Moving to days

Today I made the transition to dayshift. Normally I work graveyard, mainly because I'm not a morning person. My body clock is and has always been between 8 and 12 hours shifted from what most people call 'normal'. I slept fine last night, and got plenty of sleep, but was tired when I awoke and am still tired right now - a good 4 hours after initially waking up. At least today is sunday and I don't have to worry about dealing with people too much. Tomorrow will be worse - the lights will be on and I'll have people around me, making noise and talking and whatnot. Because of that I can't drown them out with music, at least not unless I put in some earphones. It's just a pain all the way around.

The only real saving grace is that the family is also on normal time, so I'll get to spend more time with them as well. At least I'm thinking that will be a good thing...hope it just doesn't mean more fights. I guess we'll see, won't we?

More going on...

The more going on about me over a year ago was due to severe depression. At that time, I had been unemployed for over 2 years, my mom died a couple of months before, all of my kids had come to live with me (which was a good thing, but it was a BIG change), and my girlfriend and I were almost broken up. Due to all of that, I pretty much forgot about this and my volvogeek blog. Right now I'm taking a facebook hiatus so I feel like I need to express myself in SOME way, and since I have this, why not, right?

Since then, I reconnected with an ex-gf of mine and we started dating again, the kids have all adjusted, dogs have been acquired - as have a gaggle of lizards, and most importantly, I now has a job again! It's not a great job, but it allowed me to go back to school for a couple of terms due to the schedule. I'm not sure how I feel about school as a whole anymore at this point in my life, but I did enjoy it. Job is working graveyard shift, 6:30pm to 6:30am Sun-Tues and every other Sat, and mainly it's just monitoring things in case they go bad and provide support to the groups that own machines. Not many machines though, so it's really very easy and very boring. But at least it pays well and I've got insurance as well for all of the kids, so bonus.

Lots has gone on since all of that, but it's mainly boring day-to-day stuff that could probably be best found via facebook, so update yourself there and I'll put more interesting things here from now on.

Soap Update

I stopped the not using of soap a while ago. I think the catalyst was when I swapped out the oil pan in my car. I was crawling around under it, my head and hair got pretty much covered in oil, and there was NO WAY oil wasn't coming out of hair without soap.

So I used a minimal amount, but I really enjoyed the way my hair felt after that. I still don't really lather up my body, and I use a washcloth sans soap for that, but I feel like my hair needs a little more love.

There's more going on with me, but I don't think I'm ready to share the rest of it with the internets right now.

More No Soap

So back in January I posted about not using soap, and I've kept to this regimen for the past 4 months now. I'm not completely 'product-less', as I use deodorant and shaving cream (I'm not gonna shave dry, ffs), but when I shower, I don't lather up on the body nor the hair.

The only thing I've noticed in my own smell is that if I go without a shower for a couple of days, the deodorant starts to wear off and I smell a lil ripe. That reminds me to go shower and re-apply. I think the main issue with that is that the soap generally has a scent, and it masks body odor a little better than just deodorant. But it's not THAT bad, because if it were, my girlfriends' overly sensitive sense of smell would kick in and she'd bathe me herself.  Not that this is a bad thing, but I'd rather it not be because I was stinky.

So, so far, so good. The only issue I've had at all was when I put some gel in my hair (it's at a weird transitional length and looks funny) when I went to jury duty, the shower after that reactivated the gel and my hair was kinda funky for a couple of days until the next shower. Other than that, nobody has been the wiser except the few people I've told in person and the 0 people that actually read this blog. Haha.

No soap!

I remember reading about this guy who decided stop using soap back in February 2010.  Well not ALL soaps, but mainly shampoos and other body-lathering substances whilst showering.  It intrigued me.  Then he updated about his experiences about a year later, and now I think I'm gonna try it.

I took my first soapless shower this morning.  I used a washcloth to scrub my dirty parts, and only used some shaving gel as lubricant to shave my face and head (I recently shaved off all of my hair because I was in a mood).  To be perfectly clear - I'm not against soap in general.  It's good for cleaning dirty hands, and lets face it, you don't want to be handling food with hands that have been stuffed who-knows-where into who-knows-what.  I DO have a problem with those so-called antibacterial soaps, that kill '99.9%' of germs.

Bacteria multiply exponentially, people.  It does not take that long for something to be completely coated in germs.  But I'd rather put a germ that my own immune system can kill into my system than one that has made it past that 0.1%.

But I digress.  Trying this out.  We'll see how things go after a week or so.

Google Laptop!

Last night (well, tuesday night) I came home and there was a package waiting for me.  I figured it was something from Amazon that I had a recurring subscription for, but alas, it was not.  Instead, it was a Google ChromiumOS Laptop!  OMG WOOHOO!!

And though I was going to play with it in stock form for a while, I ended up not being able to wait 24 hours before putting it into dev mode and installing ubuntu.  Mainly because I wanted to use this thing as a megasquirt tune box running Megatunix.  And so far, Megatunix runs and everything - I haven't hooked it up to the keyspan I've got nor to the actual megasquirt box, but that will come soon enough.

All in all, I'm really enjoying this little laptop. It's a bit smaller than I'd honestly prefer, but it has most of the features I'd want in a laptop (plus a SSD!).  It's reasonably fast, though it could probably use a bit more ram even under linux.  No cdrom, but honestly that isn't as big of an issue as you might think.  Most everything can be dropped onto a usb stick or sd card, and this has both a usb (just one!) and a sd card slot.  It wakes up instantly, and even when shut down completely it takes maybe 5 seconds to boot to a login screen.

I think the biggest thing it has going for it is that now I won't have to turn on the behemoth of a desktop (quad-core, 8gb ram, 2+tb storage, dual monitors, beefy video card) every time I want to simply browse the web.  My phone does a reasonably decent job of that, but even a 4" screen is sometimes too small.

JourneyQuest

I'm sure there aren't many people (if any) who read this, but I'll post this anyway.  JourneyQuest ROCKS.

  I really enjoy this little web show, and they need donations to make a season 2.  Donate a couple of bucks and help a cool show stay alive.