I’ve discovered that I can do two things simultaneously pretty well. Three things, and things begin to drop out of my mental queue. Four things, and I start faltering on bits and pieces of virtually everything. Five things, and I might as well not be doing anything at all.

Recently, I’ve managed to focus down to two things, and I’m having a really good time with ’em. I’ve got two other things that I’ve had to essentially force into the periphery, but it’s ok, because I’m not really critical on one of ’em, and on the other, there’s not much to do. As long as things stay that way, I’m good to go. If they change, and either of them suddenly becomes as important as either of my two primary tasks, I’m fucked.

Still, I’m definitely enjoying work, and I’m actually *really* enjoying the fact that Ei-Nyung’s been working late, because it gives me some time when no one else is around (or few people, anyway) to actually get stuff done without distraction. So that’s nice. The downside is that Mobius is alone the next two weeks, but I think he’ll be ok – I’ve been actively playing with him, trying to tire him out more, so though I’m sure it’s just a drop in the bucket, hopefully he’s at least having some fun. Maybe Monte will come over tomorrow.

Mmm. Property tax. Fun fun. Check’s going into the mail tomorrow. Gotta love it.

wowzers. Quite a haul this year. Got a PSP, two Calphalon pans, The Incredibles, America’s Test Kitchen Live!, and best of all, three copies of my 24 hour comic, printed up in book form.

The pans are great, The Incredibles is hilarious, the ATK book is excellent, and the comics are a wonderful keepsake.

The PSP, though, is the surprise of the bunch for me. I knew, once Lumines was announced, that I’d have to have it. Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s games are system-sellers for me, and Lumines is no disappointment. Fundamentally relatively simple, but very fulfilling, and just a great experience all around. Now, the question is what’s next? Untold Legends isn’t supposed to be all that great, but three people at work have it, and are looking for a fourth to play with. Wipeout Pure looks really fun, and Metal Gear Ac!d looks like it could be quite interesting. Any of the EA games would be cheaper (for me), but neither of the two currently available really blows me away.

But yeah – the PSP’s a wonder – ergonomically, it’s everything the DS should have been but isn’t, and the screen is *gorgeous*. The speakers completely stink, but with headphones, the audio is quite good. The discs are curious – I expected they’d have a minidisc-like enclosure, but strangely, they’re actually open to the air. I’m worried that they’re going to get full of crapulence, and that having that cover is actually going to be worse than better. We’ll see, though. I’m definitely more impressed than I thought I would be, that’s for sure.

So. 29 years old, in a couple hours. Pretty odd, I think. I can’t say I really think of age, one way or another, with the exception that in my mind, I’m still ~26ish. So it’s a little odd to realize that I’m on the cusp of 30. Am I happy with what I’ve done? Do I think I’m where I’d be when I was say, 18 looking forward to 30?

I used to use thirty as a benchmark, because my dad was 30 when my parents had me.

I suppose next year, I’ll be able to figure out how different my perception was from reality. If I have to look at it now, I don’t think it’s that off – by next year, I expect to be more or less where I thought I’d be. Very different, in terms of employment, but apart from that? Well on my way.

… and so, back to square one. All three windows are leaking again. Mind you, the rain today was *insane*, but still. Not good news.

Gah. So the bedroom window still leaks – that’s sort of a given. But the living room windows were looking fine, and one of them still does. But the middle window had one single drip of water after last night’s bizarre weather, and as a result, “still leaks”.

Fuck.

It’s about as close as you can get to not leaking, but still be leaking. Literally, a single drop of water that hadn’t even fallen from the frame, but was hanging there when I checked the window. One drop. Argh.

It’s weird – I’ve got essentially … one main job, one secondary job which was one person’s main job before he quit, and essentially another fistful of *other* tasks to do that are essentially support for other people. AND I’m taking care of a coworker’s tasks while he’s out on a long-scheduled vacation that his manager didn’t know about, and had fully scheduled him for. Fun!

