Anyway, while I’m not yet ready to show to you exactly what the project is, I want you to know that I have been working on it with renewed vigor recently because I believe in it more than a lot of my other projects I start and inevitably get pushed to the back burner.

The details I’m willing to divulge are that it’s a piece of software for writers. In ways, it exists already but I don’t like how those are implemented and I wanted my version that I can tweak to fit my needs and inevitably share with you for your needs. If it’s a hit, great. If it isn’t, at least it’s fun to work on.

Given my history with the project, there’s no guarantee that it’ll be ready anytime soon but that shouldn’t deter you nor me on its potential greatness or that someday it will be ready. Pester me from time to time and I’ll give you updates.

For holidays and birthdays, buying gifts for my dad is a really hard thing to do. He is a man who needs nothing because he uses what he has as long as it still works. He’s also a man who doesn’t need things just to have them. If he needs something, he really needs it. It’s really frustrating but it’s also one of the things I admire most about my dad.

The problem is, however, that motorcycles can be expensive to maintain. The daily costs of gas and oil changes and spark plugs is relatively low and can easily be done by even a novice mechanic (especially the gas). Since I don’t come from a motorcycle family, there are plenty of things I don’t know how to do nor have the tools to do them or mentors to teach me. This really is a shame as I’d love to be able to do most things myself because I hate having to pay for things I could be doing.

A week and a half ago, I had to take my bike in for long overdue tires and chain replacement. Since I’m still new to the area, I had no idea where to take my bike so I ended up scheduling it at the place a few miles down the road. I dropped it off and was told it should be done the following day (though I couldn’t pick it up until a day later than that because of work).

I should have known that my weekend was going to be a bad one when I got home from work the day after dropping it off to find that the painters who had painted my balcony neglected my plants and dripped paint all over them and knocked them over and it even appears that they stepped on a few. My luscious plants had taken a beating. I notified my landlady of what happened and she said she’d take care of it, but that was only the beginning of my terrible, no good, weekend from hell.

Since my buddy was out-of-town on Saturday when I wanted to pick up my bike, I had no one to give me a lift to get the bike. This didn’t bother me; I actually looked forward to the 2.5 mile trek to start a day full of riding around Southern Wisconsin (I had to go back to my parents and then over to my sister’s place to help her move). To get to the motorcycle shop, it took me a solid 40 minutes of walking. When I got there, I found out that my bike wasn’t ready. I’m a different person today than I was three years ago and I don’t take kindly to being walked all over by people who have no right to it, though I may have let me temper take control more than I should have.

The way I look at it, if I was told my bike would be done on Friday then it should be done on Friday. Their excuse for not having it done was that one of their mechanics called in sick and they couldn’t get through all the work the shop had. Also, they told me, that since I didn’t get a call I shouldn’t be expecting my bike to be ready. I can see how they thought these arguments were valid. The way I looked at it, they weren’t valid arguments for a service business. They said that the bike would be done on Friday and it wasn’t. They knew that one of their mechanics wasn’t coming in that day, so they should have either found a replacement for him so their work didn’t fall behind or they should have notified me that my bike wouldn’t be ready as promised. Neither happened and I ended up walking an hour and a half for nothing.

I asked how long it would take to finish up my bike and the desk guy went and asked the mechanic. He told me an hour. I debated waiting around to get it but I’m glad that I didn’t. It wasn’t until 2.5 hours later that I got a call saying my bike was ready to go. Terrible.

Then Monday after work, three days after my bike should have been ready, I went in to pick it up (I fortunately didn’t have to walk this time as my buddy was around). I get up to the counter and the guys turn to me and say, “We were just talking about you.” Though I never asked about what, I figured it was about how I put up such a fuss about my bike not being ready and then I didn’t come and pick it up as soon as it was. The guy, Mike, went and got my bike while the other guy rang me up. Again, I was not happy with the price that came up. It was $70 more than I was quoted.

