Maebius Musings

Not much to report today.

I sat outside, tried hard not to fall asleep and just zone out, and realized after not getting very many consecutive hours of rest while working the midnight shift at work, I was just too darn tired for much more than catching up on more ZZZ’s.

Tried reading a bit of a book, stared at the same page for what felt like an hour, then figured zen-practice can wait until tomorrow.

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Nettle made a comment in a prior post about something I said, and have now used as the subject of this post, regarding my brain being weird.

Not to disappoint, my night-shift sleep-deprived right-brain then suddenly began an intense conversation with my left brain to go sod off somewhere while it played. After flouncing around with the first two verses completely spontaneously, it shackled the left-brain again to listen up and contribute to the joint effort and come up with a rhyme for Sartre (which does in fact, rhyme with “apple tart”) and then, consequently, the first parts of that particular verse.

The first draft of this little bit of mental gymnastics is found below. While it’s not quite Xanadu with it’s stately pleasure domes, don’t say I didn’t warn you!! This whole poem popped into being within about 10 minutes, and flowed all-but intact in concept as I typed… then I had to go back and edit it to conform to the initial lettering pattern I noticed in the first two verses which were [unintentionally?] the same.

One thing I know, my brain is weird
But not as much as I had feared.
It takes such random stimuli
From tongue and finger, ear, and eye
Transforming muddiness to cleared.

OBIFT the letters from the first verse,
By normal terms, not a word, much worse,
I could form it into mantra text
Freely spoken, though others vexed
To get the depth in such so terse.

Twice now I used five selfsame starts
For yet the third time drifts apart
Inspired by a blog-post Dream
Began this poem’s rhyming scheme
Oh, may relate to Sartre !?!

Till more research is done tonight
Final findings won’t come to light
In addled brain they bounce around
Boing boing, then suddenly they’re found
On further dreams and posts I write.

Now, back to work I go!

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Yesterday, I was cleaning up my desk at work and re-arranged the little semi-altar spot with a few less wintery things and a few more springy things, but somehow it turned out less Brightly Spring and more “Spring evening“. I do this either when the muse strikes me, or about four times a year. I don’t actually adhere to a strict calendar of Beltaine/Samhain decorations at work, but keep it more subdued and only change it when I look and think “Oh, I should change that“. It’s better that way, I think. (click pictures for full-size)

To the ever-present cactus pot and ficus sproutling (raised from a cutting of a cutting of a cutting, with the ‘parent cuttings’ also visible on my desk), I had added a clam-shell that I found in a box of random junk from home while spring cleaning there, and a chicken bone we found in my back yard and picked up so the dog wouldn’t, plus replaced a few assorted rocks from the “bunch of collected rocks” I have.

To the clam shell, I added 4 chunks of rock-salt that were still sitting in the sandy gravel in the parking lot. (Usually, our workplace de-ices the lot with sand and slag-ash, which I then collect in buckets to augment our soil or fill flowerpots for seedlings. Unfortunately, in the last big unexpected freezing rain, the trucks apparently flung rock-salt crystals, which means the tonnes of sand still being swept into piles around the lot are useless for planting in now.)

While puttering this morning, I noticed the mood was rather darker (not necessarily bad) than the original “spring brightness”, but continued fiddling with things until it felt right. To the shell, I added about a half ounce of tap-water which started dissolving the salt crystals and made a really neat swirly pattern as the different densities swirled and mingled in the ‘bowl’. After watching this for few moments, I was inspired to drip a few drops of 100% Pomegranate juice into the shell.

Let me say the effect of that crimson liquid was immediate, unexpected, and powerful. My fingers tingled, the hair on my neck tingled, and I got that “Real Magic” feeling. My eyes were drawn into the impossibly deep pool of water as the pigments swirled and spread out. I felt myself lean into the pool, hesitate a moment to consider the fact I’m still at work, then shrugged and allowed myself to ‘fall in’ visually. Quite a visceral scrying experience!

In the depths, I saw a hillside bathed in just-morning light, red and welcoming, then a huge bonfire sprung up off to the side. Then a series of smaller fires flickered in and out over the course of a few seconds, as if an assembled army or pagan gathering were making cookfires in the field where a central Drumcircle-fire was built, but the cookfires sped up to fire-fly flashes while the central bonfire burned ‘normally’. Then, as fast as that happened, the vision swooped upwards like a barn swallow wheeling towards the distant cloudy horizon, and I had leaned back upright here at my work desk, an idiot grin on my face.

