Man, I am not at all happy with my domain name registrar for Beckism.net. My websites have all been down for the last few days (or longer, my memory is fuzzy) thanks to the fact that the damn host didn’t give me any way to update my custom DNS entry (for those of you who might understand that). Since Beckism.net is the host for all of my other websites it meant they were all down. Granted, Beckism.com is the only one that I’ve set up properly since the last outage, but still. It’s the principle of the thing.

Since I wasn’t able to post this before (stupid freaking website outages!) I am currently on the West side of the state, at the moment of this entry sitting in my mom’s house. Thanks to the terribly spotty wireless internet (and the fact that I got wrapped up in a book) I’ve not been doing much computer work the past few days; a fact that is very, very bad, since I’m woefully behind on a couple things. Looks like I’ll be spending tomorrow working on website stuff.

On the positive side, my orientation for my new job got pushed back a couple days, so I don’t have to leave as quickly as I thought I did. Mainly this will be nice for Dad, since he was hoping to do something with all of his kids Father’s Day and was sad I was going to be out of town driving across the state.

The reason that I’m over here is all thanks to Valerie, wonderful person that she is, who let me hitch a ride with her and her mom back across the state and is graciously taking me back to Walla Walla when the time comes. Hopefully she will stick around (she has something to do in Walla Walla the next weekend), although I am granted not all that exciting a host. I mostly sit and stare at things all day (be those things books, computers, walls, or whatever else I can find).

I haven’t done much the last few days. I’d been hanging around in Seattle with Dad, and he’s one of those people who needs to be doing something (Mom is much more of the welcome-home-I’m-fine-if-you-sit-on-the-couch-all-day types, although she would probably be happier if I did something with her, too; might have to try and convince her to go to Borders with me, she mentioned she had a gift card). In Seattle I did various fun things like eat fry bread (I don’t know if it was being born in a place with fry bread in the air, or what, but I live for fry bread, and you just can’t get it most places in the Pacific Northwest), watch X-Men 3 (Valerie came and saw it, too!), watch Thank You For Smoking (hilarious, but I’m still not sure what the message was, and if I approve of how light it made of serious issues or not), go to Half-Price Books (where I bought an absolutely fantastic book on a whim–can’t argue with a $6 hardback), and so forth.

So far at Mom’s I’ve set up my eMac for Kristin–which she was very happy about since while it is slow like molasses it’s still faster than the laptop she was using–sneezed a lot (I think I may be allergic to the rabbit in a big way), and read Wizard’s First Rule again. I might need to obtain a copy of the second book in the series and reread it, too. I’d forgotten how good they are. Maybe I’ll try to reach the later books again. I’ve given it a shot once or twice, and given up both times around book four. However, if I remember correctly the first time I gave up it was because I got disgusted with the explicit sex and violence (of which there is sometimes quite a lot; it’s hard for me to get through some portions even in the first book) and while my tolerance for violence is possibly lower than it has been in the past, I’m less put off by sex. I was such an uptight little kid. I probably owe most of my integrity to the damned Disciples of Christ church, but the repressive sexual legacy the church left me royally pisses me off in retrospect. Can’t recall why I stopped the second time through. It might just be that the series gets old by then (the books are huge, 600+ pages). Perchance I will have to try and see.

Then again, I should probably just forget it and work on my way-backed-up web work. Bah. Responsibility is annoying.

Speaking of responsibility, my dad asked me what my plans were after college, and was pretty disapproving when he found out I don’t have any. While I like to think of it as “keeping my options open” he seemed to think it was more like “denial.” Just watch; I’ll graduate, have some percussion gig drop into my lap, and that’ll show him.

And worst case scenario, I can always move in with Mom and start actually writing for a change. That would be nice, too. I just wish that I could find a way to make money with the writing that I do online without selling my soul in advertising to do it. I love Beckism.com and Idol Bat and all, but they just aren’t money-makers.

On the other hand, it is possible that I will be getting a very sizable check from CafePress soon. I’m not holding too much hope for it, because it seems a little too good to be true, but somehow I got over $120 in affiliate earnings. The reason I’m thinking there has to be some sort of mistake and fate is playing a cruel joke on me is because it’s the result of one phenomenally big order (over $600!), the order was placed on my birthday, of all days, and as far as I know I don’t have any affiliate ads out that people would click through, anyway. Plus even if I did, I’m pretty sure that my website was down during that time. I can’t figure it out.

Of course, if CafePress sends me a check that large, I won’t turn it down. It would mean that, against all of my expectations, the shop had paid for itself for the first time since ever. And during the year that I received free. How rich is that?

I just realized that this post is ludicrously long. Many apologies to anyone on LJ whose friend page got cluttered up by it. I would put things behind a cut, but thanks to the cross-posting nature of this thing, I don’t know if I can. So many apologies. Hopefully in future my damned website won’t be down and I will be able to post smaller incremental posts.

Because I do that normally. Right. Oh well; it’s a nice thought.

Ian out.