This week went by much more smoothly than last week; a lot of people were out of the office on my side of the building, so things were nice and quiet, and I was able to work in some modicum of peace while most people were away. Unfortunately, a number of people who normally bother me anyway were still there, so I still managed to take at least one day to myself to work from home so I truly had some peace and quiet. It was blissful, and I need to do it again soon.

I would say I need to do it next week if I weren’t going to be out of the office later in the week for Otakon. It’ll be another beautiful vacation, and after Wednesday I won’t be in the office until the following Tuesday. I’m really really looking forward to it, and I’m also looking forward to being out of touch with the office. I can’t wait, and I’ll be taking tons of pictures.

I also managed to finish a number of articles I’d been meaning to write this week, including a keyboard roundup that should go live at Tom’s Guide sometime next week. I’m looking forward to that one going up – I got to play with some pretty interesting toys in order to write it. The writing circuit has been heating up a little, and I’ve even been authorized to post a little more often at Gearlog, so keep an eye out for me over there.

I’d been thinking after some of the events earlier in the week that maybe I talk about my writing a bit too much, or maybe I write too many long-form posts, but I think I’m mostly over both of those worries now. I talk about my writing because I’m a writer and it’s my passion – I think some people should be so lucky as to have their passion identified, and some people should be so lucky as to be working on their passion to the point where they can discuss it the way I do. And when I look at some of the most popular blogs on the Web and see where they’re linking when they post their content, I see all long-form articles at the content sources and short form pieces at the aggregators.

I made a commitment to myself a long time ago that I was tired being just a content distributor: I wanted to be a content creator as well. I want to write new and interesting articles, damned if they’re longer than some people’s snack-size attention spans can handle, and not just link to all of the new and interesting articles that other people are busy writing.

With all of that aside, I think I’ve been doing pretty good by myself lately. Next week is my first vacation since I traveled to San Fran a few months back, and that wasn’t so much a vacation although I like to think I made the best of the time. I checked my available vacation and sick leave a couple of days back just to make sure I’m set for Otakon, and it’s official: I need to plan another trip after Otakon is over. I’ve accured far too much leave to not actually take any.

To say the past week or so has been a whirlwind of activity would be something of a massive understatement. Between all the goings on at the office and then running up to see my parents in the middle of the week and then coming home to try and tidy up the apartment for the first time in a couple of solid weeks. Thankfully a late-night cleaning spree took care of the apartment, most things considered, and I managed to get my warm-weather clothes all laundered so I have clean short-sleeved shirts to wear now that the temperatures are going up high enough that I can’t pretend it’s just a passing event.

Mopped the floors, vaccummed all over, moved my cold weather clothes to the back of the closet and the warm weather ones forward…the only thing left to do is that real bout of spring cleaning I’ve been meaning to do, where I pile up a bunch of items I don’t want anymore and then call a junk service to come and take it all away. I could use a little help with the project though, so I might conscript an unwitting someone to lend me a hand.

That being said though, things are the office have taken a turn for the depressing; we lost a few people and the funding to hire more help has been frozen, so while the workload remains as high as it was at the end of my last major project back in March, it looks like we won’t get any help to deal with the pressure and the increased workload anytime soon. It’s a bit dispiriting, to be blunt, and I’m not sure what I want to do about it. In the interim, I’ll just hang on and see what happens, I suppose.

In other news, Otakon is coming soon, and I should probably go ahead and confirm the reservations and see if there are any upgrades available. It’ll probably be another full house this year. I think I’ll need to pick up an aero-bed to accommodate everyone. This year I have a little bit of a shopping list too – A few things I’m particularly interested in. We’ll see how well that works out when it’s actually time. I would say I have a lot of prep to do, but honestly, I don’t think I have that much to be done if I want things to go nice and smoothly. Sometimes you just have to let things happen the way they’re going to happen.

In other news, the warm weather always makes me tired – I have to admit, I feel more creative and interesting during the fall and winter than in the spring and summer. I feel like I could be doing more if I had more energy – writing more, expanding more, spending more time putting energy into my dreams. I know they’re all opportunities right there in front of me, but in some ways I’m not totally sure if I can stretch as far as I want to in order to get there. I know part of it is just making time for those dreams – the time management skills that have always eluded me to some extent, the ability to know when to stop one thing and start another without getting sucked into it, the ability to quickly and easily switch tasks from one to another that I can actually accomplish given the amount of energy and effort I have at the moment…they’re all things that take time to learn, things that take time to perfect.

Then again, they’re things that I know I have to do. I can’t just have an unmotivated day at the office and just stare at the screen for 20 minutes wishing I didn’t have to do the things that were on my plate at the office and instead desperately try to find something else to do. If I didn’t know better, I’d say I needed to shake things up in a big way, but really? I’m already doing that, so I can’t complain. Shakeups for the sake of shakeups generally don’t accomplish anything unless you take some meaning away from them. This is a lesson I’ve had reinforced several times over lately.

That being said though, I still think it’s time I thought about where my next adventure will take me. I’ll have some time off for Otakon, but I’d like to travel a bit. Whether that takes me back to New York City or maybe somewhere else I haven’t been, I haven’t decided yet. I’m open to suggestions.

