Day Four, Oh My Tummy

I did the major geek thing last night and ordered a pizza from pizzahut.com. They're located about a mile away and I could have driven over but I didn't feel like moving. Yesterday was a massively lazy day and I topped it off by doing the classic geek thing of pizza for dinner, eating much too much, and wanting to die until the Pepcid Complete hit my tummy.

Right now I'm awake, I'm not sure what I'm doing today. I might go find somewhere to throw this pizza box out since there are no visible trash cans around here. I hate the smell of dead pizza and Room service isn't coming for another six hours or so. I also should find a way to work out. I tried copying my taebo tapes to computer but ta-da it was copy protected so you can't dub it. Bastards. Taebo is so five years ago anyway, but still, I was going to bounce around a bit and try to get a workout in. Really, I was.

Still strangely at peace. Not sure why. I've stopped caring. I'm hard to read anyway. People assume I have a lot of anger and a lot of emotions because I don't visibly react to things. Sure I can get frantic and sure I can get mad, but most of the times when you expect me to be mad (and assume I am because I don't react), I'm not, I'm fine. I just let it go because most of the time anger is just a waste of time. You can spent all of your time being angry at someone or you can spend all of your time fixing the problem. It's your choice. I usually take the road that deflects the most pain and suffering for everyone and take it in, get over it quickly, and move on.

I think I'm going out today, just over to wal-mart. Going to look for a birthday present for my dad then probably spend another day playing neverwinter nights to figure out if the one house really is a brothel and why my paladin is hanging out there. :)

k9

Day Three, Reflecting Forward

It's the start of day three in Parts Unknown. I know I'm a weirdo because I'm serious when I say these parts unknown trips are about catching my breath, sleeping, and not doing much else. I'm perfectly happy with that. If Laura were here I'm sure we would have filled every minute of the day with activities, but this time I really needed to have some time to myself where I don't have to be anywhere, I don't have to do anything, I can just go brain dead and sleep if I want to.

I'm at peace for the first time in quite a long time. Honestly, after the chaos of the last six months that's a good thing. I've put behind the troubles I've had and I'm just sort of cool with the world right now. No lingering specters or emotional ghosts popping out of the woodwork here to scare the bejesus out of me and that's a pretty good thing.

Spent yesterday copying CDs for a friend who lives out here. I had it all planned out -- maid service usually comes early and I was all dressed and ready for when they came. I was going to go to wal-mart and get some munchies and then come back when they were done. Trouble is ... I waited and waited and waited and ... they didn't come until 3 PM or so. I needed to be online to see if the friend I was meeting was off work right at that moment so I got towels and garbage changed and that was it.

Today I'm ready, I'm going to be lazy and I won't do anything in anticipation of them. I got my pager working again (damn dead batteries), so if they come to kick me out to clean the room I can go to the car and fart around if need be and still be on-line. Since I got all the CD burning I had planned done yesterday, that was the last real thing on my to do list for the week so I think I'll spend some time reading and playing ::gasp:: video games today.

Last night I tried the ridiculous folly of in room PPV. When Evil James and I saw Attack of the Clones in the Theatre it was okay, but the place was jam packed and we were forced to watch the movie from the extreme right viewing angle so it wasn't exactly a great experience. So I splurged and spent the ten bucks on the movie from in-room PPV (won't be doing that again though -- too expensive -- and the DVD is $20 when it comes out so you do the math), mind you I was half wake and watching at 11 PM, but it had my full attention. Here are some random observations:

* Maybe it was because I read the book and I was tired, but I kept feeling like parts of scenes were missing. I don't think they cut the movie for room PPV but it felt like scenes should have been extended by a few seconds. I was sure there were more to scenes like when (MAJOR SPOILER WARNINGS FROM HERE ON DOWN) Jar Jar is tricked into calling for the vote on making an army of the republic, I thought it went a few more seconds of sinistry before they cut away. It does in the book, but then again I'm an insane neophyte. I'm probably having flashbacks of things that weren't there.

