"...Collect $200 if you pass Go."

Got my first paycheck from Top Flite yesterday. I was quite happy with the results. Seems they also threw in 12 hours of holiday pay since I was hired on a contract holiday. Where I'm not sure is if this extra 12 hours bumped me into a new tax bracket and took a good chunk of that money. I found at my old job that if I worked 10 hours of OT I would get a sizeable amount of that money. But if I worked 11 to 18 hours OT it would only result me taking home about $6 of the $21 an hour I earned.

In any event, the increase in pay overall helps me pay off the trademarking process that much faster.

Weird dreams today. One Iwas back in school, maybe high school while also working at my current job. It was a story-telling class where we would lok at a very well drawn, colorful picture and have to come up with a story and background info on the spot. I kept falling asleep and getting called on for it until I finally blew up at the teacher and walked out. Weird stuff. The book full of pictures though was really awesome. Really colorful and terrificly painted pictures.

There was something else minor I was going to write but I forgot. :(

The book is up for sale!!!!!

http://www.indyplanet.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=37&products_id=67

Yep! The Necropolis Chronicles Book 1. This combines issues one and two into one 48 page monster! Get the story that starts it all off without having to worry about needing to find either of teh two issues seperately.

Highly excited about this. And just wanted to give props to all that have helped me out on this. The crew: Jenn, Jason, Wendy, Tori, Sara, and Elodie and also Alexandra and Kristy!

And thanks to Raven Gregory for helping me out.

From great to shit

The weekend was quite enjoyable. Saw my friends on Saturday and hung with them for about 6 to 8 hours. Finished up the 1st season of The Sopranos and scored well playing Call of Duty 2.

Sunday was a terrific day too. More Call of Duty 2. I really enjoy this game. As I've said before, you just run around shooting the hell of out everybody and getting shot the hell out of too. Mindless video game violence is really fun! :)

Spent the bulk of the day with family at the parents. Terrific chow (Banana Cream Pie!) for Easter dinner followed by a game of Settlers of Cataan (winning always helps the enjoyment factor) followed by a couple of hours of The Great Dalmuti. Got to see my oldest brother who I haven't seen in about a month.

My fantasy baseball team rebounded during the weekend to win 7-3. Now I'm in 1st all by myself although I'm only one game ahead of 2nd place and it's a long season.

Monday? Not all that bad until I tried to write. I felt inspired and opened Microsoft Word. Typed for about fifteen minutes and went to save what I had as a precaution. So the fucking program crashes and I lost everything. For whatever the fuck reason, MicroFuckingSoft Word loves to lock up when I try and save. I haven't used the program for several months and forgot this. So the work I just typed up is totally lost. I'm so fucking pissed off I have no desire to try and write it back down. Why bother. The fucking shit fuck program will just lock again and I'll lose everything AGAIN.

And for whatever reason, I constantly get 'connection refused' at several different websites that I frequent. MySpace is one. It's such a disaster going there that I quit the fucking thing. And it's usually an effort just to connect to see my friends' blogs.

And now Yahoo Fantasy Baseball pulls this shit too. I rarely have an issue with Yahoo Mail but I usually have to spend a minimum of 10 minutes and about 10 tries to access my team to make the daily changes. I just get the same message again and again - 'connection refused'.

Clean out cache memory, empty cookies, you name. No better luck. What the fuck?

So yeah, right now, I'm fucking pissed. Can't you tell?

Fun at work,...well, not really.

Yeah. Work was only okay tonight.

Nazi Boy was there again tonight. The dude LIVES there. I guess he's all about money. You can make quite a bit of money at Top Flite if you cxan suck up a lot of over-time. There's a ton of time to work on my crew because 2 guys left for days and another girl is leaving for days also. And we have 3 people in a different department because of a huge order. So that leaves something like 7 to 8 slots of over-time people per night we're on.

