Back to the office today, it was nice to get to see all of the Peoria folks again.  We had a VERY productive day, covering a wide variety of important topics.

Last night I noticed that my rear passenger tire was flat, so I filled it up with air this morning and made it to the office just fine.  I called the rental car company and asked them what they wanted me to do about the flat.  They told me I could go pretty much anywhere and get it plugged and they would reimburse me.  That was more hassle than I wanted to go through, so I asked if I could bring it back and trade it out for another car.  They said I could, so I left work and went straight to the airport to swap it out.

I came home and had dinner with the family, now they’re watching the Tony Awards.  And I’m trying to not watch the Tony Awards.  Tomorrow I get to drive up to the Hale Road office and start two days worth of meetings, so that’s something to look forward to!

Today my Dad, Grandpa, and brother-in-law went out trap shooting!  I haven’t been trap shooting since I was around 10 years old and it was a lot of fun.

Apparently, all my years of running around in Quake and Half-Life has made me pretty decent at trap shooting.  I was pretty consistent all day long.  We finished up the day with some time on the handgun range.

It was a fun day, now I’m off to dinner with the rest of my family!

Today was my first day back home for this week.  My flight was delayed an hour or two, which put me into Peoria after midnight.  It took me a bit to get home and settled, so I had to get caught up on sleep Saturday morning.

After lunch with Matt, Sarah, Suzie, and Eric I went to look at some guitar stuff with my cousin.  That went uneventfully, I got to play his David Gilmour relic stratocaster.  It was pretty amazing!  Had dinner with my folks and my niece, sister, and brother-in-law.  It was a lot of fun, my niece is SO adorable!

That’s all for me, more tomorrow!

I’m heading out to Peoria tonight!  I’m excited to get to touch base with my Peoria coworkers, but even more excited to get to spend a weekend back in Illinois.

In other news, last night I spent a couple of hours getting the remaining posts from my Livejournal migrated over to WordPress. Because of my Livejournal Crossposter that I have installed over at WordPress, this had the unintended result of importing duplicate posts from my Livejournal.  This means I got the esteemed pleasure of deleting a boatload of duplicate posts from my WordPress installation, but at least the history is here.  I’m fairly certain that Livejournal specific tags such as the <lj-user> and <lj-cut> tags didn’t come across correctly and I don’t anticipate spending much time fixing them.  I know the majority of you read this via my Livejournal anyway, this was mostly an exercise in screwing around with WordPress.

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone over this week!  I’m outta here!

Tonight I got home from work a little late and was pleased to find the Return of the King being shown on TNT HD. By the time you add in a ton of commercials, its just now getting over. This movie looks INCREDIBLE in high definition.

While I was watching the movie, I installed Windows 7 on my laptop. They’re providing a public trial of the release candidate, and it really isn’t that bad so far. This also had the added side effect of clearing my hard drive, which was long needed. While that was installing, I got in quite a bit of guitar practice. I’ve been working on my basic chord formations and getting more comfortable strumming.

Tomorrow night I head back to Peoria for a week of work and visiting home!

I got my electric guitar set up today! My coworker has about 40 guitars and has learned how to properly set them up, so I let him have a crack at my new acquisition. He found that the previous owner had locked the floating bridge down to make tuning easier, which isn’t exactly the way the bridge was meant to be treated so he set it back to float properly. This also eliminated some of the fret buzz that was happening because of that setup, did some fine tuning with the bridge and I was set!

I also had my first experience changing strings today. My coworker accidentally left his wire cutters in his other bag (it was about the only tool he DIDN’T have) so he explained to me how to do it and the eccentricities of doing so with a floating bridge. So I came home and gave it a shot, and only screwed up one string that I cut too short prior to tightening it down. After a quick tuning, now I am ready to rock!

It was rainy all day today. I woke up with a stomach ache for some reason and my back spasms were continuing, which wasn’t fun but thankfully I started feeling better (on both fronts) around 2 pm. After I finished up some work, I came home to play my new guitar. I’m going to take it to work tomorrow so one of my coworkers can set it up for me, also about half the guys want to see it. My workplace is a pretty creative, musical bunch so new guitars and instruments are likely to spin off a little conference room jam.

Fun stuff!

My guitar arrived today and it’s a beaut!  It looks very vintage, its used just enough to make it look broken in.  It sounds great on my Crate amp, having a tremelo to play with is fun too.  There’s something about using it that makes you feel like a total rock star!

I went to the music store to get some fresh strings, a new guitar stand, and I splurged on a cool guitar strap.  Tomorrow one of my managers is coming over to set it up for me, I’m really looking forward to playing it some more (after my fingers stop hurting from the amount I’ve played it already).

Been a long, lazy day.  I spent most of the day upgrading StupidRanger.com to WordPress so I can have more control over the spam manager.  We went to the store and watched some TV tonight, including a cool Maroon 5 concert on Palladia.  Now we’re watching Da Vinci Code in HD.

I have to get back to hunting down spam, more tomorrow!

Tonight is D&D night, and we’re about to embark into the portion of the campaign that is my own writing, so its a lot more fun for me!

Not much else to report today… I slept in a ton, we went to the store to get food for the D&D session tonight.  That’s about it, we’re pretty unexciting right now!