To change a habit, you have to shuck the nun first.

Er. to change YOUR habit, you have to actively work at making a different habit for a while. Not molest nuns. No nuns involved. Nope. None. (Buh. Puns...and rhymes. Groaning is appropriate... )

insert work bitching...

Grr. Stupid coworker. Body achy.

End work bitching.

No, seriously. I am not that interested in filling this space with bitching about work. Its not really worth the effort. This is not the job I want, but it is the job I am going to have for a while. A long while. So, I am really trying to make the best out of it.

In other workish news, my vision plan kicks in 1-1-12, which means I should be able to get new glasses in January. About fuckin time. I have to turn and cock my head oddly to be able to focus on the screen enough to make out what I am typing. It is quite annoying. There are whole areas of my vision that are blurry blotches because of the scoured lines in the lenses.

In other news, my December is becoming more and more crowded.

Joan is having her birthday/graduation party on the 17th, the holiday concert at SF is the 8th, and singing at candle light will be the 19th and 20th. I have to figure out which of the first, third and fourth options I want to be SURE and make, because I am predicting that the week of all of that will be BUSY AS FUCK at work, my boss will need me, and I will be making bank hours. Unless I take all three days off, or try to, and my boss gives me dirty dirty looks.

A coworker asked me if I am looking forward to any video games. The answer was fast. Only one: Heart of the Swarm. MmmmMmmMmmm. Must have my zerg lovins.

Work work work.

Insert more work.

Insert still being a bit depressed.

Re: Drawing... So, it seems that I may have to wait a bit longer (Like, LOTS) to use my bamboo to do drawings.

Turns out, there is some fugly with GIMP and Wacom's Bamboo. Dunno why, but the tablet works perfectly when I am using it as a mouse pointer combo, but the second I click to start drawing it mirrors my actions. Up is down and left is right... I tried flipping the tablet, but as the input is exactly opposite of the actual output, there is no orientation of the tablet that allows up to be up and right to be right. UGH. So... I guess now I need to do some in-depth research into a substitute free program. I have/had a copy of PS5, but that will NOT play nice with Windows 7 and I'm not going to rollback JUST to use photoshop.

Re: Depression... So... as cliche as this sounds, music seems to be my medicine. (Insert Black Eyed Peas - Play it Loud here...)
While singing I am happier, lighter. When I get the music that fits my mood it lifts my spirits. I wish our connection would support Pandora, so I could stream some bitchin music.

I wonder if one can get a SirusXM type radio that is portable and does not require being installed in a car. But I think that also has a subscription... dunno.

Insert nonsequiter here: As it turns out, I can honestly say that I am a rather handy motherfucker at this point. Carpentry, Plumbing, Car-work, computer-work, gardening, fencing, and many more things have been undertaken by my hands and turned out positively.

So... I let myself get away without posting for two days.

Not sure if that was because of how slippery my mind feels, or just because I have been avoiding talking about the more personal stuff, or ... maybe I'm a little more depressed than I am letting myself know.

... Don't judge me on the music choice. I don't care if the show is for kids. I like it. Go to hell.

My headphones got killed. Thought I could salvage them but only wound up staying up until 4am yesterday stripping wires, creating electrically sound joints and being frustrated with the results. Good bye nice pair of Logitech H330's. Hello cobbled together POS made of a coat hanger and a very old set of headphone cups. It isn't comfortable but at least I Have sound in both ears again, and well sound.

If you live near a publix, hit it early for your turkey day needs. .59$ a lb is pretty effin cheap.

Was visiting my usual round of web comics and found this: http://www.behance.net/gallery/The-Bear/2414352 quite poignant, or however you spell it. (Guessing the spell check will fix that one for me... got it...)

Oooh! I tasted my first batch of mead tonight. Holy shit smoooooooth stuff. I was worried up until now that having left it on its must so long would have turned it a bit. Nope. That shit is smooth and wonderful. It will be most epic Christmas mead. Going to have to figure out how to give away enough to make people happy and keep enough to get ripped on it. I'm rather curious to see what the current specific gravity is now, but I want to settle out the grunge that went into Rack 1 with the mead first.

