distance between the new location and Brooklyn, it wasn’t all that bad. Laura and I ended up making two trips up to get everything moved. We had this terrible, gas sucking, dented up 10’ box truck that we rented from Manhattan Mini Storage. Unfortunatly for us, we were not informed of their policy of charging per mile after 40 miles a day…so that was a shocker to the wallet when we got the final bill. Oh well.. still was only $300 for the whole two days.

I would have to say that the worst part of the whole damn experience was that I was highly reactive to the dust that was in the air in our apartment. Because Laura and I never took the time to clean and rarely brought out the vacuum, there was crazy ammounts of dust in the air, and well…my delicate lungs couldn’t really hack it, so I ended up sucking on my inhaler for a good portion of the following day. In that regard, I’m glad that we are out of there because it was causing me crazy ammounts of respiratory angst.

Today is Thursday, and for the past week, I have been participating in a Business Objects training course that is being run through my job. It’s been pretty interesting, but like anything where you are sitting the whole day, learning about the same topic, it has been getting a little tedious in the afternoons. Thank God we get out at 4:00, because I don’t think I could handle it much longer than that. On Monday and Tuesday night, I slept at Laura’s sister’s place on the Upper East Side. It was all well and good, but because she lives all the way over on York, it took me around an hour to get to Jersey City, not to mention having to truck myself 4 avenues in the freezing New York January cold.

Laura is departing from my parents house Mid-day on Friday. Tonight, after I get home from work, we are going to start to load up her trailer that she is picking up from Uhaul today. I have this strong suspicion that all her stuff isn’t going to fit into the trailer. The other day, we were sitting around talking about what was going to go into her car itself and she says:

“I don’t want to put anything in there but my art work and my computer.” I silently thought to myself…ummmm...yeah, that’s not going to happen, and sure enough, there is not a chance in hell that she’ll e able to fit all the boxes that she has into the trailer. I don’t even know if she’ll be able to get everyting into the trailer and the car, so we’ll see. I am betting that she’s going to have a fairly hefty postal bill after this is all said and done.

This weekend is going to be the first weekend where I will be up at my parents house. As it turns out, there are a few things that are going on. Tomorrow, Ryan goes in for his DUI sentencing, so that’ll be at least something to talk about with him over the weekend. I have a feeling that they are going to come down on him fairly hard, but he doesn’t seem to think so. I wrote him a letter of recommendation, but I doubt it’ll actually help all that much. My prediction is that he’s going to lose his license for a year, be on probation for 3-5, and not be allowed to drink at all during the whole of his time. He voiced to me that he may want to go up to New Paltz on Friday…. I was like “What the fuck!?!” He explained that he “couldn’t drink around Middletown.” Ugh… I have a feeling that by the end of his three years, he’s going to have spent a few nights in jail.

On Saturday, I am going to go with my father to work on the engine of his car. He believes that he’s got a burned up valve, and is going to a friend’s auto shop to work on it and hopefully fix it. I won’t get to be there on Friday when he tears it down, but I will get to see the mid-way and end stages of the project. Seeing as how I have never taken apart an engine before, this should be an interesting little event.

On Saturday evening, I’m going to be going over to Joe’s Uncle’s house to play some poker. Apparently they are having some sort of tournament over there. I’m not one to play a whole lot of poker, but I think that I’ll do pretty well. I’ve never played in any games with people that I don’t really know all that well, so it should be interestsing if nothing else. Joe expressed that he wanted to go out afterwards, so I suppose I will be the designated driver.

We’ll see how the weekend works out.

Posted by Michael at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today is Saturday, and it's the last fun Saturday that I'm going to have in New York City where I will still actually be living here. Next weekend is the big move. Laura and I are going to rent a van and drive all of our stuff up to my parents house. I figure that it's going to take somewhere close to 3 trips, but I'm hoping that we can do it in two.

Over the past week we have been posting various things up on Craigslist to see if we could lighten the load a little bit for the move. We were able to successfully sell out massive 52" Sony projection screen TV, so that was just great. I was really worried that I was going to have to put that monster out on the street, but no...a nice family came and picked up all 248 lbs. of the 20 year old television. I ended up having to take out the actual projector unit so that they could get it into their van, but in the end, Laura and I were $250 richer and the family paid for a TV by the pound.