* Hayden Christiansen was a little less robotic and a little more annoying this time around. I guess he HAD to be since they wanted to show that he was indeed Luke's father. I just rolled my eyes though. Here's this kid with ultimate power (and let's face it, he's 100X as powerful as Luke ever could be), and he wastes all his time whining about things he could be doing. I did see a lot of his actions reflected in Darth Vader, though. If you look at the first three movies, Vader made rash judgments and often acted like a teenager with power. He wasn't a cold calculating villain, he was a bully with power and didn't really have a grasp on anything else. If anything, these prequels are spoiling the coolness factor of Vader by showing his life story. On a side note, Clark Kent's turn to the dark side on Smallville last night was handled much better than this movie. Even if Smallville is essentially Dawson's Creek with superpowers, it still blew circles around that aspect of this picture.

* The movie is probably the most beautifully shot picture I've ever seen. EVERYTHING is beautiful. The landscapes, the desert scenes in Tatooine, the senate chamber. It's a stark contrast to Star Wars, Empire, and especially Jedi -- where ships are falling apart and Tatooine is a slum. I don't know if that's intentional (to show how far the empire had declined in the later movies), but the beauty of everything was enough to distract me from key plot holes (and if you're a star wars fan -- GO READ THE BOOK -- it actually salvages the plot).

* Christopher Lee as Count Dooku wasn't that bad. We had panned him since he had just played a bearded villain in Lord of the Rings and this role was too close to that. This time around though he came off more as a reflection of his role as Count Dracula than as his role in LOTR. I still question why they had an 80-something year old man flying around on a futuristic segway scooter as the final action sequence (note to self: old guys on scooters ain't sexy), especially when it's unshielded and unarmed and seems like one good head shot by a competent sniper could have picked him off ... but I guess they needed to simplify that action sequence down to Dukes of Hazard "good guy/bad guy" car chase levels.

* It was Qui Gon Jinn's voice screaming "Annikin, Annikin NOOOOOOO!" in the chamber as Yoda senses Annikin becoming a mass murderer. On another note about that, let's face it, Padme is pretty demented NOT to go running from this guy when he came to her and admitted to his Vietnam era type war atrocities. He admits to killing women and children and she gets turned on. RIGHT. If this was how to get women, then Charles Manson would have more fans than David Hasslehoff.

* Speaking of Padme. Natalie Portman is ice. Frozen. Beautiful girl, but does nothing for the role this time around. The spunk she showed in the first movie is all but gone and replaced with a robotic performance that only comes alive when she's being goofy. I thought it was great when they gave her lock picks and let her get out of the chains in the arena by herself (and let's face it, the lines on that white outfit were strategically placed to give Star Wars it's first official -- not like the unintentional boob shot in Jedi -- dose of T&A), but she's still paling in comparison to Leia's far less camera pleasing but so much more fun in over the top antics.

* Oh, last rant for now, Jango Fett was robbed. Does anyone else feel that the Stormtroopers are doomed because they're all clones of this idiot? Let's face it, he looked cool but wasn't the brightest guy in the bunch. He had a half decent fight scene with Obi Wan but then got his head cut off pretty easily by badass Samuel L. Jackson. It goes to explain why a) Boba Fett really didn't do anything but look cool in the first movies, b) why Boba had such a stupid ending in Jedi -- though the later books say he survived and did massively cool things I don't believe it (just like the Darth Maul book tried to salvage that character with another lame ending), and c) why the storm troopers -- who I'm assuming are still clones and watered down versions of Jango Fett (which was a plot point they made clear), kept walking into walls and couldn't hit a man two feet away when armed with the best weapons in the galaxy.

All in all, there were bright spots of the movie, but I had to rant this morning and get it out of my system. :) I'll save them for another time.

I'm off to avoid maid service.

k9

Day Two From Parts Unknown

Yesterday I made the 11 hour drive to my vacation spot in about 10 hours. I would have made it in 9 hours and 30 minutes or so, but crossing one state line there's always traffic that goes to stop/start traffic for 20 miles for no apparent reason.

Did a lot of thinking and figured out a lot going on in my life on the drive. I will say this: thank god for Sirius radio. I know XM is getting the push right now, but Sirius is the one we have and it really made a difference on the ride here. I was able to scan 5 news channels and flip to E! radio while I was driving without interruption. I just loved it.

