Much better.
That whole 'worrying about bills' thing? Crisis averted; had more money saved than I thought, so bills are paid or being paid tomorrow; either way, taken care of, and the store's starting to pick up again. Not as worried anymore.
The three of us are starting to look for better apartments, 'cause the management company wants to raise our rent, and frankly, this place isn't worth what we're already paying. Problem is we have five cats, and there's very few places in town that are okay with even one or two.
Doc and I went out looking today, and we think we might've found a nice three-bedroom, two-bath; bigger than this place, and not much more money. I'm going in early tomorrow so Doc can take Amanda to look at the apartment and have a sitdown with the apartment staff, see if they can work something out about the felines. If not.. well, I have some small amount of faith that we'll find something.
I want to go back to St. Louis at some point. Probably only for a week, 'cause that means I lose less money, but we'll see. I would prefer to do it before summer hits, maybe around the end of May? I don't know, we'll see how things stand around the end of April, when we should be officially taking over the store. God only knows what hell will break loose between then and now.
One more thing: Doc and I have been spending the last couple weeks (on and off) working on whipping our media center situation into shape. Doc put together a nice little file server, which now has a shitload of TV shows, movies, and anime on it, and I've been playing with XBMC on Doc's Xbox, getting everything tagged up real pretty. We'll likely be replacing the Xbox with a dedicated Linux box running XBMC soon enough, though; then it'll have enough memory for the MediaStream skin. (translation: shiny.)
When all this is done, sitting down and watching something will go something along the lines of:
a) turn on TV/surround sound/PC or Xbox
b) select 'Movies'
c) pick a movie
And bam, gorgeous HD movie for you long time. I am far too pleased with this.
(Also, BitTorrent is a hell of a thing. Downloaded all of The Young Ones, Jericho, a bunch of other shit; also checked out Monty Python's Flying Circus from the-best-library-ever (yeah, all 16 DVDs, for two fucking dollars) and we're in the process of ripping/transcoding/copying it to the file server. So uh we rock.)
I'm done here.
The three of us are starting to look for better apartments, 'cause the management company wants to raise our rent, and frankly, this place isn't worth what we're already paying. Problem is we have five cats, and there's very few places in town that are okay with even one or two.
Doc and I went out looking today, and we think we might've found a nice three-bedroom, two-bath; bigger than this place, and not much more money. I'm going in early tomorrow so Doc can take Amanda to look at the apartment and have a sitdown with the apartment staff, see if they can work something out about the felines. If not.. well, I have some small amount of faith that we'll find something.
I want to go back to St. Louis at some point. Probably only for a week, 'cause that means I lose less money, but we'll see. I would prefer to do it before summer hits, maybe around the end of May? I don't know, we'll see how things stand around the end of April, when we should be officially taking over the store. God only knows what hell will break loose between then and now.
One more thing: Doc and I have been spending the last couple weeks (on and off) working on whipping our media center situation into shape. Doc put together a nice little file server, which now has a shitload of TV shows, movies, and anime on it, and I've been playing with XBMC on Doc's Xbox, getting everything tagged up real pretty. We'll likely be replacing the Xbox with a dedicated Linux box running XBMC soon enough, though; then it'll have enough memory for the MediaStream skin. (translation: shiny.)
When all this is done, sitting down and watching something will go something along the lines of:
a) turn on TV/surround sound/PC or Xbox
b) select 'Movies'
c) pick a movie
And bam, gorgeous HD movie for you long time. I am far too pleased with this.
(Also, BitTorrent is a hell of a thing. Downloaded all of The Young Ones, Jericho, a bunch of other shit; also checked out Monty Python's Flying Circus from the-best-library-ever (yeah, all 16 DVDs, for two fucking dollars) and we're in the process of ripping/transcoding/copying it to the file server. So uh we rock.)
I'm done here.