Snapshot

Posting to the blog has been irregular of late because I've been as busy as I've ever been with work, with looking for work, with side work and, last but certainly not least, my family. Oh yeah, and getting some hours at the pre-school co-op as the school photographer which has been an interesting and occasionally aggravating experience.

Amid it all I am trying to get my bike rides in to keep the tenuous grip on what passes for my sanity these days. I can't complain too much though. Weather reports had us ready for a wet and indoors weekend but we didn't get so much as a drop and today ended up being quite nice out. I got a ride in first thing yesterday morning, nothing special, just a couple of loops on the slough paths. But it felt good to get spinning again nonetheless. Today was more of a surprise ride. I came home from a couple of photography appointments, that went very well, to find an empty house. Rather than ask where everyone was, I loaded up my bike into the car and headed up to Santa Cruz. I parked outside my old house in Seabright and enjoyed a slower paced warm up pedal to the base of Delaveaga where the real riding began!

It wasn't a super long ride, maybe ten miles total, but it really felt good to get back on dirt and mud and enjoy some of the nature that's been hiding behind sheets of rain for weeks.

This next week promises to be busy too. Two schools tomorrow, the second going into the early evening. One school or department each day the rest of the week with the photography make up day at the pre-school towards the end of the week. Also in the mix is an evening of computer work at one of my office manager's house and an open house at Grady's new kindergarten school.

One of the few benefits of my semi-employment in the school district is that I can basically choose whatever school I want my son to attend. The school we are assigned to is an under-performing crap hole, to be indelicate. The school he is going to is one of the best performing and most highly regarded schools in the area. The only other school regarded higher is one of the other schools I work at. Yes, I do take some measure of pride in working at two of the best schools in this district.

The downside is that the school is in downtown Watsonville. I don't particularly like this town very much, I don't care for the mentality, the gangs and the general fuck-you-gringo attitude I get alot of places. But to make the best of a pretty crappy situation, this school is it.

I guess I'm rambling now. I'm writing this while running tests and anti-spyware on an XP laptop I've been working on off and of for the last week. It does some stuff no problem and then totally freezes up and crashes with other stuff and not necessarily the same things each time. One thing the recent work I've been doing on Win machines has taught me is how much I hate the XP operating system. It is utter crap, like it was designed by a drunk monkey or something.

Give me my Macs and don't go yapping at me about fan boi shit. My Macs just work and work well. These Win XP machines freeze up, slow down or just plain lag ass all the day long.

Anyway, I need to get this party wrapped up so I can get to bed at a reasonably decent hour so I can hit the ground running tomorrow. So much to do, not enough time. Always.

I think I might try to plan an IP universe update post. I've been writing to several of my other blogs lately and think it might not be a bad idea to toot my own horn, as it were.

For now though, time to feed the dog, get the coffee machine ready and call it a day.

What I've Been Up To

Life continues, life rolls on, there is no stopping the flow of life. Even when you just need a short break for the ride to stop so you can get off and catch your breath, the ride doesn't really stop, you just stop and the ride plunges onward, upward, outward. Luckily though, you can grab back on when you are ready and get swept right back into the stream of life again.

My life, of late, has revolved around my family. Around my two little boys who make me laugh a thousand times a day, make my heart sing, make the world worth dealing with. I can't even remember what my life was like before I had the overwhelming beacon of awesomeness that is my two children.

Sure, it isn't always fun or easy. There are plenty of times when things are annoying and frustrating and it is too easy to get sucked into the vortex of feeling angry. But being angry is a huge waste of time and energy. And I don't know about you but whatever time I have on this planet is limited and ticking away with each passing second.

Like many sentiments, there's a great movie quote to encompass my current mood. "Get busy living or get busy dying." I will deliver two karma points to the first person that can place the quote without cheating (though I'll never know but the karma points will know and they can be fickle so you best not cheat).

Anyway, I haven't been writing to this ol' blog as much as I used to. A combination of being busy with work and having other, more immediate, outlets for my thoughts. I Twitter like a demon some days. Other days, I just bend the ear of whoever's closest by. No matter what though, I've always got something on my mind, always got something in the works and always have some idea, thought or plan to add to my pile of to-dos.

But tonight I got the chance, actually I took the time, to start and finish a pretty neat project that ended up working out quite well. I used some plans I got off of the Maker Workshop for a DTV Antenna. Yes, we dumped our cable subscription a month and a half ago. It has been a little different but, on the whole, it has been nice to not have 70 some odd channels of crap on the box all the time.

But a few more than the four we were getting would be nice. The digital antenna I got at Target was adequate, it pulled in some signals but would often fuzz out or need to slightly repositioned. It hasn't been ideal. Nor is the new antenna I made tonight. But damned if it doesn't work way better than the store bought one!

I'd write about work but work is a little loopy these days. I'm not fully hired back by the district but am working full time. It is an untenable situation in the long run and I continue to search for more complete employment.

That's about it for now. Or all I care to share.

