decent weekend

Blog 052907


Not a bad holiday weekend.

I saw Pirates of the Caribbean 3. It was…okay. I enjoyed the ending and it looked terrific. There were so many story elements the movie felt boring throughout most of it. I’m glad I saw it though.

I drew up some pictures for my friend Sara. They were just a couple of character shots but they came out decent and she seemed to really like them which is cool.

I went to my buddy’s place to play Magic The Gathering on Sunday night. I was a bit torn because I had my new kitten for only a couple of hours. Well, I got squashed and eliminated in my first two games in about 5 minutes each. So I ended up talking with the rest family in the living room for like 10 to 15 minutes each time. I wasn’t pissed because I get along with the family pretty well and had a decent time chatting with them.

My buddy got into a big fight at the table with his dad over a fairly minor thing which was disappointing. He scooped his stuff and went to his room in the basement and didn’t come back up for the rest of the night. The rest of us played without him for 90 minutes or so which probably pissed him off more.

The days were hot as hell so I finally turned my central air to AC. It’s a huge help. My house was regularly pushing 85 or more degrees this weekend!

There are some plumbing issue plaguing my clothes washer which is annoying. I’m trying to fix them but it’s not working out well.

Saturday night I was on a drawing high and finished off another page of the comic with full backgrounds and everything. I think I’m down to three pages to pencil/ink and the issue is done. I thought I had lost a page but it turns out I combined it with another page so I may have 2 pages of poems this time around.

I mowed the jungle that was my lawn. My neighbors, especially the retired guy that seems to mow his lawn twice a week, should be happy. My brother felt guilty and cleaned the bathroom a little bit and did the dishes. I was fairly happy about the dishes being done because I had used so many of them including every bowl in the house and many plates.

The biggest news of the weekend for me was that I got a kitten. She’s a little black cat although she has slight stripes in bright light. I think her coat may lighten up a bit as she gets older which is fine. I named her Weebee. It’s short for Wee Beastie. I’ll be keeping the name Cocoa that her original owners gave her but we all call her Weebee. So her official name is Cocoa Wee Beastie, Weebee for short.

I felt really bad about taking her away from her parents and brother and she was really crying in the cat carrier which made it worse. But it’s been a few days now and she’s happily running around, climbing on everything and scratching and biting fingers and toes of humans. My family enjoyed her presence on Memorial Day gathering quite a bit and she was the hit of the party. As I am writing this I just had to pry her off the back of my chair as she was trying to climb around my shoulders.

As I was driving her to my parents place yesterday she really hated being in the cat carrier again and wouldn’t stop meowing. I let her out and she climbed all over the car including the top of the backseat by the back window. She managed to make her way until she was up and on the back of my shoulders between my neck and the seat rest. Fortunately, she just sat there and wasn’t a problem or major distraction during my driving.

I’m sort of not looking forward to going to Wizard World Philly later this month now. I always get a little bit like this before a trip but it should pass. But this time, I’ve now been slated to drive my car down. I have a 1999 Cavalier. It’s not a big car. My AC also sucks. And 4 of us are going.

This also means that when the con ends at 6pm each day the guys are going to want to drive around Philly and the surrounding area. I know they are going to go to numerous strip clubs and it came up as to whether I would drive my car to them. I’ll pass. I have a limited budget that will mostly be used to buy con tickets, buy food, and pay for the hotel room. I suspect I’ll only have around $100 to spend there. The last thing I want to do is drop money just getting into a whore house – er, I mean strip club, and drop money on strippers. I lend them my car though. Besides, I’m not a fan of the way my friends treat strippers. When it comes right down to it, they really do treat them as whores and that does bother me even if I don’t care for the lifestyle of strippers. I still laugh at the total double standard my friends have. When my friends were at the strip club last time they were folding dollars into tight squares and purposely trying to hit the strippers with the flicked money giggling like school girls themselves when they did. The next day at the con there was a soft core porn star there (you heard me, a soft core porn star at a comic con) and she was running late. In fact, she was barely setting up as we got to her booth about an hour into the show. So I wasn’t sure if she was ready and I asked if we could get her picture. Holy shit you’d think I’d asked Jesus Christ himself to commit murder with the way my friends were all ‘give her some time, man’, type comments towards me and their eager defense of her. I almost told my friends right in front her ‘you’re not getting into her pants, boys, chill’.

