Being a homeowner can be a tough thing sometimes. What is even more tough is when you start dealing with septic systems. They plug up, they refused to drain, the tank gets full.... and all sorts of wonderful challenging things happen. We recently went through a stint where our septic wasn't doing well. We decided the tank was full and wanted to have it pumped. This was after my husband had gotten intimately involved with snaking out the line from the house to the tank... then from the tank into what he thought was the house line. At the same time, since we live on a corner property, some jackass had probably gotten drunk, drove through our pasture, right through our drainfield and dukes of hazzard up and over our septic and out our driveway - potentially causing a whole host of issues. So, after not being able to fix it ourselves, we figured we'd call a pro and have them pump it so we could at least see what the issue was.

I asked around to my friends at work (who all live in the boonies and deal with this topic often) and got a recommendation for a company that was local. They came out friday, and wow... I didn't know I was signing up for a college course in poo 101. First off, our tank didn't need to be pumped. That was great news because its horribly expensive. We have, it seems 3-5 years left to leave deposits before it becomes necessary. Secondly, the sneaky thing had three chambers... baffled... off either side of the main tank we weren't aware of. So... in essence, we pulled the drain field side of it, and that was functioning perfectly. We pulled the house side, and whallah... after having problems with it since around July, we found the issue. That baffled chamber was completely stuffed and compacted with material. Everything we were flushing was going into it, or trying, and not being able to get into the main tank itself.

The septic guy, a 31 year old homeboy with an absolute love of septic systems sat there and lectured...

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I don't do milestone posts too often, unless they are about the fantastic Hardy-Ramanujan number, which I celebrated when we hit 1729 posts and deserves further celebration when we hit 1729 threads, 1729 registered users, 1729 files in the lore, you get the idea.

It's February 1 in this corner of the world, though, and that means six months of Mizahar. Our first six months. We launched on August 1, 2009 and it's been a great ride. Most play-by-posts don't even last this long; they die within the first few months as the initial drive runs out and people move on to the next great idea. My worry when we started Mizahar wasn't that we would fold, honestly. I knew we wouldn't, because what causes a site to collapse is the admins/owners abandoning the project. I like to think I'm someone who gets things done, and so are the other Founders. My worry was that we might have a lot of trouble attracting people to the site, partly because of the difficulty in advertising a PbP and partly because of Mizahar's nature. The decision to keep Elves out the door did not come without a discussion on appeal and demographics. In truth, we didn't really know much about our 'market' as we didn't play on a lot of sites before Mizahar.

It turned out I'd underestimated the RPers on the web. I think the setting is now one of our main selling points, so to speak. The other side of the problem was a little more frustrating. Advertising a new PbP is kind of hard. Advertising without taking affiliates is even harder. You always start out at the bottom of all lists, surrounded by tons of dead sites. I think a lot of sites die while in the process of climbing through the piles of deader sites. I won't even talk about all the rejections I got from specialized directories, and the huge waiting times elsewhere. That's why I did Google ads for a little while, and they helped us a bit, bringing a few really cool people to the site.

But yeah, startup's not easy. We tried a banner exchange, only to discover...

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Sometimes everything is fine, and I’m all happy and cheerful and joking all over the place. I’m surprised how good everything goes, how perfect most of my countless little problems work out without me doing anything special. I’m just doing what I’m doing all the time, and the flow of life is perfect – perfect harmony.

But that state isn’t endless. Then, one day, I always wake up and think: This is going to be bad. And then the bad days start. They are always different, and of different length. A few hours, two days, a week … and, if I’m not paying attention, weeks and weeks and weeks. I think my record was one or two months, last spring. It was horrible. My grades are one of many visible proofs.

Since then I’ve learned a lot. To be particular, I’ve especially learned a lot in the past two weeks or so. A book, it’s called “The Artist’s Way”, showed me the way and did the majority of the work. The rest I did without thinking much about what I was doing. I just tried it out.

I’m big when it comes to trying things out, exploring new challenges and projects that look like fun. Maybe I’m even bigger at lying projects down again and deciding that they carry too much responsibility and seriousness for me. I like to have fun – but I don’t like if that fun becomes a regular duty. The ‘you have to’ hart makes it stale and grey. Not fun anymore.

I wonder why it’s always this way. I’ve started twice as many things as I’ve finished, likely more, I’m just guessing now.

But why does that have to happen to me? Everything is perfect, and then … everything vanishes somehow. I’m ignorant. I mean, in theory I know that the world is neither perfect nor working on it’s own, without any help from me. Working with that principle is a lot more difficult for me.

I guess I’m just rambling anyway, haha. I don’t want to be that way.

It also is a problem that I let myself fall into that bad mood – and then I turn on some sad music, read the blog of a very lovely, but sometimes very d...

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If I am depressed for a while, its because I found out last night a good friend of mine, a friend I knew from Kindergarten through highschool, died. He was a WVU sophomore named Dustin. I'm helping his mom and twin sister with funeral arrangements. After my parents died while i was in school, I sort of attached to them. So I apologize if the Dimitri you all know isn't quite up to par. Thank you and I'm sorry.