Sailors take warning

"Red sky at night, sailors' delight. Red sky in morning, sailors take warning." So goes the saying. Here are pics of the sunrise this morning.

Catharsis

Thanks everyone for the happy thoughts. I feel better today. Blogging must be cathartic. After writing down all my perceived problems, none of them seem so overwhelming. It does look like Ernesto will be a pretty wimpy hurricane, if it even reaches that status.

Pendulum status

I have lots to say but not much energy to say it. I've tried to avoid posting a woe-is-me story on my blog, but life is full of ups and downs, and things have been down, so here goes. The past two days have been some of the worst I've had in a while. Part of it is Hurricane Ernesto, part of it is my job, part of it is my mom, and the rest of it is me. Ok, maybe all of it is me and the rest is just details, but the devil's in the details, y'know? Start with the job. Yeah, I work from home and things are all hunky-dory as far as that goes, but recently my network connection has been dog-slow. I'm up against a deadline to get a project delivered, and I'm trying to focus on getting the work done, and Chris keeps interrupting me wanting my opinion on what to do to prepare for Ernesto, and my mom called asking when I'd be down to help her prepare for Ernesto, and it was just a pressure-cooker of a morning. I just realized that I have a bright light I can focus on at the end of this tunnel. The hurricane will push out my deadline. Our office is closed for at least Tuesday, and probably Wednesday, so I have more time to work (assuming I can connect). Yay! (See Larry, it helps me to talk things out, too.) Moving on to my mom. She is a complicated person. She and I haven't gotten along very well of late. To be honest, I have avoided her for about two months. Every time I've seen her this year she has been unhappy about something. I try to focus on the bright side of things, and she just won't have it. The last straw was when she twisted my bright-side-focusing to mean that I judged her. So, according to her, I'm not allowed to have an opinion about things, I should just say, "Awwww, that's so awful! I'm soooo sorry!" And I should twist everything into a huge catastrophe when most of the time things are just minor issues. She's great at playing the victim, and I'm not playing that game anymore. Sadly, there is no bright light at the end of her tunnel. The kicker is that she lives 5 houses away from me. Vancouver never looked so enticing (and it's a beautiful town anyway.....3,404 miles away). Ok, that covers the job, and mom, and Ernesto is just sitting there hovering over everything. On to me. This is what my ex-therapist would call a downward spiral. I get frustrated about something, but then I get angry at myself for being frustrated, and it just snowballs from there. As I mentioned, starting yesterday I've had the hurricane butterflies. Beyond that, we were at Lowe's buying extra gas cans, and I seemed to have an anxiety attack. I realized it while it was happening, and I told myself that no good would come of the anxiety, but that didn't help. I tried to shrug it off, but it stuck with me. We spent most of the rest of the afternoon yesterday strapping down the boat, putting away loose articles under the house, etc. I finally just gave up and told Chris I was done, and he accepted it. He's used to my moods and can maneuver around them pretty well. So I cleaned up and we went out to dinner, and I relaxed a little, but I still didn't feel right, and haven't felt right today either. I wish I could deal with these situations with a little equanimity. I get so agitated and all the little things start to bother me, and it all contributes to the downward spiral. Hehe, one of these days I'll post about my experience in group therapy, and I'll reference this post, because after typing all this out, I feel a little better. I feel optimistic that the spiral has changed direction. Anyway, that's the status of my pendulum. Thanks for listening. I will be working Tuesday and Wednesday, assuming we have a network connection, but I'll try to take some time and play Eve post another blog entry.

