New and not so different
Mood:  a-ok
Topic: Just Yakkin'

The post I put up yesterday is a far cry from anything else I've put on this inconsistent and infrequently updated site, but hopefully it won't be the last thing I ever try to write like that. It was cathartic, and was something I needed to explain for a while, if for no other reason than to clarify it for myself, which, judging from what little information I can gather about my traffic, may be my entire audience.

 I hope to write a little more frequently now than I have, and looking back on some of the things I have written, I've wondered why I bothered. If I do any game reviews, I'll try to keep them short unless an interest is expressed in my opinions. I'll try to make posts a little more substantial, and maybe tell a few stories.

I want to stress that I will continue to attempt humor... maybe successfully, maybe not, and I warn now that some of it may be just alittle bizarr, because weird humor makes me the happiest.

Thanks. 

More like my father
Mood:  quizzical
Topic: Personal thoughts
nb I've spent most of my life up to this point feeling I more closely resemble my mother, both physically, and philosophically. The physical aspect is remarkably apparent, even though I have a beard, and she (presumably) never has, it's pretty easy to make the mother/son connection between us.

 I've also felt like I think more like my mother than my father, but that may not be true.

 This is a difficult thing for me to try and put in to words, as I have been in the past by nature a very private and quiet person. A good portion of my humor and ability to take things lightly is partly because I don't externalize more personal feelings and mostly because I'm an irreverent pain in the ass.

My father and I have had in the past what can be described at a "strained" relationship, and at worst as "a relationship we were lucky to have both made it out of alive and uninjured".

I love my dad, I really do. His sense of humor and outlook on life have (happily) warped mine into being very similar. We both think that life is too serious as it is and try to inject humor into what would otherwise be an all together too depressing existence, although he may not look at how he acts in the same way as I do. We're both stubborn and can be very set in our ways. These last two were the cause of a lot of our problems from the outset, because most of what we were stubborn about we didn't agree on.

Even with 30 years separating our ages, I'd like to think he's the kind of guy I'd hang out with even if we weren't related.

I still more closely identified with my mom though, until yesterday, when I had a mind expanding experience.

My dad came over and we started talking politics a little. We only can talk a little about politics you see, because we both are rather pointed about ignoring it. That's when I found out something about my dad I had never known, just because it's so far from both of our minds it never even was remotely interesting, until yesterday.

 My dad isn't registered to vote. I am, but I haven't voted except for one time back in the late 90's (a school funding bill, something to help our local school modernize, which, I think, didn't pass). He mentioned it in passing during the talk we were having, and I kind of fixated on it, determined to find out why. Why would this person not vote? It turns out he pretty much doesn't vote for the same reason I don't.

That's gotten me thinking about my relationship with my dad. It's taken me 30 years to start to know my dad on more than just a father/son level, and these last few have been very difficult for me.

There have been times in the past where I think my father and I have hated each other while still loving each other as family. That was the status quo for years, and it's been very hard for me to change that adversarial feeling that I had. I don't know that it's been the same for my dad, it didn't seem to be, but he, like me, is pretty quiet about what he's thinking about.

The pride he expressed at my graduation from college, and when I got my first post college job were most likely met by stares of disbelief, and the toast he gave at my wedding was (I think) one two things to bring tears to my eyes that day, the other being seeing my soon to be wife in here gown coming down the aisle. Of course after all the pomp and ceremony were over when I thanked him for the wonderful toast he just smiled and said "Weren't expecting that, were ya?", which put us that little bit back from being to close and got us laughing together, which I think we were both more comfortable with.

My dad is retired now, and has a lot of free time. He calls me periodically to chat on the phone about nothing much at all, and I suppose I have a tendency for dramatic mimicry towards my wife as my dad and I pass the hour and a half mark on the phone. Thinking about it though, I'm grateful that we can talk together now instead of shouting at each other.

I'm glad that I can be not only my father's son, but his friend, and I'm proud to say that when I look at myself that I see a very large part of him.

I love you, dad, even though I don't say it enough.

Moving
Mood:  chillin'
Topic: Just Yakkin'
I've moved twice now within a space of about 6 months. I'm beginning to wonder if I'll ever know where everything is again.

I've got soul, but I'm not a soldier
Mood:  chillin'
Topic: Just Yakkin'
I've had that song running through my head several times a day since I saw Southland Tales. A movie I probably wouldn't even had watched if it hadn't been for the fact that Kevin Smith was in it.

Today....
Mood:  not sure
Topic: Just Yakkin'

I almost don't feel the way I do.

(Thanks George) 

Girls of loathing
Mood:  chillin'
Topic: Just Yakkin'

So I play The Kingdom of Loathing, as I've mentioned before, and I think one of the most entertaining things to me is the calendars, and I was thinking of building some small page about the calendars, kinda like this one, but with pictures of real girls instead of the stick figures. It's just kinda hard to find them really.

 

So if you want to help build that page and have or can make a good pic, post to the comments or something, either a pic or some way to get one of em (e-mail or somesuch).

 

Thanks 

Guitar Hero.... damn you I used to have a life
Mood:  chillin'
Topic: Game Review In Depth

Holy crap, does Guitar Hero suck up your life.

I'm a big time gamer, but usually things like RPGs and less so on the rhythm games (my wife has a Dance Dance Revolution game, and I usually flee the area when it gets pulled out). Guitar Hero, however has taken over my console gaiming for a week (not my online gaming though, not even close).

