Janicek.com

When it comes to getting things done, I like to, well, get things done. I don’t like to do jobs half-assed. My wife, friends and family have told me that the house won’t be as I want it overnight. I have blisters and back spasms to prove that I’ve been trying. Though cussing, kicking and screaming, I’m coming to the realization that by the time I get my house and lawn the way that I want it, I’ll be able to sit down in my porch swing just long enough to enjoy it before I have to deal with my sporadic incontenence. This will be because I will be as old as dirt by that time.

Though owning a house is great and all, it’s really stressing me out. My life hasn’t sucked that much up until this point. I really can’t put into words how stressed I am on a daily basis. We didn’t buy a money pit – our house is in excellent condition, it’s just the things that I want to do to it and the every day maintenance. There’s just not enough time in the evening after work and on the weekends. I reiterate, I like to have things done. This whole house thing has been just one big punch to the ol’ yarbles.

As I was outside this afternoon, digging a flower bed/garden, I started thinking about how much work I’ve already done and how much more there is to do. I thought about how much money we spend on our mortgage payment, how much extra I pay on the principal, how much we’ve spent on home improvements – the list goes on. That’s when I figured out the whole yarble punching thing. Shovel in hand, fist full of St. Augustine grass in the other, I thought: wouldn’t it be cheaper to have a dominatrix come over once a week and for $100, hit me upside the head with hedgeclippers and kick me in man land?

I don’t know why I actually thought that. Perhaps it was the sun and because an unidentified bug flew up my nose a few minutes prior. I guess my point is that you have to be really old to have a nice house and lawn.

I want to love my iPod mini, but I can’t. I wanted to more songs on the mini for Elise last night and my computer won’t let me. I plug in the iPod via my USB 2 wire and the iPod immediately says “Okay to disconnect”. Then my computer tries to install a new USB device. My computer then tells me that there were “errors”. Then the process starts over again. It’s an endless cycle. As of right now, the mini is stuck with the songs that it has.

In other news… I was supposed to compete in the Unified Tae Kwon Do tournament this weekend but can’t because I royally screwed up my ankle. My instructor and I were point sparring Tuesday night and I came around with a reverse crescent kick which hit his knee going full speed. It didn’t really hurt at the time, but I was rendered a limping invalid yesterday. My ankle hurt so badly that I had to go to the doctor. I generally won’t go to a doctor unless I’m on the verge of death.

My ankle feels better today, but still not well enough to bear full weight or any sort of impact. I’m pretty bummed. I was really excited about fighting on Saturday. Oh well, maybe next time.

This past weekend was relatively uneventful up until the very end. Philip came over on Friday night and helped me hang blinds in the master bedroom. After that, we stayed up and talked about selling things on eBay. Philip is going to go to the public auctions in Sealy every month or so and we’re going to see if we can make some extra cash by selling the items on eBay.

Elise catered the Vernal Equinox Benefit at the Enchanted Forest on Friday night/Saturday morning so she didn’t get home until 6 a.m. I woke up and had our taxes prepared at Jackson Hewitt. That wasn’t fun. We owe the Gubmit $1,000. I’m not happy about that.

After starting my day off at the tax office, I went to Discount Tire to have two nail holes patched in one of the Jeep’s tires. I went home, picked up Elise and she came up to work with me for a little while, we stopped at Hollywood Video where I picked up a few movies for my evening entertainment and then I took Elise back home so she could go back to work.

I stayed up and watched Matchstick Men, Party Monster (don’t ask me why – it looked interesting), and The Eye (which I haven’t finished yet). Elise came home for a little while to take a nap and then go back to work at 2 a.m.

On Sunday I got up when Elise got home at 10 a.m. She took a nap, I went to Wal Mart and bought a lawn mower. I came home and Elise went back to work. What was supposed to be a simple mowing of the backyard turned into the removal of two huge bushes and a tree that were too close to the house and otherwise not looking very nice. That took me a good four hours. Our back yard looks twice as large now!

Elise came home at 6 p.m. on Sunday, fajitas in hand for Josh’s dinner and told me about her weekend at work. I showed her the new backyard.

We went to El Arroyo to get ready for that night’s event. Elise, Clay (owner of El Arroyo) and yours truly cooked steaks, chicken and veggie burgers for the cast and crew of Drop Dead Sexy. I saw Crispin
Glover and Jason Lee. Unlike my better half, I am prone to starstruckedness. I went on the set a couple times, met one of the producers and saw part of a scene being filmed. It was a very cool experience.

