Hi!
Currently, the Dr. and I are on a long "road trip" style vacation.
Okay. THAT'S a lie.
When I started writing this post, we were on vacation, but now I'm already home and trying to finish this thing AND eat leftover Chinese food from Springfield, Mass. AND make sure my cat Kody doesn't make off with any of my moo goo gai pan combo plate as I type...
My wife and I started our vacation Aug. 11 and we came back home Sunday, Aug. 26. It was our first two week vacation together, our usual breaks being only a week long. I actually didn't have the time saved up at work to do this. Hell, I didn't even have one week's worth of vacation saved up!
But, we had planned this for several months (and when I say we, I really mean my wife, because she did pretty much the majority of the preparations for this enterprise, but, uh, I knew about it!), so whether I had enough vacation time accrued or not wasn't going to stop me from going.
My sweetie-bear has been calling this the "Sam and Dean Road Trip," a reference to the TV show, Supernatural. If you're not familiar with the show, it's about two brothers who travel to all sorts of places in the U.S. in an old Impala, armed with various weapons to fight demons, monsters, etc.
A sort of combination of the Hardy Boys meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
My wife's become a big fan of Supernatural since she bought the DVD set of the first season, so her fantasy was to drive around like Dean and Sam Winchester, playing the music (Dean's into classic rock) that is often heard on the car radio during the series episodes. She burned all these CDs with music from the show's soundtrack or compilations of songs she liked with this road trip in mind.
Our trip took us from the Buffalo, NY area to Danvers, Mass. (located between(ish) Salem and Boston) to St. Andrew, New Brunswick to Dingwall in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia to Halifax, NS to Bar Harbor, Maine to Springfield, Mass. and back home.
And yes, I'm behind in my blogging, but what else is new? Although my internet absence the last month or so was directly attibuted to the vacation and preparations for it. The last week and a half leading up to our departure was really hot weather-wise and work (where it's sans AC) was totally kicking my ass, so I barely had any energy to do anything when I got home, bla bla bla wah wah wah.
But the trip was great and I've been adjusting to being back. It is good to be home but my first day of work started at 7:00 am and wound up ending 12 hours later, so that was an adjustment...
Anyways, I'm back and there'll be more posts re: the vacation, plus other thoughts.
Ooh, and pictures, too! We bought a new digital camera online just before we left, so both of us were "practicing" with the new toy. Prepare to be bombarded with my damn vacation pictures!
So, just wanted to say hi, to, uh, whoever right now and let you know that more's coming!
Later!
34/125
Project 365 : first / previous / next
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Saturday, August 04, 2007
THINKING OUT LOUD: 150 DAYS LEFT UNTIL 2008 (33/150)
Hi-ho.
Well, less than five full months are left in this fine friggin’ year.
Of the many projects and enterprises I’ve either initiated or gotten involved in this year, a number of them have been sort of stuck in idle recently.
One of those is the bloggy Project 365, inspired by Beedow’s blog who in turn was inspired by something more theatrical. But my take was a quasi-attempt at posting a blog entry every day this year, although I kind of bent the rules a bit (gee, how uncharacteristic of me!) and said I’d have 365 posts by the end of the year, although not necessarily daily. Oh, definitely not daily.
I’m currently at about 30-ish posts, I think. So, only 335 to go!
Actually, it’s not that impossible, if I consistently do two posts a day from now on.
If I make posts as short as the one I did yesterday, then I actually have a chance at doing this.
Anyways, that’s my rough game plan for stratemegizing on Project 365, although, there are bound to be lapses, because I have some distractions coming up on the calendar, so, for instance, I may be unable to post daily during that instance.
But, still…
Also, there are a few posts that I’ve been meaning to do that I never got around to. Like my daily diary of working on Emil Novak’s BANSHEE movie. I still plan on following up on that idea. But when I do, I think I’m going to post-date them, so that the entries fall more accurately on the calendar dates when I did that stuff (for example, the first week of shooting began May 7). But, I’ll still number the entries themselves in order of when I actually write/post them – you know, those goofy numbers in parentheses, the ridiculous Project 365 crap? So, I’m covering my ass both ways for those nitpicky, detail-obsessive readers/historians out there.