Our other quality sale came at the hands of our dishwasher. Laura and I had gotten a dishwasher off of Ebay about 18 months ago. We had to go and pick the thing up from this guy's house in Jersey. It was a pain and we got water all over Laura's car, but we got a sweet ass dishwasher for around $100. Not too shabby considering how they are around $400 new. Well, Laura and I knew that we had gotten a good deal when the people came to buy the dishwasher handed us $200 in twenties. It's always nice when you can use something for 18 months and still pull off a 100% profit.

For our last "fun" weekend, Laura and I are planning on going to see a Broadway show tonight. We don't know what it'll be, but it'll be something that we can get from the ever popular TKTS booth. I'm looking forward to that, and at least I won't be hung over tomorrow. Speaking of tomorrow, Laura and I have another fun filled day planned because we're going to the Brooklyn Museum. Apparently there is some pretty fun things going on over there and neither Laura or I have been over there. Again...I'm looking forward to it. As for the rest of the week...that's going to be devoted to packing. Yuck.

Recently, my father and I have been playing around with this piece of software that's quite good. It's called Hamachi and it enables computers to act as though they are conncted on a local area network, but allows them to do so through the internet. At any given moment, I can browse my father's computer and steal movies and music from him and he can do the same from me. It's totally secure and works flawlessly. Not to mention that it's free. Brad...if you are reading this...go and download that software. It's good stuff.

Anyway, I am going to go and pack for a little bit.

Posted by Michael at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Awesome. What a perfect way to start my Monday. I walk into my office building in Jersey City to the fire alarms going off. An announcement goes off over the building-wide intercom “Due to a gas-like odor, we are closing the external vents of the building….there is no need to be alarmed.” Meanwhile, I’m thinking to myself “yeah, that’s what they told the people in the WTC. I honestly doubt this is anything other than a gas-main leak, but it's disturbing none the less.

This morning, I arrived at the DMV in lower Manhattan at 8:20, waited out in the rain for 10 minutes and was finally permitted to enter. I was quickly able to get up to the window, but was greated with grim news. The beautiful 2002 Acura RSX Type-S that I just puchased, will have a nice little 8.25% sales tax on it. That, along with the nice DMV fees, I shelled out almost a grand to the DMV that I wasn’t expecting. Ugh. There is one good thing about the whole DMV experience, and that’s the fact that I know have two license plates for my car. Sweet!!

The original plan was for Laura and I to head to Jersey to grab the RSX and then head to my parents house. We were going to go after we got off of work, but seeing as how there is this funky gas smell going around and the Path trains are all shut down, I think that we’re just going to be from work a little early and get the car somewhere around noon-time. I don’t have a whole lot going on at work today, so it’s not really that big of a deal, but at the same time, I did bother to show up at the office, so that kind of sucks that I’m not going to even stay for the whole day. Ugh. Such a bad worker I am.

I’ve been looking around on the internet, checking out some other RSX’s and seeing what people have done to them. It’s crazy how much money people will spend on their cars. I figure that eventually I’ll do something to the car, but I doubt it’ll be anything that’ll cost me $1000’s of dollars. Probably be more like a CarPC or something like that. We’ll see. I’m going to be home for a few months, so maybe my father and I could work on it together. Hmmm…or as a birthday present 

Anyway, I gotta see what the plan is, so I have to go and talk to Laura.

Posted by Michael at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have to just say that there are some major perks that come with my job. It’s currently the 5th day of January, and I haven’t actually done any real work since the 19th of December. Granted, part of that was because of the whole “Holiday Season”, but as it stands, I don’t see myself being put on another project until around the end of January. There is talk of having a few of the people from my orientation group participate in some software training. I have been hearing that for months, so we’ll see if that actually comes through.

I’m currently headed up on a train to my parents house. As it turns out, there are quite a few reasons for my visit. First and foremost is to go car shopping, which I talked about in my last entry. The second reason is to fetch the two cats that have been staying at my parents house. After Laura and I move out of our apartment in Brooklyn, I am going to be taking the cats for a few months until Laura is settled into Law School, or whatever she ends up doing, so she wanted to have the cats back at the apartment for the remaining time that we have left there. It’s understandable, but at the same time, it’s such a pain to be bringing them back and forth. Oh well. It’s just this once and they’ll have a pretty set schedule for a few more months.

