Lol

[ishte]

I'm just stopping by here.  Honestly, I feel like hardly any of my friends are using livejournal any more. Photobucket totally destroyed all my beautiful themes that I worked so hard on.  It's been so long that I don't really remember how to make them again and I don't want to waste time making new ones... or learning how to adapt my old ones... OR taking the time to find a new place to serve the images from.  So I'm back to boring default layouts.  At some point I did apparently move my cute little cloud mood icons over to LiveJournal Proper.

So I'd love if anyone is still here, to get a comment so I know you're still around. I know there seemed to be a mass migration to a basically duplicated service, but I don't remember what it was called, and since I haven't been LiveJournaling with any regularity, I don't know if it's still that active either.  FxcxBook has pretty much ruined everything.  I hate it so much, but but that's how I stay in touch with family and friends so....

Since I've been writing again, having finally figured out WHY I haven't been writing, I've made some changes to my setup. No longer using my office for writing.  It's not comfortable. It's fine for stuff I need an office for, but I needed my swing arm and couch setup back. So I've been writing a lot more recently. Chasing the Trail FMA fanfiction has two new chapters and a third underway. I've been working on Gaia's Song some too.

October this year was extremely unkind to me, so I'm still in recovery from that.  The stress got me pretty sick for a while, but Docs and meds seem to have me on the right track for recovery from that, and my stress level has started to decrease now that I'm starting to feel better physically.  It kind of sucks when you're sick because you're so stressed out but being sick is the thing that has put you over the top of your stress tolerance.

Anyway, I'll leave it there. Give me a shout out and i'll try to check back and see how things are going.

PS if you have a photo sharing site you use to serve pictures, let me know what you're using and I'll check it out.  I told Photobucket to kiss my ass.  I took everything off of it and uploaded one 'artwork' that basically said "Goodbye Photobucket! You suck now" lol

Comments

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

I'm still around. I use imgur.com for photos

[ishte.livejournal.com]

Thanks @cornerofmadness. I checked it out and it seems to work satisfactorily. I appreciate the tip.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

No problem. It was actually developed in Athens OH (probably at OU but I'm not sure)

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

I'm still here but sporadically. I don't use Dreamwidth.

Haven't been doing much except work and taking care of Mom.

[ishte.livejournal.com]

I just sent you a message about Fragments Born of Pain. I didn't realize it wasn't finished. I thought I just didn't remember the end. lol. But I get it. Looking back, I realize that my writing troubles started right around the time I was working for that horrible company on the AT&T contract. It 100% ate me alive. I have had some levels of abuse at just about every job I've ever had until my current one. 5 years at my job now, and I feel like I'm still decompressing from a lifetime of job abuse.

The real trouble started when I got sick from sticking it out for my 18 months on that AT&T project. I should have followed some of my coworkers and gone to work for AT&T directly, but I didn't, and then besides the stress at work, my house was literally making me ill due to the dampness problems in the basement. I could barely hear most of the time because of the level of tinnitus I was experiencing, but I was still writing then. I had tried to sell the house for 2 or 3 years, and I knew I couldn't live in the house for another winter with the furnace blowing that musty moldy grossness all over the house I absolutely hated anyway. So I abandoned it and moved to a rental house which I really loved. I kept my normal writing setup for a while, but when I couldn't work for several weeks and then LOST my job due to my illness (clear violation of FMLA) I had only my meagre savings and MK business to live on once I was well enough again. I had to get a roommate, and ended up with TWO. lol... so the house got a lot fuller and a lot busier/noisier and at some point, I changed up my whole computer setup without realizing that I was also totally defeating my ability to write effectively. Who knew.

In retrospect I should have realized why I wasn't writing, but so many other things were going on, that time was going by much faster than I realized. I was creating. Just not in the same way. I was writing and recording music. I was out playing music too. I "adopted" an honorary "son" (one of the two roommates) who still calls me Mom to this day, and who my own daughter calls her brother too. Years went by and my "son" moved to Texas found his soul mate, moved to South Carolina and got married. My roommate, daughter, grandson and I bought a house which we love in 2016. I applied to work where I am now the day after we closed, but I never set up my writing station in a way I could use it. My daughter and grandson moved into a house 3 doors down from us, and my roommate and I converted my grandson's room into an office space. But even with my desk setup complete, and scheduled time set aside for writing, I just wasn't really doing it consistently. Then I started taking over the finished attic (formerly my daughter's bedroom and the more I set it up the more things came together, and I thought. "What if I go get that swing arm out of the basement and set up this spare monitor to this old computer up there...???"

