Go team Venture!

After reading Karell's entry, I realized I never posted about our move from almost 3 weeks ago. Whoops.

The short version is that it sucked completely and utterly.

The long version: We went to pick up the u-haul in the morning, and that was all well and good. We did that first because we wanted to go and pick up our new couch (which, incidentally is the most comfortable couch ever). So, we got the couch, no problems. I was quite surprised that this hasn't sucked so far. Well, we were in for a rude surprise.

We got to the new place to sign the lease after dropping the u-haul off at our house. We go into the office and sit down and say, "okay, we're ready to sign the lease and move in!"

"Oh," says the girl at the front desk, "I thought you were moving in on the 8th." It was the 28th.

Cue shocked looks on Liz and Nathan. "No, we have to move in today, because our lease at our old place is up on the 31st." The ensuing hour-long phone call session finally found us with an apartment that wasn't quite ready, and had a washer and dryer. We originally planned on not getting a washer and dryer in the unit, but that was before we got knocked up, so this will actually work okay. It just sucks that we'll have to play a little more a month than we thought we had planned on, but we're still saving like $200 a month since all bills but electric are paid.

Moving out was pretty miserable, but it was a little easier since we put all the furniture in the garage over the last few months. We had originally planned on hiring movers, but decided against it to save a few bucks. Next time, we are hiring movers. No question. Especially since we'll have a toddler by that point in time. It took a lot longer to do all that, so we ended up just loading up all the furniture and a smattering of boxes that we shoved into corners and wedged under furniture. Realistically we probably could've gotten everything into the u-haul, we were just tired of hauling crap.

Moving in was pretty horrible too, because most of the furniture had to go upstairs, so we just left a lot of it downstairs for the first week. This was made all the more challenging since the entry way diverges in a corner: one way leads upstairs, and one way leads to the living room. Getting the couch in sucked since we pretty well had to Hulk-Smash it into the living room. It was even worse because the a/c didn't work in the new place, so we had to keep stopping every 10 minutes for fear of overheating. That took from like... noon to past dusk, which was annoying. Surprisingly the only casualty was a desk, but it was a cheap-ass Sauder desk, so it wasn't a really big loss. That and we had an extra desk that was just going to be a bills paying desk.

On Sunday we got the rest of the boxes and Liz cleaned the old place. Fetching stuff from the old place was pretty exciting, because I had to play "shove things into the car and hope they don't break." We had left our futon chair because Liz was certain it would fit in the car. It did, but I had to take the legs off and ride with my knees in my chest for that load.

Anyway, we're moved in, the cats and dog are adjusted, blah blah blah. We still have a metric crapton of boxes to unload, but we'll get that done eventually. It's at least livable now. For week one we had just left the mattress downstairs and shoved it out of the way during the day. Fun times indeed.

I felt like making a post. Aren't you excited?

You know who's cool? Liz. You know why? She went out and bought a PS2, which was bundled with LEGO Batman. The first two thoughts I had were "OMG, my wife rox!" and "I sure hope we can afford this..." It's annoying that money is such a concern. I guess that's adulthood.

Speaking of money, I got a raise. Yay. Ryan has said over and over again that you are pretty much GUARANTEED a raise after 3 months of working there and on your anniversary, so ... I guess I can at least celebrate that I'm not a screw up who DOESN'T deserve to get a raise.

Side note: I'm tired of people going door to door trying to sell us crap. WE ARE LOWER-MIDDLE CLASS. GO AWAY. Not to mention that the dog flips out and won't stop barking for 10 minutes.

Back to work. We had a Thanksgiving dinner/lunch today with the production staff (basically that means everybody except acquisitions and marketing. Why they don't get included is beyond me, but I'm not in charge, so whatever). Liz made fruit salad. People liked it, but we made WAY more than necessary, because it seemed like there wasn't that much stuff when Liz was buying the ingredients, so I made her do a double recipe. Long story short: we're going to be eating fruit salad for dessert for a while. Anybody want some fruit salad? It's good, I swear!

Umm... does anybody have an awesome survey or something they want me to do? I'll do it. Honest.

I think I need a nap.

So, who misses me updating several times a day despite not having anything to say?

Paintballing was today.

Let it be known right now that I am terrible at this game. I am covered in welts. A fair amount of them are from the last round when we played "nobody's out until their gun is empty" so I get hit no less than 30 times.

I had loads of fun. The teams seemed a little unbalanced, unfortunately, because the other team had a lot of retired military personel and at LEAST 4 people who play the game fairly regularly, whereas my team had me, who played about 10 years ago and was given the slingshot, and 1 person who was a pro. So, for the most part we were basically just walking targets.

We played 8 games, only 1 of which we actually won. I was wet, dirty, sore, and filled with glee.

I hope we do stuff like this more often.

Well, I've had quite the adventure with these Jim Gaffigan tickets.

See, we bought these tickets in like... April or something like that. Liz and I were both really excited. They've been sitting on our cork bord since then.

Recently Liz got a job. Since this is a job that they could very easily replace her, company policy is to can anybody who misses a day of training. We had both forgotten about the tickets until that point. I remembered on like... the 30th. We started flipping out, because we were probably not going to be able to go for a couple reasons: a) Liz's shift is 4:30 pm to 11:00 pm, so she would have had the car, and b) I still don't have a license anyway (yeah, yeah, I know).

So I sent an e-mail around work seeing if anybody would want to go with me. I figured I'd get inundated, because I was offering the ticket for free, but I only got two responses: one from a person who wanted to but couldn't, and one from a person who was going to go with me. I thought I was all set.

On Monday this guy remembers he agreed to dog sitting that day. I'm like "Crap. Oh well, I remember somebody else saying he was planning on going." So I ask this guy. He ALSO had a prior engagement that he forgot about. So I send out my "does anybody want this extra ticket?" e-mail again, slightly revised. Zero responses. I'm annoyed and I'm thinking I'm not going to be able to go. Then I remembered somebody else was planning on going, so I asked her and she's still planning, so everything is hunky dory.

Today Liz reads in her company manual that she can, indeed, miss one day of work during training, so if I don't get somebody to take this extra ticket before Saturday Liz is just going to call in sick.

What a long, boring, pointless post this was.

Holy crap, it's so nice to actually have a desk. I've just been using the bedside table as a desk for my computer since we moved in in September. Ahhh. This is great! And now the big, giant, super tall desk is hidden in the bedroom, and the reasonably sized desk is in the living room. Now all we have to do is (eventually) move Liz's noisy computer in here and move my ultra quiet computer into the living room.

Now I need to measure things. Bah!

I have a job interview tomorrow. This is exciting to me. The job is in a publishing place, locally owned and operated, and what they need is somebody for doing layouts, package design, and possibly illustration for children's books.

The illustration bit has me a bit on edge, because that's never really been my strong suit, so hopefully that won't be the make-or-break. I have a strong design sense, and my layouts don't suck, so hopefully this pans out and I actually don't have to... y'know, be unemployed and stuff.

So, yeah. Wish me luck with all that, then, and extra Happy Vibes™ are always helpful.

Now it's off to fooding. WOO!!!