As anyone should do, I asked for a breakdown of my charges. $14 was taxed. Fine, I said. $25 was for an inner tube for my tire. They told me it was standard practice when they replace tube tires to replace the tube. When I asked why it wasn’t included in the original quote if it wasn’t standard practice, they said the guy must not have known if I had tube tires. Ask. I know these things. Also, why was only one replaced if it was standard practice? I received no answer on this. $8 was for tire disposal. Again, I feel like this should be included in the original quote as it’s standard. $9 was for wheel weights to balance my tires. I would expect this kind of thing to be included in the charge for “Mount and Balance Tires” but again it wasn’t. And finally, $10 was for “Shop Supplies.” I really wonder what shop supplies my little bike needed for its’ rather basic work.

I was fuming and argue and piss and moan as I might, they refused to do anything to ensure me being a repeat customer. I paid my bill and hightailed it out of there. I made sure to leave a nasty review for them on Google.

In case you were curious, I ran into the painters this morning as I closed up my balcony before work and chewed them out for how the treated my plants. It felt good and I also got the feeling that they’re in cahoots with the same people who worked on my bike because they also had terrible customer service.

And now, because I know if I read through this I’ll get all pissed off again, here’s a picture of me on my bike from back in the day to cheer us all up.

]]> http://sassyhacksaws.com/2013/06/11/terrible-customer-service/feed/ 0 http://sassyhacksaws.com/2013/06/03/the-long-project/ http://sassyhacksaws.com/2013/06/03/the-long-project/#comments Mon, 03 Jun 2013 11:58:36 +0000 Danny Zawacki http://sassyhacksaws.com/?p=5639 Continue reading →]]> At work, I’ve been working on the same project since January. It’ll probably be the highest billed project of the year. For someone who’s still learning things, it’s been a bit of a challenge but a great teacher as I’ve had to dip my hand into a little of everything.

I’ll be the first to admit that the project could have gone smoother. I know I’m new to all of this but that doesn’t mean I’m dumb. The client, for whatever reasons, didn’t have things organized on their end. I had worked directly with one guy who had been tasked with keeping track of all the items that needed to be translated. He was a nice guy to talk to, though he talked a bit too much about non-business related things for my tastes. I prefer to not let myself get distracted or it’s a vicious cycle of not getting stuff done.

Anyway, through one of our conversations he explained why this was a larger project than we usually have. It’s because their product (which I’m convinced is a roller coaster but all the product sheets point towards natural gas refinery) is usually sold with all the literature in English. Well, a sales person made a blunder and promised the materials in Spanish. That’s where my company steps in. They needed everything they send to their customers translated in Spanish. The guy I was talking to reckoned that the salesperson should have been canned due to the amount of money the one sale cost the company. Rightly so.

Well, Thursday I submitted the last of the documents and came home to celebrate with a beer. The next morning, when I got into work I had an email waiting wondering if I knew where two small documents were. I had missed them and set out about getting them translated as quick as I could. An hour later, I get a call informing me that the guy who I’d been in contact with had been fired.

It really came as a shock.

He said he had been told that his place had been eliminated. He had gotten a nice severance to satisfy him. But everyone at my company couldn’t help but notice the coincidence. Less than twelve hours after his work on the project had been completed, he was sent packing. Maybe it was just a coincidence but it surely didn’t feel that way.

I like cooking and I like eating and I like writing. It’s simple enough, no?

Well, that’s not all of it. Back in March I was damned close to getting my foot in the door at a publishing company as an editor. I had applied back while I was in Peace Corps and the guy in charge emailed me back and asked me to resubmit my application with a few more items that the hiring process would need, but closer to when I’d be home. I did. Then I heard nothing.

Then I heard something. I was told within the month I should be hearing about an interview. The month passed. I waited and waited and the whole time I was expecting it to be an out from the job I wasn’t enjoying at the time but now has grown on me.