I’m not going to name names, but Elise is a full-blown snooze hitter. I’m definitely in one of those opposites attract marriages – my wife snoozes, I don’t. When the alarm sounds, I’m up. If I know that I’m going to want to sleep a little extra in the morning, I’ll reset my alarm the night before to allow myself just enough time to get up, shower, get dressed and make it to work [almost] on time. Due to my loving wife’s snooze abuse, I’ve had to wake up ten extra times this week. Shouldn’t I get some kind of reward for that? I mean, where’s my Spring Break? I’ve already woken up early for two weeks of work. Where’s my ticket to Cabo?

I cannot grasp the concept of snoozing. You’re granted 9 extra minutes of “sleep” by the digital demon. I don’t see how my wife can fall back to sleep in less than 9 minutes. If I were a snooze hitter, I would sit in bed, waiting for the alarm to sound again.

I’m not condemning my wife or her sleep patterns. Only once has she mentioned my subtle Angela Lansbury utterances while in deep sleep.

Note to self: Do not remove pizza stone with bare hands from hot oven.

Elise’s and my project this weekend is the guest bathroom. We had to prime the walls twice to cover up the bloody wine colored paint that the previous owners chose. Elise is finishing up the paint job as I write this. She chose a color called tranquility or serendipity or something of that nature. It’s a really calming green. When she’s done I get to install a new sink faucet.

Before going to the HoPot this morning we had lunch at the Satellite Cafe in Oak Hill. Our objective: have a quick breakfast, buy paint, go home and paint the bathroom. We were at Satellite Cafe for an hour. Our food took nearly 45 minutes. I was about ready to walk out because 1) breakfast is my least favorite meal, 2) we were behind schedule (I’m the Home Improvement Nazi). “It [explitive] needs [explitive] to get [explitive] done right [explitive] NOW!!!” and 3) it was almost noon and I don’t like eating breakfast that close to lunchtime.

Anyway, the wait was worth it. I had a wild berry smoothy and Elise had coffee. For our meals Elise had gingerbread pancakes with two eggs over easy. I had the Mississippi Sun – two veggie cakes topped with roasted potatoes, two poached eggs, chipotle citrus hollandaise with black bean pico and a serrano herb sauce. Muy bueno!

Well, I’m procrastinating. I should be helping Elise in the bathroom. Painting, that is.

So my father-in-law e-mailed me last night and said “Josh, you sure sound bummed recently.”

Yeah, I’ve been bummed. I’ve been stressed. So today I thought to myself: “It’s Friday, you setup two forced contribution Roth IRA accounts at the credit union this week, you’re doing okay for you and your wife. Life is good.”

I left work on the trusty Shadow to go to the dentist this morning and it rained. Not only did it rain, it got cold. So life sucks again.

I find solace in knowing that when one searches Google for “a three legged cat trying to bury turds on a frozen pond“, Janicek.com is noteworthy portal for such information.

I bought Elise an iPod mini for Valentine’s Day so she could listen to music while training for Danskin. I was the first nerd to purchase a mini from the CompUSA on Brodie (yes, I was there an hour early – first in line). I had problems with it from the word go. I plugged it into the wall for an hour to charge it up to 80% of its battery capacity per the Apple representatives instructions. To spare you the details, it didn’t seem like it was working when I tried to sync it. I left it plugged into the wall overnight and it worked great for the next day, the next week and the week after that.

Last week I wanted to show off the elPod to my father-in-law, Steve. The elPod wouldn’t turn on. I figured Elise hadn’t charged it in a while. I plugged it into the wall and I forgot about it – never got around to showing it to Steve. Elise and I went to run errands one night and I grabbed the elPod to listen to in the Jeep. It wouldn’t turn on.

Last night I finally had a chance to call Apple Care. They’re sending me a box so I can ship the elPod to them for repairs. John called me shortly after. I told him that the elPod was going to the shop.

John: “Apple Care is cool.”
Josh [minus expletives]: “Yeah, but I shouldn’t have to be sending it back – it’s brand new!”
John: “You should know not to buy the first version of something.”
Josh: “Yeah, it sounds like something we would do…
“Alright, it’s done, let’s ship it out to the masses.”
“Should we plug it in first to see if it works?”
“Nah, lets just ship ’em out and sell ’em.””

