Refractional Darkness

It’s October 10th. Not even halfway into October yet.
Just looked outside.
It is SNOWING.

That SUCKS!

LabGirl and her brother have recently decided that the time has come to put down their family dog of the last 12+ years.

She’s having a bit of a rough time with it, and I’m actually very saddened by it myself, and I honestly barely know the dog as well as they do.

He’s a large huskie, who still likes to play with you when he can muster up the energy, has a unique personality and will actually “converse” with you sometimes by giving little howls in response to your asking him questions, he’s soft & fuzzie, and just overall seems like a great dog.

LabGirl actually took on the responsibility of caring for him back around Spring, when her brother (who’s dog it really is) and his wife had just gotten incredibly frustrated at his issues and were thinking of putting him down at that time.
At the time he had been having incontinence issues, and would just let his bowels loose randomly throughout the house. As a result the dog ended up being locked up in the basement there nearly 24/7 and had become pretty miserable.

After LabGirl offered to take on the challenge of taking care of him he seemed to make marked improvement – he seemed, frankly, much happier.
He did still have some incontinence problems but they weren’t constant or anything, and LabGirl tried to help as much as possible by making sure he spent a good deal of time outdoors and by using urine-catcher wraps whenever he was indoors – as she doesn’t have carpet in her house most accidents weren’t a big deal.

Unfortunately though things have deteriorated over the last few weeks. The incontinence has gotten much worse, to the point where urine flows pretty much constantly, like a leaky faucet, and any time she leaves the house she prepares herself to have to deal with a “present” on the floor when she comes back.

She had been seriously considering making him a purely outside-kept dog, to the point where we had started piecing together plans to make a large shelter for him.
But – this was thought over, and the conclusion was come to that although this may allow him to stay around a bit longer – he’d almost certainly be miserable.

He’s always been a very indoors, pampered dog. Yeah, he’s a huskie, but he’s a huskie that’s never really had to deal with the cold except for short trips outside to take care of his business.
And to go from that to having to stay outside during the winter here, even if he does have shelter?
Plus he’s got a pretty bad case of arthritis in his hind legs, which he doesn’t whine about or anything but that you can tell is hurting him – whenever he stands up his hind legs shake from lack of strength, he has a very hard time simply standing up or sitting down, and as a result spends most of his time just laying on the ground not wanting to move any more than he has to.
I can only imagine the winter air would just horribly aggravate it.

So, it was decided that it was time – better to have him put to sleep while he still feels somewhat loved by those in the home rather than after months of feeling miserable and rejected after being banished to the back yard.

She and her brother have made an appointment to take him in on Thursday.

I saw this tonight on PostSecret and it brought a few tears to my eyes:

He’s really a lovable dog, and considering I’ve gotten misty-eyed and I barely even know him, I can hardly even imagine what it’ll be like for her.

We’ve both got the week off of work this week, but I’m pretty much assigning the last few days of the week to knowing I may need to be around for her.

Working on an idea for the weekly audio trivia segment that the Slice of SciFi podcast does. It’s fun stuff trying to identify movies and tv shows from various sound clips, usually all falling into a specific theme.

I don’t think anybody has done one yet that’s just the engine noises from famous sci-fi space ships. I think that could be interesting – not to mention a solid test for sci-fi geeks – can you identify spaceships just from the noise they make?

I’m currently downloading some software that based on forums should be able to rip audio tracks from video – which is a start.
Then just to get the video of the right ships.
I mean stuff like the Millenium Falcon and the Enterprise are obvious.
And I was thinking of adding a 5-second clip of complete silence and labeling it “Serenity” just cuz it’d be fun.
But I’m not sure what other ones to add – the Nostromo maybe?

Hmm… Maybe the Heart of Gold.
Or the Gunstar from The Last Starfighter…
Maybe the saucers from Earth vs the Flying Saucers could be fun…
Or a Cylon raider?

Anybody know of any other movie or tv space ships that have an identifiable sound?

So friday I got a call from my doc’s office.

I’ve already been taking Pravastatin for a little over a year now, due to high cholesterol.
Since I started on that my cholesterol has been fairly well in check, but I have an eventual goal of getting myself to the point where I can get off of it – I don’t like being on any meds more involved than a daily multi-vitamin… and frankly I sometimes have my doubts about even those.
Add on my Zyrtec-D (or the generic equivalent that I buy now) and starting monday I’ll be up to a minimum of 4 pills a day.

