Alucolor & Roksys: We Don't Know What We Are Doing

It's been a weird week. Alu has been out of the house, so I've spent a good amount of time alone, which was pretty normal a few years ago, but unprecedented since I moved in with Alu and reverting was more difficult than I thought it would be. That said, I think it was good to remind ourselves who we are out side of each other and maybe we should do things like this more often. As much as I'd rather not have to be alone, I do think it's important to be alone sometimes, so you know how to handle it, emotionally or otherwise. I also think it's better to be alone in general, and learn to be okay and happy on your own than to be with someone who isn't good for you just for the sake of being with someone. I wonder just how important it is to be happy on one's own before entering a relationship. Is everyone capable of being happy on their own? Will Smith tweeted recently something to the effect of "My wife and I don't make each other happy, we're each...

Rok and I have been under a lot of stress recently, partially just as a result of being alive. We love our new apartment and are so glad to finally be alone, but our rent is now higher. Which we are hoping becomes less of a problem with getting a new job, ideally we wanted to get the new apartment around the same time as a new job, but most things don't work out ideally. But for right now we are a little strapped for cash and are trying to cut back as much as we think we can get away with. Which leads into the next reason we are stressed, our cat Monty. The little monster is so good, and we love him dearly, but he is very costly. We recently get a dental estimate of about $600-$900 for the various teeth things needing to be done. And of course we want him to live a healthy pain free life, so we are getting a loan from a pet service. And while that is going to be better than paying it all upfront, we are going to have to pay monthly payments that we can only barely afford while st...

We're still pushing boxes around, but the worst is over, so we can get back to blogging irregularly and streaming sometimes! Although we are also planning on changing jobs soon, so maybe it's not over after all! We've officially submitted our final assignments for our machining course, so once they get graded, we should have our certifications and our instructor was helping us look for jobs to apply for and put in a good word for us with a place where he's sent students in the past with good results. So come July, we might be making parts for spinal implants, which sounds pretty rad. Much better than listening to people's phone calls all day. And we'd get a swing shift with four 10 hour days, which I think sounds ideal, so we get to sleep until we wake up and then get a weekend and then some! I'm trying not to get my hopes up too high, since we don't actually have the job yet. Especially because we won't actually get to start until July after a pla...

So we haven't gone over goals in a while, even while we were still kind of blogging, so I will try to be honest about these goals. But just like with this blog we haven't been keeping up on anything else unfortunately. | Fitness Goals| Bench 100 lbs| We haven't been going to the gym :T Lift Three Times per week| See above Do Cardio Four Times per Week| We have sometimes done 1 active cardio a week, we have been moving stuff all around our house so i am going to count that at least some Tuesday Night Yoga| We have kinda been doing this, we have at least been going to my aunt's house to attempt yoga but that doesn't mean we succeed Morning Yoga| Absolutely have not be doing Reach Weight Goal 180| I'm embarrassed to say but I am back at 200 again, we dropped off our diet and thought we would start again from phase 1, but that has lead to us eating bad this week because we are dieting next week. |Lifestyle Based| Meal prep| Honestly thi...

Geez, I feel like there is a huge weight on my chest. This past week we have continued to move and put our place back together, or at least trying to. We are closer than we were last time I blogged but I would give it another while before we have everything really good. But we have got our office/game room more put together and there is even a path to our guinea pig cage now. We have also been working on finishing up the last part of our machining class. Job seeking skills. Which is harder then I had hoped it would be. We have found some good job leads in the process and have our instructor who is willing to vouch for us, but it is still a daunting task to find job in a trade I didn't know existed a year ago. I am having trouble writing a cover letter, partially because I don't know how necessary it is for our particular field. But I am hoping I can still write a relatively good cover letter despite having little experience in the field and not that many qualifications behin...

Hello, and we’re finally back from our month and a half long hiatus. I wish there was a better reason why we haven’t been blogging but honestly it is just because we forgot, or had nothing interesting to say. So we are going to try blogging on Mondays and Fridays, and have our goal reflection day still be Sunday. So I know we aren’t very interesting most of the time, hopefully blogging two of the seven days we result in more interesting blogs, we shall see. Not a super lot has happened in the last month and a half. There has been one huge thing though, we finally moved! We moved in to our new apartment last Sunday and it has been a wild week trying to balance work, moving and motivation. But we are liking our new place a lot, it is finally just the two of us plus our pets. We still don’t have everything together but we at least got our living room and dinning room ready so we could have our moms over for mother’s day. We have spent a lot of money and bought a lot of furniture but we ...

