All Kinds of News

Scott Hardie | June 15, 2002
I've been kind of silent on TC lately because I've felt crappy. Besides a cold, I've had nausea and headaches for three days because I'm plagued by nightmares all night, nightmares about running out of money. But a lot of stuff has happened. Here's a quick catch-up.

- We signed the lease this morning, so 4423 Lanier Drive, Tampa FL 33616 is ours. There's still a little work to be done by the contractors (screens on the windows, paint on the garage floor), but it's ready for us to move in. We will move our stuff in on Monday, but the time when we occupy the house will be determined by the water and the electricity, which we can't call about until Monday morning. We do have a phone number, which will be activated sometime on Wednesday. (I will send the number out in an email message; I don't feel comfortable putting it on the web.)

- Lotsa furniture. All very expensive (partly causing my nightmares), but it's worth it to get good stuff, and most of it has lifetime warranties. I bought a six-piece oak desk (three tops, three bottoms) and a very comfortable leather desk chair. Kelly got herself a two-piece oak desk. We also got a huge three-piece pine entertainment center with glass doors. It's so huge that it blocks any window that we put it in front of, so we have to put it on the one solid wall in the living room, which I don't like because that leads to glare on the screen, but hey, what are you gonna do? We are also pretty sure about a couch and an armchair, both olive green with gold trim, but we haven't actually bought them yet.

- Ryan and Brenda Orsucci had a daughter, Jenna Lea Orsucci, on Thursday. Congrats to them. The baby is very quiet so far, crying only when her diaper is changed. Ryan already knows that the baby's initials spell J-LO, but now that she's married to him, Brenda's initials are BLO. Incidentally, Ryan said that down the hall, John and Steph Kiouressis were also having a baby. Those names don't mean much to most people reading this weblog, but a few of you know them. Good for John and Steph.

- We saw two movies: "Ice Age" and "Insomnia". My TMRs say most of what I feel about them. "Ice Age" was bad mostly because it didn't try very hard to be entertaining. It broke no ground in the genre of crappy kids movies. "Insomnia" however was excellent. Nobody can play a man who's been awake for six days quite like Al Pacino can.

- PHP work is progressing nicely, Matt reports. We've got the goo game database working, and he's debugging it now before we begin the long process of data entry. Once we get that done, it's time for an overhaul of Tragic Comedy (to make it more of a bulletin board than a weblog), and the site should be public when that's ready. It will involve user registration - you log in, and it tells you that you still need to guess at the current goo, that your latest entry on TC got so many replies, et cetera. Very cool. In one of the upcoming messages to the goo mailing list, I plan to ask for suggestions on how the game can be improved, since it's about to get an overhaul.

- How to get a free dinner at Don Pablo's Mexican Grill: Get the manager to snap at you. We ate there last night with my mom, and after waiting for half an hour, we finally got a table. It took the waitress another twenty minutes to take our orders. They didn't bring me a spoon for my chili. The food was terrible. The place was incredibly loud (it's a one-story restaurant with a two-story ceiling), and they blared loud music from a speaker behind us. After we finished eating and waited for twenty minutes for the shit-ass waitress to give us our bill, my mom lost her patience and got up to complain. She was still complaining when the waitress finally showed up, so the nervous manager came over to apologize. He took her credit card and started to leave to ring up the bill, but my mom kept complaining to him, and he snapped at her. Suddenly he panicked and handed us the card back and told us to leave, and we darted out of that place, steamed about the terrible service and overall shittiness of the place. We're not going back. I have only been there once before, to one in Virginia with Erik Nelson about four years ago, but it was in the middle of a quiet afternoon and service was just fine.

I plan to write more tonight, but now we're going out to look at and/or buy more furniture. This is gonna be one cramped house.

Matthew Preston | June 15, 2002
The PHP programming is good to go for the Goo Game. Just lots-long-ass data entry now.

I can't wait to see your furniture.

Scott Hardie | June 15, 2002
Yep, lots more furniture today: A couch, a loveseat, two end tables, a dining table with four chairs, a futon for Kelly's room (where guests can sleep), and two paintings. We still need to get a king-sized bed, two nightstands, and some lamps. I don't know when we'll get those.

Stupid U-Haul lost our reservation. The Bradenton U-Haul didn't have it, so they gave us the corporate number, and corporate didn't have it either. The lady said, "We'll try to find you a truck for tomorrow, and we'll call you about it tomorrow morning, okay? Bye!" and she hung up. Thing is, I didn't give her my number, and since they never got my order, they don't already have it. Damn fools better give us a truck when we call 'em in the morning; we want to move into this house bad.

Lori Lancaster | June 17, 2002
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | June 17, 2002
Yeah, the reservation was made online. We called them in the morning and they said they didn't have a 17' truck like we ordered, so they'd give us a 24' truck at no extra charge. When we went to the U-Haul location in the afternoon to get it, they said they didn't have any 24' trucks, so they'd have to give us a 17' truck. These people have no idea what they're doing, I think.