Yeah, like so many others of late, I'm hopping off the Myspace bandwagon as well.

In case you haven't noticed, I haven't blogged since May.  I keep trying to come up with reasons why I should, but the interest just isn't there. Also, Myspace is so full of ridiculous amounts of ads... I almost dread logging in just to be inundated with the latest retarded internet meme or pop tartlet du jour. Although I just noticed that they finally put the text editor back, which was one of the main reasons why I stopped blogging in the first place!

Oh yeah, and thanks to the few of you that stop by and check for new entries. True die-harders...that's you.

If you want to get in touch with me, I'll still log in here every once in a blue moon, but I might fire up my never-used other blog on Blogger too, so who knows.

See ya!


fin

I suppose I should apologize for the complete lack of blogging over the last few months.  But I won't, because it's my blog and I'll update when I feel like it. HA! Plus, it's not like I have some vast readership that hangs on my every word like it were gospel.  The few readers that I have are bright, attractive, have social lives, and are immune to any forms of pandering, and therefore don't need to have me twitter about the consistency of my BM's and the philosophical ramifications of them every ten minutes.  I've decided that when I update, I'll make it more like a full-course meal - complete with fingerbowls, dinner rolls, and those little tiny forks that are brought out of the china cabinet once every ten years - and less like grazing for snacks in the breakroom.

The last few months have been pretty nuts. We moved, then spent most of our time unpacking and making the house a home. It's nice now - completely liveable, especially for a fifty-year old house.  We had a hell of a time getting it furnished no thanks to IKEA's lackluster outsourced delivery service, but that's all been resolved and everything's good now...housewise.

I, on the other hand, have had possibly the worst health-related month of my life. Not from contracting some horrible, terminal illness or anything like that, but due to a series of smaller illnesses one after the other.

The first was a horrible bout of strep throat, which got so bad that it inflamed my tonsils and gave me tonsillitis.  For a little while I thought I had to get my tonsils removed, which would have sucked but wouldn't really have been any worse than the hell I was going through at the time, but in the end the throat specialist said I should keep them unless it started happening again.  Two miserable weeks go by, but I got the stomach flu almost immediately afterwards, so I was running back and forth to the bathroom every 30 minutes for about five days.  That went away (yay!), but then I got acute bronchitis (boo!) and spent two more days at home hacking my lungs out. As of this posting, I'm just finally starting to get over everything, but am still keeping Kleenex singlehandedly in business.

As a result of all this crap, I've lost about 10 pounds, some of my sanity, and nearly all of my patience for many things, blogging included.

Life hasn't been all bad though - I got to spend a day with my oldest buds last weekend, which was a lot of fun...part of which was spent seeing the new Iron Man movie (which I thoroughly enjoyed and is now indisputedly my favorite superhero movie, edging out Batman Begins and the first Spider-Man movie).

I also managed to make it out of the house yesterday with Cress and Kayla to go to the Richmond Beach Strawberry Festival in Shoreline, which was a lot of fun, but also oddly nostalgic as the location was in a park that my schoolbuds and I used to toss a frisbee around every once in a while, but now has a small library and tons of kid's play equipment. A little strange, but it was nice to go back and see how things have changed in 15 years.

Speaking of changes, lots of them in store at work. We're staffing up for the summer, which means tons of hiring, interviewing, etc.  Also, it looks as if I'll be taking a trip to the UK in the next couple of months to visit one of our studios.  I'm not sure when that's supposed to happen, but I assume it'll be late next month.  A safer bet would be however long it takes to get my passport renewed as it's been quite a while since I've actually used the thing...

My parents will be coming up from Arizona in late June and staying here for a few months - partially to help out when my sister has her third kid, but also because they're kind of snowbirds, and any excuse to get out of 120° weather is a good one . Anyways, they'll be going back and forth between our place and my sister's (wherever they're most needed at any particular time), which will be quite the commute as the two houses are about 75 miles apart in some of the worst traffic in the nation!

Finally,  Happy Mother's Day to all you moms, soon-to-be moms, and MILFs out there.

Part of the reason I haven't been blogging lately (aside from general disinterest...and the Xbox 360), is that our little house is filled with cardboard boxes full of stuff in anticipation of moving.

Tomorrow.

I figured we should move on Leap Day since it's not a real day (sorry Leap Year babies...it's true), so I could take the day off and oversee the moving process. 

So moving into this new house is the "moving forward" part, as it's the next chapter of our lives. The "moving backwards" part is because the new house we're moving to isn't really "new" to me...I lived there for a while when I was in high school (at Shorewood, not Interlake), and it was my grandparents' house originally.  In fact, we're the third generation of my family to live there, as my parents moved in after my grandparents passed away a while back.

It's been years since I lived there. I graduated high school in 1992 and much has changed in the neighborhood since then. It'll be like living in a time capsule...I look through the house and I can remember vividly how the old carpeting and paint looked, how the front porch used to be, etc.  It's going to be very weird living there. 

Don't think I'm not excited about it.  It'll be great in most respects as it's 1000 ft² larger than our soon-to-be-ex place, it's an area we totally know, and my parents are our landlords (we're renting).  But there are definitely some old ghosts in that place and it'll take some time to get used to.  Plus, the house was built in 1958, so there's some "old-home" quirks and idiosyncracies to figure out.

Those of you interested in our new (old) address for mailing purposes, drop me a line at the usual email address.  Cell number is the same, but we have a new (old!!) phone number too.

PS. I hate the smell of cardboard.

Filler because I haven't blogged in a month. Woo!

I hope yours will be better than '07 was. I know I am. 

PS: To the members of "Juicy Business"...the kick drum pedal has been replaced, and we are now once more ready to rock.  With or without a webcam.

