ETA: Seems like everything is back in working order. Enjoy!

A disagreement with my roommate left me scattering for two months to find a new place to live. Unsuccessfully. When you have bad credit and every property within your price range is overseen by a property management company? HA! It’s a cardboard box for you! Or an unsuspecting relative. At any rate, with the realization that my credit is fail and that I’m still a much better candidate for a roommate than the alternatives appeared to be, I won’t be having to relocate after all. At least not immediately. There is a lot more melodrama attached to this but I think it’s probably best left untold.

The holidays were less than thrilling. Then again, they usually are. I survived (obviously) my flight to and from Mississippi. As well as survived the handful of relatives I had to see. More than anything, the trip really make me pretty sad. I miss my folks a lot, it’s really rough being two thousand miles away from them so it was great to spend a week hanging out with em. On the other hand, I realized while I was “home” that all of the things I find myself nostalgic about? All of the things and people that I miss so much while I’m here? None of it is the same anymore. Those things, those people, they just don’t exist in the way that I knew and loved. It makes the decision to stay here or move back there a lot easier, at least.

I’m rambling a bit. Wasting valuable time during my pseudo lunch break. It’s my first day back at work after a two week vacation and I’m finding it pretty hard to rip the cup of coffee from my death grip long enough to actually get any work done. But hey! I wasn’t really late for work this morning! That’s kinda starting the year off well

It’s beginning to dawn on me that I have no idea what I’ll even be writing. I tried the outlining thing… I came up with a general idea of what I wanted the story to be about and attempted to flesh out the characters and put things into a time line… All of which has been a failure of epic proportions. Oh sure, I have all these wonderful, quirky, and lovable secondary characters, but I have no idea who the main character is. I decided the story would span roughly a year’s time.. I’ve managed to put down about a week on the outline. SO, I’ve decided to throw away my meager attempts at planning and just wing it.

The Scream by Edvard Munch

I’ve been in a rather strange place mentally lately. I suppose I’m always in some strange place. This painting, The Scream, keeps coming to mind. Maybe it’s the abundance of gore movies I’ve been watching, the stress from work, or even this killer toothache but I’ve felt for the past couple of weeks that I’m just about to let out a blood curdling scream. I can feel it in my bones, crawling under my skin, tensed at the back of my throat, it’s there, building up with great anticipation for the moment when I begin ripping the flesh from my skull as it splits in two from the cacophonous caterwaul.

Maybe I’m being a bit melodramatic, but how often do you get to use the word caterwaul seriously? I suppose it is most probably just stress. The arrival of fall always induces some odd sense of panic. Especially this one with its fast approaching quarter-century milestone and ever lingering job uncertainty. No matter the cause, I sure wish someone would shut up this wailing loon in my head, she’s really starting to become a distraction.

New Debian install sexiness.

After a little wrestling around with Nvidia drivers and crappy integrated sound, I managed to get everything up and running. I still have a few things to finish configuring (by much banging of my head against the desk, I’m sure) but I’m excited that this was a mostly painless install.

And I must say I’m in love with this machine now. Is it blasphemous to say I almost prefer Compiz to Expose on my MacBook?

Now if only I can get WoW running worth a damn on here, I’ll have no reason to ever boot into that blasted Windows partition! All in all, I’m really impressed with how far Linux has come. I remember my first try at installing Mandrake years ago and the many utter failures that were to come after that. I think this is the first time I would actually consider a complete switch to Linux.

I’m sad that it’s already Sunday. Weekends are so extremely short these days. I guess I can look forward to that two week “vacation” in December that’ll be here before I know it. It’s another beautiful day here in “Vacation Wonderland”. I should head down into town, maybe camp out at a cafe and people watch but no, I’m sitting here with my nose against the screen and my fingers glued to the keyboard.

Maybe I am addicted….

I found out yesterday that my company is doing a global worksite shutdown for the last two weeks of December. Fine and dandy for the people on salary who’ve scheduled vacations for that time. Not so fine for us poor hourly contractors with no paid vacation. This means three weeks with no pay in a two month period - I don’t know how I’m going to manage it.

You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do though, right? I decide I’ll just move my flight plans to the end of December instead. Only to do this, it’s going to cost me an additional 150 bucks. On top of which, I still have to contend with the fact that I’m going two weeks in a row with no pay, during fucking Christmas AND at the end of the month when rent is coming due.

Boardwalk on the Sonoma coast

Sometimes it feels like I will just never get ahead. It’s always something. Always some health crisis, personal crisis, or financial crisis. I don’t ask for things to be easy, but it’d be damn nice if they could just be certain.

On the bright side, NaNoWriMo should now be somewhat easier to take on

I think it might be a really good weekend for a trip down the coast. It’s been a good while since I’ve done that but the temperatures have gotten pretty nippy around here so it might be nice to bundle up in a million layers of scarves and jackets and soak up what’s left of this year’s sunny days.

