'Come down, and waste away with me, down with me...'

Well the Diamondbacks game was kind of fun. The game itself wasn't particularly exciting, since not many runs were scored, or even hit for that matter, but it was fun just to go and watch. I've only been to one other baseball game in my life, and that was to a Seattle Mariners game like ten years ago when my dad got tickets through his company. Thankfully the Diamondbacks won 2-1 versus the Detroit Tigers. We didn't get to stay until the end of the game, as we had to leave about the middle of the 8th inning to make it to work on time, not that it matters since all the runs were scored before we left. Food is outrageously expensive there. A large 44oz soda is over $5, and no free refills. I also got chicken strips and fries, which was another $5 or so, and the chicken strips were pathetically small. The fries were surprisingly good though, which is saying quite a bit considering I'm not real fond of fries. That night at work time flew by at a decent rate, which is always good when it's the last day of the work week. For some reason it seemed like half the people didn't show up that night either, including Eddie. When I text messaged him he replied saying he had driven somewhere on the West side of town with his girlfriend, when his car broke down, and apparently he was high as shit, and walking down the street somewhere...not sure where though.

I went with Stefanie to the mall today so she could buy some new tongue rings. She asked me which one she should get, but I told her if it were up to me she should just take it out. I like earrings and belly button rings, but when it comes to tongue rings and nose rings, or anything else really, it's just not something I find particularly attractive. While we were at the mall we walked through the JC Penney's we both worked at (and where we met) three years ago, and on our way out of it we saw Mike and Tiffany standing in line at the register, and talked to them a bit. Mike turns 28 tomorrow. After that I hung out over at her place until she had to go to work.

I was supposed to go see a DJ at some club tonight with Richard, but called me up and apparently those plans have fallen through because apparently the club it was at turned out to be a gay bar. Ah well, there'll be other weekends and other DJ's. I ended up going to Dennis' for a couple hours instead, and watched "Coach Carter". After that Stefanie got off work and we went to T.G.I. Fridays and hung out there for a couple hours.

Here's some pics of Bank One Ballpark that I took at the game. The panoramic one is three shots spliced together. As you can see, I didn't have a tripod or anything, so the images don't quite fit perfectly, but you can get the general idea of what it looks like.

'This disease, keeps holding me down...'

Well this weekend should start off well. The week itself has gone by fairly quickly, probably due to me sleeping for 8+ hours a day. I also just got approved for a Providian credit card, and was able to transfer the balances of two of my other credit cards to it, which is great, because they were both at 25% and 29% APR's, with balances of over $700 each. Now that they're on the providian card, they're at 0% until April of next year, and only 13.49% after that, and my minimum payments will be consolidated, and lower. The reason the two credit cards had such a high APR is a bit of a long and boring story, so I'll leave that out, but now things have been corrected, and I should be saving ~$70 a month just from lower minimum payments hopefully, as well as saving all that money from lower interest. Going to an Arizona Diamondbacks (Major League Baseball for you foreigners) game later tonight. Tickets are free thanks to the company I work for, so even more money saved =P. I'm not a huge baseball fan, but I enjoy watching anyways. I don't have any solid plans yet for the weekend, but sometimes that's better anyways. I'm hoping to go to Richards new house and take a look around, and possibly install a new home theater system, and of course there's always the possibility of hanging out with various other friends that I normally hang out with on the weekend. It was my Grandmother's 86th birthday yesterday, so I gave her a call, which she was pretty surprised about, even though I call her every year =P. My parents and sister happened to be there (there being the state of Montana) as well for the next week, so I got to talk to them also. Well that's all for now. I'll post again in a few days about how the weekend went. Now it's off to bed so I'm not dead tired for work after the game.

'Happy and free inside a world of misery...'

Time to catch up on yet another week, this one happened to be particularly busy for me. We'll start at the beginning...