Hmm... You can laugh, I have a brand new (bought last year ) HP Windows 10 computer in my nice office. Up here, I have and old Sony Vaio that is probably 20 years old running Windows XP (with all kinds of mods to allow it to function safely online since most browsers and stuff don't bother to support such and old OS and this computer isn't going to run Win 10 I don't think it could even run Windows 7. lol.) In fact, I'm 99% sure this computer is the same one I brought with me the last time I got out to visit you. You know what it has though? It has my original copy of MS Office 2003, which it runs perfectly on it. And it has a monitor attached to a swing arm clamped to a heavy wood table and a ratty little burlap loveseat for me to sit on with my keyboard in my lap. Now, despite everything else that's going on, I'm writing. I put my phone down for hours at a time, and I write consistently. It's like this old swing arm that I've had for close to 30 years was some kind of magic pill. lol! how did it take me 11 years to figures this out?

[silvrethorn.livejournal.com]

I'm still here, mostly lurking, but sometimes LJ is my go-to when there are things I want to say that my, ahem, politically diverse friends at the "other place" might start crap over. Sometimes being a bit exclusive (okay, sparsely-populated) is an advantage for a social platform. So glad to hear you're back writing. In the last four years I started a new job and lost both parents, so writing got sidelined. Like you, I'm just now starting to get my creative mojo back.

[ishte.livejournal.com]

I alluded to the fact that October had been extremely unkind to me. I hurt my foot in late September, and was off work for several days. Then just when that was starting to get better, my only brother passed very suddenly and unexpectedly on the 8th. He left work at his usual time in a good mood, feeling fine, and looking forward to a hunting vacation he was planning on in the next few days. It looks like he got home, and pretty much dropped dead as soon as he stepped into his house and shut the door behind him. He hadn't even closed his garage door. Over the years Mom has called me many times to pass on that someone had died. It's always been prefaced with the words "I have some sad news". Her sister used the same phrase to tell me that my dad had passed after a long illness. This time, when Mom called me, she said "I have TERRIBLE news". It was such a shock when she told me what happened. Aside from the obvious grief, the shock of it did very unkind things to my body, and I'm only just starting to feel like a "normal" human with some reasonable consistency again.

For a while, writing was like a respite I could escape into for a few hours when I wasn't too miserable with my guts to even do that. It was a temporary de-stress activity for me though. I'm thankful for that.

[yuukihikari]

Yeah, livejournal looks like a wasteland now :( its sad. I made myself stare at some CSS code (which I haven't looked at in like 10 years?) to fix some layout stuff.

I logged in because I got an email for your update haha. I'd been meaning to clean some stuff out on LJ. The service I think you're referring to is dreamwidth, it's not exactly all that alive either from what I can tell. The places to be seem to be tw*tt*r and t*mblr, both of which are exhausting. I'm trying to escape them and have been looking at dreamwidth a bit (I do have an old account there...)

Glad you're on the right track though! Life needs fewer stressors.

imgur is the go-to now that photobucket is trashed (but I think you know that now haha :D)

[ishte.livejournal.com]

yuukihikari, I totally forgot that we were friends on LiveJournal. I still have the CSS files for all my LJ spreads I think, and certainly have the graphics I made for them. I don't know about my mood icon sets. I love my little cloud one. I spent SO much time making them. lol. I'm very proud of them, so I'm glad I they were actually saved on LJ instead of in the bucket. I tested out imgur and that seems to work pretty well. Once I get finished with Chapter 17, I might spend a little time relearning out how to update my CSS and load one of my themes. I used to keep a paid accound because I kind of hate having my comments and reply pages look different than my main page. One of the things I always hated about FB was the lack of customization. I mean, seriously? can't format how anything appears other than a profile picture and a header that is constantly changing shape and size anyway? lol. Boring. FB is really about on my last nerve anyway. Seriously the only reason I keep it is that I have connections with members of my natural family that I wouldn't have without it.

[ishte.livejournal.com]

I actually went back and essentially rewrote some of my CSS code. It looks like LJ has removed one of the styles that I used A LOT for my layouts, which is inconvenient. I can still get access to ones I've made using it and just modify the CSS, but it means and extra step of annoyance. lol

[ookamikagakusha.livejournal.com]

I am still here (sometimes) I haven’t really read anything new except your current chapters of CTT. Feel free you message me anytime here or on fb (which I don’t post too much often) but I am super glad I am seeing some of my old friends! It brings me joy to read :) you all are so talented!

[ishte.livejournal.com]

Glad you're still here too!