March 6th, 2010
The last couple weeks have been interesting.
My car was making noise, so last weekend I took it to my dad to see what the deal was. There were a few things that needed to be done, so we did them. I wound up having to take it in for an alignment the next day because the work we did made it necessary. The noise was drastically reduced.
Only it got louder Monday and Tuesday, so I took it back Tuesday night. It turns out my motor mount was broken, so I left it there and drove my mom’s car for the next few days.
Today I went back over there to see how things were going. A bolt had broken, one that supported about half the weight of my engine. My dad was headed to town to see if he could find a replacement when I left his house. Hopefully everything will be in working order tomorrow.
March 1st, 2010
Yesterday, I took my car up to Sears to get an alignment. My wife went with me and we were forced to go hang out at Barnes & Noble while we waited. We got coffees and sat around in the cafe for a while, talking about my latest neuroses and trying to figure out what we could do about them.
I recently worked through a programming textbook and started on a web design book. I’ve been taking these things to work to read and work through during my lunch break, in addition to what I can get done at home. Only, lately I’ve been feeling crazy overwhelmed and not doing much at home — no studying, no music, no writing, none of it. The time is there, but somehow it never feels adequate.
A few weeks ago, I said something like, “Oh man, I thought about something when I first got into work, and that activated my brain, and I’ve spent the whole day fully aware of how little brainpower this job requires.” Turns out, that quip was the key to solving my problem.
I don’t use my brain at work. When I get home, I suddenly need it, so I fire it up and start all of my thinking applications. As you may have observed when doing this to your PC, that slows the boot process (and sometimes crashes Firefox). With enough crap running, things are sluggish and it’s hard to be productive. That’s what my brain is doing.
So, Sarah came up with some ideas for fixing my brain. They fall into two conceptual categories:
Start utilizing my brain at work. If I can figure out how to keep my mind active during the day, it should be easier to transition into “do stuff” mode when I get home. We picked up a book of lateral thinking puzzles, and Sarah is going to start emailing one to me in the morning so I have something to think about while I’m performing repetitive tasks. She also suggested that I start learning random words in a foreign language, things like objects found in an office, insults, and the words that the boss and the brown-noser are constantly misusing. I may give that one a go pretty soon. We had a couple other ideas worth trying out at some point, too.
Don’t do stuff at work that I want to do at home. If I read a web design book at work, it feels like I’m bringing work home with me if I open it at home. If I start writing a blog entry at work, it’s near impossible to finish at home. So, instead of trying to take real life into work, I should play stupid Facebook games during lunch and, you know, utilize my brain the rest of the day.
I’m optimistic. If this works, I’ll be rocking hard again. Wish me luck, and feel free to offer any suggestions or insights you have.
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February 28th, 2010
There were two other things on my list: Write a module for the D&D campaign I keep talking about, and spend an entire day playing Fallout 3.
The campaign – One thing I realized when I sat down to start working on the campaign was that I had no idea what I was doing. I spent about an hour coming up with concepts for the world, since I’d like the campaign to make a little sense. I didn’t actually finish a module, but I’m laying groundwork, which will benefit me more in the long run than a contextless module.
Fallout 3 – The original plan was that I would get to spend today on Fallout 3. I decided to load up my game Friday night, just to get back in the swing of things (I hadn’t played in a long time). It was frustrating because unlike the original Fallout games, Fallout 3 pretty much makes non-gun skills useless. When I created my character, I put points into talking and being stealthy, which don’t help when you’re out in the open and a super mutant with a minigun spots you. So I started over, put my points into weapons, and promptly got bored and quit. I’ll go back to Fallout 3 later.
I spent today working on new music instead.