I’ve been sitting on this post for a long time. Pondering how exactly I’m going to approach it, what I was going to say. It’s been a while, obviously, but that’s not the reason I’ve hesitated. Let’s get some of this stuff out of the way first, okay?

My mother’s health has been iffy for several months now, and while things were largely okay through November, she and my father made the decision to stop the chemotherapy she had been on for the past year or so because it was getting too difficult for her to move from first her chair, and then eventually from her bed. Shortly after that decision, her health began to deteriorate–not unexpected, but still–and finally on December 13th I got the call that “it could be any time now,” and that I should be there as soon as possible. My mother greeted me when I arrived later that evening, we sat together and talked for a while, and eventually she fell asleep. From there she hung on, in and out of coherent consciousness, until Friday the 16th, when she heaved one last sigh of relief and passed away, out of this world and on to the next.

Before we go too much further, it’s worth noting that I’ve never lost anyone super-close to me. I’ve heard of old friends passing away at untimely young ages, far off relatives who had died, family of friends, things like that. My mother’s funeral would be the first one I would have to sit through, and I had to sit through it up front. Her internment was, thankfully, not as dramatic as I had feared it would be, but still the first I’d ever been to.

I’ll fondly remember our Thanksgiving-one of the last times we had family surrounding us and all talked together as though there were nothing going on–in fact, even in her last days my mother would tell everyone she was “doing fine” when asked, and she her strength is something I can only hope to channel when it’s my turn to go.

All of this happening so close to Christmas would normally cast a long shadow over the holiday, and it did, but my mother wouldn’t have approved if my father and I sat around feeling sad and sorry for our loss. We miss her, we miss her terribly, but my mother wasn’t one to have anyone mourn her. “If you didn’t cry for me in life, don’t cry for me in death,” she said.

So we did have Christmas–Raevyn and I visited my father for the long weekend, traded gifts, made a delicious Christmas dinner. In fact, it was the first Christmas dinner I’d ever had to cook inside and out. We started the afternoon with curried crab dip and steamed shrimp, and moved on to prep dinner. We roasted a fat, seven pound chicken, made sweet potatoes, sauteed squash, made kale, and sipped wine, and it was lovely. Obviously the table was short a person, but it was a beautiful evening regardless. My extended family, all of whom had come from miles around to attend my mother’s funeral, went out of their way to give us a few gifts here and there to make sure we had a Christmas, and they were all lovely.

When Raevyn and I returned home, on Monday evening, we had our own Christmas, and suffice to say that we went ahead and spoiled each other, partially because we had to do all of our shopping after my mother passed away, getting deliveries to the apartment the week before Christmas, when Raevyn had to go back to work and I had to attend to funeral and internment arrangements. All of the gifts are unwrapped and the wrapping paper is tossed away, and our home is full of books, anime DVDs, Portal 2 related gear, cable management tools, and a new coffee mug that looks a lot like the ones used for sipping Raktajino on Deep Space Nine, among other awesome gifts.

Frankly, I’ve been so busy these past few weeks and so drained otherwise that I haven’t had time to post pictures of any of it – or any of the other photos I’ve taken since I got my shiny new Sony NEX-5N a while back. The photos are on the SD card, I just haven’t plugged the camera–or the SD card–into my computer to have them copied. I think part of it is that I use a Mac to write every day, and at the end of the day I switch over to my Windows PC for browsing and gaming, so I’m stuck trying to figure out which system (and which app on that system) would be best for managing my photos. I’ve usually gone for just a folder system I keep organized myself in Windows, but I’ve been pondering giving up and letting Picasa manage my photos in Windows (since it’s already installed) or iPhoto manage them on the Mac. We’ll see. Either way, I’d love to get them up at my Flickr account sometime soon.

All of that aside, the holidays treated me well, all things considered, I’m thankful to the team at Lifehacker for keeping an eye out for me while I was running around dealing with issues that kept me from the keyboard, and even more thankful for the love and support from Raevyn and the friends I’ve been able to talk to about this up to this point. I know as soon as I post this there’ll be more of you, and I’m grateful for you as well.

