oh hai

This weekend I am packing. The goal of this packing process is to NOT take things I have been dragging around with me that I never do anything with and just need to finally get rid of. My goal is to minimize the amount of clutter in my life!! I have too many papers and other nonsense. It needs to get recycled or Goodwill'ed.

I have so many things I keep around for "art projects" that while once upon a time I actually did and used, it's been years since I've done anything with any of it. I need to streamline my interests and just say goodbye to some of them. I need to accept that I will never get around to doing them until I'm either retired or otherwise inspired. I have too many things on my plate and too much damn stuff.

This will be a tough purge, but it is very necessary.

I finally got my knee checked out and I was diagnosed with chondromalacia patella. This basically means my knee cap is tracking too far to the outside of my leg due to some cartilage damage. My innermost quad muscle is very weak and the outer ones are over compensating, so I'm walking all retarded.

I started physical therapy last week and omg ow. The therapy consists of quad strength exercises and some deep tissue massage using a foam roller. I swear I was in tears this morning from that damn foam roller. My calves and outer quads are so freakin' tight.

I've also switched to wearing Vibram Fivefingers shoes. For awhile now I've had chronic pain in my ankle and a couple of weeks ago it just got too unbearable. I finally could only wear Crocs clogs because every other shoe I had just hurt too much. Well then the ankle pain started with the Crocs so that was no good. A couple of my coworkers swear by the VFFs so I thought I'd give it a shot.

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Life has been super crazy the past few weeks. Deadlines at work caused me to have to work a lot of extra hours and then some challenges in the ol' personal life ate up what was left. I'm not going to get into details here but all I'm going to say is when you really fall in love with someone and you are committed, it's not easy. We all have little demons locked away and it takes a special partner to bring those to the front and make us face them. It's not pretty, in fact it's ugly and painful. BUT when you truly love someone and have made a commitment to being on this journey with them, you are willing to face those things and work through it. So we're working through some very difficult things, been working through them, and some truths that we'd both been hiding from each other have come to surface in the past couple weeks. We've had some heated confrontations and very emotional discussions. I really believe that we've both fully confessed at this point and have let go of some things as a result. But again, it's a never ending process of evolution so there will be more challenges. I'm just happy to be making forward progress :)

In other personal news I've made a commitment to get my financial situation sorted out this year. I've been working to get some outstanding collections debts paid off in an effort to improve my credit score. I also got my first credit card in 10 years hehe. Limit is $500 LOL. Hey I don't care, I just need something that I can pay off each month so I can boost my credit score. My credit score is about 630, or a "D" hehe. I signed up on this website called http://www.zendough.com and it's pretty snazzy. Anyways so currently I just have about $12k left on my student loans and one outstanding collections debt from ages ago that I forgot existed. Settling that will be easy. My goal is to pay off at least 50% of my student loan debt this year MINIMUM. Once I've got that straightened out, it's 401k/Roth IRA consolidation time so that I start regularly putting money into those accounts. I need to start regularly putting money away into those accounts and thinking about the future.

I've also made a commitment to get my physical health sorted out this year as well. Last year I started eating better, limiting refined carbs and really paying attention to what I'm putting in my body. I joined Seattle Fitness and have been going almost every day in the past 2 weeks. I've done a great job of losing weight with a minimum of excersize and diet alone (lost about 50 pounds!!) and now it's time to crank it up a notch and get off this plateau I've been experiencing. I've promised myself when I get to a maintainable healthy weight, I will go on a small shopping spree and re-do my wardrobe (another thing to save up some money for hehe).

One thing that is a big challenge for me is my tendency to bitch and moan when things aren't the way I think they should be. I've been making a huge effort to improve that. It's especially bad when it's coworkers. Right now it's a challenge because I'm essentially under-valued and under-ranked. I'm doing my best to not focus on the areas of lack amongst my coworkers, especially folks who I do not feel justly out-rank me. I feel like I'm being held to an unfair standard that others on the team are not being held to. When I've pushed the issue I've just been told to "demonstrate it more" whereas other people are not being asked for this same effort. I feel that I'm going above and beyond and getting kitchen scraps of recognition for it. The truth is, that's my biased perspective and it's not as if I've hit a glass ceiling or anything. I'm just frustrated and unhappy with the present, but hopeful because I'm doing what I can to change it.

I'm not looking to switch jobs right now, however, because I do feel like there are some areas where I need improvement and I have some projects I'm working on at $werk that will help me to grow as a developer. So basically I've just taken the attitude of keeping my head down and just focusing on what's important to me. I've just noticed lately I've been a little overly critical/negative and I need to watch that.

I'm not even really sure what I want in the long run. I'm a little sad because while our team is really fun and there are things I've liked about it, something has changed in the past several months. In particular we split into 2 smaller teams and instituted "SCRUM". This pretty much shot morale and made everyone miserable. The business side just keeps ignoring our needs and pushing stuff down our throats so our planning efforts are basically worthless since we are constantly getting derailed to put out fires.

Anyways I don't know what the issue is but there are clear morale things going on with the team. I haven't been paying much attention since I've been focusing on getting involved with Dreamwidth and some pet projects at $werk. I think that's just the way to go, frankly, I don't want to get caught in any crossfires.

I cut down the front of a lightweight sweater i have that has gotten too big. I have all these great geeky tshirts but i dont like wearing an extra shirt underneath when its chilly. Soooo this is my
solution!

Submitted my first Dreamwidth patch today!

http://bugs.dwscoalition.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60

Got some shit from someone in #dreamwidth about using the word "codez" so I've decided to tag all of my code-related posts as codez in her honor.

Spent some time wrestling with PerlTragick with cxreg. He knows the internalz of the Perlz much better than I do so we were looking at different build options to figure it out. Turns out Perl isn't passing the right path to PerlTragick's configz despite a local path being set :/ I'm installing a dw sandbox into my home dir so I have custom paths and such. Luckily it's not *required* for dw, but kind of annoying and it would be nice to get fixed. We're putting together a shell script to help other folks who might just want a local sandbox of dw on their machine to hack away at.

cxreg and I keep meaning to spend some time on some electronicsy stuff. I got this Make book awhile ago with the components kit that's like an intro type deal but haven't made time to do anything with it. So we busted it out tonight and were doing basic experiments with LEDs :)

Electronixx are fun.

I put on my lighter weight raincoat today as it is pouring down rain, but not cold enough for my regular wool coat. I haven't worn this coat since last year sometime... and I found some stuff in my pockets!

In my pocketses:

* lots of used tissue (ew)
* a plastic sammich baggy filled with Aleve
* a roll of doggy bags