deadlines

oh my god, i hate tight deadlines. always in college i'd get stuff done a week or a few days before the deadline so there was never last minute stress.
i just finished an assignment and was editing up to the last 10 minutes. i got it uploaded with 8 minutes to spare on the deadline. phew! what a rush. and not really in a good way. it wouldn't really do to miss a deadline on my second assignment.
ah well, it's done now. all i can do now is wait for feedback on stuff i got wrong. hopefully not that much. i spent ages going over it to make sure it was ok.

i kinda feel like i have loads to do and no time in which to do it. hmmm. i should make out a list. that will definitely help to de-abstractise things. :giggle: i just made up a word. it's amazing how this still entertains me :)

Yea. i think i'm tried. i get to the end of a paragraph and my brain just goes: stop, no thoughts here.

yea. i'm going to go now.

the evening news

i went to see bolt yesterday (well, technically it was two days ago, but well). i really enjoyed it, your typical disney movie: funny, emotional, very well animated. i love disney movies anyway.

i really shouldn't be updating my journal right now. i'm tired and need to go to bed, but i'm lazy and don't want to leave the warmth of the sitting room.

tomorrow is my last day at work. yeay. then i get to go home and see my parents and penelope_stone's house and fish. that will be good.

so yoshi won the battle of wills. we are just feeding him morio worms now, i did a bit of research and it is ok for them to be his staple, as long as they eat well and we dust them with vitamins and calcium. he's putting on a bit of weight now. he's a cute pudgy little lizard. (i feel like writing kawaii, but i will resist).

lordkilljoy is playing mass effect at the moment. it dosn't seem like a bad game. i don't think it has the theme / overall feel to keep me interested if i was playing, but it's fun watching him play. and i'm modelling one of the guns in 3ds max. it's going slowly, after an evening's work, i'm about half way though the modelling.

right. i have no energy left and my brain is mush.

valentines

I had a really good day yesterday, well after i got home from work, that is. lordkilljoy bought and cooked dinner for me (3 courses), and got me a beautiful rose. Dinner was delicious, we settled in to watch a movie after and finished up the evening in the pub discussing religion and politics. The religion part was interesting, but try as he may, lordkilljoy will never get me to care about politics. In fact, we have directly opposite views on politics. He thinks it is of vital importance to everyone in the country, and i think it is the greatest farce ever to have been invented. But anyway. He's suffering somewhat badly today from an over-indulgence in wine. I tried some and almost spit it out it tasted so foul. I really don't know how anyone drinks it.
It was a good valentines, though. Usually i just ignore it and hope it will go away, and it does, but it was good this year. I guess having a boyfriend makes a difference.

Our lizards arn't doing so well. It turned out that Yoda and Yoshi were both males and yoda started intimidating and attacking yoshi. Poor dudeums was really scared. So lordkilljoy brought yoda back to the pet shop and got a different one (who we called yoshimi in the hopes that it would be a girl) but it turns out that he is a guy too and also has territorial issues. awh. so we are thinking of just keeping yoshi on his own now. I think we should try to get a girl somewhere in a few weeks.

I finish work in a week. I can't wait. I'm totally going home for about 4 days the first week i'm unemployed.

So i handed in my notice yesterday. I've never actually handed in a notice before. Mostly contracts have ended, or employers have known the day i'll be leaving for ages. But anyway. It's over now. My last day is the 22nd. Yeay.

We went to see the wrestler the other night. Darren Aronofsky makes movies that affect me so badly. Like requiem for a dream: that movie left me scarred for weeks. The fountain had me in tears from about half way though, and the wrestler made me faint. There's one bit in it were there's some kind of crazy blood-frenzy wrestling going on and they are stapling each other and sticking in thumb tacks and wrapping each other in barb wire and stuff. It was utterly gross. Even worse was when all the tacks and staples had to be pulled out again. Gross. I think the fact that i'd eaten a lot of really salty pop-corn on an empty stomach didn't help either. lordkilljoy will probably say i'm just making excuses, but it's happened to me before that i've fainted eating pop-corn. But the gory scenes were definitely a catalyst. It took me about 10 minutes to recover. My ears were buzzing and i couldn't hear anything. I missed the whole next scene because of it.

