Well, I was pretty active here for a month or more then fell off the face of the planet.  Two reasons there: One is the various work products I had since November (as sort of outlined in my Priorities blog post), the other was the birth of my second son, Zachary.  (Picture in my gallery).  Abosulte dream and my first son, Jason is pretty cool with him too.  Now Zach is five weeks old and he and mom are doing great.

So, hobbies had  to get shoved to the side while all this happened. I think I can now get back to a semi-reasonable work balance.

(Joking:) And to be a little crude, I can use the new kid to get some gear: Set of talkies make a great baby monitor.  That HD Camcorder would be a great way to document both kids, and to go all out, we can get the DVR system to visually monitor the baby sleeping.  "Oh and honety by the way, I'll need to borrow all the gear tonight to hunt some ghosts"

All joking aside, I am a proud dad for the second time.  As hectic as things are right now, life is good.

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Okay, got a bit of a personal rant. My project at work is behind schedule.  I know it.  It is my fault.  Half was because I started up slow instead of full steam on it, and half was that I'm new to estimating times.

So, this week I've tried to catch up.  I'd love to show my bosses that I can get this stuff done well and on time so I can approach them about starting to work from home.  I mean, seriously, I go into the office, turn on my computer and literally stare at it for 9-10 hours.  My main personal interaction is though IM and phone.  Which I can really do anywhere.  I'd love to do it from my couch.

So anyway, Last weekend was a bust on catching up so I tried to play catch up this week, so I ended up working about 15 to 20 hours every day, M-Th.  Presented the material to my team, and they did love it, but like usual, did help me see where it needed work.  I didn't get the whole thing completed by the time of presentation, but still I got a lot of praise.

What's kind of bugging me is that my boss is kind enough to do a pretty extensive copy edit on my work, but I have a lot of editing before it goes to her.  So this deadline, I've been literally losing sleep over, upsetting my older boy because I can't play with him, keeping me away from my newborn son, and kind of pissing off my wife for not balancing work and home to be able to help her with the baby.  This deadline for a finished, polished product has gone from an absolute to "whenever I can get it to my boss."

I do like my job, but this is just a bit frustrating. The pressure I was under to get it done on time was just huge.  And it wasn't like the deadline was anything "real".  The project wouldn't make the company any money, wouldn't have to be presented to clients or even the staff for an event, it was just a massive redesign for new hire training.  So the deadline was really just superficial.

Even though I'm happy that my boss and my team like it, it just feels like I killed myself for the past week for nothing.

Still tired enough that I'm not processing it right.  I'm not sure if I should be pissed, relieved or what.

Not sure I have a point here, but wanted to get it out.

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Alrighty, so partly because we have now entered the season where the "ghost hunters" come out of the woodwork because of the holiday looking for a scare, (so looking for places to investigate becomes a bit trite) and just because I think it is cool, I'm right at the moment obsessing about one of my other passions: writing!

NaNoWriMo is the National Novel Writing Month.  Write at least a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.  It happens every November and the forums there are open (although seriously slow).  October becomes the prep time for the insanity in November.

I did it last year and managed to "win" with a 50,500 word novel. I was aiming for 60,000, but I did make the minimum 50K.  It turns out it would be nothing I would EVER consider for publication, but I did end up with a really cool character that I could definitely plug into a better story already fully fleshed out.

This year, I still have no clue what I'm going to write.  I have the same three concepts I had last year, but last year, concept 4 jumped out of my head about a week before it started.

And heck, with the Ghost Hunters live special on Halloween running 6 hours, might just pull an all nighter to enjoy some GH goodness and end with some exciting first day writing!

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I'm in just a weird kind of mood and was partly thinking back a couple years to when I was active in a T'ai Chi group.  Was reading up on the Tao yesterday, then saw the blog post here on meditation and it brought all the great T'ai Chi memories back. 

First off, T'ai Chi is an absolutely awesome experience, if you have ever thought about trying T'ai Chi, DO IT!  Oh, and it is NOT an "old person's martial art." More on this later.

Anyway, years before I ever went to a class, I had heard of this moving meditation.  And thought, hmm... I can meditate - which always sounded interesting - but keep moving?  Cool!

Fast forward until about four years ago and I was doing some soul searching, and really wanted to train understand my body. I'd done martial arts before, and had actually wanted to get back into the heavy stuff.  I was starting to get drawn to Jeet Kun Do, and found a teacher, but the way it was worded on his site, I didn't feel qualified.  Before then, my martial art experience had dwindled to remembering a couple blocks. But he did have this T'ai Chi that was open to all skill levels. I wasn't THAT interested in T'ai Chi, but thought I could do that for a while then jump to the Jeet Kun Do.

Well, I went to the class, and it was seriously cool.  Everyone was basically laid back, everyone was really just having a good time.  Very much NOT like the semi-militaristic approach I experienced with Hapkido, Kendo and Tae Kwon Do. (I don't knock them, I did learn a lot from them, but this was still totally different).  People of all ages were there.  Granted there were a large number of older people who were there for the wonderful exercise, but there were quite a few young people too, who were there for the same reasons, and for some of the martial aspects. 

And just an aside, do NOT think that a T'ai Chi master is any kind of push over.  T'ai Chi Chuan is definitely a real martial art.  My teacher was in his late 70s then, and he could still wipe the floor with any of his students.  Seriously amazing man.

So I learned a couple of relaxing exercises which helped a lot more than I expected. I knew I was stressed, but didn't know how bad.

Now fast forward a year. I have now learned the entire Yang style 108 move long version of T'ai Chi Chuan.  I have learned a lot of Push Hands and generally now having a lot of fun taking the 33-36 minutes to go through the form, then spend an hour and a half fine tuning and learning the mirror set.

Now there is a feeling that can come over you when you do this, at least it did for me, where you do a couple of the moves and everything feels perfect. You aren't thinking about the current or next move, you aren't distracted. The joints and muscles feel like flowing sacks of water as you go through the move.  It is an amazing feeling.

Well, one set one day, I got into that groove and I wasn't getting out! Near the end of the set I was feeling like I was outside my body, because my body never felt this good or this coordinated.  I thought, "Wow, I'm really doing this! This is beyond cool!"  Then I hit the harder end piece and got out of that groove, but it was like I was a little drunk from the experience, but in a totally good way.

Some will say it was an endorphin rush or the runner's high, and I tend to agree, but it was weird that it hit really early, like within the first four minutes of the set, and stayed that way for a good twenty.

I have hit that groove a few times since that one experience, but nothing as long as that one time.  I keep thinking how amazing it would be to stay in it for the entire set plus the mirror set.  Gives me good shivers.

And now it has been a couple MORE years since I had to drop the class  due to work restrictions, but now that work has settled down a little, I think I will get back into it. Probably work on my own a bit to remember the moves before getting back to the class, so I won't have to start over, but dropping T'ai Chi was definitely a big regret.

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Well, I tend to suck at maintaining blogging, but I'll see what I can do here.  I'm starting up a group (have been for a couple months now) and just trying to get everything organized and together.

We have a site started: http://www.ghost-fu.com/

Not quite ready for normal viewing, but it is up and running.

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