Um, I’ll pause for the laughter to die down… or wait for the confused staring or bored eye-rolling to get out of your system… or…
Meanwhile…
Well, I thought it was supposed to get up to 95 yesterday. It hit 90 Thursday. I didn’t check the weather report but someone at work told me it only hit 88.
Hot enough, hot enough, I say…
I’ve been thinking of this lately.
Five daily things to do:
1. Pray.
2. Wash the dishes.
3. Check/do the laundry.
4. Clean the cat litter.
5. Clean a little of my room.
6. Shave.
7. Shower.
8. Do at least one blog post.
9. Write (screenplay/story/comic script) or draw.
7. Read a chapter or two of my wife’s story/stories on-line. Comment.
8. Watch a Netflix movie once a week.
Did I say five? Now that I try to make an actual list, of course, I can’t keep it to a short number.
Hmmm.
I was debating whether or not to… dammit! I have this whiskery orange fur-face hovering over my left hand as I type here… I’m working on the laptop on the dining room table and our “first-born,” El Zorro, likes to keep me company when I’m working here. His fat-ass, prolate spheroid shape is buzzing next to me on the table, sitting sphinx-like but with his front legs curled under and his head directly over the TAB key. Occasionally, he tries to chew on my pinky finger every time I hit the shift key or type on the left side, meaning I briefly stick my pinky in his puss (ha!) and it’s interpreted as an invitation to munch.
But, as I was saying: I was debating whether or not to include this list of daily things to do, because some are personal or just embarrassing. However, even though in reality it’s dull, on paper those personal things are the stuff of good blogs, I think.
1. Pray. Even if it’s just the Lord’s Prayer. I say “just” because I guess I treat the Lord’s Prayer as sort of a generic prayer, because it’s something short and memorized. So, in the sense that something that’s repeated often eventually becomes taken for granted, in that way I mean generic. Although, having said that, there are little phrases that still have some meaning to me because they’re short and easy to remember, like “one day at a time.” Those are perfect reminders (and mantras): concise, to the point and easy to repeat over and over again, uh, mantra-like.
I remember my friend Steve told me years ago how he thought the Lord’s Prayer was, well, okay, I can’t remember exactly what he said, but the gist was, he was impressed by how it covered everything in a prayer, and in a short prayer at that.
Personally, I put this on the list to sort of get me in the door to another place that I rarely visit, the realm of spirituality. In a weird comparison, I guess this would be similar to hiking in the woods or in a park with my wife.
My wife is the acknowledged nature person, I am not. If I had not met her and fallen in love with her and married her, I could quite conceivably never go into the woods at all. I have no aversion to nature, I just don’t naturally go there.
But it’s always a positive experience for me to visit the outdoors and see different landscapes, trees, foliage, bugs, animals, various kinds of weather, and actually experience them firsthand. It beats a little humility into me, I think, makes me consider the place of mankind on earth, of Nature at work and how we may fit in. Rather than the idea of Man is always Number One and everybody better just accept it, but in reality, maybe we are Number One, but even that has its limitations.
So, perhaps a single minute of prayer may “beat a little God into me.”
Or, at least, make me consider some things beyond my nearsighted self and situation.
2. Wash the dishes.
3. Check/do the laundry.
4. Clean the cat litter. These are probably the closest I come to specific duties I do around the house, and I don’t even do those sometimes as regularly as I should. ‘Nuff said.
5. Clean a little of my room. My room is currently just an impregnable fortress of disorganization. My life has been an example of disorganization, with a few moments of real accomplishment in total disorganization. My room is in the latter category of achievement. But, I need to get in the room occasionally. And I can’t, that how stupid bad it’s gotten. So, ‘nuff said about that. What did I say about “one day at a time”?
6. Shave.
7. Shower. Actually, I consider all three things (including cleaning my room) as personal maintenance items. The last two just happen to be more hygiene related, obviously. Yeah, the showering thing is embarrassing. I won’t go into any more detail about that.
The shaving is more a concession to my wife. I like not shaving. I don’t want a beard because I look stupid with a beard* but if I shaved once a week versus daily, well, that would be quite fine with me. But from a smooching point of view, there are some complaints from my lovely, shapely partner, something along the lines of “Aagh, I’m getting stabbed!”, and her opinion certainly does matter to me in such areas, although I’m sure it doesn’t seem that way to her at times.
