As of yesterday afternoon, I became a member of the working class of America.  It only took the company three and a half weeks to realize I was the best person for the job and offer it to me.  I start Monday morning, and I’m very excited and very nervous.  I can’t believe that after all this time i will actually have a real grown-up job.  I’ve never had one before that I had real responsibilities.  I’ve always been just an intern where what I did didn’t really effect anything else.  Let’s all hope and pray that it goes well and that I like it.  I won’t be doing anything to extreme my first few days, just getting orientated and reading a bunch of SOP’s (standard operating procedures for those who aren’t familiar with the acronym).  Then I get to shadow a veteran employee until I get the hang of what they do exactly.  But I will be getting paid and not sitting home all day eating my self into obesity.  So congrats to me for landing a job.  I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

YIPPEE!!!  I had a job interview today!!!  Isn’t that super exciting!!  I’ve been waiting so long for someone to recognize the total awesomeness and potential that is within me, and someone finally did!!!  I interviewed today with a pharmaceutical company that makes generic drugs and it was not at all what I was expecting.  Has anyone else ever gone on an interview where they were asked no probing questions at all???  I mean, all the interviewers did was tell me about the company and then we sat and chatted for about fifteen minutes about life, football, and my dog.  It was excellent!!!  I just hope that their constant asking me if this was someplace I could see myself working is a good sign, and that I hear back on Friday that they would like to hire me.  Anyway, if I do get this job it will mean that my husband at one time was a drug dealer for his mother, and I will be the drug maker that will be providing the drugs that she sells, isn’t that fun!!  Anyway, I’m very excited about this and I wanted to share my excitement with all of my wonderful readers out there!!!  The job however will put a damper on my Solitaire play.  Oh well, the paycheck will be enough consolation for me, I’ll make do.

Later peeps!!!  I’ll keep you posted!!

About four weeks ago, I got a phone call that I wouldn’t normally have even answered, but I was in a good mood that day.  As it turned out, the call was from the Nielson Ratings people.  The woman asked me if I knew what the Nielson Ratings were, and I said yes.  She then asked me a bunch of other questions about what kind of shows I watch and how many tv’s we have in the house.  My favorite question was when she asked if we had DVR.  I answered yes, and then she proceeded to clarify that she meant the device that digitally records shows off of tv, and not the hardware that simply plays DVD’s.  While I could have replied, “Is that the thing what plays them small shiny discs?” I composed myself and simply said that I knew what DVR was and that I was sure we had it.  The last question she asked was to see if I was interested in being a Nielson Family for a week and filling out a booklet reporting what shows I watched and the times that I watched them.  I thought this was entertaining due to the sheer volume of shows that I watch everyday as I am currently not employed with nothing else to do.  (If you wish to remedy my lack of employment, please feel free to contact me.)  The woman told me that I would be receiving a booklet for each tv we owned in the near future and that we were to record our show schedule starting February 9th.  By this time, Kip had gotten home from work.  He was confused by the strange look on my face (amusement) and the things I was saying on the phone.  He was especially startled when I got off the phone squealing because the last thing the lady said to me was that in appreciation for our participation in the process they would be mailing me $15 with the booklets.  I was excited because that is like “free money”!

Well, three days ago the booklets arrived, and to our surprise the $15 included was not in check form which we both expected but in the form of a ten and a five!!!  So it really was free money!!  We have officially started recording the shows we watch.  The only problem I have with this whole process is that the Olympics are this week, which means all of the shows that we normally watch are doing reruns this week.  So it isn’t like this is an accurate account of the shows we normally watch.  But I can’t complain because I got $15 for watching tv!!

I just added a text-only feature to my site.  If you’ll notice at the very bottom of each page is a “View text only” link.  That might be useful if you are on dial-up.  And the setting is stored in a cookie so you don’t have to keep clicking it.  And, if you are browsing from a PDA, my site will default to text only, which is nice for people who, like me, browse the web from a PDA from time to time and don’t like how this page doesn’t fit neatly into a 240x320 screen.

Tuesday evening, Kip and I drove back to Newton to pick up the newest addition to the Robinson Family.  We are happy to welcome Miss Punky “Pants” Robinson, a 6-month-old wire haired terrier mix, to our loving family.  I would like to tell those of you out there, that she and I are very good buddies right now, but it did not start out as such a good relationship.  The first night Punky spent with Kip and me, she didn’t want to go to bed when it was time.  We crated her for the night, and for those of you that don’t have dogs, that means that we put her in her crate and closed the gate on her so that she couldn’t get out.  Well she didn’t like that, and after about twenty minutes of whining and scratching from the crate, we decided to see if she would be ok with just being penned up in the kitchen.  We learned all too quickly that she could jump or climb over any kind of blockade we could create to keep her in the kitchen.  We had to put her back in her crate in hopes that she would eventually calm down and go to sleep.  By 12:30 am she had finally calmed down some, but I couldn’t sleep.  I stayed up playing solitaire and reading in the room.  I finally thought that I might be able to go to sleep around 1:30 am, but as soon as my head hit the pillow and I rolled over, she was whining again.  It didn’t last long, but it kept me from sleeping for the next two hours.  To top it off, Kip started talking loudly in his sleep, so loudly in fact that I was afraid he would wake Punky up and she would start barking and whining again.  Anyway, after that first night, we realized that Punky needs to be in a more closed off place to sleep at night.  Wednesday night we tried out keeping her crate in the pantry room, and we didn’t hear her at all.  Since then, everything has been going quite smoothly.