My keyboard is being a little annoying. It's starting to miss some keys. Hmmm. This just won't do at all. It's not like lordkilljoy doesn't have about 5 keyboards lying around, but i really like this one.

In lizard-y news... Yoda has stopped eating and has taken to hiding in the corner. His skin has turned very brown. I'm a little concerned. Yoshi is doing well, though. He seems to have settled in. He ate 2 mealworms this morning. yeay. I should post pics.

I was talking to penelope_stone today. Her fish laid eggs recently. That's so crazy!

You can tell i've been doing proper work recently, because there are a few capital letters scattered in among my sentences.

chinese water dragons

it has taken too long for me to get around to writing this post. but work is screwing around with my hours, again (why does this still surprise me? i'm actually this close to quitting. my mood has plummeted and whatever little bit of motivation i'd worked up over the last week and a bit is totally gone. i just don't care at all for the petty, unorganized, greedy company i work for. i really should quit.) so i haven't had a chance.

we got lizards on saturday evening. green water dragons. two of them.
they are adorable, but i think they are finding it a little hard to settle into their new home. they aren't eating that much and their skin looks healthy occasionally, but the rest of the time is sort of pale and lacking lustre. we need to try to get the humidity up in the tank. it's at 40% and needs to be at 80%, but even spraying it down a few times a day does nothing.
anyway, the two cuties are called yoshi and yoda. they are about a (small) hand long, not including their tales, which are about a foot. we have no clue what sex they are, but we'll find out when they get a bit older.

i'm doing up a website for penelope_stone, but i'm having trouble finding time to work on it. i should be doing it now, but i really needed to update my livejournal. i had news that needed sharing.

yea, it's funny. we got pet lizards, and they need food, so we have temporary pet crickets and locusts. the dudes are picky eaters, though, and will only eat crickets (and a few mealworms). i don't know how to get them to eat new food. we tried them with an apple too; they didn't even look at it. ah well.

i don't really have any other news. bye, then.

[edit] my mood for today is annoyed, which i debated over choosing, but i think i chose right. i'm totally distracted - i forgot to choose a user pic and give this post a title. :sigh:

news stuff

so... lots of news since my last post. warpcon was really good fun. didn't get home before 3 any night. saturday night was club warpcon, fun but the music wasn't really to my taste. anyway. it was good. sunday night was royal rumble, my somewhat sedate introduction to wrestling. but it was kind of fun. i think my main problem was exhaustion. ugh - going in to work on monday was so awful, i was so tired i could hardly think. anyway i sorta caught up on sleep and now i have the weekend off.

actually, since i got on to work... i don't think i'm in a really good place with it. i've been made part-time and i'm even afraid that they will just let me go. there's lots of meetings and i don't have my hours for monday yet. i have to ring on sunday afternoon to see what the story is. hmmm. oh well. i complained for ages and ages about hating work, but the whole part-time thing actually had me a bit excited. i think i'm just not cut out for full-time work. it makes me so tired that i get really depressed. aaanyway. part-time would give me lots of time for writing as well. but not having a job just makes me lazy and i do nothing at all.

so, yea. that's all my news in a very quick post. i'm going to eat dinner now. pasta and chorizo. yummy :)

eyes and a tongue make for cuteness

goo, i'm tired. i think i will make a large (this word does not go here) effort to go to bed at 9 tonight. we went to see role models last night. it was funny, but simple. i wasn't expecting there to be a big larps battle so that was a surprise.

we had a very creative day in work yesterday. some parts of work involve lots of make and do stuff, like playing with selotape and cutting things up and writing with markers and stuff. i love that part of work - it's like being back in art class again (in primary school) and having fun because you have a break from the awful awfuls of work you don't like. anyway - yesterday involved sticking random stickers to random objects and laughing at the comic value they possessed. and we turned the scanner into a creature and called him samuel. and he is insanely cute.

k - gotta go now. if i had time i'd write more, but i don't. awh.

