Monday, April 04, 2005

The Month of March, in a Nutshell

Okay. So, reveling in my slacker-ness, I didn't get caught up on my blog this weekend. I had several false starts, and realized it was just too tall of a task, as I had let too much time pass. So here's my solution. I'm starting fresh tonight with a recap of stuff that I've missed, because there really is some stuff that bears at least a passing mention.

The weekend after my last post, Brandi and I made a trip down to Troy to spend the weekend at my parents' house. That was an enjoyable weekend. We hadn't been down there since Christmas, and it's always nice to get home and spend a couple of days with the family. It's relaxing. Troy is like a mecca for me, and I love being back there. I also like being in my childhood home, spending a couple of nights in my old bedroom. Despite the fact that I haven't lived there for several years and that a number of changes have been made to the house, it's still "home" for me, and probably always will be.

While we were there, we got to hang out a pretty fair amount with our friends Amy and Doug. We went up to their house one evening to hang out and play some video games, and we had lunch together the next afternoon. We hadn't seen them since Christmastime either, so that was a lot of fun.

In terms of my job, two weeks ago I had two performance reviews; one was on Wednesday (the 23rd), the other on Friday (the 25th). The first was my 30-day review, which should have been done near the end of December, and the other was my year-end review, which should have been done sometime in early January. Whatever. The end result is that I was told I'm doing a wonderful job, and I also got a raise of $1 per hour. More importantly, some of my concerns were addressed, which makes me feel more comfortable about staying there. The pay raise puts me at the same rate I was making at my previous job, which effectively ends any thoughts (no matter how preliminary) of trying to return there. It's still not enough money, of course, but it's a start. I was also told that more raises would be forthcoming as I took on more responsibilities, and I feel pretty good about that, because I'm always looking for more stuff to do. I'm still waiting for someone to train me on my new graphics duties, but at least now I'm a little easier in my mind about waiting for it. They're sending me to a Photoshop seminar later this month, so I'm guessing I'll have some training before that happens.

Brandi and I went a couple of weekends ago to see the movie Robots. Besides the fact that it was a pretty decent movie, with some really cool animation, we also got to see the trailer for Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. It looks awesome, and I'm starting to get really psyched up for the release (May 19). I picked up the Clone Wars DVD, which is an animated feature from Cartoon Network which bridges the gap between Episodes II and III, and I have to say, it's really cool. That has only helped to heighten the anticipation. The next month and a half is going to crawl by, I think.

Beyond that, I think the main notable event is that Brandi and I purchased a new digital camera. It's pretty sweet: a 5-megapixel Kodak with 3X optical zoom. We had been looking at them for a while, and we liked this one a lot and got a pretty good deal on it. I had an older digital camera, but we weren't very satisfied with it anymore. It'll be fun to play with, and I'm sure I'll be sharing some of the output on this very blog.

So now I'm caught up, in a manner of speaking, and now I just have to stay this way. I'm really going to try to lay off of quite so much talk about day-to-day happenings and focus more on some other things. We'll see how it goes. At any rate, thanks to those of you who have continued to check in each day. I'll try to reward your perseverance by getting back to daily postings.

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