Climbing That Great Big Hill

So my wife and I like to garden. Making our own stuff out of nothing but seed, dirt, sunshine, and water is cool. In most cases you get near-immediate results, and if you're lucky, you get to have more stuff to eat for free, which is always nice.

We just moved to our new place in October, which is actually kind of perfect for starting a new garden, since during the entire winter, we've been doing all the things that needed to be done in the house (putting stuff where we want it, hanging art, figuring out the heater, etc) and thinking about the garden.

Our backyard is a little kitschy, with a moderate hill and a small copse of trees in the very back. I tried to take a few pictures to illustrate the blank canvas, as it were; a starting point to all later garden updates.

Here we have the view from our back porch/patio. This really is the width of the backyard, as we share a wall with our next-door neighbor (to the left), and there's a fence on the right side that goes all the way to the back. In the middle third of the photo above is the hill. It's about a 45 degree incline.

I tried to get better shots of what the hill was like, but I think I effectively just shot a lot of pictures of dirt and weird little sprouting things that we think are onions.

This is probably the best picture to see the hill in action. My plan is to cut away three foot terraces and then block those sections with brick or paving stones. I think I'll get three vertical sections, and maybe four total horizontal sections.

This shot is looking back at the back patio from atop the hill. You can almost make out the line of bricks in the center of the shot.

The copse of trees. Just behind the big tree on the left I want to build out a six foot diameter compost bin/leaf holder. I built one at our last house, and the dirt was just really getting good after three years of feeding it.

This is the corner of the weird line of bricks mentioned before. I think someone had the same idea that we have, but they wussed out and didn't really follow through.

The first year is always a learning period for new gardeners or old gardeners at new locations. It's a time to try out different methods, different plants, and find out all the conditions that your yard and plants have and need.

I'm excited.

When will February End?

Son got two shots yesterday, he's complaining a lot of soreness today. They say while he was getting the shots he was such a trooper and was telling them to give him more. And now, he's just bitching up a storm about the pain.

It's weird, this completely diametric approach to life, and I've seen it in him before. One minute everything's cool, and he's chilling with us watching tv or something, and the next he's a whirlwind of terror, fighting with his sister and chasing the cats.

Boys will be boys, I suppose, and he's all boy at this point.

Nana is taking the kids to go see the Bieber movie today; they're super-excited. I think us parents will take a trip up to the local clothing outlet mall to see if we can replace some clothes that we lost in a recent basement drainage issue.

In other news, this keyboard is acting up, might be time to look for a replacement.

I narrowly avoided doing six months in county yesterday. Got pulled over a few weeks ago for speeding (like, 6 above), and a broken license plate light (didn't even know I had one). Cop said he'd give me a warning, but had to hold me for tax evasion.

Long story short, I didn't file my local taxes for two years. I did state and federal, but the local peeps want their money. After appearing in court, and talking things over with the local tax official, I'm set up with a payment plan that will stretch about six months, but at least I can spend that time free rather than sitting in a cell with bubba.

Although I doubt there's enough room in county for a small-time "crook" like me...

Jagged Pills

I like to think I'm a pretty patient person. Patient and compassionate, you know, I don't really hate people, I don't invoke huge amounts of unnecessary chaos, and I want to make sure my kids grow up into being good people.

But there are seriously some things in this world that I hate.

I understand when there is a need for something, sometimes R&D gets thrown to the side while production is ramped up. If you just need some form of capturing data, but all the power is out, you grab a pen and paper and start writing shit down. It's cool, if the need is that great, MacGuyver a solution, and keep moving. But when the power comes back on, revert that paper information back into the system.

When you need a communications device to send images of paper to other people in other places, I get it, you needed to do it RIGHT THEN, and a fax machine was all that was available. It's alright, it was 1985, fax machines were hot shit.

But you know, it's 2011. We have better stuff now. Hell, whole companies are running paperless. Get rid of fax machines. The options available to you only start at email, ftp, and something like dropbox. There are countless options for conveying data from one machine to another. You're using one option now.

Get rid of fax machines. They're dirty, use paper, use electricity, are loud, take up a phone line, take too long to communicate, and are from a time when some guy just needed to send this paper to someone across the country without using the pony express.

