Enemy of Entropy

Another week, another 1⁄4 semester

20 January 2008, 11:40 pm. 1 Comment. Filed under College, Education, Family, Fun, Health.

I’ve suc­cess­fully com­pleted 1⁄4 of the semes­ter! With­out using any kind of accommodations!

I real­ize that’s a fairly piti­ful thing to cel­e­brate, but I have to take what I can get.

The project man­age­ment course is actu­ally giv­ing me use­ful expe­ri­ence using MS Project, along with infor­ma­tion that is applic­a­ble in the “real world.” There’s also a ridicu­lous amount of ver­biage that I’ve never heard used in the work­place, but maybe there’s been some sort of PM rev­o­lu­tion since 2000. I doubt it, but it’s pos­si­ble.
Read on…

Further Prof of Insanity: Blog365

1 January 2008, 11:45 am. 1 Comment. Filed under Blogging, Family, Fun, Geekery, Health, Holidays, Home, Homeschooling, Music, RPGs, Reading, Writing.

I got through NaBloPoMo, as ridicu­lous as it was to com­mit to post­ing at least once a day for a month. So of course that small suc­cess has led me, in a moment of more-​​than-​​usual-​​lunacy, to sign up for Blog365 (oth­er­wise known as “Out of the Fry­ing Pan, Into the Fire”).
Blog365
The pur­pose is fairly clear: to post at least once every day of 2008. Feb­ru­ary 29 is a “rest day.” Posts may be writ­ten on any site, rather than stick­ing to just one blog, so I’ll try to spread them around on mine/​ours. If I can’t get some­thing on the actual site on a par­tic­u­lar day due to net con­nec­tion issues or what­ever, I have to write (yes, write! like, cuneiform or some­thing!) a jour­nal entry and trans­fer it to a blog as that day’s entry.

It would be far sim­pler to have a sys­tem of some sort. Maybe I’ll cre­ate a rotation:

Hope­fully there will be new pod­casts up soon. There will def­i­nitely be more music, as we have that lovely con­cert piano we received via freecy­cle all repaired and put together. It’s beau­ti­ful and sounds great! Not at all bad for one drive to pick it up and less than $200 in repair fees! (Sam wanted to just take it to the near­est autho­rized repair cen­ter rather than doing it ourselves.)

2007 wasn’t a stel­lar year, but nei­ther was it ter­ri­ble. Sam has a steady, secure job that he enjoys, in an orga­ni­za­tion that’s allow­ing him to advance. , Katie had a lot of health prob­lems, but I’m hop­ing that we’re on the right path to resolv­ing them. Shel­ley passed away a lit­tle shy of her 18th birth­day, but since we’d been told in 1999 that she only had a year (at most) left, we felt that we’d got­ten an “extra” 8 years with her any­way. Kioshi has grown into a nice com­pan­ion, too.

We really kept to our­selves a lot through the past two years. When you’ve been betrayed and hurt as deeply as we were by our for­mer housemate’s sud­den crazi­ness in 2006, there’s a lot of heal­ing to be done. I don’t know if I’ll ever approach Thanks­giv­ing with­out trep­i­da­tion again, but we had a good one any­way. The stress did con­tribute to the dete­ri­o­ra­tion of my health, and that does make it harder to get out. We’re work­ing on it, though. We cer­tainly learned who our true friends were, and we’ll never for­get that.

So on to 2008, which we hope to be full of more time with friends, bet­ter health, much more music, Katie spent last night and almost all day today with friends from the school she was attend­ing as well as her new beau. Sam and I spent the day gam­ing, upgrad­ing some web sites, eat­ing good food and watch­ing movies. If it’s true that what­ever you do on Jan­u­ary 1 indi­cates how your year will go, we should be just fine.

Rumbles from the Recliner

23 October 2007, 11:12 am. 1 Comment. Filed under Family, Health, Home, Music, Parenting, Reading.

Not from the grave, oh no, not yet!

