Current NaNoWriMo Word Count: 33,328 words. I've made some fairly tremendous progress in the course of the night (despite my lack of sleep) and perhaps more largely because of my sheer stubbornness and determination to get more done. I'm on the fifth "chapter" of the book and I need to start thinking about wrapping up the whole thing soon enough.

So yes, my hectic, tiring, stressful Saturday ended with a night of writing. Well that and cooking a nice big pot of Mexican Relish to make me feel better and to help me re-energize. Archer was amazingly supportive and he massaged my aching legs and feet (multiple times, I must guiltily admit) in order to help work out all the kinks I developed in my multiple train rides. But despite all the commuting, a little rain and an emotionally heavy day, I think things worked out well enough...for now. I think I mentioned this in yesterday's entry that it will still need a lot of work (albeit, in a highly cryptic manner) and I'm sticking by that assessment. I say this with no sense of regret or anything of that nature - just acknowledging what will be needed in the times to come.

So yes, a night of writing and Archer massages really helped me along and made me feel better and eventually more recharged. Eventually my body wasn't willing to work with me anymore given more than 28 hours of being awake and so I relented in slept.

I got up this morning to write some more and eventually Tobie and I had a fun leftovers lunch instead of cooking anything new. We got around to finally watching Doctor Who: Waters of Mars and it was quite the heavy piece. I was surprised at what direction they seemed to be taking for the Doctor, but then again things resolved themselves well enough in the end. Thus there remains the matter of his eventual death, which had been decided on ages ago and how the fans will ultimately react to the new Doctor just around the corner.

Today is gaming day - perhaps the final thing that I need to fully get out of the heaviness of yesterday. As always, the gaming group is gathered and we've just gorged ourselves on pizza, fortune cookies and buko pie. Ah yes, the night is young and I still have A jabberwocky to kill - or five. Argh.

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A little something for all my diabetic friends, hehe.

Current NaNoWriMo Word Count: 14,001 words exactly! I'm still about 2,600 words short of my daily target, but I'm still overwhelmed with how much I've accomplished thus far. I just need to tie up this chapter so I can move on to the next story segment. As always, the morbidly curious can check out my work-in-progress at The Gossamer Tower.

It's fun when work throws an interesting problem your way - the kind that really makes you think about how to solve it for practically the rest of your work shift. Last night was one of those days and I still find myself thinking about it. Call centers and other BPO companies are all about mass production - we aim to train agents to do the same job with relatively the same level of skill. If they fail to attain this, we try to coach and train them some more until there's no chances for improvement left. Then we let them go and hope they find a job that better suits their abilities. This particular challenge requires me to figure out a way to totally upgrade a particular group of agents to be totally different than how they started in terms of a job redefinition that we still need to come up with. When you decide to raise the bar, the trick is trying to define just what constitutes that higher level and what are the behaviors that will act as indicators that the desired change has happened. All that while still remaining profitable and working within what limited guidelines the client has provided.

Gods, I love working with really, really intelligent people. Even when they don't quite know how to express what they want.

Anyway, the training professional in me is joining forces with my tinker side and my problem solving side and my trying-to-think-outside-the-box-without-really-leaving-it side. The result is a LOT of interesting ideas and potential paths to take and I'll just have to figure out what to do in time.

Tobie and I did our weekly grocery run today and were shocked at how expensive shrimp is. I guess that just really goes to show what makes it such a special treat. We wanted to try something different this week and the dish that we have in mind is chop suey, or some other variation of stir fried vegetables. We bought a bunch of ingredients for it (thank you 10% off fresh produce Tuesdays!) and hopefully we'll get to run the experiment tonight or some other day this week. I also made sure to have ingredients of sinigang na bangus and of course the pork chops that have become our stable back-up food. Yay for food!

I've kinda forced Tobie to go through the Community episodes rather quickly. I say forced not because he doesn't like the show or anything, but more because he's still a bit shocked at the rate we're watching them. I tend to like finishing things in one go, especially when they come in 22 minute bite-sized chunks whereas he likes to take things a bit slower, giving time to savor whatever it is we're enjoying. Well, almost everything - ice cream melts and floats tend to bubble over, after all. We only started watching the show last Sunday and despite rationing, we're already finished with the 5th episode. Whee! Joel McHale is fun!