Some things I didn't love: The Washington D.C. area sniper is getting a lot of coverage in the press. That was THE news story yesterday. They had experts on who were saying this and that about the sniper. FOX News was especially bad as it had experts on who insulted the sniper. They had one guy on saying that he could take a little girl out into the woods for a weekend, train her with a scope, and he'd be a better shot than the sniper. All of the news channels picked up that a *real* trained sniper could hit from 300 yards or so, not the 100-150 yards that the sniper has been hitting from.

The laid out all the sniper's patterns, devoting hours to saying what his profile would be like and gave him so much attention and expected a daylight shooting because it was his pattern. Worse yet, after dinner last night I came home and ABC had devoted a special 20/20 to sniper coverage before Monday Night Football. They detail the vans and trucks the sniper uses, tells us what to look for and profiles his victims.

Less than an hour later, the sniper shoots and kills a woman. Nighttime attack. Right after 20/20 gave him more attention. Apparently from over 100 yards away. Apparently has a new van to do it with. All I can say is D'oh.

This guy is getting off on all the attention. He's a smart bastard who watches the news. He's showing how insane and how dumb our press is. They take holier than though attitudes about how they need to provide coverage and how they're always right (especially FOX news), but the more they're giving this guy attention -- the more he's changing his patterns based on what they're harping about and the harder it's going to be to catch the bastard.

Lastly, a lot was made yesterday about *drum roll please* videogames as a motivational factor for the sniper. Some experts were going on and on about how you can take a video game and learn to be a sniper because they're so realistic. I'll say this: I've played hours and hours of HALO, which has one of the most realistic sniper modes out there (though you're killing monsters and not humans). Sure it's neat and sure you can feel like a nameless faceless force of nature when you're picking them off from so far away, but it's a game. There's a BIG difference between picking up a video game controller and playing sniper and picking up an actual rifle, going outside, and planning killing attacks.

NO video game (not even Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six series -- which features realistic squad tactics), will teach you what you need to actually kill people. Sure they can desensitize you (13 year olds playing GTA 3 demonstrate this), but they can't put the gun in your hands and pull that trigger for you.

It's hogwash and the experts are just trying to get face time.

With that rant, I got up late, I'm sure housekeeping is going to come to annoy me soon. That is their goal in life after all. :) Got to get a shower in and go over to wal-mart to get some breakfast stuff.

k9

Rainy Day

Today has been kind of overcast and it's been raining on and off. I woke up and finally took the bath I put off yesterday. There's something about a long hot bath first thing in the morning that puts my mind at ease and really gets me started to ... well being half awake all day.

Stumbled through morning shift, waited for the Schwan's frozen food guy to make to come with the first of his twice monthly visits, then took a nap for an hour. Got up, said hi to Stef, went back to bed for another 40 minutes or so and now I'm getting ready for an evening shift where I don't want to do anything more than climb right back into bed and sleep some more.

Most of my friends are gone this week so there's no compelling reason to keep me glued to the computer. The only one on right now, for example, is gone or AFK or off having a life. I probably won't IM her anyway since our friendship took an odd twist a while back and I still don't know what to say to her or how to talk to her like we used to. That's the killer thing, I would love to live in the past. I always remember how things used to be and I don't know if I have the strength any more to cling to those old dreams. On the other hand, I don't have the energy to adapt right now so maybe it's better that we're just silent. Though I miss her, it's just weird, until I work out some stuff we'll probably carry on like this. I can't express how sad that makes me feel.

Ugg. Goose bumps. It's really cooling down outside. We're supposed to have storms all day tomorrow so I was lucky to have finished the wood yesterday. Stef wanted to know if I'm going to keep up the workouts now that I've pretty much thrown my body into a state of being, well, less flabby. I don't know yet. Easiest way to doom something is to announce it to the world, so I'm going to hold off for a while before making up my mind one way or the other.

Just a couple more days until vacation ... a couple more days ...

k9

Totally Zonked

Oh wow, 13 minutes into a three hour shift at work and I'm half awake. It got colder over the past couple of days. I'm wearing a jacket inside the house and trying not to fall over onto my computer keyboard. Hopefully this Dr. Pepper will wake me up or else it's going to be a very long shift.