See, here's the deal. Until New Year's Eve, I had never played a Guitar Hero game at all, but my friends who came over that night brought over the Wii version of Guitar Hero III, and we played it for about 6 hours, taking turns. About three weeks later, for my birthday, we went in search of Guitar Hero. Fat chance finding a Wii version of it, they're back ordered for a couple months I think. So we went and bought the original for the PS2, with an after market guitar (wireless, and bigger than the original PS2 version, which I liked, since I have large hands).  I got the original instead of 2 pretty much because the first game has "I Wanna Be Sedated". Nothing listed on the second game was anywhere near as enticing to me.

So yeah, a week has gone by and I still play that game every day, usually for a couple hours. Got 5 stars on all the songs on Easy mode, finished all the songs on Normal (including all of the unlocked bonus songs), and am starting to work my way down the list... gotten 5 stars on 14 out of the first 15, and am working my way down, and now I'm starting on the advanced list (only finished three so far, but 4 stars on one of them the first try. Gues swhat it was---"I Wanna Be Sedated").

It's way too fun, it's challenging, and great for when friends come over. I'm definitely going to get a second guitar for it, and probably start picking up the subsequent versions at some point.

Guitar hero is, sure as hell, a

A brief hiatus
Mood:  chillin'
Topic: Just Yakkin'

So after a brief hiatus (described as being, oh, over a year in length) I've decide I might give this blog thing a bit more of a go. Not sure if I can, but I'm going to try.  We'll see how it goes.

 

The original purpose of this blog was based on a bet between myself and my wife, which I won hands down, by being the more prolific blogger, even though I was a sporadic poster at best. She prfoessed to want to blog a lot to help keep her writing skills up to snuff, but I was around 1000% more active. Who would have figured, as it is usually my bent to avoid writing as much as possible (see the 1 year+ gap).

 

Don't know what I'm going to write about, or why, but we'll see as I go along. 

Happy Birthday to me

The injuries of late
Mood:  happy
Topic: Just Yakkin'
Okay, so I am not on a regular basis a particularly accident prone person, but recently I've had a rash (defined in my non accident prone existence as "two") of accidents. The second followed as a direct result of the first, but we'll get to that later.

I have this friend who just graduated from college last spring, so this August he moved back home. Not only was I the first, but I also seemed to be the only person he asked to help him move (This is normal; I am the moving help for many of my friends. Not one of the helpers. The help). This was for two reasons, first, I have been described by many people who both he and I went to college with as being "freakishly strong", and second, I was the only person he knew who has a truck. So I was elected to assist. Well, at the time my truck had a dead battery. We went to replace it, which got us the weird looks of "you had this battery in a V8 truck?" because the previous owners had installed the wrong battery type... one that would have been more appropriate for Empress' Neon. Damn it people, not all car batteries work in every car.

Anyways, I also needed to get a new positive battery cable because the old one was not doing to well (broken connector, generally abused). Empress thought we should get the 48" cable, while I thought the 12"-18" ones would be fine, but she played the old "Better safe than sorry" card, and we got the 48". It turned out to be about 40" too long, but that wasn't a big deal. Got the battery put in place, started connecting the wires, when the nut fell off the positive cable and fell down besides the battery. I promptly reached down to try and grab it before it managed to meander down into the unreachable recesses of the truck when my watch (did I mention I was wearing my watch?) touched the positive battery terminal.

Turns out this is a Very Bad thing. My wrist instantly started sizzling. I jerked my hand out from under the hood and undid the catch on my watch, shaking it to try and get it off of my hand. Oh, another fun fact about me: I have a high pain threshold. No really, I stabbed a knife into my finger tip to the bone once and all I said, no inflection, very quietly was “ow”. Well, much the same happened this time; I didn’t say much of anything when I got burned. What I did do was walk over to my friend who was there and say, “Can you keep an eye on the tools and everything while I go in and rinse this off? Oh, and could you also pick up my watch when it’s had a chance to cool off?”

She said yeah, so I went inside and started washing off my arm with cold water. There were four blisters on my wrist, 3 pencil eraser sized small ones one the bottom and one below my thumb about 3 ½” long and about an inch wide. I actually had a blister on top of a blister, I burned myself so bad (2nd degree I’d say, multiple layers of skin but no permanent nerve damage or anything).

Anyways, got myself rinsed and bandaged, then went out to finish working on the truck.

Couple days later, I was taking a shower, and I was trying to keep my wrist raised so all my dressings for “The Wound” as it came to be known wouldn’t get wet, plus it was still really heat sensitive. Well, as I was turning around to rinse my hair, I stepped in some shampoo or something on the floor of the tub and slipped and fell, landing on only my right knee and elbow, bruising them rather badly.

The next day I helped my friend move. Sort of. To the best of my abilities. I moved all of the really heavy stuff, and I drove, other than that I tried to take it easy. As I was thinking about it though, I got really annoyed. I work in a shop, and have for the past 5 years. I spend all day around power tools, hand tools, and other various dangerous pieces of equipment, and yet I get hurt by a battery and falling in the shower. What the hell? Oh, and my previous worst injury before that, about 6 years ago I fell while roller skating and almost jarred my wrist to the point of 3 days of immobility. Hell, at least one of my old shop mates had the decency to put a radial arm saw blade between his pinky and ring finger when he got hurt (Missed everything important though, no permanent damage).