With the weekend in full swing, I’m feeling absolutely wonderful. Sometimes you just feel like a superhero.
To complete this entry, be sure to add audio accompaniment.
Video coming soon! 🙂
January 2006
Planning.
Earl and I are in the process of planning this year’s vacations. Because of the way my work likes to schedule things, we’ve already planned our two vacations for the year. We have a five day weekend coming up in February and then a 12 day vacation in May. The February plans are falling apart all over the place, as we were planning on going to Disney but there’s no space at Mickey’s place the weekend we wanted to go. (Time to bank the time share points!)
Our May trip on the other hand, is coming together spectacularly well. We’re driving to Phoenix and back on a grand Jeep tour. I wonder who’s idea that was (as I bat my eyes innocently).
I’ve always wanted to drive across the country. While we’re not making it from coast to coast, we are driving across a substantial portion of the U.S. and back, and we’re going to barrell right through the “red” states with our blue state sensibilities in check and in practice. I’m looking forward to seeing the gradual change in terrain and accents and weather and all as we drive from Upstate N.Y. to Arizona and back.
Now the task at hand is to plan the activities for the trip. I want to drive on Route 66 a bit. I want to experience local diners and back roads. I wish I could be guaranteed a tornado while we drive through Oklahoma.
So much planning to do!
Back On My Game.
It’s amazing what sleep can do for one’s body. Last night I was about to get almost nine hours of sleep with only one interruption. I’m feeling much more like myself today. There’s no fog hanging over everything I’m trying to say, see or do. I’m also coming a little out of my shell again as well and I will probably be accepting visitors after this run of on-call is over with on Monday morning.
Long ago I was told by an unfortunate mistake of a man I was dating that my personality revolves in predictable cycles and that anyone coupled with me would find me to be maddening. Of course, this came from a nut job that I really shouldn’t have been seeing at the time anyway. I still remember the sigh of relief when I simply hung up the phone on him while he was babbling on about what my problem was. I giggled and took comfort in knowing that I would never speak or see him again. Now that I think about it, back in the day I was quite harsh when I decided to stop seeing someone. For example, one guy I saw while I lived near Boston had all his wisdom teeth pulled and he wanted to spend the weekend at my apartment in the suburbs to recuperate. So Friday night I drove him out and tried to keep him comfortable. Come Saturday afternoon I simply couldn’t take his whining anymore, and I told my roommate to help him pack up his stuff and to get him out of my sight. I didn’t speak to the man again, ever. I feel no remorse.
I’m looking forward to settling down to a weekend at home and the universe willing, enjoying a relatively quiet ending to my bout with on-call. The next week I’m in Massachusetts for some Cisco router training for work.
I hope one of the guys I dumped isn’t there!
Sleep.
The night owl is calling it a night. After getting only six hours sleep in the past two days due to work responsibilities, I’m going to try to catch a few z’s tonight.
I’m closing the PowerBook and then closing my eyes.
Sweet dreams.
Anti Social.
I’m feeling rather anti-social today. It’s a feeling that’s been bubbling about my psyche for the past several days and now I think it’s coming to full steam. I’m not mad at the world, I’m not depressed, I’m not anti-people; I’m just not in the mood to deal with others right now.
Curiously and thankfully, Earl does not fit into the anti-social equation. I have my own little world that I like to live in sometimes and Earl fits nicely into it. Aside from family members, a couple of friends and a few co-workers, not many people are allowed to look inside my own little world, probably because I’m basically a loner. In kindergarten, my teacher Mrs. Mosher (her philosophy was “no child is really different from any other child”) had two things to say about me: I’m a loner and I was probably developmentally disabled.
Well, she was correct on one account. I am a loner. I enjoy being by myself, without intrusion from ringing telephones, flashing lights, radios, IMs or uninvited voices. As far as being developmentally disabled, well, Mrs. Mosher just didn’t “get” me. I didn’t color in the lines. (Who has time for that? While color when you can create three dimensional objects by folding the paper?) I didn’t fold my papers neatly and put them into my book bag (Like my mother had never seen a worksheet with the numbers 1 through 10 on them before.) and I couldn’t tie my shoes (when a good looking classmate named Robbie is sitting in the next chair and is willing to tie my shoes for me, well, you figure it out.) Nevertheless, I passed kindergarten and I pretty much aced the rest of elementary school. It’s because my other early years teachers, Miss Kania, Mrs. Hayden (especially) and Mrs. Delaney, they all “got” me. They left me alone to do my own thing. They challenged me. Mrs. Hayden really got me because she forbad all the other kids in the class to run the Bell & Howell movie projector, leaving me the chosen one for the task. Neener. Neener. Neener.
I mentioned a couple of days ago that I’ve been busy building a little Media Center for our great room. The project has been frustrating because I’ve been trying to use Windows on the computer I built. It’s just not fitting into my grand scheme. I’m coming very close to obsessing on this Media Center. As I’m on call this week, if I’m not sleeping or cowering in fear of my pager going off, I’m thinking about this computer in the basement that I’ve named “scrambler” (named to fit its Windows-like personality and to fit within my computer network naming convention, others are trabant, tempest, tagada, himalaya; the little computer is called “merry-mixer”, its eventually going to be in the kitchen.).
Earl has such patience.
Incogneto.
I’m thinking of getting rid of my Flickr account. I’m still going to post pictures on the blog from time to time and use my .Mac account to display little photo albums as well, but I’m thinking of jumping off the Flickr bandwagon for a while. I’m getting too many creepy messages e-mailed to me.
Any other Flickr users have the same issues?
Absurd Heights.
