A Good Day

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Good day on Friday. Started off slowly but got a call from my buddy. We headed out to get chow at Pizzeria Uno. The parking lot was PACKED because it was noontime. I didn’t see my buddy there and went in and asked for a booth. I got the last one. So I’m sitting there thinking ‘oh shit, he has no way to know I’m inside!’ I question about a pay phone and they don’t have one. I had ordered a soda and a smoothie (YUM!) so I was certain they would have a fit if I went to my car to get my Trac-phone to call him. But I was able to use the front desk phone and got him.

Lunch was pretty tasty. I got the Uno burger which comes with a side dish which I made fries. How original. LOL! That burger keep me feeling full for almost 10 hours. I didn’t eat anything else the rest of the day until I snarfed a piece of bread just before bed which was at 1am.

After lunch I used one of my Christmas gifts. It was a gift card from my 18 year old niece. I was only for $10 but it was a really nice gesture since my niece works for probably minimum wage and bought gifts for everyone. I wanted to see Night at the Museum. It looked neat and I love the concept of all the things in a museum coming to life at night. I’m not a big Ben Stiller fan but I ended up really enjoying this movie. My buddy wasn’t to big on seeing the flick but he was laughing quite a bit throughout the movie. I’m sure part of it was because other people were laughing which can be infectious but he was still laughing. Later he said the movie was ‘alright’ with a tone of ‘it was average’. Seemed like he enjoyed it more than just an average movie should be enjoyed.

On the way out of the theater he stepped on the back of my sneaker by accident. My sneaker came off and landed right under my now only socked foot and I nearly tumbled and took a face plant. Thankfully I was able to regain my balance and call his a bastard – in front of two 4 year olds. Nice. Oh well.

After a quick check of some mall stores for possible future purchases it was off to the comic store to hook up with Angry Black Man for some Heroclix. I hadn’t played in a long time – maybe a month – so I was fairly up for this. I get really down on Heroclix because they change the rules so often everyone has a different idea of how to play and it causes conflict and tension. Those are not endearing elements to making a fun game. The Oompalooma made it 800 points and no cards of any kind. I ended up making a team of 18 people. LOL! That’s a HUGE team. Everyone else had maybe 8 guys or even less. I beat the Angry Black Man and my buddy in consecutive games to win the minor prize which I immediately traded away. Both guys had made very similar teams in that they each used two Superman figures. Dwain I beat on points and Angry Black Man I thumped soundly. It was good to know that although I generally lose on a consistent basis for the most part these days that it is due to the fact that I do not invest much in the game anymore. When playing normally I do not have many cards which make a huge difference to the game. I’m usually competitive but usually lose because I do not have the cards that the other guys have.

There were four of us playing and we then decided to do a team even. I was randomly paired with the Angry Black Man and we thumped our two friends fairly badly. Then it was off to home for some decent sleep.

Today I should be heading out to play Magic at my buddy’s unless he cancelled. I’ll find out after writing and posting this.

Had a slight blast for the past as my buddy from Trinidad called to say he was around. He told me to give him a call but I don’t have his cellphone number. So it seems I’ve missed him which sucks. I’m going to guess he didn’t catch my e-mail about needing his cellphone number because he never called back.

Done for now.

being a bum after the holidays

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Christmas has come and gone and I LOVED it!!!

Yep, another awesome Christmas for the Roberts family. Lots of good food, good atmosphere and presents! I’m a sucker for presents! And I got a huge stack of them for Christmas this year. One thing that made that possible is that I asked for a lot of cheap gifts. So here’s a quick run down of some gifts I received:

Office supplies such as post-it notes, paper clips and a stapler.
An ice cream scooper
A hand can opener
3 music CD: Cream, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd
An ultra soft and ultra warm Red Sox blanket that I totally love already
2 gambling computer games
2 alarm clocks
A book titled the Physics of Super-heroes
A 110- piece tool set
A 6 foot ladder
Narnia DVD
The last (newest) Star Wars movie on DVD
2 pairs of pajama/lounging pants in plaid flannel

I think there were some more that I’m currently forgetting. But on Christmas morning, this all seemed like a huge mountain of gifts so I was both highly impressed and hapy to open them all!

Watch Narnia last night. I’d seen it in the theaters but this is one of those rare movies that I wanted to own. I only ask for movies that I expect to watch which usually means once a year or so. I plan on watching the Star Wars movie tonight. I LOVE the lightsaber fights in it. That alone is why I asked for it.

I also got 2 gift cards, a movie pass and cash to boot! A good haul for 2006!

And the meal my mom cooked tasted absolutely awesome. I’m sure part of it was because I was quite hungry by the time we ate in the afternoon but it smelled so awesome the whole day.

I can’t help it, I’m like a kid on Christmas Day.

I had a deva vu like experience on Christmas Day. In fact, I may have seen part of it in a dream. Haven’t had this feeling in a while. When it happens, for absolutely no reason I feel like I’ve seen everything all before and then recall dreaming about it or at least part of it some time before. I can recall seeing in the dream that I was watching football and what struck me was the day I was watching it. I wasn’t sure what day it was during the dream but that football was almost never on during that particular day. I really can’t recall many games playing on Christmas Day but two did this year.

So chalk up this Christmas as pretty special for me.

Today and yesterday though, I’ve been and am being a lazy lump. I really ran about this year even though work was shut down on the 22nd. With my dad needing rides to prep for detached retina surgery and my mom still needing a walker to get around I and the other siblings had to help them out a lot this year. When I helped them out doing whatever, transportation, shopping, or wrapping gifts, it was usually for about 2 and ½ to 3 hours a day. Top that off with working 12 hour shifts and needing to do my own shopping and some minor shopping per request of siblings and I’ve been fairly worn out. I think yesterday I slept 9 hours, got up for awhile and then took a nap. LOL! Did some drawing of my super-hero characters instead of for the comic. Whoops! But I wanted to draw something other than Jaina.