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Don't underestimate cows!

Current NaNoWriMo word count is 8,152 words! While I'm still behind on my target daily word count thus far, I'm happy with the progress of my story, The Interrogation and finally got to finished the first chapter. I expect future chapters will remain similarly long since they're meant to act as semi-autonomous stories that will only start to really connect to one another towards the end. At least that's the plan that I'm keeping in mind as I write all this - good luck to me if it actually pans out.

Work was worky and tiring in a workish way and that's all I'll say about the matter for now.

It's fun to cook after you've restocked on supplies through a grocery run. Last night I made sinigang na baboy again after a long time without and that turned out fairly well, I'd like to think. This morning was a lazier brunch consisting of some ready-to-eat pesto we bought at the supermarket eaten together with spaghetti noodles and fried sardines. The mix of flavors worked out well enough in the end but I'll continue to look for more precise pairings. Naturally Tobie topped this all off with a killer bowl of Magnolia vanilla ice cream topped with Malteasers, Wiggles, cashews and Hershey's chocolate syrup. I swear, the darn thing was huge and seemed almost menacing, but we managed to defeat it together, hehe.

Over breakfast we watched the 2009 remake of V, and based on the pilot it certainly seems promising. It also seems somewhat Firefly-ish, but I guess that sense of nostalgia is only going to last for the duration of this episode. Or will it? Anyway, it's clear that they're trying to turn this series into the next Battlestar Galactica given the strong play on the notion of the "enemy" hidden among us in human form and the increasing presence of drums in the supporting musical scoring. BSG totally mastered the use of drums to build tension and push emotional responses to action sequences. I guess it's only logical for other shows to try and learn from BSG somehow. Tobie keeps waiting for one of the Visitors to eat a mouse or something, but so far it hasn't happened, hehe.

NaNoWriMo is taking up more and more of my time and it's small wonder that I still manage to post updates for the Geeky Guide despite the shift in writing focus. I have found myself watching less TV shows or reading as much, but that's an understandable sacrifice. Heck, I'm left World of Goo behind for now given I'm stuck in that damn stage with the yellow spiked goo and it's driving me nuts. Better to focus my efforts into my novel and hope I manage to catch up with my writing over the weekend. Hopefully. **crosses fingers**

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Oh yes, everyone needs a dog to not only carry your stuff, but sell it for profit as well!

Happy Birthday greetings go out to my "LA friend" and co-worker, Cathy! Happy, Happy Birthday! I bet you got even better birthday greetings from LA, har har!

Work last night didn't involve a trip to QC, and yet I ended up feeling even more tired. I guess there was just so much going on, it was quite a pain. Agents that needed to be interviewed because they were being transferred to meet headcount requirements one way or another, items to transition, inherited follow-ups several months overdue and meetings up meetings (canceled and otherwise!) - ARGH!!! You can tell how busy / stressed I am at work based on the number of updates I manage to post via Ping.fm to Twitter, Plurk and Facebook. I think today I pretty much had one late update after my first few meetings and a few more towards the end of the day when I finally got to catch my breath. Seriously, my life has gotten a lot busier ever since I started my transition over to the Audit & Compliance Team. I'm not complaining (yet), just making an observation here.

So I got home with what I call MRT legs, which essentially describes the feelings of soreness I get in my feet and lower legs because of the effort of jockeying for a relatively comfortable position in the train along with just remaining upright despite the erratic movements of the MRT and the sheer volume of people crammed in with you that general tidal wave patterns of their own. Despite the feelings of fatigue (both mental and physical), I was determined to cook something nice for breakfast / dinner with Tobie. Plus I needed the cooking to de-stress somehow, beyond the normal de-stressing I manage when I compose these LJ entries.

