The joys of middle age approaching

Well I'm not as young as I use to be. I'll be 38 soon. I've been letting my time down here at McMurdo break my normal self discipline. I've been drinking more, celebrating more, and just staying up later than I ever would at home. When you are young and doing that sort of thing, the body recoveries rapidly so we just dismiss any bad days. As you get older recovery is not quite the automatic thing it use to be. So here I sit with minor aches throughout my body and a major headache, and I have not touched a drop of alcholol in a week. No, I just never gave myself adequate recovery time from the periods when I did stay up late and drank with friends. I think my new Year's Eve week shall be an ascetic one with a rigid regime to get plenty of rest, a purely healthy diet, and proper levels of excercise. It might be dull but it sure beats feeling old before my time.

The Cost of Age and Martial arts

I have been a life long dabbler in the martial arts since the age of six. Being a small framed child, I was bullied often and quickly learned that physical intimidation was a part of life. Whether such is right or wrong, it created in me a strong desire to be able to defend myself and to encourage others to be able to do the same.

Unfortunately I never took to physical martial arts with the passion that many other people who became masterful at them did. Oh I dabbled, trained half hearted, sometimes very enthusiastically. But through it all it stayed an interest that was in my life more as concept than as constant.

As I have gotten older, I have gotten much more serious about the martial arts because of all the other secondary benefits beyond just skill in self defense. It has helped settle my mind, increase my self discipline, and just in general offered me an outlet for stressors I could seldom address in any other way.

Yet as the human body ages, it recovers from injury with less easy every year. Many of the traditional masters in many martial art traditions always noted that humans become better mentally but less able physically for the various arts. It is one of the ironies of life.

Of course all this contemplation created because my neck is sore from ju jitsu class last night, and my thighs from bagauzhang practice yesterday morning.

Post christmas post

The family is having a good Christmas if a quiet one. Once again I am regretiblely away from home. We celebrated Christmas yesterday here in McMurdo since we are on the other side of the international date line. I had a good Christmas. I had stayed up till 3 in the morning on Christmas eve talking to the wife and friends online and watching the 2nd season of Dead Like Me. Christmas day I sleep in, had brunch, then curled up to write and finish Dead Like me. I had dinner in the galley at 5 and then spent an hour and a half washing dishes to help out the kitchen staff. An early evening of washing laundry while reading Prachett's Hogfather made the wrap up to a fairly quiet day. It was relaxing and enjoyable.

Started tackling the outward Stellar Collisions

Well I finally started tackling Stellar Collisions again and all the writing and game development projects. To day I created the developer blog at unwelcomeneighbors.blogspot.com Also I started organizing the commerical project divisions in Unwelcome Neighbors. Since I'm going to create Unwelcomeneighbors.com as a encyclopedia setting reference for UwN, I started outlining some thoughts toward that. March will see the big overhauls for both Stellarcollisions.com and UnwelcomeNeighbors.com because I'll be changing service providers about that time and working with my web developer Raina. It is going to be a busy year for the whole design team, me especially.

Job completed

Well the HF receiver I came out here to Black Island and the remote site to fix is ..fixed. I had to drag another comm. tech who had been down here for several more seasons to fix the stupid, obsolete network control system for me. But all is well that ends well. The whole process took only just a few hours compared to the two days I thought it would be.

So tomorrow we will tackle some other minor projects like checking the spare batteries for the battery banks. Overall it should be an easy day of work, and then catching a helio flight back to McMurdo at about 1700 local.

busy work day and a helio flight

Well I catch a helicopter flight in about one hour out to Black Island, the remote satellite uplink site for McMurdo Station. Myself and a coworker will be out there for two days trying to address some problems with the HF receivers. In the long run it should not be to hard, but it will be a long and time consuming day. So not many post till tomorrow.

Objectives for 2009

Planning for 2009
I took the weekend to really catch up on a lot of things. I worked Saturday but spent it in the office skating. And sunday I opted out of playing Softball to catch up on things. And this is what I came up with: my personal general objective list for 2009.

