James Chamberlin

Every now and again I fall off the wagon, so to speak. I’m not as regular with my exercising as I once was and when I do exercise, I almost end up regretting it from the pain instilled in my body afterwards.

Case in point… my feet. They’re aching tonight after a four-mile trek on an elliptical machine this morning. I also did a little weight lifting, but that won’t hurt until tomorrow morning. In the meantime, I’ll be putting my feet up if possible tonight.

I’m not a comic book reader… never really have been. I’ve only owned two comics in my life and that was when I was about seven years old. However, it’s hard for me not to notice the popularity of Comic-Con thanks to Twitter, just to start.

A web without Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace doesn’t seem like all that long ago. My, how the web has changed since I really got into it in 1998-99.

Some of the best shows on television are at Comic-Con this year and some of them are my favorites. PSYCH (USA Network) happens to be one of them and they’re giving out exclusive PSYCH comic books to a couple of lucky fans at Comic-Con.

It makes me envious. 🙂

I don’t track WordPress development very closely, but it’s annoying to have installations out of date. WordPress puts an annoying banner at the top of the Dashboard which alerts you of this fact. I find most of my installations are now three or four versions out of date thanks to the small fixes released in the last few weeks. I updated one of my blogs, but it’s something I don’t enjoy doing because I have to back up everything. Oh, how I hate backing up data. What a pain in the ass.

I don’t have any pics ready just quite yet, but the garden is doing well this year. Everything is growing well with the exception of the broccoli, which I neglected to protect early on. The birds got to it before I could cover it with netting. They won’t have such luck next year. I’ll take special note of that. They decimated my little broccoli planets. Out of the twenty plants, only one or two were left untouched. Bastards.

Everything else is doing well. The tomatoes are looking nice. The fruits (tomatoes) are small still, but the plants themselves are all nice and healthy. They’re growing bushy and tall (4 feet or better).

The peppers are also looking nice. Instead of only planting green bell peppers, I put in some banana peppers and even three jalapeno pepper plants. That should be an interesting experiment. 🙂

It’s hard to imagine that weather I would expect in the middle of summer has already arrived. 90 degree temperatures with 80+% humidity is something I’d expect to only read about in the south right about now. This is just terrible to live in. You southerners can take back your weather whenever you like. I can deal without it. 😛

I don’t follow the news quite as closely I did before 9/11, but I do read the news every day and this Iranian election mess has gone on much longer than I expected it would.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has done a decent job of suppressing the media, but hasn’t been able to quiet everyone. There is still Internet access there and people are still able to get images and video out of the country.

While I consider myself an optimist, I am not very optimistic about the situation in Iran. I don’t see a new election in the future. I see Mahmoud Ahmadinejad snuffing out all those who stand in his way. The bloodshed is only going to get worse in the upcoming days. This isn’t going to end well.

The big family garden has been in for a few weeks now and the weeds have overtaken just about everything. That was until this morning when they were all dispatched thanks to a heavy duty steel rake that I like to use. The weeds don’t stand a chance against that beast of a rake.

It’s still too early to harvest much of anything. The only thing picked is strawberries. They’re coming off the vine quite well this year. We’ve received a great deal of rain this spring and the plants are looking very healthy. From the last two pickings (today and about four or five days ago), four gallons of strawberries have been harvested! And just like virtually anything picked from a garden (as opposed to the garbage sold in the grocery stores), they look and taste just like they should. I hate buying produce (namely strawberries and tomatoes) in the grocery store because they’re always shipped in from California or Florida and are often picked too early and they haven’t ripened properly, leaving them nearly tasteless.

In other news, I’ve applied for a new job. I’m trying to get out of my writing job and into something I could see myself doing for twenty or thirty years. One of the local TV stations recently posted a job ad for an opening they had in the control room.

I didn’t dismiss the ad like I would have ordinarily because the ad mentioned it was entry level, all training provided. Since I’ve never worked in the control room, I’ll need the training. Most of these sorts of jobs demand years of experience, but it looks like the local station is trying to find someone young and have them be there for a while and I’d like that someone to be me. Writing has been great for me, but as I get closer to turning thirty, I think more and more about finding a career and being able to settle down. I don’t feel I can do that with my writing job. I haven’t heard back from the station engineer, but I’m hopeful.

I haven’t mentioned by chiropractor visits in quite some time because there isn’t a whole lot to say. I’ve been entirely pain free for weeks now! I am going in once every three to four weeks, so I’m doing pretty well these days.

It’s nice to be able to move around or just sit and not worry about my back giving me fits.

I’m not sure if I’m the only one, but I have found myself on Twitter much more than I expected to be over the last few months. I haven’t abandoned my blog, but it does feel like something I could do without.

The biggest issue with Twitter is that you’re limited to under 200 characters. Twitter won’t kill blogging because of that reason alone, never mind any others.

I have found Twitter to be a handy website to be a part of. It has helped a few times with my job with IGN. I don’t post very often, but when the mood strikes me, I’ll type up something, or just retweet something I liked.

As a huge fan of USA Network for years, I always enjoy their promos and they have some great ones this year again.