things

I applied for a new job yesterday. The last straw in my patience with the company i'm working for now was the rota for next week. i'm working 46 hours and have only one day off. i nearly cried when i opened the email and looked at it. but it did give me the kick up the bum i needed to actually go look for a new job. and it's pretty silly. they gave me so many hours in an effort to get more sales, but i am going to be way to tried to actually sell anything by next week. pah - working 7 days in a row and them having one day off. then i'm guessing i'm not going to have a day off until christmas day. but that would be 7 consecutive days without a break and that goes against my contract... so we'll see.

in other news - excellent news - lordkilljoy got me a bike for christmas :) it's cool. the guy in the shop let me cycle it around for a bit last night and it's amazing how a new bike works. not like my bike, which has some problems.

i had a wierd / cool dream last night where i was a tourist wearing a cross and a photo of the pope and people thought i was "a little bible girl." there was a castle-type-thing with a view over the town and out to the ocean. as i was exploring the castle a massive wave came and drowned everything and we could see fish swimming around out the windows.
that was the quick and nasty version of my dream, it was actually quite good.

the games i'm playing

in the past 8 days i have played and finished little big planet, played and loved prince of persia, not played fallout3, watched lordkilljoy set up his new pc and crank WoW settings up to full (it does look pretty), contemplated moving my oblivion save games over to said computer to check out what a high-spec system can do with it, picked up my new camera, tested to make sure it worked, and my cold has improved a lot.

yea... little big planet is very addictive. even though i finished the story levels, i can't stop thinking about it. i want to design a level, but i'm not sure what to do - i want something that will work like a domino effect, where you start falling and hit something which falls over and hits something else and you go flying up in the air and stuff. but it might be a lot of effort and trail and error. but i feel somewhat up to the challenge.

prince of persia is good - extremely pretty. the price is kinda the same as usual, with his silly comments and brashness. though this time around he seems to care more - i guess because he's not quite as stuck up as the prince from the sands of time trilogy.

i don't have much else to say, really. i'm seriously considering getting a new job. not having weekends off is making me very depressed, because i don't get to do anything really interesting with lordkilljoy. it would be nice to have a full day off together to go into town, or off on a day trip or whatever.

ok - i'm going to go play little big planet now.

work peeves

my lungs are not invincible, and wearing my scarf around my mouth does actually help with cold getting into them. it was pretty mild today, so i decided to try cycling back to work after lunch without my scarf around my mouth. my lungs were burning with cold after the 7 minute cycle. at least i know that my scarf is actually doing a lot of good. i don't just look like some hippy bandit raider.
i grow sicker of work every day. they are so unrealistic. they want us to sell the same amount of laptops we sold this time last year and they don't want us selling anything under €900. people just don't have that kind of money any more.
i also don't think i'm really cut out for sales. i'm too used to being poor and not buying things, so when people come in to buy stuff, i don't know how to convince them - 'cause i'm good at talking myself out of buying stuff. i also don't believe in convincing people to buy stuff they don't need; like when someone comes in for one thing and they go out without that one thing, but with 5 other things they didn't need.
:sigh: we'll see how stuff goes in a month and a half - my 3 month trail is up then.

right. now i must write. i have just under 3,000 words to do tonight. i'm a glutton for punishment. but i'm really suffering week 2 doldrums. i just have no motivation at all. oh well.

gaelcon weekend

heh, i quite like the new livejournal look for halloween - so zombie-tasatic.

just home from gaelcon (i have a feeling that this post is going to be slightly strained - my brain isn't really functioning. uh oh lordkilljoy dosen't have firefox inline dictionary installed, so prepare for careless spelling.)

ok - gaelcon. i'd not been since 2003. wow, that's 5 years. it hasn't really changed much, though - same venue, same layout, but none of that really mattered. the best part of the con was being able to stay in the hotel bar until 3 / 4 in the morning, talking and laughing and messing and then just skipping up 2 flights of stairs to bed. :) it was great.
got to play various card / board games, the most fun being the order of the stick today and no thanks yesterday. i also played hellboy rpg. while it was fun, it just didn't really feel like hellboy at all. we were human and there were no demons in the game. but well.