The whole thing took probably 20 seconds, but felt much longer, and by now, the Pom juice had evened throughout the water, and it was a simple shell filled with pinkish water.

However, the thing that made this experience even more entertaining and caused me to have this almost idiot-grin this morning, was when I looked up from the shell and saw the after-image on my mostly white computer monitor.

It was a blue shell-thing, hovering across some work-note about our timecards.

Blue Thing. (referenced from this dream)
I laughed.

…of course it makes sense that the thing I was supposed to be looking for wasn’t a Thing at all. Tricksy Fae!

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Excuse the harsh tone of the title here, I just read some things on my web searches that struck me very deeply, and I am seething in anger and frustration.

My own employment is currently on the rocks, and a source of personal stress, since the cause of it is essentially outside my control. Our manager is fearing for her own job, and told us that the way things are going, it is assumed that one of us will be let go eventually unless something miraculous happens. It’s not a fun atmosphere knowing that even if I do everything right, I may still lose my job. It sucks.
Then I saw this article about FOX making a reality “vote them off” style show using small business employees as their “contestants”.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090408/ap_on_en_tv/tv_fox_layoff_show;_ylt=AnircPAgCc0eOatjJRyphJh34T0D

Here’s a blurb:

The series, “Someone’s Gotta Go,” is in production, but Fox wouldn’t say on Wednesday when it would go on the air.

Each episode will feature a company with about 15 or 20 employees that needs to cut costs because of the economy. Instead of the boss deciding who is fired, the company will open its books to show everyone’s salaries and let the employees make the call.

In an inverse to “The Apprentice,” the chosen one loses, instead of gets, a job.

Fox says the laid-off worker will get a small severance, but isn’t saying whether the network or producers are paying the participants in anything beyond the chance for prime-time fame. Fox is developing the show with Endemol USA, the company behind “Big Brother,” “Deal or No Deal” and “Fear Factor.”

Am I alone in being more than moderately outraged?! Has our debased humanity sunk to this level of voyeuristic sadism? What the HELL is wrong with us?!

For everyone who is losing their employment in this troubled economy, they have my sympathy. For the folks at FOX who decided to cash in on the situation like this, and offer unfortunate people a probably stipend beyond “15 minutes of bad-press fame”, I am finding it very hard not to wish you be dragged naked over burning coals.

/takes a deep breath….

To try to counter-point it, I suppose making public light of the economy is a defensive mechanism, and the studio execs are being creative in a sagging TV market. But even those feeble attempts at rationalizing it away seem too false for me.

This show is a new depth of lowness for an already low-brow station. While there are some decent shows on FOX still, the wheat is getting covered by more and more chaff.

I’m glad I don’t watch TV anymore beyond my few weekly dramas. (House, Bones, and Dollhouse)

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(Just a silly little poem that I was inspired to write after a horrid Monday morning, which suddenly got un-busy after lunch. I’ve seen this little critter a LOt lately, almost every day last week, and this morning one landed on my knee as I sat doing my daily business. It’s cute, and always makes me smile for some reason. Perhaps it’s a Fae-fly of some sort, since I’ve asked some other guys at work and they think I’m crazy, and never admit to any sort of fly, much less a friendly one in the men’s room at work.)

At work I sit and ponder life upon ceramic throne,
and most of the time I stop to think, I sit here quite alone.
But once a week, or sometimes two, I sense a spying eye
who watches me, through facet-face: it is the bathroom fly.

No mere house-fly, this insect friend, ’tis smaller than those kin,
his wings enlarged, his body hid, found nowhere else he’d been,
Except at work, amidst the sinks, and hidden on the walls.
This little creature pokes about, his home is in the stalls.

I smile each time I see his company, by some thought unclean,
and chuckle how this sterile work, still holds nature generally unseen.
Thus lately I seek to learn of this friend, his habits and his food,
Since even in a corporate bathroom, he brings a smiling mood.

I turned to google, and the net, to find this wing-ed being,
but “fly” is common as a search, endless results it’s seeming.
Then randomly, I typed a search, not thinking answers got a,
and discovered it’s name IS Bathroom Fly, Clogmia albipunctata.

