wandering the sheltering sky

I do think of this site more often than my posts suggest. My life is largely sleep (and barely at that), work, then i usually come home absolutely exhausted and unable to think of, let alone do anything creative. When Saturday comes around, i’m usually emotionally depleted from work the previous week and i tend to just stay in this fugue state all day, then somehow manage to usually stay up too late.

Sundays are the only day in the week (usually) where i’m rested. And it’s filled with chores and errands and sometimes cooking large batches of food for the upcoming week.

All of this is about as exciting for you to read as reading a catalog of wallpapers but if i were to be honest about it, there is a larger point to be made. 

Unfortunately it’s getting to the point in my day where i need to transfer to my bedroom and start getting ready for bed. 

One thing i’ll say before i go is that when i leave for work, it is now pitch black outside. We are in this odd period of the year where it’s not hot enough to be summer nor cool enough to be autumn. Still, this afternoon, an awning of grey stretched across the horizons and it rained for a while. It was relaxing in a way that i haven’t felt since spring.

Oh, before i go- i’ve been trying to paint more lately. It has not been going well. I may talk more about this as this post develops. 

Welcome to my late Sunday afternoon ramblings of a mostly sane man with allergies, stopped up sinus’ and no script. Lots of pauses as the voices in my head tell me what to say next and the microphone is a cheap, headset mic. I’ll work on my production values in the weeks and months to come but i wanted to just hammer out something tonight. 

Note: i didn’t edit out the pause at the start that’s used for noise reduction. I’ll go back and edit it out eventually. Come to think of it, i’m probably going to edit out a lot of the pauses because listening to me speak sometimes is like waiting for a cold engine to finally catch. 

Also, i forgot that i was streaming SomaFM in the living room – so if you pick up some music in the background, that would be the ever popular Groove Salad helping out. 

Hi. I’m tinkering with a new template and the interface for modifying it is vastly different than what i’m used to. I’ll keep tweaking it but in the meantime, things are likely to look a bit garish around here for a while.

-s.

Two Saturdays ago, along with about two hundred other people, had a memorial for the life of Barbara Cramer. A lot of people shared their stories which is probably the biggest reason why i went. I wanted to hear the voices of others that knew and loved Barbara. I think the most remarkable thing was this thread that wove itself into everyone’s story – when you spoke to Barb, she was there. She was genuinely there with you to listen, to talk to you and to enjoy that moment.

In other words, she was sincere. She was genuine.

Continue reading “Saying goodbye to a friend | part two”

Updated 30 mar 25.

Some years ago a man that worked where I worked died of complications onset by the covid 19 virus. There were hundreds of people at his memorial and of those, a handful of us that gamed with him. I didn’t know Eddie well but i’d helped him several times (i’m a desktop support monkey in a heavy, industrial environment) and of the two LAN parties that Barbara hosted, Eddie was there both times.

Barbara and her husband, Cody, was there for Eddie’s memorial. I was a bit shocked at just how few of us from work were there because he was deeply loved by many where we worked.

Continue reading “Saying goodbye to a friend | part one”

I had a few things on my list that i was supposed to do this weekend; not least of which was to complete an entry here that i started a few days ago. Unfortunately i’m having difficulty sleeping these days and my three day weekend ended up being a three day stretch of being stuck in a fugue state.

There’s nothing newsworthy going on with me and whatever rants i may have in store are pretty tame (but hopefully amusing). More than anything, i’m making this entry to remind myself to get off my ass and start writing again. Writing is kind of like painting in that the less i do it, the less i want to do it. But writing is also like painting in that i need to do it because i need it.

To that end, i’ll make it a point to turn my focus this week toward those things that i put off this weekend – publishing videos from my converted ACTV tapes, painting and writing.

I have no doubt that i’m not going to finish this entry to the degree that i want it to be finished. I usually rehearse what i want to say for days before i put my fingers on the keyboard. I find the strands, i pull and tease them apart, then as i try to find a way to work them back into each other, i feel for a certain type of cadence; a rhythm to my thoughts and how they interconnect. Once i have that, i try to weave them back into a tapestry with some parts fitting into others with the hope that once completed, there is a cohesiveness and singularity to whatever it was that was on my mind.

This feels a bit loose and disjointed. Maybe it’ll congeal as i keep going.

I’m not sure i should be writing tonight. Technically speaking, i had enough sleep last night but i don’t think i had enough REM. So let’s see where this goes and if it holds together well enough as a rough draft, i’ll publish it but with the caveat that it’s likely to be revised a few times.

Parallel to everything that i’ve written about in the first two parts is something that has been growing in me for several years.

the disconnect.

Continue reading “the disconnect | part three”

I’ve been wanting to change the appearance of synaesthetic for some time but i never put much energy into it- so it didn’t change. Funny how those two things work together.

This template is called LowFi and i like it- but it doesn’t behave like any other template i’ve ever administered before. As such, i’m not sure if it’ll stay. For instance, i’m trying to change the image on the index page but no matter what i try, the image i’m selecting won’t stay. Worse, i prefer to use one of my own pix or maybe even one of my paintings instead- and that doesn’t appear to be an option*.

Still… i like the simplicity and elegance of this template. I’ll see if i can understand it better in the coming days.

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Oh- before i forget- for reasons that i don’t fully understand, i’ve been unable to upload images to this site. The permissions on the directory are set correctly and there’s a discrepancy between what WordPress thinks my asset library is versus what i say it is.

*i managed to change the default image- it was more manual than i expected but every template is going to require different solutions