So things are okay until break where I sit at a long table where two of my friends are and Nazi Boy with one of his co-workers working OT. My buddy starts asking me some football questions about how i thing teams will do this season. So I'm talking to him and one of the OT joins in here and there. So Nazi Boy hops in. No biggie because it's a table discussion until he starts shit with me. He raises his voice at me over me contention about the New England Patriots not picking up a certain field goal kicker and with his tone accusses me of being ignorant. His statement was 'Don't you watch football?' but it was all in his tone that I supposedly knew nothing I was talking about. So the insults started being hurled back and forth pretty fast after that. I was getting sick of his praise for the kicker in question and said 'then go suck his dick then' and it was even more downhill from there with everything being on a personal level. Break ended soon thereafter and we muttered back and forth to one another. Somehow I said something to the effect of his girlfriend not being able to please so he dropped into the forever high school 'I did your mom' or something to that effect. We traded a fewm more similar jabs and then were in seperate corners for the rest of the night.

I did think about things on and off for the rest of the night. And for awhile shortly after the confrontation I was fairly agitated. What I do know is that so far, out of about 10 or 12 people, one person says Nazi Boy is a good guy, another says he's okay if you put him in his place the all the rest say he's an asshole.

My buddy that I was having the original discussion with kinda made my day at the end of the shift. He said I handled myself pretty well. And he liked the 'go suck his dick' comment I made. And he brought it up without me saying anything about it so that was cool. Earlier I had told two people about the incident looking for praise. Actually, I didn't really get the praise and kinda got blown off as they changed the subject back to about work! LOL! Although both have admitted before that Nazi Boy is a dick.

On the way out of work I passed Nazi Boy. I think he was standing at his car. My friend/co-worker was with him. The car seemed to be having problems. I think it was a flat from what other people said. I think it was Nazi Boy's car. I don't see him to be one to help someone else. My co-worker that was with him is into cars and does help people though.

It's almost 8 am as I write this and I have a crappy decision to make. Stay up all day or sleep for about 3 and 1/2 hours and run down to the comic store to see my friends. I'm still a bit anxious over the confrontation with Nazi Boy so I'm probably going to play Call od Duty 2 until 9am to blow off some steam.

Later.

Well, ...crap.

Checked on-line the tracking of my comic. It's been rescheduled by UPS to arrive Tuesday the 18th instead of today.

:(

Had to work with Nazi Boy tonight. We had one of our guys change a mold (for making golf balls) and Nazi Boy immediately started making fun of the guy calling him a retard and stuff to another one of my co-workers. That co-worker didn't mention to Nazi Boy that he hates Nazi Boy. The co-worker being made fun of didn't hear anything and was none the wiser.

So another co-worker starts asking me about the 401k stuff because she's never been in one. So I'm telling her some stuff and Nazi Boy decides to grace us all with his boundless knowledge. Overall, he wasn't too bad tonight but he did make sure to drop in two hacks on me during the 401k conversation.

Nobody was sorry to see Nazi Boy go home.

Got hired by Top Flite. My official hire date is the 17th - Monday. That's when my new pay rate kicks in. Benefits start at the beginning of the following month (May). The orientation was quite boring as expected. But it was a neccesary evil. But one of my co-workers made it downright horrible. I don't know if he was overly tired or what. He's usually a little negative with his views but on Wednesday he was outright horrible. Everything was pretty much muttered under his breath for only us around him to hear but he wouldn't stop saying how Top Flite was treating us like shit, the company sucks, the benefits suck compared to the Army, blah, blah, blah. He did it through the whole 4 hour process. He even made sure we all knew that he walked out of a bar when they carded him. He's 27. Made his wife leave with him. She must've been happy because I think he said she was the one that wanted to go out.

I don't know. He just seems to find a confrontation with just about everybody. He hates the temp agency too. I haven't had any problems with them but according to him they got in his face, wanted to know his business, don't mail his paycheck out on time. While I still like the guy overall, I'm thinking he's his own worst enemy. He said he hates paperwork but that's pretty much been his whole career (including the Army) and what he plans on continuing in - paperwork. I don't know, I guess he's going to be fairly miserable in life if he keeps it up.

