We finally got a start on the second phase of re-organizing my office yesterday. We hauled several hundred pounds of unused shipping boxes and materials to the recyclers, and I recovered just under half of the floor space in my office, and we also donated the huge laser printer to the Salvation Army. I also moved the furniture around a bit so I could make more efficient use of the freed-up floor space, and re-adjusted the shelves on my workstation desk so I could move the laptop back to a more comfortable position.

Today, I spent some time de-cluttering the various tables and putting everything into its new home. As part of that process, I had to pack up all of the business paperwork, printed sales records, the Supply Depot shipping scale, and a bunch of other things. I didn’t think that a sense of awful finality would hit me as hard as it did, and in some strange way, I felt a bit like I was finally laying an old friend to rest after a long terminal illness. I’d pick up some item, and it would remind me of something, and I’d either chuckle or feel a little bit sad. I guess it’s something I was able to push aside in the interest of moving on and taking decisive action, so I never really gave myself the time or the luxury of thinking too hard about it until now.

I also transitioned a lot of stuff over to the new notebook and set up the other hardware to work with it, and I’m composing this post on the new machine. The keyboard is gonna take some getting used to–the spacing and positioning is different enough from my old Gateway convertible that I have to pay extra attention to spelling.

I also found some more stuff that needs to go to a good home. First come, first serve.

• 2 packs of Copplestone plague zombies, 5 figures each. Metal, unpainted. The original buyer flaked out and never got back to me. Asking $10 plus shipping for each pack.
• 1 pack of Copplestone zombie troopers, 5 figures. Metal, unpainted. The original buyer flaked out and never got back to me. Asking $10 plus shipping for this pack.
• My whole Games Workshop bitz box. I just finished culling out all the useless stuff. All plastic parts, either still on the sprue or desprued and bagged. It’s mostly Imperial Guard figure parts. Also included are most of the Stupid Bitz Tricks and Colonial Marine conversions shown elsewhere on the blog, in varying stages of completion, plus a few baggies of Space Marine and Tyranid bitz. 14″ x 10″ x 4″ box. Asking $25 plus shipping for the whole box.

I finally have my papercraft and photo tables back. I also have room for a Detolf display case next to my work desk, and the whole top shelf for models. I should be able to hit the ground running whenever I get back into making new models.

3 items of interest today:

1. Harold Camping is full of bologna, as I predicted.

Highlights of my day: $24,000 truck failing to start. Rolled out of bed without coffee, straight into hours of driving from auto parts store to auto parts store. Several misidentified causes. 50-cent piece of broken plastic. Regrettable meal from McDonald’s. It’s 9:32PM at this minute, and my morning coffee is finally brewing right now.

Okay, long form. Sara, my stepdaughter and landlord, set up this neighborhood event today where everybody living on our street comes together to clean out the alley behind our houses. Brush removal, garbage pick-up, tree clipping, and stuff of that nature. 22 people showed up, and they did a great job cleaning up the alley. Of course, being the night owl, I was out cold all day. Mrs E was doing dump runs in her truck (a 2007 Nissan Frontier pickup), and she stalled it on the last trip. It failed to start. Fortunately, this was like right down the street, so she didn’t have to walk more than 50 feet to the house.

She rolls me out of bed and asks me where the jumper cables are. I tell her they went with her old truck when she gave it to my other stepdaughter Gloria. She tells me her Frontier is dead out front. I crawl out of bed, brush my teeth, get dressed, and I see Sara in the living room, who tells me Mrs E is out front getting her truck jumped. Mrs E and the neighbor got her truck running again, so I put my shoes on and we left to get a new battery. Guess what? Battery’s fine. The lube monkey at Wal-Mart (we went there because that’s where we bought the battery) was really insistent that the culprit was the front blower relay, because it was hot and clicked when starting the engine. He also tested the battery, and swore up one wall and down the other, and on his sainted grandmother’s grave, that the battery was still good.

