Tag Archives: life

Muscle Memory

Posted on by
4
Photo by webhamster

Photo by webhamster

On my way into work this morning I ended up following a tractor trailer that had a flat bed on the back stacked high with wooden pallets, and for a few minutes I was lost in memories of a period in my life where it looked like I was going to end up living the the blue collar world.

After I got back from my largely unsuccessful turn at being a roadie for the Renaissance Festival I spent a few months wallowing at my Mother’s house being largely useless.  When I say wallow I’m being pretty literal.  I slept all day, stayed up all night, smoked like a chimney in my bedroom, and was pretty much an out-and-out drain on her finances and her sanity.  She was constantly on my case to get a job and do something with my life, and I was constantly ignoring her requests and continuing my daily routine of “get up, waste my life, go back to bed.”

One day, however, she knocked on my door at the ungodly hour of noon or something like that and simply said “Come on, Mike.  Get up.  It’s time to find a job.”

My eyes snapped open and the first thought that popped through my mind was She’s right.

Two days later I had a job working as a temp for Skaraborg Invest (USA), Incorporated.

SII was an injection molding plant.  Specifically, we made CD jewel cases.  The job itself was pretty simple.  I monitored the machines as they put out boxes of jewel cases.  I would inspect every sixth box or so that came down the line and make sure there weren’t any flaws in the product.  If there were I’d notify the supervisor on duty so that he could make adjustments.  I would put the finished product on a pallet, load more boxes into the machine, and repeat the process.  When a pallet was full I moved it over to this nifty spinning platform and cover it in shrink wrap for shipping.  At certain points throughout the night I would fold up boxes to prepare them filling.

Sometimes I got to drive a fork lift.  I highly reccomend driving a forklift, or even better standing on the forks of a forklift as it’s being driven, as a recreational activity.  It’s hella fun.

After a while I impressed them with my abilities and they hired me on full time from the temp agency (translation : I showed up on time and sober and wasn’t a complete moron).  Christmas rolled around and as a Christmas bonus they gave everyone who worked for the company an entire weeks worth of pay as a bonus.  This was big money for me at the time, and a pretty sweet reward all around.  This was the early 90’s, you see, and compact disc sales were through the roof.  We really couldn’t make jewel cases fast enough.

Eventually SII announced they were moving to Lake Wales, Florida, to expand their operations.  They offered to let anyone who wished to move over with them do so if they wanted to keep their job.  I quite literally had nothing going on here in St. Petersburg so I decided to go with them.  We spent a few weeks getting the factory ready (note to any of you who do industrial painting : epoxy based paint is evil) and then we moved over.

After a short time in Polk County I started attending the Polk Community College.  It’s this point in my life I reference when I mention the fact that at one time I was working full time, going to school full time, and participating in all of the shows at the college becuase I was on a theater scholarship.  I was pretty much on top of the world.  I was in great shape, had a decent job, was making good friends, and enjoying life.  At the time the job was just a stepping stone towards my acting career.

Of course, as often happens to the aspiring artist, life kind of got in the way of my plans.  I met a girl, we fell in love, and suddenly my highly focused solo life got a lot more complicated.  We moved back to Pinellas County and I went to work for the Home Shopping Network.  I got fired from that job and attempted to make a go of getting a job at another plastics factory in Pinellas county but eventually ended up working in a convenience store.  The girl got pregnant, we got married, and in December of 1995 our son was born.  We were living with my friend Steve in his really small house and I was making six bucks an hour or so working the midnight shift in a gas station.

I caught wind that SII was expanding operations and made a few phone calls.  Pretty soon the decision was made to move back to Polk County.  There was talk of training me to be a supervisor.

At that point I was pretty much convinced that my life path was being laid out for me.  I was going to be a blue collar factory worker for the rest of my days.

Fortunately (although it didn’t seem like it at the time) things didn’t turn out quite that way when I got back to Polk County.  The supervisor position they dangled in front of me wasn’t at their state-of-the-art modern facility but at this piece of shit side project they had running in a building across the street.  They were using a temporary mold to make some kind of flower potting plants they were going to sell at Wal-Mart, and the entire shift was spent pulling these crappy bowls out of the machine and trimming all the excess “flash” from them with a box cutter.  I still have a deep scar on my left thumb from doing that.  This was during a really harsh winter in a building with no insulation and no heat.  The only thing we had to keep us warm was an orange grove heater.  Something like this…

Cantherm EC 200 Indirect Fired Portable Heater

Cantherm EC 200 Indirect Fired Portable Heater

Except ours was about 20 years old.  If you were standing directly in front of it you were blasted by a wave of super heated air that did absolutely nothing in the realm of radiant heat.  You were either boiling or frozen.  There were no other alternatives.

