Sunday woes and busy start to a new week

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Busy boy today.

I didn’t ant to do one fairly important task so I did every other task so I wouldn’t have time to do the real task I should’ve done. So today I did: the wash, both washing machine & dryer and then folded and put away clothes, vacuumed the house, mopped the bathroom, kitchen, and part of the living room, write out five bills, wrote out letter and packaged hard copy of the comic to send out for review, changed the sheets on my bed, removed the winterizing plastic from my windows, cashed my paycheck from last week, did this week’s grocery shopping and organized my budget for the week. I was able to save money to put towards Wizard World Philly! Sweet!

Last night I loaded up my submission for challenge four of CBR’s Project Runway. Not sure how long I’ll last. Every week I’m in the bottom three for getting votes. When had to make super-villains based on the months of the year. I ended up with September because I pretty much got last pick.

My artwork for the entry is here:

http://www.comicspace.com/jamesroberts/comics.php?action=read&file_id=90121

And the background info is here:

http://forums.comicbookresources.com/showthread.php?t=173141&page=4

I couldn’t sleep Sunday. I was jealous. A male co-worker went home with my crush. It could have been a totally innocent thing but I was still jealous. So I was up over 24 hours straight. I finally fell asleep when I didn’t want to - 7pm Sunday night. I wanted only a quick nap of half an hour but my brother made sure to keep waking me up. In the end, I went to sleep around 2am Sunday morning.

I did get some more inking done on the comic and it came out pretty decent. I was trying to vent by drawing and it worked somewhat. I’m no where near as jealous today but it still sorta stings a little. That’s life.

My two friends I’ve been consulting must be sick of me! I keep bothering them for advice! Then again, maybe there are enjoying seeing me squirm and on the chase.

Oh yeah, work sucked Saturday night. The previous shift had a lot on inexperienced people doing important jobs for keeping the job flow going. It looked like a bomb hit the place. The 2nd shift supervisor screwed up by letting non-qualified people sign up for over-time and trying to half-ass teach them to do it when qualified people with less time at the company were passed over. The guy that won the OT bid admitted he didn’t know the job at all. The 2nd shift supervisor seems to be an idiot. This is also the second or third time second shift has left the place a total shithole on a Saturday O.T. day. I ran my ass off trying to fix things and keep the work flow going but those bastards take the easiest orders to fill leaving me with crap to work with. It was real nice of them to have orders started on the table with zero balls ready to go that need to be specially treated before they can be used.

My heating bill was nice and small. It was $80 less than what I had budgeted for it which was terrific. Since I had already put the money in my checking by a few hours – I wasn’t expecting the heating bill to come today – I’ll just keep the surplus in my account instead of spending it. Somewhere down the road I’ll pay a small bill here and there that’ll gobble up the extra money in the account.

Fatigue is starting to set in. I’ll be taking a nap shortly before work so that I don’t pass out during the night.

Oh yeah, when I was buying luncheon meats from the deli during my grocery shopping, the lady in front of me ordered 5 slices of cheese. 5 SLICES! WTF?!

Going crazy

I can't get to sleep despite being up for 20 hours including a rough/busy night at work.

Found some mythological creature quiz on my buddy's website and did it just to pass some time:


Result of Quiz :: What Mythological Creature are you? (Cool Pics!)
created by WildOnyx
To create your own quiz, click here
You scored as Angel.
Angel: Angels are the guardians of all things, from the smallest ant to the tallest tree. They give inspiration, love, hope, and positive emotion. They live among humans without being seen. They are the good in all things, and if you feel alone, don't fear. They are always watching. Often times they merely stand by, whispering into the ears of those who feel lost. They would love nothing more then to reveal themselves, but in today's society, this would bring havoc and many unneeded questions. Give thanks to all things beautiful, for you are an Angel.
Angel
92%
Demon
84%
Faerie
50%
Dragon
33%
Mermaid
17%
WereWolf
8%

More on the crush and general news

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Hmmmn,…

Not a bad night and a good start to the day.