Last night, Brad and his brother came into the city. They are up visiting their parents, so Laura and I met up with them at d.b.a. Good times were had, conversation was lively, yadda yadda yadda. Everything you would expect when seeing a friend that you haven’t seen in quite a few months. I’m going to be hanging out with Brad again on Saturday for the Giants Wildcard playoff game against the Eagles. Should be a good time. Haven’t watched football with Brad in YEARS.

Prior to meeting up with Brad, Laura and I went out to a snazzy sushi dinner at Ushi Wakamura over on Houston street. The previous day, Laura and I had rolled up all the change that we had collected from the past year and put it all into nice neat coin rolls. It ended up being $185.00, so we figured that that could subsidize our sushi binge. After our nice little subsidy, the meal only cost us $40, so that wasn’t too bad. Unfortunatly, I put my credit card down at d.b.a. and ended up with a $70 bill. Oooops. So much for saving money before I leave NYC.

Ugh… the other day I called the Vet’s office to see if they had submitted the bill for the cats to the insurance company, and sure enough, I don’t think that they had. The woman couldn’t tell me for sure, but I truly suspect that it wasn’t done. Oh well. I guess I’ll just have to wait a little longer for my $400 in vet bills.

Hopefully, with a little luck, I’ll be able to secure a car today. Not that I NEED one today, it would just be nice to have that little segment of my life taken care of. I know that in these next few weeks, the less that I have to worry about, the better.

Yesterday, we had the first group of people come to see our apartment. It was a couple that had two puppies. They were so damn cute…the puppies that is. Hopefully they took the apartment and we won’t have anyone else looking to rent it and that’ll be that. On the bright side, because we had the broker and prospective renters coming, Laura and I FINALLY cleanned up the house. There is still a HUGE pile of clothes on Laura’s dresser, but that’s pretty much the only area of the house that still needs some work. It was so nice to get up in the morning and not have to walk over piles of garbage and clothes all over the house. And when I walked into the kitchen, I didn’t have to mantis off my feet (rub them together) before I climbed into bed.

In my search for a vehicle, I have found a very nice 1996 BMW 328iC with a hard top. The car is Cherry Red. It’s totally sweet. Unfortunatly, because of the hard top and the fact that it only has 89,000 miles on it, it’s going for $10k, which is a little higher than I would like to pay for a 1996 vehicle, but we’ll see. I still haven’t gotten a reply from the guy that has it, so who knows if I’m even going to be able to see it, let alone buy it.

The plan for today is to hit up the credit union in Middletown, NY, and then head down to Paramus, NJ to check out a few dealerships down there. I am just hoping that I can get a pre-authorized check from the credit union. I have a solid credit score, so that shouldn’t be a problem, I just don’t know how long these kinds of things take. Additionally, I have not a clue about insurance. I know that I’m going to be paying around $2K a year for insurance, so that sucks a big one. Oh well, I suppose I’ll make that back living with my parents for two months.

Recently, the head of recruiting just left our company. With that, I lost the one person in the organization that really had all the answers to my “how does this work…” kinds of questions for my job. The one question that I do have, is how the hell am I going to get my recruiting bonus for my Friend Nick. I got $500 when he was hired, and I should get another $1000 once he is there for 6 months. I think his 6 month mark is coming up in February or March, so that’ll be nice to get a little extra. That, added along with my potentially very large federal tax return, and I should have a nice little nest egg in a few months. We’ll see.

Anyway, I’ve rambled enough. I’m on the train and just trying to waste some time, so that’s why this post is long and fairly boring. Sorry.

Posted by Michael at 12:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Every year all my friends and family sit around and ask the typical question after New Year's Eve..."So what's your New Year's Resolution?" I hadn't thought much about it until last year when I was talking to my friend Brad. Brad's view of the whole new year's resolution was that it was pathetic that people had to use the new year as a time to set a goal. Is that true? Does it make you a weaker person that you have to use some random changing of the year to set off changes in your life? I dunno. I don't think so, but it does make for an easy to remember way to calculate how you are progressing, so what the hell, I'm all about making it easy to track progress. Hell, I'll even throw it on a spreadsheet if that makes it easier.

