Author: Kalin

I should be writing more. Almost two weeks since last entry. I keep thinking of things to say and don’t find the time (or energy) to say it but I tend to feel much better when I do.We got two cats at my house. Don’t think we introduced them properly. The sister (Nikita) abandoned her brother and climbed up into the basement ceiling to hide while the brother (Odie) isn’t really a climber so he’s trying to acclimate to the house by himself. He’s slowly warming up, but their fear…

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My chest still hurts. I’m not sure what happened but yesterday I was burping all day but it wasn’t painful. Then I woke up in the middle of the night and my chest hurt. I assumed it was a pulled muscle and went back to sleep but then when I woke up I started getting paranoid, thinking about a friend who recently told a story of her dad ignoring a heart attack then finding out what it was years later when the doctors did an x-ray and found his heart…

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It’s been a chill weekend for me, which is rare. I’m almost always doing something, party event, a trip or a big dinner or something. It feels like it’s been months since I’ve just been able to take a weekend all to myself.The timing worked out as my roommate has COVID. I think I may have it too, as I felt real tired yesterday and groggy. So it’s good it happened on a weekend I was already looking forward to doing nothing.I’ve been consuming audio. Funny that self-help and educational…

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I wanted to talk more about immigration and my experience working for Anagh Technologies, kind of continuing from my last entry. The whole thing about Anagh Technologies was they would sponsor immigrants, get them their green cards, then guarantee them a job. Since they work directly for Anagh, and Anagh just rents them out to anyone who wants their skills, they don’t need to worry about being deported when they lose their job. Anagh just keeps them on the salary and gets them another position.The problem seems to be that…

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Tonight I wanted to tell the story of the two years I spent working for Anagh Technologies. Someone the other day told me they feel safe around armed guards because they are given background checks.So I have a story about background checks.On the one hand, Anagh was probably the shadiest company I’ve ever worked for (which includes Boss Tweed fish and chips in Bellingham where my boss once whispered to me that our illegal fishing practices had actually caused the Arctic Rose disaster which killed 15 fishermen.)Okay so in 2014…

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Okay am I gonna talk about how great my life is again–strange I keep wanting to do that now when my entire life up until recently, I’ve always wanted to use writing as an expression of my anger, frustration and negative thoughts and granted, I was often trying my best to turn it into something positive, but up until recently almost all of my writing–well there’s a lot of joy in my stories I write–but especially with my journal, i mostly only wrote when I was upset about something.Now I…

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I went to Kennywood yesterday and it was cold as balls but still surprisingly fun despite none of the real coasters being able to run in that temperature.Been thinking about how great my life is and why–that’s really the important thing to analyze for me is why did my life turn out so great?, I know it’s due to my decision making, and I know in general what I’ve done right, but sometimes it’s hard to pin down the specifics of your own behavior patterns.But I’ve been thinking, really it’s…

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Figured I should write a thanksgiving entry because it’s like it’s kind of mind boggling how much I have to be thankful for these days. It’s after 1AM but I figured I’d stay up late tonight and bust this out. I wasted some time today playing Brotato. Not sure what’s wrong with me. Can hear my roommate downstairs playing it. Got a couple more friends into it.It’s not good. Like crack.But I did work on customd.app earlier today and last weekend I spent most of the weekend working on it…

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I’d like to say I’ve been busy and that’s why I haven’t written in a week but I’ve actually been struggling a little to stay productive.I blame Brotato.I need Brotato intervention. I used to make fun of my roommate for being addicted but now I think I’m worse than she is.I did work on my app, customd.app a little last weekend, upgrading angular to 18. I really really really need to get back into that. I use it for so many different things in my life and I’m convinced that…

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Are we still doing the whole “trigger warning” thing? It occurred to me that I’ve totally stopped worrying about doing that. Probably for the best. Trigger warnings, and the overall mentality that we need to be protected from ideas and stories is really counter productive to the long term mental health and stability of our whole society.But maybe I should give a trigger warning for my aunts and mom and others in my family.I’ve held a lot of bitterness for a lot of years and it’s time to talk it…

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Oh man, I don’t think I’ve been this depressed since the COVID lockdown.I wish I could just be selfish. I’m a cis white male and real-estate investor. From a purely selfish level, it won’t be that bad for me assuming we don’t have a civil war, which is a huge assumption. But most of my friends and partners are queer or trans, at least here in Pittsburgh, so I fear for their safety.And you know, the other thing is that I think that my message and strategy on life will…

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I’ve been getting rather sad lately, at least sad by my standards, about the election. I’m pretty confident that Trump is going to win, which effectively, to me, means that half the country kind of wants me dead. At least that’s what it feels like after my long list of experiences with Trump supporters. They want me to suffer and die for who I am.It’s just hard to accept. Yeah, i know that sounds super hyperbolic but it wouldn’t seem that way if you understood where I was coming from…