Last Monday night was great. I went to my 2nd concert, this time which happened to be Static-X. The three opening bands were a chore to sit through..particularly because we were forced to stand, since there were no seats. All three bands were basically heavy metal or death metal, not sure what you would call them. Basically a hell of a lot of screaming that made absolutely no sense at all. All of the songs sounded quite similar to each other, and the only reason you could tell you were listening to a new song was because of the short pauses in between each one. The 2nd band was actually a Hispanic death metal band, and all their songs were in Spanish, not that it made any difference, because as I said earlier, you couldn't even understand the ones that were in English. Had we have known there were going to be three opening bands before Static-X, we probably would've came later, but oh well. Once Static-X came on, things got much better. They played quite a few songs from their previous two albums, Wisconsin Death Trip, and Shadowzone, as well as a couple of tracks from their album that came out that night, Start a War. Every song was damn good though, and what made the show even better is that the band actually performs really well, in that they didn't seem like they were there to just play a few songs and then get the hell out of there. I went to the show with my friends Dennis and DJ for Dennis' 26th birthday, which was on the 15th.

Tuesday and Wednesday passed without anything extraordinary. When Thursday came, I went with Stefanie to school early in the morning, around 7:30 I think, to help her with her CIS 105 work. She had to take a test on Excel later that morning, and didn't have a clue what she was doing. Unfortunately we didn't get through too much of the practice exercises she had to do before the time to take the test came around. Eventually she convinced the teacher that she didn't have enough time to take the test anyways, as she had to be at work by 9. The teacher agreed to let her take the test the following Monday (today) instead. Later that day I went to The Cheesecake Factory with Stacy for her 24th birthday, which was actually a week earlier on the 8th. We were there for about two hours, and there wasn't too many long moments of silence, so hopefully she wasn't completely bored.

Friday was really fun. Started off playing tennis for the first time in my life with Stefanie. I sucked ass at it of course, and kept hitting the ball much too hard, or not hitting it at all. We didn't play for very long because Stefanie said I was going to give myself a heart attack, so we went swimming instead, which I haven't done for a very, very long time. Unfortunately that didn't last very long either, as the maintenance man came and said he was closing down the pool for the day to clean it, so after changing, I went back to her apartment and just hung out until Dennis called. He was having a barbecue at his house, and was on his way to pick me up. Stefanie wasn't too pleased, and she told me I shouldn't go, and I should just hang out with her instead, but I'd already told Dennis that morning that I would.

Saturday morning, Eddie (friend from work) and I were going to go to Fry's Electronics as soon as it opened up at 9am. Since we got off work at 6am, we just hung out at my apartment for a couple hours talking, and showing him my apartment, computer, etc. Then we went to Fry's and he returned a few things, then we just walked around the store for a little over an hour just looking at stuff. After that I went home and sat around the house for a few hours until around 5:30pm when DJ came and picked me up to go to a restaurant called Fuddruckers, which is basically just a sort of "homestyle" burger joint. We were going there for Dennis' birthday party. The food there wasn't all that great, at least not for the $10 it cost. I could've got better, and more food, at any fast food restaurant for half the price. It was fun hanging out though. I got home around 9:30pm and called Stefanie to see if she might be bored and wanted to hang out, but I couldn't get a hold of her. I really didn't want to go to sleep so damn early, but I'd only had roughly 8 hours of sleep in the last three nights, so I was extraordinarily tired. I'd just finished downloading roughly nine or ten Pearl Jam albums, so I added them all to my playlist and fell asleep listening to it. I woke up once or twice during the night and tried to stay awake listening to Pearl Jam as long as possible, so I wouldn't have to wake up at 6am from too much sleep. Not the easiest thing to do, as much of Pearl Jam's music is a little on the slow side. Somehow I managed it though, and didn't wake up until 10 or 11am the next morning.

Sunday is usually the day I try to hang out with Mike, so I gave him a call. We ended up going to the mall, along with Tiffany (his girlfriend). Usually we just end up walking around looking at stuff, but we actually did a bit of shopping this time. I probably spent much more money than I should've, but I needed the clothes just as much as I needed the money. One of the stores we went to was JC Penney, where I used to work. Only one person recognized me, which doesn't surprise me since I worked nights there. He actually didn't even know that I'd quit my job there, even though he hadn't seen me for more than 3 months.