Today I’ve spent all on the internet. I’ll be tidying up the house a bit though. It looks like a bit of hell with stuff everywhere from empty bags, opened gifts and just general house debris that tends to gather up after a while.

The Necropolis Chronicles Companion Guidebook has been listed at Indyplanet.com. This is welcome news as it took a wee bit longer than expected. Kind of hard to pimp a book while having no outlet for which potential readers can go and buy it! So here’s the link:

http://www.indyplanet.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=231

All art is by me except for two reprint pages. The guidebook explains the characters and academy in more detail that show help readers with at least some questions. Of course, wanting to avoid spoilers, I tried not to give away too much info in the entries. I also very much enjoyed doing the ‘bloopers’ . Yes, bloopers. A comic book with ‘bloopers reel’. I’m claiming credit for that one if it becomes popular. LOL!

It’s weird what you forget doing while sleeping. Last week or so I went to bed al’ natural. When I woke up, I was wearing underwear. Hmmn. The only thing I can figure is that I went to take a leak at night and put on some drawers in case my brother happened to wake up and need to use the bathroom. No need to have him see me with my dork hanging out.

One thing I didn’t get on Christmas that I will probably go buy is the Richard Donner version of Superman 2. He originally directed the first Christopher Reeves movie and starting doing 2 when he left the project for whatever reason. The only thing that sucks if I buy this DVD is that I’ll probably never watch my first Superman 2 DVD again. I can remember as a kid falling in love with Sarah Douglas and her character Ursula. Anyone who knows my costuming taste for female comic book characters should easily see the influence of Ursula. Superman 2 was the shit too. One of the best fights in comic book movie history in Times Square! Great movie!

Is it okay to be miffed that I sent out an e-mail to a bunch of friends wishing Happy Holidays only to have over 75% not respond at all?

One the fantasy football front, in Bob’s league I bombed out losing both consolation games more often referred to as ‘the toilet bowl’. So despite going 8-6 and finishing 5th out of 10 teams and just missing the big play-off’s, I lost to a 5-9 team in the first round and then to Bob himself who was 7-7. In the end, my team will finish ranked 8th out of 10 teams which sucks. It also ruins my perfect scoring in my Yahoo sports profile as I had won the previous two fantasy football leagues I had played in.

In Dwain’s league which is my favorite, I finished 6th by going 7-7. The two halves of the year were exact opposites. I went 2-5 and then 5-2. I faced Bob again in the toilet bowl and flushed him that time. I then beat Oompaloompa. I don’t recall Bob’s record, maybe 7-7 or 6-8 but Oompalooma was 8-6. So I hopped up one space in the final standing to finish in 5th place out of 10 teams and won the Toilet Bowl.

So next year in Bob’s league I should have the #3 drafting spot and the number 5 drafting spot in Dwain’s. I think I finished last in the work league over at ESPN but I don’t even care.

There’s more stuff I could write about but I need to get off the computer if for no other reason than I’ve been on it for over 2 hours already.

Christmas Eve stuff

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Averted a small disaster today. I was thinking that all my Christmas stuff was done when I realized that my father probably didn’t have any gifts for my mom because of his surgery and all that. So I quickly gave him and shout and found this to be the case. So off I went blasting around from store to store grabbing gift cards and a couple of items to unwrap. I think she’ll be happy with the gifts. And my dad won’t have to feel like a lump because of his eye.

In the end, I went over a couple of budgets that I had for people. I’m not all that worried though because I only put two things on my charge card and I should be able to get them off it by February. Everything else was paid in cash so I have little lingering bills from Christmas.

So I still have some wrapping to do as the New Patriots are about to start playing at 1pm. I may have to do some more wrapping at my mom’s by one of my brothers is there helping her out. I was there last night for about two hours wrapping gifts with her.

All in all, not a bad shopping season for me. I only owe some on my credit card although some shopping was last minute. I did do some store to store to store searching looking for a hot gift that never materialized. Got a pretty good dose of Christmas music but I’m not burnt out on it. Left the damn ham in my trunk overnight forgetting it was in there! Did a lot of gift shopping for other people who then give the gifts to someone else.

It is a bit of a sad Christmas in a way. My parents are getting older and needed some helping getting things done. It’s a heavy reminder that I really don’t know how many more Christmases will see my immediate family all intact. That first Christmas where one of my siblings or parents has passed on will be kind of tough. Still, I’m very much enjoying the present.

This is the final week of fantasy football in the leagues I care about. I’m only moderately interested in them. It’s because my parents’ health and all of Christmas has gobbled up my time recently.

Although I’ve come up with some new characters and ideas for comics, I haven’t put pen to paper in any way whatsoever.

I see the usual Christmas bashing on various chat boards I go to. Sometimes I want to tell these people to all fuck off. Is it my fault Christianity is the most popular religion in America? I don’t usually bash other religions but it always seems open warfare and acceptable in America to bash Christianity.

It’s super windy outside and my house gets the occasional falling branch bouncing off the roof. Rather unsettling. Further unsettling considering the trees around my house tower way over my roof – I’m talking what seems like 20 to 30 feet over my roof. I try not to look out the windows in my roof. LOL!

Okay, time to watch football and finish gift wrapping.

I love this time of year. My birthday, Christmas, and the New Year. It’s all one big party!

Last few days before Christmas.

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Done with work until Jan 4. We shut down Thursday night although I we didn’t leave until 4:20am. A small crew stayed past 6, maybe all the way until 7am. I can survive a 2 and ½ hour hit to my paycheck.

