It’s Friday. The last friday that I will be at my current job. Doesn’t really bother me all that much to be honest with you. I’ve had more upsetting life things to deal with in the past, so this one on a scale of 1-10 is about a 3…maybe a 4 if you count how much I’ll miss the view from my office window. Which…by the way, isn’t even close to how good it was when I had my old office. Anyway… I digress.
I have to admit that I was pretty excited because there was supposed to be this big inter-office party where everyone just had some drinks and afternoon was just going to be fun. But no. They moved it to next week while I’m away. That sucks. I’m not pleased about that. Oh well. What are you going to do. I brought some homebrew with me to work today, so I’ll just drink that at lunch time. I think the Office Manager said that she was going to buy lunch, so we’ll see.
It isn’t a surprise that I still don’t know about the US Open, because well.. I doubt that it’ll even happen. Even though I was REALLY hoping that I would get that because that would have allowed me to you know…not take loans out for housing and stuff like that. It goes back to the old adage that “if it sounds too good to be true…then it probably is” so anyway.. back to the waiting game on that one.
So recently Laura and I have been reading the Harry Potter books. I’m on the 6th one and she’s on the 5th. It’s going well. I read it way too much though, especially since I’ve had so much free time recently.
I was thinking that I may eventually give up this URL that I have. The whole “Michaellastname.com thing is just a little off. I think I’d rather it be something like sevensparadise.com or even just anything that doesn’t have my name in it. Not that I REALLY care, but I’d rather it be alittle more discete. We’ll see. The renewal comes around this November, so maybe at that point I’ll switch it over to a smaller plan and buy a new domain name. We’ll see as that comes around.
So Laura and I are trying to figure out what we’re going to be doing for labor day weekend. It’s still really up in the air, so I have no idea. We talked about going on a river cruise, but we’ll see. Maybe we’ll just find a cheap flight to Baton Rouge and go visit Brad. Although, with my whopping payments to Columbia coming up, I don’t really see that as something that’s going to happen.
Anyway, I am going to clear out my computer some more and call it a day.

I can’t say that I’m going to be “sad” per say, but I do know that it’s going to be very odd to go into a new job with new people and all that jazz. I’ve come to realize over this past week how comfortable I am here in everything from my interactions with the other people on the staff, to the way things work and everything else that goes on. It’s just nice knowing everything.
Today we had a little “issue” I guess you could call it. The office manager asked me to work on something. I didn’t even think about the fact that the document was originally in Word Perfect (TERRIBLE PROGRAM), so I loaded it up in Word. Of course Word perfectly loads up Word Perfect files, but stupid WordPerfect can’t seem to get things right when it tries to load up the word file. So the office manager did everything but scream at me when she found out that WordPerfect couldn’t open it up… I just remained calm and she practically ran out of the office in frustration. So I found a computer that had WordPerfect on it, re-opened the file in Word and saved it as a RichText document, opened it in WordPerfect and presto. It was back to it’s original state. Took all of 3 minutes for me to figure it out. Meanwhile the office manager was ranting as she ran out of the office “You don’t even know how much work you have just destroyed!!” It’s so so so nice to know more about computers than 95% of the world. So nice.
Anyway… So I’m going to go and meet up with Laura today at lunch. It’ll be nice to get out. It’s once again, totally totally beautiful out. I actually went out running yesterday and then lifting last night when I got home.
I got to do another one of those Focus groups. This time it paid me $100 to sit around and talk about an add for the new Intel VIIV chipset that they are going to be using in their multi-media computers. The whole concept eludes me why you would want to integrate your computer system into your TV. I can understand it on the basics, for media purposes that is, it’s a great idea. But if you want to do anything productive on the computer or edit photos or anything like that, it’s totally worthless. Am I going to sit on my computer at home in my living room with a keyboard in my lap? Nope.
Today I have to go around my office and pack up anything that’s considered to be “mine” and bring it home. Speaking of which.. I have this huge monitor stand that’s sitting attached to my desk. It’s got this little clamp thing that holds it on. It’s threaded, so you can screw it tight, but I’ve found that it really hurts the desk a bit, so right now it’s secured using a 2 gig hard drive. I put the hard drive down and screwed it right into it. Works amazingly well actually. I think that I’ve actually done a pretty good job in the past couple of weeks in clearing stuff out of here. I still have a few things kicking around though, so I guess today I’ll pack those up.
Tomorrow I’ll be leaving straight from here to go to the funeral, so the last “Casual Friday” and I’ll most likely be wearing a suit. I guess it’s kind of fitting because I think that I wore the same suit to my interview here, the first day that I came, so I’ll wear it on the last day too. Reminds me of 5th grade. I had this terrible pair of Umbro soccer shorts that were almost neon green on one leg and black on the other. I also had this Spalding shirt that matched it pretty well. I really liked how it looked together and I remember that I wore it to the first day of school and the last. I was pretty happy about it. Then I realized that Umbros were terrible and that I looked like a chunky little dork. Oh well. I think I should look marginally better in my suit than I did in my Umbros.
Anyway, I’m off to meet my beautiful girlfriend for lunch, so I will post again soon.