For now though, I have plenty of work to get back into, a new year to look forward to, and a lot to do even between now and the beginning of the new year. I have some freshening up to do, both virtually and in my physical space, and I’ll need all of the luck I can get. Here’s looking forward to 2012.

I’m woefully missing the catharsis here. One of the things about taking your passion and making it your day job is that sometimes you still need a break from your passion when you do it enough: which means that I need more opportunities away from a keyboard than I’d like to admit that I do. Might be time to pick up another hobby-or at least hit the gym more often. It’s not like we didn’t move into this building partially because there was one on the first floor, free to residents. Working from home should give me plenty of time to drop in for a half-hour workout, right? Right?

In the time since I’ve started working full time at Lifehacker, I’ve written more than I thought I ever would, researched more than I ever thought I would, read more horrible stories and DIY projects gone horribly wrong than I ever thought I would, and waded through more self-entitled commenters and attention-hungry PR reps than I ever thought I would. And for the most part, I love it – all of it. I may not love getting up as early as I do to make it all happen, but I wouldn’t trade it in to go back to a day job, commute to a cubicle, and slave away at work that I don’t find half as interesting.

To that end though, it’s been an emotional rollercoaster that I totally thought I was ready for – maybe with a few known weaknesses, but I thought I had shored up my mental and emotional defenses, knew where my weak points were, but this has been more challenging than I anticipated. There’s a reason I posted this video to Gears and Widgets, and if I said I didn’t have at least a moment a day where I wish I could force at least one person to watch it, I’d be lying. I know eventually I’ll get used to it or ignore it, and honestly I think that thicker skin is coming in, but I wish it didn’t take so long, or suck so much.

So in the past few weeks, I inherited an iPad for my ailing mother, who has a second-gen iPod Touch that’s just too small for the emailing and blogging that she’s trying to do with it. Oddly enough, using it for a few weeks while I got it ready to give to her made me want one pretty badly: not that it fills any essential need in my life–it really doesn’t–but boy is it a handy tool to have around.

I also finally upgraded my old OG Motorola Droid for a shiny new Droid Bionic – I’ve been sitting on an eligable upgrade for months now, and I’ve been waiting for the Bionic since CES in January, when the phone was the star of the show. The reviews have been largely positive, and while people note that Samsung is likely bringing a new phone to Verizon Wireless in October or November (the Galaxy Nexus or Nexus Prime, depending on who you’re listening to, and it’ll be the first phone to run Android 2.4 “Ice Cream Sandwich,”) I figured if I keep waiting and clinging to whatever the “next best thing” will be, I’ll always find myself waiting for the “next best thing.” All things considered, I love this thing – it didn’t take me too long to configure, and really appreciate the extra speed.

At the risk of sounding like I’ve been buying too many toys lately (which I probably have,) I also picked up a Sony Nex-5N – my first camera that’s not on a phone since my old 5MP Pentax (which I donated before I moved last because it was on its last legs anyway) and the first one I’ve had with interchangeable lenses. It’s a powerhouse, and I’m still learning my way around it. Thankfully my colleague Adam Dachis has an excellent guide to the basics of photography that’s been a huge help so far.

To that end, maybe this Sunday I’ll take that camera to the market and do some shooting, if I can muster up the nerve. It takes a certain amount of fearlessness to take photos in public when no one else is: fearlessness that I don’t know if I have quite yet. I know a lot of people who post beautiful photographs on a regular basis, and I used to do it with my phone (until my poor OG Droid’s camera stopped working,) I’d love to be one of them again.

Anyway. Back to the real world. Things to do, places to go. Still struggling every day with living that life in my head. It keeps changing, which I suppose is what makes it beautiful. Here’s to the weekend, and here’s to you.

Yes – those cherry blossoms? They’ll be back soon.

Last week I took a vacation. A serious, well deserved vacation – the kind where I actually unplug from the net (not that I wanted to, the nature of the trip forced me to,) spent time with the lovely Raevyns, had a great time relaxing, got some reading done, and saw some amazing sights.