During my most stressful days, things somehow align such that it coincides when I decide to cook munggo or happen to have the ingredients for it. I know, I know, I seem to be cooking a lot lately, but it's such nice yummy comfort food and not as difficult to make as I thought it would be. Sure, a lot of time is involved in terms of pre-soaking the beans and later on boiling them, but in terms of actual procedural steps, it's not that bad. It's a given that I'm probably not doing it as perfectly as other amazing cooks would, but I manage decently enough and seem to more or less get the taste I want. I just need to make sure I consistently get the right balance of ingredients whenever I do this - I ever have a little too much or a wee too little water. Ah, the wonderful imprecision of the cooking process, nyahaha!

For today's viewing session over breakfast, I loaded one of my favorite Doctor Who episodes, The Girl in the Fireplace, which was actually nominated for a Nebula Award and it won a Hugo Award. Ah yes, definitely science fiction at its best. The story is deceptively simple enough but then the twists and turns reveal hidden complexities on so many levels. It's not necessarily an episode with a happy ending and it certainly carries with it a rather somber tone to things, but overall it was just a very good story told quite well. Episodes like this are the main reason I fell in love with the new Doctor Who series and it was nice to be able to share this side of geekery with Tobie.

Now I need to find time to write another Geeky Guide review, read the new Blackest Lantern comics that I've just downloaded and maybe squeeze in a little World of Goo time before bed. Pressure much? LOL

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Sorry, but context is for the weak. I just thought this whole sequence rocked. And made Mike hotter. LOL

First off, Happy Birthday to a longtime family friend and now fellow blogger, Ina |inabear|! Have a great weekend with all your kiddies! =D

I survived going to work last night despite the weird lingering cough. I still didn't feel quite 100%, but it was still better than nothing. I had some important one-on-one sessions I wanted to make sure got addressed along with a key weekly meeting, so skipping work this time around really wasn't a feasible option. As a consolation, however, I did end up going home a little earlier than usual since I felt I was at my limit.

I made sure to pass by the company clinic before going home and was able to catch the doctor this time around. She didn't hear anything significantly wrong in terms of my lungs, which was a good thing, so she ended up prescribing some antibiotics instead given I've had this cough for like a month now. I'll still use Ventolin Expectorant to help address the cough too, although I somewhat dread the increased levels of Salbutamol that I'm adding to my system. Why can't there be more affordable, non-steroidal anti-asthma medicine? =P

I slept through the morning after finally watching this week's episode of Glee, which was quite a treat. It seems that the producers were determined to have this episode act as the strong reminder to everyone that Morrison can actually dance, including actually being able to break-dance. What do you expect? The man's a theater professional. Singing and dancing is all part of the routine, and it definitely adds more to his charm.

A lot of TV shows are entering their mid-season breaks in time for the coming Thanksgiving holidays and so I Tobie and I actually have a chance to get fully caught up on some of the shows that we've been downloading. We tend to watch episodes no later than the most current one for most shows like Fringe in order to keep a back-up episode in reserve in case things get a little weird and we end up DYING to watch another episode. Beyond that, there are a number of other shows that we haven't had the time to resume like the second season of Dollhouse or getting Tobie fully up to speed on Doctor Who. So many shows!

I've been putting a little more work on migrating stuff over to my two new Google Sites: Sietch Creare for my recipes and other domestic tips and the Gossamer Tower for all my writing and collected stories, poems and geeky fun stuff from around the web. More of my recent focus has been on the Gossamer Tower and how I pretty much see this as becoming a living, breathing document and venue to share my creative output more. I've managed to link many of the pages to the live Google Documents that host the actual stories so as I update them in Google Docs, the changes become immediately visible in the Gossamer Tower, where people can leave comments but not necessarily edit the original work.

The main purpose of this goes beyond just sharing my work and soliciting feedback. As I've mentioned before, I'm seriously considering attempting NaNoWriMo this November and I figure the Gossamer Tower would be a great place to document my on-going efforts and sort of keep things transparent for everyone interested to see. With just over a week to go before November actually starts, I want to make sure I get the Gossamer Tower full set up so it just goes on easily enough come November. I seriously doubt that I'll find enough time to finish a novel AND continue the number of updates that I do for both this LJ and the Geeky Guide, but it's definitely worth a shot. Even if I fail the November deadline, I'm definitely going to try to finish the novel before the year ends. I already have a tentative concept in mind and hopefully I'll have a more concrete plan in time for NaNoWriMo kick off next week.

