Cripes, Not Again.

Name change!

Thu, 27 Oct 2005 19:03:38 GMT

Hey folks. You may have noticed that I don't update much, and I think it might be because my username doesn't really inspire me to write anything. I mean cmcykana? Come on. I'ts just my freaking initials and last name. So since most of us use a different handle with some sort of personal meaning, I'm gonna join the club and start posting under driant, which is the name of Heidi's adorable little Taru red mage from FFXI. Of course, I was Wenhaver back in that life, but that's obviously already taken, so driant is the next best thing.

In conclusion, I suppose, everybody update your friend lists, because cmcykana is basically toast. I'm keepin' the moogle icon, though. That thing rules.

Wow.

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 21:00:18 GMT

20 years ago this month, the original 8-bit NES hit store shelves. I'm willing to bet that everybody I currently know has fond memories of this machine.

TWENTY years ago. Folks, we are OLD.

Wow. Just, wow.

PSA

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 20:31:31 GMT

Because I care about all of you very much, let me reiterate:

Do NOT be a jackass when you self-medicate. Too much cough supressant makes you feel strange.

Not...freakin'...necessary...

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 20:22:11 GMT

I may be uncomfortably tripped out on cold meds right now, but even I can see that this is stupid.

First the MMO, an upcoming collectible card game, and now an 80 dollar board game?! Yeesh. There are times when I really, really miss playing WoW, and there are times like this when I see the obsessive/addicted culture that's sprung up around it, and I'm glad I'm out of that scene.

It was the scenery that made it compelling for me. The first time I rode through Feralas on my crazy warlock demon horse was a Classic Gaming Moment. So pretty!

untreated ADD == good times

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 19:58:45 GMT

It should be fairly obvious to anybody who knows me that I've got teh ADD something fierce. It's a struggle to sit through an hour long TV show, I'm constantly fidgeting, and when I'm around people, I tend to not say much of anything because I've got so many possible conversational directions playing out in my head that I freeze.

This will hopefully all be fixed at the end of October, when I see a neurologist who will finally, finally give me the meds I need to re-balance my brain.

Until then, however, I'm kinda skrood. Here's where I sorta get to the point:

For the past four days or so, I've been very fatigued. Yesterday when I woke up, my limbs were actually kinda rubbery, exactly like when you're on Xanax or Valium. Heidi suggested that my body was fighting off a bug, which made perfect sense to me, so I hopped myself up on cold pills, in an attempt to help my immune system nip that thing in the bud. A few hours later, Heidi and I notice that I had been uncharacteristically easy to hang with, all paying attention to TV shows and not fidgeting and generally being less annoying than usual. Of course, this is because of the pseudoephidrine in the cold pills. It's a stimulant that increases the dopamine levels in the brain, just like the usual ADD medications. Heidi looks at me and jokes, "Well, we could keep you hopped up on cold pills until you see the neurologist".

I, being an ass, took this comment seriously. All I have to do is munch cold pills for a month and I can keep myself focused and make my wife happier! I'd be happy! Productive! My life would change forever! So I got up this morning and swallowed 6 cold pills, and took 4 more over the course of an hour and a half, for a total of 300mg of pseudoephidrine in my system. This is a Good Thing, because it keeps me from spazzing. Unfortunately, cold pills also contain acetominephen and dextromethorphan. The acetominephen is harmless at the dosage I took, so that's ok. The dextromethorphan, on the other hand, had the truly bizarre side effect of making you trip like crazy if you take too much of it, which I believe is where I'm at now. 150 total milligrams of that stuff is more than enough to render one ever so slightly out of joint, and it's really unpleasant.

So, yeah. That was long. I suppose the moral of the story is to not be a jackass if you choose to self medicate.

Why we can't have nice things

Wed, 01 Jun 2005 01:37:09 GMT

We have this rug. It's not terribly fancy, one of those $250 Persian/Oriental things, but it is a fairly nice rug with a modern block pattern that we spent 80 dollars on at ShopKo. After 6 months of use, it stinks of piss and shit and is covered in fur. Our baby plays on this rug. I vacuum it once a week and try to steam clean it every other week or so. It doesn't work. There's a little hard spot close to one of the corners, where a cheap candle melted. The wax ran off the coffee table and dripped down onto the rug. By the time I noticed, the spot was huge. I took a hot iron and wet towel to it for twenty minutes, and got a lot of it up.