That didn’t really make any sense to us, but the guy works on cars for a living, so whatever. He knows what he’s talking about, right? We went to 3 different auto places, and only one of them had the right kind of replacement relay. So, I pull the old one, install the new one, and what do you know, the truck starts right up. Of course, I don’t trust my automotive repair skills one iota because my daddy was the grease monkey in the family, and he steadfastly refused to show me the ropes out of some misguided fear that teaching me how to fix cars would doom me to following in his footsteps. As a consequence of my dad’s irrational fears, yours truly is not mechanically inclined when it comes to cars, which tends to result in me standing next to a busted vehicle with the hood open muttering “Thanks a lot, Dad” and paying somebody else a king’s ransom to fix whatever broke.

So I tell Mrs E to turn it off and try again. My self-distrust is justified! The thing doesn’t start. I pull the new relay and put the old one back on. It starts! I tell her to try again. No dice, it doesn’t start that time. Okay, obviously, it’s not the relay at this point. And I’ve just about exhausted my automotive abilities, so I suggest we have the store test the battery, just to confirm the Wal-Mart results. Good battery. I’m flabbergasted. We have the starter and alternator tested. Guess what? Nothing wrong with either one of them.  I need a photo of Saul Tigh going “What the hell?” for moments like this.

Turns out that the culprit is a little 50-cent piece of plastic. It’s a grommet, actually. A frigging grommet on the clutch pedal that lets the clutch pedal ignition lock close the starting circuit when you push down the clutch all the way. The old one broke in half, so it was basically a 50-50 chance of the truck starting or not. That’s it, a broken 50 cent piece of plastic stops a $24,000 truck from working.

R.C., an employee of the AutoZone store at 9509 Manchaca, is awesome. He’s the one who found the problem and fixed it. Turns out the grommet is a dealer-only part (Really, Nissan? Really?) which Mrs E has to visit the dealer to get on Monday. He whipped up a MacGyver fix to hold the truck over until then. People like him go a long way towards restoring my faith in the human race and the retail sector.

And on that note, I’m going to go have my first cup of coffee.

Would you believe that my wife and I completely forgot that today was Easter Sunday?

We were watching The Amazing Race when Mrs E suggested we get a pizza from Papa Murphy’s, the neighborhood take-and-bake chain. It sounded pretty good to me–the prices are good, the ingredients are fresh, and they prepare the thing right there in front of you like a Subway. Except with pizza instead of sandwiches. Anyway, she goes out to score the pizza, and 20 minutes after she left, I get a text message from her saying it’s Easter Sunday and Papa Murphy’s is closed.

Uh-oh. So’s the grocery store. And just about every other place that appealed. Our cupboards are empty because we were too busy to go grocery shopping earlier in the weekend. We’re both starving by this point in time, and we made the semi-desperate decision to hit the local Denny’s for supper, since they were one of the few places that were open.

It was a surprising experience. Now, this is Denny’s, and my expectations for restaurants like that are pretty low. I’m talking “Please, Lord, I hope we don’t get food poisoning” low. I ordered their double cheeseburger because I didn’t believe their menu photo for one minute–I thought it would be a sad little biscuit-sized travesty with 2 vaguely beefy-tasting slices of processed meat product, placed forlornly in a depressing nest of limp, flaccid, and soggy fries. Instead, I actually got a I-shit-thee-not massive double cheeseburger that looked like it needed to be renamed Humongorr the Burgernormous. I had to sort of nibble at it rather than being able to bite into it, even after mashing it down to something that wouldn’t require me to dislocate my jaw to eat.

It wasn’t bad. About a six on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being “microwave burger from vending machine” and 10 being Mighty Fine Burgers. Next time, I get the regular sized burger, because damn. Fries were surprisingly OK as well.

