I’ve never really given much thought to Thanksgiving. It’s a highly arbitrary holiday with pointless traditions and no real meaning. Coupled with the fact that our Thanksgiving dinner is usually indistinguishable from any other weekend dinner (my mom, sister, grandma, and I going out to the chain restaurant du jour), it’s always been difficult to see this as just another day.

But, I’ve had an extremely difficult time being positive about much of anything lately, so maybe I should give this a try.

I’m thankful for:

-My family. The only family member I can stand to be around anymore is my sister, but they’ve supported me for the last several years more than anyone without life-threatening injuries could ask for.

-My friends. I don’t live in the same area as any of them, and the loneliness literally hurts sometimes (I was in tears yesterday because I had to leave Pittsburgh), but they’re always there for me when I do have the opportunity to get away from my isolated town, even when I make stupid, insensitive mistakes.

-My job. It has a few downsides (10-99 = :-/ ), but compared with the side benefits, I couldn’t ask for anything better. It allows me the social freedom I’ve been terrified of losing, without sacrificing a good salary to do it, with a boss who’s open-minded and fun to talk to, and a co-worker/close friend who I love spending time with.

-My car. It’s a bit odd to be thankful for a vehicle that sounds like it’s about to shoot pistons through the hood, but it does run without major issues, and it transports me wherever I want to go without stranding me. It even still gets the “Wow, cool car!” reaction that I crave so much, for lack of anything else about me or that I own that consistantly gets praise from others. And, it’s almost paid off. I know friends who don’t have cars, friends who can’t afford the ones they do have, and friends whose cars don’t run at all, so yeah, I probably shouldn’t take mine for granted.

Despite my efforts to the contrary, I had a really crappy day today.

Things started out just peachy; I saw how pretty the sky was, and I was up earlier than usual, so I decided to go off-roading and take autumn pictures of the forest. I’ve been itching to do that for a few weeks now, and I recently got a polarizing filter for my camera that I wanted to play with. I borrowed mom’s Blazer (my Rover is out of commission, currently), grabbed my gear, and headed for the mountains, taking lots of pictures.

Now, my mom’s Blazer isn’t as capable off-road as my Rover, but it does pretty well for a vehicle that was largely purchased by soccer moms. However, the trail I chose (selected for the greatest number of beautiful photo-ops) was rougher than I remembered, and it was a nerve-wracking experience to go down it without pulverizing the truck’s suspension. I thought I was ok at one point, but I encountered a rock that I just couldn’t get over. So, I had to go back down the trail, which involved driving over obstacles on a steep slope in reverse for over a mile before I could find an area wide enough to turn around in (these are mountain trails, where the road is narrow, and bordered by a cliff on one side, a sheer slope on the other). By the time I got back to the smoother area of the trail, I was a ball of nerves.

About that time, I realized that all the pictures I’d taken would probably be useless. See, my camera, despite being expensive and high-end, has ridiculous sensor noise. In order to take anything close to SLR-quality photos, I have to keep the ISO set to the lowest possible setting, 80. Above that (even 100), the pictures are unusable for anything bigger than 1024×768 images on my website. Now, this normally isn’t a problem, except that the Obama rally was last night, and I photographed it. An ISO of 80 is pretty darn difficult to work with in anything other than bright daylight or still-life, so I set it to 200, the maximum possible setting that doesn’t make the pictures look like they came from a 1st-gen camera-phone (400 looks grainier than Polaroid film, and 800 looks like analog TV with bad reception). Since those pictures weren’t great anyway, and they were just going on my website, it wasn’t a problem there, but I forgot to change it back to 80 when I started this journey. So, the first 150 pictures I took were probably going to be crap. It’s ok, though, the sun was still out, and I had to go back the way I came, so I’d just take a new set.

Then, the low fuel light came on. Great. I’m on a road that’s not even on the map, 20+ miles from the nearest gas station (almost 30 to the nearest station that takes credit cards, and I had no cash), and I now have to drive for 10 miles in first gear with the idiot-light on. I got out of there as fast as I could, and I just barely made it to the credit-card-accepting gas station. But, between the unexpectedly small gas tank, and the heavy clouds that rolled in on the way down the mountain, I only got a few retakes, and they weren’t very good.