Oh my effin' god.  Rock Band made its way to my house last night.  And I can't even begin to tell you how absolutely badass it is.

If you don't know what the headline means, consider yourself lucky.  But if you do...

...lol.

Hey!

Well, hell, it's been almost two months since my last entry.  Guilt-blogging's never been my forte, but I find it getting harder to just blog about little things all the time, so I have to build up this huge constipated pile of bloggy excrement to make it all worthwhile.  Otherwise, I'd just do a twitter...but I'm not nearly narcissistic (and frankly not interesting) enough to make such an endeavor worthwhile.

Here's what's been going on these last few months!

I need to build up my blogging stamina. I'm totally winded right now.  Where's the scotch??

Okay, so here's a poultry-free update on how life is going with the Schneider clan:

First off, the most important news: Cressie's back brace is a thing of the past. We had our last check-up with the orthopedic specialist on Tuesday, and he was very pleased with the last set of x-rays.  The fracture was essentially healed...and then some, as it looked like the vertebra above the L1 (the fractured one) was beginning to fuse with it to help protect the disc, which must have received more damage than initially thought.  Surprisingly, this is okay. The disc will be better protected, and the fusion is better than disc replacement surgery...

Cress had her first physical therapy appointment yesterday and it went very well. The therapist seems to think it won't take too long to get Cress back to where she needs to be - maybe a month or so.  Hell, that's better than how long it took for my whiplash. That shit went three months!  And I needed chiropractic and massage too!  Just goes to show you how much my wife kicks ass.

So life is starting to resemble normalcy again. Cress has weaned off her meds enough to safely drive by herself (and take Kayla to the store!) and she'll be starting back at work in limited duty on Wednesday.  Once she's fully back to work, we'll be officially back where we belong.

Believe me, we're all ready to put this episode behind us and try to salvage some good out of this year. There's not much left of it now, so we'll take whatever we can get.

Nothing else needs to be said.

Yeah, there have been a lot of Disney movies played at the Casa de Schneider lately.  I awoke to my mother-in-law and my daughter singing this particular song with the gusto usually reserved for the professional or the inebriated.

But the title, as Disney's The Lion King so aptly points out, means "No Worries", so that's almost been my mantra over these last several months, because let's face it, 2007 has been a pretty shitty year thus far for my family and I.

But we are turning the corner and things are getting better (it can't get much worse):

 * Kayla just turned 3 a week ago. We had a small, low-key party for her at our house, and considering how we were stressing hosting a birthday party in Cressie's current condition, it went very well. Good food, an amazing Tinker Bell cake, great presents, and excellent company. Oh yeah, and a Guitar Hero II jam session afterwards.  Kayla was jamming on her own little guitar while we were playing and a good time was had by all.
 * Cressie had a progress check the week before and her fracture appears to be almost fully healed. She has to wear the brace until September 4th, which is our next and hopefully last appointment with her orthopedic specialist.  She's now seeing a pain management specialist (oddly enough, the same one I saw for my accident), and also had her first PT session last week.  Her meds are being adjusted and we're still weaning from the heavy meds with moderate success.  The big thing will be getting that brace off. Then it's party time.
 * Work has been busy as hell, but I found out that I don't have to fly to Austin at the end of the month like I initially thought, so that's good news.
 * I've watched more movies (albeit on dvd) over the last week or so than I have in a long time.  I mean, more adult movies.  Wait, that's not right either (unless you count Orgazmo...lol). I've seen enough Disney movies and others of that ilk to last me the rest of my life, thank you very much.
 *  We got a call from our auto insurance reps and we should be finding out about a settlement for the hit and run thing as soon as tomorrow. Closure would be nice, but if they lowball us on the $$, this could go on for a while...

I'm trying to think of major milestones coming up and I'm failing. The overwhelming one is the back brace coming off.  I'll try to find some blogging time before then but I'll hop back online when it actually happens at the very least.

Okay, bye-bye.

Sorry for the lack of blogging - it's been a pretty busy month and a half as you might imagine.  Here's an update on how things are going:

 - Cressie is progressing nicely. It's a slow process, but there have been no setbacks, so that's a "good thing"™.  She's in a back brace that basically immobilizes her upper body so she maintains good posture while the fracture heals.  She's taken herself off Percocet and is now enjoying a Valium and Vicodin blend twice daily. We figure about two more weeks or so of the Vicodin and then we can move to something like Advil.  I think we end the Valium once this bottle's done, but I may be wrong about that...

 - Her next appointment with the orthopedic specialist she's seeing is on the 31st, so once that's done, I'll update the results here.  We figure she's got about another month or so with the back brace, then she does physical therapy for a few months.

- Cressie's mom is in town and staying with us so I can go back to work.  I'm not sure how long she'll stay, but it seems like it'll be a couple of months at least until Cressie is ready and able to get back to a somewhat normal routine.  Cathy (Cressie's mom) has been wonderful - taking care of both Cressie and Kayla was no easy task for me, but she's picked up the ball and ran with it as only a Mom/Grandma really can LOL. We're lucky to have her here with us, and Kayla is absolutely enamored with her.

 - We've been visited and helped by numerous friends and family since the accident happened and I can't even begin to tell you all how absolutely incredible it's been to have the help and support we've been given.  Our refrigerator has never been so full; Kayla has been on numerous playdates; we've had people doing laundry, yardwork, dishes, housework, you name it. It's been a trying time, but everyone that's helped out has made our lives so much better. It really reaffirms one's opinion on the inherent goodness of the human race to see such outpouring of love and generosity by so many people.  We are forever thankful.

I'll be updating every once in a while when time permits and major things occur. My schedule is still very hectic, so I don't have much time for the frivolous stuff unfortunately.  Thanks for being patient :)