Right now, sitting at the desk at the Y, all I can really think about is seeing Star Trek. I’ve heard so many good things about it… sure, some classic trek fans have their issues, but it’s trying to reboot the Star Trek world, not continue it. With a bunch of the Fringe team behind the writing and production, it has to be good.
update: Star Trek didn’t happen tonight, but we did a lot of research into how to set up a clothesline for Patti for Mother’s Day. Hopefully we’ll fit Star Trek in, tomorrow.

Good things coming up: more days off, mini-vacations, new Fable II downloadable content, macbook

In the bummer zone: Garmin announced more delays for the Nuvifone. The android phones are looking more and more attractive, even though they don’t have turn-by-turn directions, yet. Unfortunately, the only android phone even rumored for Verizon has a crappy-looking keyboard. If I didn’t think I’d miss the real keyboard, I’d already have broken down and gone with the iPhone. In the meantime, my phone is surviving… only shutting itself off once or twice a day.

The visit home is going well. I probably won’t make it to the teen center this time around, I’m not going to take a ton of pictures of all my old haunts (which was on my mental list of things to do and not well defined, I think it was a flickr-groups-inspired idea and I can’t think of which groups/themes I had in mind) and I don’t think I’ll be able to fit in hanging out with everyone who wants to, since today is pretty much the only day I have and only Erika has come up with a time and place that works for her… and I pretty much slept the whole morning away. I suppose I could fit some time in with someone around our visit to Karen and the kids in Stoughton, tomorrow… or before dinner time on Monday. Heading out to Worcester this afternoon, most likely, with Mom and her good friend Joyce. I’ll probably take my own car so that I can break off and meet with someone, if they get in touch with me before it runs into my other plans. I guess I should go shower.

√ Dinner @ Mom’s (Monday night)
√ Go to Hava Java (on the way back from the airport, with Mark)
√ Go to Java Hut (for the last time … ::sniff::)
√ Get remaining gifts for people in the area
_ visit the teen center
hang out with:
√ Mark (ride home from airport, no Raianne or Scrabble, though)
√ Kristin
√ Drew (at Numark party)
√ Sara (at Numark party, no Tyler visit)
_ Jess and Erika
√ Karen and Cousin Mark

I guess I also need a packing list. A things not to forget list:

_ Tim Horton’s coffee mug didn’t fit, not important
√ laptop (little one)
√ camera
√ ipod and mount (maybe cupholder-mount)
√ stocking stuffers for Mom’s house
√ phone and charger (both car and home)
√ sunglasses
√ gloves

Ooh, and a things to not forget to bring/ship home list:

√ stocking stuff from Mom’s and other gifts
√ hard drives that need rescuing (out of the barn and shipped to Gillware)
√ Just For Sundae CD (haven’t found it yet)
_ Peggy Lawton cookies, Devil Dogs and other local foods (not this time, I can always get stuff shipped)

I may be adding to this.

edited on 12/25

Tuesday evening, I met up with Erika and Shane. We took a little shopping trip to pick up a remote controlled dragonfly (like this one). Then we headed back to Webster and went to Friendly’s for some dinner and ice cream. I love their peanut butter sauce. I had kinda forgotten how much.

Wednesday morning, I headed out to the Mazda dealership, where we bought the car, for an oil change and tire rotation. I had Kristin with me and we took a walk to Honey Dew Donuts while we were waiting for the work to be done. Honey Dew is the same as I remember it… good competition for Dunkin’, even if it is just in a small regional market. Kristin and I also visited Steve at Toad Hall, and I got my dose of Wormtown music and gossip and such. We also swung through Woonsocket, while we were killing time and I went to Hava Java, where they still remembered my order (six months later). I took a few pictures of a local landmark while we were in the area. That evening, we swung out to the Hockomock Teen Center and saw all the kids who weren’t there on my last visit.

