An Anniversary

While everyone is focusing on this as the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attack, I have to report that it is the third anniversary of the beginning of this blog. Odd that it should have fallen on such a date, but there you are. Here's the first entry:

My friend Kathy has a blog, and I was so taken by it I decided to try one.

I have nothing to say at this point. I am still working out the bugs in figuring out how to get this up and running.

Perhaps profound things will be said here. I really doubt it. Once I get things going and get familiar with the lay of the cyberland here, I may add pictures and such. Just getting this first message up on the site is enough for me now, though.

I'm assuming Kathy has abandoned her blog, since the last entry was about two years ago. She has found Facebook a much better way to keep in touch, and in a lot of ways, she's right. I check Facebook far more often than I do the blog. In fact, I only visit here when I'm making an entry.

I was going to celebrate this anniversary with a revealing of the "before" and "after" pictures of the new flooring downstairs, but with all the changes that the remodel incurred, not everything has found a new home yet.

We've removed the aquarium for the time being, since all but one of the fish died during our fumigation exile, and a lot of the tchotchkes that populated the living room in our "before" phase simply no longer have homes. So we're planning on doing a culling of items, opening up some space, and getting ready for the new look.

This would have been achieved this week, except Steve came down with a really bodacious bout of gastrointestinal flu on Monday evening and was out of commission for a day or so. Then I came down with it on Thursday and am only now recovering. This being so, the week was kind of shot as far as domestic projects went.

Another victim of the remodel was the fountain out on the patio. After a good cleaning, I set it back up and it is now leaking from mysterious sources somewhere in the base. A generously applied tube of aquarium epoxy did nothing to stem the trickle, so I'm thinking the exterior finish has simply eroded to the point where it is no longer viable. So there's something else to shop for this weekend.

I continue sending out resumes and still here little back. I'm working this month with the Foothill Employment and Training Center, and have gotten lots of support and encouragement, but nothing in the way of a solid interview, much less a job offer.

The website for Pearce Plastics is now complete, including a pretty cool 70-second introductory Flash animation. The only parts missing are those that the client has not yet provided (which have been weeks in coming and have still not been done). I'm going to have to push them hard, I think, because the site is contractually supposed to be online by the 25th of this month and there will several days worth of work to get this final information onto the pages and properly coded.

It doesn't help that the owner of the company (a nonagenarian) simply will not turn on his computer and look over the site. He wants me to print it all out (140 pages!) so he can look at it. His wife is a little younger and a little more responsive, but it will still be an uphill grind, no matter what.

So, hopefully we'll get things situated in the next week for appropriate "after" pictures and there will be something interesting to look at in the next entry. Until then, everyone keep well and happy: That's my plan.