I had been planning on picking up a new Macbook Pro and possibly a new iPad in the near future, but I think I’ll be careful about how I pay for those things. The Macbook Pro would easily be a tax writeoff for my writing, but the iPad is entirely a frivolous purchase – although I suppose I can write it off too if I wrote about iPad accessories more than I currently do. Ah, possibilities. Or maybe I’m just lusting after a wishlist, like anyone would.

Anyway – it’s a nice long weekend, ripe for relaxation and recuperation. I’m starting off watching Paprika, then I might move on to a few other anime and DVDs I’ve let pile up over the past couple of weeks. I still sadly admit I have a great deal of media in my collection that’s never had its shrinkwrap removed, and I’d like to do something about that.

But first, I’ll pour myself a drink.

Thanks in no small part to Rae, I’ve been diving back through my back collection of CDs, finding music that I haven’t listened to in a while. When I was in New York and at her house, she played U.N.K.L.E.‘s Lonely Soul, and when I started marveling at it she mentioned it was on a soundtrack and she liked it, but hadn’t heard the rest of the album. So…we took care of that. U.N.K.L.E.’s Psyence Fiction is one of those storytelling albums that you absolutely have to hear at least once from start to finish, starting from the first track all the way through to the outro track at the end – the narrative of the songs is really amazing, and some of the short tracks in between some of the longer ones are fun to hear as well. Between that and The Avalanches, she and Alms have a tendency to stumble on really awesome bands completely by accident.

Speaking of whom, since I’ll doubtlessly be busy this weekend with New Years festivities, I figured I would take care of my annual look back and reflection ritual a little earlier rather than later. Usually I wait until sometime in January to really start thinking about the things I want to do with the coming year, but I think this year I have some pretty strong ideas of the things I’d like to work towards and the things I’d like to do. Let’s take a look back to this time last year, shall we?

A lot has obviously changed between the time I wrote that post and now, but most of my goals and desires haven’t. (Can you believe my beloved Deneb, the computer I was building at that very moment, is a year old now? Sheesh – it feels like it was just yesterday I was reading all about the new hotness in processors and video cards and making tentative decisions on the components I wanted to install in her that Christmas.) So here’s what I wanted to do and how I did:

Media //

** Rebuild my home theatre/media computer (Polaris) with more storage. This will allow me to rip and store more music and movies easily, and back up our main computers to it!
So this one came kind of inadvertantly! Polaris is powered down now and Orion is my new home server/theatre computer, and he’s stuffed with four 1TB hard drives and a 250GB drive for the OS and applications. And good thing, too – I’ve been collecting video podcasts and other various video downloads! I’m glad for the space, now I just have to figure out how to get the video to the TV over something other than s-video. Maybe I should pick up a new video card that supports HDMI, now that I have a shiny new TV. No rush here though!

** Figure out an easy way to digitize VHS tapes before they disintegrate.
Ugh – I still need to do this. I have tons of VHS tapes still, and I’d really like to get them in a format I can back up or even take around with me when I travel. I’ll try for this one this year!

Personal //

** Take more pictures. (partially so I dont have to start every post with a picture from Lucky Star) When Photowerks seemed to die, I stopped taking and uploading photos. Photowerks is fine now, let’s put it back to good use!
I’ve actually really nailed this one, it’s just not been in the way I thought it would be! I thought I would start taking lots of photo galleries of trips and such and uploading them to Photowerks, which I did for a few outings, but I’ve been making use of Lorelei Complex (my moblog) much more than I thought I would! In fact, all of the photos from my trip to New York City are up there!

** Do more for myself on weekends than sleep. It’s so easy to get into the mindset that the weekends are for relaxing and getting away from the stresses of the week; which is true, but that relaxing doesn’t have to always entail sleeping in super-late and lounging around. At least not all the time.
This one actually was kind of reactive to some behaviors I was indulging in around the turn of the year, and I would say that with some of the major life changes that came early in 2009, this was all but wiped away. My weekends are still chill-and-relax times when I’m not traveling or something, but they’re also times for housekeeping and tidying, laundry and cooking, and often staying up late with some ideas in my head and a glass of wine. I’m definitely over this one, happily.

** Experiment more. See strange places, visit wierd and new things in my backyard, try strange foods and restaurants – I’d like to branch out a bit. I keep hearing from people who live in my area about restaurants I’ve never seen. I’d like to try some of them.
If I had to rate this one on a scale of 1 to 10, I’d give myself an 8.5 or a 9 on this one having knocked it out of the park. It took a lot of changes to get me where I am now, but especially in the latter part of the year I’ve been making plans and getting out of my comfort zone. Traveling to New York and back twice, headed to Vegas for CES next week (good lord it really is next week), deciding to go through with Otakon earlier in the year…it’s all been pretty amazing, and even though it’s forced me to peel back some of the layers of my comfort zone and my semi-hermit nature, I’m glad for it. The only thing I’d like to do a little more of is trying some new restaurants in the area. I live in a different place than I did when I made this resolution, so I have a whole spate of new eateries to try!

** Revive Before I Sleep. I all but forgot about it around the middle of the year, and I want to follow through on those lists, and come up with more.
Hmm. I keep stopping and starting on this one because that list is over at Aeria Gloris (my livejournal). I made a little inadvertent progress on this one, but not a ton. I’m not going to hold myself strictly to that, but I’m kidding myself if I don’t admit there’s a lot on that list that I really want to accomplish, even if they’re actually really small and quick little things I can do for myself.

