A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup

Listen Up!
Ok, I really need to get back to making these posts every Monday instead of screwing around and waiting until I'm too tired to write it. Sometimes I have to kick my own ass to do something. :: BIG news, I finally got myself a laptop. I think it's about time that I got one, so that now I can do everything that I was looking for a public computer for whenever I was away from home, without needing access to a library or whatever! There were plenty of reasons for me to get one, and it'll take too long to list, but let me say that none of them really required that much power. As thus, I found on Craigslist, an IBM Thinkpad T23 with a wireless card, for $150, which was absolutely what I was looking for. I'm not going to run games on it, and I'm not going to be editing podcasts or anything, so all I really needed was something that would go online with no problems, run photoshop when I need it, and have Bejeweled. :: Finals are fast approaching, and I'm ready for them, despite popular belief. I understand the concepts behind both of the subjects, I feel confident, and yeah. I'm good. :: THE NEW MALDROID CD ARRIVED! I could not be happier. I really couldn't, my favorite independent band's first full CD, with new tracks that aren't just remixes. I really suggest everyone puck up a copy of this CD, and if not, just go to their band page on fuzz.com, they've got plenty of tracks you can listen to there to convince you. :: My stereo system is getting really old. I've had it for somewhere around 8 years now, and it's worked fine for the past 8 years, and then all of the sudden over the past 2 weeks it's just been starting to commit suicide on me. It's skipping around on CD's I put in, the sound quality has suddenly become shit, and the volume it's able to put out has been slowly dropping. So I'm in the market for a new one I guess... :: I haven't gotten Mario Kart yet, though I will sometime before the week is up, and I'll review it in next weeks post. However, I'm still playing and unlocking things in Smash Brothers Brawl. God damn, the amount of good stuff to unlock in that game is just mind boggling. :: Oh, and I've started work at a machine shop which fabricates railings over in Perth Amboy. I work there doing whatever CAD drawings they need, and then helping fabricate, powder coat, and do whatever else they need around the shop. I'm also good for traveling and helping with installation or taking measurements. It's a good job, and best of all, I'm in the double digits per hour on what they're paying me. I think I've found my ideal job for now. SO right now I'm working Fridays from 8:am to 3:30 PM when they shut down, and Tuesdays from 8:AM to 11:30 AM. :: I've also got a batch of photos for DeviantART that I'm going to edit and put up sometime soon. ::

-- Music Release -- (not really)
You know what, I think it';s this that's been driving my blog posts to two weeks between. Because I feel compelled now to not break the "A new mash-up for every blog post" thing that I've been doing. Maybe I should break that, especially because I'm only still working on a few tracks that are not done yet, and I don't want to release (not anymore anyways) tracks that aren't fully done and polished. So from here on in, don't expect a new track each and every week, I think that's overwith. I will post here though whenever I come up with a new one. HOWEVER! Now that the nbew Maldroid CD is out, I am trying to find a good track to mix with some of the songs on there, and that'll probably be my next finished piece.


Daily Life:
Ok, so let me set the scene for today, because nothing else that happened the past 2 weeks was really worth mentioning more than today. My grandmother down in Florida has been having health issues and has been in and out of the hospital for a few months now. My parents recently decided that it'd be best for her to come up here and live with us. Not sure for how long, probably until she goes. And a note, I may sound a bit dim when I talk about the fact that she doesn't have long left, but I know she doesn't. I came to the realization that she would go within the next 10 years about 4 years ago, and have had the time to let it sink in and have accepted that someday soon she'll be gone. Yes it'll hurt when she does finally go, but I'm just saying.

Now, she arrived yesterday off the plane from Florida, and we've been preparing the house all weekend so that it will cater to her needs. We have a new TV that she will have no problems figuring out how to operate, the stairway has an electric chair that will lift her up, and all this other stuff. We've even hired a, what do you call it, not a nurse, but one of those helpers to help her do whatever. I'll figure out what they're called later. So I've had to help with all of this, which I don't really mind so much, seeing as how I understand it needs to be done and stuff.

Now, yesterday was a great day because I had a long time walking across campus and back again in the rain to get the guy to lend me the starter jumper cables because I'd left the lights on on my truck when I went into class and by the time I came out the batteries were gone. And then I had stayed up until around 3:00 AM catching up on stuff and putting off writing all of this. So skip ahead a bit, I basically had to get up at 7:30 to go to work, which I don't mind so much, but it meant that I got 4 hours of sleep last night and have thus been tired all day today. So work wasn't bad, you know, it's work. Work is work, you expect it to be what it is, and that it was. So let's skip to around 11:30, when work was ending for me. The last thing that really needed to be done to the house to prepare for grandma was a special electric recliner that we got, and had shipped to where I work. So it was there today, and I have to heave it into the truck and then get it back out and into the house and assemble it. That all wasn't so bad, it was pretty much all assembled, and lifting it wasn't so hard, but what really sucked was while I was assembling it, I didn't realize how sharp the edges on one of the steel portions was, and basically gashed my middle finger (my typing finger, which is why there's probably more than one spelling erropr in this post) and have been swapping band aids all damned day.