I had no specific plans for Thursday morning until Erika called and asked for a ride to Worcester. She needed a CAT scan because she had sneezed and then gotten a sudden headache and problems with vision and tracking with her left eye. I left her at the huge new “Medical City” in the early afternoon. She was there until 7PM, and they sent her home, but another killer sneeze has made all the pain come back since then. I dunno what her plan is, the big shiny hospital seems useless, from my point of view. On my way out of Worcester, I stopped by a new shiny diner, fairly close to where I used to live. It had a 50s theme and was fairly good.

Name Me?

I ended the night with the only official plans I had for the day – a visit to Sara, my old roommate, and Tyler, the cat. Tyler was as cute sexy as ever and there’s a new kitten, who is being called bit until he gets a permanent name. We watched some awesome TV and had some awesome sandwiches and were entertained by the cats.

This morning, I grabbed a coffee with Mark at Victoria Station in Putnam and then tooled around Webster, chatting with some other local artists and talking about upcoming Webster-Dudley events. Now, I’m trying to decide what to do until I pick up Sarah at 11PM in Providence tonight. I’ve got plenty of options, but no idea which one makes the most sense.

Yesterday, I visited Camp Foskett and Camp Elmwood and the Hockomock Teen Center. I’ll probably make some time to go out to Hockomock again next week, since Dawn and Rebecca were out at Leader’s School. It was good to see some old familiar faces still hanging around Foskett and nice to get a warm welcome from a lot of the staff and kids at Elmwood.

When I got home, Mom pointed out all the yard sale stuff and what her goals were for pre-sale day set up (after a small distraction by some local raccoons) and then we showed each other pictures of our recent adventures.

Today, with the help of Mark, we tore through a bunch of stuff in the garages and got a few aisles full of sellable stuff and tables to display it all on. We also went to Jimmy’s Pizza for lunch.

• help Mom with stuff for the Yard Sale
• visit Camp Foskett
• visit the Hock Teen Center & Camp Elmwood
• catch The Bangles @ the Woodstock Fair (sweet)
• take pictures @ the Woodstock Fair (hopefully better than theirs)
• see some Wormtown music (maybe a Wormtown Wednesday)
• hang out with whoever says they miss me

Northeast Stuff to acquire and bring home:

• Devil Dogs
• Peggy Lawton Cookies
• Coffee Syrup
• Moxie & other Polar Sodas
  

Find and bring home:

• folding chair with footrest
• last year’s Nalgene bottle with the good lid

Before I leave:

• make sure I have coverage at the Y
• get new sneakers
• load up iPod with audiobooks/new music
• get new iPod mount for car

What’d I forget?

Speaking of my birthday [I told you I'd think of more], I thought of something else I could use:

a brightly colored case for my glasses/sunglasses. In my car, with it’s mostly black interior, I often can’t find my glasses until I’ve stopped and dug around the back for a while. If it’s got some cool feature that makes it stick or mount or clip somewhere, making it even harder to lose, that’d be great, too… and if it’s even a little more sturdy than the crappy cases Lenscrafters gives out with their glasses, I won’t worry so much.

And now, because it has been requested (via mom, from several family members, at the very least), I’m going to attempt to write up some captions/stories/explanations to go along with the images in my calendars. This sort of reminds me of a website I used to contribute to called Themestream. I could put photos up there and get critiques from people, but they had to be accompanied by 500 words of text, since it was originally a writing based site. Adding those descriptions seemed like a lot of work at first, but it was sort of fun by then end. I hope that goes this way, since I’m about to write 26 such descriptions. Anyway… here they are. And the calendars are both still available at Cafepress, i you didn’t get one (or wanted the other one).

January: Drip. Taken after a particularly treacherous adventure in my van, to a show at a VFW hall in Grafton, MA. The roads were about as frozen as everything looks in this shot. Chosen for January for weather reasons.

February: Baby. Taken at a restaurant in Blackstone, MA, the day I met this Baby. Her name is Diamond, and she’s no longer a baby. She’s the oldest daughter of my old friend Sarah Green, who I had lost touch with for several years, before randomly finding out that she lived 5 minutes from me… this restaurant was about halfway between us and we met there for breakfast.

