I am constantly amazed at how fast kids grow. Peyton is about 22 months old now, and it still seems like it was yesterday she fit in my hand. Oh and in case you can't tell she likes stuffed animals.

So I have been pretty pleased with my gmail acount. Found a tool that sits in your system tray to alert you when you get email, and another tool that lets you use your 1gb google acct as a storage drive on your computer. If you would like an acount let me know, I have 5 invites, first come first serve.

Wow, I really hope this movie doesn't suck! I was a huge He-Man fan. I think I had just about every action figure in the series: He-Man, Battlecat, Skeletor, Beastman, Teela, etc. Hopefully this movie will be better than the last one with Dolph Lungren, Courtney Cox, and Jack Palance. John Woo could make it interesting though. We will have to wait and see.

Mt. St. Helens Erupts! That is some crazy messed up shit. I can still remember it blowing the first time and all the ash everywhere when I was a kid living in Portland. I wonder if this is a prequel to bigger eruptions to come?

Switching browsers and Other Such Tech Stuff

So I have completely switched my internet browser from Microsoft Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox. And I love it. Firefox is almost perfect and far safer than IE. It took me a little while to break the IE habbit, because it was comfortable and there really wasn't anything else. But I am done with IE now and forever. The only thing that I don't like about Firefox is that when I select a larger font size (cause my eyes suck and my monitor is too small) it always reverts back to the default whenever I restart the program. But really haven't found anything else that I don't like, and I am sure that the font thing will be fixed with later releases. Go try it www.mozilla.org/firefox!

Also recently got a new mouse. It is cobalt blue like Nathan's Dog, is wireless which is the only way to go, and it has the crazy wheel that scrolls from side to side as well as up and down. It rocks.
Wireless Intellimouse Explorer

And finally, I got a new email address. I already had too many emails to begin with, but since I got an invitation to Google's new email, Gmail, and is by invitation only right now, I figured I would give it a shot. And so far I am pretty pleased with it, though I am still a little leary to use it on any websites in fear of spam. It has 1 gb of storage space which is a ton of space, and a great search tool, but I hate spam with all my being and have had to abandon more than one account due to the overwhelming volume of spam I was receiving.

I have been watching a lot of movies, I got a membership with Netflix so I can rent as many as I want a month 3 out at a time. I was sorely disappointed in the Ladykillers with Tom Hanks, but very much enjoyed Man on Fire with Denzel Washington, if you haven't seen it, and like a good action movie, definitely go get it. There is a scene where he duct tapes a guys hands to the steering wheel of a car with his fingers extended, and cuts his fingers off one by one to get information out of him, damn that was cool. I forgot how much I like the remake of the Punisher, and the last Star Trek, Nemesis. My collection just keeps growning I 2 Fast 2 Furious Balde, added the animatrix, contact, armageddon, and Kill Bill 2 which I like a great deal more than the first.

I got rid of my cable and signed up with Dish Network. I get more channels and I get a Dual Digital Video Recorder that works with both TVs and can record up to 100 hours each, which I think is really cool, for the same amount of money. With the DVR and my dvd burner, I will have no need for a VCR ever again.

If I haven't said it before, Nip Tuck, is the best damn show on TV. It is the only show I make a point to watch every week. New episodes are on Tuesday at 10 on FX, but keep in mind this is not a show for the kids. There is a lot of nudity, sex, drugs, incest, graphic surgeries, violence, foul language, and other entertaining adult themes. I haven't been so glued to a show since the first year of Fox's 24 which went downhill after first season. Watch this show!

