The beginning of the year always has me thinking about where I’ve been, and where I’m going. And currently I must admit that it seems I’m largely going no where. On every scale I can think of there isn’t much I can say I have accomplished that would be considered good.

Only positive thing I can say is currently it looks like I’ll be at the same job for 2 years in a row soon, its been a while since I have been able to say that. However not entirely sure this can be considered a good thing.

So my vacation is almost done. Will be back at work Friday what fun! Will have pictures soon

So today I made my first pork shoulder roast.

Of course the first thing I did was pre-heat the oven to 325 for 15 minutes. While the oven was pre-heating I removed the wrapper.

Then I added my choice of spices, to all over the meat:

I put into the oven for 2 hours and 40 minutes, and when it came out and I started to remove the net, it looked like this:

So I do have a new camera now, it may not be as nice as the one stolen from me, however it does the job that I need it to. I now have a FujiFilm FinePix J38. While I can’t say I have done a lot with the camera yet, it does work well in what I have asked it to do.

Fujifilm Finepix J38 12MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom and 2.7 inch LCD

I have sometimes missed the higher optical zoom from my previous camera, but this is usable.

I previously had found and tried a FujiFilm S1500 from WalMart, however the item was obviously previously used, and locked up a couple of times during use. I was disappointed having to return it, for my purposes it was close enough to the S2000HD that I had previously lost. The only item they had left was the display unit, which obviously did not want.

So recently I had yet another birthday. I decided to do something quiet, and just have a few friends join me for dinner at one of my new favorite restaurants.

This was the restaurant I chose, if your in the mood for a good Bar-B-Que buffet, this is the place I would select in Houston, TX anyways.  I invited several people but only two came:

On the left is Paul E Cooley on the right is one of my neighbor’s Dave. While I had hoped more would come, hence the long table, it wounded up being fun as it was and a good time was had by all.

It may be a bit early for me to do a 2009 Year in Review, but being that its January 1st, 2010 seems to be as good as any place.

At the beginning of 2009, I was part of the 7.6% of American’s who were on the Unemployment roles. I was almost at the end of my initial unemployment funds was getting ready to have to request an extension. Up to this point, all I had been able to find was one day jobs till even that dried up.

I spent the end of 2008 and start of 2009 visiting someone I went to High School with to see if anything could be there. Her 7 year old son and I hit it off famously, her and I? not so much.

By end of January I had accepted a job with my current employer, I just had to move from the Los Angeles area to Houston, TX.  Unfortunately my Twitter’s on the subject seem to be lost, I can only go back to a point after I had arrived here in Houston so the exact time frame escapes me.

However, I do see that by January 31st, according to my blog entry “I have a Job” I was already planning on moving for this job. And I know my start date was February 9th.

If my deduction reasoning works right now I would surmise then I arrived in Houston on either the 4th or 5th of February 2009.

Looking over the rest of my blog entries for this year, I can’t say things have been remarkable if this year follows weather wise the same as last year, March will be very rainy and the start of the muggy season which will last until fall hits again.

September was a particularly bad month for me, starting with having all of expensive (ie: worth more than $100) electronics stolen, being stolen from and attacked while at home, and then deciding to move in a hurry as I leave the hospital with 7 stitches in my forehead.

This explains the lack of photography, and related blog entries since then. I have looked to see if I could find a camera that is the equivalent to the Fujifilm S2000HD that was stolen. While I may not have known the half of what it could do, I would like something that is in that same line. Who knows perhaps I will pick one up off of E-Bay, or Amazon, I see Amazon still sells them new.

Overall, I’d say 2009 was much better than 2008 (with the glaring exception of September). However, I do still miss my friends from California. I have also found that I miss the singular season of LA, however here at least snow is a rarity.

So last night as I was getting ready for work, I was chatting with a friend and she suggested that I run a tool called Belarc Advisor to get a detailed look at my computer. Well one of the tests it ran was telling me what other computers were attached to my router.

Well what do you know, I wasn’t the only one connected to my computer. I tried to log into the control page for the router, and it was “unavailable.”

Well I showed them, I unplugged the router, and today when I came home I did a hard reset on it, and changed all the passwords and turned off the wireless access.

You really shouldn’t use someone else’s internet with out asking. If you don’t know who it belongs to, that isn’t an excuse.

Chris

So today on my walk to the mail box, I found a little kitten, who was in desperate need of a home. When I first gave her some water she drank and drank from it for literally minutes on end. I put her in my bathroom for a few minutes so that I could head up to the local store and get stuff like Kitten food and kitty litter.

From Kitten

So far when she is awake, she doesn’t like being alone. She’s very talkitive it seems, which may prove to be difficult, time will tell.

I’m bouncing a few ideas around my head for this little kitty, which I believe is a girl. So far I’m thinking of Nina, Mija, and T’pal.

What do you think?

Woke up early this morning (early for someone who didn’t go to bed till 4 AM anyways), and while doing some searching online to see when the State of California will give me my refund, I saw the following at Google:

Google saying its currently 0 degrees in Houston, TX

I thought this was really suprising, considering how warm it is in my apartment.

Guess I will file this in with occassional odd news that Google gives.

Today I had an interesting situation develop. It had actually been developing for a while, but it became unignorable today.

A few days ago I recieved my first electric bill for my new apartment, and I noticed it was saying I owed -130 and some odd change. And it showed that they had taken money out of my deposit to pay the bill.

Naturally, I was interested on why they were doing this, so I called up the electric company, but due to a company wide software upgrade they were unable to tell me anything about the issue I was having. So after I woked up this morning I called them and waited for a quite a while on hold to speak to someone.

While on hold, someone came to my electrical panel, and TURNED ME OFF! I couldn’t believe it. I followed the guy out to his truck still waiting on hold, and asked him what was going on. His reply was that “Your apartment complex wants you to get electricity in your name.”

This came as a huge surprise to me, because I thought I already had electricity in my name.

It turns out that somehow a week ago the apartment complex turned on their power here, and so that seems to have automatically turned mine off. This caused my electricity company to believe I had found another carrier or had moved, and so they were processing my refund check of my deposit.

So after my electricity company figured out that they weren’t supposed to go anywhere, they put in an order for my electricity to be turned on. The bad thing was they didn’t know when it would be turned on. Just that it would be sometime before midnight tonight.

I spoke to the apartment complex office and they were totally surprised they didn’t think they were able to turn off a resident’s power, and were of course sorry that I didn’t have any power now at this time.

So for about 2 hours I would suppose I did with out power, and finally I decided to go to the local Kroger’s to buy a newspaper, figuring if I was going to go all day with out power, there wasn’t a reason for me to stay at home. So I was thinking of taking in a movie today.

As I was entering the apartment complex, the person who had turned off my power, was just pulling away and told me that he had just turned my power back on.

So I’m not sure really what happened, but glad that the electricity found its way back on.