Here, at last, is the long-awaited (yeah, right) conclusion to yesterday’s post. I kind of lost steam towards the end, but this post ended up being longer than yesterday’s. Go figure.

November

Finally, things started to look up. Target had me start doing “comp shop,” which consisted of me getting a PDA with a list of products each week, taking said PDA to Walmart, and getting the prices for those items. This coincided almost exactly with me putting in my two weeks’ notice at Target, as I’d had more than enough of working in retail to last my entire life. For the first few days, I was good; I stayed in Walmart for most of the day. Three days later, I was guessing prices and walking around the mall for eight hours a day on Target’s dime. Fantastic. I did comp shop for the rest of my time at Target, with the exception of my last day there.

Before I started doing comp shop, I got offered a job working for a mortgage company. I took the job, because it gave me a way out of Target, but I’m kind of regretting it now. The work is horrendously tedious, and my boss is possibly the most incompetent person I’ve ever met. Oh well, live and learn.

November also saw the long-awaited release of the Wii. I played Excite Truck in a Gamestop about two weeks before launch (while I was being paid to do comp shop, no less), and I knew right away that it was going to be amazing. When it came out two weeks later, I brought it home and played for basically the entire day. Zelda was and still is everything I hoped it would be, even though it isn’t perfect. I am very, very pleased with the Wii.

Thanksgiving was nice. My aunt, uncle, and cousins all came to our house for the first time since Easter of 2002. The “kids” played Wii Sports and Excite Truck for basically the entire time, and if that didn’t prove how much fun the system is, then I don’t know what will. They all left wanting one.

Thanksgiving break also saw the much-anticipated Shrimpfest. On the Saturday night after Thanksgiving, I met up with Scot, Ryan, Matt, Tom, Dan, Vogel, and PhilCollins at the Roosevelt Raceway theater, where we saw For Your Consideration, which brought the lols home. After the movie was over, we made our way to Red Lobster, where much shrimp was consumed and much good times were had. Endless Shrimp had ended earlier in the week, which elicted a collective groan from the eight seated around the table. Oh well. Coconut shrimp are delicious.

Towards the end of November, my brand new Wii decided its system memory should be corrupt, and it thusly stopped working. I was pretty distraught about it, but Nintendo handled it very well, and it was replaced within three weeks. Go Nintendo.

December/January

December was probably the overall best month of the semester. With weekends now free, my sleep schedule became much more normal once again, and as a result, I regained my sanity. Classes ended on the 13th, and my last final was on the 21st. With my two finals (my other three classes had final essays, which was a nice change of pace) completed, I bid Queens College farewell once and for all.

My cousin Danny managed to score three tickets to the Giants’ last home game (on Christmas Eve against the Saints) and offered me the third ticket, which I quickly accepted. I drove up on Saturday night and nearly died when I had to swerve out of the way of an SUV that had stopped to let a deer cross and my car decided to keep going. I ended up on the median, quite a few feet away from where I lost control of my car, but I didn’t hit anything, which was definitely a good thing. Scared the hell out of me, though.

The game itself would have been much better if I was a Saints fan, as the Giants were murdered. The final was 30-7 Saints, but the Giants didn’t run a single play on offense in Saints territory all day, so the score doesn’t really express how poorly they played. The seats were fantastic, though. We sat in the eighth row on the 20 yard line. I’ve never had such good seats for a professional sporting event before, and it was nice to be that close to the field.

Christmas was nice. Michelle flew back in on Christmas day and spent another two weeks here. Just as with our previous three visits, it was wonderful, but never long enough. I’m sure that’ll always be the case. Wiifest was fun, and New Year’s Eve was spent at my aunt and uncle’s house. The rest of our time together was mostly spent just hanging out around my house and actually getting to spend time with each other, something that I really don’t appreciate enough. I’ll see her again over spring break, and that can’t get here quickly enough.

Since she left on the 6th, most of my time has been spent working or playing video games. Classes start at Post this Monday, and I guess I’m looking forward to it. For some reason, I’ve always preferred spring semesters to fall semesters, and I’m hoping this one will be more of the same. It’ll be nice to only have to drive fifteen minutes each way to get to and from class again, as well as actually being able to park on campus, two things that Queens was sorely lacking in.

I think that about does it for the recap. I really hope this is the last one I’ll ever have to do on here, and that updates will be both more timely and more numerous. I’ve said that already, but it bears repeating, so there it is again.

Posted on 17 January 2007 | Comment [1]

I’ve been working on the site pretty much all day. The individual article page should be finished now, and I cleaned up a lot of the stuff on the back end. I’m still not done by a long shot, but I feel pretty good about how things are going. With any luck, I’ll be able to continue this trend and finish things up before classes start next week. I really need to rewrite the “about” page, as it’s outdated and poorly written, and I’m going to do a style guide as well. I’m sure I’ll think of other things that need to be done, too, and I’ll deal with those as they come up.

