Weird Dreams and a bit of a downer

Two weird dreams lately.

One had me driving around a rural area of lush green hills. Drove up a back mountain road and wandered around some private property apparently owned by big business. Hid from heavy construction equipment in use and then a car with two college aged girls and then found my way into some sort of factory or something. Saw three people there I use to know: two former co-workers from Toys R Us and this kid from middle school. They were employees looking to punch out and go home. I was trying to escape now stuck in the place. I set off some sort of alarm because I didn't punch out before trying to exit a door. Don't remember much else.

The other had to do with my internet friend Sara. Apparently I was driving through some local area (the green brisge by Monsanto hill Route 141) on either a motorcycle or bicycle. I decided to drive to Sara's place. In reality she lives somewhere in Illinois and I live in Massachusetts. In the dream she either lived or moved to Connecticutt. I also knew where she lives in the dream and I don't in real life. There were some young kids, maybe 8 to 10 years old in the street on bicycles and we either raced around or they chased me around until I finally stopped at Sara's 2 or 3 story house and entered. I can only remember really one or two rooms. I think it was stairs up into a sort of dining room or miscellaneous room. I followed some girl that was one of Sara's lesbian lovers into a living room. This room was rather clasutophobic with two or three HUGE chairs that were more like beds. And I think there may have been a bed or two also. And then there was a small gaming table about the size and shape of a bench with a chess/checkers boards laminated into it. I saw Sara for a second and she headed off somewhere. In this living room where two older guys. I think one was her step-dad and another a friend of his. They seemed fairly bed-ridden staying in the room a lot to play games or watch TV. The living room led to a small kitchen where I think Sara went and then there was some young guy there. Don't know who he was. And connected to the kitchen and connected to the living room making a sort of circular three room pattern was another dining room. On a messy table were tons of gaming figures. Something similar to the Heroclix game but a little larger I think. They also had an armorie there filled with the figures. They all belonged to the two men and Sara said something about not using her's anymore. Apparently I either played this game or at least wanted the figures and two guys in the living room started talking about trading figures with me. There was some other stuff in the dream but I forgot it.

The downer stuff. I would like a Bengal Cat kitten with marble pattern. Here's the problem. They run $600 to start and go up from there. I've never paid for a cat in my life. So this is a huge adjustment for me. Everytime I think I want to buy one I stop and go 'but's it's $600+ (usually higher!)!'. At this time I don't expect to buy one. But you never know. Then again, there's no over-time at work. But they do seem really neat. But I could buy so many other more needed things,...etc.

Meh, Can't buy one for now. :(

AT last,...the website!

http://futureworkscomics.com/

Yep. I had purchased this domain last week or so but hadn't really delved into it. It's kinda basic for now as I get my design feet again. I haven't done HTML in years so I used a template offered there to get things started. I plan to add more to it over time and make it a cool site with preview pages and other images.

I also plan to add some PayPal buttons so that the book can be purchased directly from me if the buyer opts for that. I'll throw in some props of some sort - maybe an autograph or a sketch or something to make it worthwhile.

It's a small start for now, but most great things don't start off as instant hits.

A new week

And so it is. Not sure if it's off to a good start though.

The pain and sadness over Elvis's (my inheritted pet cat) death has dulled to a low pain. I still wait for him to start walking under my feet waiting for me to feed him after I get out of bed. And the empty spot where his food dishes were will always be a sad reminder.

Sunday I wasn't up for much. I was still fairly depressed over Elvis's traumatic death and it was raining. Because I hadn't really slept at all Saturday and having been awake pretty much since friday afternoon, I slept for about 12 hours - Sat 10:30pm to Sunday morning 10:30am. Got up, did a whole lot of nothing and went back to sleep for another couple of hours. From 1pm to 4pm I think. Well, I haven't slept since then. I tried and stayed in bed from 3am to 6:30am this morning but I said to hell with it and got up and showered. I figure I'll crash and burn either late this morning or early afternoon. As it is, I can feel a slight throb of headache in my head. Nothing really painfully, just kind of a pressure residing behind my eyes.

When I was awake yesterday I wasn't really in the mood to do much. I was playing fairly subdued music to cope with my loss. Mostly instrumental stuff. Pink Floyd's Darkside of the Moon which I find to be one of the most relieveing albums I've ever heard, and then some Led Zeppelin played by an orchestra and finally the music from the movie Alien. My brother heard it and thought it was Star Wars. I then mentioned I felt like watching the movie Alien as the music played. He was bored and didn't want to spend the night on the computer so he left almost immediately to rent Alien. It's one of his favorite movies to and neither of us had seen for awhile.

I drew some more after that. Nothing major though. Played some Call of Duty 2 on-line til 3am and then decided I'd better try and get some sleep. After 2 hours of nothing I read an X-Men comic and tried again. I waited for my brother to leave for work so that I wouldn't bother him and then got up.