We got a new couch right after we got married. My parents gave us a thousand dollars to spend on a king-size bed (at the time we were sleeping on a full). After deciding we couldn't possibly fit a king-sized bed in our peasant-sized bedroom, we got a living room set instead, including a charcoal-colored couch that kind of feels like microsuede but really isn't. Within a week, the cat had completely flayed both of its arms, ripping apart the fake microsuede and exposing the cheap foam padding underneath. Since then, the couch has also endured multiple cigarette burns, drink spills, and houses countless balls of lint and food crumbs in its cushions.

The kitchen trash is a huge point of contention right now. About once a week on average, Chester will knock it down and spread it all over the floor. Sometimes he'll go for three weeks without fucking it up, once he did it three times in one day. At any rate, we'll get home and find an enormous mess to clean up. It gets cleaned, and then Heidi and I fight about just why the hell we even bother to have pets, since all they ever do is destroy our things, get in the way when we're trying to eat, misbehave when we take them outside, and so on.

But I'm wondering if we'd really be better off without them, since we're just as good at screwing up our nice stuff as they are. We've got brains and opposable thumbs and shit, all the dogs and cat have are big stupid ids; but we're all equally to blame for the stains and burns and all the other random little shit that's wrong with our stuff.

I've never really cared for pets, and if allowed, I could drop them off at a shelter as easily as I'd drop off a video at Blockbuster. But knowing how happy they make Heidi, it's worth remembering that all the nice stuff we have that they ruin, we'd probably just fuck up ourselves eventually anyway.

I am a fucking pussy.

Tue, 31 May 2005 20:32:51 GMT

I tried to do push-ups today.

Got up to 4 and just about DIED.

This is a situation that needs to be rectified.

In other news, the pile of laundry in the bedroom is a good 2 feet shorter. That is good.

We finished Scrubs season one last night. Next up is NewsRadio -- ALL of it.

unemployment

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 01:08:33 GMT

Today's my second day off work. The project at AmFam ended last Friday, and I'm staying home with Evan 'till I find something else. There's a possibility of part-time work at Apex (the gutted remains of my old employer, Impressions), and if that pans out, it'd be wonderful, 'cause I could still stay home during the day.

I've been puttering around cleaning the house since yesterday; there's maybe fifteen more minutes of work in the living room, and then all the public areas of the house will be clean. I'm loving staying at home during the day, I've got more energy than I know what to do with since I'm actually moving around and doing stuff, instead of sitting in front of a monitor. Evan seems much happier, too.

Two albums have been making me happy lately: The Arcade Fire's Funeral, which sounds to me like the Flaming Lips, Broken Social Scene, and Franz Ferdinand got together and made an album. That is Very Good. It traverses the same sort of melodramatic psychedelia territory that The Soft Bulletin did so well.

Then there's Two Lone Swordsmen's From the Double Gone Chapel, which is quite a departure from their usual dirty electro: TLS has gone...goth-rock! Seriously, it's pretty awesome, if you've got a soft spot for dark basslines and black-clad eyeliner guys growling into distorted mics.

C'mon. You know you do.

low

Tue, 11 Jan 2005 02:50:57 GMT

So. The advantage of having this never-ending cold is that at around 8:30 every night, my voice starts doinng this nifty Barry White/Leonard Cohen thing.

I need to figure out a way to use this for evil...

mundane

Mon, 10 Jan 2005 21:00:19 GMT

I took the day off today hoping to get into the doctor, since I'm starting my third week with The Ass today. They said they couldn't get me in till Wedensday, the jerks, so I had Heidi ask her doctor what was wrong with me when she went for a checkup today. I don't have emphysema or anything, just a really shitty cold. So that's good.

