So… I have a new found appretiation for the Department of Motor Vehicles in the state of Michigan. For my entire life, everyone has always talked about how horrendous it was go have to go to the DMV. How it was crowded, the people were rude, the lines were long and you had to wait forever. To all of you Michiganders who think they know the deal… F’koff. First off, I never had any of those problems in Michigan. I never made an effort to go at times when people wouldn’t be there, I was too lazy and unorganised for that. There were never more than 6 or 7 people and I never waited more than 20 minutes. Half the time, I walked in and the person behind the counter told me not to bother grabbing a number, and called me right up. As for rudeness? I’ve never been treated rudely at the DMV, and in fact, have always been treated very nicely. You do your thing, get a temporary paper license, and your card is mailed within 2-3 weeks.

And secondly? Screw all that. Flordia’s DMV is unbelievable. I’ve never seen a more rediculous concept in my life. They’re not open five days a week, which I can understand. But, not every one of them deals with driver’s licensing. So, within a 50 mile radius, (and mind you I live in Orlando… which one would think could be considered a failrly large city, but not enough to warrant a large enough supply of these places apparently…) there are three facilities. Everyone says, “Make an appointment.” So, figuring that it makes a lot of sense, I get the number and call. And call, and call, and call… I call for a week, and get a busy signal every time. Now… In the info I read online it said that if you have a current license from a certain list of states, MI being one of them, that all you have to do is go in and they give you a FL license. My MI licese expired on my birthday (I turned 21, that’s the first time you have to renew MI licenses, because your birth date is red when you’re under 21 and black when you’re not.) and the all the info said “valid license” and an expired license isn’t valid. So I was under the impression that I had to get in there before my birthday and get this taken care of. (And since I still hadn’t managed to get ahold of anyone on the phone, I had no way to verify.) So… figuring that I didn’t really want to spend Valentine’s day at the DMV, I made the decision that if I hadn’t gotten an appointment by Tuesday the 12th, I was just going to drive out there on Wednesday. And yes, Tuesday came and went. So we left at 7am on Wednesday to get there early. We got there in plenty of time, there were only 20 or so people, the check in line was fairly short. And while I was waiting, I got all my stuff together so I would be ready when I got up there. But, of course not. We had gone out to a club the previous Friday to hear a friend of Nickie’s spin, and I managed to leave my ID in the pocket of those pants and not realise it until I was next in line. AND instead of staying in line and asking if my passport would work OR staying in line and getting a number (Nickie: “They’ll call your number before we get back.” Right.), we took off for home. By the time we got back (which was only 45 minutes later…) and got checked in, I was handed number 60. They guy asked if I wanted to make an appointment, but I said no, since the earliest was the following week, and I needed it done by Saturday. We sat down to wait.

At 10:30, they called number 19.

People around us were talking about the previous day, and how after a certain time, they told everyone else waiting to leave, because they weren’t going to have time to get to everyone. I realised that I would probably get arrested for murder if we waited there all day and then got sent home. I joined in the conversation, offering up my plight as another story for discussion, including the whole thing about my license expiring and some woman across from me says, “They’ll honour it for 10 days after expiration. You should go make an appointment.” What? I sat there for about 10 more minutes. (Nickie and I were in the middle of a playing that game anyway… the one where you make a bunch of dots on paper in a sort of grid and take turns putting lines between the dots and whoever ends up making the most boxes wins.) Then I got up and walked over to the counter and asked about the grace period. Sure enough, it was true. So I made an appointment for Wednesday the 19th. And we left.

Now… the guy seemed a little out of it… or like he was having trouble understanding what I was asking with regards to the license expiring… And I was not about to have to take a driver’s test and whatnot… So I decided to call one of the other places to see if I could get in that day. (This one was almost an hour away, but if it meant not taking the test, it would be worth it.) Again, the number was busy, but then I actually got through. First she thought I was asking how long I had after moving to FL I had before I was supposed to get a license (which is supposed to be 30 days, but no one enforces it) but then she figured out what I was asking. “You have 6 months after it expires.” Oh.

So I went on the day of my appointment and waited for about 10 minutes. I wasn’t treated rudely, but wouldn’t say nicely either. It took about 10 minutes to get everything into the system and about 2 minutes for them to get to taking my picture. The only neat thing is that they make the card that day. That took about 2 more minutes. And we went home.

