So I drove out to my mechanic's today to see how my long ago promised (future) supercar is doing. The transmission has been completely disassembled and put back together with no problems found, but it's still not dropping into fourth. The tranny guys think it's the linkage, and the linkage guy thinks it's the tranny, so tomorrow I'm supposed to head out there and drive out with him to the desert where the shop is so we can all see what's up together and choose the next step.
I asked him what time we should go, and he replied by pantomiming holding a beer and making repeated chugging motions — I guess the guys at junkyard have a bit of a drinking problem so we're heading over at 10:30 in the morning to ensure that they're not totally trashed.
I'm still missing Rachel like crazy (and that's an understatement), but not as much as this little three legged dog is missing his leg* thanks to his apparent itch.
Trying to take that photo I nearly crashed Rachel's truck as I drifted into the lane next to mine — which reminds me that I should predict how the interview that Lane did with me while he was here might begin:
"When I first met Shannon Larratt, he was dirty, disheveled, and had a strong but sickly sweet smell of coffee about him..."
I'm sort of an absent minded professor character I think. While driving down to Cabo to meet them at the airport, we stopped at a gas station to get a drink — I got a bottled cold coffee spiked with guarana. It's got a strange packaging that always tears apart when you pop the cap off, so after doing so, I started blabbering about that which got me distracted.
It's also one of those “shake before drinking” beverages, so naturally I did that, but without bothering to put the lid back on, which sprayed half a bottle of coffee all over me and the leather seats of Rachel's Escalade EXT. She was understandably unthrilled!!! I am very lucky she wasn't in the car with me today, because I pulled exactly the same stunt (albeit with less stench), soaking myself as a bottle of shaken mineral water sprayed all over me and the car.
* Bring on the jokes about his BME/extreme membership.
Thursday, January 5, 2006
Tomorrow you should see updates posted to both sites; some of it is uploading now. Thank you everyone for your patience (minus the small number of you who've been dicks about it).
As well as catch up work I did a little preliminary development on moving the current IAM codebase from a CGI model to an ISAPI model to dramatically increase the efficiency of the system… I really wish I'd written it this way from the start. Anyway, I think that with a move of this type I should be able to expand the current IAM system to handle a hundred thousand members or more.
I know I'm supposed to take a day on the weekend off — that was my New Year's resolution — but I think I will spend it working out of neccessity to keep my mind from sinking in an ocean of tears… Without something to occupy me I'll just get increasingly depressed and lost about Rachel being away on business. Yeah, I'm a big baby or something but it really hurts me a lot and I have trouble getting through even a few days of loneliness. In the morning I'm taking Saira to the bus station so she can go back to Toronto which is also sad. Phil cooked a real nice supper for me though (pictures on his page I think) which was greatly appreciated and very veganalicious.
Other than that, I'm getting nervous that our maid is stealing but it's hard to say if it's simply stuff getting misplaced… It's just that weird stuff keeps going missing like bags of socks, kitchen utensils, and even things like t-shirts. Most of it doesn't even really make sense to rip off because it has no real value and is easily identified as mine. Meh, I don't get why people do the things they do, it's so strange…
Update: OK, I am currently wearing one of the things I thought was stolen. I'd looked at it a dozen times in my search, but somehow couldn't see it… Boy do I feel dumb about that! I hope that all the other items have the same explanation.
Not that I'd rather be a rhino on account of poachers, but sometimes I do wish my encounters with humans were limited to curious tourists feeding me. That's not asking much, right?
The padlock for our front gate was forgotten in the car (which is parked on the outside of the compound) so I had to climb over our wall this morning. It's not that high (10-12 feet) but it's really rough textured concrete so my one arm is a little chewed up). Small price to pay for freedom, right?
GOTTA LOVE INJURED MANHOG (I'M TALKING ABOUT THE TATTOO, NOT ME!)
Other than that, Saira is still here for a couple days, Jay and his niece are visiting until tomorrow, and Phil gets back later today (so BME work officially starts again tomorrow, so you'll probably see updates starting up again in two or three days — there's tons of great stuff in the queue).
And of course Lane and his family are here as well… Lane's definitely the most driven and motivated person I've met in a long time regarding the future of where piercing and tattooing are going (and I meet a lot of people). I wrote it a while back on ModBlog (which will also fire up again in a few days), but I really think you're going to see some amazing things from him in the future (to say nothing of his current efforts in running studios and publishing a T&P magazine).
Let's start the day off right with a little funmail:
From: "Marc Albrecht" <MarcAlbrecht@gmx.de>
To: films@bmezine.com
Subject: bme videos
YOU ARE FUCKING SICK!!!!
WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU PUTTING VIDEOS LIKE www.bmevideo.com ON THE INTERNET???
CUT YOU'RE OWN DICKS OFF AND FIST YOURSELF ON THE SAME TIME!! HOW ABOUT THAT????
STILL HATING YOU!
FUCK YOU
Thanks for the feedback Marc. Sorry to here you're still a hater.
In more pleasant news, I weighed myself this morning and somehow I lost ten or fifteen pounds in the last month without even knowing it, so I'm down to 225. A couple years ago I wrote a charting plugin (that generates custom graphical charts for your IAM page) that could be used to track weight (or anything else numerical) over time… Maybe if I can find the time I'll finish that.
Well, Rachel and I are off to the airport in Cabo to pick up Lane and his family. One nice thing about living in Mexico (versus, say Miramichi or Tweed or even Toronto) is that we get regular visitors. Anyway, here's a photo that Rachel took of me on this New Year's Eve (as I mentioned, our fifth anniversary of meeting in person).
I don't know that it's a very flattering picture (and I'm wearing little jewelry in it), but you can see that I'm very happy to have made it five years!
I've been reading various 2005-overviews on friends' pages here that are really wonderful… I wish I had time to post a list of my own because it's been a wild year. First of all, we moved to Mexico of course, and have traveled in Africa, South America, Europe, and of course across Canada and the US as well. Rachel has restructured our business lives, and this is the first year that BME (which grew significantly in 2005) has had real employees.
I don't have time to post a year-in-review, so here's my likely-to-be-broken New Year's Resolutions. Probably being pessimistic about it is not a good start. Anyway, here are three I think I can mostly keep:
- Physical
Living in Mexico I've gained about fifty pounds, primarily because of not maintaining a vegan diet like I did in Canada. The picture above is me at about 180 pounds, taken near the start of the year in Durban, South Africa. I want to do two main things: (1) get back as close to an ethical and healthful diet as I can reasonably do here, and (2) exercise with a target weight at the end of 2006 of a fit 220 pounds. That is, get rid of 40 pounds of fat and replace it with 30 pounds of muscle.
- Medical
I want to have laser eye surgery done this year.
- Personal
Although I love what I do, it's not always fun being the hardest working guy in show business. I have worked almost every day that I could for the last five years, and I don't want to do that any more. So my resolution is to take off Saturday or Sunday every week — where I'll do no programming, BME work, or BME/work-related posting (barring emergencies). I need to take time for myself to paint and read and to spend time with my family and friends.
Well, that's about it. We have visitors tomorrow, Phil gets back in a few days, and within a week or two I'm sure 2006 will be running smoothly. Now I'm going to go and read a book.
