So, an interesting thing happened just now. I was about to post a comment on e_r_e_n_e_t_a's most recent entry saying, essentially, "yay for restarting your LJ presence!" But when I hit Preview (to recheck my always poor typing) an obnoxiously flashy advert took over my browser for 30 god damned seconds. When it finally got around to showing me the pro-LiveJournal comment I'd just written, I was no longer feeling particularly pro-LiveJournal. That's what you might call ironical.

I didn't hit Post.

So: instead of encouraging people to use LiveJournal more, I think what I'd really rather do is encourage people to use LiveJournal less. If you've already started a non-LJ blog elsewhere (as esmesquall and sun_doth_burn have recently done, e.g.), then great! I think you did the right thing. Please give me a link in the comments, so I can follow your RSS feed.

UPDATE: In the comments, glowing_fish suggests another fine alternative: Dreamwidth.org, an open-source journal site running on the same codebase as LiveJournal, sans annoying ads. That's brilliant. Thank you, Matthew. I easily created a new account over there. Even snagged my first-choice username. If you plan to continue using LJ, please consider switching to DW instead.

If LJ is the only blogish thing you do, then that's fine too I guess. Before I close up shop, I'll take one last pass down my LJ friends list and subscribe via Google Reader to the ones I'd otherwise miss. (As a semi-hidden feature, every LJ account has an exportable RSS feed.)

As for me: this'll likely be my last post on LiveJournal. If you'd like, you can follow me at BeyondMetamora.net and on E2, or Twitter, or Facebook.

Thank you to all the fine folks at LiveJournal Inc for letting me freeload on your servers.

To everyone else: Love ya. Keep in touch.
~ MWK/RP

So, I returned home yesterday from a trip w/ my sister to Central Florida. We were visiting our parents, who I hadn't seen in more than a year.

It was quite lovely. On the same day that I stepped off the plane I was photographing manatees in Blue Springs with my new camera. I got to see a pre-dawn Space Shuttle launch (sadly, the last). I got to watch the Superbowl with my dad. My mom gave me a sewing lesson and I stitched a hole in my favorite sweater; it's good as new. I paddled a kayak through a mangrove swamp with my sis, mom & aunts. I won four games of ping-pong, three games of Scrabble. Climbed an orange tree, and scrapped-up my hands leaping out of it. (plus, the oranges I picked were under-ripe and mercilessly bitter. oh well, it was fun anyway.) I saw hawks, herons, huge pelicans, ibises, ospreys... birds of all shapes and descriptions, everywhere. Watched some charming films: Up in the Air, Pixar's Up, The Hangover (also, an old favorite: Jean Reno & the 13-y.o. Natalie Portman in The Professional). Just a fun week all around.

Last year my family went through some serious upheavals, so-- most of all-- it was good to get back together with my sister & parents and see that each of us is falling into our new routines pretty well.

Now I'm back in B'ham. Mostly ignoring the big Winter Olympics hubbub going on 50 miles to the north of me. I may wander over to the brewery later this week and do some spectating, but right now I have other things on my mind.

Since it's been such a warm winter here in Whatcom County, folks at the greenhouse are talking about planting even earlier this year. I could be starting my "summer" weekend job this month(!), maybe even this weekend. That means going back to a no-days-off schedule again-- kind of a bummer-- but I'm excited by the prospect of two more paychecks each month. If my budget stays on track, I could have more than 50%(!) of my remaining debts paid off by October.

In the off-hours, I have my usual spread of pursuits and hobbies. Getting more serious about practicing on my guitar and piano again. My friends & I are still playing a lot of MtG, and I've also started playing Pauper Magic on MTG Online, which is a surprising amount of fun. I bought a new-used camera (a Canon G10) with the intention of improving my photography and getting back into Flickr. I'll be restarting Nodeslam.com this week, finally. I've also been recording myself reading The Silmarillion outloud, purely for my own amusement. (I may upload the recordings at some point, but in a more out-of-the-way location. I don't want to run afoul of the Tolkien estate. I'll let you know.)

