Jaws of Steel II

Well, the braces have been in for a few days and my face is finally starting to feel something close to tolerable.  The tension in the front has eased off quite a bit and I don’t know if this means the teeth have actually or if I’ve just developed a tolerance for the discomfort.

My next appointment is on October the 30th, and if having the braces adjusted feels anywhere near as bad as having them installed I’m glad it’s so far off.  In the mean time I’ll be preparing for a couple of extractions (a wisdom tooth and an impacted canine).  It should be interesting to see how they manage pulling teeth when I have a mouth full of steel, but they wouldn’t be pushing for me to have the teeth pulled right now if they didn’t know what they were doing, right? FNORD

More as more develops.

So, uhm, yeah. I trust them. I really do. Just not very much.

Jaws of Steel

So as many of you know I’ve been having a lot of dental work done. There’s been a lot done from fillings to root canals and there’s still a lot more to go. Last week I went to the orthodontist to begin work on the biggest project:  Braces.

There’s a lot of work I need in that area because not only does my bite not line up, my right canine is impacted. I openly admit that I don’t know much about dentistry other than the fact that teeth are what you use to grind your food up before you swallow it. Therefore, I won’t try to give some fancy  explaination about the jacked up situation of my teeth by using terms that I either had to look up or only happen to know because they were explained to me by my dentist and orthodontist.

The situation looks bad enough on the outside, but it begins to look even worse when viewed through x-rays. In the words of my dentist, my case is a very complex one, but it is workable. 30 months from now and very possibly a couple of oral surgeries later I might finally be ready for an implant (and possibly two or more if some of the existing teeth don’t want to move.)

Today little plastic ring thingies were placed between my rear molars to space them out so that some kind of metal bands could be wrapped around them. Those will be some kind of support for the rest of the steel. There’s only a mild discomfort right now, but I imagine it is going to get worse.

Next Tuesday is the date I am scheduled to go in and get the actual braces installed.

Pictures? Hah. Yeah right.

Tattoo: What, When, Where

I’ve been planning on getting a tattoo for a while.  I keep coming back to the same few basic ideas.  I am certainly getting The Holy Chao, but the rendition of the art is the only question remaining.  Do I use one of the many available on the web or do I create my own?  This question is still one I must tackle along with the ultimate decision of where I will have it placed.

Today, though, FriskyKitty was showing me her new hardback copy of The Principia Discordia and I saw a bit of artwork I’ve never seen before.  It was a depiction of Eris and I immediately fell in love with it.

Now the only question is, where will I have this awesome piece of art placed on my body?

So, uhm, suggestions?

Public Intox - Self Humiliation

Friday night after class I went out with Groundhog and his wife, Kat, a Buddhist and his girlfriend, and some other people I knew (most from work.)  The drinks came pretty regularly and I proceeded to down them on a mostly empty stomach.

Needless to say I found myself trashed fairly quickly and continued to make things worse for myself.  Most of the night is pretty blurry, and I do not remember much but I do remember saying a lot of shit I would never say while sober.  I was making a total ass of myself and I know that happens when I get that drunk.  I normally control my drinking because I hate The Evil Side of Fuse!, Yog Sothoth.  The demon I keep trapped inside is normally pretty well contained.

As Groundhog said, I was in very rare form that night.  It’s best I probably do not remember most of the bullshit that spewed from my mouth that night.  This is my second day after that night and I still feel sick.  I still feel hung over.  I just spend 10 minutes on the elliptical and I’m about to try out my new bicycle.  I’m going to redirect the humiliation I feel into working harder on the projects and self improvement I’ve been ignoring as of late.

Maybe by keeping myself productive the demon I work so hard to keep inside won’t feel the need to get out like he did the other night.  For a while I have felt his eagerness to show his ugly face, and if I’m not careful I might allow him to habitually make an appearance.  Let’s not let that happen, m’kay?

So, uhm, yeah.

(Oh, and uh, if you happen to be privy to anything said or done that night, please, keep it to yourself.  kthnxbai.)

Seedless

When I was a child I used to hate the seeds that you found in oranges, watermelons, and grapes.  They were just a major inconvenience when trying to enjoy a piece of fruit.  For the longest time this put me off to many types of fruit that were not organized enough to keep their seeds in the core, where they belonged.

