OK so here's the deal, I do not have any inspiration to write about anything. In between being super busy at work and the little time I have left for life, I am just not inclined to write. And I have lots of things I want to write about. Remember my hype about the "People Series" thing that I got so excited about? Well I still want to do it and I have a list of people to research about, but I just can't get myself to sit down and do it ! I have no idea what is wrong with me from that point of view. Thing is when I get home all I want to do is eat something quick, shower and settle in bed with a book, oh yes I am overly obsessed with reading right now and wish I could just stay at home and read ! That of course is impossible. Which brings me to my next complaint.. I have lost all interest in cooking, I can't believe it ! My poor food blog, I haven't had anything to add to it in ages, which is why I have decided to take it down for now. And yes that means I'm back to eating microwave junk and take-out food. Ugh. But then I'm perfectly happy to do that, as long as I can get my ass to bed early and spend a good couple of hours reading. At the moment Shelfari has been my addiction, who knew interacting with other people about books could be so much fun? Oh and addicting. I have never had the opportunity to have discussions about books with anyone, ever since high school when we had to read books which we then discussed in class, but this is different, you can choose which books to read and heck you can even make suggestions, what more could you want. So now you know the reason behind my lack of posting. I am however pleased that I have been keeping up with my book blog, so far, and I have no plans whatsoever to drop it, like say the food blog. Still I have not been writing reviews as soon as I finish a book, but that's OK because I actually feel like I want to do it, and it's not because I keep putting it off and make up excuses to make myself feel better.
This is what, the fourth or fifth time that my blog has gone into an unexpected hiatus? Some people have been blogging for years, and they have dutifully done so without going blank for periods of times, but that apparently doesn't seem possible for me. You would think I have some problem with commitment, seeing how I get excited about it and then a couple of weeks down the line all the excitement has died down, until the next spurt. I wish I could understand this part of me !
Let's just hope that in the coming days I will get my motivation to blog back, and until then I will just continue to read, read and read. I even have lists of books to read, except the problem is my TO READ list keeps growing and growing much more than I can read. My lists include, the 100 Classic Books List, 1001 Books to read before you die, the Complete Stephen King Books list, and I can't forget about my Wishlist on Shelfari which at the moment has another 15 books, and the books I own which I have still to read. Aaaa why are there so many books in the world !!
I have been back for two days but dang I haven't had time to do anything. The few days I spent in Barcelona were great ! Thanks to the nice people at the reseller where I was doing training, I managed to see some places because when I told them it was my first time in Barcelona they really wanted to show me around. That was a major plus. Barcelona is known as the city of Gaudi, and rightly so since there are so many of his architectures. There is so much to see, I only wish I had more time ! I have to say that from the the [few] cities that I have been to in Europe, Barcelona is the one I liked the most so far and I attribute that to the fact that its a modern city but at the same time intertwined with rich cultural heritage.
I'm in the process of uploading pics to Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/apolskis/sets/72157613783347783/, still got a long way to go though to filter all the pics I took. This is my favorite picture of the bunch, taken from Poble Espanyol, which is an outdoors museum representing different locations in Spain.
As usual after every business trip, I have been super busy at work but it should tone down from next week. I'm really looking forward to that so I can get back on track with everything, including my blogs.
The first installment of the People Series is about Vlad Dracula, also known as Vlad the Impaler because of his chosen way of killing people by impalement or simply Dracula. My interest to find out more about him was stemmed when I was looking for ideas of what books to read next and came across Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula". I have heard before that the character of Dracula was based on a real personality and I was curious to find out if this was true and if so who was this person. What I found out was not what I expected.
Intro...
Vlad Dracula, a.k.a. Vlad the Impaler, Vlad Tepes (Tse-pesh), or Vlad III, was born in the citadel of Sighisoara, Transylvania, in 1431. Transylvania, Moldovia and Wallachia are today joined together as Romania. His father, Vlad II, was a member of the Order of the Dragon, a secret fraternity sworn to to uphold Christianity and defend the empire against the Ottoman Turks. It is said that at age five, young Vlad also become a member of the Order of the Dragon. Undoubtedly Vlad III is most commonly known for inspiring the character of Dracula in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel with the same name.
