Halcyon Repose

I hate being sick, but normally I can suffer through it. What I can’t stand on the other hand, is having a fever. I never really had fevers when I lived in Tennessee, but for some reason, ever since I moved to California, every time I come down with even the slightest cold, I manage to run a fever along with it. When it comes to having a fever I am a little baby. All I want to do is curl up into a little ball on my bed and cry.

I bring this up because there is currently a nasty little bug running around work. Coughing, headaches, and really really bad fevers. Of course being the lucky guy that I am, I managed to contract this along with everyone else. It was an absolute nightmare, for 3 days of solid fever. Not only was I sick, but my roommate was sick as well. Get up for awhile in the morning, down some Theraflu, sleep for a bit longer, take some Advil, check email, sleep, and when the coughing got to bad to sleep, I got to make some half hearted attempts at game playing. I was wrapped up like a burrito trying to sweat out my fever, and all in all.. I wouldn’t recommend the experience to anyone.

About the only thing that comes close to being that sick, is watching a close friend get sick as well. She started getting sick a bit after me, so after I battled my way out of my fever and was coherent of the world again, I started worrying about her. Psychologically I am a fixer. I see someone who needs help and it breaks my heart faster than anything. So seeing someone else laid out that badly about drove me nuts. There is not a lot you can do for them except comfort them while they wait it out, but yet I feel like there is something more I could do to help. Of course she has plenty of people dropping off the drugs and medications, so all that is left to give is a sympathetic ear, which in it’s own way is a help.. or at least I hope it is.

Ah…

The work Christmas party was a great success. It’s amazing how much the company has grown in the few short years that I have been with them. They gave out the 5 year swords this evening, and for the first time, I actually knew a majority of the people who were receiving them.

I almost missed the ceremony, as I had to cover some classes at the center. Thankfully one of the guys who helps out a lot came to my rescue and bailed me out. I love him for that, especially since he threw out his back recently and can’t fence. I know exactly what it is like to sit there all night knowing that you are unable to fence due to injury. But it was my work party, so I bid him a fond farewell and got the hell out of there.

The party itself was fun. I lost all of my “gambling” money fairly early in the evening at the poker table. I actually lost to pocket aces (with another on the board), so gambling for prize tickets was out. I got to spend the rest of the evening with the my lovely friend, and we hung out in the karaoke room. We ALWAYS have a karaoke room going at the work parties. The reason for this is that some of the higher ups can really belt out the songs. It’s actually a joy to sit and listen to them all, they are all extremly talented.

We finished off the night with a drawing, and of course I won nothing, and then I promtly headed headed home. Of course on the way home the freeway on ramp was closed for construction and trying to get off the freeway the ramp was closed for construction as well. I swear I actually screamed myself horse I was so frustrated. An extra ten minutes later I actually managed to get home.

One side note as I get ready to pass out.. I officially declare that I am in need of a girlfriend. I’ll have to look at fixing that soon.

Yes I am indeed still alive. I have been busy, I find that if I am constantly out doing things with others, I tend not to dwell on things and get all moody. Seems to have worked out so far, life is much brighter and happier now.

I finally took the time to get together my Blizzcon photos. There are not as many as I would have liked, but at least I got some of them. I am working on some of the other photos I have lying around as well, hopefully I will get them up at some point too.

Life in general is going good. I have started jogging in the mornings. I am starting off nice and easy. I am only doing a mile a day starting off , but I find I can get excited about doing one mile, while thinking about doing two miles is just tiring. I did extremely well for my yearly review at work last week, which makes me a happy camper. I am still constantly learning at work, and things are still exciting. I can only hope they stay that way for a long time to come.

There is another fencing tournament tomorrow. Recently my fencing has actually been improving (it is amazing what practice actually gets you), so hopefully I will start actually seeing some results in the tournaments themselves.

Regardless it is getting late and I need to get to sleep if I want to actually get up and function tomorrow (I find that I am no longer 16, and that I require a decent nights sleep to actually fence at anything approaching a normal level).

I typically have to choose between visiting the family on Thanksgiving or Christmas. The trip is just too far to make a 2-3 day trip, the flights are too expensive, and I don’t have the vacation to spend a week there every month. I would love more than anything to spend more time with my family, they mean the world to me.

Since this year (as with most years) I will be flying into visit the family on Christmas, I am all by my lonesome for Thanksgiving. The first year I was here in California, my roommate, his girlfriend and I all cooked Thanksgiving dinner, but since then I have mostly glossed over the holiday. It just isn’t the same without loads of food in front of you, and I wasn’t up for cooking loads of food for a very few people (tnot to mention the cost of doing so).

This year, I have a couple of friends, who like myself, are away from their family for the holiday. I have laid my plans and they shall all be converging on my place tomorrow night for some good ol’ holiday cooking. Turkey, stuffing, green bean cassarole, corn on the cob, mashed potatoes and gravy, cranberry salad, pumpkin bread, and pumpkin pie. Between Kenny and myself, we have quite the spread. While I am somewhat annoyed that most of the people who are coming backed out of bringing dishes (grrr), at least they let us know far enough ahead of time to pick up the slack.

