Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

next, on a very special CK…

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I don’t know how this suddenly turned into Peter’s Precious Story Time at Crushing Krisis.

Seriously, aside from my re-launch during NaBloPoMo I can’t tell you the last time I posted three heavy-duty stories with dialog and stuff within a single week, let alone the last time that from a word-count angle I had this high of a words:posts:week ratio (1013:1).

I guess part of that is being a little more diligent about blogging lately. That partially comes from reading the blog archive more, and realizing how many gaps it leaves in my life and the things I have opinions about. As a result, I blog more. And while I’m blogging more and thinking about blogging more then there isn’t the need to so carefully prune by topic or length.

Essentially, reading more means writing more means writing more.

Also, life is actually pretty exciting lately. Like, not as obscenely over-stimulating as it was last summer with all the #blamedrewscancer stuff. Really just stimulating enough that I have some time left over to write some of it down.

As for this week, basically I have spent the five days since skydiving trying to completely unpop my right ear.

See, not all of the stories are interesting.

personal anti-wireless forcefield update

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Now heading into day seven of no internet in our house I decided to do a cursory inspection of the grounds to search for some external culprit, and it seems that a panel of our back fence has collapsed on top of the phone/internet switchbox.

Now, I’m not saying that I don’t have a personal anti-wireless forcefield generated by the intense electro-magnetic powers of my hair. I’m just saying that maybe the my hair is not to blame for this particular portion of my life-wide wireless signal outage.

Unless, of course, my hair caused the fence to collapse.

my personal anti-wireless forcefield

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When you are an internet addict trying to buy a house and maybe launch a new feature on your website, it can be a little frustrating when your connection is spotty.

It can be downright maddening when every device in your life stops communicating with the outside world at once.

Evidence of potentially villainous hair. Note its awesomeness.

To whit: The wireless in our house died, followed by the entirety of the internet connection. The GPS on my phone has stopped working. My broadband card keeps sputtering and dying.

I’m not sure if the static electricity contained in my awesome curls has mutated me into some sort of electromagnetic pulse deploying super villian that surrounds myself with an electronic deadzone, but pretty much every wireless device in the vicinity of my body has stopped working. It’s only a matter of time before the effects extend to radios and digital watches.

This is a steep price to pay for having one of the best heads of hair in Philadelphia, but we all have our burdens to bear.

houses, wombats, sinuses, clouds, etc

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The house process continues to rage across my life like a wombat on methamphetamine. While I had that under control, I also came down with a bit of a complete sinus disaster on Thursday, which left me feeling like I had a blanket wrapped around my head for the past four days.

Have you tried fighting an allegorical rabid marsupial on uppers with a blanket wrapped around your head? Slightly more challenging than your typical allegorical wombat-fighting.

An angry wombat.

(PS: On wombats, Wikipedia says the following:

Wombats are Australian marsupials; they are short-legged, muscular quadrupeds, approximately 1 metre (39 in) in length with a very short tail. … [T]heir lack of fear means that they may display acts of aggression if provoked, or if they are simply in a bad mood. Its sheer weight makes a charging wild wombat capable of knocking an average-sized adult over, and their sharp teeth and powerful jaws can inflict severe wounds.

See that sidetrack I just took? That is my life for the past four days.)

Usually if I’m sick – even a little under the weather – I go on complete life lockdown. I’ll go to work or appointments, but I am low key and constantly snacking and hydrating.

Friday didn’t really allow for that. I went to a United Way business breakfast and awards, which meant I had to be up early and completely on-point w/r/t personal style. Somewhere in there i may have forgotten that I already took decongestant, so I took it again. At that point I think *i* began to resemble a wombat.

Then I had to condense a full workday into a less-than-full workday to deliver a huge project. Afterward, what was supposed to be a 10-minute appearance at a goodbye party turned into a four-hour odyssey, interrupted intermittently by calls to our Realtor until my phone died.

And, PS, for the first time in five years the internet in our house was completely down.

Yeah, so, not a lot of snacking and hydrating in there, which meant i woke up at 7am on Saturday in less than tip top shape – making it a perfect day to jump out of a plane with Gina and Wes.

Just ignore that Peter is carrying an entire roll of toilet paper with him as he straps into his ‘chute. “Why a roll of toilet paper,” you inquire? Because he is using boxes of tissues at the rate of 2boxes:3hrs.

Fast forward seven hours and half a roll of toilet paper and no skydive has occurred, due to cloud cover. Which, honestly, I know it’s a very complex process with a seemingly endless array of safety concerns, but when you’ve paid and you’re sitting there on the bench staring up at clouds with hunks of toilet tissue wedged up your nostrils you are thinking, what is the big fucking deal with the weather that it’s going to interfere with you THROWING ME OUT OF A PLANE!?

It’s probably all for the best because – as E pointed out – if your sinuses are completed jammed even after two boxes of tissues and half a roll of toilet paper you probably do not want to introduce massive, repeated pressure changes to ram that farther up into your brain.

I finally got my rest and hydration after that, but I had to make up for all the abuse of being out and about before I felt totally blanketless. And, while resting and hydrating and lacking internet, I didn’t get all that much done in the way of signing away my life in exchange for a charming 87-year-old Tudor.

And that was the last four days of my life.

I’ll come back and tell you the next actual chapter of the house project tomorrow. Ish. I have to make sure that wombat is corralled before I make a big show of talking about it.

The Human Calculator v. The Harmony Jukebox

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That would be a pretty dull superhero fight, huh?

Actually, the title refers to Friday’s post, which drew a quick comment from someone who built a straw-man of “The Human Spellchecker” to stand next to my snarky Human Calculator.

I’m so high-and-mighty about math, but do I use a spell-checker when I blog? Would I deny people a spellchecker too in my dedicated Ludditism?

The answers are, respectively, “occasionally” and “of course!” The existence of tools to assist us doesn’t replace the need to master skills or knowledge on our own.

Consider the source. I take for granted that I’m comfortable doing both of these things. I have to proofread words and numbers as part of both my jobs and my hobbies. It’s in my best interest to be a knowledgeable snob about both.

Maybe they aren’t the best examples for me.

I always say, “music is like calculus to me.” Yet, I’m a musician. I don’t have wonderful pitch, and I am not a natural singer. I can’t pluck perfectly in-tune harmony notes out of thin air like E or Gina, each of whom I refer to as “The Harmony Jukebox.”

When our band learns a new song I usually have to play along on piano at first, and when I sing harmony in the car E has to sing with me the first few times. And I have to pay careful attention to breath support, shaping, and phrasing to stay in tune.

At some point I have to sing the notes myself in an effortless way. If I never eliminated the piano, or E, or the careful attention to every note, I wouldn’t be much of a musician. I mean, yeah, they have auto-tune for that now, but what about performing live.

Bottom line: being a musician is hard work for me! Sometimes it isn’t any fun at all.

What if math was that hard for me? Would I sometimes just whip out the calculator? Probably. But just like music, I’d still want to know how to do it myself. I still want to possess that knowledge.

What about you? Forget grade-school antics like math and spelling. What is a difficult skill that you have to reproduce daily? Do you use a tool to assist you? And, can you still perform the same task without the tool?