Anyway, they’re starting me on Trilipix as of tomorrow, which is a drug that’s taken along with the statin in order to control not only the cholesterol levels, but now also the triglyceride levels, which apparently were through the roof, nearly twice what they should be.

The level being that high basically means that I have been eating *way* too much fatty food.
I mean, it doesn’t seem like I’ve been going crazy with the grease or anything, but I guess over the last year I’ve been a little more free about eating burgers and other fried foods.

Unfortunately this means I’m probably going to have to make some serious changes in my diet and be more careful about what I order when I go out to get something.
And probably eat even more chicken. Sorry, I like chicken and all, but I get sooo sick of it after a little while.

Well, as of right now I still have a job.
Also as of right now, I’m still not all that sure how good of a thing that is.

Yesterday the company gathered everybody together and announced that due to the company’s inability to land new clients and actually, you know, generate income, that wage earnings were to be reduced in most departments of the company.

The area I work in was one of the only ones not effected – and that’s probably because we already get paid so little that they would be in danger of breaking labor laws if they were to drop it any further.

Then, today, one of my cube-mates was called away into management offices, and never returned. Laid off.

My department usually has 5 people in it. One is out after a surgery. Another called in sick in the morning. And then this one got escorted out partway into the morning.
Which meant that myself and another guy got to do the workload that is usually distributed between 5 today.
Ya, I worked a bit later than usual.

Anyway, another company in my field had posted an ad on Monster a couple of days ago and I jumped right on that puppy – updated the resume and got that posted to their web site (which was a complete pain in the ass – why is it that every online application system I’ve seen has been such a pain to use??) so if I’m really, really lucky maybe I’ll hear from them.
I did get an email from them this morning asking me to update information regarding my ethnicity – not sure what that’s about unless they’ve got some quote they’re trying to fill or something, sheesh.

Anyway I’m hoping something comes through, because not only have I had endless problems at my current company, which I’ve vented about plenty of times in the past, but the way they’re going I’m having serious doubts that this company is still going to exist a year from now.
They’re losing money like crazy and haven’t landed any new clients in forever.
And as of a year or so ago they’re now owned by a company in India who is so far separated that I’m sure all they see is numbers, and those numbers haven’t been good in a while.

Yeah, I really do think micro-blogging is killing my main blog.

So what’s been going on?

Work:
I’m the least annoyed at my job than I have been in probably over a year. I’m back to doing what they hired me for in the first place, and have also been given additional responsibility in the form of double-checking the work of others, who are apparently much more prone to screwing up than I am. I am able to listen to my mp3 player again (thank God, as the days would actually drag like molasses if I wasn’t) and have been plowing through audio books like mad, starting with a large number of selections from Art of Manliness’ 100 Must-Read Books: The Essential Man’s Library.

On the down side of the work situation, I’m still making about half of what I was making there a year ago, mostly due to lack of work. And when we get that work is absolutely random, so on any given week I may get sent home 3 hours early one day, and then have to stay 2 hours late two other days of the week, and there’s never knowing until the middle of the afternoon on any given day if it’s going to be a long or short day. That *really* sucks ass (and, of course, the long days almost *always* happen on days where I have plans after work).

The company went through a round of lay-offs a couple of weeks ago. I think this recent change of positions may have helped save me from that, because although it seemed like in my last position (the shitty making-phone-calls position that I hated more than I can even express) she felt I was borderline useless, in my new position I appear to suddenly be her favorite, to the point where she’s actually switched gears and seems to be all pleasant when talking to me, etc.
I am however torn on whether being saved from the lay-offs is a good or bad thing though.
See, thing is, if I was on unemployment, I would probably be making about $75/week more than I’m making now. That is not a typo.
The problem though is unemployment benefits are finite, and the job market is still pretty much non-existent, especially in my industry. Most companies in my industry are still laying off, not hiring.

I did however just send off paperwork to the US Dept of Ed regarding my school loan asking them to defer it for a year, based on how I’s all po’ now. Sent them copies of paychecks, trying to express that taking home a little over $500 for two weeks of work is *not* all that unusual lately. Hopefully it’ll go through smoothly and fall under their “We’ll defer it if you can show you make less than 150% of the national poverty standard” because, well, frankly this year I’m making less than 150% of the national poverty standard.

I’m also planning on going down to the local “Employment Security” office soon on one of my shortened work days to see if I qualify for “partial” unemployment – which means, from what I gather, that if you’re currently taking home less than you would qualify for if you were on unemployment, they’ll pay out the difference. I tried applying online and the system booted me, so I need to go down and actually talk to a human at the unemployment office (ugh) and see what’s up with that and what I need to do. It sounds like I have to have the company sign off on paperwork every single week that I don’t make much and take it down there to file it, which may be such a pain in the ass that it’s not worth the bother, but we’ll see.