1. I want to get the Stellar Collisions short story webzine Myth & Starships back under way. I want to put up quarterly issues in March, June, Sept, and December of 2009. Each issue will contain 10 short stories.
2. I want to get the Stellar Collisions wargaming webzine War Fantastic as a triannual with issues up in April, August, and December of 2009.
3. I need to try and get another college semester out of the way for my Math degree in June and July of 2009.
4. I am needing to move most of my household back to an apartment in State College to line up for future school plans.
5. I really need to practice my conversational Japanese with Chris so I can try and get some what competent so when we go to Japan for her degree and work.
6. I have a stack of moderate level debts I would like to pay off. We still have several major debts but I want to get all the four digit ones paid off just to get them off my back long term.
7. I'm trying to set up employment for both Chris and myself for the Summer 2009-2010 season here at McMurdo Station so we can come down together.
8.I have long though about taking Ken Burnside up on his suggestion that he was still looking for authors for his 10 Worlds setting for Ad Astra Games. I might submit a novel manuscript proposal to him early next year.
9. I want to complete Part one of Staff of Empery. The final novel manuscript is going to be something like 750 pages so there is no way I wil finish it next year since I started a complete rewrite a year ago. But I might get Part one of three done.
10. I am trying to finish my design document for Unwelcome Neighbors: Artisans of War. This online based grand strategy game has been reworked so many times over the past 7 years that I'm trying to nail it to the floor on concepts.
11. I want to complete Exiles' Odyssey. This is the first Unwelcome Neighbors graphic novel. I still need to work with Raina, our main artist to work out concepts of design.
12. I have a good part of the IDB novel, Demon & the Dancer completed. I need to do a final draft next year.
13. I want to get my son Zachery more time on horses and spend more time teaching him robotics and archery.
14. I want to get the family both basic and advance diving certifications.
15. I need to help Chris complete some of her computer certifications for her career.
16. I want to set up decent training programs for 2009 for Kuntae, Pekit Tersi, Pakua chang, ju jitsu, and maybe iajitsu if I can work all those end. I have full intentions of getting some training in on all those through the year, but I'm unsure of where the balance will be yet.
17. I want to spend more time horseback riding and doing some personal study on equine training. Eventually I aleast want to get an associates in equine science.
18. I need to finish a half a dozen home improvement projects for the house.
19. And I want to find the resources to fix back up our old Pontaic that blew it's engine again.
20. I need to look at how I'm going to develop UwN: Artisans of War in it's core algorthims. Objective 10 is to complete the design documents and conceptualization. This objective is to instead try and get the algorthims worked out for all the conflict, economic, and strategic factors.
21. I want to go back over my Haiku collection and see about rewriting them now that I have had a few more years to contemplate the art form.
22. I really should look at digging back out my epic poem Ddraig-Jotan war and see about rewriting it and furthering the work.

Well that is my personal objectives for 2009. It includes no major career advancement, nor does it include my major family objectives. Those are all pragmatic personal objectives.

Peanuts Christmas Play

Well down here at McMurdo you do what you can to keep yourself entertained. Several of the folks decided to put on the Charlie Brown Christmas special as a play. We only drew about a hundred people for an audience, not bad when you figure the base population is only about 1000. Well last week I was asked to play Pig Pen since the guy who was doing it had to work. So I put on a pair of coveralls and rolled around in the dust. So for an hour I acted like I was a kid again and did a play that had the production value of a 2nd grade production. But we were so confused and rushing around that it was funny as hell. Everyone had a good laugh at us making fools of ourselves. To be honest the chaplian said that was the busiest he has seen the chapel since he has been here. I had fun. The post production party at the coffee house was even more fun, since most of us sat around polishing off to bottles of wine and laughing at each other.