Thanks to her company, every year the staff get to take a big vacation together in celebration of the company’s performance the previous year and for surviving the holiday season. So this year, they booked their employees and their families and significant others for a 4-night western Caribbean cruise, aboard the fabulous Celebrity Century, a ship awesome enough to have its own Wikipedia page.

I’ll work on getting you guys the photos soon, but the vacation itself was incredible. Sure, we had satellite television on board (I got to watch the BBC World Service! and Sky News! and Cartoon Network in Spanish!) but Internet access was so prohibitively expensive and the trip only a few days that it didn’t make sense to spend the money on it just to check email and post to Twitter. So I put my phone in airplane mode, carried it around as my camera, and didn’t think twice about it.

Now if there’s anything you should know about me, it’s that I’m not a huge fan of unplugging. My idea of vacations and relaxation tend to involve fiddling around on the Internet for leisure activities, so it was something of a culture shift for me – but it’s not one I had a problem taking to. There was enough to do on-board, enough people to hang out with, enough to drink (Raevyn sprung for the unlimited premium drink plans – which included tasty adult beverages,) and enough other things to see that I can’t say I was ever bored. Whether I was taking photos of the port of call at Cozumel, Mexico or I was relaxing on the deck just reading, I don’t think I was ever wanting for things to do.

Speaking of which, on the trip I managed to tear through Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It! in about a day, and it was incredible. Virtually every tip for building communities, attracting attention to your work, and living your passion are things that I absolutely plan on doing. It may sound cheesy, but after you hear what he has to say, you won’t think twice about building your “personal brand.” I then moved on to The Unfettered Mind: Writings from a Zen Master to a Master Swordsman by Takuan Soho, which is a thinner book but much more of a dense and philosophical read.

So reading Crush It! got me thinking about the technologies that I currently use and whether I’m making the most of the ones available to me. I started thinking about some of my blogs that I love but that I update out of principle, not because I think they’ve beneficial to my writing, and thought about what I’d like people to focus on when they find me on the Web. I thought about ways to make my brand more focused, and put out more content at the sites that matter the most for where I’d like to go. I’ve got some work to do – I picked up a couple of new domains to keep in my back pocket, and I’m already planning a move to PicPlz instead of my moblog, moving to my Flickr account over maintaining Gallery over at PhotoWerks, and even pondering a Tumblr account for those quick-hit videos and things I want to share but don’t want to burden my friends at Twitter or Plurk with.

We’ll see – it’s a lot to do on top of everything else, but I’m pretty excited about doing it.

I’ve also got some other things on my mind that I’ll keep under wraps right now for fear of jinxing them or making the wrong move publicly, but I’ll just say that good things are afoot, no matter what.

Now then, I’ve got work to do. Someone remind me not to sleep the weekend away?

I’ve had this Target commercial in my head for the past couple of weeks. I think it’s my unique way of being festive. The gifts are all wrapped, the cider is mulled, the apartment smells fantastic, and there’s some cold eggnog in the fridge and rum on top of it. The holiday season is in full swing, and on this Christmas Eve Eve, I’m happily sitting back and enjoying the atmosphere, pondering gifts and New Years events for next week.

Over at Plurk, Narilka asked the question: what’s your favorite holiday memory? I thought it about it for a while, and sadly didn’t get a chance to respond before the thread kind of went off the rails into hilarious territory, but I figured it would be a good thing to blog about.

When I was a kid and living in Germany, a lot of the other children I used to hang out with were part of the military community and kids that I went to school with, so I knew a lot of English speaking children. At the same time though, we learned a lot about Christmas traditions that aren’t necessarily the American style, and considering how old I was, it makes sense that some of those German Christmas traditions tend to resonate a bit more with me than some of the more happy and fluffy American ones.

One of the cornerstones in the German tradition was that Christmas Eve is the big evening, not so much Christmas Day – and that Santa Claus to Americans is somewhat analgous to Saint Nicholas, but instead of dropping down chimneys to deliver presents under the Christmas tree (which we still indulged, don’t get me wrong,) all of the children left their shoes (and in many cases, their parents too!) outside of their doors for Saint Nicholas – patron saint of children – to leave treats in. Because the the community was semi-urban with lots of apartments and townhomes, and because the people in our community were a combination of US Military families living near base and German families who lives and worked on or near base as well, there were plenty of shoes to fill. Saint Nicholas clearly needed help.

