A step in the wrong direction

Under normal circumstances I’m am fairly strongly against focusing on negativity. In this particular case, I feel like it is very important to me to dedicate one post to this. I need to make sure I highlight the problem so I make sure that I see it. I also worry that if I included this in a typical post it would seem like I was trying to cover up the problem, both to the reader and to myself.
I smoked this weekend; more than a couple. As you may have read in a previous blog, I have struggled primarily with not smoking while at social functions, especially when alcohol is involved. Rather than thinking of a way to deal with this problem and take care of it, I chose, instead, to embrace the problem and let it grow. I decided that there was no way I was going to not smoke while drinking and that in an effort not to be mooching cigarettes all night that I would just buy a pack so I only had to deal with the guilt of smoking and not the guilt of taking cigarettes from people. The plan was to smoke until the end of the night at which time I would give the remainder of the pack to someone else. This worked relatively well on Friday night. I smoked maybe half of a pack and, at the end of the evening, gave it away to another friend that smoked. This seemed all well and good to me. I had my cigarettes for the night of drinking and at the end of the night, they were gone and I could pretend that I was still a happy non-smoker.
Then Saturday night came around and to my surprise, I found myself out drinking with some friends again. I hadn’t planned on this and of course, I had to have another partial pack. So I went and bought one. I did it last night, and truthfully, a prior evening a few weeks ago. Why wouldn’t it be equally successful this night? Unfortunately for me, at the end of the night, I did not give this pack away. Why didn’t I? That’s a great question and in truth I could give you several very valid reasons that I did not. But each one reeks of being a lame excuse and I will not burden you with them. There were several people I could have given them to. I could have just left them at the house I was at. Even better, I could have thrown them away. But I didn’t, I kept them. At the exact moment I chose to keep them, it was too late to do anything about it. I had cigarettes and I was going to smoke them. I had several Sunday morning and even through the evening and into Monday morning. Of course this whole time I kept telling myself, “I just have to finish this pack and then I’ll be done again.”
The first thing I realized is that I had been lying to myself. Obviously it hadn’t been a conscious decision. And in this case I think it was one of the more convincing lies I had ever told myself. I think most times that I have told a lie to me, somewhere, I knew it was a lie. In this case, I did not. I told myself I was in control, I had beaten this thing and now I was going to taunt it. I was going to use the occasional cigarette to remind myself how terrible they were and how much I didn’t need it. The moment I caught myself in the lie was one of the strangest and worst feelings I have ever encountered. I was driving home from somewhere, I don’t even remember where and I was angry about some little thing, I don’t even remember what. I remember sitting in my car on the freeway and just fuming over this little tiny thing. I was so unreasonably angry about it. It took a while but at some point I realized this. There was absolutely no reason for me to be so mad about this insignificant little thing. Then the thought entered my head that maybe just one cigarette would be good to calm me down, but no, I’m not a smoker, why in the world would I need a cigarette? That’s when it it me. Yes, I was unreasonably mad about something, that was being caused by the nicotine withdrawals and yes, I thought a cigarette would help, that was also being caused by the nicotine withdrawals and I was addicted again.
The realization knocked me on my ass. I’m sure most of us know how it feels to be caught in a lie. The guilt, the embarrassment, the frustration at being caught. Being the one catching the lie isn’t pleasant either, betrayal, anger, feeling foolish for having believed the lie. When you really truly catch yourself in a lie, you experience all of the emotions of the catcher and the caught at the exact same moment with no one to direct them towards but yourself.
The other thing that I thought was really off about this whole situation is that I was more comfortable with giving a poison to my friends than I was with taking it from them. Seems rather backwards to me.
Anyways, the good news buried in all of this is that I am back on track. It was a rough weekend but I’m back on the wagon again and feeling great. I do have some residual sore-throateyness and congestion from a weekend of smoking but I expect that will dissipate within a day or two at the most. While this was definitely a set back, it was not a failure. Merely a small stumbling block on my road to victory. I have no doubts that I have beat this thing. I may not be perfect, and I may not have done it all at once but my eyes are on victory. I am consciously aware of my struggling and I am fighting it. I will beat this.
See ya later.
-Paul