So… In conclusion… The only thing FL DMV has on MI is that you get your card that day. And the only way to conquer the Florida DMV is to think months in advance and make an appointment.

The picture turned out pretty good too.

Keep in mind my birthday is February 15th. This is dated the 16th because it’s after midnight and I just sat down to write it.

You turn a key age and you’re supposed to go do the things that you couldn’t do before. Eighteen and you go to certain dance clubs, strip clubs and bars, and buy a pack of smokes. You rent porn videos and go into porn stores. Nineteen, in applicable locations, you drive to Canada, go out to any bar or dance club, and buy alcohol. Twenty-one, and you are as adult as you can be in the United States according to everything but car insurance. You gain nothing more than access to all bars and clubs and can buy alcohol. Really, if you haven’t been drinking before that, you’ve been living under a rock. In a dry county. Just means you can buy it now. Or, twenty-one in my case means that I can hang out with my friends at some local pool hall that is 21+ for some stupid reason.

Anyway we never really had any plans made for what to do on my birthday. Again I slept in until 10 something at night and that was essentially too late to do anything. I had really wanted to go out to a dance club… I hadn’t touched alcohol in a year exactly (except for a couple of sips on New Year’s, and that was sips of Bailey’s…) and didn’t really want to go out to a bar, since you go to bars to drink. I don’t drink. Anyway… I was ready to go at about 11:30, and Nickie found a club in Citywalk that was open until 3, which would give us the most amount of time. Fish had wanted to go out with us and get me drunk.. He’s usually out somewhere drinking, and this was an actual excuse… Either way he’s always trying to get us to go out somewhere with him. Well, we called him on the way to the club, and since it was kind of far away, he didn’t want to drive, so we turned around and met him back at the apartment. He ended up talking us into going to a restaurant/bar right near the apartment, which didn’t take a whole lot of coaxing since Nickie was hungry anyway. I wanted to go to a dance club, and since that wasn’t happening, I really didn’t care either way. So to the restaurant we went. We didn’t wait long, went to the bar and started the drinking before sitting down. I went though half of a fruity-vodka drink, half of a Red-Headed Slut, a Beam Me Up Scotty, and we ordered food as well. Fish decided he had to order me a Greatful Dead because it’s “like a Long Island iced tea, but it tastes like a Flintstone’s vitamin.” This place actually kicks you out at 2am. “It’s quarter to two, you have fifteen minutes to finish your drinks.” Anyway… There was no way I was going to get through the rest of the Greatful Dead… The waiter brought me another Beam Me Up Scotty, on the house, for my birthday… Which, to my dismay, ended up getting tipped over on the table. 2am and they turned the lights up and booted us all out. To everyone’s suprise, mostly my own, I chugged the rest of the Greatful Dead (which for the record tastes exactly like a Flintstone’s vitamin). Either way… I had fun, and the whole experience reminded me why I hate drinking. I’ve been drinking water since I got home, and took a couple Advil, and I should be fine.

It wasn’t really what I was expecting or what I thought I wanted. But I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting or what I thought I wanted. I had a great time, got to hang out with friends… And Nickie’s going to take me out to a dance club sometime soon when we can leave earlier. So yes.. Happy birthday to me. *smile*

I ended up staying up until noon-thirty or something close to it, and took something to help me sleep. Nickie kept asking me what time I needed to go to sleep to be up at 5, but that didn’t end up happening. He wouldn’t tell me why I needed to wake up, only that I should dress up. I kept asking what we would do if I didn’t get up in time, but he said that it would be fine, that we could do it tomorrow, so I should sleep until I wasn’t tired anymore. I ended up sleeping really late and I got kind of upset when I thought that I was going to miss out on my surprise. It was already 9pm, but he called “the place” and they said they were seating until 11:30. I walked into the bathroom to get ready and turned on the light to see, and walked back out into the bedroom to get something and on my desk was a bouquet of roses, a little box and a card. Nickie had made the card for me, it had a key and a heart on the front. The box was a little heart shaped candy dish, sparkly red on the bottom and clear on the top with a bear on it and pink, red and white runts inside. I cried. I wasn’t really expecting anything for Valentine’s day… We aren’t doing so great right now, and I figured we’d just end up spending the evening together doing something nice… It caught me off guard. And it made me very happy.

