First Day of Spring

This picture turned out really well! It is even better when it is regular size. We took the little guy to the beach this weekend, not for us to go swimming but to see how he did with the scary waves. He did really well, had to be on leash though so that meant someone had to go into the water with him...FREEZING COLD (as expected), but he really enjoyed himself. He liked walking on the sand and the waves were fun to run away from and then jump over. I love the picture because he is so crisp and clear and his normally blank mind seems to be showing a lot of thought (probably something along the lines of "my balls would have frozen if I still had them"). The beach was in Brigantine, NJ which is the town directly north of Atlantic City (which was on fire by the way) and driving in I was not expecting much...seemed pretty trashy. Once we got past A.C. it was a nice little town and the beach was very wide so hopefully somewhere we can go later in the summer. One thing N.J. likes to do is to charge you to use the beaches so that kind of sucks...we did not pay to go on there today!

Once we got back to the apartment and dropped off the now sleepy puppy we hit Rita's Italian Ice for the annual Free Rita's on the first day of spring and we plan on hitting it again after dinner :)

The Art of Shaving

I was given a gift card to the (at the time very new) retail store "The Art of Shaving" about 2 years ago. It was a very exciting gift as I had talked about wanting to get a straight razor shave...like the good ol' days. So long story short there aren't many locations and the only one around here is the one in downtown Philly. We had stopped by once before and at that point they didn't always have the "barber spa" available only on certain days so we struck out that day. Now they have it all the time and we went in without an appointment just going to buy some product to use and we were pleasantly surprised that I could get something done! So I chose a traditional shave which for me meant trimming my beard and shaving my neck with the razor. This included hot towels, cold towels, lotions, hot shaving cream and god knows what else as I was border line asleep once that hot towel hit my face. I COMPLETELY recommend for any guy to get this done at least once in your life...even if u get your whole face done. It is an amazingly relaxing experience and after you really feel like a million bucks.

I still have $20 on my gift card and I am debating between 2 things. While being unemployed I have though about shaving my head completely bald and that is a service the Art provides so I am toying with that just to see what it looks like and the other option is to purchase a straight razor of my own. They last for as long as you take care of them so you never have to buy new blades but they are a bit pricey to start out (saves you money in the long run) and I would have to teach myself how to do it (and be VERY careful!).

Check out The Art of Shaving, their products are pricey but their services are really fun to try!

Resolutions

The start of a new year is always a good time to really take an inventory of your life and see what you want to change. I am not a big resolution guy but I do know the things about me that I would like to change and I like setting up starting points for goals.

1. The holidays messed with getting to the gym with the weird work schedule and the trips so getting back to the gym is at the top of the list. Luckily I was able to regulate and control myself somewhat during the holiday eating season so I didn't really gain any weight!

2. As some of you know I am not the most hygiene oriented person out there so I am working on that.

3. Keeping a "want to buy" list which will double as a birthday/xmas gift list over the whole year so when it comes time for gift ideas BOOM here is the list.

That is about it though, nothing really huge just back to a regulated schedule, gradually working on each one. Once I get moving I set up goals and so on! Hopefully I get a full time regular working hour job too, but that is just a dream and we will have to see.

Christmas Breakdown

The holidays are finally over! Not that they were bad but just VERY busy. We had 2 weekends of visits to our families which was on top of me working the holiday retail rush. We had a good time but the retail portion really screwed things up and made it much more hectic, having to rush back to get to work. I don't think I'll be doing retail next holiday season, it just isn't worth it (for what I was getting paid) to mess with the holiday planning as much as it did. Thankfully we are pretty flexible and have some flexible family.

We got lots of fun gifts, and we are enjoying everything, thank you to all of you (probably the only ones reading this)! I am currently enjoying a delicious pot of coffee from my new coffee maker, it is like having my own coffee shop in our apartment! Aston and Kami are loving their gifts, Aston is loving Kami's as well (we have already lost 2 or 3 of hers to him). I also got a good bit of help paying for this new computer and Angela will be buying her hair straightener this weekend we hope!