I thought about going back up, there’s another spot I could go to that doesn’t require 4WD. But, at that point, I was down to my last hour of daylight, and with the events of the day, I just wanted to go home. It was freezing cold anyway, which made it hard to be out of the car for very long, and that kinda kills the point of going out there in the first place. I go to the mountains to commune with nature, to be alone in the forest, just me and the trees for miles in every direction. When I have to bundle up to keep from freezing, and/or get in the car every 5-10 minutes, it’s just not the same experience.

So, I came home, and checked a forum I admin, to find a bunch of members whining over a policy decision I made this morning. Normally not a big deal, but I really wasn’t in the mood to deal with that bullshit, so I took care of it much more aggressively than I normally would. It feels good to do that every once in awhile, as much as I hate to admit it.

Then, I checked my email, to find that my laptop can’t be shipped any sooner than November 19th because the display bezel is backordered. I spent $4500 on a laptop, and they can’t ship it for a month because of the $20 piece of aluminum. That pissed me right the fuck off, so I tried to call the helpful lady I talked to before, figured I’d see if the extension she gave me works. It went to her voicemail. It seems that the hours in her email signature are the hours for the call center, not the hours she’s actually there. I tried to transfer to a manager, no luck; their system is broken, and the extension that the voice prompts claim will send me to a supervisor is a circular redirect. So, I called again, and jumped into the queue this time. I spoke to someone who seemed fairly helpful at first, until she found out that I already had a case ID in the system. Because of that, the only person I could speak to was my agent, or her supervisor, neither of whom were available. I responded via email, hoping that it would be received by someone.

And, on top of all this, I’m way behind on hours at work because I’ve spent too much time finishing up leftover work from when I was unemployed for so long. And because I utterly fail at time management, but I’m getting better at that. I’ve just been trying to do too much.

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Pictures from the Obama rally, New York, and today’s adventure (what few usable ones there are) will be coming soon. For now, I just needed to vent, because this day fucking sucked.

My mom’s birthday is tomorrow (technically today, as I type this). I don’t normally do a lot for her birthday, I save the really “wow” gift ideas for Christmas. However, I couldn’t afford to do anything for her for mother’s day (I usually take her out for dinner at one of her favourite restaurants, and I didn’t even have the money for that), and I had a little extra cash this month, so I wanted to try to make it up to her.

Two nights ago, I had a brilliant idea. She always talks about how she’d like a particular picture of mine from Myrtle Beach (she loves the beach) framed so she can hang it in her office. And earlier this week, she showed me a small print of a picture my sister took of the beach, a very stunning sunrise shot over the ocean. Plus, we’re not going to be able to take family vacations forever, with my sister going to college next year and me planning to leave the state when I’m able. So, I decided to put the two aforementioned pictures together, along with a new one I took there that she likes, into a large frame with some nice matting and a little dedication. It’d be well-suited to hang on the huge blank wall in her living room that we can’t figure out how to decorate, and I know she’d love it.

So, after doing a bit of processing to get the pictures ready for significant enlargement, I started running the errands necessary to put this together. I went to my favourite photo lab to have the pictures blown up, which went smoother than I thought, then to the frame store while the prints were being printed. Since the enlargments alone were like $75 for all three, my grandma gave some much needed assistance in purchasing the frame and matting. All’s well so far.

After mom went to bed, my sister and I took over mom’s dining room table to assemble this project. She provided much-needed assistance, and aside from my usual measuring screwups (I have somewhat shaky hands, especially when concentrating on detail work, so measuring and marking things accurately is a big challenge for me), everything seemed to be going smoothly. At about 2am, we had been working on this for over an hour (just for measuring), and I didn’t really need her help for cutting, so she went on to bed. I took a half-hour break to rest my back, and proceeded to start cutting.

