it's raining, it's pouring, the old man is snoring!
It's raining out today. Which is actually a nice change of pace. It's cool out - the rain itself is quite cold - and there's a break from the still-sunniness of Florida in November. I'm actually going to wear jeans today (whoo hoo) and not melt. I like the rain. I like listening to it tap out againt the roof and the pavement. I love the sounds of the trees in the wind and I love the clean feeling that rain brings. Everything just feels like it's sorta new again.
Don't know what if anything we're up to today, but I wanted to make note of the nice weather change for us today. :)
So we had a gaming night over here tonight. About ten of us total, three pizzas, an order of chicken strips from Papa John's (was supposed to be TWO orders, I didn't get any and the damned people were like "oh, well we'll give you a free order NEXT time you order." Dammit, I wanted chicken strips, it's why I ordered them tonight and not some "other next time" I call. Grr), two video game systems (PS2 and Xbox), a CCG (collectable card game - Legend of the Five Rings), a slew of games (including the new DDR Max for PS2 only, which I didn't get to see since they played it when I was in the bedroom catching John Doe [I really like that show]), and an assortment of alcoholic beverages later, we had fun.
*grins*
Though, there's something rather silly about cleaning the house to have people over so that as soon as they leave you have to clean the house again. D'oh! Though, that's exactly what I did today. Then I decided to surf around a bit and I thought I'd pop off an entry while I was at it. Weee. So, here's the entry. OooOOOooo Aaahhh..
So it was 5am and I had been listening to this group of about 6-8 teenaged kids out in the parking lot, yelling and generally horsing around and being loud for the past hour, over the television and through the closed doors and windows one building over and upstairs. I was sick of it. So I called the county sherif's department and spoke with a very pleasant woman in dispatch who said they'd gladly send someone over to break it up.
I hang up, open my patio door and with the lights off and such, proceed to stand out there and watch for the cop to arrive. I was not disappointed. Not three minutes later, a cop car pulls up with it's headlights off - presumably so they don't run away - and comes to a stop right in front of the overly loud group. He asks them if any of them live here - only one does apparently - and tells the rest it's time to move it along and head on home. I don't know all of what he said since he was speaking at a normal level of voice and not yelling like they were, but within minutes, they got into their cars and left. Yeah! Thank you sherrif's department. Today, you rule. :)
You have to understand, this is not the first time these kids are causing trouble. We have a cop next door to us and he went out a few weeks ago and yelled at them to shut up (it was about 3am). They started to give lip and asked him who he thought he was to which of course, he replied, "I'm a police officer." They complied. ;) They are always out there, yelling at the top of their lungs, rapping, drinking, and generally being utterly annoying. I was just so pleased the cops came out as quickly as they did.
So that's my story. I went to bed after that and man, it was nice and quiet in the neighborhood then.
There is something very sick and wrong about having the cable modem sitting right there, hooked up, and supposed to be working perfectly well and instead, having to click the "Connect to the Internet" dial-up icon. Grr.
Had a migraine from hell last night. Finally got to bed at like 2am and fell asleep maybe an hour later. My head hurt so bad, every little noise was pain and every motion of the bed was an earthquake. Ugh. Slept until about noon, so that's good anyway. I slept pretty deep once I feel asleep so my head's not hurting now. Although, anytime I get a migraine and I wake up and it's gone, that whole next day, I'm paranoid it's coming back.
That's about it for now. Just got up and so, thought I'd pop off a note. ttfn - I'm off to go watch some cable since I can't surf. :)
Time Warner was coming out today to install cable and RoadRunner. My Love called last week and make the appointment (the old service was under MY name, this service is under his, so we didn't have to pay the past-due amount under my name since it's not under my name anymore). He wanted us to have tv again and wanted me to be able to use the net instead of just look at it slowly load and not be able to really do anything with it.
Didn't know what time they were coming out. So he called them and called me this morning at about 10am to tell me it was between 4pm-6pm. Ok, good enough, I got to sleep in some, finish cleaning up the house - doing some laundry and dishes, etc. - and set to waiting. I didn't feel like surfing the net today because I knew we'd get the cable modem tonight and I'd just use it then. Humph. I also waited around since Jef was coming over to help me wait today and keep me company. (Couldn't call him since his phone is off so I just had to wait for him to show)
Finally at about 5pm, the techs showed up. I had to move all sorts of furniture and boxes and such so they could run the wires and they got the living room set up and ran all the cable for the bedroom's cable modem. (they also gave us a second tv hookup for free in the bedroom which is pretty cool). It took forever.
