Pissed at myself

So I'm home from work and winding down with some games of Call of Duty 2 on-line. I'm playing capture the flag with about 40 other people, 20 per side. I have a 98 ping which is pretty good conisdering most others are 150+ or a lot more. The leading killer has a 218 ping which is suppose to be bad. But I'm getting killed left and right by everybody and his brother.

Finally, we're playing a game with 1:17 seconds left and each side has captured the other's flag and running with it because you can't score without your own flag at it's base. I see my teammate with the opponent's flag get attacked so I run in and gun butt. And I got MY TEAMMATE. And I get killed immediately. Thus handing their flag back to them and they score the tying point because they have our flag already. Sigh. The game ends in a tie. We had the win and I handed it to the bad guys. I quit playing because of embarrassment.

Off to bed.

No blogging for a few days

Back to work tonight and tomorrow night and sleeping half the day on Thursday. Maybe I'll blog Friday if there's something to report. Then it's back to work Sat/Sun/Mon so expect this entry to be it most likely for the next 5 to 7 days.

Gah! Asleep until noon!

Blog 11/27/06


Whew, got up at noon today! Ugh!

Had a crazy dream. I can only remember snippets. It seemed like it was really long though. I was at Toys R Us for some reason. Can’t recall if I was working there. I leanred my friend the Angry Black Man aka Fred was really a demon in a human skin! He chose the Angry Black Man routine so he could get away with things. ???? I dunno.

While at TRU, I had to go to this thin, side store room that reminded me of the shelving area. It was totally cluttered with products and extra shelving everywhere. When I would walk by this on thing it would light up like a flash and I would feel almost a shock. I had to walk by it a couple of times and even grabbed demon Angry Black Man to ensure that it really was happening.

Sable from the WWE showed up for some reason at the store. I guess she was there for a personal appearance or something. She was in the breakroom with a bunch of employees hanging around her.

I then remember being at my parents’ house. Family and friends were there including my buddy Rob. Turns out him and I and some other dude that I can’t recall were going on a roadtrip to Texas. Not sure entirely why. Because of other things in the dream it may have been that I bought a house in Texas. It might have been that we were traveling performers or something and our next gig was in Texas.

So we start to take off when Sable shows up walking up the road. She had parked a short distance away in the driveway of a neighbor (the Baroney’s). So now, apparently I, Rob and this third guy (some little dude) were at least part of the WWE. Sable told us our next show was in Texas. So we were all going to Baroney Texas or something. We drove, Sable was flying down.

On the ride down we pitstopped at some place or small town. I think this may have been in Texas already. We pull up to this sort of church that seemed more like a hall or suburban hosting facility. We go in and some guy is in there. I want to say he was getting married but it was like him, some girl, I think his mom, and some older other church goer’s. The other church goers were out of sight. The guy starts in with some shit. I can’t remember what but I know I was pissed off by it. So I threaten the shit out of this guy who was taller than me but slim and skinny like me. I said something to the effect that my two friends and I were going to kick the shit out of him, tell the church goers that he beats his wife, something else, and that he fucked a donkey up the ass. LOL! But it seemed to work and this dude was all scared and didn’t give anybody any more grief.

We left that place and arrived at my new house. It was my standard favorite house. Most likely built around the late 1800’s, kind of a white farm house. But this place was pretty big. Two floors, probably something like 4 or more bedrooms, and the rooms in general were quite large and able to sit like ten people with plenty of space. It needed some work but was a solid house overall.

I found a large room near the road that seemed to be used as sort of a gathering or party room. It almost seemed like an addition that was finished but still put in use. The room suddenly had this giant bowl – essentially the bowl part of a toilet. And it was a toilet. And I had to go. I could feel a need to pee and also deuce. So I decided to deuce. I was a bit worried because there were lots of windows – 3 per wall or so and no curtains and cars were driving by maybe 10 outside the front wall. But I started to deuce anyways. So what happens? Two cars pull in and visitors pour out! LOL! In one car was my parents’ neighbor and his mom (the Jahns) and also my buddy Tom H. and his mom as he was suppose to travel to this place with us. I remember quickly pulling up my drawers and all of us in the party room sharing small talk. I kept asking all of them if they were delivering cocaine as a joke. I don’t recall much else of the dream.

Although my brother lives with me, I’ve barely seen him in days – since Thanksgiving night – 3 days ago. I saw him for maybe 5 to 10 minutes yesterday, that’s been it. I’ve been out of the house a lot and he’s been staying over his new girlfriend’s place pretty much every night. In fact, other than Thanksgiving, I don’t think I’ve seen him for more than an hour in over a week. And like I said, he lives here! LOL!

Played Magic the Gathering at my buddy’s Saturday. The guy that plays tournament style decks wasn’t there and I found it kind of fun because it was like old school for me. Our games literally lasted an hour or more. We all had time to get deep into our decks and play all sorts of stuff instead of being dead in five turns. Tournament decks are built for fast victories and that dude has a ton of the current power cards. Magic is still fun in tournaments but I always like a more relaxed atmosphere where it’s more about fun than just winning. And I think the other three guys felt that way on Saturday. One guy said he liked the oddball stuff I play because it makes you think differently about how to play the game. I was quite happy with that.