The amount of suck I was dealing with at Blue Chip (the name of the side company) on top of the suck of being a new parent led to me being fired due to excessive absenteeism.  My career in the plastics industry was cut off at the knees.

Which is ok.  A short time after that I got a part-time job working in the business machines department for Staples, which eventually turned into a full-time gig.  That got us back to Pinellas County when I got a lead position at the store in Bradenton, then eventually Clearwater.  My computer experience helped me get an entry level programming job with Auction Broker Software, and eventually (through a long series of events chronicled here) got me where I am today.

But for a brief time it really looked like i was going to be a factory guy, and I really think those years helped define who I am today.  It was, for the most part, mind numbing and tedious work and I’ll never say it wasn’t.  That being said, there was something honestly rewarding about it.  We were creating things from scratch.  We were producers.  It was hard, sweaty, and intellectually unrewarding work but at the end of your shift you could look at the stacks of completed product and say “I helped make that.”  There was something immensely satisfying in that.

I think more than anything those years help me to appreciate what I have now and explain why I’m so shocked over the fact that people seem to just casually chuck off jobs, even with things as bad as they are right now.  There are times when I wish I was doing something else, something more artistic, and there are certainly times when I get a sense of wanderlust and feel the urge to just pick everything up and start over again somewhere else.  When I start feeling that way, though, I remember those years in the factory.  I remember feeling like I’d never amount to anything more than a line man or maybe a shift supervisor and I say “No.  Protect what you have.”

So there you go.  The story of Mike the working man.

All brought on by a tractor trailer carrying a load of wooden pallets.

Lack of Inertia

Posted on by
Reply

I feel like I should be doing something.  Something…more.  I’m not talking about anything on a grand scale.  I just feel, right now, like I spend far too much of my time sitting idle.  Much of this is fueled by the fact that I work from home and spend most of my off-hours entertaining myself in front of my computer.  The upshot of this is that I probably spend 3/4 of my life sitting in the same chair starting at the same two screens.

So much so that, the other night, when I announced to the family at large that I was going to go out to Starbucks to grab a cup of coffee because I felt the need to just get out of the house I was met with bewilderment.  Alex ended up going with me and asked, in the car, if I had wanted to talk to him privately about something.  They couldn’t seem to grasp that there wasn’t any kind of ulterior motive to my actions.  I, quite literally, just wanted to be out of the house.  When compared to my normal activities this was something strange and unusual.

The fact that my patterns are so predictable and stagnant that the simple act of wanting to step out for an hour to grab a cup of coffee is unusual causes me some distress, my friends.

What’s more, they aren’t alone in this.  I myself have gotten to the point where things that are outside of my normal array of activity are seen as being bothersome.  I’ve started to get resentful of any time I’m asked to leave the house when I’m not expecting to, and only part of that is due to the fact that gas is so expensive.  I make decent money.  I can afford gas.  It shouldn’t be an issue if for some reason I need to go somewhere I hadn’t been planning on going, but when confronted with a situation like that I tend to get cranky. 

This lack of doing anything other than sitting at the keyboard is not limited to activities outside of the household, either.  I don’t do nearly as much around HERE any more, either.  I don’t cook or clean as much.  Home improvement projects take forever or never happen.  Yard work is sporadic at best, with things usually needing to get to a critical mass before I do anything about them.  I want to do something different with my web site, but the amount of effort required to do so simply puts me off from even starting. 

A lot of this can be attributed to the time I spend playing World of Warcraft.  I’m aware of that.  Frankly, though, my apathy and lack of inertia bleeds over into that arena as well.  I’m exceedingly bored with the current level of content we can access in our guild, and the new stuff that we’re moving in to really doesn’t excite me all that much either.   Running the guild for as long as I have has taken a toll on meas well, and I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve dealt with so much drama and bullshit that I instantly assume the worst whenever I face some sort of possible “controversy.”   As proud of I am of where the guild is and what we’ve managed to achieve, there are many times when I miss not having to juggle 100 people and their schedules, personalities, and attitudes.

Work is…work.  Again, very stagnant right now.  We’ve got a few major projects coming up but they are all in the planning stages right now and I find myself sitting around waiting for “permission” to start on projects and subsequently doing nothing.  We’ve gotten all official with Project Managers and outlines and charters and sign offs and meetings and I spend most of my time wondering if I’m even supposed to be working on something.  In the past if someone wanted me to do something and I had the time to do it I just DID IT.  Now I have to tell them they need to submit a project request and they have to wait for it to be talked to death and approved before I can even start.

It’s not very effective.  I realize it COULD be and that transition periods like the one we are going through are always painful, but that factors in pretty heavily in the “spinning my wheels” feelings I’m having right now.

