Balance, Batteries and Being Me

The word of the week is acquiescence.

Sept 2 - Beer and Nostalgia!

After work today, I went to a craft beer party.

Actually, it was a mini-beerfest which turned out to be a celebration for the two hosts who got engaged and announced it yesterday. Which is also a very good reason for drinking beer, one would think.

The party got off to a good start with a few people there and after a few hours we had about a dozen all told, all of whom brought unique local beers with them. I had to be careful as I don't know which local brews contain copper, which unfortunately is a headache trigger for me… but tonight it didn't happen, which was great.

What was also great was that I ended up being a video DJ of a sorts. The place we were in was not large, was just a kitchen and a living room to hold us all and the conversations tended to break up into small groups, which is natural. I was sitting over at the computer and decided to add some background to one of the conversations by pulling up some intros to popular 80s cartoons - definitely a g33k crowd tonight.

A hint to what my Halloween costume is this year, is in this image.

That proved to be incredibly popular with everyone and I spent a few hours searching and playing various videos from shows that people remembered, ending with a Top 25 countdown that I found of the greatest 80s and 90s cartoon shows. We were all surprised to find out that the number one cartoon on this first list was… GI Joe, which I somehow guessed ahead of time, to everyone's amusement.

It was a great evening and I really enjoyed chatting with everyone there, most of whom are g33ky to one degree or another. I hope to see them all again soon, or at least when we have a Halloween party, which was held at the same place last year.

Did I mention I already have my costume? It's pretty sweet.

Sept 3 - Did you say Free Car?

I almost got a free car this week, believe it or not.

It turns out the building superintendent got himself a new vehicle, a nice Toyota SUV. He had no need of his other older vehicle and as he wasn't going to get anything for it in trade, he disposed of it.

When I ran into him today, he exclaimed regretfully that he thought of giving the old vehicle to me only after the fact and apologized. I told him that it was wonderful of him to think of me and unfortunate that he did so too late, at which we both had a chuckle. It really was nice of him to consider giving me a vehicle and it may have worked out differently with better timing, but oh well.

The thing is, I don't really need a car here in Victoria. I can ride my cycle for most of the year, even in the rain, which is fine by me as it definitely keeps me in decent shape. Sure, it be nice to be able to just hop into a set of wheels and trundle about town, yet there's not too much speed advantage traveling distances under 10 km from my home - especially when I have to try to find a place to park downtown. It is a little easier with a car when I need to carry things that are a little bulky, but as the photo below shows, it's not always necessary if you plan ahead a little:

Balance in one's life really helps when dealing with odd things...

Sept 4 - Holding Relationships

Four of my friends got engaged this week.

Well, two couples, but still I'm really happy for them all. They've managed to beat the odds by both finding love and seeing it strengthened to the point where making it official is the next logical step. It's a beautiful thing to see.

For myself, I can only hope that I'll be as lucky someday to find someone who's a good match for me. I've said before that I don't need someone to 'complete' me or to help me become a better person; I think I am well-covered in both those regards and most people who know me would agree with that self-assessment.

I'll break my usual silence on this topic to say this: while I'm not closing the door on love, for the next long while I'm just pulling it softly closed and moving on down the hall towards other things.

This isn't a sad or bad or even pitiful move but instead, something needful.

I've been looking for a few decades now without even a hint of success and some recent developments have got me to thinking that right now, I need to focus on other things. Far too much of my mind has been occupied with this particular 'unsolvable' subject and it needs to stop, as it's taking its toll on my emotions far too often. Online dating services, meeting friends of friends and other avenues of locating love have all proved fruitless and I've been totally uninterested in the few advances that have been sent my way... they were completely wrong fit for me in far too many ways to list here. Settling for something isn't my nature.

Maybe one day I'll run into someone who I can talk to as an intellectual equal( I know that sounds massively egotistical, but it's a bald truth ). Who also shares many of my interests, attitudes and outlooks on life. Who I find as attractive, interesting and compatible as they do me. I know that in order to find what I want, I have to find it within myself first and this year has been all about that, moreso than at any previous point in my life. What I want, what I need, is within as much as without. We'll see what happens. 

