An update

I believe I am over my caffeine addiction now. I'm not suffering from headaches and as far as I know, the grumpiness associated with caffeine withdrawal is gone. The nice thing about not having coffee in the morning is not having to go pee 4 times before noon now.

In other news, I have a very busy day at work this saturday. I just plotted out my course and I will be driving over 250 miles to get to my 3 appointments. Half of my work day will just be spent in the car, which isn't all that bad since I'm getting paid while I drive and the VW Beetle is a comfortable car to drive. I know I'll be exhausted by the time I get home, which I'm guessing if I start my day at 7:45am I should get home around 7pm at the latest.

I've also learned that my cable company will be adding the Food Network to their list of High Definition channels. This is going to look fantastic on our new 50" plasma HDTV.

Oh, I didn't blog about the new TV did I? Here's the story on that! My laptop had to go in for servicing several times and under the Best Buy service plan policy if it requires a 4th repair, they will replace it. They added a new option where if you can't find an acceptable model for replacement or if you didn't want the same type of product that you could just get store credit. I really didn't use my laptop all that much, most of the time it just sat there being unused so I opted to get store credit.

The laptop I bought was fairly high end at the time so it was rather expensive. With the store credit, I was able to get a 50" Panasonic plasma TV literally at no cost, pretty much just sales tax. It happened that my laptop was worth what a huge TV now sells for. We got rid of our older TV and entertainment center and it is now a very nice smaller TV stand with the big TV on top. It actually gave us more room in the living room and the TV looks amazing. Anna and I are both very happy with it.

Fun times!

Lots of fun can be had with a webcam:










Be sure to click them to get the full size picture.

Houses! Houses for sale!

There are three houses for sale on my block. That is a significant percentage of houses, do they know something about this block that I don't? Is the apocalypse going to start on this block? Is an asteroid going to crash into the street?

At least we are very happy with our house. We have been very fortunate in the 2 years we've been in it, no issues nothing has fallen down or crumbled apart. Looking at the market now, we paid too much for the house, but it was in the perfect location, had almost exactly what we wanted, and it was a pretty fair price to start with.

On a completely unrelated topic, Taco Bell is the most delicious food you can possibly have. Especially when its night time and you are absolutely starving. $6 got me a ridiculous amount of food and a large drink last night and I was so very satisfied. After a couple drinks and you start getting the munchies, Taco Bell can be the perfect answer to that problem.

Have you hugged a tree today?

I'm becoming more and more aware of how wasteful our society is with materials. I try my hardest to not only recycle everything that I can, but also purchase items that use less packaging or packaging that is recyclable.

At work today I had a few hours to kill before the store opened, so I went through and cleaned out the old forms, invoices, brochures, and other promotional crap that we had laying around. It was all expired so I started piling it up to take it back to the recycling box for paper that we finally have in. I quickly realized I was going to need a shopping cart to hold it all and by the time I was done, the cart was half full of paper. I was glad that we now have our paper recycled but still kind of bummed me out a bit that so much paper was created, never used, and had to be recycled into something else.

Even though all this paper will be recycled, it is still incredibly wasteful. The process to both create and recycle paper consumes quite a bit of other resources like water and wood, and to create paper can sometimes require harmful chemicals. You would think working for Best Buy's Geek Squad, a very high tech company, we could figure out a way to not need to use so much paper, but apparently it is the opposite.

This isn't supposed to happen!

I did laundry today and since the forecast was for clear skies, I hung 4 loads of laundry outside. Was sunny, a slight breeze, perfect for drying clothes the natural and environmentally friendly way. They were outside for around 3-4 hours and were probably dry, then I heard thunder. At first I thought it was just from the road construction a block away but then I heard it again and softly said "Oh Sh&@", since Anna was napping.

I ran out with laundry baskets in tow and started pulling the laundry off. Just a few droplets of rain, no big deal, I'll be fine....WTF its POURING NOW! I was getting soaked and so were the clothes. I frantically got everything pulled off and brought it inside where I surveyed the damage. The clothes weren't all that wet but I will have to run them through the dryer to get the dry again.

Damn you mother nature...DAMN YOUUUUUU!

Emergency meeting

On my way to an appointment yesterday around 3pm, I got a phone call from work saying that the general manager of the store wanted to meet with me and the other Double Agent at work. He wanted to meet with him at 6am and me at 6:30. I immediately had a bad feeling about this, since we have not had that many appointments lately. I was concerned that he was going to fire or demote one of us.

I got pretty anxious for awhile, got to my appointment and forgot all about it. Soon after leaving I remembered it again and got anxious. I let Anna know about what happened and we talked about it for a bit. We were both worried, but after a little while we were fine.

I woke up at 5am this morning, got ready to head over. I got there a bit early so I waited while they were in the meeting. When they came out, it was my turn to go in. The store manager sat me down and started in his speech, which sounded like a "You're being demoted" speech.

Turns out, my job is safe but the other guy is being demoted to just working in the store, acting as a trainer to get the store's performance back up to where it used to be. He does have the option to get his spot back if business deems it necessary.

Needless to say, I was incredibly relieved that it wasn't me since I absolutely love to work out in the field. I feel bad for the other guy since he'd been in that position longer than I have, but my hard work and performance level assured me the spot. I'm also glad that neither of us were let go or anything like that.

Overall, my meeting was good, the store manager had many good things to say about me, so I'm happy. And my stress level immediately went down after he said that I wasn't being demoted. One plus side of this is I will be the only Double Agent for the Geek Squad here in Mankato (for those that don't know, I do on-site computer repair/setup/maintenence, wireless networking, etc) so all the appointments will go to me, keeping me busier and probably opportunity for overtime.

I've got a bad feeling about this

For quite awhile, I had coffee in the morning. Two, maybe three cups, then I would go to work and that would be all the caffeine for the day. For a few weeks now, I have been starting to get headaches in the later afternoon and evening and I would usually wake up with one too. I get a very specific kind of headache if I haven't had caffeine in awhile and it is certainly not pleasant.

I don't like this reaction my body has, and I dont want to have to be consuming caffeinated products throughout the day, so I have quit caffeine more or less. Its been 3 days since I've had any morning coffee and I've had just a few Diet Cokes.

I haven't been doing too bad, but I do have a pretty decent headache going on right now. I took 800mg of ibuprofen about half an hour ago but there hasn't been much change. I dont feel too grumpy yet but I'm sure it will happen since that is also a symptom of caffeine withdrawl for me.

I would say by Tuesday or Wednesday I should be doing just fine. Its sure going to be a fun ride there and I apologize in advance if I'm mean to you.