Idoru.us

This one has been a win. This entire fucking year has been a win on every last checkmark.

So lets see, its been a while since I wrote anything down here. I believe the last time I wrote something was a week or so after I closed on my condo. Since then I have managed to get my shit moved in, managed to, more or less, furnish the place and most importantly, turn it into home. I think about ‘home’ and this is what comes to mind. Which is both a little surprising and completely awesome. Don’t get me wrong, there are a ton of things that I need to get done still, but there is nothing urgent about it at this point. What remains can take a bit of time to get done right rather than fast. Plus, I have been operating in the red for long enough that taking a bit of time to let shit settle down will be a damn good idea.

Plus I was able to cancel my fucking comcast account. Not to say that I might not have to go back to them in a year thanks to the bullshit internet in the US but for now at least I am free and centurylink DSL is ‘good enough’ for right now.

I continue to volunteer intermittently, in fact I just finished a last minute volunteer thing for the non-profit beer company I sideline for. It was at a not so great part of town in a trashy liquor store (they have cops permanently assigned there, classy huh?) but I still managed to get about 5 cases of premium higher priced beer out the door so, you know, mission accomplished and all that when it comes to that. I am sure that they got their money’s worth from me, even when you factor in the surprise of getting some free beer from them for doing it on less than 24 hours notice. Frankly its not as though I really had anything better going, as evidenced by the fact that I am sitting at home writing this on a Saturday evening.

Sometime around January when I was pretty unhappy with a number of things in my life I mentioned that I had bought a gift certificate to go sky diving. Well this coming Monday is the big day. Not sure whether I should be excited or scared or what but at this point it doesn’t even seem real to me yet. I drive out there, they strap me to some dude and then throw me out of the plane at 15,000 feet or something. I am sure that it will become real but for right now its just something still out there. Expect a report or something the next time I get off my ass and update this some more.

Speaking of my mental state lately, I have been terrible about going  the gym since I started moving. In fact I made it once last week and hadn’t made it since … I think before we went to Chicago. So I am working on getting my, somewhat chubby, ass back into the gym.

And speaking of Chicago, it was a great long weekend. Low stress, just getting the hell away and spending some time with the lady. A bit of shopping here and there, that sort of thing. Some beers with lunch by the river, walking along lake Michigan, etc. You get the idea, just a short weekend away. I give it a 4.7 out 5, would repeat.

I also, oddly, managed to attend an event to celebrate Canada Day at the consul general’s house. We went last ear as well and its a very surreal environ. Its basically a bunch of big wigs hob nobbing. Basically… an adult party? I am not positive but it was a fun time and I will go again if I get the chance. The weekend after that we went to the beer dabbler at the local pride festival. Good times and lets just say I am rather glad that I live close enough to the light rail that I can take it downtown should I want. It might not be the fastest, or most convenient method of transit but I don’t need to worry about drunk drivers, DUI, my car, anything. Plus, realistically, I almost never go downtown anyway so this might mean I actually start to now.

So here is the other news…. This is the news that has been waiting to happen for a few years now actually. Last Friday I was offered and accepted a new position. Achievement unlocked, new job acquired. I don’t want to give to many details but its one of those things where, as I told my boss, I really couldn’t not accept the offer that was made. So… yeah. Its a win and a learning experience. One thing I will say, I will genuinely miss the people on my current team. They are good people and they are going to have to deal with a lot of bullshit. My leaving has only made the bullshit worse for them. I will genuinely miss some of the people in my current office, but they will get over it and so will I. I will also genuinely enjoy never having to see one worthless woman who has gone out of her way to make my life worse. Its good to be going somewhere more positive and getting away from that negative energy pit.