Anyway… Rush rush rush, we managed to get ourselves ready to go. Nickie had said to dress up, and I didn’t have anything to wear. So I decided to go with cute and punky instead of nice, and wore a little school girl outfit. As it turns out, the surprise was the Cheesecake Factory. This is an upscale restaurant that has 30 different flavours of cheese cake as well as fabulous food. Anyway… We got there at about 10:30 and we were seated at about 11:30. During the time we waited, we looked through the menu and figured out what to order so there wasn’t any waiting once we sat down. We ordered an appetizer, which was fantastic, but neither of us could finish our dinners, let alone eat cheesecake. So we got our leftovers and a whole slice of cheesecake to go. Our server was great. I had her ask the manager if they could serve me alcohol at midnight, since it was my birthday, but the manager said no. Wasn’t a big deal or anything… I was drinking a super keen peach smoothie thing anyway. Tasted like real peaches!

At about 12:30, we finished up and headed home. We thought about trying to find someplace to go hang out for the rest of the being-out-able night. Our server suggested hitting a bar on the way home, and mentioned one, and coincidentally, I had remembered a couple of our friends mentioning that they were planning on going to the same bar. But we called them, and they had gone someplace else and Nickie didn’t know where that was. So we went home.

I was disappointed that I had forgotten my camera to take pictures while we were out to dinner. So when we got home, I started taking all sorts of pictures of Nickie and the flowers and the candies and so on, and Nickie took pics of me.

I had talked about wanting a pretty princess tiara to wear on my birthday, and Nickie promised me that we’d go looking for one tomorrow, but I decided we might as well go look for one now, since we had nothing better to do. And where do you look for anything at 6am? Walmart! We got there and went to the toy section, the idea being that I could pull off wearing a cheesey plastic kiddy tiara. But the only one was huge and purple, and that wasn’t quite the idea I was going for, so we headed elsewhere. Somewhere along the line, I decided that I needed some supplies for a present I was planning to make for Nickie. So we picked up posterboard and headed for the back of the store. We wandered through the fabric section and I talked about making something to wear for my birthday, but you can’t buy fabric afterhours because there’s nobody there to measure it and cut it for you. So we left there and spent time sitting in the craft section while I picked out paints. Then by some bizarre chance, Nickie turned around, and on the other half of one of the aisles was wedding supplies and nestled in the middle was a pretty princess tiara. I ripped one of them out of the box and tried it on, but we decided to wait and actually shop for one tomorrow, since deduction implied that wedding stores probably sell them. So armed with paints, brushes and posterboard, we headed home.

Nickie sat up for a while longer and then went to sleep, while I retreated to the living room and proceeded to make a mess into a masterpiece. And made Nickie a (late) Valentine’s picture that says on it “love makes us beautiful.” Not sure why it says that… but that’s what I thought to put on it while I was making it, so that’s what it says. And he had said something about liking banana runts the best, and how he divides them up and saves the banana for last. So I bought him a box of runts with 2$ I found in the pocket of the pants I had dug out of the bottom of the drawer to wear that night… and divided out the banana ones and put them in one little present and the rest in another one. I woke him up to give it to him. He loved it.

And that is how it went and how I got to where I am now… Sitting here writing about the best Valentine’s day I’ve ever had. Nickie did everything to make me feel like I was the most important and special thing in the world and it worked. That’s exactly how I felt. We had an absolute blast.

Last year a pretty crappy Valentine’s day and the worst birthday in the history of birthdays for reasons I won’t get into. This year I had the best Valentine’s day ever, which I would have to say is a pretty good start for my birthday tomorrow.

Thank you, Nickie, for making me feel special.

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It seems like I’m always setting personal goals and never keeping them. Not the important ones, like getting to work on time or getting school work done… But the truly personal ones such as excercise and lose weight, or as a recent example, to try to do something productive every day, including updating this site. As it would appear, I have again failed to achieve my goal. I definitely haven’t been productive every day. I began editing a pair of my pants, which involved tearing them apart and sewing them back together differently, but i screwed it up a bit. All it meant was taking a little more time to finish it, but they’re still sitting in the living room pinned awaiting the rescue mission. I went for a long walk about a week ago… excercise-long, we walked over 5 miles. Other than that I haven’t really done much. I realised that I’ve gained weight. I was deciding what to wear for tonight and when I tried on one of my favorite skirts, it was too tight. That’s no good at all. And is rather strange considering I don’t have much money to buy food, and therefore don’t eat much. Who knows. I suppose that’s some incentive to attempt some sort of exercise schedule, but that’s the first time in over a year that I’ve had the chance to dress up. So it’s not very likely.

