Facebook Integration

Apparently it is fairly simple >.< Shoulda done this earlier really!

I R SMRT

~Jon

Back in the Swing of Things

Well, I got a job. Kinda. Am signed up with a local supply agency and am waiting for my CRB check to go through. Can take between 10 days and 10 weeks. Usually not the latter, fortunately. Have a list of seven schools in the 'local' area that I can be shipped off to, so need to print out routes to get to them. Ridgewood is the easiest, as it is five minutes walk away. The others will involve buses, taxis, trains or all three, which could be awkward. We'll see. £110 a day before tax sounds decent enough considering there won't be any work in the evenings.

Also doing more writing. This last week has been a tangled web of emotional turmoil so I've been a bit slack. However, Cat is gonna fly over and eviscerate me if she doesn't get more of the book to read within the next week or so, so I best get moving. Evisceration isn't pretty. Ever. >.<

Other news, other news...

Oh yes, Facebook stuff. Finally got round to uploading some of my artwork onto there, then spent about an hour writing captions for the colour ones. I'll do the B&W ones later. Now what I really need to do is figure out how to integrate this blog and my facebook page together. It says it can do it... We'll see...

~J

Twenty Seven

Today's blog is bought to you by the number Twenty Seven (27 for those of you who never learned to spell numbers at school >.>) and by the words Birth and Day.

Oh ho ho! Yes, I am the funny man!

No, really! (~_~;)

Okay, it's my birthday. Many happy returns to me and all that.

So far today I have:

1) Opened an awesome present from Mr.S. Jones which I shall be watching later today - Remastered "Transformers: The Movie" - the original animated one with the awesome soundtrack (in 5.1 surround no less!!)

2) Been pestered by the Jehovah's Witnesses. Did they know it's my birthday? Our local J-Man is a nice guy called Richard who I did have a chat with at one point about stuff. Unfortunately I was sat at the pc in nowt but my dressing gown, some slippers, and a glazed smile, and thus standing at the door talking to him this morning may have been a bit chilly. Besides, I was working.

3) Been 'entertained' by my LOVEY sister's birthday card. "Brother, you are Fantastic, Wonderful, Marvellous, Charming, but above all..."

Yeah, cos I didn't see that one coming...

"...Gullible."

Oh ho. Hoho. Haahahahaohahaoah. *sides burst*

4) However, she did buy me some Thornton chocolate toffees. Which I shall attempt not to eat all of today.

So yeah. 27. I've always been a bid advocate of the somewhat chauvinistic phrase: "You're only as old as the woman you feel." This has always generally left me a lot younger than I would appear ( thank you laydees <3 ), ranging from...well...let's not go there actually.

At the moment of course I like to think this makes me "ageless". Vanity? Moi? Naaaah!

And now, I think it is about time I got some proper clothes on and did something... *\(^_^)/*

Motivation

So, we're three weeks into 2008 pretty much. Monday is my 27th birthday. 27, living at home with parents, single, no job.

Not the best start to the year.

But this doesn't mean I'm unmotivated. No!

See, things are moving in my life. I've got over the GOTTA GET BACK TO LANCASTER vibe that plagued me for a few months. Its a great city, and a part of my heart will always be there, but there's other places I want to go, other things I want to see and do, other people that I'd like to spend time with.

Let's face it. 30 isn't that far away, and I kinda always hoped that by 30 I'd at least be engaged to a beautiful woman and be thinking about settling down. Sappy I know, but that's me!

Don't get me wrong; I don't have this OH MY GOD I'M GETTING OLD mentality - teaching has kinda kept me a bit younger and a bit more vibrant than all that (wow, maybe it WAS good for me after all!) But, I'm a fan of stability. Always have been. I'm certainly not saying my wild days are past me, but ya know, looking to the future. Its motivating.

Now that's the slightly sad stuff out the way, here's the page of motivational posters that Cat sent me which inspired me to write about motivations in the first place. These are mostly for guys, to be honest, but women might get a kick out of them too ;)

http://botw.org/articles/motivational.html

Tonberry Fell Over

Today I'd like to talk about two things completely unrelated except, tenuously, by the blog title: Final Fantasy games and Photographs.

First of all, you don't need to know what a Tonberry is, past the following description: its a small, green, bipedal lizardlike creature, usually shrouded in a brown hooded robe, that tends to carry a large, LARGE knife. They're found in the Final Fantasy games, in which they will attack your characters by, firstly, walking slowly towards you over the course of several turns. Then stabbing you. Hard.

If, however, you are awesome, you can pummel the little gits with attacks, at which point they may fall over. Tonberry Fell Over.

