Fall.

Posted on November 1, 2026 by murphy

So I know it’s technically speaking been fall for a while, but for me, it’s the changing of the clocks that really kicks me into the seasonal mood. Ran out to pick up a Sam’s order this evening at about 5pm, and it was pitch dark, windy, and damp. Instantly started grinning and couldn’t stop.  This is definitely weather the cuckoo likes.

Cleaned out my hall closet and set it up for my emergency supplies; flats of water and iron rations. Between those stores and my pantry, I’m loaded for bear. Frankly, I could lock my door and as long as the water stayed on and was at least filterable, I could probably exist in here for at least three months without any major issues, if not six. Probably be running out of specific items and craving fresh food by the end of it, but it’s nice to know I’m supplied.

Utterly bizarre thing that happened last night, though. My legs were a bit sore, so I decided to grab the remote for the adjustable bedframe and set it to “zero-g”, which raises both the head and the legs so you sleep in kind of a cradled position. Supposed to be pretty good for circulation, but of course, you can’t really roll over. I woke up on my side with the bed down flat in “snore” mode, which just raises the head by about six inches. The remote was out of reach on the nightstand. I have no idea how it went from one to the other without input, unless I was sleepwalking or something.

It is the spooky season, I guess. (And I was talking about signs and portents and communications from beyond, woo woo.)

Finishing up the outline this week (or at least as much as I have of it). Really interesting seeing how everything fits together in summary, and then being able to go and work close on the individual pieces. I might actually get somewhere with this thing.

(And I haven’t forgotten that first chapter I owe you. I really do want to get posting this thing proper, I just have to make the beginning work since I’m doing something obnoxious and self-indulgent with it and starting in the middle of the story. But I’ll get there; living in this world is the next best thing to going back to where I really want to be.)

I want to wake up where you are

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Ghosts.

Posted on October 31, 2026 by murphy

So, a bit of an explanation of why this was a rough week.

I live a lot in the memories of better times, and while I’ve told a lot of stories here and elsewhere, occasionally something pops up that I’d forgotten. And it’s almost always sweet and nostalgic at least at first; however, that feeling fades to a more melancholy, hollow realization of what I don’t have anymore. And one of those is kind of what set me off this week.

So, I was browsing my feed and I got thrown a new LEGO release. I’m a sucker for the NASA line, I’ve got the ISS, the Apollo LM, the Saturn V, and Discovery, among others, populating my shelves. And they just released a model of the Hubble telescope. I saw it and immediately ordered it.

And then all of a sudden I was back in Sid’s office; we were eating Chinese food after a gaming session. It was the year they were fixing the Hubble Space Telescope. They’d discovered the Hubble telescope had an issue with its mirror; due to a manufacturing defect, it effectively had myopia, and a subsequent STS mission was going to have to fit it with a compensating lens. I made a snarky joke about it, and after a moment of silence, saw Sid just looking at me, expressionless. I swallowed. “What?”

She pointed her chopsticks at something behind me. I turned and saw a framed photo, several clean-suited figures in a large room filled with technical equipment. They were standing around a large optical instrument, and the picture was shot from above, a familiar setup showing the team that accomplished some great feat.

With a sinking feeling, I realized what was coming. “See the guy on the left?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“That’s my dad.”

(Fortunately, I am extremely good at mea culpas. And she didn’t hold it against me.)

So that memory popping up unbidden made me smile on a dreary day, but that night I felt the loss all over again, which put me in a bit of a mood. So I sat down and did what I often do, I wrote a letter to one of my ghosts. A bit of self-therapy, unburdening myself of things I can’t say in person. And I can hope that maybe at a time like this, when the veil’s a little thin between the worlds, maybe a little bit of the love will get through.

I did get something out of it, though. Melancholy always makes me want to write, and I was digging through the scenes for Elsewhere and decided it was high time to put together a proper outline. I know how the story flows in my head, but I want to get it down in a concrete form just to make sure I know where all the pieces fit and don’t miss anything. I still have a big chunk of the story missing—I have to decide what to do with the years between the parting of my two leads and their rediscovery of one another, because the story is really only properly interesting to me when it’s the two of them. And the outline did help me fix one thing that was bugging me, an event where someone did something that I felt didn’t really fit with their character. Looking at it from a 10,000-foot altitude helped me see how it should go instead, and I’ve sorted it out.

So, writing this weekend, laying in some more supplies, and also biting the bullet and joining a remote jobs marketplace since the job thing this week seems to have fallen by the wayside.