In the meantime, I have lot of other things to do.

Sept 5 - Book Update

This week I started the revision process on my book, to create my third draft.

It's been slow going, as I sort through all the notes that I've been given from half a dozen people who've read most or some of the book - in detail or in general. There's a LOT of info to go through and collate, from basic spelling errors on up to concerns with thematic issues and plot.

Tackling this third draft will be best done on the scene by scene basis, working paragraph by paragraph as I build up a better book. I have developed a ton of ideas thanks to the wonderful feedback I've received so far and that extends into the next two books as well.

There's isn't much more say this point, save that I won't be doing much else this fall save working my day job and writing. My social outings will be the exception to this rule but for the most part I'll be spending my free time doing revision, which is as it should be. Writing a better book should and will consume my full attention if I'm going to make it my best work possible and so enable me to catch an agent's attention once it's done. If you're doing anything halfway, then you'll never finish.

Otherwise, it's just a hobby and always will be.

Sept 6 - Fuel+ For My Cell

My cell phone's battery continues to underwhelm me with its performance.

Fortunately, I keep an eye on various tech sites as well as weekly sales of said same technology by Canadian vendors. This enables me to pounce on the occasional happy confluence of the right product at the right price at the right time, such as happened today, when I found a USB battery pack on sale for half-price: just what I was looking for.

It's the Fuel+, made by the reputable Patriot company, who also manufacture RAM of various kinds and a few other things that they're known well for. Five years ago I purchased a small USB battery pack from APC, but advances in smart phone technology have meant that it can no longer fully charge my current Samsung galaxy S3 and so I purchased the FUEL+ today. The version I bought has a 5200mAh battery, which holds a lot more juice than the SIII's standard 2100mAh battery, so I can charge it several times during the day or just leave it plugged in. Reviews of the unit have been rather positive, so I got one for myself.

Basically, I'll keep the Fuel+ with me during the day instead of taking my charger with me as it will charge the SIII just as fast. Also, I don't have to leave the phone plugged into a wall socket where it's vulnerable to damage or even theft, if it comes down to it. It's a good solution for me, as I didn't want to buy a bigger battery which would add bulky weight to the phone in addition to making the cases that I have for my SIII worthless as they wouldn't 

fit any more.

Plus, I just love getting a deal( inexpensively )and this definitely qualifies!

Sept 7 - Struggling in my head

Balance is a tricky thing, as any high-wire performer will tell you.

Case in point for today's lesson: applying a screen protector to a mobile device. Normally, this is a straightforward process, albeit one fraught with the potential for failure, should a small dust particle get under the screen as it's applied. If that happens, you're stuck with a little dot or other visual irritant under the film.

Last week, I purchased( on the cheap )a trio of protectors for my phone, my sister's and for my TF101 ASUS tablet, all of which are meant to cut glare for using them outside. They arrived yesterday and today was the first day I had time available to apply them. The first application on my sister's phone went well, but localized distractions in the apartment meant that the second, on my TF101… didn't. I ended up with multiple particles stuck under the screen.

This annoyed me out of all proportion, as I dislike wasting time and money for no good reason and said distractions were nothing I could control.

After getting myself calmed down, I wisely set aside the third screen protector for application another day and assessed things from a forced calm. Sure, I'd wasted about an hour's time, as well as about $12.00, but those weren't the issue. What bothered me was my inability to control the distraction source, enough that I envisioned being unable to work on my book without being disturbed on a regular basis. Just like last year, when I had to leave the apartment to get any worthwhile writing done.

I'd rather not mention any more here, but suffice to say the thought that I'd be working under similar circumstances ignited a firey furnace within me that it took some time to quench.

I want to write my book. I don't want to do it outside of my apartment. It's that simple, and I came to terms with it today while wrestling my inner goblin into quiescence.

It wasn't easy, and shows that I'm still not able to recapture that perfect zen I felt when Arizona three months ago.

I'll work on that some more.

Sept 8 - The Next Forty Years

As a writer, you have to be observant. Not to mention thinking a lot, about many things, all the time.

