Insane Random Ramblings

I can’t wait for baseball to start! Pitchers and catchers report to spring training in 13 days! John and I are planning on going to several games. The March 1st date is the day Cleveland Indians tickets go on sale. We want to go to the Yankees game which is in April. That sucks because I really don’t want to be outside in April but it the Yankees!

We’re planning on driving to Cleveland to pick up the tickets in person. John found that if you pick up the tickets, you get better seats than if you order them off of the internet. And I want to be as close to A-Rod as possible. Hehehe. That’s the only series we really want to see that’s being played in Cleveland. We might hit a game in Toronto too because we both want to see them at home. That will have to be a weekend thing though because it’s a far drive.

I’m so excited for spring/summer to arrive!

John thought I was going to buy him a gag gift for his birthday. I don’t know why though. I had been telling him that I had a good gift picked out for him since mid-December. I know he loves baseball so I knew that would make a great gift.

I guess he thought I would get him something stupid like a Chia Pet or something. He said depending on what I got him, he already had some gag gifts picked out for my birthday. He said something crazy like Depends, progesterone or something silly like that. Of course that’s a crack at my age since I’m older than he is. That’s cool I can take a joke.

I’m just glad he realized that I didn’t get him a gag gift. Maybe that means I’ll get something cool for my birthday. I have to wait until August to find out though.

The sucky part is that we’re not moving for 2 years. So we have to go through 2 more winters. I was trying to avoid that. John will be ready to move when I’m finished with school. Unfortunately that won’t be this year now because I doubt if I’ll be able to get all of the classes I need in.

We’ve decided that we want to go somewhere with warm weather. It looks like we’ve settled on Florida. We’re just not sure which part of the state yet. We don’t need to talk to a real estate agent because we’ll rent for a year or two. Some of the apartments that we’ve seen down there are really nice. And they seem affordable too.

It just sucks that we can’t move this year. I hate this cold weather.

I thought about it today while here at work. I’m going to let John decide which game to go to. I know he loves the Mets but there might be a game he may want to go to even more. We’ve been talking about going to Cleveland (because I want to see the Yankees). He might want to go to one of the games in Cleveland. We both like the giveaways during the games, especially bobblehead night. So I think that’s a better idea.

Hopefully he agrees.

Today is John’s birthday. I woke up a little after midnight and told him Happy Birthday. I was half sleep but I remember him saying to me that he wouldn’t officially turn 29 until 6:45pm. lolol, yeah ok.

I have his card here at work. I’ll give it to him later tonight. He’s going to a job fair after work so he won’t get home until probably 6 or 6:30pm. We’re going out to dinner, hopefully Olive Garden. I didn’t get him a present but it’s because they’re not on sale yet. His favorite baseball team is the Mets so I’m getting him tickets to the Saturday night game with fireworks. I guess I’ll put some kind of IOU in his card.

I don’t have to worry about him finding out what I’m giving him because he doesn’t read my blog.

I had to take a makeup test to try to bring my grade up in my econ class. I was expecting my professor to get back to me but he hasn’t yet. He said that he would email me and let me know what my new grade was. I don’t know whether him not emailing me means that I didn’t raise my grade, whether he forgot about me or what.

At one point I was really hoping that he lost my test but I thought about and I hope he didn’t. I don’t want to have to take another test. The one he gave me was hard as it was. I can’t imagine if he had to make another test. It would probably make my head spin. Maybe if I had worn one of my sexy corsets to class I would have passed. Hey, I’m only half joking here too.

I guess if he doesn’t email me back by next week, I’ll go ahead and email him and see what he says.

Here’s  some random ramblings for ya:

1. This blog is only 8 months old and it’s my 2nd most popular blog out of my 4 active blogs. This blog gets less than 100 visitors per week. I’m trying to slowly change that to 100 per day. Baby steps though.

2. I still haven’t figured out how to use Stumble Upon to my advantage. I wrote a post about how some people are misusing the system. They’re stumbling posts that shouldn’t be stumbled. Anything to get traffic I guess.

