Fear
I’ve posted in the past that I do my best to approach life without fear. For some reason, Kiara thinks that I need to revisit this topic to talk about things that I fear. No one can live life without fear, but how you approach it and deal with it determines how you live life.
Here’s a list of things that I fear:
1) House fire while I’m not home… If I’m home, I’m fairly certain that I’ll be able to stop it before it gets out of hand. From past experiences, I handle crisis situations quite well, so I think I could get the fire put out with one (or more) of our various fire extinguishers that we have stashed around the house. If I’m not home, then I’ll lose everything that I’ve worked so many years to collect. I’d also lose my precious pets, and that would be the hardest part of it all. I can replace the books and computers, but the pets are unique.
2) Losing Kiara to another man… I’m not the greatest husband. I’m not the best looking guy out there. I somehow manage to constantly piss Kiara off even when not trying. I sometimes dream (nightmare?) that Kiara has found someone else to replace me, and that I’m out of the house and home that I love.
3) Losing my mother… I know that she won’t live forever, but she’s an important part of my life. I’m not sure how I would handle her loss. She’s in good health, so if I lose her anytime soon, it will be some horrible accident. If she lives another 30 years, and passes away in her sleep, I think I could handle that fairly well. However, losing her to something tragic would crush me deeply.
4) Alienating my friends… In the past, my friends have stood by me through all of my issues. I’m much more stable these days thanks to maturity and medication, so I don’t think this will be an issue these days. I’m really surprised that some people have stood by me in the past. Maybe that’s why I value my friends so highly. They’ve been there for me through the good, the bad, and the really ugly.
Hrmm… Looks like most of my fears are based around losing what I have in my life. I guess that means that I’m pretty happy with my life as it stands. It’s good to be content.
To Do List
Here are a few things that I would like to do before I die. They’re not in any particular order…
1) Go skydiving. Looks like a rush, and I would love to try it at least once.
2) Get a book published. Ever since I was in my early teens, I’ve wanted my name on the byline of a book. I’m not sure why I want to get published, but it’s an urge that is there. I don’t care if it’s a technical book, a role playing book, or a fiction novel. I have the skills to do any one (or all three!) of those. It’s just a matter of honing my skills to the point where they are good enough to be published, and actually finding the time to get something finished. Someday…
3) Go back to Europe. I would love to spend a week or two in Europe just traveling around and looking at the sights. Kiara has never been to Europe, so I would love to take her there someday.
4) Track down an old friend of mine. Last I heard from him was around 1999, and he was joining a seminary school with the intention of becoming a Catholic priest. His eventual goals were to become a Franscician Monk, and tend to people in prison. I’m not sure if he ever met his goal or not. Shortly after talking to him when he was going to enter seminary school, he dropped off the face of the planet. I’ve tried to get in touch with him a few times, but I’ve always failed to actually talk to him.
5) Get a tattoo. Kiara will only let me get one that is “meaningful.” My idea of getting Tux (The Linux penguin mascot) is not “meaningful” enough, so I’ve decided to do a portrait of my sister on my arm. As you probably know, I lost her to a drunk driver 9 years ago. I think getting her portrait on my arm should qualify as “meaningful.”
6) Graduate college. I want to get at least a Bachelor’s degree. Maybe even a Masters. I already have all of the skills necessary to do my job, so this is more of a personal goal than a professional goal. Either way, it’ll be good to get that piece of paper in my hands. While I’m at it, I’m going to try to win The Lady Ada Lovelace Award for Outstanding Achievement in Computer Information Systems, Computer Networking, Computer Science. Yeah. It’s a long title. It goes to the person in the graduating class in CIS, CN, or CS that has the highest GPA. My current GPA is 3.778 (Damn College Algebra and Philosophy killed me), but I hope that I can pull it up over the course of the next 2 years to earn the award. We’ll see how it goes.
7) Have a child. What better way is there to ensure that part of you continues to exist in the world? I would love to have a son or daughter to teach, rear, love, and watch grow. Sure, they’ll make mistakes, and I’ll be there to pick them up when they do mess up and put them back on their feet. I’ll also be there to hold their hand when they need it, or lift them up on my shoulders in celebration of their accomplishments. This is probably the most important one to me on this list.
There are probably a few more things that I would like to do before I die, but I’ve got to get back to what I was doing before I started to post.
Being Sued
I was going to do a post about Thanksgiving, then I realized that it was a totally boring long weekend. It was a good weekend. I enjoyed my time with friends, and Kiara, but nothing too horribly exciting happened, so I won’t bore you with the details.
Instead, I’m going to write about a letter that I received the day before Thanksgiving….