I’ve borderline loving my mp3 player. I was a bit too busy last night to use it at work but before work I added about 20 more songs to it and it still has over 600 megabytes? Or space left. Basically, it’s a little over half free for memory. I created a new playlist for it to. That’s the only short coming that I’ve found so far into my first foray of these personal devices. I’d like to just click and have random songs play rather than creating a ‘random’ list where I try to spread out the different artists so it seems like a radio broadcast.

My crush continues. I thought it was waning but things have gotten…interesting. Okay, I flirt with her very badly as in every chance I get which actually isn’t all that much. I’ve been consulting with my good friend Sara for guidance in lesbian affairs and it’s been a great help. My co-worker might just be bi-sexual. To make a long story short, I was getting kind of down because there didn’t seem to be much interest returned my way. I’m not fully sure how much really is. But she did ask, somewhat as a friend that lives two minutes away (literally I recently found out!) but maybe with some potential romantic interest too, for my phone number. It was essentially ‘dude, you’ve got to give me you phone number.’ When I asked ‘why? So you can give me a ride on your bike?’ she responded, ‘I’ll give you a ride alright.’ So at the end of the day I gave her my number on a piece of paper.

And suffice to say, I’m currently quite happy.

Ironically, Sara, my lesbian friend helping me out in lesbian affairs, was asked out by a guy! LOL! Talk about timing. Lemme quote from her blog:

“A guy at school asked me out t'other day. I told him had a boyfriend named Jim "The Dungeon Master" Clark."The Dungeon Master?" He asked, slightly wierded out."It's a sex thing." I said, rolling my eyes then walking away.Today before World History he came up to me and asked, with a twisted smile on his face, "So, Sara, what kind of things do you and the Dungeon Master do?"

He just asked this right out of the blue. Like it was okay for him to ask a girl he hardly knows about her sex life. Now, I'm very forward and open online, but in the real world I am ANYTHING but! I'm quiet and very reserved and rarely talk to anyone I don't know.

(some snippage)

So after he asked me this, I walked away without saying a word. No dirty looks or anything. Minutes later I saw Lora and told her about it. She didn't get upset or anything, just, "That's why we're lesbians, right."

For full details, Sara’s blog can be found here:
http://sarasdarkness.blogspot.com/

On a related note, apparently Sara’s blog is the favorite of one of my favorite comic book writers, Brian Michael Bendis. I’d have to give a nod that his Ultimate Spider-Man book is my favorite comic.

I just got off the phone with a guy from Charter calling me to get a promo package. I started asking him about my bill. In the end, and this was cool, he signed me up for a year of internet cable that should save me $10 to $17 a month over what I’m paying now. Not bad, especially when his original call was to get me to sign up for tv and phone in addition to high speed internet. To his credit, he didn’t try to push those on me. So in the end, his phone cost his company money! LOL!

Oh yeah, my baseball is stuck in loser gear. I have a darn good team on paper but 4/5ths of my team is slumping to start the year. I’m in dead last and already 20+ games out of first. I may rebound to make the play-off’s but it’ll be a struggle. I played in our league’s World Series last to finish in 2nd place overall.

Work is having some sort of ‘bring in your hazardous waste material’ day this Friday. This is good news. We have to pay something like $10 a computer monitor at my local dump/trash pick-up. I have 4 monitors and a TV to get rid of. I’m kind of ashamed of the waste since most work but are obsolete. I took a friend’s junk monitor from the comic book store to get rid of too. So I’ll have 6 monitors/tv’s to get rid come Friday.

It also seems I’ll be working 6 days a week for awhile. That could change but we’ve worked the past two Saturdays and will have to work this Saturday even though it hasn’t been officially announced yet. It will be today which is Thursday morning as I write this.