No Caffiene

For the past week I have been drinking extensive amounts of soda and coffee to stay awake. I've had some long work days that just took a lot of mental concentration. Well now it's time to back off such habits. The radios and satellite links are not all fixed, but things are operational and quiet till next Monday. So no caffeine today, instead I'm just trying not to be irritable as hell at everyone and everything. It's not an easy road to walk for some one that is naturally somber like I am.

Oversleep for work

Well in my package from home I got a book from the RMAX International corporation by Coach Sonnon called Body Flow. The focus is on mobility training and fitness designed with focus more on reducing hypertension in muscle movement patterns. It's not his most recent work but I have the book and the DvD down here now. I started using some of the techniques to relax and work out muscle tension in groups. It works alright; after I crashed out last night I oversleep to alarms and was late to work.

Packages from Home

When you are literally thousands of miles from home, in the middle of no where, it is great to get a package just before Christmas. I had some idea of what was in the package. But the nonfiction books that arrived will help further my personal studies so that occupies my time productively. The fiction novels will keep the wee hours of the night amusing and light (Ah how I love Prachett' s work). And the 21 movies will allow me to enjoy and relax at other times. It is amazing how much a little touch of home can make even the most barren of places feel comfortable.

Technical procedures and trends

I have worked in electronics and telecommunications for 17 years now. I've seen many equipment types pass by and whole skill sets become obsolete. But the newest trends in electronics and communication technology tend to bother me. Few of the newer technicians and even some of the engineers have no real idea of how the systems they work on actually operate.

Transportation cost for goods has dropped so low, the new procedures have been to pull any suspect units of equipment and return them to the manufacturer. This leads to people just focusing on the box itself. There is often times no awareness of how the boxes interconnect to form a complete system. For more obvious failures when an entire unit goes bad simple pull and replace is a fine procedure to use, but when problems are more systemic or subtle a person has to understand WHY each of the units operates and the parameters under which the system changes. Far to many technicians these days just learn to pull and replace each unit till something works, all the time just burning through their spare parts with no understanding. It's a bad work habit which is becoming the industrial standard.

Getting Older

I am currently sitting at the Black Island Satellite Uplink site for McMurdo Station Antarctica. I turn 38 at the end of this year. Once again there is another Christmas I'm away from friends and family. Between remote telecommunications contracts and military service, I seem to have developed a bad habit of doing that these days.

A man becomes somber as he realizes that many of the things he had hoped to achieve by forty are just not going to come to pass. I can not complain about my life. It has been good so far. I've served my country well, and I have a beautiful family.

Recently I've lost track of some very dear friends, and had some friendships imploded. It reminds me of my own mortality. The death of several comrade in arms in the Sandbox really eats at my soul as well. But I guess life goes on, all you can do is have faith in something bigger than yourself and that it is all to a purpose.

I'm plowing away on my mathematics fundamentals and half a dozen speculative projects on space technology. I might not ever get anywhere with this, but my own hopes and dreams are tied deeply to me succeeding in completeing all my schooling for Math and Engineering aleast through to my Masters. But it's not an easy row to hoe when you have a family to support as well. I know so many people have walked this road before me, I am just amazed at how many have succeeded.

I still hope to get the small publishing house WWW.STELLARCOLLISIONS.COM off the ground with the help of my wife and some very dear friends. I am trying to work with our web designer Raina to get the whole website into some semblance of order. I still have 5 book manuscripts just piled up waiting on rework. Two hundred essays await work for our science fiction setting, Unwelcome Neighbors. There just never seems to be enough time and energy in the day.

I am still debating on whether or not to put together two webzines or if it is worth the effort. The idea for Myth and Starship was to create a contemporary fantasy setting, short story focused webzine quarterly. War Fantastic was conceptualized as being a quarterly containing fanciful military analsysis of science fiction and fantasy warfare, along with wargame reviews and suggestions. I still debate whether it is worth all the work. I just can't make up my mind nor stay focused at this stage in my life.