So what did all of the good little Army brats do? With the help of our parents, we cooked up lots of popcorn ball treats and treats and put them in little clear plastic bags. We filled sacks with them, dressed ourselves in white (I think we were supposed to be angels) and went from door to door, leaving treats in the shoes, the same way Saint Nicholas does, according to legend.

Admittedly, Saint Nicholas’ feasting day is December 6th, not Christmas Eve, and it’s very possible that we did this on the 6th and I’m just compressing time in my memory – but it felt like Christmas Eve, what with everything going on, and the fact that I had the distinct impression that I had to be home soon to be abed myself, or else I’d miss Saint Nicholas/Santa Claus’s visit to my own home.

Of course, upon returning home under the guidance of another soldier in our community who somehow was tasked with sheperding most of us children back to our respective apartments and flats, I celebrated with my parents with hot chocolate, holiday specials on television, and of course, a good night’s sleep to prep for the gift-opening frenzy of the following morning.

Maybe it’s the fact that it was a holiday well spent doing things for other people in the community, maybe it was the opportunity to indulge a Christmas tradition that wasn’t the same as I’d been used to, but that holiday definitely ranks as one of (if not the) most memorable I’ve ever had. All of my holidays have been filled with love and laughter, but that one was unique and it’ll always stand out in my mind.

In other news, now is usually the time of year that I look back on my resolutions to see how well I’ve done. As usual, and as with most years, my progress is usually determined by how well I can generally insert those resolutions into my day-to-day life. I don’t, especially when the year gets into the swing of things, start thinking about my resolutions and look back on them in the spring or summertime, for example.

So, let’s see…what did I say last year? Oh, that’s right – I didn’t make specific resolutions last year, because there was so much going on. Travel to New York City for fun and for New Year’s, travel to Las Vegas for CES (which I regretfully won’t be on the way to come Jan 2011,) and so on – I committed myself to making more progress on my standing goals from the beginning of 2009, and I think they still hold water.

I’ve been doing really well on all of them, strictly – I’ve traveled more in the past year than I have in the past several years, and CES notwithstanding, I don’t want that trend to stop. I do much more on the weekends than sleep – I’ve been to wine festivals and happy hours, visited amazing creperies in downtown DC and revisited a fantastic diner a little closer to Baltimore. Suffice to say I’m much happier with the state of my activities than I used to be.

I could stand to get back on the horse when it comes to working out, but that’ll come on its own. I think I need a Wii – I’m so tired of the tracks in my copy of DDR for the PS2 that it’s not even funny. Oh! I said I need to take more pictures. I’ve been doing that but slacking in recent weeks. Nice reminder.

Beyond that though, the technical stuff are all things that I haven’t managed to do – my VHS tapes are still sadly decomposing quietly, and my CDs sit stagnant behind me, both groups waiting to be digitized and saved from their eventual destruction. I think next year – especially with my plans to move into a place downtown in DC – will be a year of minimizing, so there’ll be new motivation to make sure that those tapes and CDs go digital and get backed up…and hopefully then get put into boxes from which I won’t need to remove them.

I also suggested that I revive my Livejournal theme, “Before I Sleep.” There’s something I haven’t even looked at for a few months, and since I’ve spent less and less time at Livejournal aside from using it for my own little moments of Zen, I’d forgotten about my plans there. Another good reminder – I might get started on some of the foods and drinks I said I wanted to learn to make sooner rather than later. After all, one of my old bosses used to explain that he got so good at cooking and bartending because he challenged himself to learn how to cook and mix something new every week, without fail, regularly.