March: Cover. This was taken while driving, somewhat dangerous, I know. I think I was on the way to work in Marlboro at Telecomnow… or perhaps that’s just a subconscious association I put with it after the fact. I was amused at the logo of Sherwin-Williams, so blatantly ego-maniacal and full of undertones of manifest destiny. The fact that it was red, white and blue just made it irresistible to me. Such a glowing example of american corporate ideology… ‘we’re a paint company and our goal is to paint the whole world. GAH!. Probably chosen for March because it was taken in March. (sorry to say that I no longer have the original or any copies of this photo anywhere except on Cafepress.

April: Eggs. Taken at MaryBeth’s house in Webster, MA, on the weekend of Easter, probably, because we were definitely about to dye those eggs. There was a pretty large group of us there, mostly friends from high school, a good four or five years after we graduated. Chose for April due to Easter ties.

May: Road. Taken from a dam in Connecticut (the name escapes me), overlooking an abandoned road with a large section that’s gone… flooded, washed out, former bridge… I dunno. It was a favorite spot for me and Mark to go take pictures. Chosen for May because it was probably taken in May.

June: Shadow. Taken at a park in Pennsylvania, somewhere near Olivia’s parents’ house. The dog’s name is shadow. I have a similar image to this one, but not the exact one, in my gallery. I don’t remember if this was taken on the first trip down there or the second. We got stuck down there for an extra week or so, due to car trouble, so we had lots of time to hang out and take photos of dogs and dams. Chosen for June because I think it was taken in June.

July: Playground. Taken at a playground in Woonsocket, RI. This was a day when I drove down to Woonsocket with Mark and met Candace and Drew in the park. I think Drew and Candace lived in Woonsocket at this point, but I might not have moved in yet. Chosen for July because it was probably taken in July.

August: Swim. Taken at one end of that closed/fooded road that the Sunset/may photo was taken. I liked his puzzled body language and the obvious problem. Chosen for August because it was probably taken in August.

September: Red-handed. Taken at the after-school day care program I worked at in Woonsocket. This was our activity on 9/11, the year after it happened. This little girl was a trouble maker, and I couldn’t resist the Irony of catching her red-handed. Chosen for September because it was probably taken in September, and because it seemed patriotic enough that I wouldn’t draw anyone’s wrath for dismissing 9/11.

October: Playground. Taken on the street I lived on in Woonsocket (though possibly in North Smithfield, that far down). I remember wandering around and trying to get some good foliage photos one of the first years I lived in Woonsocket. I might’ve gotten a couple, but my weakness for arrows drew me to this. Definitely taken in October.

November: Pumpkin. Taken in Mom’s backyard. This pumpkin had grown out of her compost pile from “last year’s seeds.” I think she wanted a picture of it, and I really liked how it came out. This is in November because Cafepress messed up the original November image, and I have no record of what it was. I did find the original list of who was going to get copies of this calendar, though, and my friend Erika was on it, so that might mean it was going to be this one of her, but I don’t remember.

December: Mug. Taken in the Kenmore Diner in Worcester, MA. All I truly remember about taking this photo is that I was incredibly tired at the time (this is a diner that is specifically open after last-call, for that sobering-up crowd. I remember that my head was actually at this angle, and I was staring at my coffee mug for some time before I pulled out my camera and took the shot.

January: lsda. Taken in the camp office of one of the YMCAs I worked for. This brand of lock seemed to be on everything at that Y, I’d seen them all over, but this one ws very striking… posing in the bright sunny spot on the desk.

February: Taken on the way to work in North Attleboro, MA. The sagging half of the barn is gone, now. I actually took this with a friend in mind who needed to make a jigsaw puzzle out of a photo to demonstrate the capabilities of the photo lab she worked for.

March: three. Taken at Roger Williams Park Zoo. These are radiated turtles. I was at the zoo with Olivia for her visit, for some good photography subjects. Chosen for March because there are three of them.

April: Stepped out of my apartment door one day (in April)… immediately ran back upstairs, grabbed the camera, ran back downstairs and shot lots of pictures of the pretty flowering trees. The winds had blown most of these petals away in a matter of 24 hours. I might have been late for work that day… but it was worth it.