Now days I’m wanting to grow my own grape vines, and without seeds in the grapes this means I’m going to have to go buy vines at a nursery somewhere.  That really doesn’t bother me, even though I prefer to grow everything I grow from a seed.

What bothers me is that as an adult, I’ve started to realize that these food stuffs SHOULD have seeds in them.  The watermelons not having seeds just doesn’t seem right.  Oranges and grapes have been seedless forever, and I guess I’ve just grown used to it.  But since when have watermelons been seedless? Has this been going on for a while and I just noticed it?

Is this some kind of conspiracy to keep people buying their produce rather than growing their own or do the famers really just care about what their customers want?  Do they really think they’re helping you by saving you the trouble of having to spit out a seed?

A small amount of research indicated to me that all of these fruit (and possibly others) are in some way a mutation.  Seedless grapes are all grown from cuttings of other seedless vines.  Seedless watermelons are essentially mules of the watermelon world where the offspring come in three varieties; regular seeded, seedless, and a sort of mixed seedless/seeded type from which next year’s plants are grown.  Naval oranges are all derived from one original mutant tree and each tree from that point on was spawned asexually from a mutant parent.

They’re feeding us mutants.  I’m not sure how I feel about that.

So, uhm, yeah.

August Agenda - I Need A Vacation

I’ve not been sleeping well.  This isn’t exactly news.  It’s the norm for me.  I operate on average with less than 4 hours of sleep per night.  Ever since high-school I’ve been something of a night owl and except for the few years I spent on the night and evening shifts at work I have generally been the sort of person that just accepts the fact that sleep is a luxury I am not allowed to live with.

My attendance at work has never been stellar.  I would have probably been shit-canned a long time ago if I weren’t in a union.  The rules laid down at work are very specific on what is tolerable and what is not and I push the envelope so far it normally arrives with postage due.

To make matters worse, I have been neglecting house work and video games.  I have a paid WoW account that I never log into, I have Diablo II characters which I log into only long enough to keep them from being deleted, and I haven’t powered on my Wii or 360 in over a month.  A few weeks ago in the midst of heavy overtime I even missed a few days of class because the only thing I wanted to do was come home and be lazy while the robot mowed the lawn.

Now I’m faced with a few more tasks.  I’ve dedicated myself to cleaning out my garage and computer room by getting rid of everything I don’t want or need.  I’m determined to have this house looking spotless, tidy, uncluttered, and devoid of all the junk that takes up precious space.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been in the middle of reorganizing my finances and as of yesterday that was final.  For the first time in years I will now have an acceptable amount of disposable income each month and it couldn’t come at a better time since the dental work I’m having done is entering into the stages where it could start to get expensive.

On my immediate agenda are a few items which require immediate attention.  Storms earlier this year did some minor damage to my roof which will I will have to have fixed and that will be one of the first things I work on getting done right along with buying a bicycle.

Tomorrow, Friday, I have class.  Saturday and Sunday will be spent lounging around the house and setting up a new computer that my father purchased online this past Sunday.  It’s a very sweet quad core system and naturally it will only increase my desire to spend money on my own computing habits.

On my list of things to buy:

1. Roof repairs
2. Bicycle
3. New wireless N router with 1 gigabit Ethernet
4. Ethernet enabled 1 terabyte drive
5. New monitor for my PC
6. Sausage

There are other items as well but those are the items that require immediate attention.  The Mac Pro is still on the list as well as equipment to help me with my plans on pimping out my yard with cool shit like flower beds and fruit trees. FNORD

Most of the stuff I will only buy once I have saved enough money, so progress will be slow.  For the time being I will just work on things a little bit at a time.  Having said that I think it goes without saying that my offworld vacation will have to wait for another year.  Tickets for transport on a charter Starship are difficult enough to get and they can be hellishly expensive.  It doesn’t help that I’m out of vacation time at work.

So, uhm, yeah. The flowers will be plastic, of course.

Manga of Fuse!

Okay, so I created one of those silly manga icons. I’m kind of thinking that I’m not going to wear it out in public.

Unwired

I have spent the past few days in a slightly different mindset than usual.  Since I’ve been in the middle of redoing all of my finances and getting myself squared away I’ve also taken it upon myself to sort through stuff in my house that I want to get rid of.  ( NOTE: If you want old computer junk, NOW IS YOUR CHANCE…)

Throwing away old things has never really been easy for me. I’m something of a pack-rat and in recent months my various losses have left me a little unconcerned with most of my physical possessions.  Ideally I’d love to live my life in this house with a somewhat minimalistic decore.  I’m getting there, but I’m working my way from the small to the large.

