< This post edited to cover my own ass later >

There's far too much going on at work over the next month or so. Sigh. I don't know how much one person can take on. I guess I just have to deal with it a day at a time and try to forget about the whole thing when I go home, it's not easy to do that. So many different people wanting so much of your time starts to wear you down after a year or so. Even in my downtime I'm consistantly busy. I'm starting to feel like I don't have time for my projects, or my life outside of work. Currently I've got 4 major projects to work on, and countless little projects, one project gets completed and it feels like there's three more to take it's place. I really don't know how much longer I can stay here and stay sane, but my biggest problem is that to move on I need some sort of certification. And I don't have the energy to devote to Microsoft certification (MCSE) when I get home lately due to the workload, and that (for me) is the easiest certification to aim for right now. In about a month I have a week of holidays, I could use this week to devote to studying, but I really need a break from the computer world. I think I'm ready to take the first test for MCSE, but I don't know when I'll have the time to take it, let alone the time to be sure I'm ready. I find this very frustrating. Great, someone just knocked at the door, and I was done 5 minutes ago. That'll teach me to Blog at work. Ok, I've rescued a student's final project from Word temp files too, and I'm putting in for a half hour of overtime. < cries >

We went to buy fish tonight, and the store, being responsible, suggested we wait until Wednesday or Thursday to buy fish, as the aquarium needs some time to settle down. Thursday they'll have new fish in the tanks, so we'll go Thursday night and get some colourful (hopefully healthy) fish.

As a side note, the pizza coupons I bought last year, and are legitimate, not some stupid scam. Well, it's a scam to get you to buy pizza from one store, but it's a legitimate scam. And it includes video rental coupons this year. Yeah, I guess I'm a sucker. All this talk of pizza has made me hungry.

Today's been exciting. So far I've changed our Postal Code (Thanks, Canada Post) with the phone company (twice, for phone service and DSL service - Two different departments), the cable company, the city (covering property taxes and water and gas), and Hydro. I've also cancelled useless services on the phone, and had a service order put in with cable to bury the cable to our neighbour's house which had a temp line put up over a year ago. The cable service was actually for TODAY! 2:00 - 5:00. The guy showed up at 2:07! I was shocked. By the time I'd answered the door, he'd already made a workorder for burial to come and correct the problem, and marked it RUSH! While he was here he corrected some wiring issues I had, crimping good ends on my jumpers. Then this other guy showed up at the door with pizza coupons, which, if I use twice, pay for themselves. Our new fishtank is almost at the correct temperature for fish, I've rolled $90 in saved coins, and I've done two loads of laundry and folded last weeks laundry. I've been a productive little boy today!

I'll admit it, I have a computer that is not set up for receiving email. A good friend of mine was shocked to hear this, which I didn't think was a big deal at the time. I've had a couple hours to think about it, and yeah, he's right. It is odd that I can't get email on the compter I've been using most often lately. John Laroquette just appeared on a The Practice ad, that just might be worth watching. I guess my point is that I've become less and less reliant on email recently. I've been using instant messaging for most of my electronic communications. Email is fine for mass mailings (Op-in mailing lists, NOT spam), and for longer communications that aren't dependant on real-time conversations. Perhaps it's the recent increases of spam (is this just happening to me?), but perhaps not, as I generally get three or four unsolicited ICQ messages a week. I do have access to many of my email accounts through various webmail sites, but not my main email account. I'm only using my main desktop machine for email recently, and the odd game or two, but it's starting to show it's age. Perhaps I'm on the leading edge of a technology shift with my less-frequent use of email, or maybe I'm just living in my own strange world.

Note: If you don't want to hard boot your firewall, you shouldn't randomly flip breakers in an effort to figure out which breaker shuts off the bathroom fan so that you can install a timer.

For the record, the breaker that shuts off the bathroom fan is... The last one to possibly try.

And now publishing in temporarily unavailable. I'm having a shit of a day.

So my Palm went for a shit, I've upgraded my firewall, and we've finished painting the last bedroom.

Side note: On the old firewall hard disk is the graphic files for this site.
Note to self: Either retreive them or do a real redesign, neither of which you have the time for.
Additional note: I'm lazy today.