Merry Christmas!

Guy made a really cool “comic” for today (I’m the one with the laptop in hand lol) just to say Happy Holidays!

Hope everyone had / has a good Christmas and New Years

-Josh

Free TV = Woot

I don’t get a lot of time to watch TV (with studying and all ) but when I do, I really hate watching commercials and it seems that the only thing on is Law and Order (and on about 4 different channels at once). Enter Joost! It used to be an application (on any major platform for that matter) but now they’ve moved to online (web) only I suppose to help combat the other major players out now (Hulu, Youtube, and a few other major players). For some reason I prefer Joost, probably because the ads are small and infrequent (unlike Hulu) and I’m finding a lot of cool shows that make me reminisce a little (Ren and Stimpy lol).

If that doesn’t work, there’s always torrents. ted would be my application of choice for that. It works with Windows, Mac, and Linux (pretty much anything with the Java Runtime Environment) and is getting better and better as time goes on.

After this month is over, I’ll probably end up canceling my cable TV service entirely (at that rate, maybe even my internet too, because I have a few neighbors nice enough to share ) which would save ~$100 per month

Back From Cali

And it was grrrrreaaat!
I have so say, I will definitely miss the California climate. It only got up to about 80 degrees the whole time we were there and stayed closer to 75 with a nice cool breeze and next to no humidity at all – perfection.

What few pictures I took (compared to Guy at least) I’ve tossed up here: http://josh.thespiffylife.com/pics/california/ and maybe FaceBook later on, although I could care less about Sir FaceBook

We went to like four different beaches while we were there and what’s funny is that the “more well known” ones were actually the crappiest of them all. The first one we went to was just a regular public beach, closest to Bob’s apartment … and it was all of our favorites. Laguna Beach was just in a slightly ritzy neighborhood which made it “popular” I suppose, but it had tons of seaweed all over the tiny beach and rocks everywhere; not a lot of fun really. We also went to a state park beach that had a $10 fee just to get in (and the only reason we went was because of the fire pits) and was probably the dirtiest, most littered beach I’ve ever seen. But we had a nice little bond fire that night and grilled some bananas (lol) and our toes.

Guy and I walked around the shops at Laguna Beach and found a really cool candy store that nearly killed us with temptation …

We really wanted to get a few handfuls of candy but got a little scared about prices because they neglected to list any (which is rarely a good sign). I got a little kick out of this street sign we saw while walking too:

I (surprisingly) didn’t get overly sunburned while at the beaches. I intentionally left my shirt on most of the time so my poor pale skin didn’t get roasted and bright pink. Although with all the walking around we did (at least a few miles a day I would say) I definitely have a nice little farmers tan once again (yay? … no, not yay). I’m really, really pale compared to the others and skinny too lol.

Guy really enjoyed trying to show off by doing an infinite number of handstands everywhere we were the entire week. It was kind of funny because one night we were there playing basketball and he hurt is hand and complained about how it wouldn’t heal, then he would do handstands for 10 minutes … and repeat. Here’s an epic shot of one I got on the beach the last day:

He also did about a billion of these “kip-up” things too.

We also learned that Life (the game, but probably real life too) is a major pain … even though I won two out of three times. OH and never let someone get both Boardwalk and Parkplace while playing Monopoly … mahaha.

Probably more to come later,
-josh

Breathing

Song of the day is “Work” by Jars of Clay (surprise surprise!)

yes, i realize he resembles Snape in this video, it is a bit odd

I have no fear of drowning
It’s the breathing that’s taking all this work.

Sometimes life really does feel that way (for me at least). There have been times when it seems like it’s harder to get out of bed and live the day than it would to …. well, the best way to phrase this is … not. I admit, I was a huge rut there for the longest time. There are moments (no longer days) where I feel that way. It of course, goes further than just getting out of bed, but that’s the least revealing metaphor I can come up with right now.

Do you know what I mean when I say, “I don’t want to be alone”?

There are many different ways a person can “feel alone.” Being alone spiritually, not being around your friends as much, being really distant with (nearly all) of your family, and not having that special person around to make you feel so very good inside. In some form, I’ve gone through (or still am) all of those to some degree. Lately it seems things are getting better for various reasons. Or maybe my outlook has just changed a little. For some reason the 1 year “anniversary” of my mom passing didn’t really hit me as hard as I had expected, but in some ways it seems like either she, God, or just myself in some way or another lifted a weight of my shoulders and allowed me to “move on” more so than I’d ever been able to for that entire year. It’s been nearly a month since that day, but looking back I can tell. She still comes into my mind at least every day, which is (really) good to me. But I’m no longer dwelling on it as much as I used to, at least in a bad way. Other people have come (or reappeared) into my life, helping me find happiness and bliss once again. In many ways I have to see all of this happening as a (really delayed…) answer to countless prayers. A lot of things, feelings, events, etc that have happened in the past month couldn’t have been put together by shear chance or circumstance. At least I sincerely doubt it could. Either way doesn’t change the present from being what it is; grand.