Hump Day

I am writing this blog entry as a way for me to stay awake and focused. I am literally falling asleep at my desk. I just finished my 2nd cup of coffee and I still have not felt any effects. This is how bad I fall asleep. I am down to my last sip or so of coffee, and I'm reading some article on the web. I feel myself nodding away and wake myself up in time to catch me from not spilling my coffee onto my shirt. This has got to stop. I need to find something to do at work. I spent my lunch outside on the patio which was good because it gave me the chance to get some fresh air. Surprisingly it was cool yet bearable outside. I enjoyed that. I take my lunch usually around 1 or 2 pm so that when I get back to work I only have an hour or so of work left since I get off at 4pm. Today was a hard day since I was or have been falling asleep this whole day. It sucks. But hopefully it won't happen again tomorrow. The weather outside feels good. The clouds are out so it is not too sunny but not to cold either. I have finally wrote down some goals that I want to accomplish in the following months and I wrote to myself a pledge that I intend to keep. Most of the pledge is to stop my frivolous spending and to focus more on saving money. I need to save money not just for me but for my girlie as well. If I plan on marrying this girl, I have to give her parents a dowry. But upon looking this word up, I think the correct term is bride price. This is where I give her parents money for the blessing of marrying her. I don't really know what the purpose is but I will look it up. On top of this, I have to save money for our trip to Hawaii to see my best friend get married. I can't and won't miss that.

My girl has told me about this tradition of the dowry/bride price and I would just shrug it off as something that I will cross when I get there. But more and more each day it is becoming relevant. If I want to marry her I will have to produce the money. This kind of scares me since I do not really make that much so when I start saving up for this it will take a long time. Plus, I am not sure about who pays for what during the wedding, but I am sure I may have to pay for that also. Honestly I just want to go to Vegas and get married if I had the chance. Why do I have to jump over this hurdle to be with the one I truly love and care about. I think I am just afraid of not being able to spend money on myself as I have done for the past 7+ years or so. Ever since I started working after college, it has been all about me. Of course I wish I could go back and do a lot of things over. But I can not. I am 31 years old and I have nothing to show for it. Maybe I have multiple phones, some laptops, some ipods, and a list of other items but I do not have anything for the future. When the thought of the future comes to my head I think about the next big think I want to get. Not for anyone else but for me. That is my problem. I have been so kind and caring towards other people in my past that I think I just forgot how to do that. I would call myself a romantic guy but at the present I haven't really done anything romantic. I used all this up when I was in my twenties. I have to find away to get this back. She deserves better than what I can offer to her at the moment. All I can do is refocus my energy on my goals.

Wish me luck cause I sure could use it!

Oh so Tired

Today is Monday, the start of another week. I had a weird dream last night involving my ex. It was really weird. In essence I was trying to get back with her, but in the end I did not. This insert may not make sense for I do not know what to talk about. The last few days I have been in pain, my ankle is acting up. It is swollen and it hurts when  you touch it. During the night when I am trying to sleep or during the day today, it would spasm to the point where it would twitch my whole left. I am scared. I just want to get better and be able to live my life without such pain. I know I have to lose weight. I think I am. The jeans that I am wearing are unusually baggy today. I buy my jeans big, but the jeans today is really big. I had to go beyond my usually notch on my belt just to keep my pants from falling. Hopefully I can keep this up.

I have purchased a lot of items in my life. As you may know I am a gadget guy and I have to have the latest gadgets. I find myself containing my gadget (electronic) purchases and have not bought an electronic gadget in a while. However, watches are a different story. I have a pretty decent size watch collection. My current watch that I am wearing is the Casio G-Shock Riseman watch. This has been my latest purchase until I ordered a G-Shock Frogman. The frogman style has been on my wanted list for a while. It is a style that Casio has stopped manufacturing. It is a 25th Anniversary edition and is hard to find. Maybe not that hard to find. If you google it, some places have this watch. The good news is if you look on the Casio/G-Shock website this category is not there. I like limited edition items. I just have to find a place to display my collection.

My collection does not stop at watches. I have multiple sunglasses, all from Oakley, and I have started collecting  these big headed action figures. I have the Hulk, and I have Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow from G.I. Joe fame. You could also say that I have a large collection if writing instruments but mostly they are taken from my work environments. I would imagine these as a good hobby but I really need to focus on saving money so that I can go on a Hawaii trip and also to get married. I found my passion, I just need to find a way to organize, display, and focus on my hobby.

I told you this would not make any sense. It is just something that I had to get off my chest.

Happy Friday

Happy Friday! It was been one crazy week here for me. The last week started with a gout attack that lasted until, well it is still on going. I was unable at first to bend my knee a week or so ago. Then my knee was getting better to the point of it being able to bend but now not straighten. This is still going on. However, during the last week or so, it was so bad that I first was using a cane to move around and finally I had to use crutches. I've been on crutches from last week until Monday of this week. So needless to say, I am walking without crutches but I still can not bend my knee straight. For this pain, my gift was 2 days off last week. The result showed on my paycheck! haha Oh well. At least I have a job, my health is getting better and everything is A-OK!

I think that is all I want to write for now..my feet are hurting but its all good.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!