Vlad Dracula's Names
"Drac" is the Romanian word for dragon and "ul" is the definitive article and thus Vlad III's father came to be known as Vlad Dracul, or Vlad the dragon. The added "a" means the son of, so essentially Vlad III was known throughout his life as Vlad Dracula, the son of the dragon.
The word Tepes stands for impaler in Romanian, this name originated after his death and it came from Vlad Dracula's preferred method of execution, impalement.
Vlad III has also been referred to as simply Dracula in a number of documents of his time, including the Transylvanian Saxon pamphlets and "The Annals of Jan Dlugosz".
Historical Background
In 1431 Vlad Dracul (Vlad Dracula's father) was named the military governor of Transylania by King Sigismund. Vlad Dracul was not satisfied with being a mere governor and so he made a plan to seize Wallachia from Alexandru I. In 1436 his plan succeeded and after killing Alexandru he became the prince of Wallachia. During his reign Vlad Dracul tried to remain neutral between his powerful neighbors, the Hungarians and the Turks. In 1442 the Turks invaded Transylvania and were defeated but John Hunyadi of Hungary forced Vlad Dracul to flee with his family. Essentially Vlad Dracul betrayed the Order of the Dragon and in 1443 he regained the Wallachia throne once again with the support of the Turks. To assure his faith to the Sultan, Vlad Dracul sent his two younger sons, Vlad Dracula and Radu, to Adrianople as hostages to insure that he will not plan to strike against the Turks.
In 1447, John Hunyadi orchestrated a coup to assassinate Vlad Dracul because of his pro-Turkish policy which Hunyadi, having devoted his life to fight the Ottoman Empire did not approve of. Upon receiving the news of Vlad Dracul's death, the Turks released Vlad III but Radu decided to stay behind. With the help of Pasha Mustafa Hassan's Turkish cavalry, Vlad Dracula seized the Wallachian throne at the age of seventeen for a brief period of time. Only two months later, Hunyadi forced Vlad Dracula to surrender his throne and flee to his cousin, the prince of Moldovia.
In 1456, Vlad Dracula invaded Wallachia and defeated Vladislav II. Thus he became prince of Wallachia, his native land, where he instituted his strict policies, stood up against the Turks and thus began his reign of terror by impalement.
The Reign of Vlad Dracula
Vlad Dracula's reign of terror began almost as soon as he gained the throne. Early on in his reign he had a feast for all the boyars and their families to celebrate Easter. During the feast he had all the nobles arrested and those who where old an weak were impaled on the spot while those who were healthy were condemned to slavery and put to work on the rebuilding of his Poenari Castle on the Arges river. According to records the slaves labored until their clothes fell off from wear and then they were forced to continue working naked with most of them dying in the process.
One day Vlad Dracula wanted to cleanse his Kingdom from the people he considered lazy, who suffered from an illness or disability or were simply impoverished. He announced that nobody will suffer from hunger in his Kingdom and invited all the poor and unfortunate souls to a banquet. When his guests were all fed, and not to mention drunk, Vlad asked everyone how they would like not to feel hunger ever again and not to have to worry about anything. The crowd's reply was enthusiastic so he ordered his men to board up the hall and then set it on fire. Nobody escaped alive from this ordeal.
Rumours exist that Vlad Dracula also ate the flesh and drank the blood of his enemies, as well as held dinner parties next to people that has just been impaled. Vlad felt proud of his work and anyone who showed dislike when looking at the corpses soon suffered the same fate. He liked to arrange the stakes in various geometric patterns, most commonly in a ring of concentric circles in the outskirts of his target city. The length of the spear indicated the rank of the victim and the corpses were left to decay for months. Apart from impalement, Vlad also had people decapitated, skinned alive, burnt, dismembered, had their eyes gouged out and sometimes just physically disfigured.
No one dared break Vlad Dracula's laws for fear of being punished or killed. He especially enjoyed torturing and killing women, maidens who have lost their virginity, unchaste widows and women committing adultery. Such women were punished by cutting off their breasts, mutilating their sexual organs and impaled on red hot stakes.