it's a total downer knowing that tomorrow morning all the inspiration and happy-fun energy will just be forgotten as the alarm goes off and i get up to go to work. there is nothing more depressing in life. i totally have to find a job that i really love; one that reflects everything that's good about life and that makes life worthwhile.
:sigh: my current jon is really not that bad. but really - i want a job that is like my years in college. where people are having a laugh and playing, but still being hightly creative and coming up with really good ideas. hmmm. the last time i was at gaelcon i was in 1st year of multimedia and right now i can totally see c120 so clearly in my head and us all being our usual crazy selves. ah well.

jonathan coulton on friday was good too. it was great being at a gig again. it's been ages.

nanowrimo starts on saturday. is this the first mention of it i'e made on my journal this year? how very shocking... (ahhh, lordkilljoy's v key is sticky and annoying.)

yea, i'm just going to go now. i think i'll go to bed in an hour or so. just sitting here, i feel so tired.

oh yea - i bought dice at the con. they look cool.

dreams

my dreams have gotten totally crazy again. i thought it was just a spring thing, but no.
the night before last i dreamed of me and lordkilljoy trying to buy groceries, but everyone kept butting in on front of us, and then the girl ran off and our shopping was left sitting on the belt for hours.
then last night involved a group of rebels or some sort of resistance movement going up against a pirate / skeleton king and there was this wierd bit where there were demons or something and i had to free someone (possibly my aunt joan) from this dark room; but i was terrified to go in because she was possessed by the room. but i did get her out and the room looked like an old parlour from the 50s or something.

next week i will not see the sun rise, for it will all ready be up by the time i see it.

i can't wait for the weekend. lordkilljoy and i will be staying in clontarf castle. woo!! a whole 3 days of not having to stand up except to move from one place to another.

work's going well enough. i'm not really having a great week this week, simply because my hormones are acting up and making me feel rotten half the time. but i can't blame work, because i know that it wouldn't matter what i would do - i'd feel the same way.

to wrap up other things: been watching dr. who and lordkilljoy play lost odyssey and i've been playing prof. layton. we've been cooking lots and making some yummy pasta sauce mixes, with sort of random ingredients thrown in. jonathan coulton on friday - i hope my feet arn't killing me.

k - i'm going to go now.

the trials of work

"Last updated one week ago."
I don't like not getting to update my livejournal every day. I feel like when i read back on it i'll be missing chunks of my life. hmm. Oh well.

My life has been rather one dimensional recently. Get up, go to work, come home, play something or watch something and go to bed.

I did get a new pair of pants and a pair of doc martens - cute shoes with a buckle and chunky toe-area. Here is a picture of my shoes. (Please note, i did not buy them on amazon. i imagine the price on shipping would have been awful.) They're comfy and I was so happy heading out to work the first day i wore them. (however, my feet still ache something awful every day. oh well. i'm looking forward to the day i get used to the pain.

I really need to get a bike, though. It takes 18 minutes to walk to work (14 if i go really fast) and i get an hour for lunch. So i charge home every lunchtime, breaking my feet so that i get half an hour at home. But if i had a bike i could be home in 5 minutes and take 50 minutes here for lunch. That would be great. Actually - i was thinking of looking on jumbletown to see if anyone's getting rid of an old bike around here. Because after January, i may be able to get a bike off work - the finance manager said he'd look into it if enough people were interested in cycling to work.

Not a whole lot else - i'm playing professor layton at the moment. It is such a fun game. Hmm - i should go over to gamespot and give it a rating - maybe 9.8 or maybe 9.4 because the answers to some of the puzzles seem quite random to me.

ok - i really don't think i have anything else to say.

it's lashing outside and i have to walk to work. all i can say is - thank god i have a good water proof coat. and water proof trail shoes. but i'll be wearing jeans down and changing into my work pants and shoes when i get there. i hope i don't get too wet.

not a whole lot else going on at the moment. jaarius, lordraath and the_kannon are coming up this weekend. that should be fun - and possibly a bit crazy.

the only reason i'm really updating is to see the new last.fm music link thing, but i can't see it here. oh, wait. i have to put in my username on my profile first.
awh - it dosn't look like it's working. oh well.