Okay, I’m off to read some comics I bought yesterday to get me to sleep. Hopefully I won’t have more weird dreams like I did about punching out Tom Hanks because he was treating his date, a young black woman, like a piece of shit. I, …um,… then kicked him in the face several times while wearing steel toe boots. WTF?!?!?!?!?

Some stuff and crush update

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Haven’t written for awhile because I’ve been working a lot. For the foreseeable future, I have to expect that I’ll be working 6 days a week, 8 hours a day. While the extra money is helpful it also kind of sucks. Working the night crew of 11pm to 7am I rally have no full day off. I get out now Sunday morning at 7am and go back to work Monday night at 11pm. Sunday I only slept about 4 hours and that was interrupted by at least 3 phone calls maybe as many as five. It really sucked.

I think my crush on my co-worker is starting to wane a bit. While she’s friendly to me, that’s about it. So that’s a bit of a bummer. I did find out that she lives literally two minutes from me. There are some red flags that tell me I shouldn’t get overly involved with her but her not responding much to my flirtations and such are the main reason for my losing interest. It’s too bad because there is a lot I like about her.

I certainly picked the wrong lines today at the stores I went to. I think I literally spent as much time waiting in lines as I did shopping. At Circuit City I got stuck behind a customer trying to return over $1000 of merchandise that they had bought the previous day and had paid over 90% by check. The guy threw a semi-hissy fit and walked out leaving his wife/girlfriend there to deal with things. His voice wasn’t really loud but you could see by his hand gestures that he was annoyed. He was speaking in Spanish so I couldn’t tell what he was saying. I think I waited over 5 minutes or more for another cashier to come over and help out.

I then went to Stop N Shop for groceries. Of the two lines I saw I made the mistake of getting into the line that had no bagger to help, a slower cashier and a lady with her cart filled like a mountain range. As I watched the other lane I finally hopped in it after 3 customers were able to pay and get through after I had gotten in my line. I finally hopped over and paid and got out. The original lady I was behind still had anywheres from half to one third of her stuff to still check-out. I think I waited in that line for like 4 or 5 minutes.

So I hop over to Big Y to pick up a couple of more groceries that were better buys. I hop into the 12 items or less express lane behind this lady checking out. She wants a rain check for vanilla extract and the cashier was a bit unsure how to do it. So that takes like 3 or 4 minutes. Man! I couldn’t win.

I sorta felt good the other night at work. I was stamping which isn’t my favorite thing to do but it is my job. The older Vietnamese guy that I had trained the previous week was scheduled to do the job I trained him for. Well, I guess it didn’t go well. I was kicked off of stamping just before lunch and told to help the older guy. He was really behind and was screwing things up like mixing different types of golf balls pretty good. The guy that takes the orders to the stampers was pretty upset. When I asked him if he needed an order filled right away he barked out of frustration , “I don’t give a damn, I’m going to lunch.” I rather laughed at this. It wasn’t towards me but how the night was going.

I did splurge and buy a modest mp3 player today. It’s a little 1 gig Sony Walkman with FM tuner for a total of $40. It’s for work because I don’t have a radio that I can use there. I was also hesitant about buying an Ipod because I didn’t want the added cost of downloading music. Of course, I’m fairly ignorant on Ipod tech so I may have that wrong. So I’m going to end this here and check out my mp3 player.

Work and a heavy duty, good old fashion crush

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Lots of stuff if I can remember it all and feel like writing about all of it.

I got done working a 60 hour work week. I’m not sure how badly taxes will zap me. I always hate it when working O.T. that sometimes I give over half of that O.T. money to the government. And no, I don’t believe that I’ll get it back next tax season. I’ve seen my taxes and they are pretty consistent from year to year. If I don’t claim ‘zero’, I always end up paying money instead of getting money back. I’m hoping to put the extra money I earned towards going to Wizard World Philly in June. Unfortunately, I just got my dentist bill for a cleaning, x-rays and I guess consolation. After a co-pay and dental insurance I still owe over $87. WTF? My last cleaning was only like $90. Actually, I just noticed a $50 deductible. Why do I bother with insurance again when I’m still paying a hefty chunk? Sigh.