I’m just an inert, f***ing, lazy ass when it comes to showering. I don’t dislike showering. But when I get into the shower, I take forever because I become an obsessive time-consuming raccoon (and I don’t mean I like to handle my parts under water)(well… wait a minute...). Yes, water turns me into different creatures.
At the sink, I’m a duck.
In the shower, I’m a raccoon.
In the water, for brief moments I’m an otter (floating on my back wrapped in kelp eating shellfish as I use my stomach as a table. Okay, sans kelp and shellfish or any food.) or dog (my swimming prowess) or some creature that seems bent on drowning and flailing about a lot on his way to the bottom. Maybe that rubber octopus that Bela Lugosi/Martin Landau wrestles in ED WOOD.
8. Do at least one blog post.
9. Write (screenplay/story/comic script) or draw. Well, something’s better than nothing. In the case of the screenplay, for instance, some days I didn’t think I really had enough time or energy to create anything substantial, maybe only 100-500 words. But, then 3-4 days pass with nothing happening because of that reasoning. Following Akira Kurosawa’s advice from his autobiography, he says if you write even only a page a day, after a year, you have 360 pages of script. Perhaps three days of “insubstantial writing” would have given me at least another 1000 words, or another 20th towards my word count. So, there, Kimmel, ya procrastinating f***ing f***. Just do it. (Hey, another one of those mantra things!) (Meaning, the Nike thing… the self abuse comes naturally, and often, on its own.)
10. Read a chapter or two of my wife’s story/stories on-line. Comment.
11. Watch a Netflix movie once a week. More maintenance crap. Maintenance in the sense of there’s all these things I want to do, but I don’t seem to do any of them, so I need to consciously put them on a schedule now in an effort to remember to do them, which just seems stupid, but look who’s writing this in the first place so there you go, dammit.
That’s the eternal f***ing conflict, man! Wanting to do everything, having time to do only so much. It totally sucks. Totally.
But, I guess that’s how we ultimately make ourselves the type of person we become: what we prioritize in our lives. We then do what we really want to do, and we see what we’re really made of by the choices we’ve made in those priorities. Hmmm, that in itself is scary shit if you start thinking in terms of one’s eulogy. You know, which is spoken by someone else.
Um… nervous pause…
Crap. It’s 7:00 am already. I woke up at like 5:45.
Okay, I go now.
*When I let my beard grow, at a certain point, it gets long enough to, well, point. It points to the side. It looks like I have a perpetual wind blowing my chin hair to one direction, or if someone took a picture, one could wonder if my head were rotating as betrayed by my beard dragging off by the speed of rotation, but the picture happened to be snapped just as my head aligned itself with my neck in mid-turn. So, my head attached to my neck is actually an illusion.
Yeah. So: an actual beard for me? Heck, no.
Although… okay, I have a VERY fond memory of a picture taken of me from years ago with a goatee and mustache and a mullet and my sunglasses on. No, I’m not being ironic.
33/150
Project 365 : first / previous / next
Well, less than five full months are left in this fine friggin’ year.
Of the many projects and enterprises I’ve either initiated or gotten involved in this year, a number of them have been sort of stuck in idle recently.
One of those is the bloggy Project 365, inspired by Beedow’s blog who in turn was inspired by something more theatrical. But my take was a quasi-attempt at posting a blog entry every day this year, although I kind of bent the rules a bit (gee, how uncharacteristic of me!) and said I’d have 365 posts by the end of the year, although not necessarily daily. Oh, definitely not daily.
I’m currently at about 30-ish posts, I think. So, only 335 to go!
Actually, it’s not that impossible, if I consistently do two posts a day from now on.
If I make posts as short as the one I did yesterday, then I actually have a chance at doing this.
Anyways, that’s my rough game plan for stratemegizing on Project 365, although, there are bound to be lapses, because I have some distractions coming up on the calendar, so, for instance, I may be unable to post daily during that instance.
But, still…
Also, there are a few posts that I’ve been meaning to do that I never got around to. Like my daily diary of working on Emil Novak’s BANSHEE movie. I still plan on following up on that idea. But when I do, I think I’m going to post-date them, so that the entries fall more accurately on the calendar dates when I did that stuff (for example, the first week of shooting began May 7). But, I’ll still number the entries themselves in order of when I actually write/post them – you know, those goofy numbers in parentheses, the ridiculous Project 365 crap? So, I’m covering my ass both ways for those nitpicky, detail-obsessive readers/historians out there.