Now, I already knew that without fancy tools, I wouldn’t be able to cut the mat with that snazzy bevelled edge that’s always used on this stuff. But, I figured I’d be able to cut some nice straight edges, and use this mat as a template to cut a new one once I acquired the fancy tools to make this look professional. I’ve seen non-bevelled matting, and it looks just fine.

Unfortunately, nice straight edges were not on the agenda for the night. I don’t know what that stuff is made of, but even a brand-new Xacto blade couldn’t go straight through it at any angle. I tried a variety of different techniques, but nothing seemed to work quite right. On the plus side, the edges weren’t unredeemably screwed-up, so I figured I could find a way to fix it afterward. Then, I turned the board over. The front coating on photo mat varies, but in this case, it was just paper. Somehow, the paper had stretched out a bit around the cut, and was sticking out from it like plastic often does when it’s cut with a razor blade. Still, not unredeemable, but after two cuts (out of 12) that took 30 minutes to complete, I realized that I didn’t have time for this.

I took a quick trip to Wal-Mart’s craft section, hoping they’d have something - anything - that could cut a perfectly straight line without having to wrap around the work piece. And, they had something that looked quite promising, a handheld rotary cutter that’s designed to sit on the raised groove of a ruler model by the same company. Perfect! Unfortunately, after scouring the craft section, and taking up a half-hour of the night manager’s time researching this thing, I found out that they didn’t even carry any of the companion rulers for the tool, nor could they find any other Wal-Marts that had them. Oh well, I have miscellaneous materials, I’ll find something! $30 later, I left with the cutter, an extra blade (this mat seemed to be dulling my other blades unusually quickly), and some special double-sided tape strips that looked like they’d come in handy.

So, I started to work again, attempting to make my cuts with this mini-pizza-cutter, guided by a strip of aluminum angle-bracket I was using as a straight-edge. At first, everything seemed just peachy; the cutter was fast, and appeared to make a very nice edge. Unfortunately, appearances are deceiving, and when I flipped the board over, I saw that the outside of the cut wasn’t nearly as straight as the inside, making a wildly irregular wavy pattern. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, the utterly worthless “safety guard” on the cutter (a spring-loaded plastic piece that sits a full two milimeters from the blade) made a dent in the board in a couple places, on the non-waste part of the mat. In other words, my $15 mat was now trash.

At that point, I decided to say “fuck it” and call it a night, I’ll pick up a new mat on Monday and order a proper cutter (they’re not super-expensive, just impossible to find, and I originally didn’t have the time to order one online). But no, that would’ve let me off easy! In the process of cleaning up, I accidently kicked the glass panel for the frame (it was leaning on a chair, for lack of a safer location), and shattered the entire corner all over the carpet. Just to make things even more fun, most of the broken glass completely disintegrated for some reason.

After having a fit of irrational rage and kicking a chair across the room, I cleaned up the glass as best as I could without a vaccuum (I didn’t want to answer the question of “why are you vaccuuming at 4am?” when I never even do it in the first place), thanks to the magic of duck tape. I don’t know how much it’ll cost to replace the glass panel, but with the other costs involved in un-fucking this project, I’m on the verge of giving up and just giving her the prints to do what she wants with them.

(more…)

As is par for the course, just when things were starting to go pretty damn well, the universe just had to crap all over it.
(more…)

So, I know I haven’t kept up with updating this. Since my last real post, the Integra has been looked over twice by the insurance adjuster. The first estimate he gave was a few thousand, not too bad. However, our body shop said that he forgot to include the crumpled rear floor in the estimate. We finally got him to come do the second estimate, and his second estimate said that the car is totalled. They’ll be picking it up Monday morning.

So, mom and I went over tonight to pull out the last of my stuff. I had already pulled the stereo and such, it was just a few things left to get.

And on the way home, it hit me. Out of all the cars I’ve had, this one has been the most reliable by far, and has always been there for me when our other vehicles crapped out. I know cars don’t have emotions, but I’m in tears as I type this thinking about all the times I drove the hell out of it, all the times I swore I’d sell it and get something else, and it just kept right along like a faithful companion, always by my side.