Looking forward to Easter. My mom's going to be making her usual awesome holiday meals. Now if I can just remember to bring Settlers of Cataan with me I'll have a great time.

Bleh. I'm really anxious to see the comic. Waiting til Tuesday really sucks.

Yikes! Already after 8AM. I need to get to sleep. Work's in less than 11 hours.

Multiple things of good news

My buddy Jason Embury who is the inker on issue two of The Necropolis Chronicles just got hired by Image comics to be the colorist on Shadowhawk. This is sweet news for Jason. Shadowhawk is the creation of one of the founders of image, Jim Valentino. I have to admit I'm quite envious of Jason at this time. :) Go, Jason!

Contacted one of my favorite comics writers to see what their page rate is. While I didn't think I had a chance in hell of hiring the person the possibility is there. The person has an exclusive contract until the end of the year and said to contact them then if I was still interested. They also said they have a 'sliding scale' meaning that they charge a little less for smaller indpendent guys. So this is fairly cool news in my opinion.

My fantasy baseball team won it's first game/match-up. In fact, score wise, I sorta slammed the other guy pretty good. The way it works is that you face off your opponent in 10 categories for the week. Some of these categories are home runs, wins, strike outs, etc. Your players amass stats for the week and when the week is over, whoever has the most combined points in a category wins that category. So while at one point I was down 7 to 1, my guys posted enough stats to eventually win 9 categories. While this is a drubbing, I barely beat the guy in most categories. So my team currnetly resides in first place with a 9 win, 1 lose record. Only something like 24 more weeks of compiling stats in bulks of 10. It's quite stressful fretting who to play and who to bench. But it is usually fun stress. It's much more involved than fantasy football which only really requires my atention about 3 times a week tops. Baseball is almost every day.

This Friday - April 14, I should get 100 copies of my comic The Necropolis Chronicles Book One. Book One is really issues 1 & 2 combined. I'm doing this for a couple of reasons rather than selling two seperate issues. the main focus is that comic sales drop usually by almost 50% after issue 1. I also wanted to have 2 full issues in the can ready to go. I really hate promising things and then not being able to deliever. That's why, for the moment, all other issues of the book have to wait. but hopefully not for too long because...

Good news #4:

Wednesday I go to get hired as a full time employee for Top Flite!!! It's taken them a month and a half over how long they said it would take to hire me but I'm really excited. It's a fairly big step up in pay for me. And because we work mandatory 48 hours every other week, that'll make the paychecks even fatter. It does mean I miss every other weekend because I'm working but for now, the sacrifice is definately worth it. Along with a decent employer comes benefits and a 401k plan. It'll be nice to have health coverage again. And while I have a Roth IRA, having a company drop in like 6% to my weekly deductions will help. And it's free money from the company.

So there you have, terrific news over the past fews days.

As always, I have some gripes but they are hugely overshadowed by the good. But I am getting sick of my sister calling for my brother (and quite frequently it seems) at 1pm in the afternoon. He's never home because he works daily until 3:30 pm. And it's essentially my 'middle of the night' when she calls on a work day. And she has a nasty habit of calling back within 10 minutes to add to the 20 second message that she just left! Ugh!

So the other day, after she calls twice within like 8 minutes and leaves two long messages, a street cleaner goes by the house - verrrrrry slllllloooooowwwwwwlllllyyyy.

And like I said, in the middle of my 'night'. Yeesh.

Messed up sleep this week but can't recall any dreams. :(
Didn't help that all three works days I woke with little time to shower, eat and make 'breakfast' (a bowl of cereal) before hustling out the door to work.

End of line.

