| Not enough time to really panic |
[Jul. 7th, 2009|09:24 am] |
My Aunt Vicki called Sunday night to ask if I was going to be around. She wanted to surprise my grandma by bringing her up here to visit me. Grandma used to travel A LOT. She'd just pick up and go. Take bus trips, cruises, whatever, all on a moment's notice. I used to tease her whenever I came home from college about needing to set up an appointment to see her, otherwise she'd be off and running. But Grandma is slowing down. She doesn't travel much and she got herself a little lap dog, which gives her an excuse to stay at home. But she's been saying for three years now that she wanted to visit me in Boston. Apparently the stars all aligned and the right people have the weekend off to watch the house and puppy sit, so Gram and Aunt Vick and Vicki's daughter Peanut* are coming up.
Which is great. I used to spend at least a week or two every summer traveling with them. We'd go to the ocean, to the Smokey Mountains, out to Phili or Pittsburgh. They are wonderful traveling companions and all of them are history buffs, so Boston will be right up their alley.
No, the panic part comes from the fact that Mom is coming too. My mother is ... my mother. You know how argumentative and stubborn I can be? The neat streak that goes a mile wide? I came by all of those honestly and it wasn't from my dad, let me tell you.
So yeah, now I need to scour the house spotless, clean the fridge, the whole nine yards. Because my mom is visiting. And I have two days to do it. Eeep.
*Peanut's real name is Audrey. She got the nickname from when she was a baby and vastly undersized for her age. She has food allergies and, back in the early 70s, if you were allergic to wheat, dairy and nuts, then you were just SOL. Basically she was raised on ginger ale and vitamin supplements for the first year or so. |
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| Is there any way to say my bits are frozen and not have it sound dirty? |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|08:10 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | knees | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  happy | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me | ] |
It seems that screaming at the sky DOES occasionally work. The weather cleared up for the first time in a month and we've had three whole days of sun and warm.
Friday a bunch of us piled down to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) omnia_mutantur's family home on the beach. We spent a couple hours goofing off in the water, despite the fact that that Atlantic is DAMN COLD. It seems all those storms generated some waves, a rarity around Boston. Nothing really big but fun, none the less. We swam until all our bits were frozen, then we went back and played games and cooked out and played more games and ran around the house in the thunderstorm and watched nuns SLIDE across the lawn and watched fireworks and tried to figure out what sort of monster was going to come out of the house at sundown. It was great and I need twenty more days JUST like it at least this summer.
Other than that, I've just been out enjoying the weather. Both yesterday and today, I biked down to Bedford and back. Yesterday I hopped on some of the mountain bike trails near my house and played around a bit but my knee isn't quite ready for that sort of work yet. Bouncing down a hillside just didn't agree with it at all. Today I went clear down into Concord on one of the rail trails. I ended up doing about 16 miles of mostly flat work in a bit under two hours. Lunch was in there somewhere but I didn't think to time that. Not bad time given how much mud I had to plow through. I ended up power spraying both myself and my bike off when I got home. You wouldn't be believe all the places I managed to get mud.
Right now, my knee is actually alright. Over the last week, I've spent 3 hours riding,2 hours playing sand volleyball and at least an hour a night on the bike on the off nights and my knee seems to be holding up to the work. Now if I can just get a little bit of weight lifting in there without it turning into a pumpkin, I might actually start believing that the damned thing isn't a lost cause. |
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| ARGH! |
[Jul. 1st, 2009|11:49 am] |
Okay, New England, ENOUGH ALREADY!
It is the first of July, for God's sake.
Can we PLEASE have one day of sun? Please?
It has rained for three weeks straight. My garden has rotted off. I haven't been on my motorcycle more than a handful of times. I've gotten to ride the pony outside maybe three times and even then, we were rained on. Heck, I had to go get my winter sweaters out of storage since it is not only raining, but it's cold! It was 42 degrees at the house the other night. In late June! ENOUGH!
I want clear skies, 80 degrees and the occasional thunderstorm. In that order. |
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| Winding down or free falling, you tell me? |
[Jun. 8th, 2009|11:20 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | work | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  exhausted | ] |
So work is finally settling out after months of complete insanity. The What Were We Thinking Project is in a customer enforced code freeze and all that is left is documentation. The WSF Project is completely done except for setting up one of the labs at the customer's location and documentation. Next week, I'm taking a road trip to wire computers together. Until then, I document. Easy, right?
