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This week has consisted of long and drawn out days that seem to go on and on... each of them has felt like a Friday to me for some reason. Tuesday after work, I met some of my old coworkers for cocktails downtown. It was really great to catch up. Last night I didn't do much of anything as I was extremely tired from a long week not even half over. Despite going to bed early, I woke up this morning not very well rested with the weight of a heavy headache upon me. I have struggled with it all morning. I caught a bee in the face on the way to lunch. There is nothing like a bee sting next to your eye that helps a persistent headache. At least lunch was nice. Barry and I met some of his friends at this little hamburger joint in Old Town Spring. A couple of beers in Old Town Spring on a nice sunny afternoon, as it turns out, is not conducive to an eagerness to return to the office. I really want to go to the HBS open jam tonight, but don't want to go alone. I probably won't make the long drive anyway. I just want to go home and veg anyway. *sigh* Hurry weekend... hurry.

For a work week that passed so slowly, the weekend was gone in an instant. Friday evening I drove down to The Continental Club for the Guy Forsyth show. The opening band seemed like a pretty fun bunch and Guy was as incredible as any other time I've attended his shows. Urs and Sam were designated passengers, so I didn't drink much at the show. I ran into Irfan and a few of his friends that night as well. I rarely am seen inside the loop these days, so it was a cool sighting. Saturday was intended to be lazy and lackadaisical... culminating in some Mucky Duck libations during a Hayes Carll show. It didn't end up that way. Ted and I took to the road around 4:30 or 5:00 Saturday afternoon and didn't stop until we ran another hundred or so miles up on the bike odometers. EL and I watched a movie instead of live music part deux. I barely recall Sunday as it went by so quickly. In the blink of an eye, I'm back at work. What happened?

Going from a streamlined web published application for expense data entry and a completely electronic approval system to the old fashioned print and staple method is enough to make me second think treating clients to anything. Hmmm... If I buy you lunch, I will have to spend 15 minutes doing a tedious and antiquated expense report later. NO SOUP FOR YOU! I was up until after midnight on a school night last night. Humorous considering the 3 o'clock bedtimes of yesteryear where regularly early if not the norm on weekdays. Who needs sleep anyway? I'll tell ya... old people. They say that young children need the most sleep with babies requiring sometimes 16 to 18 hours a day at times. They say that the older you get, the less sleep you need. They are full of shit. Anyhoo, back to the evening. I had some wine and some of EL's famous kitchen sink stew. I didn't ride the V-Max at all yesterday despite the wonderful weather in the evening. It feels good that it's Friday. I don't have any outstanding plans for the weekend, but this week has lurched in inches. Relaxation on the homestead will be much appreciated.

Un-freakin-real. My office temperature is approaching the surface of the Sun. I don't know what is going on with the ventilation in here, but it is borderline unbearable. I'm probably going to have to work from home this afternoon. Ted ended up buying a Triumph this week and we put about 100 miles on the bikes after work yesterday. Oodles of fun. I was supposed to head downtown this afternoon for libations, but it doesn’t look like that is going to happen now. I'm just looking forward to a relaxing evening at home... in the air conditioning.

Feel like wasting some time? There's always something to cry over when you think about it. By the way, are you hungry?

The new bike is working out just dandy. It rides like a cocaine addiction. I drove my truck for the first time in days this morning... finding a new gizmo on my dash. Apparently there are built-in sensors that detect when any tire's pressure falls below a certain level (even the spare) and illuminates a thingamahjiggy on the dash. Nifty! I guess, other than that, my days have been like marching ants going through the motions. EL started yelling upstairs for me to rush from my office last night. I feared the worst. I flew down the stairs only to find I wasn't the only thing flying. A bat was circling our living room. Yes, I said bat. It was like a Abbott and Costello slapstick in the house for the duration of the significantly ungraceful capture activity. He was cute as pie... couldn't bite his head off even if I hadn't just had pizza. He looked like a tiny, dark, tailless mouse with velvety wings. He squeaked in terror when I scooped him up in the blanket I netted him with... which made me feel sorry for him. Anyhoo, he's safe and sound flapping through the skies of our neighborhood now. I've been busy with work and haven't been sleeping well. I'm really tired. Left. Right. Left. Right. March!

As of today, I am a V-Max owner.

