February
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Well February is almost over, just over a week to go. Lots of things have been happening, very little of it is newsworthy, most of it is barely even noteworthy… with one large exception.
A few weeks ago now at the end of January my Sister-in-law Brigitte passed away. This was for the most part expected (she was basically terminally ill) but the end was very sudden. She didn’t tell anyone beyond her husband and his grandfather that she was going to have heart surgery performed, the specifics are complicated but basically she never woke up from surgery She was 29 years old and is survived by her husband Ryan and 8 year old son Kellar. I have never lost anyone this close to me before so I don’t quite know how to react, she still falls into the outer ring/zone for me… she is someone I knew but we didn’t talk all that often, we were friendly once but less over time. Her passing is sad but she wasn’t so close to me that I feel a part of myself missing. Does that make sense? It is more like an optical illusion or impossible puzzle, when I look at the whole of my life right now I know there is something that should be there that isn’t and it makes my head swim trying to find it, when I look to the space I know she should be it’s like she’s cloaked, she has been “photo-shopped out”.
Anyway, moving on. School is going okay I think. Money has been okay too but it has been evaporating almost as fast as we can get it, hopefully my financial aid should be coming in soon and I can buy at least one thing off of my list before it goes too. The car is still broken, we haven’t been able to even have anyone look at it yet before the money is gone. Soon though, soon. Crap, which reminds me the registration on it needs paying…
Sigh. i don’t know. I guess that is it for now, there is so much going on that it is swirling in my head, a storm of crap. Hopefully next time my brain is less bogged down with stuff.
Barry @ February 20, 2012
A New Year, a good start.
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Alright, So January is now more than a week in and despite some of life’s usual little, day-to-day hiccups, I can officially say that things are off to a fine start this 2012.
In about a week (Exact day to be determined later today) I shall be starting classes at Bakersfield College, beginning my journey back into edumacation. At some point soon (also hopefully to be determined later today) I shall be receiving some financial aid which will facilitate the hardware upgrade needed to (hopefully) ensure the completion of all of my unfinished projects this year. For better or worse I will take one more pass at them all and get them out there, probably not by summer but that would be nice. People talk about Spring being a time of new growth and cleansing well I intend to start with Spring-cleaning and I am going to try and keep it up all year long.
This won’t be just a slight course change at the start of the year, I intend to be steering this ship through all the dangerous waters ahead in 2012.
Alright, time to go, I have laundry to do amongst MANY other things and I have a little person all but dragging me out of the door. I hope everyone else out there reading this has a great year too.
Barry @ January 9, 2012
2011 is near it’s end. Progress!
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Alright, I can’t be long, there is too much to do today but it has been too long since I was here last I have to stop and say something.
Halloween went well, I got the porch decorated and we scared some kids, it was fun. I’ll try to post some pictures soon.
After that was November so NaNoWriMo consumed me for 30 days. I now have another 50 thousand plus start to a novel, only another 10-20k to go to finish it I think but that can wait until next year. I had a lot of fun this year, it was a lot of work but thanks to my wife’s help and kind understanding I did it (for the third time in a row) and I was able to participate with the local NaNo group like NEVER before. Hopefully I made some friends that I will meet up with throughout the year.
My teeth are fine now, one little note though is that the dental office manager is like a bulldog, she would not let me out of the office without making an appointment to get my OTHER two wisdom teeth out. I will have to change the appointment because it turns out that I will be busy that day and many following it because -
I AM GOING BACK TO SCHOOL! It is official, I wanted to anyway but prompted by the government threatening to cut our benefits I had to either get a job or go back to school… so back to school it is! That decision is not made out of laziness, it is just a lot easier to go to school than find a job in this current job market. Plus anyone who has been to college knows that it isn’t necessarily easy!
My mum just called and I have completely lost my train of thought…
Okay well I’ll recap some of the crap that has happened too…
I think that someone hacked my e-mail because within the pace of about 10 days someone tried to order a new phone on my sprint account; they posted spam from my twitter account, twice; and I think they tried to mess with my bank account. I have had to run around and change passwords etc, not a lot of fun.
A couple of days ago I had to go and get my pre-op blood work done because on December 27th I am having my hernia surgery finally. I am scared shitless. but I am trying not to dwell on that.
