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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Life

  • Aw, dagnabbit.

    So much for once-per-week posting.

    I utterly, completely, and totally missed last week. Sorry about that. It was busy! Work was nuts! I got my tax refunds and spent lots of money! The fruits of that spending arrive today (probably)!

    What did I get? A QNAP 219p II home NAS device with a pair of 3-terabyte Seagate drives to fill it, and… new phones for everybody. My first smartphone in many years, Kylanath’s first full-on smartphone, plus new feature phones for the kids. It’s going to be a fun week getting all that set up, and I’m sleepless with excitement about it.

    No, really. I’ve been so keyed up for the last few days that my insomnia has run rampant. Ugh.

    At any rate. That’s the news, and there’ll be more to come as things progress. And hey, I’m taking Thursday & Friday off from work to celebrate my impending forty-first natal anniversary, so there’s that…

  • One Flu Over

    At least, I sure hope it’s over.

    A nasty bug’s been going around the office, and I worked hard at avoiding it for as long as I could. I don’t know if I ended up with that one or something else entirely, but early Monday morning I started feeling moderately awful, escalated to fully awful by mid-afternoon. I had my wool coat on in the office, I was so cold. Yesterday morning the alarm went off and between the splitting headache and intense fever with chest congestion for extra fun, I decided to bail on work and go back to bed.

    I slept until eleven, when sunlight stabbed me right through the eyelids and insisted I get the hell outta bed.

    All that extra sleep screwed up my sleep schedule, though, since I just spent most of last night… awake. Wide awake. But the fever’s gone down and my head doesn’t hurt nearly as much, so back to the salt mines I go. Stuff’s gotta get done, I’ve gotta earn my keep.

  • One Saw Weak

    And this makes once a week every week in January of Twenty-thirteen that I’ve managed to crank out a post of some sort.

    I’ve set myself a few small goals and limitations for the time being. One, I need to get something posted here once per week, more if I can manage it, but no less barring catastrophe. Two, I’m allowed only one breakfast and one lunch “out” on working days per week to cut back on the huge monetary outlay that I’m sure the fast food places near my work are now sorry to be deprived of. And three, I only need to produce four more months’ worth of the webcomic before completing its official run at the end of May. (I might later do some one-off comics, events, that sort of thing… but twice-per-week-like-clockwork will be over.)

    Mind you, I don’t know what I’ll do for a creative outlet afterward. I’ll need to do something or I’ll go nuts.

    Okay, nuts-er.

    One idea I’m tossing around is that of a radio-play type thing, get a few people together to record dialog, insert some sound effects, something along those lines. If I do this, I’ll start small with a one-off half-hour episode and get a feel for whether I can make a story work and whether I can handle the workload involved.

    Anything’s possible, yes?

  • Two Thousand Fourteen

    No, I didn’t get the date wrong. Two thousand fourteen is the post count for this journal as of this entry. (Yes, I know that the URL would have you believe otherwise. Blame WordPress’s weird way of counting certain things.)

    It should be higher. It should be much higher. Somehow I went 2012 writing between one and three posts per month instead of per week. Which means that now I have one of my “new year’s resolutions” locked down: Write more, write better.

    Well… more, anyway.

    Happy New Year, everybody.

  • August of Two Thousand Twelve

    Well, I almost let an entire calendar month go by, didn’t I? Whoopsie. So much for getting back on the horse… again.

    So! Notable things about this month? One, I managed to take an entire calendar week off from work for the first time since I started work. (This doesn’t count stretches of unemployment, mind you.) Last time I scheduled a week-long vacation, my boss got canned and I spent half the week in the office anyway. This time? Peace and quiet.

    What’s really cool about the time off is that I didn’t actually waste it all. Instead, I used half the week to de-junk my living space a bit. A couple bags of trash went out, sure, but the really big part involved having Green Century come by on Thursday to haul away several 17-gallon bins’ worth of computer paraphernalia. I’d accumulated 15 years’ worth of working-in-IT and taking-my-work-home junk, like old PCI cards and cables and drives and drives and cables and plastic fiddly bits and empty chassis and printers and you get the picture. Finding, sorting, piling, and staging all of this took up the first two days of my vacation.

    A lot of work to do on a so-called “break,” yes, but utterly worth it. I reclaimed a lot of storage and floor space, found some nifty things during the sorting that I wanted to store more safely, and my physical possessions total a few hundred pounds less now than they did before. Sweet!

    The second notable event this month? My son turned 20, mid-month. Twenty years old! It’s amazing, and he’s turned out to be pretty damned cool. I have the best kids, I tell ya.

  • A Body Made Of Ouch

    I should be at work right now.

    I’m not, because I spent all night gulping down pain medicine and trying to find a position in which I could sleep. There’s a knot in my back at my left shoulderblade that hurts like [censored]. There hasn’t been a minute in the last 15 hours in which it hasn’t hurt at all. I occasionally slept through it, when I became too exhausted and when the meds kicked in for a while, but it never lasted long.

    There are important things to do. The Kaseya server needs some attention, most importantly. I haven’t even entered my time from yesterday. I hate letting the company down like this. I almost got up and went to work anyway, but finding myself on the verge of tears merely from sitting up in bed put the kaibosh on that idea.

    So, I’m going to spend the rest of the day trying to find a comfortable-ish position from which to grit my teeth and endure until this knot goes away. Wish me luck.

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