Tomorrow is Christmas, it's practically here!

Well, no new job for the new year yet, I actually just finished up a hellish week pertaining to my previous project. Worked 12+ days on Tuesday and Wednesday, and had to work on Thursday, which was originally scheduled to be a day off. No matter, it's done, the client's happy, and now I get to celebrate Christmas in Havasu!

I had a very interesting dream last night, included within were such fun things as my great uncle playing World of Warcraft and loving it, my grandpap taking pictures on a chair with some chick who lives in Havasu I saw on OKCupid, and me peeing into a sink. Also, at one point I was running down a hallway which featured the cover art for every album on my computer. As I walked into the art's perimeter, the associated music began playing. The whole time my dad and uncle were trailing behind, enduring my awesome music library consisting of such winners as Adema, Limp Bizkit, and Saliva.

Anyhow, I woke up and now I have to get a shower so I can beat traffic on my way to Havasu for the festivities. I wish the drive wasn't so goddamn long, but it is what it is. Merry Christmas eve and Christmas day to all of ya!

Trekking the Bleak Wasteland of Corporate America

Of certain import is my situation, oh blogulant ones. I work as a traveling software tester. They pay me to go to their offices, I do my best to help them fix their shitty programs. This time, I was sent off to one of the more unsatisfying adventures of my career. I was sent to the Newest Jersey, home of Snooki and other such distasteful guidos in order to help baby soap manufacturing giant Johnson and Johnson solve a problem. I will not bore you to bones with technical details but suffice to say I am merely retreading established pathways. The issue with this is the trekking itself. You see, the J&J offices are located in scenic buttfuck egypt, NJ. I am there from Sunday night until Friday afternoon every week. The problem being that I get no time at my house. I bought my house with the intent to live in it, but it appears that will not be the case as I've gotten a solid two months of actual living time out of the place. It is more of a winter home, one that I inhabit one full day a week. That being said, I stewed on the issue and decided it may be about time for a job switch.

Today marks the first day of the search. Granted all I did was fill out profiles on Career Builder and Monster to attract some interest with likely candidates, but it's a start. I would find it quite lovely to end up in a position with far, far less non-local travel (as in no travel) as of right now it's bothering me to the point of wanting to be done with it all (not a shotgun mouthwash, mind you). I shall use this as a checkpoint and wait to see how things end up.

Song Idea

Something about fixing Mexico being allegorical to a relationship.

Or...

Fuck, a song about fixing Mexico. Cause that Abraham Reyes guy is a total asshole.

A Transferrence

Wrote this some time ago in a quaint analog notebook. Gonna do my best to transfer it verbatim.

Ahem...

The exorbitant amount of unequality today stuns me. However, I see it may be necessary to continue the current trend of society. However, I wish to know the ultimate goal of it all. Where do we go from here? All I see are signs of regression, economies which have gone down the shitter, and our land, the world-leader in so many fields, has become so xenophobic as to inspire tears. However, it could be due to more coverage by the media. Either way, I don't see a unified global community ever taking shape, seeing as how man has always defined himself by those he likes least. Life breeds conflict, nay, life is conflict, and without strife, the world would be something it's not meant to be: perfect. Matters on a global scale are near impossible to deal with, so maybe it's best to leave our politicians to decide how to better their world. Why are those least qualified to lead most eager to? Do they believe that positions of power will make up for their lack of competence at life? What leads them to believe this? And most importantly, why do we let them? There are millions of people who reside in this country, why are they so easily influenced by a fucking flashing box? Damn these unanswerable questions. My goal, if I were to become filthy rich, would be to create a country where only those who I deemed intelligent and strong willed enough would combine like minds and develop things beneficial to mankind. Such things would include an alternative energy source, elimination of currency, and fireworks. Fireworks are cool, no matter how you look at them. They're as bright and loud as a war, but without the side effect of death.

