February 07, 2005 20:36

Well that's all I fucking need. I'm doing a load of washing and the washer suddenly stops dead. It is full of water. I try to restart everything. I move clothes around. The agitator will weakly agitate in one direction but the drum won't rotate at all. I was happily getting things done and now this comes along and throws me off for the evening. Not happy. Not one bit.

February 06, 2005 14:55

So many things to talk about, so many things on my mind just at the moment. I shall start with my vacation.

The trip to the Bahamas was great. We flew out on Monday morning and were in the Carribean before lunch time. Interesting factoid number one: Bahamians drive on the left side of the road. Interesting factoid number two: most cars on Grand Bahama are left-hand drive. This makes for some interesting driving experiences. Having said that, Lauren did all the driving, in our Toyota Corolla, hired from Brad's Car Rentals. Yay for Brad.

We found our accomodations with only the minorest of difficulties - our map was not particularly accurate - and delivered our luggage to our unit. It was nice enough and had all the required amenities. We headed out to do some grocery shopping; the plan being that we would eat breakfast and lunch at the condo and dine out in the evening. This would allow us to save a bit of money. It worked out well, as we had eggs and toast for breakfast every day and ham and cheese sandwiches for lunch.

While on our foraging trip, I also bought a pair of flip-flops/jandals/beach footwear, and we also stopped in at a liquor store. Interesting factoid number three: no sales tax in the Bahamas. Interesting factoid number four: there is no consistency in liquor prices from store to store. I picked up a bottle of Absolut Citron and a bottle of rum (both one litre) for $26. Later in the week we restocked for $20, although the vodka was just regular Absolut the seond time, because the Citron was $26. Like I said, no consistency, except possibly in the price of rum.

Interesting factoid number five: the Bahamian dollar is pegged to the US dollar. This meant that we could use our American money to pay for everything and not worry about trying to get local currency. I didn't buy much on the island aside from food and liquor. As mentioned above, I did buy some footwear, and I bought some cheap sunglasses. Later in the week I went looking for souvenirs but was not very impressed with the choices. I also bought a nice pair of Fossil sunglasses (to go with my Fossil wallet and Fossil watch) but I ended up breaking the arm last night. Yes, I am somewhat pissed off with that.

The weather was mixed. I was able to sit out in the sun and turn a nice shade of pink on Tuesday and Thursday. Well, parts of me turned shades of pink, other parts stayed pasty white. The shape of the colour on my body is really quite bizarre; obviously the result of a somewhat haphazard application of SPF-30 sunscreen. I noticed this morning that I have started to peel.

Much reading was accopmlished, which was a major desire for me. I finished reading The Stories of English. I started and finished the book Lauren's parents gave me for Christmas, Star of the Sea. Actually, that was Tuesday's book. Heheh. I also started Will Durant's The Pleasures of Philosophy. I completed about half of that by the time we landed back in Atlanta on Saturday afternoon.

The dining was good. I ate a lot of conch fritters. I had fish twice, greek food one night, and lobster pizza another night. We also drank a lot. A lot. We finished three bottles of rum and nearly two bottles of vodka. I drank rum. It seemed to be the thing to do, so I drank rum. It's not a habit that I think I will continue with, but it did not kill me. On Thursday night it was Happy Hour at the condo's pool bar. So we went on down to that and drank some highly alcoholic rum beverages. We got somewhat toasted. To say the least. Lauren also won the dollar raffle - you wrote your name on a dollar bill and put it in a bag and then this old lady drew one at random and the name on the dollar won and it happened to be Lauren. A nice little $48 windfall.

Ah yes, old woman. They were all old. Every one of them. It was like being in a retirement home. Not that I'm being hard on the concept of old people. I mean, assuming my body doesn't give out some time in the near future, I guess I will become an old person, but at my (and Lauren and Matt's) age, we want to be hanging out with the beautiful young people. Or at least the people that are our approximate age. It seemed that everywhere we went we were the odd age-group out.

In other news I blew through $180 at the casino on $15 minimum blackjack. This was the Thursday night. Quite disappointing really.

We got back into Atlanta yesterday afternoon. We did the customs and immigration thing at the Freeport airport, which was nice, because I hate having to deal with that after landing in the States. On getting home I unpacked and also learned that I had left the doors to my porch unlocked. Craziness. I fuddled around on my computer, did some reading, sorted my week's worth of (snail) mail (yay for bills). I then got a call from Stacy, and she and Dill stopped by to take me to the Local for a cocktail or two. Or three. Or four. Or, yeah well, by the time Ben picked me up to go to Lauren's birthday dinner I was already quite toasty. I picked up the drink tab when we got there and then we had a grand dinner, with tasty food and yummy wine.