Since I dropped out of Blog365 (Sorry Rachelskirts, that’s just the kind of fail I’m made of) I’ve written very little. No blogging. Little twitting. No novel writing. Very little of anything. I’ve even been paying very little attention to the wired world from my iPhone at work. No Dot, no Digg, and even though I have both AIM and Twitterrific on my phone I haven’t really been logging into them.

So does this mean that I’m entering a new era of disconnectedness? No. I can’t honestly say I see myself drifting too far from my digital identity. After all, I’ve been online quite a long time and I know a lot of people exclusively online. I just expect that my time spent in front of a computer in general has slowly become so minimal that my digital presence has suffered and I really don’t miss it all that much.

In the end though, I’ll still be here tweeting, blogging, and posting images to flickr. I promise not to go insanely huge amounts of time without some kind of update through one of the three mediums. As you no doubt know by now this site, JaceFuse.com gives you a quick peek at all of those mediums. On the side bar (currently to the right [subject to change without notice]) you will find both my FlickR and Twitter feeds. Couple that with blog entries and my many daily logins to MySpace (thanks to my iPhone) I’m an easy person to keep track of.

Do know, though, that I have been sketching out some ideas in my head (and on paper) concerning my novel. Writing a book with such a convoluted time line really has been difficult for me. I don’t consider myself an outstanding writer to begin with, and relying totally on creativity doesn’t help much when I’m intentionally creating a story that is supposed to be both twisted and seemingly self-contradictory. The novel is still a top priority.

Right now I’m about to get ready for class.  I’ve actually missed a few classes lately and I’m not very happy about that.  I’ll be focusing more attention on class, though.  No need to miss any more.  I’ve been doing so good (in my weight loss) and I would hate to interrupt my progress now just because I’ve become apathetic about everything else in my life.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to shower.  You can contact me me through the normal channels if there is any old junk you might want to inquire about.

So, uhm, yeah.

Another Perpetual Motion Machine

I don’t see any reason why this should work.

Preparing For the Party

This week was fairly busy, I would say. Fortunately the place had not had much chance to get messed up since I cleaned it well last weekend.  I had to get ready for a party though, so not only did I have to straight up what had been messed up but I also had to go buy things for the party; Paper plates, plastic cups, and of course sausage!

I got that finished before 5 and shortly after that Friskykitty showed.  Making her the first to show.  Last to show were the Groundhog and his Kat. Of those of there who tweet were @Blindsquirrel42, @Yamez4u, @AlericB, @Friskykitty82, and @ShortCircuit. I don’t think I tweeted too much last night, except to mention that every body really seemed to be enjoying the sausage.

What can I say?  I really am the Sausage Man.

I would like to thank everyone who showed up.  It was really a great experience having all of these friends (and brother and cousin) together at one time.  Most of them know each other but we rarely ever get together in such a large group.  I often how much fun I can have with a group this large.

I’ll have to do it again soon.

New Printer

I have been without a good printer for a long time so I decided to finally give in and buy a printer and scanner combo.  I went with a HP 6200 series because it had network connectivity allowing me to use it over the network without having to connect it to any one specific machine.  This works out really well for me since I do plan on using my laptop mostly for writing and the desktop that I plan to buy (a Mac Pro) for everything else.

A few test prints show that the printer actually does pretty good with photo quality and black and white and it is reasonably quick.

Picture follows…

Boredom and Fatigue

I came right home, cleaned up, chatted with a few people, then went to bed.  I woke up a few minutes ago but will be returning to bed here shortly.

I ended up skipping class because I’ve been way too tired for anything with all of the overtime we’ve been working at work.  Fortunately for me we’re off this weekend so I’ll be going to class Saturday to make up for missing today. I just hope I can get some energy soon, I have way too much to do this weekend to waste every day coming home and sleeping off the side effects of life’s bullshit.

Family Visits and Union Meetings

My cousin and a friend of hers came down to Tennessee this past weekend.  They spend most of their time hanging out with my parents.  My parents are just cool like that.  After that, they came and spent some time here at my place.  It was your typical Saturday night for me.  Sitting on the back deck while watching the robot mow the lawn and firing up the grill.

