Jerome's Dream - Thirty Dollar Bill

I created a new theme with the lovely Marilyn Monroe. She decorates many of my apartment walls and this is the second Wordpress theme she has inspired. Obviously I am completely obsessed! This is hopefully not obvious to the majority of you unless you are plagued with dial-up (I’m so sorry), but this new theme is rather large in file size, due mainly to the animated gif within the tv screen (talk about painstaking) and the general graphics-heavy nature of all my layouts. However, I believe I have managed to keep it somewhat web 2.0, and by that I mean I added some new glossy icons, hahaha! Just kidding – this really wasn’t meant to be a geek post.

I have been gone for so long even though I promised myself I’d try harder to keep my blog alive. I must stop making promises! On a serious note though, I do love the blog world, and I have made so many wonderful e-friends throughout my reign as a neglectful webmaster. I never meant to lose touch, but I’ve been going through a sort of premature “life crisis” phase and I never felt this blog could handle all that melancholy without sinking and depressing everyone. There is that constant desire to entertain everyone when you keep a blog, and guilt always haunted me when I’d pen another “woe is me” post even though those were all I felt compelled to write for such a long time.

Anyway, I will be in Buffalo for exactly 3 more years. That sounds like an eternity, but I have already crafted my to-do list in preparation for our getaway back to Philadelphia, and here are a few of the most important points:

1. Go to driving school and get my license. I don’t need or want a car right now, but I need to have had my license for at least 2 years in order to use PhillyCarShare and I also need a license to drive the U-Haul van when I move.
2. Learn Italian. This is academically necessary for when I transfer to Buffalo State, but also a personal goal and dream of mine.
3. Fix my credit score. Somewhere along the way a medical bill and unpaid utility bill screwed up my credit just bad enough so that I can’t even get a student credit card in order to build my credit. I need to fix this somehow if Justin and I have hope of buying a home in a few years.

PS. I named this post for the song by Hot Water Music because it’s so fitting.

Welcome the Plague Year - Quiet. Still. Dead.

I’m enjoying the whole President’s Day thing. No classes for 4 days straight.

Justin and I finished all 3 seasons of Dexter, and now it’s a waiting game for the next season. It’s definitely a fun process getting into a show once there are already multiple seasons. You can just download them all, burn them, and have a marathon for a couple weeks. I guess it could be viewed as pathetic as well, but we don’t have many friends. Actually, we have two couples that we are friendly with but we take no initiative to actually do stuff with them. I keep telling Justin that we need to go to the movies with them or something because I’m bored as hell. Chris and Brandy are our “punk friends” and Brian and Holly are our “less punk friends”. It’s a good mix, because Justin and I are the “totally fucking punk friends” hahaha. Psych. We are pretty badass though.

I don’t know if I ever blogged about it, but we were supposed to go to Italy this coming summer, but back in December we found out we didn’t actually have the money we thought, so now we have to wait two more years. It sucks, blah blah blah, but hopefully this summer we will get to do something stateside. Justin mentioned going to Great Adventure in NJ which actually is a big deal to me because I haven’t been there in years, and not since they built that death-wish of a coaster Kingda Ka.

Yaphet Kotto - First Meetings Agreement

One night, like a week ago, Justin was taking a break from watching a hockey game on tv. So we’re both in our room on our computers when all of a sudden he jumps up from his laptop and jets out of the room because his game is back on. All of a sudden I hear a huge THUMP and a groan. I rush out there because I have no fucking idea what just happened, and Justin is on all fours holding his head. He says something like “I think I bumped my head”, and I just stood there thinking…

How the fuck did he bump his head on the top of the doorway, which is like a foot higher than he is tall? Then I think of the sounds I heard his feet make just before the THUMP and it all makes sense. Justin was so excited about the dumb game, he had been SKIPPING (like a child) into the living room and actually JUMPED high in the air and bashed his head practically on the ceiling, and then fell to the floor in shock.

H-I-L-A-R-I-T-Y

A 23 year old man (nearly 24), hopping like a little kid through our apartment, so lost in the moment that he didn’t realize he wasn’t 4 feet tall anymore and shouldn’t jump full force into the air.

Needless to say, that was around the time of the Darkest Hour show so we couldn’t go, Justin had a headache/concussion. I was so upset at first, but I’ll get over it. All the other bands sucked, and I only wanted to see DH as a nostalgia type thing.

Circle Takes the Square – Eleven Owls Have Eyes

I was going to scan new images for my scan site, and then found out that my scanner doesn’t work with Vista. I’ve been finding little annoyances like this for the past few weeks I’ve had Vista and it’s frustrating. Of course, I didn’t pay for it or anything so I’m not fuming that it sucks so bad. Anyway, I found this fix which shows how to use the XP drivers/software for hp scanners on Vista. Pretty cool that I don’t need to actually buy a new scanner, which is what greedy HP recommended.

Okay, so Converge is playing here in March and even though we just saw them last year, I’m ecstatic. We bought our tickets already since it will definitely sell out. Since I’ve lived in Buffalo, not many bands that I like have played, and it’s a shame because Buffalo is the second largest city in New York. It’s unfair, but I guess bands don’t want to drive here or something. Darkest Hour is playing in (I think) February, which will be a treat because I used to be very much into them, especially as a teenager, and yet I’ve never seen them live. I don’t know what they’ve done recently, but hopefully they didn’t go the way Every Time I Die went a few years ago. Metalcore is a tricky thing, folks.

My cat has been chewing on USB cords lately. He wakes me up at night, trying to climb on the computer, and last night he knocked my ipod off the desk. I’ve read about animals chewing on wires, and it’s scary because what if he chewed on the tv cord while it’s plugged in or something? I mean, couldn’t that potentially kill him?

I know I said I was going to post more often, and it’s harder than I thought it’d be. It’s not quite a chore, but it’s not as fun as it used to be. I’d really love to be passionate about web design and blogging again. Has anyone used Wordpress 2.7? The admin panel is totally weird. It’s cleaner… but at the same time, I’m very confused. WP has used the older interface (top-heavy navigation) from the beginning, and this is looking more CMS-like now. I haven’t made up my mind about it yet.