Today I purchased Dragon and using voice input. It's going to take some getting used to. Today's New Year's Day and I stayed up until nearly 7 AM this morning when I went to bed it had snowed fairly heavily, when I rose it was raining and nearly melting off all the snow. Got a call from +Barry Wainwright, who invited me down to his house for New Year's Eve. He said there was good to be another couple at the house besides he and his wife I politely declined and wished him a happy new year. I'm hoping Dragon is going to help me write papers for college in a quick manner and I would hope that my art professor would accept late entry for my midterm she says I didn't turn in. You have to drop them in a drop box for Columbia College and wings you do that you automatically receive a dropbox receipt of which there is none for my midterm paper. I have recently wiped my computer hard drive for five times and did not save my midterm paper to the cloud, to my chagrin. I'm planning on getting a new laptop and have promised myself a gaming laptop for a very long time. I've done a lot of research over the last week or so and I had had in mind an Alienware but after searching for several of those, I had found that alien ware are a very clunky heavy machine that most other gaming laptops are able to compete with very easily without all of the clunkiness. I believe I have decided on Asus Republic of Gamers which has the best fan setup I've ever seen on a laptop, not to mention it's blazingly fast. I guess that's about all for today. -Chief out

Dagoba

I am not grieving much over the loss of the military life anymore. it's been nearly a year since I left it and nearly 4 since I left my one true love, the sea. The anxiety doesn't come from that. It was there for several years and kept at bay with constant busying of sea schedules and inspections and jets screaming off the "pointy end". One cannot truly understand the source of my anxiety unless they understood my job. There were lives hanging in the balance with every decision I made. Whether it was the pilot and rio clinging to the innards of the aircraft I was slinging up into the air with fire spewing out the back, or the guys that were in my charge, and ensuring they were constantly ok. If I had a catapult go down... well... in the theatre of world operations there is always a carrier. That carrier has jets on it and they are the one fine line in the sand between our ground troops advancing or staying safe. Also the jets are the magic wand in any conflict that can erradicate the enemy with one swift gushing of armorment and firepower. ok, back to the catapult, There are only 4 cats on every carrier, and 4 arresting gear wires to retrieve the jets from flight. When one of those cats breaks, there are only three. Each battle platform is mesured at the pentagon on the huge workd map in realtime by percentages. When one cat is down, that little blip moves from 100% to 75% in a microsecond, lessening our warfighting capabilities in an entire region. if two goes down, kiss your ass goodbye because we can barely sustain air supreiority in that particular theatre. Well, since 97' I have been in charge of at least one catapult. By 2006 I was in charge of all 4, and all the arresting wires and the electronics which guide the planes in for recovery. It's a knee jerk life that has a "the only easy day was yesterday" kinda mindset. Most of the guys that are in positions like mine were able to tune out the gravity of the situation or just able to mindlessly carry out their repititious duties, too stupid to grasp the level at which the job hung on the scheme of things. I literally controlled the entire warfighting capability of an entire theatre, let alone the carrier. I once tried explaining this to Barry and he could hardly grasp the idea that they would hang all that responsibility on one guy. I don't think he really believed me, or was just placating a guy who's delusions of grandeur made him think he was that important to his country. I truly wish the latter were the case. It's not! I'm shaking as I type this and having to retype every like 4th or 5th word due to anxiety. It keeps the giant pinned down and I am a giant of a man inside, capable of huge things. I someties feel like Yoda living in a little hut in a swamp, so powerful that he could take down gods and idols without lifting a finger but somehow exiled by an unseen force putting him there.

Sunday Blues

I finished my Art class last night with Brett's help. He's really great at digging through Google and finding stuff out. He's gonna be a great husband, my only hope is that he has a great wife. I went to bed at 1 or 2 last night while Brett's friends were over watching videos. I slept a couple hours and woke up with an achy tummy and went to sit it out in the living room. Chatted a while longer with friends and went to bed a couple hours later. I awoke to a headache this morning, well noon, rose and took some excedrin. That's really all that helps with my headaches, which I recently learned were migraines, during my physical for retirement. I'm really down after taking my regular meds and hope it's not a theme that's building. I was really down the past couple days as well. I have been, over the past several months, been experimenting with prolonged periods of not bathing. I somehow feel it will help me if there's ever anything that would happen to force this to be the case. I can't make it very long, 3 or 4 days tops, as private areas do not take kindly to not being shown some cleanly attention. That and I detest feeling gross and dirty. I would hope I would find a way to cleanse myself if the inevitable happens. I'm wondering what's going on with the weather last few weeks. It can't seem to make up it's mind whether to be really cold, like freezing, or fall like temperatures. Some think it's global climate change and the planet's pole aligning itself to a different degree. I do know that true north isn't aligned with magnetic north any more as a compass doesn't align with GPS. Whatever's happening it's wreaking havoc on my sinuses. I'm an afrin junkie at night just to breathe. I find myself explaining why I never call anyone nor answer my phone at all more and more. I have made the attempt to answer it when it rings but my social anxiety really goes bananas on the phone. I wish I could feel more normal with all of it. I think I would have more friends if I were more sociable.

Was up until around 3 or 4 last night. Woke to the heater in my bedroom and the feeling I would suffocate from the heat in there. Took the dog out and it was 60 out there. Seems like all she wants to do is bark when she's outside so she came in rather quickly. Sometimes when I wake before I've had 8 full hours I sometimes have to get up for a while and wait until my body's ready to do the rest of it's sleeping. Well after my date with my son's friend's mom, she had hit me back on facebook and let me know her heart still belongs to some guy she has fallen in love with online. Her son and his wife both say he's mean to her and not very good to her. She had also commented on how he treats her and how she was still in love with him. Oh well, guess you can't see the forest for the trees sometimes. I'm nodding in and out of reality sitting here trying to blog. See ya next time.

Vichy Rd posts

I must get started blogging again. There's really nothing I'd like more. Brett has been out here living with me for a couple months now and it's been really great. No more sitting around totally lonesome and having no one to share things with. He has introduced me to his new Rolla friends and they seem really nice. I even went on a date with their mom! I have switched to Linux and it's been refreshing. A brand new way to do the same old thing online and on the pc. The thing with Linux is that you have not one OS to choose from but a plethora of them. When you get bored with one or if it starts acting up, you can simply switch to another one you may like, and keep your files without losing all your pics, music, whatever? I have settled on two that are pretty great, Ubuntu is kinda ubiquitous. There is quite a bit of support online. The other is PinguyOS. It's lesser known but really user friendly and has tons of commonly used apps pre installed, the guy even set the browser favourites that most of us would set anyway, online video content to boot! There's a brand new one out that I'd like to try called Linux Lite. It's created by a chat buddy of mine that also created the Linux Distribution Community. If they can't give some insight on there, not many can and you should probably not be using a computer in the first place if they can't help you out. The biggest thing about switching to Linux is you have to get handy with digging through the online forums. There's enough Linux users in the world that someone has encountered your particular problem somewhere and has probably fixed it and really willing to share how they did it, as it's kinda a triumphant feeling to share a fix you found. I have a bucket list. One of the items on it went away and I'm so glad I finally got to try it. I don't think I will ever stop. more to come...