After that we went to Fuddruckers yet again, although one in a different part of town than the one I'd went to the previous day. The food wasn't any better, and this time it was with Tiffany's parents rather than a bunch of my friends, so it wasn't quite as fun either. The day only got worse from there. We went to Best Buy so that Tiffany's parents could buy her sister and her sister's kids cell phones. The fact that her parents had to buy her and her boyfriend and kids cell phones pissed me off enough, but the fact that we spent three hours at Best Buy waiting for them to pick out their phones was fucking ridiculous. This is of course, one of the many things that won't happen once I finally have my own car. After that, we went to Tiffany's parents house, and nearly everyone went swimming. I wasn't really in the mood, so I just sat in the living room watching TV until Mike and Tiffany were ready to leave. Dennis had called earlier in the day and was having another barbecue for Father's Day, but I told him I wasn't going to be able to come because I was hanging out with Mike. I really should've gone. Other than the fact that it was hanging out with friends, the day was a complete waste of time.

When I finally got home, I called Stefanie to see if she wanted to hang out. Couldn't get a hold of her again, but she called not too long afterwards and wanted to know if she could come over so I could help her with her CIS work again. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, we couldn't get her software to work, so instead we just ended up talking and listening to music for 4.5 hours, which made me forget about the horrible day I'd had earlier.

Finally we come to today. I woke up around 8am because Stefanie wanted to go to the computer lab at the college to see if we'd be able to get the software to work there, and she could practice for an hour or two before having to take the test. Unfortunately the software still didn't work, so I tried to think of stuff on my own to try and teach her to use Excel, but I couldn't think of much, so we just went and ate breakfast at Jack n' The Box instead. She got a 100% and 70% on her last two Excel tests though, so hopefully she'll do relatively well on this one. I told her to call me as soon as she was finished with it, but it's been a couple hours since she left to take the test, and no call. We're supposed to go to the optometrist later today to see about getting me new glasses though, so I don't have to wear my contacts all the time while at home, which would be really nice, particularly at night, and when playing games, so my eyes don't dry out.

I really should start doing these blog entries on a semi-daily basis so you don't have to read all that text at once =P

'The water is rising up on me...'

This weekend should be...interesting. Saturday I'm going to take the A+ Certification test. Not to get certified mind you, just to see how well I'll do without actually studying for it. My friend Eddie has an A+ Study Guide, and he was asking me some of the test questions, and I had no clue what most of the answers were, heh. After I take it I'll probably read the book and then take it again, to actually get certified. I personally don't give a damn about the certification, because for the most part, I know what I'm doing; but if it'll make people feel more secure about me working on their computers, then so be it.

Stacy's birthday was the 8th. She turned 24. I bought her U2's new album "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb". U2's her favorite band, and normally I'd assume she already has the CD, seeing as it's been out for some time, but since she just had a baby, I imagine her finances are going various other places than CD's. Especially because she's only working three days a week. I kept the receipt just in case though. I'm going to take her out to lunch or dinner as well, depending on when's best for her. Going to leave the restaurant up to her, mainly because I really don't care where we eat, and because she's sure to enjoy the food that way.

Stefanie's probably going to come over Saturday or Sunday. She wants to install her CIS software on my computer so she can do her schoolwork here. I'll also be helping her out, as she doesn't know a whole lot about computers. She has a computer at her house, but it's a old Pentium II if I remember right, and she has no internet access. Her ex-boyfriend asked her if I'd be willing to help, but he was more interested in having me actually do his work, than have me help him. He offered to pay of course, but I'm honestly not real thrilled about doing that. Especially when it comes to computers. CIS 101 is just basic computing skills that everyone should learn if they plan on getting anywhere in life today. It's the same shit they now teach in Junior High. He said he already knows what he's doing, he just wants someone else to do it so he doesn't have to waste his time. The class is a mere $50 per credit hour though, so I highly doubt he would've paid me much to do it, certainly not enough for it to be worth the time though, especially since I wouldn't be getting a grade. If he already knows what he's doing, he should've just tested out of the class.

