Well, enough of the depressing posts for the time being. Time to change the subject.
As some of you may know and many others don’t, I was laid off from my previous job back in June of 2010. I was out of work for the longest span I have ever experienced and it was tough. Our savings took a royal beating and it is going to take a while to recover. We skipped birthdays and Christmas for the most part.
Yeah I know I said no more depressing posts for now and I meant it. Oddly enough I wouldn’t trade that time off for the world. I have gotten to know my daughter so much better than I ever had time for before. We’ve bonded over that time at home and it has been wonderful. Sure things were rough and even a little scary now and then but that was minor compared to getting to see my baby girl learning and growing and transforming like my wife has had the privilege to experience since her birth.
Being a stay at home parent is hard. I knew that before and this time has only confirmed it. But it has its own rewards. Its own compensation. But still… I’m glad I’m now back to work.
I started a new job a few weeks ago before the end of the year. That was supposed to be the start of a happy 2011 but you know how that has turned out so far. But this new job is good. I like what I’m doing and the compensation is good. Plus its for a non-profit who is making a difference every day for people who need it. What else could I ask for? Well how about working from home? Yeah, I got that too. It’s freaking sweet.
I’ve decided to participate in my first Topical Tuesday and the topic for the day is Life List. As stated on that page: “This weeks challenge is to write a Life List of ten things you would like to do before you die. Only ten mind – make them count.“ That’s a tall order. Ten things I want to do before I die? I want to do everything before I die. If you do them after you die then who would know?
Well, here’s my attempt. This is going to take some brain strain.
- Visit Europe. Anywhere in Europe is fine although I’m particularly interested in England, Ireland, Scotland, Iceland, Czech Republic, Austria and Turkey.
- Get a six figure income. Bonus points if it starts with a number higher than one.
- Live long enough to see my baby girl grow up to be a happy and successful woman and hopefully watch some grandbabies grow up.
- Make a positive and profound impact on the lives of other people. My dream job is to be a philanthropist.
- Go on a road trip from one coast of the United States to the opposite coast.
- Retire early enough that I might get to enjoy some time off before I die. By the time I’m 65, the retirement age will probably be 130.
- Have something published and sold – even if it’s not successful. A novel, comic or screenplay I suppose.
- Become passably fluent in a second language.
- Ride at least five of the fastest roller-coasters in the world. Preferably in at least two different countries.
- Own and operate a bar & grill or a pub of my own design.
Wow. That was a lot harder than I thought it would be with narrowing it down to only ten entries. So many things come to mind but with only ten spots its hard to pick the things that would actually mean something to me in a way that was more than just saying, “OK that’s done” and then checking it off a list and never thinking about it again.
It’s March already. March 2nd to be exact. Ten days away from another birthday and another day closer to the grave. Yeah, not much activity on here lately. No real posts this year and not much towards the end of last year. No revival over at A Little Scary and if you follow me on Facebook, Twitter or Plurk then you know I’ve not been very active in those areas either. I’m well aware – and most of the time I’m OK – with that.
I guess my priorities changed. Having a toddler, yeah Kira is almost 16 months old now, means having a lot less free time. A lot less freedom too. If I have free time, I usually just want to relax or play a video game or maybe watch a movie. There are a hundred and one things I’d like to do but I just don’t have the time or ambition to do them all and sometimes that means I don’t do any of them. Writing is one of those things. Drawing is another. Sculpting, I finally started and will hopefully post some pictures of my first piece (in progress). Reading, playing, sorting, organizing, learning, designing… all things that don’t happen all that much.
Now I know that there are people out there who go to work full time, go to school, work out and still take care of their kids. I have the utmost respect for those people. I have no idea how they do it. I want to be like that. I just don’t know how.
I watch things like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition on television and say to myself “I want to do things that impact people like that.” But I don’t have – or at least make – the time to better myself. How can I expect to make the lives of others better if I don’t even make my own life better? I don’t know.
Is this whining? I’m not sure. Is this a plea for help? I have no idea. Is it me venting and just spinning my wheels in the life I have put myself in? Yeah, probably. What do I do about it all? I don’t know.
