Tag Archives: ruminations

Organization

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As most of you who know me are aware, I am not exactly the most organized person out there. My books, DVDs, CDs, computer files, et cetera, yes, they are fairly orderly, and I don’t have much trouble finding what I need. No, my central (but not sole) area of disorganization is in organizing my time. In school, my packets are pretty consistently at least a day late (sometimes much, MUCH more), and my personal projects never seem to get off the ground floor largely due to me not dedicating time to them after getting them started.

It’s not something I’m exactly proud of, but that makes it no less an issue. After several abortive attempts (heh), I’ve decided to try and schedule my time a bit more rigidly. Using iCal, I’ve made a daily schedule for myself, alloting time for the projects and tasks that I want and/or need to get done. It runs roughly from 8am to 8pm, and includes time for meals, puppy wrangling, showers, et cetera. (It both begins and ends with a puppy feeding, hence the 8 and 8.) Evenings are for spending time with Mickey, days are dedicated to getting my shit off the ground. When it’s time to switch to the next item in the schedule, my computer beeps at me, in the loudest, most noticeable alarm noise I have.
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Merry Christmas!

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Merry Christmas everyone :)

Sorry for disappearing for a while like that. I have been doing a few things with my time, and I do mean “few”. They have primarily involved doing schoolwork, and coming up with a content management solution I’m actually happy with for Critical Games. Mambo just wasn’t doing it for me… it felt kind of like a Ferrari that was missing a steering wheel… looked awesome, but was a pain to actually drive.

I did a lot more digging than was probably necessary, and finally found NucleusCMS, which is really flexible in what I put in and don’t put in… documentation isn’t the best, and the forums are slow in response time, but after dealing with some of the other systems out there I managed to figure a lot of it out on my own. I migrated it into production tonight. (Whee!)

Non-geekstuff in the extended entry, I swear:
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Rainy in Seattle

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Well, since no one else is posting, I figure I may as well keep up the good fight. This is just a general update on what’s going on with me, so relax, no revelations or brain-hurt this time.

My mother-in-law is visiting this week, which is nice, and the puppy is growing like a sprout. She’s largely well behaved, and is too smart by half, as Mickey would say… good because she understands a lot, but bad because it means she’s constantly knows her boundaries and then PUSHES them. Silly pup. We’re hoping to put her in puppy training classes soon.
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Freya and Finding Time

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Silly me, when I posted my previous puppy post, I forgot to mention puppy details. Her name is Freya (we named her; her previous name was a generic “Babe”), and she’s 12-14 weeks old (we don’t know precisely… I’m erring on 14 weeks, Mickey is erring on 12 weeks). Looks like she has some husky, some yellow lab, and some german shepherd in her, making her a VERY smart little pup (which has already gotten her in trouble a few times, but nothing too serious). She’s currently napping on the couch next to me, hence why I have the time to write this post.

Y’see, this past week, my life has been largely consumed by the dog. We’re still acclimating her to the house, and she’s still learning the finer points of house training, so I’ve ended up spending most of my days either taking her for walks/potty breaks, or keeping her occupied inside. I’ve found that if I just sit down on the couch and work at my computer, she’ll play for a bit on her own and then curl up next to me and go to sleep. Of course, this took me a few days to figure out (my first dog and all, plus every dog is different on this sort of stuff). The drawback to this technique is that sometimes I don’t catch her making messes as quickly as I would have otherwise. Mostly she just stays within eyesight even when playing. Also, if I need to get up to get anything (even a drink of water), she wakes up and the process starts over again.
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Writing to Avoid Writing

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It makes sense, trust me. As Mickey mentioned last night to me (and which I’ve been saying myself for quite some time), it’s a matter of writing every day, even if it’s just writing about not wanting to write. Right. Correct.

A few things I haven’t talked about from my trip: the early early morning drive to the airport was an interesting (and perhaps intense) experience. We listened to volume 2 of a compilation I’d made, and rode up the empty interstate, stopping in Lebanon for gas and coffee. I remember remarking as we pulled from 91 to 89 that what I dig so much about compilations and playlists that you share with others is that at any time that you put it in, there is the chance that someone else out there is listening to it right at that moment. By the very act of thinking about that, friends become closer, more immediate.

We pulled in for gas, and got out: it was warm for a 4am in November, and I could see the stars clearly in the sky: Orion was in full armor, with all his stars full and bright like they only get during the winter. Riding on, I remember looking back and to the north and seeing the sky start to shimmer, the northern lights illuminating the sky like moonbeams without a moon to originate from. It was a damn good trip.
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Eternal Sunshine of the Waking Mind

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It’s currently around 12:30am, and I’m sitting on the couch at Uri’s place, staying up all night so I can catch my 6:30am flight in Manchester. We’re watching Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s commentary on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, an absolutely brilliant film that I am the proud recent owner of. It’s interesting just how quickly the movie became one of my favorites.