Then I finally heard back, about six months after my first application. The guy wanted to know more and specifically what my background is in their two niches (crafting and cooking). I didn’t have any formal training in either nor did I spend much time working on either (I cooked, but I didn’t work on improving my cooking). I explained this and said that I’m a fast learner and be more than willing to immerse myself in whatever I needed to. He said thanks, but no thanks because he needed people with experience. Catch-22 is a common theme when looking for a job. Also, thanks for stringing me along for six months, guy.

That’s about the time I decided to start a food blog. While I was living at home and commuting 70 minutes each way, it wasn’t really easy to dive into a recipe and eat at a normal hour so I kept putting it off until I had my own place. That day arrived and now I’m going to be updating from time to time. I want to build that experience that I was lacking and somewhere down the line turn it in my favor to be gainfully employed by it.

I hope you enjoy it.

Then I got this medal:

 This medal got me thinking about what brought me to the point where I was ecstatic to receive a medal that had no sign that I was better than other people but merely stated that I tried and succeeded. It’s the medal I got from running, and finishing, a half-marathon this past weekend. It was the hardest medal I ever earned.

I trained for a month to get ready for the half-marathon and during that time the longest I ran was 8 miles. I felt like a white rapper (for the record, I’ve used that joke every time I tell someone about that milestone). Then the day of the race came and I hadn’t ever known what it was like to run 13.1 miles consecutively. As I lined up with the 2:10 pace crowd, I assured myself that then was as good of a time as any to learn.

Blah blah blah. I can try to make it into something more than it was but when it gets boiled down, I finished a race that I was unprepared for. I stepped up to the line with the only thought of, “Dear lord, what have I gotten myself into? I hope I can at least finish sub-two hours.”

The beginning was deceptively easy as I pass all the people around me (once I made it out of the horde of tightly packed runners). Then came the first and tallest hill. I think it might even have been the steepest. It was a breeze. I flew through the first seven miles. Then I hit the proverbial wall. It was right about the time I got deep into the UW Arboretum where the course led us. It was at that point the only way to stop was to get out of the Arboretum because there was only one long road that wound its way through the place. I couldn’t stop. I didn’t stop.

When I made it through, there was a group of cheering people not for anyone in particular. It felt good hearing the cheers, though. They had drinks and some sort of energy gel (which I avoided). I was refreshed only enough to get me to the last hill where all hopes in the race went to die. It was steep, tall and ten miles in. It was cruelty at it’s finest. I wasn’t the only one swearing as we inched our way up but I made it.

As I rounded the second to last corner of the race, I got a pleasant surprise. My good friend Joe had come out to cheer me on. The sight of him gave me a burst of energy I should have used to finish the race but instead I wasted it on cheering for him cheering for me and running over to give him a hug without breaking stride.

In the end, I finished the race in 1:49:01. That was about 25 minutes faster than my buddy who conned me into the race. I also later found out that I knew another guy running the race who was always training for races and running them. It made me feel better when I looked up his time and found out I beat him by just over a minute.

Medal earned.

On an unrelated note, Marley has a new friend:

 Also, I cooked some broccoli today, go read about it.

However, however, I need to maintain the bike. This is something I’ve struggled with as I don’t know anyone else with a bike and I’ve learned all the maintenance as I go. The simple things like oil changes and spark plug checking I can do on my own, but for the bigger things, I need to have someone else take care of it. That’s the case with my Nighthawk now.

For two years, she was pretty much neglected as I wasn’t around to ride her. The gas went bad, the chain rusted, a layer of dust collected on it. DUST! Not on my watch would that have happened.

Granted, the chain had needed replacing for some time now and the tires certainly didn’t wear themselves thin sitting in my dad’s garage. I could have taken better care of the bike had I had the money. It’s expensive; a weeks wages to replace the tires, chain, and sprockets. It’ll be worth it in the end, once I have my bike working again.

How about a quick update post to catch you up on my life? The important parts, at least.