This weekend we are spending in Newton for a family reunion.  It was quite exciting when Punky first arrived at Kip’s parents’ house.  The last time we had a puppy here, August chased Ted and Grace around the house.  They were both terrified of her.  This time around, Punky is big enough to take on Grace.  But Ted keeps growling and barking at her.  Grace and Punky are still trying to get to know one another, and their playing scares me a little.  I’m always worried one of them is going to get hurt.  But I’m told that is how they get to know one another.

Pictures of Punky will be coming soon.  Keep an eye on Kip’s posts for when they are online.

Kip finally finished working on his website tonight!!!  That means that I get to post all of my thoughts right alongside his!!  I’m sure after a few days of this he will realize what a BIG mistake that was.  Then again, you guys out there can always just sort so that you only have to see his posts and you can skip all of my nonsensical babbling.  Otherwise, we’re in for an entertaining ride!!!  Anyway, it is late and I need to get to bed, I just wanted to experience what it was like to put my thoughts out on the interweb for all the world to see.  I’m sure you can’t wait until my next post!!

Good night world...I’m looking forward to you getting to know me!!!

I’m working on a completely new site design, and this is probably last blog post I’ll make until it is ready, since I am moving from text-file storage to database storage for my blog posts, and I have to go through kind of a ‘process’ to import the old posts.

The site design is nothing like what I intended to make when I started out.  It now looks very “inspirational”.  That will make more sense when you see it...  Hopefully sometime next week...

Today our puppy had to be put to sleep.  I have put up the last set of pictures on my photos page for your enjoyment.  Please excuse the blurriness of many of them.  I need to figure out how I managed to turn up the exposure time, and then turn it back down.

August, born (about) June 20, 2005, died today, at an age of twelve weeks.  She got very sick over the weekend and could barely breathe this morning.  We took her to the vet and they x-rayed her and found that her lungs were clouded and her heart was too big and was actually blocking air from getting to her lungs.  They think it is most likely a birth defect that would have continued to give her problems.  They kept her all day and gave her oxygen.  When they give a little dog oxygen, rather than using a mask, they put it in a mostly-closed (not air-tight) aquarium and stick the tube of oxygen into the top.  By evening she was not better and was in pain trying to breathe a few minutes after taking her away from the oxygen.  We did not even get a chance to take her back home and play with her.  The vet told us that there was very little they could do for her.  So I had to make the decision to let them put her to sleep.  It was such a difficult decision to make, even though I knew it was the humane and responsible thing to do.  But we had grown so attached to her.  I keep seeing in my mind the image of her in that aquarium full of oxygen this morning, looking at us with big puppy eyes, probably a little bit high, and knowing that she trusts us completely.  And then this evening I had to make the decision to end her life and I feel like I betrayed her when she was helpless to do anything about it.

My heart goes out to anyone who’s ever lost a child, because I can’t imagine how much more strongly you must feel everything I feel now for just a puppy.  I’ve lost grandparents before, but losing someone who looks up to you as a parent (even if it is just a puppy) has an entirely different kind of emotional pain associated with it.  You may be reading this and thinking I’m overreacting; I probably would have thought that if I read something like this in someone else’s blog a few months ago.  This is really hard emotionally and I never would have expected it to be so difficult.

If you’re a fan of The Office, you will recognize how incredibly funny this article is (read to at least the fourth paragraph...).

And if you’re not a fan, you should be.  Season 2 starts September 20.  9:30pm on Tuesdays on NBC.  Check it out.  It’s stupid awesome.

Having a puppy is so much fun!  I’m teaching her things!  I’ve never really had a pet that saw me as its provider.  Kind of weird seeing as how I grew up in a house with Snookums, Biscuit, Muffin, Toby, Grace, Ted, Boots, Oreo, and Sniddley.  But all of those animals saw my mom as their provider and me as someone else my mom let sleep there.  Or in the case of the cats, someone besides my mom that they let sleep in their house.

Unrelated topic:  I’m planning on redesigning my site.  I don’t like it now.  It’s too dark and “goth.”  A lot of my graphics were intended to be placeholders but stayed there for a year because I got lazy.  I really came up with the homepage logo and then designed my site to fit that.  Now I’m thinking about a very white, plain design.  And something that uses more of the screen—I don’t like how I restrict my text to such a small space just because someone out there still runs their computer in 640x480.  In fact, the inspiration for my next design will come from this nifty little picture Garrison came up with.  Not that I’m going to rip it off.  It might not even look like it.  It’s just going to be inspired by it.

I’m also considering updating my blog.  I’m thinking about using an actual database (this will require a small amount of learning on my part, which increases the chance that I’ll put it off indefinitely).  I’m also going to make it so Stephanie can make posts too.  I’m thinking of a format similar to Penny-Arcade’s news posts.  And I’ll probably add options to filter just my posts or just Steph’s posts.  And I wanna do one of those calendar views of posts.  I think that’d be useful.

Some interesting things I came across when looking at my site’s stats.  No one goes to most of my pages... so I’m going to take a lot of them down.  Interestingly enough, Yahoo! will send you here if you search for “ssbm3” or “super smash brothers melee tournaments” apparently.  Those two search queries were my top two referring pages.  Although when I just tried them, I couldn’t find myself in the first eight pages of either (sidenote:  I think that was my first non-Google internet search in about four years).

My AIM-Profile blog view is apparently one of the more popular ways of reading my blog (I’m KipTheGreat on AIM, in case you didn’t know).  So I might update that a little bit.  But there’s really not too much updating to do there.

I never planned to fade... away