Dream Journal : A House with Many Passages

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This one isn’t so much about a single dream, but about a dream concept that I seem to have over and over again…

Whenever I find myself running around a house in my dreams, it’s always a big house and there are always all sorts of secret passages running between the rooms. In fact, a lot of the time we don’t even end up using the regular hallways … and why would you when you’ve got secret passages to slink around in instead?!

The dream I had last night that lead me to writing about this had me in a rather large, Victorian-era house, and the secret passages connected a series of playrooms for kids – one with video games, another with toys and action figures, and another with a foosball table, I think it was?

Anyways, what was unique with this dream is that I wasn’t really being chased by anyone, as with what typically happens when I find myself sneaking around secret passages in gigantic homes. Usually there’s some sort of invasion, Home Alone-style, and the passages are used to escape and eventually defeat them, but this time they were just kind of there for convenience, which is how I like to think that they would be used in your regular day-to-day life if you had an awesome house with hidden chambers! Hell, I think I’d even argue that the hidden areas of this house were a bit cooler than the conventional ones!

If I ever have a house that’s bigger than your average lot and I’ve got a little stupid money to spare, I’d love to build in some stuff like that just for fun … I’ve seen pictures of various places that have done it, and I know there are even companies who specialize in it. It’s probably more common in castles, but seeing as there aren’t exactly a whole lot of those here in Florida, it looks like I’d have to build whatever I wanted … but it’d be fun, wouldn’t it?!  😉

Resolution Reconsidered

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So I wasn’t crazy about this proposed resolution at first because I still think that a resolution only ending exclusion for gay youth in the BSA is only half of the solution … but the more I read all of the vitriol on the BSA’s Facebook by everyone who is so convinced that inclusion will absolutely ruin the organization now that it’s been passed, the more I can appreciate that at least it IS a step in the right direction.

Personally I’d rather see the organization lose some members and be a safe haven to all than stay as it was if those are the kinds of “morals” that it’s been harboring. They may not represent the majority, but the fact that they exist at all should still be a point of concern when we’re talking about Shaping America’s Future…

Case in point:

  • “I’m not burning anything, I at least get to say, ‘I was an Eagle before the Boy Scouts went homo.'”
  • “Are they going to fly the rainbow flag now? I would never let my kids join now. Let our kids be kids.”
  • “Where do we send design ideas for the ‘Fudge Packing’ merit badge???”

The BSA doesn’t need people like that.

Put Your Damn Photos Online Already!!!

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So I kinda stalled out on this effort last year because:

  1. it turned out to be a lot more work than I had expected
  2. I was having second thoughts about paying an annual fee to Flickr for hosting when I already pay for web hosting by itself

I guess today’s announcement by Flickr kind of changes part of that … at least the second one … because with ONE TERABYTE of hosting for FREE, there really isn’t much sense in my paying for a subscription anymore. I’m actually really happy with this one because I’ve always liked Flickr, but photos aren’t a huge priority for me … I feel guilty because I don’t have them online, but I know that they’re mostly there for me and maybe a few friends and family at best.

And yet I’ve never gotten around to putting up a full-fledged site self-hosted because I’m just not really happy with the software that’s available. I tried for a while using Gallery/Gallery2, but their themes have never really kept up with the times … whereas the interfaces for sites like Facebook and Flickr look pretty great. I could throw up a self-hosted site that would take up half of my server’s disk space by itself, and it would look like it was built in 2001, or I can use somebody else’s service like Flickr’s and just go all in.

The real challenge here is simply … getting the photos uploaded.

Right now my Flickr account has about 700 photos between about a dozen sets.

The folder of photos on my PC has about 25,000 photos in about 150 sub-folders … almost 70 GB total!

Now that’s certainly no issue for Flickr’s new size limits, but it’s still a bear of a volume for me to go through before uploading them because I’m sure at least half of them, if not more, aren’t worth saving, and I’d also like to add some captions here and there, maybe do a little editing for the ones taken back when I knew even less about photography than the tiny bit that I do now, etc, etc…

I guess what I need to do is just make a point to do a few folders each week and keep pushing on it – roughly speaking, with about 7 months left in the year, if I could do say 5 folders a week, in theory I should be all caught up by the end of the year. I haven’t uploaded photos in such a long time that I’m not really sure if that equates to an hour a week or much, much more than an hour a week … I think that’s what always slowed me down in the past because it was really easy to get in the zone going through photos, but when I finally looked up again, I’d realize that it’d been a week and a half and I hadn’t done any actual writing in that whole time!

Still, I’d really like to get this done, so enough – that’s my challenge.

Personal photos online and caught up by the end of 2013. Bam!

And here are a handful of old favorites that I’m digging out of my archives for this post to help get me psyched up about starting this effort back up again…  😉

aIMG_5419

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Thin Post : Overeating vs. Over-tired

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It’s weird – I thought that I was doing pretty good for about a week, and then things started to fall apart again.