Speaking of girls and computers, it'd be nice if there were more girls that were interested in computers. Even the ones that go to technical schools arn't really interested in them. I know someone who graduated from DeVry Institute of Technology with a Bachelors degree in Computer Engineering Technology, and she couldn't even help her boyfriend install a copy of WindowsXP Pro that she got from the school for free. For those of you who don't know, installing a copy of WindowsXP is as simple as putting in the CD, booting the computer, and following the on-screen directions for about 5 steps. The rest is 100% automated. For those who took this paragraph the wrong way, I'm not saying girls can't use computers, I'm saying there aren't enough of them who are genuinely interested in them.

I mainly bring this up because my friend DJ was talking to me this morning about how I need to find girls that are interested in the same things I am to be able to talk to them for long periods of time, and not just long periods of silence during generic conversations that mainly consist of small talk like "How's your new job going". Easier said than done of course, because my three big interests are computers, video games, and rock music. Three things most girls aren't so interested in. Yes, there are girls interested in rock music (hence the purchased U2 album above), but not quite as much as myself, and most of them are more into hip-hop and R&B. They're also more into the more medium and softer rock bands, rather than bands like Rage Against the Machine, Tool, or Godsmack. I'm into the medium and softer stuff to, but not quite as much as the heavier stuff (and yes, I realize there is heavier, harder rock than Godsmack). Basically what this comes down to is I have nothing to talk about when it comes to conversations with girls other than to reply to whatever they talk about, and thus, I'm uninteresting, which is never good.

While out to dinner with Stefanie last Sunday, when she was first telling me about her CIS class, she mentioned that they would be designing a web page. After asking her if she knew if it would be using a visual editor, or if they would be coding directly in HTML, she looked thoroughly confused at either idea; so I started describing the differences and stuff, and how easy basic HTML was, and as I kept talking, I could tell she really didn't care, which was pretty disappointing, as I thought she might have some kind of interest in it. Still, I've found that some people get more interested in things once they realize they can actually do them, so hopefully helping her out with her school work might spark some interest since she'll actually be using the computer for something other than to search for information on Google or Yahoo, or check her email.

I haven't hung out with Mike for a couple weeks. We were supposed to go shooting last week, but I wasn't able to because I wasn't going to be home early enough, and you have to get out to the range early in the morning before the heat starts to build up. Last weekend I didn't call him either. I'm not sure why, as we normally hang out on Sundays. I did want him to sort of have a weekend alone with his girlfriend so they could possibly work out some issues though; and because I didn't hang out with Mike, I was able to hang out with Stefanie for two days in a row (or was it three?). I think I've hung out with her more in the past month than I have all year, or even all last year.

Still no new pictures from my camera, however, my parents were recently down in southern Washington, and stopped by Mt. St. Helens, and took some decent pics and sent them to me through email. Not the greenest part of Washington for sure, but still makes me somewhat homesick.

Getting off this Wisconsin death trip...

This weekend started off slow, so I prepared myself to waste it sitting around my apartment being bored, but thankfully, that wasn't the case. Friday night was my last night in the mentoring program at my work, so Monday night I'll be a full fledged employee, which comes with no additional benefit, in fact, quite the opposite. While in mentoring, if I screwed up, it didn't matter quite that much, as I had someone to turn to and ask questions, as well as take the blame or make up a story for the Supervisor, so that I wouldn't get into too much trouble. The next couple weeks should reveal fairly clearly if I'm going to be able to make it through the year without getting fired.