Reward for a hard day's work

And so it begins

Hurricane Ernesto is headed right for us. On his current path, Ernesto will be in our back yard on Wednesday morning. If you look here, our house is right under the 'A' in '8AM Wed.' If you look closely, you can see me waving at you. (Update: Actually, they keep updating the map, so we're no longer under the 'A' in '8AM Wed.' I'm still waving at you, though.) This period of time, the days before a hurricane is forecast to strike, is characterized for me by a telltale butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling. No matter what else is happening in our lives, there's always the faint background buzz of those butterflies. Projects at work are due, we're trying to finish home improvement tasks, my mom is being a pain in the ass (as usual). Those butterflies keep buzzing. I think after last year's hurricanes, we're more likely to evacuate. We'll head to the east coast of Florida. Regardless of where we end up, though, we've got our hurricane survival kit:

• Food
• Water
• Batteries
• Lube
• Backup power for the laptop and internet connection

I picked the wrong decade to quit drinking. I'm being flippant, but honestly I'm nervous. We've worked so hard to get where we are and to have the things we have. It all can be so quickly erased by a hurricane whose intensity is doubled because of global warming (or the natural cycles of the Earth, you choose), the recovery from which is ridden with the obstacles of an inept and uncaring government. It's not very Jedi of me, being so attached to my worldly possessions. I fear losing what I have. As Yoda said, "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." For today, the activities will include:

• Strapping down the boat.
• Bringing in all the loose things around the house, except the plants. We'll bring them in later.
• Gathering our supplies.
• Filling our gas tank and gas cans.
• Planning our evacuation.

I'll keep y'all posted on any new developments.

Wilma Footage

We moved into our house in May, 2005. In October, 2005, Hurricane Wilma came through and reminded us to stay vigilant. Though our house wasn't damaged by Wilma, our boat was. My boyfriend, Chris, has posted webcam footage from Hurricane Wilma on his blog. Feel free to pop by and check it out. This is our first attempt at posting video on either of our blogs, so let us know if things work properly.

Things are looking up

After a long week, I'm definitely looking forward to the weekend. Maybe a little tennis, some home improvements (lattice), and being lazy and naked. I like being naked. And lazy. I found a blurb in Details magazine (amidst all the ads) about the US ranking on the New Economics Foundation's (nef) Happy Planet Index. We're 150th. The #1 spot is held by Vanuatu, an island in the South Pacific. This inspired me to go to the nef's website. It's a cool website with a cool aspiration. Check it out. Their ideas helped put me in a good mood today, because it proves there are some people in this world that care.

The abuse of trust

The Department of Defense is paying a law school to figure out a way to undermine the Freedom of Information Act. So we, as taxpayers, are paying someone else to figure out how to keep us ignorant of the truth. As if it isn't already impossible to determine what really happens in our government. And I wonder why I believe our government doesn't give a damn about us.

Stability is good

We live in a piling house. For those of you unfamiliar with this concept, a piling house is built on top of 10"x10" wooden pilings driven 15-25' into the ground. There is 9' of space under the house providing space to park our cars and where we have a large screened area. This is the first time we've lived in a piling house, and something we didn't anticipate was the amount of movement that can be felt inside the house. When the washing machine starts its spin cycle, the house does a little shimmy. When Hurricane Wilma came through last year, the whole house shuddered and shook, making an uncomfortable experience even worse. So, to reduce the amount of movement, the pilings can be braced. We have installed cross-braces on several sets of pilings, and today we finished installing the last planned set of cross-braces. Here's what the front now looks like: You can see the little aluminum trailer we got for the Golf, as well as another set of cross-braces near the middle of the house. Here's what the side braces look like: The biggest drawback of the braces is their appearance. To alleviate the eyesoreness, we will be installing lattice over the braces, as we've done on some other braces: The nice thing about the lattice is it provides some privacy and still lets the air flow through. Not everyone thinks it looks good, but we think it's better than the cross-braces, and it is a common element in island decor. So, we've got part of this major project done. The next step is installing the rest of the lattice. Thankfully, we've got the trailer, so we can haul the 4x8 sheets of lattice, along with the 2x4's we'll need.

