David's Boring Blog

I have developed an annual habit. The week leading up to Halloween I ponder how the current year has gone and what I would like to do differently in the following. I start this musing a bit with resolutions in mind, but I look at quite a few things on the approach to the holidays and beyond. This practice helps me start examining and altering habits so that I have a chance of making them stick through practice before that mystical connection to a new year begins.  I am a quiet thinker. I like to get a little space around me. I love when I can remove distractions. I have spent this weekend spinning my wheels, letting my brain process, and reading a couple of books. I had looked at my trackers and there were a few results I was not unexpectedly disappointed in.  I started the year planning to draw a picture every day. That lasted a couple of months and just stopped. April through July were not great months for my health both physically and mentally. I spent quite a bit of time in bed fee

 One of the struggles I have in writing fiction is writing a great bad guy. I can scheme up all sorts of examples of fantastic evil shenanigans for a villain to do. There are plenty of tropes to draw from. The antagonist could work to replace the current royal person in order to replace them directly or via a puppet they can control. They could be carrying out a ruthless agenda and the hero or their family gets caught in collateral damage. As some casual side effect of the ambitions of the sociopathic character a great many souls can come to one bad end or another.  All of the pieces of getting them into a story are in my head. The problem for me is fleshing that character out. I think I enjoy ancient and incomprehensible beings from beyond space and time because you don't have to explain how they interact negatively with the hero and their world. The Great Old Ones just aren't good for reality and the people who live in it. They don't have to concentrate on how they are wr

 I love shopping on Amazon and a few other online stores. I have a website for shopping for firearms. I have primary go to for roleplaying games, card games, and board games. I have my comic book website where I do most all my business. Online shopping is a huge source of pleasure. It is also really bad for my bank account. I figured out I had a problem with it a few years back. I began eliminating my habit of collecting things as a hobby. That meant that I stepped away from Magic the Gathering entirely.  I stopped "filling in gaps" in my comic book collection. I sold off quite a bit of the comics because it was unlikely that I would ever go back and read them again. I still read comics, but I limit my purchases mostly to storylines I really enjoy with the occasional purchase of a piece of art I really enjoy. Artgerm, Jen Bartel, Sean Murphy, and Mirka Andolfo can trigger me to buy a few extra pieces here and there. I keep that carefully under control.  I quit collecting kniv

 I finished work today and immediately cut open a bag of potting soil. Teagan and I started loading my seed trays with soil. I took a bit of dark delight in the fact that I was doing this on the work bench in my office. The spills would clean up easily with a broom and a dust pan. Our acorns had waited patiently for this. A couple had begun to sprout in the humidity of the baggie. This is a good sign for viable acorns. We dropped them into the seed trays and had a nice time covering them up with soil. Teagan started to get a little bored at this point because she did not want to get her hands dirty. Meanwhile. I am thoroughly enjoying dipping my hands into the rich soil.  She helped me strip two trays worth of maple seeds. I ended up assembling the last two on my own. Teagan joined back in the reindeer games when it was time to moisten the soil. Since I am not flush with gardening gear I have no watering can. I do have plastic trays so a quick spray under the faucet gets me the soil co

Modern firearms are quick to load and fire. If I am just looking to make a ton of noise I can take my Kel Tec CP33 or S&W M&P 15 outside and fire off 30 plus shots in seconds. The reloading takes significantly longer. After emptying about half of my collection (I refuse to call it an arsenal) on Sunday I spent an hour and a half reloading and another hour cleaning weapons.  In other words, a "day" at the range can be a lot like terrible sex: tons of anticipation with a brief payoff that leaves you feeling less than satisfied. There is a reason that most ranges start their purchase time at thirty minutes. You can put a fair number of shots down range in a half hour. Spending a day, or even an afternoon, shooting means you are taking your time between shots and reloads. Even then it is not an inexpensive hobby.  You can enhance the experience greatly by firing black powder weapons. I have two. I have an 1858 Army reproduction cap and ball pistol. I also have a Hawken re

 I don't know how it began. Dad and Teagan went out to lunch and a trip to the park on a weekend. They came back talking about planting trees. I was briefly consulted. My input into the proceedings was to suggest that it is best not to plant within thirty feet of the house.  The next thing I know Dad has stepped off and marked a place for three trees to be planted. I would discover that on one of their trips they had collected three acorns from a local park. I get online and become an expert on planting oaks. My grandfather once installed a working knowledge of how to identify trees by the shapes of their leaves. All these years later I know the difference between trees with needles and trees with leaves. I redeem myself ever so slightly that I can identify poison oak and poison ivy at a distance.  Turns out that it is the right time of year to plant an oak tree. This makes total sense as it is also the time of year when acorns are plentiful on the ground. I also find out that you

I used to collect books. I started as a kid. From the time I learned to read well I have been ravenous for stories. I had shelves of books along the way. The first time I remember starting to put together intentional collection was when I stumbled across Margret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Dragonlance novels. That led me to explore the Forgotten Realms with Drizzt and his companions. I eventually stumbled on to Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind, Stephen King, Anne Rice, and my fictional worlds expanded exponentially from there.  By 2007 my book collection could fill half a tractor trailer. Moving and reorganizing was a painful process. When I traveled I always packed a few books for any trip. Though part of the fun of visiting a new place was discovering their bookstores. For this reason, and a few others, I avoided eReaders like the Nook and Kindle.  Besides all of that, I took a great amount of pride in my book collection. I had lots of first editions from my favorite authors. I had mor

 I have been working on my emotional reactions for the past few years. Along the way I realized that if someone can trigger me or get me to react then they have power and control over me. Pausing a reaction is not natural to me. My thoughts and emotions move quickly inside me. For many years the natural thing to do was to allow my outer response time to match the speed of my thoughts.  The first step in this control was to learn to play the pauses. There are times it is appropriate to respond quickly, but more often it is best to allow my natural reaction to occur internally and extend the thought process further. I learned to control my reactions by not only working out the appropriate response, but also to think through what the person speaking to me was trying to make happen. Making this educated guess allowed me to work deeper through my thoughts and then start working on what reaction I wanted to get with my response.  Now, pausing is not a permanent fix for reaction. At most it i

 I had an interesting revelation after reorganizing my office over the last few days. My struggle against clutter is completely the fault of my wrong way of thinking. I have always pursued things that interested and entertained me. I try and make those things fit into my life and home. That has been going about things backward. Yes, I am just realizing this.  Here is what woke me up. As I said, I have been reorganizing my office. I started that process because it was starting to feel messy, cluttered, and crowded. I will get stressed in a displeasing space. It stifles my creativity. It distracts me. It can even annoy me and make me irritable. You know that feeling. I think we have all had it at some point in time.  I rarely know when the space I am in is stifling me. Normally it is behaviors that I would not relate to the space itself that tip me off. Lately, I have been taking all of my breaks from work outside. I love autumn and the cooling weather. I don't dislike winter, but th