May: Waterfall just off the road in Yosemite. Very easy to miss, I just happen to be looking that way on the way out to our goal. Sarah missed it, so I took her back to it and surprised her on the way back.

June: Taken at the zoo that Sarah brought me to when I visited her in Chicago for the first time. The kids and the exhibits were moving pretty fast for such a low light condition, but I managed to come away with something that looked okay. Chosen for June because it was taken in June.

July: Taken at a beach at Big Sur during our southern road trip from San Francisco. Wish I could’ve taken more pictures on the Pacific Coast Highway, but in order to get to this beach in time for sunset shots, we couldn’t really stop too many times. Chosen for July because it was taken in July.

August: Moon Bear at the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, RI. There were a lot of foggy, plastic windows to view the animals through, but the rocks were ow enough and I was tall enough to grab this shot without the blurry plastic between us. Chosen for June because it was taken in June.

September: Former mill/factory in Putnam, CT (or somewhere between N Grosvenordale and Putnam). It was quite a landmark, as route 12 had to zig zag around it. Definitely a place where I had stopped and snapped off shots when I was in high school… but then I drove by it again, after not having traveled route 12 for a while… and all that was left of the mill was the smokestack and the tower… and a lot of nice lue sky in between.

October: The Sutro Baths ruins, in San Francisco were such an interesting place to wander around with a camera. None of the pictures really captured the huge feeling that place left you with, but some of them were pretty neat, anyway.

November: Crunchy. While Olivia was in Woonsocket, we were lucky enough to get breakfast at the “shiny diner.” One of their specialties was this yummy dish, called Crunchy French Toast. Essentially, just french toast with cornflakes all over it… but so good. I grabbed Olivia’s camera to take this shot, as I didn’t have mine with me.

December: Taken at the teen center in North Attleboro, MA. These cookies, made from Nutter Butters and melted white chocolate, with mini chocolate chips, mini m&ms, red sprinkles and white chocolate chips, were a popular holiday project for the kids. Everyone who helped out took a small plateful home with them to contribute to their family’s after dinner treats.

In other news, the Ropes season is almost over… and then I go to Chicago! Yay! I’ll spend a week doing some job scouting, while I’m there and then we’re gonna go to Florida for the week of Thanksgiving… err, most of it. It’s like two vacations in one! Then I’ll come back here and finish packing things I need… and storing things I don’t need right away… and figuring out whether or not to trash all this extra furniture. I’ll have a lot more time to get through this packing process when I come back, I’ve been working just about every day, lately. After the super double vacation, I’ll just have the occasional Teen Center hours. Speaking of the teen center, time to get ready for work…

I’m hoping to add to the temptation for Olivia to make the trek up here while she’s visiting her parents in PA for two weeks. That means I should get crackin’ on the cleaning. I’ll start as soon as I get home, I guess. There are already tentative plans to go see Mark play some music up in Maine… How quickly plans come together! Sarah B, our other hostess/food guide in San Francisco is coming out this way next week, too… I doubt that she’d be into Scrabble, but I told her that if she needed a break from kicking her Dad’s ass, that she should call me. I might be really busy next week! Sweet!

Pictures from San Francisco are up, by the way. If I find my discs, I might take some screenshots of the video games I was talking about… but, probably not for a while, cause that would distract me from cleaning. It was such an amazing trip. Sarah is coming out this way in about a month and I can’t wait! The month will fly by, I think; Hopefully all the cleaning and other people visiting and work will keep me busy and distracted.

And I have a working 35mm camera, now. A Spotmatic F, the camera I learned to shoot on. I haven’t finished my first roll of film, yet. I’m hoping it turns out ok and the camera is in perfect working order. It seems to be, but I won’t know until I get the roll developed. It’s been fun getting used to it again… I have to sort of save it for special occasions. The digital is so much quicker to pull out and use and get a decent shot… but, that’s it, just decent. This camera makes me want to shoot quality, which is not to say my digital does not, but it also makes a nice quick point-and-shoot.