One thing that I've been observing and thinking about a lot for the last little while is the other half of life. By that, I mean the years to come rather than those that have already passed. This line of thought was brought on by my recent acquaintance with another writer in the building, who is well into his 80s and lives alone -by choice or by circumstance, I don't know.

Specific or general, my line of thought is this: where will we all be in another 40 or 50 years? I'm not talking about flying cars or cities on the moon or other prophetic things, but rather who will be in our lives at that point.

For some, it will be their children and grandchildren and all the attendant family that comes with them. For others, it will be a small group of friends who have gathered and stayed in regular touch by meeting at a local hangout or a similar social get together that takes on the trappings of a ritual as the years pass. Still others will be making new friends and going new places, perhaps traveling the world for the doesn't time with their partner just to see something new in a corner they hadn't found before. And finally there will be those who sit by themselves on a park bench, remembering those they knew and who have passed on when nobody else does, with the sharp clarity that sometimes comes with well-honed memory.

Where will I be in that matrix? To be honest, I don't know. I certainly didn't think I'd be were am today, here on the West Coast, blogging with my voice rather than my hands. Thousands of miles away from my old friends where I grew up in Ontario and among new friends here in BC, keeping in touch with both groups as best I can while keeping my head above water, so to speak. With my family, yet without a committed other.

It may be that I end up with someone and we have a family together, or not. It may be that I walk a path of my choosing towards an unknown destination, stopping quite often to see what's around the corner or under a rock and to write about it. Whatever the path I walk, it will be of my own choosing; of that I'm certain, for as of this point in my life, the only person I'm making decisions for is myself, which is fine.

Sometimes I think being a writer means being a little apart from the world, sitting and watching and writing down all the ten thousand little details that make up a day. Many people don't notice these, caught up in the menu today of simply existing and getting through the hours until it's time to sleep again and start fresh once more. For me, I have universes and worlds my head that I need to find a way get out for others to see, somehow in the spaces between earning a living and being social and quieting the clamor of worrying emotions inside. Yet I know if I didn't worry, if I didn't think about half a hundred things that lead to other things that I didn't know I needed to think about, then I wouldn't come up with the stories that are uniquely mine.

It's those stories that I need to tell, to leave behind me for others to find, no matter where I end up.

The last week's been exhausting, as it's Back-To-School at work and that's been tiring, to say the least. I've got a lot to do, so I'll head to bed, with plans to start my week early tomorrow... and to see what it brings me.

Drafts, Downpours and Drama

The word of the week is incisive.

Aug 26 - Ritual

It's interesting how quickly people can fall into habits.

We live short lives, yet sometimes we feel like we've been doing something for far too long. Other times, these habits can be comforting to us, as they reinforce the normalcy of our lives.

One habit that I've been keeping up for over half a decade now is writing this blog. In the beginning, it had a different purpose than it had now, which is still to inform but also to record and document, if you will. Where I've been, what I've been doing, what I've been thinking and feeling and all the other things that I write about, week to week.

Not a whole lot of people read this blog, when it comes down to it. A few dozen here and there that I know every week, plus a lot of strangers that wander in from the web from various sources for various reasons. Some of the most popular posts in this blog of mine might surprise you: TotalDrama Island is the most popular post of all of mine, with over 400 hits. But most the time it's not like that. I like to think of this blog is a positive habit, one that keeps me going and forces me to think on what I've been doing at the same time.

It's writing practice, reflection and journaling all-in-one, all of which are good.

Aug 27 - Bill Watterson

Who better to give life advice than Bill Waterson, who drew Calvin and Hobbes?

The creator of one of my favorite comics is famous for giving a graduation speech in 1990, in which he espoused quite a lot of good advice. While some people would say that it's advice given by a successful person after the fact, the fact remains that it's still good advice no matter what the source.

Above, I've shown a small snippet of a comic drawn in Waterson's notable style by another younger comic artist who wanted to pay tribute to Calvin's creator by drawing parts of his famous speech. It's a wonderful way to enjoy some Calvin and Hobbes that we haven't seen before. Click here to jump to the full comic and enjoy it in all its splendor.

Aug 28 - Wrecking It

I was feeling down again, so I went and rented Wreck-It Ralph, for a toonie.