So the only reason I’m going to Philly is to try and meet one of my favorite writers there (Gail Simone) and to try and sell my comic to Diamond with a face to face chat. I’m not even sure if Gail Simone will be there because she’s not on the list.

I’m also traveling with two guys I’ve never traveled with before. One is a pretty meek dude so I expect no problems from him. The other guy is trailer park trash. Sometimes we get along other times he just spends all his time sexually harassing me like he’s still in high school. Well, mentally I guess he still is. And because of that harassment which sometimes gets really out of hand he isn’t always my favorite person.

So I hate to say it, but right now the unknown bad outweighs the known good for going to Philly.

Oh yeah – a pretty decent week of work. Who’d a thunk it?

Huh.

Two decent nights at work. One was really bizarre though - lots of errors kept my production numbers low. I must add that almost none of the errors were mine: I got an order that was initially stamped on the wrong type of ball so I couldn't do the second logo on it, the crew gave me a two color job one the stamp I was one can only handle one color, the crew gave me the wrong color ink for a job, my machine was missing a pivitol part of the machine so I had to go hunting for one, I had to wait a couple of times for jobs and the image on the printing plate for one job had missing elements. All of that in one night made for a weird experience. We also had an employee meeting to take a survey that I had already taken so I lost an hour of production doing pretty much nothing at the end of the night.

Just a weird night.

Turbulent week

Blog 052005


What a week.

I walked out of work Monday and took the next day off. I couldn’t believe that I still felt shitty after I had woken up. My stomach was still in turmoil and I was muttering about my job using swears and curses for a number of hours.

I did do some nice drawings though trying to alleviate the stress within me.

Other things in random order:

My baseball team should finally win its first match-up this week. I’m sitting in 10th out of 10 teams and there’s already pretty much no way I can finish in first this year as my team is already 35 games behind first place. I still may make the play-off’s and win the World Series though. We still have something like 17 weeks to play.

On a whim I signed in to AIM looking to talk to a friend of mine. I was surprised to find Elodie on instead. I hadn’t seen or heard from Elodie in months. I wasn’t even sure it was her but I gave her a shout. I’m happy to say that she gave me permission to use a poem she had posted to her blog awhile back that I rather liked. So that was a nice and cool.

Work got better later in the week. I had an interesting conversation with a co-worker. I was surprised by what she had to say and I felt pretty bad for her. If she lets me, I’ll try and help but she has to let me. We’ll see what happens.

Got to see my friend Rob from California a couple of times this week. Him and Dwain showed up and I showed them the Wii. We had some good chow later in the day. Later that week I went over to Dwain’s because Rob is staying there. They played a lot of Xbox 360 and then a group of us went to eat at Pizzeria Uno’s. I was on a limited budget and when I read that bacon on my burger cost $2 I nixed that idea. Turns out that after tipping and paying, I had exactly $2 in my wallet to go me for a couple of days. Whew! Glad I passed on the bacon.

While we were there I was stuck in between Rob and Trailer Park Trash. They started bitching because I couldn’t stop shaking my leg. So out came all sorts of comments from ‘good beat’ to ‘playing the drums’, to sexual innuendo. After some food I finally stopped shaking my leg.

I almost sort of choked on a French fry. I inhaled a as I was putting the fry into my mouth and a particle from it landed on the side of my throat. It was one of those irritants that eventually brought tears to my eyes because it was so scratchy. So while I was in no jeopardy of choking and dying, I kept coughing trying to get the particle off the side of my throat. Even after I had dislodged it through eating and drinking the remnants of half the table’s drinks, my throat was all still irritated for most of the rest of the night.