I hate fax machines.

Continuing in this direction, I hate printers, too. We have lots of ways of looking at information. You can view it on a monitor. You can dredge it through a front-end to make it all pretty and then display it on a scoreboard for a sports team. You can throw it up on a wall using a projector. You can even use your phone to look at it.

Printers are loud, dirty, wasteful little inventions. I get it, you needed to get information out of the computer that you typed everything into. You couldn't read punch-tape, so you needed the computer to convert information into letters and numbers that were recognizable. It's cool. It was 1985, printers were necessary for business.

But... it's 2011. Paperless companies... Think green...

I hate Blackberries. More specifically, I hate the Blackberry Enterprise Server software package.

Smartphones are a great thing; I can do a significant portion of the things I can do on a desktop workstation computer on my phone. It isn't easy, but I can struggle along. I can view email, I can watch video, I can even open files and edit them, then send them off somewhere.

But the evil beast that created BES decided that they really hated anyone that administered a company full of BBs. There are a ton of restrictions, extra components that have to be installed to a server, and all these weird licensing regulations. If Google had the same requirements to use their services, to access the stuff you need... they'd be out of business.

There are other things I hate, or at least dislike, but these take the top of the list.

Break the Crust

So many plans, so many things to try. We moved to a new place in October of last year, so this will be the first spring in the new place. First steps in getting a garden together, in getting the patio just right for grilling. First shovels of dirt flip-flopped around to mix in better dirt, to prepare beds for flowers and fruits and whatnot.

I'm getting older, and I can feel it. I once relished the thought of days and afternoons sweating over a 10'^2 plot of earth to get a few more tomato plants in the ground. I used to really enjoy walking behind the too-loud lawn mower, lost in thought and totally segmented from reality for an hour while the engine I trailed filled the air and blocked all everything else.

But I'm getting old. My bones hurt. My joints would rather sit in a hot tub or lay on a soft bed. I like the after-effects of gardening, but do not want to pain myself more in the process of getting there.

Alas, it is my duty (and more than a little my pride) to wait for the ground to fully warm up and dig out the grass and replace everything with what is needed to eat, if not for just a meal or two.

When I was much much younger, I would sit on the couch and watch gardening shows with my mother and sister. Shows like The Victory Garden, or The Square-Foot Garden were often on in the early afternoons. We'd watch the hosts walk around these... these simply awesome back yards where anything and everything grew. It appeared almost like they could exist completely on the harvests of their crops.

But I grew up, and now I understand that man cannot live on peppers and tomatoes alone.

At the last place, we tried okra, radishes, sunflowers, and other small fruits and veggies, but never really got anything close to enough food to sustain us. It was really nice to be able to cut something and toss it in a pot, or to slice up a tomato for a burger, or to rip a few basil leaves to add to a marinara. But there isn't enough land nor time to grow enough food for everybody.

Maybe if I had a big farm, and I didn't have to work in an office all day... maybe then I could grow food and have some animals and do something worth-while... But then I recall that I'm getting older. My body doesn't like moving all that much.

Really, I'm not that old. I'm barely old enough to be losing my hair...

And in a way I'm excited about getting out and getting dirty, even if it's only for five minutes at a time.

Everything is candy bars

Long story short: Lost my job again, waiting on two jobs to start up soon (interviewing in the next week or so), collecting unemployment, working out, trying to quit smoking, bought a bike for $10 (AND IT WORKS!), signed up for college at Cincinnati State for Network Administration to get an associates degree, trying to keep everything straight.

Also planning on starting a small magazine with some friends. More just to get used to writing again than anything else. Who knows? We might make some money or just have fun with it.

That's Me in the Corner

This weekend was great. I got to see lots of people I haven't seen in ages, and then met a few others I had only talked to online.

We got together for a lan party, but it really didn't focus on computers at all. Most of the weekend was spent talking around the campfire, drinking excessively, and playing/watching Guitar Hero. It was a blast.