It was about 6:15 or so by the time they were actually hooking up the cable modem box- this terribly cheesy Ericsson one - and then it had a problem. The modem power wouldn't stay on. It had a short or something because the minute after you plugged it in, the power light went off, then back on, then back off. I told them no way, I wanted another one. So they brought out another one (same lame Ericsson one. Dammit, I want my legacy motorola one back) and set it up and called in the change.
It then took them until about 7pm to get it working. Calling the techs, waiting for it to initialize. Finally it did and they left. I surfed for all of maybe 30 minutes and then it lost connection. YOU'VE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME! This happened the last damned time. The very first night we had it at the other apartment, we lost our connection.
So I call the RR tech support. They reset it and nothing. Never initializes. So they make an appointment for a tech to come out. THURSDAY. FUCK FUCK FUCK. I am sooo pissed off. Now I'm typing this up ahead of time in Notepad and I'll hop on the dial-up and publish it. ARG. This is so not even funny. My head is killing me and I'm so pissed about how crappy this always seems to not work out for me.
Our cable tv is working though, so once the guys are done using the tv in the living room, I'll get to at least watch something more interesting the those bad "date" shows that are the only thing on at night besides infomercials. *sighs*
So.....that's about it. Really annoyed. Head hurts. Still can't enjoy my cable even though I've been looking forward to it since my Love called the order in on Wednesday of last week. Arg.
Ugh. Let's recap then we'll get to today's fun. Hrm. Where did I leave off?
:: Saturday, November 9, 2002 :: Ok, so we were trying to figure out what to do. There wasn't much of interest going on. We were going to go see the movie, Femme Fatal, but didn't. (Luckily enough from what I hear, since it's supposed to be a stinker) We all ate dinner at Perkins and after, ended up loading up into the car and heading out to Gameworks in Ybor instead.
We had fun. It was Kali, Rand, my Love and I. I actually ordered a drink for myself - and drank all of it - for the first time ever. (I just don't drink. I've had a winecooler here or there at home, but nothing more then that) I ordered a foo-foo (but really yummy) drink called an "All American." It's like a daquari of sorts, with a blueberry smoothie at the bottom, whipped cream, then a layer of strawberry smoothie, topped off with more whipped cream and spiked with 2 shots of Baccardi light rum. It was pretty tasty. I'll have to get it next time we go back. :)
So we all played games and I got really into this fun thing where it's like a modern-day "whack-a-mole" only with a flat screen and a mallet you use to smack at things darting around the screen. It's one of the games that gives out tickets. See, they have some games that are just games and then they have games that give out tickets which you use to get trinkets and items from their prize center. Anyway, I was really good at it and I even got the 100 ticket jackpot bonus one of the times. :)
We played so many different ticket games that I couldn't even hold them all in my hands. So when we finally turned them in, we had like 1050 of them. We went and looked at what we could find and I fell in love with the sillest little lamp. The lamp was 1200 so I played the game a few more times (that's when I got the 100 ticket jackpot) and ended up with 1246 tickets. Borrowed four from Rand and got myself the lamp and my Love a cute little surfboard keychain. (he has a matching larger sized one we got the last time around). We had a ton of fun. It was a great night. The only thing that was just weird was that I got some mild heartburn from the rum. *lol*
:: Sunday, November 10, 2002 :: So Rand, my Love and I weren't feeling good. Everyone but Kali - who has the worst stomach ever - was sick to their stomachs. My Love and I didn't feel so good and didn't feel much like doing anything short of going back to sleep, but Rand's mother had invited us to a dinner and so we went over for the meal. We had a nice dinner with them and some friends of the family and then came back home to rest. Joolo was supposed to come over and was waiting for us in the parking lot when we got there. Rand came over for a bit, they played some more NHL Hitz on the Xbox, and then we watched Angel. Jef went to work, Rand went home and we called it a night.
:: Monday, November 11, 2002 :: Yesterday was Veteran's Day, so my Love took a half-day and we went down to his Grandfather's grave for the first time since the funeral. There were a lot of people around there since it's a Veteran's cemetary. Spent a little time there and then went to go get some lunch.
We headed downtown since we were out that way and had some lunch and walked around a bit. Got some ice cream from the Ben & Jerry's shop and then headed on home. We had a pretty quite evening, we watched a dvd (the second half of Star Trek: Insurection that we started the other night, but that my Love fell asleep on). We headed over to the 24-hour Super Wal-mart after that because we needed some things and looked at the different movies scheduled to come out in a little less then an hour. (We were there at like 11pm and all the releases go out on the shelves at 12:01am) We were looking to see their price for the newly released Highlander: Season 1 boxed set (YEAH!) but we didn't stick around long enough to get it. (luckily enough, because Rand went today and they didn't have it yet at all)
I stayed up and cleaned up the house, took a shower and finally made it to bed at about 5am. Which brings us to today...
