wafblog v3.0

So, Friday was my last day working for the trains. I don’t think it’s really sunk in yet. Perhaps it will hit home more once I’ve started my new job. Everyone at work was really nice though, and they gave me a special ‘custom-made’ card with photos of everyone from work. That was pretty cool :D Unfortunately the cake they got me had peanuts on it so I couldn’t eat that, but it looked very nice anyways. We went for drinks after, down at Paddy’s and a few people that I’d worked with throughout the year dropped by as well. Hopefully will be able to keep in contact with a few of them, and I’ll only be down the road from now on so I can probably still meet up with them for lunch.

Anyways, this was only meant to be a quick post to say that I’m going houseboating today :D Well, actually… I’m going to the cricket first (my Christmas present to Mike) and then we’ll be going houseboating. But Manda, Travis, Mr Pal and Kirsten will be getting there about mid-day. We’ll only be there for 4 days, but with Big Day Out on Thursday and everything I won’t be home till Friday afternoon. Hopefully with lots of photos.

So, over the festive break I took the opportunity to reformat my computer as well as install extra RAM into it. Tichondrius is now sporting a sweeet 2GB of RAM. After some initial hiccups with memtest (damn ASUS BIOS bug!) it seemed to be working fine. My main reason for reinstalling XP was to get rid of some nasty errors that I kept getting. I have a few hard drives in my computer, and on each of the drives I usually have at least 2 partitions. Only because I like to have separate ‘drives’ for different files (Document, Games, Music, Movies). I used to have this problem where, if I clicked on a file (usually a TV episode), Windows Explorer would have an error and I would get a pop-up box saying that it had to be shutdown. If I was really lucky I’d also get a Dr Watson error. I’d click ok, Explorer would disappear, the taskbar would disappear and then reload, and that would usually be fine. Of course, it’s a complete pain in the backside to have this happen for just about every file as I like to rename mine with the title. Initially I thought it might be a HDD error, but a Seagate Tools diagnostic said everything was fine. Then I suspected the RAM, but memtest cleared that as well. After re-formatting, I was sure that the problem had gone… until a week ago when I was trying to rename something and *bam!* error again. I’m not sure if it’s a kernel problem, but I haven’t been tinkering with the registry or anything. Maybe a program running in the background is causing a conflict? But I can’t seem to see any real consistency to the problem so I don’t know. It seems to happen on any drive, not just a particular one and even after I re-partitioned stuff it still happens. It’s becoming quite frustrating and I’m kind of stumped on how to fix it as no one else seems to have had this sort of problem. So really.. I’m just throwing it out there… anybody have any ideas? Maybe I should just wait for Vista.

I guess it was bound to happen eventually, and I was sort of seeing the signs but it’s only really now that I’ve realised the full extent of it. It’s kind of scary how much I’ve changed and possible in a backwards sort of way. I’ve never been that open about my feelings, but there’s always been people who have been able to pry me open and get me to talk. I think I spent a lot of last year bottling things and trying to hold it all together for fear of completely falling apart. And then after that, I spent a lot of energy on trying to be ‘better’. But I haven’t dealt with the problems that were there, or the issues that I had (still have) in regards to them. I get the impression that they’re lingering just below the surface and unless I force the issue, may never be dealt with in the proper context. On top of that, I have even more trouble verbalising how I feel now. For fear of being weak, for fear of rejection or ridicule or something else.

To quote Grey’s, I’m “broken”. And much more broken than I thought I was. I am no longer fighting the urge to shut down, and I think that’s because in most aspects I already have. I’m not really sure how to go about fixing this – it’s not really something you can fix by yourself and at the moment, only one person has really noticed it. In some ways, I am quite worried because it took so long for me to become comfortable with telling people stuff and it seems like a few steps backwards. On the other hand, I’m used to bottling and this is the normal sort of side effect. I worry though, that I’m trying too hard to hold it together and eventually I just won’t be able to. Maybe I’ve used up all my energy to do that, and there’ll be a lot more problems then I guess.

What shocks me the most at the moment though is the realisation that I have some very deep-seated unhappiness. The surface ‘happiness’ and ‘contentment’ is there, but in many ways I’m not truly happy. I spend a lot of time worrying about the future, about what I can and can’t control. And there seems to be more and more that I can’t control. It’s a little bewildering at times. I’m even more insecure than I used to be, which again is a by-product of last year, yet at some point I have to realise that there’s no *reason* to be. Why can’t people be more reassuring though? Maybe it’s not for them to be more reassuring but for me to just believe – even then, aren’t I just setting myself up to get hurt? And thus we come back to the circular argument.

