Posts in category "Daily Life"

Cottage On A Thursday

Thumbnail: Boat upholstery

I got to work ear­ly this morn­ing, around 7:30 or so. It was an effort to make up for yes­ter­day, in which I called in sick. By 8:30, my boss had asked me to go to his cot­tage and help him with his new pon­toon, and we left by nine.

Thumbnail: Boat motor

After pick­ing the boat up from the deal­er­ship, I was charged with the task of dri­ving his car from one of the boat docks of the lake to his cot­tage. We spent the whole day there, and I man­aged to get in a few pho­tos. I like the shot of the uphol­stery the most: the colours are per­fect, and have those lux­u­ri­ous, match­ing cream colours that are so char­ac­ter­is­tic of aqua vehi­cles. Even the motor is pret­ty sweet (4‑stroke elec­tron­ic fuel injec­tion) and only requires the turn of a key to start.

Thumbnail: Cottage dock

I’m exhaust­ed now, but it was def­i­nite­ly nice to be out of the office and on a lake, on a Thursday no less.

A/C For Computer

I already had a new com­put­er priced out — One of the dual-core AMD Athlon X2 4400+ proces­sors (because 0.2 MHz isn’t worth a moth­er­fuck­ing $500 price jump) based on the Toledo core — mark­ing my switch to AMD, 2 gigs of super fast RAM, 200 gig SATA HDD (I decid­ed not to go dual for RAID 0 cause strip­ing appar­ent­ly does­n’t do much), the lat­est ATI Sapphire Radeon series — X850XT Platinum with dual DVI (I was think­ing of SLI nVidia cards, but then I’d want to buy two cards when upgrad­ing), a DVD burn­er, and one of the deluxe sock­et-939 Asus moth­er­boards. I even bought two 19″ flat pan­el mon­i­tors two months ago in antic­i­pa­tion of the sys­tem, and got my par­ents to front me for some of the cash.

Then my air con­di­tion­er broke. It’s one of those grey areas, where it would cost me $300 just to test for leaks (after spend­ing $100 to find out what was wrong in the first place). This, in turn, is to find out how much it would cost to fix it, which could be any­where from $300 to $1000. So instead of tak­ing the chance on a sev­en-year-old A/C that may break again next year, I decid­ed to put the mon­ey towards a new one. A brand-name one that would hope­ful­ly last me more than 10 years, with a 5 year parts/labor war­ran­ty and a 10 year war­ran­ty on the com­pres­sor coil.

Unfortunately, it’s going to cost me $3500. This means that instead of sav­ing for a com­put­er, I’ll be aim­ing to pay the A/C over the next six months. I could have stretched the pay­ment over a year, but it’d be at 5% inter­est, com­pound­ed month­ly. My finan­cial goals are being put on hold now. I don’t need a new com­put­er, although I could eas­i­ly take advan­tage of a dual-core desk­top, and it would cer­tain­ly be inspir­ing to use such a sweet machine to work on my projects with Aaron. This has only made me more deter­mined; I’m going to save all the mon­ey myself now, and think­ing over a longer term.

I Was Up At Five

Not by choice, of course. I rolled around in bed for an hour or so, and decid­ed that I should do some­thing pro­duc­tive if I was awake any­way. After some shop­ping in the refresh­ing morn­ing weath­er (thank god for the 24 hour gro­cery store just five min­utes away), I made break­fast and fell back asleep for anoth­er hour.

I’m awake now, but I’m still drowsy as fuck.

I’ve been try­ing to get an entry writ­ten since wednes­day and a pack of ground beef browned since mon­day, but the week has been one exhaust­ing day after anoth­er. I worked a 13-hour day on tues­day, and it feels like I haven’t recov­ered yet. It seems like every week I’m wait­ing for anoth­er week­end so I can recu­per­ate and get my life togeth­er.

Getting Easier To Write Again

It’s not that I haven’t had time to write late­ly, it’s that every time I sit down and set myself on writ­ing, I can’t fol­low through on any of my ideas. I blame the close prox­im­i­ty of my house to my job. For years, going to uni­ver­si­ty and going to work on the bus would force me to sit pas­sive­ly, while some­one would take me to my des­ti­na­tion. I did­n’t have to think about any­thing, so my mind would drift about ran­dom things, like my friends, my rela­tion­ships, and my life. Back then, my entries were thor­ough and bet­ter devel­oped.

It’s slow­ly get­ting eas­i­er to write again. I don’t have to force myself as much.

It Was Raining This Morning

I stepped out­side, and the street­lights were on. To the west the clouds were clear­ing, while the sun was fight­ing the brood­ing sky in the east. Everything felt a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. As I walked to work, zipped up in my light wind­break­er, sweat­ing from the suf­fo­cat­ing mate­r­i­al, the rain slowed then stopped.