Did you know you've been looking at a movie star every time you visit my actual blog page?

It's true!

If you've seen “Mission: Impossible III” and you know anything about Virginia geography, Ethan's headquarters are in Richmond and his wife works at a hospital that has a name that could be construed as a replacement for Southside Regional Medical Center in Petersburg. That also makes sense because they obviously have to live somewhere in the metro Richmond area.

Anyway, when he speeds off to save his wife, he gets there far too late because he drives by something that is not on the way to neither Richmond nor Petersburg and then is speeding down Dock Street past that very viaduct. Even if she worked at the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center, there would be no damn reason if it was a pressing situation to be on fucking Dock Street on your way to rescue her. I mean, he was on the fucking Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. If anything, I probably would have hauled ass to 460. Sussex County speed traps be damned. It makes no fucking sense. From where he was, he would have either gotten off the Interstate 64 in Williamsburg or I-295 in Varina and somehow thought Route 5 to Dock Street was a better option.

Maybe he dialed 511 and found out 64 was slow going in New Kent. But Dock Street? What the shit? Did you want Julia to get kidnapped so you had something to do?

This was probably the largest geography fail in Virginia film history since Pocahontas somehow found a waterfall that was within reasonable walking distance from Jamestown in the Disney film.

Stupid Tom Cruise.

I've been meaning to take pictures of the house next door but that would require effort. I would do so now but I'm sick and don't plan on getting out of bed until I go warm up lunch or something later on.

About two weeks ago, the front door was open again. I called the police and I'm guessing they contacted the property owner and made him put a padlock on the door. I had called the number on the for rent sign (which has the last four digits wiped off now; that happened after the city came by last time and I'm wondering if they did that) and nothing happened to rectify the shit that is that building. There is still garbage from the last people who moved out. I'm very certain a window is broken on the second floor. It looks like it hasn't been renovated in any way in at least 30 year (there's some siding on the front and I think on side that is probably from the 1980s). From what one can tell from the open front door, there is a door just hanging out in the living room and a sorry excuse for a paint job on the inside. I both want to know and don't want to know how much the rent is.

After the padlock was put up, a notice was posted on the door. I was an order to clean up waste in the yard. When I went on the porch to read the post, I noticed that the porch floor is sagging. The condemnation sign is still in the window.

Today, a few minutes ago in fact, the city called me to let me know a building inspector is heading over today. There is no way it is getting a free pass. Without studying the city code I know that some work needs to be done before it can be rented out (e.g. actually fixing the door; you can't rent a fucking house with a padlock to secure it). If it is to be condemned/closed, it needs to be properly secured. Although a boarded-up house is the last thing this block needs, I'd like knowing the odds of someone squatting in the building being lower. It's fun getting home after midnight to see a dark building next to you with the door wide open.

Hopefully, some good comes out of this. It's sorta a nice old house. It would be a shame for it to be torn down but if the twisted chain of ownership doesn't want to invest in it (it is not cost effective since the property value has gone up by association), so be it. My bedroom would have a view of something until a responsible person put up a house.

In an 11^th hour decision, I'm adding five chapters to my novel and it's going to be about 70,000 words or more when I'm done. I realized it presents the opportunity to convey something that I am experiencing and it fits perfectly with the plot. After I do this, FINALLY, I'll shop around for agents.

I'm not going all the way out to Abingdon anymore to write but I am holing up somewhere next Saturday. I might still get a hotel. I just need a change of venue, I think. I've also realized that, every time I've tried to go back to Washington County something has stopped me so I'm not going to try anymore. I think, at this point, I would be tempting fate. I've been there before. I've seen what I wanted to see. It's over.

But, anyway, I'm excited. It seems like what I'm adding in was what I was waiting for. I don't think I ever thought the book was incomplete but, until this came up, I realized it was.

I'm hoping to have something in hand by this time next year. Keep your fingers crossed.

It's a little hard to believe this was once a 25-part friends-only series on this very blog a few years ago that was only about 15,000 words and it's really cool that I preserved the first draft/outline that way.

I can't even elaborate on exactly why I got home from work an hour ago because one of them is a news story we can sit on till our Tuesday edition because I know only we have it. I love that. My newspaper comes out twice a week and we've been kicking ass all over the place. I just needed a competent writer and a multifaceted journalist whose craziness is greater than or equal to mine.

Today included me literally running around like a madman, yelling a my mom because she called about the weather at the worst possible moment (I apologized later and she completely understood when I explained why) and driving down dirt roads through a corn field because of a body that washed ashore in Charles City County (204 square miles, population 7,000).

