MY LIFE - JUNE

Thursday, June 13, 2002

I spent the first part of my day sleeping after I was up until around 3 or 4 in the morning making sure my cat was going to be okay. This was because after I got back here with her last night, I realized that she didn't have any food, any water, or a litter box. This meant that at 1 in the morning, I had to run out to Super K-Mart in Brooklyn to grab some of the basic necessities in order to keep my cat from completely destroying the place.

It's become pretty clear that she's missed me though. Not only is she sitting next to me right now, but she has been next to me anytime I've been home since bringing her back. When I've been gone, she's been hiding under my mom's bed, sleeping on my mom's bed, or sleeping next to my sister while she was reading a book in my bed.

She follows me up the stairs. She tries to follow me out of the room. She follows me around the entire suite and has tried to get into the bathroom when I've been in there.

She keeps attacking the mouse pointer while I try to type this. You try typing with a white cat standing in front of the screen, attempting to eat the little arrow that's in the corner. It's not easy.

The next part of my day was spent at work trying to take care of some things that I needed to get done by the end of the week. I was there for five hours doing our regular scan of the pharmacy inventory, something that we have to do about two or three times a year it seems.

CVS uses what's called computer-assisted ordering, or CAO as we call it. What it's supposed to do is automatically order the medicine that we use during the course of the week and replenish the store without us having to write an order. What really happens is about 75% of the stock is replenished, while the other 25% is ignored for three weeks and we have to order from our outside vendor.

CAO really doesn't work that well, especially in a busy store like mine. Although it's been better of late, it still fails to send us some of our faster items, then two weeks later, it sends us too much. There are just certain things we should never run out of that we've run out of since the system's been in place (about 4 years).

Then I had to clear out two drawers of prescription files (yeah, I do just about everything at the store) so that we could continue to file the hard copies away like we normally do. Space had become a little tight because I hadn't gotten around to cleaning out a drawer sooner. I just haven't had time of late, which is also why the returns haven't been done. I have a huge drawer of outdates and damages to go through that I still have to look at. I'm thinking this will happen in two weeks.

Right now, I just can't wait for my vacation to get here. I work one more day this week, then I'm off for a whole week. What am I going to do? Probably not a damn thing. I really need the rest right now as I've been pretty much run ragged lately.

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We finally got a preliminary list of the personal items that were affected by the fire. I say preliminary because there are no prices listed on any of the items and I guess I'm supposed to estimate how much each item cost me and even where I might have bought it. This could prove a little tricky since some of the items I had I've had for quite a while and a couple I didn't buy myself.

For instance, the tv was bought like 10 years ago and I think was around $250 or so, but I can't be sure since my dad bought it.

The computer, on the other hand, was bought with a printer, monitor, and speakers included for about $2000. The scanner and zip drive were separate, but the scanner was from about 4 years ago and the zip drive right after I bought the computer.

In any case, I have to sit down and go through this list, try and remember what I paid for all these items, remember where I got them at, and then hopefully not get screwed by our insurance company.

Meanwhile, at the house...The walls are starting to come down, especially on the second floor. I walked up there and was kind of surprised to be able to see through into all the rooms on the floor and see the wood supporting the house there. It was kind of freaky but kind of cool to see the skeleton of the house.

The entire house has wooden floors as well that were simply covered up by carpeting, essentially ruining the floor, although we do wish to keep hardwood floors in most of the house. The basement and probably some of the bedrooms will have carpeting, but other than that, it looks like hardwood floors throughout.

I'm thinking that most of the windows will be replaced, a god-send since the house is filled with windows that were painted and nailed shut. The woman that lived there before us was obviously afraid of the outside air, living in air-conditioning during the summer and using the heat in the winter. All the windows on the first and second floor were like that.

Walls are going to be removed in some parts of the house. My mom wants to expand certain rooms, other rooms she wants to change completely, and certain rooms won't exist anymore.

We won't have a dining room anymore, which makes sense since we never eat in the dining room anyway. The kitchen is going to be condensed a bit and the dining room will become part of a front bedroom that will include part of the porch, which is going to become closed-in.

The living room will remain mostly unchanged, but one bedroom upstairs is getting wiped out completely, becoming one with the master bedroom. Instead of two bedrooms, there will be one master bedroom with a walk-in closet. The linen closet will become just a regular closet for the room that's at the end of the hallway just past the master bedroom, which is going to be slightly adjusted.

My mom intends to put a porch on top of our current porch so that she can have a place to sit outside if she wants to without having to go downstairs. I'm kind of curious about this one.

The upper level will not have a kitchen at this point. There will be a bathroom and the pitch of the roof will be adjusted, allowing for more head room. Windows will now be on all sides of the third floor and a back exit is planned as well as a better placement for the stairs going up.

The basement, as I said earlier, will have carpet at least in the part where I'm at. One wall is going to be taken out while new walls will be added, along with a drop-ceiling, so that I have a real room down there. There will be a phone line going downstairs (or upstairs depending on what room I ultimately take) so that I can have my own internet access once I get a computer back.

It's really just a matter of us all sitting down and discussing what we'd like done, but most of the plans have pretty much been set and I'm anxious to see how this all works out. The sooner we can get back in, the better things will be and I think that this will definitely be a chance to get the house we've really always wanted.

Now, if shit would just stop happening, things would be fine.

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It's hard to believe, but in ten days, this site will be five years old. Yeah, I can't believe I've been dabbling in this whole web site crap for as long as I have myself, but it was five years ago when this site first started.

June 23, 1997 was my first foray into the online world of maintaining a web site. It was first presented to me by someone I used to talk to online that I have since lost track of. This guy offered to start a site up for free and showed me how to upload files using AOL and that I should learn basic HTML if I wanted to continue making the site.

On that day, I uploaded the first pages that became what was known then as "Dave's Home Page," a site that was more dedicated to my favorite television show, Mystery Science Theater 3000, a show that would remain the focus of my web building at first.

The evolution of my site is a process that I've talked about many times since. I've written about how I learned how to write HTML coding, how to upload pictures thanks to the picture disks I bought when I'd get pictures developed, how to expand the site into something bigger and better.

After a few months, I realized that I needed more space for my site and transferred the entire site over to "Geocities," now Yahoo!Geocities. I tried to expand on my MST3K-related pages, but slowly I spent less and less time on those. I was writing editorials every week on different things, pieces of writing that are jokes compared to what I write now. Editorials gave way to monthly columns about things, which eventually led to the last really successful page that I ever created.

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