I checked into work an hour late after that and stayed 2 hours extra trying to make up time. I got home at 9am, stayed up til 10 doing internet stuff and then sleep for about 5 hours. I then got up and went to work for 12 hours. I guess a number of people from the crew went to the bar in the morning (Saturday) but I said screw that. I was in bed and asleep by 9am. In the end, despite missing most of Monday and all of Tuesday I should finish the week with 30 hours. But I really needed that time off. I was ready to quit and thinking seriously of taking the lay-off when I left.

I guess my co-workers really were wondering if I was going to come back after skipping Tuesday after leaving early. LOL!

During staying for over-time I got to talk with a few co-workers that I don’t normally get too much time with. It’s surprising to hear their comments on other workers from our crew. Some people on our shift aren’t as popular as they think they are. Other popular ones are considered good people but screwed up. I’m usually pretty neutral in such affairs. Unless someone screws me or treats me badly, I usually have no problem with them. Most of the people on my shift treat me pretty well but I can tell that with spending enough time with some of them, our now friendly relationships will deteriorate.

I will have to give my co-worker some shit. I kept asking her if she was going to the bar with the others. She kept insisting that she wasn’t because she had her son this weekend. I was a little late getting out of work and happened to see her driving down the same road as the bar. Could be that’s the way she goes home so I’ll have to be sneaky in asking about her. Then I’ll lay into her if I find out she went. J

Work was okay later in the week. My boss put me on jobs other than stamping because we have so many people coming in for over-time. I appreciate it. I seem to be in good with my boss which is cool. Friday night my co-worker and I finished our tasks early with about an hour to go. He told us to go take it easy for the rest of the night. We’re both pretty hard workers so we helped out some guys cleaning so they wouldn’t be stuck running in high gear right at the end of the night.

The crush was working nearby. Her CD of rap started skipping a couple of different time and it was quite an amusing addition to the songs.

Some punks ripped my mailbox out of the ground last night. I think I may have heard them do it as I heard several voices outside my house late at night. I wasn’t sure if it was my neighbors who sometimes get drunk in their driveway so I didn’t investigate. During the day I noticed 4 boys around middle school or high school freshmen age walk by my house. I had never seen them before and I never saw they walk back. My paranoia says it was them on their return trip.

I guess after review I had a fairly busy week. It certainly had its up’s and down’s. Work sucked A LOT at the beginning of the week. I’m am thankful that Sara and Wendy were there to give me a pick-up when I really needed it.

Last night I was in an altered state. What I mean by this is that I was somewhat exhausted and I couldn’t tell if I was asleep or not when I had what I guess was a dream. It could have been me ‘day dreaming’ new stories but I think it was a dream. The dream was essentially my super-heroine Holly driving up a large hill on a thin road. This area was no lit and had lots of dense forest on all sides. Occasionally, like every half-mile or more was an industrial business that was mostly hidden by the trees. Pretty much there was just suddenly a chainlink fence gate in between two trees that marked the entrance and only the very tops of the buildings could be seen. There were no lights on and it was late evening. Holly was driving up towards the crest of the hill. There was suppose to be something there but I’m not sure what – maybe a rest stop or something. The road was well paved but thin. The branches of the trees blocked most of the view of the sky. If another car were to come down the hill each car would probably have one set of wheels off the pavement while passing one another. Holly’s car started having trouble and she had to pull over. Originally it was car trouble but then it may have been just lack of gas. She hadn’t seen anyone else around, hadn’t passed another car in some time and civilization was miles behind and she wasn’t sure if anybody was ahead of her.

A lot of things are fuzzy because at some point I had woken or at least gotten up to piss. I know I tried to work the story in my head because it was really creepy feeling – hot girl lost at night on a lonely mountain road. There was no super powers in this dream and Holly was a normal person. What made it creepy was the setting and the evil that humanity could do to one another. Holly was worried about her car as she walked back the way she came and planned to hide from any car that may have come by. A car did come by and it was full of teenagers – four or five. One was the prime evil dude. He was maybe 16 while the others were younger like 14. I can recall story options of attacking Holly and at least handcuffing her hands behind her back as they drove to her to who knows where. The kid was skinny dressed in black except for a white long sleeved shirt under a black t-shirt. He was shorter than Holly who is 5’10 in my stories and was wearing knee high spiked heel boots in the dream. She kept to the road instead of walking in the woods in the dark and spraining an ankle. He also wore a black knit cap like teenagers do these days.