Well then! I made more progress this year than I thought I would. I actually made some other serious changes this past year that I think reflect really well on my personal goals: I update all of my blogs at least once a week, and put them all on an update schedule that I strive to keep. I’ve been doing that for a couple of months now and it seems to be working out really well. I’ve been making a point (just like I mentioned above) to travel more and see the people I love who don’t necessarily live within arms reach of me. I’ve been doing more personally and spiritually enriching things: indulging in more music, spending time at my turntables, posting my mixes for the world to hear, doing more reading of both books that make me think and manga that make me feel good, watching more movies and making use of my Netflix subscription, reconnecting with old friends, and so on. It’s been a delightful change, and as negative as the impetus for all of those changes may have been, if there’s anything that’s true, it’s that there’s something in my blood that burns and churns to take bad things that happen to me and turn them into something good.

So let’s look forward to 2010 and see what I can do this year, shall we? As well as keeping up the momentum on the things I’ve been doing (taking pictures, traveling, ripping music and movies, etc) what else can I do?

Media //

** Digitize those damned VHS tapes! – Even if I have to buy a stupid USB VCR, I’ve got to do something; I’ve moved a bunch of my tapes several times, and I wonder how much more they can take.

** Get back to ripping CDs – I fell off the wagon a little here when I moved, so I have a lot of music ripped but there’s even more that’s not…and I’d probably listen to a lot of my older stuff if it were digitized, not to mention use the mp3s in some of the vinyl mixes I’ve been spinning.

Personal //

** Keep Experimenting! – Don’t let up on your traveling, don’t let up on trying new things, and find some new interesting places to eat…and people to eat with!

** Revive Before I Sleep – Time to look harder at this; some of the items are obviously harder than others (catch and gut and cook my own fish? really?) but some of them are pretty easy things I’ve always wanted to do.

** Keep Writing – One of the biggest changes I made this year was to focus on my writing, and through all of the writing I do I’ve met so many amazing people: World of Warcraft players, technology writers and pundits, wine and liquor lovers, and all around classy people. I have so many blogs on so many different topics, I want to keep that up.

** Continue exercising; losing weight – My DDR workouts have already helped me shed about 30 pounds, and I’d like to keep up that momentum. The holidays had me stumbling a little bit, but I’d like to get back on the pads and keep up the workout. Eventually I may even pull the workout clothes I already put in the trunk of the car out and use the gym at the office!

I think those are pretty good, don’t you? All doable, all reasonable. I was going to toss in a little something about making sure to treat myself to more media like music and movies and books every now and again, but I don’t think I’ll have a problem doing that – I’ve never had an issue making sure I had something shiny when I wanted it, but I’d like to be a little more targeted in the coming months, remembering to get albums from artists I already love as well as spontaneously picking up one from someone I just discovered, buying manga I’ve been meaning to read as well as titles I’ve been keeping up with, stuff like that. I’ll consider that a reminder, not so much a resolution.

Anyway, here’s to a happy conclusion of 2009 for all of you. The year started out well, hit some turbulence early on, but emerged pretty strongly and has turned into an amazing year. Here’s to keeping up the momentum, and to great things in 2010!

From the Vocaloids and I to you and yours, I hope you’re having a very happy holiday season – a happy hanukkah, a merry christmas, and a very very happy new year.

Yes, I’m being a bit facetious, but I can happily say that this holiday has been absolutely fantastic, and I like to think that it started long before the actual day – Thanksgiving was lovely as I mentioned, and my trip to New York City was phenomenal and I still have tons of stories to tell from it. (I’m only partially kidding when I say I left my heart back there.) I got all of my holiday shopping done before I went to New York, so it was all waiting for me when I got back, no last minute rush there, and like most years I managed to get all of my holiday shopping done without setting foot in a store or having to shove my way through people. (with the exception of having to pick up holiday cards and wrapping paper, so there was that) All in all, it was chill, relaxing, and almost entirely without undue stress. I even had a chance to get a little people-watching in when I went to get my wrapping paper.

Everyone was happy with the gifts they received this year, and I splurged a little bit on my parents – picked my mom up some gadgetry that she needed (an iPod Touch to replace her now-dead Palm Zire and a
Nintendo DS she can’t put down) and gave my dad something to make the most of his shiny new HDTV he picked up after Thanksgiving – Planet Earth on Blu-Ray, and a Harmony One remote. I gave them a few other things, but I think they really appreciated those.

I on the other hand picked up a few things I needed, some workout clothes that I like a lot, a little bit of spending money, all lovely things (I may take some of that spending money and put it to some of the Blu-Ray discs on my wishlist!) – and thanks to the lovely Narilka and Zannah, I now have a shiny new copy of Borderlands! I really can’t begin to say how grateful I am for such generous friends this year.

My white elephant for the shack was very well received, and mine should be on its way, so I hear; and the secret santa we set up over at Plurk (again thanks to Narilka) went swimmingly – my giftee has yet to get the ones I ordered for them, but the ones I got were lovely, delicious treats and some gloves to keep my hands warm! (you can see them at at my moblog here)

So all in all, it’s been a pretty bountiful holiday season, and at the same time it’s been personally rewarding too – lots of time with family and friends and people I hold near and dear to my heart. It’s been good to be surrounded by people who love you and cherish your presence in your life, it’s a feeling I’d recommend to anyone, and if you’re ever in town, hey – let me be one of those people, okay?