Wikipedia link

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The holiday season has mostly come and gone around here, and it was fun and exciting, long and stressful, and otherwise weird. We did lots of traveling, a bunch of fixer-upper stuff around the house, and are now furiously preparing for Disneyworld Vacation!

We are headed to Florida on Jan 14th, returning Jan 20th. Thus, this blog will be pretty quiet, if not entirely silent for a while.

Additionally, Mrs Maebius is an accountant, and the months from January – March are packed full of work for her. It is not unusual for me to come home from work, have the sprogling thrust towards me with a note reading “feed me“, and the office door stuck closed until well after bed-time for us male-folks. That happens more often than not this time of year.

While personal tax-stuff is due in April, the corporation-clients also need their W-2s completed and out by the end of January, then those types of business taxes finalized in March. It’s a hectic and rather stressful time-period around here, and this year it seems much more so due to vacation plans and other things going on.

My own employment is in serious question as well, due to some recent changes in my company and our contract obligations. Thus, there’s some big changes and plans happening around Everthorn Farm, to brace for impact. Hopefully, the rumors I’m seeing are all smoke and mirrors, but it’s best to be prepared just in case.

All told, there’s quite a lot of crap to deal with in the next month or two, just before spring hits and the outdoor gardening begins in earnest. I’m not quite overwhelmed yet, but it definitely seems the roller-coaster is climbing the hill lately, and I can;t see where the drop starts. Life Happens.

Not to be all negative sounding, I hope you all had wonderful seasons!

I will take lots of pictures and update everyone on the Disney vacation sometime in February. Disney is going to be a blast! Camping at fort Wilderness by night, riding the cool rides and meeting cartoons come to life by day. I’m looking very forward to that week!

-Maebius

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Quick post, just to jot down some thoughts before the Blizzard of 2008 crushes all life as we know it in the northeast US. (Seriously, the way folks are acting around here, closing schools, letting businesses off early, and it only JUST started snowing 15 minutes ago?!)

To those non-gamer readers, sorry if the following makes little sense to you. Just try to extrapolate the facts into real-world possibilities.

Fact: In a rather popular computer MMO game, you manage to acquire a rather rare recipe, that allows your character to make a nifty vanity-item. Lets call this item a set of “Red Holiday Clothes“.

Fact: Holiday season is upon us, and in-game, the place is decorated with festive things. This is a limited-time event that will be gone in two weeks, when the patterns are no longer available.

Fact: There are other patterns available, and if your character is wearing all three items, they get a special little bonus, but nothing permanent. The three separate patterns are used by different character-types, such that MY character with the clothes can not make the boots, or the hat.

Fact: Since the gathering of all three items requires a minimum of three different types of character, it encourages cooperation, (or at least coordination) among players. Since it is a social game, this is probably a good thing.
Given this information, the relative cheapness of materials required to make the items in question, and the apparent demand for these items during this limited time….

• Do you charge an exceedingly inflated price to make the items for random people in the trade channels, thus maximizing the opportunity, and enabling you to accumulate gold? Gold is obviously very very useful for high-end things in-game and somewhat hard to come by through casual game-play.

• Do you offer to make the items available freely to anyone who provides the necessary materials to you, Optionally, suggesting a tip for your service? This generates a lot more business, and smaller individual profits, but potentially increased net income over (limited) time.

• Is there a third compromise option available?

It’s an interesting question, and since I am no business consultant, I see validity in each argument. I also have a marked preference for one of them.

* * *

In reality, I have been acting out option B. If other players come to me with the necessary materials, I will gladly make them an outfit for whatever they feel like tipping. I’m just collecting virtual gold here, not real money, and I’d rather strengthen my reputation as a helpful character, rather than a selfish greedy bastard. (I have another character who is much less hesitant to steal and press advantages in-game… I love Roleplaying servers!)

The strange thing that prompted this post, is that these actions have drawn an unexpected amount of flack from some other characters. Presumably those who were trying to sell their items at the current inflated market price. I’m willingly “undercutting the market” by a decent percentage. I’ve even been accused of “fixing the market” by essentially driving out all competition and setting the market price at almost null-level.

These self-described business-people are simply unable to compete, except when I am offline, and thus I am ‘criminally‘ preventing them from playing the game of economics as they feel it should be.

It’s a really deep topic, and not one I have time to fully ponder out right now. But its interesting enough to blog about here.