Looks like I’m going win both my fantasy football games this week. In Bob’s league I’m 6-5 and have beat the 2nd place 8-3 guy. His team stunk it up pretty bad. Actually, REALLY badly. My kicker scored more points than probably 6 of his guys combined. In Dwain’s league it looked like I was doomed by Tony Romo’s 5 touchdowns on Thanksgiving. But one of my running backs scored 4 touchdowns Sunday night and I’m now up by 35 points which is quite a sum. So I should win barring totally disaster. In Dwain’s league I’m 5-6 and Dwain’s 8-3. I still may have a chance to make the play-off’s in Dwain’s league and try and secure a third straight championship. We’ll see. I face a losing record opponent next week but that doesn’t mean much. I haven’t bothered to check my work league. I don’t really care about that league. Since it’s on ESPN instead of Yahoo where my real leagues are, I always forget about my work league.

Fantasy football between Dwain and I is fun because on Sundays we call each other up bitching and moaning about the day’s events. We always try to outdo one another in the sob story department. It’s really quite laughable but it’s fun. It’s laughable because we are both quite possibly the best at fantasy football among our friends yet the worst always happens to us. LOL!

Saturday was also Heroclix at the comic shop before Magic later that night. It was a fairly big tournament as my old nemesis returned bringing along his buddy and Cain and Abel showed up along with others.

My nemesis is this guy that I swear justifies his life through Heroclix. This guy lives and breathes ‘clix. He keeps tabs of his wins/losses. He has dice that ‘have mojo’ and he actually cried when his girlfriend mixed them up with other identical dice. Well, it turns out that his girlfriend was apparently cheating on him and they broke up after a number of years of going together. This after she use to say she waited for him and all this and that.

So Dwain sets it up that nemesis and I play each other. I ended up losing to him but I think I surprised him by killing off some of his dudes that I don’t think he expected to die. I actually expected to get squashed and wasn’t totally into the game because I was exhausted from staying up past 3 am the previous night but I did alright.

I eeked out a vicoty on points next and then faced Abel. I hadn’t met Abel before. I don’t know what his real name is but he’s this really tall dude with bad skin. His brother literally looks like Kane from the WWE and I think the kid likes it that way. Cain is a big dude like 6’4 or 6’5 and probably pushing 280. He’s bald and wears all black and wore fingerless gloves.

Abel had what I thought was a tough team but my dice got hot and I kicked the shit out of him. After a pick up game between me, Dwain and Elly I headed off to play Magic at TJ’s (see above).

My sleeping has been really bad lately. It’s mostly my own fault. I’ve been getting to sleep on a consistent basis of after 2:30am. And on two or three days I’ve woken up after only 4 hours sleep unable to get back to sleep. So I take a nap here and there to help out. Right now I feel rather drugged up. After the craziness of Sunday football and then two hours of frenzied combat in Call of Duty 2 on-line I couldn’t get to sleep until sometime after 3:15 am this morning. I woke up around 8:20am and said ‘no way, I’m staying in bed’. I guess I needed it as I didn’t wake up again until 11:45am. That’s when I forced myself out of bed.

So here I am at 1:54pm finishing up my blog after writing out some bills and checking some internet sites. The plan for the rest of the day is to get a lot less inking done than planned, clean the bathroom and go for Magic the Gathering at my buddy’s for 7pm to 11:30pm or so.

The end.

Been out of the house

I've been out of the house a lot over the past couple of days and it'll continue at least through Saturday.

Thanksgiving was great except for Tony Romo passing for five TDs. That sucked.

Some more minor stuff.

I survived my trip to the shopping mall today. I went to the Holyoke Mall in Holyoke MA. It's one of the bigger malls in MA I believe and easily the biggest in western MA. I headed out at 11am since none of the items I was looking for were door busters. Parking was a pain but I expected that so it didn't get me to worked up. The place was packed, I have to admit. Cops were there handling traffic so that went pretty well. By the time I left it wasn't much of a problem, pretty much like a busy non-holiday weekend. I almost missed getting a present for my niece but the employee I asked was great and found the last one of the item I was looking for. Prisma Colored pencils, a 48 piece set. Used a 60% off coupon to drop a Radiograph from $28.99 to $12 something or other. My mom's on limited income so it's a nice way for her to give my niece a somewhat pricey pen for a lot less.Man, I gotta stay out of Barnes & Noble. I love that place so much I always buy more than I intend to. But it was hard to pass up soft cover Marvel Masterworks books for $4.98 a pop. And if my young nephew doesn't like them, I can always read them since they're gonna end up at my house anyways since my brother lives with me! LOL!

Probably the only suckless thing that happened and it wasn't all that bad was that I was beat into an express 10 items or less by this girl. Not a big deal until the rest of her family took a place in line next to her afterwards so that I was suddenly dropped behind 3 more people. But things moved fairly quickly and it didn't add much time to waiting in line.I didn't see many problems and only one lady customer was kind of a jerk. The cashier waiting on me had a glitch with her cash register before cashing me out. It took maybe two minutes tops to clear up but the lady behind started making comments under her breath to people behind her.

I think I spent about $160 today and will probably drop another $50 or so at Toys R Us when I stop there on route to my parents house to swallow up some wonderful tasting Thanksgiving left-overs!

Not a bad shopping day overall for me.

Struck out totally at Toys R Us.

7 days off

Whew, done with 3 12-hour days. Always a tough schedule but the pay is quite nice.

I snuck in some character drawing at work. One sketch I doubt I'll be using. Drew some characters of Sara's. I usually only draw for myself because my time is somewhat limited but every now and then I like to draw from other people's ideas to give me a different challenge.