Speaking of which, I'm going to be charting for the next few months, my weight. Yes, that's my new year's resolution. Weight loss. How cliche, right? I don't care what you think. That's what it is, and that's what I'm going to do. It's not really even the weight that I want to lose, it's the unhealthy lifestyle that I've been living. Looking back on the last few years (3), I've gained around 35 lbs. That's miserable, and seeing as how it's only going to get harder to lose it in the coming years, I figure that I better start up the process right now. When I was in school, this kind of thing wasn't hard to do because I was so freaking active, but now that's not so easy.

In order to attain my goal weight (somewhere between 205-215 (I currently weigh in at a svelte 248...wow..that's just so much when I look at the actual number)) I'm going to hit up a diet and a strict exercise routine. At the end of January, Laura and I are going to be splitting ways, and I'm going to be moving up to my parents house in Orange County New York. Not exactly the greatest move, but I'm going to be saving a lot of money and am going to have lots of time on my hands. I figure that that will be a great time to really kick off this whole diet thing, and spend some time on my photography stuff.

In the past weeks (2), I've been on vacation, and the week before that, work was slow, so I didn't have all that much going on. In preparation for the upcoming move upstate, I've been doing quite a bit of online car searching, and have come to a few conclusions. 1) It's not worth me spending less than $4K for a car, because at that price, I'm going to end up spending double that in maintenance and other unsuspected problems in the coming 3 years.
2) I need something more powerful than what I drove in High School. I just can't see myself driving around in a Honda Civic with 115 hp. Just can't do it. Not to mention that I occasionally have people ride in my car for work, and I've gotta have something half way decent as to not look like a high school senior....again. 3) While it may be pretentious to drive a BMW, they are some of the best used cars out there in terms of quality and cost to value ratio, so I have been looking at those quite a bit.

Tomorrow is the first day that a broker is going to be bringing people into our home to see it. I'm not all together thrilled with that seeing as how #1) our place is a fucking mess #2) it's our home and the last thing I want is spoiled hipsters to come in and talk shit about my house #3) the whole process is just sad. #4) I want to make sure that we can sell our stuff to whoever wants the apartment, and seeing as how they will already be paying a massive broker fee, I doubt they are going to be willing to buy a couch, grill, shelves, etc.

In other news, Seven had some shit on his neck... It was like little clusters of lumps. He wasn't too pleased about them and this itched him quite a bit. We brought him to the vet, and were informed, after a $412 vet visit and shaving down the cat's entire neck, that it was an alergic reaction and he didn't know what caused it. At the time, he took a biopsy and put three stitches in the cat's neck. While that's all well and good, he tells me "We're going to have to put a collar on him because he's going to scratch it..."
I replied "I don't think that'll be a problem..."
"Well, they tend to scratch at the stitches so we should just take that..."
"He doesn't have a leg to scratch it..."
"Oh...jeezz... can't believe I forgot that..."
Good times at the vet. At least I got a little entertainment for me $400. Hopefully, the pet insurance that we got for him will cover this in full and it won't be an issue. We originally got him the insurance after his little constipation issue a few months back, but now I'm really glad that we did. Well... I will be once they pay me some money.

Let's see...what else is new... not a whole lot really. My whole attempt to put OS X on my computer went town in flames. I cleaned out 200 gigs of space on my hard drives as to not risk losing anything in the move, but it didn't matter. I had a successful install, but when it went to actually run the OS, it failed and I had to restart the computer and reinstall Linux. Oh well. It was worth a shot. In the next few months I think that my next project is going to be to install a computer into my new car. Hopefully I can get a car loan that will cover the cost of the new car and then a little extra so that I can put a GPS/MP3 Player/Touch Screen LCD/DVD Player/ Etc. in the vehicle. My father's already done the research for his own car, so it shouldn't be that bad, but it'll still end up costing around $1000 to install it and get it all set up. Considering how you would end up paying around $500 for a decenet GPS anyway, doubling the cost to have an actual computer that can monitor your engine and all sorts of other things would be more than worth it. I'll have to post detailed documentation on that when the time comes to actually go about installing it.

For Christmas, my parents bought me a snazzy flash for my camera, so that'll be fun and interesting to play with during the upcoming year. According to Laura, she's going to take me to B&H and get a camera lens, but I think that she's already done too much for me, so hopefully we can just pass on that.

Anyway, it's about time that I search out a Sushi restaurant for us to go to tonight to celebrate her birthday.

Posted by Michael at 04:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)