It's a computer-animated film lovingly done as a tribute to the early videogame age, along the lines of ReBoot, which explores what happens inside video games when they're not being played.

I thoroughly enjoyed it!

It's wonderful to see films that show the viewer how much effort has gone into creating them and arched just smarmy ads for products or treading old ground that we've all seen before. In the case of Wreck-It Ralph, we get to see a character who wants to be more than he's been up to that point in his life and yearns for something better.

I found it to be a delightful story, with memorable characters and no slow spots that jumped out or took me out of the story. The animation was excellent in HD, with creative choices by the art director to provide colorful and entertaining visuals as the story moved along.

It definitely took me out of the mood I would perhaps described as despondent and left me at the end of the movie with a much more balanced view of how one can change one's life if you really want to. While that may sound cliché, I will have to say that the film didn't make me roll my eyes at any point about the lessons it was conveying but instead had me nodding in sympathy with Ralph as he made his choices.

Sometimes those choices work out, and sometimes they don't. You'll never know unless you make them.

Aug 29 - Rain!

Victoria got one of its rare rainstorms today, and I was out in it unfortunately.

After a fairly long and tiring back-to-school-busy day at work, I emerged to find that the rain had turned from a gentle shower into a veritable downpour. While it wasn't a thunderstorm, it was the heaviest rain I've seen for quite a few years and I made sure that before I left the shelter of my workplace, I had all of my waterproof gear on including shoe covers and a slip cover for my backpack. My glasses and my other workaday things were safe inside the waterproof covering, thanks to my planning ahead for this sort of thing happening every once in a while.

What I hadn't counted on was the rain being quite salty, having come from over the ocean to dump all over the city. The only unprotected part of me was my face and within a minute, my eyes were burning from the salt content of the water that was running down into my eyes. I also discovered that my gloves, which had been fine in previous light rains, gave up the fight and became sponges quite quickly, leaving my hands soggy and cold to grip the handle bars as I rode.

Note that he's not wearing gloves...

Fortunately, traffic was quite light given the heavy rain and I was able to go at a steady pace, despite not being able to see all that clearly. Wiping my eyes did little good as the water came back right away and kept burning just enough to make me blink rapidly the whole way home in order to make out objects.

Once I did get home, I had to hang up everything to dry in the bathtub, including my helmet, unusually. I washed my face and got my hair dry, still smelling of salt. I also discovered that my waterproof biking jacket has started to lose its waterproof coating, as it was rather damp on the inside in addition to being soaked on the outside. Given that it's a decade old, I'd say it's probably time to replace it but right now the price of a decent jacket isn't in my immediate budget.

So I'll just be sure to bring along a towel in case another downpour happens.

Aug 30 - The Play's The Thing

I saw a live play tonight!

Not having been to the theater for probably a decade or more, it was quite a treat. The play was one of dozens of performances being put on by the 27th Annual Fringe Festival, part of the national on goings in cities across the country this week.

The play I saw was a small production called The Occupied Mind of Mr. K. Here's a brief summary of what the play was about:

From the creators of last year’s hit Awkward Hangouts of History comes a riotous, unnerving black comedy of the supernatural and the “one percent.” Jobless programmer Vijay, deadbeat friend Dylan, and psychic meditation guru Pericles conceive a novel solution for their economic woes: to take over a recently deceased billionaire’s “vacant” body and gain control of his business empire.

I really enjoyed the entire production! The performers were lively as a group, with very few line stumbles and very energetic performances, with the sole exception of one young lady whose obvious inexperience on the stage showed in a somewhat wooden but still serviceable delivery. It gathered some very favourable reviews as well, which I heartily agree with.

As a writer, I have to say that I now look at live performances in a different light. Observing people is a big part of what I do and watching the actors on the stage, I got a real sense of how one brings a character to life through the actors art. Much like painting a picture in the mind with words as I've been doing on my own, the two are both sides of the same coin in many ways.

It I was also there to be entertained and I really truly was. The world outside and all its cares disappeared for an hour as I watched the story unfold live upon the stage under the lights. Becoming immersed in the performance was a fantastic experience, being drawn into the emotional river as it flowed towards the end of the tale was wonderful.