I was hoping to be involved in a show or two soon, but it looks like I probably won’t be until the beginning of next year at the earliest (if at all).  I could go out for something with another company, but the fact is that finances do factor into THAT equation.  With the amount of money I spend on gas to do a show and the amount of time it takes away from my family I have to be able to turn some kind of profit in order to justify it.  I know I’m supposed to be an artist and all and that I should get satisfaction out of just being a performer, but the bottom line is the bottom line.

I’ve had a really hard time getting back into the exercise groove.  I haven’t stopped completely, but I really have to push myself to do my workouts on the days I do them.  Maya asks me how I’m feeling and I almost always tell her “You’re lucky I’m here.”  I’m back up over 250 again and currently sitting at 256, having managed to get down to 248 right after Rosencrantz and Guildenstern finished. 

Healthy living requires motivation.  I think the tone of this post makes it pretty clear I have none.  Want and need to quit smoking again, but can’t muster enough “care” up to do that either.

So yeah, that’s where I’m at right now.  Maybe it’s just a phase I’ll shake off, or maybe I need to make some big changes in my life.  Maybe I just need to turn off the damn computer more.

I’m just not sure.

This, I Believe.

Posted on by
Reply

The inspiration to write this post hit me last night as I was driving home from work.  This, I Believe is one of my favorite spots on NPR and I decided I wanted to make my own contribution to the project.  Whether or not I actually submit it to them remains to be seen.

I believe in the power of self-determination.  I believe that the course of my life has always been largely in my control.  Where I am and what I have achieved is not the product of fate or luck or any series of random events.  Good, bad or indifferent my status in life is a direct result of the choices I have made and the effort (or lack thereof) that I have put into getting here.

I believe that each and every one of us has the power to change our lives if we truly desire to do so.  Many people have told me that my weight loss is an inspiration to them, or remarked that they could not do what I have done.  I believe this is a fallacy.  I believe that if you truly want to do something and devote yourself to doing so the actual task in and of itself is simple.  I believe that excuses are convenient.  I believe that it is far too easy for us to justify why we cannot do something or point fingers at some kind of irrelevant factor as a stumbling block.  I believe that change is a matter of choice, and that  “Do or do not, there is no try” is much more than a geeky reference to Star Wars that nerds make. 

I believe that ignorance is a sin and that stupidity is a choice.  I believe that there are very few people in the world who are mentally incapable of broadening their horizons if they desire to do so.  I believe that the English language is a beautiful thing that should be cherished and appreciated for what it is, and I believe that the flagrant disregard for spelling and grammar that is running rampant on the internet these days is a sad thing. 

I believe that jealousy is pointless.  What others have achieved in their lives has no bearing whatsoever on what happens in yours.  At the end of the day the fact that you think someone has it easier than you doesn’t put food on your table and you are wasting valuable time and energy getting yourself worked up over it. 

I believe it is difficult to write on a laptop that has a key that keeps falling off.  I believe the fact that I just got a mouth full of coffee grounds in the last sip of coffee may make me sick.

I believe in the power of family and friends.   I believe that if you are loving and generous you will be surrounded by people who give the same to you.  I believe that true friendship does not require validation – it just is.  If the ties that bind you to another person are so tenuous that they cannot survive long periods where there is no contact the bond was never truly solid to begin with.

I believe in the power of love, but I also believe that it is more important to love yourself than to be loved by another.  I also believe that if you have not mastered the former the latter will never be true.  I believe in raw, dirty sex and I believe in gentle lovemaking.   I believe that fantasies are a good thing, but I also believe that far too many people forget that fantasies rarely come true and that there are no fairy tale endings.

I believe that religion is often a crutch for people who refuse to take responsibility for their lives.  I believe that if there is one sentient being that created all of existence it is ludicrous for us to think that he or she would rely on something so fallible as man to speak directly to us if they needed to do so.  I believe that Jesus was a kind and loving man who did his best to make the world a better place and I hope that wherever he is now he is not aware of the evil that has been done in his name.  I believe that in all my years studying religion the two words that stick with me the most are “Harm None,” but I also believe that most of the “witches” I met when I was a teenager were simply trying to be cool or get laid.

I believe that all of us, at one point or other in our lives, have done silly shit in order to be cool or get laid.

I believe that it’s very likely by this point most people have stopped reading this entry, and that more than a few people who have me on their friends list are bitching to themselves about the fact that this wall of text isn’t behind a friends cut.  

I believe that’s lame.

I believe that it’s time for me to wrap up this post and do some exercise. 

I believe in this power of self-determination.

I believe in Me.

This, I believe.