I've posted a few times before about short-lived, ADD-induced bouts of creative energy. This has led to a lot of concepualization, but very rarely to any real fabrication. This week, that's taken the form of a board game I had an idea for a few years ago which I won't detail here for paranoia reasons. But I'm hoping to at least get it a bit closer to finished than a lot of other things I try. I'm looking into making it into a mobile game, since it's a simple concept that Alu and I can hopefully figure out on our own, and releasing it digitally shouldn't be as costly as a physical product. I think the main problem that arises is our lack of coding knowledge, but a few widely available game engines either come with or can be outfitted with methods of getting around that, and I've read that Unity and Unreal can be used for free until your game makes a certain amount of money, which would be great for a start. Of course, all of this rests on the rather fl...

So Alu and I are signing a lease on a new apartment. We'll be totally by ourselves, which should be a nice change. Of course that also means we've been exceptionally busy, which is part of why I haven't been posting. That and I keep forgetting, but here's hoping I can pick back up. Though we're moving in May, so we may neglect it for a bit around then as well. We've also started learning the manual mill in our machining course, which is supposedly significantly easier and shorter than the lathe. So we're coming up on the end of the course, I guess. I've been fantasizing a bit about getting a job at Boeing or somewhere so I could tell people I make airplane parts for a living. I actually found an opening around where I live, but it will probably be filled by the time I'm able to reasonably apply. Oh well, I'm sure I'll find something. At this point whatever Alu and I find will probably be better than the job we have now. I'm hoping w...

I can't really think of one thing to blog about today. I could blog about FMA vs FMAB, but I don't think I have enough to say to fill out a blog. I was thinking maybe I could blog about Rok's present again, but I feel I have said a lot on that already. I could blog about Gods again, but I also feel I have said a bit much about that. So I decided I would blog a little bit about several things I am thinking about today. So here goes. I think that FMA the 2003 version has a better start then Brotherhood does. I feel Brotherhood skips over a lot and rushes through to where the stories really depart. And I feel there is some merit to that but I don't feel it was done very well in this case and I didn't appreciate all of the sudo-comedic scenes, they were too cartoony and I think they didn't fit well with what I was expecting from Brotherhood. It also gave me a feeling that the director figured you had already seen the 2003 version so they didn't need to flesh e...

Today is going to be a bit shorter of a blog because since we did nothing Monday we are doing everything today. We are shopping, cooking food, moving stuff, cleaning our house and we have to go to class today as well. Those aren't all of the things but they are the more prominent time consuming ones. While not doing things is nice sometimes, it makes it harder if you ad things you needed to do during that time. So while we are running around all day: Stay cool.

Sunday mark ed Rok 's and I's third anniversary, and to celebrate we got a buncha junk food and played video games the latter half of Sunday and all day yesterday. We didn't do anything and it was great! Well we went to a couple of stores but they were all luxury shops. Really we should have done more, but sometimes we just need a nothing day. And we figured our anniversary is a good enough excuse to do nothing together all day. This sudden outburst of laziness wasn't helped by the fact that we had been taking a lot of overtime last week and didn't have nearly as much time to ourselves as we would have liked, as a result we have remembered the money isn't worth the time. But anyway back to the main point, Rok and I have now been together three years, and I believe we have only grown stronger mentally and physically. I think we have been good for each other in so many ways and I think we can still elevate each other further. It has been a bit journey but it h...

I think a large problem I have is that my interests bounce around so much. It makes it difficult to make headway in any one project when I'm onto something entirely different the next day, but if I try to force myself to keep on one path, I get bored and frustrated and end up actively not wanting to have anything to do with it. But in addition to being so impulsive, it doesn't help that I'm also rather impressionable, much as I don't like to admit it. As a result, my reading and re-reading the Scott Pilgrim books and my dad's old Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes collections have instilled in me an interest in producing comics, at least for the time being. Alu periodically expresses a similar interest, though in her case, I think it's a more permanent one than mine likely is. Who knows though? Maybe if we get a good start on a decent idea, we'll stumble into something worthwhile. About a week ago I had an inkling of an idea for something called "Rick...

