2002-09-03 - 7:50 a.m.

Dear Diary,

Man am I tired. The last time I looked at the clock last night, it was 1:00 am. Waaaah!

I laid in bed at 8:30 to read until bedtime. At 9:55 I hit the end of a chapter and diligently turned out the light. The neighbor's fight with her daughter ended at 11:00. By then my head was full of energy and I made a pretend conversation telling her off: "YOU are the adult, YOU are responsible for making sure she get's everything she needs, including a loving home. If YOU have a problem with her, then it's YOUR fault because you're her mother. Get a grip!"

Yeah.. Just by writing that I got a bit of adrenaline. Anyhow, by that point my mind had lots of energy and my body had that feeling that I've been laying too comfortably for too long to fall asleep.

The next half hour was me thinking of Irene again, thinking of how I got screwed, and going through a mental play of me telling her off, then going to the Ontario Labour Board and getting her in trouble. Another fine example of how smart I am because I can do the right thing in hindsight. And leading up to midnight were thoughts of seeing Michelle and Kris. Especially Kris. Although Michelle figured heavily in the thoughts, because at first she didn't want to leave me alone with Kris, and I talked her into it. Ha! Why can't I ever stop myself from having these useless mental plays? If I'm going to bother, I should be making them in terms of a story and writing it down instead of keeping myself awake.

I don't remember when it was that I finally got fed up and sat up in bed. Remember, the night before I had fallen asleep late as well and 6:30 had felt really early, so I should have been asleep for hours already. My solution was to get up, have a drink of water, then grab my guitar and play it sitting in bed.

Did that ever do the trick... it calmed me right down, made me happy. It sounded so nice. I love the feeling of playing in the dark, because I lose that urge to focus on the frets or on the strings and I start to just grope my guitar like an inexperienced lover. Inexperienced lovers may not be very accurate or productive but they definitely enjoy their endeavor :o) After playing for about a half hour, I laid back and began my usual half hour drift to sleep. Some day I swear I'll get into enough of a routine that I'll be able to fall asleep faster. Actually, I think it was because I didn't get any exercise in yesterday.

In the morning, I cleaned up the rest of the living room, vacuumed out the bedroom, cleaned the lamps and furnishings in the bedroom, and set everything up nicely in there. I also did laundry, which I swear practically did itself because I used the time on the microwave to tell me when the machine cycles were up, and I folded the clothes in record time as soon as they came out of the dryer. At least some things about me are still the same and I want them that way :o) What else did I do?? I can't remember.

Oh yeah, Damon called. I wonder how many more people I'll have to tell my news to. It's hard now because I don't have the weighty voice and constant rehearsing, so my delivery comes out funny. I say things are bad, I say that I hit Michelle, but I don't.. focus on it? dwell on it? It rolls off my tongue pretty fast and I just say that I'm working for the future and every day is getting better.

As far as reactions go, Damon's was I believe the coolest I have received. And I wish our language hadn't been so altered lately, because I mean cool as in cold, unimpressed, not knowing what to say. He still wanted to get together in a few days (because I was still busy with all my cleaning and didn't want to go anywhere or have visitors that day) but I think he was more disappointed in me that the rest of the people I've told. I sensed a definite influence from his history of abuse, just like Michelle. I think he will see me differently now. Who knows, maybe to people who've been under the fist of an abuser people automatically fall into two classes.. and Michelle has put me in that bucket now. That's tough... cause I know I don't belong there.. but what can I do? Sigh.

So yeah, that happened.. what else? I tried meditation and had a second shower during the day, and oh yeah! almost forgot.. I tried to play computer games. This is the 2nd time I've bothered with games at home since everything happened. The first time I played Aliens vs Predator 2 to kill time before my first meeting, and although I played for an hour I never saw a single enemy. I was freaked to high hell though and haven't had the urge to play the game since because it's too scary to be fun (for me). Yesterday I figured I would try out a racing game. At first I just checked to see if the steering wheel would fit on the table and when it did I engineered some way to prop the pedals up underneath with pillows under my knees and all, it was very comfortable :o)

I remembered thinking that one of the wires I had jerry rigged had come loose on the pedal cable so I unwound the electrical tape carefully and had a look but everything was fine. When I finally connected everything up and checked the test panel, the gas pedal wasn't working. So I reunwound the cable and didn't see anything wrong but just unwinding it seemed to make the pedal work. So I launched the game, realized the configuration was wrong, relaunched the game, finally figured it out, exited the game, set the pedals to single axis mode, rerelaunched the game and finally raced through the first stage of Greece in Colin Mcrae 1 *with* 3D glasses :o) Unfortunately, the gas pedal stopped working half way into the stage and I just took it as a DNF: mechanical failure. :o( All in all I spent maybe 45 minutes from first taking the steering wheel out from its storage place to finally tucking the last piece back in. Sigh. I figure some day I'll give the thing a complete overhaul and set it up permanently on some sort of bench or custom-made seat. Some day in the fairly distant future, mind you.

