The Electric Buzz of Merriment

I got iced in last week.  Couldn't leave the house for days.  Inches of hardened sleet, in early December no less.  Just ain't natural.  But at least it was just sleet, and sleet doesn't pull down trees and cause blackouts.

Speaking of trees, I hope everyone has their lights and trees up by now and gotten things all festive-like.  I went with a blue theme this year.  Used some outdoor icicle leds I had sitting around on the tree.  With the lights on it's an innocent, if brightly lit, white tree.

But turn off the lights and

electricblueKAPOW

 

 

I feel like I have to shout to be heard over it!  Even though it's completely silent!  And I'm writing!  That's how blue it is!

Happy Yuletimes!  Yeah!

Boo

It's not too late to get in the Halloween spirit!  If you're not, maybe you can help it along by watching the Great Pumpkin?  Or gorging on candy corn until your skin takes on a sugary orange patina?  Or I could prescribe the dermal application of black cats?  Or maybe you could just carve a pumpkin.

Here's my contribution to the cause..

Bad times

As everyone knows, October and Halloween is my favorite time of year.  I've been trying to work up the motivation to write an appropriately Halloweenish post, but it hasn't happened.  For weeks I've been struggling with some pretty severe depression.  I'm normally rather resistant to such things, I'm generally upbeat, or at least emotionally stable.  But this has hit me hard, and I'm all kinds of messed up.  I feel like I'm going crazy.  I'll have some average days and then out of the blue it'll hit me and I can't stop crying or tearing myself apart.  I don't think I'm likely to go into much detail, as I don't really like to put too personal of stuff out in a public forum, and also I like my blog to be a happy place that I enjoy looking back through from time to time.  But, I don't know, I'm feeling very very hopeless.  Shattered dreams and all that jazz.  I write stories, but I'm just not seeing any happy endings for myself right now.  Rationally, I realize that depression and grief are fleeting things and that eventually things will go back more or less to normal.  But at the moment it's all very bleak and frightening, and I just don't know what to do.

Too left-brainy

Have you ever wondered how junebugs survive?  They can barely fly, careening wildly into every solid object they can find, and once crash-landed they can barely walk with their prickly uncoordinated legs picking up every loose bit of cobweb nearby, and they end up staggering in small circles.  Yet, they somehow seem to get by.  It's a mystery.

I've been silent of late since I haven't much ado to report, other than the buzzing of cicadas.  It's the summeriest of sounds.  Mainly I've been preoccupied with that old idea of making the slave role generator concept into a sims-like game.  Now and then it just keeps popping into my head, regardless of how ill-conceived it is.  So, in order to satisfy that urge by attempting to do something, I've been reading up on C# programming.  I'm... not very good at this.

The general idea is that I might be able to make something with Unity3D, a mostly free game engine.  I have a fair idea how I'd want it to function and look, along with how I'd want a needs-based AI to function.  But to make even the simplest of games there's gotta be programming.  And that hurts my brain!  I've never been good at learning new languages - it's so left-brainy.  I get most of the basic concepts okay, but the 'grammar' of it isn't wanting to stick in my head.  I look at the examples and think, "I know this is supposed to make sense . . . but how!?"

But, I'm still going at it... blindly... gropingly...

June-iper

What's going on?  Well, there's just not been much going on around here, it seems.  I've done a little writing, but no huge leaps.  I've also been scanning and restoring lots of old family photos, to preserve them before they all turn yellow and fade away.  Just finished the album of the road trip up to Maine when I was 6.  And I have a summer cold!  Hmm, it's not quite summer yet.  It's a spring cold.  But that sounds strange. 

Anyway, I've been preoccupied the last month or so.  For the past eight years or so I've hosted the parties for one of the local kink groups.  We've been saving up our money for a real dungeon, though, and now finally we found a suitable place.  A big place!  It's called The Foundry and is, in terms of square footage, now one of the biggest dedicated play spaces in the US, or so I've been told.  Lots of people have been working on making it look snazzy with decorating and painting and building furniture.  I'm not very handy, so I've been donating lots of supplies. There's still a lot people want to do with decorating and furniture, so it's an ongoing project, but people seem happy to have such a large space in Arkansas of all places.

It feels strange not hosting the parties anymore, but at least I can sleep in now.  For the past eight years I haven't had the option, I've had to be up for every party.  Now I can skip if I wanna!

Springtime Updates

It's been a while since my last post, but nothing much has been going on.  I'm all better from my wintertime bouts of illness... except my ear is still ringing.  I went to an ear-nose-throaty person about it last month.  I was tested in a sound proof booth and was diagnosed with some minor hearing loss.  The ringing has gotten a little better, at least.  Some days it's not noticeable.  Right now it is.  Maybe it'll get better in a few months?  One can only hope.

What else has happened?  I haven't been terribly productive.  My inspiration has been next to nil.  I don't know why, I'm just lacking artistic and creative focus, even when it comes to writing a little blog entry.  But look - I'm writing one right now.  Maybe that's a good sign?

Also, Spring sprung!  All outta nowhere.  One week it was all bare trees, the next there was yellow pollen everywhere and leaves covered with light green baby leaves.  Now everything is all sticky-sap.  It's time to start lawn-mowing and, and... doing things! 

Here's some tulips that were planted in my yard last fall.  And isn't that nice?

What's goin' on?

"Why have you been so quiet, you bad, bad dolly?" one might ask.  "Where have you been?"

Alas, my previous post's optimism about being on the mend was a tad premature.  Days after the flu, I came down with a nasty bit of flu-related bronchitis.  After that, with every symptom I overcame, a new and worse one came along.  I'd rather have had the flu again.  Ended up with pleurisy and even tore my throat from all the coughing.  Thrills and excitement!  I'm much improved now, finally, except for this ringing in my ear from an ear infection I picked up along the way.  It hasn't stopped for weeks!  It goes, "Eeeeeeeee."  Hopefully that'll clear up from the meds I'm on.  If not, I'll have to see a specialist.

Suffice to say, I haven't had the energy nor the motivation to any writing or sketching or anything.  At least I finally refilled the bird feeder.  So that's something.