I am off for 7 days. I get Thanksgiving off and the Friday after as paid holidays. Since those fall on my work days because of my crazy schedule I don't go back to work until next Tuesday at 7pm. And I get paid so I don't lose any money in the deal. Sweet!

But I expect the week to pass quickly. I need to sleep some today. Wednesday is get my paycheck and running around helping mom with Thanksgiving dinner. Thursday is Thanksgiving. Friday is unknown. I hit up some of the door buster early (as in 6am) sales. I may do it again this year. Saturday I'm hoping is Magic at my buddy's place and Heroclix at the local store. Sunday is football. Monday will be recovery from the week. LOL!

I squeaked out a victory in my favorite football league after leaving a huge 29 points on my bench! I got totally blown out in the other 2 leagues. In the other league that I care about I lost my awesome QB for the year when Donovan McNabb hurt his leg in real life. It's a big blow to my team since he was having the second best fantasy year of all the QB's.

Okay, I'm tired and quite done here.

Blogging to blog

Blog 111706

What a week!

Well, not really. It was fairly standard.

Fantasy Football on Sunday was a disaster. I lost all three games. But then on Wednesday, scoring was changed because I guess the NFL changed some stats and I won a game after all. I lost in Dwain’s league though and that really stunk. Out of 10 teams I scored higher than 7 other teams. What sucked was that I played the 2nd highest scoring team of the week. Sigh. Watching the Bear vs Giants was frustrating. The Giants really sucked and things fell into place perfectly for my fantasy opponent. His team scored 4 touch downs that game and then his team got a garbage TD on Monday. A garbage TD is one scored at the end of the game with the game almost already certainly decided. And thus, I lost in Dwain’s league. I think I need to win every remaining game to make the play-off’s there. In Bob’s league that should go down to the end. I’m 6-4 there and in 5th place. Top four teams make the play-off’s.

Work wore me out for some reason this week. I only did two days but I’m still dragging even on my second day off. I’m wondering if I have arthritis in my knees. They were quite sore after even the first day of work. While the weather has been warm – in the 60’s! – there has been some rain. So who knows.

I finished The Necropolis Chronicles Companion Guidebook and sent it off to Ka-Blam only to find some errors after I thought I had done a decent job checking for errors. So today I fixed the pages and will mail the new files tomorrow.

Still heavily involved with IMVU 3-d chat. It’s still got some decent gloss to it. Of course, working 24 hours in 48 hours cramps going on-line.

My friends thought I was pissy today. The new Heroclix set came out. I haven’t been big on the game since I bought a brick – about $100 – and didn’t get a single unique. Normally you get at least 4 sometimes as many as 6. Well, the clix I actually wanted was late – again. So I said to hell with that and used that money on this new clix set. There are 4 figures per box and I think I got 6 boxes. I got 1 unique, 2 reds, 1 blue and the rest yellow rookie cards. I wasn’t happy. I almost threw them all out right then and there. So yeah, I’m pretty much done buying Heroclix. I have plenty of figures to play with already. If I buy more, it’ll be single characters and almost exclusively X-Men.

Wow, this is really boring blog. I’ll end it here.

gambling and sci-fi con

Blog 11/12/06


Went to the Foxwoods casino Friday night. I guess I had fun. This was more of a learning tool and business trip. I was there to win money. I had my ups and downs for success. I certainly didn’t hate going.

The bus trip is around 90 minutes. Our organizer popped in Mission Impossible 3 for our viewing pleasure. It was okay. Had a lot of standard plot stuff with one or two twists. Still, in a spy movie, there’s only so many times that you can see ‘there’s a mole in the spy agency’.

The bus was probably 50/50 middle aged people and elderly. There’s one in every crowd however. What I mean is, we got to the casino and received very clear instructions about our bus number and gate and what time to return. Either someone was babbling or just not paying attention and asked in all seriousness ‘what’s our gate?” and another asked “what’s our bus number?”. It was literally 10 seconds after the guide had very clearly told us over the intercom twice that information.

I was new to Foxwoods and this bus trip stuff so I let my brother-in-law take the lead on things. After logging in our free Keno ballots my brother and I went to get some chow at the buffet while my brother-in-law and sister went to play Caribbean Stud Poker.

The chow was okay overall. Nothing tasted bad, some of it tasted like nothing (the ice cream no less!) and some stuff tasted pretty good (apple/cherry cobbler). During our chow my brother-in-law lost all of his money. So they went to eat and my brother and I wandered about taking in the casino.

I finally sat down and dumped $10 into a slot machine that was 25 cents a spin or max bet of 75 cents a spin. My money lasted about 8 minutes. I think in to total I won about $40 with a hit at one point of 70 credits, 25 cents a credit. I put it all back into the machine though and walked away with no money.

My brother for a table of Caribbean Stud Poker for $10 a hand. Pretty much, it’s a $10 ante and double the ante to bet in order to win money. Then you can also add $1 for extra bonus money. Despite it being rather simple I stood about 40 minutes watching my brother play. I think in the end he lost $60.

After about 10 minutes of wandering we returned to the same table and I tried my luck. I was pretty nervous because it was my money and I still wasn’t sure of the rules. I dropped down $60 and started playing. I played maybe 10 to 15 minutes lost my money and on my last hand pretty much got it back. I needed a $20 spot from my brother though for a bet on the last bet. When I won that and ended up with $65 total in remaining chips I stopped. So in the end, I lost $20 at the table.