Listening to weird old songs on my musicmatch jukebox. No Doubt's "Simple Kind of Life" comes to mind. I could play that 20 or 30 times tonight and just get lost in the lyrics. "Hanging by a Moment" by Lifehouse is another. I don't know what came over me today, but I'm sitting here listening to music and not getting anything done.

Ugg. If I get through until 8 I'm going to take along hot bath and soak until my entire body prunes.

Zonk.

k9

It's over

Got up early this morning in order to take my dad to the doctor's. Sat in the car while he was in for his appointment and just sorta stared blankly. Had to make myself read something and turn on my AOL Pager in order to NOT look like some creapy guy sitting in the car by myself. But I was zonked, I still am. Got home and dropped my dad off then went to work on the final part of the wood pile.

I hate this part of having to stack because all the wood is up on the steep hill and it's jus torture having to climb up to grab every piece and bring it back down. Today was strange because a lot of the wood had sat there for a month (since our first load of wood), and had settled. When you pick up wood that's settled there's usually lots of wildlife or insects in it. Today there were a lot of salamanders.

I've only seen one salamander in my life. Today I saw about a dozen. These were small ones, biggest one about 2 inches long, and a lot of them were a weird shade of purple that seems to change color in the light. I can tell why they were regarded as mystical in ancient times. They're strange little guys and it could have been my failing sanity (by this point I was getting goofy out there), but they seemed to radiate strength or heat as I picked them up and moved them to safety.

Okay, so yah, my mind went for a while. I was exhausted out there. I still don't want to go out and see how the pile zig zags as I had to start new rows in strange spots as I literally used every inch I could out there. If I go out in a few minutes and notice that I've made a monument to Leo's face with the wood, I wouldn't be surprised. LOL.

Had a long nap and forgot to turn off AOL buddies when I went to sleep. Well, sorta, it blocked IMS but didn't block my name from buddies. I have no clue how I did that but if you tried to IM and it said mine were off, it's fixed now. Now I'm still zonked, but I'm here. I have to work in an hour and so looking forward to sleep tonight.

k9

pt. 2

So it's 11 something and I'm falling asleep. Strangely, I did more work today than I did yesterday but I feel better. I think it's that the weather system finally changed and that today I was more careful with how I was stretching and picking up wood today. I have a headache, but that's normal.

Tomorrow I finally have to make my reservations for next week. I'm so looking forward to not being here. Well, you won't see a change. I'll still be *here* (as in on-line), I just on't be home. So no webcam for a week or so. I'm tired. I really am and I need this.

k9

Day 3 from the front lines

Blogger seems to be down so I'll write this to myself then post it later. Right now it's 12:19 on a teusday afternoon and I just came in from day three with the wood. I'm beyond tired.

It was cold this morning. Too cold to get off of my ass and out the door to do wood. I waited until after my allergy shot to go out and start on the pile again. I'm seriously running out of room. Even though I errored yesterday by saying it's up to my neck in places (it's really up to my chest in some, waist in others, depending on the slope), it's still a whole hell of a lot of wood.

When I'm out there my mind goes a lot of places. For instance, today I plotted out parts of season ten while I was mindlessly stacking the wood. I have a plot in mind that's probably going to run through the first half of the season after we wrap up the Martin stuff. I'll probably do all of this next week when I should be sleeping.

Had two funnies today. First I was getting my allergy shot and I had the nurse check my weight and my blood pressure as always. I'm the same weight I was two weeks ago but she looked at me and said "you're getting so thin" and I didn't put two and two together. I don't think of myself as thin, especially when my weight was the same. She asked if I was working out and I said yah with the wood and she said I gained muscle and that's why I didn't lose any weight. It just blew my mind that my body is changing.

I didn't really think about it at all until I got home. My mom forgot to take my dad's wheelchair out of the back of the station wagon. He doesn't need it, it's just for worst case scenarios. Anyway, it was clanging off the sides of the car so I decided I'd carry it in when I got home.

I pull into the driveway, and I get out of the car and open the back hatch. Then I lift the wheelchair out of the back and start carrying it to the house. I'm halfway downstairs when I realize that I can't feel the weight. It feels like it's nothing to me. This is the chair I usually struggle to carry anywhere (it's an extra big reinforced chair because my dad is so heavy) and here I am carrying it without any problems.

I'm so scared.