Weekend Recap

Posted on by
Reply

Well, we’re home again and it is time to return to the daily grind that is life.  I figured I’d take a few minutes to fill in the gaps that my twitter feed left in what was, overall, a truly awesome weekend.

We hit the road on Thursday night around 7, I think.  I was trying not to pay attention at that point.  See, there’s this thing about my mentality.  When I get it in my head that we’re going somewhere at a certain time I get all bent out of shape when we miss that particular window.  We had no real agenda on Thursday night.  The only thing we wanted to do that was really set to a certain time frame was stop by the Sony store at International Plaza on the way out of town, and the only restriction that put on us was that we had to be there by 9.  We weren’t meeting up with anyone or going to any kind of event that required us to be there by a certain time.  It was all completely open to our whims, and the only reason we had the “leave at 5:00” directive is because that was when I was definitely going to be off of work.

And yet, knowing all that, I still got stressed out when we didn’t leave right at five.  Knowing full well that if I kept that shit up I was going to be a walking ball of nerves from that point on, we made it a point to set as few definitive time based objectives over the course of the weekend as possible.  That accomplished, it was much easier for me to relax.

Anyway, when we finally did leave our first stop, as I mentioned above, was at the Sony store to order Krystalle’s new laptop.  I went into the saga of our attempts to order one online last week, so there’s no real need to hash it out again here.  The amusing thing to note was that the customer service rep with Sony was, mostly, correct it what she told us over the phone.  Custom orders of Sony computers are really only designed to take one form of payment.  They do have ways to split things up at the store, but the salesman told us that sometimes when they do that the order will end up getting canceled.  So after all the drama we ended up buying a gift card for the total value of the computer after all. 

Once we were done slumming at the upper class mall we got back in the car and made our way to Jacksonville.  Driving without a stereo is lame (mine is currently “in the shop” for warranty repairs).  We dropped Jareth off at his Grandmother’s place in Orange Park and made our way to the hotel we had there for the evening, stopping along the way to pick up a few Krystal burgers.  That turned out to be the single worst customer service experience I’ve ever had in a fast food restaurant.  After I made my order, Krys realized that something I had ordered sounded good and wanted some for herself.  Realizing that she was now in combo territory I asked the woman on the other end of the speaker to drop a few of the items we ordered and add a combo.  When she told me the new total I looked at the screen and realized she had gotten it wrong and told her so.  At this point she interrupts me by yelling “Well that isn’t what you said!” and proceeds to read back the order to me and tell me what I  had ordered.  I attempt to correct her, still being polite and explaining that we had changed our mind (and even referring to her as “ma’am”) and she changes the order again but STILL gets it wrong, then she proceeds to give us the total and close down the speaker phone without asking if it was correct this time.  Literally stunned by how rude she had been we drive through and pay for our food, and while we were charged for what we got it was still not what we wanted.  I ended up going back to get the rest of the food Krys had ordered, and the woman didn’t even act like she recognized me the second time through.

I still need to write a letter to the manager of that store.  I realize that it’s not always easy to keep up the happy face when you’re working in fast food, but that level of rudeness is just beyond the pale.

Friday morning we got up and hit the continental breakfast buffet in the La Quinta we were staying at.  Nothing to write home about there, but the waffle press was pretty cool.  The coffee was complete ass, though, so while Krys finished up her morning posts I walked over to the nearby Panera bread and got myself a cup of decent coffee.  While I was out I grabbed a Coke Zero from Krys at the nearby BP as well.

It’s the exciting details like this that keep my journal riveting, folks. 

Once we were done in the hotel we went over to the World Market so Krys could get in some of her much anticipated “I can’t get this stuff in the Tampa Bay area” shopping.  I did my usual routine of walking around and looking at the neat food and kitchen toys, then ended up waiting outside while she finished up.  I don’t begrudge her the time she spends shopping in these stores when we head up that way.  If we had a World Market here in Tampa I’m sure she’d be there every few weeks, so I don’t mind waiting while she crams as much shopping in as she can stomach when we get a chance to visit.  When she was finally done there we skipped over to Riverside for a stop at the Chamblin Book Mine and our traditional Beer Cheese Soup and Smokerschmitt lunch at European Street (topped off with a couple of their decadent cookies).  Having fulfilled two of our vacation goals we took off for St. Augustine.

We got to the Carriage Way around four and were escorted down to our room at the cottage.  It was, as expected, absolutely gorgeous.  The cottage itself is this really quaint little bungalow about half a block down from the main building.  It has two rooms, a kitchen, and a sitting room with a dining room table, a couch, a recliner and a television.  There was a 2 person whirlpool bath in our room as well as a private bathroom.  Yet again, the place we were staying was one of the best parts of our vacation.  I cannot recommend Carriage Way enough for a getaway in St. Augustine.  The staff is great, the food is delightful, and the bed and breakfast itself is just charming.  The only letdown of the whole weekend was our breakfast in bed, which of the three breakfasts we had there was the weakest.  Really, though, if that’s the worst criticism one can come up with for a weekend stay I think that’s saying a lot.