The house is in much better shape now, which makes us feel really good. There's 8 bags of laundry sitting in the corner of the bedroom, but aside from that, it's really nice to be able to walk around without having to step over junk. Hopefully we'll be able to keep it this way, 'cause once school starts for Heidi, there won't be time for big cleaning orgies.

Evan's been asleep most of the day. I should probably take advantage of that by going to sleep myself, but there's lots of little things I can putz with here that Heidi would really appreciate, so I'll probably take a shower and do that instead.

It's Heidi's birthday!

Tue, 04 Jan 2005 00:55:18 GMT

She's taking a nap until seven, then we'll go out to Noodles for a small celebratory dinner, where she's gonna get chicken with her pesto, because it's her birthday, dammit. I'm thinking of little free things I can do for her in lieu of a present, since we're still fairly precariously perched, money-wise.

I'm doing my little part to fix that situation by giving up my debit card and going on a $20 a week allowance for small items like snacks and lunches. There's a possibility that I might even budget cigarettes into that, but I'm not sure how much of my weak-ass willpower I want to rely on all at once.

The apartment is a wreck, and I've been too sick to do any cleaning lately. We'd all feel better, I think, if the place were tidier. Should probably get on that.

There's an opening in Blythe's department for a data-entry hamster. I've got part of a cover letter open in another window. It's not very good in its current state. Tweaking cover letters is easily the worst part of the job-hunting process: they always feel so insincere.

So much snot!

Mon, 03 Jan 2005 00:58:09 GMT

I've been fairly ill for the past...eh, week or so. It's the stuff everybody gets around this time of year; the awful sinus congestion and headache plus herd of elephants clogging up your chest that's not quite bad enough to warrant a trip to the doctor. Most people call it The Crud; in my case it's gotten an order of magnitude or so worse, enough to dub it The Ass, like a tropical storm turning into a hurricane. Massive doses of just about every OTC concoction available have been consumed. I discovered an old albuterol inhaler in the linen/medicine closet, too. That thing's great.

Heidi first brought The Ass home with her a couple of weeks ago, and she's pretty much over it now. Early last week, poor Evan caught it, but luckily, it blew through him and into me in about a day or so. There's nothing in the world more pathetic than a sick baby.

In between coughing jags and sad, self-pitying moans, I've been looking at job sites, in hopes of minimizing the downtime between when this current project at AmFam ends and the next thing I find. So far, I've sent resumes in for:

A tech-support monkey for a school district

An electronic publishing gig eerily similar to the one I used to have

2 Photoshop/Quark hamster jobs

Meh. I've noticed that, while the economy is generally down in the dumps right now, temp agencies and staffing firms are doing very, very well. Which totally makes sense.

To the 51%...

Thu, 04 Nov 2004 19:25:31 GMT

Congratulations! You've taken our good friends Reason and Common Sense out back and shot them in the head.

But hey, who needs objective reality when you can just make shit up and call it a church?

I feel far less safe than I did 4 years ago. And sadly, it's my fellow citizens who I fear.

Also...

Tue, 12 Oct 2004 12:44:06 GMT

...more unicorn-related news here.

Nnnnnyaaaaar.

Unicorns Against Bush

Tue, 12 Oct 2004 12:11:43 GMT

Heh.

Moms, babies, and bogys.

Wed, 06 Oct 2004 23:13:55 GMT

My mom's coming into town tonight, and she'll be staying for a few days to help out with Evan. She even suggested that she could take him for a whole day while we use her hotel room for precious sleep. This is an Excellent Idea, which I wholeheartedly endorse.

Actually, my parents have been full of Excellent Ideas lately. The one we're most excited about, and certainly the Most Excellent Idea Ever, is that they're considering getting into the real estate game up here in Madison. See, they're about to sell their enormous 6-bedroom house of doom down in Texas, and are looking for another investment property to sink the proceeds into. Since I'm a totally fucking awesome son, and since we just had a baby, and since our current apartment is several sizes smaller than cramped, they're thinking of buying a house up here and renting it out to us. Oh dear sweet jesus, that would rock. So, we're sending them local information and hoping for the best.