Anyways, why on Earth did I chose to start today's blog like this? Well dear reader... Its mostly cos one of my friends who lives overseas asked me what I looked like. Quite a few have asked me this over the years, and I've always tried to pull out a photo to show them. This has got tricky as of late. Since I left uni and started teaching, and subsequently stopped teaching and done an MA, my circle of friends who I regularly go out with has shrunk. And with said shrinkage, the number of people glibly snapping photos of me while drunk has also dipped horrendously. This means there are less amusing photos to show people. I had to dip back to 2004 to find any real photos of me DOING anything.

THIS HAS TO STOP!

So, starting tonight, I shall be attempting to get more photographs of me out in the public eye. I shall be enlisting the aid of my good friends Mr Jones and Mr Cartwright (soon to be Doctors Jones and Cartwright) in doing so!

Oh yeah, and I found a pic of a tonberry while looking for decent photos. There's the link! Hurrah!

~Jon

"Thus we play the fools with time...

...and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us."

Yes, I started with a Shakespeare quote. How pretentious of me. The theme for this post is Time. It is 4:20am as I beging to write this, 4:20am on the 11th January 2008, already 11 days into this new year. Already I have achieved some things this year, though none are related to my resolutions (unfortunately).

I've made 2 people feel better about themselves.

One I've known for quite some time, have a great deal of affection for, but is plagued by low self-esteem/self-worth despite being one of the nicest, most dedicated, hard-working girls I know. I haven't actually seen her months now, but we stay in touch and it always pains me when her life sucks and I'm not around to do anything to help. Call me old-fashioned, but I don't like seeing women upset, and she's had a lot of crap heaped on her in the last 3 years. She's shovelled through it all and come out a stronger person. I admire and respect her for that, as well as understand why we need to stay apart. It gets too complicated.

The other I haven't known as long, but in some ways know just as well. She told me recent that no one has ever told her how great she is. I thought for a start she was just being modest but then I realised that, sadly, she was being honest. Hopefully I've cheered her up and at least knocked out a few of the dents in her own self-image these last few days.

As for me. Well, I've spent the last few days tinkering with computer bits - installing a new motherboard, processor and graphics card into my old box. Its a bit tight in there now, but its running great! - as well as writing, not sleeping well, and watching Transformers the Movie (the new one, not the animated classic). I wanted to be up to this point with the writing about a month ago, but things have been slow and, I'll admit it, pretty hard. Redrafting is hard. Rewriting is even harder. I knew it wasn't working the first time. I knew it would have to be changed to retcon for the bit sandwiched inbetween that I hadn't written yet, but I never expected it to be quite this much work.

I kinda get the feeling that people around me have been looking down on me lately. All I seem to do is sit here at this computer and play games while they are out working. That makes me really unhappy, even though I may be being paranoid. Fact is, I'd LIKE to be out there, earning a wage, being independent. I actually dislike living at home and sponging off my parents. After 8 years living in Lancaster, its really hard being so dependent on someone else. Its like someone has pressed the pause button on my life, and I'm stuck. Worst thing is, despite all my efforts, I can't seem to shift the pause button myself. I like to think that I am not playing the "fool with time", that I am doing something worthwhile, that some day soon a publisher will see my work and go "My word, we must print this!!", that I may actually make something out of this endeavour of two years and countless hours of intellectual toil. Something to make all the headaches, the sleepless nights, the sleep-filled days, the anxieties, all of it worthwhile.

I can but hope.

New Year's Resolutions

2007 has come and gone, as years are wont to do, and I find myself looking ahead to 2008 with general apathy. I should be excited and happy and generally wanting to get stuff done, but having seen my list of things to do, and the general state of the world in general, I could be more enthusiastic.

Anyways, here is my list of Resolutions. I'm usually decent at sticking to them.

1) Update the website more often, including the blog. At least once a week, preferably more.

2) Get out more. This is a general, cache-all resolution. I spend too much time at home and it has to stop. It ties in nicely with...

3) Get a job. Its proven difficult these last few months. Nothing going in Lancaster, little going in the Midlands. Living with parents is starting to grate on me and I need to get out of here, but without some kind of guaranteed income I'm not going anywhere any time soon.

4) Get more exercise. Another one I've been meaning to do for a while. We have a handy selection of gym equipment in the cellar here - much more than I expected actually - so am gonna use that as much as I can, as well as trips out to the actual gym to work on the muscles we just don't have the equip for here. Hopefully this will make me feel better about myself.

5) Finish Book #1 and find an agent. I've specifically put "find an agent" because I'm actually quite scared of the whole process. Finishing the book will be time-consuming but fairly easy. SELLING it is the bit I'm scared of. But I want to see my novel on the shelf in Waterstones more than anything! I keep going up and looking at the New Fantasy Books shelf and thinking... "One day! Soon! My book will be there too!" So that's what I want!