So now I have a place in Toronto, on a street called Broadway, which is, in case Torontonians can’t just place some random road in the tangle, is the second minor road north of Eglinton on Yonge, and the apartment building itself is about a 10 minute walk from the intersection, so I’m close to the thick of things, busses and subway.

I have it starting Aug 1st but I’ll be moving in the next weekend I think. It’s a Jr. 1 Bedroom apartment, emphasis on the Jr. Pretty small, which is my only complaint, the rest is pretty good. And yesterday I just signed over all the money I had (and quite a bit I didn’t) over to secure the place. Now I get to live frugally.

So now I have a place in which to live at least 1 year of my life, and the ability to pay for it for the most part, now the elusive Life part, hehe. I check the wanted ads for a job, I check the rental ads for an apartment… is there such thing as a Life ad? If there is I’m sure it would be inadvisable to use such a paper.

This is just a quicky to log major changes in my life status, of sorts.

Anyway, I’m currently employed, a company called Workbrain in Toronto. Now all I have to do is find a place to live nearby, as right now I’m commuting and that is getting a little tiring, which is sure to get worse as the heat lasts.

I can now finance a life, all that is left is to concoct some sort of life to finance

So as of yesterday, I’m now 24 years old. The trouble with being 24 is that it’s not very much different from being 23, and that in turn wasn’t much different from being 22 and so on, and that goes back a ways, but not all the way back as I figure puberty must count for something. Almost makes me wish there were most stages, more fur where there was no fur before (actually, not really ) something to make these years a little more different from the previous than just a number.

Of course, I imagine in not too long, other changes will happen, and I’ll be wishing for the time when the years ticking over where the only change

Many years ago, we got a pair of kittens, brother and sister, which we named Hobbes and Missy, begot by Cuddles, my aunt’s cat. For years we enjoyed them, with only a slightly serious illness befalling Hobbes early on, and Missy disappearing for two days as she had fallen in an old well, but they both were recovered.

Now, last night, he did not return, nor will he, for he always stayed close to home, and entered frequently to drink and eat and immediately withdraw to the hunt once again. We will indeed wait long for his coming.

I’ve read the The Silmarillion recently, and I felt like speaking in somewhat grander terms, and this story does feel like an epic, to me at least. We keep losing cats, Burroughs we only had for around 8 months or so, and he had such personality that I doubt I’ll ever find again. The top of my mother’s computer tower is adorned with a number of cat related objects, and standing most promenantly are two pictures frames, one of Hobbes, one of Missy… and it seems a third one will need to be added. It’s fitting enough that the graveyard should be in photographs only, for in my entire conscious history of having cats, we’ve never buried one. They merely disappear amid the howling from the Far End.

I had joked that when I got my own place, I would get 40 cats, a la Cat Lady from the simpsons. At this point, I don’t know if I could handle even one. Sure, in Toronto a housecat (as I should hope it would be) is not likely to be eaten by coyotes, but die it will, and I’ve had about enough cat-death as I’m willing to tolorate for the time being. As for here, one of the hardest things about losing Missy was the thought of putting away all her things, the litter boy and scratching post and food dishes, but Burroughs needed all those things, and so they remained… but I doubt we will be getting another cat, at least, not for a long while.

Goodbye Burroughs, you deserved better than this.

Now I just feel silly…

I waited until this morning, when it was light, to write the above. I checked outside, walked in my slippers and pajamas around the house, calling for him, figuring if he was to come home, he would have by then. Alas, nothing.

Then the neighbour came by, as she does each day, to ‘pick up’ our dog on her and her dog’s walk. She just knocks on the door, Joey comes running, and she lets him out into the breezeway. I was in the computer room, playing a game to distract myself, not having slept. The door closed, the neighbour was leaving… then the door opened for half a second and closed again… I thought, she must have put the paper on the counter or something… I didn’t consider the — and then cat came walking into the office, not meowing (as he usually does), and just looked around. I went over and picked him up, and held him as if questioning his existence, wondering if it was a dream… as I have had those dreams before, of Hobbes and Missy, and woken and felt terrible… but I was still awake.