The End
Although Vlad Dracula was a feasome enemy, in 1462 finally the Turks succeeded in forcing him to flee to Transylvania. Not wanting to leave anything for the Turks, Vlad destroyed his Kingdom by burning every village to the ground and poisoning the wells. In Transylvania Vlad met King Matthias Corvinus, but the King had heard of Vlad's inhuman ways and he had him imprisoned in the Hungarian capital of Visegrad. As time passed, Vlad was allowed to come and go as he pleased as long as he reported to King Matthias.
For nine years, while Vlad Dracula was in King Matthia's custody, Vlad's brother Radu occupied the throne of Wallachia. When Radu lost favor with the boyars and King Matthias, the latter and Prince Stefan Bathory of Transylvania joined forces with Vlad and after months of attacks he returned to Wallachia to occupy the throne. The boyars, knowing the possible pitfalls of Vlad's reign opened to the idea of Basarab's return, thus Vlad found himself in a precarious situation where his army was undermanned and left with only a few thousand men to combat the Sultan's ever growing army. The battle was difficult but Vlad Dracula fought against overwhelming odds a refused to accept defeat, but eventually they would meet their doom. Vlad Dracula is thought to have been killed during battle near Bucharest in December 1476, and it is claimed that he was accidentally struck by one of his own men. Ultimately the Turks decapitated Vlad's body and his head was sent to Constantinople to be displayed on a stake as proof that Vlad the Impaler was dead.
Sources and further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlad_the_impaler
http://www.vladtheimpaler.com
http://www.donlinke.com/drakula/vlad.htm
Yep once again I have decided to change the layout. It's crazy how when I make the layout I like it, and in a couple of months, weeks or even days I start hating it. This is what now, the third layout change? I think it has a lot to do with getting fed up of seeing the same thing over and over again, after a while I need something fresh. In the coming days I will change the layout for the other two blogs too, you know so everything is in sync.
I have also decided that I will go ahead with my little project of learning about new things and getting to know more about some of the people which, in some way or another, left a mark on the world. For now I will be starting with the latter to see how things go, and mainly because I already have some ideas for it whilst I need to put more thought in the other. I will be calling it the People Series and I will be posting the first one in the next one or two days. I'm really looking forward to start this, I hope the excitement doesn't die down after the first few posts, as is the case most of time.
Updating my food blog has been a bit slow lately, but that's not because I lost interest in it, far from that, but simply because I haven't been cooking anything worth mentioning the last week. Frozen food and eating out has pretty much taken over my life, but I will try to make more effort to cook. That's not just to keep up with my blog either, it generally makes me feel better when I actually cook instead of heating food in the microwave, apart from being much more satisfying.
Some times I get this realization that there are so many things I don't know about, so much that I could learn, and when thinking about the vastness of it I start to get this feeling of anxiety, like I really need to do something about it. There are so many topics and areas, it's impossible to know everything, but I feel like I need to make more effort to learn new things outside the subjects I'm more familiar with. Science, history, economics, and so many more, but how do you go about it effectively?
While thinking about this I got an idea, two ideas actually. Number one is to make it a point that every week I will choose a random topic which I come across and do some research about it, then blog about it here. The blogging part is for motivation, and to make it more interesting. The second idea is along the same lines, but instead of a random topic I will choose a random famous person and get to know about him/her. Different people from all walks of life, people that in some way or another made an impact in their life. I already got some ideas of people I want to know more about. Again I will blog about it. This is still an idea and in the end I may or may not really do it, but right now it seems like it will really help to broaden my knowledge, about everything. Apart from that it will also help the blog, because usually I don't have a whole lot of things to talk about, and when I do most of the time I have a hard time saying much about it, so I end up not blogging about it. The thing is that I like the idea of blogging and I think it's fun when you have a topic to write about. My writing abilities are not too spectacular, but I would really like to improve that too. I admire people that can write so eloquently and express their feelings in such an articulate manner, if not even jealous of them.
I get so excited thinking up these little projects, even though not all materialize in the end, but I really want to try this out, and hopefully be able to keep up with it.
Yesterday I just learned that next month I will be going on a business trip to...Barcelona, Spain. I haven't been on a business trip since last September and I was sort of relieved that I didn't have to travel so much anymore. Especially when my business trips involved going to the UK every month just for three or four days. It was fun at first but after a while it became tiring so I was glad when this series of business trips came to an end. Now that it has been a while that I've been on a business trip I am excited about this, even more so because I have never been to Spain before. I will be staying there for five days and apart from the usual presentations and training for the reseller I am hoping that I will have some time to look around. You know there are lists like X places to visit before you die etc.? Well I want to see as much of Europe as possible before I die ! I am still way behind but these kind of business trips help too, heh.