There are some things I’m forgetting and the story never ended as I woke up or feel asleep. Holly was never raped or anything but I think she was punched in the mouth giving her a fat lip. She escaped at one point trying to run and hide with her hands cuffed behind her. I may or may not flesh out this story. We’ll see.

Not good times

Blog 051507

I walked out of work yesterday.

I refuse to admit it, but I hate my job.

I work on machines that put personalized logos on a golf ball using a stamper and ink. The problem is, the machines don’t always hold registration so the logos sometimes look like a shitty printed newspaper photo where it’s all wonky and out of alignment. Certain inks print like shit on balls so that gaps of no ink appear on the ball where image is supposed to be. And some jobs just run like shit. And part of it is my inability to run the machine the way I want it to be – perfect.

Last night was a disaster. I had a job fully set-up for me and ready to run. When I produced some balls for inspection the people complained about ‘peeling’ spots where there is no ink. So I tore down the job and pretty much started from scratch after I couldn’t get rid of the missing spots after a lot of adjustments taking up a lot of time. Then I noticed it. The missing spots of ink were SUPPOSED to be there. It was part of a tree design giving the tree texture. What a total waste of time. Then my cup that holds the ink went bad. Ink was leaking out of it and it dried making peeling happen for real. So for a job that should have been done in about 40 minutes tops, I took about 90 minutes.

The second job I did I never finished. That’s the one I walked out on and went home. I think the real problem was that the ink I was given was to thin. That makes the image smear on the ball. I did everything I knew how to try and fix things but the image came out fucked up one way or another. It didn’t help that the image was so big that the pads we used could barely fit the logo. I didn’t realize it but we had two people call out making the guy that helps people really run his ass off. This guy is a really good guy and tried to help me where he could but he just didn’t have the time because of other job responsibilities. He eventually told me to pull the job and start another one. So in 2 and a half hours, I produced 42 dozen stamped balls. According to the sheet we go by I’m suppose to have about 124 in the same amount of time.

I was so frustrated I was almost crying at my machine. Yup, crying. Crying with rage in that I wanted to lash out and destroy the machine before me. Lash out and rip a new asshole to anybody that talked to me. I was physically shaking with anger and frustration. My voice was wavering and I couldn’t form sentences forgetting words in my anger. I also began to feel sick. My stomach was in a knot and my chest felt all tight. Worse, I’ve felt like this before because of this stamping job. I’m too critical and too much of a perfectionist for this stamping job that allows crap product or at least sub-standard quality go through in my opinion. If need be, I’m allowed to produce junk. I won’t have it. So I told my supervisor I was going home and did. He’s a really cool guy and didn’t give me any shit. He knows I have a lot of trouble with the job. He also knows I work like hell when I’m at work and I haven’t missed a day yet that wasn’t excused. Tonight, I’m thinking about calling out.

I’ve been thinking about work all day. The only plus is that I’ve produced some good artwork by trying to vent my frustrations out on my drawing board. So some of the panels that I’ve drawn and inked for issue 3 look pretty darn good. But I’m still muttering to myself constantly and I’m already in a slight rage. I signed up to work over time today knowing that I’ll be late to work on Thursday because of seeing a visiting friend that shows up only once or twice a year. I’m already blowing half of that time off. We aren’t listed for how many hours we agreed to so I can drop it from 4 to 2 hours. And it’s packing so it’s a lot less stressful for me. But my stomach is still a bit miserable from last night. I also slept from 4am to 8am solid and then off and on til 10:30am or 11. And I haven’t been able to fall back asleep which is pissing me off.

So right now, I’m not in a good place emotionally. Combined with the crush looking totally awesome with a new haircut with colored highlights and sitting right in front of me so I can stare at her all night while I don’t seem to rate on her radar as much as even a friend means I really dislike work right now.

I’ll be bidding on jobs again whenever I decide to go back to work. That doesn’t seem to help though since I lost every bid so far which has been on over 11 jobs.