I didn't blog two of the four I was supposed to. I think this new setup is both good and bad for that reason. I don't worry so much about blogging so I don't write nothing blogs, but also sometimes I just don't blog. Oh well, there's no use in worrying about things I can't change. Now onto goals: Fitness Based Goals Reach Weight Goal (160 lbs) | I have been fluctuating on this goal for a minute. We went a bit to crazy after phase one was up. But we are coming back down and are getting back into the diet and being more true to phase two. I am over 200 still but only just. I am looking forward to continuing this diet and hoping we can still retain some self control now that are restrictions have loosened. This morning, I weighed: 200.5 lbs. | Lift Three Times per week | We stopped going to the gym while our bodies adjusted to no carbs. But we kept not going u fortunately. But we are planning on going back tomorrow and starting out easier on ourselves. Do ...

The gift I was making for Rok was supposed to be a Christmas gift, then it was supposed to be his birthday gift, then when it wasn’t done by his birthday it was supposed to be done by his birthday party, now it has been several months and I am still working on it. I guess my next goal is just to get it done before his next birthday. Maybe I can finish it before Christmas this year. I have been working on it a lot but I still don't see an end in sight yet, it was a rather ambitious gift to start with (Oh also I am sorry I am not saying specifically what it is, Rok will probably read this. I will probably make a post about it when it is finished and Rok has seen it, or maybe he can make a post about it.) But anyway, back to the point. It was a ambitious gift that I didn't realize would be so much work. But here I am stressing myself out because I haven't met a single deadline so I can give it to Rok. I am going to hopefully work on it all day today and get at least close to...

I don't know if I'm a fan of this diet. I also don't know if I'm a fan of dieting in general. We have indeed been losing weight as advertised, but I keep wondering whether it's worth it. I feel like so much of my mental energy is going toward our food now and I don't know that that's healthy in and of itself. And healthy or not, it's obnoxious. I have other things to think about. Thursday marked the halfway point of the first phase, so we're going to try to finish out that part at least and it's supposed to get easier after that. Although, for something that's supposed to kick your cravings for bread, I think the other day was the first time I actively contemplated stealing a sandwich out of someone's hands in the breakroom at work. I'm becoming increasingly frustrated that things that are healthy and things that are easy or convenient seem diametrically opposed and it's making more and more sense why so many people are overwei...

Alu and I have been watching Fullmetal Alchemist, the 2003 one that isn't Brotherhood. I've never actually finished this one, but I prefer Brotherhood in general and this runthrough doesn't look like it's going to change that. Overall, the storyline, pacing, characters, animation, even the voice acting just doesn't impress me as much, but that's all been covered to death by other people for the last ten years. What I can't find any discussion about is how the two series treat alchemy itself differently, which I think is strange, considering how important the practice is to that world. We're not finished with our run of the show and I might have to correct myself on this later, but I feel like while FMA '03 talks an awful lot about alchemy being a science based on equivalent exchange, it doesn't seem to go much deeper into it than that and its use often even seems to contradict that idea. A lot of the time, it seems as long as a circle is prese...

It's Sunday and we have made it three of the 14 days with no carbs! It has been a long couple of days! Fitness Based Goals Reach Weight Goal (160 lbs) | I have been backpeddeling on this goal for a while, but since we started this new diet I have been starting to lose the weight I had gained, I am still over 200 for now but I am hopeful that this new diet will help Rok and I control ourselves, and not order pizza five times a week.   This morning, I weighed: 205.3 lbs.  Lift Three Times per week | We did start getting back to the gym, but since we have started a new diet that is designed to ween our bodies off of carbs, the main energy source for Rok and I, we have opted out of doing the gym until he stops feeling the no carbs and I stop feeling hungry all the time. Do Cardio Four Times per Week | This is the same as lifting, except we didn't get as back into it as we did lifting. But we are still opting out for now. Do Morning Yoga | Similar to the first two, thi...

Rok and I have burned through all of the Gundam we can currently buy. It's a lot of series and Rok's ability to recall any of it at any given time is impressive to me. But that isn't what I want to blog about today, maybe another day. But since we finished everything we have and can't buy more we have resulted to watching other shows. We have watched the Netflix Series Castlevania. We both thought it was pretty good. A little bit to much animal death for me personally and really, in the first two episodes at least, I little to much blood and gore. Episode three is what I expected form the show, there is some gore but there isn't literal pillars of blood and guts and babies being eaten. But I would watch it again, and I am looking forward to season three. I looked into it and it appears their will be a third season at least, and I want to know what happens to my boy Hector. Since we finished that we have moved on to Fullmetal Alchemist, the first series not the b...