I’m actually a bit sore from work. I have to bend and lift a shit load of times at work per night. I’m talking constantly. At least it’s exercise.

I’m very ecstatic over the coloring job Jason Embury did for me on the back cover of issue 3 of The Necropolis Chronicles. Just look for yourself by clicking on the following link:
http://www.comicspace.com/jamesroberts/uploaded/4268/1176592190_Sy1BMWgZIP.jpg

I also posted my entry for the second week of CBR’s Project Runway. Our assignment was symbolism like Captain America. The art for my entry is here:

http://www.comicspace.com/jamesroberts/uploaded/7858/1176516084_Fbk5glhyXJ.jpg

I should be getting a raise at work starting Tuesday of this coming week. Because it’ll be my official first year at Top Flite I now move into the highest earning wage for my job. It’s not a big raise though.

I’ve got a mad crush on one of my co-workers. Then again, so do most of the guys. She’s quite cute in the face, fairly tall at 5’8 or so and skinny as a rail. She usually has something real guttural to say yet I’m entranced by her. Figures, though, she has a girlfriend. Which makes her even more sexy.LOL! One of my lesbian friends gave me a warning to not even mention a three way with the girlfriend to my co-worker. I shall heed my friend’s warning.

We’ll see how things go. She’s a fair amount younger than me and usually doesn’t talk to me unless I start the conversation. But then she’s like a total exhibitionist high-fiving me, showing me her scarred foot before I could say ‘no’, and sometimes touching me like a hand on the shoulder with a soft pushaway after one of my comments or jokes. So I don’t know. She’s pretty chatty overall but I haven’t noticed her touch other people much that I can recall.

We heard that my brother’s ex is still telling the kids that they are moving at the end of summer to Ohio. Further, she has said that anyone that is telling the kids otherwise is just trying hurt the kids and make them feel bad. What a wonderful person she is. No doubt about it that if the courts do allow her to move that she’ll continue to do what she does now: dump her 6 year old son in daycare and then have her just turned 13 year old daughter be his caretaker/raise him. And then she’ll continue to harp how she is the superior parent over my brother who actually spends time with his kids when visitation allows.

I think I’m forgetting a lot of stuff. Seems like I had a lot more to write about. Oh, well.

Vote for me before Apri 12th!

Hi all!

Here's the thread to vote for my super-hero creation at CBR's Project Runway. I'd appreicate your vote so I can make through to the second round.

Thanks!

http://forums.comicbookresources.com/showthread.php?t=171023

Oh yeah, I got 4 hours of sleep today and I'm scheduled for a 12 hour day. Ugh! And there might be over-time all week and maybe a manditory Saturday because we are behind and we have next Monday off as a contract holiday. I was possibly considering a 64 hour work week to wipe out all my bills and give me some decent spending cash this month but the 4 hours of sleep probably put the kabosch on that.

Decent weekend gone bad

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The weekend wasn’t too bad until mid-Sunday night.

I had Friday off which meant I got home at 7am Friday morning. I fell out of bed around 5pm and was a zombie until around midnight or so when I ‘woke up’. I didn’t get back to sleep until 4am. So that really sucked. I didn’t really do much of anything. My brother had his son here and they watched a movie. I think I was in my bedroom reading some comics and watched something that now I can’t recall. I was totally unmotivated.

Saturday was more of a normal day. I can’t recall when I got up but it was late since I fell asleep somewhere around 4am the previous night. I spent pretty much the entire day at the comic shop my friends own. The previous owner and good friend was in town so it was a fun day. Unfortunately during the gaming I got my ass kicked all day. I lost all three tournament games of Heroclix because I couldn’t concentrate. I missed a lot of stuff that would have saved me. I must have been tired. I also sucked out in Axis & Allies. Mainly that was because of my piss poor rolling. I think I lost 50% of my pieces in my first turn and killed only 2 to 4 pieces of my opponent. It was only a matter of time after that.

