Feeling sexy

As promised, here's a picture of me from earlier today in my costume. I ended up winning a prize (a Starbucks gift card) for "most creative". I decided to leave the costume on for the rest of the day and to wear it when I take Rece out trick or treating tonight. Hope you enjoy the photo!

Edit: I posted larger versions on my site.

This entry brought to by a weirdo transvestite.

Trick or Treat!

I just had to post about the costume that I'll be wearing to work today - it'll be total transvestite! I'll be wearing a dress, makeup (lipstick, eye shadow, and whatever else Laurie at work wants to put on my face to make me look really vamped out), a purse, and my hair will be in pigtails. The jury is still out on whether or not I'll be wearing panty hose, but we'll see when the time comes.

Trust me, there should be plenty of pictures, so check back later today or tomorrow to see.

This entry brought to you by my filthy mass of meat and hair.

Like the Weather

This morning I was listening to some music while sitting at my desk, copying files from our old server to our new one. I queued up 10,000 Maniac's Like the Weather and went into my head for a little while; thinking of days past (like when the song originally came out) and also of how much I actually enjoy the weather at this time of the year in SoCal. This summer was too hot for me, which led to my wanting to stay indoors far too much. Now that it's cooled off and there are actually clouds in the sky, the urge to get outdoors has hit.

The last 2 weekends I've gone hiking with friends and, in about a week, I'll be going out to do it again. Geocaching has provided me with an added interest in getting out on the trails and communing with nature. My body has been craving the twinge of muscle burn received by walking up inclines and over long distances. This autumn and winter, I plan to treat my body to a buffet of physical activities.

This entry brought to you by lactic acid. Feel the burn.

Screaming banshee

My friend Staci Ann sent me this e-card yesterday and I found it very entertaining. So I thought I'd drop in here and put up a link to it so y'all can check it out. So, uh, check it out!

This entry brought to you by the undead.

Do I still get to be the janitor?

It appears that I'm still in a state of flux since my divorce started. While I'm not technically divorced yet (paperwork is pending), I am separated and trying to deal with being single (with a kid). What really sucks is that by getting married at 18, I completely skipped the single adult youth stage where you figure out how to handle mature adult relationships. Not only did I really not know what I wanted in a partner, I jumped into a relationship that in hindsight I probably shouldn't have. On top of that, I ended up spending a good portion of 14 years trying to make it work. The one thing that made it all worthwhile was the birth of my son - otherwise I would have considered it a total waste of time.

So here I am at the age of 33, pretty much unprepared for the single life. I know who I am now, what I do and don't like as far as boundaries and preferences go. What I don't know is what type of woman is right for me. Who I might find attractive physically, might be bad for me relationally as far as their personality. A gal that's a great friend, may not be the right person for me in the long-term for a variety of reasons. I feel like I've been thrown a tennis ball, a bowling pin, and a chainsaw and then asked to juggle them - and I don't know how to juggle.

Most of the folks that I know seem to consider me a good person; I'd like to think so as well. What I'm dreading (and seem to have already done) is to get involved with somebody and then end up hurting them. I know this is probably what I would have had to go through back in my early adulthood, but at my age it seems a little pathetic - at least to me it does. Most single women my age already went through all that garbage and, if they've never been married (or even if they have), are looking for a man to settle down with. The prospects of dating much younger women seems shallow and not really something I'm willing to put myself through - even though it might prove to be fun for a little while.

So here I am, a divorced (with a kid) 33 year old man, not knowing exactly what I want, but knowing I want something. Now I have to try and figure out how to navigate the sea of relationships rather late in the game and I'm concerned about the clouds on the horizon and the choppy waters ahead. Man overboard?

This entry was held over a cliff and told to repent or perish.

There I was, there I was... IN the Congo...

Yesterday was a lovely day at work. We had to upgrade our servers to Windows 2003 Server and migrate services from our old Domain Controller to a different (newer - faster) one. We had an awesome consultant helping us through some of the process, which was much needed. Altogether, I worked around 13.5 hours yesterday, pretty much non-stop.

Due to me not having a car, my boss was nice enough to drop me off at my apartment. This was just after 12:30 am. So all that happened after getting into my apartment was getting out of my work clothes, throwing on a t-shirt and shorts and then straight to bed.