Today, Sunday and Monday should be busy as all hell. I need to finish up Christmas shopping today. Should be fairly easy stuff to get though. I highly doubt Windows Home edition will be sold out nor the gift certificate my mom ask me to get for her to give to another family member. Then I have to finish wrapping my gifts to people (easy) and then wrap my mom’s gifts to people (maybe not so easy). The good thing is, I’m fairly laid back for a personality so I don’t expect to get all crazy if the stores are packed. If the stores are packed and people are doing stupid stuff like causing problems or bitching in line or something, then I probably will get uppity.

I stopped to pick up a gift certificate that my brother wants to give someone. The lady was nice and all and gave me an envelope for the gift certificate. She gave me one of the small mailing envelopes. So the gift certificate is about twice as long as this envelope! LOL!

A stop at another place to grab another certificate for the same brother to hand out took a small while. That wasn’t all bad because I saw the little brother of my best high school friend there. I haven’t seen my best friend from high school in years, maybe even 5 or more. A lot has changed. I still remember his brother as a little kid. And I probably always will despite the fact that he bought a house years before me and has a couple of kids now with one being 8 years old I think he said. Man, I’m getting old. Glad I don’t feel it.

My dad’s eye still looks like hell. He looks like something out of a horror flick. It’s all puffy and swollen and evil looking.

I bought myself a music CD when I took my parents Christmas shopping last night and I screwed up. It’s a 3 cd set of movie favorites. What I didn’t notice is that the songs are not by the original artists. In fact, when I listened to the music, anything with vocals sound pretty terrible. I’m considering just throwing the set away because I don’t expect to listen to it again. At least I only lost $10 in the deal.

Bought a bunch of pies the other day for Christmas dinner. As I feared, being the end of the sales week, the first store I went to that had ‘buy one get one free’ was wiped out. And still was the next morning I returned. So I pit stopped at the store I normally go to and bought $21 worth of pies. I bought Banana Cream, Chocolate Satin, Apple and Razzleberry. My mom had sounded rather disappointed when I had told her that the original store had been wiped out both days so I’m glad I stopped and bought the pies even though they really weren’t on sale.

The other day I had taken my mom food shopping. I’m almost positive I saw a lady I written about a few blogs earlier. This lady was a small blonde wearing an ivory white coat and had terrific legs. She was also wearing fishnet stockings and stiletto heeled pumps – ugly pumps actually. I’m fairly certain this is the same woman I had seen earlier. I noticed this chubby store clerk lady taking a long look at the lady too. But I think the store clerk was looking at her shoes and stockings because she had kind of a weird look on her face like ‘you’re wearing that?’.

I’m beginning to wonder if this blond in the ivory coat is this bank manager I use to occasionally see in Toys R Us numerous years ago when I worked there. Ivory coat woman is blond and about the same size as bank manager. I’m talking about 8 years ago but if it is the same woman, she hasn’t lost her terrific legs yet.

Got the semi-retarded like guy at the credit union yesterday. That rather sucked since the girl I like was working but didn’t help me this time around. Oh well.

Couldn’t sleep the other day before work and that really pissed me off. I donated about 90 minutes to getting to sleep and I think I slept maybe 15 minutes right at the very end of my slotted time frame. Even then I kept waking up because I kept dreaming (3 times!) that my brother was waking me up. He never woke me up in reality.

I’m rather excited over a new character I created. I’ll be reserving her for use in The Necropolis Chronicles. In a way that sucks because the character wouldn’t show up until an issue in the mid-teens for numbering with what I currently have planned for the series. But I think the character is really cool. I hope that she would be well received. I’ve created a history for her that should make her sympathetic or hated but that should at least give her probably the most depth of any character in the book – even more than Jaina who’s the lead.

I’m kind of missing some of my internet friends because I haven’t seen them on-line lately. But it’s a busy time of year and I’m quite busy to so I guess it’s to be expected.

I had better get going before I’m doing things out of necessity until midnight.

things for 12 - 20 - 06

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Lots of various things over the past few days.

I still play my new Elvis Presley Christmas music CD a lot. I stopped a bit on days I work. The reason for that is because I pretty much get up, make a lunch, watch BBC news for 15 minutes or whatever time I have left and then I head off to work.

I actually started watching Youtube recently. I may have mentioned it before but I went there looking for wrestling videos. I found one listing many wrestlers that have died. It had a wonderfully sad song. It’s called Mad World. Originally done by Tears for Fears it was redone by this fellow (I forgot his name) and was used in the movie Donnie Darko (which I have never seen). So now my favorite current song is Mad World. Because of the wrestling video I often think about friends and history gone by and even though many of those memories are very happy ones the tone of the melody gets me kind of misty eyed in that they are just memories these days.

Seems the detached retina surgery went well. I was at work so my oldest brother brought dad down and my second oldest brother brought him home. I went up to my parents to see how things were after I had grabbed some hours of sleep. Mom was to call in case of problems with the surgery and I thankfully never got that call. Unfortunately, my dad’s one the worst patients around. He’s already breaking doctor’s orders only hours after surgery. He’s supposed to lay on his side for 24 hours I believe for pressure reasons or details I’ve forgotten. Instead he’s sitting upright with his head propped on one arm. It was expressly put to us that he not sit up but you can’t tell my dad nothing. So the whole family is kinda pissed at him for this and if he has complications we won’t feel sorry for him because he’s the only one not following orders. And if you tell him what the doctor said he gets all mad and starts bitching at us. He was specifically told to sleep only on his side or stomach during sleep. I don’t think he was successful in that last night. Of course, ignoring the fact that everybody rolls around and changes position during sleep, my dad insists that he sleeps on his side and can do so all night. There are a few scary things about his vision. One is that he might lose a lot of it in one eye from the detached retina. Worse, in Massachusetts the doctor said it’s not illegal to drive with only one eye. So here’s where it gets really scary – real world scary – I can easily see my dad refusing not to drive. A 70+ year old man with fading reaction times and possibly one good eye thus further limiting decision making ability based on reduced depth perception. I could see my dad causing a car accident and killing someone because he drives my brother’s pick-up and blaming the other driver to avoid dealing with the consequences and responsibility that he should never have been on the road in the first place.