Sunday I made it up to my parents for Easter. Chow was awesome. I ate so much during the day that I couldn’t eat much for desserts. But! I now have a huge chunk of uneaten desserts in my refrigerator.

After returning home I beat my brother home who had left about 30 minutes before me. I thought something was up. It was. More on that below.

Monday kind of sucked/sucks so far. I mailed out the comic to a foreign publisher to review. We’ll see what happens there over the next few weeks. Hopefully it’ll be good news.

My dad needed a ride to a doctor’s appointment. I headed over to the local big ass mall while up there. Well, as I walked towards A.C. Moore art supplies I discovered I somehow lost the 50% off an item coupon that was in my pocket. Terrific. I didn’t even bother going in after that. I saw in the car and waited for my older brother who tagged along because we don’t often go to that big ass mall because it’s 30 minutes away. Our local mall is 12 minutes away.

So for now, I’ve driven around all day, got food from my parents and now it’s close to when I bed down for a nap before work. So pretty much, this day is lost to 85% of what I had hoped to do.

My fantasy baseball team got beat up pretty good this first week. My team went 3-10-1 in 14 categories. My opponent had two of her batters score more HR’s & RBI’s than my whole team combined. Sigh. At least there are 21 weeks left to play. And yeah, I said her. I got beat by a girl. I think my team would’ve lost to just about any of the other 8 teams though. My boys really stunk it up.

At work tonight I’m not expecting to work with the older Vietnamese guy. I’m kind of happy about this. My problem with the guy is that I really don’t think he can read English very well. And when I tried to correct his mistakes by showing him, he would go ‘yeah, yeah, yeah,’ like he understood what was being said and he would just walk off. And he would do that in the middle of my explanation so that I never finished showing him the right way to do it for the third time.

I joined a thing called CBR Project Runway. Pretty much, it’s a rip-off of the show called Project Runway. CBR is Comic Book Resources so this stuff is all about designing super-heroes and or villains. Our first project was to design an animal costume wearing super-powered person.

My contribution can be found in this thread:

http://forums.comicbookresources.com/showthread.php?t=170383

Feel free to join CBR and vote for my entry G. Penguin.

Okay, now to the part of Sunday night that sucked and STILL has me pissed off 12+ hours later.

My brother arrived back at my house and he had a messed up aura. I could tell he was pissed. Big surprise (sarcasm) the ex decided they needed to talk. Less than 3 weeks after calling my brother to say that the kids were wrong and that she is not planning on moving anywhere than she announces that she plans on moving to Ohio at the end of the summer. And that she’s taking the kids. Ohio is pretty far from Massachusetts. So from what my brother told me things didn’t proceed well. Here are some of the things she accused my brother of or tried to make him feel guilty over:

That he can’t trust her. Hmmn,…she cheated on him during the marriage, asked for the divorce, tried to turn him into to DSS, tried to have his daughter under her orders do physical damage to the house… Gee, I wonder WHY he wouldn’t trust her. I’m glad he told her he doesn’t trust her.

She wants to move the kids to her ‘family support’. As far as she’s revealing, she has one uncle that she went to see in Ohio. That’s it. When my brother countered that the kids have a large family support here (3 uncles, 1 aunt, 2 cousins, and 2 grandparents from my side alone!) she countered that the kids have family in Ohio that love them and miss them dearly. My brother countered again “after one visit?!” It should also be noted that by moving away my niece and nephew would also be moving away from their grandparents and their mother’s half-sister from her side of the family. Then again, they never see them anyways because the ex has burned all bridges to her immediate family members.

She also tried to blame my brother for not seeing the kids on the nights of the week she has them. She stated that her daughter age 12 has to take care of her younger brother.