Evan is eating like a fucking fiend: if he keeps this up, we'll have to send him to fat camp. Heidi passed him off to me at ten this morning, and said he'd just eaten 3 ounces. 30 minutes later, I'm forced to stuff another bottle in his mouth to stop his mewling, and he chows down another 4 ounces! Y'know that thing where he was born and he was all frail and tiny and his tummy was so little he could barely eat half an ounce at a time? Well, two weeks later, and that's no longer a problem.

In FFXI news, we managed to get on the same server as flamestar_m, so woo hoo for that! H and I have been duoing in Jugner Forest lately, and have suffered 6 horrible deaths: H has fallen twice to the hideous, slavering maw of the undead, and has also been mauled my a tiger. Me, I've been eaten by two tigers, and then one of the slavering undead maw thing.

We're thinking of leaving the forest.

night owls

Sun, 03 Oct 2004 11:15:04 GMT

It's six in the morning, and we're both still up. Evan's kinda up. Like, in that state where he's basically unconsious when you cradle him in your arms or put him in a bouncer or Boppy. We could put him in the crib, and that'd fool him for about 20 minutes, but then he gets wise to that scheme, realises he's not being swaddled or held, and starts fussing. He likes the human contact, he does.

A "whooo!" just came from the nursery. I can only assume another poo bomb.

Egon came over, we rented The Girl Next Door, and some other movie whose name escapes me at the moment. It was pretty good; a much smarter kind of comedy than American Pie and its ilk.

I have just been handed a baby. Bye now :P

the thing with the baby

Sat, 02 Oct 2004 19:29:11 GMT

So, as y'all may have heard, there's a baby on the loose in chez Cykana. Well, not really on the loose, since he's got the coordination and mobility of a hunk of moss, but still. He's here. Big thank yous to everybody for their support and humor during the pregnancy hell and post pregnancy confusion. I'm a totally rad husband, but without the support network she has, particularly the LJ community, this whole thing would have been a lot more difficult.

Oh, and BOO to those who say don't use propped bottles to feed your baby. Propped bottles are your FRIEND, yo. Kiddo's starting to eat 3-4 ounces at a time, and that's a good 30 minutes or so that you can be using to fold laundry, clean the kitchen, or protect yourself and your family from terrorists. I'm a father now. I've got to think about that kind of stuff.

We've applied for World Emigration in FFXI, which is what happens when they decide the servers are too crowded and make a new one to balance the load, then populate it with folks on the existing servers who've submitted apps. Doug and Connie are doing it as well, and we're gonna try to talk Egon into doing the same. Playing with real-life friends is far superior to pick-up groups with idiot strangers, so this should be really fun.

Heidi got the new Laurell K. Hamilton book on Tuesday, which apparently involves much fucking. Par for the course for Anita Blake series, I hear. My shiny trinket was Dark Cloud 2, which is just a phenomenal game, and I'm an ass for not picking it up like, a year ago.

Evan's fast asleep in his Boppy. It's hella fucking adorable, yo.

snuh

Tue, 09 Mar 2004 01:05:02 GMT

Yes, I'll probably update just this once and then forget about it for another 6 months. Thpbbbbt.

Spent the day at work doing...work stuff, not much to report there. Now that I'm home, we need to figure out what we're going to do tonight. At some point I'll be calling my mom to whine about the fiscal clusterfuck we're in, but everything else is up in the air. I'm leaning toward picking up some beer and soda and renting this Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic game, since it's supposed to be face-meltingly awesome, even if you're kinda indifferent to the whole SW universe. Which I am. We'll see how H feels about my little scheme.

I'm bracing myself for an earful of piss and bile from mom for "getting myself into the situation I'm in" and "accepting consequences" and lots of other stuff she tends to let loose when I get in a bind and she forgets that I'm not 14 anymore. But since I'm 1000+ miles away, my situation's gotta be little abstract to her, so it's forgivable.

My parents are unusual...they'll buy us massive toolkits and steam cleaners and entire flippin' living room sets for wedding gifts without thinking twice, but getting them to help us, say, not get fucking evicted is like asking to help hide a body. Bah.