A furious lightsaber duel is underway. DARTH VADER is backing LUKE SKYWALKER towards the end of the gantry. A quick move by Vader chops off Luke's hand! It goes spinning off into the ventilation shaft. Luke backs away. He looks around, but realizes there's nowhere to go but straight down. Darth Vader: Obi Wan never told you what happened to your father. Luke: He told me enough! He told me you killed him! Darth Vader: No... I am your father! Luke: No! It's not true! It's impossible! Darth Vader: Search your feelings... you know it to be true... Luke: NO! Darth Vader: Yes, it is true... and you know what else? You know that brass droid of yours? Luke: Threepio? Darth Vader: Yes... Threepio... I built him... when I was 7 years old... Luke: No... Darth Vader: Seven years old! And what have you done? Look at yourself, no hand, no job, and couldn't even levitate your own ship out of the swamp... Luke: I destroyed your precious Death Star! Darth Vader: When you were 20! When I was 10, I single-handedly destroyed a Trade Federation Droid Control ship! Luke: Well, it's not my fault... Darth Vader: Oh, here we go... "Poor me! My father never gave me what I wanted for my birthday! Boo hoo, my daddy's the Dark Lord of the Sith! Waahhh wahhh!" Luke: Shut up... Darth Vader: You're a slacker! By the time I was your age, I had exterminated the Jedi knights! Luke: I used to race my T-16 through Beggar's Canyon... Darth Vader: Oh, for the love of the Emperor... 10 years old, winner of the Boonta Eve Open... Only human to ever fly a Pod Racer... right here, baby! Luke looks down the shaft. Takes a step towards it. Darth Vader: I was wrong. You're not my kid. I don't know whose you are, but you sure ain't mine. Luke takes a step off the platform, hesitates, then plunges down the shaft. Darth Vader looks after him. Darth Vader: Get a haircut!

We took down Darathar last night in a record breaking 26 minutes from pull to death with no wipes. On a more realistic note, it turns out my homeowners insurance is going to cover part of my laptop theft after the crazy whack deductible. Something is better than nothing. I have been in a constant fluster since Friday. I can't believe it even happened. My boss's mother-in-law died yesterday, so he's out the rest of the week. I'm having to impromptu cover a sales call for him tomorrow that I'm totally not prepared for... but hey, I knew the risks. I can probably wing it... SSL VPN Global Server Load Balancing. It's the "proximity based deterministic user routing to the server" that I'm curious about. You can do geo-lookups based on IP address that are somewhat accurate, but I think the GSLB implementation I deal with only has granularity to the Continent level based on the original IP space allocations in the early days of IPv4. I have a little reading to do this evening. My frustration for the day is with my credit union. I have been a customer in good standing for over a decade. I've financed my home loan, auto loans, etc. through them over the years. I've been a customer through my career since my early NAVY days. I applied online for a small loan pre-approval a couple days ago. I'm not even sure I am going to use it. I just wanted to know. So the start running the paperwork and see that I've recently changed employers. This requires the do an employment verification. Rather than call me for a number, they call 411. I work in Houston. My company (ie. HR) is based in California. Of course, 411 returns a wrong number for my company which raises a red flag in the loan approval process. Strike one... they rely on 411 instead of contacting me with their question. At this point, the loan officer makes an annotation on my account that they still need employment verification and it goes in the dust collection file. They noted "next time customer contacts credit union for any reason, ask about employment verification". Strike two. Obviously the joint is run by poorly trained monkeys. Rather than clearing this up in 5 minutes, they leave me thinking nothing is wrong while they stop all progress with my app until some future TBD date when the stars and planets align and I call wondering what's up. Pure fucking genius. I am astounded at the unbridled display of efficiency the finely tuned machine formerly known as my credit union has presented. I think I was on hold (cumulatively) for half an hour before I got to the bottom of the case. I made one phone call (2 minutes... tops) and got a name and number in HR for them to call and shine a ray of sunshine through this cloudy day. There is still no word as to when strike three is coming, but I've lost faith in expeditious processing at this point anyway.

My laptop bag was stolen today with (of course) my laptop, phone sync cord, phone charger, laptop charger, optical mouse, remotes, handheld GPS, USB converter, USB flash drive, account CDs and paperwork, and months of email/work... about $3500.00 in material items and countless hours of labor. Gone.

Whenever I feel I've made a small stride in progress, I reflect on inspiring work in my craft to humble and motivate myself. There is where I am technically and artistically as a photographer... and then there is where I would like to be.

I am tired this morning. I was up late last night crafting for the big raid tonight. I resized a few photos for print intended for a flip-book portfolio after work, but decided to wait on the shipment to the lab because of the expense. I have to replace our garage door. That sucks. I've decided to join the 24 Hour Fitness near my house. I love that it is open 24 hours a day. You just can't beat that sort of convenience and it makes it hard to say "I was going to go to the gym but by the time I got home, there wasn't enough time before they closed." Heh. I stopped in and checked it out yesterday afternoon. It was quite nice... a full featured facility complete with lap pool, dry and wet saunas, hot tub, oodles of cardio equipment (such that one wouldn't have to wait on a machine), and a full compliment of free and mechanized weights. I have a week full of meetings after today. I have to go to Austin on Wednesday. This weekend is EL's birthday and I haven't stopped to pick up her gift, but I already have it picked out. Mom's going to be in town this weekend for a wedding and to visit for EL's b-day. I feel like I need to take a time out and haven't even really started the busy part of my week. *sigh*