On another small note, my dad is blaming my niece and her boyfriend for clogging up the computer with spyware and viruses to the point where I think my computer savvy brother may have to reformat the hard drive for like the 5th time in 2 or 3 weeks. All of us that know about computers are starting to think that maybe dad should go back to WebTV were there are no viruses or spyware.

I love my dad but he creates a lot of frustration within the family by being old and crotchety and refusing to accept certain things in life.

Mom’s Christmas open house party went fairly well. She figures about 60 people showed up during the day. The weather was extremely warm for December – around 50+ degrees – so people were outdoors which made the house less congested and made it seem like attendance was off. The chow was terrific and I saw a lot of people I only see once or twice a year. Of course, there was some tension before the party because a number of things were left until the last minute or not done. There were some legitimate reasons for some stuff not happening like my dad’s pre-surgery various bloodwork and doctor visits at the last minute and some that were due to people just putting stuff off until it couldn’t get done. But I don’t think the attendees noticed anything way off-base. And nothing really was. I suppose it was just a need for my family to be the perfect hosts and being our own worst enemy at times.

Had a small shing-ding at work. Mostly it was just people bringing in food and taking a 90 minute break instead of the usual 30 minute lunch. The chow was surprisingly really good. Another surprise was that store bought stuff didn’t get eaten half as much as homemade stuff. The big hit was my co-worker’s wife’s strawberries on cream cheese or something with whipped cream. That plate was scrapped bare. I brought two half gallons of Friendly’s ice cream. I think only myself and my co-worker that loves ice cream had any. I offered her the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream to take home and she readily accepted it. I kept the chocolate/vanilla half gallon that wasn’t even opened. One of my serving spoons was scoffed up to be used for the strawberry cream cheese thing though.

The maintenance guys that service our room came down and had some chow too. They’re pretty cool and good workers so it was a welcome addition. About an hour into the 90 minute dinner this other guy came down. Never helps us, not sure how he knew what was going, and showed up when most of the food was gone and some slight picking up was going on. He took a plate, looked at the scraps that were left, apparently just tossed his plate on to the center of the table and walked out. Good riddance you douche.

The rest of the night was fairly easy because one of my three presses was done and I ran out of materials to mill (shop talk) which was nice after a big dinner.

The two work nights before weren’t the best though. I was circle tech. This means me and another dude make sure the people running the mold presses have good working molds and change the 55 gallon drums of materials that run the chemical mixtures of the banks. It’s not my favorite job. It’s not my favorite job because I have to put up with bitching by my fellow co-workers. We all like to have nice working molds instead of ones going on the fritz damaging the golf balls or causing havoc in the creation process which can really add to the work we do. The problem is, cleaning the molds takes a long time like 3 hours. So we often run out of molds and have to work a bit harder because of trying to extend the life of a mold going bad. And as circle tech I have to go around and listen to all this bitching. The two newest members of my crew were driving me nuts. They’re pretty nice people overall but goddamn, one mold gets a little sticky after a two hour rotation and they’ll chew my ear off looking for a new mold. Many of my co-workers noticed that I wasn’t in my usual good spirits those two days.

Part of the reason was I was mad at myself. I do okay as circle tech but I’m not perfect. And I like to do a top notch job on whatever I do. At the end of the night I and the other circle tech had a disastrous time trying to grasp the new scrap collecting details. Because we supposedly lost $2 million dollars in scrap last year or something to that effect, we now have to count every single scrap ball we make. If a bank is running well we are expected to make over 700 dozen balls in one night. And banks are really in sets of two and we run 5 banks on our shift. So ideally we should be making something to the effect of 7000 dozen balls per night. And everything has to be documented. So the circle techs and the supervisor really run their asses off at the last hour of the 12 hour shift. And we were really horrible that first night. The second night saw probably a 300% increase in performance from us circle techs and things went fairly smoothly. But that first night my supervisor’s hair was literally standing straight up because he kept running his hand through his hair from anxiety. I felt really bad about that because he was really frazzed out and even though he said it wasn’t us, we had a part in it.

In any event, I work one more night, Thursday, which will be a shutdown night which means it’ll only be a partial day and then my room gets shut down for about 10 days. I love this time of year but I can use the break to finish things up like my Christmas gift buying and wrapping and helping my mom wrap. And then there’s brining my dad to the eye doctor and … you get the picture.

Detached retina

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Took my dad to the eye doctor today. Mom came along too which was a bit of surprise because there’s a lot to do for tomorrow’s party. He has a detached retina as stated in a previous blog. The decision was made for surgery and that’ll take place Tuesday morning. So the bulk of the morning was donated to bringing him around to get everything in order including a few blood tests. We lucked out with that in that he was able to get in without an appointment and get in and out fairly quickly. I noticed about 2 or 3 other patients waited the whole time we were there and were barely getting in to see their doctors just before we left. So for now, Dad’s home and available for the party.

The operation is an out-patient deal and about an hour long with a few hours in recovery. The doctor said it’s similar to the cataract surgery dad had some years before. Dad will be awake for the surgery and able to go home afterwards. Sounds fairly low on the hazardous to your health meter which is good news. He won’t get full vision back and the doctor stressed the level of recovery of vision is on a patient by patient basis. If nothing is done dad will go blind in the eye for sure. There is also the possibility that the retina could detach again later on.

