Saturday, January 3, 2009
This was my present to myself. I got a bunch of “shocking” presents from Shocking Fun for different people, and the one I self-indulged with was this memory game. It plays a pattern of lights, which you need to repeat, and the pattern gets longer on every iteration… And if you get it wrong, ZAP!, you get a mild electric shock. I love it!
Speaking of “shocking”, when we picked up Nefarious at the airport yesterday, on the way home we were chatting about the various things we did on our respective vacations, and she’s like “Oh, oh, oh!!! I have to tell you the craziest thing! You’re not going to believe this!!!”
“Did you know that Grandma believes in God?” — as if it’s the nuttiest, most hilarious thing she’s ever heard (everyone else in her life is effectively atheist) — “she thinks praying really works!”
Followed by much “can you believe it” laughing…
I suppose Nefarious is in one of the first generations where the vast majority of people she comes in contact with do not believe in a deity of some sort, so the idea of someone believing even in a Christian God is as silly as someone calling out to help from a fairy godmother… She has lots of books on mythology — creation stories from different cultures and such — so from her experience it really is just fairy tales; stories that reflect on the lyrical richness of a society, but have no bearing on the objective reality of the universe. Anyway, it was really very funny to hear her how shocked she was.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
(Slash – “Plans for 2009″)
- Get back in shape… I’ve gotten more than a little chubby in the last year and I don’t feel as good about myself on that level than I’d like to. I’m not unhealthy, but I’ve definitely eaten a few too many cakes in relation to the number of laps I’ve swum.
- Have a fun marriage… Our first idea was to have a Halloween wedding, but on second thought that might be a little silly? There are so many possibilities, but we’d like this to happen in 2009.
- Publish my first children’s book… Either as a collaboration with a writer, or on my own. It’s the illustration that I want to focus on.
- Finish two more books on body modification… The first one (on male genital mods) is 90% done, and the second one (more general interest) is 10% done. This is an easy goal.
- Launch my new company and get it on its feet… After a year of just doing “whatever”, I’m looking forward to really getting back to work on something big.
- Go back to school… I don’t know for what yet — maybe jewelry (setting stones and such as I’d love to extend my art expression into this medium), maybe welding — but I feel like learning some new technical skills that I can’t easily teach myself from a book and experimentation.
I have other things I’d like to do — get a yurt and work on the Cape Breton Island homestead, buy a catamaran — but I think that my legal situation forces me to live my life a little more conservatively that I’d like, so these may not be reasonable goals for 2009.
On a more “serious” level, we have been thinking more and more about becoming foster parents as well… I’m sure those are feelings amplified because Nefarious has been on vacation for two weeks, but I really enjoy children and feel that I could do a great job at it and it would be really rewarding.
I read over my resolutions from previous years (“get fit” seems to be recurring as I do it, and then lapse, and repeat), and I think I have about a 50% success rate on my resolutions in general. I think I’ve been much more realistic this year.