Uri and I were heading home from Eli’s tonight, and listening to a compilation I made while I was out here, which opens with Beck’s “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime”, a song from the movie soundtrack, which is this beautiful surreal song, and I remarked on how it fit the feeling of the moment, of driving along late at night, with the wind blowing the fallen leaves across the road. Uri commented that it was midnight music, and I found it that the moniker absolutely fit, not just about the song but about the movie as well: it’s a midnight movie. The feeling of the movie feels VERY much (to me) the same feeling of driving down an empty road very late at night (or very early in the morning, depending on your point of view).
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Rain in Seattle

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For the first time in several weeks, it is raining in Seattle. It has been sunny and hot for most of the summer, and the entire area is wrapped in a drought. It was discussed on the radio that with the ground where it is, if we got a torrential downpour, it wouldn’t help… so instead, we’ve gotten exactly what we needed: big droplets of water, falling at a steady pace. I can hear the pitter-patter as it falls through the trees outside my window, through which a gentle cool breeze is blowing.

I’ve got Nick Drake playing on my computer, and I’m listening to the rain, talking to interesting people. It is all relaxing in a way that only quiet rainy days can allow.
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Chase Me

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You have dishonored my dog! (Why? because it’s fun. Apologies to those on dialup.)

I’ve gotten pretty used to the new Movable Type at this point, though there are still a few tweaks I need to do (like adding internal site navigation again). Expect those back up sometime in the not too distant future, but in the interim, I’ve re-uploaded my Online Communities essay[PDF], so if you missed it the first time, feel free to check it out.

I’m actually a little irked about that essay. The PDF as it stands is just the core essay and the bibliography. The cover letter, the cover page, the table of contents, the appendices… are all gone. For some strange reason, I didn’t manage to save them last time I reformatted my hard drive or something, because it’s all GONE. I only have the PDF that used to be on the website left, because I had it in a tarballed archive I’d made of my site prior to the last major housecleaning. This is extremely upsetting, and I’m not quite sure what to do about it. The only idea I have is to borrow the copy the school has next time I’m on campus, and scan it all in as text. (This might involve an intermediary step of photocopying it all, since they’re not willing to release those essays from the building.)
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Freaky

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Allow me to preface this post by stating that I have dreams with people I haven’t actually MET but know through other means pretty regularly, usually when I’ve been doing a lot with them. A prime (pardon the pun) example would be dreaming that the Decepticons were spying on our apartment after watching the entirety of seasons one and two on DVD, followed by reading up on the full Transformers Metaverse history. What makes the dream in this post a bit more unique is that I HADN’T done any overload prior. In fact it had been quite some time since I’d even read his blog, let alone any of his work.

So, about a week ago, I had a particularly vivid dream. I was travelling with Mickey, and we were in a grocery store somewhere in the northern midwest (I’d say either Minnesota, Wisconsin, or possibly the Upper Peninsula of Michigan), and while leaving the store, ran into Neil Gaiman. Mickey had run back inside to get something, and so I struck up a conversation with Neil in order to stall him, because I knew that Mickey would want a chance to talk to him as well.

The conversation continues, and one or two other people join in (talking about the nature of dreams and the impact they have on reality), until finally Neil simply has to get back to his office, which is in the shopping plaza across the street, in a converted storefront. He invites me to swing by later to finish the conversation, and to bring my wife (since Mickey had still not come out of the store).
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Weekend in the Sun

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This past weekend was delightful, pure and simple. It started early with Mickey coming home after a half-day on Friday (if she works even just an hour longer on the rest of the work days, then that means she can take a half day on Fridays). We ate, then went shopping for various knicknacks (cross stitching materials, clothes, et cetera), then went and saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I really, REALLY liked. It was surreal, sublime, and very much a Charlie Kaufman movie. I felt that both Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet did fantastic jobs with their roles, and there are some real moments while jaunting around inside Carrey’s head. (In particular, I’d like to point out any of the scenes where he’s a child.)

One of the interesting things about the movie (to me, anyway) was that we see the feelings and emotions and thoughts of this character who is incapable of saying it in the real world. So we (the audience) becomes endeared to the character, because we see this nakedness. WE see how much he cares about Winslet’s character. We want them to be together, and after all why wouldn’t they after that level of honesty? She’d have to have a heart of stone to not be with him after that.

And then you remember, it’s all in his head. She doesn’t know ANY OF IT, and may never.
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