I want the easy way out. I want to win the lottery so I can quit my job and become a philanthropist. But I don’t even buy lottery tickets but a handful of days out of the year. I guess that shows how much faith I have in the “easy way”.
It’s easier to be a “dreamer” instead of a “doer”. I’m guilty of both. What about you?
I’m just beginning to see
Now I’m on my way
to another meeting. Only two today, not so bad really.
Left-over pasta for lunch from Cecil Whitakers All-You-Can-Eat Pasta special that they have every monday. The tortellini is actually better reheated than it was fresh. It turns out that I can’t eat as much all-you-can-eat pasta as I once could. And for that degredation in skills I am actually quite happy. Sometimes I am still shocked at the portions at restaurants. I’ve been back from Hong Kong for one year and sadly I have adjusted to the gigantic meals of the Midwest but its sad. No wonder overweight people outnumber the thin here. Trained. Blarf.
I have bought some clay. My wife printed off a 25% coupon for Hobby Lobby and we went there last night after I got home from work. I ended up getting some Sculpey Firm which from the descriptions online that I read seemed like a good fit. I also have a cheap package of what I can only guess is just plain old clay and not polymer. The package is in 438 different languages and none of them seem to be English. It was cheap so I thought I would try it out. I have no idea what I am doing so who knows what will actually work for me.
Kira is off with Grandma and Grandpa Stinky for a few nights. They get called Stinky because they both smoke and… well… they stink. I’m sure there’s a nicer way to put it but – no. Febreze is used so it helps but only so much. Maybe some day they will quit. Yeah.
I think we are planning on going to see a movie tonight.
So much happens on a day to day basis to me and everyone else that there is no possible way to for everyone to keep everyone posted on the goings-ons and what-nots of their lives at all times. It’s just not possible. So we share small samplings of our lives on bliggity blogs and our face-spaces and we move on. Years ago we didn’t even do that much.
Kira and Michelle have both been sick for a little over a week now. So far, I have been very lucky to not yet get sick. The wife went through antibiotics and had no result so more than likely she has viral bronchitis just like our poor baby girl. Kira has to breath in medicine in vapor form from a mask hooked to a loud machine. She was basically tolerant of the experience at first but I think her patience is getting thin for that routine. Not sure how much longer she needs that treatment but hopefully not too long. She seems to be a bit better.
Kira continues to amaze me with her progress and ability. Michelle continues to amaze me in taking care of Kira every day and the house and everything else. I know she thinks I don’t appreciate her and the hard work she does every day but I do. I really do. I am very proud of both of them. I really don’t think that Kira would be so well adjusted and amazingly advanced if it weren’t for Michelle being with her every day and working with her and taking care of her.
We have been getting the run-around with Graebel… again. You may remember we had issues with them back in October of last year. Well, to one extent or another we have had continual issues since then as well. Now for the past few months we have been dealing with trying to get our insured items covered and repaired. Some things have worked out and many things haven’t but nothing has gone smoothly. You can read up on the current problems over at the wife’s site. I have given up dealing with them and turned them over to her to deal with. I’m betting they are now wishing that they would have just worked things out with me. If we ever decide to move to a new city again with my current employer I will do everything I can to NOT use Graebel for that or any other move.
I’ve been busy working on a few different projects at work. I’m working on getting some new security software rolled out to all of our computers (actually our Altiris guy is doing all the work) and I’m in the final stages of getting ready for a big office integration in New York City. I do not look forward to being away from the wife and our little girl while working on that project and I’m sure Michelle isn’t looking forward to it either. But I don’t have to travel too often and I’m still employed so I do what I have to do.
We were planning on migrating from Microsoft Exchange 2003 to the new Exchange 2007 and I’ve been working on the testing and planning of that for a few months. However, now that Microsoft is releasing the next version (2010) earlier than expected, and faster than any other major revision cycle in history for that product, we are now on hold. The idea is that we will now skip Exchange 2007 and go directly to 2010. OK cool. We can do that.
I have been working on some new comics for A Little Scary in my “spare” time but I missed my re-launch date of June 1st already. I’m hoping to get a couple done soon. Here’s hoping. I don’t want to start up again without at least a small buffer or I’ll just end up getting discouraged again when a deadline comes and goes with no update.