(Happy Decemberween, kiddos: I tossed together a Whitman's Sampler of 20 songs plucked from the albums mentioned below, and you can [download it right here]. Share & enjoy.)

One of the things my dad sent me for my birthday last week was a double-CD of two Dave Mason LPs: It's Like You Never Left from '74 and his self-titled follow-up album, Dave Mason. These were a couple of my father's top-ten albums from that era, back when his life mirrored mine in a lot of ways. (Like me, my mom & dad left Michigan in their mid-twenties and moved to a laidback Cascadian college town-- Corvallis OR, in their case-- to go back to basics and enjoy a hippie lifestyle. Yes, this is basically where I got the idea.)

It got me thinking about what I'd choose as my top albums of this decade, the 2000s.

Furthermore, if you still haven't heard: I broke up with my girlfriend Jet last Saturday and-- although I'm still content with the decision and hope that Jet & I can still salvage a friendship-- it's thrown a ratchet into my brainpan that's been rattling around all week. For any serious topic, it has made it hard to introspect farther back in time than the last few weeks and months, what I should have said and done differently, etc. So-- in true [Rob Fleming] fashion-- talking about music seems like a nice diversion.

And thirdly, I enjoy making lists. A lot. To an embarrassing extent.

( 10 years, 20 albums. Make it so. (beneath the cut) )

It’s pretty warm in my apartment right now. It’s a 3rd story loft– a big open space– so it’s hard to keep the temperature consistent. When I turn the heat off, all the warm air tends to drift to the top. A fan would probably do the trick, but I haven’t figured out how to rig one up. Haven’t given it much thought really, to be honest. It rarely gets this cold in Bellingham. It’s been below freezing now for nearly a week. Jet predicts that it’ll snow soon. But anyway, I’m comfortable.

We’ve been busy at the mill. A lot of people dust off their cookbooks around this time of year, and that means a lot of extra demand for good flour. I’m happy to provide.

I’ve had two jobs in my life that I’ve really enjoyed. The first was my I.T. internship at Oakland CC in Auburn Hills, but that was mostly due to the laidback work environment; I loved the comraderie of hanging out in nerd central with the other I.T. guys, playing Unreal Tournament on the college LAN and waiting around for trouble tickets to roll into the queue so that we could swoop in and save the day. When it came to the actual job though– fixing finicky PCs & printers– meh, it was fun but it got boring after awhile. I didn’t feel like I was really doing anything, just maintaining other people’s tools so that they could carry on with their day.

I never get bored of making flour, though. Mostly because my job is so easy. I feel as if Kevin– the miller, or in other words, the mill’s owner, my boss (I find it an interesting statement about 21st century life that all of my friends know what an I.T. guy’s job is, but I have to explain every facet of what a miller does for a living)– I feel as if Kevin has the hard job, talking with customers & suppliers, making business decisions on what grain to buy & what prices to charge for our flour. Making the flour (my job) is the easy part. It’s so simple that there’s nothing to get bored *of*. Hell, making flour is something that hunter-gatherer societies had figured out. Using electricity to do it makes the machines more complicated, but it tends to save on labor. And since we only use organic grain purchased from trusted sources in WA, the nearby states, & Canada, I have complete confidence that the flour I make every day is at least as good or better than the flour made by every other miller’s assistant in the entire history of humanity.

So, in other words, I like my job. It doesn’t pay a lot but it pays the bills, and it helps pay my debts, and gives me a little left over on the side to have some fun and a lot of extra free-time to enjoy it. Sometimes, in moodier moments, I come down a little hard on myself for living as a modern-day peasant in a world where wealthier people have access to such incredible things– books with electronic ink, cars that run on cooking oil or get 200mpg, hiking gear made out of space-age materials, routine travel on intercontinental airliners, …. But then, I look around even within my own circle of friends and also see a lot of people who are currently looking for work & having a stressful time of it– most of them better educated & more hard-working than I am– and I feel supremely fortunate that I’ve lucked my way into such a lovely lot in life.

Though that doesn’t mean that I expect to be a miller for the next 40 years. I’d be content to do that, sure, but I have other things in mind.

More on that next time.