Taking Stock

I had a good chat with my mom yesterday, the initial reason for calling was to see if I'd been one of the hundreds in my district getting a pink slip layoff notice on Friday. However, since I'm a classified worker and not a certificated, my possible pink slip gets to float above my head until the middle of May so I don't know what's going to happen yet.

I do have some sense of what's likely to happen and I'm cautiously optimistic that I will just barely escape the retrenchment hammer this time around. But anything can happen so it makes sense to keep as many irons in the fire as possible and hopefully one gets hot enough to blaze a new path.

What are all these irons I'm metaphorically speaking of? Let's see:
- The bicycling site complete with interviews, merchandising, bike and trail reviews. Current status: Paused due to competing priorities.
- The invention, the concept for which I came up with more than a year ago but have only recently gathered the prototyping materials. Current status: Inching forward ever so slowly.
- The editing and publishing of the latest dogs and bikes video: Done and done.
- Migrating IP from eHostPros to BlueHost: Awaiting ignition but should be pretty fast once it gets underway.
- Prepping to photograph not one but two weddings in July: In process but complicated by the loss of the wedding planner for both events.
- Building our distributor pyramid for Kyani: On-going and a priority right now.
- Keeping an eye out for rental houses to relocate to in Santa Cruz: On-going.
- Watching the job postings: Never-ending.
- Probably a half dozen other things that are escaping me right now.

This isn't to say that I'm unhappy or stressed out. I'm actually pretty happy most of the time these days and feel that things are definitely moving in the right direction on most fronts. There will always be room for improvement.

Yesterday was alot of fun too. While my wife napped and the boys were supposed to be napping, we ended up playing in the backyard, Grady hitting balls off a tee, Sully riding one of the cars around and Nande being, well, Nande and thinking that everything was all about her. I shot some funny video of the boys running around screaming and laughing. I wish I'd been able to get a bike ride in but it isn't always possible so I'll just squeeze them in when I can.

This is part of the reason I want to get us back up to Santa Cruz, access to decent mountain biking trails because Watsonville has crap and sometimes those crappy routes are populated by buster douchebag gang bangers looking to fuck other people's days. Have I mentioned how tired I am of this town? Yeah, the prevailing fuck-you-itis does wear thin.

Anyway, time to get to it. Got a cranky new PC with a bad image that refuses to boot up and play nice.

Starting Off Off

Any week that involves me dropping off my cat for some paw surgery is bound to be a little bit of an odd week. And yes, that's exactly what I got to do this morning on my way into work. She's probably waking up about now, pissed off, in pain but, hopefully, better and won't be susceptible to infections in her extra toe paws.

I've spent an inordinate amount of time trying to find my serial number for Apple Remote Desktop so I can fully move into my new workstation. But without the number, I'm stuck with the old computer on my desk as well. This is what happens when you move into someone else's room and they didn't keep things as they should have. Now the install disk is missing and I look like a computer greedhead with two nice computers on my desk.

Oh well.

What else is happening today? We're still doing our winter at night and in the morning and summer all the rest of the day long. Its now beautiful and hot and sunny out and I'm stuck in jeans. Can't really complain too much though.

Damn, still tired of not having proper Gmail access at work. Sometimes my email will load up and other times it'll just fail.

Either way, its annoying but I can live with it since I've always got my iPhone and that makes checking email simple with or without a Wifi signal.

Anyway, time to get back to trying to discover just where the hell Apple hides that serial number. And hoping our cat is going to be just fine.

Progress Report

Here's a quick update on some personal fronts.

The bite on my hand is pretty well healed up, it still looks a little gnarly but doesn't hurt much at all and has shown no sign of infection at all. Which is just fine by me and it means I will likely be able to go riding this coming weekend.

Hey, its October! I thought yesterday was the first but I always screw up that 30 and 31 day month thing. Anyway, September was decent, here's hoping October is just as good or better.

As any regular reader of this space would know, I'm anticipating the veep debate, tomorrow night at 6 pacific, with some optimism that it will be the start of the end of Sarah Palin on the national stage. I make no excuses for how little I think of this woman and her "qualifications" to be running for the second most powerful seat on the planet (arguable but it sounds good). She has experience in the public debate space and has her own set of weapons that I'm sure she'll deploy. But, at the end of the night, what she says, what she knows and what she admits she needs to learn should be the important takeaways. Not that she had some good quips or that she was able to parrot GOP talking points accurately, not that she's a decently good looking woman (arguable) or that any hard questions leveled at her by the media is sexist and/or "gotcha" journalism. I fully expect her to crater and maybe even explode. Nor is it about Tina Fey's spot-on impersonation or the sad fact that Tina Fey is probably more capable, experienced and would be a better vp nomination than Palin.

Either way, it is truly must see tv and is expected to be the most watched veep debate in history.

Which reminds me, Easy emailed me a very interesting piece about White Privilege and how it has negatively impacted this race. I may cherry pick it and post some parts to try and illuminate the double standard of qualification being applied to Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.

That's about it for right now. I know, not very exciting lately. I'll try to do something stupid soon.