So today at 10:00am, I can register for classes. It’s been awhile since I’ve been able to do that, so hopefully all goes well. I have been assigned an appointment time. I was looking at the school newsletter and found that this REALLY old teacher that I had previously and who usually teaches one of the classes that I have to take, won’t be there. He’s probably tormenting other students abroad. I also found out that one of the elective classes that I wanted to take, won’t be available to me because I don’t have the pre-requisite classes. Oh well. So that prompted me to look around a bit further and I found that Xavier Sali-I-Martin (one of the best Econ Teachers ever) is teaching an elective this year, so hopefully I’ll be able to hop into that class. It’s a grad level class, so it may be difficult, but at least I’ll have a good teacher.
Laura and I are running a little late this morning, and she was even tempted to just take the day off, but I think that eventually we’re going to end up wasting this amazingly beautiful day indoors. What a great time. Oh well. What are you going to do. I’m just looking out my window at the clear blue skies and I want to cry…just a little.
Anyway, it’s about time to go to work. I’m sure I’ll post again.

Well… it’s arrived. I’ve still not heard back from any new jobs, and this is my last week at the law firm. Sniff..sniff..so sad…well not really, but I like to be dramatic. I’m actually so happy to be getting out of there it’s not even funny. Recently it’s just been terribly boring and when it wasn’t boring it was tedious. At least the people that work with are decent enough.
So today was just a brewing extravaganza. It was great. I bottled up the 12% English style ale, brewed a German Alt Stout and also attempted to brew a “Mike’s Hard Lemonaid” haha… love it. So we’ll see how they come out. I think that the lemonade may come out a little too dark, but we’ll see once the yeast does its thing and falls out of solution. It was the first time that I’ve used stored yeast that I’m trying to rouse into action, so I may have wasted 6 cans of frozen lemonade for nothing.
Laura and I did an amazing job at cleaning the apartment on Sat. It’s so nice to have a clean house again. Now it’ll just be a battle to keep it that way. I should mop the floor tomorrow, but I know that won’t happen.
So today I put in the time and got my mother’s web page up and running. I want to learn how to use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) so that I can set a style sheet and it’ll remain throughout a web page, but with my minimal knowledge of all that sort of thing, I may just stick to HTML coding. Not that I’m really doing that either. It’s all graphical FrontPage stuff…Oh well. We’ll see what I can figure out at work tomorrow when I’m passing time between reading Harry Potter and trying to figure out a class schedule.
Yeah, so before I said that I hadn’t heard about any jobs…well that includes my US Open payday. Yeah, not “worried” yet, but I’d like to know seeing as how I think the Open starts next Sunday or something, so I’d like to know when I’d have to start working. I’d especially like to know so that when school starts I’ll know how broke I’m really going to be.
It’s about time to head to bed. It’s been a long day.