As we walked out of that casino room I grabbed every ‘how to play…’ pamphlet there was. LOL!

I found out later that my free Keno ticket won me $5. I bet $10 for $1 a game selecting 10 numbers. I won $30 there so I made $20 on that.

In the end, I broke even pretty much. The bus ticket was $14 which included 2 Keno tickets and chow which I believe was $18 if I just walked in. So these bus trips are terrific deals. The big winner on the bus scored $3000 off the free Keno ticket.

The bus ride home seemed like it lasted 30 minutes or less. Watched the remaining part of MI 3. Again, I wasn’t really impressed with the movie. Mainly I just didn’t care for the characters and the script really felt ‘been there done that’ to me.

I think I was probably to uptight about trying to win and learn some table games instead of just relaxing and enjoying things.

The thing I enjoyed the most was the eye candy. The casinos see all walks of life of people. But I was looking at the women there dressed up or in some cases, in states of undress. Lots of my favorite fashions for women were there – simple stuff like jeans and stiletto heeled boots. Hell, I even checked out this 40-ish year old woman in a brown business skirt suit with stiletto heeled brown boots. Hey! She looked pretty good! LOL! I did see two women dressed like maybe they were hookers. I think it was just bad looks. I saw them at separate times but I did wonder if they were ‘women of the night’. LOL.

I then stayed up waaaay late talking to a new internet friend on the west coast on IMVU.

Staggered out of bed the next morning sometime after 9am. Showered up and headed out to my buddy’s place to head down to United Fan Con. We stopped at a greasy spoon for breakfast. I rather enjoyed my meal of two Texas Style French toast. I think the chef put some cinnamon sugar on the French toast. It was really good because I could taste it without being over powered by it. My buddy and I oogled over the eye candy there. I swear, half the women in that joint were quite attractive. So my buddy Dwain and I were constantly scoping the scene.

On the way to the con we realized that I screwed up because I hadn’t looked to see what hotel the con was at. A quick phone call to a friend solved that.

We got to the hotel and found the registration area after a brief search. The line wasn’t horrible – maybe 30 people in front of us, but it moved incredibly slow. So we were in line for what seemed like 15 or 20 minutes. I think part of the problem is that registration ran out of change. Some dude was walking the line asking if people had $10’s and $5’s.

We saw a couple of people we knew since it was a local con for us. We saw religous nut – former co-owner of my buddy’s comic store that tried to totally screw them over there. He was cordial. Overly cordial it seemed – as if nothing ever happened.

I succeeded in my main goal, dropping off my comic with a writer from Marvel comics who’s also had some Hollywood screen writing success. I asked him how much it would cost him to review my comic. He said he’s not a reviewer and wouldn’t take money to do so. He did take my comic and said if it warranted it he would write something up. I was satisfied with that and thanked him and thanked him for writing enjoyable stories for several years. The last was no bullshit. I have enjoyed a number of comics for several years. Will he bother reading my comic? Who knows. I know I’ve heard many pro’s just toss anything given to them because of no desire to bring tons of stuff home. He did tell me he checks over e-mails sent to him though so I may follow through. I hardly expect this fellow to be my friend or anything but who knows. I also have no idea what kind of impression I made on him. I know sometimes I come off like a total dick to people my first time meeting them. People usually find out about the ‘real’ me by spending time with me. If someone gets screwed over or needs help I try and help them. But without the opportunity to do so, I usually seem like a dick because my humor is so dry that when I make a crack it seems like I really mean it.

With any luck, said pro will at least give me a quick review of my comic. We’ll see.

The actresses at the con looked terrific. Linda Blair was fairly hot for a woman older than me. Claudia Christian still looks quite fetching also. She’s starting to get up there in age and I expected her to start showing it. There was some young actress from Firefly and she looked drop dead gorgeous. I may actually have to watch Firefly to check her out.

The guys at the show were fairly uninteresting to me. None were big names and I didn’t follow their shows. A bit player from the X-Files was one of the only ones I can remember.

William Shatner was the VIP. I would’ve have liked to have seen him but Dwain had to leave for another engagement. Seeing Shatner was also quite expensive. Initially, Dwain and I weren’t all that up for even attending that morning. We opted for the $15 autograph area and dealers area ticket. Hearing the stars blabbe was another $25 for a total of $40. To even hear Shatner was another upgrade of $75 and to get an autograph and pic was even more – over $100+ in total.

We were disappointed that Grace Park was there only on Sunday. She looks quite exceptional.

Kurt Angle walked by me at one point. I was totally surprised that he didn’t look very big. This guy could kick my ass 10 million different ways but in street clothes you wouldn’t necessarily think he could. And he only seemed my height of 5’9. On TV while wrestling he looks pretty big.

The dealers’ room was what I expected. Not overly large and the usual stuff. I did make a couple of purchases though. From a customer at the store I bought a unique Heroclix from him for $6. The character usually goes for $10 to $15.

I was quite happy to find some Led Zeppelin concert DVDs. I bought two different ones for $20 each. The quality or lack there of was expected but good enough for me. And the more I look back on it the more I’m happy I bought them. I kind of regret not seeing Shatner because I had wanted to. But my Zep DVDs have blunted that blow rather nicely.