Thoughts on blogging

I am beginning to define more clearly the variety of reasons I started a blog. Initially, I had thought to use my blog to write down random thoughts and to use it as a journal of my life. I see now there are many other fruits I can pick from this tree. Muscles, when they are not used, tend to atrophy. I know I can be creative, but I have had little cause to exercise my creativity. I want to use my blog as motivation and location for creative expression. I have ideas for short stories, I have opinions on current, past, and future events, and I hope to express all this in my blog. As I've said elsewhere, I have a strong hermit instinct. And while it's all well and good to be happy with one's own company, it does get lonely sometimes. Recently, I have mustered enough courage to leave comments on other people's blogs. I hope that by exposing parts of me to others in their blogs, others will drop by my blog and share parts of themselves with me. In short, I hope to make friends via blogging. [Side note: although I work with computers for a living, I'm new to blogging and what it means to blog. The idea of meeting people via blogs didn't occur to me until recently. I can be dense like that sometimes.] The blogosphere has enlightened me regarding how many bright people there are in the world. For the most part, the people I was exposed to on a daily basis included co-workers, people in local stores and restaurants, my family, and a few friends. My opinion of the world at large was based on an inaccurate sampling of the total population. Blogs have made me realize humanity is much smarter than I thought. Up to now, my "activism" has consisted of donating money to HRC, Lambda Legal, and Equality Florida. I hope interacting with people about issues that concern the LGBT community will inspire me to do more than donate. Southwest Florida doesn't have a branch of Equality Florida, an AIDS support group, or even a GLCC. If one of these groups does exist, they're pretty well hidden. There has to be a way for me to get involved, though. I just need to keep searching. Lastly, I acknowledge that I am a moody bitch person. I sometimes feel like writing, and sometimes feel like not. Although I aspire to lofty goals with my blog, I know realistically that things will develop slowly and in alternating bursts of activity and idleness. This whole post is what I had originally intended for my blog: a place to corral and organize my meandering thoughts.

Give up soda?

Gasp! How dare anyone suggest that I should give up soda! After all, when I started the Atkins diet a few years ago, I switched from "bad" suggary regular soda to "good" diet soda. What more do you want? Well, here is a reason to give up soda entirely: Coke and Pepsi are banned in parts of India for containing too much pesticide. Coke and Pepsi vociferously deny these allegations, of course, but this is the second time an outside organization has tested these soft drinks and found dangerous levels of multiple pesticides. It seems to me an easy matter for Coke and Pepsi to refute the allegations by testing the same samples the outside organization tested and show their results. I gave up soda about a year ago. I sometimes drink selzer water or club soda, but for the most part I drink filtered water or bottled water. For variety, I sometimes mix in lemon juice and/or cranberry juice with stevia as a sweetener. For those of you who believe you can't live without soda, my experience quitting wasn't bad at all. I don't miss it. I don't crave it. I enjoy myself just as much drinking water as I did drinking soda. It was easy to transition, and I hate the taste of soda now. Give it a try. Replace your cans of soda with selzer or juice, get a water filter for your home (I bought a water filter pitcher for about $20), and try living without the potential danger of pesticides in what you drink.

Hit counter

I installed a hit counter on my blog. It's on the bottom of the right-side nav bar. I got it from TinyCounter. It was quick and simple and free, and no ad's. It seems good enough. If anyone knows of any good hit counters that give good statistics and are free or low-cost, please let me know. I will be investigating doing my own hit counter, too. Any advice on this would be most appreciated.

About my job

I work from home. I work for a large corporation, which has upsides and downsides (like everything does). The big upside right now is that I can work from home. My job primarily is software development and application support. My company has a very large software team, and I support some of the tools that they use to write the software which goes into our products. I also write small support applications which fill in the gaps between the tools. Collectively, all these applications and tools are called "CASE Tools," or Computer-Aided Software Engineering Tools. Are you still with me? I can see some of you dozing off in the back row. And who threw that spitball?!? So, the upsides of working from home:

• No commute - saves gas, saves time, saves sleep, saves stress.
• No cubicles - no unwanted noise, no office politics, and I have a window view.
• Diet - I eat healthier and cheaper at home.
• Facilities - I have a full kitchen at my disposal. In the office, it's an ordeal to get coffee and food, or just to heat anything up.
• Productivity - I get about twice as much done at home as I would in the office. There are fewer interruptions, and I can focus on my work, which actually makes it more enjoyable.
• Freedom - I usually workout at lunchtime, so I don't take a shower until after I workout. I also don't shave very often, mostly because I'm lazy and don't need to be presentable.