It was amazing. And exhausting.

But, damn, I love my job.

I love that I'm moving more toward coordinating our coverage but I still get to literally run after a story. I wish we had more resources but we excelling with what we have.

But we could do better. Everyone can always do better.

I've definitely been slacking off lately and I hate myself for it. You're probably like “You're always at work. How are you slacking off?” I just feel that I am. I haven't been getting deep enough. I haven't really physically interviewed anyone for a week or two. I need to fix that.

Anyway, we need to do more. We already have a lot on our plates but we need to separate some wheat from the chaff. We can't do it all. Actually, we can but we need to work smarter and not harder.

One of my employees said a couple weeks ago that we could put another paper out of business if we knew what we were doing. That is correct. Our biggest hindrance is that I am the institutional memory and the leader and I'm only 27. For our paper, the world begins in March 2006 and not really then because I played no true attention to our coverage area until 2008. We have to learn as we go and that is wasting time.

We can't change that but I'm proud of what we've been able to do with what we have.

And that's why I can sleep well at night.

And why I'm tired enough to start that sleeping now.

Part of the reason for my hiatus from posting (beyond the general frequency of my posts dropping) was that my computer has been acting funny. Like taking 20 minutes to start up funny. It had been since June 28 but it got REALLY bad lately (like the 20-minute thing started last week). I thought I would have to get a new laptop early because it was so bad.

Of course, since I never give up on anything easily, I had to try my hand at fixing it once I was home for more than enough time to cook dinner and sleep and had energy to do something else. That probably won't come until NEXT weekend (guess who's working Saturday morning and plans on not getting out of bed Sunday?) so, in my lack of better judgment said, fuck it and set out to work on it last night.

I had to at least be definitely out of bed by 6:30.

I went to bed at 3:30.

If you don't give a shit about how I figured out how the fuck to fix my shitty computer, stop reading here. I'll do something interesting in a couple of three days. Promise.

Here's what happened:
Like I said, it started acting funny as I was fixing Shaunelle's virus-ridden computer. It was like something jumped from her computer to mine and I just hadn't had the time to take a good look at mine since then. The main problem was that I would restart, it would take forever to load and my page file usage would skyrocket. At its worst, I had to create a virtual memory file on my external hard drive so it would get to the point where it turned on my wireless. But, after that 20 minutes of dragging like nobody's business, it worked normally. In fact, it would run faster than when I got it (LSW4 was a gift and it came with Windows XP Media Center Edition with a bunch of useless crap I had to delete).

That made me figure it wasn't a virus.

But, when I opened Task Manager when all hell was breaking loose, it didn't show anything out of the ordinary beyond the astronomical virtual memory uses. So I hit the Internet. After some trial and error, I turned on a column in Task Manager and What the shit, services.exe?

Of course, there are like 18,999 viruses that create a false services.exe so almost everything online basically said to wipe the hard drive and start over. Fuck that. I don't take the easy way out. Furthermore, nothing stood out as this being an actual virus.

Finally, I got so some tech-savvy message board where someone had my issue after uploading a Windows update and was insistent that it wasn't a virus . Of course, he got nowhere because the Internet is for morons now and of course this pea brain with far more processing power than he'd ever need went to some free celebrity porn site and got the plague.

Eventually, someone suggested that the update was incompatible with something on his computer and he either needed to remove the program, remove the update or get a new computer. I did a search for the update to see what was incompatible, I found another board where someone was just as insistent as the other guy but there was seven pages of responses so something had to have been accomplished, I reckoned.

the guy had problems completely identical to mine. Completely. The only difference was that he had some sort of software on his computer I didn't have. Then, on the sixth page, I discovered that I did have the software.

As I was looking for solutions for Shaunelle's computer, I tested a couple things out on my laptop because her computer wasn't working enough to figure out how to work a program before it unleashed a legion of demons and crapped out. I had downloaded a "portable" program I was going to transfer over to her computer on my jump drive since she lost the Internet. I discovered it wasn't what she needed after I downloaded it to my computer and I deleted the folder. Since it was supposed to be "portable," I figured it didn't establish itself on my hard drive.

Wrong, wrong.

It set itself up in the registry and I should have uninstalled it like any other program. When I started my computer up, it was trying to start a program I incorrectly uninstalled and lead to services.exe freaking out. It was a rookie mistake but I was up till the wee hours fixing her computer when I did that to my own.

I had another fun moment deleting things in my registry (I hate doing that) and now everything works to the point where I can use this computer as a backup when I get a new laptop later in the year.