Once we got settled in we went over to the nearby English pub.  I got to try a “traditional” scotch egg, which apparently is served cold in the UK.  Bleargh.  I don’t get it.  Warm beer and cold scotch eggs.  You European people are weird.  My fish and chips, however, were very tasty (if slightly overcooked) and went down well with the Black and Tan I ordered.  We did a little walking around in downtown St. Augustine that night and capped off the evening with a nice long soak in the whirlpool bath.

Saturday morning was met with Blueberry stuffed french toast at the Carriage Way (which was our favorite breakfast the last time we stayed there).  We lounged around on the porch in front of the main building eating breakfast and chilling out while Krys did some work and I read (over the course of the weekend I managed to read two books).  Once we were finished there it was downtown again for some shopping and (later on) lunch at the Cracker Cafe.  We were pleasantly surprised to find the Hugenot cemetery open for visitors, so we walked around in there for a while and looked at all of the tombstones.  I then went back to the cottage and took a brief nap while Krys did some more shopping, then I caught up with her and we took a train tour.  A six that night we had dinner at the Colombia restaurant (my first time eating at one, despite having lived near the original one in Ybor City most of my life) and followed that up with a walking ghost tour.  Our tour guide was nowhere near as experienced or engaging as the one we had last time, but we still enjoyed ourselves and tipped him
well.

Sunday was quiche for breakfast at the Carriage way and more shopping.  We had our picnic lunch that afternoon in the grass near the Castillo San Marco (another “slight” letdown of our stay – our picnic lunch was Publix fried chicken).  After we were done eating we got out the kite that Krys had purchased at World Market and after several abortive attempts managed to get it into the air.  I haven’t flown a kite since I was probably Alex’s age, and it was a real blast to do so again.  I believe Krys got videos of me flying it, and once we get all that sorted out I’ll post a link or something.

Our plans for the early evening got kind of sidelined.  We were supposed to get ice cream with Jack and Candy, but they fell asleep that afternoon and woke up too late to join us.  Turned out for the best, really.  I went back to the cottage and fell asleep, as I was starting to feel a little crummy.  After my nap I walked around for a bit with Krys again and then we took our carriage ride.  Again, we’ve done it before but it’s always fun to hear a new take on the same old historical tour.  Our guide was great, and she really made the ride enjoyable.

That night, however, I fully fell victim to the only truly sucky part of our weekend.  I don’t know if I got ate something that wasn’t cooked properly or not, but I think it’s much more likely that my body just isn’t used to eating that much fried/greasy food anymore.  What started out as some truly horrid gas turned into several marathon bathroom sessions that left me in quite a bit of pain.  I won’t go into too much detail here as grossing out my readership isn’t really something I like doing, but let’s just say that things were so bad between Sunday night and this morning that I got out of bed at 3:30 AM today because I was too sore to go back to sleep.  Things seem to be getting better now, but I am NEVER going on vacation again with a supply of Immodium AD on hand (and I’m seriously going to be a lot more selective in my eating out indulgences). 

I’m also reminding myself, yet again, that I really need to get some better shoes for marathon walking sessions.  I love my new red Chuck Taylor All-Stars, but they truly suck for extended periods of time on your feet.

I spent the remainder of our vacation mostly holed up in the cottage while Krys did some last minute shopping and we got ready to head back to St. Petersburg.  After we left St. Augustine we went by yet another one of her favorite stores in Jacksonville and I, yet again, allowed her all the time she wanted to shop while I chilled out with a book in the car.  The trip back home was uneventful, if uncomfortable (for me anyway).  I let Krys drive most of the time and polished off that second book.

All in all, even factoring in the mishaps with my ass, it was a fantastic and much needed weekend.  Naps, reading, good food, good lodgings, and the company of my other half.  It really doesn’t get much better than that.  Still, I’m every much looking forward to our next trim to Colorado in just a few weeks.

This time there will., hopefully, but much less drama on the intestinal front.

Somebody pass me the damn Cheetoes

Posted on by
Reply

I’m itching to do some table top role-playing again.

It’s been a long time since our group has gotten together to do so.  In fact, I don’t think we’ve actually played an RPG since well before Dragon*Con last year.  Between

[info]draxzaster

and

[info]princessloki

having a baby and the acquisition of Rock Band our gaming groups have been sporadic and largely taken up by eating and drinking with the occasional mini-concert thrown into the mix.