In other news, I’ve been fixated on the closing theme to K-ON! lately, it’s been firmly implanted in my head and it won’t come out, so of course I’m going to share it with you:

The first line (and the chorus, wherever you hear “lazy” and “crazy”) translates to “Please don’t say you were lazy when you were actually crazy.” I love it. It’s a little misrepresentative of the anime, since Mio (the dark-haired girl singing in that video) is actually the Bass player and Yui is the lead guitarist and does a lot of the singing, but I love it anyway. They also did a lot for a closing sequence to make the characters actually appear as though they’re singing the words of the song, which I thought was a really nice touch. Mio’s expressions in various places are kind of compelling too. All in all, it’s pretty well done, I dig it.

I won’t embed another one, but the opening sequence to K-ON! is a different matter. Aside from being one of the most sugary adorable things I’ve ever seen, the work put into making it look like Yui is actually playing the guitar (look closely at 0:07 and 1:01) although I’m not a guitar player, so it could just LOOK impressive and be nothing more. Still! Cool effort.

I haven’t actually been paying attention to anime lately – I don’t remember how I stumbled on the K-ON! opening and closing themes, I haven’t seen any of the actual anime, although that may have to change if they’re that adorable. I could use a few more uplifting and actually happy titles in my collection – not everything I watch and enjoy has to be heavy and difficult.

Speaking of heavy but still enjoyable, the office treated us to Avatar in IMAX and 3D, and I have to say it was worth the experience. I didn’t have to pay for it or the snacks, but even if I had I would have been happy to – and to spend the 2 hours and 40 minutes I spent in there. For being such a long movie, I have to say it moved VERY quickly and kept the pace up throughout. The story’s been told a dozen times, so I didn’t expect too much there, although it was still enjoyable. What was absolutely fantastic was the world that the movie created: the world was distinctly alien to our own, but familiar enough that it really did seem like a place you could go to and set foot on. Everything from the bugs hanging in the air during some of the panning shots to some of the amazing animals were all impressive – and the fact that the Na’vi characters were all entirely CG but came off like real human beings (complete with emotion on their faces and non-verbal actions that were completely believable) made it incredible. I’m actually really glad I saw it, and glad I saw it in the theaters on a huge screen, and in 3D. That’s saying a lot for me, since I’m normally not a huge “go to the movies” person.

And yes, Avatar completely rekindled my love for Michelle Rodriguez. Yum.

That aside though, here’s hoping this coming workweek is nice and slow, and since Alms and Rae will be in town for New Year’s, there’s something else to look forward to – it’s actually funny, since I just found out, and I had been thinking earlier about whether I wanted to head down to Annapolis for First Night or do something a little closer to home. Looks like closer to home it is!

Then the weekend after that it’s onto a plane and out to Las Vegas for CES! Another adventure, and I’m staying in a lovely suite in the Bellagio. I wonder if I’ll be able to see the fountains from my room! Even if I can’t, I hear they’re not to be missed, and Nari and a ton of PC Mag folks will be there at the same time as I will, so I’ll have some company when I want it. I hear there are crazy nerd parties out there – cocktails and marketing reps showing off their hot gear. Kinda looking forward to that. I should probably put my stuff in to the dry cleaner’s before I go.

In the interim though, I hope you all had as lovely a holiday as I have, and have a wonderful wonderful New Year’s. I’ve been thinking a bit about my resolutions from last year, and how well I’ve done. I knocked a few of those off the list pretty easily this year almost unintentionally, but it’s good to see that I’ve internalized so many of my personal goals, large and small. I have to chuckle at myself from a year ago though – I’ve learned so much in such a short period of time. Here’s to 2010.

It’s getting colder. Not that I mind – I tried on my winter coat for the first time since last year’s cold – the one I had left at my parents’ because it was one of the many things in my arms when I fled there in the spring – and found myself swimming in it. It’s a pleasant surprise, but then again, Autumn has always brought me nice things, including the passing into Winter. I don’t mind either, as long as I can stay warm.

One the way back from my parents’ house for Thanksgiving, I was listening to The Blues Show on WXPN and thinking about the monumental truths that blues artists had to have been tapped into when they were singing, enjoying every note. It’s really remarkable how many people really think the blues are deep, down, depressed music, and to a certain extent they are – when you have the blues, it means something – but at the same time the blues often are some of the most inspirational music you could listen to. A number of songs tell you all about the deep, dark hole that the singer is in, but always there’s a glimmer of hope somewhere behind the music. It’s really remarkable how good I felt while listening to the blues, and I was feeling pretty good before I turned the radio on.

On the way home I was thinking about everything I needed to do when I got back to my pad. Reseat my computer’s processor, do the laundry, tidy up the place, get some writing done, book my travel plans, and I had something of a realization – it didn’t feel major, and I won’t characterize it as epiphanal even though it may be: I was looking forward to all of it. I was looking forward to all of the tough stuff, all of the fun stuff, I was even looking forward to going back into the office at werk on Monday. And as I told myself in my head that I was looking forward to it, the same voice in the back of my head piped up and said “I’m looking forward to all of it – I’m looking forward to life.” I think that’s the first time I’ve ever been really said that to myself, and it was an incredibly liberating thing to feel. That doesn’t mean there won’t be difficult things, that doesn’t mean there won’t be things I don’t feel like dealing with, but it’s a great feeling, even now when I say it to myself again, right now.

