Thought we could try something new this time around and start the week on a sunday. The weekend has been pretty good, both in rest and with activity. 

We started friday pretty not great, but after work Mrs Potato and i went to get a sandwich and sit in a park. I want to start walking in parks more often, but with the weather starting to turn around here that will probably have to be something for the springtime. It was still a nice day and sitting in the fresh air having a nice little dinner is a good way to spend the time. 

 The dudes and i had sort of a weird disjointed weekend game time but it was still nice. We played some peak friday night and then just watched a movie saturday. I think the racing movie was a nice thing to do, mostly because i probably wouldnt have watched it on my own and I've really missed watching stuff with other people. Watching movies in groups is always a nice way to unwind. Especially when its old-man brad pitt driving a neat car, haha. The movie was so silly but the racing sequences were cool enough to keep us all into it til the stupid end. 

The next week or so will be interesting while i prep for a pretty major change up in the way that the server and most of my storage is set up.I've lucked into 6 3tb sas drives that should all work great and that should give me more than enough raided space on the server to finally move all the important stuff off of the old drives in the desktop file server. I call it that b/c it's really just a beefy desktop with a bunch of hard drives. It's cool but i'd rather have everything on the server platform than that, and use that to host network backups of the virtual machines.Then they both get cloud backups, because im a nerd like that. 

It'll mean i'll have to take everything offline a few times and move some drives around, but also move/copy all that data off of Michiru over to the new shares on Yoshino. Moving the movies shares temporarily off of the 4tb i need to take out of the t610 took 8 hours, i'm interested to see how long it takes for the 13TB or so to move to the new shares. There are too many drives to plug them into the t610 directly, and the 3tb drives will take up 6 of the 8 drive bays anyway. 

I think it'll make sense, i hope so anyway. I think i net gain about 3tb overall, which is good. And organizationally it'll make more sense, since the raided drives will basically just be one large drive, then each share it's own folder. Although with the raw space I could designate certain amounts of space to certain shares and make them their own drives, but that seems like a stupid idea, since it would be difficult to resize those partitions if i needed to. I think one giant partition makes the most sense.We'll see next weekend i guess. 

We are excited for our next day off, halloween. Decided this year to actually try and use all my PTO days before the end of the year, so i picked halloween, black friday, and the working days around christmas. Im really stoked with those choices but it does mean i have to work all month with the light at the end of the month as far as days off go. It'll be great to have that christmas week off again though, i really do love that. It's a great time to recharge and get ready for the next round about the sun. 

Lets take bets on likelyhood of whining tomorrow. I'm bettin yea

 

 Happy Monday, as they like to say. This weekend was pretty restful, had some time to clean up and keep rearranging stuff. We got all the stuff in for the tv in our bedroom so roskabox got re-purposed as a new tv computer. I'll move the installation of the roskadj stuff over to Michiru this week so the dudes and I can still use it for friday nights, since thats been kind of a winner since i got that working. they like it, i like it, and it honestly just feels weird to play games and not have some jams going.  Its been a weird transition, but i think putting that computer in our room with a different job was the best way to get myself worked out of my funk. It showed her that i'm really probably actually done streaming. i think i am. maybe i wanna go back still, but the time in my life just doesnt exist to do a good job. I dont think i've done a good job with juggling that with real life at all. 

 Today we are cushion shopping for the kotatus. We've got the two, but only enough cushions for one since the one used to be down here and i was the only one that used it. I feel like a new large warm kotatsu blanket with be a great idea too, or maybe a comfy rug to sit on in our room (and cover the corner destroyed by the rabbit, rio rabbit) or probably all of the above. I know I'm also looking for bedside lamps, and a lamp for the living room, and whatever else she wants to pick up. At least im not super focus on records or tapes right now. I do have a lot of them and i should work on actually archiving them before they get weird. Not that i've had any get weird on me, but i know just playing them can wear them down a little, same with the tapes. I keep them in a dry area away from the sun. 