Completely unrelated to money, when I got moved to the new position they moved me to another cubical again, this one is completely not adjusted right to my height, and they are refusing to call somebody in to fix it. The desk is actually up so high that I can’t raise my chair high enough to compensate for it. And my body is starting to pay for the super un-ergonomics of the whole thing. My wrists hurt, my hands hurt, my elbows hurt, my back hurts, and my knees hurt. I’m actually probably going to soon buy stuff like wrist braces just so my wrists & hands are forced to bend the right way while I’m typing all day.

Dating:
On the dating/girlfriend/relationship front, everything still seems to be going smoothly. We’ve settled down a bit to where we can handle having some weekends where we just hang out rather than having to have some kind of special date event every week, but I’m still trying to find stuff here and there (the last thing being Thursday’s RiffTrax Live event, which was, by the way, freakin’ awesome) while trying to balance out how a) we don’t live in an area that’s exactly overflowing with stuff to do and b) neither I nor LabGirl has a ton of extra cash to throw around.

Also in regards to LabGirl, it’s looking very strongly like we may be “shacking up” come October when my lease on the apartment ends. We’ve already had a few discussions, as well as a near-argument about how to split the bills (basically my view being that since she makes 2+ times as much as I do that she should take on a slightly larger blunt of the financial burden, like maybe a 60/40 split, while she is absolutely insistent that it has to be 50/50).

in regards to the possibility of moving, I really, really need to go through all the shit in my apartment and see what can be sold or donated. I have a ton of stuff laying around that I need to put on eBay, but selling stuff on eBay is frankly such a pain in the ass (or maybe I’m must so burned out on it from it being a side-business for a few years) that I haven’t had much ambition to actually do it.
I’ve got games, DVDs, pocket knives, women’s clothing and jewelry (stuff I bought for the girlie and ended up not fitting, etc), and heaven knows what else sitting down in storage that I could get rid of.
Although LabGirl does have a ranch house with a basement, it’s going to be VERY cramped if I don’t get rid of some stuff. As it is I’m probably going to have a bunch of “doubled up” furniture sitting down in the cellar for a few months (if not in a storage locker somewhere) while we go through our “trial period” of a few months to determine if we’re going to take the “getting hitched” path, or rather the “strangle each other” path that we’ve both been down before with others.

Health:
Last week I stepped on the scale and it has now crossed the 200 mark. I know I have several friends who haven’t seen that mark since they were kids, but still, at least for me, that is *not* healthy.
Actually, I knew I was entering a dangerous zone when LabGirl and I went to Home Depot a few weeks ago, and I, who doesn’t consider himself to be *that* heavy, nearly was over the load limit on the extension ladder we bought.
I seriously need to start exercising. My diet, although far from perfect, is not THAT bad right now, although I’m still fighting temptations such as the vending machine at work that has Hostess products (and man I LOVE cake…). My main problem is simply that I sit on my ass all day at work, and then when I get home, I feel so drained that all I want to do is sit on my ass for a while longer.
LabGirl and I are both hoping that if/when we move in together that we’ll work on motivating (or just getting on each other’s asses) each other about being healthier and more active.

My best idea on how to handle this is that we need to get involved into more outdoors games and sports.
There are however several problems with this.
Most if not all outdoor games require at least an initial purchase of equipment. We do not have spending money for this kind of stuff.
Most if not all outdoor games require a lack of rain or snow. That means that around here you can’t do them for about 8 months out of 12.
I do have both a stationary bike and a (very crappy) mountain bike, but my body doesn’t not seem to react at all to biking when it comes to losing weight – I could bike all week long and my weight won’t budge.
Walking *does* work, but it’s gotten so that it feels like such a bore and time-waster. LabGirl has expressed an interest in doing a walking routine with me, but I think there might be a problem in that in order for it to work for me, it has to be a fast walk, and she’s a good bit shorter than myself and thus probably would have problem keeping up with those shorter legs of hers.
That and I think there may be something wrong with one of my knees, it tries to give out on me if I put too much pressure on it in one session.
That will still probably be the best way to get started though, and hell you can walk through pretty much any weather, as long as you dress right, and as long as I throw some weight training in there it will be a more well-rounded program.