So speaking of my poor computer, Deneb, was sitting on my workbench with the side case door off because after pwning n00bs at the office LAN party on Wednesday (which was crazy fun, and we definitely need to do it more often – I learned that apparently I have mad latent Call of Duty: Modern Warfare multiplayer skills) I got her home and hooked her back up to discover that she would only stay on for a few minutes before shutting herself off. Granted, by the time I got home on Wednesday I really needed to decompress and get some sleep to head up to my parents’ place for Thanksgiving on Thursday, so I fiddled with her a bit, just long enough to realize that the auto-shut off was symptomatic of an overheating processor (the Core i7 is smart enough to shut down before temps get to dangerous levels) and upon checking the heat sink and fan I found it loose and not firmly fastened down – it must have wiggled loose while I was lugging her back and forth to and from the office.

Since I really needed to get to bed, I played a little Soul Calibur IV on the 360 and head to bed to get up for the holiday and head up north to see my parents. Thanksgiving itself was lovely as usual – my father brined a turkey and it was probably the best turkey I’ve ever eaten in my life: it was so good I wound up picking at it in the middle of the night and even wanted to eat the white meat – something I almost never do because it’s usually too dry when compared to the dark meat to me. Dad also made his legendary macaroni and cheese, Mom made stuffing and candied yams, you know – classic Thanksgiving eats, and it was all phenomenal.

My parents napped over the course of the night because they were headed up to their local Air Force base for a Black Friday sale in the wee hours of the AM (and they returned triumphant with a shiny new Sony Bravia HDTV and Sony blu-ray player for my parents’ living room that looks spectacular…I’m glad I helped them pick it out!) and I spent the evening writing a bit and catching up on sleep. it’s completely out of the norm to do Black Friday sales in our family, but I have to admit, it was a pretty good deal they caught. Now it’s on to Cyber Monday.

Friday and Saturday I spent the day with my parents, indulging in good advice, sharing some technology buying tips for them this holiday season, getting caught up with my weekly writing that I missed over the holiday, and helping out a bit around the house. Saturday night I finally got a chance to really test the GPS feature on my Morotola Droid, and I can honestly say it’s amazing enough that I don’t need to buy a car GPS anymore – now I just need to pick up the car dock so I can put it on something while I’m using it to navigate. It actually found a slightly different route to get me home that’s a little faster, so no complaints there.

And here I am at home. On the way out of my parents’ house watching a special on Motown music and groups like The Four Tops and The Temptations that kindled an old love of traditional R&B and Soul in my heart. On the way home, listening to the blues while I was in range of XPN out of Philidelphia, then over to The Shamrock and Thistle where I listened to protest songs, labor march chants, and civil rights protest spirituals penned by Pete Seeger (who is a literally amazing man in every sense of the word – the man who wrote “If I Had a Hammer” and the original writer of “Turn, Turn, Turn,” and one of the people responsible for making “We Shall Overcome” a popular anthem of the civil rights movement, and “Step by Step,” of which the video is above) and an interview with him, then listening to Hot Jazz Saturday Nights when I was in range of WAMU in Washington DC, thrilled to be in my own little world of beautiful old music. Even this morning I hit the iPod on the dock next to my bed, fired up Pandora and started my Miles Davis channel to listen to some Jazz.

When I was a child, there was always music in our house. Especially on Saturdays and Sundays – and really especially on Sundays. I would wake to the smell of food cooking in the kitchen and the sounds of Gospel in the morning and Jazz in the late morning and early afternoons. When my parents made the switch from Gospel to Jazz, I knew it was time to get up, get dressed, and head out to join them.

Speaking of music, I should tidy up my last 2 mixes for Plastic Bohemia and post them – I’ve been procrastinating because I know there are some mixing errors in them and I hesitate to post them publicly, but my friends at Plurk have been nagging me for them, so I’ll concede and chalk it up to practice. Between that, some writing, and booking my travel plans (more on that later), I have a lot to do, and I’m going to try and get a lot of it done today so I don’t get lured into the inertia of the werkweek and wind up not doing anything.

With that, I’m looking forward to all of it. Damn it’s liberating to say so.

If you’re reading this, you probably already know there have been some major shakeups in my personal life.
If you’re reading this you’re probably curious how I feel, how I’m doing, what I think.
To your curiosities I respond simply: I deserved better than that. No matter what stories are spun, what lies are told, what I say or what others say, or where the world spins – on and on eternally – from here. I deserved better. And now I have to find it.

That’s all.
Seriously, you know me, I’m wordy. I could go on for paragraphs, for ages and ages, about everything, my thoughts, feelings, beliefs, reflections. But that wouldn’t be fair, especially not to me.

In other news, nothing brings your truest and best friends out of the woodwork than a good bit of personal strife. It’s been good reconnecting with a lot of people I haven’t spoken to in a while, and reaffirming a number of friendships that have been there all along. Nothing to do now but continue to move forward.

