Reading: Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters by John Waters
Music: Great Big Sea
TV/Movie: I Shot Andy Warhol
Link o' the Day: Comedity

A season of change.

That's what it's been. This past month has seen changes from small to great.

The biggest, of course, is my father's passing. He and I had gotten very close over the years--even moreso this past year as he attempted to deal with strokes, confusion, and cancer treatments. He had a really bad year. I'm very glad he was able to see me safely married. At the very least. We have a lot of paperwork to deal with, and work still to do. There's a lot I could write about this whole thing, but it's still a bit too close right now.

Other changes? Well regular readers may remember that a week prior to my dad's passing, I got laid off. I'm still laid off, but doing okay. Unemployment helps. I have some freelance work. Pretty Maggie is working. It'll be tight from time to time, but we'll be okay, and I'm trying to make good use of my time. I'm doing housework. Catching up on freelance. Writing. Very happy about writing. It's been a little rough lately with everything else, but I've gotten some good work done the past couple of days so we'll see how this pans out.

What else? What else? We have subscribed to FiOS service from Verizon and are pretty happy about that. The internet speed doesn't seem much improved except for when I have to do huge uploads or downloads of graphics-heavy files--then it's very fast. We didn't have e-mail through our Verizon accounts for a couple of weeks and I finally got pissed off enough to yell at some people. Now it's working and I was then very sweet to them. (It helped that I didn't get out-sourced customer service which has never gotten me the results I needed.) Mind you, I like Verizon, but they need to work on their inter-office communication skills. Most problems I've ever had with them have been due to poor communications between their various branches.

The best thing about FiOS, though, is the TV service. My god. The movies. The Movies! I've caught indie flicks and obscure flicks that I've been trying to find for years. The On Demand is a wonderful thing. This service is going to pay for itself in just the money I save from buying DVDs. Documentaries. Boomerang! BBC America! Biography! Turner Classics!

I'm hyperventilating here.

Suffice to say. I'm pretty happy with it. I'm not necessarily watching more than I was before, but the variety has greatly improved.

After pumping hundreds of dollars a month into trying to keep Pretty Maggie's car going, we finally decided it was time for a new vehicle. The straw that broke the back was the day of my father's wake, the car died and I spent most of the day at the garage watching them do $700 worth of work tgo get us back on the road. (I didn't miss anything, but we were a little rushed the night of the wake.) Shortly after that we had more problems, and then another. Enough. Pretty Maggie has been wanting a Ford Escape for years and now she's in a position to get one. After visiting several lots and dealing with a bunch of sleazy dealers, we found a great guy at Tasca and got a great deal on an 06 model. She loves. I love it. We're determined to keep it neat and clean. We even took it to a car wash yesterday. It's a nice smooth ride. Lots of room. Mileage isn't bad as SUVs go, and not much worse than the 99 Cirrus was toward the end.

Lessee... anything else? We have geckos again. We had geckos once before, but they got sick and died on me and it shook my confidence for a while. Pretty Maggie encouraged me to try again and we have some nice fellows who look very healthy and who I intend to keep healthy.

I missed out on Banjo Camp after all that preparing. My dad's final and fatal stroke was the night before I was to leave. The nice folks who run the camp are going to give me a half-tuition credit on next year. I still want to get the t-shirt, tho.

Okay, there's more I could write about, but let's pace myself. I'm going to try to get back to writing here daily again. Life is getting back to a semblance of normalcy and I'm getting my disciplines back.

I hope all are well.

Cheers!

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Today's link goes to Comedity, a pretty good webcomic. Excellent artwork. Pretty good writing. Definitely worth checking out.

Enjoy!