Grateful for the Little Things

This past week, I wound up with a gland infection. It was so bad because it was pressing both on my jaw and on my ear at the same time. It was both painful to chew and made me rather dizzy. Not to mention the huge lump on the side of my head in front of my ear that made it easily noticeable that something was wrong... just ask the doctor who saw it as she walked in the door.

Rather than whine and moan about it, I saw things a whole lot differently. To start, I praised God that it wasn't anything worse. I also knew that I would be healed by His hand in time. As it is still clearing up at the time of this blog, it also opened my eyes to the small things in life that I routinely take for granted, and today, I am really grateful for them. Here are just a few in question:

1. The ability to chew food. For the past three days, I have not been able to chew any food without excruciating pain. It was so bad at times that I couldn't close my mouth... and boy, what a pretty site that is. Joelle, being the loving, good-hearted person she is, made me the most delicious chicken soup (okay... her chicken soup is always most delicious!) so that I wouldn't have to chew much. If anything, it feels great to be able to chew again. Right now, there is just a minor discomfort, but at least it's healing.
2. Shaving. There's no way I would have trusted myself to run a razor sharp object across my face when I am dizzy. I looked like a beach bum for the past few days. I went back to work with a Hawaiian Shirt as I looked the part. No one paid any mind to the fact I didn't shave (although they did notice how swollen my face still was). They were just glad to see me back in action. I may not have been all in one piece, but at least I wasn't dizzy anymore.
3. The ability to climb stairs. Talk about a real chore when you're dizzy. I don't know what was worse: going up or going down. Mind you, I almost tripped over myself going down... I probably would have preferred to do that going up if I had to. If anything, I'm just glad that I made it both up and down the stairs safely.

Those are just a few of the things that I am sure not to take for granted any more. If anything, this made me see how much I look for that one big thing in life while totally overlooking, and missing, all of these great little things in life. I'm sure if I added up all of these little things, it would make that big thing look not so big.

Learning there are no rules... aka Crossing the Line6

Yesterday, I did something in my little aspie world that is very hard
for us to do: I broke our little rules. It may not seem like a lot to
some people, but it's huge in our world. I think in breaking those
little rules, I think I discovered that the rules themselves never
really existed and established that as a rule, even though I sort of had
that inkling that this rule was always there, considering that I have
always read it on the pro-audio forums. I needed to experience it for
myself, however... it's an aspie thang.

If anything, what I did was to combine Logic 9's Pedalboard plug-in with
my Line6 POD Farm plug-in and wound up with a monster sound. There was a
certain fullness that I loved with PedalBoard and when I combined it
with a Marshall J2000 emulation, everything just sang! Not to mention
when I put it with an Engel or a Bogner emuulation. It was like a huge
discovery to me. There was all of a sudden a wall of guitar sound that
almost had me believing that there really were amplifiers there.

For some reason, I have misled myself into believing that I needed to
keep everything either within POD Farm or Logic. Part of it was probably
believing that I would take these settings and use them on my POD X3
Live. Seeing as I probably may never get the chance to play these songs
live, what does it matter? I'm in a state of anything goes as far as
recording goes. I'm starting to mix and match a bunch of things now and
I will admit that things never sounded so good. Now, I'll see if I can
break whatever rules I have as far as mixing goes (and I think I have a
few examples to help).

Letter of love...

Perhaps I don't say it enough, or worse, demonstrate it openly enough, but there's one undeniable fact in my life that needs to known to all: I am deeply and madly in love with Joelle and I have always been.

I can still remember the day I first set eyes on her. The day she just walked into my life, looked at me and grabbed the guitar our of my hands and played a little. My heart must have been attached to my guitar at the time, because she managed to grab my heart at the same time. If anything, I didn't want to admit at the time that I was falling instantly for her, because I was afraid of getting hurt like I always did before. But something inside told me she was different. She was the one. She was my gift from God, and she still is.

Almost 30 years later, we've celebrated and we've suffered together. We've sought and we've found. We've partied and pondered. We've gone across the country and across the ocean. We've made it through feast and famine, richer and poorer, and sickess and health. But the most important thing is that we've done it all together. I couldn't imagine doing any of these things without her. I don't remember any real good in my life before she came and I definitely don't want to think of my life without her. Sure, they say that life would go on, but I don't believe that I could really function without her. She completes me in ways no one can imagine. She is truly my other half... and she is my better half. Honestly, if God took her away today, I'd be half the person I was yesterday.

Sure we argue... and we fight too. Isn't that what real married couples do? And we get hurt... if we didn't hurt, that would mean that we didn't have feelings for each other. We also heal each other and we grow stronger together and we also learn to fight with each other, as opposed to against each other. Anyone who things that you never fight or are never supposed to get hurt when you're in love with someone, is living in a fantasy land. How can you get stronger together if you don't get hurt? I wouldn't trade any of those hurts for anything. That's when you realize how much you're in love.

So what if there are things we don't get about each other. It's all good. To me, it's what makes it all exciting and worth pursuing. Don't you think it would be boring if we absolutely knew each other inside and out like a book. If we could predict every single move the other makes? I'll admit that I love it when I think she's gonna do one thing and blows my mind and does something totally opposite. Sometimes, I'll be stuck in a routine and she'll throw in a spark of spontaneity to throw me off. If anything, I'd never want Joelle to stop being Joelle, because no matter what I may think at any given time, she's perfect in my eyes.

Understanding my own reclusive world...

There are many times that I believe that Joelle doesn't understand me as well as she believes she does. She always tells me that she knows me inside and out, but when she's put to the test as far as I go, the results seem to prove otherwise especially in one particular area: I don't like to go to church alone. Even more so is that she doesn't understand that throwing me out there alone makes me want to become a recluse, and not necessarily by choice.