That should give me an idea of its potency. Though I know I used a high kick yeast. I'm going to predict 20-30% by volume, probably in the 22.4-26% range.

Just a guess.

So, here it is the next day (Okay, so technically the SAME day according to LJ, but I had a sleep period in there so nyah!) and I am forcing myself to attempt to keep up with my decision to return.

This is mostly for me, though I guess I will be putting some interesting things for others here too. I can't promise that I will be reading any other journals at the moment. Internets out here in BFE are scarce. I post via an uploader software. Anyhow, baby steps.

Insert work bitching here. I had thought I would be posting about work, but decided it sounded too much like work. Bitching about how my job sucks won't make it less suck, nor change things. My manager has made that clear.

Insert rhetorical rant about not ranting about work...

I wish it were colder out. I love the cold weather. It makes me feel better. This weekend promises to be downright chill.

I keep kicking myself about not wanting to draw. Joan got me this wonderful bamboo USB tablet, and I keep wanting meaning to play with it in some sort of art software, but my copy of Photo Shop will NOT work with Win7, I refuse to roll back to an older OS just to keep an expensive piece of software working, and the pirated copy of CS4 someone gave me is all in Russian.

After stumbling around in it for a while, it struck me that I really don't like the new feel of photo shop. That, or I'm still grumping. Hard to tell which, really.

I ought to look and see if GIMP is still around, and still free.

Of course, part of my skwirl back brain keeps reminding me that pencil and paper is free/easy. Then, the lizard part eats the skwirl part and shares the bones with the OTHER parts. They all seem to agree that the lure of digital gadgetry should help to draw me back in.

Though... in all honesty, I find it hard to do ANYTHING detail oriented with these piece of shit glasses. The prescription is years out of date, the lenses appear to be suffering some sort of chemical malfunction and I have to turn my head to view things in focus at times. UGH. I signed up for the vision provider through work, but I dunno when that will kick in so I can get new lenses. Ultimately, new glasses top my Christmas wish list at the mome. I like my frames, I have fallen asleep on them and they don't break. (Gotta love genuine flexons!)

Perhaps tomorrow I'll start getting into other things... less superficial stuff. Maybe. I want to, but... even though this is mostly private, and partly anon, I'm still shying from it.

Stupid, really. I used to post all kinds of crazy shit here, but then again, I've been so busy internalizing all of it that it takes time to get back on the damn horse.

Ah, the drug.

By that, of course I mean, the addiction to returning when things are not going well. Funny, I kept promising myself that I would be posting more. But it took until today to really get my ass in gear and look to see if this still existed.

It is hard to ignore a part of oneself for so long. Perhaps, that is why I am so depressed of late.

Funny, it is so easy to say that in type, and so hard to say in person.

I'm not sure what has gotten me down, but it is pretty massive. I have lost all desire to work on the (Now multiple) book ideas, no desire to draw, lost all interest in my fake radio show, no interest in my bass. Almost no desire to hunt down new music. I'm not even sure what it was that gave me the idea to track down my old LJ.

Funny how the old itch digs and digs at you, even when you have so little desire to do anything else, and even when you don't realize it is still there, little clawed feet scrabbling on the slick tiles of your inner mind.

In the last almost three years (Sheesh!) I have discovered a DEEP love for dubstep, got fired from Shands, spent almost two years unemployed, and now I am back at the P. I have discovered a love of Bees, Honey, and Mead. I have discovered my newest finance (dear god, I AM trying this again...), discovered that I am screwed as far as school goes, and that my debt is still coming after me.

I guess any one of those could be the reason for this black cloud that is smothering my ambition and drive.

But at the moment I am tired. I have to be at work at 10 am tomorrow.

Its amazing how much can change and still stay the same at the same time.

One of my room mates got terminated yesterday for calling in sick. He works selling diamonds and he was really sick. So he called in, then got a call about mid day asking if he had anything important at his desk. Because he could either show up before everyone else today, with an MD note, or clean out his desk. Harsh.

