Cookies and US politics – who can think of a better after-school snack?
http://www.truemajority.org/oreos/
Just how awesome is my girlfriend?
Last night I was in a really bad mood. I have no idea what brought it on or what it was all about, but you know how sometimes you just get in that place where you’d rather be a grouch for absolutely no reason other than the sake of being a grouch? Anyways, that’s where I was, and here’s how my girlfriend dealt with it…
Needless to say, I’m a very lucky man. Bad mood solved…at least for now. 🙂
a long, short weekend…
Friday
Left work early because I got a message from Sara that she felt like her head was going to explode – she’d been having a bad migrain all day and heads typically aren’t supposed to do that, so I came home to make sure that she was ok. Within maybe an hour, we were en route to the emergency room at Zephyrhills hospital because she said it just kept getting worse and worse and ultimately, I’d rather pay a little extra money than have something really bad happen. Fortunately, Zephyrhills is kind of in the middle of nowhere, so we got in and had her in front of the doctor in maybe half an hour – tops. They gave her some drugs which I’m told didn’t do crap, then gave her some considerably better drugs about an hour later which put her on Cloud 9, but at least they made her feel better. At that point, they discharged her and we went home, of course not before stopping for some McDonalds that would later end up on the side of the road approximately twenty minutes later … I guess that’s what I get for catering to her every need! She did have some toast when she got home, which quote “the chick took forty-five minutes to eat,” but at least she kept most of it down.
Overall it was a pretty scary evening – of course, nobody really ever looks forward to taking a loved one to the emergency room – but I’m happy to say that she’s feeling much better now. Whew… 🙂
Saturday
I really don’t remember much of Saturday at all, primarily because we slept rather late after being pretty much exhausted by the ordeal of the day previous. Eventually I went and got my hair cut, returned to the office to finish up what I hadn’t the night before, and bought a few things for finishing the bedroom project at Home Depot. Ended up getting completely soaked leaving Home Depot because somebody decided to have a turrential downpour two minutes before I was to leave the store, but such is life. We also watched Wedding Crashers on demand, which was so-so. I’ve got columns that I’m putting together both for the movie and for my hair-cutting experience, but I’m just too tired to work on them tonight. Also, nothing really got done on my writing website, but such is life.
Sunday
We finally arose at somewhat of a decent hour today and got a few things done around the house, but not before my wonderful girlfriend made me breakfast in bed! She claimed that it was the only way that she was going to get me out of bed, and that’s probably not too far from the truth. I got the remainder of things situated in the bedroom while she began sorting through her massive pile of belongings in the living room. She ended up pitching out quite a lot of old papers, but there’s still a ways to go. (Reminder: Rome was not built in a day.) Eventually we called it a day with the cleaning and went to pick up some groceries and also the first season of House on DVD. This is another great show that she’s managed to get me hooked on (for some reason, I seem to relate with House’s smart-ass, wise-cracking side – go figure) and I think we probably watched four or five episodes alone this weekend between the DVR and the new DVDs. We watched a lot of TV today, I’ll admit, and I’m kind of mad at myself for not getting more done, but after what took place earlier on in the weekend, you can really only expect to do so much – a lot of time gets spent just recharging and getting your bearings, and ultimately I suppose that’s ok, too…
Right now I’m debating between staying up to try and make up some lost ground or just going to bed and starting off tomorrow as a new day. It’ll all still be there tomorrow – no sense in losing any sleep over it. Good night.
a little perspective…
The size of our world, as compared to other heavenly bodies:
http://www.rense.com/general72/size.htm
new Weird Al song!
It’s been too long, my friends…
You’re Pitiful
yin and yang
They say that when times are the toughest, that’s when you find out who your true friends are.
Then again, you don’t ever expect to make new friends altogether during such times, but either way, it’s interesting to see how the characters of those around you truly shows when the proverbial shit hits the fan.
I won’t tell the story here because it isn’t really mine to tell, but all I can say is yes – there was a hardcore collision between said poop and its related fan; and also, I saw someone in a different light this evening that completely changed my perspective for the better. I’m pretty sure that Sara’s glad, too. All in all, certainly not how I’d have liked to spend my Sunday night by far, but we dealt with it, it’ll be over after tomorrow, and then we can all move on.
Life does that to you sometimes – I recommend learning how to deal with the ups and downs without driving yourself insane earlier than later. Easier said than done, I know, but life’s too short to let the ignorance and disrespect of others ruin your days. Better to take a deep breathe, move on, and let God / Allah / Buddha / karma handle the follow-up.
But enough small talk – I’m going to go have some cheese toast, make up a big bowl of ice cream for my girl, and try to unwind enough so that we can both get a little sleep. Good night.
good night
Today was a good day. You know, one of those lay around most of the afternoon doing pretty much nothing, then go out in the evening and kick it old-school style sort of days? Yep – that’s exactly what we did today, or at least something like that…
The original plan was to finish painting, haul a load of stuff up from Sara’s apartment, then maybe catch a movie or something. Mind you, when none of that had happened by about 5pm or so, we opted to just skip right to the dinner and a movie part, leaving the rest to pick-up tomorrow. Talk about your perfect example of simply rolling with the punches – we headed out for dinner at Stumps down at Channelside, then to watch the new Superman flick on IMAX, but the wait ended up being so long at Stumps that we opted to just have something quick at Hooters instead. A quick meander around after our meal taught us that we’d not only missed out on the 9pm showing, but also that even the super-late showing was already sold out, so from there we decided to do the only thing that we could do living in Florida – go to the beach instead.
