Tag Archive for 'teens'

Page 2 of 4

Happy May Day

Published on May 1, 2006 in Photo and Work. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

April continued to bring me lots and lots of good stuff. I just spent the last weekend with teens at a rally out in Connecticut. The rallies are really fun experiences and always reinforce my desire to work with teens all the time… this’ll probably give me the motivation to pursue a real position at the Y. They’re also the kind of events that make me grateful for the kind of life I have… that I have some really good friends and I know what I want in life. These kids are all great kids, but some of them had some real trouble making friends and trusting people and have no idea what they want in life… and a good number of them made progress with those things over the weekend. That was fun to see… you wanna see it? look.

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.

recovery and possible improvement in web, work and music stuff

Published on March 23, 2006 in Music, Web and Work. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

One of the other Teen Directors from the Y came into the Teen Center while I was working and suggested that I go for Andy’s old position. Being the Adventure Director would put me in charge of Ropes, Ski Club, Earth Service Corps and probably LITs (next summer, since she’s been given that responsibility for this summer). I might be able to handle that. The consant hours and possibility of Benefits are really enticing. She’s gonna put some feelers out for me, and have the guy who’s covering most of Andy’s ropes stuff call me. I also found out that the sports director doesn’t have a college degree, so that makes me a little more hopeful about getting a position like that.

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.

72 hours of head-pain

Published on January 24, 2006 in Random Thoughts. Closed Tags: , , , .

… coming up on 72 hours, realizing that my headache actually started when I was in Worcester on Saturday night. It had gotten dramatically worse by Sunday morning and has been fluxuating between “so bad I can’t move” to “I can watch TV and can probably drive somewhere if I have to.” I almost gave in and took some painkiller/medicine before work today, but I couldn’t find any in any of the places I thought there was some. Work today has been rough, but there’s only an hour and a half left, so I’ll probably survive. I’m starting to think it’s more than a headache, though, because everything I’ve eaten today has tasted funny and the occasional sneeze knocks me flat on my ass with head-pain and some extreme tightening-chest-type pain.

Teen Center/Skating Rink

Published on January 20, 2006 in Work. Closed Tags: , .

no heat at work again. Yesterday, the firemen were up on the roof for a while, and the gas company truck was parked outside and concerned neighbors were coming in and asking if it was safe to be around… and then they turned all the heat in the building off. It’s still off. It’s freakin’ cold in here. I do get to leave for a while, to go to some meeting up at the Y. I was selected to be on the FISH committee… a sub-committee of the “Whatever It Takes” committee. The Y tries to be the best employer it can be with all these programs about keeping the members happy and the staff happy and I believe this is some sort of combination of the two, which will probably involve the famed FISH video (Play, Make their Day, Be Present, Choose Your Attitude, Throw Fish Around, etc.)… I can’t think of another reason why they’d call it the FISH committee. Either way, I get out of this icebox for at least an hour… be subjected to a FISH video and then probably come back here.

my thumbs hurt

Published on January 18, 2006 in Computers, Family & Friends and Random Thoughts. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Every once in a while, I break out either the nintendo, super-nintendo or the emulators and PC gamepads and go a little crazy playing some classic video games. This winter, it seems, instead of picking out some new PC game to become addicted to or obsessed with, I’m doing the classic game thing. The sudden resurgence of interest in the systems at the teen center played a small part in this, but what really did it was meeting a new and wonderful person named Alicia. She invited me to her place to play nintendo… and we did, and I brought my laptop with its emulators and thousands of games. It was a fantastic evening. When the games grew old we watched TV, popped in the Clerks cartoons, watched Wedding Crashers, etc., etc. into the wee hours of the morning. I haven’t had such a huge amount of fun and wonderful company in months.

Something else I’ve been avoiding

Published on December 30, 2005 in Family & Friends, Music, Random Thoughts and Work. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

The year is ending. This has been sort of a disaster of a year for me and I’ve been reluctant to try to sum it all up. I guess now is as good a time as any though, so I can’t be accused of waiting until the absolute last minute.

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.

avoiding the inevitable

Published on December 29, 2005 in Computers, Random Thoughts and Work. Closed Tags: , , .

Work is going well, right now… but as I mentioned, already, it’s mostly because the hours are light and the teen center supervision is very easy work. I’m trying not to think about how hard things are going to be when the Team Building season comes back. Do I attempt to do it all again? Do I drop some hours at the teen center? Or do I drop it all and find some easy, mindless job? I dunno. I feel bad avoiding this train of thought, but I think it would get me depressed, if I dwelled on it. The longer hours I’ve had this week, due to the school vacation, is what made me start thinking about this.

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.

recovering from the holidays

Published on December 27, 2005 in Computers, Family & Friends and Web. Closed Tags: , , .

The monitor switch is complete! I feel much better with this monitor on this machine (where it originally came from, sort of)… it’s crisp and clear and I can read it from my bed. And if I can’t, I just use Microsoft’s new magnify thingy. The new display on the Mac is wonderful as well. Now I’ve got to decide what to do with this blurry Dell monitor… it does ok with video, just awful for text. Maybe there’s a good use for it at the Teen Center.

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.

getting presents for yourself is fun

Published on December 26, 2005 in Computers and Family & Friends. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , .

Using Death_Machine, while Nibbler, the laptop, is out for repair has been kinda fun… but I realized that the monitor I have on the machine now, while it has been great for video, isn’t just at a lower resolution, but has some blurry sections. So I went out and got a new monitor for the Mac and will move its monitor to Death_Machine…

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.

It must be contagious

Published on December 13, 2005 in Computers, Photo, Random Thoughts and Work. Closed Tags: , , .

While I spend time on my computer here at the teen center, and it starts to lag again… I realize that this poor machine has caught my affliction. It can’t handle it, it freaks out, and becomes incredibly ineffective. Kinda like me at times. What else is this going to spread to? Is my car gonna give up? Is my camera gonna shut down?

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

woot