I might repaint this site. I think the vacation theme is a little old, and I have a new idea for a new direction. At least for a little while.

Time goes by so quickly nowadays, and I'm running out of time to enjoy it. It's a good thing I enjoy it while I'm in it, because there is rarely time for reflection.

In that sense I am glad that I took this week off from work, and will be spending some downtime relaxing and travelling a bit. I went up to camp and got a little crispy and forced myself away from all the regular stuff for a weekend. That was great.

Every now and again I like to get away from teevee, radio and the internets.

I started running. That's meant at least a half hour every other day (ever increasing) of reflective thought. Though honestly, the reflective thought portion lasts about 5 minutes before the, "Holy crap why am I doing this to myself?" thoughts kick in. I'm doing what I can to break though my limits and stretch beyond what I thought I could do.

Tomorrow I'll go down to Jersey and hang out with an old pal of mine. Then on Wednesday I'll go into NYC and chill out with my brother and a few of our friends. They all rent a space together and it's actually pretty nice.

It'll be a busy week, but I'm seriously considering leaving one of my jobs. While the pay is a decent reminder of why I'm working, my hours suck. I never minded working weeknights, but working weekend nights every week is a pain in my side.

I'm overdue for a road trip. I'm planning at least NYC, as I've got some vacation time coming up which I need to make good on. I'd go to Canada if I thought it was worth it, but as far as foreign places go, it just isn't the same as a few other places I'd rather go.

I've done a bunch of the northeast and wonder if I should venture west. I hear it's flat, which would theoretically be good for the gas tank but there's that wind issue.

On the plus side I've got my iPod all kinds of rigged into my car, so that would work out just fine no matter where I decide to go.

It's hard to reflect on things sometimes, especially after you thought they were dead and gone.

In cleaning out my favorites, I came across my ex's blog. I label favorites only by one or two letters and usually let the favicons distinguish them. If there's no favicon I have no idea what's what. So I inadvertantly found that she's currently in Europe, taking her trip which she'd been planning for over a year. I don't think it would have affected me really, except that we'd discussed me possibly taking a week off to meet her somewhere on her trip.

It took me a long time to get back to being me again, so thinking all this through isn't much fun. But at the same time, the difference in perspective is astounding. For a long time I'd blamed myself, and there is some blame that belongs there. But at the same time when I look at where I was emotionally, I wasn't capable of being a good boyfriend. I was failing at everything I tried, I was jobless and I was hemhorraging money. And she needed me to be there for her in ways I just couldn't be at that time. And I needed her to be there for me in ways she didn't understand. She was trying but not in the right direction, and I failed to make that clear.

Being back to normal, back to ambitious, back to suceeding, I can see that. It makes me sad to think of the pretenses. It's hard to throw your hands in the air and say "I guess that's life," but that does seem to be the case. At least now I have a greater understanding of what went wrong.

At least I can be content to know that I'm me again.

Being that I had a weekend off from work I went for a hike. And I found a busted up old reservoir that resembled with some accuracy varying set pieces in Half-Life 2. Did I know my town was dying? Yes. Did I think it would ever look fitting for combine? No.

The hike started at some old railroad tracks.


I have no idea what the W is for. Maybe west? I didn't see any signs coming back east though.


The only thing missing from this picture is combine rapelling down the bridge. And lost of explosive barrels.


I found an old service road that was decrepit and led to some weird concrete structure.


It had some sort of dam attached to it.


This hatch reminds me of something from LOST. I think it would be fitting if someone marked the numbers on there.


The water made a really shallow fall.


I climbed up on the wall and snapped a few shots down the catwalk area, where you can see that the guardrails were falling down.


I put this picture here because the color is drastically different, despite the same lighting conditions. Weird.


This is the view from the ledge, where the fall is. There's a lot of concrete down there to divert the water.



I guess the whole thing used to be a big reservoir and now it's all decrepit. However, the service road has seen some use lately and you could tell that some large machinery had been down there recently, as well as some surveying teams due to a few poles placed around and some orange flags. I have no idea what they are planning to do down there, since nothing is really functional anymore and I haven't read anything in the paper. What I didn't take any picture of was the backside of the wall. It was a lot of swampland with a lot of dead trees. I did scare off two mallards when I walked up on the catwalk, which was a pretty cool visual. I didn't snap a photo because I didn't have my camera ready though.

This past episode was scathing, on multiple levels. Superficially it mocked Family Guy, and I'm sure that is all 8th graders got out of it. But it ragged hard on fundamentalists, both Muslim and Scientologist. Under all the censorship attributed to Denmark and Muslim fundamentalists, there were deep-seeded attacks at Comedy Central for backing down to Scientologists and pulling an episode. It makes for hilarious television.

I've been consistently surprised by South Park on a political level. In my mind it was strange that some of the best political commentary came from a cartoon. But then I realized - that's almost always been what the cartoon was used for.

So I use Yahoo! ads on my site, and that's no secret. But when I got a message to call an associate from Yahoo! today, I was little nervous about the implications. I mean, after all, why would Yahoo! call me, a small time, part time blogger? (I mean honestly, can we even call this part time anymore?)

I called back, hit a voicemailbox and then promptly got a turnaround phone call.

Turns out their associate just wanted me to discuss the program with him and see how I liked it. I love surveys. I'm an opinionated guy, and the older I get, the more honest I get. After all, they're not looking for "right" or "wrong" answers, they're asking me what I think of their program.

Now, I had a little bit of trouble with Google's Adwords, and instead of calling me personally (I understand those weren't in beta when I used them), they just sent me an email telling me I was to be deactivated with no explicit reason listed, nor any process for appeal. And to think, Google is supposed to be the new age version of the Internet.

Yahoo! has me pretty well sold on their ad system. And so far, their customer service seems to be out of this world. I understand that my relative importance increases because it's a beta, but my understanding is I am a very small part of a very large beta program (and besides, how many Google services ever come out of beta?)