LMOTD Update / Personal Update

Just to follow-up appropriately to the previous post, I have made an announcement over at LMOTD. We'll be becoming a community-oriented site with contests in the near future.

I didn't think it appropriate to mention over there, but we've also been dealing with some water damage in the house. Our water heater is in the attic, and when it burst the weekend before all the big school projects were due, it apparently left far more damage than we had previously believed. Note how I made that post on Sunday and didn't even mention how the heater had burst early Saturday morning.

Not to give away too much personal info, but my bedroom is the room directly below the heater. I slept terribly and took a bit too long to realize that the "thunderstorm" wasn't the predicted sunny weather for the day, and was actually happening entirely in my wall. While we originally thought that the damage in my room was minor and that the kitchen below that had been dried out fairly well by us on Saturday morning, the various people we've dealt with from the insurance company felt otherwise. Of course, they started making my life a living hell the Wednesday of Posters and Pies - I got back that evening not knowing where I'd be sleeping, and eventually wound up in a makeshift bed in the room down the hall. We'd been preparing that room for a planned visit from Grandma in June, so the space was available. We've since had to cancel that visit now that we know that I'll be moving into there so that the insurance company people can redo my ceiling and floor.

The various things the insurance company has been doing to try to dry out the insides of walls have been very hard on us - we don't have access to a few major kitchen appliances, and we've been trying as hard as we can to find ways to cook various things in the fridge before they go bad (figures that we stocked up on eggs, bacon, and hash browns JUST before they took out the stovetop - I was able to save Mother's Day by using George Foreman grills to prepare mum's breakfast in bed, though).

...the process of moving [me] out and figuring out if we want to do any repairs while everything is ripped out (about a third of the house's flooring is currently ripped up, in addition to everything related to the kitchen island) is a considerable drain on my time (and the time of the rest of my family), and probably counts as a project in it's own right now.

The rest of my time is now occupied by the happier news I slipped into that LMOTD announcement - I got a job :-D. The job is a good one, but it definitely requires me to push myself a bit to make sure things are getting done, that I'm keeping up with the technology which is new to me, and that I stay focused and not do anything that would get me fired ("start up culture" is nice, but my boss has been pretty upfront about firing anyone who isn't contributing enough - I figure I need to "prove myself" for the first month or two before assuming I'm in for the long run).

That's the current news for me. I'm hoping to write more sooner than later, but if I don't get the chance, I think you understand why.