Post #1 · 6:19am Dec 27th, 2017
Well, the holidays are over. I'm back to work tomorrow. I hadn't driven my car since Friday, and I just finished cleaning it off/digging it out/swearing a lot in the lovely -14°C weather that we have here. This is what it looked like half cleaned off: 
Yeah I know, "Boo-hoo, EBL. It's Canada, suck it up." It could be a lot worse, in all honesty.
Anyway, I hope everyone had a good holiday. Mine was OK, but certainly not without its ups and downs. I came down with a pretty bad cold on the 23rd, so I was pretty useless to my family most of the time, which led to a few arguments between me and the wife since she was looking after pretty much everything and I was dragging my ass, feeling like absolute death, leaving both of us pretty miserable at times.
We had two family gatherings in our hometown an hour away; one on the 23rd (which I was fine on the way there, but on the way home my throat was so sore I could barely talk/swallow. It was like a nuclear bomb went off, because like David Cross says: we all know how bad a nuclear bomb will fuck up your throat!) and then one yesterday, (the 25th) which took two hours to drive to as opposed to the usual fifty minutes. Add to that the fact that I just had a wisdom tooth pulled last Monday, so I had to be careful when eating all those Christmas treats.
Oh well. It's good to hang out with family.
I don't usually get a whole lot for Christmas, mostly just socks and specialty coffees and what not; usually a sweater or two, this year I got some nice, bright LED light bulbs for my shop, and my wife got me a T-shirt I quite like:
Now, I was a pretty avid gamer back in the late 80's/early 90's, especially the Mega Man series on NES, then the Mega Man X games on Super NES, so I gotta say, I really love this shirt. That was a great era for Nintendo, in my opinion; SO many masterpieces came out in those days: Super Metroid, Starfox, Super Mario World, just to name a few. I don't want to get to deep into that discussion here, but yeah...what a great time. I remember renting two or three games every weekend -- remember going to the video store? Remember Blockbuster video?? LOL -- and I remember spending entire weekends with a controller in my hand, just playing non-stop like a friggin crack-head. I'm not much of gamer anymore (the last system I bought was the N64, which pissed me off because it went obsolete so quick) but I can tell that it's a fair bit different these days; back then, no one had the internet so the only way to converse about video games was with my friends at school or by reading Nintendo Power, which I subscribed to for quite a while, and I still have issues 40 to about 100 packed away here somewhere, collecting dust.
Anyway, along with the N64 fizzling out so soon, I started finding the games themselves too long and time consuming for my taste, combined with me having less and less time available to play as I got older, I eventually became disinterested in the hobby and by the year 2000, I had moved onto different things. That's not to say I don't still break out my old, piss-stained yellow Super NES every so often and give her a go, but I don't really play anything new; I think Turok 2 was the last game I really got into. And I do enjoy watching James Rolfe, AKA the Angry Video Game Nerd, because he talks a lot about the games that I remember playing back in the day, plus a lot of other stuff that I never got to see at the time.
It was about that time that I really became interested in mechanical things. I grew up on a farm, so when I became that age when I was able to start working and driving the tractors and what not, I became interested in the old machines especially; I found it fascinating to be operating something that had been around forty or fifty years before I was even born, and that the people who designed and built it are long dead, disappeared into the pages of history while the machines they built are still being driven two or three generations later. I don't know, I just find that kind of thing so profoundly interesting.
Anyway, this led me into another hobby: buying and fixing old tractors. In 1997, I bought a 1944 Allis-Chalmers WC, and then the following year I picked up a rough-looking 1956 Cockshutt 35 Deluxe for $900. I sold the Allis about five years ago, since all it really did was sit around in my dad's barn and collect dust after I'd moved out on my own, which as I said earlier is about an hour away. I still have the Cockshutt though; it's a pretty rare unit since there were only 1800 produced from '56-'58, plus I personally put a ton of work into fixing it up, so I'm a little too attached to it to let it go.
This is a video of me driving one of them. I uploaded it to YouTube in 2008, which I completely forgot about until today. I had to laugh because it's been on YT for ten years now and it still has only 2200 views, so...yeah. It's not very exciting, but whatever.
It's still sitting in the barn at my dad's and it runs like a top, but I never did get around to painting it so it still looks like shit.
It was about that time that I needed a vehicle. So I bought an 80's era Dodge pickup with a big, carbureted V8. I loved it, but holy SHIT, it was bad on fuel. So after only a year, I parked it and bought a newer truck that ended up being my next crack addiction for the next fifteen years, and even has a role in MLP EG Forever.
Yes, I'm talking about the OC's big, blue diesel truck. Originally, I meant for it to be something of a 'Millennium Falcon' type character, but I ended up not doing a whole lot with it, figuring this MLP crowd wasn't really the right audience for that kind of thing, so it's just kind of there in the story. Although, I did keep that chapter where Rarity drives it; something about her, of all people, driving such a noisy, overpowered, smelly thing just amuses me. Don't ask me why, it just does.