I made a quick search about Barcelona and it looks like there are many interesting places to visit. Apparently there are a lot of buildings by "Catalonia's favorite son" Antonio Gaudi and from the pictures I've seen Gaudi's works are pretty awesome. One place I decided I'm going to have to visit is Parc Guell, I fell in love with it just by reading about it and seeing the pictures, so one way or another I am going to make time to go there. I'll have to check it out more and see which places I can visit while I'm there giving the time I have. If I ever have doubts about my job, something like this is what keeps me motivated. I love traveling, my dream is that one day, sometime in the not so near future, I will be able to take a couple of months off work and spend it traveling. That would definitely be the coolest thing I did in my life. However for now that's pretty much impossible, because apart from not having the funds to do that, it's impossible to take that much time off work. Ah well, but hey I can dream !
Until then I will have to satisfy with going on vacation, preferably to Europe, once a year, and going on business trips. Which is not so bad after all !
I have always loved reading and unless I am going through a super busy time I read every day. Since joining Shelfari however I am realizing how much there is to read, and I want to read all books I see ! Being on that site gives me all this energy to read. For the first time in history I am reading two books at the same time, one book I'm reading when I'm at home and one through DailyLit when I manage to sneak some reading at work. In fact last Friday I stayed in for lunch hour since I had my homemade lunch and spent it reading.
I joined a group on Shelfari called '50 Book Challenge' where basically you set your own number of books you want to read throughout the year and keep a record of it. I set my goal to 20 books and if I kept at this I will be able to reach my goal with no problem, but who knows with me. Another group I joined is '1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die'. Althought it would take me more than a lifetime to read 1001 books I think it's interesting and it's great to get ideas of what to read next from it. I have only read 12 books from the list so far so there's a lot for me to choose from. You can see the complete list of books at http://www.listology.com/content_show.cfm?content_id=22845.
I just wish I had more time to read, but there are so many things I want to do during the day that I don't have enough time to fit everything in ! Such a bummer. Some people read over 80 and some even over 100 books in a year, how do they manage that?? I wonder if you can have a full time job and still be able to do it, because even if all I did was work and read I don't think I could read so many books in a year.
I can't believe 2008 is coming to an end already ! It seems like it was only yesterday that it started and all of a sudden it's ending.
So many things happened this year. After a slow start to the year I managed to get back on track and did much more than that. My personal life has been ten times better than previous years and I'm quite pleased about that. Work, eh not so much, but that's something I'm choosing to ignore for the time being. It's probably not the best approach either but I have given it so much thought and didn't come to any conclusion that I just want to leave it alone for now and see how things go, like going to bed at night and hoping that in the morning everything will be fixed.
I thought about making a list of resolutions for 2009, God knows I am the queen of lists, I got to have a list for everything. This time though I decided not to make a list because I will never get anything done from it, and I will feel bad. Case in point, last June I made a list of things I wanted to do/achieve by the end of the year. How many of those did I manage to do? None. Nada. Zip. It doesn't mean I wasted my life away doing nothing, but I didn't do anything from that list and it makes me feel like I could have done more, but didn't. So there will be no list this time. The only thing I am planning to do for 2009 is to start taking lunch with me to work. I used to do this and it worked great, but I stopped at some point and went back to eating out for lunch every day. This is not good neither healthwise nor moneywise, so for 2009 I plan on making homemade lunches every day. I even thought of using the Bento box again, which I purchased for this very purpose, it might help to make it more interesting. I hope I can keep this one resolution !
This will probably be my last post for the year. I hope everyone has a good end of year and I can't wait to see what 2009 will bring !
Since I started putting my camera on manual to take pics I found out how much more difficult it can be to take pics that are not blurred. I'm still not quite there with taking good pics but at least they're decent, kind of, and they're much better than the pics I used to take so I'm improving. Yesterday I was talking to a friend of mine that owns a huge SLR camera with all sorts of lenses and cool equipment, so needless to say he takes some really leet pics and he suggested I get a small tripod for my camera. By the end of our conversation I had ordered this Joby Gorillapod Original.It looks quite neat and just what I need, nothing complex just a little tripod to put my camera on and take pics of food I cook, because that is the only reason I'm using my camera at the moment, which by the way I am enjoying. Now let's just hope it serves it's purpose well.