I’m literally *this* close to landing a big new freelancing deal that I had been working towards last week; I don’t want to jinx anything by naming names, but I’m really excited about it and I’m really looking forward to it. It’s one step closer to me making freelance writing the job and the job the pastime, if you know what I mean. It’s a tough economy to start running about chasing your dreams, but you have to follow them when they call you – I’ve spent a long time holding back from my dreams, on pause waiting for something outside of my control. Time is short, dreams are precious, and after all, Voltaire did say The great and only serious business of life is to live happily. It’s just time to really get on that.

I’ve been pretty busy over at Gears and Widgets lately, culminated in a post I’ve been meaning to make for ages: 10 Firefox Extensions I Can’t Live Without. Now I just need to find a way to bring the poor Azeroth Metblog into my blogging schedule. It’s been rough getting my regular freelancing done what with how busy I’ve gotten (a poor economy plus layoffs at the day job plus Parkinson’s Law makes for a busy Phoenix at the office), but to be fair a lot of people are suffering right now from a dearth of things to do. I’m not going to complain about having more than enough on my plate.

In other news, I have some photos to upload; just haven’t gotten around to it yet – things have been in flux in a number of ways, and while I’m mostly settled, there’s more settling to do. I’ll get back to you in a couple of weeks, but in the meantime, I think I’ll start carrying my camera around with me more often. I’ve seen some beautiful things in the past couple of weeks – driving some unfamiliar roads to training and work have yielded rolling green fields, beautiful dense forests, even glorious rolling foothills that I’d never seen before and lie just outside of my regular day-to-day drives. I desperately want to share them.

That’s just my moon rocket.

That up there is Calintz, one of the main characters from an old Korean RPG called Magna Carta. I have a wealth of artwork of him; and as much as I love my boy Van Fanel (up at the top), I’ve been digging Calintz as of late as well. I like the above image because it looks like he’s wearing training robes; it’s not his usual outfit.

So I’ve been all but explosive over on Plurk and Twitter, probably because it’s just so insanely easy to keep them updated. I sit there with both open during the day, reading what people have to say and adding to the conversation – and it’s remarkable how connected you can feel with people who are hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away when there’s a tool that makes it easy to meet them and stay in touch.

There’s a life out there to live, and oh so conveniently the Project A-Ko Soundtrack, which seems to pop up at exactly these moments in my life, has gone out of its way to leap into my car CD player and remind me. Campily and cheesily and inspiringly, the sugary sweet vocals remind me to Dance Away my sorrows and to keep tomorrow in my heart; and that Spaceships in the Dark are always enough to get your blood pumping and your mind in a far off place. It reminds me that it’s always best to wake to Morning Light (Type A), and you absolutely have to Follow Your Dream.

Well, among other things, the election is over (with stupendously happy results), I had a nerve wracking but overall positive trip to the doctor, and now I’m looking forward to another major milestone: World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King comes out this coming Thursday!

I’m a dork, I know. I really need to get back in the WoW groove. Things kind of died in our guild for a long while there, and now that there’s some new content and more coming, people have started signing in again and things appear to be picking up.

Anyway while I tend to keep my political thoughts over on my political blog, I can’t understate my relief and happiness over the results. The wave of euphoria that swept over the country (and angst, for my conservative counterparts) was palpable, and I’m still enjoying it. Go there and read if you’re of like-mind.

I’ve also bothered to start a moblog which I’m appropriately calling Lorelei Complex. I need to find a nice way to re-pub the photos here. Oh, and even though I mentioned it before, I managed to fix PhotoWerks. I already have a bunch of photos to upload.

In other news, things at the office have improved overall, but I think it’s because I have new batteries in my noise-cancelling headphones. I still have my gripes, but considering NovaWerks is rising in the Google search results for my first and last name, I think I’ll be a bit more metered in my criticism. At least until I quit the damned job, after which I might be forced to let loose. Trust me, I have enough to talk about. Like Pastilla pointed out so graciously over at Plurk: when I leave, I’ll likely wonder what took me so long.

Now that Halloween’s over, I’m actually looking forward to the holidays. My birthday seemed to go by in a flash, and I didn’t get as much time to celebrate as I would have liked, but I’ll make up for it during the holidays. I have a confession to make though: I don’t really like Halloween. I have too many bad memories and not enough good ones. Even as a child, I didn’t do too much trick-or-treating, and while the times I remember were fun, ever since I stopped trick or treating (because I was too old), Halloween became more of an adult’s holiday than a child’s one. When that happened I was caught between worlds – too old to get away with trick or treating, but the holiday being now oriented to people much older than myself. As I got older, I wound up having less and less to do on Halloween nights.

I tried to do the Halloween party circuit, and in college I had a couple of horrible Halloweens – one where I went to a party with Tim and his girlfriend at the time where I wound up sick from drink by the end of the night and stayed the night rather than head home. Another Halloween in college I was goaded into romping around campus in a terrible Zorro costume (eg, a cloak and a floofy hat) by a semi-girlfriend I was seeing at the time. Since then, I’ve all but boycotted the holiday.

To add insult to injury, where we live now is a beautiful neighborhood, but we get home so late in the evening from work that we miss the kids who go trick-or-treating. By the time we get home, the only visitors we may get are the teenagers with plastic bags without costumes.

So maybe I need to throw a Halloween party to bring my faith back in the holiday. Really dress up and be around people who are also dressed up. Maybe go to someone else’s Halloween party, or go to New York City and see the Halloween parade. I really want to love the holiday, I really do!