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So all that whining in this journal about not being worked hard enough payed off. The gods heard me and gave me stuff to do. So the next day I went to the Hard Rock shelter and yes, it was an inappropriate place for a shelter being attached to a huge casino. I wound up getting in 25k steps in loading and carting peoples stuff down through the casino to buses. It was chaos. On my first run I was stopped by some guy I don’t remember if he was…

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Sunday Oct 20 AgainNow it’s 10PM and I’m back in my hotel room. Plans have changed again. I stayed up til breakfast then slept til almost 5PM and then got a call telling me that I’m no longer on night shifts and I’m no longer assigned to the Mega-Shelter. Now I’m going to a shelter at a Hard Rock Cafe and casino. I thought that shelter was shutting down because an operating casino is not an appropriate place to be sheltering families. They must need me to help shut it…

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Sunday October 20It’s 3:15 AM and now I’m sitting in the lobby of a different hotel trying to stay up until 5AM to prepare myself for the midnight shifts that I signed up to handle at the new “mega-shelter” which apparently is a big deal because it’s bigger and more comfortable than the vast majority of shelters that Red Cross has done in the past. I visited and did a walkthrough earlier this evening as many of their crew were finishing up their last shift. It’s in this giant empty…

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Thursday October 17 2024Today was an emotion packed day and almost entirely negative emotion. Well, maybe not entirely.I finally started doing things for Red Cross. Went to a couple shelters and yes they do exist they aren’t some kind of hoax and did shelter transition triage (SRT) basically asking the clients a series of questions to gauge their situation. They told me a lot of stories. That’s a big part of our job is just to listen to their stories, many of which have nothing to do with the disaster–well…

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Wednesday Oct 16Now I’m sitting on a surprisingly comfortable cot in a giant tent in the parking lot of whatever water park–Adventure Island– is across the street from Busch Gardens in Tampa Florida. So I got to Miami Friday evening then saturday a couple hundred of us Red Cross volunteers met in a ballroom and basically just got signed in and then they sent us out to wait. They gave us hotel rooms at this place right by the airport, the Marriott. I did have a roommate for the first…

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I’m super frustrated with myself and my situation today. I was on my way to Miami Florida with Red Cross today to help with sheltering after hurricane Milton, but I did something real stupid. Somehow I did not set my alarm in my phone. I could swear I did it but maybe it was actually the scheduling of my uber that I remember but I thought I also did the alarm, but now I look and it’s just not there in my phone. I woke up at like 5AM and…

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Now I’m in Charlotte north Carolina airport. Not having fun right now. My first return flight was late so I missed my connecting flight and no they did not give me a hotel room or a reimbursement or even an apology. I think that makes these situations worse when people keep telling you that you’re entitled to refunds or a hotel room, but the airline makes it clear you get nothing. They act like they’re doing you a favor getting you on a flight to the place you paid to…

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I’m sitting in Chicago–yeah, Chicago, I just checked my American Airlines app to make sure where I was. Been here all day, just chillin in this airport. Not my choice of course. My flight was originally supposed to leave around 9AM after just a 40 minute layover, but they changed it on me and gave me no choice in the matter. I shoulda paid for the flight insurance since my job is paying for it but I don’t feel right about charging the company for those kinds of luxuries.Airports are…

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I want to write about my web development career and the story of how everything started. In the past I think I’ve always wanted to tell stories from my past that had some sort of specific moral or political purpose, but now with this new format I feel like telling other types of side stories that might mean a lot to me personally but I guess… I’m not sure why I never told these types of positive stories–maybe that’s what it is–this story is almost all positive and joyful. Writing…

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Not sure what I’m here to talk about. It’s late. I try to go to bed at midnight but that’s a light try, a half-assed try. I have 23 minutes to.Roommate’s been playing Brotato all day long. The constant beat of that game is sinking into my soul, it’s right below me. She’s unlocked just about every item and still going. It’s on my account so I get all the achievements. Too bad I don’t care haha.I turned my XBox gamepass back on, saying it was just for one month.…

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I came to do a free write about any topic that comes to mind, specifically the book I just finished A Liberated Mind by Steven C Hayes. This was one of the best self help books I think I’ve ever read–or at least in the top 10% — or listened to — I wonder if people will call me out for saying I’ve read something when I really just listened to it.But anyway just before coming here I happened to be on facebook and saw an ex of mine posted…

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I was gonna talk about Tool’s Flood and the time I was sucked under a pile of logs on the Nooksack river–I guess that’s what I will talk about.Listening to Toadies Rubberneck. Suppose I should have Tool’s Undertow on right now but Toadies is cool too.Flood is about 4 minutes of a grinding, painful introduction followed by a moment of transition and revelation, continuing into an intense, increasingly complex and adrenaline fueled progressive rock masterpiece about a changing and twisting life perspective, surrounded in this metaphor where water is life,…

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I have so many things I want to talk about in this journal — writing in here is much like exercising for me. I never want to do it, but afterward I feel much better about myself and the universe around me. I guess one difference is that here once I start writing I never want to stop. It’s only the motivation to get started that’s an issue.But okay, let’s do the favorite song thing. I don’t know why but I just feel the need to write, like the universe…

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