Regardless, the iPod minis are really cool. When it comes to personal technology, smaller is better, in my opinion. I would much rather carry an iPod mini than a standard iPod. If Apple can develop a larger capacity mini, I’ll buy another one.

In the meantime, I sold my 10GB 2nd generation iPod in hopes of getting a 15GB 3rd generation iPod. I sold mine with accessories that brought in $265.99. I could get my new iPod for $269 but our bicycles were stolen. So I’m taking my iPod money and buying Elise a new bike.

There are two kinds of people in this world that I don’t like: those who sit in plain view across from me in a restaurant and bicycle thieves.

Been busy as hell with the house and work. Our fulfillment manager quit on us last Friday so everyone else’s workload has pretty much doubled.

I’m finally getting my office peiced together. I’m selling stuff on eBay so we can buy more blinds to cover our windows. I’ve been stressing out about getting these damn high school reunion invitations printed and shipped. My stupid cat won’t stop meowing. I finally got the garage door fixed today. Cat is still meowing. Have a headache. My wife works 19 hour days. Cat meowing. Bikes were stolen. My iPod is officially sold. Need new bikes. Need blinds. Need paint. Need more time during the day. Meow.

I think I’m going to go prime our blood red guest bathroom now.

This week has consisted of a whirlwind of activity. Steve and Joanne came in on Sunday and have been painting non-stop. We’ve had our living room, kitchen, bar and part of my office painted. That might not sound like a lot for four days of work but a lot of the work was deciding on colors. At first the living room was too peach. Luckily on the second try we got the right color (they were smart and only painted one wall so we could decide if we liked the color). The kitchen is a cumin/pumpkin color with a shade darker glaze/rag roll technique. Joanne said the glaze took five hours for the both of them to complete.

I’ve always fancied myself as not-too-picky. Well, my office has been the room from hell to paint. It first needed to be primed, which Steve and I did on Tuesday night until 1:30 a.m. I wanted a light sage/grey color. Joanne knew exactly what I wanted and wound up trying three different colors that all came out too dark. She finally went much lighter and painted one wall last night. It looked like a pastel blue to me (I think I’m slowly inheriting my Dad’s color blindness). I’ve been told it’s a very light sage grey. I woke up this morning and looked at it. I see more grey now. I think I’m seeing blue because the yellow is still showing through the primer on the other three walls and pulling a blue out of the newly painted wall.

My Mom and Joanne painted the kitchen bar last night. I’m calling the color chocolate. I’m sure I’m way off. It’s probably known as “pink” or “any other color but chocolate”. It’s brown and it makes the bar “disappear”, which is the effect that Joanne was going for. I’m really pleased with the work that my in-laws did for us.

So Elise’s parents are leaving this morning and my parents came in yesterday afternoon to spend the weekend. My dad hates painting so it’s looking like Elise and I will have to learn how to paint double quick. Dad is probably up on my roof right now with a chainsaw, pruning the oak tree in the back yard.

Owning a house is great but sometimes you just want it to all be done with. We still have miles of wall that need painting. Our bedroom and guest bathroom are blood red. I think those two rooms are next on the hit parade.

That’s it – I’m buying a Mac. I’m sick of Windows. The icing on the cake is all of these stupid worms and viruses that I’m having to contend with on a daily basis. And what’s worse is they’re not malicious. Just like little gnats that swarm around your head. I have better things to do than sift through Symantec’s tech-babble write-ups on contemporary virus removal and registry edits. Right now our home computer has the Bagle (Beagle) virus. I received an e-mail from support@janicek.com stating that:

Dear user, the management of Janicek.com mailing system wants to let you know that,

Your e-mail account has been temporary disabled because of unauthorized access.

Advanced details can be found in attached file.

Cheers,

The Janicek.com team

http://www.janicek.com

And, of course that came with a .pif attachment. So now I have to go home tonight, remove the virus, endure the arduous task of uninstalling Outlook Express, install Thunderbird, explain to my wife why we no longer use Outlook Express and cross my fingers that the new iBook will be released soon.

Also, in the past 24 hours Outlook at work locks up on me every hour or so and both of our iPods aren’t being recognized by our home computer.