November 26th, 2001 2000 hours CST

Well Thanksgiving has come and gone, and I'm feeling it. I just felt kinda icky today. I got spoiled at my parents place, sleeping in every day and playing a lot of games. We had dinner on Thursday at my uncle John and aunt Lara's new house. It's really nice. It's pretty much all John does these days. He designed the basement AROUND a surround sound area. It's great. Really good stereo components and a brand new Sony 16x9 big-ass TV. It was really good to see everyone. Dave and Rusty made it up from Atlanta with some cool news. They're moving into a brand new house at the end of this week. David brought some video footage of him walking through the place while a crew was still finishing some things. It's a really beautiful house.

Not mush else happened this weekend. I got to meet Jenny's new boyfriend Jeremy. That's gonna cause some confusion. He's a really nice guy and he held up well. Not that my parents are any kind of firing squad or anything. I got a little Christmas shopping done, but not as much as I wanted to. My parents have been talking about selling their house and moving into something that's built for them. I'm not sure how I feel about that. One, that's the house I grew up in. 2, what are my brother(s) and sister and I going to do when we come down for holiday visits? Dad wants a big wood shop, and mom wants a larger study. I see their point, but that house is going to be hard to let go of. Oh well.

November 18th, 2001

I just got back from Atlanta about an hour ago. My trip down there was pure hell. Some shit-for-brains guy decided to run through a security checkpoint at the Atlanta airport on Friday, which closed the place down for nearly 4 hours. My flight wasn't to leave Chicago until 9, but I kept calling to see if it was delayed. I got to Midway around 7:30 and the woman at the check in counter told me that the flight was 30 minutes late. Well, to make a long story short (because I don't want to write it all right now) I didn't leave Chicago until 1:30 AM Saturday morning. I waited in that airport for 6 hours.

Kristen picked me up at the airport around 4:30 and we went to IHOP for some chocolate chip pancake goodness. Later that day we drove 3 hours to stay with her parents for the night. They are very cool people. Really upbeat and easy to chat with. Just plain friendly. They took us out for some Mexican food which we completely stuffed ourselves with. Instead of going to see Monsters Inc., we stopped at a video store and picked up Unbreakable, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, both of which the parents had not seen.

Not much else happened this weekend. Despite the craziness of the airports and the fact that I still can't turn my neck all the way to the right, it was a very relaxing weekend.

November 14th, 2001

Yesterday was a VERY mixed day. I performed my first ever laptop surgeries. I've been in and out of all kinds of desktop PC's but never any laptops. I replaced a keyboard and an entire screen and circuitry on two dell latitude cpi-a laptops. The screen was the first thing I decided to tackle, and it became much more complicated when I realized just how much of the laptop chassis I had to disassemble. Which is to say, about 60% of it. It got kinda messy, but I did fix the thing. I didn't have any extra screws left over when I was done. The keyboard replacement was a cinch, as I had just removed the keyboard on the previous machine. So I had my confidence mojo in full swing until I dealt with another user's laptop.

Lets start off by saying that I love Partition Magic. It's a brilliant program that I've used relatively without incident for years now. So have my coworkers in the IT department here. This just pissed me off though. I was freeing up the additional space on this guys hard drive. Not moving his primary partition at all. Just resizing it to fill up the rest of the disk. There was a previous smaller partition on there that used to house the laptops image files. So, I applied the changes, 2000 rebooted, did the changes, rebooted again, and then half way through the windows boot sequence, I get a blue screen of death saying that it can't find a boot device. Now, of course there is a boot device there. It just got halfway done with booting into 2000. So, as my stomach turned completely upside down, I realized that the partition tables must have gotten out of synch. Meaning his data was all completely inaccessible now and corrupt. And this guy is my FRIEND, for fuck sake. I just, through no real fault of my own, completely killed my coworker and friends hard drive. It took about 7 minutes to do. I was just going to go in there, free up the space, and let him go back to work, but nooooooooo. The cosmos decided to fuck me over. And him for that matter.

Now, luckily he is one of the few people that IT folks like me just adore and admire, because he actually had all of his mail on the server, and all of his work critical files on his network drive. He still lost some stuff, but nothing major. And he was completely cool about the whole ordeal, which almost made me feel worse. I was able to set him up with another win2k laptop last night, but it was one I was planning on using as a loner for the office, and it's a little beat up. Besides having a freshly replaced keyboard, it has a small error in the middle of the screen, and the left click button doesn't work very well. So now I'm setting up another machine that's healthier, but wasn't ready to go last night.

I ended up staying late last night to do a CD update over the network for one of our sales groups. After I left here at 9 I went to Wicker Park to a cool little bar called Holiday. I met up with Karen and her roommate Courtney. They're just too much fun. Courtney and I were brooding over the fact that the jukebox there really sucks. We did manage to find the best of Siouxie and the Banshees in there, so we played mostly from that.

November 13th, 2001

Not much new happening. Work has been very hectic. I was actually in on Saturday for about 6 hours helping install a new firewall in the office. I've been completely obsessed with SSX Tricky. The original SSX made the purchase of my playstation 2 worthwhile in every way. Tricky isn't even a sequel! It's like SSX v1.9. It kicks so much ass. I have the worst case of "D-Pad Thumb" that I've ever had. Kristen of course views this as a good thing. And that's why she rocks.