So that wasn't so bad. Skip ahead a bit, after a short 2 or 3 hour break, when all of the sudden, my da gets home, and he wants me to mow the lawn. If you haven't heard me rant about it before, I'll save you the details. I'd rather eat my own poo than mow lawns. I did it for years to make money, and I'm sick of it. It didn't help at all that this was the first mow of spring,m which is always the worst because the grass is up past your ankles, and it's moist as hell. Luckily he helped using the other mower and we got it done fairly quickly, especially for how much grass there was and how much it all sucked. So that happened, then I go back upstairs, anbd by now it's somewhere around 5:50 or so.

Now, I hear him calling for me from the other room. NOW he realizes that the bed that my grandmother is sleeping in is a few inches too high for her to climb into every night, and so he wants to see if we can find a way to lower it. More work. So we ended up, after pulling apart and reassembling my sisters mattress 3 times, swapping the mattress from my room with hers. All in all, more work than needed to be done, but at least it's work I don't have to do later. (That's the optimist in me talking, if you can't tell)

Skip ahead a little bit, to around 6:30 or so. I develop a HUGE headache out of absolutely NOWHERE. So now I'm tired, sleepy, and I have a migrane that's keeping me awake. I'm currently in the 1st level of hell. I somehow make it through the family dinner, which thank god it was pizza, otherwise I probably would have lost it then a little bit. (oh, and did I mention that the only thing I had to eat today before then was a bologna sandwich as soon as I got home from work and am hungry as hell, and they don't want me having more than 4 slices of pizza?)

So after I do that, I SOMEHOW manage to fall asleep while watching TV upstairs, only to be woken up and kicked out when my dad needed to change and watch TV himself. So I walked over to my room and somehow managed to fall asleep again. I just woke up an hour or two ago and somehow I feel just a little bit better.

Juggle This:
Whoah, I did a LOT since the last post. Ok, so I've really been getting into clubs again thanks to my Radical Fish being so much lighter and less tiresome than the airflites. As such, I've finally gotten good enough that I can start being creative with them, which was just a matter of practicing, and since I hated clubs with a passion (still kinda do), I never practiced and they just kinda sat there. So of all the things I've done with them recently, I think 3 things stand out above everything else over the past 2 weeks. I first came up with a variation of the 1 high 2 low handspin (throw one high, flip the other two in different directions to the same hands and catch them before the high throw), where I do the one high, turn both clubs 90 degrees so that the body faces inward, and switch them be doing a front-faced (club rotating sideways, parallel to the body) single and then catch the high throw. It's a really cool looking trick that isn't really all that hard, but it works.

Another thing I got recently was my first 3up 180 with 3 clubs. I spent only about 10 minutes trying before I got it on camera, and it felt good, and looked even better. I threw them absolutely perfectly, and it just looks so pretty on the footage I got. Unfortunately I did that in the theater at MCC and the closest outlet that I could find to the stage was still somewhere around 30 feet away, so it's a bit zoomed out, but it still looks good. Also, in the same practice session, I had the idea to try another variation of the 1 high 2 low trick, where you throw the 1 high, then throw 2 reverse crotch throws in synch. I tried it once, failed miserably, and thought about how I could do something similar but easier. After a few attempts at random moves, I came up with doing a 753 with the 3 under the leg. Made it on the 5th try or so, and it looks great.
Other than that, I really haven't been practicing rings anywhere NEAR enough, and even though 5 rings I can still pick up and do without having to warm up, I don't feel comfortable doing tricks with 5 anymore. I'll be having a giant ring practice session either tomorrow or Thursday to try and get some back, but I'm not sure. I'm still hoping to get good enough to compete in ring intermediates come WJF5 time. Which reminds me, I need to make another profile video.

My latest video for the [Juggling] series is ALMOST done with the footage. I just need maybe 30 more seconds of finished footage before I can start really editing it. It's about time too, because it's been almost 2 months since Cold Physics, and about a month since the Stupid Tricks video, so I think it's overdue.

I've started dusting off some of my old "weird props" routines, like the picture frame act, my cu[p and spoon tricks, and even my old tennis balls and racket which I haven't performed with for years. Why? Wes. "What The Duck?", after watching it, I started thinking about how I used to fill my gap in skill with all this random stuff that crowds would find fun and different, and now I'm just getting more and more boring trying to make technicality and harder tricks seem more fun. So I'll be practicing all that stuff.

I think I can officially say that JoJ, is done. The comic is done, the main podcast is god, and I've still got ideas to make it better anbd will still do it, the problem is I don't go to hardly any conventions to report on, and I don't buy any juggling DVD's that I can review. So I can still make them, and probably will, but they'll probably just end up being convention videos. Kind of a shame, but I look at it like this. Sure, Luke made Juggling Podcast also, but if it weren't for Jason Garfield being on JoJ and then thinking about how great of a medium it is, he probably never would have started his own podcast. And if it weren't for me being the second juggling podcast, Extreme Juggling Podcast probably wouldn't have been made either, seeing as how an idea doesn't really warrant a parody until at least 2 people do it. Not to mention that (and I have to give props to Taxman for starting ME into bitstrips) the Jugglers Crib comic probably wouldn't be if I didn't push the JoJ comic on rec.juggling. So I see the entire JoJ "saga/project/franchise" as a success, because it inspired others to do things, and do them better.

A Couple Weeks In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150