Completely Awesome Blog Post

At work Friday during the meeting I had a great idea for a blog post. Something new, exciting and directly related to These Times We Live In. Sadly it happened during the Friday meeting, and I did not write it down immediately. Then a coworker I'll call "Don" started screaming about something crazy and I forgot all about it. Sorry about that.

Instead you get this update on the gutters - they are still under the weather (ha ha ha). Some dude is coming out tomorrow to give an estimate, but I'm leaning towards this woman named Joyce because she was nicer to me on the phone. I haven't heard back from Joyce yet; she was going to come by either yesterday or today. So I may get to meet Joyce in person.

In other coworker news, two of my coworkers have been dating in secret for months and months. They told me a month or so ago, and I hadn't caught on to them, mostly because I don't care what people do in their personal lives. All of my brainpower is tied up in other projects. They claim my not realizing they were a secret date couple is an indication that I have poor detective skills. I maintain that I wasn't applying my detective skills to them.

But I digress. As it turns out they are moving just down the street from me, which means that now I have more friends nearby, but no more time in the day. I often find myself trying to tell people that I would, in theory, like being friends. Sadly I can't fit it into my schedule. Work, the rigors of Dungeons and Dragons, hitting the range, playing guitar, tending to my 71st level wizard's auction house interests...all these things take time. I barely get any recreational reading done as it is, and then people want me to spend time with them?! What the hells, man? As the driving paragons of industry said of yore, "this dungeon ain't going to run itself, yo."

Truer words were never spoken.

Social Media and Stuff

Hello readers! It's been a really long time since I discovered people were reading my blog, freaked out about it and quit writing. A lot has happened since then. I know I could easily see how long it's been since I've posted anything here, but rather than push a button and find out I'm just going to say it's been years and years. Not a whole hell of a lot has happened since then, but I'll lay it out anyway.

First off, I live in the same house, work the same job, and drive the same car. That pretty much covers everything most Americans are interested in so I thought I'd get it out of the way up front. Everything is fine, except that we have to have the gutters repaired, as it rained inside our house yesterday. Tracy rigged a temp fix. She is a badass, and that's why I married her. I'm not looking forward to paying a guy to do this, but I don't even know if I could make myself climb a ladder that high. My house is really, really tall. So there's that.

The main thing that happened in the intervening time is that I quit smoking. It's been over six months now, but I had to sequester myself away for those six months for the sake of society at large. As it turns out if you smoke for years and years and then just quit it can make you irritable. I'm irritable to begin with, so it made me damnably cranky. Still, no one was folded, spindled or mutilated so I'm calling this a success, with a downside. The downside is that, as a smoker, you likely wind up with a bunch of friends that are smokers. So after you quit you have to stay away from your smoking friends in order to avoid temptation. So that sucks, especially if you only have three nonsmoking friends and one of them is Steve.

Anyway, I'm back. Tell your friends, tell your enemies, go tell it on the mountain.

I'm a quitter!

So, as you may know I cancelled my Facebook account last week. I was at work and having a bad day, and got one too many friend request, whiney post, whatever; I blew my top. "Up yours, Facebook!" And with that bold cry, I deleted my account. It was easy. It was also easy to reactivate. Deleting and reactivating your Facebook account is exactly like logging out then logging in again, with one extra "are you sure?" step thrown in.

Anyway, Facebook missed the hell out of me and welcomed me back with open arms and promises not to be such a butthole in the future.

The real reason, I suspect, that I quit Facebook is that I quit smoking. I count the official quit date as New Year's Day, as I had my last one on the Eve. That last one was the first in about four days; I had gotten sick and went on the lozenge. So I had my ceremonial last smoke New Year's Eve, more out of a sense of transition than actually wanting one. Then I woke up January 1 and went cold turkey.

Cole turkey meant, for me, no smoking, no more lozenges, pills, patches or gums. I'd tried all these things with some degree of failure in the past. There is a secret weapon. I did not have the secret weapon in the past. The secret weapon is actually wanting to quit.

So, 19 days in and I feel great. I still get cranky from time to time, but the mood swings are lessening, or I'm getting accustomed to them. My brother in law said that the last time he saw Tracy and I he thought we were super hopped up on caffeine; turns out we just have more energy. I do feel great.

New Post for the New Year

I've been terribly neglectful of my blog. I'm afraid that a lot of the free time I used to spend here has been squandered on World of Warcraft and Facebook.

The day before yesterday I fell into a terrible mood. I was having a fine old time at work, came home and whammo; it hit me. Bad mood, dude; bad mood. It stuck around too, lingering overnight and hitching a ride to work with me the next morning.

That "next morning" was a Thursday, the day at work on which I often find myself with a goodly deal of down time, much of which is used to check Facebook. So there I am, checking my Facebook, noticing that I have a ton of friends whom I don't see on any regular basis and some of which I haven't actually seen in like fifteen years. This struck me as, well, gratuitous to say the least. I don't mean to be callous, but I don't care what these people are up to. Shane Tharp can espouse his love of Civil War Reenactment and call the President Barack Osama, but I don't have to listen to his stupidity or care about who got a little bunny rabbit over the holiday.

It's not that I just don't care; it's that hearing about all this actively makes me angry.

A while back I went through and arbitrarily deleted people I don't really know from my friend's list; this seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Then I started getting the letters. Complaining, cajoling, wondering what happened to all the good times we never, ever shared. I relented; I re-friended a few of them. But the letters never stopped. The last one I got had this tinge of self-pity to it, and it put me over the line.

I'm done with Facebook. Account deleted. If you're reading this, sorry; I didn't "defriend" you specifically (and yes, I've already gotten emails/instant messages with "wtf" in them). I just can't take it anymore. I can't pretend I give a shit what cute thing your kitties are doing. I can't pretend to care about the vacation you went on with a bunch of people I've never met in my life. And I damn sure don't feel like reporting what I've been up to for the benefit of seventy people I never, ever talk to in real life.

As for my other eight friends; you all have my email, cell number and will see me on weekends whether you want to or not. So you eight are the ones that really suffer.