I’m training for a half-marathon. I’ll be running it with one of my childhood friends next Sunday. It was his idea, but I’ve really embraced it. I’ve been in heavy training for the past couple of weeks and I feel like I’m in the exact shape I need to be for the longest distance I’ll have ever run. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I get up early before work and get in a decent workout. If I have the time on weekends, I go for a longer run. Not sure if I’ll have time this weekend as the girlfriend in visiting before she jets off to France. Maybe I’ll squeeze in an hour run one of the days, early in the morning before it’s too warm.

I can’t remember if I mentioned this or not, but when my three month review came up in March I was ready to be fired. I thought I had been doing terribly and making a lot of mistakes which were costing the company money. On the contrary I heard almost nothing but praise. One criticism I received was that I need to be better at communicating. My dad tells me that this is a criticism he’s received more often than not on his yearly reviews. I’m doing my best to avoid hearing it for next year. Anyway, with that review came both confidence and a nice raise. Needless to say, I’m staying with it for a now. I’m pretty sure I didn’t mention this before, but I was on the fence for  while about whether or not I’d stay with the job. It’s really grown on me.

The most recent development in my life is that I’ve gotten a place of my own. It’s bigger than I probably need but not too big (Peace Corps imparted a spartan way of life on me that I can’t seem to shake). I moved in at the beginning of the month. I’ll try and post pictures now that things are mostly in their places. It’s nice being closer to work because I get to sleep in but it’s really nice having a great friend within the same city. That was one of the hardest parts about staying with my parents, I really only knew them in town.

Finally, I’m starting to get back on the motorcycle. After having two years of not being able to ride it, I thought I’d be on it the first chance I got. While the weather hasn’t been ideal, I really haven’t made a point to ride like I used to. I think I’ve been scared to get back on. After not riding for so long, you lose the confidence that you usually have. I don’t take turns as aggressively. I don’t put the extra oomph into accelerating. I’m afraid I’m going to take a spill and never get back on the bike. Also, the bike needs a decent tune up as the two years of riding seem to have helped it forget how to be a smooth riding bike. I’m going to try and do the tune up myself, but I need to price the tools I’ll need for parts of it.

That’s all I’m writing for tonight. I need to get up early tomorrow for a relaxing run before work followed by a hot date.

Me: I wish I could have been better at baseball.

Dad: Me too.

This was my equation:

z + m(y – 400) = x

But the 400, the amount I spend on gas a month was wrong. I checked it the other day after I filled up my car, a 2007 Kia Rio (see photo), and I got 37 mpg. I average only $265/month for gas. The new equation should read:

z + m(y – 265) = x

So I should really plug in the new numbers and update my math an all but I know it won’t make a huge difference so I’m just going to show you the promised picture of my Kia Rio.

 Isn’t she great?

]]> http://sassyhacksaws.com/2013/04/08/i-was-wrong-about-math/feed/ 0 http://sassyhacksaws.com/2013/03/30/figuring-student-loans-and-stuff/ http://sassyhacksaws.com/2013/03/30/figuring-student-loans-and-stuff/#comments Sun, 31 Mar 2013 02:42:48 +0000 Danny Zawacki http://sassyhacksaws.com/?p=5604 Continue reading →]]> I was doing some math the other day with my student loans and my bank account and my income. It was half depressing and half uplifting.

You see, I have x amount of student loan debt and I make y amount of money per year.

y > x

I also have z amount of money in my bank account.

z < x < y

However, I figured at my current earning rate plus my current bank account it will take me 5 months to pay it off and still have $200 in change. Therefore:

z + m(y) = x + 200

I like the looks of that. But if I factor in gas, the equation changes a little. I spend roughly $400/month on gas. Let’s subtract that from the monthly income of y:

z + m(y – 400) = x

If I plug-in the numbers I know, and won’t share because finances should be private, I come out with m = 5.87. Let’s round it to a nice, even 6 months (that way I’ll have a bit left over).