[Insert island diagram here]

The island itself would in fact be built by incorporating the native topography of the island, thereby creating a "cave village" so to speak. It would be impeccably clean, and a model for places around the globe. We would develop an efficient recycling system and treat the surrounding forest as an ancient, rare, and valuable antique. It would be great. I think as a hive of bees sometimes. Well, a beehive that passes its messages to completely non-related species, such as wild boars or humpback whales. I'm scatterbrained, like Jenga when you lose. Thought collection occurs as in a crane game, I might get lucky and pick one up, but otherwise it's another quarter down the drinks. I've tried to block emotion because it's scary. It's difficult to deal with. I believe this is a problem that prevents my mingling and coupling with those of the fairer sex. The ones with big boobs who are not Chris Farley (RIP). There are waves, in a minute I'm a jumble of smiles, within 5 more I am a sulking pincushion. However, these momentary lapses give me insight to things I may not already realize and almost certainly cannot change. The sands of time continue shifting as we are left to fall helplessly into the cracks it creates. I think I've changed reasons why I like music, the sound itself is what hooked me before, but I now realize imagery is the main component in good music. If I can't get a decent image from a song, chances are I won't much care for it. This explains my love for Clutch, I just can't get enough of their obscenely surreal imagery. I'm the best person at putting myself down, anything I think of something to do, I realize there is something better out there already and it puts a damper on my state of mind. I scratch my head often. I think it's because my brain is allergic to thinking. I hate when people look at me, they should let me stay invisible along the wall as a chameleon, meaning no harm and getting in nobody's way. I like when people look at me, however, in a non-condescending manner. I am a human, a natural attention whore. This is why I believe we must have evolved from apes, they are just as loud and obnoxious as your average human. Therein lies the omnipresent life = confict. Well, I believe therein lies relief of stress, time to go back on the computer

[Insert chimp jacking off graphic]

Well, that was embarrassing. My way of thinking has not changed much, but my level of self-expression has (hopefully) improved from this. I do believe this was a stream-of-consciousness exercise, however.

Desert Living (Part II)

Time to pick up where I left off (more than 6 months ago)

After reaching the great rural hillocks and forests of Sadie's hometown, we woke up and promptly began to pack. And pack. And pack some more. All in all there was a huge amount of things Sadie took with her, and being that she took some very large stuff (such as the queen bed and a couch) the truck filled up in no time. When all was said and done, me, her, her mom, her brother, and even her dad (whom she rarely sees) were loading stuff into the truck. We had to shift things about left and right, up and down and securely fasten all we could before taking off. It was a pretty brutal affair but in the end the team managed to pack it all in. After this grueling affair, Sadie's mom invited us over for dinner. I debated this invitation for the simple reason that Oklahoma City, the day's next destination, was a very, very long ways from Clarksville and the sooner we got on the road, the better. However, I figured this gave Sadie a chance to spend one final afternoon with her family, so we went and partook in the tasty meal (which was pasta I believe). Soon afterwards, we went back to get the truck and that's when disaster befell us. I was not, for the life of me, able to maneuver the damn thing back to the road. The problem was getting the truck out of her grandmother's field. You see, we had to back the damn thing in through the grass in order to park it in front of the house and load it up. The problem came with trying to back it out, and not because of the truck itself, but the trailer Sadie's vehicle was loaded onto. I tried for a solid hour, or even two to get it freed, but I could not do it. In the end we had to ask her dad to maneuver it out for us, as he had lots of experience with that kind of thing. Thankfully he didn't have a problem with it, and we got on the road well into the evening.

The journey through the rest of Tennessee was not problematic; clear skies and clear roads on into sunset. Even driving through Memphis was a relative breeze. We crashed through the border and began our incredibly long, tedious, and winding journey through Arkansas, battling a wicked storm front all the while. The beginnings of our Arkansas journey were nothing to write home about, but the storm, which hit shortly after passing through Little Rock was cause for concern. Visibility was poor. Lightning was frequent. Winds were high, and I was driving a damn moving van with a vehicle strapped to its ass. I pulled off the road a few times to regroup with Sadie, relieve myself, and regain my composure before setting off once again into the hellacious tempest. Eventually, after hours of mind numbing driving, we reached the Oklahoma border.