Today marks the day of a new height in American Absurdity. I heard a commercial on the radio for a product called “Height Max”. Apparently aimed at short people, this product is a supplement you take if you’re between the ages of 15 and 25 and feel short. It’s packed with vitamins and amino acids and will help you strive for that height that you’ve always dreamed of. No longer will you be the short guy at the prom having to look up to your dance partner. The members of the basketball team will no longer laugh at you. Guys on the beach will no longer kick sand in your face and say “Back on the shrimp boat, shrimp.” With Height Max, you simply take this non-prescription supplement and faster than you can make a bionic ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch noise, your body will grow to its fullest potential.
Something sounds very unnatural about the whole thing.
“I was concerned about my 15 year old son. He seemed small for his age. But his confidence was restored and his self-esteem improved after taking Height Max. Why, he’s towering over me now!”
Give me a bleepin’* break.
I suspect this is the beginnings of social engineering where we start to weed out the less desirables. Too short? Take Height Max. Don’t like your dark hair? Color it. Don’t like your dark skin? Bleach it. Where does it all end?
A recent snapshot of me on Flickr showed a white streak I have in my mustache. In fact, it’s prominent enough that someone put a Flickr note on it that said “white?” From afar it may look like a boogie hanging out of my nose. But it’s not (or its not snot), it’s just a white streak I have in my mustache. It’s like Bonnie Raitt’s white streak in her hair. I wear it with pride. I’ve earned in. Why would I want to get rid of it? It’s part of me.
There are tall people, there are short people, there are those of us in between. Don’t take some crazy supplement to grow taller than you were intended to be. That’s crazy. Embrace who you are and deal with the hand you’ve been dealt.
* It’s not really a New Year’s resolution per se, but since I let out a few expletives at a recent party and scared away half the people at the dining room table, I’ve decided to calm down on the f-bombs.
Zoning.
There are times when I just an idea into my head and I’m not going to let it go until I realize the dream. Poor Earl steps aside because he knows that when I get in these geek-intense moods, there’s no stopping me, except perhaps a debit or credit card with no juice left.
The project of the day is a media center computer for our great room. Or is it Great Room. Whatever it is, it’s starting to look like Yucca Flats after the blast as I throw cables about, swap network cards and give the subwoofer cable one more tug to make it reach just to accomplish this vision I have.
I want to be able to sit down and show pictures from our iPhoto collection, watch a movie or surf the internet right from the comfort of our Great Room using the big-screen TV as a monitor. Think of it, with a monitor that big we should get amazing detail on even the tinest of items! (Get your mind out of the gutter, we don’t do porn in the living room, not unless we want the neighbors to watch us. Now that I think about it, that could be fun.). Is this too much to ask?
Granted, with the Christmas bills getting ready to make their ’06 debut in the mailbox this week, my budget is quite limited. Looking at the pile of junked computers in the basement, I found that if I mixed and matched enough parts, I could come up with something that should work fairly well, provided we go to Circuit City and buy a power supply and a firewire card. So we did. Earl sighed, I spent and all was right with the world.
Now I’m trying to install my perfectly legal copy of Windows XP on this computer I’ve scrapped together so I can say I have something up and running until we can afford to buy another Mac Mini. (Sweetheart, if you’re reading this, consider yourself hinted.)
Now I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a huge fan of Microsoft Windows. I’ve been using various incarnations of the operating system since Windows/286 came out in the mid 1980s. So I pride myself on the fact that I kind of know how Microsoft thinks and how they like to do things. It’s this knowledge that has made me very popular with my family as I play system administrator to various aunts, uncles, cousins, sisters, mothers, fathers, neighbors, et al. I don’t mind doing it at all, it keeps my system admin skills in check and gives me an excuse to get a free meal for payment.
But when I’m home trying install Windows XP Professional on a home-built computer, a computer that I built myself, I shouldn’t have to jump through ten hours of hoops just to get the blasted thing going! “Your username does not exist.” Funny, I feel like I’m right here.
So Earl sighs again and knows that when I’m in the geek zone, you just gotta ride it out. At best I’ll get the thing running and we’ll have small items with amazing detail in glorious technicolor in the Great Room.
At worst, I’ll eventually fall asleep.
2006: Typical J.P. and Earl.
Earl and I kicked off 2006 by taking a road trip. The temperature was in the mid 20s, there were snow flakes in the air, the only place we could go was into the Adirondack Mountains of course.
I started a New York State Counties project back in 2003 that went something like this. Being the big road geek that I am, I would get a picture of myself standing next to a county line marker for every county in New York. All 62 of them, including the five that include the five boroughs of New York. I never quite completed the project, so we had to make two stops in the Adirondacks to add to the collection.
I am a big geek. And I am very proud of that.
As we came back down out of the mountains through the city of Amsterdam, we stopped at one of our favorite diners, The Windmill Diner, because after all, nothing says “I love you” more than a snappy diner dinner for New Years Day.
It was absolutely delicious. The folks at the Windmill had a special menu for New Years and I ended up having prime rib au jus, complete with mashed potatoes, green beans, tossed salad, soup and roll and butter. I passed on the complimentary wine. Earl had roast pork with the same trimmings. It was fabulous!
We’ve also made this kicked-back weekend of ours a cinema experience. Last night we saw “The Family Stone”, which we both enjoyed very much. The movie is not as slapstick funny as the previews portrayed it to be and we found that to be a good thing.
Tonight we saw “Brokeback Mountain”. Earl says he was a little disappointed with the movie because he didn’t find it as emotionally engaging as he expected it to be. Personally, I loved the movie, but I’m a sucker for the scenery out west and for some good lookin’ cowboys.
Tomorrow is organization day so that we’re both ready to hit the ground running on Tuesday when we go back to work.
I have great feelings about 2006.