As Rok has said before we are starting the South Beach Diet today, well we are buying and prepping food to start the diet tomorrow. Which we are both pretty psyched about. We have been eating just horribly, because bad/sad things keep happening, life generally sucks sometimes, and the fact that we were going on a diet soon. So I am excited to actually get into healthier eating, something I have tried at before but haven't made permanent life changes about it. Another reason I am excited is that with all of the excess food we have been eating I am not getting as full as I used to when eating the same amount of stuff. I want to have better habits but when both me and Rok have been beaten down with boredom and frustration for 8 hours we break to easily. With a more physical job I am hoping we will be engaged enough that I won't think about pizza during lunch and then spend 4 more hours thinking about pizza. Also with a more physical job eating out every once in a while won'...

For the past couple months I have been working on a gift for Rok that I think he will really like. I can't talk to much about it here since this is a shared blog after all. But this project started as a little thought of something that would be cool but needed far more planning and time commitments than I thought at the time. Now I am 100 hours deep and about halfway through. But I can see the other side and the closer I get to finishing this project the more excited I get for Rok to get to open it and see what I have been working on this whole time. I still have more drawing to do, elements to assemble and time to spend till this project is fully complete but I am getting closer by the day. I wish I could say this was my first time that I got way to into a project to later realize how big of an undertaking it is. Then I have to ask myself, "Do I take the option where I have wasted however many hours of my life on this thing that will never be complete. Or do I spend howeve...

We don't have the best track record with goals, and we're really only adding to that with the last week or so. Most of our goals have exploded in one way or another, so I'm not sure whether I should bother really reflecting on them this week. That said, we're planning to start a push on Wednesday, so I suppose a review wouldn't be the worst idea. So I guess here goes that! 　 Bench 100 lbs. I'm no closer to this than I was last time, but I'm no further either, so I guess it's better than some of the other goals on here. Really this is pretty arbitrary, so I guess it's not that important, it would just be nice to know I'm getting stronger. Tuesday Night Yoga We were doing pretty well on this one until this week when we got distracted and didn't end up doing our yoga. We were just about to get new mats, too. Morning Yoga We've been on and off for quite a while on this, and we've actually been pretty all right o...

Our machining teacher seems confident we'll be able to find work easily enough, but I'm having difficulty finding anything we'd likely be qualified for online. It might be that the type of place we'd be hired by wouldn't post job openings online, but I'm not sure. I guess I'll have to ask further about that. I'll also have to brush up on geometry, because I was getting confused the other day. We were supposed to be cutting a groove into our workpiece with a 30 degree angle on either side, and by my (apparently mistaken) calculations, the dimensions shouldn't have been able to add up. But eventually I got fed up with working out the theoretical dimensions and just got to cutting the part and ended up with nearly the exact dimensions I was meant to without quite understanding how. It's a bit funny since earlier that day I was talking to Alu about the ills of overthinking things. That said, I would like to at least figure out why my figures were ...

I've posted before about not having any time and being frustrated about that, and that hasn't really gotten better lately. However, Alu and I are planning on starting the South Beach diet soon. We would have started it at the beginning of February, but the way our paychecks are distributed is somewhat prohibitive, so we should be doing the shopping and prep for the first week EXACTLY ONE WEEK FROM TODAY, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 30 (wink). We're hoping eating better food will give us more energy and more drive to do more with the disparate bits of time we do have, which, hopefully, should make us happier and give us more energy and drive, etc. The first two weeks are supposed to be the biggest hurdle, as it's meant to reorient your body toward eating healthier over the long term by cutting out sugar and carbs almost entirely, thereby (supposedly) eliminating, or at least greatly reducing the cravings that make you eat too much of them. Over the following two weeks or so, s...

Hey guys, this morning I am sick! Anyway here are my goals that I may or may not have been able to achieve for both legitimate and very good reasons! Fitness Based Goals  Attach Loot to My Goals |  I've think I got this pretty good, I set up one time loot that is a bit bigger followed by more repeatable smaller loot that I can continue to get every time I hit a goal checkpoint if you will. I also attached time frames for the one time goals and additional time frames for the repeated goals. Reach Weight Goal (160 lbs) |  We've eaten to much Domino's dude, I have only back peddled but Rok and I have decided that we are going to try the South Beach diet. We have looked into it and it looks like a pretty good way to take the steps to eat better in general. This morning, I weighed 204.4 lbs. Lift Three Times per week |  We had some things happen recently that kept us from getting to the gym, some valid some lazy, but either way we got back this past Wednesday an...