Note that there is nothing wrong with just hanging out while consuming good food and having a good time.  At all.  I do, however, get the urge to actually relive my childhood days on occasion though.

I have an idea of what I think would make a pretty decent campaign in the Star Trek Universe, but would need to pick up some new books to do so.  I have a few of the Last Unicorn Star Trek RPG books, but they were done by series and what I’d need to do would require stats from different eras.  I think the Decipher game covers that.  I’d also like to take another stab at running the Drow War campaign that

[info]cavalorn

wrote.  We just started that when our gaming group got sporadic and never really made much progress in it.

I dunno.  It’s hard these days.  People have real lives and shit.  But at the very least we now have much more comfortable furniture in the living room for gaming on. 

Now THAT was a good weekend…

Posted on by
Reply

Dude.  They don’t make weekends like this often.

I got a TON done around the house on Saturday and Sunday, which may not seem like too much of a fun thing but I realized that part of my burnout with the whole MMO thing was that I was letting stuff slack around the household.  Things that, in all honesty, make me batshit crazy.  I wrote down a huge “to do” list for myself and got through most of it.  My kitchen is spotless, and the living room is looking pretty damn good too.  I planned out all the meals for the next two weeks and got the grocery shopping done.  I only got in 15 minute workouts on Saturday and Sunday, but I coupled that with many hours of cleaning activity so I still count that as a win.

Got to take in a baseball game Saturday morning, which isn’t really the pinnacle of fun for me personally but I love getting to watch Alex play.  Saturday night I went to see Iron Man with the family along with Xany and Lexy.  Did the responsible thing and ate off the Weight Watchers menu at Applebee’s so I could splurge on popcorn and Sno-Caps at the movie theater.  The movie absolutely blew me away, and if you’re any kind of comic geek you MUST stay through the credits.  Went home and was still in a movie mood so I took in Serenity in the living room with the new furniture, TV and surround sound system.  Yes indeed, watching movies at home has become an enjoyable experience again.

One brief bitch/comment about Saturday night, though.  Holy crap it’s expensive to take my family out for dinner and a movie!

Tickets for four purchased in advance online : $40.00
Dinner for four at Applebee’s : $60
Snacks at the theater : $35
A fun evening with family and friends : Priceless

The feather in the cap of the weekend was going with our guild to Magtheridon’s Lair in World of Warcraft and downing him on our first ever trip there.  That, and everyone along stating that I should be the one to loot his head for the quest that you get afterward. 

Yeah, good times.  Good times indeed.

More weekends like this, please!  Next weekend is already looking good with

[info]draxzaster

 coming over on Saturday, and of course the weekend after that is our trip to St. Augustine.

Yay!  Happy times!

Summer Agenda

Posted on by
Reply

May 16th – 19th : St. Augustine with

[info]netgoth

 

June 5th – 9th : Denver with netgoth for Scott and Donna’s wedding.

June 20th – 27th : My sister Karen and her family will be visiting from Missouri.

August 8th – 10th : Convergence 14 in Tampa

August 13th – 17th : Gen Con Indy with Alex and

[info]ross_winn

 . Will get to meet

[info]haujob

  and hopefully see John and Random.

August 23rd : See Embedded

August 27th – September 2nd : Dragon*Con in Atlanta with

[info]netgoth

 ,

[info]etcet

  and possibly

[info]aishlynn

 . Hooking up with many of the Children ofMidian guild mates.

TBA : A trip to the Magic Kingdom with the family, compliments of my pay from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

I cannot even express how excited I am about all of this, or about how I’m finally able to afford doing this kind of stuff without putting myself in the poor house.

[info]netgoth

  and I have both suffered through a lot and worked very hard to get where we are. Hell, she’s been homeless and if it weren’t for Karen I would have lost this house after my divorce. It’s been really rough for a long time, and it’s nice to have finally gotten to a point where things aren’t quite so hard in the financial department. They aren’t perfect – I still don’t have any savings to speak of and pretty much live paycheck to paycheck, but I’m doing that because I’m putting lots of money on to credit cards and paying down certain ones to 0 every time I run them up again.

Progress is being made, and despite the downturn in the economy recently we’re in a pretty good place.

So…Yay. 🙂

What a week I'm having!

Posted on by
Reply

I’m going to start this post with a quick, one line statement for those of you who may have caught wind of some of the events of the last few days through my various other social networking tools. 

Alex is fine and he is coming home from the hospital today.

For those of you who aren’t in the loop as of yet, that should give you a pretty good indicator of how my week was.