I think I can deal with student loans for that long. Everything after that is profit. Or car payments. I don’t want to factor those in now.

Harrison Ford as Col. Graff

Years ago, I was given a copy of Ender’s Game as a birthday gift (my tenth birthday, I believe). Fewer years ago, I got it signed by Orson Scott Card. Most of the years since, I’ve read that book. It’s a great story but I don’t think it can be done justice in a film.

Here’s my problem with it. The actor who will play Ender is going to be 15 when the movie is released in November. That’s really not following the book. Ender is 6 when he’s taken to the battle school. This is right after he kills a boy. While he’s at school, he kills again. By the time he does the important stuff near the end of the book, he still isn’t 15. To me, that’s important.

Part of what makes this book so intriguing is that these are kids doing horrific things. Make them older, and it’s a little more plausible.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to see the film but that doesn’t mean I’m going to be happy about it.

Work has also been keeping me busy. In a surprise turn of events, I had my three-month review at work and found out that they didn’t want to fire me. In fact, they seem to really enjoy having me as an employee. Seriously, though, who doesn’t? Also, seriously, I thought they were going to fire me because I had made so many mistakes at work in the recent weeks. Nope. I got a raise instead. I’ll take it.

I’m still living at home since coming back from Ukraine. I had an apartment lined up but I didn’t end up moving in for a few different reasons. The most significant one is that it’s easier to pay off student loans when you don’t need to pay rent. For the time being, my parents understand the situation but I don’t want to over-stay my welcome. I think this summer I’ll start looking for my own place. With any luck, I’ll have the majority of my loans paid off by then. I paid off one of them this month and it felt great. I want that feeling every month until they’re gone.

The NES HTPC is happening.

Still dating the same girl.

When will Spring get here? I want to take my Honda out of the garage and get in a good ride. Also, a friend of mine finally wants to learn how to ride. Looking forward to teaching him.

But the time for me to tell grandma that she’s done drinking has ended. Yesterday, March 15, 2013, grandma Ferraro passed away.

Her life is a story I’ve been working on telling for a while and I never seem to know where to start. I want to start at the beginning and tell where she was born back on June 16, 1938 but it feels too sterile. I want to say her beginning came earlier with her ancestors coming to America. I want to think that maybe her story really begins later in life when she met George Ferraro who she ended up marrying and having four children with. Maybe her story really begins with her grandchildren, of which she had nine. But I really don’t know where to start. All I really know is how to end the story.

Around the same time I left for Ukraine, Grandma was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia, a rare form, I’m told. It pained me to think that she’d have to fight it and I’d not be around if anything happened. But life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans, as they say. Each week, when I talked to my parents, I asked about Grandma and heard about her ups and downs and new treatments. It was a slow and steady decline. Towards the end, I wondered if I’d be home in time to say my goodbyes.

Grandma was a fighter. She had already fought breast cancer and won. I knew she could hold her own, but she was fighting a losing battle. When she beat breast cancer, she was much younger. She had the strength to fight as long as she needed to. The leukemia was a stronger breed than the breast cancer had been and Grandma was much older. In the back of our minds, we knew it’d be her end.

In November, when I surprised my family on Thanksgiving, Grandma was the first to see me. She was tired, but still full of energy and she was happy. Since that time, her decline increase its pace. She was taken off the special treatments because it was causing more harm than good. Her blood transfusions increased in frequency and decreased in effectiveness. Each week, there was a stark contrast from the earlier week.

In early February, I went and spent a day with Grandma just talking. She told me how she had remembered more and more about the old days. Memories would come out of no where. She’d tell them to me and I’d listen. Some I had heard before, some not. She seemed healthy that day when I left.

A few weeks later, I visited again and I knew the time was near. Her body was breaking down quickly and it scared us. “She was fine when I saw her last,” we’d say to each other. “I can believe how weak she looks.”