I went to the doctor on Sunday, and was meant to get a blood test as previously mentioned. I took my mum with me, as she knows a lot more about these things than I do so she could ask some questions about the test and also to request the specimen be sent a specific lab. Anyways, when we got in, she asked the doctor what sort of tests were being done and it took a few times before he replied “allergy tests” rather rudely. Then when she asked about sending it to a specific lab, he got rather aggressive and was all “Do you want treatment or not?! This is how we do things here.”. Well, as far as I know, a patient has the right to choose where they get their health care from as well as where their specimens and other tests are done. Moreover, I’ve never been to a doctor that has been so vague about the sort of treatment they are giving. Normally (and so it should be), they’ll tell you exactly what the test will (and won’t) tell you. Otherwise, what’s the point? Most people will want to know exactly what is wrong with their body – and what they need to do to as a result. I think I’m just more annoyed that he was so rude and wouldn’t answer our questions. Obviously, we left without the test being done – which is somewhat of a conundrum as well because now I’m not going to know what the test could have told me. Although, I maybe go back to my normal GP and talk to him about it. I think it will be a long time before I set foot inside a medical centre again – the treatment and level of care you receive when you visit one of those places is just not acceptable.

Other than that, weekend was rather boring. I cleaned up my room a little bit although I have a fair way to go. Big Day Out tickets arrived, so I’m quite excited. Also installed some RAM into my dad’s computer so hopefully that will shut him up for a bit. Oh, and bought a few suits before I start my new job. Guess it was still a pretty relaxing weekend, and was productive enough. I still have to do quit a few things before I go on houseboat and want to make sure they’re done so parents get off my back about it.

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Ok… going to test this e-mail blog thing again. Hopefully it will
auto-update my blog with this post.

This has not been a very good start to the year. I was coming home yesterday after the gym, and I don’t know what I did, but I snapped the frames of my glasses. So now the whole right arm has detached and obviously, I can’t wear them. This is rather annoying as I am quite attached to my glasses. Luckily, I had bought a new pair before I went to Europe, so I’m wearing them now. They weren’t meant for day-to-day wear though – I only intended to use them when dressing up. The lenses are thicker because they’re rimless frames, so the light refracts into the lens differently. Plus, the light reflects on the edges making them much more obvious to me. This pretty much means that my glasses are giving me a headache from wearing them for too long. I’ll be going to the optometrist tomorrow to see if they can be fixed (soldered) back together, but I kind of doubt it which means I’ll have to fork out like $300 for a new pair.

So, during my 10 days off I went to see the doctor because my eczema was unmanageable and I was having lots of trouble sleeping. He gave me prednisone, which I’d expected, and since taking it my skin seems to have calmed down a lot. I’m hoping that it’s broken the cycle and if I keep putting cream on it it’ll be ok. I’m going for a blood test on Sunday so hopefully that will shed some light onto what I’m allergic to so I can avoid it like crazy in the future. I’ve also cut a bunch of foods from my diet now, ones that are well-known allergens and I could have an intolerance too. It kind of sucks, but I suppose I don’t have much choice.

I’ve become somewhat addicted to this lemon-scented tea from Twinings. I drink it at work, and originally I was drinking like one a day. Then it became two a day… now it’s like three a day. It’s rather nice by itself, no need for sugar or milk so that’s cool. I’ve also taken to drinking camomile tea at night before bed. It is rather soothing and helps me to sleep so I’m quite impressed. Admittedly, it doesn’t taste that great, but tolerable enough.

Oh yes! In other news, I got tickets to the Big Day Out. Which is totally AWESOME. There’s no other word for it but AWESOME!!! After Homebake, I’m quite excited about seeing Eskimo Joe and The Butterfly Effect again. But the band I’m most stoked about seeing has got to be The Killers. Wooo. I’ve even listened to some of My Chemical Romance, but I don’t really like them on first listen. This time I’m going to remember a camera, and will definitely post up good photos afterwards :D

Started playing Tekken again, hoping I don’t get RSI this time. I’m getting better with Jin now, although he has this 10 hit combo which I don’t think anyone can pull off. It is kind of fun to customise your characters to play against the CPU. I did also try out Lemmings, but I think Mike enjoyed it more than I did. They are very very cute and hopefully I’ll get enough time to sit down and have a proper go at some of the more challenging levels. Must try to finish a game.

I was also looking on some of the PSP sites – seems they’ve released a custom firmware (3.02 OE-B) which allows you to loads PSX ISOs from the memory stick and play them on the PSP. So I can d/l the ISOs or buy some off the Sony site. I’m quite interested in investigating it, and M1ke e-mailed saying that he had got it working and it was pretty cool. To be honest, I’m not really sure what PSX games I’d want to play on the PSP considering the number of games I have at the moment that I haven’t played, but the possibility of having that entire library available to play – awesome.

We’ve also started playing Guild Wars again. Prophecies, not the expansion. Seems silly, but we never finished the game, and well – it did kind of get boring playing by myself all the time. The NPCs are complete idiots and never heal you properly so unless you’re heaps buff you’ll usually die. So yeah, playing about an hour a day is slow progress, but still fun. Not sure I could play for hours everyday anyways, but I do enjoy completing quests and getting items and things like that. Not sure what specialty I’ll make my necro yet. Most likely I’ll level the attributes for raising bone horrors and that sort of thing – I don’t like the curses much but maybe I haven’t got the good ones yet. I’ll be adding elementalist as my second profession so hopefully that’s a good combination. At the moment just waiting to get out of this ‘n00b’ part of the game.