Okay, when the divorce first happened she told the judge that she was getting the kids too often in the joint custody decision. The judge MADE her take the kids. A couple of years later when my brother refused to take her back after she decided she couldn’t find anyone better she sued and won physical custody of the kids with my brother getting two week nights and every other weekend custody. Then she decided to go to night school on the nights she has the kids. This might almost be every week night too, I believe. So now she BLAMES MY BROTHER for not taking care of his kids?!?!?! WTF?!?!?!

She further said that he won’t miss much time with the kids if she moves half the country away. HUH?!?!?! He’ll also get a break in child support.

Gee, what a wonderful lady – ‘you won’t be able to see you’re kids but you won’t have to pay as much’. Nice trade off. What a skank.

There’s more but that’s it for now. I’m pissed off.

Another enjoyable weekend

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Another good weekend.

Staurday was decent, Sunday better. Saturday I got home from work, crashed and burned at 10am and got up around 3pm. After some phone calls I stopped at my local supermarket to buy a cake sort of on a whim. It was a vanilla sponge cake of three layers. Between one layer was strawberries, peaches in another and Bavarian crème between another. Fresh whipped cream on top too. It was awesome!!!!!! I didn’t expect it to taste so good. Anyways, it was dessert after some good old hamburgers at the parentals. A trip to the comic store to hang with friends and a quick game of ‘clix followed up. I then stopped at the supermarket again, but this time a different one, and bought up some groceries. My brother passed out from flu like symptoms on the couch as I played Call of Duty 2 before reading a few comics in bed.

Sunday I saw the movie 300. It was pretty good. The visuals were pretty nice. I really enjoyed some of the one on one type fight scenes between normal men. The movie had some standard Hollywood stuff like a huge 8 foot tall guy fighting the main hero that was totally predictable. I didn’t care for some of the ending scenes though. In the final climax of the story, the Spartan king does something and the explanation is rather lame in my opinion. And the second to final scene reminded me waaaay to much of Gladiator. In fact, I was going ‘they ripped of Gladiator’ until they explained the scene a bit better.

Some more food shopping after that followed by a return trip to the parentals. I hadn’t seen them in almost 2 weeks so I wanted to visit. And my mom makes great chow. I donated some more minor foodstuff to them too. From there it was off to a friend’s place to catch Wrestlemania. I was somewhat shocked to learn I was a bit late and had missed about half of the first match. I didn’t realize it started at 7:30pm.

MLB baseball has started and so have the fantasy baseball leagues. My first opponent is a girl. Oh, man! A girl! What the hell is the world coming to? Are there no more sacred geek guy clubs anymore? First D&D has been infiltrated, then comic books, and now fantasy baseball?!?!?! A geeky guy just can’t be a geeky guy anymore. Sheesh. Women. (Shakes head). Next I suppose they’ll want equal pay. : P

This week will be somewhat interesting at work. I’m not sure if I have to go back to my real job of stamping. I’m not very good at it. However, I think I shall still be in service market. While I trained the real replacement for the job last week, there is world that my shift will eventually be getting a spot of sort of a handy-man type deal that helps everyone in the service (supply) area. So I’m thinking I might be that guy until the job goes up for bid. I also haven’t heard anything on the jobs I bid on nor the art room job.

My electric bill dropped almost $15 this past month. I’m hoping my heating bill drops way more than that. I did turn the temperature down to 65 from 67 degrees since it’s been warmer around here lately. I have been waking up to wet sheets lately. No, I’m not pissing in my bed or anything like that. I need to go to a lighter blanket I guess because my legs sweat so badly that the sheets get damp. It’s fairly uncomfortable having to wriggle around trying to search for a dry spot for my calves and feet.

So! It’s back to the weekly grind of working and trying to get myself to do art projects before work. After work I’m usually wiped out by fatigue and have no desire to do so. I should have Monday April 16th off for a holiday. Sweet!