We're debating declaring bankruptcy, since we have a lot of debt in front of us. Typically, bankruptcy wouldn't be something I'd even consider, but in the last few years (hell, ever since we got married, even), we've been totally behind. We got married in debt. We had two kids in debt. It's very frustrating to work all month and only have at most thirty bucks to your name until the next month's paycheck. Most of that money is all late payments and interest, anyway. It's not like any of it would actually go towards any principle at all.

So we're gonna wipe the slate clean. True, it'll be on our credit report for seven years. True, we'll look like failures. But once the seven years are up, we'll be in a much better position than if we just plod through the bills very very slowly. Besides, we've paid lots more than we ever borrowed. Those people and companies got what they loaned us, now they're just after blood.

What I learned from this weekend is that we're all essentially the same, deep down. It's how you get to that essence that sets us apart.

Long time, no update.

There's always a good way to tell a story, and a bad way to tell a story. Traditionally, the really good story tellers are those who have told the same stories over and over, occasionally adding things in, like spicing an old soup brought back to the fire for leftovers.

Sometimes I find really great stories out there. I recently read the Me and My Shadow short story on Kevin Smith's blog. Wow. A fantastic story about a lucky guy who gets his friend back from the clutches of drug abuse.

I only wish I wrote so well as to keep people from working for a full day as they poured over my words, tasting and retasting them in their minds.

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After I was fired from Medpace (which I believe had something to do with how my boss and I never saw eye to eye), I started working at a place that did blood treatment. I didn't actually touch any blood there, I just worked on the computers and network.

My boss was a really nice lady who had been there for over ten years, slowly trying to educate the powers that were into the twentieth century. (Well, twenty-first, whatever) They were convinced that fax machines were the end all be all of technology, not even comprehending the concept of paperless offices, or telecommunications in general.

So together, she and I attempted to set up a wide area network connecting all sixteen locations.

Unfortunately, it really didn't get out of the planning stage. The important people decided that this was a project they were going to become interested in, and began to nitpick every single detail.

Eventually, they came to the conclusion that my boss and I were only out to 'waste their money', and wanted 'professional advice'. So with that, they hired a consultant to come in, assess what we had, what we were planning, and give us his ideas on where to go from there. From the very beginning, this consultant was made aware that we had no plans to buy anything from him. He was just there to give his advice.

Let me just stop there for a second, because I really want to say this: When you have two employees in a department that is responsible for making sure your business doesn't fucking fail, maybe it's not the best idea to bring someone else in for their ideas.

Now, don't get me wrong, when it comes to planning, it's better to have more ideas in the mix in case you've gotten too deep in the details... But explicitly bringing someone in to debunk and dismiss your ideas because you think they're too expensive is just childish.

The guy came in, asked us about our current setup, how we did things, etc etc. It took almost a week to go over everything. There were manual procedures for just about everything, but I was working on ways of automating stuff, since they sure as hell weren't about to hire another system administrator... He took all this information somewhere else, and compiled it, ran it through best practice black boxes, and wrote out a proposal. I guess summary, but proposal was the word he used.

In his summary, he basically said that my boss and I were on the right track. We had done our homework, and we had a good grip on what to expect if our WAN plan was put into effect. He also went a step further, and mentioned how he would like to see how the department was run: it was like heaven. Basically, his idea of IT is to make things available and working for the rest of the company. If something breaks, we fix it, if something needs to be implemented, we research it and install it. For customization, the end user educates themselves on the product, and fucking customizes it themselves.

Wow.

So yeah, the VIP and her cronies didn't really like this summary. They paid the guy more than I make in a year for a week's worth of work, and he basically told them that the IT department knew their shit, and not to fuck with us.

That didn't go over so well... But a deal's a deal, and the guy left with his check and a smile.

Then my boss quit after a few more months of trying to get our ideas to fly.

Then I was stuck there, alone, with no possibility of getting anything we had planned set up. It's hard enough to support 300 people, much less trying to get a WAN setup for 16 different networks in 16 different markets...

So I basically gave up. I got really depressed, almost committed suicide, my car broke (timing belt or some shit), lost my job (all they said was that 'it wasn't working out'), apartment caught fire, got 'asked to leave' the apartment (which isn't the same as an eviction, but it still feels shitty), moved in with the in-laws, got a notice from our landlady that we owed her $6000 for her deductible for insurance, and found a job at a place where everyone seems so defeated.