3. I need to network more. With a full time job and school plus blogging, it’s pretty hard. I do have a handful of blogs that I visit several times a week. I just don’t leave comments or anything like that. I guess I have to change that soon.

4. I changed the title of my ramblings posts to my blog name. I had named it something else but then I figured that my post would rank high for someone elses keywords. I guess it’s good that I’m finally taking SEO into account when writing my blog posts.

5. I wish Pitt offered accelerated classes.  If there were accelerated classes offered, I could take 1 class now and 2 in the fall in 8 week increments. That is an option at other local universities so I’m not sure why Pitt doesn’t offer them. I know it would help me out immensely.

I hate taking pictures personally. I know some people are camera hogs but I hate the camera, I always have. Even as a child I remember dreading picture day in school. So it’s no surprise that I don’t use a lot of pictures on my blog.

First off, I don’t have a good digital camera. I have one but it’s crap. I originally got it 3 or 4 years ago when I was a Ebay seller. I only got it to take pictures of the merchandise that I was selling. Like I said the camera is crap. I think it holds something like 50 or so pictures in memory. That’s not a lot at all, especially when you go on vacation. I always buy disposable cameras for vacation. They only cost about $6 bucks and I can hold them as long as I want before I get the film developed.

I do have a camera phone but it’s a pain to find the usb cord, plug it in and download the picture, then put the cord away. I can’t leave it plugged in because I have a laptop. If my desktop was still working I would just leave it plugged in and connect to download the pictures whenever. Plus have you even seen the quality of camera phones? Grainy and dark is the best way to describe them.

Maybe if I find some really good Amazon coupons I might buy a camera. Who am I fooling? I just don’t like to take pictures. So don’t expect to see a lot of them if you’re reading my blog.

I think StumbleUpon is a great idea. You stumble a site or an article to get it noticed. It’s a great traffic generator and you learn about some neat sites along the way. The problem is that some people are stumbling every single article they write.

Some examples of not stumble worthy articles are 1.My cat yakked on the carpet last night, 2. I have the greatest cat/dog in the world, 3. I used New York movers to move 3 blocks. 4. We had pizza for dinner last night, 5. Hey, I cooked a pot roast.

Of course, all of the titles above are made-up but you get the idea. You’re supposed to get your best articles stumbled so people see your best work and want to come back. Would you really want to visit a site again after reading about cat yak if that’s supposed to be their best article? My guess is not unless you just happen to love reading about cat yak.

Pretty soon every sploggy site on the internet will have all of their articles stumbled and that will be a shame because then nobody will trust the site anymore. Then everybody loses with what started as a great idea.

Especially coming from Pittsburgh? John and I did yesterday. We were at the Mall at Robinson having lunch and he asked me if I wanted to do anything instead of just going back home. We both work at banks so we were off for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. I said sure so we started walking to the car and decided to go to Cleveland.

Man was it cold! You know those signs on the top of banks that tell the temperature? Well it said it was 31 degrees. Ha that’s crap! It was more like 0-yeah zero! It was soooo cold. Cold air really affects me so my chest was hurting and I couldn’t stop coughing. We only walked a few blocks from where we parked since downtown was kinda dead.

We passed by the Quicken Center-where the Cavs play, and Jacobs Field-where the Indians play. Their arenas/stadiums look nice from what I saw. Then we went to the downtown mall. That’s different. I’m from Philly/South Jersey originally so I’m used to downtown having shopping and things to do. There is hardly any shopping in downtown Pittsburgh except a few crappy stores. It was nice to see that again.

We also went to a regular mall but it was dead. No really it’s Randall Park Mall and it’s considered a dead mall. Macy’s is the anchor store and they’re closing this year. More than half of the stores were closed. Of the stores that were still open, half of them were jewelry stores. We started to go to a different mall but when we got home we found out that that’s a dead mall too!

We plan on going back to Cleveland once it gets warm so we should really be able to see all of the sites. We might even hit the House of Blues or maybe the Hard Rock Cafe. Who knows. It should be fun though.