State Of The Smitty Adress

Last week Blizzard let me know I was to receive three free days of World Of Warcraft as soon as I redeemed the gift that was in my login screen.

The first day I played relentlessly, the second not as much and by the third, only somewhat. The small amount of time I spent on that last day was not unlike an elderly person "getting their affairs in order" prior to death. I tried to make sure my characters were left in a state where things could be picked back up without as much incident, unlike a lot of time I felt was wasted relearning to play each character and getting them to a place where I felt they could be productive.

My PC monitor stood tall and behind my laptop which I used to play the online stream of the Lincoln Saltdogs games as I quested away most of my weekend.

After having returned from a bathroom break my laptop monitor looked like a shattered window on acid. Colors and individual pixels danced about the mostly static screen that looked like a Microsoft Paint doodle in which someone went nuts with the paint bucket tool.

I did what any computer person would do in the above situation, I turned my laptop off and turned it back on. After two unsuccessful attempts, I let my laptop cool off as I feared I had let the poor thing get too hot ....no luck.

My fear upon seeing the screen was that I had let the laptop get too hot and I had melted or somehow damaged the graphics card but my eldest stepson was over and assured me that the screen had merely been punctured, broken or somehow hit with extreme force. He was kind enough to look up the cost of a replacement which ran right around $100 and removed the old LCD screen. Now I worry though that I lost the tiny screws for the LCD screen he had carefully gathered. He seemed baffled by what could have caused such extreme force. My guess would be my 18-month-old son who had spent the previous couple weeks popping off keys from my laptop keyboard one by one every time my wife and I were distracted for mere seconds.

I limped the laptop along getting precious database backups created and off the machine by hooking up the laptop to my flat screen tv. The second time I went to do so though resulted in a series of beeps and silences which made me worried I had lost everything else on the machine. The third attempt worked and now I can confirm that this indeed had all occurred on a Sunday because I left the laptop to copy files as the wife and I made our weekly trek for groceries.

The laptop worked a few more times after that, but a week later I can't get a visual at all anymore, regardless of what I hook it up to.

The epic and mysterious demise of my laptop plays a big factor in most of the issues I am about to list but ultimately just about everything below is also at least partially my fault.

My podcast is toast as my only unlocked version of Audacity rests in the unaccessible C drive of my laptop. By unlocked I mean, set up so that the audio can be exported. This is Audacitys way of not getting sued for people who might use it to copy or otherwise redistribute copywritten material, the name of the third-party software needed for this? L.A.M.E. I'm not making this up and can only guess that this software was both made and named as a sort of a subtle middle finger to the frustrating law side of things. Of all the issues in this blog this particular "lame" one is the easiest to remedy, and most likely will be by the time you read this.

I can't speak highly enough about Audacity, it's free, give it a go. I've seen videos on YouTube boasting that they could teach the viewer how to make music exclusively with Audacity which I may very well have to do because my only copy of FL Studio was on my laptop. I've had mixed results and the software is very expensive and somewhat frustrating. Despite these frustrations, the laptop had all of my works in progress and a working copy. I'm sure I'm allowed to download another copy if I can find my original login info, but that is a very, very big 'if'.

The above, although also solvable has for at least the moment put a halt not only to the podcast but to any headway I was making in the music creation process.

The laptop also had the best speakers I own, so even after standing up Audacity and even FL loops my playback would be limited to the cheapest pair of speakers I could find at BestBuy when I received this pc, I must remind myself, as a gift.

Another hardware failure (I think) has befallen one of the converters that enables me to use old Nintendo controllers to play Tecmo and Super Tecmo Football on my computer. Therefore the two leagues I have with my family the Smitty Family Tecmo Football League and Smitty Family Classic Tecmo Football League are both on hold again, no long after a brief return to glory since receiving new NES controllers my old ones had been devoured by the puppy of the house. Even if I pony up the dough for another converter, there is no guarantee the issue will be alleviated as my PC seems to be very picky when it comes to USB devices, especially allowing two controllers, so both of those leagues are shelved.

In addition to my two family leagues I was working towards a third solo league which I could technically work on even without being able to use both controllers but the other big factor in all of these is the general feeling of fatigue and lack of motivation that permeates my very being both at work and once at home.