Oh and I ordered it from Ebay, because that is the only logical place to buy stuff from. Seriously I think that I have just recently got addicted to Ebay. Apart from the Gorillapod I also just ordered sheets and cookie cutters, besides the other five or so items I ordered the week before as part of my new addiction. I already know what I will be ordering next too ! I know it's crazy...
Behold the very exciting news that my new Random Food Blog is up and running. I have also posted my first random food since yesterday I made cookies. This is only the first post so I am still excited about this blog, we'll see how I feel about it in a month or two when probably the excitement has died down. Now wouldn't it be cool if people actually read that blog and posted their ideas/suggestions/experience. Right, but not happening. I decided that I will be posting pics of the food too, otherwise it would be kind of boring wouldn't it? See the pic I have on there of the cookies, not that bad is it ! I am being a little more adventurous with my camera and found out that if I put it on manual I can take pics that are way better. Who knew? Well I knew, and my friend has been telling me since forever that if you leave it on auto you can't expect much from a camera, but I just ignored him because I thought it was more complicated than it actually is and I don't have much patience. Now if I play with some of the settings I can at least take decent pics that don't make you want to puke your brains out. Sometimes it is good to listen to your friends.
In other news I have updated the layout for all my blogs. They are all the same but in different colors, because that's how I like it. They look pretty neat if I may say so myself. I think they are closer to looking like the 'real' blogs now. I still have to fix the Blog Archive for all of them but I just discovered that it doesn't work like it should on this blog and Book Archive, and its kind of ugly on the new Random Food Blog. I'm not really sure how it turned out the way it did so I have to look into it but right now I don't feel like wrecking my brains over it so it will have to wait a bit more. Oh and is it becoming hard to find the name you want for your blog on Blogger. I started with something completely different when I was creating the food blog and ended up with that. Not really what I had in mind but it's the best I could come up when every other name I tried has already been taken.
I haven't posted anything on here in ages. In my last post I was contemplating if I should keep this blog or forget about it and just post on Posterous. As it turns out I haven't been doing that very well either. My excuse is that I took up a little job of helping my friend set up his website, but what was supposed to be a little help became creating the whole darn thing from scratch. And after the website came other things, and right when I though I was done with it he got another bright idea. Gotta love friends !
So today I was pondering this blogging business again an I decided to keep this blog, or I will be trying to because really I like writing on it. Sure I don't always have anything interesting to say but nobody really reads it so if it sucks it doesn't really matter ! That's my theory anyways.
The first thing I did was change the layout because as soon as I opened it this morning I thought "Shit that's one ugly layout." I'm not really sure what I was thinking when I made it but I thought it was pretty cool back then. In a couple of months time I will probably be thinking the same thing about this layout, but at the moment I'm liking it.
My poor book blog has also been abandoned because I have not been reading anything at all, shame on me. In fact the last book I read is the one I last posted about and that was in August ! Hopefully I will be reviving that blog soon as well. Yes the first thing to go is the layout, again what was I thinking?? I am thinking of making it similar to this one but in different shades, I like to have some coordination between my blogs. The more important thing is to start reading again, so I actually have things to post about on there.
The other thing I'm thinking about is to create another blog to post about things I cook. You must think I'm crazy right, I can't keep up with the ones I have let alone another one. True, true, but lately I have been cooking quite a lot and I think its fun to blog about it. It will be just another unread blog, there are so many of those in the world, what's another one going to do?
We shall see how this goes the second time 'round...
Right now I have a dilemma, to keep this blog or not to keep this blog. Since I found out about Posterous it seems the obvious thing to do, it's just what I need, somewhere to post absolutely anything I want without having to think too much about the words. In reality I could do the same thing here on my blog, but Posterous is so much cooler (and simpler to use). Besides when I think about blogging I always think that when I post about something I need to go into more detail and not just post something completely random because, well it doesn't seem right to have a blog full of bits and pieces. That's why I'm loving Posterous because in my mind I can post about aything on there and I don't have to make it long. Is it just me that is making this distinction or is it actually like that?