Um, I’ll pause for the laughter to die down… or wait for the confused staring or bored eye-rolling to get out of your system… or…
Meanwhile…
Well, I thought it was supposed to get up to 95 yesterday. It hit 90 Thursday. I didn’t check the weather report but someone at work told me it only hit 88.
Hot enough, hot enough, I say…
I’ve been thinking of this lately.
Five daily things to do:
1. Pray.
2. Wash the dishes.
3. Check/do the laundry.
4. Clean the cat litter.
5. Clean a little of my room.
6. Shave.
7. Shower.
8. Do at least one blog post.
9. Write (screenplay/story/comic script) or draw.
7. Read a chapter or two of my wife’s story/stories on-line. Comment.
8. Watch a Netflix movie once a week.
Did I say five? Now that I try to make an actual list, of course, I can’t keep it to a short number.
Hmmm.
I was debating whether or not to… dammit! I have this whiskery orange fur-face hovering over my left hand as I type here… I’m working on the laptop on the dining room table and our “first-born,” El Zorro, likes to keep me company when I’m working here. His fat-ass, prolate spheroid shape is buzzing next to me on the table, sitting sphinx-like but with his front legs curled under and his head directly over the TAB key. Occasionally, he tries to chew on my pinky finger every time I hit the shift key or type on the left side, meaning I briefly stick my pinky in his puss (ha!) and it’s interpreted as an invitation to munch.
But, as I was saying: I was debating whether or not to include this list of daily things to do, because some are personal or just embarrassing. However, even though in reality it’s dull, on paper those personal things are the stuff of good blogs, I think.
1. Pray. Even if it’s just the Lord’s Prayer. I say “just” because I guess I treat the Lord’s Prayer as sort of a generic prayer, because it’s something short and memorized. So, in the sense that something that’s repeated often eventually becomes taken for granted, in that way I mean generic. Although, having said that, there are little phrases that still have some meaning to me because they’re short and easy to remember, like “one day at a time.” Those are perfect reminders (and mantras): concise, to the point and easy to repeat over and over again, uh, mantra-like.
I remember my friend Steve told me years ago how he thought the Lord’s Prayer was, well, okay, I can’t remember exactly what he said, but the gist was, he was impressed by how it covered everything in a prayer, and in a short prayer at that.
Personally, I put this on the list to sort of get me in the door to another place that I rarely visit, the realm of spirituality. In a weird comparison, I guess this would be similar to hiking in the woods or in a park with my wife.
My wife is the acknowledged nature person, I am not. If I had not met her and fallen in love with her and married her, I could quite conceivably never go into the woods at all. I have no aversion to nature, I just don’t naturally go there.
But it’s always a positive experience for me to visit the outdoors and see different landscapes, trees, foliage, bugs, animals, various kinds of weather, and actually experience them firsthand. It beats a little humility into me, I think, makes me consider the place of mankind on earth, of Nature at work and how we may fit in. Rather than the idea of Man is always Number One and everybody better just accept it, but in reality, maybe we are Number One, but even that has its limitations.
So, perhaps a single minute of prayer may “beat a little God into me.”
Or, at least, make me consider some things beyond my nearsighted self and situation.
2. Wash the dishes.
3. Check/do the laundry.
4. Clean the cat litter. These are probably the closest I come to specific duties I do around the house, and I don’t even do those sometimes as regularly as I should. ‘Nuff said.
5. Clean a little of my room. My room is currently just an impregnable fortress of disorganization. My life has been an example of disorganization, with a few moments of real accomplishment in total disorganization. My room is in the latter category of achievement. But, I need to get in the room occasionally. And I can’t, that how stupid bad it’s gotten. So, ‘nuff said about that. What did I say about “one day at a time”?
6. Shave.
7. Shower. Actually, I consider all three things (including cleaning my room) as personal maintenance items. The last two just happen to be more hygiene related, obviously. Yeah, the showering thing is embarrassing. I won’t go into any more detail about that.
The shaving is more a concession to my wife. I like not shaving. I don’t want a beard because I look stupid with a beard* but if I shaved once a week versus daily, well, that would be quite fine with me. But from a smooching point of view, there are some complaints from my lovely, shapely partner, something along the lines of “Aagh, I’m getting stabbed!”, and her opinion certainly does matter to me in such areas, although I’m sure it doesn’t seem that way to her at times.