Let me clarify: I started feeling depressed.

Which lead to my darkest hour.

At some point in the wee hours of the morning one day, I awoke from sleep with the express need to urinate. After taking care of business, I returned to the bedroom, but couldn't sleep. It was as if in those two and half hours I had somehow compressed time and stolen ten hours of sleep from the nether cosmos. Not to say I felt great, just really rested.

So I sat up, watched TV, stared at some websites, smoked, tried to get something to drink...

But around four in the morning, a supreme feeling of dreary sadness washed over me, and left me breathless and in a state of such self loathing that I really didn't see how I could go on. It was as if I felt supreme guilt and grief and anger all in one, but paralysed and unable to DO anything about it. The wife was totally asleep, unable to be stirred. The daughter and son were too.

So I sat. I sat in that computer chair, smoking dutifully, shaking though I was not cold, starving but I could not eat, tired but I could not sleep. All I could do was think. Think about how horrible a person I was. How the things I did weren't good enough. Things I should have done, or said, but couldn't.

I sat up all fucking night long. When you look outside before a bad storm, you see the dark clouds forming. Typically it gets really dark, then torrential downpouring rain follows, and finally resolves by the clouds drying out or blowing away. This was not the case with my storm.

The dark clouds of depression came in, got dark, and then got darker. It was as if I was surrounded by a dark glass block, and it was closing in on me. The wind never came, the dawn never broke. I was alone, and there was nothing I could do to feel better.

The weird thing was that I didn't just shut down and die. I continued to live, if you want to call it that. I got dressed and went to work. I did my job. I ate lunch, supported people on the phone, came home, ate dinner, watched tv, talked with the family, then went to bed. Granted, most nights I would stay awake for hours, faking sleep so that I wouldn't have to talk about it with the wife. After she was asleep I'd get up and smoke and cry, never able to get a grip until the morning when I'd get dressed and go to work.

It was really a blur for me. Finally I got fed up with it all and decided to either cheer the fuck up, or do something about it. In my case, the first thing to pop into my head was to drink this stuff called Fabuloso.

Fabuloso is a cleaning product made in mexico for mexicans. It's really a fantastic cleaner. We bought it from a cheapo dollar store in town. It really cuts grease and cleans windows... all for a fraction of the cost of most modern cleaners. Who knew?

Anyway, at some point in the wee hours of someday in the past, I was awake, nearly naked, smoking, trying to decide on the color of my vomit post-mortum. We had two kinds of Fabuloso, blue and purple. And I wanted to match the tile in our kitchen. Why I don't know, but suddenly the realization of what I was thinking of doing washed over me, and I knew I needed help.

So I went to my computer and attempted to contact help.

I tried looking up suicide hotline numbers. I found two. One number was out of order, and the other had some really bitchy ladies answering that night. I guess they were tired, too.

Not wanting to talk to bitches, I instead tried to fire up my IRC client and find someone who would listen to me.

My normal channel was basically dead (it was ~5am), so I searched around for somewhere to talk. A half hour later I came upon a channel centralized in southern australia, intended for people with depression.

I joined, and had an hour long talk with someone. I think we were the only two people in that channel for a long time. But we both had some pretty dark thoughts, I guess it was good to get them out, even with a stranger.

But it proved to just be temporary, for the whole next week, I would have these ... well, episodes of supreme sadness wash over me. I'd be fine one second, balled up on the floor sobbing the next.

Where I worked was a little secluded from people, my main point of contact with the outside world was my phone and computer, so when the phone rang, I'd either let it ring out to voicemail, or compose myself enough to help.

I had a problem, and couldn't really see a way out.

One day, I think it was a Saturday, I went back to the main channel I frequent, and asked if someone could please help me... a few crass snaps back and forth between myself and some other people later, and I leave, again feeling as if this was the time to finally find out how the purple Fabuloso tasted.

Then I get a call. One of the admins saw the fights and saw there was trouble, and wanted to make sure I was okay. I put the bottle of Fabuloso down and we talked for hours. He had contacted one of my friends and had him come over to cheer me up. It was all very surreal, very after-school-specially. I decided to go see my doctor that week, and he put me on a script.

