Sunday May 9, 2010 – 10:40am – 4:36pm = 5 hours and 56 minutes. It’s been a year since my last alone time…my how time flies when you’re having fun. Spent the majority of the time sleeping in my chair. Will i ever remember how to enjoy?

I have a feeling that this will be my last alone time.

So we had some more police action here in my wonderful neighborhood last week. Apparently just 3 doors down from me they had the police out and it was officially filed as “Criminal Damage/Malicious Mischief” and “Motor Vehicle Theft”. Lovely. So far we’ve had tons of vandalism, several cars broken into, a car tipped over, gang grafitti everywhere, gun runners and now this. This hellhole is getting better and better everyday! It’s sooooooo fun when you have to be scared even in your own home. I’m telling you things had better pick up economy-wise soon so I can sell this house and move back to where I belong. I swear I never saw this much police action when I lived between New York CIty and Newark, NJ. I felt safer there than I do here. Ah well, I guess we get what we deserve, right? I must have done something really horrible in a past life and now am paying the price. I need to put a stop to it is all. Someday…right?

I know this is a week or so early but I thought I would take a look back on the past year. To be honest, most of 2008 is NOT something I want to remember. It was the year that I finally accepted some hard truths about my family and myself.

But there were a few goods parts too. Yeah, I’m as amazed as anyone about that. In the beginning of the year I started a new pastime that I really think I could enjoy especially if family wasn’t interfering (yep, there’s that bad stuff again!). I’ll explain. I started creating stained glass stuff. I could really get into this as it’s an incredible feeling to watch something come to life and know that it’s because *I* made it happen. Now for the bad part…Mom insisted that I pursue this hobby out in the garage. I would have setup my workstation in the house like a real person would but having to listen to Mom go on and on about it was too much to deal with, so I setup in the garage. It’s not that that is a totally bad place to do something like this but it means that here in the boiling pit of hell that I live in I can’t work on anything in the summer months (which out here is about 6 months long)…it’s just too fucking hot. And there is also the thing about Mom starting her usual panic rant about money anytime I say I want to buy more glass. So yeah, that shit does take some of the passion out of things. But in the short time that I was able to work on stained glass I created something that I am really proud of (see image on right). This is something I hope to continue with.

The second good thing came out of having to take a break from the the first good thing – the stained glass stuff. Since I couldn’t work on the stained glass during the summer months, in August I started creating themes for WordPress to be distributed publicly thru my new site The Cloisters. Much to my pleasure and surprise, my themes are fairly successful. And it really is a great feeling when someone likes something that I had an incredible amount of fun creating. It’s awesome! So check out the site and maybe download one of my themes – I offer pretty decent support too!

The third good thing was getting to go back east for a week in June. I swear the minute the plane landed back there I felt I was home. That’s a feeling I haven’t had since I came out here to this desert wasteland. I do have some pictures that I took and will eventually get up on this site. And since I already wrote about the trip in the post Back Home Again, I won’t repeat things here.

I think maybe I’ll stop here and try, for once, to keep things light and end this hellish year on a positive note. So Happy Holidays to everyone and here’s hoping 2009 will bring some good changes.