Cj B – Page 113 – Chris' Site

Weekend Recap…

Ok, So I am on the plane now and thought I would take some time to write about the weekend.

Lets see, I really didn’t do to much during the week. I went to the gym with Dustin one day and no gym the rest of the week. Iw as pretty lazy. Friday I went out with Sirin and Christian to this place in downtown LA called Seven Grand. It’s a whiskey bar that Guerrilla Gay bar was hosting at. Tons and tons of fun! We hung out and talked and played pool and what not. Matt was there and I tried buying him a drink, but he declined. How sad! 🙁 OH well.

Drove back to my place after that and the three of us drank the bottle of wine that Constantine and I brought back from Austria. It was not very good. Christian spent the night and Saturday morning I drove him home and then was getting my car washed when I got the first of many bad news phone calls during the weekend. I had planned to hang out with a bunch of people and go to a gallery opening that night, but I cancelled all those plans and just ended up sitting at home all day reading and doing random computer stuff and debating about what I should do.

Sunday I got up and went rock climbing. It was just me and Jerry setting up so that was fun. We talked a lot and he taught me some interesting stuff. Jenny and Megan showed up and some other guy. We all did some rock climbing on three different climbs. I made it to the top of two of them and then failed on the last one. The last one is called Birdshit crack and I have yet to make it up that one. There’s this weird move you are doing because you’re coming out of this crack and have to turn and get yourself up somehow. Anyways, it’s hard to explian, but I just can’t keep my footing on it. Very annoying.

Had a great time rock climbing, but I got two calls during that with more bad news. After climbing we went up and had a picnic up on this mountian thing and just chatted and stuff. Lots of fun!

Drove home after that, called Constantine on my way home and of course he didn’t answer. I was debating about what to do and ended up just calling my boss and he said to go home and work from there. So I bought the tickets and then freaked out because my flight left at 5am Monday morning and this was 5pm Sunday night. So I had to arrange someone to take care of the cats and drive me to the airport and I had to pack everything. What a mess. I was freaking out.

My friend Rob came over and we hung out for like 45 minutes and watched some TV and caught up. It was relaxing to have him chill with me. He’s very laid back and cool.

Called Constantine again and left another message about me being in Houston on Monday for 3 hours and seeing if he wanted to have coffee or something.

He called back a little later and we talked. I was very angry with him and with everything else that’s going on and called him an asshole. As soon as it came out I felt so horrible. I wish I could have taken it back, rewind the tape…I didn’t know what to do. We talked about a lot of random things. Sounds like he’s having a great time in Houston, sounds like he’s moving on and forgetting about me and all the great times we had together. When I got back from Lone Pine….(stop me if I wrote about this already??) anyways, I noticed that someone from houston opera house and Halliburton had both spent a LARGE amount of time reading EVERY entry about Constantine and I all the way back to when we first met. I find this very very strange, why are they reading about all this a month after it happened. Why are they spending so much time going back and reading about everything that’s happened… I don’t get it. He said he knew they had done it. Sirin has her theory, but I am guessing that’s not the case.

Anyways… Being in Houston, being so close and yet so far away from him. In the short month I feel like we’ve already grown so far apart. I’m moving on very well, but with all this shit going on, I just want him back. I want to hear his voice and have him comfort me. After readin “Call me by your name”. I keep hoping that he’ll show up in Iowa, we’ll see each other from across the room, run into each other’s arms and kiss and swing each other around and be so happy (ala the wedding scene). I kept hoping while I was waiting in Houston that he would show up at the gate and say. “I’m comging with you”. I know that he won’t, but I need support right now, I could really use someone to lean on. To cry on his shoulder, to hold him and have it feel like everything will be ok. I wish he could be there in Iowa, to sit in the hot tub, watch the sky and talk about my grandpa with me.

My crying has been so random lately. I just can’t stop it. It’s very annoying.

