In Pursuit of Mysteries

Jesus Christ, that hurt!

Woot. Back from both my Ancient Greek class and my tattooing session. I’m getting my teeth cleaned for the first time in a couple of years on Thursdays.

Is this purgatory?

Anyway, total time in ass-numbing tattoo chair: 4.25 hours plus breaks. Yes, this is my first tattoo and it took over four hours straight to do. My tattoo artist (Tina Bafaro, wonderful lady and artist!) says that I sat well, especially since it was my first time. I must say that it hurt like a motherfucker to do though. Not the kind of hurt where you go “Fuck this, I’m out of here, you prick!” but the kind where you go “If this hurt just a little bit more, I wouldn’t be able to handle this.” Tina said that it gets better after a short while and it did get a bit better for a while but it would come and go. After about three hours or so, I could tell that my body was getting fatigued. It was getting harder to just sit and let her work.

It’s hard to have witty conversation when someone rubbing your arm with some bastard offspring of a buzsaw and a belt sander that leaves ink behind. We spoke a bit but after a while it got to be “How you doing?” “Fine.” “Cool.”

It’s done though. We finished the whole thing unless it gets screwed up by the healing or me scratching it or something.

It did make Greek seem lightweight though! ;-)

Anarchists

heh. For a bunch of anarchists, those guys at CrimethInc. have their shit together. I ordered their book Days of War, Nights of Love: Crimethink For Beginners when I posted my last entry about them. That was 11:25 pm on Friday. I got my copy of their book and extra papers in my mail today… Now, they are only about sixty miles from here but that’s pretty damn efficient for anarchists. ;-)

I spent part of my evening, after buying Day of the Dead items at La Tienda leafing through the book and being pretty impressed with it. It’s very well put together.

Weekends and such

So, we shipped MSN8 last week. If you go to any of the major news outlets, you’ll see a review of it (like the Washington Post, or PC Magazine or the New York Times). They are largely favorable, especially for the area that I ran the test team for: Parental Controls. I’m happy that we’ve been mentioned favorably in almost every review and I’m very happy that we’ve shipped. I’ve been working about half time on our new project, which is within Windows, and I can now concentrate fully there. This will make my day to day life a bit easier.

We had a goodbye lunch for one of my contractors on Friday. He’s going to go work for another team now that we’ve shpped. This isn’t so bad since we’re now free to hang out a bit easier as I am no longer the “boss.” He’s come to some OTO stuff and has interests in Thelema.

Since we shipped, I got a couple of extra days off. I’m home today and tomorrow and I’ll get 11/11 and 11/12 off too. Combined with Thanksgiving, I’m winding up with most of a month of three day work weeks. That really breaks my heart. ;-)

R and I spent most of the weekend quietly together and didn’t go out a whole bunch except for a big chunk in the middle of Saturday for local OTO initiations that we attended and witnessed. We watched a bunch of cable, cleaned the house a bit and I practiced my skills at Neverwinter Nights.

Today was more of the same but R has just gone to work. I’m going to go down to “La Tienda” in a few and pick up a couple Day of the Dead items for our shrine in the living room. We tried to go yesterday but they were closed. We did get our new passport pictures for our trip to Greece.

Tomorrow is my five hour tattoo session. I’m getting my first tattoo, which will be on my upper, right arm. It’s a scarab beetle with the sun and it should cover my entire upper arm. We’re going to attempt to do it in one sitting. We’ll see how well that works… I’m sure to be a hurtin’ unit tomorrow night and I have Greek then too. Combining this with my big dental cleaning on Thursday, this will, indeed, be the week of achy pain…

Anyway, I’m off to view smiling dead things. Ta ta!