Mrs E picked out the Tsing Tsing Chicken as the appetizer, and she had some sort of BLT sandwich with a really unfortunate name that made me think of whoopee cushions. The Tsing Tsing Chicken is, as the name implies, supposed to be some sort of Chinese-style sweet-and-spicy chicken. I wasn’t expecting much from it either, but I was pleasantly surprised. It actually tasted way better than the typical “meaty lumps in red sauce”, “meaty lumps in brown sauce”, or “meaty lumps in slightly redder sauce with sesame seeds” kind of stuff you get at the local Chinese buffets. I was stunned when the waitress asked us if we wanted ranch dressing with it. Ranch dressing? With Chinese-ish kreplach? The horror.

We were planning to try the bacon maple sundae (they’re running this Baconalia thing for 10 weeks where they add 7 bacon-themed dishes to the menu), but we were much too stuffed to even entertain the thought. Yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like: vanilla ice cream, maple syrup, topped with crumbled bacon. We’re gonna try that next time.

I’m about three minutes from a meat coma, so I’m gonna pack it in for the night.

I quit smoking 8 days ago.

I didn’t suddenly wake up one morning and decide to quit or anything that dramatic. It just sort of happened. I came down with a cold last week, and I usually don’t smoke much when I’m sick, if at all. I mean, I just don’t feel the urge when I’m sick. I’ve been like that for years.

The one big difference this time was that instead of somehow finding myself taking the habit back up after getting better, I decided to see how long I could stay quit for. You know, take it one day at a time, no pressure. It’s harder than it sounds, because a large part of smoking, besides the addiction, is simple habit. You’re used to taking smoke breaks, or you have a routine where you’re just used to having a cigarette in your hand while doing something or the other. That’s usually what caused me to take it up again the last several times, force of habit.

You have to really go the extra mile to break habits. Not just the habit of smoking itself, but also the other habits and routines that you associate strongly with smoking. In the past, I wimped out and resumed smoking because I couldn’t handle the disruption to my comfortable routine. I always had an excuse–I needed to get work done on a critical project, I’m surrounded by smokers and temptation, or whatever. This time, I decided to grow a pair and tackle the whole problem like I was serious. Why? That shit’s expensive, for one thing. A pack of fags doesn’t cost a couple bucks anymore–I think they’re up to like seven bucks a pack right now. Second, it’s inconvenient, especially if you’re like me and you prefer to smoke outside. I had a prime window of opportunity to quit for good, so I hatched a plan.

First, I made the most of the fact that I don’t get urges when I’m sick. That’s important, because it helps reduce the power that the addiction holds over you. If you tough it out past the hump, past the part where you’d normally be climbing the walls and biting other people’s heads off because you need a nicotine fix, you’re halfway home. From there, it’s a matter of managing habits.

Second, I tried to break habits and shuffle around my routine. I avoided being around other smokers for a few days, I found something else to do at the moments where I normally would step outside for a cigarette, and I got used to not taking smoke breaks while working. Wasn’t easy, but a few other major life changes made it easier. Suddenly, it’s evening of day 8 and I realize I haven’t even thought about smoking.

How do I feel? Weird. I mean, it’s easy to think you’re a manly paragon of health when you haven’t had a proper frame of reference for what “healthy” really means for years. You kind of forget what feeling healthy is really like, and you don’t really notice the effects that smoking has on you. You think about the lung cancer, emphysema, or whatever, but you don’t notice the other effects creeping up on you. You don’t really notice that you get winded more easily. You don’t notice the lower energy levels. You might not even notice your performance in the sack gradually decreasing over the years.

The one word that comes to mind right now is “oxygenated.”

That’s how I feel. Oxygenated. It’s weird. I have more energy, I feel more alert. I don’t need anywhere nearly as much coffee to get through the day as I used to. I even feel a little bit smarter. I’m not going to comment on the sexual health aspects because you didn’t come here to read about my wang.

Suffice it to say that I feel better than I ever have, and I think I’ve really kicked it this time. It’ll always be a one-day-at-a-time sort of deal, yes, but I feel great about it.