We’re still looking for someplace to go on the 4th for fireworks, so we thought it would be good practice to just drive around and find something. This ended us up at Madeira Beach over on the gulf coast and even just the sea breeze alone proved to be just what the both of us needed after an otherwise topsy-turvy kind of week. We first stopped off for a cheezy round of mini-golf (after 18 holes, I beat Sara by one stroke, for those of you keeping track at home), then grabbed some ice cream from a barely open gas station and walked over to the beach for a leisurely stroll down the shoreline. It was great – the water was warm as bath water, you could actually see the stars twinkling in the sky because we were far enough away from the city lights, and there were only a few other people in the area at the time, so it was nice and quiet to boot. It would’ve been sooooo easy to fall asleep out there, with the ocean waves lapping up against the beach – truly a great way to wrap up a day otherwise spent doing absolutely nothing!
…of course, my opinion stands that sometimes you just need to take days like that every now and again to preserve your own sanity. Next time, though, we vowed to go sometime during the day when we might actually get a little sun and be able to spend some time in the water, but this was still a good start! Now if you’ll excuse me, clearly I’ve had a busy day and could use some rest…
Where does the time go?
I’ve been putting off posting this for a while, or rather I suppose I should say that I’ve been postponing writing for a while – I’ll be damned if this isn’t just going to be an extraordinarily busy summer!
I know that there’s only so much time in the day, but it kinda sucks right now because after sleep and work and trying to find time to spend with Sara, any time left over to write or exercise or (gasp) work on the Just Laugh rebuild is pretty much nil at best. And it’s rough because I know she feels bad a lot because she thinks that she’s cutting into my time to do other stuff and I really don’t want her to feel that way because I love any and every minute that I can get with her, but sometimes she does get more brunt than she deserves simply because I can trim time away from her a lot easier than I could, say, from work…
And just between you and me, I think that’s a lot of my problem right now – I’m at a very dull point in my job right now where for some reason it’s just horrendously mundane for me to even make it through the day. I’ve lax’ed things up a bit to try to get out closer to my scheduled time without putting in so much overtime lately, but the bottom line is that simply put: I’m bored. I’m not being challenged, so my duties are purely routine at this point; the same workload problems continue to slack on by, so I’ve pretty much just come to look at them with tinted glasses because nothing seems to change; and ultimately, I don’t see any end in sight, so basically I’m forced to live with a nine-hour block of my day just void of anything other than time on the clock.
(…and I know, I know – there are certainly worse things that I could be doing for a living, but that’s another topic for another day…)
It’s kind of funny because it’s times like these when I start to fantasize back to the days of Just Laugh and wonder if we could ever bring it back again, or more. When the site was at its peak back in 2001 / 2002, I fondly remember having dreams nightly about the site getting just absolutely huge and becoming a household name – truly “Your Source for Humor on the Internet.” I invisioned skyrocketing talented writers and artists into new careers, donating huge sums of money to charities and somehow bringing HBO’s Comic Relief program back to life, and basically just living the high life doing what I could truly love doing – making people laugh and helping other people make people laugh. Comedy tours, celebrities, realizing true fame by finding a plush version of our ever-popular Just Laugh Pepper Monkey on a store shelf – so many possibilities for success…
Of course, I always wondered how those days could’ve been different if I’d had one or two other people on board with me that were just as passionate about the project as I was – staying up all night staring at code to get a feature online by deadline or brainstorming for our next interview. Trouble is, that kind of dedication, just short of a miracle anyways, takes money to support because like it or not, nobody else has that kind of time on their hands either. But if one didn’t actually have to punch a clock and spend 40+ hours a week earning rent money, you just might have a chance…
So that’s what I’ve been thinking about lately…a lot. It seems that whenever my job really gets me down, I start to get off on these drives about how I’d like to get my creative efforts to the point where I could focus on them full-time and count on them to pay the bills. I still honestly believe that there are some good concepts behind Just Laugh and the right people could make some money off of it – it’s just a matter of my being able to put the necessary time in to get it to that point…all the while keeping my job and my girlfriend in tact, too. Talk about a tough balancing act!
But still, they say that dreams are worth following for a reason, so if I really believe that there’s something to this one, I owe it to myself to continue persuing it. I don’t know where the time itself is supposed to come from, but I can attest myself that some of the most entertaining creative minds do their best work after they’ve already spent a full day’s work hammering out widgets to make ends meet while they follow their dreams. Nobody ever said it was easy, but then again, how many really good success stories ever began with the hero having it easy right off the bat, anyways?
First, though, I should probably get some sleep… 😛
Bye-bye, Textamerica…
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/20/textamerica_goes_fee.html
So I heard a rumor earlier this week that the original moblogging site, Textamerica, was planning on deleting all of its free users and switching to a paid subscription model. For a while I was actually contemplating just accepting the charges because it’s always been a pretty cool site to me and I enjoy looking like a complete dork on those instances when I’m actually being an active moblogger. Then I saw the new rate structure today – $99 a year – and said, “Poo poo!!!” to that!
All I can guess is that they’re about to go under, so they’re panicking because otherwise, that rate doesn’t even make sense and they’re going to scare off 90% or more of their user base the moment they start implementing it. Sure, it’s a premium service and I’m all about their trying to recover costs, but a hundred bucks a year is just way too much for the ability to simply post pictures from your cell phone. At least, it’s too much when there are still other services out there that will let you do it for free. I think I pay something like $15 / year for LiveJournal and I use their site a lot more than I ever do TA’s. Also, all of my blog posts from the last three years aren’t simply going to disappear if I don’t make my payment on time. Meh…
While I was thinking about looking into hosting a moblog server of my own for a replacement, I see that Flickr also seems to offer the same thing so I might just go over to them instead. Does anybody have any experience with Flickr or have any better suggestions for this new MoBlogger soon to be without an online home?