Hello?

Is there anybody out there? Probably not. I don't blame you. It's been more than a month since my last post. I blame a number of things.

1) Sciatica. About a month ago, I seriously messed up my back and tweaked my sciatic nerve. It hurt to sit upright. Thus, it hurt to sit at the computer.
2) Our computer. Slow, slow, slow. It literally took ten minutes to boot up. And the last thing I want to do after getting home from work is sit here for ten minutes just looking at the desktop.
3) My job. Part of the founding principle of this blog was that I always had a reason to bitch about something. And for the most part, I don't have much to bitch about anymore. Oh, sure... I can always find something to complain about. But for the most part, my job is pretty boring. A good kind of boring.

So, why blog now? Well, for starters, My back feels much better. I've started going to a chiropractor (big bucks... but I'd rather spend the money trying this than have some money-hungry orthopedic surgeon tell me I have to go under the knife). Yeah, it still hurts. But I've stopped carrying a pillow into the movie theater with me, which is nice.

As for the computer, we've made some improvements on that front, as well. About two weeks ago, our old computer crashed. It was trying to install updates when the power went out. And windows ceased to work. After borrowing a windows boot disk from work-- and several hours with my own personal I.T. staff (my dad), the computer worked again. But we considered it a wake-up call and started computer shopping. Two weeks later, we have a quad-core processor, 4 GB of RAM, and (if you count our external hard drive), more than a terabyte of memory. I could damn near run a TV station off of this thing. Oh, and it boots up in about ten seconds. Oh, and we're now using Firefox for our internet browser. Bye-bye pop-ups!

Oh... and I have plenty to bitch about lately. After shelling out a hefty payment to my chiropractor... and buying our snazzy new computer... our air conditioner decided to crap out. Okay... it's not as bad as it sounds. We still have air conditioning (good, since it's been in the mid-90s every day), but the air handler in the attic is pumping out so much condensation that it fills the drain pan every other day. So, every other day, I have to climb up into our attic (did I mention my back?) with a freakin' turkey baster and empty the drain pan. Last night, I emptied 600 ounces of water. And it was still about half an inch deep.

The first estimate? $1950 for a new air handler. Oh, and our condenser is also 21 years old... so we'll have to get a new one of those eventually, too. And that's another $1600. Good times.

So I may not have reason to regularly bitch about my job (though today I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown), I've got plenty to whine about. Stay tuned!