More Than Meets The Eye

In more ways than one, it's more than meets the eye. 

'Ronacation

I never heard back from my HUM on whether or not I'd be able to work from home.  I think some of that may be me inadvertently pissing her off.  We've both talked about people taking advantage of the system we work in.  For instance, if you're a close contact you can choose to follow our new guidelines.  Those are the getting a  temp check twice a day, even when you're not working, and getting an instant test every day.  If you choose not to do that, then you have to sit out for two weeks.  Well, we've had nurses that have been close contacts that have chosen to get their 'Ronacation (a vacation that's paid for because it's created by having exposure to the coronavirus) instead of going through some easy to follow safety measures and coming in to help out.  

Useless Wastes of Money

So I have purchased several new toys.  To be honest, these are all complete wastes of money and I'm not here standing up tall and saying that I'm spent my money wisely or purchased something that will make my life better.

Nope.  I just wasted some money, far too much money on one, on things that make me smile.

On each item I justified it to myself just before purchase and it seamed reasonable at the time.  In retrospect I wasn't so much getting reasons to buy them, I was pushing down my financial responsible side that was saying loud and clear "YOU DO NOT NEED THIS".

I think that part of me, the financial responsible side of me, is weak.  It had far to much help in the past.  In the past it was hardly ever a decision to make.  I simply didn't have the money to make purchases like this.  Sure, I wanted the techy toys since I got my Voltron action-figure/toy when I was a little boy, but I also recognized that they were wastes of money.  I guess it's kind of like wearing a cast.  Your broken body part can't support itself, so the cast does that job.  Once the cast is removed your body part is used to NOT supporting itself and needs work so that it can do it's job again.

In that way, my cast was removed when I got this job and I skipped going to physical therapy.

So my purchases were, in order of purchase, a Roku 3, a Kindle Voyage, and a Microsoft Surface Pro 4.  The Roku 3 is a video streaming device that connects to the television.  Think Netflix.  The Kindle Voyage is the Cadillac of ebook readers from Amazon.  The Surface Pro 4 is a tablet/laptop.

Getting Healthy

When I graduated high school I weighed about 220 pounds.  I remember hearing everyone saying that they'd love to have the body they had in high school and thinking to myself that I'd never dream of the same thing... I'd get my body into better shape and keep it that way.

I'd also be married in a couple years, have a big house, two loving children, drive a sports car to work read as many books as possible and....

Like all those other dreams, my 'fit' body never materialized.  Now at nearly 40, I'm wishing I had the body that I had in High School.  I'm sure you've heard of the 'Freshman Fifteen' referring to the fifteen pounds that many freshman put on when they go to college.  Well... I had the 'Freshman Forty'.  That's right... I ballooned up to over 260 pounds.

While it's not a goal to return to 260 pounds, I'd certainly like to be 'down' to that weight again.  You see in the 20 plus years since high school my weight has continued to grow and grow.  My 'high' point came several years ago when I was tipping the scales at closer to 320.  I didn't make any specific changes then, but I did lose my sweet tooth.  I just stopped enjoying loads and loads of sweets.  I DO like an occasional cookie or piece of cake, but that's it.  I can no longer gorge myself on sweets.  I'd much rather eat a good sandwich.  In addition to cutting out most sweets I refocused on what 'full' meant.

I Love A Good Video Game... sigh

I love a good video game.  Or... at least I used to.  I guess I still do, but much like I love to go to art museums, it's just something that I'll love from afar from now on.  It's one of the most bitter irony's of having a job.  You see I used to want to play games all the time but just couldn't afford the new ones.  Now that I can afford them... well I just don't have the time to do so.

In the first half of this year I bought maybe 3 or 4 games and those were through the 'Humble Bundle' program.  If you've never heard of the Humble Bundle, it's a system that bundles up games (mostly from independent studios) and then let's you name your own price.  The majority of the proceeds then go to various charities instead of the game studio.  One bundle I bought included 5 games that cost $79.99 if purchased individually.  I paid $10.  It seems like a great deal, but at the time I still had to worry over the decision for a day or so as I really couldn't afford to spend $10 on any games... no matter how good of a deal it was.

The game that I played the most was Team Fortress 2.  I had purchased this way back in 2007 and in my mind is one of the most fun games on the computer.  It's a first person shooter that lets you select between 9 classes of characters.  But where most games go for hyper realism, TF2 goes for comedy.  The characters are all drawn from a 1950's style and have ridiculous weapons.  The game has survied for this many years by constantly updating it. Over the years they've added new game modes, new weapons and even new purely decorative hats to the game.  Yes... I said hats.  A few years back they made the game free to play, and started letting people buy the extra weapons and hats.  They've made more money since offering the game up for free compared to selling the game for $20.

There are things, and there are Things

I finally got to play a video game the other week.   Playing video games used to take up a lot of my time.  I couldn't afford many games so whenever I bought one I played through it with a vigor normally saved for life saving measures.  I'd don my headset so that I could fully immerse myself into whatever virtual world would consume me and try to block out the real world.

One of the problems though was that my headset was pretty old and frankly pretty bad.  It was a very 'tacticool' headset from Logitech with a 'letherette' band that surrounded my ears and went around the back of my head.   But at it's core it wasn't anything more than the standard circular ear pieces that sat over your ears.

As such it didn't do much to block out the sounds of the real world.  Oh it looked cool, and if I'm honest it wasn't bad when I got it.  Gaming headsets hadn't really come into their own yet and it had the two features I wanted at the time... an attached microphone and a volume control dial.

Well after years of use and abuse, it finally gave up any semblance of being a useful attachment to my computer.  The left speaker had an incredibly annoying crackling noise in it.  The 'letherette' ear coverings had a crack in it which made it almost painful to wear for more than a few minutes.  The volume dial got so dirty and corroded that it was a major undertaking to change.  The volume slider was difficult to move and if it was in anything bu the perfect position it would eliminate the sound in one or even both speakers.  It seems that the only position it really wanted to be in was at full blast volume... which made the crackling left speaker horrible.

Distractions

Umm... yeah.  I hate it when I make promises to myself and don't follow through on them.  It's worse when I do it publicly.  I obviously didn't get to the friend's bios.  I didn't get an updated outline.  I didn't get to start the writing process.

Truth be told, it was a combination of not feeling inspired and being distracted.   The lack of inspiration isn't surprising as my interest in (and fear of) doing this waxes and wanes.  I'm hoping that once the ground work is laid that I'll be able to bypass this reason for not writing.

But no matter what happens distractions will always be something that can derail my best laid plans.  And since I've gone on and on about inspirations, I figured I might as well open this door and talk a bit about distractions as well.