 Its getting to be about that time of day when my brain just stops working and it's time to lay on the ground. Most people do lunch and maybe i'd work better if i did too, but i just cant eat during the day most of the time. So what i end up doing instead is waiting until like 1545 or so and then taking my 30 minutes on the floor. Laying on the ground is so nice and calming and quiet. I miss my grouchy cat that used to keep me company down here, but thats easing lately too. It's just quieter. and It stinks less. I loved him but he was a stinky boy sometimes. It was worth it though, he was such good company. 

 I've been talking to gemini a lot over the last two to three weeks, trying to weasel out a schedule that would let me do all of the things that i want to do, including stream better and more consistently. It wasn't it's fault it helped me realize that i literally just dont have time to give something like that my attention and not screw up other things in my life. I was also spending a little too much on gear for it, even though a large majority of that stuff can and is being used elsewhere when it's not stream-time. I dont know. Maybe i'll try to shoehorn it back in someplace. I just gotta figure out where it can go that wont completely hose things up. I miss it. 

 One fo the things that i've let fall by the wayside is learning sign. I really want to learn it, and use it, and get good enough at it that i can make some deaf pals and get lots of practice. With enough practice and some credentials maybe i can find a job that doesnt require my brain all the time, or at least a different part of the grey meat. I still like to help people,and fix things, but i want to help people in different ways, i'm kind of tired of fixing printers and helping people sign into their phones. I know what i do is a little more complicated than that but thats what it feels like most of the time. And of course i realize i have to use my brain to interpret or translate, but it's totally different. I dont have to solve problems in the same way, i can solve them differently. I also realize that this is a long way off and not something I can just do

 It's about that time to lay on the floor, so I think thats what I'm gonna do. 

 

 

 Alright so we are actually going to finish a post this time. 

We stepped back from the internet for a couple of weeks there after having a very productive and enjoyable long weekend with my wife over her birthday. The release of stress and the dropping of certain responsibilities made me realize that there are a number of aspects of my life where i input far too much energy for very little return. Which sounds a little pompous and awful to say, but as i've gotten older i've really started trying to prioritize where i put my attention. I'm very bad at paying attention. 

 The end of it all is really there have been certain aspects of my life that i've not been paying attention to that i should have been. Shirking one thing for something else is fine if the other thing is actually more important, and not just dopamine. I've missed streaming, i've missed chat and my friends, but i've gained quite a bit of inner peace and lowered my stress, so is that a good trade off? 

There were never really any hopes of making it big streaming, or even making money off of it, i was just there for the party. And boy did we party, so much so that I had to take a step back earlier in the year because i was just giving too much of myself to it. When you wife stopped working due to some health issues, that also truncated my time to stream. Between that and working extra to make up for certain debts, the amount of time i can put into streaming just kept getting less and less. 

It doesnt help that I think my saturday nights went kind of off the rails there for a month or so. I mean they were always a little bananas but it felt like people wanted to be there and it sort of had some kind of structure. It didn't, but i felt like guided chaos at least. The last few streams were just chaos, no guidance. And i couldnt get it back, just no matter what i did after each evening i'd be wasted tired and reaching to find what felt like it went wrong. Maybe nothing went wrong. Maybe the chaos finally got to me? I just dont know. But it didnt feel right anymore, like i was trying to hard for something but i didnt know what. 

 There have been times where i've been very tempted to go back to it. I miss the chat and i miss doing fun things. I still do fun things, i'm just the only one around for any of them. Well, thats not really true, Mrs Potato is always with me. We got to spend some time together this sunday jamming to records, like i used to do on saturdays. It was really fun and i didnt drink and still had a blast with it. We cleaned up down here and hung out and it was just....nice reconnecting to things i like with her. We've had a fire just about every night this week since i'm on call and cant go anywhere anyway, thats been really awesome too. 

Well its been a few hours and i havent added anything new to this so I'm just gonna post it and call it good. 

I think not streaming for a while is a good thing, i just dislike it and feel lonely about it. At least no one really seemed to have noticed too much. I still havent decided it thats a good thing or a bad one.