The eye candy was expected for a sci-fi con – not very good. LOL! There was a really cute girl there walking around with some guy. We made sure to oogle over her. We knew we could take her boyfriend if he started any shit with us. I was checking out this blonde. She was dressed in a brown skirt suit, matching colored wide brim hat and knee high boots with metallic ice picks heels. Then she turned enough so I could see her face. Well, she was either a hard 40 or closing in on her 50’s. LOL! Oh well.

So despite some early mis-givings about even attending the con, it ended up being enjoyable and I’m glad I went.

Now it’s time for about 8 hours straight of NFL football!

crazy work hours

Blog 11/10/06


Got out of work early last night so I got home at 3am instead of 7am. They were doing a shutdown for the weekend since for us workers, Friday (today) is the holiday instead of tomorrow which is the actual holiday.

I got to bed around 5am and here I am at 1:36pm. Looks like and awesome day out there. It certainly hasn’t felt like November over the past couple of days. I swear the temp has been in the sixties! Even when we walked out at 2:30 am last night it felt like it was 55 or higher. I’ll take it – makes for a cheaper heating bill.

Going to the casino later today. Because I left 4 hours early from work I need to make a $40 or $50 profit to off set the loss of income. Of course, I’d prefer a lot more. Instead, I’ll probably spend and lose the $100 I’m taking with me. But as long as I have fun it’s okay.

Had weird dreams. I know I had two. At the moment I’ve forgotten one. Part of the other one had me at my parents’ house. The wild turkeys came into the side lot where all the wood was. Then a ton load of animals started coming into the yard. I’m talking all sorts from Africa: zebras, bulls, giraffes, lions, and even a tiger. The tiger was trying to catch some other animal and eat it. Most of the animals were almost oblivious to this as if they were going – ‘hey, as long as it ain’t me’. Then the lions started harassing some animals but this huge giraffe chased them away. Then the lions started on a plains bull. But the bull started flopping around on the ground like a fish out of water. This one lion seemed dazed or something and the bull rolled over it for apparently a second time. Since the bull weighed like a ton, the lion staggered off deciding it had had enough.

I was heading up stairs and my brothers were there and the bull came into the house through the open front door. I had this huge metal flashlight like the cops have and started beating the bull on the nose while it was on the stairs. Then it started talking! It was like a smart animal from Narnia or something. It didn’t attack me back and it left.

I remember looking through my dad’s rifles trying to find a powerful gun to kill the lions since they were around the house. I was talking with my brother’s friend Dean about how to shoot the guns and which was the best. I don’t remember much after that so I must have woken up.

The first dream was kind of weird too. Unfortunately, I’ve pretty much forgotten it.

The Necropolis Chronicles Companion Guidebook is just about done. The colors are done unless I go back and play with some small details like hue and saturation. I need to drop in the logo and some title stuff and then it’s done. Then it’s burn a CD of the files and place the order with the printer and send in the copyright for that issue. Since my weekend’s kinda jammed up I suspect I’ll place the order on Monday since I’m not due back to work until Tuesday night.

Still fighting my addiction to IMVU. It’s just so neat seeing other people’s avatars. Some of their homepages suck though. Many people apparent feel that a homepage doesn’t look good unless it has SO many images on it that they cover up other images and even links. Sheesh.

I shouldn’t watch PBS’s Frontline tv show. It’s a sort of news show that has hour long subjects. It almost never fails to piss me off or get me worried. LOL! They tackle things like credit card companies, the cable and phone companies screwing over America, and the most recent show I saw was on 401k retirements. Turns out, the 401k was put into law about 1978 to help protect the income of CEOs in tax shelters. How typical. But someone found out the little guy could too. So the 401k which was suppose to be a supplement to a pension plan has essentially replaced pension plans. The jury is still sort of out in a way on the 401k. A lot of people aren’t making it with just social security and their 401k. Pretty much, the experts said a couple of things. One was you need to put away about 16% of your pay to a 401k. Not 6% or even 10%. You also want about 8 years worth of yearly wages in your 401k by the time you retire. So if you make $50,000 a year – you want at least $400,000 by the time you retire. Most employees that haven’t been in the 401k for a long time are getting kinda screwed. In fact, a lot retire just to find out that they have to go back to work at some sort of job just to make ends meet. So for a lot of people, even people making middle class incomes of $30,000 to $50,000 a year, retirement isn’t an option. And this is really sad about America.

It was also interesting to see how much companies and even the government is dropping retirement on the shoulders of the individual. This one 401k rep made an interesting comment to a CEO. He asked the CEO of a company if the CEO would trust the employee that serves him coffee to run the financial aspect of the company. When the CEO said essentially ‘are you kidding?’, the rep responded, ‘then why are you forcing him to forge his retirement on his own?’.

Another kickers is that pension plans usually work. Unfortunately, a lot, maybe most companies, don’t bother putting enough money into their pension plans which then gets the company in financial trouble because of the pension plan. So these companies dump their pension on the government crying poor. What happens is that someone like me partially bails out these companies with my tax dollars. For the pension plan members though they get a reduced pension maybe as much as having it slashed by a third or maybe even more.

I can’t help it. The more I hear about most big companies, the more I hate them. They have little to no interest in their people. It’s all about profits at almost any expense. Just ask any person that’s lost their job to cheap, virtually slave labor foreign markets.

First day back at work

Blog 110706


Back from first day at work.