On Tuesday, November 21st, I received a notice in the mail that there was a certified letter waiting for me at the post office. I left work early on the 22nd to go to the post office (which turned out to be a small trailer in a strip mall parking lot.) Once there, I signed for the letter, and I noticed that it was from a law firm based out of Austin, TX. This got me concerned since I have an uncle that lives in Austin. I was afraid something had happened to him.
I immediately tore open the letter while still in the parking lot next to the trailer. It was from the Midland Central Appraisal District. They were suing everyone listed in my grandfather’s will for back taxes, court costs, and administrative fees. I knew this day would come, again. I had to deal with this same mess back in 2005, and it’s time to deal with it again.
You see, my father is a huge fuck up. He’s irresponsible, immature, and has zero drive to make a better life for himself. He’s always ridden on the coat-tails of my grandfather, and even 3 years after my grandfather’s death, he’s still coasting along doing much of nothing good for himself.
My father has not paid taxes on any of the eleven properties that are still left in the will. He waits to be sued, sells a property, pays the taxes, and pockets the rest of the money. What should be happening is the total sale of all properties, and that money should be split six ways according to my grandfather’s will.
I’m not sure if there is anything that I can do to rectify the situation. I don’t have the money to pay the taxes myself. Even if I did, it would only be a band-aid on a sucking chest wound. We’d be right back here next year.
The letter said that I had to be in Texas within 20 days of signing for the letter, but I did manage to get in touch with the appraisal district’s lawyer, and she told me the she could mail me a form to send back instead of taking time off work, and traveling to Texas to get things resolved. I told her to go ahead and do that. Now I’m here waiting for that letter, and I hope that it doesn’t include language like “the signer of this letter agrees to pay all back taxes by X date.”
I just wish that my father would get his shit together long enough to take care of things permanently. I’m thinking that the only way I’ll get things taken care of is to wait for my father (and then my uncle) to kick the bucket, so that I’ll be the next executor of the will. Then I can sell off the houses (if there are any left) and split the money with my brothers.
Great Diet
BTW: Food poisoning is a great diet. I went from 220 lbs. to 210 lbs. overnight. Not the most pleasant diet, but it works!
How Sick Have You Been?
Last night was one of the worst nights of my life. I wasn’t feeling very good, and went to bed around Midnight. I was under a sheet, a quilt, and a comforter, but I could not get warm. I figured that I had a fever, so I took my temperature. It was 95.1. That’s way too low, so I hopped in the tub to warm up with a warm bath. It helped quite a bit, but as soon as I got out of the tub, I threw up. Fortunately, I made it to the toilet before letting loose.
Then came round after round of diarrhea, vomiting, and harsh chills. I tried to sleep between trips to the toilet, but it was no use. I was up and heading to the bathroom every 10-20 minutes. Needless to say, I didn’t get much sleep. There was even a time that I was so exhausted that I didn’t wake up in time to get to the bathroom. I got most of it in the toilet, but there was a stream of drops between the bed and the bathroom. My wife, the wonderful person that she is, got up to clean up after me because I was no shape to get on my hands and knees to scrub the carpet.
I’m sure that she didn’t get much rest either because I was constantly up and in the bathroom.
I managed to get some sleep this morning, but I had to get up for more diarrhea time after time. The last time that I threw up (about 3 hours ago) I felt tons better. I’m thinking that I got some food poisoning somewhere yesterday. I’m not sure where it came from, but it was most likely the fast food that I had yesterday.
I had hoped for a more happy blog today to review the long weekend, but this took precedence. Maybe I’ll have a less gross post tomorrow.
MIA
Yeah. I know. No posts the last two days of last week, or over the weekend. I’ve run dry of ideas (but Kiara has given me some, and life has given me some.) I’ll start posting again tomorrow. Hopefully, I can keep going for a few more weeks now. Good think I wasn’t in that NaBloPoMoZhaKin (or whatever) contest. I just can’t seem to remember to post on the weekends.
Photos Are Up!
Thanks to Shinto for pointing me to ImageMagick that helped me create the thumbnails that I needed. A little Perl, and some usage of ImageMagick’s convert utility, and I had my thumbnails in mere moments.
Here are the photos that we had taken yesterday.
While I was at it, I posted my Breckenridge photos (a month later!) from our trip. They are here.
Professional Photos
Kiara and I couldn’t figure out what to get my folks for Christmas. I already got them stuff individually, but we would like to get them something for the both of them. We decided to have some professional photos taken (well… as professional as you can get at Sears) and give them a large photo of us for Christmas. The photos came out fairly well. We got them on CD as well as prints (we won’t have the prints until Dec 1st.) I just finished Gimping the photos to rotate them, so that none of them are sideways. The next step is to create some thumbnails for a PHP photo album that I wrote years ago. Once that is done, I’ll be putting them on my personal web site. Once I get the photos online (later today, I hope,) I’ll post a link to them, so that you can check them out.
