I feel good, I feel light... weight.
Finally managed to get ahold of my landlord, so notice has finally been given. He was pretty cool about it even though it all came about fairly last-minute for him. He even offered to refund any excess rent in the unlikely event that he manages to shop out my apartment before the end of the month. I say "unlikely" because the place above mine has been empty for something like 5 months, and the most I've seen him do about it is write up a sign made on a dry-erase board in the window of the
office that he's never in.
Speaking of moving... My dad is coming down with one of my uncles and a truck on Friday morning to move all of the things that I'm not taking with me to Des Moines either back to my Grandmother's basement (some furniture she gave me) or to his house (stuff I won't need in DM, like the microwave). I'm planning on junking some stuff, like the old mattress, entertainment center, and computer desk but I don't know how much they're going to want to be driving around or anything. I'm sure it'll all be taken care of by late afternoon though. As per the things I'm bringing to DM, that's mostly my electronics, paper-stuff (books, comics, manga) and clothing. All of which can fit into my car, albeit not in one trip. So if someone wants to come over to my place on Friday late-afternoon or evening and haul some shit, that'd be cool... But it's certainly not required or even asked for. A truck
would simplify things greatly, however.
The blog has been pretty slow lately, but I'm not complaining too much. I keep meaning to do some constructive criticism on some of the posts, but put it off a bit for a couple of reasons: One, some of you (not going to name any names here) don't seem to take criticism too well. As an artist (particularly, a shitty anime-style artist) I've had to put up with some brutal scathing critiques of my art for years, and I've learned to always take criticism as constructive, something to learn and grow from. Sometimes I forget that some people not used to that kind of thing take criticism as an attack, and simply fight or throw a fit instead of learning and growing from it. Second of all, I've been pretty happy with the direction the posts have gone overall. There's been some low spots (I hope Dave's latest few posts are just 'spots' and not a trend, at least. Heh) but overall I feel that everyone's posts have been slowly been becoming better and more readable, from the formatting, paragraph breaks and better spelling to the stupid/unnecessary shit being culled out bit by bit. I've peeked at a few of the 'most recently updated' blogs off the old main blogger page, and I have to say that we're in kind of an odd place for blogs. Usually the "serious" blogs, like political blogs and whatnot have a very nice, simple design and excellent readability. The "personal" blogs are usually
cluttered clusterfucks of code (or just one of the shittier templates badly edited) and range from "difficult to read" to "unreadable pile of shit." Annoying slang, rambling run-on sentences, funky spellings, and stupid internet lingo abounds; not to mention the horrible spelling in general, bad grammar, and unreadable ugly formatting. Strangely, our blog is about the only one I've seen in the middle of it all. Not excellent, but at least we capitalize the first word in our sentences and (usually) format the post well. Not surprising, really since a fair amount of our posters on here are English majors.... Or in my case, just a pedantic-elitist-linguaphile-grammar-and-spelling-Nazi.
Hm, speaking of the blog. I've been messing with the blog template a bit more again (well, I was before the whole moving thing consumed all my time), as I feel that the current one is a bit too "floaty," but I've been having trouble with my newest template. There's something in it that is causing all the text to slowly drift leftwards in each post, and it's cumulutive. By about the 20th post down, an inch of the text is off the screen, turning the lower half of the blog basically unreadable. I haven't been able to track down what's causing it, which is quite annoying. So I'm sticking with the current design for now. I know most of you don't know or care
what the fuck I'm talking about, but I just wanted to rant. Heh.
Oh, one last thing for Karl: Apparently they have decided to go ahead and shuffle all the jobs in my old department around so a night custodial job
will be opening up in a week or two. The hours are 11pm-7am at the warehouse Sunday through Thursday, and it's mainly cleaning a bunch of offices, a huge-ass breakroom, and (ugh) all of the warehouse bathrooms. Most of the time, everyone has gone home by 2am or 4am at the latest though, so about half your time will be spent alone (except for some security guards) and unsupervised. There's certainly worse jobs, although that whole "warehouse bathrooms" thing kind of sucks. As soon as I get more info, I'll let you know. I'll definately toss a mention of you my supervisor's way during my exit-interview or on my last day, though.