I'm so excited!

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Sadly, this makes more sense that you may initially think. =P

I've been coughing on and off for the past few weeks, which is definitely getting beyond annoying and more along the lines of being something to be concerned about. I know, I know, I really should have consulted a doctor by now and I'll definitely get around to it within this week. The straw that broke the camel's back, as it were, was how I felt last night before work. I wasn't running a fever but I was definitely feeling under the weather and my throat felt pretty bad - all gummy and stuff. My cough has definitely become productive and beyond the actual coughing, I'm desperately trying to cough out the phlegm that has built up.

So yeah, it was one of the rare occasions that I called in sick for work and opted to essentially work from home as needed. I always feel guilty about missing work, but the warning signs were definitely too strong to ignore this time around. I ended up staying home for the night and Tobie was nice enough to try and make me feel better. He rubbed Efficascent Oil on my chest and back like a parent would rub Vicks Vaporub and it generated a LOT of heat, which ultimately felt really good. It helped bring the coughing down, surprisingly enough, and so the rest of the night wasn't as bad despite the fact that I kind of smelled like an old person, haha!

I spent the rest of the night checking work email remotely, coughing, and eventually getting around to watching our copy of Battlestar Galactica: The Plan. Despite all the buzz, I was actually pretty disappointed with the direct-to-DVD movie. It ultimately felt like around 2 hours worth of scenes and sequences that could have just been repackaged as DVD extras instead of a standalone film product. I guess the having Olmos as director may not have been the most amazing way to handle this project. His vision of the BSG universe seems darker, cornily animated from a CGI perspective and with very different camera angles. It just wasn't the same experience.

My only other major highlight of my sick day other than sleeping was the fact that I got to unclog our kitchen drain using nothing more than baking soda, salt and boiling water. I was following the tips in my copy of Reader's Digest's Extraordinary Uses for Baking Soda and was a tad skeptical about their approach to clearing grease-clogged drains, but after I let the chemical concoction do its work, the drain was better than when we first moved in! Hurrah for the never ending wonder of baking soda solutions in the home!

Woke up before noon today and stepped out for errands with Tobie. I will have to try and nap again before going to work tonight. Yes, I am still going to work. I can't afford more than a day away.

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Thou shall not question the power of Google! ROFL

First, Happy Birthday greetings to a high school classmate, Migs, and to a fellow geek, Ron! Happy Birthday to both of you...and good hunting! LOL

Things are definitely picking up at the office. The addition of my new role on top of my Training duties is certainly keeping me busy and I'm finding myself going home a tad later than normal these days. At least I don't feel overly tired because of all this. There's still that degree of fatigue, but it's the nice tired feeling you get when you really like what you're doing or when you really feel like you've accomplished meaningful things. The work is barely beginning and I know that things are going to get "worse" in a manner of speaking before they get really better. Here's to stressful, busy weeks ahead!

Random Bit #1 - I love the Integrated Gmail Firefox extension! It's the prefect add-on for the heavy Google user!

As I compose this entry, I'm waiting for this week's Glee to download so I can watch it later with Tobie before work. My downloading has gotten pretty organized in recent months, perhaps almost obsessively so, but it makes me a happy camper. After a year of owning a Terabyte drive, I'm down to about 130GB left and so this means that I need to either (1) delete unneeded files, (2) back-up less utilized files to DVDs or (3) buy another drive. I'm kinda torn about all this and I know that I also want to get around to buying a new camera this year. You know what that means - new digital megazoom camera = more photos = more storage needed. Whee! The data conundrum never ends!

