Listening to SOMA FM. Doomed radio.
My gf will be away for a couple of days helping her sister Amelie move and watching her baby. Amelie is moving from her old apartment in Japan Town to a house in the Richmond neighborhood on the western side of the peninsula. She's leaving tomorrow morning.
Her sister is moving because of her own domestic problems. Amelie just annulled her marriage after about 1 yr. A little over 1 yr ago, she married a co-worker at her firm, and got pregnant. Then, with her sister 8 - 9 months pregnant at the firm's Christmas/winter holiday party, her sister's husband makes out with another co-worker, right in front of her in the bar. It's not an "open" relationship, so this behavior is inexcusable. She later found out that this had been going on for a while. To make things worse, in the following weeks, it was discovered that he has piled up 10s of thousands of dollars of online gambling debt, has drained their joint bank accounts. And, he (Jon) continued to go on with the affair in open defiance of basic decency.
Idle hands are the devil's playthings
It will nice to have my gf out of the house. She's unemployed, has no hobbies or passions that she devotes much time to (except cooking sometimes), and watching TV... A healthy, able-bodied adult ought to stay busy nearly every day. If not with work, with reading, art, or poetry or something engaging and uplifting. Something that gives life a purpose. Aelys has been unemplayed for a while. Not paying her share of the rent, but that's not what I'm complaining about. I don't mind helpign her with that for a while as long as she uses her tiem wisely and is considerate.
It's her idleness that is causing all of the problems I've been having with her lately. She says her only hobby is myself. I'm some kind of project for her, an emotionally damaged and uncouth person for her try to fix and civilize. So, all she does during the day, while I'm at work, aside from a minimal amount of housework, is to get into my things, open my crates and boxes, organize my closet without my permission, mess with my clothes, my books, my box of smut magazines, somethign, anything. And all of it crosses personal boundaries and creates a lot of stress. My things are none of her business. Another thing I mentioned has been spying in my browser history. If not that, she sits around wathcing TV and crying.
She complains that I go down stairs and shut myself up in the workshop. She calls it the "Geek-o-Sphere." It's a large windowless basement room brightly lit with fluorescent lights. Its walls are lined with shelves, cabinets, and work benches. Power outlets are everywerhe - ceiling, floor, walls, and benches. Except for the humidity (i need a dehumidifier), it's a good place to work on electronics. The room is crowded with tools, some dozen computers, servers, short wave radios, video game consoles, monitors, cables, stereo equipment, video equipment, cameras, amplifiers, gadgets, vintage scientific lab equipment (e.g. microscopes, ccd cameras, lab glass, etc.), electronics and software-engineering projects: microcontrollers and circuit boards I'm working on. Last night I was working on an audio file database - getting everything so its serachable from a website linked to a MySQL database with an embedded audio and video player or streame it something. I have some music files in the form of mp3s, ogg vorbis, and others. I'm working on getting it all online (only acessable by me and a few friends) and in the form of an infinite Jukebox wehre you can type in the website, a password, type in what you want to hear or watch, and then have it streamed to your computer.
It's a big project. Just getting it all setup in 1 searchable webpage is a challenge. Anything commercial that I've tried just chokes. So, working on some batch files to try to automate some parts of the setup. Anyway, it's goign to be 3 corporate linux servers that I found in the trash. They are huge towers, much larger and heavier than a beige desktop tower pc, packed with hard drives and cooling fans drawing more than 500 Watts each. The databases will be kluged together by 1 searchable webpage. During the winter, I'll keep it turned on to provide heat for the house.
Anyway, this morning she complains that I come home late, then I shut myself off down there and play games.
Me: would you rather have me down there smokin' crack? (I used to do too much cocaine and heroin, mostly iv. Enough that I was having trouble focusing on school, or getting anything done. So, hobbies like this have been therapeutic, provided they're not making me so mad (which computers will do) that I'm punching the cement walls. Somethign that I immerse myself in and get my mind off the occaisonal cravings).
My gf, on the other hand, wants me to spend my free time, what little of it there is, watching TV upstairs with her and her cats. I hate TV. I haven't been interested in TV since Seinfeld went off the air. And, I am not overly fond of cats. I get twitchy and restless after only a few moments up there, though sometiems, I bring a laptop upstairs and read or work on a project and sit with her while she watches something on TV. Then she gets pissed wehn she comments on something that just happened and I say "huh?" But now, I am working on trying to nod and smile and say "yeah" or "how about that" and pretend some enthusiasm for her programs, and fool her into thinking that I know what is happening in the show. Then Eloise cat walks up to my chair and jumps on my lap and gets in the way of my keyboard. I bought her a few ounces of catnip a few weeks ago to try to keep her occupied so she wont' keep bothering me.
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