And here I am. It's another dreary, rainy day. I don't really have to much planned for today except for food shopping, cashing last week's paycheck and eating supper at my parent's. There are some things I probably SHOULD do but they can wait if I don't feel up to it or end up napping part of the day away.

I have been thinking about getting a new cat because I know eventually I will. I like cats to much not to have one. I'm leaning towards a marble Bengal cat but they are so expensive that I really shouldn't. We'll see.

Shitty week

Like the previous entry stated, I was rejected by Diamond Dist. - pretty much the only game in town for distributing my comic across America.

It also looks like one of my internet friends has either had her PC go belly up or give up the internet. Because of college and a new love interest and community interests, I'm figuring she gave up the internet. It probably is for the best but I miss her wackiness and wrestling knowlegde.

And today my cat died. He had been having his troubles so I took him to the vet today. He wasn't eating much, looking like he was half-dead, trouble breathing. Turns out he had congestive heart failure - fluid in the lungs essentially. And the trip to the vet was too traumatic for him and he had a stroke or a heart attack and died in front of me in the vet's arms. Pretty much, the whole vet incident killed him. It was the right thing to do - to bring him to the vet - but I'm sorry for Elvis (the cat) because he was really scared and couldn't breathe and was meowing and even moaning and he was never vocal. I know he was going to die knowing the conidition he was in but I just wished he had gone more comfortably rather than having a bunch of strangers holding him and pricking him with a needle trying to get a blood sample. It wasn't a very happy final image for Elvis.

I inheritted Elvis when my brother's friend passed away unexpected. There was really no one else to take the cat in so my family did. I then took the cat when I bought my brother's house. Otherwise, there would have been 4 cats at my parents' place.

I didn't realize Elvis was 13 years old when I took him. I actually thought he was a young cat. He was kind of a pain in the ass at times throwing up by gorging himself on food. For awhile I was considering giving him away because of the throwing up. But I changed his diet and that stopped.

He was a neat looking cat all gray. I used to love the way he would come to the doorway when I would come home, look at me, seemingly shrug like 'oh, it's you', and wander back to wherever he was laying. Today when I came home from burying him he wasn't there to do it. And that's when I do and will continue to really miss him. He wasn't very affectionate until he started getting really sick at the end and he hated to be held. But I was very fond of him and miss him already.

The vet did say that on the x-ray you couldn't even see his heart because of all the fluids in his lungs. So Elvis was going to die shortly. I just wish it had been easier on Elvis. So I buried him at my parents' place and I hope he's been reunited with his true owner - my brother's friend. And I hope I did well as Elvis's caretaker until his time of death.

See ya little buddy. I miss you a lot.

Rejected!

Yep, rejected. Diamond Distributions has decided not to carry my comic, The Necropolis Chronicles.

So what does this mean? It makes selling the book that much tougher. Diamond is not the end all of comics distribution. Had the comic made it into Previews, their monthly catalog, it would have to try and stand out against literally something like 300 to 500 other pages of comics. A daunting task. But it would have be nice nonetheless.

There are still on-line comic stores, overseas sales (and for some reason, I really the chances of the comic overseas) and conventions. Some will be tougher than others. There's also the possibility that the comic will never succeed financially. But instead, it might be a springboard to a job in comics maybe at a bigger name publisher.

I'm not stopping though just because Diamond said no. I'm continuing on with the companion issue and will continue coming up with stories for Jaina and crew. A webcomic may be used in the future also.

On the good side of things, today is payday at work. Pretty much the bulk of my check is already gone but bills should be fully paid up for the month leaving to the whole next paycheck at my spending descretion.

Sleep is all screwed up. But that should clear up some. I told my buddys at the comic store I won't be helping them anymore except in emergency situations. Wednesday was a prime example of why I've made this decision. Tuesday I got home at 7:30am. Started feeling a migraine coming on so I immediately went to bed. Got up somewhere around 4 or 4:30pm and felt kinda shitty. So Tuesday was kind of a waste.

Wednesday I got up a little after 8am. Didn't want to get up but I had made the commitment to help 'pull books' at the comic store on my Wednesdays off. Wednesday is also trash. Because of stormy weather I waited til the morning. Also needed to shower and to feed my poor cat who looks HORRIBLE. He eats, but he's skin and bones. I don't get it. So I ran out the door around 8:55am with no breakfast.Got to the store and helped out for 3 hours. Made a quick stop to pick up cat liter supplies and then back home for around 1pm maybe a little after. Read some comics and passed out for several hours. Went to parents for dinner. Almost 7pm before I got home. Day pretty much gone. But then despite feeling tired around midnight, I never fell asleep. I finally fell asleep around dawn to the tune of birds chirping. Got a whopping 5 hours of sleep. If I hadn't crashed and burned in the late afternoon I would have been okay and gotten to sleep at a more normal time. So this is exactly why I'm giving up pulling book at the store.