I’m just an inert, f***ing, lazy ass when it comes to showering. I don’t dislike showering. But when I get into the shower, I take forever because I become an obsessive time-consuming raccoon (and I don’t mean I like to handle my parts under water)(well… wait a minute...). Yes, water turns me into different creatures.
At the sink, I’m a duck.
In the shower, I’m a raccoon.
In the water, for brief moments I’m an otter (floating on my back wrapped in kelp eating shellfish as I use my stomach as a table. Okay, sans kelp and shellfish or any food.) or dog (my swimming prowess) or some creature that seems bent on drowning and flailing about a lot on his way to the bottom. Maybe that rubber octopus that Bela Lugosi/Martin Landau wrestles in ED WOOD.
8. Do at least one blog post.
9. Write (screenplay/story/comic script) or draw. Well, something’s better than nothing. In the case of the screenplay, for instance, some days I didn’t think I really had enough time or energy to create anything substantial, maybe only 100-500 words. But, then 3-4 days pass with nothing happening because of that reasoning. Following Akira Kurosawa’s advice from his autobiography, he says if you write even only a page a day, after a year, you have 360 pages of script. Perhaps three days of “insubstantial writing” would have given me at least another 1000 words, or another 20th towards my word count. So, there, Kimmel, ya procrastinating f***ing f***. Just do it. (Hey, another one of those mantra things!) (Meaning, the Nike thing… the self abuse comes naturally, and often, on its own.)
10. Read a chapter or two of my wife’s story/stories on-line. Comment.
11. Watch a Netflix movie once a week. More maintenance crap. Maintenance in the sense of there’s all these things I want to do, but I don’t seem to do any of them, so I need to consciously put them on a schedule now in an effort to remember to do them, which just seems stupid, but look who’s writing this in the first place so there you go, dammit.
That’s the eternal f***ing conflict, man! Wanting to do everything, having time to do only so much. It totally sucks. Totally.
But, I guess that’s how we ultimately make ourselves the type of person we become: what we prioritize in our lives. We then do what we really want to do, and we see what we’re really made of by the choices we’ve made in those priorities. Hmmm, that in itself is scary shit if you start thinking in terms of one’s eulogy. You know, which is spoken by someone else.
Um… nervous pause…
Crap. It’s 7:00 am already. I woke up at like 5:45.
Okay, I go now.
*When I let my beard grow, at a certain point, it gets long enough to, well, point. It points to the side. It looks like I have a perpetual wind blowing my chin hair to one direction, or if someone took a picture, one could wonder if my head were rotating as betrayed by my beard dragging off by the speed of rotation, but the picture happened to be snapped just as my head aligned itself with my neck in mid-turn. So, my head attached to my neck is actually an illusion.
Yeah. So: an actual beard for me? Heck, no.
Although… okay, I have a VERY fond memory of a picture taken of me from years ago with a goatee and mustache and a mullet and my sunglasses on. No, I’m not being ironic.
33/150
Project 365 : first / previous / next
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Grrrrrr..! (32/152)
Man, I freaking hate everything.
It's hot and sunny outside, but at work it's merely hot and hotter.
I suppose the upside is, this "diet" I'm on is only succeeding(ish) because I'm losing weight at work.
I was just unbelievably irritable today at work.
What a pain-in-the-ass to have to work with.
My apologies to my fellow employess. But it's supposed to be 95 tomorrow, so I'm sure I'll pick up where I left off today considering it's a 12 hour shift as well.
Project 365, my ass.
Oh, wait. Look.
Only 364 more to go.
I'm taking a long shower.
My wife will appreciate it.
32/152
Project 365 : first / previous / next
It's hot and sunny outside, but at work it's merely hot and hotter.
I suppose the upside is, this "diet" I'm on is only succeeding(ish) because I'm losing weight at work.
I was just unbelievably irritable today at work.
What a pain-in-the-ass to have to work with.
My apologies to my fellow employess. But it's supposed to be 95 tomorrow, so I'm sure I'll pick up where I left off today considering it's a 12 hour shift as well.
Project 365, my ass.
Oh, wait. Look.
Only 364 more to go.
I'm taking a long shower.
My wife will appreciate it.
32/152
Project 365 : first / previous / next
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