I will definitely keep my book blog, but I just don't know if I will be keeping this blog too.
In other news yesterday I deleted most of the pics I had on Flickr, because once I again I thought they were total crap and they were making my Flickr account look ugly. I know I'm that unpredictable. Last weekend I got to take some pics using my friend's spiff camera, one of those big cameras with different lenses and an extra flash, I don't know anything about it except that it's a Canon and that it takes awesome pics. I actually took pics that looked nice, that had this sort of depth in them, I was thrilled that I was able to take pics like that. So I realized it's not entirely my fault that the pics I take look lifeless and dull, it's the camera too ! Except I'm not willing to spend so much money for a good camera, although it would be uber cool to have one like that. Now if I just come home one day and find a package waiting for me containing a leet camera, wouldn't that be the neatest thing? I can dream...until then my Canon PowerShot SX100 IS will have to do.
I just discovered Posterous from someone's blog and I think it's a totally rad idea. I just put up my first post on there, check it out.
Why is it so cool? Well sometimes you think about something but you don't really want to make a whole blog post about it, but you would still like to share it. Posterous is the solution. It's somewhat like Twitter but you could post anything on there. I don't use Twitter myself as I don't have friends online to keep updated of my doings, so if I did use it nobody would read it. But this Posterous thing is different in that regard. People are coming up with all sorts of things for the web these days, some I actually really like, like Posterous for instance, and some are just not for me, but these kind of sites are definitely what's in right now. A good, innovative idea is what you need.
I added a link to it on this blog, to your left side under my Blog Roll. You should really sign up and subscribe to my blog. It's extremely easy too !
Oh and I removed some of the links I had in my blog roll, namely Dooce, Blurbomat and Death by Children. Those are the more leet bloggers and I'm sure they don't need another link to their blogs, especially from a site that (probably) no one reads.
Today I had to stay in during lunch hour, on stand by, just in case some nitwit that was doing a conference call with a customer ran into some problem like if the customer got aggravated by his lack of intelligence and inability to handle people, then I'd have to come to his rescue and save him from the call from hell. Isn't that just the most awesome thing to experience? Trying to calm a customer down after your beloved colleague, ahem, I'll call him that for the sake of not being anymore disrespectful, managed to drive him off the edge and his every other word is 'refund'. Fun stuff.
Well while I was eating my homemade mac and cheese, waiting for my phone to ring any minute with a panicked voice at the other end, I got on wired.com, everyone checks that site right? The first article that caught my eyes was Space Invaders Remake Takes Retro Gaming to the Limit. Oh my God I love Space Invaders ! You just got to read that article, it explains word for word how I feel about retro games. I'm not some hardcore gamer myself, in fact I haven't been playing much at all the last year, but I like to play games every now and then and that's enough. But nothing beats those retro games I used to play when I was younger. Simple, cool, games.
Games today are different, all so very complicated, and while I like today's games, some I might even love, I miss my retro games. Reading that article today made me want to buy a PSP or a Nintendo DS, just to play Space Invaders Extreme. The last hand held game console I got was the Nintendo Gameboy Advance SP which was a Christmas gift from my mom. After I went crazy over it and played it nonstop, I eventually put it to the side and didn't play with it anymore. That is the reason why I held off buying a Nintendo DS or a PSP, but oh have I been tempted.
I am so aching to buy a game console, an Xbox or a Nintendo Wii, but I know I don't have much time to play games so it will probably be a waste of money. And since seeing that article the Nintedo DS or PSP are also on the radar. Ack if I could justify it so I won't feel so guilty about it...
These guys are just amazing.
See what Wikipedia has to say about this: Shaolin Kung Fu and the Shaolin Monastery.
There are many blogs that I read, different kinds of blogs, from a variety of people. Moms, dads, college students, artists, globetrotters, geeks, anyways you get what I mean. What I'm always wondering is how do people get so much to write about? Especially on personal blogs. It's either everyone has a super interesting life and I'm stuck with a boring one where the most exciting thing that happens in my week is going to Mister Tiki Mai Tai Lounge with a bunch of friends after work, or else I'm crap at writing about an uneventful day by writing an essay about the little things, like my thoughs on going to the bathroom or how pissed off I got driving home from work stuck in traffic. So which one is it? Or maybe it's a combination of both.