I did two hours of wood after that. About 2 more days to go. God knows where I'm gonna put it.

k9

PS Fear the bunny.

Outch

It's the 2nd day of dealing with the 2nd batch of wood for the winter. We typically get 4 cords of wood a year and this year. We had about 2 cords left over from last winter already stacked outside, so I'm trying to be creative in where I stack it this year. We just don't have the room out there. I'm afraid that I'm going to have to stack higher than I want to (right now it's up to my shoulders -- I'm 5'9" tall). If I go much higher it becomes unstable and the last thing I want to do is have the pile collapse on anyone.

A few people have asked "what's in a cord of wood?" I can say cord all I want but I can't really tell you how much wood it is. Fortunately, someone did it for me. According to that site a cord equals a stack of wood 4 ft. X 4 ft. X 8 ft. Click on that link to see what else it equals (7,500,000 toothpicks! Yipes!).

I'm sore today. I'm duck walking. I made it through my early shift and I could feel my braincells falling away. I ended up sleeping for three hours this afternoon, which I never do, and I feel like someone took a baseball bat to my lower back. Not pain as in "oh you've really hurt yourself" just the "you overdid it dummy" pains that I've never been accustomed to.

One week and I'll be away from it all. Oh god, get me through this.

k9

Blog it

Sunday night, winding down. This morning I spent two and a half hours throwing 2 cords of wood down a very large hill. This is normally a three day job but I'm on a deadline of next sunday to have it all stacked and done for the winter. Next monday I'm going away to parts unknown to spend a week or so sleeping. That's all I want to do right now. I'm so exhausted and ready to give up on everything.

Right now I'm listening to Cyndi Lauper's "Unconditional Love," for the first time since losing a friend who made this song special. Well, losing is harsh, more like having things change and wind up in a far different place than where I thought they'd go. It's funny that life gets this way. Stef asked me if I ever thought of where I'll be in five years last night. I said no. I said I'd happy to be alive in five years. That's the truth. I can't manage to guess where I'm going to be because life changes each and every day. Where you think you're going isn't going to happen. Where you dream of being, isn't going to be exactly the way you want it to be so it's better of spending your time in reality than in the future.

I manage day by day. I have a pretty good life. The missing puzzle pieces on making it a great life is for some way to get discovered and find a job that makes a lot more money than what my current job pays and, of course, finding someone to spend my life with. I think I'm getting too old for that though. I gave up on finding "the one" after having the one taken away from me time and time again. I think I'm settling on making it through the day okay with myself so I can sleep at night. I'm valuing a good nap more than a good kiss right now and that scares me a whole hell of a lot.

So one more week of work and stacking wood then off to parts unknown. Joy. Joy.

k9

Uh ...

In the words of Gilda Radner's SNL character Emily Litella, "Nevermind."

It seems that in the past couple of weeks Microsoft has changed the internet update patch for service pack 1. Instead of getting to the point of changing my registry and dying, this time, oh this time ... well it worked. It confused the hell out of me but it worked.

Could it be that by interacting with Tech Support they actually FIXED THE PROBLEM?? Oh dear god. My world is shattered. Here I wanted to hate Microsoft all day and be pissed off and blame them for my troubles when THIS TIME THEY ACTUALLY FIXED A PROBLEM!

I'm so confused.

So I'm going to apologize. Microsoft isn't totally evil. MACS, however, are made of flaming disease that spreads the flames of evil to the earth with every new i-switched commercial. The jury is still out on Norton. I'm trying that nightmare when I get home from wal-mart later.

Installing soundblaster drivers now. Joy. :)

k9

Welcome to my nightmare

Saturday morning and I'm both at work and installing service pack 1 for xp. I know, I know, most everyone knows I went through hell a couple of weeks ago with service pack 1 but I finally got it to work with a lot of handholding from microsoft's tech support (and yes, I had to buy a new copy of xp's upgrade because they refused to support my OEM version -- those rat bastards), I got it running.

But there were problems. I think I screwed up in the very last reinstall (don't ask how many times I've reinstalled in the past month) and didn't install the drivers for my AGP port until AFTER I installed my video card stuff. I was getting all sorts of graphics card related errors and sometimes my system would completely reboot after taking a CD out. It was really really weird and really really annoying.