Today was a good day for me. I went about my business. I read Harry Potter. I did some work (HA…kidding about that one) and pretty much just went on as usual. I called and found out that I did get that job I was waiting for so I won’t be unemployed (that’s a really nice thing) but I’ve yet to hear from the US Open guy. Not really shocking there.
So then I get home from work. I get a nice E-Mail from Button telling me that I need to get some stuff from the grocery store. So I go get them… I see Princess Jill on the way out of the house, I give her a cat call (get it…cat call) but she obviously continues to walk the other way. But she looked healthy and that makes me happy. I then ran into our neighbor at the grocery store. She was carrying her little white dog. I waved hello. I walked out of the store with my eggs, mayo and two pounds of hamburger meat. What a nice day. It’s really nice out too, slight breeze, perfect temperature. Then I get a call from my mother. She’s crying. A friend from home has committed suicide.
I don’t really know what to feel or say about this. I suppose I’ll be going home closer to the end of the week for the services and to see friends from home that I haven’t seen in a few years. Not going to be a nice home coming. But as the title of this entry says: the wheels of life keep turning.
I’ll come back and work the open or start my new job. Football season will go on. The sun will rise and fall as it always has.
Scary world we live in.
My condolences go out to the family.

Laura and I awoke at noon today. We were out till 3:30 last night with friends. There was a drunk girl…she threw up… we had discussions about the regional difference in dialect when speaking Spanish…we talked about how Tom Brady’s QB rating should increase in Madden when he’s in the playoffs. We had an in depth discussion about (this is Nick’s point of view) how there is no “genetic factor” in athletics. His premise was that anyone that was a given size could be the best in their respective athletic event if they had the drive, coaching, and passion for what they were doing. I think it’s utter bullshit. We never did come to any conclusions.
So back to the title of this entry… So when Laura and I woke up and it felt like someone was hammering a nail into my forehead we both swore off drinking… Yeah, well we just had a tequila shot and are on our way out. Speaking of which… I have to go.
Maybe I’ll write something fun and entertaining when I get back.
Oh yeah,… we cleaned the house for 3 hours this morning. Not fun.

So I was perusing BeerAdvocate today and I saw an interesting comment: “Choosing your favorite beer style is like choosing your favorite child from amongst your brood… you love each one for it’s unique characteristics.”
I thought that was really funny because it’s so true. I was actually talking to Erik about that the other day. I can’t decide what I really like the best. Sometimes you really want a nice hearty stout and other times you want something that’s lighter but not a Natural Ice. You obviously aren’t going to grab for a Bud, so you have to go and get an IPA. Simple solution, but what’s better? I love all my children equally… from my first porter to my London Ale to my three legged cat.
Thank GOD it’s Friday. Tonight Laura and I are finally going to sign up for the new gym that’s around our place. So that’ll be nice to finally have a place to go and work out. We’re also going to clean up the hell hole that is our apartment. It’s so gross right now. There are clothes and dishes all over… nasty. But that shouldn’t take that long. Maybe I’ll even have the drive to bring out the vacuum. Wouldn’t that be special?
So… Just another week here and I’m done working at the law firm. Sweet sorrow. Well not really. I’ll be happy as anything to not be working here anymore. It’s just so terrible. Especially in the past few days when they are riding us to get work done before everyone leaves. I’m just happy that I have vacation time to take so that I get out of here a week sooner than everyone else. The one thing that I’m not looking forward to is slowly bringing home all the crap that I’ve brought to work over the two years that I’ve been working here. Granted, it’s not THAT much stuff, but certain things, like my monitor stand are just a pain to carry. I also have like 30 lbs of grain for home brewing sitting next to my desk that’s gotta be brought home pretty soon. I brought home all the hops and some specialty stuff the other day, but now I have all the damn base malt to bring.
Oh well, could be worse stuff.
A week or so ago, I went through all the papers and stuff around my office, so I’m pretty clear as far as work stuff goes. So that’s at least a good point.
I’m pretty excited today because a) it’s the weekend and b) I should hear back about the new job at the staffing agency today. Not that I’m like super stoked about getting a new job, I just want to know that I’ll have some money coming in a month from now without resorting to going on unemployment.
So last night Laura and I met a few friends at this bar that’s not far from out place. We stayed there talking till around 12:15am. It was a good time. It’s called the Bushwick Country Club. I think they were trying to be funny because they have a Putt-Putt course (it’s pretty sad, but whatever) in the backyard. Complete with a PBR Windmill.
Anyway, I think it’s about time I go and do something else.