Last weekend I completed moved our intranet at work from an old, seriously outdated server to a shiny new one with updated and/or different versions of all of the major software used to support it.  The machine the intranet was on was a Windows 2000 box with ColdFusion 5, MySQL 3, and Visnetic Website as the web server software.  The new machine is a Windows 2003 box with ColdFusion 8, MySQL 5, and Internet Information Service 6 as the web server software.  The move itself went fairly well (despite the fact that I originally moved the wrong database files over…but I corrected that on Sunday night). 

Monday, however, the shit hit the fan.

As I referenced in my post earlier this week – there simply is no way to test for every eventuality when doing a move of this kind.  I spent the majority of my time working this week correcting errors that simply did not exist on the old server.  On top of that, one of the biggest changes that happened in this changeover involved moving away from using employee Social Security Numbers as a UUID field and going to a generic 10 digit code.  Many employees did not get crossed over properly and I had to go back and run conversion routines two additional times to get everyone in line (and I still have one more block of them I need to straighten out).

So work pretty much sucked.  The only bright spot in the whole week was that I finally found out what my annual increase was.  It was on my paycheck that I received on Friday, along with all the retroactive pay I was due dating back to the first of the year. 

It was a very nice check.
 
On the homefront, however, it was significantly worse.  Alex got a stomach virus on Monday night, and it kicked his ass.  I have never, ever seen him get this sick.  He didn’t eat for several days and spent most of the time in bed.  So much so that, on Wednesday, I gave in to his tearful begging of me not to check his blood sugar or give him a shot.  This turned out to be a very stupid thing to do.  Wednesday night Krys, Jareth and I came down with the bug and I spent most of the day on Thursday sleeping.  Alex, feeling better that day but seriously dehydrated, got into the gatorade that I had purchased and drank the majority of a 32 ounce bottle.

No insulin + Sickness throwing off his body chemistry + 32 ounces of sugar water = Very bad things for a diabetic.

I went in to check on him at 3:15 on Thursday and he was breathing heavy and seriously incoherent.  He couldn’t move without it hurting and he was barely able to stay conscious.  I checked his blood sugar, and the meter came back as “HI.”  This means over 500.  I gave him a shot with extra insulin and checked his blood sugar again at 3:40.  Still HI.  Gave him another 10 units of insulin and checked it again at 4:30.  Still HI.  Waited until 5:00 and checked again.  Still HI.  Gave him another shot and called his Mother.  At this point panic was starting to set in, as I had to be at the theater by 7 for the evening performance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and it was looking like he was going to need to go to the hospital.  I left him in the reluctant care of Krystalle (who, due to not being related to him, cannot authorize medical care in case of an emergency…a situation that I need to have remedied post-haste).  Jody finally got Alex to go to the bathroom and test to see if he had any ketones in his blood, and it came back that there was a moderate level of them.  She called his doctor, and while he was not panicked he did say that Alex needed to go to the hospital.  We were going to wait and do it when I got home that night, but Alex could not even stand up to take a shower on his own.  When I called Jody to tell her that (I was at the theater at this point) she made up her mind to take him then and there and rushed him down to All Children’s Hospital.

Long story short, Alex had entered a state of ketoacidosis.  This is a potentially fatal condition that can happen to diabetics who don’t get insulin.  In Alex’s case it was bad, but not nearly as bad as it could have been.  I got to the hospital around 11:00 and stayed there with him overnight.  Finally went home around 4 yesterday afternoon after his Mother got back and his blood sugars were back to normal levels (he had to be put on an Insulin IV to get his body back in line).  He called me at 8:30 this morning to tell me he was coming home.

Krystalle and I finally feel like we can eat again today, and I got a decent night sleep last night (the first I’ve had since Tuesday).  I ate some soup this morning that Paul gave me last night and am drinking coffee again (the caffeine withdrawal symptoms weren’t helping things either).  All in all, this is has been one of the crappiest weeks I’ve had in a long time.  I’m going to be chewing on the guilt of what happened with Alex for a long time.  I should have insisted that he check his blood sugar on Wednesday and he should have had a shot.  Everything is ok now, but I’m seriously shaken over the situation.  I can tell you this much – he’s going to get seriously annoyed with how anal I’m going to be about this stuff going forward.

So yeah, that was my week.  Sorry if I’ve been out of the loop for the last few days.  If I missed anything important out there let me know. 

Always look on the bright side of life

Posted on by
Reply

I have a giant pimple on my face that has, to date, refused to develop a head.  It is painful and I really wish it would go away.

This is probably the most exciting thing I’m going to post about as far as my personal life is concerned in the post that follows.  I apologize for the mundane nature of my existence but I can’t always have a life that one would want to live vicariously through.