See, I spend most of the day at work, like everyone else that works full time I would suppose, I get home, cook and eat, sit at the computer doing various things (like reading blogs for one !), occasionally watch some TV while I'm on the computer, then shower and get to bed, where I spend an hour or two reading and then sleep, most of the time not because I'm tired but because it's late. What's there to write about? I mean my days aren't always so predictable, sometimes instead of going home after work I go out with a couple of my friends, and then by the time I get home I'm too tired to do anything so I just shower and sleep, which means there's even less to write about. Weekend are different, I'm out most of the time and they aren't so boring as the rest of the week, but still nothing to rave about in a blog post. There are people that do a lot of ranting and complaining on their blog, about how this sucks and that stinks and the other is unacceptable, but me? There's not much I could complain about. In general I'm not one to complain much, I usually accept anything and go with the flow, at work, with friends, anything actually. Unless something is really bugging me, then you will hear me complain alright, but that happens once in a while, and I'm very thankful for that. I could write about everything that happens to me, from when I wake up to the time I go to sleep, but wouldn't that make for a big boring blog? And I don't care for that anyways, I never meant to write about every little thing I do. My purpose to start a blog was to write about my thoughts rather, of which I don't seem to have much !
Well I did go to a shooting range this week. And want to know what I thought about that? It was freakin' AWESOME ! I got to use a shotgun for the very first time and I didn't think I'd like it so much, but I actually loved it. I hit like 2 of the 25 targets, but that's not important, what's important is that I used a gun. You got to agree that it's cool right? We plan to go again soon and I want to try with the handguns, I think I'd like it even better than the shotgun. They had rifles and bows too, maybe we'll try them all one by one. They all sound fun, but I still think I'd like the handgun best.
Oh and because I read www.dooce.com, I caved in and bought her book "Things I learned About My Dad". Mainly out of curiosity, but if it's as witty as some of her blog posts are then it should be good. I'm hoping on that. I got it in the mail yesterday and I can't wait to start reading it, but because I always have to finish one book before starting another I got to wait a couple of days more.
How's that for a blog post on my uneventful life?!
But so little time ! I have so many things I want to do but before I know it it's midnight and I need to get myself to bed to wake up decent for work the next morning. I feel so frustrated when there are so many things I could be doing and I have so much motivation, but instead I have to go to bed. As if having a huge list of things I need to do in the upcoming days is not enough, I have another list of things which are not really that important but I want to do them nonetheless. I decided to make a separate list for these things, to make sure that I do get to them eventually. When I have a list I want to cut out things from it so that motivates me to do more. I am hoping that having this list will help in actually doing these things sometime. Oh and it will definitely help with the fact that I keep forgetting about these thing too. Here is what's on my list so far.
- Organize all the data on the various hard drives I have
- Set up a backup system because if one of my hard drives dies I will go insane
- Read "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" books
- Read "His Dark Materials" books
- Become a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS)
- Put up that website I've been meaning to for a while
- Watch all the movies that I have, that's a lot I'm talking about
- Clean out my car from the inside, any volunteers?
- Clean out my place, it needs it
I know I'm missing some other things but I just can't remember what right now. See what I mean? If I keep going on with these lists I'm going to need a list to remember all the lists I have, heh !
This week I had to go on a short business trip to the UK, which means about an 8 hour flight both ways. I usually don't mind it, I've done it so may times that I've pretty much got used to it. This time however? It was a total different story and if I had to spend another minute on the plane they would have dragged me out unconscious and mumbling crazy things about how I didn't mean to kill the kid but he was asking me to do it.
BOTH WAYS.
