Data Recovery Efforts
I really don’t know entirely how much I was able to save, but someone mentioned a good idea at work that I decided to try and luckily it ended up working beautifully! As I’d mentioned, my backup program was making regular backups of the faulty drive before it went caput, and then deleted the backup after the drive disappeared, so someone threw out the idea of attempting to undelete the backup rather than trying to recover the original files. I found a nice, little freeware program that did exactly that and although it does look like I’m missing some of my most recent files, at least all of the old comic stuff is there along with photos up to and including Mom’s trip in March, so I’m happy.
Only bad news was that it changed all of my filenames from upper to lowercase and I’m normally a bit picky about that, but I suppose it beats not having them at all!
The New Job
In as much as I can say here, work is really going great. It’s very involved at times and I’m finding myself faced with a lot of “different” things that I never had to think about in my old position, but ultimately I guess they come with the territory and I certainly wouldn’t want to go back the other way at this point! My days are anything but mundane now and I think I’m getting closer to being able to come home and be productive after work again, so all is well in that particular venture.
The Writing
I’ve actually been doing pretty good in this arena – not as well as I’d like to be, but at least progress is being made. Aside from a few “days off” here and there, I’ve been doing ok at getting at least one or two things done each night, which makes for slow work at getting through my backlog, but it’s better than nothing at all. I’m trying not to discourage myself right now by putting down any definitive goals for getting the site online anymore because I’ve just missed so many of them that it doesn’t seem to help anymore. When I get to a general point that I have in mind, I’ll start working on getting stuff up, but in the meantime it’s just good that I’m writing at all!
The Diet
Now here’s an area that I wish was at least making “progress”, but sadly I’ve really let this one slip as of late. I finally forced myself to go out and exercise tonight for a while – the last time I did anything at all was April 8th, and although I haven’t really done too bad at eating moderately (not counting calories really, though), I’m simply maintaining at best and you don’t lose weight by just maintaining!
I need to find a way to get my motivation back and get working because I think Sara’s just about to that point and I’d rather lose weight along with her than have her leave me in the dust. She was bragging about losing a few pounds the other day and I didn’t really think much of it, but then even just the other night when we went out to dinner for our anniversary, she had put on some make-up and whatnot (which she hardly ever does) and everything together looked really good! Don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly happy for her success, but it’d be nice to see some on my own, too. And the hard part is that I know exactly what I have to do – it’s just a matter of getting up off my ass to exercise a few times a week and staying away from the cookie jar the remainder…
This afternoon I contemplated the idea of starting a new, little creative project – a blog dedicated just to my dieting efforts, if you will. Technically I could just use the one that’s included with the calorie and exercise tracker that I’ve been using, but it’s kind of bland and hosting it myself would give me a chance to play around with WordPress to boot! I guess the thought process was simply that it might give me a little more motivation if I can be creative while I’m trying to lose weight, although the deadline-minded part of me just screams that the last thing I need when I’m trying to get caught up with my other writing is another project to work on! Maybe I’ll just continue to incorporate anything mildly amusing into my LiveJournal here and leave it at that … we’ll see…
The Recreational Happenings
I’ve been on a real Family Guy kick lately – rewatching old DVDs, watching the new season that I picked up the other day, and even finally playing the video game that Sara bought for me way back on Christmas! Right now I’m stuck in an area where Peter has to beat up little kids in the ball pit at Quahog’s Chucky Cheese look-alike, so that’s … interesting. There’s some pretty funny scenes in it, though, including all of the flashbacks that you see in the show.
Also, I can’t remember if I posted when it was actually finished, but my “garden” has finally all been replanted after a gentle nudge from Mom back in March. I’ve been holding off on pictures until the dieffenbachia starts to look a little better because as of late, it’s been looking rather sickly. I probably need to pick up some plant food for it or something.
And for anybody left wondering, we’re still without FIOS too. The girl said that she’d reschedule for today, actually, but I never heard anything from anybody over the weekend. I kinda figured they weren’t gonna show after we got a recorded call from Verizon on Thursday asking us to call to schedule an appointment, but I didn’t want to do anything on the chance that she might show up anyways. We also got a nice packet of paperwork from them in the mail yesterday, so it’ll be humorous if we get a bill before they even install the damn thing! But even the pain that it is, we really need to switch because Bright House isn’t being any better – we had an outage last night that I called in, only to be told that they’d send a tech out in a week and credit my bill. The service came back up two hours later anyways, but I’m about done with them because their Internet service has been doing this every other night for a while now and, well you already know where I stand on their TV service… 🙁
And Speaking of TV!
It’s actually been kind of boring lately! As previously mentioned, I’m almost going to be glad that The Apprentice is over because it’s just been horrible this year. I really think the show has just about run its course – the “brilliant tent city” idea didn’t do much except for irritate the contestants and send them to challenges with bad morning hair. I used to watch this show because it was “different,” unlike Survivor that has gotten to be just the same thing over and over again, but this season was definitely weak. Good news, Entourage has officially started up and although Ari is really looking like a sad, little puppy, I really like the show so I’m glad to see it back.
Now if only Studio 60 would make its return!
Recycling is Fun!
Probably small news to most everyone who doesn’t live with me, but I finally found someplace to take our recycling which was definitely a long time coming! This has been a pet peeve of mine for quite some time because neither of the places that I’ve lived down here have had recycling bins or collection areas, so I’ve had to throw away a lot of stuff that I normally wouldn’t have to. I remember one night at my old apartment, I drove around town for literally an entire Saturday evening looking for a single recycling drop-off, only to eventually have to drop about four months worth of newspapers in the dumpster back at the complex. But no more! It may be a bit of a drive, but at least I feel a little better about the environment…
On Vacation, We Will Go…
And now less than two weeks from today, we’ll be over in Orlando on our very well earned spring vacation / 1-year anniversary celebration! I never did get around to making advanced dining reservations at anywhere around Disney, but honestly I’m not really sure if that matters or not simply because I feel like the vacation is going to go by really quickly already and we’re not even there yet. As much as I’d like a nice, sit-down meal, I also enjoy my freedom to say, “Nah – let’s go eat dinner after we hit a few more attractions…” so we’ll see what happens on that one. Also, it looks like we’ll be hitting up Sea World in addition to Discovery Cove because the pass that they give us has to be used within 7 days of our visit, so that limits us to only two days in the Disney parks as it is, minus time spent at the hotel.
I hate time management.
I guess that should be enough for now … time to go find something better to do!