I hope to see more plays next year, now that I know to mark it down on my calendar for the 2014 11-day run.

Aug 31 - A Year Gone

One year ago today, I finished the first draft of my novel.

Since then, I've completed a second draft and I'm currently working on a third. I've also printed dozens of copies of the second draft in a lovely paperback formats to hand out to friends and family at cost, a project that I'm quite proud of despite the amount of work and funds that it's taken to date.

From here, I've got a ton of work to do still. With all the feedback I've received to date on the second draft, I feel that I can now do justice to the third draft and make it the best book possible without having a professional editor look at it - something I can't afford right now. However, the third draft should be good enough for me to shop around to agents and hopefully from there to secure a publisher.

Okay, this is a pic of the second draft. It's still a big stack o'paper...

That's the route I decided to take: traditional publishing. Why, you ask?

Simple: it's a matter of time. Having a mostly full-time day job right now means that I don't have the luxury of time to be able to promote my book myself, which is quite necessary in order to secure any sort of meaningful sales. With the resources of a publisher behind me, I am free to write the next two books in the trilogy instead of spending many hours every day flogging my book near and far myself.

That's the choice I've made and the one I'll be following this fall and winter. We'll see where it leads me.

Sept 1 - Moving Onwards

The last couple of weeks have been a little hard on me.

While my job is going fine, I've been having growing thoughts about spinning my wheels, so to speak. I've been there six months now and though the people have been fantastic, is certainly not something I'm going to retire on a large pension from. In fact, it's not even really paying most of the bills.

But that's not what's bothering me. My mind is strange sometimes, in that it often won't let a problem go until it's found a solution. Right now, my problem is that I'm not feeling fulfilled in many ways, including my employment. They're not things with easy solutions, unfortunately.

Writing the next draft of my novel is my top priority. I have to wrap my mind around that and let everything else that's distracting me go, including thoughts about being unworthy of relationships and working at a job that I'm massively overqualified for. Plus dealing with being at a point of my life where I never thought I'd be: free to do whatever I choose to but being burdened with debt that's unattached to any sort of equity-based possessions like a house or car, which I find immensely frustrating. I'd love to be able to work a day job simply out of the desire not to dig into my savings instead of doing so out of necessity of not having to become homeless due to a lack of same.

I can't help being where I am right now, which means I have to make the best of it as I always have. My emotional state has been a pendulum for the last couple of months, despite the pithy I experienced in Arizona which has not studied me as much as unstuck me from my burdens to wobble around juggling and admittedly fewer number of them. Yet they're not all gone and I still worry, regardless.

Where to go from here?

It's a new month and this blog, as I said a few times before, is about new beginnings. I've also mentioned before about needing focus and in thinking about it these last few weeks, I've come to the realization that my worries will not go away. I have to simply set them aside, not ignoring them as much as not letting them have power over me while I focus my energies on what I can do about my life right now.

I have the third draft to do. I have a job that I generally enjoy because the people I work with, despite the constant mistakes I make, which is great. My family are all doing well and I have to pull myself up by my own mental bootstraps and push on despite the steepness of the hills that I feel I'm treading.

Nobody else is going to walk a mile in my shoes for me.

I'm tired, with bags under my eyes and a busy week ahead. I hope by the end of it I'll be more energized, as right now I'm feeling worn. Best to sleep on it.

Coincidences, Colds and Consciousness

The word of the week is dichotomy.

Aug 19 - Symptom of a Down

Lately, I've been feeling rather down and blah, not just because of the cold I've had.

I think it's a case of my subconscious and my conscious minds battling, with old habits fighting the new positive inputs that I've had in my life this year. Stress is, of course, a constant companion and again I've been dealing with that in new ways instead of letting it take over as I used to sometimes.

It's a strange thing. On the one hand, you could look at things is still being rather unstable in my life, with no solid career, house, family, kids or many of the things that people my age look on as the natural progression of things. I'm certainly not in the same place that my parents were at this point in my life, nor similar to the parents of most of my friends. Only some of my friends have some or most of these things, but I don't feel like I'm missing out; my life is my own and I'm living it now as I believe I want to.

