February 22, 2014

I think I can count last night as being the first good night of sleep I have had since last Saturday night. At one point, around 3:00AM I think, I got my heating pad to lay on, but it was for a hint of an ache rather than actual pain, so I was able to go right back to sleep. And for good measure, I took a nap in the afternoon. It was partly because I was feeling tired but mostly just because I could. I find it hard to believe that the stone has completed the first phase of the process but I certainly wouldn't mind if it had. And it would be nice if phase two would happen while I'm at home, over a weekend, so I don't have to worry about it while I'm at work or in the middle of the night on a school night.

With my day, I caught up on my DVR, watched YouTube videos, read some articles, and played a little BF4. Successfully managing to not use explosives on a no explosives server. In chat there were a lot of people complaining that smoke grenades were also banned but they don't cause any damage (unlike flashbangs) so they should be allowed. I started using smoke on Operation Locker in attempts to cover a push toward the C flag but in general my team is never on board with it. On Operation Metro I use it mostly to hide behind and shoot guys rather than to move forward. I have an infrared scope on my LSAT and that allows me to see guys through the smoke while remaining safely hidden behind it. Unless I they also have an infrared scope or I have been spotted. The best way to combat this if you don't have an infrared sight but the other guy does, is to use flares, which wash out the infrared scope. I have come across some teams that use the flares effectively, or annoyingly, but for the most part the infrared scope paired with smoke is a solid strategy.

At work tonight I switched off between the four books I am currently reading. I'm about halfway through two of them, a third of the way through another, and just started the fourth. I really need to read more. I could finish so many books if computers weren't a think. And TVs and anything else that I find myself distracted by. I could definitely see myself spending my days reading and making stuff out of yarn. But not really in this modern age.

Here is a quote about speaking from The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson:

"All of this is by way of coming around to the somewhat paradoxical observation that we speak with remarkable laxness and imprecision and yet manage to express ourselves with wondrous subtlety - and simply breathtaking speed. In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300 syllables a minute. To do this we force air up through the larynx - or supralaryngeal vocal tract, to be technical about it - and, by variously pursing our lips and flapping our tongue around in our mouth rather in the manner of a freshly landed fish, we shape each passing puff of air into a series of loosely differentiated plosives, fricatives, gutturals, and other minor atmospheric disturbances. These emerge as a more or less continuous blur of sound. People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed." (p. 89)

And a quote from Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris:

"States vote to take away my marriage rights, and even though I don't want to get married, it tends to hurt my feelings. I guess what bugs me is that it was put to a vote in the first place. If you don't want to marry a homosexual, then don't. But what gives you the right to weigh in on your neighbor's options? It's like voting on whether or not redheads should be allowed to celebrate Christmas." (p. 156)