Another solo league the Simulation Axis Franchise Football League sits mothballed but like the above could be getting worked on. As of this writing, I think the last tweet or the pinned tweet sums things up pretty well.

My two other leagues the NAFL and AAFL are still tangled in a database failure combined with issues from the C# front end which was as you might guess it....on my laptop. So even if I was to untangle the corrupted database their still is the systemic issues on the C# front end, I managed to get the files off the laptop as it turns out....just in time, but I doubt the links to the backend database still work and programming at home is even less appealing on my PC than it was on my laptop.

When contemplating writing this I thought about keeping up the charade of each of these accounts being attributed to different entities, but I doubt few will make it to, let alone through this entire whiny blog (Hi mom! Hi wife!).

I have other leagues like the PFL and my college league but both suffer from the same front end C# dilemma as the NAFL and the AAFL that thankfully for you none of which I created a twitter account for. As it stands only one league is still playable without effort put into external issues.

My train set is also mothballed as the curve I went to fix resulted in an entire side of the basement long layout being ripped up. I've tried to cludge together the curve from scrap wood but I think it's best to obtain a fresh piece of particle board and borrow a truck from somebody and do the thing right, in the meantime, the mediation of watching my locomotives do laps around me is also gone. Of course me being me, I was developing software and a database backend for my fictional model railroad reality....on my laptop.

Yesterday the wife and I rearranged the bedroom but not without casualties, she suffered a strained back that had already been reeling and dropped something heavy on her foot. I never should have let her move anything on that back of hers, it sucks, but that one is one me 100% she can hardly walk. The room is much better in both arrangement and functionality but I feel the cost was too high.

Our two toddlers are a constant strain on time, energy and sanity. I tried to think of a way to sugar coat that but I really can't. It's not like I'm not grateful for them but anyone who has raised a toddler let alone two at the same time can appreciate the challenge.

Most of the time we have four dogs in the house as well, one of which made quick work of the carpet next to the door here in the bedroom, I don't really mind honestly but the bare wooden subflooring acts as another reminder that the house around me is collapsing. The state of the house is also my fault but that patch of flooring yells at me for my own lethargy, laziness, and downright sloth.

The carpet in the nearby master bedroom was yanked up in what was to be a fruitless search for what was soaking the carpet in there. And as I write this my wife is trying to get the toilet in there to stop running after my efforts were ultimately fruitless. Speaking of fruitless, the bathroom that will soon pass year ten of its own remodeling abandonment, a monument to my own failures as a homeowner has a ceiling bulging with water damage, a look at the flooring between the two bathrooms reveals another potential leak.

Two of the dogs in the house are being babysat for free more often then they're not, much like the toddlers they have their positives too but additional chaos is inevitable. At work, I have a  project that is overdue and barely survived last week even with the 4th of July holiday. A holiday that went better than I ever could have imagined but stressed out about big-time beforehand.

The last home-related issue is a strange spell that seems to have been cast on my entire household where everyone but me is either unwilling or unable to sleep in their own rooms, it's bizarre, but I had to throw that in there.

This is going to sound extremely narcissistic but I feel like work is a place where I exchange part of my life, almost all of my energy and my creative soul for a paycheck. Don't get me wrong, I love my job and as far as the line of work it's in I'm convinced it's the least-worst place to be.

Many apologies as this has turned into a whine-fest but some positives exist. I'm in the middle of a good book: Ready Player One whose reality escaping premise is a welcome escape if said escape can be achieved amid toddler and dog chaos. The price for this escape is what feels like a very self-indulgent story acting as a mirror reflecting my own desires back at my being, making them seem petty, narcissistic and ultimately implausible.

Rediscovering World of Warcraft is another escape but often hinders any progress on the other ventures I have listed here. WoW offers a much easier and less tedious dopamine hit which proves addicting in my usual tired state.

I took a class on self-publishing but my lack of energy combined with, believe it or not, my inability to create enough content to fill a book compounded by constant desire to switch and think up new projects has thus far proved fruitless.

More exists but believe it or not there are problems even I won't share publicly.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Tar-jay Doors

A cold early March wind blew in our faces. My wife’s longer gait and more urgent pace had created distance between her, and my daughter and me.