Today is my girl's birthday!! WOOHOO!!!

We have been together for over a year, 2 years this Aug. Wow, just thinking about the day that I met her, I had a lot of stuff going on. I was at my old job as a project manager during my last few days there. I would actually leave early saying that I had an "interview" with another company and head straight to the OC to visit her. I would meet her at work and after her work we would go out to eat or see a movie or what not. The day I asked her to be my girlfriend, was one of those days where I left early to visit her. We went to a park and walked around. We sat on huge rocks overlooking a man made lake watching the ducks swim by. It was a pretty place minus all the graffiti on the rocks. Nice place to go during the day, but beware at night! You might get jacked! Ok, anyway, as we were lounging on a big rock, my butt hasn't forgiving me yet, I turned her around to look her in the eyes. I asked her to be my girlfriend. She thankfully said yes! I know its cheesy but it worked. We've been together ever since.

We have seen some good times and some bad times. But through all that we stood by each other. She is actually rubbing off on me. Or should I say she motivates me. She motivated me to get off my ass and get organized. Now I have less clutter in my room and my office. Everything is simplistic, well almost. Let's just say it is a work in progress. I now can go into my room take off my shoes and just lay down without having to look at piles of stuff everywhere. That is a good thing. We are now looking to save money for the future. And if you read any of my earlier posts you will understand that I have a hard time saving money. But this is for a good cause. We have a wedding to attend in Hawaii come this Sept, we want to save for a house and you know, marriage. Scary I know. She is the one. After all that searching and whining and praying for a long term girl to come my way, there she is. I am happy.


HAPPY BIRTHDAY MY LOVE!!

Hope your days are filled with blessings and good fortune.
Thank you for letting me be who I am and who I should have been.

I love you always.

Low Tech? 2

It has been a while since I last wrote in this blog.

The last time I wrote, I was using my storm about to give it up and go to a flip phone. During that time, I did give up using my storm. It was too big and bulky for me. Don't get me wrong I loved it, but I thought I could handle something without all the hassle. I decided to go low tech, kind of, with the LG Decoy. I got so far as to order it as an upgrade from Verizon and open the box to check out the phone. All in all it was a good phone. Convenient to say the least. It had its own bluetooth headset built in and can be removed at a touch of a button. While sitting at my desk at home, messing with the phone, I came to the conclusion that this may not do it for me. I would call myself a tech person. I would even go so far as to say that I am a "connected" person. I need to stay connected to the Internet. Whether it be email, rss feeds, or even facebook. Something to get me away from what I am doing at the present. That it why I kept the decoy in its box, and returned the faithful blackberry phone. There were issues for me going back from a regular phone to my BB phone. The main issue was I didn't know which one to go back to. I have the storm, the curve, the world phone 8830, and the pearl. The world phone is a no brain-er. No camera no play. The storm is new and high tech but I couldn't get over the accelerometer issues. I decided to activate the pearl. Once it was active, my girl and I went to walmart to walk around and get some McDonald's. While we were walking I was playing with the phone to get re-accustomed to the features. I tried video recording with the pearl but it would not record. Let me rephrase that. I can record just fine on the pearl. It was a matter of the pearl saving the video to memory. This was just fantastic. I want to use a phone and use all of its functionalities. I was disappointed but I tried to troubleshoot the problem. I checked the settings on the phone to make sure it was saving to the memory card. I checked the directory folder on the memory card to make sure it was the memory card and not the device memory. I verified all my settings with my gf's pearl, which can record video. But none of these items worked. It would say that it is recording but the file is always at 0kb. When we got home, I immediately went online and switched the pearl to the curve. Everything went well. I was able to activate the curve and use it. However, I forgot that the curve's trackball would not scroll up so easily. It would take me a few swipes for the cursor to go all the way up the screen. I have lived with this problem since I got the phone but I sure wasn't going to live with it now. I decided to do a little surgery to fix this problem. I took off the silver ring around the trackball off the phone. The trackball was easy to take off after that. Since the pearl and the curve use the same equipment I just swapped out the trackball and silver ring off of the pearl and placed them in the curve. Powered the curve on and I was able to scroll in all directions without a problem.

A couple of key points from this splurge of my mind:

• I want to be low tech
• But I need to be connected

• Thus I need my blackberry.

What else can I do to save some money.

In part one of Low Tech?, I stated that I had 5 lines and I wanted to consolidate those into 2 lines. As I was speaking with the Verizon rep to help me activate the pearl, she kindly helped me reorganize my lines and my plan. So instead of having 5 separate lines, she turned them into a family plan. I have yet to see the total bill for this change but it has to be better than what I was paying before. I will eventually ( meaning some time soon) cancel my 3 lines and just pay the 2 lines. In the end it will turn out nicely for me. I will most likely have to pay about $550 to cancel 3 lines compared to paying $3000 a year for all 5 lines. In the long run this will work to my benefit. I just hope I can pay this chunk in smaller chunks.

I guess low tech for me would be using what I have to benefit me without the need to spend a lot of money. For instance, I have multiple large usb drives I can use for back up and storage. I have several external hard drives for back up and storage. I have several ipods for music and videos and entertainment. I just need to calm down with my spending and use the tech that I already have. Wish me luck with that!