the morning news

i shall attempt to get all my news in in ten minutes. excuse any bad typos.

work has been going well. i had my training on tuesday and had to travel 3 hours by public transport yo get there, even though it would have taken 40 minutes by car. oh well. i think getting a car and getting my licence is moving up in my list of things to do.
the training was good - i learned how to approach customers in an open manner and it really works - even where you stand in the shop makes a difference. people are coming up to me asking for stuff, and buying stuff. it's cool. i still haven't managed to sell a laptop, but i've helped people make up their minds on what sort of thing they want.

i'm on my computer right now :) nothing like working on your own computer that you know every quirk and nuance of. and i get to listen to my itunes again. woo!

emmm... i don't actually think i have much else to say. i got to play my ds for the 6 hours of travelling i did on tuesday. i'm really liking drawn to life. i love drawing the things it tells you - because it's easy - you just follow thier giude and then go mental with shading, highlighting and adding in details. of course, all this is in little pixels, so you're not coming out with masterworks - but it's still fun.
i can't play the world ends with you anymore, because i can't get past the battle on day 2.

right - i have to go now, get ready for work.

subject here

gosh, i just hate seeing "last updated 3 days ago" when i log into livejournal. three days is a lot of news to have to re-cap, especially when i went home for the weekend.

lordkilljoy and i drove down to cork on friday evening. i got to see penelope_stone for a few hours that evening - we had turkey dinner at home; it was delicious.

ok - this post isn't going to be the most coherent thing i've ever written. i'm just home from my first day of work - like 10 hours on my feet in 2 inch heeled boots, and trying to learn all the products in the shop and how things around the till work. i feel more tired than i have since the day we walked around bangkok for 13 hours straight with about 2 10 minute breaks. i don't think anything would ever make me as tired as that again, and i don't have the blisters to contend with. no - compared to that day, i'm just peachy. but i am tired and i think if i went to bed right now i'd be asleep in minutes.
but i'll go to bed after i post this - i have to be up at 5:30 or something. buh.

anyway - the weekend. saturday night was goldsoundz. it was so great. the liquid lounge is a nice enough venue - smallish, but the crowd was just the right size. they played excellent music. me and lordkilljoy and jaarius drank cocktails while we were there. they make some excellent ones. so delicious - definitely to be tried again.

sunday was taleweavers. it was great to see the lads again. we actually got loads done, nearly everyone had work to show; it was great.
but i had to leave early to get the bus back up to dublin, and home to an apartment on my own! heh - no, it was fine. i got in at 7:20 and raced across the city to catch the train out to maynooth at 7:30 and made it (it kinda helped that the train wasn't actually until 7:39).

i'm playing "the world ends with you" on the ds at the moment. it's interesting. kinda fun and the main character, neku, reminds me so much of cloud strife. actually the 2 of them shiki and neku remind me of tifa and cloud. it's a little annoying, but i'll get over it. the only other thing that bothers me is that combat is impossible.
i also tried drawn to life for a bit - i love the drawing parts. the actual game play is kind of platformer standard, nothing really intriguing. but it was fun. except that i was playing on the bus and trying to draw was somewhat difficult. but i think i managed quite well. when i saw my cloud in the game, i was like "woah - that's kinda good looking" but i love drawing clouds.
and i also tried my hand at puzzle quest, but am woefully bad at it. it's kind of a visual recognition game where you have to get 3 colours in a row, but i just go for the first one i see and think little of strategy. you get "training" - basic and advanced. i passed the basic, because you play by yourself, but the advanced i had to try 4 times because the game kept killing me. oh well!

emmm, so yea. i had work today, i woke up to the sound of cars and was like "where am i? why can i hear cars going by outside? this isn't right." eventually i woke up enough to remember that i wasn't in cork. it was very odd.

and if i haven't mentioned: work is fine. nothing too stressful - just helping people find things in the shop mainly. except that i don't know where anything is yet. but that'll come with time.
i'm so tired though. i really have to get to bed. i think i'm going to crash out tomorrow night the second i get home.