On a funny note. There is this spanish couple in the seat infront of me on this flight, they have lunch on this flight (amazing!) anyways, they don’t speak ANY English, the flight attendant was aksing everyone if they knew how to say “Turkey” or “Ham” in spanish. No one knew. She had chicken, beef and fish on her little translation card, but no Turkey or beef. Anyways she started making farm sounds. It was really funny. Then they answered by mimicing the sounds. Very entertaining. lol. On the flight from LAX to Houston, I had the whole exit row to myself. That was very nice. 🙂

Heading Home

Well, when it rains it pours. I found myself booking tickets yesterday afternoon and am on my way back to Iowa now.

I am currently in Houston. What a perfect stop over.

My grandpa has been in and out of stuff for the last month. This past week it’s gotten much worse. He’s in hospice care now. Yesterday they were saying he wouldn’t make it through the night. I just didn’t know what to do stay and work or try and make it home. I called my boss and explained to him that things weren’t good.

He said, “Go home and just work from there”. So I will be in Iowa till June 1st.

I love my grandpa. He’s been an amazing person in my life, he’s taught me so much, been there for me and it’s been so sad over the past few years to see him getting less and less active. We all knew this was coming, but we thought it would be a while yet. This has all come on so fast.

Anyone who knows me well knows how much I talk about my grandpa and how much I look up to him. I just wish this wasn’t happening. I wish I had had a little more time to go back and be with him while he was still able to comprehend what was going on…

The weekend itself had some ups and downs, but that’s all suited for another entry, another time.

Tuxedo has been FOUND!

I found Tuxedo!

It’s been a week since I’ve seen him. I wish he could talk to tell me where the fuck he’s been all this time and what he’s been doing.

Yesterday morning I left my apartment and noticed my car was COVERED in cat prints. I was wondering what was up with that.

Behind where I park my car, I still have my TV box which is huge. Inside that I have a ton of other boxes from random stuff that I’ve purchased over the years. On top of that is a screen from the window in my house. When I got home yesterday, I noticed the screen was all messed up. So I start looking around and calling Tux’s name. I hear a faint Meow and dig through the box and there he was laying in the bottom all curled up.

Yay he’s been found! 🙂 I was beginning to lose hope that he would be found.

Open Source Madness!

Well, ever since I got dumped. I’ve had a lot more time to do some fun projects… Contributing to the Open Source Community!

So today, I am happy to announce 2 BRAND new WordPress plugins, 1 proof of concept plugin, 1 updated plugin, some code contributions to the Zen Cart community and a new web service for the VTiger community!

How exciting!

1) First is a wordpress plugin which allows you to use HTTP or HTTPS with your pages. If a page is accessed via HTTPS then all the elements contained within the page will also be HTTPS. It is required that you have used proper coding practices by using wpurl and url respectively. You can download HTTPS for WordPress here

2) Second is a wordpress plugin which allows you to track users who are logged in. This only tracks the UserID, the PageURL and the Date the page was viewed for users who are logged in. This is in very early development stages so at this time there is only data collection and no reporting features are available in this first release. userTracker is available here.

3) I have made some pretty big changes to the Private Post plugin which has been around for a while now. The new changes allow anyone who is logged in to view all private posts and pages. Upcoming features will support integration with Role Manager so that you can assign roles to specific posts. Check your WP2.5 Plugins page to update this plugin or you can download it from here.

4) This is a proof of concept plugin which will base protected content viewing ability on an outside system. In this case we have an internal software which contains a list of our WP users and the type of Support contract they have purchased. This plugin does a web service call to our software to get a list of the contracts for that user and then sets the users role automatically based on that list. So each time the user visits the site, the list and thus the roles are updated. Since this is dependent on our outside system, the plugin cannot be downloaded, but if you are interested in seeing how to handle this, please email me.

5) Is some contributions to the Zen Cart community. These contributions tie Zen cart’s users into the wordpress users. This way you can use the built in Zen cart registration, login and logoff functions to also register, login and logoff of wordpress users. Currently the only issue here is that when Zen cart does an auto logout, people will stay logged into wordpress. You can download this here

6) This is new web service for VTiger. This new web service provides three functions

1) a better way to create accounts and contacts then the built in webservice. You build an array of the needed information, pass it to the webservice and it will create the account and contact. It will return an array with the contact and account id’s.
2) Find contact based on email. You pass the email address and it will return an array with the contact and account id’s
3) Create sales order. This will create a new sales order with the users Shipping and Billing information filled in. It will return the sales order id. You can also add products, tax, shipping rate, discounts, etc to the sales order.