It’s been too long to do a real “this is all that has hap­pened in my life.” Writ­ing it would exhaust me, and read­ing it would likely bore you. If you want to know about some­thing in par­tic­u­lar, please ask.

I’ll be post­ing a few things shortly that I had “ready to go” and just didn’t post, for what­ever reason.

The girl is enjoy­ing life as a teen, or as much as any teen can. I wouldn’t want to go through those ups and downs again! She’s always my most pre­cious, beau­ti­ful God­dess gift baby, even if she will be 17 this week. That’s our “big thing” right now.

She con­tin­ues to amaze me with her cre­ativ­ity. She’s the head pho­tog­ra­pher (or what­ever they call it there) for the year­book, which has had her run­ning around to all man­ner of events for which there must be pho­tos! Now! Yes­ter­day! Couldn’t they hold Home­com­ing in July? Come ON peo­ple! And she loves it. She com­pletely filled her 1GB com­pact flash card with live pho­tos from Fri­day night’s foot­ball game, then had to switch to her smaller, older card and be very judi­cious in her shots to fin­ish the game. She obvi­ously needs a much big­ger card!

Yes, she uses her own equip­ment. Her cam­era is head and shoul­ders above the qual­ity of those the year­book staff owns, even the few dig­i­tals. That makes sense, con­sid­er­ing the expense of them, the time it takes to really learn to use a dig­i­tal SLR prop­erly, etc. Most of what they have are point-​​and-​​shoot 35mm film cam­eras, which aren’t such big a deal if a stu­dent loses or dam­ages them.

Sam is still work­ing at the same place, help­ing peo­ple with com­put­ers and net­work­ing and phones and so on — even A/​V equip­ment at times. If you can plug it in, his depart­ment is the one every­body calls first for help. I’m sur­prised jan­i­tors don’t show up with vac­uum cleaner com­plaints some­times (and I don’t know that it hasn’t hap­pened at some time at the past).

The help­ing peo­ple part is, of course, the most impor­tant thing. He loves it, he does it well, and he finds wells of patience that must come from Some­where Else.

I’m reg­is­ter­ing for fall classes (DeVry is on an odd sched­ule, but you may have noticed that). We’re look­ing for a place to move to, but not find­ing what we can afford where we want to live. I sup­pose that’s an eter­nal lament, isn’t it?

I’m still a gimp, and now have a (man­ual) wheel­chair of my own. I really need a ramp for the front entrance of the house, but I’ve delayed try­ing to have one put in here since we want to move.

We’re still in limbo with Social Secu­rity. In Geor­gia, the wait to have your case heard by an admin­is­tra­tive law judge is (accord­ing to the SSA office near me) about 36 months, aver­age. That’s the level I’m at now.

It’s damned frus­trat­ing not to be work­ing, not to be able to work. I don’t want to be on dis­abil­ity or need it! I want to find a job I can do for a decent wage!

But I’ve had yet more icky health stuff, so… Sam and Katie are more of a bless­ing than I can say, cer­tainly far more than I deserve.

I really want music. I mean, to make it. Noth­ing else seems to be able to replace hav­ing a piano (not a lit­tle key­board) in my home. That’s when I sing the most, as I accom­pany myself. (I don’t play all that well, so I don’t play in front of any­one else.) I was think­ing of tak­ing a new vocal class Elise Witt is offer­ing, but it con­flicts with a fam­ily commitment.

I’m re-​​reading Madeleine L’Engle’s Cross­wicks Jour­nals and poetry as I mourn her pass­ing. Yes, there will be a sep­a­rate post about that, but for now, I’ll leave you with a tiny quote from her:

I learn my lessons slowly, sel­dom once for all. Con­tin­u­ally they have to be learned and re-​​learned, not with solem­nity, but with awe and laugh­ter and joy.

Namaste,
Cyn

 

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