Saturday I did nothing, just sat around the apartment. DJ called me up and said he was planning on going to see "The Longest Yard" with Dennis, and wanted to know if I wanted to come, which I did. Unfortunately Dennis couldn't get his mom to watch his three kids while we went to the movie, so we ended up not going. I stayed up Saturday night until about 5:30am, as I figured I probably wouldn't get any phone calls to do anything until at least 10:30-11:00am. Turned out I was wrong, as Dennis called up at ~9:30, so I only got four or so hours of sleep. I didn't feel all that tired though, so wasn't too bad. I got up, shaved my head and got ready for the day, and walked over to his house, which is about a mile away, in the 95 degree heat. Thankfully there was a slight breeze, so it wasn't completely horrible. August can't come any faster though... Played six or eight games of pool at Dennis' with him and DJ. Only won once, but came extremely close every other time. I'm getting quite a bit better at it lately. They used to win with nearly all of my balls still on the table =P. After that we watched "The Aviator", which was a pretty decent movie, though slow at times. Probably wouldn't hurt to cut at least 30 minutes of footage from it, being a 3 hour movie. After that we went to Blimpie for subs, and then Blockbuster and rented "Finding Neverland", (also a decent flick, especially for one tailored to children) and another movie, which I forget the name of, as we haven't watched it yet.

Dennis dropped me off back home around 11:00pm, and I decided to give Stefanie a call so she wouldn't complain about me never calling. Turns out she lost her job as a server at The Olive Garden on Thursday, just for not ringing up someones desert, so that sucks. She was going to go get something to eat at Taco Bell, but asked me if I was hungry, and wanted to go to TGI Friday's since their appetizers were 1/2 off. I wasn't particularly hungry, as I'd just eaten a foot long sub only a couple hours earlier, but I'd rather hang out with her than sit around my apartment, so we went. Originally she was planning on just buying some cheap $2 appetizer, since she just lost her job, and was trying to conserve money, but I thought that was pretty ridiculous, and told her to order whatever she wanted, as I would pay for it. She objected of course, so while we were looking at the menu, I just asked her what she thought was good to eat, and I just ordered a few things she said, which ended up being chili cheese fries, mozzarella sticks, and some giant salad, as well as an alcoholic drink (called a Tidal Wave) that she suggested I should have if I ever started drinking alcohol. So we just shared all the food (except the alcohol, which was hers of course) and talked for a long time about her old job, school, friends, etc. Good times.

Yesterday I was thinking about how hard it seems to be to maintain more than a couple of friends as an adult, particularly with a schedule that's completely the opposite of everyone you know because I work nights. I have roughly six friends that I like hanging out with, none of them which work with me, and none of them hang out with each other. I used to spend every Saturday with Dennis, and Sunday's with Mike, and the others pretty much got neglected, as I have a hard time calling people to just talk to unless they're a really good friend (which are the two people I already hang out with). Week days and nights are virtually impossible to hang out with anyone because I sleep during the afternoon/evening, and then go to work at night. Having to work on Friday nights certainly doesn't help either. Thankfully Stefanie's sort of a night person herself, so after I'm done hanging out with Dennis or Mike, there's still a chance to hang out with her for a few hours on the weekends even if it's around midnight. My friend Richard, who, before today I hadn't spoken to in three months, recently bought a house and sent me the pictures a couple days ago, so I called him up to say Hi and congratulate him, and catch up, etc. He'll be going to Texas next weekend, but he wants to buy and install a new surround sound system in their house for their new 52" HDTV, and asked me if I'd help him out with it in a couple of weeks, so that should be fun.

While at Dennis' I talked to my parents for an hour or so about various things, including taking a trip up to Alaska next summer. I get three weeks of Paid Time Off a year, and since I'll have my car in a couple months, I really want to drive up to Washington, which is about 2.5-3 days of virtually non-stop driving. If no one down here wants to go up with me, then I'll probably end up flying my brother down or something so we can take turns at the wheel. I'm extremly excited about that, as the longest "road-trip" I've been on was only about 13 hours, from our house in Washington to my Grandma's in Montana. Plenty of opportunity for pictures though, and thankfully, my battery recharger came with a car adapter =P. The Alaska trip would probably have to be separate. My Dad said it'd be best if we had at least two-weeks of time to do it, and that's probably best, as it's about a 2-2.5 day drive non-stop my parents house to Fairbanks, where we used to live. Then we'd probably head past Mt. McKinley, and to Anchorage, and possible a couple other places, then head back. I really want my parents to come visit Phoenix again as well, and I told them if they could find the time, I'd have no problem paying for the tickets.