Overall it was a fun evening, but since they obviously aren’t the night owl types they went to bed fairly early (about 2am).  This meant I too ended up in bed and I woke up early enough to go ahead and go to the union meeting.

The meeting sucked as usual. It was dull and nothing was really said that would accomplish anything.  It lasted about an hour.  After it was over I went back to the Groundhog’s house and sat and shot the shit for a few.

I came home to take care of some things but they went by quicker than I expected.  So now I’m sitting here bored.

So, uhm, yeah.

Yard Work Sucks

Yard work is a real pain in the ass.  Not only does it suck to have to weed eat in the first place but it is even worse when your weeds have vastly overgrown and your weed-eater is broken.  As I have already mentioned, I purchase a new weed-eater and did away with the only excuse I had to not tidy up my yard.

Even with the new weed eater the extra tall weeds were annoying to mess with, but after a few days I finally have things looking good.  I ate the weeds, cleaned up most of the mess, and swept all of the junk off of the porch.  I even threw away some junk that has been laying around on my front porch and back deck.

Between the unusually high amount of work on the yard and the house cleaning I’ve been doing the past week this house looks really great.  That’s just as well since my cousin and one of her friends is coming to visit this evening. I like having company, I don’t like having a big old mess here.  I guess that makes at least a couple of not so bad things about the past week.  Everything else about it sucked, though.

So, uhm, yeah.

The Website is Down

I won’t write a whole lot about this because some things are just better seen with your own two eyes.

So just shut up, sit back, and WATCH THIS.

Weeds and Echos

First let me say that my yard has been the most horrid display of uncaring this year compared to all years before.  Most of it I will blame on laziness but the parts concerning weeds I can very easily blame on m piece of shit weed-eater.

No longer willing to let not having the proper tools be a valid excuse, I put off the meeting in Hermitage with the Bluish Green Lizard People.  Instead I went to Home Depot to acquire a new weed chopping device hoping to avoid both Lizard People and Hairless Monkey Men.

I entered, picked a reasonably high priced Plant-Life Execution Tool, interacted with a Hairless Ape tending the check out counter, and came home.  There were no Lizard People anywhere to be seen.

I spent a good portion of the evening doing yard work.  Mostly weed eating and push mowing the sections that needed it.  I ran the Robot in the back yard and he seemed to be in a rather good mood.  He ate most of the grass in section C and didn’t even complain about bumps or snags.

The new weed eater really is nice.  Hopefully it will not suffer the fate of the last two.  My first one was battery powered and it went tits up in my hands and then caught on fire right before my eyes.  The second one was a regular gas powered piece of crap.

This is my third one and if I burn it up somehow then I’m saying “screw the yard”.  The Ancient Illuminated Lizard People won’t mind if my weeds are overgrown. They might, however, ask me if there are any which they can smoke. FNORD

So, uhm, yeah. Stay away from the wild lettuce.  It doesn’t really work. 

Robots, Weed Eaters, Headaches

The robot played out in the yard for a little while today while I messed with the weed-eater attempting to get it to run.  I was finally able to get it started just enough to almost be useful.  There is clearly something wrong with the choke or throttle, though I’m not sure which.
This is where I lay the smack down on white space. Huah!
Either way, I was able to to find just the exact right place for the throttle to be with the exact right place for the choke to be in order for the whole thing to actually start and run.  Moving the throttle would instantly kill the engine.  Putting the choke on either full or half would kill the engine.  It had to be stuck right between the two in order to stay running.  If I moved the choke to run it would seize up instantly.
This too.
I used it in this ridiculous fashion just long enough to take care of the worst stuff around my front bushes then I put the stupid thing away.
This three.
I’ve had a terrible headache since I went to the dentist but it goes through phases.  I wish it would chill out.  I’m not scheduled to go back to the dentist until the end of August.
Fnord my ass.
So, uhm, yeah. (FNORD)

Data Recovery Fail

Groundhog’s PC died a few months ago.  He recently replaced his PC with a Macbook Pro, but his dead hard drive on the PC contained a lot of lost data.  In an effort to restore some of his digital life I attempted to undelete his data off of a back-up HD which had previously been used to move a great deal of his data around before the failure happened.

