Before Nap

I haven't been posting too much here lately, other than the occasional bellydancing video from YouTube, so I thought I would toss a couple of lines out here before I go take a nap with Bubbit.

I am feeling a little overwhelmed with the amount of work around here that needs to be done, but I think I may get more done if I take a little time to plan out what I am going to do. I think that's what I will do after my nap.

I am sleepy because I didn't sleep well the night before last. It was just one panic attack after another all night long, and now I need to catch up. Anyway, I have a warm, sleeping toddler on my lap, and I can't think of anything that would be more pleasant than to go snuggle up with her and go to sleep myself.

Rachel Brice performs at Tribal Fest 6

Who's the Fairest?

I love watching someone who is obviously having a good time doing whatever they do...

inFusion Tribal Bellydance - Bhangra Fusion Improv at TF06

Ok, I've changed my mind...

My crappy job at the mall isn't as crappy as I'd originally thought. It's CRAPPIER. OMG, I hate it so much.

I can do better.

Not so bad...

My crappy mall job isn't quite as crappy as I had originally feared. I've gotten a raise already, for one thing. Raises tend to make all kinds of work more bearable. But it is generally easy and mostly fun, too, so that's a bonus.

I haven't yet started to be able to scrape up money for school. I am not sure how I am going to handle that. I'll be very upset if I don't start back ASAP.

It's the middle of the night, getting on toward morning, and I have to get up in the morning, so it is time for me to cruise on to bed. I just thought I would drop an update here, since it had been over a month.

I'm a bad blogger. No biscuit!

Got one of the plankton jobs

I start at the DQ/Orange Julius in the mall on Monday. It's not my dream job, but it is a paycheck with opportunities to advance. The most important thing about it is that it will help us pay our bills and make it possible for me to go back to school in the Spring. I am still going to apply other places, in case it doesn't work out or in case a better opportunity comes along. I don't want a better opportunity to get away from me.

It's only 7:21pm, and I am dead tired. I have reached the point that I can't even think, so I am just sitting here watching "Ros na Rún" on TG4 WebTV.

In the Dark, No Escape

I am tired beyond words, and frustrated beyond even primal grunting. My head hurts. And yet, I don't really want to complain. I want to fix this. That's the story of my life, always trying to fix everything.

I have some applications for bottom-of-the-foodchain jobs. The application from Dairy Queen in the mall basically just wants to know if I have a name and a pulse, while the application from the Hallmark store is so long that I am wondering if working there requires some sort of government clearance. I may try applying for some jobs a couple of links up on the foodchain, but I am pretty sure I am the plankton and those jobs are for fish.

Tonight, though, I am not going to think about it. Right now, I am going to brush my teeth, wash my face, and go to sleep.

Izzy's Impish Encore

bellydancing + dueling banjos = something between intriguing and hilarious.

Bayou Shimmy Hafla

Another video that I am adding because it looks just plain FUN!

inFusion Tribal Bellydance - group improv and solos



This looks like so much fun!

Tribal Style Bellydance

I rather enjoyed this. Just thought I would share.

In the Raw!

"Sugar in the Raw" sounds like porn, but it is actually a brand of turbinado sugar. I thought I would mention it because I have a box of it in my cabinet. I like it in coffee and tea, but what it is really great for is gingersnaps. I use regular sugar in the dough, and then roll the cookies in the turbinado sugar before baking, and they come out with lovely big sugar crystals on top. It looks good, it tastes good.

I am going to have to check out the recipes on that site.

(And don't YOU want some sugar in the raw? Isn't that just the best name for a product?)

5(+) Links, Just in case

http://www.thesquirrelcam.com/ Just in case you want to watch for squirrels coming to a feeder in someone's back yard. I haven't seen any squirrels yet today, but I am a sucker for this sort of thing, so I'll keep looking.

Bob Bavasi's JapanBall.com Just in case you want to know something about baseball in Japan. Today I am pondering the question of whether or not this jersey would make a girl more popular, at least with some guys.

Meathenge Just in case you were hungry for some meat. (No, that is IN NO WAY a reference to the jersey linked above.)

alt.NPR Podcasts Just in case you were looking for a podcast... (Or, how about SomaFM, just in case you were looking for music instead. I groove on Groove Salad regularly. I see that they have a "taste of the week" podcast on the alt.NPR site as well. You can usually find Groove Salad under the "radio" option in iTunes or Winamp too.)

And, just in case you were looking for an online game just a few steps off the beaten path, check out The Saga of Ryzom. There's a free trial. Yay.

EverQuest, Before and After

I resubscribed to EQ last week to follow Sodi along on a raid. I've played a little on The Sleeper since then... I have a level 5 wizard (female erudite named Lorra) and a level 6 enchanter (male dark elf named Tamin). I am lukewarm on the progression server. It's ok, I guess, but it's not terribly exciting. I was going to be an enchanter, at first, but then I decided I didn't want the responsibility of crowd control. Dishing out the damage is always a blast, anyway, if you'll pardon that bit of wizardish word play.