Windows Live Writer

Ok, I know I already posted today but I just read a post about Windows Live writer and I decided I need to give it a try. Partially because I have nothing better to do. It seems pretty cool thus far. It actually allows you to write things IN your blog. As I’m typing this, I am seeing exactly how it will look when it is published which is pretty cool. Just to explore some of the functionality here I’m going to be posting some random videos, links, pictures, etc. Please bear with me.

Fun little side note: I was a little unsure about the correct word usage above (bear with me) so I looked it up. I did actually use the correct form of bear in that circumstance. The website I used to verify this also gave the tip that using the phrase “bare with me” would be an invitation to undress together. I seriously doubt I will every have a hard time remembering that one again.

 

Fun little video Chris and I shot making fun of Mulligans golf course in South Jordan

Ok, adding videos is pretty sweet. Windows writer will link to your YouTube account and you can simply choose videos that you have saved to your account. Also, if you load a video file from your computer it automatically uploads the video to your YouTube account, allowing input of tags and descriptions for YouTube. That’s pretty sweet.

Awesome music video

Ok fantastic, I was a little concerned there for a minute. You can’t directly add videos that you have “liked” from your YouTube account but you can add any that you have added to your favorites list. You can also just find a video on YouTube, copy/paste the link into Windows Writer and you’re good to go.

The photo functionality is a little disappointing. I was hoping you might be able to link to a Picasa account similarly to how YouTube links. This is not the case. You can either upload directly from your computer (which works great) or you need to have the direct link to the photo on the web. There isn’t even a way to browse to a photo online to use. I would have thought that it would be fairly easy to integrate some of IE’s functionality into this program and allow you to browse to photos on the web. There are, however, some nice formatting options for photos. It’s fairly easy to change the size, background, border options as well as crop the photo and add some limited photo effect. You can also fairly easily add an external link to a photo, which is pretty cool.

Ooh there’s an option to upload a map to the post as well. I’d better find a way to try that… hold on…. oh, lame. It links to Bing maps. I guess that’s not altogether surprising, being a Microsoft product. That’s rather disappointing though. That could be a really cool feature but I don’t use Bing. I use Google. Like the rest of the world. The rest of the cool world anyways. Maybe I’ll have to play with that and see if you can upload a map from Google to Bing so I can blog about sweet cycling routes in the summer or all of those awesome trips I go on (hey, I should go on some sweet trips.)

This is odd. I’ve noticed that while scrolling through the post if you hit a video or picture, it stops scrolling using the mouse scroll wheel and you have to actually mouse over to the sidebar and scroll from there. Not really a damning glitch but it’s a little annoying. YES!!! Old school messenger emoticons FOR THE WIN. That is a definite plus for this program.

The formatting options are nice. It has all the typical windows functionality for text which makes it easy to emphasize things.  I can also use all the cool custom fonts I’ve downloaded for  Mystery theatre posters and such. Having a spell check built in is nice also because I’m lazy and I sometimes can’t spell. There’s also a word count feature which is essentially useless but kind of cool anyways. I actually checked the word count when I noticed that tool and it was at 666 so if you’re superstitious, you’re going to want to make sure to read past the beginning of this sentence. Good job.

This is kind of interesting. Apparently you can group a whole section to make it a block quote. It seems that it has to be seperated from the rest of the post by a page break though. That’s a little odd but I guess it’s cool. I was thinking that it might be annoying if you wanted to only quote one line but I guess you can just quote one line and make it a separate paragraph.

-Paul

The preview feature is great as well. It’s not really necessary I don’t think since I’m writing on the blog background as we speak but when you go to the preview it puts in all the little sidebars and things so you can see it all. Not hugely important but nice to be able to see. Also it’s nice that it won’t add views to my blog stats which drives me nuts.