Hope springs eternal.

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Fub Fact Friday: Two-Time Winner.

Posted on October 30, 2026 by murphy

If you ever feel like you’re having a bad day at work, consider Tsutomu Yamaguchi. He was an engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries who was sent by his boss on a business trip to a nearby city. That city was Hiroshima, Japan. He was there on August 6th, 1945.

The blast didn’t kill him. He was a few kilometers from ground zero and survived the detonation of Little Boy, and was part of the evacuation of the city shortly after the blast. He took a train back to his headquarters office, whereupon his boss questioned him extensively about what he’d seen.

The headquarters office was in Nagasaki, Japan. It was August 9th, 1945. In the middle of telling the story of the Hiroshima blast, Fat Man detonated over the city.

(“It was just like that.”)

Personally, if I’d gotten nuked two times in three days, I’d have a hard time not thinking it was personal.

While at least a hundred survivors of Hiroshima were in Nagasaki at the time of the second bombing, Yamaguchi was the only officially-recognized two-time hibakusha, the term the Japanese use to describe those who survived a nuclear blast. Yamaguchi died in 2010 at the age of 1993.

The hopeful depend on a world without end

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Another miss.

Posted on October 29, 2026 by murphy

Taking the night off. Not because I didn’t write; I wrote a fair bit. Just not for public consumption. A letter to an old friend, is all. Just feeling melancholy and wanting to wrap myself in it a bit.

I’ll be all right. Just maybe not for tonight.

If the silence takes you, then I hope it takes me too

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Confession time.

Posted on October 28, 2026 by murphy

I’m something of a prepper. Not one of those, mind you, but I grew up in the shadow of the Cold War, and the thought of having supplies ready should the proverbial shit hit the proverbial fan has always been on my mind. Coupled with being poor and being in fucked up situations a lot, I’ve got a tendency to keep my pantries and larders full, just in case.

The problem is I’m also hugely disorganized, so that leads to me inevitably failing to rotate stock and having to toss out stuff that’s gone well beyond the use-by dates. So it’s this constant whiplash struggle of buying a bunch of stuff to stock up and then getting furious with myself for not managing it and having to clean the place out.

That is until fairly recently, when I was wandering through my local Wal-Mart and passed through the camping section. The freeze-dried food caught my eye and I was momentarily tempted by the good ol’ astronaut ice cream. And then I eyeballed one of the meal pouches and noticed something.

“Best by 2056.”

Do what now?

After doing some research, it seems that Mountain House is now rating their meals for a fucking 30-year shelf life.

So yeah, nail, meet hammer. The stuff’s kind of expensive, but now I’ve got boxes of honest-to-god iron rations put up that have a longer lifespan than I have left. Kind of nice knowing I don’t have to even think about it anymore. (Water’s another issue, but frankly it’s easier to buy a couple of flats of bottles every year or two than it is to try to stock up those two-decade Aquablocks water supplies.)

The topic came up because of all the bedwetting online about the news; I realized it had been a little while since I added to my stock so I extended my supplies by about five days. Do I expect anything to happen? No. But the odds of a major-league fuckup that drastically affects the supply chain is growing day by day, with how dumb everyone’s getting (I think COVID and AI are frankly going to drop IQs well into the double-digits before too long). And nobody ever said “Dang it, I wish I hadn’t prepared.”

Okay, really I’m just glad to have something else to talk about other than the job shit. The meeting between the headhunter and the company takes place tomorrow, so I should hear something in the shape of a final offer soon. My gut feeling is it’s all too risky to gamble on, especially considering I’d have to spend at least four months of next year on a Marketplace health plan and holy shit what I’m seeing for next year is horrifying and the remainder of this year is already like $200 a month above the shitty insurance I have now.

I just have to keep telling myself that a) I’ve got no major gripes with the chair I’m in at the moment and b) I don’t necessarily need to leap into the first remote role I’ve seen, as tempting as it is. Going to retool and start applying in a couple of different marketplaces to see if I can up the ante, since I’m actually past the whole “instantly ghosted” phase of my career search.

Hope springs eternal.

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The saga continues.

Posted on October 27, 2026 by murphy

Man, I can’t wait until this is resolved so I can stop fuckin’ talking about it.

