Author: Teel

Okie-Dokie. Going to bed now. Sleeping pill went down around 10, starting to get drowsy. Here’s to a long hard day tomorrow!

And I guess Heath has a three day weekend this weekend (Sat, Sun, Mon), so perhaps we’ll be able to get a lot of good work done before it is over.

I want to, at the very least, get the floorlamp I am working on completed and out for sale by the end of the weekend. If we can finish that and the table lamp Heath is working on, and maybe get started (or finished, if things go well) on that “table” I’ve got a piece of log laid out for, then it will be a good, good weekend.

My minimal, actual goal for the weekend is to get the floorlamp finished and out for sale. Everything beyond that is, as they say, “butter”.

Of course, there’s also moving a bunch of wood and clearing some land, and then perhaps digging a trench. Three feet deep and perhaps 100 feet long, though not a straight shot. But that should take long.

And maybe at the ends of the days I’ll be able to get some writing done instead of any of the other things I’ve been working on this month. (I balanced Quicken tonight, after not looking at it for … well, let’s just say it was pretty sure my computer’s calendar was off. I won’t even say what I did all night last night, but if I get back into working on something like that again, you’ll hear about it just as soon as something comes of it. And then getting ME’s backend working with “RSS” for a couple of days before that… and I don’t even remember what came before that. Sigh.) I have several good ideas for things to write, and perhaps the best is to just write the stories I used to tell when I was younger. Some good yarns, those.

Man, really getting pretty drowsy now. I guess I’d better get this up and lay me down. Maybe put one more chunk of wood in the fire before I go, and look forward to brighter days ahead.

I’ve been quite a bit off, lately.

My sleep has been off, my performance has been off, my appetite … well, I still have most of an appetite, but not at the normal times…

“We” started work on building furniture this week. I have been looking forward to this for so long that I thought it would make me feel good, not bad. But in recent weeks, and then in the actual getting started when it crystalized, it became more and more clear that it was not going to be what I had expected. I had thought… I had been told (or thought I had been told) … and had been telling people … that my father and I would be building furniture together. That I would be working with my father, learning from him how to do it, and producing furniture at his side. But that was apparently never his idea.

My father wants me to do one kind of furniture while he does something entirely different. He doesn’t want to work with me, he doesn’t want to help me, and in fact doesn’t even want to work on the same STYLE of furniture as I am required to do. I say required, because whereas he appreciates and enjoys and understands and easily envisions furniture in the style he is requiring me to do, he is not doing it. And whereas I appreciate and enjoy and understand and have been coming to be able to envision furniture in a style approaching what he will be doing himself, I am not allowed to do that kind of furniture. There are no two ways about it, this is what I have to do. If I do not get this furniture made and sold at a steady rate, I will be in serious personal financial straits.

Which is pretty annoying, since until three days ago, I had no idea that I would be totally on my own in getting it done. I had thought that we would be working together, both creating furniture all day, several days a week. I had thought that there would be some sort of … structure or guidance … coming from him. I was mistaken. He expects me to do the whole thing myself, as though it were my own small business and I were my own boss, accountable only to myself, making my own hours, etc… etc… which is an entirely different mindset from … well, from every single day of my life since I moved to Pine. And until he moved here, really was not even close to an option. Now it is… but I am not prepared for it. It is too sudden.

Now, out of the blue, I have control over my own schedule. Not just when and whether I work, but when I wake and sleep, which I basically haven’t had all last year. There is no one telling me what to do, or how to do it, or when to have it done by, or even when to work on it. In fact, because of all the other things I knew need to get done this month, I was not expecting to even be introduced to furniture building until near the end of the month. So even if I had had a clue that I would have to “be my own boss” and had been mentally preparing myself for such a massive shift, I would still not be prepared for it at this time.

And to a certain extent, this is what is throwing me off. This is what is keeping me awake at night and in bed all day (I didn’t get out of bed until 1:33PM today). I am used to being told what to do and when to get up and when to go to sleep and when to eat and drink and what to eat and drink and when to go to the bathroom and all that. Not that I want to be told what do do, but that it is what I am used to.

So now I am figuring out what is going on; the idea of a father/son furniture building experience was all a lie or misunderstanding and it is up to me to create and make successful my own, seemingly independant furniture building business.

So tonight I will try taking a sleeping pill … early … and see if I can get myself to wake up tomorrow in the morning … and work myself all day (how does eight hours sound?) on what I know how to do to try to build this God Damned furniture. And then this weekend, theoretically, since my brother will be here all day, and since he is the only person in the world who is supposed to be working with me on the furniture, maybe I’ll have some company as I try to repeat the same thing, two more long days of work, with only myself for guidance. I am not opposed to work; this is me trying to make a plan for myself to follow – this is me the “boss” scheduling me the “employee” to work all day for several days. Sigh.

I’m not feeling too well.

Worse, there’s this shadow hanging over any plans I try to make … that some other responsibility (generated by my father and having nothing to do with making money) will suddenly take over the time I have just tried to set aside for work. Because really, my time is not my own.

(Which is why it never occurred to me that I might have to try to take ownership of getting the furniture built or of scheduling time to do so; neither my father nor my grandfather believe that my time is my own – it is valueless, and thus whenever they need or want something to be done, regardless of what I am doing, it is their right to monopolize my time. Sigh.)

I’m going to go see about a light breakfast.

Okay, so.

