I’m ready to call this one a success. The only sports I’ve event paid attention to is ETSU’s game in the first round of the NCAA tourney. That was it. I didn’t even watch the freaking Super Bowl! The spell is broken, freeing up time for reading, writing, and other things.
...I’m just terrified of crashing.
I think this sort of sums up my issue. I’m not really scared by the act of flying or even dying. I’m scared of the possible ways of dying as a result of flying. Make sense?
This phobia is one that has taken root in me sometime in the last 6 years or so. There was a time that flying never bothered me, actually I looked forward to it. And then I snapped.
It first hit me when I wanted to fly to visit family in South Carolina from Vermont, where I lived at the time. I got the time off of work, booked my flight, and let everyone know I was coming. Then, a week before I was supposed to go, it hit me… oh shit I’m getting on an airplane.
I went through with the trip, and when I’d landed in Philadelphia after the first leg from Burlington, VT I actually felt a bit silly about losing sleep for week about it. However, instead of it being a one time freak out it has just gotten worse at time goes on.
The last time I flew was about 4 years ago to a conference in Boston for work. I couldn’t sleep for weeks leading up to the day, literally drank my face off before boarding here locally and during a stopover in Charlotte. By the time we were ready to leave Charlotte for Boston I would have flown on a winged unicorn…
Now I avoid air travel at all costs. Two years ago when I had to take a business trip to Chicago I rented a car and drove 11 hours instead of flying. Last summer when my brother got married in New Jersey I rented a car and drove over 13 hours.
However, this summer, I have an event that I must fly to. As in there is no physical way to drive a car to it. So here I go… trying to attempt to figure out some way around this fear.
This week I setup www.floatcamp.org as a way for people to get information about the event and add their information, etc… Several people involved and wanting to attend complained about the main BarCamp website and the fact that it was yet another login you needed (however I do think that site allows for OpenID now). So we thought it would be a good idea to get our own domain.
Me being bored as usual of everything decided it was a good chance to play around with Google’s App Engine. I found some existing example Wiki code and went from there. So far so good. And if it wasn’t for the fact that you have to use Python I’d probably do a lot more with that App Engine.
The date of the event is also solid now. March 28, 2009.
This thing is still one, and is being morphed and and changed as we speak. The group Will This Float? that I’m a board member of has secured the space and we are starting to get the word out.
Technically… it is being called a FloatCamp because, well, the Will This Float? group has started the planning and there are some set presentations and events that we will be doing. So we didn’t want to straight up call it a BarCamp because they, typically, are completely free form with nothing being set until that day.
That being said, there is plenty of timeslots and space for anyone to show up and speak and share their knowledge… so it is half BarCamp and half a Will This Float? event.
The date, tentative I think is March 28th. It had been set for March 21st but that is the weekend of the Bristol Nascar races in this area… a time when pretty much everything shuts down. Except for the racecars that is.
The biggest next step is making sure we get the word out. What if you had a BarCamp and no one showed up. We are aiming for 150 people.
I’ve got to be a bit more mindful of this resolution. I never drink soda at home, only when at a restaurant usually and just out of habit sometimes I’ll order a Coke.
So this is something that I said I would do this year. Scary. In 5 years, I’ll be 39 years old. Almost 40 and that terrifies me.
So this morning I’d started scribbling down some notes in an effort to get started on this and I’m just wondering how specific you have to be with these things. In my mind I’ve got this idea that one of the points of my 5 Year Plan would be:
Become comfortable and satisfied with where I’m living.
This is something that deals, potentially, with two specific things:
The house I live in
The town I live in
The House
When we first bought our house I loved it for about 6 months. Since that time it has become this big fat gouging thorn in my side. A lot of days, I simply hate the place.
I feel like we got a pretty good deal on the house, the monthly payments are very much within out means. We knew when we moved in that there were a lot of things that needed updating such as the kitching, the bathrooms, and the roof. The big mistake was in buying such an old house. Every time you turn around something is breaking which is constantly taking away from the other things we want/need to get done.
2008 had to be the low point for me because I just sort of gave up on the place and became what I’ll call “adaptable”. That big hole in the wall that we had to rip out to get to the busted pipes in the wall… yeah I can totally ignore that because I’m sick of this place and don’t want to think about it. Shutters on front of he house need to be replaced? So what, I’ll ignore that too because I’ve got no extra money and I’m totally pissed off at this house.
I guess I need to figure out if I’m going to walk away from this place and try to break even (easier said than done in this economy) or put on my big boy britches, buckle down, and stop ignoring this house that haunts my days and nights.
The Town
I have a thought at least a few times weekly that involves us packing, pulling up stakes, and running back to Burlington, VT. It is a place that I miss, a lot, and was simply a wonderful place to live. Awesome downtown, great music scene, and a big huge mess of delicious local restaurants and fun bars. This is partially why Becky and I find ourselves over in Asheville so much. I long for being able to park my car downtown and then spend the whole day/evening eating, drinking, shopping, and hanging out. I’ll argue with anyone that this is impossible currenly in Johnson City.
But things in Johnson City aren’t all that bad. I’m involved witha lotof things here that I may not have been able to get involved with if I had lived somewhere else. Maybe. I’ve got a few good, smart, friends here that I would miss if I did jump ship. If I didn’t have to drive an hour or more every time I wanted to see a show that would make things better.
Wow this is harder than I thought. In 5 years, where do I see myself living?
Got the wiki page setup. Jose has a domain already… now we need a couple of logos. One for BarCamp TriCities… one for FloatCamp TriCities.
Having a BarCamp here in the Tri-Cities is something I’ve wanted to do for quite some time. Actually I figured someone else or some group would get around to it first and I’d just get to attend.
Using the momentum we got from the November 2008 Will This Float? event, the group of us responsible for that are plunging headlong into a BarCamp.
Initially we were thinking another early ‘09 Will This Float? event, but I think it is going to grow towards a BarCamp type event with a Will This Float? event as a main item… but others are welcome to organize whatever other SubCamps they want during the time depending on time/space constraints.
Today I went ahead and started a wiki page off the main BarCamp site:
http://www.barcamp.org/BarCampTriCities
Now I need to get someone to create a snazzy logo :)
I’ve got a lot of creative friends both local and remote and the run the range of full time artists to people I love swapping stories with over beers.
For a while now I’ve had this idea where I want to do a one time literary/art journal and get all of my friends to submit. A fun project for the year where I ask all of them to submit a story or a poem or a photograph or a drawing or just a two paragraph reason why I should buy a bottle of their favorite wine. If they don’t want to send something in I’d ask them to pass it on to someone else.
In the end I’d gather it all up, pick the best stuff, and get a book made just in time to give one to everyone as a gift. There are some great services now (www.blurb.com) that look like they could assist in that process. Probably would put it up online somewhere to.
Crazy idea? Think it would work… I think so.
I’m not nearly the sports nut that I have been in the past, but in the last few years I feel like I’m wasting cycles on something that I don’t really get any return on. Why spend that 10-15 minutes a day reading the sports page or that hour a day watching Sportscenter when I could be reading a book or learning something useful? If I were to actually achieve this goal in 2009 it would be off in 2010 because of the World Cup… of course.