Insane Cats Lead To Energy Drinks
I didn’t get to sleep last night until well after 1:30 AM. Picasso (our newest cat) sometimes goes insane at night, and decides to jump on top of every surface that he can find. It’s an hour of endlessly hearing “Tha-THUMP” every 30 to 45 seconds. He mainly does it in the kitchen for some reason. The kitchen has hard wood floors, and they carry the thumping sound into our bedroom quite well.
About 1:15, I finally got tired of it, and decided to chase him into the bedroom. I wanted to close him into the bedroom, so that he would stop being an idiot. He knows that he’s not supposed to be on kitchen counters (or anything else in the kitchen,) and soon as I get up, he darts away from the kitchen and runs off and hides.
Last night, I managed to corner him, and capture him. As soon as I caught him, he started to wail and scream like I was killing him. I did managed to scruff him with my right hand, and grab his back legs with my left hand. It was a fight and a struggle, but I wasn’t going to let him win. I was really pissed, and he’s lucky that I didn’t throw him outside to feed the local coyotes.
Once I got him into the bedroom, he wigged out, and I’m not sure why. I held him down until he calmed down because I didn’t want him to learn that fighting would get him loose from my grasp. Once he settled down, I turned him loose. He quickly ran under the bed to hide, and I managed to crawl back into bed to try to get some sleep.
The fight with the cat got a little bit of adrenaline pumping through my system, so it took me a while to calm down enough to get to sleep. The last that I looked at the clock, it was 1:34 AM. I’m not sure how much longer after that it was before I finally got to sleep. Once I was asleep, I was out until the morning. However, the morning came much too soon, so I’m sucking down an energy drink right now in an effort to wake myself up.
Out To Eat
Yesterday I went to a small diner near my house to get a little chow. I’d been playing World of Warcraft all day long, and I realized that I hadn’t eaten yet. I could have made something at the house, but I decided to get out of the house for some food.
The place was almost empty when I got there, so I got a seat right away. I ordered my food, and it came in a timely manner. I was about halfway through my meal when the wait staff began to setup tables for a large party right next to me. Ugh. I was hoping that it wasn’t a ton of loud teenagers or something. Turns out that it was a set of parents, a set of grandparents, two boys, and a girl. One of the boys was being loud, but mother quickly put a stop to that. She was firm, but nice about it, and the child responded quickly. I was thankful for that.
The place gave all three children paper place mats and some crayons to color the paper with. One of the boys dove into the crayons and began to color. The mom spotted this, and took the crayons away. She told the boy, “These are yucky. They’ve been touched by other people. We can have one dinner without crayons, can’t we?”
What the fuck? Yucky crayons because someone else touched them?
The boy was too young to be in school (I’d put him at around 4 years old,) and as soon as he enters school, he’s going to have zero immune system. Kids need to be around germs on a regular basis to stay healthy.
I learned in vet tech school that puppies, kittens, etc. need their mother’s milk because the milk contains proteins that build up their immune system (among other things, too.) I’m assuming the same kind of thing happens with humans. When the child is finally weaned off of the mother’s tit, they’re on their own for fighting off germs. If a child is constantly kept from being exposed to “yucky things”, then they are in for a world of hurt when they get outside parent supervision, and get exposed to all sorts of germs.
I felt sorry for the child. Coloring with crayons is one of the joys of being a youth, and it’s a great idea when eating out because it keeps the child occupied while waiting for food. Adults are able to hold stimulating conversation with each other to pass the time while waiting for food. Children haven’t quite developed those skills yet, and they get bored easily. When this boredom sets in they start to cause trouble for the adults around them.
On the flip-side of things… The child without the crayons looked at the paper mat that he had been given. He was still learning words, and trying to place words with objects that he sees. He kept pointing at the paper, and asking, “Daddy! What’s this?” He did this repeatedly, and the father was very patient with all of the questions. He would answer the child, and tell him what everything on the mat was. The father even went so far as to walk around the table to read the words to his son. It was damn cute.
Now, I know that women have this biological clock thing that tells them when they’re getting almost too old to have children. I’ve never heard this term applied to a man, but I think mine is starting to kick in. I was jealous of the man with the son because it was so obvious that he cared deeply about his son, and he went out of his way to pass on some minor education to his son.
I hope that I can do that someday. I’ve always wanted to have someone to pass on my (limited) wisdom, and education to. In my opinion, there’s no greater accomplishment than raising a child. Maybe that child will cure cancer? Maybe not. If they do something useful (and hopefully something that they enjoy) with their life, then there’s nothing better.