So apparently he is an irritating sort of cat that will, first time in 8 months, dissapear and hunt overnight. *sigh*

Apparently I’m employable, who knew? Well, Alicia knew, but even she is surprised at the speed in which I found employment, given when I started sending off applications. It was a good little holiday, but it will soon be over. The next trick, is to figure out where I am to live. The options are to either find a place in toronto to rent, or to live at home and get a lift in to the subway, and I haven’t decided which I will do, as one has high cost, while the other has long commutes.

I’d like to be off on my own at this point, if at the very least to escape the earwigs, but I have very few funds at the moment, and need to save up enough to actually pay for life. But first a life is needed, then the circle will be complete, first I was but the learner, now I am the master.

Only a master of evil, darth.

Have had to implement some hotlinking protection… for some reason my provider can only do All-But-Some blocking, rather than Some-Not-All. So I’ll add domains to the bad-list as they offend. If people asked for permission to link to images on my server, that would be one thing, but to just do it, grrr. I make it a point to upload my own copies of things whenever possible.

Edit: I’ve decided to take that out, for the moment. Looking more closely at the bandwidth consumption, in the end those hotlinks are consuming the most, but of my total, it’s still nothing. So if either those sites that hotlink become more popular, or if my site becomes more popular (unlikely) then I will reimplement the hotlinking denials. It was still interesting to do, having to mess around htaccess itself.

Edit 2: I’ve put them back in, just because I like the no-hotlink image I put in. People can come and ask to be un-hotlink-banned, and I’m curious if anyone will even notice that the images won’t link.

Death is kind of surprising sometimes… of course, there are the ones that take people by surprise due to the nature of the death itself, like a car crash or something, as you tend not to get a letter from your insurance company telling you they are upping the premium due to your immenent demise.

But, when there is some forewarning, you tend to expect it to count for something.. but it didn’t. A couple days ago, my mother was receiving family news and gossip, including one bit of bad news. One of my aunt’s was in hospital. The aunt is by marriage, to a brother of my father, and they both live off in the eastern canadas, and I hadn’t seen them since I was conscious of my surroundings.

anyway, the story went like this… my aunt, several months ago, slipped and fell while bowling, and had a concussion… they gave her a few brain scans to make sure all was well, and put her on medication. She, after that, seemed to have problems communicating, and balancing and such, waved in and out. Her husband suggested that it might be the medication itself, so she weened off, but it didn’t seem to help. A couple days ago, she fell out of bed… fed up, her husband took her to the hospital, where another brain scan (I can never remember which ones, but I was told) and they found a large, inoperable tumour. She was going to be taken to another hospital for some radiation therapy which might buy some more time, and get a biopsy which might indicate that it was benign. That night we heard about all of this having gone on… the next morning, we got a call that she had died.

Barely 60 years old, very active (not that that would have saved her from a brain tumour)… but still, those are the types of things that you’d expect to occur and then get the dreadful “you have 6 months to live”… but for her, medical science could only give her 6 hours. And further, the same scans she underwent only a few months earlier didn’t seem to reveal anything, while the new one showed a large, unmistakable mass… so even with the current technology for showing the problem exists at all, she would have only had a few months warning.

I’ve often wondered which I would prefer, to know I was going to die (with warning), or to have it happen suddenly. With the latter you just pop out of existence with the surprise you had on entering it. But with the former, you get the agony of waiting, but can put affairs in order, and have the knowledge that you are going to sleep and not wake up… as that is what I feel death is, a dreamless permanent sleep, and the fear I have is that you don’t know you’ve slept until you wake up. I don’t like hiding from the truth, or even having the truth hidden from me, so if I die, I think I’d prefer knowing it was coming, rather than it happening and never having the opportunity to acknowledge it.

So last night I’m complaining to my brother about this 3d rendering he has me working on. It requires a lot of source crap (textures, simple models other people have done, and such) from the main computer here at home with the internet connection.. and my computer, which is better to run 3d studio on. I had been using a cd and continually writing stuff on it, but they conk out for whatever reason sometimes and I’m sick of wasting CD’s, so I ask for my brother’s USB keychain, figuring it would be ideal. He doesn’t have it here, but suggests just using a spare router to network the computers, and share the internet.