There are times that I'm too much of a nerd for my own good. But I do like doing this without any formal training. It makes me feel more bad ass.

Stop the presses. We have to get this press release I was just e-mailed on the front page.

BREAKING NEWS: The Man Christ Jesus (666) to Transform Himself in 2012

Miami, Florida – Jose Luis De Jesus, The Man Christ Jesus, once again makes history and shocks the nations by announcing today the exact date of the most awaited and most spectacular event in history – The Glorious Day of The Transformation, where His physical body will be transformed, dressed in immortality and incorruptibility (1 Cor. 15:53-54), in the same manner as Jesus of Nazareth experienced.

The evidences are irrefutable and the countdown has begun.

The prophecies foretold that Jose Luis De Jesus (666), the fulfillment of the Second Coming, would be given exactly 42 months of authority to act, as stated in Rev. 13:5 where Apostle John confusedly referred to Him as ‘The Beast’. Of these 42 months, Dec. 2008 to Dec. 2009 marked the fulfillment of 12 months since His ‘image’ was given power, thereby leaving an approximate 2 1/2 years left of judgment on Earth.

Haiti, Chile and recent alarming earthquakes are merely examples of what is yet to come during this judgment period. As today’s generation have made a mockery of Jose Luis De Jesus and have taken His Return all too lightly, the Earth groans. The planet will continue to witness the famine, earthquakes, and wars of Matthew 24:6-8 and Revelations 6:5-8 — foretold tribulations that would occur as part of God's direct wrath and judgment right before His transformation.

The signs of the times are clear. Thousands worldwide are marked with the number of His name, 666. The Earth’s rotation has accelerated to a speed of 66,666 mph. All prophecies are fulfilling, even scientific, astronomical and numerological formulae are aligning - all pointing to the year 2012, where the Puerto Rican-born Jose Luis De Jesus (Latitude 66.6°) curiously turns 66.

Throughout history, this date has been proposed inaccurately 59 times, however The Man Christ Jesus has spoken. The one and only ordained to communicate the date in which this would take place (Acts 17:31).

“Who is like the beast? Who is able to make war with him?” (Rev. 13:4). The King of kings, Lord of lords is here and His transformation – The Great Day of the Lord - will take place in our lifetime.

How can anyone refute this? THE EVIDENCES ARE IRREFUTABLE. So irrefutable, it is the first time that I, a man with a degree in English, have seen “evidence” in the plural form.

Everyone, everyone! Get ready! The end is nigh! On the 66^th day of the sixth month at exactly 6:66 p.m., The Beast, The Man Christ Jesus, Teh 666 himselfs, Jose Luis De Jesus de la Cruz del Sol Delaware y la Mancha shall give us the most SPECTACULAR event in history. There are only 715 days left!

I have to get out of here for a while.

After numerous false starts and oaths, I'm heading back to Abingdon. For those of you who have no idea why, I created a city and county adjacent to it back in 1998 and the universe of all of my creative writing since then has included or referred to it. Although I hadn't gone there before, I did a pretty good job of describing the topography. For the most part, the people there were an anomaly so I could remove them slightly from the overall culture of the region, about which I knew next to nothing.

In 2004, I finally went out there to see where I arbitrarily placed Imperial City and the adjacent Wessex County. It was a beautiful area but the ride back was marred by my 1989 Toyota Camry breaking down and a complete uncertainty in being able to return. I didn't truly drink in some of the most beautiful sights because I was cautiously eying my temperature gauge.

I made reservations in a hotel. I'm going back July 31. I'm going for the ride. I'm going to get out of this part of Virginia and clear my head. Most importantly, I'm going with the goal of ending the editing of my novel, which is set there, and writing my first query letters to literary agents.

I've been putting that off for long enough.

I don't think it's going to be the next bestseller but I have to at least try the traditional route. I have to do it. Although for at least the past four years, thousand of people have been reading my words weekly and I have won awards, this has been the last hill, the last bit of validation. I mean, what else do I have going for me beyond writing?

But, most importantly, I have to get away for a while. It's a long story that goes beyond the previous entry. Yesterday, which for many reasons I care not to talk about right now, was perhaps one of the most disappointing days of my entire life. It was a culmination. And I just need some alone time with an internal combustion engine, pen, a notebook, a laptop and a camera.

Premature edrunkulation.

I have a friend over who showed up drunk and passed out about two hours ago. Note the time.

When did I start becoming the sober voice of reason/the person who takes care of the drunkies?

Guess I'm paying the piper.