I have the pumpkin pie, and cranberry salad all finished and chilling in the fridge. The Turkey is all trussed up and ready to throw into the oven here in about 2 or 3 hours for some slow cooking goodness. Which leaves very little for me to do tomorrow.

I am all excited. Food and friends.. good times.

Music: Flunk – Blind my Mind

Crazy week so far.

It seems like I have been walking a tight rope bridge at work the past two days. Nothing too awfully bad, but bad enough that the stress was building up. Thankfully I was able to resolve the problems at work today (It is always good to see the customer happy, even if it was your mess up that caused them to get irate in the first place), and everyone was extremely happy on the forums as I left work. I can only hope that maintenance tomorrow goes nice and smooth, and that the rest of the week flows smoothly as well.

After work, I headed to the gym for a much needed work out. Not only have I not been able to go for the last few weeks, but I was in serious need of the stress relief. I hate being as out of shape as I am, but I have to keep a nice steady pace lest I reinjure my back. I am all paranoid about it now, but of course in this instance I feel that my paranoia is justified and actually required to keep me up on my feet throughout the competitive fencing season.

Afterwards my gym visit I am now nice and relaxed, and I am working on plowing through all the photos that have piled up on my camera. Who knows, maybe I will actually be able to get to one of the wide variaty of side projects that have been piling up on me lately…

On the lighter side of things the fencing floor should now have the last coat of varnish on it. And so we complete yet another construction project at the fencing center. It always amazes me that we continually get emails from other fencing centers asking for advice after they see the photos up on our website. It’s always strange to think you are good at something, because deep down I know there are plenty of people who have much more experience, but the clubs contacting us always ask the same questions we asked as we started our projects. The only difference is that we had an absolutely wonderful pool of members with a wide variaty of talents which allowed us to really bang out some amazing things. From the fencing floor, to the overhead mounted reels, we truly are thankful for everyone’s contribution. If another club isn’t as lucky to have the expertise necessary to undertake their own projects within their club, then we are always glad to answer any questions and lend them the experience that our labors have given us (read: school of hard knocks).

Current Music: The Eagles – Take it Easy

I finally got out of my funk. I seem to go through these periods where I am super depressed, everything pisses me off, and I just want to be left alone to mop by myself for awhile. Typically these spells only last for a few days, but this last one lasted for about a week. I hate being in those moods, because there is nothing I can do about it, I just have to ride it out.

At least life is all shiney happy again, and just in time for the upstairs reconstruction at the fencing center. Nothing like some good manual labor to feel better about yourself. And I scheduled a massage appointment for myself on Sunday, ever since I got back into the active side of life again, my back has been one big knot… What I need is to hire a big Russian woman named Ulga to beat my back into submission…

Now that I have bared my soul, on to the rest of my gritty life.

Apparently I have a whole block of my life missing. I say this because I received a letter in the mail two days ago from the LA Sheriff’s department telling me that I am past due on paying a parking ticket. A ticket I received at 9am August 29th. Not only was I apparently not at work that morning, but I was in a part of LA I have never been in before.

Assuming work calms down tomorrow, I will be giving them a call to let them know that apparently there has been a mistake. I’ll tell them what happened, or what didn’t happen as the case may be, and I will listen to them tell me that there is nothing that can be done and I will have to pay the ticket. I mean there is my license plate number in the letter along with a rough description of my car, and without some sort of concrete proof, that will probably be all she wrote.

This is just totally crazy, the sort of thing you would expect to see on some cheesy TV show at 10 o’clock at night. Regardless of how crazy it is, I guess it is better to pay the $45 ticket than to have that go on my “permanent record”. Crazy…..

On the lighter side of things I actually got my Death Cap For Cutie tickets.. So very very happy.

The Long Beach Invitational tournament is this weekend. I have actually signed up for the first time in 3 years. I don’t expect to do great, as I spent all summer recovering from a sprained back, but gosh darn it, I plan on enjoying myself.

Family truly is important. I have friends that are not very close to their parents, and are even further removed from their extended family, and in a way that is very sad. I take that back, it is sad in almost all ways. They have their reasons for not keeping in touch, and to tell the truth, if I was in the same situation, I would probably do the same thing. Not everyone can have a wonderful family, but thankfully I do. I have a loving sister and parents, and all my aunts, uncles and cousins are great.

I truly enjoy spending time with them, and now that I can actually afford a plane ticket to pay them a visit from time to time, I am a much happier boy. My family is, and always will be, the balm for my soul. Sure there is the usual family politicking that goes on, but most of them are capable of putting all of that aside when the holidays come around. There really is a love that runs through my family and I am honored to be a part of it.

The only reason I bring all of this up is I just got back from visiting Newnan for my cousin’s wedding. It was a great trip, I got to visit everyone briefly, and I was able to see the beautiful bride on her wedding day. My only complaint is that it was all over with too quickly. It was a short weekend from the get go, but at least I now have something to look forward to come December.