Well, I think that about covers it. I think I’m going to go ahead and continue to use this program for now for all my blogging purposes. By the way, this post was really fun. I don’t think I’ve really ever reviewed anything before except short little Yelp reviews. I feel like this was a really good objective review. Plus being able to write the review in the program I’m reviewing was kind of cool and unique. I think I see more reviews in my future. I know, you’re super excited.

See ya later,

-Paul

There's just really not much to say...

I find myself really wanting to write this morning but with a complete lack of things I feel are exciting enough to write about. I suppose I could make things up but that just seems to kind of defeat the purpose of a blog that I'm writing about my life. Although I suppose it would give some insight into my imagination. I have been thinking lately that I might want to attempt to move my blogging time into the evening. I find that in the evening as I'm wrapping up my day I have all kinds of thoughts swirling through my head and I could get some really interesting (at least to me) things written down and have something meaningful to say. By the following morning, all of these cool thoughts are pretty much gone. I could solve world hunger one night and if I didn't write it down by the next morning I think it would be gone. I guess a general update couldn't hurt anything right?

I have never been more excited for a semester to be over than I am right now. This semester has been a busy one for sure. I am looking forward to my upcoming time off of work and school with great anticipation. My engineering class project has been a pretty major source of frustration for me lately. We don't seem to be making a whole lot of progress lately and we cannot, as a group, make a decision as to which way we're going to move forward. From talking to some of the guys at work it seems that this is likely to be a recurring theme throughout the rest of my schooling. Wow, that is just exciting as hell right? My math class hasn't been much better although that is more to the fault of the teacher than anyone else in the class. I will be so glad to be done with this guy. I really hope that my Calculus teacher next semester is better than him. Having a crappy teacher really makes it hard to learn. I don't think I've ever really needed to make that distinction before. I've always had really good teachers. This is a new experience for me and I have to say I think I could have done without it.

Work has been ok I suppose. Nothing terribly exciting going on. I'm working on a few projects at the moment but it seems like most of them end up giving me a couple of hours worth of work for a day and then several days of waiting for something else. There's been some drama over updating working drawings of our new ceramic brackets. I guess people are expecting me to do them but I don't know what needs to be done. Our chief technologist has a whole bunch of things he wants changed in the prints but he won't tell anyone what needs to be changed and he's getting frustrated that it isn't done yet. Makes sense right? I was supposed to meet with my boss yesterday and find out what the situation on that is but he was a little late yesterday and missed the meeting. I guess I'll find out about it sooner or later. Probably I'll get a list one day and they'll expect all 240 individual drawings to be updated the next day. Sweet!

Ok so I might be in a bit of a pessimistic mood this morning. Ah well, this too shall pass. I'm gunna go listen to some Chili Peppers and see if I can't find some work to do since I've been at work since 6.

Thanksgiving weekend: twenty-eleven

Wow. What a weekend it was. I believe one of my favorite ever. Of course Thursday was filled with all of the usual family stuff. Early dinner with my dad's family and pie with my mom's later in the evening. I also actually managed to make it over to my parents early this year and watch some of the parade with them. At pie with the Broshinsky's I had some time to look at photos with Karen. We both took some time to show off some of the shots we had taken, that was a lot of fun. After looking at some of her work I'm getting really excited about taking my photography class next semester and learning more about how to use my camera. That really just about covers Thursday, nothing really out of the ordinary but great nonetheless.