Then it was back to the Local to continue drinking to Lauren's birth. At some point here the arm of my new styley sunglass became separated from the hinge. This make Damon sad.

And now it is Sunday. I was to have caught up with Stuart McG, who is in the States for a couple of weeks working with Coke United, but he is caught up in resolving some issues with the deployment, so I just caught up with him on the phone. I was going to burn some DVDs (backing up stuff - I do that, you know - I should store the backups somewhere safe, to make the backups useful for more than system recovery, eg if my house burns down I will still lose all that data since it's not stored somewhere safe) - but I learned that the blank DVDs I bought were 8X media, and my burner does not support writing to that media. So I'm going to have to go out and buy appropriate disks.

And that about catches things up. I will be going to the Local this afternoon for the Superbowl. I'm putting my money on the New England Patriots.

While in the Bahamas I was given opportunity to think about a bunch of things. To reflect, as it were, on what it is I want from life in the near and long terms. Events of recent weeks have given me cause to think about my desires and my loves and my hates and so on. I have stated previously my desire to pay down all of my debt and that I have a plan currently executing to enable that desire to come to fruition. It still requires some effort on my part to ensure that the goal can be met, but that's really only a matter of willpower.

Willpower. And that is a bigger issue than I imply in that previous paragraph. But aside from the past week, I have largely been keeping my expenditure under check. There are a few things I want to get (primarily a MP3 player) but I am restricting my credit card usage to make it all manageable and I may allow myself to get a player later in the year if my debt reduction goals are met.

I also thought about relationships, the many that I have with the people that populate my world, what they mean to me, and ultimately what I want from them individually and as a whole. And, I guess, what I want from myself in these. Over the past twelve months I have been questioned, I have been challenged even, about what it is I want from specific relationships as well as overall. The answers I have given have never satisfied anyone, and not really even myself. I recognise certain traits in my character which are not conducive to maintaining stable monogamous intimate relationships. I am not a talker. In general, I only talk when I have something to say. I don't make smalltalk. I also have difficulties saying the important things. I am not a communicator. This makes me seem aloof, or that I have something to hide, or any of a number of things, but it is simply that I have difficulties in talking unless I have something specific I want to say.

I am also a very solitary person. I enjoy my own company. I love my alone time where I can extricate myself from the rest of the world. I am very selfish with alone time. Again, this can be misinterpreted.

As I grow older I am finding that sleep, or rather the lack of it, is having an increasing effect on my moods. I like to consider myself a patient, laid-back person; this may or may not be true in reality. But I do find that I lack patience when tired. I find that I am unaccepting of irritations when very tired. Dare I say it, but I become grumpy, short, irritable, and generally bad company when lack of sleep grows to unmanageable levels. I recogise that this happens, and I try to give people fair warning of the situation when I see it happening or as being a likely occurence.

I am in general a very accepting person (excluding the circumstances described above). People are who they are, with idiosyncracies and traits and behaviours which define them. I don't judge people for their behaviour; maybe I should. In spite of my frustrations and difficulties, I only exceedingly rarely hold any grudges or issues against anybody. This means that I maintain some friendships that others do not understand.

That is probably related to the difficulty I have in explaining why I like someone. I simply do. "Why do you love me?" is a question I always hate. I have an emotional response to a person simply because I do. Answering with the usual, "beautidul, intelligent, fun," while being accurate identification of aspects of a person I love, simply does not satisfy either myself or the person that asks the question. THe mere fact that being in that person's company makes me happy, a purely selfish feeling, is the simple truth, but that is rarely a suitable answer as well. On reflection, I guess that such statements by necessity include the unspoken clause, "at this time." And that makes it even more harsh in a sense. And there is the notion that that is the same answer to the question of why I am a friend of any person; that is, their presence gives me pleasure.

And that raises another issue which greatly annoys me. I am an analytical person, true. I am an avid learner and acquirer of ideas and opinion. I am pretty well read (although not as well read as I would like). Something about this and the way I behave (maybe the aloofness to which I referred earlier) has given rise to more than one intimate asking me, "do you think you're smarter than me?" or "do you think I'm unintelligent?" I hate that anyone would think that of me. I consider myself quite intelligent (if often foolish), and I prefer to surround myself with intelligent people, both to learn from them and to have them challenge me. Everyone's experience and knowledge is different, and I do not feel that I am qualified to rate an inidividual's relative intelligence. I may know more about a particular subject than another person, but they will know more about another subject than I. And there are people who know more than I about the stuff that I am well versed in, but not necessarily everything.

But the biggest issue really is the one of commitment. I don't commit well. Why is this? I guess there are several reasons, any one of which is likely to be more or less relevant than any of the others. My exploration of this issue will be postponed. It really is the fundamental one, I guess. But I've written enough for one day.