First day back to work last night was pretty good and quite productive. Because of holidays I only work Thursday of this week and the Monday night I just did.

I was slightly concerned about some things at work. I found out that all the union crap has failed to make the work day 8 hours and some other ideas that could cost me my job or make it easier for those already in the plant to take from me. I found out that most of the people still laid off are probably not coming back to work. One part of me is quite sad about this. Another part is feeling a bit guilty because I made it and they didn’t. And yet another part of me is saying ‘thank god I got my decent paying job back’.

Now the new thing on the block is that the company is looking into having a robot remove the gold balls from the molds instead of humans. While interesting, this does seem to pose some problems for the company. Quality assurance of the product is probably first and foremost. I’m not sure how they expect a mechanical arm reaching into a mold and removing golf balls determine as quickly as a human whether the ball is damaged or not. It’s also going to be fun to see how they expect a robot to remove a stuck ball or fix a mold having problems.

In any event, my goal was to stay there five years. My other two manufacturing jobs that paid well only lasted 2 years each. So we’ll see what happens.

My brother drives me nuts with the recycling we have to do. I’m actually into recycling because I have to live here on planet Earth for another potential 55 years. So I follow the rules and such our town has set. They really aren’t that big a deal if you even bother to recycle. But my brother, who’s lived in town for a couple of years longer than me, STILL freely mixes cardboard with cans and plastic jugs. This drives me nuts for two reasons: the pick up leave all bins mixed incorrectly and the second is that I have two grocery bags – each maybe half full – right there for all the cardboard to be easily placed in. My brother also insists on placing plastic coat hangers in with the cans & plastic jugs. And he even threw a telephone with a plastic casing in with the cans & jugs. I’m like ‘wtf?!” I’m not sure if he’s just ignorant, lazy, or just doesn’t care.

All three of my fantasy football teams won over the weekend. I believe the work one is 4-4-1. Bob’s league my team is 5-4 while the tops teams are only 6-3 and in Dwain’s league I’ve crawled back to 4-5 after losing 5 games in a row. In Dwain’s league I’ve crawled from 9th place out of 10 up to 5th place. Top 4 teams make the play-off’s. Not a whole lot of games left but I’m still in the hunt for a third consecutive Super Bowl championship in Dwain’s league. I want to remain the only champion of that league’s existence!

Probably doing way too much chatting with IMVU the 3-d cartoon chat room thing. But it will cut down because of work.

Driving my friend Wendy nuts by writing a story with her. It’s a fun story that might see print some day – who knows?

My weekend at this time looks jammed up. I work Thursday night to Friday morning 7pm to 7am. I get home Friday morning, do an e-mail check and I should head off to bed soon after getting home because I’m going to a casino to see about some gambling. It’s a bus trip with some family members. The bus leaves local area around 4pm. The trip/gambling deal usually lasts about 7 or 8 hours. I should be in bed by midnight or 12:30am I’m told from veterans of these trips. That’s good because I expect to go to a sci-fi con in Springfield the next day with friends. William Shatner is suppose to be there among others. Although seeing him – if tickets are still available – is additional charge of something like $40 it would be about my only chance to ever see him in person. So I’ll probably prompt my buddies to pay up. And then at some point on Sunday an acquaintance wants to have a housewarming party for the house he just bought. Ugh. I’m already dipping into saving to splurge on the things I actually want to do with the gambling and maybe seeing Shatner. But that’s the plan for the weekend – plus watching football and managing my football teams.

My mom recently had some surgery for preventive purposes. Things went well I’m happy to say. Getting her in an out of my little Cavalier was a bit of a challenge with her leg in one of those wrap around casts to keep her leg straight and immobile.

On one of the days we went to visit her during her recuperation was quite an adventure. I took my dad and oldest brother along. My brother needed to stop at a store to get a memory stick that was on sale. On the way to that we saw a car accident happen literally right in front of us. We were waiting for a red light to turn green on a four lane street. For whatever reason, this lady flips on her blinker and switches lanes while she is waiting for the red. She must have never even looked because she clipped a mini-van that was passing her on her right side – the lane she was trying to turn into! Not just that, the lady clipped the van on it’s rear wheel. There really wasn’t much damaged but we were just stunned that this lady just literally pulled out and into a car that was passing her. And none of the people involved looked past middle age.

So of course, being the first car behind the accident, every car behind me throws on it’s blinker and goes around me because if I pulled out I would cause another accident. So like 6 cars passed me from my lane and more cars passed from the lane I was trying to get into to get around the accident.

So we get to Staples and my brother utters the faithful words of - ‘I should be right out’. 20 minutes later he returns. Seems the memory sticks were locked in a case. This was expected for a small expensive item easily stolen. He got a person to get him the stick. At the register there is a problem. Seems the stick won’t ring up with it’s advertised rebate. Turns out the guy gave my brother the wrong memory stick. So my brother had to return that one, wait for the guy to get the correct one and then go through the check out line again.

So we get going on our way and quickly find out a major intersection is jammed up. My mom later heard that something like two or three small accidents involving 5 to 6 cars occurred very close together and jammed up the intersection leading to a slow movement of traffic.

I was able to turn off avoiding a potential long delay of getting through all the smashed up cars and eventually made it to the highway. It wasn’t a huge loss of time and probably made things quicker. But of course, I screw up. Despite having traveled this one stretch of high way literally 300+ times, I decided to take the wrong exit to another highway before I realize it. To go from 291 to 91 North is a right turn. The 4 lane highway breaks off into two lanes heading north, two lanes heading south. The two left lanes become an overpass over the two right lanes. This two left lanes lead to 91 North. The two right lanes turn left and go under the left lanes and put the driver on 91 south.