Of the other hand, trying to tell my subconscious that everything is looking up has been challenging. As I've been struggling to learn at work, I've also been trying to shake my decades-long habits of worrying over things like money and direction for my talents. The money issue has receded into the background once again with my sister having secured a well-paying job, but it's been very difficult for me to get my mind around that given that my own job pays so little yet demands so much of my time and energy to perform. As for the directional issue, I've been getting a better handle on that with the issuance of my book's second draft this month. It's been a lot of work to get everything organized but most of the books have been handed out or were mailed out this week, so the ego boost from having people reading my work is wonderful. I can only imagine what it'll be like once I get the next draft finished and published.

One thing that has been very much on my mind this year has been the subject of relationships. I won't get into that this week; all I'll say is that my subconscious really has its claws dug into that topic.

Aug 20 - The Return of Cable TV

Sometimes timing is perfect, sometimes it isn't.

This week, I got a call from Shaw Cable, telling me they had an offer for me yet again. I sat patiently through the first few minutes of the call but as it turns out, it was worth taking. They had a deal to combine a cable package with a free HD PVR for the next six months, hoping to entice me back into the boob-tube world.

Surprisingly, it worked.

Normally, I wouldn't give a foof about cable television but we are heading into the fall season with some new shows - no Game Of Thrones on my budget lineup, though. I'm no longer feeling overwhelmed by my new job which I've been at for over six months now and my sister has a day job for the next little while, which means she has some free time in the evenings. Both of which add up to neither of us minding being able to flip the TV on for an hour or so an evening a few times a week, with a lot more choice than just a half-dozen channels that are in French over the air.

While some people might not like the current cable television landscape, I don't really care either way. As I've said before in this blog, most of the television I want to watch is already on DVD or digitized on my computer, awaiting my available time and not the other way around. I have a lot to do and while I appreciate the hard work that the creators and cast of the shows I like have gone to, I don't really feel that my time is best spent nowadays watching somebody else's work when I could be creating my own.

Aug 21 - Riddick is REAL?

It may be that mutants ARE real. Maybe.

There's a story out of China from 2012 about a boy with bright blue eyes who has the ability to see in complete darkness, just like the main character from the Riddick series of films.

Yet I always take stories out of China with a grain of salt, as their media tends to sensationalize things with an odd spin in order to draw world attention and not pay so much attention to the facts. Not that everything out of China is laced with falsehoods; there are quite a few interesting stories that have come out on a regular basis… but in this day and age of instant sharing before fact checking, I always like to do a little bit of background digging before I take things at face value.

In this case, numerous publications have written about this boy's unusual ability and I find it fascinating that his unique genetic gift has developed. Perhaps it's a sign that the human race is still evolving and changing at a fairly rapid pace, so that we may see more unusually gifted people appear in the near future. Or it could just be another hoax, as some people claim.

Blue eyes, man. The LOTR movies were full of them...

Aug 22 - The Writing Edge

A phone call led me to make a new friend today.

Oddly enough, it was another call for my technical assistance skills, this time with repairing a printer for someone in my building. As I was working on the printer which had slipped a belt due to a jammed piece of paper, the older gentleman got to talking and I discovered that he was a writer. He also paid me a compliment by saying that I reminded him a lot of himself when he was younger. I was also amused when I had to correct his estimate of my apparent age from mid-20s to my actual 40s, which again was complementary.

It's interesting how life can be serendipitous at times; in this case, I randomly ran into someone that I share a lot in common with as a writer. This very senior man has written several books, one of which he gave me a copy of and it's amazing how parallel is to my current situation: it's about a young writer on the West Coast in the 1940s who's trying to make his way in life with the written word as his calling.

Perhaps we will chat again soon and I'd be interested to compare notes with him about the writing life, as he's had quite the breadth of experience with making a living at words. Again, I wonder about how people's paths cross and how you might find just what you're needing at a certain point in your life just around the corner, when you're not looking.

Just remember to keep your eyes open.

Aug 23 - Legacies

Everyone wants to leave something lasting behind.

For me, that's my writing; I hope that someone in the future will read my work, some part of it, and feel a connection to me and what I've related through my words.