So I figured I'd play Counter-Strike. I went to cogeco and to my joy discovered that my ping was 500. I did some traceroutes and it is indeed our sprint provider who has the issues... but I figured I was game to start playing and hope the ping went down. My ping did lower, bottoming out at 100 and hovering mostly closer to 200, but I quit in disgust after only 30 minutes because there were too many other things wrong with the game. First, that stupid sound pack is still on, where the guys swear every time a bullet hits them and stuff. Second, your own footsteps and gun sound really far away. Third, if I'd have played long enough the sky would have gone mulitcoloured I'm sure :oP I just decided I'd reinstall half-life completely and start playing again in a little while.

Instead, I ended up chatting with Karen for a while as I carefully saved custom maps and files from the cstrike directory so I wouldn't have to redownload maps. She started messaging me as I was going through the history of end-of-game snapshots that Michelle had left behind. I'm so impressed with her skill.. I converted a bunch to jpg because I don't think she wants to lose them. She has an impressive track history of raping people on their own servers and just generally dominating "her boys" as she affectionately called them ;o) I'm not so sure they liked it, especially when she was 47 and 5 or some crazy ratio like that hehehe. My chat with Karen ended just about as I was done with the files, and I uninstalled and deleted the entire half-life directory tree. It really needed a good cleaning and it felt good to do that.

Then instead of reinstalling right away (I had the CD ready and everything) I made a decision to expand the hard drive to use all 60 GB instead of leaving some for linux. If and when I install linux on this machine, I'll just use the 10 GB drive and leave the 60GB one for my games, movies and mp3s. So I rebooted to dos and fired up old partition magic 4.0. The operation started and I watched it for a while till it got to "checking for bad sectors" and it took a minute to get to 1%. This was at maybe 5:30 pm.

I went to the bedroom to play some music and ended up reading through an old 'diary' that I had written in grade 8 English class. (Our teacher had made us write weekly in a notebook.) I had a few really good laughs at what I'd written. I absolutely have to write some things from that diary in this one because they are too funny. I checked on the hard drive repartitioning a half hour later and it was at like 18%. Joy. Well, I figured, it'll be done before bedtime.

I dug out my clarinet, tried playing it, was amazed that I can still read sheet music and still play a bit of an old song. I gave up on that clarinet in disgust, and dug out the newer and more working but crappier sounding one instead. That one didn't get played long either because it's just too much work to play these old things. Seriously, compared to the guitar, even though it was a freebie, these cheap clarinets are a pain in the neck. I played the guitar then for a little while, I really can't remember what all I did for the next little while.

Around about 7:30 the "checking for bad sectors" was getting to 80% when a big thunderstorm started to roll in. I stood at the window watching the lightning and loving the thunder as the sky got darker by the minute. I was starting to get nervous, but the bad sector check finally ground through to the finish about 8:05. Then it was "changing structures". I can't tell you how ominous it was to sit there and watch the progress indicator crawl for 10 minutes while the program was "changing structures" on my drive in the middle of a thunderstorm. Near 80%, there was a flicker, the monitor almost flicked off, the DSL connection cut out suddenly, but the whole thing kept lugging along. After that it only had to "check current integrity" again for a little while before it let me shut down and breathe in deeply in relief. I really didn't need to risk corruption of all the important files I've been saving for years. Next time I'll check the weather forecast before I do anything like resize a 50GB partition to 67GB because it takes a few hours. Or maybe I'll get a better copy of partition magic ;o)

Wow! What a thrilling! account! of! resizing! my! hard! drive!. I can hardly believe how thrilling it must have been to read that. I spent the rest of the night reading my book, as the fair of memory will attest, since I started out by saying I went to bed to read at 8:30.

man.. I really didn't intend on typing this for 50 minutes. I was thinking more like "you're tired, make this a quick entry, go for a walk in the early morning cause it'll feel good" Well, anyway, time to have breakfast.

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