Really a bit unreal..

The smell of late is so wonderful. I call it the smell, but it's more like a feeling. A memory that's disconnected from my brain and pervades my entired being. Floating freely from cell to cell syncronously to my elation. I don't understand it, but I get that feeling now and again, regardless of the circumstances and I feel a bit disconnected from myself.

And that's how I've been feeling. Everything at once feeling a little bit unreal, even as I take pleasure in all of it. I have a wife.. a remarkably wonderful wife. A wife who I love more than my own life. She holds our child.. who is a mystery and wonder to me. A child I've yet to meet and even still feel connected with. I have a cat.. something that I never thought I would be able to do. I love cats, but the cat is really my wife's companion when I must be away.

And I'm again leaving the place I grew up. I've done it before, and felt quite alien. I know that you think I'm talking about my last visit to Australia, but I'm not. I actually feel quite at home there. No, I'm talking about when my family chose to leave after 14 years at the same house in Newton, for a bigger place outside of a town called halstead.. only 8 short miles away.

It might as well have been a new continent. One where I was revered.. held in much higher regard. And disconnected. It wasn't long before I made new friends, but they didn't know me. So I became mysterious, even as I held nothing back about myself.. these strangers still knew nothing of me. How I grew up, played in the alley with the neighbor kids. Picked a fight with a boy half my size and lost. They didn't know that I liked climbing trees or why. They didn't care to call me up to see if they could meet me halfway and go exploring. They had thier own lives, and I was only a small part of that. The new kid.

The place was big. Lots of me time. No more bullies. Lots of respect.
I played my horn alot in the fields. I think my best friend was my dog. He was the most brilliant dog anyone could hope for. He would listen to me and know just how to respond. He would welcome me home every day. I didn't appreciate him nearly enough. It always seems that way. Those in our life who are the most reliable, consistent, meaningful ingredients to a well lived life.. those are the ones that are only secretly revered. Those who get no notice or gratitude.. those are the people who bless us all. And oh what a feeling when they finally discover thier role. Tears don't describe the feelings well enough. They are as vague as they are moving.

So now I'm doing it again. I'm going farther away.. and yet I feel I already am. I feel like I left home a long time ago, and I'm just saying a long goodbye to the family I love so much. I hope my new family embraces me. I don't expect my own to be replaced.. by no means can anyone take thier place. They're the only ones left who know the Len and Yen of my youth. A priceless archive of memories from one who cannot remember without member to recant his-story. Though I recognize my good fortune to own the gift of the present, I know it will too[,] soon be past.

English is a beautiful bastard language, isn't it?
-len

Doing better..

By the way.. Rach is doing a lot better since we got some decent meds.

Zofran seems to be doing the trick at this point.. and she only needs to take it about every other day when she starts feeling nauseous. Sometimes she tries not taking it until after she's emptied her tummy, because she'd much rather do without. I hate to know how we'd be dealing without this drug.. even as much as I hate the whole idea of medicating away problems.

Rach still is bothered by headaches, weakness, and incessant hunger most of the time.. but I suspect that's the more normal effects for a pregnant woman to be experiencing. She seems to be eating a lot of Chinese and Italian food, as these types of food are very much the kinds of foods she is familiar with back home. And they're really the only reasonably healthy and quick option for vegetarians when you need food straight away.

I keep trying to explore other options, but I'm afraid I'm not a very good cook to begin with. The biggest struggle for me is seasoning food appropriately. Rach and I both have very little experience with anything short of prepackaged seasonings. It's something I know we will grow into over time, but it's a little shocking that we're bringing a new one into the world without a good base of how to get the little one nourished. I guess that's what the gran-folks are for, to help establish some of those habits while the little one buys us some time with a propensity for liquid foods.

I sure hope the little munchkin likes Aussie.
-len

Restless..

It's about 3am and I'm restless..

I've many thoughts flowing through my head. Mostly work and visa stuffs. Today I told Dv, my boss at the Strat that Rach and I are looking to move back to Aussie. I'm thinking about that and all the stuffs we talked about. I'm thinking about the visa papers and worried they'll be done in time. I'm thinking about moving to the other side of the world and growing my new family in an unfamiliar place. Thinking about all the expectations I may never live up to over there.

I'm thinking about that silly minicase and the silly truckputer equipment that Dk bought instead of paying off debts. Had ideas popping thru my head about how IPS could use a touch screen to provide additional info and resources at the client interface. Thinking how it would degooglify the interface tho (complicate it). Then got to thinking about how I need to update my flickr account with pictures. I'm pretty excited about that. Being able to upload a new batch every month without limit. And the coolest thing is tagging. Grouping our massively unstable archive of images with nice neat little tags. Identifying people, places, feelings.. whatever I want to. Even blogging about each one if I want. Yet another silly thing for me to manage. Yet another pseudo-archive of my life.

So yea, I felt like blogging... But to where? I got to thinking.. I have so many blogs it's not even sensible anymore. I have gkumba.com which is basically dead until I start posting one of my blogger blogs to it. But which one, I have a half dozen just on blogger alone. Then there's tblog which annoys the crap out of me with the lost posts because it doesn't archive indefinitely, but I keep going back to now and again nonetheless. I had all that work just poof, disappearing like that. Just like the memories themselves do in my head.. what good is that? Then there's the one I don't think I've ever posted to that my bro uses (I'm gonna really miss my bro even tho we don't really get to hang much anymore). The one that allows you to say what you're listening to. Well, most of the time I'm not listing to anything anyway.. too distracting. I prefer to be alone with my thoughts while I blog, otherwise I tend to plug lyrics into my posts.. or just plain forget what I want to get off my mind (just to have it all haunt me again later). And well, that's not even counting all the forums and memberships I've signed up for and never use..

My domain has come up for renewal again for this year. I'm debating if I should stick with Gandi.. they seem to do the deed well enough, but it's another $12 or so and I'm cheap. I should tidy up my account on the 'til box. I'm really grateful Jn kept me hosted as long as he has. It's been great to have that up there. I should actually keep it a little more live tho, if I plan to keep renewing the domain. I think maybe I'll post this blog there and just make the old stuffs disappear. I need to make a banner for this page like I did for inkboy.org. That turned out really well, methinks. Too bad I'll never actually create the domain, or do anything I planned to do with the idea.

Yea.. Dv is right, the era of high volume inkjet printing is fading. People are printing more stuff at kiosks and online printing services. Most of today's stuff is more like, I need to print a hard copy of this blog, or this website, or this receipt. And it doesn't really matter how good it looks, so maybe I'll just use the laser printer for this job. I was kind of hoping all the info packed in my head over the past couple of years would be useful to the general population, but their interest is waning. I even hoped to make some kind of really cool clothing line. Design some stuff that I might see someday circulating in the printergeek crowd. Not that the printergeek crowd is very extensive.. I wouldn't be surprised if Dv and I were the only ones within a 100 mile radius. And I don't wonder why.. printers are the bane of most people's existence. It's almost a masochistic thing to be all nerded about printers.

I should probably post and go to bed. I'll prolly regret being up so late tomorrow. We'll see soon enough in the morning. latrz.
-len