But that's presuming that I have time to write a lot of things.

For some people, time is not in great supply, yet they do great things with what they have been given. In the case of Zach Sobiech, by age 17, he'd done more than most to share his gifts. Watch him soar:

http://www.upworthy.com/this-kid-just-died-what-he-left-behind-is-wondtacular-rip

Aug 24 - Voices

This seems to be my week for compliments, which I don't mind at all.

Despite my having a rather froglike voice this week due to my cold, I was paid a compliment today by customer. She told me that I have a wonderfuly unique voice and that I should do voiceover work, as I'd be excellent at it. She made the point of saying that she was a professional singer and thought that I had a voice that in her words "has something very special about it" which really tickled my vanity, I have to say.

This message was waiting for me on the way home today - click to zoom!

So there's another direction of my talents that I've been reminded that I need to explore and not neglect. Adding voiceover work to my writing skills might just be the double whammy that will take me along career-wise towards making a living with my abilities. To ignore one or the other might be foolish and to be honest I really don't mind the way my voice sounds - when I pay attention to it, that is.

The difference between having good voice and being professional voice actor is very large however. The main thing is to have the ability to take direction with one's voice, which entails at the very least having some acting lessons in my future. My brief forays into voice acting in the game world made it quite apparent to me years ago that I need to be able to modulate my voice just as an actor does in order to convey emotion effectively through just the audio medium.

Otherwise it's just me reading the phone book, which is pretty darn boring.

Aug 25 - The Keys to Losing It

Sometimes being nice backfires a little; that's just life.

Such was the case today, and I found out that my sister had lost my keys last night. She wasn't able to locate her own and she was being picked up right at that moment, so she has to borrow my set until she could locate her own in her purse( there's another story right there, but we won't get into that ). Being the good brother that I am, I agreed and she was on her way with a smile on her face.

This morning she told me she couldn't find them and after we both searched the apartment, I was in agreement, as well as not being pleased. I never loan my keys to anyone and the one time that I do, this happens; this perhaps maybe a lesson of some kind. It also may be a sign that we really do need a Lockitron on our door ASAP, so that keys become a moot point and all we need are our cell phones to enter and leave our apartment securely. But that bit of tech is not going to arrive for another month or so.

Keys aside, we went out for breakfast to Jam, a highly regarded local eatery that specializes in an all-day breakfast with some fantastic menu items. We didn't wait in line any longer than it took us to walk there on the other side of the downtown core and it was busy enough that we decided to be seated at the bar. My sister ordered the red velvet pancakes while I had the biscuit( singular ) with sausage gravy. Both arrived in good time and stunned us with the massive portions for the price: the biscuit was easily the size of a saucer and filled with delicious gravy and scrambled eggs. My sister's order was also fantastic: fluffy red velvet pancakes that tasted similar to cake with a delicious sour cream sauce. We were both utterly stuffed when we left and will be going back again soon-ish, which means probably next month. Eating out is a treat, not a daily or even weekly thing for us.

As big as THIS picture is, the portions were even BIGGER - click to zoom!

The rest of my day was a relaxing one, with a few hours spent taking a walk through Beacon Hill Park for an ice cream and then a tea over at Moka House. I didn't stay very long on the patio there however, as clouds have rolled in and the temperature dropped fairly rapidly from the lovely afternoon with its sunshine.

Good news when I got home though: my sister called to say she had found my keys! It was even better scenario ending than I'd hoped, for though I had a War Amps keytag on the ring, there was no guarantee that someone would have known enough to drop it in a mailbox in order to get it back to me. I'll be sure to duplicate my bike lock key this week, as it's the only one on the ring that I don't have an extra of. Not being able to bike to work would be rotten.

I'm feeling almost normal again, with the cold finally giving up its grip on me after nearly two weeks. I seriously have to get healthier, as I've never had a summer cold before and this one was a doozy. In the meantime, I've managed to injure my right arm, something to do with the tendon, so I'll have to see the doctor ASAP; it's been well over a week and its not improving. Unlike the cold, I can't fix it with rest, fluids and chicken soup - my arms just seem to be out of whack all the time. Maybe I should learn to use my feet as I do my hands?