"The Big Move" Commences (i.e. what I did the past month, and what I'm going to do now)
I just walked in the door to my Redmond, WA condo from the airport about an hour and a half or so ago. Up until then, I'd been in North Carolina, since December 22, 2013.
What I did during the past month-plus, in no particular order:
Beyond all that, I took my mother (aka Ma) to the grocery store, helped to carry in firewood as well as split it on occasion, helped with some plumbing issues that arose thanks to those crazy, super-cold weather systems that moved through on more than one occasion while I was there, went to a birthday party for my now five-year old grandniece, and, of course, did Christmas related stuff. The only movie I saw was the first Hobbit movie on DVD.
Here is what I plan to do now:
While I'm here in WA, I will be spending the next week or two, or however long it ends up taking, on two separate tasks. The first is to finish up cleaning out the useless junk (pizza boxes, junk mail, etc.) that has been collecting over the years and get rid of it, most likely by taking it all to a nearby dumping station. The second is to pack up all of the stuff that I want to keep, which is mostly just my computer, my video games and consoles, most of my books, and whatever assorted clothes I want to keep, take it to UPS or Fed Ex or the post office or wherever is the best/cheapest (suggestions welcomed) and ship it all back to North Carolina. Both of these tasks will likely require that I rent a pickup truck or something for at least a day or two, so I hope to have all of it done together, so that I'll need the vehicle for less time. Everything else (such as furniture and the like) will simply remain behind, to be dealt with (or not) as my sister, who owns the condo, sees fit.
After I return to NC again, for what will be most likely the final time, my plans are somewhat more nebulous. As it stands right now, for the short-term at least, I will need to get "a job" in order to pay bills and the like. What that job will be remains to be seen. I'd prefer to avoid anything that requires A) dealing with the general public, B) standing up and moving around all day, and C) using a telephone for any reason... but those things are not entirely off the table if push comes to shove. If I can get a computer-related job that would fit with my two BS degrees in Computer Science and Real Time Interactive Simulation, that would be better. If I can get a job that somehow ties into the below longer term goal, though, that would be the ideal.
For the long term, however, my plans are a bit more ambitious... perhaps even a bit of pie in the sky. I want to become a writer. As in, an actual, honest-to-goodness, professional, published writer. This was heavily hinted at by my choice of reading material listed above, if it wasn't already obvious. I have had a novel clanging around in my head for at least the past decade or more, which I've puttered around with writing off and on over the years, but I have now decided to stop futzing around and just do it. Here is something I wrote about it in my journal that I mentioned above: "Stephen King, when talking about writing his epic Dark Tower series, made a comparison to just piddling around with a pickaxe in the dirt to getting into a mighty steam shovel. Well, to take Mr. King's metaphor and apply it to myself, I think it's time that I stopped dickering around with a little plastic toy shovel and bucket in the sandbox and picked up a pickaxe. I think I still have quite a while before I'll be able to drive that steam shovel, though."
As for right now, though, as in the rest of today and probably at least some or maybe even most of tomorrow, I intend to get caught up on all my Internet stuffs that I haven't been able to check at all in the past month, like webcomics, AVGN stuff, Two Best Friends stuff, season 4 MLP:FiM episodes, etc. The airplane hell of today took a lot out of me, as it usually does. ...well, writing this post alone took over four hours, as it's now almost 8pm, so that has already eaten into a lot of that time.
What I did during the past month-plus, in no particular order:
- Sat around and played (and replayed) games on my DS and PSP (in rough order I played them):
- Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII (didn't complete)
- Persona 2: Innocent Sin (didn't complete)
- Chrono Trigger (two playthroughs to get all endings, plus completed all the DS-specific stuff)
- Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (mostly complete re-playthrough, though didn't bother to actually defeat Dracula or complete the Training Hall and Large Cavern levels)
- Time Hollow (complete re-playthrough)
- Mario & Luigi: Bower's Inside Story (only re-played as far as the part where you're chasing the Fawful Express as Giga Bowser)
- Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney (complete re-playthrough)
- Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth (complete re-playthrough)
- A few other games I won't bother to mention because I only played them a few minutes or so at most.
- Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII (didn't complete)
- Sat around and watched a lot of MeTV:
- On weekdays:
- Daniel Boone
- Perry Mason
- Ironside (which I learned is where the Kill Bill siren came from)
- Hawaii Five-O
- Gunsmoke
- Bonanza
- The Big Valley
- Dragnet
- Adam-12
- Emergency
- The Rifleman (well, I only got to see this a few times, since Ma usually turned it to the news when this came on)
- M*A*S*H
- Stuff came on later that I could have watched, like Gilligan's Island, but... well... I watched a little of it, but Gilligan's Island just seemed to be way stupider than I remember it being as a kid... >_>; Hogan's Heroes and F Troop didn't interest me much either, for similar reasons. When Gilligan's Island came on was usually around when I decided to go to bed to read or to write some more in my journal (see below) or go back to playing DS/PSP or whatever.
On Saturdays:
- The Rebel
- Wagon Train
- Rawhide
- Wanted: Dead or Alive
- Batman
- Wonder Woman
- Star Trek (Yes, even though I've already watched all of it before. One of the eps they showed on MeTV was "The Trouble with Tribbles" and that's always worth a re-watch. I kept hoping that they'd show "Shore Leave" but they never did.)
- I might have watched some Svengoolie had it come on at the advertised time of 10pm, which was right after Star Trek, but it didn't. Instead, they snuck in the local news at 10pm for thirty minutes, then thirty minutes of Get Smart (which I had little interest in, at least not at that time of night), and then Svengoolie came on, and there was no way I was staying up to 1am or however long watching old horror movies, when I'd already gotten used to going to bed around 8-10pm EST.
- Daniel Boone
- Sat around and read some stuff:
- Frankenstein; Dracula; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (A three-in-one book with an introduction by Stephen King. I'd already read Dracula once before as a kid, but that was the first time I'd ever read Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I think I still liked Dracula the best, and even it I liked a lot better on this second reading than I did on the first one, when I was much younger.)
- What Should I Do with My Life?: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question by Po Bronson. (I got this from my sister on either the first day I got to NC from WA, or on Christmas, I can't recall which. Anyway, I read this and it's pretty good. It's not what I'd call a "self-help" book, as it's more a bunch of stories about people that Mr. Bronson interviewed while researching the book, along with anecdotes from his own life. It seems to have gotten mixed reviews on Amazon, which I wasn't aware of until just today, but I still liked it well enough. I didn't get any blinding flashes of insight from it or anything like that, but it was still an interesting read, in my opinion. My sister liked it as well, for what it's worth. *shrug*)
- The Elements of Style, originally a textbook by William Strunk Jr., later edited by E. B. White. (At first, this one didn't interest me that much, because it mostly seemed to be just basic English language rules that I'd already learned years ago in elementary, middle, and high school. It was originally a textbook, after all. But then I got to Chapter IV, "Words and Expressions Commonly Misused." In a comment to one of my " linguistic pet peeve" posts, owsf2000 asked if I was an English teacher in my past lives... well, it is entirely possible that I might have been William Strunk Jr. in a past life, at least, because that entire chapter read like it contained entries from my linguistic rant posts. I was kinda grinning pretty much all the way through that chapter. It has entries on " care less," " irregardless," and " literally," among many others. Chapter V, added entirely by Mr. White, was pretty interesting as well, since it dealt with "style" in a more general, subjective way, intended for would-be professional writers. Anyway, I'd heard about this book years ago when I read On Writing by Stephen King, and elsewhere since then, so I figured I'd probably do well to finally track it down and read it.)
- Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. (This one is interesting because it tries to teach less about the mechanics and techniques of being a writer of fiction and more about how to get in touch with one's unconscious, to unlock the "genius" that Ms. Brande claims everyone has within them, to greater or lesser degrees. I think the most useful suggestion, at least for me, was the chapter on "wordless recreation." Also, the sections about the writer being a dual personality which should be trained separately reminded me a little bit of tulpas, particularly the "'Dissociation' Not Always Psychopathic" section, though that obviously wasn't what Ms. Brande herself was actually talking about.)
- Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 Years of the Clarion Writers' Workshop by Kate Wilhelm. (I started this one and brought it with me back to WA, but haven't finished it yet, and am only a little ways into it. It's quite interesting, what I've read of it.)
- Chapter After Chapter: Discover the Dedication and Focus You Need to Write the Book of Your Dreams by Heather Sellers. (I haven't actually started this one yet at all, but I figured I should mentioned it, since I bought it at Edward McKay's Used Book Store in Greensboro the same day as I bought the previous three listed above.)
- Frankenstein; Dracula; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (A three-in-one book with an introduction by Stephen King. I'd already read Dracula once before as a kid, but that was the first time I'd ever read Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I think I still liked Dracula the best, and even it I liked a lot better on this second reading than I did on the first one, when I was much younger.)
Beyond all that, I took my mother (aka Ma) to the grocery store, helped to carry in firewood as well as split it on occasion, helped with some plumbing issues that arose thanks to those crazy, super-cold weather systems that moved through on more than one occasion while I was there, went to a birthday party for my now five-year old grandniece, and, of course, did Christmas related stuff. The only movie I saw was the first Hobbit movie on DVD.
Here is what I plan to do now:
While I'm here in WA, I will be spending the next week or two, or however long it ends up taking, on two separate tasks. The first is to finish up cleaning out the useless junk (pizza boxes, junk mail, etc.) that has been collecting over the years and get rid of it, most likely by taking it all to a nearby dumping station. The second is to pack up all of the stuff that I want to keep, which is mostly just my computer, my video games and consoles, most of my books, and whatever assorted clothes I want to keep, take it to UPS or Fed Ex or the post office or wherever is the best/cheapest (suggestions welcomed) and ship it all back to North Carolina. Both of these tasks will likely require that I rent a pickup truck or something for at least a day or two, so I hope to have all of it done together, so that I'll need the vehicle for less time. Everything else (such as furniture and the like) will simply remain behind, to be dealt with (or not) as my sister, who owns the condo, sees fit.
After I return to NC again, for what will be most likely the final time, my plans are somewhat more nebulous. As it stands right now, for the short-term at least, I will need to get "a job" in order to pay bills and the like. What that job will be remains to be seen. I'd prefer to avoid anything that requires A) dealing with the general public, B) standing up and moving around all day, and C) using a telephone for any reason... but those things are not entirely off the table if push comes to shove. If I can get a computer-related job that would fit with my two BS degrees in Computer Science and Real Time Interactive Simulation, that would be better. If I can get a job that somehow ties into the below longer term goal, though, that would be the ideal.
For the long term, however, my plans are a bit more ambitious... perhaps even a bit of pie in the sky. I want to become a writer. As in, an actual, honest-to-goodness, professional, published writer. This was heavily hinted at by my choice of reading material listed above, if it wasn't already obvious. I have had a novel clanging around in my head for at least the past decade or more, which I've puttered around with writing off and on over the years, but I have now decided to stop futzing around and just do it. Here is something I wrote about it in my journal that I mentioned above: "Stephen King, when talking about writing his epic Dark Tower series, made a comparison to just piddling around with a pickaxe in the dirt to getting into a mighty steam shovel. Well, to take Mr. King's metaphor and apply it to myself, I think it's time that I stopped dickering around with a little plastic toy shovel and bucket in the sandbox and picked up a pickaxe. I think I still have quite a while before I'll be able to drive that steam shovel, though."
As for right now, though, as in the rest of today and probably at least some or maybe even most of tomorrow, I intend to get caught up on all my Internet stuffs that I haven't been able to check at all in the past month, like webcomics, AVGN stuff, Two Best Friends stuff, season 4 MLP:FiM episodes, etc. The airplane hell of today took a lot out of me, as it usually does. ...well, writing this post alone took over four hours, as it's now almost 8pm, so that has already eaten into a lot of that time.