All it takes is practice – something I’m proud to say is definitely its own reward sometimes. After all – it’s been just over a year since I put all of my blogs on an at least once-weekly update schedule. The only one I’ve let myself slip on is this one since it’s purely personal, but all of the others have been regularly updated. Here’s hoping the readers over there appreciate the fact that they can bet on new content every week. Now if only I had even more time to write, maybe I could toss something up on each of them daily…but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

So. With all that said, and a little attention paid forward to the New Year, I wish you and yours a happy, healthy, and safe Holiday. Seasons Greetings to all of you, and here’s looking forward to 2011.

It’s been a hell of a week, I’d be lying to say it were anything otherwise. There’s been stress on virtually every thing of influence in my life: work, family, love life, all of it. That being said, a lot of it has smoothed itself over around the end of the week, so they’re easier to deal with or gone entirely. One of the things I’m grateful for is the ability to talk to my love and my family in ways that I can’t really talk to a lot of people, and especially ways that are open and honest, even if we weren’t able to talk like that before. Between talking to my parents about work and talking to Raevyn about everything, I think I feel a lot better about the stresses I’ve been dealing with. Now I just have to go and deal with the things that have been getting to me, you know?

Also many many thanks to Pastilla for reaching out to me to chat about things – we commiserated for a while about how we’re both the type of people who are at our worst when we’re flailing and feeling like our situations are out of control, and she made the point to remind me that I should take some time to do something wholly and entirely for myself; something that I really want to do. Maybe find a meditation group, or take a vacation to a place I want to go. I hadn’t thought at all about doing something just for me in ages. Like I said over at over at Plurk, when I was younger I just wanted to be needed – by someone, for something. Now that I’m an adult, I would love just one day when no one needed me for anything.

Of course, it’s been a lovely weekend and tomorrow it’s back to the grind and back to work, but I think there are good things on the horizon for me, one way or the other – it is, as always, just a matter of reaching for them as much as I can.

We’ll have to see how things go with work, but it’s comforting to know that if things don’t work out, I always have the option to look for something else. I also know that I have the freedom to look for more freelancing gigs: something I also want to do. I think I’ll need to update my writing clips though with a few more recent samples of work that I’m really proud of. The trick of course is to identify which of some of that recent work I’ve thought is particularly compelling. I’m pretty sure my resume is up to date as well, so it’s worth looking for some new and challenging full time work if the changes at the current gig don’t work out.

On top of that, I’m still thinking of moving downtown to DC, and Raevyn and I need to look at neighborhoods and see which ones might be ideal. It’ll take some work and we have a good, long head-start, so hopefully that’ll be more fun than anything else. In the meantime though, it’s all about making sure I keep doing the things I know how to do well and stick to my passions. Wish me luck.

In other, lighter news though, last night Raevyn and I headed over to our local Mongolian Grill for some custom-made bowl dinner, since she’d never been to a restaurant like that and I haven’t been in ages and wanted to go with someone other than the folks at work who keep asking me about it. We had some dinner, and then walked a few storefronts up to the Frisco Grille for some craft beer. While I really liked the german doppelbock they had on tap, I think the Dogfish Head Imperial Stout stole both Raevyn and I’s hearts that night, and we gleefully drank a couple of them each. It was a really relaxing evening and a welcome, delicious respite from all of the worries and troubles that had been getting to me over the course of the week.

These weekends are definitely a welcome escape, and it’s difficult to get back into the swing of things during the week – I’ve had a little trouble sleeping through the nights these past few weeks, and I’m hoping it’s really just due to the stress of everything going on around me. As things settle down, I’m hoping I don’t have that “look forward to the weekend” mentality as soon as Monday morning rolls around. Still, it’s not as though I don’t have anything to look forward to during the week: I love my writing and I love the evenings I have to relax and play some games here and there; I just wish the days weren’t so frustrating.

Even as I say that though, I know that the only person who can really do something about those frustrating daytimes is me, and maybe it’s about time I push myself out of my comfort zone and do something about it. No time like the present.

That and spend a little more time over at Frisco. Those nachos were great, and the beer was better. Plus it’s pretty much on the way home from the office. More pictures of the bar, the drinks, and the live blues playing in there while we were there are over at Lorelei Complex. That reminds me, I want to get an early start on this week’s article over at The Classy Geek!

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.