Anyway – charging forward to Thanksgiving, we have a lot to be grateful for this year.

Elections aside, Raevyn and I are sticking to our money-saving plan for the holidays, and spending what money we would have spent on each other on new computers for ourselves. I’ve already started to assemble parts, and I’ve been waiting for the release of Intel’s new Core i7 processors so I can snag one of those. I’ve got all the components figured out, but I’m waiting for the post-Thanksgiving shopping season to begin to pick up the rest of my parts, including the Raeon 4870 x2 i want. Here’s hoping that by the holidays, Raevyn and I will have new rigs to play with. It might be expensive to built these state of the art rigs, but my current system is something like 5 years old, and I’m comfortable with spending a little more to futureproof myself as much as possible.

There might be some money tossed around over the holidays on video games to play on those shiny new rigs, but other than that, we promised not to spend a ton of cash on each other this holiday season in order to save some dough. I still might give her a few games for her new computer though.

The most irritating thing about working late in the evening is that I’m expected to essentially work from home in the morning as well. It’s kind of like putting in a 13-hour day, only my managers like to fool themselves into thinking it’s less than work because I’m at home for the first half of the day and then come into the office. Alas.

It’s come to my attention recently that a number of people that I at least used to read or be familiar with are absolutely incapable of blogging or posting their thoughts online without being incessantly or irritatingly preachy. You know what I mean: the people who simply can’t discuss an event in their lives or in the world without turning it into a story that has a moral that they already know but feel absolutely compelled to hammer into you like so much congressman into the call girl of their choosing.

I would be worried about discussing such in public, but frankly, the offending writers of this variety are usually busier crafting their next epic fable or personally authored book of psalms than they are actually engaging, reading, and talking to people on the Web, so I don’t really think I have too much to worry about on this front. It’s not that there aren’t lessons to be learned from the experiences that people go through, but I’m something of a follower of the “show me, don’t tell me,” method of writing. If you write it properly, people won’t know they’ve learned anything about themselves at all until they’re ready to comment on what you’ve written, or weeks later when they tell their loved one “I read someone who had the strangest experience…”

Shoot me if I become one of those folks, okay?

In other, but somewhat related news, another birthday has come and gone and I’m a year older. My parents dropped by to spend a little time with us over last weekend, and they asked me how it felt to be a year older. Everyone gets the question on their birthday, and I explained that it felt like yesterday, except now I’m a year older.

Upon reflection, I cant help but wonder when I’m going to actually get started. I had a long talk with my mother about potentially moving to Seattle, something I’ve always wanted to do, and while I know she and my father are distressed at the notion of my moving so far away, I’m desperately eager to start what I like to think of as my life, meaning doing something I want to do in a place I want to do it in. Veronica provided some incredible insight in a comment to my last post that struck a chord:

Being happy is the best thing you can do for yourself. But it doesn’t come over night. Plan the escape. Maybe give yourself a year to downsize, reload, rework, especially in today’s world.

This is a radical shift from what I was thinking – I had already thought of how many types of freelancing gigs I’d need to make what I’m making now, but I dreamt of getting it all lined up and then walking into the day job one day with a letter in an envelope and a middle-finger standing by at the ready – me, poised on the brink, absolutely terrified but feeling liberated at the notion of embarking on my life. But there’s more to it than that, and I know it. As rewarding as it might be to tell my boss to shove off, getting to that point (and then not actually doing it) will require planning and savvy. I’ve got it in me, I just can’t be distracted by the roller-coaster ride of idiocy that is the day-to-day at the regular gig.

So for my birthday, I’m giving myself a shiny new new sense of destiny. It’ll go well with the computer I’m building for the holidays.

Ah, and before I forget. I managed to fix Photowerks so the photos actually load now. Go and see if you like. Now I have to make myself upload everything I’ve taken since finding out it was broken.

My love affair with TheSixtyOne hasn’t dimmed by any stretch of the imagination. Leveling there is slow, but it’s oh so worth it to hear so much new music that I would never have been able to hear before. For example, if you’re in the mood for a little upbeat electronica, I’ve been jamming on CASIO’s Sexy Friends:

It’s a lot of fun, but warning, it’s a bit long. I tend to listen to the whole thing during those long nights in Karazhan or Zul’Aman when it’s me, my headphones, and my Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix. If you’re not in the mood for the whole upbeat thing, might I suggest the beateous brilliance of DJ Spooky’s It’s So Late. It’s a softer, more melancholy, and hauntingly rhythmic. I’ll probably be posting it to my Pownce feed anytime now.

In other news, I’ve been lusting over the kinds of home offices that people have posted at Home Office Snapshots. It’s gotten me thinking about how relatively dissatisfied I’ve been lately with my current job, and how lovely it would be to make freelancing a full-time gig and work from home, set my own hours, and work on something I truly enjoy. At the same time, I still owe my editor at ZD a copy of my resume so she can toss my hat in the ring for anything up there; but I hesitate to uproot Raevyn and I from the DC area, partially because I love it here and partially because she just got a promotion at her job and loves what she’s doing now. Maybe freelancing is the way to go, at least for the time being.

