Can it be? Has it been a whole year since I broke away from free blogging sites like Xanga and WordPress.com and went to my own domain?! Yes!
In many ways, it’s hard to believe that a year has passed this quickly. On the other hand, it also feels like an eternity since I’ve had my own domain.
I’m Finally Moving Out To Bowling Green!
Yes, you read that right! No more planning and pondering on how to get there, I’ve finally secured a sweet place and I move there on June 1st.
Let me give you a quick rundown of the amenities of the apartment complex where I’m moving to: outdoor pool, 24-hour hot tub, workout room, tanning beds, washer/dryer INSIDE the apartment, computer study room, 52″ TV, free internet and free shuttle to BGSU every ten minutes until 7 pm! Oh yeah, and I get my own bathroom!! It’s only $315 for June and July and then $284 for the rest of the year. Cable, electric, and gas are split evenly between roommates. I only have one roommate so far, a girl whom I didn’t meet at the apartment showing, but there’s room for two more people!
So how did I score such an awesome pad? Well, it all started off terribly. You see, back in February 2009, a certified letter came for my stepdad that I signed for. I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I’m guessing that after I signed it, I put it on the table with the rest of the mail. I didn’t think a thing of the letter until a couple weeks ago when my stepdad said that the house payment didn’t go through.
Apparently, what was in the certified letter was a bill/collection notice/notice to appear in court (I’m not sure which one it was) involving an old credit card that he says isn’t his. He didn’t get the letter and his house payment was taken by the credit card company. Because he wasn’t working for about three months, he fell behind on his house payments and was put on a special plan so that it wouldn’t affect anything. The plan says that he has to pay on time for six months, and July would have been his last month. So he was freaking out and saying that we’re gonna lose the house because I didn’t give him the letter back in February. He then said that I had until the first of June to find a new place to live.
At first, I was freaking out because I was gonna wait until August to move out and I didn’t have enough money to get my own apartment. Then, I calmed down and began to plan for how and where I was gonna live. Once I accepted the fact that I couldn’t live here anymore and after much browsing online, I found an ad on Craigslist looking for a roommate in a 4-bedroom apartment. I set up a time to meet and view the place the very next day.
I took Jon with me because he wanted to go to Guitar Center and I needed some Hobo Stab Insurance, hehe (it is Craigslist after all). I was worrying about pretty much everything when we arrived at BG. In actuality, the girl who showed me around was incredibly nice as was the whole apartment complex. As I mentioned before, I’ll be rooming with a different girl and two other roommates will be coming sometime before the fall semester starts (around August-September).
There Are Only Two Guitars Right Here!!
Unfortunatly, I had to sell three of my guitars last month in order to pay off a back cable bill that I owed. I sold off my Silvertone Apocalypse Special, Epiphone SG Junior (with a p-90, bitches!), and my Squier Stratocaster. How much did I get for them? Only $150 for all three of them. I wanted to put them on eBay, but my stepdad wanted the money now dammit! I could have sold only one guitar on eBay to cover the bill (and a little extra left over). Well, there’s not much I can do about it now I guess.
I do have higher-end replacements in mind for all three of them. I want to get a Gibson SG Classic (with two p-90s, bitches!!), a Fender Deluxe Player’s Strat in sapphire with a maple fretboard, and a Dean Splittail Floyd in white.
After Jon and I toured the apartment, we went to Guitar Center and had a field day! I tried out the SG Classic (the pickups were cursed with some wicked 60-cycle hum, but it sounded great otherwise), a Fender Deluxe Player’s Strat (awesome, awesome, awesome!), and a low-end Jackson Kelly (it was set up all wrong and I was disappointed in its tone, but it played okay regardless and felt good to play sitting down).
I got another chance to play on the super-special-awesome Peavey Vypyr amps and tried out all of the guitars on them only. My big gripe with the Vypyrs is that it’s hard to find a super-clean setting right out of the gate. Even though I was on the green channel, pretty much all of the “clean” channels had some gain to them, which works sometimes, but I had a hard time dialing down the gain to get a clean Metallica-esque tone. I’m sure that once I actually buy this amp and dink around with it, this won’t be a problem. However, if I was unsure about the Vypyr in the first place, this would be a big turn-off for me.
Oh yeah, and there seems to be delay that can’t be turned off in almost all of the amps settings. Since I like delay, I don’t mind so much, but sometimes there’s no need for delay and not being able to turn it off is quite the selling turn-off.
What do you guys think? Am I being too namby-panby about the unstoppable global delay as well as having to dial in a super-clean tone or should Peavey do something about it by turning off the global delay and making the super-clean tone readily available in one of the default amp settings?
My Goals For TheAndySan.com
First off, I’d like to be posting moAr! I haven’t been posting much at all since the year started, mostly due to not having Internet on a consistent basis. With free Internets at my new place, I’ll be able to post more often.
Second, I’d like to stick to the posting schedule that I mentioned awhile back. However, I want to revise it since I found that posting daily all the time has an adverse effect on my creativity and I end up not posting for a month or two, hehe. Maybe you guys’ll be able to finally get me to talk about anime and Japan for an entire post instead of my boring-ass life. Oh, I crack myself up sometimes, haha!! But seriously, an anime review here and there seems reasonable and is actually in the works.
Next, I want to better incorporate vlogging into this blog. Ever since I got my camera, I thought that I’d be vlogging all the time. However, I found that editing video can be a real time-consumer in comparison to just writing, not to mention my “knack” for creating monologues on the spot. Also, when I do a vlog, I don’t want to just slap up the embedded video and hit Publish. I want to type out the content of the vlog so that I get the higher expression benefits of video along with the search-engine and reader-friendly advantages of plain text.
Finally, I want to make more money and bring in more readers here. Judging from my past experience with monetization, setting a goal of $1,000 a month by the end of the year might be too much for me. Although I don’t want to squash my intention of earning $1,000+ a month from my blog by year’s end, I need to be somewhat realistic about this goal. Therefore, I’m going to be shooting for making a consistent $100 a month from this blog by the end of this year. Since I make roughly $25 a month right now, I only need to make $75 more a month. That’s a steady increase of $10.71 a month.
Looking Towards The “Green” Future
Since I won’t be able to bring all of my stuff to the apartment, I’ll be making a list this week of all the things that I’ll bring with me initially. After I get settled in, I’ll stop by and gradually pick things up. Also, once I get a job and can afford to put my stuff in storage, I’ll go ahead and do that. I can’t wait until June 1st!!
Once again, thanks for celebrating my first full year here at TheAndySan.com and here’s to many more years of blogging!!
TheAndySan
P.S: I’ve recorded and edited some material for several vlogs that I’ll upload when I move to Bowling Green since the WiFi here craps out when I try to upload a YouTube video. Stay tuned!!
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May 29th, 2009 at 04:56
Hey Andy, I haven’t stopped by in a while and was really happy to see this post. Congrats on finding a place and moving forward with your life. Here’s hoping that everything works out for you. Goodluck
Kate´s most recent post..The Importance of Food Independence
May 29th, 2009 at 09:01
@ Kate – Hey Kate, it’s good to see you again!
Yeah, I’m so happy that I’m finally moving on and moving out, haha!