After that visit, I saw Grandma at least once a week until now. I’d visit for my sake and to take friends and family to visit her and say their goodbyes. It was hard knowing that the time was near, but it felt good knowing that Grandma could say her goodbyes to everyone that could make it. By the time had come, she had seen nearly everyone that we figured she’d want to see. Only one or two hadn’t been able to come in time. That comforts me.

On Thursday, my mom called me at work to let me know that Grandma had taken a turn for the worse. Mom had stayed with Grandma for the week to take care of her while Hospice wasn’t around. She had told me that each day was worse that the previous but I wasn’t ready for what I faced Thursday night. Grandma had been moved to a hospital style bed near the windows in the living room. She was weak, frail, and not able to open her eyes. She couldn’t speak but she could hear. For the first time, I realized what her sickness had done to her. It hurt to look at her. She was in pain. Everyone in the room was in pain.

I stayed for a bit on Thursday. Before I left, I kissed her forehead and said, “Goodbye, Grandma.” At that moment, I knew I wasn’t saying goodbye. I was saying goodbye. The French have two goodbyes in their language, “au revoir” means “until I see you again” and “adieu” means “goodbye, with finality”. This was, adieu.

She passed away five hours later.

Someday, I’ll have more stories about Grandma. I’ll tell her life from the beginning until the end and you’ll understand what a great woman she was. But today, all I know is the end though I desperately try to remember anything but.

Joanne T. Ferraro’s Obituary

 But seriously, Steve is finally coming home after an extended stay in Ukraine for paid work. It’s time to welcome him home in style.

But I digress.

I read comics (I also tried my hand at writing them too, does anyone remember that?). When I went off to college, I wanted to continue reading them and I didn’t have access to my parents’ Sunday paper. I had Badger Herald comics, but they weren’t the good, syndicated ones I’d known. Fortunately, the internet has a great feature. You can get the things you need for free if you know where to look. Lucky for me, getting the comics I wanted was easy because the syndicates put them up for free and gave me a multitude of options for reading them. I chose to use an RSS reader and I had it filled up with about 20 different comics at its peak.

Jump forward to about a year ago when finally, after telling people for years that I had read Garfield every day to give it a fair shot, that Garfield no longer showed up in my RSS feed. Well, a link to the comic hosted on the syndicate’s website showed up but not the real comic. I was thrilled because I finally had a reason to stop reading Garfield because despite the fair shot, I never once laughed or enjoyed myself. I gave it a fair shot, but it gave up on me. What I didn’t expect was that Garfield giving up on me was only the beginning of the end of it all.

You see, in recent weeks, a lot of my comics started giving up on my the same way Garfield did. I’m no longer getting the image in my RSS reader, just a link to their site. I know why they do it and it’s all about money. You don’t get the ad revenue for your site if people read your work elsewhere. But then, I say, why don’t you put an ad at the end of the RSS post? Before I do anything else when I install a web browser these days, I make sure to install the ad blocker, yet I’m not bothered in the slightest by advertisements embedded in an RSS feed. To me, that sounds like a fair trade-off for me viewing their work, no?

Then I started thinking about the comics I read and I realized some of them already did this and they were some of the first to leave me. Maybe it doesn’t work as well as I thought?

I guess the point of this whole rambling post is to say that I’m starting to be rehabilitated of my comic addiction but not by choice. Internet, be good again is all I ask.

You’re welcome internet.

]]> http://sassyhacksaws.com/2013/02/23/the-internet-is-for-cats/feed/ 0 http://sassyhacksaws.com/2013/02/21/an-octopus-in-the-mouth/ http://sassyhacksaws.com/2013/02/21/an-octopus-in-the-mouth/#comments Fri, 22 Feb 2013 02:56:00 +0000 Danny Zawacki http://sassyhacksaws.com/?p=5555 Continue reading →]]>

 This is what we ordered as an appetizer on the last date I was on. We both read the menu and it said, “Baby Octopuses” but neither of us thought they’d actually be whole, baby octopuses.