I thought I had recovered about 75% of his material, but when I got the backups over to his house this weekend we discovered that the recovery had failed and all of the data was totally corrupt.  As a result, the reality that all of his stuff was probably gone began to sink in.

All wasn’t lost though, some pictures have turned up in other places on the web and most of his important financial information is slowly being reconstructed anyway.  That leaves just his music, and I was able to give him a lot of his music back from backups I had once stored on my old Dell PC.

Lesson reitterated.  Keep backups.  Seriously.

So, uhm, yeah.

Dentist

After a little gas I was okay with needles. Well, maybe not okay… but I didn’t faint.

Rut Ro Raggy

Actually, I hate Scooby Doo.  There was some point early in my life where I found Scooby Doo fascinating.  I wasn’t even doing drugs, but I probably should have been.  Now days, it seems like few things fascinate me.   None of that has anything to do with this blog.

 …

I bought the spark plug and the weed-eater still will not start.  My yard looks totally uncared for.  I really should do something about that but until I can get this stupid thing started or replaced there isn’t a whole lot I can do about it.

Sometimes I would really just like to pour gasoline all over the edges and just burn the shit down.  It would use the same amount of gas and be a whole lot quicker.

 …

 I bought deck furniture.  It’s taken months of blabbing on about not having anything to sit on but now that pesky problem is solved.  Unfortunately it cost me what I was going to spend on a new weed-eater.  Maybe I can get mine started and I won’t need to buy a new one.  Or maybe I’ll get pissed off, break it in an insane fit of anger, and end up having to buy a new one anyway.

 …

Still no word about people falling out of the sky.  (Not officially, anyway.)

So, uhm, yeah.

Nothing About People Who Go Splat

I spent a bit of time looking for information about the mystery pancake and could not find anything at all.  It seems to be the opinion of several people I know that There Was No Skydiver fnord.

I personally cannot say for sure.  I did see a helicopter landed right off of Purple Heart though. I should have taken a picture of it.  I really could not identify the helicopter.  I’m not an expert on helicopters but I do recognize a few different ones and it was not any of the ones I’m familiar with.

It didn’t transform, nor did the ambulances.  There wasn’t a huge robot battle.  Bombs weren’t falling from the sky.  Space ships weren’t visible on the horizon.  The sky wasn’t burning to black.  There wasn’t some dead guy laying in the street.

That doesn’t make me crazy. I know what I saw. I believe Short Circuit is telling me what he saw accurately and truthfully. So that can only mean one thing.

“They” cleaned it up and withheld information from the press.  It never happened until they release an official report, and there obviously hasn’t been one yet.

Oh, that, and we’re under an invasion.

Web Server and Sky Divers

A long time ago @ShortCircuit dropped a very large server system off at my house.  It sat in one of my back rooms taking up space for what seems like an eternity.  Finally he decided to take it away if I could help him move it.  So I did and we moved it out of here.

When we were done moving it he spotted some skydivers in the sky and asked me if I had just seen that.  I asked “seen what?”  He then told me that one of them had just plummeted to the ground.  I thought to myself “huh — we’ll hear about that tomorrow.”

I left there to head over to my mom and dad’s house.  I needed to take care of their rats while they are gone.  Very near their house back just off of Purple Heart a bit I saw a bunch of police and rescue vehicles, and a helicopter blocking the road into that subdivision.

This was all just about in the right direction from where we saw the skydivers in the sky.  It made sense.  I’m pretty sure that’s what I saw.  I didn’t see the skydiver, though.  Neither in the air nor on the ground.

So maybe there is no skydiver.

If there is, we’ll hear about it in the paper tomorrow. FNORD

So, uhm, yeah. There was a skydiver. Seriously.

Day One

This is probably going to be a strange weekend for me.  I woke up shortly after noon and have proceeded to do little more than shower, eat, and do a load of laundry.  I replied to a text message someone sent me earlier but haven’t really be trying to get in touch with anyone.  I can easily see myself doing very little outside of the house.

I’m in a fairly rotten mood and it doesn’t seem to allow me to want to do anything.  I’m not hungry, and I’m not about to start stuffing my face to make myself feel better.  I should probably get ready to go get that stupid spark plug, but paying the Wal~Martians a visit is out of the question at the moment.

I think I need a drink or five.

So, uhm, yeah.