The real takeaway from all of this though is that I have managed to accomplish more goals in the last 6 months than I had managed to accomplish in the previous few years. I am sure that there are a lot of different things that I could point my finger at and say ‘it was X! X held me back!’ or ‘man, if only Y had been the case everything would have been so much simpler!’ Instead what I am going to do is say that I got complacent. I got comfortable and allowed myself to start thinking of the status quo as, not exactly superior but perhaps…. easier. It was easier to keep myself in a position of being a big fish in a little pond. Then when I became a little fish in a big pond I was scared. Scared of getting eaten by one of those big fish that I used to be. Eventually I realized that this was really no way to live. I was miserable, I was situationally depressed, I was drinking way too much, I was angry all the damn time. So whats the fucking solution?

Try again, fail again. No worries, fail better.

Work on what I could control and let the chips fall here they may. Just fucking do it. That was the answer I found. Doesn’t matter really if I am afraid, its better to be a bit scared than a raging ball of misery (how come I never learned that when i was 18 and fueled by hate?). At the very least fear keeps you on your toes. I might not float like a butterfly and sting like a bee but I can still dance & when I bring the pain it can be felt so thats good enough for right now.

I think thats probably enough rambling self congratulatory masturbation for the evening. But yeah, after a lot of learning its a big fucking checkmark in the win category all the way around.

So a lot of changes have rolled out in the last week or so, give or take.

The biggest and most obvious one is that I am a homeowner. Picture a gigantic fucking asterisk on that as it will in truth be roughly 30 years until I actually own the place outright. in the meantime the bank owns it and I pay rent to the bank. That’s ok though, its a step. I went back and forth a lot over whether or not I should actually buy. I mean yes at the end of the day you have something to show for it but at the same time you get certain things that you otherwise wouldn’t by renting. The two biggest items you get are the freedom to cut the cord and the freedom from responsibility more or less. Fridge breaks? Not my problem to replace it. Accept a job in sri lanka? Great, I can do that. On the other hand my mortgage will be over 100 a month less than my current rent. and over 150 a month less than what the increased rent would have been had I not renewed my lease. For a lot more space. Admittedly the association dues changes that situation so that I will be putting out more per month but its enough that I am comfortable with it.

The other big change happened today. About a year ago I started the process of getting my CAPM which is an intro certification in project management. Well today I finally took the test and I passed. I learned a lot of different things as I was going through the process actually. Some of them were, obviously, about project management but some of the more interesting items were about myself. One thing I definitely learned is that I actually do better when I don’t tell people my goals. Instead I just do what I want to do and then present the results. I have mentioned it before but it was wildly apparent in this case. I honestly wish I had never told a soul about the damn thing before I finished. One of the other things I learned is that project management might not be for me. Or it might. Could go either way. But hey, looks good on a resume and as I told the lady it never hurts to invest in yourself.

As I described myself to a coworker: highly intelligent and observant, criminally low motivation at times. So here’s to overcoming some low motivation.

Finished Arkham Origins earlier this week. Pretty good game actually but you can tell its not from the same team or writers. I did like it enough to actually purchase the DLC which I thought was exceptionally well done and well written. It might have been fairly short but I thought it was worth the money. Started playing Remember Me and realized that while the concept of the game is amazingly good the execution is amazingly bad. The mechanics, the camera, the  fighting…. its just not good. We will see whether I can power through to actually finish this game but so far the prospects are not good.

One of the big things I need to take care of soon (in addition to moving & furnishing and whatever) is getting the bike into the shop. At the end of last season the front fork got seriously crunchy which is pretty darn bad. However now that the down payment on my condo is done (ouch by the way), I can set aside the money to get that fixed and fixed right so that i can start riding again. Its a beautiful day and man do I wish I was out and about on the bike.

Now I think I should probably get back to drinking a few beers in celebration and packing.  Or something.

On to the next set of goals and all that.

I really hate bumper sticker politics. In a lot of ways I subscribe to the whole “Obviously but maybe” theory that Louis C.K. espoused so effectively on HBO one time. Feel free to Google. So many local political things going on right now (Medical marijuana, Sunday sales, etc) and everybody wants to distill it down to a bumper sticker. Yeah right.