Kristal

Siouxie

I feel like I forgotten something somewhere and I can't determine what it is that's giving me this feeling of something being out of place. I don't necessarily mean a physical item like that stubborn guitar effects processor either... I'm just a little out of whack this morning. I went to bed early last night and woke up exhausted, yet I don't remember broken sleep. It's quiet in the office. I was alone all morning until just a few moments ago when I heard my bosses key jiggle in his door. The office suites I work in are so peaceful and calm during the day that you can hear practically anything that goes on in adjacent offices or hallways. It's a blessing and a curse. The ability to work from home often becomes an escape on the occasion someone is doing something loud nearby. I'm still waiting on the landlord to repaint my walls and replace my carpet before fully settling. I have items and equipment queued at the house and ready transport to work once everything is done. Sean called me last night. That was a great conversation for me since I haven't heard from him in a long while. Other than a brief detour to discuss diving in shark cages with Great Whites in Mexico and motorcycles, it was mostly work, home, and love in RealLife™. My night was uneventful other than that really. I finished the last translocator ring for Nagafin's Deception and am flagged for Darathar as the last step toward prismatics. If you don't get it, don't worry about it. The coffee is going down well this morning and I am slowly starting to function at a normal capacity. I have a conference call in 8 minutes, so I need to go. Perhaps once the gears are all fully engaged, I'll have something more substantial to say.

This weekend has blown by and I can not even begin to accept that it is Sunday. I suppose the skewed sense of time has a lot to do with last weekend being long and luxurious by comparison. I absolutely hate when I have misplaced something and know it is around (most likely just out of reach), but just can't remember where I've left it. I have a small in-line guitar effects processor that is about the size of a deck of playing cards. I can't find it for the life of me. It is the original Korg Pandora... quite primitive compared to the jewel I gave Sean a while back. Grrrr! Where is that blasted tinkerbox?! I've been shopping around for motorcycles again. My problem is that I simply dislike so many models that I have a hard time finding anything I would even consider researching the worth of purchase. I spent an hour or two in the studio yesterday with EL. Although not a professional model, she's got a great attitude about assisting me with lighting tests and trying new setups. She's the best. I've posted 4 of the shots in the extended section of this entry. It might be worth mentioning to my budding photographer friends that read this that the background in all four shots is a roll of plain black ("Superblack") seamless paper. I've lit the background with a strobe fronted by gels (they are more of a plastic nowadays than a gell, but the name has persisted). You can control the depth of the color with the background exposure relative to the overall scene. Sam came by last night for some cerveza on the patio. The weather was fabulous! Today, I don't have much of a plan. I'll probably play some EQ2 and maybe have lunch EL. It's really a lazy day. It would be a good day for a nice ride in the country on a motorcycle. ;-) Sean, check this out.

"The Enigma We Answer by Living" by Alison Hawthorne Deming Einstein didn't speak as a child waiting till a sentence formed and emerged full-blown from his head. I do the thing, he later wrote, which nature drives me to do. Does a fish know the water in which he swims? This came up in conversation with a man I met by chance, friend of a friend of a friend, who passed through town carrying three specimen boxes of insects he'd collected in the Grand Canyon— one for mosquitoes, one for honeybees, one for butterflies and skippers, each lined up in a row, pinned and labeled, tiny morphologic differences revealing how adaptation happened over time. The deeper down he hiked, the older the rock and the younger the strategy for living in that place. And in my dining room the universe found its way into this man bent on cataloguing each innovation, though he knows it will all disappear— the labels, the skippers, the canyon. We agreed then, the old friends and the new, that it's wrong to think people are a thing apart from the whole, as if we'd sprung from an idea out in space, rather than emerging from the sequenced larval mess of creation that binds us with the others, all playing the endgame of a beautiful planet that's made us want to name each thing and try to tell its story against the vanishing. ________________________________ I love extended weekends. They are like mini-vacations that don't cost anything. My surgery went well on Thursday despite the mental discomfort having a need stuck in my eyelid multiple times to deaden the nerves brought to me. When they draped and clamped the lid for the incision, I could still feel things I shouldn't have been able to feel, so they went in for round two. I actually heard the doctor tell the nurse, "no, no that won't work... we need a bigger needle". People just aren't supposed to hear those things. Believe me, I would have been better off not hearing that. They patched me up like a pirate afterwards and I made my way home... sans parrot and 3D vision. My mother and step-father arrived on Friday afternoon with my grandmother in tow. I had asked about her coming earlier, but the answer was a definitive NO. I guess minds were changed. It was a pleasant surprise and quite delightful to have her around the house for the weekend. We attended the arboretum on Saturday and cooked at home both nights of their stay. I picked up some fresh, organic salmon fillet to grill on Saturday evening. We visited a lot and played cards... which EL and I love to do. It was a successful visit overall in my humble opinion. One of my favorite moments of the weekend was Sunday evening when I realized that Monday was a holiday. What a great feeling! I learned this morning that Oasis burned down last night/this morning. I haven't been there since my groomsmen and I headed out for drinks and sunset the week of my wedding. It is absolutely freezing in my office this morning. FREEZING! I'm shivering. I have to service an account in San Marcos tomorrow, so the road trip will be early. I need an MP3 player in my truck. I think I want one of these for my birthday... heh. I need more coffee. I do. Really.