April 2008 Archives

Huzzah for a working authoring and editing system!  Sure it looks a little different and I haven't gotten things entirely moved over yet (and I'm sure there were some errors in the moving of the old stuff) but it's much much easier for me to manage now.  PLUS, bonus, it's got handy image upload utilities so I can share the genius of the fred meyer product placement/marketing department:

I can't tell if it's a disgruntled employee or a legitimate effort to place something close to where someone might want to find it.

Soon I fly to the Make Faire and I'm excited to learn to spot weld and take a few thousand pictures.  Then it may or may not be off to Orlando to learn all about visual studio (that one's for work), a quick jaunt home and finally I return to Vegas.  It's been far too long.

Oh yes, comments are now wide open - just as they were before - though if the amount of annoying spam continues I may eventually try the whole "account" thing, thoughts?

Some of the things that happen in my life I've tended to avoid writing about - or at least delay writing about - because I just don't quite know how to treat the subject matter. My normal style of writing is either dry wry wit or as accurate a record of traveling as possible.. and that's about it. One or the other, I seem to have a hard time putting anything into any other sort of form. So when I've got something that it's hard or in poor taste to be witty about and I'm not out traveling I just sort of flounder and don't know what to do.. and the blog sort of dies while I sort that out or something more in keeping with my style happens. Now I've been challenged to just write about it anyway.

5 days ago a friend of mine tried to kill himself. Thankfully unsuccessful, it's not really clear how serious he was in his endeavor. He's not one of my very closest friends but close enough, and closer to friends who I'm closer to so that it affected me a fair bit. Over at the Etrurian house during game night there was a furious pounding on the door - it was assumed someone was trying to get us to shut up (we can be somewhat noisy at times) but instead it was someone looking for a key to get into this fellow's apartment to try and find out what he'd taken. The rest of the evening can be summarized as breaking into the house, finding six empty pill bottles (thinking "oh man, what have you done"), helping the paramedics, talking with the police and holding a crying friend for a half hour or so.

As a practical matter I'm glad I've inherited my pop's sense of "right, let's get done what needs to be done" mentality during crisises - making sure at least one person around could do what, well, needed to be done, but it also means I don't really get to process a lot of whats happening the moment it's happening and I'm left to rehash it later when my brain takes it back down a notch. In this particular case it was the next day at work during a meeting at around 2 in the afternoon - no feeling really concrete enough to place a nice label on, just sort of a depressed sense of "wow". Some of my general thoughts...

I've felt low before, after a breakup, whatever, but I don't think my mind has ever gone to that little potentiality so the fact that someone's would is a pretty foreign concept to me. Maybe it was the pills (combined with alcohol) that lead to that - frightening since I take one of them as well, maybe something to talk about with the doc? What's it going to be like when he gets home from the hospital, is this something that will ever be talked about? Even if it is, since I'm of distant friendship will I get to know about it?

Like I said, hard to focus on the meeting.

So there you have it, that explains the last week of silence - the proceeding three probably from struggling with an escaping dog and what that may entail in terms of fixing the problem. Oddly enough this all just motivates me more to find someplace to travel to since I really miss writing and wanting something a little more positive to write about. That or learn to write in a third style. Patrick, pointers?