To return to the subject of budgeting, its pretty fascinating to me that I have blown my budget both months since I installed it. Pretty badly at that but both times was with good reason that will bear future dividends. I am ok with that. The really fascinating thing to me is how easy it is to blow your budget. Either way I am still coming out ‘ahead’ in a very general sense.

Last month I received a used macbook pro. I had forgotten just how polished the whole OSX experience is to use. Its simply much more polished than any of the competitors even if it isn’t as powerful. Whatever that exactly means at the end of the day. harder to get to the guts I suppose. I have a lot of complaints with their hardware choices but I still think they are a very very functional machine. Odds are good that within a few months that macbook will be my primary personal use computer for day to day stuff (not gaming of course). Also its really fucking nice to have a laptop again.

I have been reading like a madman recently. I have read something like 20+ books in about the last month. nothing particularly noteworthy other than the sheer volume of books that I have been reading. Unfortunately I have fallen into the habit of not reading what I should have been reading. One book I did read however was The Four Hour Work Week. Its pretty fascinating to me to see what can be taken from it and also what I think doesn’t really apply to anybody or anything. There were two things I really got out of it (both of which I knew to some extent already): time management is what you make of it & side hustles don’t hurt. I suppose arguably the methods of limiting communication were interesting but I do that already anyway. Overall I think the amazon reviews are pretty accurate.

A side effect of doing all of that reading is that I have been playing less video games lately. Not that I played much already but it has generally been cut down. Rogue Legacy and Arkham Origins are about it. I have to wonder whether in the future I will even bother to buy a PS4/XBONE/Gaming PC. It simply seems less important as a means to spend my time. Part of that however might be the spring being here and the fact that I am going outside more as a result. It was such a miserable winter that its nice to be outside and doing something, anything, instead.

I heard recently that everybody is the average of the 5 people that they spend the most time with. I suppose that I am the average of the lady and then 4 different versions of myself as of right now. The simple fact of the matter is that, as a terminally ill man said ‘I am leading a quieter life now’ which seems actually quite fine. I have started associating with a different group of people than the guys who hang out at the bar 4 to 7 nights a week. It has nothing to do with alcohol, instead it has everything to do with the fact that its just not very interesting anymore. Also I pretty much hate wilful ignorance and that seems to be a common theme with bar flys. Might be a harsh judgement I suppose but I think there is at least some validity there. In other words I am in the process of finding a few new people to become the average of. Raise the bar son.

I have considered going a bit ‘Donner Party’ on my group of friends. That is strictly metaphorical by the way, I am not considering actual cannibalism. Unless I get hungry enough I suppose…. But regardless I am a bit tired of feeling like I am one of the people putting in all of the work for some friends. We’ll see whether that lasts or whether others start to exert some effort. I kinda doubt it but that happens as we get older I suppose.

I have taken on a few new projects recently as well as restarted a few older projects. However in the interest of not doing what I have done in the past I am not telling people what they are nor when they can expect t be finished. The reasoning behind that can be found here but the short version is this: Some people get motivated by telling people what you are going to do and being held accountable. Some people get less motivated because they receive some of the psychological satisfaction from simply telling people their intentions. I am not sure whether I fall into either of these categories but I don’t feel like being held accountable for things I want to do myself. I would instead rather hold myself accountable and either succeed or fail on my own merits here. If there is something worth announcing I will do it on my own schedule and my own terms.

That reminds me that I need to schedule my skydiving day.

Other than that…. 8feet has slowed down in updates but I think its probably to something a lot more manageable at the end of the day. I like where its at now and think I will probably stick there.

We went to Florida a month or so ago for my birthday. It was pretty awesome to get the hell away. Especially since i have had to postpone my European trip this year, probably for at least an additional year. The reasons might be acceptable but still, its kind of irritating to postpone something that I was looking forward to. The good news is that I am out no money whatsoever since the situation changed prior to me spending a single dime on anything. Take the small blessings where you can find them I suppose.

I think that’s enough rambling for the moment.