I am not at all nostalgic for the bad old days, since I didn't really care about EQ for the first 18 months that I had an account. It took me 18 months to get my first character, a human enchanter, to level 18. I played 6 or fewer hours a week for the first year and a half. I only started playing seriously after I had a complete emotional meltdown, and I played pretty seriously for a long time in that sad, broken state of mind. I felt like I had to give up the things that were really important to me and immerse myself in the game so that I could be part of my husband's world and life. He played many, many hours a day, and when I asked him if he'd play with me for a while, he said he felt like time he spent playing with me was wasted time because I wasn't a serious player. The resentment in his voice really hurt me, and I felt like I wasn't going to be worth his time until I was a serious player. Something inside me snapped. It became vitally important to me to prove I was worth his time in the game. I wasn't a terribly stable person, in real life or in the game. I was moody, often angry, and unpredictable. I was trapped between a hatred for the game and all the pain it had caused me, and my love for my husband and desire to be worthwhile to him.

Things have changed. EQ isn't as important to my husband as it once was, and I am starting to return to a more normal life and exploring my own interests again. Things are slowly getting better. The side effect of my personal life improving is that when I play an online game, I do it on my own terms. I still like to log in here and there, just to mess around, but it is more like how I originally played-- just hanging out in the virtual world and fooling around. I am returning to being myself in the real world too, and it feels good.

Unfortunately, most of the people who know me in EQ met me while I was in a rather poor state of mind, and now I feel like the people who know me are expecting me to be the person they knew, and that's just not me. That was me at a bad moment in my life. That's not the person I really am or who I want to be. I don't know how to explain it to them, though. It is frustrating to me, in some ways, and it makes me feel sort of lonely and isolated because all of the people who think they know me don't know me.

5 Links

http://www.thesquirrelboard.com/ -- First, I think squirrels are adorable, and I love watching them. Second, there's a forum for EVERYTHING on the Net.

http://www.netgame.com/ -- Like free Asian-style grindfest massively multiplayer online games? Here's a couple in one place.

http://seventhsanctum.com/ -- Random generators for just about everything, from names to plot lines.

http://africammo.com -- MMORPG *IN DEVELOPMENT* about Africa. No orcs. No elves.

http://www.habbo.com/ -- Odd little virtual community thing. I actually pretty much... well... *hated* all 15 minutes I wasted on it, but it must be up SOMEONE'S alley.

Oh, please, don't let me make you think!

Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.
Herman Melville (1819 - 1891)

Here's a story for you:
A customer came into the store where my husband works and was talking about kids and asked my husband if he understood, and my husband said, yes, that he has 6 kids. The man in question then asked my husband how he could feed all those kids working there, and my husband admitted to getting some help from food stamps. The guy made a comment about not having kids you can't feed, and my husband explained that he used to make $60,000 a year and lost that job to corporate layoffs and hasn't been able to find steady work in that field since. This fellow he was talking to told my husband he'd have to do something about having so many kids, and my husband replied, "I've already had a vasectomy. What else do you want me to do?" to which this man responded, "I don't know!" and stormed out of the store mad. As the guy pulled out of the parking lot, my husband noted that he had a "If you can't feed them, don't breed them" bumper sticker on his truck.

At first, when my husband told me this story, I was very upset. I feel like we're in a bad situation, working our butts off to find our way out of it, and getting kicked ever step along the way. I felt like this stranger was attacking us, and he didn't know ANYTHING about us. He only had his assumptions. I am ashamed of our situation. I am trying to make it better. My husband is trying to make it better.

I realized, at some point, that this poor fellow probably left mad because he would otherwise have been forced to actually THINK through his ideas a little bit. It's easy to make blanket generalizations and then to propose generalized solutions for them. Dealing with reality is a little harder than figuring out what to do with a simplified, generalized theory of reality.

I realize that many people think "the poor" are stupid, lazy, uneducated people who just want to take advantage of society and not give anything back. Many people who are stuck in poverty are the hardest working people there are-- they are mowing your lawn, they are refilling your coffee, they are sweeping your floor and pressing your suit. Some of them are leaving that first job to go on to a second one. The reality is that poverty is a stage that a lot of people pass through, sometimes when they least expect it. When my husband lost his job, we got by without any assistance on our savings, for about 2 years, until we'd depleted that too. My husband was sure he'd find another job in IT right away. It didn't work out that way. He's going to college to get a degree, and, yes, in the meantime, he's working in a crappy furniture store.

It's easy to talk about "the poor" in generalized terms. It's a lot harder to talk about them as thinking, breathing, working, feeling, loving, struggling human beings. It's easy to simplify the situation, and then come up with slogans for your simple solution. It's hard to take your blinders off and see what's really there.