Am I doing something ethically wrong, by trying to be helpful? Is my presumed good Karma actually harming the player-driven economy?

It’s a little thing, I’m sure, and the long-term markets will balance out just fine once the limited-time event is over for the year. But does that make it right to be doing?

In the real world, I almost think such an activity would be almost illegal for some obscure tax-code reasons, and definitely somewhat unlikely to work due to being for “real money” and the potential to lose money over time.

Since crafting real-world items takes much more time than pressing a few buttons in a computer game, the economics are skewed much differently. Hmmm…..

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I’m on night-shift this week, which means my schedule is all wacky and I tend to either be At Work, or sleeping, or eating, (then sleeping some more). I used to be able to do the whole opposite-shift in a heartbeat, easily switching from a regular 8am-5pm to the midnight-8am shift whenever necessary. Lately, as a sign of (shudder) Getting Old, I seem to totally crash the second day and want to sleep 24 hours.

(actually, yesterday, other than going to see a movie with the family, I DID sleep from 10am-5:30pm, then back to sleep from 8pm-2am. I’m STILL tired here at work. Forgive the rambling-ness of this posting.)

…zzZZzz..zzZZZzz… Wha? Oh right. blog post.

Tomorrow is our Thanksgiving holiday, which will have it’s own blog-post this weekend once my brain is on a proper “Musing about Thankfullness” wave. For now, know that I’m thankfull for a heck of a lot. My life is pretty good comparatively speaking, and I do acknowledge that. Might not make it totally into blog-form coherently. *grin*

As for actual Content today, I bring you a Music Meme, discovered over here in the Magical Hills. Rules:- Choose a singer/band/group.

Answer the following using ONLY titles of songs by that singer/band/group/Band/Artist

I choose the group that’s been rattling in my head lately, regardless of how many OTHER songs I try to put in front of them. Heck, I’ve dreamed about going to see them in concert last weekend. Obsessed a bit?!?!: Gaia Consort

1. Are you male or female? Cooling His Fire
2. Describe yourself. Three (or The Web)
3. What do people feel when they’re around you? No Shadows
4. How would you describe your previous relationship? Blood
5. Describe your current relationship.Every Sacred Thing
6. Where would you want to be now? Evolve
7. How do you feel about love? Just Because
8. What’s your life like? Move to the Country
9. What would you ask for if you had only one wish? Peace Now
10. Say something wise. Cry Freedom

This was actually kinda hard, because on one level, the song titles kinda fit the question, but on the other hand there is a whole sub-text of connotation with actually knowing the songs. I wanted to almost put “Just Because” as an answer to question#5, if only for the song content itself, not the title, since using just the title sounded rather flippant and dismissive of the relationship with my wife. But the song itself is a nice love-song, in some sense. Also, #2, with an answer of “Three” is meant as a title-only to refer to my current family of Wife, Child, and Kid…. I love my family lots, and is a huge part of who I am. Yet, the song itself is about Polyamory, which isn’t really me at all. *shrug*

There’s no tagging rules posted for the meme, but feel free, if you are reading this, to reply with your own answers! Curious Maebius is curious. (and still sleepy).

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I’m sure by now all you readers have been rather inundated with the media’s marketing of “little steps” to help save the planet. Green-washing aside, there are plenty of smaller steps you can do which may not single-handedly save every human on our little ball of dirt, but can help out a little bit and “make a difference to that one“. (ie: Loren Eisley‘s “The star thrower“)

Without stepping on too large a soapbox, I’ll propose a challenge-tagging to you all. I’ll list 5 small very tiny steps that I’ve taken this year, which have managed to stick in my routine for over two months now, and thus become “habit”. They are not huge things, but I’m fairly proud to have wrangled them into reality.