I had been meaning to give the fine folks at Whiff Roasters some love lately, because Raevyn and I, coffee snobs that we are, have been all but exclusively buying their coffee these days. They’ll ship anywhere, and have an absolutely ridiculous selection of blends, both flavored and non-flavored. Might I suggest the Aztec as a nice dessert coffee? It tastes like Cocoa Puffs. Seriously! And in the morning, might I suggest you open your eyes with a nice bold Zart’s Blend, or their delectible Kick-Ass Coffee? Yes – they have a blend called “Kick-Ass,” and it’s fabulous.

In other news, I’m still musing over the costume I was thinking about over 2 months ago now. We still haven’t registered for Otakon, but the hotel rooms are all nicely booked and money is slowly getting stashed away for the convention. It didn’t help that I had to sink about $1200 into car repairs and new tires, but it’s an expense I can recover from, especially if I manage to get my freelancing checks on time. I’ve also recently fallen in love with Code Geass in recent weeks, and I’ve been thinking about cosplaying a Britannian schoolboy since I really love the jacket they wear in the anime. The high neckline with the fleur-de-lis on the neck just wins me over. For example:

I think maybe I just love the neck line. I could never cosplay Lelouch, it’d require purple contacts, a wig, and probably being of somewhat paler complexion than I am now, but I think I could pull off one of his schoolmates pretty well. I found a few other leads on the costume that are a little cheaper, and I’d have to have it custom made, but I think it’d be nice.

Anyway. I need some time off. The big corporate move to Columbia is at the end of the month, and everything I hear says it’s going to be hellish getting up to that point. My gripes and grudges aside that the entire people and corporate move fell to the technology group for a rather silly reason, I’m glad that on the other end of the move I’ll feel a bit freer. People’s workloads will have lightened, sure, but I won’t have an obligation to stay and put up with the mess I’ve been putting up with. Then again, with all of the stress off, maybe things will get better. That being said though, I really don’t like my new seat in the new building, and that could chafe me more than enough to make me go – frankly, I already don’t want to go there every day, if I hate my desk space, I’m not going to want to be there any more than an I am now.

But that’s not totally why I need some time off – I need some time off partially to regain my wits, some time to just not be tethered to the office, fielding phone calls from my over-needy boss who has no clue how anything we work with works, much less how to help serve our group’s customers (how to you make technology recommendations when you don’t know anything about the technology? I’ll stop there though, I’m not in the mood to get Dooce’d because I talked smack about my boss.) But the past few months I’ve felt my wits slipping and I’m more and more depressed in the morning before heading into the office. I think I need some time away, maybe take up more hobbies than World of Warcraft, and possibly to chat with a therapist on a semi-regular basis.

The other reason I need some time off is to get my finances in order. I want to save more, and for some reason lately I’ve been very concerned with nest building. I’m planning on sending my entire stimulus payment (whenever I get it, I was supposed to get it by now) to my lowest balance credit card and work my way towards having that paid off. By November, my car will be paid off, so that’ll be some more money in my pocket to pay down debt, and I want to start squirreling away more money for my retirement – I haven’t contributed to my 401(k) since I joined the company I’m with now. (Partially because for the longest time – and this changed only two months ago – you could only enroll during an enrollment period every quarter, and even then you had to attend a training class where the HR folks taught you how to fill out the forms and read from a Powerpoint presentation on a projector screen. Have I mentioned my biggest pet peeve about meetings: people who read directly from Powerpoint presentations? I know how to read, thank you very much. Add onto this the fact that our corporate match is something like half of one percent, and it’s vested over EIGHT years. Yup – worthless. The only thing that changed is that we have a better selection of funds and you can enroll and manage your account online anytime. Even if the company won’t take an interest in my retirement with their vesting schedule and pathetic match, I can take an interest myself.) I have investments scattered across three or four different investment firms and banks, and I want to get some order and control around them. After all, it’s my money – I shouldn’t let people I don’t want to have it keep it just because I’m too busy to take a personal day. If anyone knows a good financial advisor, let me know.

I could fill the days off I want to take with chores and tasks I’ve been meaning to do, honestly. I managed to vaccuum the house for the first time in months just this week. Laundry needs to be put away as I type this, the bathroom needs to be scrubbed, the dishes need to be done, we have DVDs that need to go back to Netflix, a storage room that needs cleaning, clothes that need to be donated, closets to empty out, a spare bedroom that needs fixing up, a carpet that should probably be cleaned, movies I want to see, the list goes on. It’s stressful knowing there’s so much to do, so much I want to do, knowing it doesn’t necessarily match up, and knowing that I waste 9 to 10 hours a day when I wish I had time to do any of it, much less relax.

Yeah, I think I need a vacation. Or a sabbatical. Maybe both.

I can hear string instruments in my head today. They make me think of empty seasides, somewhere chilly but warm enough that I don’t need a jacket, somewhere I can put a cello down and play. I don’t even know how to play the cello, but I’d love to learn if for no other reason than to make this dream come true. I also hear violins, rising chords that compete with the rushing sea and dark clouds rushing past overhead.

It’s funny how music can inspire, can make you dream, and then how much you long for those dreams as if it’s a reality that’s just within reach; something just too far away to get your fingers around but close enough that you can taste it – close enough that it fools you into thinking that if you just wished for it hard enough it’d come to you in an instant. Something that makes you think on it, fantasize over it, and just sit in one place, close your eyes, and wish.

Someday I think I’ll find that escape. I don’t know when, but I will.