The flight over there was a nightmare, or so I thought. I had no idea how worse it could be. I had this nice little family sitting on the row behind me with their two boys, maybe 5 and 3. The youngest one was sitting on his mother, right behind me and he just wouldn't stop messing with the seat in front of him, i.e. my seat. Punching it, kicking it, pulling at it, and there I was sitting in my seat feeling like I was on a ship sailing on stormy seas. At one point I was starting to feel nauseated and if I was going to throw up I would have liked to turn around and do it on that kid. Fortunately for the kid and his mother no such thing happened though. The good thing about it all? You wouldn't hear the kid whine or cry or anything like that, he was as good as a pea playing with toys and talking to his parents about their trip, it actually sounded really cute and that's probably what kept me from hating him. Finally he slept and I was so relieved, for all but half an hour ! I felt like telling him kid you got a long way to go don't you think you should consider sleeping a bit longer?? It didn't seem so. Lets just say that when the plane landed and they opened the door I was out in the blink of an eye.
The flight back home, now that is a real nightmare. Out of sheer luck I had another cute family sitting in the row behind me, again with two boys, this time around 2 and a baby just a few months old. What do you think the 2 year old did as soon as he was buckled up on his mother? Start kicking and pulling at the seat of course ! A couple of minutes in and I was thinking why oh why did they have to be placed behind me? Why couldn't someone else enjoy such a lovely experience on their flight? But wait that's not what made the flight a nightmare. It's the 8 hours of whining and begging from the 2 year old and wailing and screaming from the baby which made everything so darn frustrating and made my flight three days before seem like a breeze. Seriously, don't kids get tired at all? And that baby, his throat must have been burning by the end of the flight, I'm surprised he could still make noises with his mouth. I thank God for my iPod in times like these, it let me sleep when the kid wasn't wrestling with my seat. The two guys sitting near me were huffing and puffing, I thought one of them was going to turn around and wrangle those kids any minute. Now I'm not the kind of person that would turn around and say anything to the parents, because really what can they do, I actually felt sorry for them because it must have been even worse for them. I wouldn't like to imagine what a trip with two small kids would be like. One lady thought differently though, and she wasn't sitting near enough for the wailing to get into her head, but she went up to the parents and went tsk tsk tsk you young parents don't know how to control your kids. When I heard her I thought whattt?? Would anyone really think of doing that? It's not like the parents where enjoying it all and as irritated as I was I still thought that was uncalled for. Who was she kidding? I seriously felt like telling her to shut up and go back to her seat.
The Concept
a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd's mosaic maker.
The Questions
1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One word to describe you.
12. Your Flickr name
Neato?
The energy and craziness that filled my brain a little more than a month ago is starting to tone down a bit, phew. I'm not back to my old self where I did absolutely nothing and just had no motivation, but I think I'm in the normal range where you do what you need to, have fun and go to bed at night feeling that it was a productive day. At work things are moving on nicely and I've decided that I'm going to stick around for now, which is good and I don't have all these uncertainties which seemed to eat me up.
I still love cooking, that is one thing that has stuck. I have lost interest in taking pics of the food I cook though because I'm just crap at it so I end up with a pic that doesn't do the food any justice, which sucks really because the food would be awesome. I also have given up doing a laptop lunch everyday for work. While the idea was great and I was liking the fact that I was eating somewhat healthy, I say somewhat because I can't go without having some type of candy during the day, nope that's impossible for me, but I thought it was time consuming and instead of making a laptop lunch I throw the food in the first container I find and keep a stash of random snacks at work. Although not as healthy, because I have cut down on the fruit for example, it is working so I'm not going to worry about that and it's still way better than the junk food I used to eat everyday at work.
The other day I went over to my friend Rachel, which had another friend over, Heather. While there Heather was on the computer playing Neopets, and I said man I used to play that ages ago. At that instant she was like OMG why don't you play it anymore it's the coolest thing on the internet. I used to play it when I was 16 or something like that and eventually lost interest in it, partly because i didn't have time to play it anymore, and she managed to get me to play again. I had to make a new account because I totally forgot the password and what email address I signed up, and I ended up playing Neopets again, see me here. The site changed so much I don't even recognize it. Now in the evenings you can find me on there making Neopoints to try and make my pets leet again, and trying to figure it out all again. I might be getting hooked on it again, pooh on Heather. Meet Bjorn86 and Pizu60.
Right now I am planning a vacation in September. Most likely it's going to be a trip to Amsterdam, Holland, to start my attempt at touring around Europe. I'm actually really excited about this and can't wait ! I want to plan everything right, that's the part of me that needs to have everything planned out speaking, so I'm looking at all the places to visit while I'm there. It's fun planning a trip !