My depression is something I've battled for a while. I'm not really sure what's going on, but I know that it seems to be almost seasonal, but very chemical. It tends to start in the fall, and continues on into spring. The typical things people do to get better don't seem to work for me. Chicken soup, napping, talking, etc just don't hit the spot. I've been looking for a good drug that will actually fix me, but so far nothing. This last time I tried Wellbutrin, and everything seemed to be cool until about a month after I started taking it, I broke out in hives and had some breathing problems. Since I was ramping up on it, I had to wait for all of it to flush out of my system, which took about three weeks total. It was hell. The doctors couldn't do anything to help me, all they could do was just sit and laugh.

So during all of this, I'm itching like crazy, trying to keep control over the rollercoaster that is my psyche, while still trying to maintain the stability of my job's network. Yeah.

So I break down. I ask my HR director for help, and she directs me to our employee assistance program. They hook me up with a temporary psychologist, who doesn't really do anything but listen, never really made any comments, and just gets paid.

Meanwhile, my car breaks down. I needed to do a maintenance on it for a while, something to do with the timing belt getting replaced after 60k miles... I was on 70k when the belt finally broke. Was gonna take ~$600 to replace, but I had a second car.

I took a few days off from work to try to figure out how to fix everything, and when I called in to work to tell them the next day I was coming back in, they fired me. Apparently I was doing a good job, but they thought I "just wasn't working out." Seems almost like HR lady told someone I was a crazy loon and they just wanted me out.

So I was unemployed... Got on unemployment, and started looking for work...

Two or three weeks after I lost my job I was giving my son a bath. Daughter was downstairs working on her alphabet, wife was in the other room checking email.

My daughter calls to my wife, saying she smelled smoke. Wife goes to check it out, and saw a fire in our laundry/utility room! She yelled up to me, telling me to get the hell outta the house. I run down with our son, saw the fire right next to lots of gas pipes, and immediately went into protection mode. Wrapped the son in a blanket, ushered the three of them outside, grabbed the phone, car keys, wallet, and two cats and ran outside, calling 911. Our third cat was still inside, I didn't see him through all the smoke. (most of the smoke was black from clothes that were on fire).

A few minutes after I called 911, two cops came up to the house and radioed in that it was, indeed, a fire. Two minutes after that, TWELVE fire trucks pulled into our little street, totally blocking traffic, and set to extinguishing the fire. About two hours later they have it put out and all the windows open. My wife and I were let back in where we found our third cat, still alive, hiding under our bed and between some blankets.

I'm skipping some details here, but I will hopefully go over it in more detail later.

Basically, the place was wrecked, and we couldn't sleep there. So we packed up some stuff and went to my mother in law's to live until the fire damage was repaired.

A few days later, our landlady called and told us she was going to evict us. We got a moving truck and a storage garage, and moved our stuff out. But we never got an actual eviction. Just her threatening us with it...

It was basically like everything was going horribly wrong, and I couldn't find a way to fix anything... Thankfully, I was still getting unemployment, and we went to a food pantry service to get some things to eat...

But then, the people with whom I've gamed and talked with and partied with and complained about all my troubles to... The people in the irc channel that represent a group of people who came together to game but ended up being more like a family... They all came together and donated a huge wad of cash to me. Noone else offered anything like that. I was touched, and didn't know what to say.

It's good to know people care about you, especially when you think everything is long gone and lost forever.

A few weeks after all this crazy shit, I found a job at a place that's 150+ years old. It's an old factory that makes valves, something that is used in lots of places, but people never think about.

It's a nice place and all, but the people here seem so... defeated. Like they started working here at one point, but then realized that they would never get anywhere, and would just sit and flounder about in a stagnant dance with trying to keep up with the standard of living raising, and gas prices inflating, and ... well, it's a little sad to come in every day.

Which brings me to today. After today I have the weekend off, and am going to a LAN party with the people from that gaming group I spoke of earlier. They get together every six months or so for a weekend of gaming, beers, and conversation. I've been to a few in the past, and wanted to show up with my first paycheck and buy the good beer.

I hope it lasts for a long time.