The process of keeping this journal has been fascinating. When I started it was just a way to help augment my, at times, poor memory. It has become a little more than that, but it primarily remains a mechanism to record what I do so that when I'm an old drooling fool who barely remembers his own name, someone who's read this can say, "Hey Uncle Aaron, tell me about the time you jumped out of an airplane." This will of course trigger the blurpity blurp babblings that so often come out of those of us who've been around for a while. "Sonny, when I was your age, I jumped out of a plane with a man strapped to my back." Mwap mwaaap mwap mwap mwa? "No there wasn't anything wrong with the plane. I did it for fun." Wwap mwap mwa? "No the man was there to make sure I pulled the rip cord." That's how the conversation would go. Of course the person on the other end would be cornered and trapped into a two hour conversation about crap that happened a long time ago and means very little to him. Poor guy.
If you're reading this some time in the future and I'm an incoherent babbling old fool, please keep in mind that I wasn't always like that.
I think this post will mostly just be a list of general crap and not have some overriding theme. Not that any of these posts really have a theme, but I do try to keep it to one or two subjects.
Home repairs. Why is it that working on your own home sucks, but working on someone else's is fun? This Saturday I was at a friend’s house helping hang drywall. I really enjoyed myself, despite the heat. There were five of us working in a small space, so it was a little cramped. This job was interesting in that they were trying to match drywall to existing plaster and lath. Anybody who's worked with plaster and lath knows that it is never a uniform thickness. We did a good job getting the places where there were going to be joints and seams level, but I'm sure the mudding and taping will be fun. While this was going on, I had someone working on my own home. Since I bought the house a couple of months ago, there are things that have just been annoying me. First of these was the expansion foam that was sticking out of random places in my house. I've hired a person to come in and fix that and do some tuck pointing around the place. He's a pretty nice guy and he does pretty good work, but he doesn't seem extra worried about being punctual. It is now a week after when he'd said he'd be done, and there are still things to do. It is primarily because he doesn't seem to want to show up that much.
On another front, I have decided to try online dating. Let me rephrase that. I've started looking at online personals. I think historical there's been a bit of a social stigma to this, but I don't think it is reasonable, especially for someone of my generation to buy into that. In doing this, I've found that there are several hurdles that I'm needing to overcome. Primarily is the fact that I don't have a good picture of me. I think there are a couple of reasons for this. First, its very hard to take a natural looking picture of yourself. Second, I don't like to smile in pictures. I'm not sure why, but it just doesn't seem natural. Finally, there's the fact that I'm very new to this. And by this, I mean dating in general. I started dating late. I got into a serious and committed relationship very early in the process of dating. Finally, I stayed in that relationship for a very long time. I think all of these things have conspired to make me feel like I'm at a disadvantage when re-approaching dating. I've made a serious effort to be more outgoing and personable. I certainly feel more comfortable in crowds and large groups than I used to.
Last night, or rather Sunday night I responded to my first personal ad. I've not gotten a response yet, and I'm beginning to wonder if I will get one. Being a babe in the woods on this, I don't know the protocol for these situations. I also have the dilemma of my approach. Should I be careful and measured about who's ads I respond to, or do I respond to a whole bunch of ads and deal with the social and emotional consequences later. The first approach would certainly allow me to be more deliberate about things, but what are the parameters about how long I should wait for an answer and how long between meeting someone and deciding to move on or not. The second approach would be a more efficient, but is that what I'm really looking for in a relationship, efficiency? Moreover, I'm sure that the potentially awkward situations that arise from that approach would keep sitcom writers busy for years. I think I will stick with the first approach for now. If I don't get any results, then I might switch things up a little.
I just moved the server to another room and connected it directly to the switch, so things should be a bit more stable now. I had the server sitting on the other side of a wireless bridge. It worked some of the time, but for things like web serving, the results were sketchy at best.
For some reason I didn't sleep very well tonight. I woke up at around 2:30 in the morning and couldn't get back to sleep. It's now 6:30 and I'm going to need to get ready for work soon. Ironically, I'm starting to feel as if I could take a nap.
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