I thought what I’d do tonight is do a month-by-month recap of what’s happened between my last real post and now. There were definitely things I wanted to post about during that span, but I somehow convinced myself that I didn’t have time to do it, so I’m going to try to remember it all now. Hopefully, this will be a one-time thing, and all future events will be recorded in a timely fashion.

Originally, the plan was to post the full recap in one fell swoop, but it ended up being three pages in Word, so I decided to post everything up to October tonight and save the rest for tomorrow. I’m hoping this will help me start some kind of routine here. We’ll see how that works out.

August

On July 20th, I made the following statement:

Michelle comes out here in less than a month. My pledge to update [semi-]regularly may have to be put on hold for the two weeks she’s here.

Well, as you can see, that proved very true. We had a wonderful two weeks together, after which I lived through probably the most stressful two months or so of my entire life.

September

The day after Michelle’s flight back, I started work back at Target, and the day after that, I started classes at Queens College. My schedule for the semester consisted of 7 hours of classes on Monday and Wednesday wrapped in an hour’s car ride and a three-hour class on Friday. My work schedule was 9-5 at work the other four days of the week. Needless to say, this very quickly took a toll on me, and I forgot what it meant to get a good night’s sleep—or anything more than a few hours a night, really.

The month wasn’t all terrible, though. I saw Staind and Three Days Grace in Philadelphia, and although the ride there and back was horrible (to the point where I swore I wouldn’t drive outside of New York for at least a year), the show was pretty awesome. I’m sure a lot of you don’t like either of those bands very much, but it was the second time I’ve seen Three Days Grace live, and they put on one hell of a show. Staind then topped them by putting on what I can only assume was one of the most amazing live shows ever.

My cousin Heather got married on the 23rd; the ceremony was very nice (and also very short), the reception was fairly insane (my family knows how to have a good time, especially when there’s an open bar involved), and it was great to see my cousin get married to such a good guy. Jeff, you may not be blood, but you’re family forever.

October

October was, in a word, hell. All my classes started piling work on at the time same, work continued to be terrible, I continued to get very little sleep, and the emotional drain soon overtook the physical drain I was going through. I began counting the days until the semester was over, but doing so didn’t help any; it only served to reinforce how long the semester was. I did get accepted to Post as a transfer student, though, which was one small glimmer of hope. Oh yeah, and the Cardinals knocked the Mets out of the playoffs. Boo. I was pretty disappointed about it, but most of the team should be back next year, and I’m pretty confident that they’ll be in the hunt again come the 2007 playoffs. Enough of October, nothing noteworthy happened.

Tune in tomorrow for the stunning conclusion to my year.

Posted on 16 January 2007 | Comment [1]

I’ve been playing around with some plugins lately and haven’t posted anything of real substance, so I decided it was time to do so.

Firstly, you may (or may not) notice that the “Categories” on the right there are now “Tags.” Don’t worry, I’m not selling out to the hype of Web 2.0 and social blah blah blah…I switched to a new plugin because it gives me more freedom than using two predefined categories for a single post. The downside is that it means I’ll have to be updating and stuff more often, or something, but I’ll see what I can do about that.

Moving on…

Things have been going well of late. The interview at Target I mentioned a few weeks ago was a success; I’m now employed as a cashier in the same store as one the scot which makes us, as Bob put it, “the most horrendously funny retail store on Long Island.” Accept no substitutes.

Michelle comes out here in less than a month. My pledge to update [semi-]regularly may have to be put on hold for the two weeks she’s here.

I finally got notice from Queens College…I’m in as a transfer student, and by the look of things, the classes I took at Nassau knocked out most of their liberal arts core requirements, which is good. I’ll have to take a few classes to account for what they want that Nassau didn’t, but that’s no big deal. I’m hoping that there are still some classes left to sign up for, however; I should look into that. Damn it.

I think that about covers everything that’s been going on.

Posted on 17 July 2006 | Comment [3]

So I know that I said for months and months and months that I was going to update soon, and keep updating, and do lots of other things that never came to fruition. I hope to make some small measure of recompense for misleading you all.

Oh wait, there’s only like five people who ever read this, and probably less than that now that it’s been nearly three months since my last update.

My reason for not updating…at all…has been a terrible combination of my own laziness and this past semester of school. It’s true that I did have some free time here and there, but I found other ways of occupying it. I wish I could remember what they were now.

Nevertheless, the semester ended about a month ago, and while I am taking a couple summer classes, I have much more time to do things I once loved, and that includes updating this site. As such, I’m going to try to post something at least once a week or so, even if it’s nonsense. I mean, after all, this IS my site and I can write about whatever I want. So there.

Things are good, really. I can’t complain too much. On a related note, I AM in the process of looking for a new job, so hopefully there will be some better news on that front before long. IKEA is the devil. The…Swedish devil. I should have an interview at Target in the coming week…pray for mojo.

I think there was more I wanted to say, but rather than making one long post and then doing nothing for a month, I’ll try keeping it short(er) and spreading it out over a few posts. Because here at Left of Center™, we believe in quantity, not quality.

Or something.

Until next time, which hopefully won’t be too far off…

Posted on 14 June 2006 | Comment