November 8th, 2001

Here are the pictures from the last few days:

• pic1 Hey look! It's the back of Vincent's head!
• pic2 The nifty wooden archway
• pic3 People in costume
• pic4 Biggest dung beetle you've ever seen
• pic5 Some guy banging on stuff
• pic6 I don't know what it is either
• pic7 People flinging fire
• pic8 100 bottles of beer....
• pic9 Math, the white menace
• pic10 I'm with stupid
• pic11 In Spanish
• pic12 Jeff as a voodoo doll

So the other day a coworker's laptop completely died. The hard drive was making rhythmic clicking noise, and for those of you familiar at all with computers know that that's not a good sound to hear. We tried in vain to "breath life" into the hard drive, but to no avail. Dave even put it in the freezer for a few minutes. I got some great pix of him at my desk checking out the laptop. These are fantastic. pic1, pic2, pic3.

November 7th, 2001

**update as of 1:41 PM CST** I copied a survey from my friend Xio and filled t out. It's weird.

Finally got to hang out with Kim last night. It's really the first time I've had to talk with her since she moved up here a month ago. She had Jeff have such a cute little place in Ravenswood. We were watching "Smallville", which I had never seen before. Besides having that horrible Shawn Colvin WB music shit playing throughout, it's kind of a fun show. And the guy playing Clark Kent is a fuckin hottie. God DAMN.

We went to Holiday to get a few drinks. I had another headache, but the gin washed it away after a bit. We talked about all kinds of stuff. The possibility of going ice skating downtown after work, living with Jeff, Kristen, Kristen moving up here and such. Karen, who works in my office, showed up around 10:15. She introduced me to her room mate Courtney, who reads this journal all the time, apparently. Freakish little bundles of energy, they are. They're tons of fun.

November 6th, 2001

I know. I know. I've been behind in my updates. Let's recap the recent events, shall we? Halloween pretty much sucked. Saturday the 27th was alright. Last year on that night I'd gone to this huge warehouse thing with Jeff and Kim. That was a crazy night. Got in a car wreck with 5 people in my car. It wasn't my fault at all. It just must have looked funny having all these people get out of my car. Some of them wearing wings. Anyway, I opted not to go to the warehouse thing because I didn't have that much fun, and it was $40 to boot. Open bar, but it was all gross. So I went over to Linsey and Christians' place to watch movies. But I already wrote about that.

The 31st was a very mixed day. Lot's of people dressed up for Halloween in my office. Jeff went as a voodoo doll. It was a fantastic costume. I'll have pictures up later. I wore my surgical scrubs that my sister got for me when she was in medical school. It was pretty much just an excuse for me to wander around work in my pj's. That night I had several boys over at my place to head over to Logan Square for the Redmoon Theater's "All Hallow's Eve Festival." I had an absolute blast at last years event. This one was woefully disappointing. My Posse kind of stood around going "uh...... what the hell IS all this?" It sucked. They had way too many people than they had last year in the audience and the Redmoon people didn't seem to know how to handle them. When you walk through this thing, they have little event areas that loop. That way you can check out the entire performance if you just hang around for a few moments. They have little barriers so you know where to stand. Well this year people were completely disregarding the barriers and just walking over then right into the event areas. It was just plain sad. The performers looked rather melancholy since they weren't supposed to break character to tell these people to wake up and back the fuck off.

The really funny thing that happened was Vincent finding this huge block of white chalk. He ended up giving it to Matthew, who proceeded to run around people in small groups, drawing a circle around them. It was beautiful. Nobody had any idea what he was doing and just assumed he was a performer. People would kind of sit there, wondering what was up. Once they saw him laughing back with us they moved on. He even got a guy in a wheelchair. That one was great. We all ended up going back to my place to have a few beers and just shoot the shit.

This last weekend I went back home to Bloomington to see George Carlin. It was a great show. He was gearing up for his new HBO special that airs later this month. He actually had new material on paper. It was a little weird. But hey, everybody needs practice once in a while. Flip, Chelle, and Flips mom were there with me. Chelle is 5 months pregnant, and I had no idea. She looks fantastic as always. The next day I went to see "Monsters Inc" with my parents. It was good, but not as good as "A Bug's Life" or the "Toy Story" movies. They didn't have any outtakes in the credits either. That just plain sucked.

I stopped in Indianapolis on my way home to have dinner with my friends Cathy and Leslie. I hadn't seen either of them since that party a few months ago. You know. The one where I thought beer wasn't flammable? Anyway. They're both doing well. I got a speeding ticket on my way to meet them. She got me fair and square. That's my first ever. 75 in a 55. Yay me.

Last night I went out with all the boys from the Redmoon adventure as well as Kara and Dan. We met up at Diversey River Bowl for some bowling and boozing. I had a major headache when I got there, but the free-flowing MGD cleared that up after a bit. It was a great time. Hopefully that will be a regular Monday night thing.

Oh Oh oh!!!!!! My girlfriend is moving up here from Atlanta in February!!!!!