Top Flite may have shown it's true colors if the heresay is true. They fired three guys from my shift. All three had some sort of criminal record. The word amongst the workers is that the company knew that these guys had records - at least one had a felony - and hired them on for a tax break and then fired them after it came close to hiring them on from temp status to full time employee. If this is true then I really don't care if people steal from Top Flite. I'm usually honest to an extreme but if a company is going to fuck with people's lives just for a tax break then fuck the company. In a way, it's not like the company's killing itself to help us workers. It's sending equipment to China where workers have shit for rights and get paid cents by the hour. It also saves a ton of money not having to pay for health care insurance.

Lego is no better. Lego had it big US plant just down the road. Well, now it's going to be quite a ways down the road. As in Mexico. They are closing the plant here including some big ass wharehouse the company just built about 10 years ago and moving. The offices will stay here. People in Lego's home country are losing their jobs to the Mexicans too. I think it was as high as 600 to 800 employees. Yet somehow, I really doubt Lego is going to slash prices. They'll save I don't know how many millions and probably record record profits but prices will stay the same I bet.

Hmmn. Guess I'm a little pissed today.

a quickie

Yep, just a quickie because I need to get to bed!

Put a lot of pen to paper at work tonight working out details for a Necropolis Chronicles story I want to write. I was having some difficulty trying to decide what direction to take the story in but once I started jotting down details and ideas it all seemed to wrap up nicely. The story isn't finished and there's a lot to further detail but I conisder what I did to be huge strides towards making the story work.

I am quite pleased with myself at the moment.

LOL!

The Teller

Yup, the teller. Or more precisely, the new credit union teller. I'm not sure what this fellow's problem is and I have no real issue or beef with him. But he just sucks at his job. He's a young dude - maybe 23 or something. And he's been in training - for what seems like well over a month. It might be only a couple of weeks but something's up with this guy.

Anyway - I go in at 1:01pm and I'm the only person there. I get helped out right away. There is a sign saying teller in training. This guy did my last check or so maybe 10 days ago. So I do the same thing as last time. I explain that I am doing a couple of things: putting cash into 2 seperate accounts. One is checking, one is savings. After that, I am cashing my paycheck. From that I am putting money into the same two accounts - the savings and then the checking account. I get what's left over.

Well, it took this guy about 12 minutes to figure everything out. He also tried to credit my account with an extra $10. Then he had to take that money out. The whole time I'm watching him I can see his face being totally 'what am I doing?' because he's pushing buttons and looking at another cashier with a pleading look. Then when she engages another worker in conversion he goes back to staring at his computer screen with a knitted brow and a pinched look. So I knew something was up. So I made sure to check all my receipts and that's when I noticed he put too much money into my accounts. Seemed pretty cut and dry to me - from $300 he was to put $150 into the savings account and the other $200 into a checking number. Maybe the hitch that they are under two seperate account numbers got him. I don't know.

Like I said, other than some minor annoyance, I really have nothing against this guy. But from my experiences with him so far, he's a suckless teller. He just doesn't seem to get it. And when I get any of the women working there they handle things in a fraction of the time. I don't know how many hours this guy works, but he didn't seem to improve in the least since the last time I saw him. And in all seriousness that really was like 10 days or more ago.

Got embarrassed today. I was browsing through my local JC Penny's department store. I was there to buy underwear. Yes, I DO buy underwear. I am not your average male! LOL! Didn't see a whole lot I liked and the 6 pack of briefs I glanced at was more than I budgetted for. Here's where I got embarrassed. I wanted to look at a rack of underwear but this young woman employee was pricing it there. And then her friend came over and the pair started chatting as they worked. I waited a sec and then said the hell with it and left. I didn't want to be seen buying underwear. LOL! What a prude I can be. I did buy a 3 pack some ways away from the girls though. Haven't tried them out. Sometimes buying underwear is really hit or miss comfort-wise.

Had to log in under a different e-mail for my AOL account than I normally do. And I noticed I had like 4 or 5 messages from MySpace. I was able to see 2 I think before the other links to MySpace just wouldn't load up. Not only that, now I had trouble trying to load up other websites. This really sucks because a couple of the people that help me put the comic together often blog there. I'd like to read their stuff but I get maybe 1 log entry and then nothing else loads. On occassion a restart of my PC helps but c'mon - a restart just to look at multiple blog entries. Forget it. So I have an extremely low opinion of MySpace.

I'm sending the comic out to Marvel tomorrow. I may have a slight 'in' there so my comic might be shown to editors. We'll see. I'm not getting my hopes up but I'd be dumb not to try this 'in' out.

Later.

Work, work, work, and oh yeah,...more work.

That's all I've been doing lately. :(

That is all.