I had to hop off the highway and follow some new exits (due to construction) to get back on to 91 north. This only ended up being maybe 5 minutes but it was highly annoying and I felt really stupid because I never caught my error – my brother did.

So with my confidence and knowledge of the highway in question, I couldn’t remember what number the exit for the hospital was. And there was no “H” sign to help. So my brother suggested I take the only exit we could and I did and everything was okay after that.

Oy.

At least the visit with my mom went well.

Okay, done tlking unless someone IM’s me on IMVU tonight.

BACK TO WORK! :)

Blog 110306


I got called back to work yesterday. Today I went and did all the tuff like reactivating my badge and getting my benefits up and going again. I was quite surprised though. It seems a lot of people aren’t coming back. Maybe not yet for some and definitely not for others. It also seems that my supervisor was able to pick and choose who he wanted back. Or it seems that way. A couple of people have seniority over me (because they walked into a room before me) but I’m getting called back before them. I think that’s because a number of us were still in our 6 month union probation period. A number of people that I know are also coming to my shift. These are day crew guys that don’t have the seniority to get back on days but still have a job. Of the people I saw today, one was on my mirror crew – worked the exact opposite of my shift and two people from days. So when I go back to work on Monday night there will be some new faces.

I feel bad for the people that haven’t come back yet. And some people took other jobs within the plant so they might not be back to the RIM room. I don’t love my job but I really enjoy the money. One of my friends was really stupid. For whatever reason, he brought in an arrow hidden under the sleeve of his shirt. He’s a hunter and apparently killed a deer with it. I guess he was going to show people the arrow. Well, his badge didn’t work so he used the arrow to try and pick the lock to the room. And he was caught on camera. So he won’t be back. But talk about stupid!

So I guess having a good attitude, having perfect attendance, and being reasonably and doing my job properly has counted for something. And that’s good news.

My mom should be out of surgery as I write this. She went in for a routine type operation. The schedule is to have her get out tomorrow. I’m waiting for my dad to call with news on the subject. I’m trying not to worry and I don’t think about it much. Unfortunately, someone has to be that statistic to make the operation not 100% survival rate. If something has/does go wrong and the worst happens, I will be devastated. There’s a wonderful sense of security at having a loving mother.

Bought a new humidifier for my bedroom. This one boils the water because I didn’t want to deal with filters. I can’t find replacement filters for the humidifier I bought just last November so that’s really annoying. I finally found some I can buy through the mail if I have to. I may just have to do that.

I did find out that the boiling water humidifier is somewhat noisy. It sounds like after a rain storm where drops of water from trees hit the rooftop. Not a constant splatter but a fairly often loud drop hitting the rooftop. I’m trying to get use to it and use it as a soothing sound. It didn’t wake me up but it’s hard not to notice it when going to sleep or waking up.

Started up on this 3-D instant messenger called IMVU. Basically, it’s like having an IM in cartoon format. You have an avatar and a setting like a small room of a coffee shop or something. You have goofy interactions with other avatars and can do stuff like bodyslam them or kiss them. There are plenty of things to buy for your avatar also like clothes, different appearances, and even weapons and pets. It kind of neat for now because the gloss is still there. But it can cost money for the unrestricted access or to outright buy your screen name which you lose in case you quit if you don’t own it. I have two avatars, one male, one female. The female one is Jaina and used to promote the comic. I do this by seeing about joining role-playing games where I try to get people interested in the comic by subtlety spamming them. I keep it clean and make sure to tell people straight up that when I use my Jaina avatar that I’m a dude. One of my characters in Star Wars Galaxy was a female avatar and other players constantly hit on the character looking for cyber sex. Then the guy would get all upset when I would say “I’m a dude”. They would get all embarrassed and make it all MY fault that they were looking for sex from a computer game. Thankfully, Call of Duty 2 on-line is all about killing your opponent and I don’t have to put up with that. It really is amazing how many people try hooking up with other people through their avatars.

Long dream

Blog 110106

Just reporting on a weird dream. Oh yeah, woke up with another headache. Because it was raining or totally foggy I sneezed like hell for about 10 minutes while trying to sleep at 6am. Mouth eventually did go dry later in the morning.

Not sure where this cream started but I was in Germany. The technology seemed to switch from modern day to the 1930’s/1940’s. I was playing Call of Duty 2 right before bed so this is probably why Germany popped up.

I was hanging around and being shown around by a man and his wife or maybe it was his girlfriend. They seemed a couple of years older than me. We went into a candle shop. I took a stem or stick and opened up a waist high freezer – the kind you see at a convenience store that usually hold ice cream bars and treats. There were tall buckets or pails that held patterns in them of what looked like ice. You stuck in the stick and then quickly moved to the check out counter (that looked like a deli) and stuck the see through candle wax on a stick into another bucket of ice to instantly harden the candle. The candles looked like ice sculptures on a stick. I did this three times before we left.

Not sure if we entered another store or not but this manager guy we met in his office ran off. Then we had to escape. I think the guy was turning in the man and lady for helping me. I was watching a show last night where this sort of happened to a reporter. So we hurried off. The place we were in was a city but not a large one. No buildings were super tall – seemed like a old city with some modern day things like car dealerships but people still got around a lot by (new) steam engines on railroads.