Bonus points if you can tell me where I got the title of this post.
Tags: family, Graebel, life, sick, web comic, Work
Baby, Business, comics, General, Rant, Work | cybrpunk | 
June 2, 2009 11:45 am | 
Comments (2)
Strange things happen. My family has always been blessed/cursed with that sort of history. I’ve lived with that all my life. Today was just another one of those days.
Many people claim that writing is therapeutic and I am definitely one of those people. I have a hard time expressing my thoughts and feelings on a regular basis but I can pour my heart out with writing. However, I never thought that my writing about depression and the loss of my USB drive would have the effect that it did.
I was in a two hour meeting this morning where my boss and I were trying to figure out the extrordinarily poorly documented process of getting SSL setup with Windows 2008, IIS7 and Exchange 2007. I did a lot of pacing and leaning on the desk as we worked through things as there isn’t room for two people to sit at his desk. Inevitably at one point I started fidgeting and put my hand in my pants pocket and started fiddling with my key ring. I do that sometimes. Just a nervous habit I suppose.
It was then, while I was in mid-sentence, that I realize that I had something small and plastic in my hand and I was spinning it around on a pivot over and over. Another nervous habit but one that was lost when my USB drive disappeared. I kept turning it a few more times in my pocket while my brain started putting two and two together in a fairly efficient manner that was thoroughly clouded in a haze of WTF.
Then just like that I pulled my hand from my pocket and looked and sure enough – there was my little black and blue USB drive completely intact. Of course my boss had turned to look at me since I had stopped talking mid-sentence and I had to explain.
Of course the funny thing is that there is no way that the drive should have been in my pants pocket. It’s been over a month… maybe a month and a half since I actually lost the drive. I’ve worn these pants since then and the pocket it was in is the right front that I use most often. And these are not the pants that I wore the day I lost the drive or on the day before which was the last time I had used the drive. I had searched both those pairs of pants. And of course I had put my keys and pocketknife in that same pocket this morning like I do every morning and didn’t notice it then or even when I was putting the pants on.
But strange things happen. We were also missing a portable hard drive that we had backed up data to for the trip from Hong Kong. It showed up two days ago in a bag that we had both searched previously. Muse had lost her Nikon flash for her camera after just having it in Chicago. It showed up buried in a box of stuff in the office that had yet to be unpacked. Yeah. Strange things. It’s what we live with every day.
Of course this USB drive doesn’t show up until I write about losing it. It’s not until I tell the world that it went missing and how it made me felt and how its loss was a focus for so many things. It wasn’t until I opened up after a long break that it came back in the most impossible of places. So you see, writing is therapeutic for me. Just maybe not in the way I would have expected this time.
As I sit at my desk eating my chicken sammich (sammich = sandwich for those of you who don’t know me in person), I reflect on the fact that I should probably be doing something. Like posting on my websites. So here I am. Typing. Type… type.. type.
For those of you who noticed that there was an update over at A Little Scary (don’t get excited, it wasn’t a comic), you will already know why I’m all whiny and depressed. I’ll give you the short version: I keep all my data on a USB drive and it decided to get lost a little over a month or so ago. Yes I had backups but with everything going on in my life the backup schedule went forgotten. So everything I made, wrote, created from Halloween to present day is gone including stuff for ALS.
If anyone happened to find a small blue and black swivel case 4GB drive laying around, I would be very grateful if you let me know. I don’t even need it back. I would be happier just knowing that all the personal data and intellectual property on that little drive were destroyed at this point instead of in the hands of the evil and nefarious. Not to say that if someone wanted to return the drive to me intact I wouldn’t bounce off the walls with joy, but that’s not too likely now is it?
So yeah, big deal right? Just get the backup and start recreating and just move on. Yeah. I know. I will. But it just came at a really bad time and other things had gone missing as well and there were other difficulties in my life and I think I just focused it all onto the loss of that little chunk of plastic, silicone and metal. That USB drive became the catalyst for everything else that was going on at the time. So instead of just taking what I did have and moving forward, I retreated. I stopped making comics, I stopped posting on my sites… all very trivial in the grand scheme of things of course. I see that. If it hadn’t been the drive then it probably would have been something else.