Okay… Yes, I’m pissed. I have been totally totally lax about writing in my blog. But you know what? This time is wasn’t my damn fault. Those fucking people at IX Web Hosting decided to fuck with their Hard drives or whatever the hell they were doing. First, I lost my whole blog completely. Totally gone. Then I complained and the next day they put it back up there, but it was not accessible. Something about the privilages was wrong. So I again talked to them and they fixed part of it. So people were able to go on it again. But… I couldn’t access the control panel part of it so I couldn’t write anything. What the hell good is a freaking blog if you can’t write anything?!?! Oh well. It’s been a bad day, but it’s good to see that this is up and running again.
Now that this is up and running, I can really get cracking on my mother’s web page. Last weekend I went up to my parents house and started making a page for her. She was going to start up www.reikimaddness.com, but I suggested something a little calmer, so we settled on www.mbshealth.net which stands for “Mind, Body, Spirit Health” I guess that’s a little better. So anyway, today she calls me up while I’m totally swamped at work (yes… even though I’m blogging, I WAS swamped.) and starts telling me that I’ve been lax and what not. Irritating Yes Mother.. I know you read my blog. Anyway, I will get cracking on it Friday night. I don’t think that I have much planned.
So last weekend I went up to visit my brother in Foxboro Mass (Home of the Patriots) and had a good time. Watched a few movies, got my ass handed to me on a mountain bike ride (actually it wasn’t bad at all… I was just dead tired) and then went go-cart racing. Which… I must say, is totally fun. You get in this little rocket sled of a go-cart and race around a track with 10 or more other people and race 20 laps. I beat Scott. They get up to around 35 miles per hour, and every inch counts when you’re going around turns and stuff. There were people there that were “Professionals” or at least hung out alot. They beat our lap times by around 2 seconds every time. And when your lap times around 22 seconds, that adds up over 20 laps. Anyway… I did well. I was happy and it was really fun.
So Laura and I have pledged to brew beer on Sunday. I have two batches that are ready to bottle, so we’ll do that too. We’re going to brew up the batch that Laura created from scratch, so it’ll be really nice to brew all-grain again. We may also make the “Mike’s Hard Lemonaid” hahah yeah, go figure. We have extra yeast kicking around, so why not. It’s super easy and I have everything to make it except the lemonaid frozen concentrate. Maybe we’ll even use REAL Lemons.
I believe that I wrote that I was laid off in a previous post. Well turns out that being laid off but being “allowed” to keep working means that they’ll treat you like slaves for the remaining time because hell.. what are you going to do? Quit? So I’ve been working my ass off for the past two days doing projects. But as it stands, I have 6 more working days and I’ll no longer be employed here.
I was supposed to hear back about working at the US Open, like last week, but it’s been dragging. The guy that runs it is super busy and just hasn’t had the time to get back to me. So as of now, it’s still in the air. Doesn’t really matter though, because either way, I’m still taking off the last week that I would be working so as to use my vacation days that I have saved up, and I’ll still have severence pay till the middle of September, so whatever.
I was supposed to hear today about a job working for a staffing agency too. But when I called, I was told that she’s still considering if she’s going to want someone there anyway. So we’ll see. I hope that that works out because then I would be employed throughout the transition.
Damn, there’s just so much happening it’s making my head spin. In less than three weeks I’ll be actually back in school. How scary is that? I actually had a dream about it and how awkward it was going to be. I just hate that feeling of walking around and having people look at me with that off glance. It was weird, when everything went down three years ago, it was terrible to walk around campus because people (especially bitchy girls from sports teams) would just glare at me, and I didn’t know if it was because I was a sexy man or if it was because they had heard a twisted version of what happened. Oh well, not that it really matters now. I figure that when I go back, anyone that was there when I was there, would have been freshmen at the time and I didn’t know very many of them and they didn’t know me, so it’s doubtfull if they would even recognize me. Especially now that I’m 30 lbs heavier and sporting an even sexier haircut.
I should order up a battery for my Archos…. Right now the thing only lasts around 10 minutes without being plugged in and it doesn’t charge all the way, so I suppose I should just suck it up and spend the $30 and get a new one so that I have an MP3 player and also I have a great device for recording lectures.
Anyway, It’s time to go home. Madden 2006 Awaits