But I got a message from the headhunter that he wanted to chat to discuss the comp issue. According to him, the discrepancy was because their agency was going to pay me the higher amount (sans benefits) while I worked on contract, and then the company would hire me on at the lower rate (with benefits) provided that I worked out. I balked a bit, because the fluctuation is super weird. I mean, I get the concept, but the goal is getting hired on permanently, and having the permanent job be worse is just nuts.

However, they informed me that the company really likes me and the agency is trying to talk them into bumping the comp. It’s weird actually being chased. I don’t think this is going to shake out into a form that’s going to work in any way, shape, or form, but at least it’s made me feel valued.

Definitely going to start poking around at my remote options once this finally winds down.

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Well, shit.

Posted on October 26, 2026 by murphy

First off, absolutely killed the interview. Answered all the questions effortlessly; I’m kind of getting good at this. Being relaxed is such a boon in this. I’m not dying to get out of where I am, so it’s more of a “well, if it happens, awesome, if not, que sera, sera. So that was nice.

The problem is the headhunter told me porky pies, and the comp the manager quoted was about $5 per hour south of what I was expecting.

So I kind of griped at the headhunter via text afterwards, and we’ll see what her response is. In the meantime, the manager liked me enough he’s going back to his boss to see if he can’t come up a bit. I figure if he can get over halfway there I might pull the trigger. Coming down a bit on comp would suck, but hopefully it would only be for the six months I’d be on contract. There’s a good bit of upward potential there, and he said a lot of his crew has been there for many years. And the MSP side didn’t sound too onerous, they don’t seem to be hugely micromanaged (outside of having to be in the phone queue constantly and having staged breaks/meals).

Ugh.

So if he comes back without any ability to maneuver, or $1, it’s a no. If he can get $3 more for me per hour, it’s a yes.

I have a feeling he might come back with a $2 bump and leave me in a pickle. I could theoretically make that work, but it would be tighter than I’d like. Coupled with the fact that my insurance is going to go fucking nuts, and that’s not even considering the 2027 shenanigans… yeah, he could come back with a figure that’s going to straight-up give me an ulcer.

Ugh. If they’d offered what I was quoted, this would be a done deal. So fucking annoyed.

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Dilemma.

Posted on October 25, 2026 by murphy

So, I’m kind of caught in the middle on this job thing. The WFH and the schedule of the new one sounds great, but where I am right now is an absolute skive and I’d have a lot of free time to study and work on certs and the like, and if I do get hired on full-time the pay should be better. The problem is, getting hired on full time is kind of an open question.

Nothing serious today because all my brainpower is tied up worrying about this shit. Got the interview tomorrow, we’ll see how it goes.

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Life coach.

Posted on October 24, 2026 by murphy

Ancestral Ghost: “Look at you, you’re a failure! You don’t conquer, you don’t pillage! All you do is stare at that light-box all day and push those buttons.”

Me: [sighs]

Ancestral Ghost: “You don’t even have a wife, let alone any concubines! At your age I had seventeen sons to ensure a healthy battle for my title! And just today, when that man disrespected you in your metal carriage, you didn’t even murder him!”

Me: [gets up, heads to kitchen]

Ancestral Ghost: “And another thing—wait, where are you going? Come back here while I’m berating you!”

Me: [goes to cupboard, opens it, rummages around]

Ancestral Ghost: “Pay attention, damn it—what are you doing?”

Me: [grabs the pepper, cinnamon, and nutmeg, shows them to the ghost with a Price is Right spokesmodel flourish]

Ancestral Ghost: “What—what are you doing?”

Me: [throws them directly into the trash]

Ancestral Ghost: [incoherent screaming]

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Fub Fact Friday: The Elephant on the Battlefield

Posted on October 23, 2026 by murphy

May 9, 1864. Union and Confederate forces were facing off in the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House in northern Virginia. The Confederates had just taken possession of a shipment of new guns with rifled barrels, and the improved accuracy of these weapons was something they were eager to test out. Whereas most gunfire in Civil War battles occurred in mass barrages at close range, Confederate sharpshooters were taking potshots at the Union lines, and the much more accurate fire was causing the men to duck and flinch.

This infuriated General John Sedgwick, who rode up and down the lines berating and swearing at his men. He saw their behavior as cowardly and unbecoming, so he heaped invective upon them and ordered them to stand up in the face of the enemy. “Stop flinching, damn you!” he roared as he rode up and down the front lines. “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist—”

I will leave it to the reader to surmise why he didn’t finish that sentence.

That’s why I say, hey man, nice shot

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