Today is VERY busy because I have to finish packing to go back to Lancaster for Christmas, the surgery and the initial recovery. so I will be there for New years’ as well. BUT Angela is expecting a package to come and I have to wait for my eldest daughter to get out of school before I can leave. then when I do I have to stop by the post office because there are two packages there waiting for me. I am going to be loaded down like a pack mule, not a good thing for someone with a hernia.
Plus the place here is a mess, I want t clean and tidy before I leave. I’ll have to leave dirty laundry but I want to at least try to do dishes and vacuum. Oh and hide most of our valuables so that nobody can break in a rip us off while we are gone. fun, fun, fun.
Okay, time to go. But I will be back in January, I will leave you with a post that I just put on Facebook:
“With only a few days to go until my surgery, Fear - like some wild animal has made a home in my stomach. I have a lot to do the next few days - Too much - and I don’t know when I will be online again; I’ll have my phone but limited internet connectivity. Hopefully everything goes well and if so I plan to go out into the desert new years eve and shoot 2011 in the back of the head… Melodramatic I know but I liked the imagery. Happy Holidays everyone, I hope to see you all on the other side :)”
Barry @ December 23, 2011
More pain, more probelms and still no real progress.
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Life has rolled on almost a week now, it is frustrating and annoying but I am actually in more pain now than when I had the teeth out. I don’t know if I have an infection or what but I have a noticeable lump on my jaw and I am in a great deal of discomfort/pain, and this is all on the side that had nothing wrong before!?!?! The tooth that had a cavity and was causing me pain if fine, but the one that was fine “shattered” when they were taking it out and there is still a chunk left in there that they don’t want to take out in case they cause nerve damage yadda yadda. sigh. I am going to wait until tomorrow and call the dentist to see what they say.
The day after my last post I did in fact go back to Lancaster and had what can only be described as one of the worst days ever. everything I did was wrong, everything went wrong and very little got done. I woke up and the computer was fucking up… I spent so long messing with it that I didn’t catch the bus downtown that I wanted but the next one… the next one got to the bus terminal ONE MINUTE LATE so I missed the bus to Lancaster and had to wait TWO HOURS for the next one. SO after two hours of waiting and the THREE HOUR BUS RIDE, I run around, decide to run to the bank now rather than later in case something should go wrong. Well, despite calling the day before and NOTHING SHOWING on my bank, I get there and they have put through a payment which took me overdrawn, more than a little annoying but whatever. okay so I put money in the bank to get my account up, then I shuffle around some more money and try to take it out to PAY OUR MORTGAGE and the bank says NO. they froze MY account because my wife had our joint account $500 OVERDRAWN. So I had to spent the phone bill money and the Mortgage money on bailing THAT out. I crawled (emotionally) away from the bank… it was so late in the day I decided not to even try and go home because I risked missing the bus I needed to catch home. There was more but I will leave it at that.
Basically the plan was to leave at 9, get a whole bunch of stuff done, rescue the bank, move more stuff between the houses in a nice non-stressful manner. I ended up running around headless, getting financially raped and limping home after dark having accomplished maybe half of what I wanted to. And I have spent the week since then in varying degrees of pain, waking up most morning feeling like I have been kicked in the face.
In other news I have started decorating and prepping for Halloween but it has been slow because we are so broke and I am so busy. but I am not busy doing anything which actually makes any money, just trying to save it etc so it all just feels like a huge waste of time. Sigh. Life goes on. Until next time people, good luck.
Barry @ October 23, 2011
Drowning.
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I simultaneously have too much to say but… I want to say it all, but it is too much. It’s like I am drowning and I don’t have the breath to say it all. I will get out what I can before I have to go.
Today I have an dentists appointment to get two wisdom teeth removed. I am very scared.
Today I realized that a payment hasn’t gone through my bank but I needed to make a payment on our phones before they got cut off. I could only make a partial payment because we are flat broke, starting to drown in debt.
I have to face a terrifying ordeal today and here I am still juggling money trying to keep everything going just a little while longer. My wife has gotten up and gone back to bed, my baby is still asleep. I feel crushingly alone, treading water in the middle of the ocean surrounded by sharks just waiting for me to drown.