My daughter’s two year old hand held mine. She didn't seem bothered by the cold wind or the increasing distance between her mother, the shopping cart and her little brother in cargo.

She didn’t seem affected at all until Target’s automatic doors began to close behind her mother and company. A brief “Nooooo-” was uttered into the cold air by her tiny voice. A ‘no’ cut short when the automatic door fully opened again for us having never fully closed.

That moment, that brief moment between the door starting to close and reopen she learned about automatic doors. She doesn’t know how they work, why they are there or even what they are called. All she knows is that when you get near them they open. She’ll never have that urgent ‘No’ moment again. The ‘No’ moment was the first and last time she’ll worry about that kind of door closing and separating her from her mom and brother.

From now until the day she finally learns everything there is to know about automated doors, such doors will be filed away in her little mind next to other kinds of doors.

Doors at home are easy, usually open, have metal things you can turn, sometimes you can’t, they are stuck (locked) but she doesn’t know why and it doesn’t happen enough to inquire about this type of state for a door.

Some doors slide like the back porch door. Perhaps she thinks those doors are only for dogs or only to go outside. This would make sense as this is the only sliding door she has encountered. Then there's the door to daddy’s work, the doors there need ‘beeped’ before they can be opened. She doesn’t know why and doesn’t seem to care but daddy has a square thing on a necklace that makes the doors beep open. From what I can tell the doors that need to be ‘beeped’ are her favorite, always good for an impressed cheer from her.

She doesn’t have a name for the Target doors yet or “Tar-Jay” as we say in our family in a sarcastic quasi-french accent in order to make Target seem more fancy, after all, it’s not like it’s Walmart. We’re fancy like that.

I’m glad I was holding her hand for that moment. I’m sure there are lots of little firsts, little discoveries each day for her nobody notices. Findings filed away amongst like objects, words and situations. Filed away similarly to the section for knowledge about doors and how they work.

I walked with her throughout Target, through the frozen foods section. I watched her reflection in the glass at looking at everything, soaking up every object with a child's hunger for knowledge. As her face traveled down the glass the world looked so big compared to her little face.

We passed through an aisle, this one had flavored jams right at her eye level.

“Strawberry” she said pointing. Pointing, not asking, pointing, not demanding. Just an object with a name, a noise which matched. Her call of “Strawberry” was a tiny call to the world that despite the world filled with unknowns, this was something she knew. Take that, big mysterious world.

Next came pondering, complete with tiny index finger to mouth in intense contemplation. “This one” she said pointing to one of the two different types of strawberry jam. Up until her thoughtful decision I hadn’t noticed that several different kinds of strawberry jams were down there.

I can’t read my daughter’s mind, but if I could I’m betting the cute little gears turning were doing so for one of two reasons, or perhaps a combination of both.

One, she was mimicking her mother, and what she thinks one does in a store, especially a grocery store. You stop, look at two similar looking objects, decide on one, and then put it in your cart. And/or two, most of last football season in order to make her pick for college football she would decide between two logos, usually going with the animal mascots. Last year was a good year for animal mascots and she won the bowl pick’em challenge. This despite picking “The Lady” her name for the Florida State Seminoles mascot, a name which is technically incorrect but on the other,....oh so right. She was told she won, but there were no prizes so I’m sure she’s forgotten about her victory by now.

Maybe her college bowl pick’em victory will be her required short personal story on Jeopardy someday. “I understand you won something special at a very young age” says some guy who replaced Alex Trebek in a suit reading off a small piece of blue digital paper. “Yes I did! …..and my dad wrote a blog about it” she replies to the audience who chuckles at the novelty and nostalgia of a written blog.

Back in the present, and in the jam aisle to be more specific, we hear the far off distant wail of a tantrum coming from the toy section of Tar-jay. I am reminded of going to the store myself as a child. One of the first and sometimes only questions was if the toy section could be visited. Whether or not this question should be broached was based on the mood of whichever adult I was with and their mood at the time. When I grew out of asking this question my brother took up the mantle. He seemed not to bother taking the adult’s mood into consideration and bravely asked no matter the circumstances.

My daughter doesn’t yet know about the toy section, and that is fine by me. That is a discovery for another day.  

Post Script: Since writing this I have heard my daughter refer to a door’s state as being “locked” so more door knowledge has been filed away.