The Franco-Taiwanese Alliance

Alice and I went down to San Jose this weekend, for dinner with my parents and other randomness.  She has to stay down there until tomorrow afternoon for a dentist appointment (sad Eug!), so we took two vehicles… I rode Rosette down, to give her a chance to stretch her legs.  She was a bit upset at me for not having spent any time with her in over a month, but once she settled down she was in fine shape.

Every ride I take, I learn a lot from.  Body position, foot placement, throttle control, handlebar control, lean angles, how much more the bike can do than I used to think… it’s a massive flood of information flowing into my brain with every mile I cover.  I should have done this a long time ago… by “this”, I mean ridden a shit-ton of miles at a regular commuter’s pace.  I realized at my second Thunderhill trackday that I’m really still just barely learning to ride a motorcycle at all, so it’s not surprising that I’m so timid and nervous on the track.  I need to be able to control a bike in normal conditions before I can expect to do so under extraordinary conditions.  That said, I can’t wait for the next trackday!

This damnable cough is never going to go away.  I’ve had this thing for damn near a month now.  Balls!  (That one was for you, Trish.  :D)

It’s vaguely fun to dig into the data files for Puzzle Quest and make a character that completely and utterly rapes the AI, in order to get revenge for my first time through the game.  It’s great when you come up against a boss that took you about twenty tries to beat legitimately, and then pull out your custom Uber Spell of Doom.  Take that, Dugog!

I feel bad about vehicle neglect.  I haven’t really taken the bikes out at all for weeks, except a very short blast on April to run an errand, and Faye hasn’t been used for anything but commuting for a long time.  I need to wash all three of them, too, except that I don’t really have a good place to do it in the apartment complex.  I think it’s just about time for a shotgun car-washing….

Alice and I had our 16th monthiversary this past week, and it was pretty glorious, though low-key.  I love you, babe!   I’m looking forward to our 600th monthiversary. 

Alice and I failed twice to go to the corn maze this weekend.  Sucktastic!  We’re going to try again on Thursday night, and hope that there are no crowds (and no inclement weather).

Luckily, it was a productive weekend in other aspects.  We got some errands done, I fixed the Camaro’s electrical problem (I think), and I got some paint thinner to try and fix the faucet in our backyard.  The faucet doesn’t seem to want to be fixed, but ah well.  It’s covered in paint from when the apartment complex got painted over with sprayers, so my shiny hose that I bought can’t thread tightly onto the faucet.  Sucktastic again!

It was a good weekend for video games, too.  I got a bit of Final Fantasy Tactics in, carved through Portal (I’m addicted to the ending credit song, by the way), and played some Team Fortress 2 with Ryan.  TF2 is good fun… anybody want to join us in playing online?  James?

We also watched Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, as well as last week’s Heroes episode, which catches us up.  This presents the problem, of course, that now we have to wait for a new episode to air every week  Sucktastic the third!  KHAAAAAAAAN!

I have corn muffins.  That will be all.

Alice and I went to the gym today.  I did:

• 3 x 12 x 35lbs dumbbell press
• 3 x 10 x 25lbs dumbbell curl
• (2 x 10) + (1 x 4) dumbbell lift (what are these actually called?)
• 1 x 10 x 40lbs shrugs
• 3 x 10 x 20lbs leg extensions
• 2 x 20 decline situps
• 1 x 10 x 25lbs weighted decline situps

and then I ran half a mile.  Not too bad, if I do say so myself.

Wyotech has continued its trend of being boring, but informative.  We’re currently learning about practical electrical testing and diagnosis with breadboards and DMMs and the like.  I’ve always been afraid of electricity, since I never really understood it, so this is really good for me.

Riding April around for the past couple of days has felt completely awesome.

I’m horny.

April, at least, has come back to me in good shape.  Well, relatively good shape.  Her clutch is grabbing really high, although maybe I’m just forgetting what it’s supposed to feel like.  And she still likes to float RPMs and such every so often.  It’s not nearly as bad as before, though, and she’s completely rideable.  I want to go ride some more right now, but it’s wet and cold and getting dark.  Sigh!

I’ve got Orange Box and Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions coming in the mail, along with a pair of cheap Mechanix gloves… woo!

Neither April nor Faye are fixed yet.  It’s been back to the boring classroom for the past couple of days at school.  And even with something like 2/3 of my day dedicated to “doing something”, I’m still restless for something real to do.  I itch.  I’m not exactly sure what it is I’m itching for.

On the upside, I’m on expensive meds at the moment that might cure two slight health problems I’ve had for about a year… I’m on proton pump inhibitor to reduce gastric acid production, which hopefully will stop my chronic heartburn and allow the flappy thing in my throat to heal, thus making it so that I don’t feel like something’s stuck in my throat for hours after every meal.  I’m also on some strong-as-hell anti-fungal foot lotion, to try and get rid of a mystery skin-peeling thing that’s afflicted only my left foot.  Also, Alice has garnered me some gym-buddies!  So between those two facts, perhaps my health can improve.  Not that it’s bad or anything.

