May 2011
16 posts
1 tag
S is for Sadness
A week ago, I was feeling great. It was Saturday and I had the day off. The sun was shining. I had eaten a great breakfast earlier, cleaned up my apartment and did some laundry, and then gone on a 6-mile training run. I was a bit tired and hungry, but satisfied and even happy. As I got ready to shower and change into street clothes, I started iTunes playing. I went into the kitchen to get some...
April 2011
32 posts
2 tags
R is for Running
I was trying to think of something clever for R, but the most obvious choice is all I can think of: running.
Prior to about 8-9 years ago, my standard response to a mention of running as exercise was “I won’t even run if a freight train was bearing down on me!” What changed? Well, I wanted to go skydiving. When I signed up, one of the many forms I had to sign explained that...
2 tags
Q is for Quest
I’m still a day behind but this morning I woke up after a dream with an unusually strong narrative. My dreams tend to have stories to them because I think like a writer, but this one was even more story-like than usual. That’s not to say that it was perfectly linear and self-contained; it was, after all, still a dream stitched together from various feeling and images.
Phone Quest:
My...
P is for Pub
A crowded pub with noisy babble
A booth to myself
(The sun barely reaches me here)
The hometown team in the playoffs
A dark beer half drunk
A Reuben, and tots on the side
The pleasant fatigue of after a run
Punk rock in the air
The only way this could be better is the warmth of new limerance.
It’s still good enough to be the best moment I’ve had in recent memory. I want to keep...
1 tag
O is for Optimism
Well, it’s time to celebrate some of my successes. If you’d rather not read this I won’t take offense. But this is a small antidote to my recent depression.
I’m debt-free. That took some work, and some sacrifices, and some planning, but mostly it took me hitting financial rock-bottom.
Short story is this: on Thanksgiving Day 2007, I totaled a rental car. I was fine and...
2 tags
N is for Negative
I was chatting with Fatboy Roberts of Cort and Fatboy podcast fame at Stumptown Comics Fest this past weekend. He was telling me about the upcoming planned Geek Olympics, and he gave as an example an event where prospective geek athletes would have to sprint the length of a room, untangle the proper controller for one of a group of different console games, then run back, plug in the controller and...
2 tags
M is for…?
I have no clue what M will stand for, so I’m just going to start writing and see what emerges.
I’m surrounded by geeks. Comic geeks, for the most part. I’m at Stumptown Comics Fest, at the Oregon Convention Center. I’m not really a comics geek, although I have enjoyed comics in the past. Distant past. Well, that’s not entirely true: i have a full slate of webcomics I...
1 tag
L is for Late
I had all day to write this post but I didn’t.
Instead I called in sick to work, slept in bed until 1p, goofed around the house and the neighborhood until 5p, read my copy of Breakfast of the Gods, listened to music, played some Words With Friend (my name on there is lunarobverse), and started watching a movie on Netflix. Oh, and walked down to the corner store and bought a couple of donuts...
2 tags
K is for Kevin
The letter K will always, and only, mean Kevin to me.
He was born on my 6th birthday, 28 December 1970. He died of cancer on 23 May 2010. He was always my friend, even when we were fighting or not on speaking terms. No, more than that: he was my brother, from a different mother. And there isn’t a day that goes by since his death that I don’t miss him.
This was the first picture I...
2 tags
Call for help: How do you use Dropbox?
I’m doing pretty good on my backup strategy. Yes, I have a backup strategy: for right now, I’m using Mac OS X’s built-in Time Machine for hourly backups of both of my computers, and once a week I use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a complete, bootable incremental backup as a second copy.
Just to be safe, though, I’d like to start backing up really super important stuff to the...
1 tag
Actual words from a believer in Invisible Sky Man
Someone I barely knew in high school (and therefore is in my outer circle of friends on Facebook) posted this actual statement:
When a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ suffers, he or she is being drawn into the experience of Jesus Christ, for He Himself was perfected through suffering.
Get the self-justification? See how the person in question is making themselves more important by...
3 tags
J is for Jokes
I have class issues, I guess. I come from blue-collar lower middle class stock; my dad served in both the Navy and the Coast Guard in order to get an education and get away from a drunk, and for most of my life, worked as an electrician, in construction. Mom worked extra jobs when she needed to but was basically at home raising the kids. I’ve had no college; my older sister went to college...
2 tags
I is for IRS
For the last day and a half, all I could think of when I thought of my I post was Internet. But, honestly, what could I say about the Internet in a short blog post? This morning, as I was thinking about money, I realized another thing that I could stand for: IRS.
I am OK with paying taxes. I don’t think my personal taxes are particularly onerous or outrageous. I’d be OK with our...
Why does Old Barfy creep me out?
There are folks in the neighborhood who think Old Barfy is harmless (more posts here here here and here). Not me. He sets off my alarms and I give him a wide berth. When he’s being “nice” it’s way creepier than when he’s angry, but the fact that his “niceness” goes away so quickly and is replaced with anger validates my feelings.
This post from Captain...
3 tags
H is for Happiness
What makes me happy? Oh, man, lots of things.
I went for a run today. Just the fact that I can run at all, that I run on a regular basis and that I’ve been doing it for more than 8 years now is amazing to me. 15 years ago I would joke that I wouldn’t even run to get out the way of an oncoming train. I was heavy and I would walk lots of places but I never moved quickly. Running...
1 tag
G is for Geekcrush
Tonight I’m going to the Roseway to see Cort and Fatboy present Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb. I listen to Cort and Fatboy’s podcast, and I make an effort to go see their Midnight Movies and other events. I like them, and I follow them on Twitter.
In fact, I jokingly claim at times that I have a bit of a geekcrush on them. They know who I am...
2 tags
F is for Formian
My friends have just left the house. I had four of them over for a game of D&D; it’s the eighteenth time we’ve met to play, and I enjoy it as much, if not more, than the first time we met.
The game isn’t just in the encounters that I create and the rest of them overcome; the game is in the little in-jokes and side conversations. Yes, the centaur charging at the group has...
3 tags
E is for Elevator
I work in a six story building. My office - well, technically my cubicle - is in the basement, one floor down from the ground floor. My cube is in a secured area down there, since the group I work with handles the computers, laptops, monitors and other tech. Also down in the basement are a storage area, a couple of training rooms, a workout room, and a few other offices that aren’t staffed...
3 tags
3 tags
C is for Coffee
I didn’t use to be a coffee drinker. When I was in my 20s and 30s, my caffeine of choice was carbonated. Specifically, Pepsi. Not even Diet Pepsi, but straight sugared Pepsi. I didn’t even notice when they started switching to high fructose corn syrup; obviously I didn’t much care what was in my food. I also weighed upwards of 230-240 lbs and was what one could calll “not...
2 tags
B is for Budget
Bought myself freedom with a budget. Wanna know how? First let’s talk about why.
My co-workers are worried, stressed and overworked. There’s been plenty of budget shortfalls, leading to layoffs and cutbacks in health care and retirement pay. Because rich people aren’t paying taxes, that means the middle class and poor have to pay more for basic medical care, We’re expected...
3 tags
A is for Apple
Thanks to my love of amazingly well-designed tools, the first word that comes to mind for me when I think of the letter A is Apple.
I have written before, coyly, on my older blog, about working in the Apple Assurance Center in Austin, TX and the tiny role I played in the launch of the iMac, but I was silent about why I left. I’ve told this story to friends but never committed it to the...