I was dubious about that plan, since I knew, at least at some point, or in some places, swapping the connection out to a router just didn’t work, MAC address crap and I don’t know enough about routers or the problem to fix it. Well, we try it out, and I do manage to get internet on my computer (which is good since I’ve been part of a lan sharing internet before on that computer), but I couldn’t see the home computer, nor could it see me. Odd, but the home computer wasn’t set up for any of this, so it didn’t have a local 192.168.*.* IP, so we try running something called the Network Setup Wizard… and then *it* started… the it’s that seem to always happen when I try to interact with computers in anything but an “in passing” sort of way… as soon as I actually try to do anything, to alter my “computing experience”, it explodes, from new software, to hardware upgrades, to the simple task of making this damn P3 with XP understand it was now part of a lan.

The first thing that happened, is that we lost all cable…. internet, tv, the lot… and it happened almost as a response to our playing about. I knew that it was impossible, or at least incredibly unlikely, but still, the coincidence was annoying. Further, the home computer, the P3, just didn’t work right at all. When it started up, programs wouldn’t work properly, like, say, the XP image and fax viewer, where it would say it was loading a picture, but would just sit there. And Norton Antivirus was mysteriously disabled, and wouldn’t load it’s main program… almost nothing would, you would run something, and it would pretend to run for a second with the hourglass… and nothing. The task-manager showed it was in there, but using no CPU time… and strangely enough, none of the processes were owned by any user, either the admin account we were under, or the system. And when trying to log into simple accounts set up for our parents usage, it would load them for half a tick, then drop back out to the login screen without any indication of why the fuck it wasn’t logged into the account we wanted.

It all smelled like some sort of virus to me, but why then? Anyway, after some trying, we managed to do a system restore to the point automatically created a day earlier, which was nice, I didn’t know about any of that. And everything seemed to work again… so for some reason, we tried the network wizard again, and again, boom, same symptoms, except this time, the system restore program wouldn’t load like it did last time. We tried lots of things to get the system to let us run it… we tried using msconfig to change the services, disabled norton thinking it was hanging things up, of course, the computer wouldn’t restard gracefully any more. When it said it was saving our settings on logging out for a restart, that was just a fancy way of saying that the computer was just going to hang and that after a few minutes it might be a good idea to hit the reset button. In any case, we managed to boot into a fully fledged and self-marking safe-mode, which did let us, thankfully, run system restore (we wanted to from the CD, but the only thing that offered was the recovery console, something I have had many useful experiences with in the past in the days XP was installed on my P2 and I had to reformat and reinstall everything everytime I booted up the computer)… so now we are back to square one, and I don’t think we want to move further afield than that.

After the computer was thankfully restored back again, I ran the now-working norton and scanned the XP drive, and it got nothing… what the hell, at least a virus would have made sense.

As for Rogers, I don’t like them either, as the TV and the internet stayed down from roughly midnight or so I think, to sometime after 6 am this morning, for apparently no other reason than to do so.

So I’m done school, and got all the results of my courses, did fairly well I guess, wish I had done better in graphics though, given the near-exclusive devotion I had for it. Alas,

Now I’m at home, awaiting both convocation, and a job… well, haven’t really been searching for a job yet, I dread that portion of life. But hopefully I’ll find one, somewhere.. doesn’t really matter where as I have no lines to hold me to any particular place… one of the useful things then I guess, of not having anyone, place or thing that matters so much that I would need to be in some proximity.

So now I am indeed in aimlessness mode… need a job. Unfortunately, I realize that everything I’ve done has been to get a decent job, so I’d better hold out for at least a decent one… but then what? The last 20 odd years in schooling has been just to get this job, so that I can have money for a comfortable means in which to live my life. Except I don’t have a life, so I’ll merely live in comfortable continuence. Perhaps that will be enough.