UPDATE:
Okay, 12 hours or so later and things aren’t looking as bad. I had my dentist visit, had both of my teeth out and it was such a relief. The next few coming days may bring some pain but I have a nice healthy prescription of Vicodin for that. I was very nervous going in but the Dentist was very nice, they gassed me, sprayed me up with skin refrigerant and whoever put the needle in did a good job, I had a very slight twinge of almost panic but I was able to hold it together and the next thing I know I was waking up. Very cool. AND a little while ago, several hours after closing, I was sitting here watching TV with the family and the Dentist called me up to check on me! Cool or what!?
Also, after discussing it with the missus, I might be running back to Lancaster tomorrow to head off a bank screw up before it blows up in our face. Then whilst doing that I can stop by home, do a few things really quick which I was worried I might not get to do AND just to make it a really worth while trip I’ll take an empty bag and try to bring back another load of stuff!!! BUT that all depends on if I wake up tomorrow feeling like I have been kicked in the face by a pro-ball player and how long it takes to get rid of that feeling. It would be a very long day either way… 7 plus hours on and off of buses.
Okay, heading to bed soon after I have something soft to eat and take my tablets. hopefully I can come back before too much longer and I will actually have some FILM NEWS, IMAGINE THAT!
Barry @ October 18, 2011
Pain.
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As per usual not much has happened recently, or more accurately, lots of things have happened just none of it is visible, it’s all prep work.
Later today if I can push away the agony my teeth have been causing me the last few days I hope to finish the first draft of Skin Deep, I am in what I think is going to be the last chapter… I might write a short epilog/teaser for the sequel I am now pretty sure will be the new novel I write in November.
I have been dealing with a lot of personal stuff recently, that has taken up most of my free time, then a big fat cloud of depression moved in and has had me sitting on the couch a lot. Mostly it is an offshoot of the pain my teeth have been causing me and the specter that is my upcoming surgery… I have an appointment in a week to see the surgeon again and then it will just be a matter of getting insurance approval and scheduling it. I am terrified. I am trying not to think about it and when I do I am trying to think calm thoughts, I don’t want to work myself up too much.
Halloween is obviously drawing near, just a month to go now. I need to do some work on that if we are going to be doing Angela’s plan of a family of killers. I don’t know if it will all work out but if I can put together the baby’s costume it might give me a happy little memory to take with my into the big scary surgery. I won’t spoil the surprise but if it comes out as planned I think it will be adorable.
Things have been so hectic I haven’t been able to work on any of the Halloween mask stuff I wanted to. I planned to have at least one latex mask I could try to sell, but oh well. I still have time to throw something together in time but it depends how other things go. sigh. it can be so frustrating sometimes how the life you have gets in the way of the life you want to have. and it is easy for some people to say that it is just a matter of working harder or smarter or some might say that you can’t always have what you want… but I don’t know if any of that is true. Okay you might not be able to have EXACTLY what you want, that might literally be impossible but you can have something close. It might just take a little time, not working harder necessarily just longer, not giving up. Most “overnight successes” work for years before being discovered and being catapulted to where they want to be. I doubt that I would ever want the success of someone like Stephen King but I would be more than happy with a Richard Laymon life.
Anyway, that is enough time spent here, I’ll be back in a couple of weeks and I’ll try to have more productive news to share.
Barry @ September 29, 2011
A Short break for me.
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Well as per usual things haven’t exactly gone to plan but they are ticking over (like the clock on a time bomb?).
There has been no real forward motion on anything. I have done some more work at the house but there is still a lot left to do. I have done a little drawing, thrown away some stuff, found out information about getting rid of more things… but not much actual achievement.
There have been a lot of frustrations recently, I was checking out Craigslist after re-posting our ads and found TWO AMAZING JOB OPPORTUNITIES… Both in the fields that I want to work in and BOTH either where we are moving FROM or in the opposite direction. So whilst we are moving towards my wife’s dreams, in a way we are moving away from mine. But I don’t mean that in a mean way, I can still do what I want to here, it will just be… different.
Something else that got me frustrated is kind of two-fold… I also saw on Craigslist a couple of opportunities for graphic design, putting together some DVD cover/Movie posters, something which would be perfect for me… but despite replying to two ads I didn’t hear from either one probably because I didn’t have a portfolio to show them. So it is understandable that they aren’t going to want to pay me if they can’t see my work but it reminded me that some time ago I meant to put together a portfolio. Now, that is the first fold, the second is this - It is hard for me to put together a portfolio because I KEEP LOOSING MY WORK because of Hard drive crashes, Websites beings hacked and Viruses. SO I am now going to have to create/re-create some work to put one together.