January 30, 2005 16:30

So I got the days wrong - we head to the Bahamas on Monday morning. That meant I was able to run a couple of extra chores today that I didn't do yesterday because of the ice storm. I still haven't picked up sunscreen or sandals/jandals. The former was an oversight, the latter is due to me being lazy. No matter, I should be able to pick up both tomorrow.

Yeah, we got hit hard by an ice storm. Roads were extremely treacherous Friday night and Saturday. And it was cold, and you know how I feel about that.

On Friday night I worked for three hours after I arrived home from Birmingham and then headed up to the Local for dinner and drinks. Later in the evening, Patrick got a poker game set up and I joined in. At one point I was about $80 ahead, but then through a run of good cards that were not good enough to win I was back to my starting $20. I decided to stop then. I headed home around 8am, walking from North and North Highland, but I already talked about that.

I walked (carefully) up the Kroger to pick up some food and some ant killer. Mission accomplished, I had lunch and then set about bringing death and destruction to the invaders. I talked to Martina about seeing a The Aviator or Sideways.

In the end, we saw neither. I caught up with Jennifer M at the Local and ended up drinking with her, her neighbour (Tara) and Chris. It was an interesting time at the Local, with this guy chatting up Tara and causing great hilarity in the process (I'm not sure if he realised what was going on). At one point he said to Jen, "let's get drunk and make out." To which, Jennifer replied, "I only get drunk and make out with Damon." Heheh. Martina messaged me to say that the theatre was shut down due to the ice storm, and in the end I left the Local before Martina turned up. I also missed Lauren and Matt, who arrived around midnight

Today has been a bit of a recovery day. I went out to buy some blank CDs and DVDs and succeeded in not buying an MP3 player. I want a 1GB memory-based (ie no hard drives, thank you) player. SanDisk (the memory people) have a good one out, and iRiver also have some good ones, but both are outside of my budget right now - debt reduction is the number one priority, aside from vacations in the Bahamas.

January 29, 2005 12:50

Holy fuck. It is a mess outside. The results of the freezing rain was mildly fun to walk home in at 9:30 this morning after poker, but right now, some three hours or so later, it is just craziness. The roads are a mess of ice; my parking lot is a mess of ice. Driving anyway right now is tantamount to suicide unless you have a properly equipped vehicle. Which I don't. Nor does practically anybody here in Atlanta, but they'll try anyway and that makes the roads even more dangerous.

It is pretty though. If you're into that sort of thing. No matter. I have a guest right now. One of my fellow poker players from (much) earlier this morning was unable to find his ride home, so he is now crashed out on the couch, I shoudl be crashed out, but I awoke after a couple of hours of sleep. I walked/slid my way up to the leasing office to drop off my rent check. It is crazy. I need to walk up to the Kroger to buy some ant killer; it appears that ants have found a secret path into my apartment and are making their way from my bedroom, through my bathroom, to places unknown. This must be stopped, especially before I leave for a week.

January 27, 2005 20:50

Birmingham, Alabama is my locale this evening. I drove out here this morning for a meeting with the client of my project, and to install and configure our software. It was a largely succcessful day. Hell, any day when you have lunch at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse has got to be good. Dinner was less exciting - a decidedly below average lamb gyro. Oh well.

The hotel I'm staying it is a Hampton Inn; nothing fancy, but convenient. I had a bag of chocolate cookies and a bottle of water waiting for me on my bed. The bed is big and soft and has lots of nice fluffy pillows. This is, of course, not standard accoutrements at a Hampton Inn, but I am a gold level Hilton person, so that's the treatment I get. They have wireless here, but don't seem to be able to get it to work correctly. My wireless card has established a connection with the WAP but I'm not getting an IP address. Oh well, I will post this journal entry later.

Last night I met up with Lauren and Matt for Trivia. Chris, Lauren's ex for before I met her, also joined us. We played a really good game, and came in second. Ben seemed less than pleased with the Bar's lack of placing. Oh well, it happens.

The first part of the week I was on site at the Atlanta depot of the company that I am working with. Monday I was sitting with their dispatcher to understand their processes as they actually occur. On Tuesday I did a route ride that took me up to Cleveland, GA. Another interesting day. It was an early start - I was on site at 6:30 on Tuesday. We got back around 3:30, which allowed me to get to the Brewhouse to watch the second half of the Carling Cup semi-final game between Watford and Liverpool. Liverpool had won the first leg 1-0; they completed the overall victory with another Gerrard goal. Man U and Chelsea played on Wednesday to determine the other finalist; I have not yet seen that result.

In other events, the Falcons lost to the Eagles on Sunday. Liverpool lost to Southampton on Saturday. Tried and failed to see Sideways on Friday, but still ended up having a great night out at Da Vinci's with Martina and Keith, and then made it to closing time at the Local. Martina and Vanessa stayed up chatting at my place until some ungodly hour.