I also got hooked on a new website… threadless … many of you may know it. It’s a site with an ongoing T-Shirt design contest. You can design T-Shirts and submit them into the contest and you can rate other peoples’ submissions. There’s also a point system that gives you credit towards the purchase of the winning designs if you refer a sale or send in a picture of yourself in a purchased shirt. There’s also a “blog” section where you can discuss current submissions or winning designs or anything at all, it seems. You can see a couple pictures of me in shirts I’ve purchased in my profile there. This site has finally pushed me to learn to use Photoshop and Illustrator a little better. If a clever T-Shirt idea strikes me, I think I’ve gotten good enough with the filters and features to take a picture and convert it into something that can be submitted. I’m enjoying the whole process. [Ooh, they're having a sale this week... go buy stuff using my links above, thanks]

So, April was good to me. In the spirit of the rally I just got back from, I hope you are all doing well and know that I love you… back to vegging out and recovering from the weekend.

iPod died; Called the AppleCare number and went through some attempts to recover it by pushing certain button combinations… none of them worked. So I went to the Apple store in Braintree and they hooked it up to their machine and officially declared it dead. Then they gave me a new one. I’m cleaning up my iTunes library a bit, in preparation for loading the new iPod from scratch. While I’d like to blame the failure on the iGrip sticky pad in my car failing to hold the iPod and it flying off the dash to its doom… that simply isn’t the case. The sticky pad actually works really well.

I decided, today, that I probably will move over to the new web host, at least with most of the sites. I might as well leave something here… since it’s paid for as a “Lifetime” account. The price seems more than reasonable and I think I can pull it off with very little downtime, if I use some of my alternate domains to set up temporary mirror sites. Hopefully, you won’t even notice the difference… unless the upgrades add some new features, or force me to lose old ones.

On Monday, we had our first practice for the new band and I had a good time. The people are really nice, it should be a lot of fun. The writing part is always kind of tedious for me, especially in a really loud, full band, situation. Hopefully we can get together in a slightly more quiet setting soon, so I can actually start writing parts and remembering them.

From the girls moving out… to the guys moving in… to the guys moving out… it has been a revolving door down in Woonsocket. It’s never really been a stable place, but this is a lot of people in and out, around me, in one year. It’s been quite difficult, especially financially. But Sara has proven to be a great roommate, and hopefully the revolving door has stopped spinning for a while.

Early in the year, I felt some general dissatisfaction with my job, at least parts of it, and left the after-school day care, probably for good. Again, probably not a good financial move, as the position had pretty steady hours. It also put me in a weird position with some of the people I enjoyed working for (i just wasn’t enjoying the work). But the teen center is a good position, too, and I definitely enjoy it as much or more than the asdc. And I still have the team building/ropes and Andy to look forward to in the good weather.

These changes and general dissatisfaction with things in the winter led to a change in my overall lifestyle… by the spring, I was totally immersed in hanging out with friends as much as possible and “living.” Seriously, I cut my hair… this was drastic. I even rekindled an old love… but that didn’t really end up going so well. And what I thought was the logical course of action, going back to my old kind of lifestyle, didn’t go so well, either. So I found myself stuck in this foreign mindset and unable to focus very well. It was pretty depressing. I’ve started to be OK with where my head is at now, though, and have, at least, stopped agonizing and trying to figure it all out all day.

A bunch of stuff happened musically. I started getting into new music and rediscovering old music with the help of my Sirius radio. It’s been fun to really dig into artists’ catalogs and soak it all in. I did a lot of playing this year, too. Snakes was pretty active and when the guys moved in, I was involved in the beginnings of a new musical project with them, called Das Happening. Playing was fun and was really fun when I injected that does of “live a little” into my life. One of the reasons I wanted to do that was to try to recapture how fun it used to be when I played in Just For Sundae, back in the day. Unfortunately, with that breakdown and the lack of focus afterwards, playing was really difficult and not fun, because I couldn’t devote enough focus to it to do it as well as I wanted to… so I stopped playing. I dunno if, or when, I’ll be able to enjoy playing again.