After getting home I helped move a bunch of stuff around my parents’ house to make room for the expected guests for tomorrow. Nothing was overly heavy but needed to be moved to make room and make the house easier to navigate. By organizing I helped to create space that will probably be filled by my brother when he gets home and has to organize his stuff that’s lying around the house. I sometimes get mad at him knowing that if there is an empty space in the house it needs to be filled by something. Or whatever is in hand goes in that open space. It gets to the point to where there is literally a foot of space covering 90% or more of table space and really makes the house look like a hell hole. It doesn’t seem to bother my brother in the least. Of course, in a way he’s his own worst enemy because things gets lost and have to be repurchased because they can never be found.

Got home around 3pm and went straight to bed for a nap. After awhile I finally fell asleep. I have a problem of starting to think a lot after diving under the covers and keeping myself awake. I cleared my mind of thought after what seemed a long time and woke up around 5:45 pm. I then staggered to the couch and watched BBC news with my eyes half open and I nearly fell back asleep.

I found out my niece and her boyfriend have the same feelings towards the guy at the credit union. I’ve written about this dude before. Simply put, he sucks at his job. I make sure to triple check all of my stubs after dealing with him.

Didn’t make it to the credit union today as planned. Darn it, couldn’t see the cute teller.

Had a crazy dream today – this morning I think. I was in a large house. It was only 2 floors but it was like a four family house or something. I lived in the back on the second floor. My brother lived in the other half of the back. Wandering through the house I actually said to myself ‘I’ll walk this route to get me to see rooms I haven’t seen in weeks’. This was mainly because I had an older black man living in the front of the house and didn’t want to pester him. My buddy Dwain needed a room and I was going to give him a room or two in the other half of the front. At least one side of the house had a fully enclosed porch. This porch extended about halfway the length of the house.

I don’t really recall doing much in the dream. I was just sort of wandering through the house. I was looking for a place to pee. I later woke with/because of the urge/need to urinate. As I walked through the kitchen which was essentially the center of the house the elderly black came down from his area. He was escorting a lady friend out the side door. That’s when Oompaloompa and Dwain appeared in the dream sitting on a small couch or bench in a small room adjacent to the kitchen. I woke up after heading off to see rooms in the front of the house that I hadn’t seen in some time.

I expect to be out of the house a lot over the next few days. Saturday is mom’s party in the afternoon and work at night. Sunday is more work. Monday will be weird. I expect to get booted out of work early but suspect I’ll work at least half a day which is still a 6 hour day. Tuesday morning is dad’s surgery. Wednesday is a follow up visit for dad to the eye doctor for which I suspect I am the driver for. I have to finish up my Christmas shopping and I think my mom needs me to grab some stuff for her too. So I expect the new few days to fly by. Once Christmas is over I expect things to slow almost immediately. The holiday will be over and I’ll be on 2 week shutdown from work. It’ll be a nice break.

Yesterday I spent the day on my computer – sort of. Got home from work at 7am and stayed up for a little while. Slept during the day for about 5 hours maybe 6 but felt exhausted. I sat like a lump in front of my computer wasting time scanning the net. Again, I had little desire to do anything. So I went youtube.com and started looking for wrestling videos. I watched a couple involving some of my favorite wrestlers: Bob Backlund, Andre the Giant and Bruiser Brody. I watched a handful of other matches here and there. I think that gobbled up about 2 hours maybe more.

One video I was watching was sort of a tribute to wrestlers that had died. These were either big names or more recent deaths. It was just a montage of photos with the wrestlers name and dates of birth and death but it really struck a chord with me because I had watched the vast majority of the wrestlers at one time or another. I’m not sure what the music playing was but it sort of sounded like a subdued Nine Inch Nails. The sound repeated ‘familiar face’ a lot in the song to a soft, rather sad sounding music long.

Another video I saw was Pyscho Sid breaking his leg. Sid was a monster at reportedly 6’9 to 6’11 with maybe 5% body fat if. He was bigger physically than Hulk Hogan. It looked like Sid was wrestling Big Poppa Pump Scott Steiner. Sid climbed to the top rope to throw a drop kick. I’ve never seen Sid go to the top rope. His drop kick was essentially a one leg kick to the chest of Pump while landing in almost a standing position on his plant leg. His plant leg snapped below the knee. It was a highly disgusting visual to see this guy’s leg almost snap to a 45 degree angle. It gives me shivers just thinking about it now. Really nasty video. I didn’t bother watching any other of the wrestling accident videos on youtube. I had had enough just seeing Sid’s leg snap.

Found out a favorite comic writer of mine has a pen name. So now I’m not sure if Gail Simone is really Gail Simone or if that is her pen name. She never stated if it was or not, just that she has a pen name. I guess I’m going say Gail Simone is her pen name. I sort of feel a little stupid and hoodwinked by this. It won’t hurt my liking of her work. I guess I’m rather shellshocked that Gail Simone might not be her real name.

Done writing for the day.

Shitty start to the weekend

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Shitty start to the weekend. About 15 minutes after I got up today I got a call from my dad. He needs a ride. Turns out his ‘cold’ in his eye is a detached retna and he needs surgery fast – as in tomorrow. Thankfully I have the day off so I can bring him. So I expect to be out of the house pretty much all day helping my dad deal with his essentially emergency surgery. Needless to say, I’m not in the best of moods. I’m kind of tired from work still and this new illness has put a fairly big dampner on my spirits. I have no idea if he’ll be home for our Christmas party this coming Saturday.

Got a free ham from work.

Still listening to my Elvis Presley Christmas CD every day.

Getting REAL sick of charities calling. It’s to the point where I get one calling every day I’m home. I figure I get zapped because they hang up on my answering machine. It’s a bit funny that the person will go through the big speal about needy this and that and if I say ‘no’ I barely get a ‘thank you’ and hung up on before I can even say ‘have a good day’ or anything. So I guess I’m suffering from charity backlash. I may switch to just giving money through live events or something. There must be a list or something that’s sold to charities providing numbers to people that do give. I hardly ever got called before but as soon as I gave to one now I get calls from and for everything. Of course, they never care that I’ve loaned my family a bunch of money this month, that my heating bill is jumping by over 50% each month, that I’m getting hit with a shut down costing me a full week’s pay and any of that ilk.