FOUR HUNDRED YEARS AGO, some of the first English-speaking settlers in the “New World” raided the village of Kikotan (Kecoughtan), killed many Native Americans and founded what would be later called the city of Hampton.

It's not a pretty founders' day but 400 years later, we can say something Jamestown cannot: we're still here. Our downtown caught fire three times. We've been buffeted by hurricanes. We've been rocked by wars. We had incompetent leaders. We lived in the shadow of the rest of Hampton Roads. We razed our mall. But we are 140,000 strong, including this expatriate. We are still here, the jewel of the Chesapeake Bay with the Coliseum as a crown.

Happy Birthday, Hampton.

I headed to the Floodwall Walk today. It was my first time on it. It's pretty sweet because it is one of the spots where you can clearly be surrounded by nature on three sides and the downtown skyline on the fourth. There were moments where it was hard to belive that I was dead center in a city of over 200,000 people.

I took a lot of pictures but I felt, out of all of them, these photos told the most.

Manchester is the more industrial side of Richmond. (There are some industrial areas along the Interstate 64/95 combo in Northside.)

I just fixed Shaunelle's computer. It took me over 24 hours. Part of my incentive for getting up at 4:30 was so I could get home and tackle it before she got home. I literally finished as she came through the door.

It was intense. I haven't had to root out a virus in a while, let alone 18 and a 35 GB hidden folder that pretended that it belonged to McAfee (the actual folder it was mimicking was where it was supposed to be).

So far, she's said it didn't run this fast when she got it.

Oh yeah. I'm fucking awesome.

And she's lucky I like here. I would have told anyone else and their computer to go fuck themselves well before I got figuring out exactly what the fuck was going on.

The day itself was low key since it was on a Wednesday and Thursday is our layout day. I didn't really want to do anything this year because, as the them was this weekend with my friends, I'm getting old. I know, 27 isn't that old but I can't rage hardcore like, for example, in the first year of this blog.

On Friday, I was still camped out at work at 9 p.m. because it's slowly becoming a hangout spot. It's a little sad that some of us were hanging out there on a Friday but I like the idea of people starting to view the newsroom as not just a place where they work.

But I digress.

I got a text to go out to celebrate my birthday. It was the one thing I had been dreading. I cancelled my birthday plans in D.C. and had nothing scheduled beyond going to Jay's wedding Saturday. In my mind, I may celebrate 30 but the era of week-long Elliott extravaganzas is over. I had fun, of course but, Saturday morning, I woke up with two hours to spare before the weeding and it was an effort.

On Saturday, I went to Jay's wedding and the Alpha Class from my fraternity chapter was there. Friends and roommates since the first day in 2001, brothers since 2003. It was interesting to think that the table contained Second Floor North of Santoro Hall. It was hard to believe I've known them for nine years.

Before I went to college, someone told me that it would be there that I find the people who will be my friends for the rest of my life, the people that, no matter how long you all are apart, will instantly make everything seem like old times. Jay and I are in and around Richmond. Brandon and Rob will probably be in Hampton Roads for a bit. Dorian is thinking Texas. Pete could be anywhere in about a year with his doctorate. Jay is the first of us to get married. Although we have been spreading out, we have been there for all of our triumphs thus far and will be in the future. I have a few friends I have known for longer but looking back at our lives yesterday was incredible. At some point at the reception, I realized the six of us at that table had an unshakable bond since August 2001, one that went even beyond our fraternity. It caused us to be the founding class of our chapter. At some point, we truly became brothers. I guess it was what we always wanted to share.

Later on, Pete and I headed to a kickball field party in Hanover. Two of our other friends from college were there. Pete got to see my Richmond experience firsthand. It's laid back. He thought I was joking when I told him that I sometimes go out side and wait for something to happen and it usually turns into something along the lines of "Hi, I don't know you. Want a beer?" I mean, I dress like a 60-year-old man (I'm a day away from tucking in my shirt and wearing suspenders) and I have a hipster beard. I'm probably the less threatening person in a social situation full of strangers ever.

Again, it was a very relaxing night but it was in no way boring. I definitely lost my ability to spell. Shaunelle seemed to be amused at the English major losing his superpowers.

Today, I'm going to get around to cleaning my room and go see No BS play their first set in Hopewell. I'm kinda excited about that. I mean, Hopewell is this thing 20 miles away from the city where I work. I don't have enough fingers to count the number of times I've had to tell people where it is (people have heard of it, of course ... I say kepone or mention odors and suddenly it's OH! THERE!). It's just that my general happiness is directly proportional to the exposure No BS gets in the entire world. I'm fucking proud of Reggie. I can say I've known him since the first day of sixth grade, saw his love of music blossom and that he wrote one of my favorite songs. I love it when my friends kick ass.