That, and part of me is thinking that more exercise and/or weight training may work as a sort of physical therapy towards fighting the damage that my crappy desk job is doing to my body every day (I’ve gained about 70lb since I stopped working retail and moved behind a desk, and all of the joint problems have come on in the last several years since I moved from a job where I was at a desk for a large portion of the day but still had to get off my ass and do something elsewhere on the campus now and then, to hardcore don’t leave your chair unless you have to pee work, which is what I’ve done since about 2005).

Investing/Stock Market:
Things are still a bit ugly in this area. I’ve been only “paper” (aka virtual) trading for over a month now, trying out different techniques and styles to determine which is better for me, as well as having discussions (sometimes heated and/or grumpy) with other traders about what I may be doing right or wrong.
Although the discussions frankly didn’t help that much (most of which was non-constructive criticism with occasional suggestions of other techniques to try with no explanation of how they’re any better than the techniques I’m already using) in doing further reading I came across a jem of information that was always right in front of me but that I had consciously or subconsciously chosen to ignore, probably to the cost of amazing amounts of lost time and money on my part.
That being this simple bit: pay attention to volume. Essentially, if there’s a move in a stock price, but there’s little volume (aka interest from traders) behind it, that move isn’t very likely to stick and will, more likely, just drop again shortly.

During my paper trading sessions, this appears to more often or not be the case. I mean, it’s not fool-proof, as I did have a couple of trades where I bought a stock because it went up with incredibly high volume, only to have a fall again the next day anyway, but by far the majority of times volume was taken into account, the stock continued to gain for some time after the initial trade.
In general my “paper” portfolios are now at around 20-ish percent gain in one month, and that was through the rocky “earnings season” where the market was all over the place for a while.
Still putting a little more “virtual” time into it to be sure, maybe another month or so, before trying to dip back into real money.

Lately I’ve been spending a good chunk of time off and on searching for new music. See, I’ve run into a bit of a conundrum with it – problem is, the types of music I most like are hard rock, blues rock, and sometimes some metal-ish stuff.
However, at the same time, I realized a while back that life is actually pretty good. I’m not loving my job but things seem to be improving there, I have a great girl who I’m fairly confident will end up being “the one,” I have good friends and family nearby… I mean really, what do I have to bitch about aside from wishing I had a bit more disposable income?

So – what is there in this music that I can relate to? Almost all of the song subjects are angry, depressive, or both – don’t rock bands ever have a good day that they can talk about?
In my searches I’ve found other people asking the same thing – where’s the happy metal?
I think some of us are probably having flashbacks of much of the music that was considered into this genre back in the 80’s and early 90’s – back when a lot of the bands just had fun lyrics, and didn’t feel the need to fill 3+ albums with non-stop angst.
The “nu-metal” genre seems to be especially bad for this from what I’ve noticed. You can pull up a song sample list on Amazon, and every.single.song is essentially about how life sucks or how his girl is a hateful and sometimes suicidal bitch or how the world is out to get you, etc etc etc etc ad naseum.

About the only modern US band I’ve found that doesn’t really fall into this may (surprisingly) Rob Zombie – I’m not saying his music isn’t dark, it is, but it’s not spiteful, hateful, “my life sucks” shit like so many other bands are spewing out. It’s more along the lines of “cinematic” dark themes – basically he’s a huge horror movie buff, apparently especially of the “campy” variety, and those themes tend to enter his music.

It’s looking like that “cinematic” dark may be the direction I end up having to lean towards if I don’t have much luck finding more “happy hard rock” – another band I discovered not long ago that appears to have this similar type of theme is Within Tempation (although, now that I think about it, they’re not American either). The sound is similar to Evanescence except with less angst and more werewolves.

Really what I keep running into as far as themes that fall into either a fun or fantasy/cinematic theme is more often than not in the “progressive metal” or “euro metal” category. This is stuff I can take in somewhat small doses – I kind of like Symphony X, for example. But overall most of these bands just don’t do it for me – they’re too synthesiser heavy, and it seems like they’re really bad at choosing vocalists, and it often seems like they are able to put together a good guitar riff but when it comes to arranging an entire song, not so much.

So, most of the negativity has been removed from my life, but I still have a little work to do. I’ve sort of naturally drifted away from people in my life who were I guess you could say emotionally draining, which is a good thing, and I highly recommend it for anyone else who similar relationships, and I don’t just mean of the romantic variety.
Although I’d like to have more money (and I’m still working on it), I’m not obsessed over a need for it, and can deal with not having a shiny new everything – another lesson I think more people could use to learn.

Now if only I can find some entertainment that provides a little but of adrenaline without trying to convince me that slitting my wrists might not be such a bad idea, all should be good