She had a few, and I ended up eating most of them. We both struggled with the idea of putting a whole octopus in our mouths. I forced myself to struggle less because I didn’t want them to die in vain.

Side note, we considered releasing them into the fish tank near the door in hope that the water would revive them but deep down we knew it wouldn’t. The soy sauce we put on them didn’t make a difference and that was evidence enough.

My problem lies in where to go from here. I don’t know where to start editing and how to go about editing. I don’t have any writer friends to ask, sadly. I suppose there’s a guy at work who considers himself a writer but I have a feeling I’d disagree with his process. I know we’re far from being the same kind of writers.

I can’t decide if I should follow the structure that’s already in place and make minor edits in line or if I should use the structure in place as a outline and rewrite the whole thing from scratch. I doubt that makes a lot of sense, but that’s my dilemma.

Also, while I have my typewriter working, it’s far from perfect. I need to tinker with it a bunch to get it in its sweetspot. Becauee of this, I’m again learning that the internet is distracting.

If you can help me with any of my problems, I’d appreciate it.

For those of you who don’t know, an au pair is typically a young woman who lives in a home and raises the children. For some reason, my mind considers this something different from a nanny. Oftentimes, it seems, they’re from different countries.

Lyuda had three years of being exposed to Americans in full force because we made her our friend. I’m guessing at least half the time we did things that made no sense to her, based on the culture she grew up in just like her culture didn’t make sense to us half the time. She put up with us because that’s what friends do, and we were relentless in wanting to be friends.

Lyuda also had never been far from home. To us Americans, this seemed a bit unusual considering we all were living 5000 miles from home. We all wanted her to come see the world with us. We all extended personal invitations for her to come visit us.

So when I heard that she had a chance to come visit for an extended period and at very little cost to her, I was ecstatic. I was even happier to hear that she’d be a short drive away from me in Wisconsin, even closer if I moved to the Chicago area as I’ve hoped to do. I dreamed of showing her pizza. Of driving her around and showing her the countryside. I dreamed of driving her around to show her the relatively smooth roads. I dreamed that she’d finally start to understand the 50% of the things I’m guessing she never figured out, but rolled with regardless.

But then those dreams were shattered. It was a scam. The profile on the online au pair site had been taken down because it was flagged. Lyuda wasn’t coming to Chicago and it made me sad inside.

I was sad because I wouldn’t get to see my friend in the way I had imagined (though she still promises she’ll take us up on our invitations some day). However, I was more sad that there are people on the internet who are trying to scam people who just want to see the world. People who want to get away from home for a bit, maybe forever. They want to scam people before they can have a chance to live elsewhere and realize that home is where they were meant to be.

Why, Internet, must you be so horrible at times. I’ve seen your good side but why must you show your bad side? Your bad side reminds me of worse things, like human trafficking and I know you’re above that. I know you can be better. But you aren’t. You insist on being good, bad, and ugly. And you’re the reason my friend has to think twice before accepting an offer to see her friends.

I needed to start somewhere, right? Aside from getting the formatting correct in Scrivener, I wanted to do something today so I decided to design a cover. Take a gander:

What was also great about this was that I got to practice a method of colorizing black and white photos. I had found it a few months back and wanted to try it, but hadn’t had a reason. It’s not perfect but I think it looks cool. I’ll clean it up before it goes to press.

Is this a good idea, or a horribly bad one?

I’ve really only ever seen the recent Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, and From Russia with Love. So this actually could be a bad idea and I don’t even know.

You may notice me in some of the photos, I’m the good-looking guy that is more often than not standing next to the groom in the spot reserved for the best man.

Groom and the Best Man Photo credit: A Sunshine Moment (http://asunshinemoment.com)

Recently, someone pointed out a nice inforgraphic which gives some important facts on the matter and I thought I’d share it with you. Enjoy:

Source: OnlineClasses.org