As you all know, I always get introspective on my birthday. It's when I sit for a minute to reflect on everything that has happened. I guess it is my version of searching for the meaning of life. I'm content with the answer to Why am I here? being This.

Once I make this a real website, I'm going to start doing pullout quotes.

I've been up for nearly two hours. I had an exhausting day of not being in front of a computer. (I've decided that I'm reclaiming my Saturdays and I no longer do any type of work on them. It's already bad enough that Sunday has become a work day and I really can't get around that just yet.)

I went to sleep before 11 p.m. My body considered that a nap for some reason. I would have been a little OK with waking up around six but not 3:45. I turned my phone and computer off with the hopes of being asleep till like eight or something. No. No. 3:45. I got a glass of water and tried to go back asleep but gave up about half an hour ago.

There is some work I could be doing but I really don't want to do it right now. Because it's 5 a.m. on a Sunday. And I'm really annoyed that I'm awake. But there are so many things I could be doing. ...

Because I've become a workaholic. There. I've said it. It's part of the reason that I have now made an effort to find something else to do on Saturdays. I go into work anywhere between 6:30 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. I leave anywhere between 6:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. Some of those days have been 6:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. I at least write articles on Sundays. In theory, I don't have to be there physically today but I might just to save myself some grief tomorrow morning. I'll still need to be there early because it is a production day.

At least I'm taking back Saturday.

The question is: why am I spending so much time at work?

I really do like the concept of my job but I think I like being there because it gives me an excuse to ignore everything else. I'm having second thoughts about serving as a national officer in my fraternity for another term (in a different capacity) because I've begun to ignore e-mails once I get home (which is a good thing considering that I'm starting to overwork myself). I don't want to start shirking duties either. I've already have two voicemails I haven't checked and I really should and I'm using being busy/trying to cut so much business from my life as an excuse. And that's not good.

I crashed and burned last week. For two days, I pretty much didn't leave my house and I felt like crap. The second day, I had all intentions of going to work and then, the next thing I knew, I was back in my bed fully dressed.

It's great that I care a lot about work but I'm pushing myself too far. I'm using it as an excuse to ignore my mom becoming a crazy bird lady because she has really nothing else to do in her retired life beyond caring for her invalid daughter and worrying that her son is going to call and say that he's decided that he is going to sail across the Pacific in a bathtub and, in fact, is calling from 240 miles west of Catalina. Because most of my crazy adventures are attempts to keep myself from having some sort of real crisis and attempting to sail across the Pacific in a bathtub.

Anyway, I threw myself into work because I just wasn't ready to deal with things and falling off my bike knocked me down a couple pegs. But now I want to focus on other things and the way I'm going about dispatching of some of my duties isn't very good. I now know the newsroom won't fall apart if I'm not there, especially unexpectedly. I definitely don't have the time to hold a national position in my fraternity right now. I have a second dental consultation on the 30^th. I want to go out and really explore Richmond again. My sister is going to die a shell of her former self and sometimes avoiding Hampton like the plague isn't going to make that go away.I need to write a fucking query letter to a literary agent. I need to get my shit together.

And, thankfully, I'm getting sleepy again so I can start this day later. And hold off on testing the buoyancy of a bathtub.

You are seeing right: I changed the header image.

Since 2005, this site was known in part from the header image and the links involved the roadways involved in the photo.

There was a lot of symbolism in that photo and it is far too late in the night to go into that now but I officially live in Richmond now so I figured it was time for the header to match my location.

This is a railroad viaduct along Dock Street in Richmond. Actually, this viaduct starts west of Fulton Yard in Henrico County and parallels the Richmond riverfront for nearly the entire length of the city. It's not exactly the photo I wanted but neither was the one of the Interstate 664 viaduct over 39^th, Marshall and Madison.

It'll take some getting used to. There are other viaducts in the city, thanks to the topography. This may change. I also think I need another theme for the navigation. It seems so plain now.

Overall, it's so weird. My Richmond license is coming in the mail. I'm registered to vote here. This city is my home. This house is legally my home. This blog now reflects that RVA is my RVA.

It's kinda funny. I can't belive I changed it.

I swear, if I do not win an award for taking the photos on this page and designing this page, I am going to go completely Kanye West at the Virginia Press Association Awards next March in Norfolk. I swear this is perhaps the greatest thing I have done in my entire life thus far. Remember that I had no idea how to use Quark this time last year. I can only imagine what I'll be capable of in a couple years.