And here are the downsides of working from home:

• No cubicles - I don't hear the rumors and gossip, and I'm frequently left out of team events.
• Meetings - I have to call into all meetings, and if I'm the only one who calls in, then the team coordinator has to take the time to set up the phone and network just for me.
• Interaction - I have a strong hermit instinct. I'm perfectly happy by myself, so sometimes I need a kick in the butt to get out and see the world.
• Exercise - Our company's facility is so big that going from meeting to meeting, I could easily walk 4 or 5 miles each day. Heck, going to the bathroom is a good 1/8 mile round-trip. At home, I sit in my chair. Sometimes I need to get up just to get up.

Without a doubt, the upsides outweigh the downsides. With modern technology, there's no reason why any of my co-workers couldn't work from home. We can have conference calls, net-meetings, and whiteboard sessions. Pretty much anything you can do in person you can do online.

New frontiers

Here's a pic of the tennis racquets we got: That's my very first time using PhotoBucket.com. I finally lost my PhotoBucket virginity! Hip-hip....! And yes, it's a "Head" racquet, so please, put any obvious jokes in the comments section.

Meds

I'm feeling down on myself this morning. I can't pinpoint anything specific that's making me down, so I suspect Effexor and/or my amino acid supplements are wonky. Funny thing is, after writing this and realizing it's probably just my meds, I feel better.

These are the details of our lives

Here's some rambling details of what's going on with us right now. Kinda dry, but that's all I got tonight. Both motorcycles are now officially sold, delivered, checks cleared, etc. I'll be calling the insurance company tomorrow and cancel the insurance for both. That'll save us about $90/month. I paid off my credit card with the proceeds from my motorcycle, so that's a savings of another $20/month in interest. The sofa is officially sold and delivered. Our living room looks very empty right now. After we sold Chris' Tacoma a few months ago, we decided to get a trailer hitch for the Golf. The hitch is almost installed. All that's left is the wiring and loc-tite on the bolts. For anyone interested, the installation was pretty easy. Chris pulled back the aluminium heat shield next to the muffler to give us access. We had to drill 4 holes through the trunk floor, and the drill would not even come close to fitting in the tight spots around the muffler. We held the hitch in place and used a punch to mark where each hole should go, and then we drilled from above. The tough parts of the installation were: 1) getting under the car far enough to see and wrench; 2) marking the spots for the holes with enough force to be visible from above (no room to swing the hammer). The rest was just drilling and tightening bolts. We did have to get an extension for the socket wrench, but there weren't any difficulties once we had that. We bought some new tennis racquets. The head guard on my racquet cracked on Saturday, and we decided our 20-year-old racquets needed to be replaced. We both got Head Titanium S5 models, $70 each, at Sports Authority. They're on the large end of a mid-size racquet with middle-of-the-road power vs. control. We're not at the same level of play (I'm considerably better for the moment), but we've both played only about 3 weeks in the past 10 years. This racquet will give Chris room to grow and it will meet my immediate needs and then some. Neither of us are racquet connoisseurs, so we wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a good racquet and a great one anyway. The ones we got are good ones. We took a tennis lesson on Saturday, and although he still gets frustrated, Chris is improving. I hope he keeps at it. I'm feeling more confident each time I play. I've said it before, but it bears repeating: I'm thrilled to be back on the tennis court. That's all for now. This evening was spent watching a few CSI episodes we had backlogged on Tivo. Just a Sunday evening chillin', dreading the workday tomorrow. Give yourselves a hug and take a deep breath.

