June 2008 Archives

I had my PET scan today to determine how much cancer is still in my body. I've had some back pain lately, likely due to yoga, which I will likely have to stop. This combined with the hard table you have to lie down on for 30 minutes left me feeling sore, tired and simply sad.

I am not sure what is wrong with me today, but these feelings of sadness and dissatisfaction won't go away easily, I think. This technically should be a time for optimism and hope, but it isn't at all. I think that the closer I get to the day of the results, which is next Thursday, the more that I am filled with a sense of dread.

But there is more than that. It's the dissatisfaction. What am I dissatisfied with? I know it has something to do with cancer, and it has nothing to do with those who have helped me. Maybe it's not dissatisfaction, but rather disappointment. All I know is that I am not very happy today, and the next couple of weeks don't look too great, either.

Maybe I just need to see more friends.

Do you have wings? I like to think that I do. By the way, this is an old meme, but I don`t actually know what my readers`Myers-Briggs types are. I wonder if there are more I`s than E`s that read my words, and the details of those I`s and E`s. Why don`t you take a Myers-Briggs test and find out, then tell me here? I, of course, am an ENTP. I think.

I would also encourage you to read this. Just how emotionally mature are you? I would say that I am just to the right of the middle of the pack, although the last year has pushed me further to the right (assuming that emotionally mature is on the right side of the scale, and emotionally immature is on the left).

And my God, this is beautiful. I have never heard this story before.

You may have read about the mystery feet washing up in BC. Here's my take on it.

Tea is a big part of our lives (Julie and I, that is) and to that end we decided to take 5 hours of our lives and go to the seminars offered by premier tea provider and salon Camellia Sinensis last weekend. It was incredibly fun! We got to taste 19 different teas! Delicious, I must say. Definitely an experience even for those that don't know much about tea. For example:

Pu-erh teas are the only tea that does not degrade over time; in fact it gets better and better with age. For this reason, they are classified by year and region just like vintage wine. They often look and taste similar to a strong black tea to the novice, even though there is a green tea aspect to it. One of the owners of Camellia Sinensis was allowed (after a grueling question-and-answer session by some local tea cultivators and sellers in China) to enter what I would call a shrine to Pu-erh tea. In this room was millions of dollars of tea stored in individual cakes. One such cake dating from 1930 (and there were many, even much older ones) and weighing roughly 350 grams cost about $10 000. Using the consumption of Julie and I as a reference* it would cost us about $30 per cup of tea. $30. Per CUP. If you wanted to try our tea, we'd have to charge you.

Big deadline this week for localization work in subtitles. My team has worked hard and is ahead of schedule. In fact, by the end of today we will be finished the first pass of all subtitles in all cinematics in the game.

I'm sitting here at my desk in the office. I just installed a little fan behind me and took a few minutes to relax while the game compiles. Now it's time to run the game and see the latest updates in Italian. And the game will not FUCKING RUN.

Goddamnit. Maybe I should stick to managing resources rather than actually being one of them. At least I can try reason with people. You can't reason with code. But in reality, I feel fine.

Now that I think of it, this might actually be a decent day in terms of relaxation and health. It hasn't been a good week in terms of how I feel physically; I realized just how bad my non-cancer-related health is. Specifically, yoga showed that no matter how easy the physical activity is that I am doing, it is still a big challenge for me. I did yoga on Monday, and I still have a sore neck. The soreness goes all down the left side of the neck to my shoulder. I hope it's just a case of unused muscles being annoyed at being woken up.

I am really looking forward to getting my body back, if at all possible. I will continue this gentle cancer yoga for as long as I can until I think that I can get into a gym (although with all the financial management I have started, I wonder if I can afford it). imagine being as fit as I was when I was 25! I think that I can do it. Yoga is about accepting what is, but I find this to be very difficult. We are going to focus on this in the next few sessions.

I think I might be getting a little impatient. I am normally pretty patient when I want changes to occur in my life, but I want to go back to school now; I want to become financially responsible and more debt-free now (although I think that I can attain my credit card goals this year), I want to become more physically fit right now. This isn't wise and is not good for the mind or spirit. I am changing both positively and negatively. I need to work on that, I guess.

Inspired by Zura, and since I have nothing to do while code compiles (I'm not a programmer, really!), here is the previous entry in Wordle format. I think it looks pretty neat.

Maybe I'll do more of these. They seem fun.

I promised to update people on things, and here is my chance to do so.

The last month has been up and down in a number of ways. Work has changed completely. We are in the last stages of our project. People are working overtime, but not huge amounts of it. We have essentially run out of people to do/fix the subtitles so, since I wasn't doing much as a PM anyway because of the nature of both the project and management, I was tapped to be the Senior Subtitle Implementation Programmer. (Did you like that new title I just made up? I've got management written all over me.)

This has changed certain things. I no longer have time to read blogs all day, and so I no longer feel the need to write about certain things right now. I'll get back to it, though, as I think that it is an important topic that most people would rather not discuss frankly. I am not nearly as bored as I was. It was a good bored, not a bad bored, so it wasn't really terrible at all. I got to read blogs all day, after all.

I have been away for two reasons. One, I have been busy with work (more on that later)  and chemotherapy (more on that later). Secondly, I couldn't have blogged even if I wanted to, which I did. There were technical problems that prevented me from entering information in the text box. Stupid, no? What's worse is that it was all caused because I didn't include the "www" in the login URL. Thanks, MT.

What I intend to do for the time being is to show you some pictures that I have taken over the last little while. I will expand on the topics I broached later. This week, hopefully. In the meantime, check out some photos from a recent trip to the Botanical Gardens.

I hate these damn dogs. There, I said it.