Screw Blogger

Fuck it. I've moved over to WordPress. Go here for the continuing adventures of me. This will include most or all of the posts and comments here. I'm not certain they all imported correctly but I am missing at most 11 posts and 5 comments so I'm calling it good.

It will also include (once I get them copied in) some Montana-specific posts I've put in another blog that I pointed the folks I worked with to when I left my company. That one is no comments but you'll be able to put any comments about those posts on the identical posts here.

After I get the new place cleaned up, I'll come back here and put up a page redirecting to the new one.

I Hate Blogger

Posting from: Montana
Listening to: Melody Gardot, Worrisome Heart

It was working long enough to publish two posts that should have published days to weeks ago. But then it would not post my latest post. I just want it to stop trying to publish. What will happen when I try to publish this? Who knows?

Mental Spring Cleaning

Posting from: Hardyville, MT
Listening to: Steve Poltz, Nickel

Every once in a while I get into a kind of mental housecleaning mode, and I feel like I'm there today. I've had a lot of recent changes in my life plus in the last few days I've had some great conversations with folks, and as a result there are some things on my mind having to do with the power of destruction.

Most often I think of myself as someone trying to build, create, network, organize, and otherwise participate in putting things and people together. I mostly look on destruction as a negative thing- particularly during my year of broken things where in I had a fire at my house followed by a break-in, a destroyed air conditioner, a broken water heater, both my dog and me going to the emergency room, etc.

But in the last few weeks I've started to have more respect for the positive aspects of undoing. I basically undid the last eleven years of my professional career, took apart my office, took apart my house and many things in it, and left behind a lot of people I love. It was like I was undoing nearly all the material aspects of my life.

All that, however, was facilitated by a sort of mental undoing. The way out of where I was turned out to be the thing that I was sure I would never do. It wasn't even on the table as an option for many years, and I only started to consider it after an excruciatingly intolerable situation I went through at work last year. In retrospect it seems much less dramatic a decision, and I'm pretty much okay with it. However, at the time it seemed a very extreme and ridiculous move to make.

Looking back before that, I think of all sorts of mental walls that I seemed unable to look past, let alone break down or climb over that I have since broken down to my benefit. There's quite a list:

-You do not touch your 401k for any reason.
-If you do not have a job, there's something wrong.
-You do not set aside a career after you've invested a certain amount of time and money in it both in school and in the workplace.
-You need to take someone with you if you're going to go somewhere socially.
-Women who are in their mid-thirties do not suddenly start playing drumset.
-Leaving or ending a relationship is a failure of the worst kind.
-Do not stand out from the crowd or people will think you are weird.

Now I feel myself really stretching out more and more as these walls come down and I see new possibilities open up in my life. I don't quite understand how I got over these things or at least started to see past them.

Now from Montana

Posting from: Hardyville, MT
Listening to: The Perishers, 8 am Departure

The big move is (mostly) complete. I still have a few things left in Tucson, plus some construction and cleaning to finish up at the house before I can sell it. I will be here for at least five or six weeks before I get back there.

The house is a funky old place where nothing quite looks right or quite works right but you somehow love it anyhow.

Let's start with the floorplan which is somewhat disfunctional. You enter the living room from the front door, and there are two bedrooms off to your left. So far so good. Continue forward and you are in the kitchen which has a laundry room and a pantry connected to it on the right. Continue forward through the kitchen and your only path is through the bathroom so if someone is in there, the front of the house is cut off from the back. Just past the bedroom is the master bedroom, and connected to that is a stairway that takes you up to a gabled second-story room which was apparently once a kids' room. That's where I'm setting up my drums. It has a leftover foosball table in there, so it is going to be the rumpus room.