Still have about one third of my Christmas shopping to do. If I’m not careful I could get into trouble. I work this weekend plus attending my mom’s Christmas party on Saturday before work. Tomorrow I expect to be with my dad. So I think I have 4 open/unscheduled days at this time to take of it.

Weird dreams lately. I may rite them down but not really in the mood to do so now. I pretty much just want to go back to bed.

Football, chairty and comics

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Mailed out the companion guidebook to the people that help me with the comic. This should make them happy as I’ve been mouthing off it looks pretty darn good.

Birthday chow at my parents was pretty sweet. A big crowd turned out most likely because of the food I picked: hamburgers and homemade French fries. My brother brought up his girlfriend to work on my dad’s computer. Poor dad is fairly ignorant on computer stuff and keeps getting tons of viruses and spyware that shut down his computer on a regular basis. Not knowing any better, he blames everyone else. LOL. He even blamed my brother’s girlfriend who fixed the computer although he loaded it up again with spyware and viruses. LOL.

My niece and her boyfriend showed up and my nephew tagged along and apparently somebody’s friend too. So mom ended up making chow for about 11 people. I made sure to let everyone know I wanted to bring home some of my birthday cake. LOL!

I sort screwed up and feel kind of bad about it. My parents bought me Marvel Ultimate Alliance for my PC. Unfortunately, I didn’t provide enough info and they bought the DVD/ROM version and I don’t have a DVD player in my PC. Because I opened it I can’t return it. Not even for store credit. On the good side, my brother has a whole bunch of computer stuff lying around and will give me a DVD/ROM player for my PC. Whew! I thought I was stuck!

Magic was okay last night. After about an hour though I got dog tired and could barely keep my eyes open. I also forgot to bring along my reconstructed screw everybody deck which really sucked ass. But my friends were happy because I brought them some packs of Magic cards as presents.

Monday was spent running around buying Christmas gifts and helping out my parents and then Magic at night. The day went by pretty quick.

I’ve been into Elvis Presley Christmas music a lot lately. Bought a CD of his stuff and have already played it fully 3 times since I bought it yesterday.

I’m rather smitten with a bank teller at my credit union. But I get the feeling that she’s 10 to 12 years younger than me. I’m horrible at recognizing flirting signs though so I have no idea if she has any interest in me. Sigh.

I ended the regular season of my fantasy football leagues on a high note by defeating both of my opponents. Both are headed into the play-off’s and both had better records than my team. One guy was the leader of Dwain’s league and had a record of 11-2 while my team only had a record of 6-7.

So in Bob’s league I finished 8-6 and finished in 5th. In that crazy league of 10 teams, 7 teams finished 7-7 or better. In Dwain’s league I recovered from a 2-5 start to finish at 7-7 while handing defeats to the top three teams in the league over the past couple of weeks. I finished 5th there also. Each league has a consolation bowl where teams finishing 5th through 8th play for what we usually call the toilet bowl. How the teams finish in the play-off’s determine final rankings for the year. So although I finished fifth in each league after the regular season, I could end up in 8th for both leagues if my teams lose and score the least amounts this coming weekend. Not sure if Bob will do it but in Dwain’s league where you finally finish determines your draft position for the next year. So if I finish in 8th I get third pick. If I finish in 5th I get 5th pick. Whoever wins the whole league gets last pick which is 10th.

I’ve been getting a bit more sleep over the past two days. That’s nice considering how screwed up my sleeping has been over the past week.

And I just about have another page finished for issue 3 of The Necropolis Chronicles. I have one small panel to redo that’s maybe three inches by three inches. Should be an easy draw.

I joined up at this place called comicspace.com. Essentially it’s a MySpace for people that read and or create comics. I’m there under my name: JamesRoberts.

I don’t think I’ll be answering my phone anymore during the afternoon. It’s almost never anyone I know except for my sister leaving a message about band practice for my brother. Instead, it’s almost always a telemarketer. Actually, the last call was a charity. Seems I’ve been getting bombarded with those lately. I give a little. Apparently this last place I gave $35. I can’t recall ever hearing of them or giving them money before but they said I did last January. Huh. Seemed legit though since they send all sorts of paperwork including registration with the IRS or something. One of the guys seemed to get mad though when I didn’t give this time around on a different call.

But anyways, no more live answering – I’ll let the answering machine handle it from now on.

Over and out.

Birthday!

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Feeling a little crappy today. I haven’t been sleeping much lately and then waking up with a headache. I’ve been waking up at 6:30am almost every day because I’m hearing my brother’s alarm going off through the floor. Usually I can get back to sleep on a work day but on my days off I couldn’t. Today I woke up after only 4 hours of sleep and couldn’t get back to sleep. I’ll try grabbing a nap after writing this as it is now 11:22am. It didn’t help on Friday that USP dropped off a delivery that I had to sign for in the middle of my ‘night’ – 12:30pm in the afternoon. That disrupted my sleeping too.

I got the printed copies of The Necropolis Chronicles Companion Guidebook on Friday. That was the UPS delivery. I dropped the box on my coffee table and went back to bed. LOL!

I think the book looks pretty darn good. I did find three errors on my part. I’m kind of pissed with myself because I thought I had found all the errors. Because my printer is on the fritz I couldn’t print out the pages like I usually do and that’s why the mistakes sneaked by.

The printer mis-cut the books slightly. There’s a teeny bit of white paper where the books were suppose to bleed off the page. I was specifically looking for errors in the book though and only noticed it then. Still, I like Ka-Blam Print On Demnad.

