life goes on

Another saturday is upon me. I had a broken but ultimately sufficient sleep. Hopefully, I'm not in line for another hard fight with insomnia. That would truly suck. Yesterday, my parents and I joined our neighbours for a corn roast. It certainly made for some interesting conversation. The corn was scrumptious and so was the catfish I got to try for the first time.

Psychologically, I'm feeling more able to cope with the life I've got rather than wishing like hell for drastic change. I guess all the isolation finally thumped me against rock bottom. Society sees fit to utterly squander my gifts. Under such circumstances, I'm doing all that I possibly can to enjoy the copious time at my disposal while doing what good I can. I no longer feel that I owe the world more effort than I'm giving. The certainty that things will ultimately improve either by my lucking out in the love department or at least by eventually obtaining affordable housing has taken better root in me. Over the past couple of days, I've actually made quite a bit of progress with Enchantment's Twilight's design document. There's still a ton to do. Even the design document is going to be quite a substantial size when it's finally done. However, I'm hopefully going to avoid the problem of wanting to continuously add new aspects to the game when actual development starts. It'll be especially useful for maintaining a cohesive vision if I ultimately choose to try and turn this into a collaborative Internet community project to be published for free. I'm nowhere near that major fork in the road.

This afternoon, I used Skype to call my grandmother. She sent some money to all her grandchildren and I always like to thank her for it. It makes quite a difference for me. Skype worked quite well as did the new gaming headset. She had no trouble hearing me but couldn't hear other people who were farther away from the mic. Also, she didn't seem to be disturbed by hearing her own voice come back at her despite the pc speakers being on. Dad tried it out also and they had quite a good conversation. It seems we'll be going on a family trip out to Winnipeg at some point. That ought to be a damned nice change of place for me. I've had all too few of those this Summer and it unfortunately shows in my overall lack of progress with Enchantment's Twilight.

Last thursday, I went out with Adam and his latest girlfriend for a meal at Symposium. It was damned good to be there with a couple of people my own age. We thankfully didn't get caught in that major storm walking over there. It struck during our dinner and seemed to be finnished by the time we left. As usual, the conversation was good right along with the food. Keith, one of the waiters there, happened to be serving us and remembered me. All the staff are quite friendly. It's a major reason why I'm fighting as hard as I am to learn how to get there and back independently. Even if, as seems likely, I don't meet anybody new there, I'll still come out ahead. That makes a very nice change of pace when most of the time, my acomplishment and experience don't seem to ultimately count for much more than praze from people I'll never meet. It's the sort of thing that gives me hope for better things to come if I can just hang on, be patient, and try to keep cheerful.

Plentyoffish is a busy place today. I couldn't get in this morning to check on the forums. It seems I somewhat overwelmed the teacher who seems interested in me with too much information. Online dating is so awkward that way. You get no feedback until you've gone and written too much and then, it's done. Revealing too little seems to have made it all to easy for people to keep hold of negative presumptions about me and simply move on. Revealing too much is problematic also. However, at least I'm left with a sense that they've got something to work with if they're actually interested. I've always felt better about things which start with all my cards on the table. I don't want anybody ever to feel that I'm hiding information or less than honest. If they're going to turn away from me, better they do so without any excuse of that nature. There was a time when I had more of a sense of undamaged hope about newly started connections to people. Janene has clearly destroyed a good chunk of that. I fervently hope that some day, I'll meet someone new who can put me on cloud nine again. I'd like to think that I still have enough remaining optimism and faith in people for that to happen. We all need some spark of magic in our lives.

Next up for me, I guess there's church in the morning. Other than that, there's nothing on the radar until wednesday morning when my next lesson comes around. One week has been much the same as the last for too damned long. I'm a bit behind in my podcast listening. By romorrow, there'll be a bunch more for me to grab. Nice to have a small stockpile to give time a good swift kick in the ass when it starts to crawl. I ordered a couple of new accessories for my netbook yesterday. One is a key-operated Kenzington security lock I found a recommendation for in Smart Computing. Subscribing to that website was a splendid investment on my part. I also found out about a new notebook stand which may work better for the netbook and be more portable than the table I've been using. I'll know one way or another about that in around a month I guess.

a family weekend

Hello everyone. It's just approaching seven thirty on Saturday morning. Yesterday, I spent from pretty much noon onward out in the back yard with the family and assorted company. My grandmother arrived from Winnipeg Thursday evening. There was a mix-up on when her flight was arriving but we used my computer to sort that out and get there in fairly reasonable time. The main event was definitely yesterday though. Dan and his family came over. Ava and Amia were as cute and chaotic as ever. Ava seems to be entering a bit more of an awkward phase where she changes her mind about what she wants to do more often. Amia wants to do what her big sister is doing until she actually gets the chance to. In the case of going in the swimming pool while wearing a life jacket, she wasn't all that thrilled. It was a pretty fun afternoon and a chance to get all caught up with each other's news. We also saw a couple of our neighbours and two out of a family of four who we've known for years. We ordered Chinese food for dinner which everyone seemed to enjoy.

Today, the festivities continue with a trip with my father and grandmother to a casino, her favorite activity. I'm limiting myself to twenty dollars of my own money. I'd much rather have money on hand for meeting new friends with. I'd love to think that someone interested in going beyond friendship would come along but begin to doubt that'll happen any time soon. Before things kicked off yesterday, I managed to cancel my subscription to eHarmony so I won't get charged again in September when my current one expires. I believe I'm now down to three, or possibly four matches who haven't closed off communication but from whom I haven't heard a peep. Plentyoffish has been rather placid with week also with no really interesting conversations happening in the forums. I'm going to meet up with one lady next week for a coffee and cookies. She's looking for new friends and has CP to contend with. Eating anything else is apparently more messy and tricky for her. We've had some pleasant chats over the past while. She has a bit of an easier time getting places and has found somewhere to volunteer a couple of times a week. It looks like I most likely won't meet Nadia for quite a while yet. She seems a bit more open to a more serious relationship but is in the proces of learning how to drive a car with adapted controls. Schedules and availability of transportation just aren't going in our favour. She told me about a new Passenger Assisted Program launched fairly recently in Mississauga which will apparently let someone like me make use of it. There's quite a waiting list from what the article she directed me to says but it could finally opens some doors for me around here. There would still be a matter of figuring out where I could actually go either to socialise or help out in the community but at least I'd finally be able to do things more on my own terms and not just when family or friends can give rides. I won't get my hopes up. There are doubtless limitations like range and such. However, it would be damned nice if this pans out.

Later on, another couple of long-standing family friends who I haven't seen in quite a while are coming for dinner. They're seriously into wines and travel quite a bit so the conversation can get very interesting. My parents have known them since before I was born.

At long last, I've started working on Enchantment's Twilight again. I just couldn't get anything worthwhile started when it comes to short stories so I started reading the ebooks I bought a while ago concerning game design. That lead to me starting to tweak and change the design document for Enchantment's Twilight and that eventually sparked some new ideas for the game's story. I just hope enough new things start happening in life to keep me fresh so I don't bog down again. The lonely routine here needs a more stable counterbalance of interaction with people who just don't seem to be available. Damn it! I should be either married or in my own place by now! It's damned hard working on a project which is supposed to show people how important we all are to each other when you're essentially barred from so much of community life! I find myself almost glad to think that this economic recession might actually give enough fully able people a taste of what they've unwittingly inflicted upon me to at last possibly offer me some faint hope of real change. I hate being driven to think like that but there you have it. When people are forced to stop living at warp speed and find that money truly doesn't offer the security they think it does, perhaps then, the qualities I can bring to the table will actually start to be worth a damn again.