You may be tempted to think "oh, the border, OKC can't be too far off now, but let me tell you that's a huge pile of lies and fetid horse shit. It was dark, it was still storming, and the City was nowhere near the border. In fact, if you check a map, you will see it is damn near the center of the state. That meant a very large amount of continuous driving for us before we could finally rest our weary heads. We trucked and trucked and trucked on, with little noteworthy happening between our border crossing and destination reaching. I believe we both were suffering from sleep deprivation and highway hypnosis by the time we arrived, as all I could see was Sadie driving my car in front of me, swerving from time to time and bringing me to nearly soil myself every time. We had a pair of walkie talkies we began using when leaving Tennessee, but by this point of the drive they were long past dead and we relied on eye contact to keep us together. At least it wasn't hard for her to see the giant yellow Penske in the distance, even in the dead of night. We mercifully caught wind of an exit to a little known place called Oklahoma City due to the friendly guidance of a little green highway sign. I waved to it, and sped with all my might to the road, eventually finding the hotel with our life-saving beds waiting for our extremely tired selves. It was 5AM by that point, with a hotel checkout of 11AM. The cats were freed for a brief period as we checked into the hotel and I tried in vain to sleep what was left of the morning away. I managed at least an hour, possibly two, of restfulness, and fully awoke, somewhat ready to begin the next section of our odyssey.

Desert Living

It's been a long while since I've updated this here page so I guess I could start with the basics. The move went well. I only fucked up with the truck itself once, and with the trailer maybe 3 times. I saw a huge amount of the country in a span of only 4 days, although a lot of it was under cover of night. I had one very horrible drive, as well as 3 not-as-bad drives, which I shall now detail for my future amusement.

The Move:

Day 1

I woke up ass early on day one to grab the moving truck from the Penske rental center down the road. I was told the truck I received was the newest of all on the lot and, barring one side of the thing, it was in decent shape superficially. I signed the necessary papers, made some small talk with the shop owners, and drove the truck out to begin the arduous task of moving all of my amassed junk from one side of the country to the other. I parked the truck squarely in front of the apartment building, unrolled the ramp, and began lugging junk from point A to point B ceaselessly. You never realize how much junk you've amassed over the years until the fateful day comes in which you need to move all of it. My bedroom, big enough to house my bed and dresser (but not much else), during the task of moving soon took on the dimensions of a cavernous basement. I did not realize I had managed to shove so much into so few nooks and crannies, and the sheer volume of shit began to irk me, provoking me to outright toss the more useless trinkets and baubles into the garbage. Thankfully, I had the assistance of Jim and Nubs, as well as Sadie when loading the truck so it did not end up being as laborious as it could have been, but all in all it was the second worst part of the moving experience. Eventually, after much shoving and shifting, everything was loaded. I bid adieu to my friends, closed up the truck, and Sadie and I made our way back to the rental facility to pick up the trailer.

The car trailer (yes, it deserves its own paragraph):
When we left with the truck, our rental-master told us if we were back before noon they would be there to help us with hooking up the trailer. As unluck would have it, we did not arrive in time. We had to figure out how to finagle the damn thing onto the truck ourselves. We fucked it up once, and holy shit was it scary (though my car was going to end up smashed since the trailer popped off the hitch and started rolling down the slight gradient it was placed upon) but in the end we got it figured out and headed out on the first very long drive of the trip.

Day one took us from Pennsylvania all the way to Tennessee, much of it happening through the night. It was an outrageously long journey, but not especially difficult. Having Sadie in the front to help me stay entertained certainly was helpful. Eventually we made it to her cat-shit filled, somewhat dilapidated housing situation and promptly took our rest to prepare for one of the longest days of my entire life.

Westward and Houseward Bound

So great and mighty interfarts, it appears I've finally gotten myself a place to call my own (since the Hawthorne apartment was leased under Jim's name). It took awhile, but I'm thinking it will be worth it in the end. I hope it becomes a vacation destination for my friends out east, and I'm hoping for a few weeks a year spent with them in my place. I, of course, will be visiting them as well. There are some repairs which need made, some minor, others not so much. I'm pretty nervous about driving a truck with a trailer on it, but thousands do it every day so it must not be too tough. Just have to make sure I don't knock anyone off course.