entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

As demanded by rbarclay, and really, six months is too long, or something.
 

2017 bullets:

• Started working part-time on Feb 1, full-time Mar 1.  Went to Portland office in late March and again in late July.  Started working in Oakland office 2 days a week in August.  Work is good.
• I had ditched the wheelchair in Dec 2016; i stopped using the walker full-time in April, and altogether by June.  I was finally able to jog a tiny bit in November.  I still can't do a single sit-up, but i did 6 pushups a couple of days ago.  I had a small relapse in February after a cold which caused numbness in my feet, which has not cleared (and my hands are still numb).
• In late 2016, we'd gotten an accessible plot at the community garden to accommodate me, but i was well enough in November to get kicked out of it and into a regular (and larger) plot.

This'll have to do until i set up my own publishing platform.  I mean, i could write a Note on Facebook, but that site is pure evil.  Google+ is the Democratic Party analogue to Facebook's GOP; it has a real chance to do things right but settles for not shitting itself or setting things on fire.  This site doesn't exactly cover itself in glory; this posting interface doesn't seem to have been updated since DW was founded and no evidence of a mobile app exists.

Anyway, for the few who are reading this and didn't already read it elsewhere, i'm three weeks away from my 1-year anniversary of the onset of Guillain-Barré syndrome.  I had a particularly shitty case of it and am now finally getting around to walking.  My hands are still not able to touch-type due to weakness, stiffness, and impaired sensation.  Parts of my face are still paralyzed.  I'm going back to working from home part-time on Feb 1.

[Scene opens.  HUSBAND and WIFE are sitting in front of their computers.]

HUSBAND (to WIFE): It's almost midnight. Let's go to bed.

[They do not move.]

F  I  N

This year has been one of big changes in things that i liked doing, mainly because i found that i didn't like doing them anymore (like when i retired from soccer, except without the injuries):

• Back in February, i skipped going to DunDraCon for the first time.  I just didn't feel like going.  Not sure if i'll go back.
• I decided not to do fantasy football this year and am not missing it.  Funny how ESPN's fantasy football coverage is now suddenly irritating.
• I dropped all my comic book subscriptions after getting a notice from the shop that it had been eight months since my last visit.  Pretty clear i had stopped caring, there.

One grandson just turned 1.  In a month, my other grandson and my granddaughter turn 3 and 7 8, respectively.  Soon, they'll all be old enough for me to tell them to get off my lawn.

You know you're getting old when you find a long pubic hair in your underpants that's gone white near its midpoint.

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

I've been wearing my Utilikilts (i have three Mockers now) for almost 3 years and i love them for all of the usual reasons: stylish, comfortable, can be casual or dressy, draws attention to myself.  I never realized, or maybe i realized but wouldn't embrace, the fact that i'm a complete attention whore; i suppose that it might be obvious when i think of my online behavior over the last twenty years (yes, i have been online for twenty fucking years, and i know that's not as much as some of you, but still, that's over half my life), but it was certainly not something that i quite got when it came to my physically present interactions.  A lot of it comes from increased maturity, as well as the increased confidence that comes from being with 2wanda.  But it wasn't until i put on the kilt that i felt like i looked good, and that i liked looking good.  Now i'll enjoy a nice buttoned-up shirt with my jeans instead of just T-shirts, and i found comfortable dress shoes so it's not sneakers or hiking boots all the time.  And i enjoy picking out a nice tie once in a while.

As for the kilts, i got some brown Doc Martens to go with my first olive kilt, then i went a little crazy and got these monsters.

I mostly wear them under my jeans as they're a bit too sassy to wear to work with my kilt (but they're fun for the occasional dress-up party).  Then Kim suggested these after i got my black kilt, and they also go well with the grey kilt.

I also got an array of knee-high socks from Sock Dreams to complement them when i'm wearing shoes.

There is some irony in that i feel pretty darn manly when i'm wearing a skirt (although i do feel that the Utilikilts marketing people hit the "BE MANLY!" button a bit too much in their copy, as do their fan-submitted videos, sometimes leaning on chauvinist stereotypes), but i think it's just that i like the way i look, and that is an unequivocally good thing, and it's also fairly new.  OK, i'm an attention whore and i'm vain.

Now comes the hard part.

We just had a small shaking quake and i estimated it at 4.3.  The USGS initially rated it a 4.4, but now they've updated the magnitude to 4.3.  Damn, i'm good.

Sirius and XM completed their merger a few weeks ago, and something that popped up on the Rock station in the last day or two was the ABBA channel — all ABBA, all the time.  Scary, i know.  But just now i had to listen to it because they were playing the Spanish version of "Chiquitita", which was my favorite song in second grade and is probably the first favorite song i can remember having.