I never really appreciated it until today, and it pains me to think of it sitting in a junkyard somewhere. Feels like I’ve lost a family member.

Farewell, my beauty.

Why do some people have such a need for drama in their lives?

For about five months now, Skippy has been almost constantly stirring the drama pot with me and some friends. I’m not going to recap the whole thing, those who care already know, but it’s been an ongoing battle since then. And Skippy even issued a public apology on his LJ for it. All’s well, right?

After Skippy’s apology post, I IMed him to thank him for it. And what was his reaction? “The apology was for Foxchild and Kain, it was not for you”. Kinda floored me, but whatever, I don’t care. A week or so later, I discovered that he had placed hidden scripted objects embedded in strategic places on my land in Second Life. I couldn’t tell what they did, but considering what great lengths he went to to hide them, I figured they were malicious. So, I reported it to the abuse staff, and sure enough, they said it was a major TOS violation (they couldn’t reveal exactly what they were, though, for privacy reasons). I have no idea how long ago they were placed, but I had just discovered them.

This week, I posted to the Babyfurs mailing list about the recent debate in SL about whether ageplay is acceptable/legal/moral or not, and a related CNet article about the controversy. Relevant stuff for a mailing list about, among other things, a form of ageplay. Skippy responded today with “So you decided to start drama here instead?”. Totally unrelated to the topic, relatively unprovoked, just out of the blue.

I’m not sure why this feud is still going on, or why he has this insatiable desire to flame-bait me, but it’s getting old really fast. This kind of crap has been going on with me for over a year, and with other people for as long as he’s been in the babyfur community. At this point, I could care less if he wants to continue to be the village idiot, I just wish he’d leave me the hell out of it.

http://swift-fox.livejournal.com/285795.html

Looks like I won’t be attending Spring Fling like I’d planned.

Well, I’m pretty much fired from Dominos. I wanted to leave anyway, but not until I had something else to go to. Apparently, I misread the schedule this week (which constantly changes, leaving me perpetually confused as to when I’m supposed to show up), and I was supposed to be at work by 11:00 today. I was already up and about when the new manager (who’s almost as much of an ass as the guy he replaced) called at 11:10 and wanted to know where I was. I could have gone in at that point, except I’d already told the guy who owns all the Arby’s franchises around here that Fox & I would be at his house in Waynesboro at noon to fix his network. So, I told this manager that I couldn’t make it in, since helping out a major business owner would be significantly more beneficial, monetarily and otherwise, than working a crappy lunch shift and getting shitty tips at Dominos.

So, we got to Waynesboro, fixed this guy’s network, and made more off this one-shot tech support job than either of us make in a whole day at Dominos. After grabbing some lunch at a nice little diner in downtown Waynesboro, we headed back home in time for Fox to make it to work without being late. Shortly after he left, I called the store and asked if they needed me for the evening shift, and Fucknut said they were fine. I heard from Fox later that there were rumours of me being fired.

On the one hand, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I’d been itching to do something creative (like writing), something I actually care about, and it looks like I’ll have some time between jobs to get something worthwhile accomplished. However, the chances of me actually making any money between now and my next job are pretty slim. On the other hand, this is about the worst possible time to be unemployed and looking for work. Students are coming back to town in full force, and they’ll be looking for work during the semester. Per tradition, they’ll get first dibs on any job they apply for, leaving us townies out in the cold.

Anyway, I just needed to rattle off some thoughts on this. Aside from working my ass off for shit pay and getting shitty tips from rude, uppity, unappreciative customers, there isn’t much going on around here. Words of advice: NEVER deliver pizzas for a living.

I feel like I should post something here after seeing Dobie’s latest LJ entry, but I really have nothing to say except what I’ve already said. No one has ever hurt me this much, not even my asshat of a dad, and no amount of apologizing is going to make it better. I don’t know what to think about anything anymore. And I don’t want to be like this, but dammit, I just can’t seem to distract myself enough to crawl out of this depressive hole. Fuck.