My work woes just have to deal with a supervisor who I believe may be sexist and looking to get me fired, but thankfully my job has this whole long and involved procedure for firing people.

Granted, I am kind of on the edge, having had such a shitty review, but I had a preliminary review yesterday, just over a month from the bad one, that has already greatly improved.

On other news, I’ve accepted another webmaster position. Again, a volunteer thing, not a real paying job, but I figure I can start getting experience that perhaps I can transfer into real life experience.

It’s still not what I want to do with my life. I KNOW what I want to do with my life, I just need to figure out how to get the training, materials, and make what I want to do pay.

It’s not the Horologist thing still, but it is based off of that. I’ve been thinking about it and I realized that working on watches and clocks is all well and good, but art pays better. Then I stumbled onto the fictional website that talks about the fictional character who crated the puzzle boxes in the Hellraiser movies. I was hooked.

No, I don’t want to make dimension bending cerobyte pain boxes. I want to build mechanical puzzles. I’ll bet a few of you would be going “WTF?!” how do I expect that to make money? Well... not easily, obviously. But there is a market, and I’m in love with some of the current puzzles on the market. Here... www.isisadventure.com/

Also, I recently acquired an Archos 5. Pretty :) I have 120 gigs that need videos and music, but I still has non-working internets! =( Hopefully soon I’ll be able to fix that.

Heh. It seems I only come back to LJ when I have problems, right? I used to try and journal every day. I used to take my lunch break and try and put something up for everyone to read. Like I thought people wanted a direct phone tap into my life.

I dunno why I fell away from it so much. I guess I figured that writing on my journal for everyone else to read was a little shallow and self centered. “Lookit me! I have PROBLEMS! And ISSUES! OMG!”

I want to say I’m so much more mature, so much more in control than I was, better collected, etc.

To some extent I am. I feel more in control of things these days. I’m reacting in more mature ways to more of the same kinds of stimuli that used to send me into fits of less productive emotion. I also feel more.

Am I putting this up specifically FOR people to read? No. I’m putting this up for me. Something in me wants to write again, even if I’m stuck on the story I’ve been writing for the last five years (blah) and all I want to write is some glib thing on my own journal about wanting to write on my journal. Yes, that sentence makes sense.

In my personal life, things are ... better. My wages are not being garnished anymore, I’m living with people who have more of my own same interests, even if they fight amongst themselves like cats :p, and I currently have plans to move my current girlfriend in with me in July.

Her name is Joan, and if you have Facebook you can find me. My userpic is her and I. I think we make a cute couple, but you’ll probably never hear me admit that, cute is not a manly word.

Everything is starting to come together. If my job would get better I’d run out of things to seriously complain about. It makes me want to start drawing again, start writing again. I’ve already started painting again and that felt ... great.

I played a pickup game of 40k at Hobby Town USA (on the other side of 75) last Saturday. God, I spanked that kid so hard. I had destroyed his entire 1600 point Smurf Army with 1500 points of bugs by turn 4. Not a pitched battle, I mean I lost seven total figures (five genestealers, one licthor, my broodlord) and had killed all but a unit of guardsmen he had added to go from 1500 to 1600 points. He conceded the battle.

I wish I had internet at home, that’s thanks in part to my room mate and a large part our landlord wanting to take her sweet sweet time getting us a damn lease. Ah well. We’ll only be here until July.

Hey, if anyone is going to be in Atlanta, GA in March, between the 13th-15th I’m going to be up there too, for a LARP convention. :)

Please excuse me if this post has an absurd number of typos for me. I am typing this while on hold with the eye care clinic here at shands because I am going blind.

Suddenly, rapidly, blind. I may not finish this, though I believe that I can at least get what I want to say down.

A number of weeks ago, in the early part of October, I had a serious scare. I was at work, and I felt a mind blowing headache start. Migrane quality. And about the point I noticed that the vision in my right eye started going. At first, I had no clue what was happening, all I could tell is that I could not watch the cursor as I typed, I had to look at the cursor and read three words behind what I had typed. My peripheral vision got grainy, like old film grain where you can see white specks and trails. The area of my eye I could actually see from narrowed to little more than the left most edge of my eye.