Anyway. It's strongly suggested that you fire up the p2p client of your choice and grab the track "Tetra-Sync" from Squarepusher's new album "Ultravisitor". The album as a whole is kinda meh, but this track is just phenomenal. It's about 9 minutes long, and includes some very cool drum and 303 programming, good live percussion, and a couple of 2-minute-long bass freakouts that would make Les Claypool cry. Considering that it's all written, produced, and performed by one guy, the sheer amount of musicianship on display here is pretty impressive.

Heh.

Wed, 20 Aug 2003 15:03:38 GMT

You are Gambit!

You are a fierce fighter and a good friend to have.
Your preference for solitude and your
attractiveness make you very intriguing to
those you meet. Unfortunately, close
relationships are few and far between for you
because you often have trouble opening up to
others.

Which X-Men character are you most like?
brought to you by Quizilla

you are a pretentious indie asshole. you piss off
everybody but other pretentious indie assholes.
you suck extremely hard and only listen to
stuff on pitchfork media. fuck you.

what type of lame scenester are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

your fuck.

What swear word are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

mud is thicker than blood, or something

Fri, 25 Jul 2003 23:58:22 GMT

Tonight begins a weekend of family-related hoo ha. My cousin Jenell's here, she'll be coming up with Linda and I to the family reunion in Sheboygan tomorrow, where I'll get to see my parents for the first time in 7 months.

Yikes.

Heh.

Thu, 17 Jul 2003 17:15:44 GMT

Destruction, the sixth of The Endless, you are a
rebel. You abandoned your realm, refusing to be
held responsible for all the disasters in the
world. You roam forever, trying to escape what
you are. Always on the run, and never facing
the truth, you live in denial. It's not your
responsibility, it's not your fault, and it's
not your problem, even when it is.

Which Endless are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

blast-ended skrewts ate my baby

Wed, 16 Jul 2003 23:14:04 GMT

Well, I left work at 5:15. Should have stayed till 7, but boo to that. I can get the hours in tomorrow. And I'll have to, too, if I expect to ship the next batch of stupid dead guy XML out by Friday. There's about 15 titles left in the pilot project, I think, and we've done all the easy ones already. I'll have to machete through a jungle of badly coded id references for the rest of them. Nerb.

Finally found time to get Powerbook back up and running after a goddamn month of not having a home computer. Not that it's mattered, I've been spending too much time blissed out with girl to care. It's nice to have it back, though.

There's a pile of clean laundry on the bed to fold, a pile of dirty laundry on the floor to wash. Hopefully my backpack is underneath one of them: it's been MIA for a week and a half now. Normally, I wouldn't give a toss (it's god-awful ugly), but it's got Zelda in it, and possibly my brain medicine. So. Yeah, must find, if only so we can get that stupid magic armor that we've been chasing down. That shit better be awesome, lord knows we had to trek back and forth across the ocean eleventy-four billion fucking times to get it. Long, pointless side-quests and compulsive videogame thoroughness are a dangerous mix.

Crap. I seem to have developed a headache. Hopefully it's not that chinese H gave me for lunch earlier. <Marge>Hrmmmm.<Marge>

Speaking of H, she should be here in 15 minutes!

*flip*

pushpins for the labrats

Tue, 15 Jul 2003 19:00:11 GMT

So, yeah. Here I am. I've had this account for 3 weeks now, but held off on posting anything because I felt I had to write some big dumb first post introductory epistle thing, and just haven't been able to coax anything interesting out of my skull. It probably would have been a bunch of stuff about how drastically my life has changed in the past 7 months, how making a random decision to move across the country is the best thing I've ever done because I'm happier now by several orders of magnitude, how grateful I am for the wonderful people I've met, etcetera ad infinitum blah blah wank typetype blah blah ugh.

So, let's leave it at that. I'm a happy, comfortable boy with a nice job who knows some great people. And now I can share the contents of my head and/or desperately try to justify my existence to all the other exhibitionists out there who like to spill their innards in view of strangers, and the voyeurs who soak up same. Nice. Thanks for the account, wenhaver.

krunk

Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:18:26 GMT

Testing...ignore.