Except I'm crashing. I mean, really crashing. After a six months of 60 hour weeks and being on call every weekend, I'm now scraping rock bottom, energy wise. I'm sleeping 10 hours a night and I'm STILL exhausted. I spent a good chunk of the last two weekends laying out in the sun, doing nothing and it still sounds like a fun way to spend a day. I'm normally not good at sitting still but right now, I just don't seem to have the motivation to do anything else. I can't tell if its allergies, a cold or just work related drain, but I have no go and no will to go. I'm just ... done.
On the up side, wandelrust & omnia_mutantur took us to DeCordova on Saturday. DeCordova is a 35 acre sculpture park in Lincoln. Not only is it a nice motorcycle ride from my house but it is one of the neatest museums in the Boston area, in my not so humble opinion.
It has PINE SHARKS. PINE SHARKS, people! The fact that someone got paid money to build 6+ foot long metal sharks and suspend them in a pine grove makes me SO happy. I want to go back in the winter and see the sharks covered in snow. PINE SHARKS!
Ah hem. Yeah. The rest of the park was pretty cool too. Obviously we didn't walk the entire 35 acres (see lack of energy) but we saw a good chunk of it. We'll have to go back later in the year and see the rest of it. |
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| Mental blocks are mental |
[Apr. 23rd, 2009|10:34 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | writing | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  creative | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Burn You Down - Opiate for the Masses | ] |
So writing.
Yeah.
For the first couple of months, I was cruising right along. Got to 50,000 words pounded out without trying. Got the outline pinned down. Had a file of character histories and backgrounds. Had names on everyone, which is a huge step forward for me. Naming ... not my strong point. Knew where they was going and how we were getting there and how everyone changed during the trip. Even had a first cut of the second story's outline written. It felt good.
Then it stopped. I mean, really stopped.
I knew what I had to write. I knew what each scene had to accomplish.
I couldn't do it to save my ass. Everything I typed just didn't work. The characters weren't IN character. The action scenes lacked tension, movement and, well, action. The dialog read like something out of a grade school play.
I figured, eh, it can't always be easy. I started editing what I already had. Figured I might as well spend the time doing something useful while I waited for inspiration to strike again.
*Insert three months of nothing but editing here*
Yeah, so inspiration? Wasn't in a striking mood. I got to the point where I couldn't read certain sections anymore. I had edited them so many times that my mind was filling in what used to be there, instead of what was currently on the page. I'm pretty sure I actively hate a couple of the chapters, even though I know they are no worse than any of the others. Editing became really, REALLY frustrating.
Then the word count started getting to me. You know, the little tag down in the bottom left in MS Word that tells you how many words are in the file? It started ... taunting me. I'd write and write and edit and write but it never made progress. I couldn't break an honest 60,000. Sure, I'd get up above it briefly, only to yank an entire chapter due to the suckage it contained. I'd spend hours in the evening rewriting, only to have that damn counter smugly sitting at 59,600.
Do you know what numbers do to a trained mathematician? I mean, writing is supposed to be WORDS. I don't need numbers when I'm writing. I don't want numbers when I'm writing. Numbers click on a whole other section of my brain that I'm trying to turn off when I'm not at work. Heck, I steadfastly refuse to use the numerical representation of numbers when I write. I spell everything out alphabetically. Otherwise, my brain goes "ooo...what's that for?" and the analytical side of my head fires up and it's NOT HELPING.
After a month of that, I seriously considered just chucking the whole damn thing. I mean, it was supposed to be fun and relaxing and not cause me to tear hair out, right? I have the day job and the art business if I want to be bald.
Earlier this week, though, something happened. I started writing a necessary scene for the tenth time. I got halfway done with it and decided it was complete and utter crap. And then I finished it.
And I left it in the file.
Then I went to another scene that had been escaping me and I did the same thing.
Now, I'm well past the cursed 60,000 mark and the story is moving again. I know I'll have to edit the hell out of those sections to make them passable. And that's okay. They are doing their job to move the story along and it's not like I won't want to edit this thing over and over again anyways before I show it to anyone as a whole story. I'm obsessive. That's what I do.
And now that I'm reading over them again, well, they really aren't that bad. They need work but not as much as some of the earlier stuff did.
Moral of the story?
Write.
Even it it sucks, write it and leave it in there. You can always figure out what isn't working later but you can't edit a blank page.