Only a few more days and I'll be off to the Bahamas. Yes, I keep mentioning this, but it's very exciting.

I think I was going to write up something interesting and fun (not to say that any of the above isn't interesting or fun), but I can't remember what it was. Something observational about the world. Something I thought about while crossing the parking lot to the not-Greek place I had dinner at.

For some reason I can't explain, I'm currently watching Home Fries. Well, I know why: it's because I like Drew Barrymore, and I like Luke Wilson. I like them for different reasons, of course. I think I will go read more of The Stories of English.

January 20, 2005 20:18

Yum-yum, that was good. I went ahead and made the dinner I suggested I was going to make. I had broccoli rather than cauliflower, and I had the left-over stuffing and chicken as well. It was really tasty. Check out the picture!

On to other things. I still need to do some work on my CSS when it comes to images included with text. The books I currently have aren't helping me the way I need them to.

In other news, I have a potentially very busy weel ahead of me. I'll be on-site at the local depot of the client on Monday and Tuesday; MOnday will be with their dispatcher and Tuesday will be doing a route-ride. Later in the week I may be off to Birmingham to do the software installation and system configuration. And then that weekend I'll be flying out to the Bahamas with Lauren and Matt, returning on Lauren's birthday. Craziness!

January 20, 2005 14:38

I made it in to work today. I slept late to get as much health benefit as possible. Nyquil is my friend.

I shall be staying in this evening. I'm going to do a little experimenting for dinner. I'm going to chop up some chicken as small as possible and cook it up with garlic and onions and a selection of herbs. Then I'm going to use this to stuff a red bell pepper (capsicum). Cover the lot with cheese and bake for a while. On the side, I'm planning on having steamed green beans and cauliflower. It all sounds tasty and exciting to me.

So yesterday I did fix the problem I found with the journal, and now everything should work correctly. I also did some updates on the information-type pages. My next piece of work will be to get some pictures in and decide on how I'm going to handle them. I want to do something that is both interesting and fun, and hopefully learn a few things along the way.

The NFC Championship game is this Sunday. Atlanta Falcons at Philadelphia Eagles. It should be a big game; I'm supporting the Falcons, of course. It looks like we're going to watch it at the Local; I'll be taking up the projector. I'm not sure if I'm going to make an effort to see the AFC Championship game on Saturday.

So Liverpool fucked out of the FA Cup to Burnley. The match reviews I've read have not been good. This should have been a straightforward victory, but apparently the guys were playing as if this was their first game. And as for Traore. Jesus. Anyway, we still have the potential to win the Carling Cup, and it is mathematically possibly for us to take the Premiership but realistically the best we can aim for there is a Champions League spot. After what looked like a promising start in the face of injury (Gerrard, Baros, Cisse), it appears Benitez's first season at Anfield is not going to end well.

January 19, 2005 17:04

So I didn't go to work today. I awoke still feeling like absolute shite so I elected to spare my coworkers any more of my germs. I did sleep pretty well last night, courtesy of the shot of Nyquil I took before bed. I awoke fairly early, but I didn't have too much difficulty falling alseep again. When I awoke-awoke, my nose was dribbling, my head felt congested, and my throat was sore. Hence the decision to stay home.

After sending an email to my boss and my project manager I got back into bed and slept for a little bit more. Then I tried to do some reading, and was moderatly successful before falling into slumber again. Well, near-slumber. I was getting a lot of those dream-like sensations while still partially conscious. This must be what delerium is like - brief snippets of visions and sounds, voices, and then snippets of reality again.

I got up around midday and attempted to do some work. I guess I got about an hour's worth done. I had left the power cable for my laptop at work so I pulled some files across to my desktop and worked on those. The other main work I have requires me to log on to the servers, but others were upgrading my primary server and I couldn't get on to my other choice so I just left the work until tomorrow. Not a big deal.

In spite of the fact I had some opportunity to do lots of other things since I wasn't working, I suffered the usual apathy I encounter when under the weather. I upgraded some software on my network, sort of resolved a network problem, sorted some folders, reviewed and cringed at the state of my finances (I can't believe I'm going to the Bahama's in a week and a half), forced myself to eat some food (I generally have no appetite when ill), drank lots of water, stayed warm, felt sorry for myself, and sat looking at my monitor for minutes on end.

Obviously I am not going to trivia tonight. In addition to the general idea of going out when unwell, the temperature simply sucks balls. So I'll stay in, read a bit, toss back some more Nyquil and get an early night.

January 18, 2005 10:21

Well, it kind of worked. Ish. No matter. I think I know what needs to be fixed, but I can't do it from here; it will have to wait until I get home.

January 18, 2005 10:20

And here's the test.