Back to work at 8:30 am, we had a few oddball glitches to sort out after we had our staff logging back on the network this morning. Nothing too bad, most of the problems were related to DNS issues, which was easily rectified.

The time is fast approaching when we're completely migrated off our old Novell 5.0 server. I have to say that I'll miss the dependability of it, but I won't miss being the only I.T. guy in the building who knows how to administer it. It's really too bad that Novell fell flat on it's face by clinging too tightly to their old "we are the master of company networks" thinking. They should have kept up with the way technology and networks were migrating and develop a functional administration GUI so that I.T. folks weren't so turned off by it. Such a shame.

Today was spent working non-stop again. Now I'm headed home! Woo hoo!

This entry brought to you with peanuts and lots of green corn.

It's madness, I tell you!

It's Tuesday and I'm in good spirits, despite being a little tired and it being unusually warm in my office. Hmm... I think I'll go grab a cup of coffee and adjust the thermostat. Be right back...

...that's better! Thanks for waiting.

A funny thing occurred to me a couple of days ago. It seems that I'm still stuck in the mode of shopping and cooking for 3 people. I guess that after doing it for so long, I developed a habit. I need to cut down on this, as it's a waste of money - not to mention a waste of food.

Rece is having difficulties in school. He's very smart and tests high, yet doesn't seem to be self-motivating and thus unable to be productive at school. For example, he was given an assignment that should have taken approximately 90 minutes to complete. He was given 120 minutes to complete it, but the only thing he managed to get done at all was put his name on the paper. This is extremely frustrating to me, since I don't have a clue about how to handle this. I can monitor his homework, help him practice his spelling words, answer questions when he's stuck on something, and assist him on projects when needed - but he's on his own when he's at school. How does a parent help his child to learn to be self-motivated? I seriously don't know how to handle this one and I'm frustrated at both him and myself about it.

Work is still a bit stressful lately, but I did manage to do everything I was asked to do last week. I had to put off a couple of things, but that's time-management for ya. Last night we had something strange happen on the network. For some reason we had massive traffic on the internal network that caused nearly everything to grind to a halt. We were lucky that this happened at around 4:45 pm, so staff just went ahead and left for home. After 2 and 1/2 hours of scratching our heads, my boss and I got things running right again. We never did find out what was the cause, which left us uneasy. Hopefully it was just a one-time glitch with a network switch or something. If it repeats, we'll have our hands full.

This entry was a series of random thoughts from yours truly.

Cheese, Gromit!

On Saturday afternoon, Rece, Shannon and I went out to see Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. I must say that I haven't laughed so hard and often at a movie since, well, heck I don't remember!

This movie is a must see for everybody! There's action, romance, comedy, innuendo, and an angry mob - what more could anybody want? A golden carrot you say? Yep, it's got that, too!

Shannon found the rabbits to be hysterical. I enjoyed the innuendo and inside jokes (for Wallace & Gromit fans). Rece enjoyed seeing "Hutch" (the character pictured on the bottom-left) act like Wallace.

Take your kids or significant other (or go by yourself!) and see this one before it leaves the theaters. It's Wallace & Gromit at their best - just more of them than ever before!

This entry brought to you by cheese!

Checking in

Since my last entry the following has happened:

• The bike I bought for Rece on his birthday was stolen - 6 days later. We'll get him another one, but I'm so mad about it getting stolen. Bastards.
• Shannon got sick with what I can only assume was the same thing I came down with. I insisted that she stay at my place so I could help take care of her. She's doing pretty good now. We both are at the tail-end of it. Just sniffles and the occasional coughing.
• My copy of Dungeon Siege 2 arrived, allowing Quinn and I to adventure online once again. The game isn't as good as we had hoped it would be, but it's still fun and an entirely new adventure, so it should hold our attention for a little while longer.
• Quinn and I are planning to go Geocaching next weekend. We haven't done much together lately, so it'll be cool to go hiking on the hunt for tupperware and ammo cans again.

So there you have it, almost 2 weeks of updates. Aren't you lucky?

This entry brought to you through the corns on my toes!