Is this thing on?

     Miss me?  It certainly has been a while since I have been around these parts.  It is almost like opposite year, in that last year I blogged almost every day and now I barely blog at all.  Truth be told, things have been happening, but the things that have been happening border on those lines in the sand I sometimes mention here, where there are things that I just don't believe are for public consumption.  So, no you don't get the whole story, just what I want to tell you as a biased observer of my own life.

     With that being said, I will say that things have been difficult at times between Jen and I since my last blog on here.  There have been missteps on both our parts, but we seem to be working through things, which is a good thing.  But the last month could easily be described as the hardest month we have had together to date.  I will not go into details as to everything that happened because that is where the line gets drawn.  

     As for other things, well they are what they are I guess.  Work continues to get piled up on my desk at work, I am now in charge of most of the ordering at our other downtown store, which sucks because I am pretty sure I have enough on my plate already.  

     The only plus about work these days is that I was clued in on something that I was previously unaware of.  As you know, because I deal with so many vendors at work, there are a decent number of freebies that come across my desk.  Some of those things get doled out to staff, other things I get to keep for myself.  Well, as I am at work the other day I see that a promotion card had come in the mail from Pepsi regarding a program called Pepsi Rewards Plus.  Now I knew nothing about this, I asked around, no one in management was aware of this program, so I really didn't know what to make of it.  So I went and do what I always do when it comes to the potential of free stuff, I did some investigating.  Turns out that we were getting points for all of the orders we were making and these points were being put into an account, which could then be redeemed for prizes, or as luck would have it, Amazon gift cards.  So I managed to snag a cool $150 or so in Amazon cash thus far, which is nice.  I like when I can get free stuff from the web.  I have already bought a few things with the money I have gotten there (in addition to my giftcards from Swagbucks).  Since I have found out about this program I have managed to get a few things for Jen; a set of wooden spoons, a watch, Yahtzee and the newest Final Fantasy game for Xbox, I got my cousin a juicer for her 40th birthday and I even picked myself up a new set of Corelleware.  The thing is I still have around $70 in my Amazon account.

     Of course I could use that for books, but I still have plenty of reading material to get to, and the gods have not been helpful in that regard.  I finished two books this year and was just starting to get into a third book, the newest Stephen King ("11/22/63") that my mom had gotten me for Christmas.  I was doing quite nicely too, I had read a little over 100 pages in just a couple of days, when I was reading page 116 and saw that a sentence continued on the next page.  Except it didn't, the next page was the beginning of a new chapter of the book.  I was a tad bit confused.  Then I looked at the bottom of the page and saw what was wrong.  The copy of the book I had went from page 116 to 149, and all of the pages in between were missing.  Now because I didn't start reading this for better than a month after Christmas, I don't even know if my mom has the receipt for me to return it or exchange it for another copy.  And I am hooked enough into the story that I would like to finish reading it, so I may just try contacting the publisher first and see if I can get a new copy from them.  

     While I am catching up on things here I guess I would be remiss if I didn't do some updates around here as well.  The change meter goes up by another $1.54 and the new total is $319.67.  Plus I continue to just rock the Coke points.  After cashing out in December for 1500 points so I could get Sammy an 8 GB MP3 player, I managed to pull another 570 points together to give Jen a year's subscription to Pogo and I am already back to 126 points again.  That is due in large part to the fact I have been keeping up with taking a long walk on most Sundays, just this morning I took one where I found 62 points.  Hey, as long as people will throw away free stuff, I will gladly take it.

     Well, that is enough blogging or one day, I don't want to prattle on too long, lest you thing I actually do this regularly or something.