2 days of news

penelope_stone left us yesterday for the naturalistic charms of murky kerry. i've had years to get used to the idea that she would eventually leave home, so the lack of her being around hasn't affected me too badly.

i pulled out old boxes of college notes last night for dumping. what with that and me being too lazy to put my clothes away into my various wardrobe-apparatus things, my room is a total mess; the kind of mess where i can either sit at my computer or lie on my bed, and everything else is out of bounds behind the piles of stuff that are on the floor. ok - i exaggerate a little, but not nearly as much as you might think.

i enjoyed the mind body spirit festival (aka the health fair). i spent all day saturday going to talks and workshops on topics from radiation to remote viewing. it was fun - i learned how to dowse with a pendulum (i don't think dowsing is my thing - i wasn't very good at it) and did a 10 second psychic reading for a random woman. madness. but it's the health fair so i'm allowed to dabble in wierd things.

while there i met a woman who wants me to work for her on a multimedia project she wants to do. it seems like a bit of fun - kind of video work, but working with still images and motion effects.

i started on my swashbuckler over the weekend. it's very formulaic, but should be some fun. i think the main problem when i'm writing for genrechallenge is that i don't really care for my characters. not like i care for zachery or zan or kej - or even the way i care for computer game characters. so i think i'll try focus on that a bit more. not just writing to get stuff done, but actually coming out with a character i care about and perhaps even a plot i care about. that would be cool.

yea... i read my zan / kej story again last night. it's not nearly as bad as i was expecting. the first half is kinda fun. the second half does lose it totally, but there is definitely stuff to work with in the re-write.

battles - atlas

i'm totally obsessed with atlas (by battles) at the moment. i listened to it about 10 times yesterday. i ripped it to iTunes and each time it ended, i pressed play again. it's just not long enough - i get to the end, and feel sad, and say: "awh, it ended." i like it so much because it's a happy bobby song - the kind i can dance around my bedroom to. ok - dance around my bedroom is possibly an exaggeration on the size of my room. but anyway. it's a good song. we'll see how long my infatuation with this one lasts!

i don't really have much other news. i'm almost finished in CIT. just getting the finishing touches on the animation. there is once bit that everyone has a problem with, but i just don't know how to fix it.

ooh - i got my first "sorry we don't want you to work for us" letter yesterday. it was from a publishers - they were unimpressed by my lack of anything even remotely resembling editing on my cv. but they said it really nicely :) then i ripped up the letter and threw it out.

right so, back to work for me. i'm procrastinating now, because i'm not sure what to do with this problematic scene.

new music

i did have some news this morning, but i've forgotten about it. half way through my day and i have 5 things on my list of things done. i have 2 huge things left though. i have to change an entire scene and then change the timing on every other scene in the animation (because it goes way too fast).

oh, yea. i remembered what i wanted to say. i created a playlist on last.fm called new music to listen to. it's a mix of: hope of the states, do make say think, a sliver mt. zion, set fire to flames, battles, jonny greenwood, guillemots and athlete (the last 2 only have 1 song each). i'm really liking all the music. of them all hope of the states is my least favourite, but they are still good. i'm really liking battles; they have a very cool sound (math rock, apparently). i had atlas stuck in my head all through lunch.

yea. i havn't much else to say. i'll go now.

ps - i made a new icon last night :)

a follow up to last night's post

so this morning i talked with people in my family. penelope_stone's reply was: "you always hate work. you complain endlessly whenever you are working." i thought i liked working in interval (in christchurch) but obviously not.
davidnarby's insight was to tell me i'm being too much of a perfectionist and working on anything is a series of iterations towards perfection, and if by 4 iterations you get to 90% of perfection then that's good. while getting to this point, i mentioned that i like animating and i don't find it boring, yet i don't like my current job. liking + not boring = not liking. yea - we noted the lack of logic and balance in this one too.
i think it all comes down to the fact that they've left me alone with little input and less feedback and my lack of self-confidence is getting in the way and making me mentally wring my hands at every step i take. i just can't run with something when i'm not sure about it - i either ignore it (which i can't do with this project) or stress out, endlessly procrastinating and getting nothing done while stressing about not getting anything done. it's a vicious circle.