I am continuing to work at Best Buy part time (no more than 20 hours per week) which will keep me getting my discount and enough money each month to pay my bills and hopefully build a little savings back up. So I will be doing that for as long as I can put up with it, but I am applying for jobs again too! So that is where we are at post-holiday season, hope you all had a good one too.

Movie Review - Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

We watched Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs last night. Let me start this off by telling you how much I loved this book when I was younger, one of my all time favorites. So when I saw that the movie was coming out I was excited UNTIL I saw how extremely different the story was going to be. I was turned off by it and didn't think I would like it but I was wrong! It was wonderfully cute, the voice acting was spot on and it was cartoony (didn't try and be too realistic). They added enough back story to make the changes to the real story work. It is very difficult to make a book with probably less than 20 pages into a full length movie and a lot of the time it doesn't really work out but this isn't one of those, it really did work. I would definitely recommend renting it, probably not a buy unless you have kids (kids would love it) but still a nice light hearted fun movie!

Windows 7 Review

Now that I have been using Windows 7 for about a month(ish) I can safely say that it is a huge huge improvement over Windows Vista.

Visually they are twins it is the behind the scenes functionality that really makes it work well. It is much more efficiently. They made some more "improvements" with features like windows snap anda multi-tasking feature where you can shake the window you want to concentrate on and all of the other windows will minimize automatically. Windows Snap is a feature where you can drag one window to the side of the screen and then another one you want to focus on to the other side and they will automatically re-size to each share half the screen. These couple of additions aren't crucial to using a computer but if you find them useful they are at least available now.

The other big improvement has nothing to do with Windows at all, it is the technology that is coming in the computers now (as standard). The amount of RAM and processing speed has caught up with what Vista really needed to run well so 7 running more efficiently is even better. BVista wasn't so much a piece of crap as it came out much earlier than it should have (as far as technology restraints are concerned) and it didn't DO anything worth the while. Now the other thing and this is kind of the real definition of 7 is that they basically give you options now for how annoying you want the computer to be. For example in Vista EVERY time you did anything it would ask you if you really wanted to do it but now you have the choice to turn those notification on or off and do it based on what those actions are.

So Windows 7 is basically an apology for Vista, it is nothing amazing but it is what Vista should have been. I do not recommend spending the money to upgrade from Vista or XP (mostly because a new computer wouldn't be too expensive) and it just isn't that great to pay at least $100 (depending on the version and what you are upgrading from).

Where have you been???

Well I went basically from house husband to very Part-time worker to extremely busy person. Our (my aunt and uncle in law) moved into an area of PA pretty close to us and I have offered my services to assist them in anyway needed basically on my days off from Best Buy which has really picked up due to the holiday shopping season (I guess it is the "play-offs of retail"). So I am working 30-40 hours a week right now and then putting in at least 1 or 2 days (10-4ish) on my day or days off. It has been great making some extra money especially during the holiday season, making gifts not have such a big impact and actually adding to savings instead of pulling from it. In the midst of all of this I have also gotten all of my Christmas shopping done, presents are wrapped, only thing left to do is mail out a couple of things. On the tippy top of all of that my computer finally started dying again so I decided it was time to move on and I purchased a new one. I got to use my employee discount and got a printer too (we hadn't had one in over a year) so a pretty good deal. I have also developed a sweet Elmo impression. We got our Christmas tree, a nice little 5 or 6 footer from Lowe's for $16! So that is a quickie little update on where I have been, there was almost a week where I literally couldn't (because of time and computer issues) write so sorry if you have missed me!

Upcoming things:
Last week of Christmas shopping for work so that will be busy.
HUGE possible snow storm coming...20+ inches potentially Saturday.
More days helping out at Aunt and Uncle's after Christmas.

Once things calm down again I should be able to get back into the blog, especially now that I have a functioning computer!

P.S. Windows 7 review will be coming soon
Christmas travels and fun times.