Anyway, before long I became an enthusiast of diesel motorsports, and I've been a member on a few diesel forums since about 2011, where I really learned a LOT about different ways to make it go faster...and go faster, it does. I won't go into huge detail, (again, wrong crowd for this topic) so instead I'll just puke up a select pile of rapid-fire pictures of some of the shit I've done with it.
Two turbos!
Camshaft swap!
27 hours spent with a Dremel porting the cylinder head. Before: (single port pictured)
And after:
I had to do that twelve times! Plus other touch ups. 
Hand-cut O-ring grooves in the block for a better head gasket seal:
Custom intake piping and two intercoolers:
This was all stuff I'd done over the past bunch of years, and there's WAY more, but I kept it short here, mostly just trying to get the point across that it's a big interest of mine. This year though, I didn't do much work to it because I was so busy with writing MLP EG Forever. In fact, the only thing I did to it this summer was a new exhaust system with BIG pipes:
That's 5"...and holy crap, what a pain it was to get it to fit in some places. I think I was working on that while I was writing 'It's Gonna Be A Long Night - Parts 1-4', but I'm not exactly sure.
OK, enough about that. You get it. I'm a diesel truck guy, who the hell cares.
So how did I end up here? And what do you get when a guy like me writes a story about MLP characters?
You get MLP EG Forever.
More about that later, though. First, I want to talk about the stepping stone that happened somewhere in between building turbochargers and writing about a dude being ridden cowgirl by Fluttershy.
It starts with this:
Now, this was a picture that I basically just found it on my phone after the fact, (though it did eventually come back to me once I saw it) but as you can see I was in the hospital, and you can see my finger there in the corner with that little clip-on O2 sensor or whatever you call it. The reason I didn't remember taking it is probably because I was baked out of my skull on morphine to deal with the pain. (in fact, I was so fucked I didn't even notice when my wife got there; I just looked over and she was sitting by the bed and I was like "Whoa! Where'd you come from?" Though I might have been asleep when she showed up, I don't really know)
Why was I in pain? Well, I had just spent the past six hours in the waiting room feeling like my back and abdomen were going to explode because my right kidney had begun to bleed profusely just before I went to bed that night (it was labour day weekend of 2015) and so my kidney and bladder filled up with blood, which then created a massive pile of clots that plugged EVERYTHING up, so I couldn't piss, even though I had to... really fucking bad. After staying in the hospital for half a week of testing, the cause of the problem turned out to be a cancerous tumour that had grown in my kidney and split open the blood vessels within, causing the massive bleed. (gross hematuria is the technical term in this case)
So that sucked. And what followed was three months of absolute hell, which I'll spare you the gruesome details of, (cuz there were lots) other than two more active bleeds that occurred exactly two weeks apart from each other, followed by surgery on October 21st, 2015. (which is the EXACT date they travelled to in Back to the Future 2! 
) Not to worry though, all is well; I'm one kidney shyer these days, but I'm doing fine. I just had my yearly re-check on December 11th, and everything seemed to be working great. My left kidney has compensated for the extra workload and is chugging along smoothly.
OK, I think I'm going to stop here for tonight. I just wanted to talk a little bit about myself since I've been on FimFiction for almost a year now (Jan 3rd) and I've been fairly quiet for the most part, other than my story. So I figured I'd finally try out this bloggy thing and tell a bit of my story so anyone interested can get to know the kind of guy I am.
In the next blog, I want to talk a bit about how I got into MLP and how/why I came up with MLP EG Forever, and I'll announce a date for when it will be continued, as promised.
Until then, take it easy.
4766467
Ah, thanks for the comment.
I know what you mean; my personality does radiate from the OC quite a bit, which I think is somewhat of a natural thing with newer writers. It’s hard to pretend to be someone else, you know?
Have you read the entire story?
4767319
Oh, there’s quite a bit of easy going stuff for the first bit, which is why I had to cut some scenes already. The first thing to go was truck stuff, since I’m pretty sure I’m the only one interested in it, so I’m not gonna subject you guys to too much of it. There is a little bit left in there, but not too much.
As for group sex, well, I plan for a bit more but it’s not until way later. I haven’t even gotten close to writing it yet. There’s plenty of clop in the first chunk though, definitely enough to get by.
4767936
Maybe. The problem is it’s hard to tell from my end how much is too much. Most people are here for MLP, so it just stands to reason that I don’t want to overdo the truck stuff. The other issue I have is that I’ve been a member on CumminsForum.com and CompetitionDiesel.com for 7 years now, and over there, pretty much all they talk about is diesel trucks, so it’s something of a habit for me to talk about them, which I may or may not overcompensate for at times, especially when I’m over here on Fimfiction.
The other thing I wanted to mention in my last comment, which I forgot to, was how I agree with you about how tough it can be to find some good old regular human on human straight sex. Not that there’s anything wrong with lesbian or futa or any of the many fetishes on here, but there’s just so MUCH of it. This is part of why I do what I do, because there just aren’t enough stories like DrakeyC’s “Ridin’”, or Grasshopper Keller’s “Reunited With Diamonds”, etc. on here.