So the Fantasy Football season hasn’t even started and already my team is getting hurt. My #1 WR just broke his nose, and my #3WR dislocated his shoulder. Both are going to miss time. Good thing there’s still pre-season to heal up. Bastards. Oh well.
So…after much deliberation, we have decided that it’s a good idea NOT to get the keg system. As cool as it would be to make beer and be able to drink it in a week, it’s just not worth the expense right now. So… until we get some extra cash that we don’t need….umm yeah right… then we’re just going to keep bottle conditioning as we have been.
So that Milk Stout that we made a little while back is pretty good. It’s going well anyway.. I mean you can tell it’s watery as hell, and there is so little alcohol in it, but at least it’s got a bit of flavor to it, so that’s good. I figure that if we just let it sit for a little while (say another month or so)it should be fine.
Until I started to write this post, I totally forgot about the other batch of beer that we have sitting in our closet. I suppose that was the point, but it still makes me smile.
This weekend, no matter what Laura says, I’m going to brew up that batch of beer. We’ve be so damn lax about ordering new stuff, I should really get on that too… It’s just been so damn hot and busy.
So last night Laura and I went to try out the new gym. It was okay, but today I’m hurting. My arms are quite tired and sore. But that’s a good feeling that I haven’t had in awhile. Hopefully we’ll stick with it for the winter and by this time next year I’ll be all buff and stuff…somehow I doubt it. I would at least like to get into shape so that when I’m back in school I can hit up the wrestling mats and not die. That shouldn’t be so hard…. maybe.
So… after messing with my blog and doing all that crap, I’ve found that I can no longer accept comments. So… if anyone out there is a Movable Type master and wants to help me getting my comments working, please feel free. I would be much appreciative.
On a different note, I finally called our landlord about those outside lights that are wired into our electricity. Turns out he was super nice about it. Something that I really didn’t expect from a NYC land lord, but he told me to just take it out of the rent check. So that made me quite happy. Now every time those lights turn on at 8:13, I don’t gag in disgust knowing I’m shelling out $0.19/kW Hr. Yes… I’m cheap, but that comes out to around $50 a month, so whatever.
Anyway, I have some time I must put in for work, so off I go.

For me, part of the fun of this blog, is messing around with all the different scripts and really learning it and figuring out how it works. It gives me something to do, and keeps my mind going. Well the other day I started to really mess with it. Screwed something up, so had to load it up from the backup that I made. Fortunately I didn’t lose any blogs, but I did have a day or so where I couldn’t access it. Sorry for those of you that tried while it was down….but anyway, I’m glad to have it back under control and working again.
I’ve actually recovered quite nicely from my blog situation there. I’ve now updated the template and incorporated categories, which should make it a little better sorted anyway. I just gotta go back and mess with the archive and assign categories to the previous 45 entries that I have.
So today I was talking with Laura about the recent changes in my Blog. I was telling her that it was more “user friendly” and she just laughed at me. She said that because I didn’t get anyone coming to it, that it was a pointless endeavor anyway and that no one would be rifeling though my old archives anyway. I suppose there’s some truth in that, but I would like to think that if someone DID want to go and snoop, they would be able to do so with ease.
So tonight I have a job doing security for some Political function at Tavern on the Green in central park. It doesn’t pay all that well, but at least I’ll get some good dinner out of it. It’s tied into working at the US Open at the end of this month, so I figure that it’s a worthwhile thing to do.
So this morning, Laura and I again had a battle with the alarm clock. We set it for 7:00… it goes off…we start to get up …then we hit the snooze. This goes on for maybe 2-3 times. Then we get tired of that, and just set it for 30 minutes later. That doesn’t work either. Eventually we just got up at 8:30 and didn’t go to the gym like we planned. We even went to bed at a reasonable hour last night. Oh well. I suppose we’ll just have to get the determination to do it one morning and stick with it. That’s what it’ll come down to. Hell, when we lived over on Amsterdam on the Upper West Side, we got up all the time and did stuff. Not a problem. Oh well. Maybe I’ll just have to suck it up and start to work out after work some days if I don’t get up.
I need a hair cut.
Seven is fat.