Now, it's not a question of God being with me. I know that God is always there and I always have that feeling. What I don't seems to have at times is that feeling of belonging there by myself. I always feel uncomfortable sitting alone. I feel lost in the many sea of faces that are there. I feel like there is no one there to pray with me, and even more so, I feel like there is no one there to pray for me. And, being autistic, it's not like I can easily just go up to someone and say hi all by myself. Or, to sit with them, or even pray with them on my own initiative is just not that easy for people like me.

In fact, you know might know me by my pattern when I do go by myself. I walk in and take a seat at the back. I often have my head down looking at the floor, or staring up into the ceiling while listening to the message (or I may switch from one to the other). When service is over, I'll often wind up being the first one out to make it to the car and leave as soon as I can, feeling a little anxious. Mind you, I often don't make it out that quickly because I often get stopped by a few people wanting to say "hi" and shake my hand. Of course, I stop and engage in a brief conversation and suddenly they're done, and with me being autistic and not being able to recognize social cues, I don't realize that the conversation is done and I feel cut off. Thus I find myself going to the car wondering what just happened. Then, all I want to do is go home and sink into my guitar, music, computers or actually do some yard work while blasting my iPod... and now I really don't want to be seen with anyone. I become very reclusive, all because I didn't really want to be alone in the first place.

Funny how it feels different when I have a guitar or a camera in my hand. I don't feel so anxious then. I almost feel "normal". Perhaps, it sort of gives me a deeper understanding of how Josh feels when he has a steering wheel in his hand. He feels so comfortable with it, even if I don't feel so comfortable being beside him. I feel more at ease with my guitar. I used to feel right at home in the moment with God when I was on a worship team, playing guitar. These days, I haven't been on a worship team for almost 6 months. Even more reason I feel so out of place when I walk into church alone. I wonder if Joelle understands that about me.

Technology seems to be against me, today...

I don't know what it is today, but it seems that all technology is
banding up against me for some reason or another. I can't seem to get
through anything today, without a piece of technology just deciding to
flip out on me.

It's starting with my in-car bluetooth device not wanting to connect to
my iPhone this morning. There's nothing wrong with the iPhone, so far,
because my in-ear device was working no problem. Next, I found when I
tried to lock my MacBook Pro, the Kensington lock was all of a sudden
loose, meaning that the security hole in it broke. Or, at least the
plastic inside the lock slot was broken. Talk about freakin' cheap
materials. I might pull off the bottom case and put epoxy around the
hole to fill that up, though. But, it's just a pain in a royal butt to
have to go through this!

It's like I've offended the machines today, yet I don't know what I did!
I wonder if it's just a lottery of computer random number generator that
they run and my number came due for computer hardship today. I don't
know. What I do know is that this totally bytes!

I'm a Guitar Hero!

Yesterday at work, my oldest son, Hank, IM's me and asks me if I have time and the ability to watch a video. So, I whip out my iPhone and go to YouTube and got this:

(In case the player doesn't show up... click here)

I'M A GUITAR HERO! At least, I am to my son Hank. He took my song, Father's Coming Home, and made it into something that he can play on Guitar Hero. When I saw this, I was floored. I was so amazed that he would make something like this for me. It may not be much to anyone else, but to me it is the one of the best homemade presents I ever received. It was something that meant a whole lot to me, and I started getting emotional at work. It really made me feel like a guitar hero. And, even if I'm not one to the rest of the world, I've become one to the people that mean the most to me, and that's what counts.

Thank you Hank for making my weekend.

Some program compilers are like women!!

I swear that there are some days where computer programming is like dealing with women! For the past few weeks, I have been programming some Flash stuff for Webkinz and today, I have found the 5 similarities between Flash's compiler and women all realized in one morning. Don't believe me? Here they are:

1) You are always forced to take out your own garbage and there's no arguing this! If I create an empty MovieClip on the stage and tie it to an object's property, that MovieClip will never get garbage collected even if I remove it from the stage, unless I declare the referencing property to be null, even though the MovieClip is contains null values. It, however, is considered a referenced object, meaning that it is in use, even though it isn't in use. There's no reasoning with the compiler. If you don't take out your own garbage, it will simply pile up, causing other problems! The MovieClip once removed is garbage. Yet, I have to deference it in order for the garbage collector to take it.

2) It speaks to other programs in their own language! They only read back our own programming to us. Heck, even decompiling a Flash SWF doesn't read the same way it was written. It twists everything we've told it to do.

3) You can do something for years and all of a sudden today, it is wrong! This was a classic encounter for me today. I was working with the Bindings class in Flash and since designing this application, it was working like a charm... until today. The basic premise of Bindings was that I can change a value somewhere in the program and this change is automatically reflected somewhere else in the application. Well, guess what... today they're not communicating. Even worse, it's telling me there's an error in the Bindings class this, which is owned by Adobe.

4) You ask what the problem is and it comes back saying, "NOTHING!" I went to look at the offending line in the Bindings class and the syntax of the line was perfectly fine. I could see no problem with the code. Go figure!!

and last but by no means least...

5) Skip a period, and it goes bonkers!!! I managed to get some really weird and unpredictable behaviour from my application, almost bringing down my test version of the site. And the problem: a period was missing from the object and because dynamic classes within Flash will not throw an error if a compile time variable is non-existant, it simply treats it as a new variable assigning the data to it. Meanwhile, the real variable is not getting what it needs and is feeling unpredictable values into the system. The system itself, went bonkers!

There you have it! Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to talk with a another programmer, whom I'm glad doesn't subscribe to my blogs... guess what gender she is!