And what's occupying the drive anyway? There's a decent amount of comic book scans around there for one, and then there's loads and loads of cartoons. There's my pre-existing library of photos taken with the past 3 digital cameras I shared with Brian before and there's a ridiculous amount of TV shows there too. Oh, and don't forget the movies, the specifically LGBT movies, the musicals and the ridiculous amount of porn. I know, I know, I should probably delete the not-so-fun porn to free up space. That would make the most sense - I'm just not quite ready to dedicate a day to checking on all those videos to judge if they're worth keeping or not. LOL

Ah, the things I end up talking about on this blog. The laughs never end, eh?

The weekend is just around the corner. Again. And I don't know what I want to do. Tobie and I were talking about prospective weekend plans and at the very least I think we'll step out to watch Julie & Julia, since apparently it's already out even though I was sort of expecting it to come out next week for some reason. Maybe we'll go hunting for shelves again but it's a major pay day weekend and I know a lot of malls are running 3-day sales. That's both a good an a bad thing since of course good deals are always useful in these tight economic times but I'm rarely if not never in the mood to wade through the masses of people who come out and occupy every possible space in malls across the metro. Yes, that's definitely not something I'd like forward to under any circumstance.

Even the weekly Sunday game is a tad affected by on-going events and this leaves us with time to possibly go out before the session. Maybe we'll visit Komik Kon on Sunday, but since it's at Megamall it might pay off to visit their branch of ACE Hardware to check for the shelves...gah, too many options!

Or we could just stay home again and watch more DVDs, clean up the Sietch more and perhaps get through the second season of Lost, which is my current retro TV project. The geekiness never stops - just like the aforementioned laughs! Har, har, snicker! =P

Random Bit #3 - There's going to be a Mythbusters episode all about Duct Tape! Coolness!

Okay, enough of this.

Until tomorrow.

Or later....

Random Bit #4 - I don't know where Random Bit #2 went. ROFL

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Rat may be a bastard, but he's a smart bastard!

Today's the birthday of everyone's Precious geeky, Gleeky Avengers-loving friend, NEEK! Happy Birthday, Niki! Keep on being the precious little you that only you can be because you're you!

I don't think I have officially noted in this blog that this week marks the beginning of an additional role for me at the office. No, it's not just a new role since it doesn't replace my old duties, but it's definitely something added to my plate. It's not a bad thing, really, at least in this case. You see, my director and I had been discussing this possibility for some time now and this week just marks the official beginning of me exploring the wonderful world of auditing and process compliance and improvement. The "and's" make sense if you say that last sentence with the right pausing.

This also means I now have three new direct reports, who are ironically former colleagues when I was still a member of the QA Department back in 2004. We have been working together on and off through the years but this marks the very first time that I'll actually be managing them, which is both interesting while somewhat daunting at the same time. I guess I just want to make sure I do things right and not make things become weird or something, certainly a common situation to consider when your former peers have become your subordinates, if only in terms of organizational structure. Of course I'm up to the challenge, along with all the other responsibilities that comes with the job.

Of course that still means I have all the fun Training stuff to worry about, and you know that's the fun that just never stops! Huzzah!

On my way home today I swung by Farmer's Market to hunt down some potatoes and carrots. Given that Shopwise didn't have them in stock yesterday and I really wanted to cook up some meals that required at least a potato or two, I ventured into the deep and managed to find vendors with the tubers in question. I'm pretty sure they probably charged the maximum amount possible, but that's capitalism for you. Supply and demand can be quite the pain in the nether regions.

I've now started to download all the episodes of Batman: The Brave and the Bold along with the entire run of Justice League / Unlimited. I can't quite explain it, but I'm in the mood for some animated superhero fun. Moreover, I'm really looking to see the animated depictions of the various supporting DC characters as opposed to the "big guns" so to speak. I think we've all had a more than healthy amount of the Trinity that is Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman and it's time for the likes of Black Canary and Green Arrow!

Oh, and like other musically inclined geeks, I'm just really looking forward to the Music Meister episode. Mwahahaha!

Tobie just left for work. The laundry has already been picked up. I just need to wash some of the dishes or something. The Sietch is all quiet now.

Well, at least until he gets back. =D

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As if Duck wasn't cool enough...LOL