The carpet is a dark green, reminding me of fake grass. The refrigerator light does not work, and the shelf on top of the crisper drawers is missing. Three out of four burners on the stove work, but I am promised they're working on the last one for me. There is no fan in the bathroom, but there are two very high open spaces right up near the ceiling which go to the kitchen (yum!) and the master bedroom. The windows of the pantry are cracked and taped back together with scotch tape. Curtains are missing from many windows, and as someone discovered at an inopportune moment, the curtains in the room I have chosen for my bed (not the master bedroom) do not quite cover the window. Ahem. If anyone peeps in and goes blind, I will not be held responsible.

I am settling in pretty well as is my faithful companion, Ms. Pepper Ann Delbarco.

I have most of the furniture in place with only a guest bed and a desk plust two fold-up bookshelves for my cookbooks left to put together. My drums are also yet to be put together- I hope like hell we have all the pieces and that I can figure out where they go. Today I hope to put together the guest bed and also finish unpacking all my non-cookbooks. I don't know where the cookbooks are going to go yet. I would love to get my washing machine hooked up in the next week, and get an electric dryer, too, to go with it.

Pepper has already made a couple of friends. White Rabbit and li'l p brought over their dogs Rowdy and Nixie (a two-month-old puppy) to play in my yard with Pepper the first day. They've been over here, and we've been over there for some indoor playtime since then. Rowdy has made several feeble attempts to hump Pepper, but she has rebuked his efforts.

We have found the sunny spot on the south side of the house, and I have set up Pepper's cushion there so she can sun herself in front of the window when it's sunny like yesterday. We were up into the fifities after noon. Right now it is snowing a tiny bit. We just came in from a walk. She's doing pretty well with the walking in snow thing. The only thing she really, really dislikes is walking on ice that is collapsing under her paws so I try to steer away from that. She is not doing well staying at home alone yet, but I'm leaving her for only a few minutes at a time right now to work up to progressively longer times. But overall I think she's going to do just fine here which is a big load off my mind.

My Excuse

Posting from: Tucson, AZ

I recently had a conversation with someone wherein we made up excuses explaining away the behavior of some jackasses in our lives so that we would not have to be mad at those people. Well, tonight I found what explains mine. I remember as a kid whenever we'd get cut or scraped, our parents would apply either iodine, mercurochrome or merthiolate as an antiseptic. We'd usually go for one of the last two as family lore has it that those would sting less. Anyway, I just looked them up tonight and they both apparently contain mercury. Therefore, I claim mercury poisoning as my excuse. Now you don't have to be mad at me anymore for whatever it is you're mad at me for.

I Hate Not Having the Secret Decoder Ring

Posting from: Tucson, AZ

A couple of weeks ago, I got an eye exam which resulted in a new eyeglass prescription. I ordered a pair of regular glasses and a pair of sunglass which were both supposed to be done in 10 working days. They got them in and discovered that the regular glasses had the wrong prescription. I was told they should be fixed and in today so I went to pick up both pairs.

The regular glasses are not in today. Okay, fine. I'll come back tomorrow.

Meanwhile, they sent me home with my sunglasses. I tried driving around town in them, but something just wasn't right. I kept repositioning them on my face thinking they just felt funny because they were new and a different style. However, after being driven sufficiently nuts, I started switching back and forth between the old sunglasses and the new to try and figure out what was wrong.

It turns out that the new glasses are better than the old when I look straight ahead, but when I look about 20-30 degrees left of center, the new glasses are much worse than the old glasses. The lenses are very clean so it's not a smudge. Also, I tried this with both eyes open and also with each eye closed one at a time. That region is just very blurry no matter what I do.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what is going on here? During the exam, all of the tests where you compare option 1 vs. option 2 (those of you who have gotten glasses should know what I'm talking about) were with me looking straight forward which is how it has always been. Shouldn't those tests account for all areas of the corrective lens though?

I am supposed to go back tomorrow to pick up my regular glasses, and I would like to have an idea of what I need to tell these people to get my glasses fixed. Do I need an exam recheck? Do they need to recheck the prescription for these glasses? Etc...

Unemployed

Posting from: Tucson, AZ

This was it. I finished my last day of work about an hour ago. Phew. I'm whelmed.