But I think I’m over it now. The chicken sammich is gone and I’m chasing it down with some Berries ‘N Cream yogurt. It’s not bad.
I guess my point is this: Everyone needs to break down every once in a while and evaluate what is really bothering them. Especially people like who tend to internalize everything and bottle up their emotions and never let anyone see what’s actually going on. After a while, I seem to keep myself from seeing what’s actually going on as well. I’m sure I’m not the only one who does that. But the key is that once you figure out what the problem is then you have to either fix it or accept it and move on or that shit will eat you from the inside out. Seriously. And you may not even realize that its happening.
I got some work to do.
Is there anyone still visiting? I wouldn’t be if I were you. I’ve neglected everything that I didn’t absolutely have to do for a while now. I guess a new baby will do that to you.
Obviously, I haven’t been updating here. I haven’t been updating anywhere. I post a little tidbit on Plurk or Twitter or Facebook now and then but really it’s no more than fluff. Worse yet, I haven’t been updating A Little Scary at all. It’s been over a month without a new comic. It makes me sad. Especially when I was doing so good for so long with staying on schedule. My car just went 7,500 before it finally got its first oil change.
I haven’t read any of my friends blogs in months. I’m out of touch in many ways. I need to call people although to be fair most of my friends haven’t called me either. I haven’t kept up on the web comics I used to read on a regular basis. I haven’t finished any of the little projects at home. There’s been no video game playing or drawing.
So what have I been doing? Well, I get up a little after 6am each day and shower and get ready for work. I eat a bowl of cereal while I feed the dogs and then I leave around 7:30am. I’m in my office around 8:15 to 8:30am depending on traffic. I work all day trying to figure out how to upgrade our entire e-mail system globally. I leave between 5:25 to 5:55pm and head home. I usually get home around 6:20pm where I hear what happened during the day. Then I go unload my pockets and remove my overshirt and shoes. Wash my hands – maybe poop first – and then go grab the baby for my shift with her. I get her last feeding of the day and attempt to put her to sleep. She’s usually in her crib around 11pm. Then I may check my e-mail or some downloads that I’ll never realistically get to work with and then I go to bed.
Now for the past few days that schedule at night has been in a bit of flux. Muse is trying some new things with her feedings and sleep times to try and get her to bed earlier. But for the most part it’s been what I wrote. Sure every once in a while we may bundle the baby up and go out to eat but that’s pretty infrequent.
I need a vacation. I know my wife does too. We both desperately need one. This isn’t what I thought parenthood would be like. Many of the problems I wrote about previously have started to subside so it is much more tolerable. We are getting more sleep now. But I’m still drained. I’m still tired all the time. We are both showing signs of depression.
I want to be creative and draw or work on my comics. I want to play games for hours on end. I want to see friends and go out and do things. But I can’t. Not really. I could make an exception now or then but everything has a consequence.
I’m not sure what I expected parenthood to be like but it wasn’t like this. I’m not regretting the decisions so don’t get me wrong. And I am grateful for getting the chance to be the Daddy of a very special little girl. But I miss being me. Doing the things I want to do on my own schedule. I knew our lives would change but I guess I was still being naive (screw you oomlats).
The sacrifice is worth it I suppose. Nothing makes me happier than to see that baby girl smile at me. That is its own reward. I just need to figure out how to modify my life to include myself in it every now and then.
I have so much stuff to post and not as much time to write it all out. I need to tell the world about the horrible days and weeks leading up to my departure from Hong Kong. I need to rant about my trip home that took twice as long as it should have. I want to share pictures and details of the new car. I want to share our difficulties with our current situations.
But I just don’t have the time at the moment.
I’ve got a bunch of stuff going on at work. I have even less time at home and no peace and quiet usually. I may consider setting up a space in the basement where it may be quieter to get some alone time and do some writing and drawing but who knows. We still don’t have our main computers shipped yet so there’s not much I can setup yet.
Well, hopefully things will start to get back to normal at some point. Probably just in time to have the baby arrive. Which at that point normal will never be seen again. Oh well.