This post is so incoherent… there are a lot of distractions right now which is making it hard to think straight… Basically what I think I want to say is that tomorrow (Sunday) is my Birthday, and then on Monday my daughter starts her new school so I am taking a few days off of working at the house in Lancaster. In my down time I will be doing a little bit of work here at the apartment but mostly I want to try to relax, enjoy my birthday and time with my family and try to do some creative stuff. Some sculpting, drawing, maybe writing… I still need to finish last years NaNoWriMo Novel “Skin Deep” and prep for this years Novel… whatever it will be.
I guess that is everything, I’ll be back in a couple of weeks and by then there should be some actual concrete progress… I can only hope.
Barry @ August 20, 2011
Frustration
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I am getting very frustrated. a lot of that frustration is aimed at myself. It seems like no matter where I go or what I do, as I am getting ready to leave one place, or soon after I have left - that is when a dozen opportunities present themselves. The first year or two after i came to this country I couldn’t turn around without finding some British production that I could have at least tried to be become involved with and now as I am getting ready to move to Bakersfield I stumble across a job ad to work for a guy I have heard of (Eddie Barber) in a field I want to work in. I probably wouldn’t get the job, that would be too lucky but even then, I’m moving away.
Also this morning I found a couple more ads that I have replied to about work but I realized that I still do not have a portfolio put together and as I sat down to try to throw something together I realized a couple more things.. recently I have had multiple computer/hard drive crashes, my web host has deleted several old images and because I am moving most (if not all) of what I would need right now to throw one together is 100 miles away!!?! it is SO frustrating not being able to just get on with something that I could do quite easily is things were different.
Sigh, i don’t know.. I’m getting more frustrated now not being able to express myself fully. I’m sitting kind of on the floor twisted uncomfortably so that I can type on my laptop in a house with almost no furniture and a TON of work to do, none of which will pay me anything. I am tired, dehydrated, bored (a word I have seen repeatedly misspelled recently), frustrated, depressed and tired some more.
I have replied to a couple of ads for graphic design work, but probably messed up my e-mails because I can’t professionally show them my work right now. sigh. I don’t know what to do or where to start, so many things need to be done and things are time sensitive and reliant on other things which cant be done and it is all just a tangled mess of crap.
ok I go now. wish me luck. please.
Barry @ August 14, 2011
What a difference a month makes.
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Okay, so I am coming here rather than posting stuff on Facebook… not that I ever really post stuff over there but this place is more personal and safe. It’s not that this is any less visible than facebook, it is not blocked or locked in any way other than by it’s anonymity. Only a handful of people know it’s head and even fewer actually read it. Sigh, but anyway.
This last month has been eventful, but not fruitful in any way. I’m not sure if I posted last time about my trials and tribulations trying to put together a charity video for a horse rescue for free. I’ll re-cap quickly just in case I have already chronicled it in detail… basically everything I tried to do went wrong. filming, capturing, editing and maybe even rendering. but it is over now, I have told the woman that I did it for that i might take one more pass at it after things have settled down and I will… but there is no sign of anything settle down really so…
The biggest new news is that my wife Angela had a car accident. She is fine but that combined with other stuff going on basically contributed to a small bout of self destructive behavior. I won’t go into detail but suffice to say that because of several lies covering up aspects of the accident and her subsequent behavior, I have told her that I do not want to be married to her any more. That doesn’t really mean much, we have separated before and said such things during heated arguments many times but this time it is different. I discussed it with her calmly and whist she disagrees with me and wants to try and work things out, I do not know if I do. Over the 12 years of our marriage there have been several large lies and “catastrophes” which have been made worse by what only can be described as a pathological need to lie and cover things up to avoid blame. I have told her, I just do not want to be married to someone like that. Marriage is a partnership and if one person can not trust the other then that isn’t a good partnership.
I don’t want to get angry over things and I hope that people don’t think me a bad person for feeling the way I do, I just say with all due respect that, they do not know the whole story. Predominantly those people might be Angela’s friends, people who have only been told part of the story. They (and she) have said “Aren’t people allowed to make mistakes?”. Yes. yes they are, I myself am far from perfect but it isn’t as simple as that. People can make mistakes but if they Make a LONG string of them and each time LIE and cover them up only making the situation WORSE, each time promising that neither the mistakes or the lies will happen again… only a year or so later for them to happen again… it to me is just unforgivable. I have been hurt and betrayed time after time, each time I have forgiven her and helped her fix the problems that she has caused only to be betrayed again. It has cost us thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars over the years and we should be much better off than we are right now… but we aren’t because one member of this team keeps letting the other one down.