And turn the fucking word count thing off. |
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| new art |
[Mar. 2nd, 2009|06:58 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | art | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | chipper | ] |
So work has been kicking my ass of late. On Friday, I left at a little after 1:00 PM ... which gave me a little over 60 hours for the week. I can't remember the last weekend I had completely off.
When my schedule gets hectic like that, I just can't deal with nice structured painting. I'm too burnt to stay within the lines.
( Painting below ) |
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| More art update |
[Jan. 11th, 2009|07:23 pm] |
Update on the grapes picture. Currently it is drying so I can work on the goblins and stems without smearing things.
( grapes ) |
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| Seven degrees to getting your head sliced open |
[Dec. 3rd, 2008|05:37 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | amused | ] |
This guy? This guy has been driving me nuts for the past few weeks. We've been plowing through Heroes on streaming Netflix. It has been bugging me to no end that I recognized the big bad but I couldn't pin from where. I mean, actor ... its hard to pin down where you might have seen an actor before and I was pretty sure I hadn't seen any of his previous work.
Well, turns out there is a good reason for it all.
He's a CMU class of '99 alumn. I don't know him but I hung out with enough of the CFA folks that he's a familiar face and name. Squint a little and change the hair and ... yeah ... that's it.
Damn, the world just keeps getting smaller and smaller, doesn't it? |
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| Oh, the fun of small town police |
[Oct. 24th, 2008|12:57 pm] |
On the way to work today, my car had an issue. The issue ended up with me sitting on the side of the road and a tow truck coming. To make matters even more stressful, the ferrets had stolen my wallet out of my purse this morning and I had no ID, no credit card, nothing to pay the tow truck with. The tow guy was taking it to a shop that knows me, though, so five minutes on the phone got the okay needed to get my car off of the road. Then a friendly Bedford police officer offered to give me a ride home (all of 1.5 miles) to find my wallet. Nice, huh?
Except said friendly police officer noticed that my inspection expired last month. Now to be fair, I knew it was expired but I couldn't find my registration to get it inspected. Trust me, I spent a good part of Wednesday afternoon looking for it. Bad thing to say to the nice police officer. Nice police officer then ran my plates and, lo and behold, my registration was missing because it had also expired last month.
So now I have a towed car, two fines for expired registration and inspection and no wallet. Once home, I found my wallet (damn rodents hid it in the dining room closet), registered my car online and hopped on my bike to get into work.
Let me tell you, 40 degrees at 55 MPH is FRICKING COLD.
I may never be warm again.
Now I snowboard. I am a firm believer in the miracle of modern fabrics but there isn't enough polypro and fleece in the world to make that ride fun, even when all the layers are covered in full body leathers. I've been picking on Mike for insisting that his next sport bike has heated hand grips, now I'm wondering what it'd cost to mod my cruiser.
For another kick while I was down, a zipper on my leather overpants broke while I was on Route 2. One of the teeth was damaged and the whole thing ripped open somewhere between Concord and Cambridge. I went from just generally frozen to frozen with wind burn in less than five miles.
On the up side, I called the place I bought them from and they said that brand of pants have life time guarantees on all the zippers and snaps. I just need to bring them in tomorrow and they'll get it fixed. Of course, that means no beefy armored leather pants for a while but after this morning, I might be ready to call it quits to the riding season.
And the real fun part of all of this? The thing that takes the cake?
After giving me the two tickets, the police officer had the balls to tell me that I should go to court and contest them. After all, I was only three weeks past their expiration and the RMV is notorious for not getting renewal forms out on time. The judge would surely leave me off.
Yeah, um, thanks. |
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| Benefits of working for the Man |
[Oct. 13th, 2008|09:05 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | relaxed | ] |
Federal holidays.
It's sixty degrees and sunny. The leaves are glorious. And I don't have to do a damn thing today.
It's a good day. |
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| Compare and Contrast |
[Oct. 12th, 2008|09:55 am] |
On my last trip out to Albuquerque, I took along both Twilight by Stephani Meyer and Orcs by Stan Nicholls. Let me tell you, it says a lot about the writing when the story without any angelically gorgeous, sparkly beings and absolutely no sexual tension at all was the one I actually bothered to finish.
Orcs was FUN.
Think early Black Company/Glen Cook except with an angry horde of orcs. The author is still figuring this writing thing out. He's only really good at writing battle scenes. On the other hand, he played to his strengths and put in LOTS of battles and gore.