Lately I have noticed our cat, Monty, only reacts to us yelling at him when he is doing something we often tell him not to. So if he is on the counter looking for food, if we make a loud noise not even directed at him he will jump off the counter and race to somewhere he can act like he was doing something he can be doing. But if he is just sitting on the ground and we yell at him directly he might not even react and if he does it might just be to look at us and give us the "Are you just going to stand there and not pet me." I am bringing this up because today whilst thinking of blog topics I could write about I started thinking I do those same things at work and to a lesser extent at home. When I am doing things at work when I shouldn't be I will minimize browsers quickly and often, especially if I think I hear or see someone who might notice. But when I can have browsers up and be doing things, I often don't react to people walking by, and if I do it is just to se...

Recently Rok and I have found ourselves stressed out, mainly about our lack of time and money. But also about our lack of energy when we do have time. These last two weeks have had plenty of stress on our bodies and minds. Helping Rok’s mom move, hearing impactful and depressing news, the existential dread that we may not get a good job, and if we do that we won’t enjoy it as much as we hope.  As a result to the stress we haven’t been eating very well, eating out often and eating far to much pizza. On top of all of this the stress has been added to by not being able to get to the gym. And the days where we could we just wanted to stay home and melt into our bed where the stress can’t get us. So it’s been a stressful couple weeks. I know this is a bit shorter blog and I didn’t blog on Monday but we have a lot to do today, once again adding to the stress. But Monday I didn’t blog because I was running away from the stress, so I am counting this blog as even a small victory against...

Every so often, when I'm in a bit more somber a mood, I start thinking about how I live my life or whether it's really my life at all. Much of my time and energy is spent doing my job, which I don't particularly like, performing obligatory life maintenance tasks, or doing things for or with others, often more as a matter of course than of choice. Of course all of this takes its toll on my energy level, both mentally and physically, and as a result, what time I can take away from it is often spent in a recovery laze. All together, it feels like I have less and less time for doing things I enjoy just because it's what I feel like doing, which used to be a very high priority of mine and which is something I often miss. On its face, it might seem like my problem boils down to a lack of time, and while that's definitely a large factor, it's a relatively recent development, while my overarching lack of progress is not. Even years ago, when I was on my own had ample...

Sometimes I like to wonder what the world would be like if cars weren't so prevalent. It's been my understanding that early in the 20th century, US transportation seemed to be leaning heavily into trolleys and the like before tire and oil companies came on the scene and said, "Hey, we're having a good time selling parts to a few people for their automobiles, but what if EVERYONE had one and had to come to us to keep them running?" and proceeded to pimp the hell out of cars until everyone in America wanted one and they became integral to the nation's infrastructure. Then it was determined that the fumes produced by cars may not be the best thing to be pumping into the air that everyone has to breathe, but by that point they were too ingrained in society and everyone was like, "Well sure, but what am I supposed to NOT have a car? Then how would I get anywhere?" And they're not wrong; public transportation is pretty garbage anywhere west of the M...

If you're a fan of Gundam, you may have seen this meme popping up occasionally. 　 　 It's no secret that a huge draw of the Gundam franchise is giant fighting robots. In fact it's arguably around primarily as a vehicle to sell toys of said robots. It's interesting, then, that while the franchise tends to glorify war with cool giant robot fights, it also usually gives its protagonists a very anti-war standpoint. Very few characters in most Gundam shows are shown to enjoy the fighting they have to do, and those who do enjoy it are usually villains who tend to die horribly. Special mention to Yazan for being the only such character I can think of that survives all the way through multiple series which otherwise rack up quite the body count. Though I don't know that ZZ counts, since he's pretty much reduced to a Team Rocket style comic relief villain, but I digress. I suppose it's easy for me to get sidetracked on this issue because I don't re...

Hey, I bet you may or may not know what time it is! It's Goal Reflection Time! Fitness Based Goals Attach Loot to My Goals | I have attached loot to my goals, but I still need to attach time frames to the goals themselves, so this I am counting as half done for right now. Reach Weight Goal (160 lbs) | I have not weighed below 200 in the last two weeks but I also haven't weighed in above 203 so there is something. My diet has been sloppy and included to much candy from Christmas and monsters to stay awake, but I am hoping meal prep will help us eat healthier foods. This morning, I weighed 201.4 lbs. Lift Three Times per week | Even though we didn't want to, we made it to the gym for lifting all of the assigned days the last two weeks. We are seeing improvement in our ability to lift and that is exciting to me. We have been stuck at bench-pressing only 30 pounds, but I am hoping we can move on to 35 or 40 next gym session. We will see! Do Cardio Four Times per Week |...