There's gotta be something in the air in my house

Dream 051405

It started with sort of a gallery showing at a house. There were lots of people milling about mostly outside trying to get in. They were trying to see Ultimate Spider-Man, not the movie or comic but the real world Ultimate Spider-Man.

I can’t recall if I was in the dream or as ‘director’. I think I was in the dream though. There were two sets of individual trios or people with super-powers. One was my co-worker Adam and his two cronies. They seemed like assassins of some kind. Another trio had powers but I’m not sure what. One of their people was a young woman that could not be seen in a sort of way. I think it adjusted on the fly as my brain worked the dream. I think at first she couldn’t be seen by surveillance cameras. Then she couldn’t be seen by the naked eye. Then this one woman could see and was pointing her out to security or something. The girl had to hightail it away after trying to stay still and not be found by crouching down in the middle of every one. The woman found a room that was full of snow. Deep snow too. AT first it was just featureless and square. The camera panned away and when she was back in the picture she was a deep blue color like all her clothes and skin were freezing. The woman couldn’t speak. She made sounds but her words were gibberish as if someone had removed her ability to speak.

I either woke up or something because the next shot was sort of a marsh scene. The area was totally flat and no trees but occasion big stalked plants that could make almost a thicket. The water was probably 97% covered with intertwined vegetation. The ‘camera’ stopped on two black, plastic looking pipes that were ribbed. These pipes had an intelligence or were programmed in that they retracted t be hidden under the vegetation when a girl’s voice could be heard coming closer. After awhile the woman showed up as a young girl of maybe 10 in blue slippers and blue robe and white pajamas. She could speak again. She was practicing speaking as she walked through the marsh as if she knew pretty much were she was going. She was going to Havana but Havana was in Louisiana. She also had a southern accent. A pipe suddenly came to life – maybe a different one than the original two and attacked from behind her swallowing her whole in one shot. It then shot out a grey canister like a cannon that contained the girl inside. I knew she was still alive and being delivered to somewhere to so thing. It felt like she was being given to the authorities that would jail her or make her a slave or something not good.

I appeared in the dream and started chasing the canister. I could see it’s moments as a bulge under the vegetation. It was moving pretty fast and zipping around forcing me to run after it. Even as the controller of the dream it was hard to catch. When I did catch it the area was still the same marsh but the it was the side field of my parents house where everyone parks their cars. When I opened the canister which was now the size of say a milk carton all I found inside was sort of a blue flower that resembled a Scrubbing Bubble – the bathroom foam cleaner. I tossed that over the marsh and on to the road. I found another canister or bulge under the vegetation. That one was a jellyfish thing like orb. It was pretty gross. So I tossed that and it immediately turned into a flowering bush the size of a large sunflower. The flowers were all Scrubbing Bubbles and it had like 5 or six of them. I found another jellyfish orb , tossed it and the same thing happened.

My alarm went off and I woke up.

Futureworks COmics, it's official

Blog 051307

It’s official. I am Futureworks Comics. I went to the registry of deeds and got all the paperwork done. I like seeing the women that work around the court house. Lots of power suits and stiletto heels. Professional women tend to look hot. I was worried my trip would take a long time but I must have hit a slow day or something. It took hardly any time at all. My parking bill was 50 cents.

The crush cut her hair and changed its styling and she looks HOT! It’s way cuter than before and she looked good then. Unfortunately, I think I’m only on ‘nice co-worker’ status with her. Grrrr!!!

I worked a bunch of OT this past week. One of the days I was hooked up with this older lady from 2nd shift to be shown how to do a job. We started chatting and come to find out she’s a painter. She took out some photos she had of her work and it’s terrific! She’s a really good painter. She also won an award for her photography and has sold a few pictures as postcards. The conversation became about her daughter sometime – can’t recall how. Turns out the daughter is a screenwriter for TV shows. She sold a script for the first season of Los Vegas. She also sold a script to Supernatural – my favorite show in current production. So you never know just what people’s stories are. And some are way cool.