I’m glad I summoned up the resolve to post that last entry, despite the fairly grumpy tone. At least it’s getting my mental gears moving in the right direction again.

Current mood: improving. Tomorrow– I’m guessing it’ll be too late tonight; I’m meeting up with some friends in an hour or so– I’ll jot down another entry and take stock.

The thing that bums me out is that I feel like any update I write at the moment is going to contain a lot of “see last entry”s, “see next entry”s and “more of the same”s.

There *are* low-key things going on in my life– a lot of fun things, even– but mostly I’m just keeping myself occupied until the economy improves, my finances improve, and my savings account accumulates to an arbitrarily high number. To an outside observer it might appear that I’m just wasting my life away. But I see it differently.

One important thing to remember about me: I got where I am today by borrowing, and I don’t regret it. I borrowed to pay for my education and I borrowed to get my adult life started. Now I’m paying back. I’m happy to do it because– in case I’ve failed to mention in the last fifteen minutes or so– my life is pretty great right now. But paying back is also hard. It’s hard to stay on track when a lot of my energy is going towards honoring old debts instead of breaking new ground.

I keep reminding myself, though, that getting into debt was the correct move then and paying off that debt is the correct move now. I made a plan a couple of years ago, and its working, and I have total confidence that it’ll continue to work. It’s kind of boring to watch, though, so posting updates to this blog can be frustrating.

The silly things that I’m doing now– reading books, playing games, watching movies, messing about on websites– are mostly filler. My life is actually *about* something quite different.

I can *tell* folks what my life is about, but it’ll be much more convincing when I *show* them. And I’m not in a position to show anything yet. (I’ve been saying that for years, and yes, it’s still true.) And anyway, like I said, I have to get going… I’m headed over to Hunter & Mary’s tonight.

More soon.

Ugh. No entries for 3 months. Briefly: things are still going well for me here in B’ham. My job is still great, my town is still lovely, my always-expanding circle of friends seem by-and-large to be faring this great depression with admirable grit and an unkillable sense of fun.

My stress levels are up, though. When I get stressed I tend to withdraw into my own world and my own mind, pushing off minor responsibilities and letting my mail build up in a bin.

I am very sorry for being uncommunicative lately. My life, while still nice, seems like it’s slipping farther and farther off-tempo every day. “Off-tempo” is the best word I have to describe it, but maybe that doesn’t really explain anything.

I am tired and I have a splitting headache but I at least wanted to take a stab tonight at getting back on-track. This is that stab. I am trying to regain my stride. It is difficult to do.

Current mood: grouchy. I am going to bed now.

Tonight I decided to update Beyond Metamora to the latest version of WordPress and rearrange the site to look like a more conventional– well, more like a blog, basically.

It bums me out in one sense, but in other ways inspires me. I’m going to miss the homemade sharpie-marker design that I made in 2006, but I’m hitting a point where I need this site to be a more purely text-based & utility-rich medium. Maybe the next time I revamp the site I’ll figure out a way to combine the two styles and get my Sharpie warpaint back.

Right now, though, I just need a place to easily decompress some arbitrary text out of my brainpan. Lately the ideas have been piling up in my mind & on loose scraps scattered around my apartment without any easy place to put them. My main aim with this rebuild is to clear out the clutter and get more of those thoughts & schemes out into the light of day.

It seems I've fallen into a once-monthly update schedule for this. That suits me fine.

I found 3 tiny bees floating around inside a bottle of J.K.'s Scrumpy hard cider today. Some people would probably be grossed out by that, but my only thought was "aww, those bees came all the way from Michigan." I may be getting a bit homesick here...

Look for a more detail-rich update all about my most recent goings-on later tonight.

Just uploaded a new Song of Whenever to my audio page: [Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros - 40 Day Dream].

Yes, I do know how to spell "zeroes". Apparently Mr. Sharpe does not. I'll forgive him though, because this song makes me smile.

Also, if you wander over to [http://feeds.feedburner.com/nodeslam], you just might get a sneak peak at a new podcast that I'm dreaming up. This is a temporary feed while Sheds & I put a Wordpress site together. Only two files there currently, but I'll be uploading more as I finish them.