I love the smell of powder actuated tools in the morning. Really.
One of the things I touched on with my little rant about hammers and their evolution is the similarity between weapons and tools. The tool I was using this morning blurs that line even further – a .22 caliber nail gun. It uses an actual gunpowder charge to drive a nail through a pressure treated 2 x 4 and straight into the concrete. With a nice loud “BANG!” Cooool 🙂
Just like the hammer could be used as the same functionality as the archaic axe, the nail gun could be used the same as a .22 (with slightly more interesting results I suppose, producing a wound track more like a flichette than a standard bullet.), though I never bothered shooting it open air – I’m in a room with a concrete floor, concrete block walls, etc – I think the richochett would be pretty ugly 🙂
But it’s another great example, IMO, of beating swords into plowshares.
Though, smelling the powder residue, I have to admit it’s probably time for a trip out to the farm or the shooting range. It’s been a while since I went shooting (yes, I own guns. No, I don’t have them with me at the house – they are pretty much permeantly stored with my father until someday I live in the country again.) That used to be a fun social sort of thing when I was younger – everyone got together, brought their guns (ranging from black powder weapons to .44 Magnums) and a couple of boxes of ammo, and shot at everything we could find that we could punch holes in (considering the 44 Mags and the 25.06, you could punch holes i damned near anything 🙂
Script work continues, though I slowed WAYYYY down today – Meredith threw in Lady in the Water (which I hadn’t seen) so I had to stop and watch that, then threw in her first disk of FireFly (I’ve seen the movie Serenity, but never saw the series). Crap. This is the problem with not having a true dedicated office for doing this sort of thing – it’s soooo damned easy to get distracted by something like a good movie. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be less distracted and get more done. At the current rate or progress, I won’t make it to my personal (but fairly unimportant) goal of finishing it on Valentine’s Day (hey, if I’ve got nothing better to do, finish a romance script 🙂
I’m sure somewhere someone ends up reading this and thinking “Gee, if you quit posting long ass entries in your damned blog, you’d probably get your script done faster!” Posting in the blog is brain cleaner, and takes VERY little time for me to write long ass entries (yeah, my curse – I’m a fast typist, and long winded. Between the two it makes for serious reading for anyone who bothers reading this – I probably type it about as fast as some people read it!)
One thing I have discovered from working on the new script -vs- the old script (these should REALLY get names someday – the working title for the old script is “Act 2”), I was able to re-think a lot of how to have the characters get their emotions across. So, when I switch back to “Act 2”, the script will end up a with a LOT of improvement. This might turn out to have been a great idea!
I’m a night owl by nature. Heck, I still structure my day so I can get away with it easily – lately I wake up between 6:45 AM and 7:45 AM (depends on what’s going on that day at R & S) and head for the site. Come home around 4 or 5, take an hours nap, then cook supper and start working on web projects or script work. Stay up till 1 or 2 in the morning. Repeat as nessisary.
Ya know, there’s a serious problem with being a night owl – not everyone else is. I, of course in my mind, expect the rest of the world to live by the same schedule as me 🙂 Two nights ago it’s about 1 AM, can’t get to sleep, decided to see if a friend of mine was still up. OOOPS! Ya see, I like texting people because it’s passive – if you’re not interested in talking to someone, or just to busy for a conversation, ya ignore it – that’s my policy anyway. Anyway, I get a phone call reamin’ my ass about texting someone at 1 AM. Hrm – got to admit, even if it’s a passive way of communicating, it still makes a racket when you txt someone 🙂 So, no more 1 AM text messages to anyone – it is indeed pretty rude 🙂
I had gotten into the habit of texting after Heather moved to Colorado – we’d text each other from time to time on random crap (even texting back and forth one time on my way to Co. to visit her). I got outta the habit, and recently got back into it (and am finally becoming proficent with the one thumb typing system) – now I text back and forth with quite a few people (though, i sent a message the other day, and realized how cruel it was – the receipient was a severe dyslexic! 🙂 Today, I almost txt’ed the owner of R & S, and stopped myself before I hit send – he’s in his late 50’s and just BARELY knows how to use a cell phone at the moment 🙂
It’s amazing how quickly you can adopt a rather impersonal “answer it whenever you feel like it” form of communication like this, and how quickly you can end up prefering it to real conversations. Hell, had a discussion one day that went on for like 30 messages, and suddenly the person at the other end piped up with “Why the hell are we still texting? I just gonna call” – if it’s more than about two messages back and forth, it’s a little faster to have a phone call instead 🙂
One of my goals I’m slowly working towards with the massive Davis Improvement project is to quit smoking. I haven’t exactly been FAST at doing it. Phase one is to pretty much quit smoking at home – I’m the only smoker in the place, so my smell is a bit foreign there. Right now, for an entire night here, I’m down to smoking like 5 cigarrettes. An improvement, but a far cry from the goal.
My buddy Brandon decided he’s going to quit smoking too… yeah, uh-huh. He told me that on the phone, and the next day I call him up to ask him how he’s planning on doing it – just as I’m about to ask, he says “Hang on a sec… Hey, Dion, throw me your lighter!” Ok, he’s not very far into the quitting smoking thing 🙂 Doesn’t help if him and I set down and have lunch somewhere either (like today). We’ll start chatting about stuff (todays subjects were cosmology, astrophysics, and quantum mechanics. Not what you’d expect for conversations from a guy who looks like a hippy setting across from a 6′ 4″ body builder type.), and before you know it between the two of us we’ve gone through an entire pack of smokes. Holy crap. Need to figure out how to get a better grip on that one.