So we hurried into this boutique to get the lady a new outfit. I was pushing for this all leather skirt/jacket/stiletto heeled boots deal but she picked something fashionable. Then we had to wait. And wait. Apparently the individual pieces of the suit were at different stores through out the city and the delivery had to go around picking them up. He also ran out of money or something and had to go to the bank.

There was a French couple in the boutique and then it got really full. While I was sitting on a couch a big fat guy came along and just SAT ON ME! I had to struggle to get out from under him and he didn’t even try to get off me. In fat, he was all pissed off and annoyed with ME! He was past 300+ pounds, bald except for the Friar Tuck curly ring of hair and a bushy mustache. He looked gross and sick too.

Me and the guy and lady left walking along the train tracks. From a TV in the boutique I saw a commercial for taking the train. I also saw another for avoiding and/or what to do in the event of a train wreck such as a train hitting a tractor trailer crossing the tracks. I commented to my companions that we didn’t have commercials like that in America. I also remember passing a car dealership and noting 0 down, .06% financing or something close to that.

I think I woke up sneezing here. In any event, I was in a totally different place.

Now I was sort of in a complex/industrial park. It was really hilly and rolling hills. Large buildings, not tall but long and wide were all over the place. A couple were modern but most buildings were old warehouses and I think a lot were made of wood! I remember thinking somewhere along the lines that I was surprised my legs weren’t getting tired because it was constantly going up hill and then downhill. The rolling hills were tall enough where you had to crest the hill to see what was on the otherside. I don’t recall if I was wearing a jacket but there was thick ice all over the tarred areas. I’m talking three inches thick. On occasion I would pass a guy skating that was really flying around like 20 to 30 mph.

I walked through this shitty warehouse that even had some hay but was really some wood storage facility. These two guys came blasting by on a forklift. It was really strange because they were moving odd pieces of wood that were like 2” x 4” or flat pieces but they were 20 to 30 feet in length. They also weren’t centered on the forks. They hung over the right side by like 30 feet and maybe only 2 or 3 feet hangover on the left side. For whatever reason, the long warehouse had sort of a track to drive on really close to the left wall which forced the wood to be carried totally off center. But they had also built a sort of racking so that if the wood tipped at all it would hit the top of the racking and sort of balance out. The forklift ran along a sort of track that acted as a bit of a trestle to. The forklift also had these two long pieces of metal on the back. This was to help balance the forklift. Sort of like those long brackets on the back of dragsters to keep the dragster from flipping over if the tip of the car starts lifting up. And finally, there were these two mid 30’s or 40’s crazy bastards on the forklift. They wore faded jeans, had beards down to the middle of their chest and hair down to the middle of their backs and worn and faded baseball caps. They had apparently been at their jobs for many years because they had moving the wood down to a science as they blasted along taking 90 degree turns with zero slow down. The second guy would hop on to the long back brackets to give the forklift extra weight to keep from flipping because it still tilted when taking the turns at a high rate of speed.

So I left this area headed for my destination. It was sort of a dinner or gathering hall. Apparently, Barbara Mandrel (a country singer from the 70’s and 80’s) was there to play to a crowd of deaf people. I have no idea why I was there bothering to stay. She did about an hour of music and left. In the meantime, apparently half the crowd was gay deaf men that started dancing. A midget asked a guy to dance but was turned down. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

I was walking back to my car which seemed a half mile away because I had to walk through the industrial park again. I passed the crazy hillbilly forklift warehouse but didn’t seem them. Almost to my car, maybe 30 feet away and walking on the ice, a skater came blasting by. The guy with curly black hair went to make a sweeping turn and his feet went out from under him and he took a nasty spill instantly giving him a quarter sized welt just above his eye and a two inch gash also. It wasn’t bleeding but was frightful to look at.

I ran over to him to help him yet I didn’t really want to get involved. I helped him up and he seemed somewhat okay but as I helped him a few steps he just about collapsed so decided I better not leave him. He also kept coming in and out of semi-consciousness so I figured he had a concussion. Having heard that you never let a concussion victim pass out I put his arm around my shoulders and started helping him along looking for medical help. Nobody was around and the businesses looked closed so I headed for the hillbilly wood warehouse. I helped the guy up their docking bay stairs as they came by. Some other guy was there as we tried to walk in through a door. The hillbillies were returning from an empty run. Because the door I opened partially blocked their open forklift way, the forkpart of the forklift caught it as they were backing up. It ripped and destroyed the door and they started screaming to the other guy about being an asshole and that he knew the door had to be shut. Knowing I’d get no help from them I carried the guy on to another place. Again, nobody was really around and I had to carry this semi-conscious guy around. I headed back to hall where the concert was held. In the distance all around me I could see a few people here and there but everyone was like 100+ yards away. I spotted some army guys in full fatigues apparently heading towards my way on physical exercise jogging. So I had to backtrack to intercept them and ask for medical help. From behind came more soldiers and these guys had a doctor in their ranks. He immediately started checking on the guy but it was like he was slapping the ice skater head and nearly poking the guy in the eyes! I was rather stunned and befuddled. The doc then moved away and tried to get a GPS reading to call in a helicopter.

I guess I woke up because I don’t recall anything after that. As usual, I’ve forgotten some details or in what order things occurred but I got the most of the dream written down.