keepin the Yule logs burnin....

It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten. Mine were an old people, and were old even when this land was settled three hundred years before. And they were strange, because they had come as dark furtive folk from opiate southern gardens of orchids, and spoken another tongue before they learnt the tongue of the blue-eyed fishers. And now they were scattered, and shared only the rituals of mysteries that none living could understand...
Holy Smokes, what a great christmas i had! I think it'd be no stretch to say that it was my favorite of the 36 that I've experienced thus far, and i hope everyone else had as much fun as I have.

I got a lot of nice things from my immediate family, and my new extended family, but the gift that i liked best is my new xmas stocking. Jen wanted to hang up the stocking she got from her grandmother when she was little, but didn't feel right about hanging hers without having one for me to hang up. She'd been talking for weeks about a "super secret craft project", but i had no idea what that was gonna be.

If you think I’ll sit around as the world goes by, You’re thinkin’ like a fool cause it’s a case of do or die

i guess i don't always have that much to say, since its occured to me that most of my posts are links and whatnot to stuff that's already available elsewhere. ok, after the first of the year I'll just post stuff i've created myself. in the meantime, check out this person's xmas lights...

ok, so that didn't work. it occured to me after the fact (actually, after i tried to haul up this blog entry in FireFox, only to be greeted by a big blank space) that trying to embed a .wmv file in this here web space might be a little discriminatory towards our Mac brethren and sistren. not to mention those seperated by the great I.E -- Netscape -- Mozilla divide. i dunno, i thought this video file was hilarious, so i'll just post it as a link and see if y'all can view it that way. let me know how it goes.

"someday you'll be just like me, and that's free, but still your chains are on..."

1. I don't want to say too much and jinx anything, but i think this whole cloud of depression that i've been laboring under for the last three years has lifted, finally. normally winter is the hardest time for me, and i knuckle under pretty soon after Daylight Savings. as of a few weeks ago, tho, things are picking up. my concentration is excellent, productivity is up, mood is elevated. barametric pressure holding steady. Winter quarter is usually something i dread, and by the end of first week I'm usually cutting out at 11am to get completely drunk, and decide which classes will be dropped. Not this time, tho. Granted, i don't have the luxury of dropping classes anymore anyway, but i pulled thru this first week with flying colors. I'm looking forward to all of my classes, and especially kicking ass at them (all repeats too: this is the 4th time I've taken the 2nd transistor course, 3rd time i've taken Physics of Semiconductors, 2nd time for Electric Fields and Generators/Motors). this WILL be the last time for all of them.

1a. been trying to puzzle out what's different this time around...cutting out getting drunk every night/day has helped some. stabilized medications, check. a Good Woman at my side, check. i have been chain smoking this week, tho. gotta keep an eye on that.

1b. My Electric Fields prof looks disturbingly like Phillip Seymore Hoffman.

2. ESVC is on hiatus for a bit. looks like some internal conflicts need to be resolved. one person has left the group, so i hope we can limp along or get this straightened out. hopefully my pal/mentor/part-time-employer will join us. its probably for the best that we take a little break, i want to concentrate on school until i know i can handle it, and i want to take some time over the holidays to make some additions/upgrades to the synth.

3. over there on the right is a link for Montery Bay Aquarium's real-time shark cam...on the same page, check out the penguin cam. it's just a corner of their environment, as they hang out, eat fish, and walk around. its as relaxing as watching fish. I could watch this all day.

4. it's been a rough year for Synth icons. we lost Dr. Bob Moog a few months ago to cancer, and Larry Hendry, a Synth DIY pioneer was killed recently in a motorcycle accident. Now it seems that John Simonton, from PAIA inc, has died. this one especially hits close to home, as John's designs for low cost kits did more to put synth gear in the hands of experimentors than possibly any of the other synth designers around today combined. Not to mention the fact that he was just a really great guy, always willing to share his knowledge and help out. I've had a few very nice email exchanges with John over the years when I couldn't get this thing to work or that thing. I also interviewed him for a class a few years ago, and he was very gracious with the time and info he was willing to share. John will definitely be missed. RIP.