For now I have some passable photos to remind me of this past weekend, and I have a new Photo Album link on the right side of the page that can take me there anytime I want. Feel free to look around, just remember to close the door behind you; we don’t want the cats to get out.

I sit here drinking a glass of Earthquake Petite Sarah, and boy do I need a shower.

Rewind to a couple of days ago. My roommate Kenny announced that it was time to rearrange the living room, and he wanted to enlist my help to do so. We had danced around the idea and thrown some thoughts back and forth previously, but apparently he was ready to make the journey towards a new living room with or without me. It was decided that Saturday after my fencing classes were finished, we would move some furniture around to see what effect we could get.

I got up the next morning and did my time at the fencing center. Once I was done, I had a message from Kenny on my cell phone that we were going to meet the other roommate Ed and his GF for lunch, and then we were going to pay a visit to Ikea for some bookshelves and possibly a new coffee table (our current one is on it’s last two legs… literally). I ran home, and had just enough time to change clothes before we ran out to pick the others up for hot wings, and some wandering in the great store known as Ikea. We didn’t find any coffee tables that struck our fancy, but we did get some super cheap book cases to hold our DVDs. We hit another furniture store on the way home that was having a going out of business sale, but alas they were a little out of our price point. Had I the money, I would have done some shopping there, they did have some nice furniture, and a super cute sales lady that I wouldn’t have minded picking up.

After the bomb that was the furniture store, back home we went. Ed and Kenny had already moved some furniture around, so we got to work and cleared out the overly large entertainment center out of the room, turned the area rug around, relocated the TV, and put together the bookcases. While we worked, Ed’s girlfriend threw a Costco’s shepard’s pie into the oven for some late night munchies. Once all this was complete we had a completely new living room that makes the place actually look respectable. Better yet, the new setup is actually conductive to a 5.1 surround sound speaker set up. I have had the stereo to do it for awhile, but the old layout (TV in the corner) did not work well at all.

Last night I stopped by Fry’s to pick up some speaker wall mounts, and when I got home, I discovered that there was only one of the two mounts in the package. Some enterprising individual was kind enough to take one of them, and of course I did not check the package before I got home. Cursing the electronics god responsible for Fry’s, I had to make another trip this evening to return the mounts. Thinking ahead, I put on my work shirt to grease the wheels at the exchange counter. Sure enough when I got there I found one of the employee’s who I knew I could impress with my job, and lo and behold, he finished with his previous customer just as I got up there. I explained my situation to him, and he turned to his supervisor to ok the return. As we were waiting, he asked if I actually worked for the company so eloquently blazoned across my chest, and I smiled at him and told him I did. He then the went on to tell me how much he enjoyed our game, and started on with his in game stories and how he had applied for a position at the company as well, but had never heard back about it. I smiled nodded at the appropriate times, and soon had an in store voucher for a new wall mounting kit.

I quickly by passed the previous set I had purchased. All of the other boxes were wrecked beyond recognition, and plus they were rated for 20+ pounds, and all we needed was 5 pounds of support. I made my purchase, ran home and then started the arduous task of hanging the speakers. I not only hung them up near the ceiling, but ran the wires all the way around the room, so after two hours of playing monkey (on twirling bar stools to boot), I finally completed my task. I poured myself a glass of wine to try it out (it is definitely better have having aired out for about 30 minutes) and I basked in the sounds of the new set up.

There is nothing like the tangible result to a hard night’s work. I now sit here sipping my wine, and watching the lightening play across the sky. Man, I live for nights like tonight.

So let’s try this again. Since the web is so being a pain, writing long posts in a text editor seems like a wise idea.

So updates on the life and times of Jaime. My back is doing well. I did pull it out again last week helping my friend load up his luggage into my car, but thankfully it only kept me out of service for a week (ONLY a week??? How sad is that?). Pain is mostly gone, but my back is one big tight knot. I am going to stretch out and then try and do some fencing tonight. If things go well, I may be able to fence in the Long Beach Invitational after all. I was hoping to be able to make it to the Miami NAC next month, but registrations end today, and I am still not sure when the events are, nor to I want to make a decision split second with my back being as iffy as it is. The up side to going of course is visiting my friend’s in Miami, but even if I can’t make it, I will hopefully be able to visit them when they have their wedding later on this year.

Concert wise I waited too long before buying the Death Cab tickets. They are completely sold out, so now I have to see if I can track down some tickets from a scalper or something. I wouldn’t normally buy from a third party, but I really want to go to that show, so I’ll have to see what I can find. The New Pornographers concert totally kicked ass. Had a great time, and the second opening band, Satisfaction, was actually really good as well. I picked up their 4 song cd, and they guys were nice enough to sign it for me. We got there too late for the first opening band, The Lassie Foundation, and I am kinda regretting it now. I have heard a couple of their songs, and I have liked what I have heard so far. Maybe I will be able to catch them in another show at sometime.