I am very much like both my fathers, it seems, in a very interesting way. Keeping busy keeps me sane, or at least keeps me from being certifiable. Some people fight stress by watching TV, some do it by sleeping, some by arguing and fighting. Some deal with stress by drinking, but my stress relief is projects. I have at any point in time 5 projects at least on the go. Some never get finished, some get lost for various reasons, and some do get finished. Projects keep my mind focused, and helps me deal with life without hurting others emotionally or physically.

When I was young, I had a very bad temper. My whole family can attest to this. They have stories of me trying to strangle my baby brother when I was 2 years old. I would just explode at people for apparently no reason. This side of me used to terrify me. Now it takes a lot to bring this side of me out, and very few people in my adult life have seen it. I am thankful for that.

How do I keep stress from releasing this part of me? I keep busy and focus the energy on a project. When I was in Korea I had a Linux Red-hat server running with a radio station playing on it for my friends and I was programming a MySQL/ PHP based Role playing game. I would come home from work, and sit there for hours just staring at code. It relaxed me. Strangely enough, it seemed that the once or twice a month I would go out for a drink with a friend, THAT was when my family would call me. So I’m sure they felt that I was always out partying. I have lost the backups of this game that I was working on, which is alright, because when I look back upon it very little of it was mine. I had used copyright free graphics, code patches made by other programmers, and the whole system was built on a free to download package, so it served its purpose, and I feel no real loss of it.

When I lived in China with my family I built board games. I would find print and play games, and put them together. Games like “Smallville the board game”, “ Bewitched the card game”, “Hot death Uno” or “Dora the Explorer: Dora Rocks”. I would also find games from my past that were not available in China, like “Sorry” or “Rummoli” and I would hand draw, print, laminate, the pieces and cards. I was making them for the kids but the kids were too young to play them. I had to give those up when we returned to Canada, but I still have the digital files to start again with later.

Here in Canada I find myself collecting free digital comics. Some of them already compiled into the CBR (ComicBook Reader) format, some of them are webcomics that I have to design cover pages for each issue for. I locate, download, resize, page layout, cover design, made little adverts for the other comics I work on to put in the issue, and then combine into the CBR format. Any comics That are professionally made, and paid for I do not edit, that would be rude of me. But I do sometimes take older comics magazines that have 4 or 5 different stories & Heroes in them, and separate those into their own issues. I also try to translate foreign comics to English before I combine them. I started to translate Cybersix from the original Italian, but there was too much nudity and sex for my liking, so I removed it from my list. (The animation was awesome, but I don’t keep “Adult” comics.)

Over the years I have written quite a bit, lost some of the writings, and re-written. These are the ones that I regret losing. I am currently trying to write a book, using expanded and clarified versions of my old Psychosix stories. It is fun, as I have to introduce the characters before they can jump into the action, whereas before they didn’t need that. If anyone out there has any of my old stories backed up somewhere I would love to get copies of them back, I find that some of the ones I want to work with the most are missing. In fact anything I have written in the past would be greatly appreciated.

Working on these projects is both relaxing and fun. I always look forward to the finished project and sharing the projects with others, so feel free to ask what I’m working on at any time. But please do not ask the one question I hate when I’m in a project “Is it important?” because that is a mean question, and I will begrudgingly say “no… no its not”. Because it is not important to the survival of my family, it won’t pay the bills, but it does keep me from exploding. And non-explosive Chad is a good thing.