Long Time No Blog
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Exercise
So I just got home from working out after work. I'm doing the Couch to 5K program to increase my cardio.
My weight has plateaued for a while in the high 250's. And ever since my trip to Tulsa, where every restaurant has "steakhouse" in the name, I gained about 10lbs and have been steady. I need to get back on track so I can get down to a dateable size again.
So week 1 day 1 down.
I felt great accomplishing it.
I have been shying away from cardio because my joints hurt and my feet and legs are pretty fragile. The C25K program seems to be a good way to start, since it starts off very very slow. I plan on continuing through the whole thing.
Last week on friday I had tried to go to start out. The website for the Wellness Center says it closes at 7 on fridays, but apparently it closes at 6 now and I didn't find out till I got there at 6:15. D'oh. But I didn't get discouraged. I went there today. It was pretty busy so that was intimidating. But I conquered it. I went in there, got changed, did my workout, and got the fuck out. Fuck yeah.
Birthday
I had a birthday. Hardly anyone came. Just hung out with my roommate, a couple acquaintances from Strangetalk, and my hot ex-roommate Beth. Seriously, folks. Beth flew in from L.A. for my birthday (well, and a wedding too), why couldn't you show up?
Next year I'll be 30. You fuckers better show up for that. No excuses.
Ladies
Briefly within the past year I had a girl I hung out with exclusively and frequently and had sex with. Despite fulfilling all of the definitions of dating that I could think of, she insisted we weren't. She "wanted to live the single life", so I let her do that. I tried to remain friendly after the fact since she was a pretty cool person. But I guess it turns out that she's not so nice. So I don't talk to her any more. Good for me.
Had a talk with my friend in Minnesota about the whole friendship vs. wanting more than that thing. So since then we haven't really been talking much. She's pretty busy at work, but I dunno. I think I may have irreparably harmed our friendship. Which is a pretty big shame, since I actually do want to be friends with this girl. Hope it works out. At least she seems to have stopped wanting to talk to me about guys. That was pretty heart-wrenching and I'm glad it's stopped. We can be friends, but man, that's gotta be off the table.
Job
Oh, what's this all the sudden about having a exercise facility at work? Well, depending on when we last chatted, you may not be aware about my current employment status. So here we go.
I parted ways with Palisade at the end of February / start of March. I was unemployed for about a month and got picked up at Source Allies. I worked there for about a month and then when it became apparent that I wasn't fitting in, I left there too. I was then unemployed from May till August 20th. It was pretty embarassing so I didn't really want to put it down in print.
So what happened at Palisade?
Well, I was blindsided really. My boss didn't think I was measuring up to expectations. I thought I was doing fine. They let me go. He seemed genuinely upset about it, but hey, he wasn't the one that was unemployed, either. It seems since I left they've lost a couple other developers too. They're apparently down to 3 guys writing the whole thing. Good luck to them. I still think the rest of my employees (and even my former boss) are nice people and I wish them all luck.
Ok, so Source Allies?
SA is a consulting company. So my first job was to develop a web-based employee scheduling system for a local amusement park. I won't say which one, but working on it was truly an adventure. The time schedule was pretty rushed. I was working 9-12 hour days to get this done on time. Working weekends some times too. So I got it delivered about 2 days late. Then that weekend I was hanging out with the girl who would later become (and then even later become not) my girlfriend. I got a call from my boss asking me to research several technologies so that I wasn't completely retarded when we pitched my next job. Pretty reasonable. I saved the list, emailed it to myself, and then went on with my weekend hanging out with A GIRL.
I thought it was a pretty easy decision until Monday. I showed up, sat down and began researching. The boss came over and asked how much research I'd gotten done. I said none. He pulled me into the conference room and told me he thought I wasn't working out and he wanted to let me go. Recalling the 9-12 hour days of completely unpaid overtime, I agreed that I wasn't fitting in. I left.
Where Now?
Okay, so fast forward to August. I'm getting broker and broker. My savings is gone. My credit cards are maxed out. I am about to run out of money. I get a job. Huzzah for me! The big problem is that now, despite having an income, I have to drive to Des Moines every day on ~$4/gal gas. Ugh.
Luckily I have a side-job to tide me over. More on that in a second. So I'm just barely making ends meet right now. I had to borrow some money from my mom and from my roommate to keep the bills afloat. By my calculations, I'll be broken even some time around January 2009.
So I work for the State of Iowa. It's a cool job with a lot of cool coworkers. I do software development in an ancient system called filePro. I'll have to make a post later about how lame filePro is. But it's paying the bills, so I love it for that.
Tulsa
Part of learning filePro was going to an advanced class on filePro in the middle of September. I got a crash course in filePro from a coworker and signed up to go. The tuition was $1696. Going into it I was afraid that at that exorbitant price, it might be a rip off. In retrospect, I was 95% right.
I didn't have the money to go. I was to be reimbursed by the State, but that didn't help me. However they did front me money for the tuition, hotel, and something like 80% of the food allowance. Woohoo.
So I went down there and had troubles with my credit card and debit card. I was so furious I had to threaten to cancel my CC every day until the damn call center people would transfer me to someone that could help. But in the end it worked out. Still pretty lame that I had to be embarassed like that in front of my coworker who went with.
Side Job
My friend Drew, who used to fix computers for a living, moved to Denver. He's been forwarding calls from his Des Moines clientele to me for a few months now. It helped me stretch my budget out while I was unemployed, and now it's helping to make sure I've got food and gas. I'm going to keep doing it indefinitely to help reestablish my money cushion and then to pay down my car loan early.
So that's all I can think of for now. I need to wash some dishes.
Categories: October 6, 2008 | Job | Money | Women | Weight