Finally, I purchased the long awaited, highly anticipated XBOX game Fable made by the same guy who made the very good PC game Black or White, Peter Molyneux. And while not perfect, it is a damn engrossing game. You can completely customize your character. You can get tattoos, have different hairstyles, your face and body will change based on the decisions you make in the game, like growing horns if you are always bad, or having all your hair turn white and you will have a glow and a halo emanate from you if you are good. You will get fat if you eat pies and drink beer all the time, or you can get big and buff if you use a great deal of melee combat rather than magic or ranged combat. People in the towns will react different towards you based on your renown. They cheer you if you are good, or run and cower from you if you are bad. And the music is fantastic, and really fits the feel and mood of the game. Danny Elfman, who has done everything from the Simpsons, to the Nightmare before Christmas, did the score. The graphics are very good, and the over all look is very unmistakably Fable. All and all a very good game, I highly recommend it for anyone who enjoys RPGs.
Anyway that's about all I got for now.

Well I have about 2 weeks to get my grass planted or else I won’t be able to do it until spring. So Rachelle and I both took Tuesday off and worked all day in the yard. We worked all day, I shoveled 4 truck loads of top soil, 4 truck loads of bark dust, and we planted about 30-40 plants and shrubs. And as much as I hated doing it, I have to admit it already looks 100 times better. But try telling that to my aching back, arms, and legs. I will probably only need about 1 more full day of work for it to be done, it is just a matter of when. Rachelle even tried out the sprinkler system, but the heads need to be adjusted cause my drive way was all wet and there was a giant puddle over one of the sprinklers up against the foundation of the house which is not really a good thing. The installer will come take a look in the morning. Tomorrow, we were going to have a neighborhood BBQ which we did once before and had a lot of fun, but all but one of the couples had to cancel. Oh well more pie for me.

So like I haven't written in like weeks, don't ask why, cause I have thought about writing something nearly every night, I just didn't feel like it. So let's see. So, I got shafted out of the Store Manager job, the company brought in some guy from Tillamook, even though everyone said the store was looking much better and was doing better financially since I got there. But oh well, that is the way shit goes.

Rachelle and I talked about it and decided it would be best for our marriage if we did not work together anymore, and we need more money than I was making as a Real Estate Appraiser Assistant/Part Time Safeway Assistant Manager, so we decided I would talk to my Safeway district manager about going back to full time Assistant Manager. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the work, because I did, but it just wasn’t working out, and I always felt inadequate not knowing what I was doing as an appraiser, whereas at Safeway I pretty much was at the top of the heap and am kind of the go to guy for everything. So I told my DM I would like to come back and he was ecstatic, and said he would take me back in a heartbeat. I told him that I would like to go to SMRA (don’t remember the acronym) which is a week long testing/interview/problem solving thing at our corporate headquarters in California that you have to go to before you can become a store manager. But I told him that I didn’t want to move, and that Rachelle had a really good job, and that I liked it here on the coast, and that unless Seaside or Astoria stores opened I wouldn’t take a promotion. He said, “No Problem” that he needed good management on the coast and therefore wouldn’t move me. He told me when 1 of the stores opened the next time I would most likely get it.

So then he asked where I wanted to work, Astoria or Seaside, and damn was I torn. Seaside is like 7 minutes from my house, I can go home for lunch, I can sleep later and get home sooner due to less driving, and the Manager in Seaside is just a great guy who really appreciates having me. Astoria on the other hand, is a brand new store, great people who I have known for many years having started my career at the old Safeway store, plus I enjoyed the change. I was leaning toward Astoria, except for the one unknown, the new manager, and I had heard some things that didn’t make me feel real comfortable. But I ultimately said I would stay in Astoria, because I knew that is where my DM really wanted me to go, and because I think I needed a change.

Within 3 days with the new boss, I was seriously regretting my decision, and was calling my old store manager in Seaside asking what I should do to get the Hell out of Astoria. Not only was the new guy a bit abrasive and overly direct, I was working a lot more hours and later shifts than I would at Seaside, which meant no time with my baby girl and Rachelle. But after talking with my old store manager and getting to know the new guy I decided that it was really too late to change my mind given all the things that my district manager has done for me in the last 2 years and decided to tough it out. It has been 2 weeks now and while my home life is seriously suffering, I haven’t been home for dinner once in the past 2 weeks; I think it will get better. We shall see.