The Cat's Nuts

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.