I suppose that’s what I’ve ended up doing at all my other jobs. At Sega, I was doing the work of at least three people, while also working two other jobs. At Fox Group, I didn’t do multiple people’s worth of work, but I did a huge variety of random stuff – enough so that it would have been difficult to find one person who could have done all the stuff I was doing. It’s just strange – I know a lot of people do a lot of different things at work, but I think that looking around, I’m definitely doing a wider variety of stuff than most. Which is good, and I enjoy it, with one exception:

If it were just the work, I think I’d really enjoy it. But because I’m essentially doing three people’s work right now, I’m beholden to a number of different managers, and schedules, and the *meetings* take up so much of my time, I’ve taken to actually scheduling chunks of time so that I can work on a single thing at once, without being rescheduled for other meetings. It’s *crazy*.

Entertaining, though, and fulfilling, so long as I can keep my head above water… 😛

Two things:

food.helava.com

and

… the housemates, Ei-Nyung & I all watched the last two episodes of MI-5 tonight. If you haven’t seen it, it’s essentially a spy thriller that originally aired on the BBC. Imagine Alias, without the ridiculousnes, with a hundred times more intelligent writing, and that’s more or less what you have. It’s topical, it’s interesting, and most of all, totally, totally engrossing. Maybe it’s the difference between 1 hour and 44 minute episodes (BBC = no commercials), but they pack *so* much content into a single show, it feels like you’re watching three or four regular American shows. That, and the end-of-season episode is astonishing. The kind of episode that it’s almost impossible to believe was shown with a several month break between episodes. A Sylvester Stallone, if you will.

So, of course now I’ve gotta go get the second season of MI-5, which is finally out on DVD.

If only the jackasses in Congress cared as much about…

…WMD, as supposedly, they do steroids.

…our troops dying in Iraq, as supposedly, they do Terri Schiavo.

…Kenneth Lay, as supposedly, they do Martha Stewart.

…the Environment, as supposedly, they do “Clear Skies.”

I could go on and on, but basically, I wish Congress would care about things that matter, instead of the trivial, inane versions of the things that matter.

It always strikes me as odd when Congress does one of these things like the baseball steroid thing, where they blah blah blah about how bad performance-enhancing drugs are, or when Bush talks about what a plague steroids are, etc. It just seems to me like finding a big problem, and grandstanding while going after the most pointless, petty incarnation of it.

Are drugs a problem? Yes. Are our nation’s problems with drugs going to be solved by going after these people? No. Hell, are BASEBALL’s problems going to be solved by this? Absolutely not. Yet, you get a bunch of Congress-people who can say that they were tough on drugs, blah blah blah.

I sometimes wonder how people can be so disengaged from our political process that they wouldn’t even bother to vote. I wonder why people have no faith in the system at all, then I see bullshit like this. Who fucking *cares* about this crap? If a bunch of people want to inject steroids into their butt so they can bulk up, I could care less. What I care about is that we have giant musclebound idiots playing a kids’ game, and getting paid millions of dollars to do so while teachers have to buy books for their classes, because the state can’t fund them anymore.

Then, there’s the media. I wonder if any of them remember 9/11, and how serious the media was taken then. Now? Michael Jackson all the time. Robert Blake. Scott Peterson. No one gives a fuck about Al Qaeda, bin Laden, Iraq, the war, the Middle East peace process, domestic economic woes, etc. Hell, even Bush’s Social Security bullshit is a smokescreen for what our real problems are, and a means to address a public, simple-minded non-fix to a real problem that his tax cuts have created.

Oh, and fuck you, Alan Greenspan, you miserable partisan asshole.

Hrh. So the Orkin guy who came out to give me a quote a week ago was a bald-faced liar. He told me that for the quoted price, that Orkin would take care of “proofing” the house, and getting rid of the rats. Instead, it turns out that Orkin simply tells you what you need to do, and you do it youself. Quite different than what he’d said, and I have no desire to pay $600/yr to have someone just set traps and empty them. If that was all I need to do, I’m glad to do that my own damn self.

Gah. So, fortunately, the guy who came out this morning was honest, told me what they would have done, and pointed out where the rats are coming in and out. So, Rod’s coming by Sunday to close up the roof vents (I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to inadvertently create a leak), and I’m gonna spend today plugging up some stuff in the crawl space, and setting traps. Fun. And by that, of course, I mean, “Not fun.”