This sucks… there are a bunch of games out now (Orange Box, Crysis, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, World in Conflict, Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lion, Odin Sphere (though that one’s not that recent), etc.) or that are coming out in the near future (Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness, Hellgate: London, the Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion, Guitar Hero 3, Rock Band, etc.) that I really want to play.  This is, of course, in addition to unfinished games I already have, and older games I want to acquire and play.  But even if I could afford all of these, I really shouldn’t… and even if I did, I don’t really have time to play them much.  I’m already sleepy as hell from stretching myself too thin every day.  5-6 hours of sleep isn’t catastrophically low, but it leaves me lethargic for the entire day, pretty much every day.  But if I sleep more, then I wouldn’t have time after Wyotech to cook, clean, hang out with Alice (sexually), watch Star Trek: The Next Generation and Heroes, play a bit of video games, and generally have a life.

Speaking of Wyotech, though, our second day of shop time today went pretty nicely.  I added a GM 5.7L V8 (not an LS1… LT1?  My partners thought it came out of a truck) and a 13B rotary to the list of engines I’ve cracked open and reassembled, although the 13B struggled mightily against the “reassembled” half of that process.  I thought those things were supposed to be simple!

The status of my own vehicles, of course, continues to fluctuate.  Faye has been having issues… a fluctuating idle that I thought was intake-related.  This morning, however, she completely died upon attempted startup, with all lights and gauges vanishing into the darkness.  She started up after a couple more tries, again with the wobbly idle, so now I think it’s a loose electrical connection somewhere.  Because THAT won’t be hard to track down.  In good news, however, Mister Awesome Man Dirty Dan has apparently successfully fixed April… if this is truly the case, then I can start riding the shit out of her all over the place.  Yay!

Wyotech is pretty fun, I suppose.  We just got into the shop today after a week of boring-as-hell classroom time, in which I have to put up with about 40 trouble-making numbskulls and about 10 decent people… such is the demographic of my classmates.  It’s okay, though… I get to hear fun stories from the instructors about various experiences they’ve had working on cars, and today I got to rip apart and reassemble a 4G64.

Heavenly Sword is fairly fun, and really pretty (even if Alice can’t tell the difference between God of War II on an SDTV and Heavenly Sword in 720p on a 42″ plasma).  It’s frustrating at times, though, but that’s mostly just my general frustration with action games in general.  They aren’t very intuitive to me, and I get frustrated at things that I don’t pick up very easily right away.  The other part of my frustration with it is the shooting segments, where you shoot things from a first-person view, and then “aftertouch” them to their targets.  That frustration went away, though, as soon as I switched off the motion sensor control of aftertouch.  Good job, Sony, your little gimmick is more annoying than it is fun. 

I feel the urge for RPGs of any sort.  I hear Neverwinter Nights 2’s expansion is coming out relatively soon, and fixes a lot of the UI issues that made me stop playing the original game about half an hour in.  I’ll probably give that a shot….  Also, Final Fantasy Tactics for the PSP is out.  I loved the original game, and this remake supposedly has lots of added bits that make it even better.  Who doesn’t love SRPGs?  Not me.

What do I want to do?  What are my goals?  What are my priorities?

Starting Monday, I’m going to be attending Auto Tech/High Performance Powertrains classes at Wyotech, so that’s 7AM-4:10PM M-F covered.  I want to turn that into some kind of career building badass cars, preferably for racing.  If I can get into racing myself, so much the better, although I don’t think I’m ever going to be super-awesome at it.  I’m definitely going for trackdays, though, as much as I can.  I’ve got such big plans for vehicles to acquire and mod and drive the shit out of… but first, I’m going to spend the next nine months eating and breathing cars.

I think I’ve mostly decided that cars/motorcycles and motorsports are what I want as my main priority.  There’s still a shit-ton of other things I want to pursue, but at least for now, this is the big one that I’m choosing to focus on.  It’s going to be a tough road, because I really don’t have all that much experience or knowledge to start from, but I’m going to work my ass off.  I kind of see this as my chance to redo school… I never really gave a shit about high school or college, and so I managed to pass, but didn’t honestly get much out of either one.  My English Literature B.A. is a testament to just how easy it is to get through liberal arts undergrad.  This time around, though, I’m going through a program about a subject I actually really, really love and am passionate about, and which will actually help me in terms of tons of practical knowledge.  Time to kick some ass.

Interestingly, though, I still also need more focus in my choices of hobbies.  There are just too many things I love and want to do, and I often can’t get myself to commit to any of them enough to actually DO anything.  Especially with so much less free time, I’m going to have to really push myself not to waste my time sitting around doing nothing anymore.

Pageant week is over, and life can go back to something resembling normal again.  If all goes well, I’ll be spending the upcoming time working on my vehicles, and possibly earning some money on the side.  October will mark the start of my time at Wyotech, eating and breathing cars.  Should be fun times!

Alice and I attended the wedding of an old family friend of mine last night.  It was interesting to see various people after 3-10 years (depending on the individual).  I think a lot of people didn’t know what to make of the fact that I want to build race cars for a living… hah!  Take that, Chinese engineering students!

Before pageant week began, I was playing a lot of God of War II and Super Paper Mario… hopefully I can get back to doing that now too.

I’m sad that the only comments I get are spam.