Friday I actually took part in some Black Friday shopping for the first time as a customer. Well, sort of. I went to Target in the afternoon after things were done being really nasty and bought a vacuum. Exciting right? I also got Blu-rays of all the old Christmas classics, which is slightly more exciting. After that my day really began. I went geocaching with Tiffany Conger. We had a great time. We found 4 total caches including a revisit to my first attempted cache that I never found. It was nice to be able to finally cross that one off the list.  We also found one that was up the side of Mt. Olympus on some crazy metal contraption. I'm really not sure what it was. Neither was the guy that placed the cache actually. If anyone can tell what this thing is from the picture it would really be awesome to know. It has an enormous engine attached to an even bigger winch all attached to a small tower. It was the craziest thing. It was really cool though. Although we ended up having to drive up part of the mountain on a pretty sketchy looking dirt road. I was a little worried for the safety of my car to be honest. Even after the sketch drive there was a little bit of a hike up to this thing which Tiffany was really not happy about but I bought her tea after. Hopefully she forgave me for that. :/

Post geocaching, we decided to grab some pizza at some new pizzeria Tiffany's cousin works at. I think it was called Limon something or other. Anyways, really weird pizza. The one we got had olive oil, mozzarella, spinach, prosciutto  and blackberries. Weird right? It was really good actually. A little sweeter than I'm accustomed to for pizza but I enjoyed it anyways. We ended up taking our pizza back to my house and chatted about our Nooks for a while. She ended up loaning me Percy Jackson Lightning Thief. I was fairly surprised to get this particular recommendation from her as we saw this movie together. It is arguably one of the worst films I have ever seen; however, several chapters in now, the book is not too terrible.

Next up: Black Metal Friday. Woo, what a night. I headed out to the Donahue's for some drinking and black metal. It was a grand time. Haley set up a black metal shrine on their table that was really cool. I tried to get some photos of it. I haven't edited them yet but I think I got a few good ones. We had mead and butter beer and other beverages. The butter beer was particularly interesting. It was served warm and I believe Haley said it had beer, butter, and eggs in it. It ends up being almost sweet and very rich. It's an interesting concoction but I think I enjoyed it. So, drinks were consumed, conversations were had and as the most metal of us left, the night gave way to pop music, dubstep and dancing, kind of an interesting transition I must say. Overall; a very fun night. Unfortunately it didn't lead to the greatest morning come Saturday.

We worked on our engineering project pretty early Saturday morning. As you can imagine I was a little grumpy about this situation but with the due date closing in and our machine still not climbing stairs we have some work to do. We made attempts to attache some spikes to the tires in hopes that they would catch the stairs and pull it up. It seemed to work pretty well but unfortunately We were impatient and tested it before the glue dried. It managed to pull itself up one step before everything tore apart. It has been re-assembled and testing will commence this evening. Fingers crossed.

Wow I didn't really realize how packed this weekend really was. I'm looking back at what I've written and realizing it's really a lot of stuff. That doesn't even cover it though. I spent a significant amount of time on homework, a great guitar hero hunt, put lights on the house, deep cleaned the kitchen, and more!Wow, what a weekend. Hope you all had a great one as well. :)

It was a dark and stormy night

Ok, this is freaking exciting. Five Iron Frenzy is back! The band officially announced their return last night at 7 PM. With it came the release of this brand new FIF song. Here's the thing that's really amazing. Since they are releasing this new song without the help of a record label, the band has asked for the help of their fans to raise the money necessary to record, produce, mix, master, market this new album. Kinda risky right? Wrong. The goal of the fundraiser was to raise $30,000 by Jan 21 2012. In less than 24 hours after the announcement of the upcoming album, FIF fans have donate over $80,000 towards the production of the new album/touring/marketing/etc. HOLY CRAP. The band has promised that any money past what they need to produce the album will go toward putting the band back on tour and I'm certain that donations will continue to flow in hopes that after an eight year hiatus, FIF might make appearances.

So I was thinking about this in terms of other fundraising efforts that I have seen. It seems that people were much more willing to donate to a bunch of middle class American rockers than to the tons of relief efforts that have been happening over the last few years. It's kind of an interesting priority. Most of us are a lot more willing to donate money for the promise of a new CD of our favorite band than to send money to disaster stricken countries to aid people that really need it. That being said, I plan to donate next payday to the FIF cause. I try to donate to more worthy causes when opportunities arise but I think I could definitely do better. End minimally fact based social rant. 

