Crappy Work-Weekend
This weekend was supposed to be a “working weekend” where I got caught up on a bunch of projects. The application I’ve been working on for the Spirit project has done nothing but drive me fucking NUTS. Basically anything I do results in finding yet another problem and having to solve it, etc. Not in the program it’s self, in the friggin’ development environment. WTF?
On the other hand, editing the stuff from Equifest hasn’t gone TOOO bad – the second camera footage that someone found sucks, so a lot of post-processing work had to go into it. And the two cameras had nothing similar for settings, plus the video when it showed up had been burned to DVD, so I lost some fidelity from that. Audio from both cameras is attrocious. But, it’s amazing what you can do to clean things up in post production.
I’ll probably make the one minute cut for the website tonight, which means I’ll embed a copy of the .flv encoded version on here next time I post (just because I can 🙂
I would have really liked to have tackled multiple projects this weekend, so I could start getting part of my list o’ crap whittled down. It really is getting kind of insane. There’s always tomorrow night to get caught up, and tonight isn’t over yet (I’m posting this while some video for Equifest is encoding.)
Cheating!
Wednesday and Thursday I’ll be working outside. The sun is NOT my friend. First there’s a like four years of being adverse to being in the sun because I had a serious issue with photosensitivity (IE – I was bloody allergic to the sun! How fucked up is that!) On top of that, I sunburn real easily. And can’t use sunscreen because whatever is in it (same thing found in a lot of soaps – a phosphate, if I remember right) causes me to be photosensitive. Hrm. Tanning lotion, BTW (was a random idea) doesn’t have the same effect (though I can burn then.) And when I do have the reaction, it’s not painful, it’s just ugly – I get big red welts all over where the sun was (which is how I initally figured out what the hell was going on – the “rash” would stop EXACTLY where my shirt started. A little testing of the theory, and I knew part of what was going on.) They don’t hurt – they do itch like crazy. And just to make things as funny as possible… when I do have the reaction I don’t get sunburns. No matter how long I’m in the sun. WTF? The reaction lasts two weeks before it goes away.
Heather and I had gone through quite a few different ideas trying to eliminate it. The solution was changing to Purex for my clothes, Ivory soap, being extremely careful about what hair products I use, etc. I’m extremely particular about EVERYTHING that goes on my skin. Even lotions – it can only be Vasoline Intensive Care or other Vasoline products that I use. Â
But that brings me around to next week – now I’ve got to be out in the sun with minimum protection. Fuck. Do I go for a sunburn, or do I go for an allergic reaction? One of the ideas that Heather had was trying to do something to get a tan (which we never managed to pull off) first, and see how things went after that.
OK, fuck it – it’s worth a shot. So, I bought Vaseline Intensive Care Healthy Body Glow. It’s got a self-tanner in it. Hrm. I’ve tried it for a day now – so far, no reactions, and yes, it has tanned me a bit. Oddly enough, no one else noticed any difference except me :-) I’m going to use it for a couple o’ days, then use sunscreen on Wen / Thurs while I prep and pour concrete.
I consider self-tanner to be cheating – if ya can’t tan, ya can’t tan. It’s that simple. I validate doing this in my mind because it’s an experiment to see if I can find a nice balance between big red welts and sun burn. When I was buying it, a piece of vanity passed through my head for a moment – Tammy had told me once that “Tanned fat looks a lot better than untanned fat.” Hm – well, that’s pretty true really, so at the same time I’m now looking at it as a vanity thing too.
Ye gods I hope this works. I hate sunburns, and I hate the stupid red welts. Cross your fingers!