Tag: walmart

Settling in

So, today was the first day of classes for the students. I got to speak to them very briefly and I also have the opportunity of sitting in on their classes. I think I will take advantage of it and see how interested or uninterested I am. Their first laboratory session is coming up pretty soon and I’m nervous and excited all together. That, however, is not the real reason for my post. I recently purchased a D-Link Wireless N Gigabit Router because M & I have begun to butt heads over who gets to use the internet. lol. This way, we both get to eat our cake and have it too! I did run into a bit of trouble with my installation. You see, I’d read on the internet that D-Link had a rather troublesome support (compared to Belkin’s awesome technical support). However, D-Link, according to reviews, provided a more solid product. Being slightly more tech-savvy than say a certain second-half (love ya, babe. :D), I decided to go with the more solid product (D-Link) over Belkin’s Wireless N1 router.

So, I received the item and I popped it into my old desktop PC running Windows XP Home Edition. The computer did nothing and locked up. A very bad sign. After a couple more tries with the same outcome (a frozen PC), I decided to do the installation on my laptop. Well, as soon as I popped the disc into my laptop, it began spinning so fast in there that I thought something was going to explode in my laptop. That was the first time I’d ever had that happen with all the discs I’ve placed into my disk drive, from movies to CDs. At least, it didn’t lock up my laptop which, presumably, had enough juice to handle all the crap it was spitting out. I installed the D-link software per instructions and to make a long story short, I had to call technical support which appeared to be out-sourced (bad sign) and I’m finally online. It was a long road to simply install a wireless router, but it was finally done. I’ve also got Network Magic to help manage the network. Expectedly, I’ve password-protected the network and encrypted it also (these are standard procedures). For good measure, I’ve turned on MAC address filtering and prevented broadcast of my SSID. A little bit of overkill, but good for my peace of mine. I’m excited to have my little network to play with and I’ll try to set up remote desktop on both PCs so I can pull up documents from one or the other without have to leave my chair. LOL. Technology will not make me lazy in Jesus’ name.

I’m kinda low on words so these wannabe-technical posts will have to do. Have a great week!

MMA goodness!

If you know M & I, you’ll know that mixed martial arts are just some of our interests. M’s managed to get me interested in the sport too so we’ve gone out to some bars together just to watch the pay-per-view fight cards (of course, we had to pay for this privilege by patronizing the restaurant). Tonight’s the free Ultimate Fighter finale featuring Amir Sadollah and CB Dollaway. My favorite to win is Amir because he can go the distance and his special weapon is his kicks which CB (from the looks of things) couldn’t counter. I am a bit worried that Amir’s flying kicks won’t be enough to give him wins once he moves to the big UFC league. I hope he does well because his sense of humor kept things lively. Tim Credeur was another fighter who deserves to be a UFC fighter because he’s got the same quirky sense of humor and just has a big heart.

I’m currently having a lazy day at home, doing what I’ve been doing for the past week or so: getting myself mentally ready for my next adventure. At times, I feel like pinching myself to make sure that I’m not dreaming. I’m talking about my husband. I swear that he has the biggest heart ever. My parents have commented that I’m taking this well and it’s largely thanks to M because he pulled my head out of the well of depression by telling me the facts i.e. losing a job is not the end of the world and that we would survive in the event I didn’t end up with anything for a few more months. After getting picked for an interview with the big fish, he was my biggest supporter and even experienced my anxiety. We’ve got that connection where we feed off our emotions. If I’m feeling down, M actually starts feeling physically ill and calls me to see if I’m okay. This has happened too many times to be accidental. Honest. 🙂

Anyhoo, because of the impending or possible loss of my steady paycheck for ~ a month (by God’s grace, I’ll have a smooth transition), I’ve gone into savings and debt reduction overdrive. Right now, I’m having M pay the rent money while my biweekly paycheck goes towards our joint ING Direct account (instead of having his separate ING Direct account, I decided to just add him on so what’s mine is his and vice versa), the SunTrust balance, my cell phone bill and our utility bills (internet and power). I think opening that savings account was the smartest account. If I keep up my savings pace, I will be on track to save close to $5,000 for our emergency fund. Again for a brief recap, the emergency fund is intended for emergencies and I hope we won’t have to tap into it just yet. Once the emergency fund is funded to whatever limits we have decided, then any specific needs or trips will need to be saved for, starting from scratch. In light of the increasing gas prices and general sticker shock, I’m mulling the idea of keeping a spreadsheet of my Walmart purchases and their prices at the time of purchase. After a predetermined amount of time, I’ll calculate the percentage by which the original price increased by. It should be interesting information to have.

Health-wise, my heartburn/acid reflux has flared up again so I’ve resumed taking my medication for it. It seems to do a good job as I’m already experiencing relief from it. It’s prescription only so it’s pretty powerful. That’s all for now.

My baking experiment

Y’all, I don’t know what I was thinking. I tried making oatmeal cookies without shortening or extract. I pulled a recipe off the internet and unsurprisingly, I made an oatmeal/flour goop that was sorta tasty. Just not oatmeal cookies. 🙁 Still, bless his heart, M praised my abilities. That man rocks. He complimented my toes not too long ago and my immediate family knows what those crusty appendages look like. 🙂 I’m slightly bummed out, but not giving up. On our next trip to Wally world, I’ll be investing in some vanilla extract and vegetable shortening. In short, baking stuff. However, I won’t be doing too much of baking because if it goes wrong, a lot of ingredients would have been wasted. Speaking of cooking, M introduced another vegetable in our cooking vocabulary: cabbage. I tried my hand at cooking it and adding it into whole wheat spaghetti. It was a success and I intend on using it some more.

In other news, We’ve made some small strides toward debt reduction. Technically, we’re in the black although by less than three figures. It’s small, but encouraging. Also, I recently made a video for my father-in-law on how to zip files. It was a fun little project made possible by Camtasia (version 3) which is horribly expensive, but there’s a free alternative at CamStudio. They are both basically screen recording utilities and Camtasia is obviously more powerful. I didn’t really do any voice editing (no take two’s largely because I didn’t know how to go back and forth to erase sections where I mumbled and such), but I tried adding arrows and things to visually help out the user. I hope this helps anyone out there! And try not to make too much fun of how redundant certain things might seem, but for a user who is not very familiar with the workings of Windows, it will be of certain benefit. M floated the idea of making a series of training videos about things mostly based on questions I’ve had from my father-in-law about certain tasks. I’d love to do them so I’ll be brainstorming on some fun tasks I can come up with. Enjoy!!