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956), Prejudices: Second Series, 1920

More stuff noone cares about.

My format here is all messed up because of an oversized image below. I guess I will have to write more to move things along.

I was messing with my Yahoo 360 page today. I am going to have to mess with it some more before I am happy with it, but it is coming along. I don't know why, but I am liking it better than MySpace. Maybe it is because my kids and all their friends aren't around on Yahoo to spy on me, so I can let my hair down a little. My kids don't even have my yahoo address. They e-mail me at hotmail.

I need to move some laundry and get my butt into bed. I should probably also gather up everything that my baby is taking out of my wallet and make sure it is all accounted for. I should also probably get my social security card out of the scanner before I forget about it.

I have to report for jury duty in the morning. I hope I am not there all day long. I have some other things I want to do. I have everything to do that I didn't do today, plus the other things that I needed to do tomorrow anyway. I think I am going to try to use the time at the courthouse productively to do some reading that I've been wanting to do but haven't had time for.

I didn't get much of anything done today because I didn't sleep too well last night. I am pretty much falling on my face tonight. I should go to bed... I guess I will unplug my headset, plug in my speakers, fire up iTunes, check out the radio section and find a nice droning ambient station to sleep to.

A quick thought or two

I did some techie work last Sunday night going into Monday morning, of the sort that pays. It was good, other than the crappy hours. The work wasn't too hard and the money was good. (Ha! As if I ever met a paycheck I didn't like!)

I have to get my butt in bed. I have to be in Dover, at the courthouse, at 8:30 am for jury duty. Yay! I get to perform a civic duty! Yay! Well, except for the getting up early part. That part sucks.

I hope they don't actually keep me all day. There's a job I want to apply for that I hear I have a good chance of getting if I just get there and get my application in.

And now it is time to go to sleep. My alarm is going to be waking me up in 5.5 hours or so. Blah.

I've got something on my mind tonight. Nothing bad. Quite the opposite. Just a little something floating around in my skull... Could it be love?

Replacement quiz for 2/14

The quiz I took and posted the results for on the utterly pointless February 14 post below moved, and I lost it, so I went and took it again at its new location and got a new result:




Take the Mage quiz.

I know these things are dumb, and yet they are fun.

Thinking through Writing

I haven't written here in a long time, it seems. I've just been insanely busy. For a while, it was the kids keeping me busy-- the last month of school is always crazy with award dinners, field trips, and all sorts of events. Now it is just the early summer crazies that is keeping me from posting here.

I tend to spread myself too thin. I've tried out some other online journaling places, but this is the only thing I have really stuck with. I realize that this site is of limited interest to the general public, but I like to put things up here so that friends can keep track of me, and more importantly, because writing about all the mundane crap in my life helps me sort things out for myself. Writing helps me organize the chaos in my mind. When I try to categorize it too much, starting a blog here about losing weight, one over there about my love life, another over yonder about what's going on in the wide world of PC games, I end up posting a lot of nothing everywhere, and my thoughts never quite clear up. All that categorization just promotes the havoc my brain is wreaking inside my skull 24/7.

With that said, I've been working on my silly little game site, gobbomania.com. I had shut it down and let it die, but I am putting it back together now. I am using TikiWiki, which I really like a lot. It's now a fan site for two completely different games (The Chronicle and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes). I've decided to treat it as a hobby, a little something to mess with in the evenings while I wait to see how the aforementioned games turn out.

I've been considering starting another site or blog to give kitchen and household advice, based on my wealth of experience in those areas, having learned most of it the hard way. I know there are a million of those things out there, but I should have the street cred to make it something people look at-- I am the one sweeping up the cereal path from the cabinet to the area in front of the TV, not the one suggesting you spend all afternoon baking a cake to look like a theme park. I know arcane secrets, like how to re-heat leftover spaghetti to be nearly good as new. (Here's your arcane household tip of the day... Try bleaching your whites in cold water instead of hot.)

I have been considering applying for an associate designer position with Sigil Games Online in order to put my extensive RPG and MMORPG experience to use. I don't know if they'd even consider hiring me, since my work history isn't much to look at. I've mostly been a housewife, after all, and that's not something that many people look on too favorably. But while I haven't been employed outside the home much, I have continued playing RPGs and MMORPGs, and I have spent more time than the average bear thinking and writing about games. So, maybe I'll give it a shot. The worst thing that can happen is that someone in HR on the other side of the country laughs and ditches my resume.

Ah, well. Time to go practice a little housewifery. Dishes don't do themselves, unfortunately, and using the disposable sort is cost prohibitive when you're broke and you've got 8 people to feed.

Find your Celestial Choir

Blah....

I've been feeling pretty run down this week. It's that time of the month, and the baby has been keeping me up at night. Blah. I need a vacation.

I am too tired to type. Isn't that sad?

Utterly Pointless Post Of The Week

find your element
at mutedfaith.com.