…specifically with regards to food…

My problem isn’t that I’ve been eating the wrong foods over the last couple of weeks, but more so that I’m just eating way too much of the right foods. Believe it or not, while I was sick I was actually able to curb my junk food cravings for the most part, switching out deviled eggs and Atkins snacks and Nutrisystem meals (long story, but we’ve got A TON OF THEM right now) for potato chips and cookies and whatever other garbage I would normally be eating. That week was pretty great, and then I started feeling better and while I was able to keep myself on the same diet, I unfortunately found myself eating more…

And this time around I’ve also made the correlation that those days when I eat considerably more than I should also happen to be the ones where I feel myself getting sluggish and tired by the end of the day, even when I managed to get a somewhat decent amount of sleep. It makes sense … kind of like when you eat too much on Thanksgiving, and you think it’s because of the turkey but it’s really just from the ridiculous size of your average holiday dinner in general … if you give your body too much food to digest, it needs to divert its attention from everything else simply to deal with all of the excess fuel that you dumped into your gut!

Fuel that, obviously, I don’t need in such great excess, and on top of that, it’s really dragging me down productivity-wise to be falling asleep at my desk at 10:30pm when I still have half a night’s writing to finish up! I suppose that gives me two reasons why I need to curb my overeating a bit … a little unexpected because I’ve really never noticed anything like that before, but then again, these bones be gettin’ old and it unfortunately makes sense that these things are just going to compound themselves the longer I let them drag out before officially dealing with them once and for all.

😐

a disneyland prospectus

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I thought this was kind of interesting – a 10-page write-up from 1954 painting the picture of a new theme park that an up-and-coming animator from Chicago had his heart set on building.

http://craphound.com/Disneyland_Prospectus.pdf

Though I’ve heard the stories a thousand times over for their WDW-equivalent, it’s still need to read the excited descriptions of recreating early America along Main Street USA, and see descriptions about some of the infamous scenes from the Jungle Cruise, and even the misguided anticipation for the Tomorrowland Speedway, which still rings out to me as pretty much the worst Disney attraction of all-time!

Still, I suppose it’s a little more appropriate than the picture of the riverboat … complete with a hint of that good, old-fashioned 1950s racism that you always hear so much about.  😯

Even in death, that man is never going to live that movie down…

Oh, Print Industry – you’ll always be relevant … in my heart.

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Print Industry: Why are you here, Video Rental Store? There are still Blockbuster Videos everywhere.

CDs: There were record stores everywhere once.

Obsolete Anonymous
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2013/03/obsolete-anonymous.html

I stumbled across this little piece over on Joe Konrath’s blog and it really made me chuckle – he actually wrote it a couple of years ago, but that print industry is still holding on!

…sorry – I knew I couldn’t say it with a straight face…

I’m not sure if I give them 6 years anymore, considering that 3 of those have passed since the piece was first published. I love holding print copies of my books, but I’m not really under the delusion that I’ll ever have them front and center in every bookstore in America.

Maybe front and center on the Internet, at least until Internet 2 finally comes along and bumps this information superhighway out of existence, too! 😯

Random Stuff That Bugs Me, Part 1,273,084,125

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  1. People who take the baggers at the grocery store up on carrying their bags out to their car, even though they clearly don’t need the help and just don’t feel like carrying it themselves. I know that it’s a store policy to offer, but it still seems like something that should be reserved for those who really need it.
  2. People who don’t STOP when they see you backing out of a parking space, instead zipping around you and then acting like you’re the asshole for not letting them go first.
  3. When the cashier at CVS just assumes that I don’t have a CVS card and doesn’t even ask. I don’t carry the actual card on me, but I always give our phone number when they ask because one of these days we might actually remember to use the points!
  4. People who drive more than 10 mph under the speed limit, taking it upon themselves to regulate traffic in our neighborhood.
  5. Whoever complained to the HOA that our front lawn needs to be re-sodded … even though it totally does because it really looks like shit right now and I highly doubt that any amount of water, fertilizer, and/or love can bring it back from the dead at this point.
  6. That there aren’t any real IMAX screens in our area anymore because I miss seeing movies on a ridiculously gigantic screen.
    1. We technically still have the dome, but that doesn’t count for completely unfair reasons because I’ve never actually been there…
    2. …and as far as those mini-IMAX screens are concerned, those have never counted in my book…
  7. I’ve been walking a lot more at night lately, but the bugs must be looking at me like I’m a feast carrying a leash because I’m coming back way too bitten up to make it worth the effort.
    1. …unless that helps me to lose weight quicker, then dine away…
  8. That the next Lego mosaic that I want to do is going to cost me a small fortune in bricks and it’s not even for me!
  9. People who fish in retention ponds, despite there being a clearly written, highly visible No Fishing! sign literally feet from where they’re standing. Like, they must’ve had to walk by the thing to get to the pond! Plus, A) do you have any idea what kind of chemicals they put in there?! and 2) the fish that do live in there are there to keep the bugs down, not give your hillbilly ass something to do in between episodes of Family Feud!
    1. And it’s not like we don’t have veritable crap-tons of fishing places that aren’t retention ponds all around the area! Remember that big GULF that we live on?!
  10. The fact that I still don’t have AC in my car. Seriously.