National Novel Writing Month 2008

Despite how hectic my life is going to be during November, I signed up for NaNoWriMo this year. Somehow, I will crank out 50,000 words despite a week vacation in Mississippi, a birthday, Thanksgiving, and friends coming to visit. No, really, I will. So far, I’ve really enjoyed throwing myself into brainstorming silly plot ideas. I find it strange that despite how big of a fan I am of fantasy and sci-fi that I haven’t even considered a plot that would fall into either of those categories. No, I keep falling back on chick lit, a genre which I don’t even actually read much of. Perhaps this is destined to fail, but I’m still looking forward to giving it a go. In trying to psych myself up for it, I decided I should better get into the habit of writing every day again. I’m going to let blogging count because I’m lazy (No, I’m efficient - that’s it!). I don’t think I’m going to take on a forced 2,000 words a day just yet but maybe set a much smaller and more achievable goal. Perhaps 500 a day.

I just made up a new word: obchievable. Obtainable meets achievable. o_O

November is going to be so so busy, but I’m looking forward to it. I fly out to Mississippi on November 18th for a week. It’s going to be nice to see a few friends and definitely to see my family but I am NOT looking forward to the flight. I admit to not enjoying a loss of control and what can you control when you’re at the mercy of a pilot in an airborne piece of metal. I guess it’s normal to feel that way and be a bit nervous. I know all the statistics about how much safer it is than other forms of travel so I guess I’ll just have to take comfort in the numbers.

My birthday is next month as well. Finally turning a quarter of a century old on the 25th. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I’ve never been a fan of birthdays anyway, but they seem to be getting closer and closer together. When I was a little kid, I seriously thought that 25 would be the absolute perfect age - you’d be young enough to still get away with doing whatever cool (or dumb) shit you wanted to do, but you’d be old enough to have some idea about life and perhaps smart enough to not actually do too terribly much dumb shit. Looking back, I definitely think I was a stupid kid. Still, I am hoping 25 turns out to be better than any of the previous years.

Oh, lookit. I breached 500 words of babbling! Maybe I should be shooting for 1,000 a day instead, hmmmm.

I’ve had this website for a few years now. It’s my baby. My poor, malnourished, often neglected, redheaded stepchild baby. I rarely update it. I’m fairly certain that no one even knows it actually exists, and honestly, a small part of me even enjoys that idea. I scribble in my trusty old composition notebook on a daily basis, I even post fairly melodramatic blogs on MySpace pretty regularly, but I always forget about my own little corner of the interwebs. I’m going to try and overcome this single tiny bit of my procrastination and force myself to post on here regularly, even if it is only a post to say “I’m posting simply for the sake of posting!”.

When I first got this website, it was supposed to be a place that I could experiment and learn the ins and outs of php and web development. Somewhere along the lines, it turned into a different kind of monster that I avoided like a kid skirting around doing their chores. Years later, I now maintain websites for a living but still fail to maintain my own. And I never did fully learn php I’m hoping to somehow rekindle that passion for learning that I used to have. The wonder that would keep me awake till the wee hours of the morning trying to get a piece of code to work. Also, I hope to regain my voice. I have a mad desire to talk but feel I never have anything to say. An extrovert trapped in an introvert’s mind. Something I’ve begun to realize… if you always wait till you have something profound to say, you end up never saying anything at all.

After muting my alarm clock last night quite unintentionally, I managed to oversleep by two hours this morning.  Hurriedly late for work, I rush out the door unshowered dawning a pair of dirty jeans and a crumpled shirt.  Late or not, I still stop for my morning Starbucks addiction — which I swear I would not even have if not for the gift card I received at work months ago, it’s all my manager’s fault.  Racing out of the parking lot and back onto the road, my car starts making an alarming clicking noise from under the hood on the passenger’s side.  After a moment, the noise subsides and I decide to ignore the fact that my car is surely about to explode, I must get to work afterall!

Half-way to Santa Rosa, I realize that my car is running hot so I pull over to the shoulder and turn on the flashers, reluctantly getting out of the car to give things a once over.  Like I would even know what I was looking for.  Call it a woman’s intuition (or common sense), I check the radiator first to realize that the guys who charged me $400 for what was initially just supposed to be an oil change but turned into Major Maintenance Day didn’t put my radiator cap on all the way.  I dig through my trunk trying to find the jug of water that I keep on hand for just such occasions to realize that its lid has come off at some point during my journeys and there is now only a few cups of water sloshing around in it, it would have to do.

Sitting there on the side of River Road with the weight of the overcast skies pushing down on me, it was all I could do not to call my manager right then and turn around to go back home.  If I had had his phone number stored in my phone, there is no doubt this is what I would have done.  Back on the road and now hauling some serious ass to make up time, I pray that those thick clouds will just fall out and bring some rain. No dice, they just grow thicker and darker but never give it up.  After battling many a minivan and luxury suv, I finally pull into the parking lot at work over an hour late and truck it as best I can on my vertically challenged legs to my building to realize that my security badge fell off in my car. I traverse the three parking lots over again to then dig through my car and find my seat had eaten my badge and my pudgy little fingers almost could not get it out from between the seat and the console.

I’ve since been hiding out trying to remain low key in my cube.  The sun is out now and there are some things to be thankful for, like the fact that I only spilled coffee on myself once today.

Oh, and Plan Z was initialized last night. How very cryptic and covert, I know. And none of you even know what I’m talking about, but suffice it to say that Plan Z is a very big deal to me and I’m handling Day 1 of Stage 1 of Plan Z pretty well.  There just may be hope for my sanity after all.