Anyway… as it were, I have been extremely busy on the webpage. It wouldn’t appear so. There’s finally pictures under visualaid and as you can see soulcandy has been taken down. I’m not sure what I’ll replace it with, if anything. But I realised that I just didn’t have the patience to put enough information on media on this site so as to warrant the necessity for an entire section dedicated to it. So down it went.

But… this is the fun part, and the entire reason for me writing this entry… I have officially converted this entire website over to CSS or, for those who don’t know, Cascading Style Sheets. Normally when you’re writing a webpage, you put all the formatting information within the page itself, right at the point where you wish to format it as such. With CSS, you write a single file and insert one line at the beginning of each page linking to that file. And voila! Every page is not only formatted beautifully, it’s formatted exactly the same. It makes for cleaner coding and zero continuity issues. Best part of all is that I did it all by myself. Once again… I did try to get other people to do it, but everyone either refused or was doing something else. And since it involved editting every page on the site, I wanted it done now. So just as I did with creating this site in the first place, I hacked it out and did it all myself.

Maybe I’ll learn and just do things myself to begin with. Doubtful.

Anyway… Now those who know technically what I’m talking about will understand that I haven’t been slacking. And the rest of you will just have to take my word for it.

So… I live in Florida now. And for the first time in my life, I have central air. Which, even living in Michigan would have been a godsend. But we had hot water heating and it would have involved installing the entire venting system… So that was never going to happen. I was the only one in the house who was too hot anyway. Now I have it, and it’s wonderful. Florida temperature is a warm early summer day in Michigan in January. If I’m lucky. Often it’s 80 degrees or warmer out. (Although the other day it went from being 75 one day to being 22 the next day… And I thought Michigan weather was schizo.) Lately it’s been pretty cool out, so having the windows open has been perfect, almost cold sometimes, which is super keen, because you can always put on more clothes to get warmer… There’s only so much you can take off. But as of a weekago or so, it started warming up again. Which means turning on the AC.

Here’s how our apartment is set up in terms of the air conditioning system. It splits into a Y somewhere, but here’s the order in which the rooms are cooled: Danny’s bathroom, Danny’s bedroom, the living room, my bedroom; and on the other part: the kitchen, my bathroom. The vent in Danny’s bathroom is closed, and the ones in the kitchen and living room are somewhat closed. The one in Danny’s bedroom is jammed, can’t be closed at all. So… what all this equals out to in terms of my comfort level, which of course if the whole point of everything… Is that my bedroom, the place where I spend the most time, is always the warmest room in the house. And Danny’s room, the place where he spends most of his time, is the coldest room.

Lets say the AC starts the day out set to 70 degrees. Somewhere along the line, Danny gets too cold, and walks into the living room and turns it warmer to 80 degrees or something close. His excuse for making it so much warmer is that there’s a ferret cage in front of the thermostat so he can’t see it. (Mind you he doesn’t move the ferret cage to look behind it like the rest of us… but anyway…) I’m usually sleeping or something… And realise that it’s ass warm in the bedroom. So I go out to the living room and turn it back down to 70 degrees or a little below, since it’s now 80 something… Then I return to my room and continue doing whatever I was doing… He eventually gets too cold again… And this continues on through out the day. Given, if I leave my bedroom door open, it stays a mite cooler since it circulates from the living room as well. But, it really only does that if the living room fan gets left on. Most of the time, that gets turned off too because people are too cold and no one ever turns it back on when they leave.

This whole thing has been a series of unspoken actions up until just the other day. I mentioned it to Danny (this is when he pointed out his ferret cage issues). My friend Alex came up with suggestions like putting a shirt over the AC vent in his room. He said he’ll look at his vent to see if he can unjam it, but that’s unlikely to happen. So the war continues on. Its cold outside right now, so I don’t mind so much. But when it’s 90 degrees outside tomorrow, I’m going to care again. It really does figure that the first time I get central air I’m living with a couple of shivering-wussies. Oh well.

Maybe I can set it to 70 and steal the thermostat…