I went down to the Oc-Health dept, to see if they could help me out, and they walked me over to the ER. In the ER the MD thought I was having a stroke. So they sent me for a CT, which was showing “artifacts”. They told me the artifacts could be problems with the CT, lesions, or blood vessels doing funny angulations. They needed to do an MRI.

Let me tell you a closed MRI of the head is my idea of hell. Tiny enclosed space (I don’t mind enclosed spaces, but this was silly. I’m a big guy. My shoulders almost didn’t fit down the tube!) with a loud tak-HAMMER-HAMMER noise going on, for which they at least give you ear plugs, flat on your back (which hurts my lower back), you have to remain perfectly still (which is hard for anyone), I can’t sleep because I have sleep apnea and I would probably wake up going psycho, all for *gasp* 45 minutes! And I “wiggled” too much during one image so they stuck me back in the oven for another 10 minutes.

... All to find out I was fine.

They prescribed me Oxycodone for the migrane, sent me home, and my vision slowly returned to normal.

Life wasn’t too bad for me over the last few weeks. Right up until the middle of last week when our house got broken into and we got robbed.

The thieves took my digital camera, 100$ in cash from my room, and a butload of stuff from Mike. From Mike they got: his laptop, two digital cameras, his PSP, his wedding ring, his iPod Nano, and a few other odds and ends.

Oh, and almost a full carton of Newports. Apparently Casey left a carton in the living room, right next to an almost full carton of Camels. The cop who took the call said that means they are probably black.

Well, I’ve tried and tried to go out with friends and have a good time, to live things up more, but goddamn if every time I make plans I get fucked over. I made plans with a friend to go see a movie, then she had to work crazy mad hours all that week. And so I told her to call me when she got her new schedule so we could go out for a movie when she wasn’t working. She never called me. She did come over early in the week after she was supposed to have called me, and she told me all about the new boy she met up with and is spending ass loads of time with.

... Nice to know where I fit in with that one. Ah well.

So then, another friend was throwing a Halloween party and I wanted to go and get drunk and have a good time. I told her I would be there and made plans. My ride changed her mind about going, which left me scrambling for a ride. Then none could be found, and I wound up so sick, I didn’t make fight practice (for TG) the next day and missed work yesterday. Today...

Well. Today, my left eye is pulling a BS repeat performance of my right eye. I’ve left a message for the eye doc on call, but they had to take a message and will call me back. Which leads me to suspect they won’t call me until I have headed home, and this will take even longer to sort out.

This is getting scary. My eyes are going out in a relatively short time back to back, same symptoms but this time no headache.

I’m very scared that this could be a portent of permanent vision loss. I hope the fuck not, because I know I already have some problems hearing. I don’t look forward to a long life of being blind and deaf.

Of course, this all comes on top of me feeling really shitty about being almost thirty and not having had a Real serious relationship. Heather, while serious, wasn’t really real because there was 3000 miles between us. Hell, she proved how little it was real to her by breaking it off with me.

... Sorry. I get angry and snippy and bitter when I’m scared about my health.

I hope this gets better and turns out to be something stupid. Stupid I can deal with. Permanent I can not.

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What a cunt-tastrophy of a year this has been. But, it is getting better!

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Today, I turn 27. I was born 11:42 AM 8/19/1981. I was conceived out of wedlock, and born to more or less newly weds. I was a condom kid. (Which my mother relished telling me at the time)

My day hasn’t been too bad. One of my co-workers brought a cake, another snuck me in to an MD Schmooze session and I got free lunch, the day has been pretty quiet and a wonderful WONDERFUL storm is on the way. (I did mention that I love storms and the rain, right?) I got a box of certified organic black chai, and everything is looking good right now. Oh! I also got a 10$ target gift card.

My plans for the future involve rebuilding and re-painting my Tyranid army for the 5th ed rules, finding a nice little 1/1 in Gainesville that I can afford, and fixing up my bike. Maybe, if I manage to put enough money away, picking up a PS3 in the future as a late B-day gift.

Also, Susan called and wished me a happy birthday! Thanks Susan!