Sigh. I have dwelt on it longer than I intended and I apologize. How about I try to come up with some good news?
Well there isn’t much really, I am back home right now and I shall endeavor to finish my adaption of “Long Live the Dead” novel into a screenplay as soon as possible and get that “out there” as well as finalizing some details on a possible opportunity to get something produced with the talented and very busy Maria Olsen.
Okay that’s it for now. my next few weeks will involve lots of writing, lots of housework, painting etc, running around like a mad man trying to stop the financial bomb that is about to explode in our faces from doing so. If anyone reads this and feels like wishing me luck it would be gratefully appreciated. Until next time people, good luck to us all.
Barry @ July 13, 2011
As we rapidly approach the halfway point of the year…
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As we rapidly approach the halfway point of the year… many things have happened so far in 2011 and here is a disjointed muddled roundup and update… a round-up-date if you will.
Angela got into Grad school so we have to move because commuting would be impossible. We got into our only option apartment despite the libelous attempt by the guy we pay our “mortgage” to, to scuttle us. We have survived the last few months. This seems the biggest news of all, especially shocking to me who has been privy to everything that has transpired.
We couldn’t really afford to move to instep my parents to help, I dislike taking money from them but until we can properly get on our feet life without their occasional assistance would be impossible. I only hope that I can pay them back some day.
Since the move about a month ago I have been sleeping on the floor at the house with the kids while Angela stays at the apartment 100 miles away. We’ve had frequent, regular visits and we will soon be in a position to finish moving properly, progress has just been slow moving the last few things from the house. we couldn’t afford the movers for anything other than the minimum so they moved the big stuff leaving us with gargantuan quantities of crap to sort through and move in the car. I wish I had had more time to prepare for them coming I could have put together a lot more stuff for them to take and there would be a lot less left for us.
Once a little more stuff is out of here I will be able to start painting. We can’t afford that either but using the cheapest paint we can get and doing everything myself it will come out to be less than $200 I think. The hope being that that investment will help the place sell. We can but hope.
I hand made a couple of posters to go in our windows so that people driving by would see them and having been up only… well less than two weeks at this point we have had about 7 nibbles but I don’t know how serious any of them are. We really need this place to sell. If it doesn’t we will have to default on it and it could end up on our credit report, something I don’t want to happen because I have been trying the last couple of years to improve our credit.
The only real business news is that today I am doing some more volunteer filming for a local horse rescue. Hopefully just one day, I don’t mind doing it but it is a little further from home then I like to go right now and these projects always seem to turn into something more than they seem at the start.
Other than that there has been a little writing done, some re-writing mostly before I post my “House that Bedlam built” script up on Trigger street. Side note to that: this is the first script that I have registered with the Writers Guild of America. I still need to finish another pass at it, I had Angela read it finally and noticed a full dozen mistakes in it, I want it to be a smooth as possible before I post it so that the comments I get are on the Story and Characters not my typing. of course I think I’ll get formatting notes no matter what I do.
I want to get Long live the Dead up there too… not that I think it will gain me anything but if I can just get a couple of strangers notes back on it, it should help and I can go ahead and submit it to a couple of publishers. Small presses anyway. Hopefully soon there will be enough spare money that I can register a few things with the WGA and get them up on Trigger Street. Not that TS is the be-all and end-all, but it is a free forum which if people like my scripts can get them a little (in theory SAFE) exposure. But I want to register them first. Bedlam was the first but I want Savage up there too and VERY soon I want to write a Screenplay adaption of Long Live the Dead. If Angela can take the kids and painting goes well for me I might start that this next week, oh and the horse video too.
Sigh. anyway, I have rambled enough for now. it is damned cold, I have to eat, get dressed and finish getting ready for the horse thing this afternoon… I want to get as much done today as possible. I have been working my ass off every day for the last three in a row, I must be in a manic phase or something. I think just so much is happening I am getting pulled into work so much that I am just not allowed to slip down into a depressive state. sigh. Much to do. until next time people.
Barry @ June 7, 2011