So the Companion Guidebook is Jaina in her purest form. Everything is by me except for some poetry by my friends. It’s a sketch book/character encyclopedia for The Necropolis Chronicles.

I’ve been working on issue 3 a bit lately. Work has been sidelined over yesterday and will be for the weekend and Monday. This is because it was my birthday on Friday and I had to work. On Saturday I tried to sleep but gave up and then spent longer with my friends than I expected and then did some Christmas shopping. Today I feel subdued, it’s football Sunday and I’ll be heading to my parents before long to celebrate my birthday with my family.

Monday is more Christmas shopping and food shopping and Monday night Magic the Gathering. I bought some new cards after my friend at the comic store slashed the prices in half. I think he just wants to get rid of them. The cards have been sitting on the shelf for quite awhile now – months at least.

My Christmas shopping is about half done. Most of the easy stuff is out of the way. I bought a bunch of gift certificates. This is because people are asking for clothes. I suck at buying clothes. I’ll wrap the certificates in a clothing like box though. I usually try to give a decent effort to disguise the presents I give out. I get somewhat weird looks from family members when they unwrap a gift to see it’s a computer printer box that weighs nothing because there’s really a gift card inside.

I met my brother’s girlfriend last night for the first time. I guess she called him back after they had broken up. She wasn’t what I expected physically. Usually my brother dates cute women and she’s only average. But she seemed fairly nice and normal in the five minutes she was around.

My co-worker got a good jolly the other night. I was showing off the new comic and had it at our little pod like area. She consulted with our third member and the two of them agreed that Jaina looks like me. She then clarified that’s how I’d look as a girl. So I had to put up with this for the rest of the night of her giggling like a 10 year old. After further investigation, I only ‘look like Jaina’ on the first page. I can sort of see why. I was trying for a slightly up shot so Jaina’s chin is rounded and somewhat wide. I also drew her lips very thin in the picture as if she was sort of sucking them in. So she looks slightly asexual in the face instead of totally girly. After further conferring we all agreed this was the case. Of course, it didn’t change my co-worker from giggling and calling me Jaina or J.J. for Jaina-Jim or whatever.

Meanwhile, the other girl was asking me all sorts of dating questions and trying to figure me out and see if I would go out with her friend. I told her the truth: I don’t like dishonesty nor bullshit from people and I have problem getting past physical fatness and I’m also extremely critical. I also have some trouble with relationships and trust because of what I saw happen to my brother and his marriage.

It also probably seemed like I hate women on some level because I was bitching about my friends’ wives and girlfriends. I made sure to point out that most of the girls seemed to be picked by my friends because they put out. But I was critical in that one wife couldn’t stand the fact that her husband (then boyfriend) would spend one night a week geeking out with the guys to Dungeons and Dragons and she made sure to call three times or more (once even 5 fucking times!) a night to check on him. Another was a stripper fighting a drug problem with meth. Another was a stripper that had spent time in a mental institution and had given her kids to her sister to raise. Another was a girl that always seemed whacked out on prescription drugs as if she was always in a fog. However, I did make sure to point out that there were two pretty good women in the mix that no longer date my friends – and I probably can’t blame them. LOL!

My two week shutdown at my work is official. It’s Dec 20 to Jan 4th. I guess I do get paid for the three holiday days in there and I can claim unemployment. Still, I’m losing money in the deal because I won’t have a 48 hour week in there. That usually means I literally bring home $300 less take home pay for that week through unemployment.

I’m looking forward to supper at my parents’ tonight. My mom makes whatever the birthday person wants. I chose something simple overall since she’s still recovering from her surgery and need s a walker to get around. I asked for hamburgers and homemade French fries. I don’t eat hamburgers a whole lot and I LOVE my mom’s homemade French fries. My nephew spilled the beans that a cake was bought for me but one always is for whoever’s birthday it is. I usually get a couple of presents to which is cool. One of my friends makes fun of me because I hang out with my family a lot. But I know he does this because on some level he wishes he had the same deal with his parents. He gets along well with his dad but his mom can be tough to love at times through her attitude. I kind of feel bad for him and usually don’t say much to his teasing because he is a bit jealous on a certain level.

Okay, it’s noon. Time to try for a quick nap before football.

Football follies

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New The Necropolis Chronicles comics almost in hand. USP had to reschedule shipment so I should get the Companion Guidebook in my hands on Friday. In a way that’ll suck because I’ll be sleeping during the day as I work Thursday night from 7pm to Friday 7am. So I expect around 1pm or so the UPS guy to arrive and wake me up.

Finally got some business stuff approved by my local town planning board. Good grief! Between crazy scheduling and lay-off’s and holidays it only took about 5 months. But they all remembered me so that was good. Lots of smiling and a bit of (good) laughter (not laughed at) on all accounts. Did my first TV promo since the meeting was aired on local TV cable access. I think I said the wrong url though. Crap! LOL!

Crazy ass dreams over the last couple of days. I wanted to dream about Jaina and told myself to do so. So in my dream I ripped off a villain from my Minutemen and had to chasing after Jaina in sort of a Mount Doom setting. Even though Seth and Morgan were there to help save Jaina, Jaina had to be the bait to lure out the villain! She’s wasn’t happy. The bad guy showed up and I woke up.

Another dream had me taking a class over railroad tracks. My buddy Dwain was there to. The ‘classroom’ was sort of a open platform with a bunch of seats and a desk for the teacher. It was over a small stretch of railroad where Old Boston Road meets with Boston Road by the recycling center in Wilbraham. I’m pretty sure I was trying to watch trains go by there originally.