Ok now, that is out of the way. I am waaaay beyond excited for this new album. I was a little concerned when I first heard about it, fearing that it would be a half-assed attempt at a comeback from a bunch of guys that have long since lost their touch on their various instruments. This new song they released really boosted my confidence in the band and in fact, made me feel bad for doubting them. These guys still have it and I am stoked to be part of the backing they need to get the gears rolling on the next chapter in FIF history. 

                                                                                        

In all fairness, I did say bring it on.

Holy crap. This week has been absolutely insane. I have been working my butt off trying to get the new Mystery Theatre show open. The Agents of Chaos (including my assistant director) were busy most of the beginning of the week tearing out everything from the old 3300 South haunt building. It's really kind of sad to see it go. A lot of my life happened at that building and as cliche as it sounds, I did a lot of growing up there. During the move I took a couple opportunities to head over there and take a few pictures. I think I got some kind of cool shots of the old building but I really haven't had time to look through all of them. I'll hopefully get them posted in the next little while. Anyways, I took Mon-Wed off of work this week and worked 12 hour days Sat-Wed at the show. From 3D haunt space to the Cromwell Bed and Breakfast took a ton of work and a lot of hours. Fortunately I occasionally had some help from the cast, my mother, and now that the move is over I have Allegra and company to give me a hand.

During all of this craziness I still have school going full speed to finals. It's coming up really quickly and getting pretty stressful. It seems like we're behind in every one of my classes. My engineering class is behind because it  is a Friday only class so the Fridays that we have had off put us a week behind schedule each. My trig class is behind because our teacher is an idiot. He consistently shows up late, leaves early, and a couple times has just not shown up for class. All of us in the class are concerned about learning everything we are going to need for the final and being up to speed for calculus next semester. My chemistry class is behind for unknown reasons and we are tearing through material at break neck speed trying to get caught up.


On the bright side, my engineering project seems to be going fairly well. We started welding together the remainder of the components over the last few days and it's really starting to come together. We hit a couple snags yesterday and had to take things apart but we came up with a new solution for our gearing so we have a plan to get it all welded back together this weekend. It should be pretty exciting to get the thing going.

It's been a rather exhilarating few days and I have managed to get a lot done. I can't wait for life to get back to normal though. I'm way behind on sleep and nodding off at really terrible times. :P Oh well, show opens Saturday and then hopefully I can get things back to normal. I don't think I've ever been this excited for Christmas time. I get the whole week off between Christmas and New Years and it is going to be a very well earned break. I think I'll start my countdown now. :)

As an afterthought; for a while I was doing fairly regular updates on my non-smoking progress. I haven't updated on that in a while and I don't want anyone to think that it's because I've slipped up. Things are going exceptionally well. Since my small slip up while drinking that I posted about I haven't had any problems at all. The only time I even think about smoking anymore is occasionally when I take a deep breath and notice that my lungs don't hurt. It's pretty fantastic. :)

Bring it on....unless there's another option.

Holy crap. Things are about to get a little crazy. Haunt season just ended and that means I have like 15 days to get the next mystery open. I met with James and Brian yesterday to start planning out the space for the new set and I started to realize how much work I have to do. It's a little scary. I'm a touch behind on homework and I have TONS of work to do to get this show ready. I'm a little nervous. Finals are coming up, work is getting kind of busy, things are just piling up. Game on.

Speaking of work, there are some kind of cool things going on. My first real mechanical project is taking shape. It was a project to add a belt drive motor to a mechanical mixer to add an additional rotational axis (kind of). Anyways, we fired the thing up yesterday and it appears to work just fine. We need to modify the cover to make it fit over the new components and I think it's ready to go. I'm pretty excited about that. My next new project I've been working on is for freeze drying. I can't actually say what it's for (which makes it seem a lot cooler than it is) but I need to basically make a freeze dryer. We want to experiment with the process without spending $10 grand on a dryer. It should be pretty cool. :) I've been doing a lot of research on the process and different configurations and should be ready to start buying parts and piecing the thing together here in the next couple of days. Exciting right?