I got booted from my art Idol type contest. I had to redesign Wolverine’s costume as a Legion of Super-Heroes team member. So I stuck the hairy legged dude in shorts. It did not go over well. In fact, I didn’t get a single vote. Oh, well. It was somewhat enjoyable when it lasted.

Had a weird dream the other day where I was burning zombies with only a torch. These zombies were lying under a sort of translucent green cellophane trying to rip free of it in sort of a back alley type area.

Lots of people moving in and out of the department at work. A number of people are being called back to their previous jobs in the plant. As they leave, people they bumped are returning. I’m too far down on the list to get my original job back. I would go back to it if offered third shift.

I’m really sleepy as I write this so I’ve forgotten a ton of things as I try to stay awake. I think I’ll end this here.

Wii Wii Wii, Spider-man

Blog 050607

Saw Spider-Man 3 today. I think I liked it best of all the Spider-Man movies. I suppose if I sat down and analyzed it I would find issues with it but I like it very much coming out of the theater.

I then bought a Nintendo Wii. I only got the little 5 game CD that comes with it but it’s pretty fun so far. The games are bowling, tennis, baseball, boxing and golf. I can actually see playing them each for some time to come. By playing the boxing game numerous times in a row I actually got a bit sweaty playing. I wasn’t pouring sweat but the back of my neck was fairly wet and my forehead was misty.

I picked up the lawn chairs from my parents place. I had asked them to buy me them (I provided the cash) because they had a truck. The chairs actually somewhat fit in my car but I had to have the passenger side window down so the chair legs would fit.

I started a drafting system for Heroclix that the guys at the store liked. It’s merely a new way to pick teams but it gave things a new wrinkle and made it fun trying to get your picks before the other guy did. We had more fun drafting than playing!

My dad got a bit of an earful from the family. On Saturday night/Sunday morning at 3:30 am a teenaged kid woke up my parents by knocking on the front door. My dad, who’ll lock every door in sight at all times of the day and pretty much refuses to leave the house for fear of break-in’s opened the door right up for this kid. My brother and mom were pissed. They said the kid was polite and nice asking my dad to call the kid’s father because a wild animal was chasing him through the woods or something. My dad called the cops eventually and I guess they gave the kid a ride. I guess the whole incident was kind of weird and they thought the kid was either on drugs or a little drunk, maybe both. But they were more upset that my dad opened the front door right up for this kid at 3:30 in the morning not knowing what this kid’s story was.

My niece and nephew were both fired from the same place my brother does. They lasted maybe a month. It sort of doesn’t surprise me. Apparently the place needed to hire 130 employees to get a certain contract or something yet my brother says on a regular basis that he has no work. So it sounds like the company hired a bunch of people just to get the contract and now has started to fire people that can’t make the quotas. Doesn’t seem very fair to expect someone to fix 10 digital cameras a day after a little over a month of being on the job.

I survived CBR’s Project Runway to design another week. I’ve been in the bottom three every time. Strangely, in back to back weeks, the guy that’s running the contest has voted for me. I’ll take his vote though. And for back to back weeks, I went to bed figuring I lost only to discover I barely made the cut to advance.

People in my current room at work are starting to get called back to their old jobs. My old room is hiring back 13 people. The sucky part is that I’m so far down on the list I staying right where I am. Some other people are getting called back and to other rooms also. This most likely means that I’ll get stuck stamping all the time. That’ll suck.

We didn’t have to work six days this week which was awesome.

I’m starting to drag tonight. When I got out Saturday morning I stayed up until 10am. I snuck in a nap of about 90 minutes before getting up and staying out until 7pm. By 9:15pm I was in bed on a Saturday night and out. I woke up after 8 hours which ended up being 6am! So I cleaned my room a little and played Call of Duty 2 until I was ready to go see Spider-man. I then bought the Wii and later headed to my parents for supper. Now I’m home and fading fast. Oy.

Close call

Nothing like the power going out and plunging one into complete darkness as one is taking a shit.

But the power came back on real quick.

Phew!

The crush said 'yes' when I asked her go out to eat and gave me her number. I called her tonight but I got her voice mail. I should see her at work though.