1. Started drinking less soda and coffee (still do on special weekends and during night-shift to help stay awake though!). It may not seem like a huge thing, but in prior posts, I’d been fairly addicted to Mountain Dew. So in addition to losing weight, I save a bit of money, and feel less sugar-drugged at work.
2. Canning our own food. Be it veggies, 40+ quarts of marinara, fruit jelly, beans, or liqueurs, the products of our garden and local farmstands now adorn our cupboards more than years past. We’ve saved money already, even buying new jars/lids/etc, and cemented in our habits a valuable sustainable kitchen-practice. While not being “green” in a more eco-mainstream sense, it does reduce the energy-cost of food we’d normally be buying at hte store shipped in from remote areas.
3. Garbage Reduction. All of our food-scraps gets fed to the chickens (recycled into EGGS!). Our paper-trash is collected and burned periodically, and plastics/cans are thankfully recycled each week as part of our regular garbage removal service. While I realize burning paper-trash releases CO2 and may impact global warming, I’ve yet to see research showing it makes MORE of a problem than hauling the trash to a landfill where it will rot and fume for years. Less trash, and recycling/refeeding of some trash reduce our impact in the long-term as a healthy eco-habit.
4. The CF lightbulb switch. Yes, it’s been mentioned to death, along with the haz-mat scare of containing mercury, but we’ve done it in most rooms. They honestly do last longer than incandescent bulbs, and are cheaper on electricity.
5. Started folding instead of crumpling. Sorry if this is a squeamish comment, but it deserves mentioning (at the very least for eccentric-maebius factor). Regarding bathroom tissue (TP), I used to unroll a good long bunch of sheets, and then crumple them up for posterior usage. Then, I read a report about the average number of sheets and realized I was far above that. So I started just using 5-7 sheets and folding it before using. I avoid paper-cuts at work (they have crappy TP, pun intended) and cut my usage almost in half. 4 sheets saved each time, = many more trips to the thinking chair before buying more rolls!

What have you done? (long-term habits from years ago are allowed, if they still make you feel a bit happier and secure knowing they count towards “helping the planet”.)

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While I always manage to avoid finding the time to properly setup a lunch before work the following day, and wind up cramming random leftovers from the fridge into my lunchbox before work, I’ve always been intrigued and fascinated by the concept of making bento-style food to eat.

I subscribe to RSS feeds of bento blogs, I even one attempted a bento in a prior posting, but I never wind up finding little containers to use or fiddling with ingredients to aesthetically define my lunches. …until now!

For the past few months, my lunchbox at work was the subject of friendly teasing, and smiles. I got it as a gift from my 4yr old sprogling who, in a wonderful display of sharing and Love4U, used his Chuck E cheese tickets to buy me the superman lunch box to take to work. He’s awesome, isn’t he?!! Yep Yep!

Unfortunately, the “sport bottle” got forgotten under the couch once with fruit juice, and not discovered until a few days later when it had turned black and fuzzy inside. It’s gone now.

But, while this humble box (Maebius strikes a heroic pose as he types ‘humble’) contained many a tupperware tub, or cool-whip container, it was never truly the “Bento Supreme” that I desired.

Luckily, my dreams and wishes were answered, with a trip to WalMart. (I know I know, *shudder* but we had to go there to get a specific something for the kid’s school. They simply do NOT sell Kinder-Kare play-sleep-mats in the heavily specified and required size/config elsewhere we found except online with horrid S&H.)

There, at Wally World, while shopping for his own Lunchable Packaging, we ran across a line of Crayola lunch things, which drew our little one like hungry moths to a S’more bonfire! They were thick-walled, not at all flimsy, and easy to open. The Bright colours were eye-catching, and we just HAD to get a set for him.

….And of course since he got a set, and we noticed it fit perfectly in my own lunchbox, then yours truly needed to go BACK to the store later that week and pick up my own!

For the record, our sprogling has a set of “Gold” and mine are, if you’ll forgive the pun, so very cherry (red)!

Inside our lunchboxes, there is just exactly enough room for one thermos, one ‘bowl’ thingy, and two sandwich flats stacked together. For our little lunches, he only has one sandwich container, but I found that I can add a second “orange” one that mom got but doesn’t really use.

The Thermos, in my own lunches, gets filled with miso paste, and random things like spices, rice, beans, hiziki, nori, soba, and/or fresh picked lambs quarter-tips. At work, I can use the hot water from the drinking fountain which makes a lovely soup du jour.

The Bowl gets filled with fruit salad, macaroni, veggies, or whatever side-dish we had leftover from dinner previous evenings.

Likewise, the sandwich holds just the right portion of entree (or even *gasp* a sandwich!). Secondary sandwicher is perfect for dessert-type scraps, or additional side-dish leftovers or veggies (carrots and such work awesome for crunch-factor festivities)

You know you think they’re cool! Admit it!
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