Upcoming on this web service will be creating an invoice from the sales order then emailing that invoice to a specified user. You can download the advanced webservices here. (As soon as I figure out this retarded system)

Lone Pine Trip

This weekend was very long and yet tons of fun!

Friday I got up early and headed out to Pasadena to pick up this guy Jimmy, from there we headed up to Canyon Country to meet up with George, Jason, Merot and Lewis. Headed from there up to Red Rock Canyon. Hung out there for a little bit and did some running around. Nothing to crazy.

After that we drove from there up to Fossil Falls for some rock climbing. We setup up at the top of the canyon and then rappelled down. I did some pretty good climbing, I was very impressed with myself. One of the climbs that I did you had to climb up to this small ledge about 15 feet off the ground, and then the rock comes out over your head. You have to put your hand in this little slot in the rock and make a fist to lock it in there, then pull yourself up while trying to get your feet into this tiny hole that was about waist level. From there you have to get both your hands up over this rock and then pull yourself the rest of the way up. I made it up that, but fell just as I was trying to make the last move to get my feet up on top of the ledge. 🙁 It was our last climb, so I’m very impressed I even made it that far.

From there we headed out to this place called Dirty Sock. It was this very interesting hot spring pool out in the middle of no where. It was really weird because when we would throw in a rock, it would bubble and create this neat fizzing sound. After that we headed up to Lone Pine and at dinner at this little cafe and then went to the GHETTO hotel. There were 6 people in our one room.

Saturday we got up at 5am and started a 13 mile hike across the desert! We started in a little town called Keeler, CA and then hiked somewhere between 10 and 13 miles across the salt flats/desert/swamp to get back towards Lone Pine. It was a lot of fun to do and not as hard as I thought it would be. The weather was wonderful. There were these two little kids with us who were lots of fun, but they were very slow so I stayed back with them for a little bit and sang old scouting songs with them and told stories. Sadly I can’t remember any of the good scouting songs any more so that didn’t last very long.

From there we headed up to the Obsidian Domes up by Mammoth lakes. On the way there we stopped at Erick Schats that was kind of hard for me up there because that was the bakery that Constantine and I stopped at on our way back from Mammoth Lakes, and played a big part in my realization that I loved him… It was there, at that bakery that I looked at him and said to myself. “Oh my god, I love this guy.” … Ugh. Anyways, there was lots of snow on the domes which was fun!

We headed down from there and went to this place called Hot Creek sadly it was closed currently to swimming, but it was still very pretty. Wish we could have got in.

That night we to this crazy party in a small town called Darwin. It was very strange and very scary. Everyone was wearing these weird ass costumes and shit. I felt like we were going to be killed!

After that I drove back to the hotel and hung out with Alisa, Edder and Matt for a while and we had a drink. Went to bed and got up at 6am to drive back. We did a lot of random driving to strange places. We stopped somewhere that morning, but I can’t remember exactly where, drove through Trona and then stopped at a tiny little ghost town run by these two crazy hicks. They let the children shoot black powder rifles. They also had what they claimed was Charles Manson’s old truck. Stopped off in Atolia as well which was fun, but they put up fences around everything since the last time Constantine and I were there. So that’s sad.

Overall it was a really great trip and I’m really glad that I went.

In sad news though, Tuxedo is missing. He’s been gone since Friday Morning for sure, but maybe even since Thursday afternoon. I left my door open while I was packing up my car. I do this a lot, and have never had problems before. Friday morning I went to say goodbye to my kitties and couldn’t find him anywhere! I spent nearly 30 minutes outside calling for him and looking for him, but I just don’t know where he is at. 🙁 I am hoping that he’ll come back. I have put food out and will be putting up posters later today.

I stayed home from work this morning and am working from home. I’m also watching this movie Wild Tigers I have Known. I KNOW that I’ve seen this movie before, but I cannot remember where or who I saw it with. Very annoying.

So that’s about it.

You can download the tracks with pictures of the weekend for google earth here. I’ll update this post when the pictures are all uploaded as well.
UPDATE:// Photos are now posted on the photodump.

Adios.