Skip to main content

I swear I'm going to start posting here more often...

...I just need to find a good 3rd-party blogger.com interface, and maybe an iPhone app so I can blog when I'm thinking of it.

July's big "fix the outside of my house" drive didn't really happen, but I did manage to get some stuff done by the simple expedient of encouraging my ex-wife to do whatever she wanted to it. So the front yard is starting to be manageable, and I've closed off the driveway in preparation for resurfacing it, as well as getting ready to open the "tomato bed" area. Still haven't done anything about the back yard, but I have a feeling that without a capital infusion it's going to remain as it is now until I have some serious time off.

I bought a ceiling fan, but it's still "in process" as far as installation goes. It turns out the ceiling mount has to be redone so the fan doesn't fall off, which is involving several trips into the attic... which it turns out is a BAD place to be during the hottest days of summer. I was up there for about 15 minutes and it was ~120F, and I nearly passed out. I'm hoping later this week when it cools off outside that I'll be able to get up there without dying and finish the razzin-frazzin' rebuild of the mount, complete with leveling shims to make sure the fan doesn't shake itself loose and destroy my living room.

The house itself is an absolute disaster area -- I haven't done any cleaning at all since my housewarming party, and the only thing that's saving it from being totally disgusting is that I won't leave food or trash around. No, just the random detritus of various projects that are all half-done. I seriously need to get myself organized and spend some time cleaning up the place. It's not that big, so it wouldn't take very long; I could probably deep-clean the whole house in 4 hours. It's just been so hot that I'm completely unmotivated to make it happen. Saturday is supposed to be nice and cool; I may just take the day and hammer away at everything.

Love life: abject failure so far. The less said about it the better.
Current Video Game: Mass Effect (still), with some Forza Motorsport 3. Waiting for the next couple of games from Gamefly. Also, finished single-player campaign on Starcraft II: still bad at RTS.
Current TV: Leverage and Eureka. Without a broadcast TV connection, I'm not really watching anything else.
Current Music: Strangely, I have "American Woman" stuck in my head. For no apparent reason, since I haven't heard it in ages.
Current Book: Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, by John Scalzi. Good stuff.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Organizing And You: Lessons from Labor History

    I made a joke on Twitter a while ago: Do I need to post the Thomas M Comeau Organizing Principles again? https://t.co/QQIrJ9Sd3i — Jerome Comeau says Defund The Police (@Heronymus) July 15, 2021 and it recently came back up because a member of my family got their first union job and was like "every job should be offering these sorts of benefits" and so I went ahead and wrote down what I remember of what my dad told me. My father had many jobs, but his profession was basically a labor union organizer, and he talked a lot about the bedrock foundation items needed to be serious about organizing collective action. Here's what I remember.    The Thomas M. Comeau Principles of Organizing -- a fundamental list for finding and building worker solidarity from 50 years of Union Involvement. This list is not ranked; all of the principles stated herein are coequal in their importance. Numbering is a rhetorical choice, not a valuation. 1) Be good at your job. Even in an at-will
Post a Comment
Read more

Money and Happiness as a fungible resource

Money really does buy happiness. Anyone who tells you differently has a vested interest in keeping you poor, unhappy, or both. I know this because I grew up on the ragged edge of poor, and then backed my way into a career in IT, which is where the modern world keeps all the money that isn't in Finance. So I am one of the extreme minority of Generation X that actually had an adulthood that was markedly more financially stable than my parents. And let me tell you: money really does buy happiness. To be clear: at 45 years old, I'm now in a relationship and a period of my life where our household is effectively double-income, no kids. I live in the city, but I own a house, and can only afford to do that because of our combined income. We also have two cars -- one new, one used (though neither of them is getting driven very much these days) -- and we have a small discretionary budget every month for things like videogames, books, and the like. What my brother used to call DAM -- Dic
Post a Comment
Read more

Activision, Blizzard, Game development, IT, and my personal role in all of that.

 I'm pretty sure if you spend any sort of time at all on Twitter and/or spend any sort of time playing videogames, you are by now at least aware of the lawsuit brought forth by the State of California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing versus Activision Blizzard, Inc., et al. From this point on, I'll add a Content Warning for folks who are sensitive about sexual assault, suicide, and discrimination based on sex, gender, and skin color, as well as crude humor around and about sexual assault , and what the State of California refers to as "a pervasive 'frat boy' culture" around Act/Bliz, especially in the World of Warcraft-associated departments.   Just reading the complaint is hard rowing, even with the clinical legalese in place. The complaint itself is relatively short; 29 pages laying out ten Causes of Action (basically, "these are the legs on which our lawsuit stands"). I'm not sure I have the vocabulary to properly express how a
Post a Comment
Read more