Ms. Meyer's story ... I want those three hours back please.
In other news, I may get a change of pace in my travel schedule. There's a good chance I'll get shipped off to sunny Florida come late November. Last time I was there, it was mid-August and we spent the entire week watching hurricanes play in the gulf. This trip should be better. |
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| Long day |
[Sep. 24th, 2008|04:07 pm] |
I got into work at 8:30 to find three calls waiting on my work answering machine from the barn. Tisa was colicing. By the time I got there, the vet had come and gone with a prognosis of gas colic (basically what babies get).
Apparently she had been going through the entire spectrum of colic symptoms, including buckling at the knees, rolling, kicking herself, shaking, fever, cold sweats, the whole nine yards.
I stayed up there from 9:30 until 3:00 waiting for it to pass. When I left, she had started passing manure again and was perking up, although she was still moving hunched up like she was in pain. The barn people promised to give me a call tonight to let me know hows she's doing.
First time in 9 years that's she's had a colic episode but the vet said that he has had to treat a slew of them since the weather changed. I hope we don't have to go through this again. I'm exhausted. |
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| why so quiet? |
[Sep. 23rd, 2008|08:51 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  bitter | ] |
You ask? Well, work has finally barred me from accessing livejournal from the company network. Seems social networking sites == trolling for dates and/or not so discrete sex and you can't have your employees getting any, not if you want them to be properly productive.
Not that I'm bitter.
Okay, I lied. I am bitter. |
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| Note to self |
[Aug. 18th, 2008|01:18 pm] |
Do not argue politics with your chiropractor while the man is working on you. He is a devote Republican and he will get distracted & overly enthusiastic.
Owwww... |
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| Grapes - Wip 2 |
[Aug. 12th, 2008|07:07 pm] |
Next couple images. Everything is sort of flat right now as I'm waiting for the layers of white and beige to dry enough to put reflection & color on them. I'm also utterly failing to take any photos without glare problems but that's okay. My studio lighting isn't set up for photographing things.
( more WIPs ) |
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| Oil theory test |
[Aug. 10th, 2008|12:42 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | art | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | accomplished | ] |
I've been reading up on the various methods of achieving depth and lighting with oils. One of the things I read involved doing the underpainting in the opposite spectrum of the finished painting ... if you want a warm finish, do the underpainting in cool colors and vice versa.
The current oil painting is, for all extents and purposes, a still life. Yeah, there are goblins in among the grapes but its a still life. The grapes are lovely green things that glow even in the photos I took (which reminds me, don't spend hours setting up a still life of fruit to photograph without warning the Boy about what you are doing. My grapes kept getting moved and eaten and I couldn't figure out what was going on).
Here's the current work in progress.
( images below ) |
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| Oil painting #2 |
[Aug. 5th, 2008|09:35 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | art | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | accomplished | ] |
Is done and varnished and on its way into a frame, never to be touched again*
( for you slow connection folks )
Most of this painting I am not longer happy with. I've been staring at it too long to like it much anymore. The cresting wave, however, is still squeal worthy. I may never have to paint another wave again thanks to that one.
* - barring when I send it out to conventions, which given the current economy, will be never.
Edited to show the color corrected version. You can see how greyed out my camera made it when you compare the corrected and the detail shots. |
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| Just when you think you've seen it all |
[Jul. 28th, 2008|10:11 am] |
I've had ferrets for a long time now, pretty much constantly since I was 13 in fact. In that time, I had thought I'd seen just about every foolish trick a ferret could come up with. I've had ferrets do everything from eating a sock (yes, an entire sock) to unscrewing the top off of caustic chemicals and dancing in them. Most ferret owners will agree that "ferret proof" is a relative term.
I have never, though, seen a ferret drag a 2lb bag of brown sugar into its hidey hole, chew through the plastic and eat enough of it to make himself sick for two days straight. I didn't even think that a 4lb rat could drag half of his weight that far but apparently I under estimated the dedication of a ferret on a sugar buzz.
I'd feel sorry for Folly except I spent the entire weekend doing cage laundry (poor boy was sick enough to be making messes from both ends) and I had to scrub the floor twice to get all the spilled sugar off of it. He had it scattered across two rooms and completely coating the dinning room closet.
Note to self, all sweets get locked in tupperware from this point forward. How he even got to that level on the butcher block shelving is still a mystery. |
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