The bands were not the only thing that was difficult to deal with because of my weird state of mind… I was definitely not in the best mental state when my Dad’s condition sent him into a coma and eventually took his life. Fortunately, there was a lot of family around, but I don’t feel like I was very helpful to any of them, the way that they were for me.

Those are the major events. Throw in the usual car troubles, computer breakdowns & hard drive failures, web host problems & web site moves/rebuilds, financial woes, blog-hopping, making a couple new friends & reconnecting with some old ones and you have my 2005. I’ve never really thought of the new year as a time to start over, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a year with so much stuff I’d rather just put behind me and forget about, either. Bring on 2006.

Even with the bigger monitor on Death_Machine, I find myself sitting on the floor instead of the bed, for a better angle and no trouble reading the smaller text… so I set out on a quest to find one of thos cushions with the arms… or maybe a bean-bag chair… but I have found nothing at the actual stores. I tried Target and Wal-Mart, which have a bunch of cool things on their websites, which they apparently don’t carry in the store stock. I’m tempted just to go to Best Buy and buy one of those ridiculous looking gaming chairs.

I have replaced my webcam… another holiday related gift. So the cam site will be online more often, unless I find a suitable home-grown replacement to host at the efdisaster server.

Also, some of you have noticed that when I imported some of the old entries I also imported some of the old comments. So you may have an account on my site and not even know it. Lemme know if you’d like to use an already existing account to comment on future or past posts and I’ll get you the info to reset your password and such.

My sister bought herself an iPod. I’m at her house now, helping her get music on it. My cousin has 14G worth of music on his MP3 player, so we’ve got them both plugged in and the songs are all transferring over. It seems like it’s gonna take forever, but she’s excited, to get the thing almost half full. My cousin, however, is asleep… my mom looks like she’s sleeping, too. We ate a bunch of good christmas dinner leftovers, and I think we’re all feeling a little sleepy.

Mom’s side of the family usually gives me money and we do a stocking thing, where everyone gets a bag full of interesting, but cheap, little gadgets and doodads. Today, I got a couple gifts, and wasn’t really expecting anything. When I stopped by the teen center to fill out my time card, there was a present under the tree for me… a nice long sleeve Y shirt, which I’m wearing now. And then here, I got a gift from my sister which I am very excited about: . I think I was the Greatest American Hero for at least two halloweens in a row. My mom made my costume for me. I loved that show as a kid.

Now, I think I’ll find a map website to find an interesting route home, ’cause the movie is about to end and I think people will start heading out soon… if they ever wake up, that is.

Speaking of cameras, I decided that I’m going to use my webspace to host more of my full size photos. We’ll see how long it lasts… All I’ve really done since the hard drive crash is take some random shots at the teen center, but I’ve put them up in the Work-related section of the gallery. I should really take some pictures, now; They’re building gingerbread houses. I’m rebuilding the computer that magically resets itself back to it’s original installation. I figured out how it’s been doing it and I’ll work on disabling that later, but for now, I’m updating it and getting all the correct software on it

Life has been getting easier to deal with, for the same reason it did when I dropped half my web host customers. And it’s gotten easier in the same way it did when I stopped playing in the bands. It’s gotten easier because I’m not doing it. I’m not leaving the house for anything but work. Even the trip down to Warwick was really so that I could get the replacement drive and spend all weekend in the house, filling it back up with all the music I lost with the old drive. I could’ve had it delivered today, instead.

I went back to work today, after this incredibly lazy weekend… and a problem happens with one of the computers there at the end of the night… I start to freak out. I know I can’t handle it, and I look at the clock and breathe a sigh of relief, because the doors are closing in three minutes. I can shoo them all out and try to deal with it later. Then I get home and find myself in some social situations, albeit, online social situations, that I haven’t been in for almost a month… and I can’t handle them. And the computer starts lagging, and I can’t handle that. I can’t help but be drawn to this idea that giving up/shelling out the cash is the answer. I find myself giving in to these thoughts more often than not: “Buy the drive to replace the old one. Close the teen center, now; Put a sign on the computer and call it broken. Don’t say that you want to hang out sometime, even though you do. Let Mom help you replace your car. Send your computer in for repair. Go to sleep…”