I don't know what to title this.

I lost track of one of my good friends from high school after the summer between our freshman and sophomore year. The last I had heard, his family didn't know where he was and had filed a missing persons report on him. I can't remember when I heard that news. I want to say that it was sometime in the mid 90's.

I got a facebook invite, and I accepted it, but I wasn't sure what to make of it since there were no photos on the page. That was probably earlier this year when I had just started using facebook. My brother and one of my friends didn't know what to make of this page either. Their guess was that someone in his family was using it to try to track down people who might have had information on him.

However, last weekend, I got a message from him that he was in town at a hotel by the fair and expo center. I gave the hotel a call and we met up and hung out for a few hours and caught up. It still seems surreal, and it reminded me how much I missed having him around.

Are things spiraling into control?

When I first started at SVS, I was looking for a way to get organized. One night, while working in the data center, I came across an article for implementing a system called Getting Things Done (http://www.davidco.com/) using gmail. Since I like gmail, I was interested. What sold me on the system was that things I wanted to do, like read a book or play a video game got to go on the to-do list along with things that needed to be done, like laundry or cutting the grass.

So for a while, all was well. I managed to do things like arrange my schedule to see the Police play Wriggly Field since I was unable to see them play Churchill Downs since that date conflicted with Suzanne's wedding. As I kept coming up with more and more things that needed to be done every week, I discovered that I was mostly just keeping up with day to day activities and (mostly) getting once a week and once a month tasks done.

Things really spiraled out of control when I had strep a few weeks ago. I didn't feel like doing anything useful, and even once I felt better, I still didn't feel like doing anything useful. I was getting frustrated by having a lot of cool stuff on my to-do list that I wasn't getting to. Learing a new ray-tracer, finishing my homemade chess men, learing new programming languages, learning Japaneese, learning how to draw/sketch.

So, I've dedicated a Friday night to getting things back on track. So far so good. I've actually gotten a bit more done tonight (this blog post being one of those things) than would strictly have been necessary according to my plan. And that's even after taking a break to watch a VH1 show on the top 20 one hit wonders of the eighties. (Seriously, 99 Luftballons, Take on Me, Tainted Love, 867-5309/Jenny and She Blinded Me with Science were all better than Come on Eileen)

Weekend Visit

Dan, Michele, and Karina came to town last weekend. I think everyone had a good time. It did highlight the fact that I need to get box springs and a matress for my 2nd spare bed. It doesn't do much good for hosting guests at the moment. My couch however was not put to the test. Dan and Michele had intended to stay with me, but they had already unloaded their stuff at Mom and Dad's.

They decided it would be easier to just stay there than to move their stuff to my house. It's probably just as well, my cleaning in preparation for visitors was not very inspired.

They got to see Nana and Elaine, which was their main purpose in coming down. My hightlight of the weekend was serving as Karina's safety net while she tried climing stairs for the first time. Attempt one only saw her ascend two stairs, but her second try saw her climb all thirteen stairs to my parents second floor. She was so proud of herself!

Things aren't getting much better

After my last post, I started feeling better at the end of the week. However I started feeling worse again the following week. This was explained when the doctor's office called to tell me I had strep. Someone at work said the quick strep tests are 99% accurate, so that was some bad luck with that not showing up right away.

The insurance adjust came out, and decided that it probably was the roof causing my problems. However, I didn't see the estimate the roofing guy left until about a week after the fact. I wouldn't have seen it even then except Michele came by while I was cutting the grass to retrieve Blake's Game Boy. The estimate informed me I needed a new roof. I'm hoping insurance will will at least pay for some portion of the repair.

Bah, now I'm depressed about needing to drop $5K on a new roof. I knew the roof was old when I bought the house, and that was factored into the price, but I was hoping to get a few years out of it, not less than one. Maybe playing Demigod will cheer me up.