I had another dream this morning concerning IMVU the 3-D chat. I’ve pretty much forgotten it having been stirred from the dream by hearing my brother’s alarm clock through the floor. So I woke up at 6:30am this morning after falling asleep shortly before 2am. Ugh. Sometimes having my brother here can suck. LOL!

He mentioned in something like 8 days it’ll be a full year that he’s lived with me. My first year in this house passed back in mid to late October. A lot of changes/things have occurred since I moved in. Lost a job, got a new job, printed up my comic, have a new issue ready to arrive on my doorstep, got a business website, had my computer blow up from downed powerlines and will have my second Christmas away from ‘home’ – my parents place. And I do my own laundry these days. LOL!

Really bummed out over fantasy football. This year has been really weird. I played in three leagues but only cared about 2. I had the computer draft for me because if I had missed work I would have lost well over $200 to play in some free leagues. But here’s the difference maker for me by having the computer draft. I could only get half the guys I wanted. And I hated the guys the computer drafted. I wouldn’t have picked almost any of them. The guys I did keep are the guys that Dwain picked for me. I couldn’t make adjustment on the fly or anything. There’s no way in hell I would’ve drafted Bledsoe or Delhomme for my QB’s. But because the computer drafted, I had no choice. I drafted 10th out of 10 teams because I won the Super Bowl in our league last year. Dwain picked 9th because I beat him in the Super Bowl. Dwain drafted live and is going to play-off’s by finishing second. My team is currently 6-7 and likely to go 6-8 as I face the number one team. Dwain’s going to the play-off’s and can finish no worse than 4th. I’m going to the consolation game and could finish all the way in 8th. It makes a HUGE difference being there for a draft.

Three computer drafts, no play-off’s and quite possibly three losing records. This after winning the Super Bowl the past two years where I drafted live. Yeah, I’m bitter and freely admit it. Next time, I’m taking the money hit.

I expect a big heating bill next time around. It was really warm here this past month and my heating bill jumped by almost $40. I’m talking weather regularly in the 50’s and 60’s throughout October and November. Now the cold has come and my heater goes on a lot. I expect a bill no less than $180. And I keep the temp at 65 degrees. I think I topped out at almost $340 for one month last year. Hopefully I don’t go over that.

Oh yeah, the company’s shutting down for two weeks, maybe three over the Christmas holiday. I’m losing $300+ over it and losing three holiday pays. Merry Christmas. So this charity guy keeps insisting that I give money when I told him. He wasn’t rude, just ‘so how much can I put you down for?’ because I gave them some money before. It’s like ‘ hello?! You’re asking me for money when I’m probably paying out more than I’m taking in!’ for the whole month. Felt like I was getting the guilt trip of ‘it’s the holidays, we need money you scrooge’ deal. I told him to get me next time. Besides, I already gave money this month to a different charity and might do so for another.

Okay, blabbing now. Done.

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Blog 120206


About to start 3 days of work tonight. It’s the usual weekend deal, 36 hours worked in 72 hours from Sat. night thru til Tuesday morning.

Got a much needed haircut. The white man afro was ungainly and too wild. I have more of a professional business cut now.

Bought a present for my nephew but I wasn’t all that excited about it. Then one of my brothers says he’s going to get nephew a $150 or so gift and wants to splt it evenly. Gah! That’s almost double what I’m spending on people that aren’t my parents! I suggested we go in thirds with my nephew’s dad. I then agreed to sell the original present for my nephew to his dad since it seems nephew specifically pointed that out to him. Works well for me and his dad since I grabbed the last one of said item from Toys R Us.

Have my family has yet to give me a list of wanted items though. Makes shopping tougher. My family members do decently in the money making department so without a list for Christmas, it’s a pretty big stab in the dark as to what to get them. And I prefer not to get gift cards if I can help it. For someone like my dad, gift cards really are the best. It’s a bit of a sore spot among us that we bought a big ticket item for him a few years back and it’s never been used once. I think it took a full year just to be removed from the package.

So while I have the money or most of the money I need to take care of Christmas shopping, I’m waiting for lists. I’d rather get people something that they want/are going to use than a gift that I think they might like.

Haven’t been signing on to either AIM or IMVU lately. Mainly it’s because of to reasons. One is that I’ve been playing Call of Duty 2 on-line. I’ve had on-line games just about crash when I get an IM from someone which minimizes the screen as I’m playing without warning.

I’ve also been working on issue 3 of The Necropolis Chronicles. Mainly I inked 3 pages but I’ve also been adding in some backgrounds to other pages that look better now.

Newest rumor at work is a two to three week company shut down starting the week of Christmas. While this is welcomed in some ways – more free time my personal busiest time of the year and can collect unemployment, it costs me a lot of money. An unemployment check is literally half of what I take home on a 48 hour week. Not many people like have $300.00 slashed from their paychecks. I certainly don’t. I was planning on buying new tires for my car and that may have to be put on hold if this rumor comes true. And so far, I think every rumor has come true.

Big week in fantasy football for me. I’m sitting in 5th position in both leagues. I’m facing the same opponent in both leagues. Top 4 teams make the play-off’s and there is only this week and next to go in the regular season of our leagues. I’m hoping not to get caught in ‘trap’ games since my opponent (and friend) has a losing record in both leagues. I hate it when I lose to teams with losing records. My buddy’s teams are both around 4 wins and 8 losses. I’m 6-6 and 7-5.

The power of women. Sigh. So I’m driving home yesterday and passing a Walgreens convenience store and see this lady walking from her car. I nearly broke my neck trying to get a better view. LOL! There wasn’t much to be seen though. She had on a knee length coat colored ivory. Her legs were bare and she had on black pumps with skyscraper stilettos. She had a short blond haircut sort of like a bob haircut. Couldn’t tell her age but her legs looked GREAT! I wonder what the car behind me thought as I was watching this woman more than the car. LOL.

Okay, I’m babbling at this point.

Done.