Soprano things

Borrowed the first year of the Sopranos from my buddy. I've always wanted to watch these because I pretty much love all things mob related. And as I suspected, instant love for the series. My brother too, who watched the first two episodes with me.

Then I had a dream that night/this morning that I was looking around a junkyard/autobody place looking for mob evidence. It got weird when then had raccoons fighting something like a fisher. A fisher is sort of a small wolverine. The fisher was winning easily having killed something like 20 raccoons. It was kind of a bizarre dream.

Bought some Prismacolor Premier colored pencils. They don't give these things away. My 24 pencils packet nomally costs $30. I used a 40% off coupon to get them for like $18 and change. I want to try these out on the black Strathmore paper I have. If I get good with them I think I can make some really cool pictures.

Getting my ass KICKED in fantasy baseball this week. My pitching - which I thought would do well - is getting SHELLED! Gah. It's horrible. Not only did my staff get shelled, many of them got hurt. Two pitchers are out for a month possibly two. Another is out unti lApril 12. Another was sent to Triple A otherwise known as the minor leagues. Out of 8 categories that determine who wins week to week, I'm down 7 to 1. Guess I'm going to get my first lost this week.

Paid the bill for printing the comic. By the comapny's on-line promise, they should have the books printed within 5 working days of receiving payment. It'll be awesome to get the books soon.

Still haven't been hired by Top Flite. This really sucks because I can't neccessarily go forward with many plans because I don't have the money to proceed. The extra income I'll earn from Top Flite will provide that.

Read Ultimate X-Men trade paperback. It collects issues 1 thru 6. I really enjoyed these. Issues as of late (I think they are up to issue 48+) are a little hit and miss but the early ones were quite good. My only complaint is that major character development took place off-panel. Essentially, so and so and A and B become love interests in a single word balloon by a teammate stating that. I actually flipped back several pages to see if I had missed something.

So! If you like fights then get Ulimate X-Men trade paperback Vol 1. Unfortunately, you do have to fill in the blanks when it comes to character development.

Starting three days of 12 hour shifts tomorrow night so don't expect and big updates over the next couple of days.

another weird dream

Today's a standard 'back to work day'. By that I mean I get up around 10am do something til around 1 or 1:30pm and then go back to sleep until around 4:30pm. I do this because I usually can't sleep much past 11am and don't want to be up for 19 to 21 hours straight by being up from 11am to 7+am the next day because of work.

Today I had trouble getting back to sleep but I must've really been in a deep sleep or something. I feel really woozy even though I've been up since 5pm (it's now 5:39pm). Had a really weird dream to go along with the sleep.

There was some stuff before what I can recall but I just remember coming home from the neighbor's house at night. Upon getting to my parents' house (it'll always be 'home' as long as they are alive) my olderst brother was there and a family friend Lance. I could see someone back at the neighbor's house wandering around in their backyard. All I could see was a yellowish flashlight light. So the three of us decide to investigate. My brother grabs a lantern and walks to the side field to light it up behind some super thick bushes. We intend to sort of sneak down to the neighbor's backyard which is about an acre away. Then he opens a hidden trap down in the field and reveals an underground complex of tunnels filled with machinery. I'm talking stuff like turbines and grating and pumps and all sorts of other stuff. The place is a little clausterphobic - not a lot of room to walk.

My brother heads off in one direction as Lance and I look around. My other neighbor that has a three acre long driveway comes home. Or somebody drives up the driveway. Lance and I are able to get right up to the driveway via tunnels. Sorta like the Viet Con use to. I got out and hid in the darkness listening to voices. Some were my neighbors others were not.

Then the phone rang and the dream abruptly ended as I woke up.

Played D&D for about 12 hours on Sunday. 8 of pen -n-paper and another 3 or 4 on D&D On-line. Yeesh!