So last night, in my brilliance (note: spellchecker will be back with NEXT blog), I decided to reformat and start from scratch since I knew what to do. Well guess what? I didn't. This time I tried installing service pack 1 from the handy disk I ordered from Microsoft. Didn't work. Same problem. I applied the fix that Microsoft told me to do (from when I installed from the web), went to reinstall the service pack and ... didn't work fatal error.

You know, I know there's something wrong with my system. It's actually both systems I've had XP on. When you create your "admin" account it doesn't really make an admin account. It's some sort of quasi-admin account. There's an administrator account that you can get to in safe mode but that's only for safe mode and you can't really do anything with it. So I'm stuck with my main name and my main account and for some reason it doesn't have the permissions in the registry to a) let microsoft windows update do service pack 1 and b) let Norton system works run without some sort of brain surgery.

Now Stef tried to convince me to try a MAC last night. Honest to god, her heart is in the right place, but as much as I hate microsoft (and I really detest them right now), I don't like MACS. Never have, never will, and for the love of god, if I see one more swarmy "i-switched" commercial (with the moronic "Apple converts" cluelessly dragging down the "cool" status of having a MAC by offering inane ramblings about how they were too brain dead to run a real computer), I'll probably just go completely bonkers then find Steve Jobs and punch him in the mouth.

But back to my windows problem. Right now I've reinstalled yet again and I'm applying service pack 1 from the web just to have it fail. Then I'm going to reboot, apply the little patch they said to do (it's a registry edit), reboot, sign back on and redownload the damn thing to see if it will work. If it doesn't I will scream so loudly that it will shake more rafters than the screams that came out of Bill Gates when he gave birth to this god awful creation we know as windows XP.

THEN I'll start on Norton. Peter Norton needs to be punched in the mouth. This year's system works has the exact same registry problems as last year's version except they call it something else and their tech support has no clue about it. I got system works to work by doing the exact same registry edit as I did last year with that god awful version of the software. I didn't bother telling Norton's tech support about what I did because I want everyone else in my situation to suffer as much as I currently am.

I'm a cold heartless bastard in the morning, aren't I?

Back to my install of service pack 1. So far I've downloaded the 40 or a million megs it wanted me to dl and I'm in the process of creating a restore point and backing up files. It will then take five minutes to install the new updates then update the registry, get access is denied, then give me the option of taking everything off and going back to my old files. I'll say "sure thing, Mr. Gates, I'd love to!" and take them off, do this registry hack, and try this whole process again.

Sometimes I wish for the lobotomy and the MAC. I really do.

In other news, I passed up a chance to join the lovely Laura Burstein in NYC for a weekend last week. I could have gone, however, I really don't like NYC. I know she had a great time (you can read her adventures at http://www.leoville.com/laura), but if I had gone with her we would have been mugged 3 times, had our taxi hijacked by crack smoking nuns, and fought the whole time since I still don't have any trendy clothes and I look like Mr. Roper (especially now that I'm letting my hair grow and it's coming back GRAY!).

You can see for yourself once I get my webcam back up. I'll be webcam whoring as I work this afternoon so you can see me losing my mind live on the Internet.

With that, I'm back to the drawing board. I'm using it to pound virtual spikes into my heart. Lovely! :)

k9

Shhh ...

An hour and a half to go until my shift is over. I'm goofing off and venting. The usual stuff. Shifting communities around and craziness at work. Suddenly there's half a dozen new changes coming our way and I'm sitting here wondering what the hell is going on.

People are bitching and I'm just thinking of taking the week of PTO time I have coming and taking a week off or so. I was supposed to go away last week, but that was changed to this week which was changed to next week, which probably is going to be changed to the week after that. I'm not sure yet. Honest to god. Just mixed emotions about everything and I'm sitting here wondering what to do next.

Saw Leo and Patrick on Sunday with Evil James. That was a blast. The stories aren't as exciting as the last time we went to a techtv event, but hey, there were more people than I expected and Patrick and Leo were really great. I thank them both for their comments on the site and hey, great seeing both of them.

Also a big thank you to Evil James for the day before birthday blast.

Working on the end of season 9 tonight and the start of season 10. So stay tuned.

k9