A new month, a new update into the lives of John and Susan. This weekend went by pretty fast. Friday I went on a shrimp hunt. Wal-mart use to carry fresh (raw) shrimp in their seafood section and I was buying them almost every week. As previously noted, Wal-mart and logic do not go together, as they stopped carrying these shrimp (just before lent started). I figured GFS would be a good place to find some frozen “fresh” shrimp. I found out all they had was cooked or breaded (in just about any kind of flavor you could think of…) Meijer was my second choice (they do have fresh lobsters there, maybe one Friday I’ll pick up a couple…) They didn’t have any fresh shrimp, but I did find some uncooked ones in a bag (jumbo size, the shrimp not the bag…) They were alright, but I’m going to try and find a better seafood place (or we could just go to Red Lobster every Friday 😉 ).

Saturday was a busy day (after I got to sleep in late), we headed over to the Home Builders Show (Susan had gotten free tickets from work). We entered a raffle for a 42″ LCD TV (hope we win, that’d look sweet in our new house) and got some information about landscaping and basement finishing (we also entered a raffle for a $25,000 basement makeover, that’d be nice!) Getting to the Home Builders show was not an easy task. The address was something like 1321 E. Wackerly. Looking at this we decided it was going to be pretty easy as we knew where Wackerly was and figured it wouldn’t be too hard to find (boy were we wrong…) After we get onto Wackerly, I notice we are heading west, the address is on east Wackerly, a reasonable person would think, okay we need to turn around and head the other direction. After seeing 1400 E. Wackerly and no Home Builders show I thought, maybe it’s in Bay County (US-10 goes through Wackerly so I thought maybe on the other side of US-10…). The only thing over th ere was farmlands, and I didn’t see anything closely resembling a Home Builders Show (maybe a half-dilapidated big red barn…) After going back to the apartment we saw that it actually was “west”, but further down the road (in another county I think).

After the show, we were really getting the home itch and decided to take a spin down to Sears to look at appliances. We get a 30% builders discount on appliances at Sears, wOOt! After oogling at all the stainless steel appliances, we did pick a few Kenmore appliances. After I memorized the model numbers we took a quick drive by our new house and headed back to the apartment. After looking at a number of poor reviews for Kenmore appliances, we decided they were not for us (no sense in investing in appliances that don’t work…) GE seems like a good choice and we’ll be hitting the local stores to get a better idea of what different models look like (Sears didn’t have very many on display, but we have to order online anyway…) We also went to the movies on Saturday to see Zodiac (I didn’t think it was all that great, but Susan enjoyed it). It is an interesting story, but I felt the movie moved along really slowly… Too bad Midland still doesn’t have Breach (that one looks really good…) O n the way home, I pulled into Family Video and rented Inside Man, which was pretty good. I recommend it if you’re looking for something to watch/rent (it’s got Denzel Washington and it’s about a bank robbery, of course it’s gonna be good.) Susan fell asleep before the ending, so she doesn’t know how sneaky the robbers really are!
Sunday was a pretty lazy day. I’ve got our desk plans mostly finished. I’m working on designing an L-shaped desk for our two computers in the corner of our living room. If I can build it, I think it’ll fit pretty nicely in there (a picture of the design can be found on the Pic of the Day page).

As far as work goes, this last week has been kind of interesting. I’ve been developing sim code to help validate the process control code (and have already found many problems with the control code). I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not, because some of the stuff should have been caught before the code was ever tested, hopefully when my validation protocol is executed, we don’t find to many errors (which has a deadline I’m pretty sure we won’t hit…) I do have a couple job leads I’m hoping to hear back on, one at CMT (I really hope they give me a call), a “real” job at Dow, and my resume has been passed off to an acquaintance at EDS (contracting company that does IT work). I don’t know how much more of this job I can take, it’s gotten to be extremely boring (I need to figure out how to get internet access 😉 ).