I spent … too much time … working on getting the RSS templates for all of Modern Evil and Darwin’s Complex updated, and getting an RSS aggregator online and working to parse the files together and put it int he format you are familiar with. But it is working now, and as soon as I can get in touch with Mo, we’ll get his RSS 1.0 template updated and his blog will be integrated properly again, too.

I did make a mistake or two, though. First, I forgot that standards-compliant (even loosely-compliant like the RSS I’m using) RDF files do not pay attention to “Most Recently Commented On”, which … I believe (with no evidence) is a popular part of Modern Evil’s core functionality. So, actually, right now Modern Evil is doing … twice as much on the back-end as it used to. Oh, and the second thing, which is that the “cache”-ing code isn’t quite working properly, so … it’s using more bandwidth than it needs to. Though I’ll be working on that… in time. Sigh.

I may just … form invalid RDF files to get the Comments thing working. BUT, I’d like to see what you think of that functionality, first. According to my current webstats, an average of around 1000 unique visitors come to Modern Evil each day. If, say, 2% of that many people comment on this that they’d like to see the “Most recently commented on” functionality remain a part of the site, I’ll work on that. For now though, I’m only going to focus on getting the cache working.

Sigh.

A while back I went to San Diego with my brother and sister, Heath and Angela. While we spent long hours in the car, Heath and I devised a form of entertainment. We created comics.

I had a pink pen, he had purple. I would draw the images for a panel, and he would fill in the dialog, then draw the images for the next panel. Then I would fill in the dialog for that panel and draw the images for the next one. Being done in a car, it’s neither the best-looking art nor the easiest-to-read text, and being collaborative in this way, it doesn’t necessarily make the sort of sense one would expect. But the three comics we did are definitely interesting. There is even at least one dancing monkey, and in the end, everyone dies.

If you sign up (or have already signed up) for a BitPass account, you can read them now:

Enjoy!

Okay, so. New idea: Focus.

I’m going to try to focus.

You know, only do one thing at a time? I’m not sure I’ve ever really tried it before… well, once… I’ll get to that. But here’s the idea: For the rest of this year (0) and all of next year (1), I’m going to focus on only doing one … sort of thing at a time.

For instance, I’ve roughed out on a calendar to spend the next four months (ie: November thru Remember) focused on Writing. Then four months (Triober thru Exober) focused on Art (specifically on painting), and the next four (September thru December) focused on … well, I have a particular complex project in mind for the end of the year. And then, depending on how things have gone, perhaps four months (Ichiember thru Catember) focused on Comics (including the Mouse Project, now with a deadline over a year in the future).

And while I want to try to focus, I don’t want to feel trapped, so I want to plan to allow … say, one day each month for each of the four areas of my primary interest (that is, four days out of each thirty working on other things), focused for one day on that one thing. (The five areas of focus, by the way, are Writing, Art, Comics, Coding, and … that other project.) This would allow me to spend a full day this month coding the new aggregation system for Modern Evil, for instance.

More importantly and to the point, it will hopefully allow me to stop allowing all my interests to play each other against the middle, cancelling each other out. November 2002 I had just lost my job and was attempting NaNoWriMo (officially) for the first time. I had no other concerns that month to speak of, I was not trying to paint or draw comics or … anything else. I was just trying to write novels. I wrote something approaching … one hundred thousand words that month, over half of them in the last eight days of the month, when my focus really kicked in and I did nothing but write and think about writing all day, every day, for eight days. NaNoWriMo 2003 did not go as well. In addition to spending a week on “vacation”, I had other things stressing me out and taking up my time during the bulk of the days after that, and then nights I was drawn to other projects (comics, painting, &c.), and while I got the novel “done” I certainly never focused on it (and it isn’t particularly good).

Of course, this brings to point a very poignant point, that my days are not my own as long as I live in Pine. My father moves up here tomorrow morning. Now, in the time since I moved to Pine myself, depending upon my grandfather’s health, I have had some time off, mostly depending upon what days my father was here or not. (That is, I could use the days that grandpa wasn’t feeling well and dad wasn’t here for my own purposes, most of the time.) Now, while my grandparents are both doing worse and worse all the time (not to be celebrated in any way, but expected, so not worried over either) my father will be here all day, every day. Which may mean that … well, my dad will have to sleep SOMETIME, and I suppose that’s when I’ll be able to work on my own interests… Wait, damnit, Heath is here now too… I’m sure he’ll suck an appropriate chunk of my time from every day. So, it must be that after my father and I have done so much work that he passes out, and then after my brother and I … I don’t know, do more, and they’re both sleeping, THEN I’ll have some time to myself.

To focus on writing.

Yep.

Between 11PM and 6AM, probably.

Sigh.

I really, really need to get my hands on some Provigil (modafinil). Maybe sleep every other night. Work straight through the other ones.

Yeah.

So.

No comics for now (except maybe a Four-Hour Comic now and again), no new paintings (though I’ll see about getting the latest ones photographed), not much work on the website (though again, I expect to devote a day sometime soon to rebuilding the aggregator). Writing.

And these long entries don’t count.

My rough goal for the next four months is 12 completed written works available for purchase through Modern Evil, at least two of them novels. That is, I want to do a lot of short stories, and sell them via BitPass, and perhaps as an anthology via Cafepress. And I want to have Lost and Not Found finally reach its final edit. And I want to either write, re-write, edit and re-write a completely new novel or re-write, edit and re-write the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo ’03, plus package it and get it for sale. All of this before 311.1 (4/29/2004).

Which should be do-able, if I can just focus.