New Locale

Tonight I'm reporting live from Pineapple Point, a gay guesthouse in Fort Lauderdale. It's not just a guesthouse, it's one of the most luxurious, friendly, relaxing places I've ever stayed in Florida. The grounds are lush and tropical, the rooms are well-decorated and very comfortable, the staff is beyond friendly, the amenities are fantastic, I just can't say enough good things about Pineapple Point. I've stayed at a few other places in Fort Lauderdale, and they don't compare.

Mood Log

Here's an update on my moods and amino acid supplements. My second set of test results came back from NeuroScience. My serotonin is actually high, but dopamine and epinephrine are still low. NeuroScience's recommendation was to stay on the same supplement dosage. My chiropractor is less interested in the amino acid supplements and more interested in other holistic approaches, so he didn't have a strong opinion. Under my own direction, I have reduced the serotonin-enhancing supplement slightly, leaving the others alone. Many (if not all) of the neurotransmitters operate on a negative-feedback mechanism, so high levels of serotonin might cause low levels of the others. On Sunday I also reduced Effexor to 1/2 dose (75mg). I've been on a 3/4 dose for 3 weeks with no noticable effects, and Effexor may be responsible for the high serotonin levels. I realize I'm changing two variables at once, so if I feel mood instability, I won't be able to determine what the cause is. If something goes wrong, I'll back up and do them one at a time. The nice thing about this is I have control of the variables and can change them when things start to veer off course. If anyone else has had experience with anti-depressants and/or amino acid supplements, I'd love to hear from you.

Lottery results

Yesterday was a strange day. Two people showed up to look at the motorcycles we had for sale. One brought cash and drove away on Chris' Magna. The other left a deposit and a check, and when the check clears, he will take my Nighthawk. While we were doing the paperwork for Chris' Magna, the people buying it expressed admiration for our leather sofa and ottoman, which are also for sale. They ended up leaving a $200 deposit for them, and they'll return after they're done painting their house to pick up their new furniture. So we ended up selling 4 major things yesterday. It had to be an omen. I looked in my wallet and I had exactly 4 dollars, so Chris and I decided to play 4 quick-picks in the lottery. None of the 4 tickets had the number 04 in it, but we were unperturbed. This morning, I checked the lottery results, and we didn't get a single hit on any of our tickets. Not exactly a surprise, but there was a small part of me hoping... If we'd won the lottery, I wonder if I'd be more open to the existence of a supreme being or some other cosmic force directing our destinies. As it stands, I suppose this experience only reinforces my belief that God is as much a superstition as the idea of worshipping Isis or Zeus. The "what-if" game is fun to play, though, and I really wonder what I would believe if we'd won.

Mid-week update

Being fairly new to blogging, I guess I haven't gotten into the habit of regular writing. Here's a mid-week update. Re: selling my motorcycle. A second guy said he was going to buy the motorcycle and then decided not to. I'm not in sales, although I did spend a year or so working for Circuit City as a salesman. I wasn't a very good salesman, which probably explains why I foolishly expect when someone says they're going to buy something, they actually do buy it. Remind me to tell the truth next time I'm in a store and the salesman asks me if I want to buy something. If I don't want it, I shouldn't be afraid to say so. Re: tennis. Tennis rocks! Chris and I took our first lesson on Tuesday, and it was awesome. The lady teaching us, Paula, was a very good teacher, and after she explained the fundamentals of each stroke (volley, overhead, forehand, backhand, serve), things just "clicked" for me and I was hitting better than I thought I could. I need to spend a lot of time practicing before I am consistent, but I am very happy to be back on the tennis court. Chris, having never played before in his life, was less coordinated, but if he is able to stick with it, I know he can become a good player. Patience and persistence. I have an update on my amino acid supplements, but I'll save that for another post. Overall, things are going very well. Thanks to Larry for stopping by my blog. I wonder if his answers to the Myers-Briggs questions were the same as mine, or if he had different answers but ended up with the same end-result. I would be interested in comparing notes.