Ah yes, time for the obligatory post about the past 12 months and how wonderful/awful they’ve been.  It seems that everyone tries to do something like this every year as January 1st looms ever closer, but as I sit down and think about everything that’s gone on over the past year, I can see why.  It’s nice to think back on everything and know that you can’t change it, so it doesn’t matter how good or bad it was, you can look at it with a unique perspective and see how the ripples of your actions have grown over time.  At least one thing in life is constant, and that’s time. It moves forward at the same speed no matter what it is you’re doing, but experiences can make you perceive it differently.  There were times that the days seemed to fly by faster than I could enjoy them, and days that crawled by agonizingly slowly, taunting me with each passing moment.

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A little over six months ago Keith and I started looking for a new place to live.  Our apartment lease was set to end in April of this year and we were considered buying a house instead of renting again.  We spent some time looking at houses online, never really finding any that caught our eye.  If we found one that looked nice, it either wasn’t anywhere near us or was way out of our price range.  I finally found a builder that was a little outside the area we had been looking at, but was a great house for an affordable price, so we went to take a look at what would be involved to build a house instead of just buying one.  Little did we know that this would start the most stressful, frustrating, and expensive 6 months of our lives.

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Having worked in the IT field for a number of years, I’ve come across the vast range of users and their comfort level with computers.  There’s the person who knows exactly what they’re doing and came across a genuine glitch in the system and needs help, and then you have the person who can’t figure out how to turn the monitor on every morning. EVERY morning.  I know computers aren’t everyone’s forte, and I don’t hold that against anyone at all – but it all comes down to the difference between ignorance and idiocy.  So let me take a few moments to help provide some helpful hints about how to handle some of the most common problems you might come across.

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My work is doing a blood drive today, something they’ve done one other time since I’ve worked here in the past year.  Last time they did the drive, I didn’t bother signing up or even asking if I could try and donate because I knew the answer would be no.  This time I decided to go ahead and give it a shot.  Maybe the rules have changed.  Maybe things aren’t as strict as they were before.  Maybe the medical world has removed its head from its ass.  Maybe?  And yet…no.  Everything is as it was before, nothing has changed.  Because I am homosexual I am forbidden from giving blood.

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Another year, another Valentine’s Day, but as the years go by I’m learning just how I really feel about this “holiday”.  When I was in high school, if you were single on Valentine’s Day, which I always was, you were considered pathetic.  What’s worse is that you didn’t even have to have other people let you know how sad you were considered, because kids were beating themselves up over it – again, myself included.  There’s some stigma about this day of the year that being single is some horrible thing to be shunned; if you’re in a relationship, it’s sure to be the most romantic day of the year, but if you’re alone then you might as well curl up on the couch with a tub of ice cream and cry into your blanket while watching sappy romantic movies alone, pining for what could’ve been.  Umm…no thanks.

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