Monday was fairly low key. The only interesting things were that I watched RAW at my buddy's. And I also ordered 100 copies of The Necropolis Chronicles Book One (issues 1 & 2 combined) from an on-line printing service and sent the CD with digital files to them also. I figure they should get the disc by this Friday since they are in Florida and be able to review the files by Monday or Tuesday. Then Paypal payment and around business days later I should have my stuff shipped to me. That's the thought anyways. Hopefully I don't have the 6 month wait like I did with Comixpress.

Many o' things over the past couple of days

Whoo-hoo! Took my physical and drug test! I'm hoping this coming I'll be hired as a full-time employee for Top Flite. I did learn that I'll be making a little less than expected but it's still the most I've ever at a job and it's still really good pay. My brother keeps bitching it took him 3 years to make what I'll be making after only 2 and 1/2 months at mine.

The drug test sucked a bit. But it was my own fault. I was worried that I'd get the finger up the old exhaust port so I decided to drop a deuce before going to the appointment. I made sure to drink liquids to refill my bladder. Well, I didn't drink enough apparently. So instead of being in and out in 20 minutes - the physical was a joke - I was unable to fill the cup to the neccessary levels.

And they said I couldn't leave until they got a specimen from me. So I drank some more water and waited. Co-workers came, test, and left in the meantime. It was really annoying. The magazines sucked overall too. The doctor went to the convenice store and I asked her to get me a soda. Soda goes right through me. Okay, this time it took like half an hour. After awhile, I had to go. But another patient came in and I was told to wait. By that time, my legs were shaking and I must've looked like a crack-addict needing a fix! I had to really go! It felt like I was about to burst and have a blast of urine shooting from my pant leg like an out of control firehose!

As I passed the doc to piss in my cup she gave a good-natured 'halleuah' or however it's spelt. I had little problem filling the cup the second time. Maybe i should've overflowed it just to be an ass :)

So I took my nice warm cup and had it tested. No drugs. Considering that I don't do drugs, this was not a surprise. So I was finally able to leave the clinic. All in all, it took about 90 minutes including travel time out of my day.

Gah! Had to reload one of my biggest time killers - Call of Duty 2. I still very much like this game. It's great just to log on and kill people (and get killed by people) from across the world. It's just all types of mayhem fun!

Saturday I was somewhat surly. I got home from work at 7am and stayed up til 8am. Slept til noon-thirty and went to the comic store for Heroclix. My 'nemesis' showed up with his woman. As usual, he started in with the occassional bullshit comment. Well, I was quite tired and it pissed me off. He bascially accused me of cheating and I loudly responded so that every could hear me say - 'what are you, stupid?!' I'm sure it pissed him off. He immediately went to the judge for confirmation of what he was asking. by his thinking, he was correct, because of my honesty, his question never had to be asked in the first place.

Soon after, within minutes, my 'nemesis' started in on bitching at his girlfirend for asking him a question. She usually asks him if he's winning or losing. Considering that this guy makes sure to keep a record of his wins and loses at this particular store, he started in on her with - 'Stop asking me that. You annoy me when you ask me that when I'm playing.' There was a little more of the same from him. All I could think of was ' nice job, dickless, take it out on your girl because I pissed you off'. I do sort of feel bad for his girfriend. My buddy says there's something not right with her - like a bit of retardation. I don't know. She doesn't seem to be the brightest person but she seems to be a decent person. My nemesis gets really jealous if anyone talks to her. LOL! Sometimes we talk to her just to piss him off. LOL!

Played D&D today. Used my cleric going to become a paladin. Had fun with some role-playing and pissing off the other party members by not letting them kick open a dude's door when there's no need. Sometimes playing Lawgul good (law abiding citizen) can be quite a bit of fun.

My buddy had his centaur get killed. It was totally legitimate but my buddy still gets really upset any time his characters even come close to dying. He did his usual song and dance about the combat being unfair and that we're going to lose, etc,.etc,.etc. Well, only his character died. On some level, it is really fun to see him squirm because although he's a decent guy - in all things he's an expert and can do no wrong.

I think that's it for now.