I guess the most exciting thing I could post about this morning is the fact that my nephew, Fred (currently in the Army and on tour in Iraq) is going to be a father today.  His wife, Jennifer, went into labor late last night or early this morning and we should be welcoming his daughter Victoria into the world any time now.  It’s got to be rough for him, knowing that he’s missing out on all of that, but knowing Fred I’m sure he’ll do his best to make up for lost time when he’s done with his duties overseas. 

For my part, it was a pretty busy weekend. 

[info]netgoth

and I went out on Friday night to see “ranney” at Studio@620 in downtown St. Petersburg.  He’s working on a new one man show and was trying out material in front of an audience.  It was great to see him on a personal level, and it’s always a treat to watch him perform.  It was also nice to finally get a chance to go to Studio@620.  I’ve heard a lot of good things about the space, and I was pretty impressed by what I saw.  There are some really nice folks running it, and it is a joy to see art happening on this side of the bay.  Tampa gets a lot of the artistic attention in this area, and it’s really cool to see that there’s a place doing some stuff outside of the mainstream that doesn’t require those of us who live over here to drive 45 minutes or more (thanks to all the wonderful traffic recently) to take part in it.

Saturday started off very early.  Alex and I went to Weight Watchers first thing and then rushed over to the park for a baseball game.  Fortunately the weather didn’t turn sour until around 11:00 so he actually got a chance to play.   They lost, but it was a really good game and they came back from a 6 run deficit to take the lead at one point before the other team rallied and ended the game five runs ahead.  After that I came home and got in a 15 minute workout in before heading over to Tampa for a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead rehearsal.  It was our first time on the set, which is HUGE.  Easily the largest set I’ve worked on in all of my performances with Jobsite.  What’s really funny is that we’ve been rehearsing with a much smaller playing area in mind so bits that we thought might be hard to pull off are actually working quite well.  All in all, I’m really excited about seeing this one go live (which is happening in just over a week!). 

After I left rehearsal I stopped by the grocery store, spent the bi-weekly small fortune on food, and came back home.  I thought about logging into World of Warcraft but the living room was free for a change so I took the opportunity to jump on the XBox 360 and play some Bioshock.  6 hours later I finished the game.  What a truly amazing game.  I understand that the endings were a bit of an afterthought and the the designer didn’t necessarily want to have 3 different static endings, but I thought that my particular ending was pretty satisfactory (I got the “good” ending due to not killing any of the Little Sisters).  I’m tempted to play through the game again and try to catch the other two endings, but I’ll probably end up just checking them out on YouTube.  I liked the game well enough, but I’m not sure if I really want to spend that much time playing it again for a few more achievements and some different cut scenes. 

I actually got to sleep in on Sunday, which was nice, but I didn’t get a workout in because I made the mistake of logging into World of Warcraft.  Two of my guildies got me a present that required me to do a little bit of material gathering to create, and as I’m a sucker for instant gratification I had to do so right then and there.  After doing that I got a quick shower in and we popped over to my sisters house for Easter (which, for my fairly non-religious family, is essentially an excuse to get together and eat a bunch of food).  Several thousand calories later we left (avoiding the requests to take home plates of evil foodstuffs) and came home long enough to change and head up to Clearwater to see Spamalot with our boys,

[info]theonebob

, [info]kungfugimp,

[info]razerwolfe

,

[info]the_tangent419

,

[info]ross_winn

 and “The John”,

[info]bitogoth

, Drew,

[info]xany

, and

[info]mistressbellona

.  Was great to see that particular gang and get out of the house with the whole family for a change (let’s face it – we spend a lot of time together in the house without actually spending time with each other).  The
show was ok, but not nearly as good as the last time we saw it.  Most of the cast on the national tour has changed since that production (in fact, the only holdovers were Patrick Heusinger as Lancelot and Christopher Sutton as Prince Herbert, both of whom where excellent in their multiple roles and easily the two best performers in the cast.  I was particularly disappointed in Esther Stilwell, who took over as the Lady of the Lake from Pia Glenn.  Her voice was fine and she did an admirable job, but she didn’t have the presence that Ms. Glenn had and as a character that is supposed to be a Diva presence is kind of important.  Case in point – during the second act the character as a number called “The Diva’s Lament.”  When Pia Glenn came on stage at the beginning of that number the audience erupted into applause which works wonderfully with the number.  When Ms. Stilwell came on last night she was greeted by expectant silence.  Overall, the original tour was considerably better and I’m glad I got to see it first.

That’s pretty much it for our wild and wacky weekend.  As of tonight I’m back into rehearsals and pretty much non-stop until we open next Wednesday.  If you’re at all interested in getting tickets to the show I suggest you do so quickly because they are selling fast and as of yet we have not decided if we’re extending to a fourth weekend or not.