It's dark down here in the dungeon...

I haven't written anything or shared any YouTube videos or anything since last April?! This is something I must fix immediately.

This blog has always been where I just post whatever kind of silly stuff that goes through my head or passes by my eyes. Every once in a while, it gets a little more serious, but for the most part, it is just stress relief. I could use a little more of that in my life.

I have been wasting a lot of time of Facebook lately. I have been playing a lot of the stupid little games over there. Most of the games only need a few minutes of attention at a time, but when you're playing 15 games and looking at them all three times a day, it's practically a full-time job. Except without the paycheck or benefits... Basically, you become a slave to your farm or your fish or what have you. And then it bugs you constantly to annoy your friends with messages about your farm or fish or cafe or mafia or kingdom, and tries like crazy to get you to attempt to lure your friends into virtual slavery. As a lolcat would say, iz not so great, akshuly.

I have done a little bit of work on my constructed languages, so I do update my Teliya Nevashi blog occasionally. More often than not, I just update the language documents with the intention to post about it later, but later never comes.

I am starting a new blog in the hope of having a constructive project to work on. It's about dieting. Or, rather, it is about trying out specific diets or eating styles/plans for three weeks at a time. I do hope to lose some weight, and maybe attract an audience as well. I am going to try to keep that blog pretty tightly focused, so I will probably come back over here to make all the tangential remarks that would otherwise bog that other effort down.

There has been a lot going on in my life, so you'd think I'd be here babbling about it more often. I will have to do that instead of planting more virtual crops on my 86500 different farm apps.

Bebo parolas en Esperanto

This is just ridiculously cute.

So, I added a furry widget..

I am the world's worst blogger. I have been posting on my Nevashi blog, but this one has been sitting here, all alone and forlorn, writing me letters about how much it misses me, but then tearing them up and crying itself to sleep.

I am going to make a sincere effort to post here at least once a week from now on. I have been redirecting a lot of bloggable topics to Twitter and my Facebook status, or posting those thoughts on forums. I will try to see that some of them end up here.

In the meantime, I found myself adopting yet another virtual pet today, from FooPets, and now it is a widget in my right-hand column there. That's Nibbles. I actually ended up with two female yorkies, this one, which I signed up for directly at the site, and another that I got through Facebook. The one I have via Facebook is named Kevrisha, and there's a strong possibility she's going to end up being a widget on my Nevashi blog, since she has a Nevashi name.

Long time, no post

I don't really have any time to post today either. I don't think anyone actually reads this blog, which is just as well, since it is mostly an outlet for my tendency to babble.

I am cleaning house today. What a drag! But it has to be done.

More silly web adoptables

Click here to feed me a fruit!
Get your own at Dinomon!

Click here to feed me!
Get your own at PokePlushies!

A Few Fun Things on the Web

I've been sending out postcards to strangers, or "postcrossing"-- www.postcrossing.com. I've gotten some back, too, from Germany, Austria, and Taiwan. It's a cheap and fun hobby.

As you can see in the right hand column over there, I've also started raising some little web dragons. Those are from the Dragon Cave. They go into forum signatures or whatever, and views/repeat views/clicks help them grow. Of course, the pages they are on have some fairly low-profile ads (i.e., not pop-ups), so it is a pretty clever way to generate views of those too. http://dragcave.ath.cx/ .

Along the same lines are the adoptable things at Valenth. http://www.valenth.com. These are adoptable things that you can feed. Like this one:

Feed Me!
Adopted from Valenth
I have a few of those I will add to the right hand column too, at some point. You don't actually have to sign up to get one, just to keep track of your code. I didn't sign up before I got my other two, so I will have to snag the code from my myspace page.

I am not having a baby (and my husband would be really upset if I were, having had that vasectomy and all), but I like names, so I have been hanging around a relatively new (and friendly) forum dedicated to names: http://namethatbaby.mit.edu ... Feel free to drop in and offer your point-of-view. You may save some poor girl from being named Grizzelanne Velour.

Blarg

I've been sick, but I feel better today, for the most part. I didn't do any housework today. In fact, I spent about 6 hours just lying around in my bedroom, emerging only occasionally to feed and check on kids. They were busy playing and watching TV. It was a day off for them. I didn't ask them to do anything and everyone was really low key.

Tomorrow, I need to start catching up on my housework and stuff.

The One Bone I Have To Pick With SOME Atheists

I am sort of a non-religion-specific kind of person, and I generally don't have a problem with people who decide that the whole God thing is bunk (as long as they don't spend too much time trying to convert me). To each his own, and all that.

The one thing I've heard atheists I know say on occasion that strikes me as being utterly ridiculous is that "people would be nicer to each other if they didn't have religion" or "... if they knew they only had this one life" or some such. I don't believe in original sin, but I do believe that a lot of people are just plain mean and miserable by nature. Some religious people are mean and miserable, but some people actually try to overcome their wretched personalities in order to be better people because of religion. And some of those angry and unpleasant religious folks would be just as horrid without their religion as a focal point. They'd find something else as a focal point for their nastiness.

Perhaps they'd get involved in party politics, which is an awful lot like religion in many respects (and in bed with religion a little too much here in the US, if you ask some people).

Useful link: Printable Rulers

I can't keep track of a ruler to save my life. I wish my desk had drawers. Anyway, here's a site where you can print a ruler if you really need one in a hurry.

Earth Hour 2008

On March 29, 2008 at 8pm, people all over the world are going to turn off their lights. The cause is global warming. I signed up, but you don't really have to. You can just turn off your lights if you feel like it. :)

I like candles, so I am looking forward to having an excuse for a candlelight hour.

And, because this is me, you know that an embedded video is coming...

Morning.

I stayed up too late last night and got up too early today. I should crawl back into bed and try to get a little more sleep. That would be the smart thing to do.

Of course, that's not what I am going to do. I am going to go wash the dishes from last night. We went out and kids did wash some dishes under the direction and supervision of their babysitter, but there are still a bunch of cups, bowls, pots, pans, and forks left to do. (Just forks, no knives or spoons... I am not sure what's up with that.)

I am going to start some laundry too. And then I am going to catch up on my email. I am running a couple of weeks behind.

Eh, or maybe I will go back to bed after all.

Sleeeeeep. I need sleeeeeep...

It's a little bit after 8am. I woke up just before the alarm this morning, at 6:43. I am not entirely sure you can call it "waking up" though, since I am not sure you can call what I was doing immediately prior to that "sleeping". My 2 year old crawled into bed with me at some point and we were waging a mostly unconscious battle for my pillow and the space on my side of the bed, which isn't conducive to sound sleep.

Did I mention that I didn't go to bed until 1am or so? I think I missed that point. Late night, early morning, kid in my bed... Yeah, I need more sleep. I think I am going to go back in there, shove the kid over to my husband's side of the bed, and then hog my pillow to myself for a couple more hours.

The kid will be fine without the pillow. She sleeps sideways in her favorite chair in the shop, after all. And on the floor. And in a carseat. And I've seen her curled up on the couch with her head on her feet. How hard could it be for her to sleep in bed without hogging my pillow?

I recently signed on at SparkPeople.com, and one of my starter, "Fast Break" goals is 8 hours of sleep a night. HA! Maybe I should go pick something I'll actually do.

Messing with Tektek.org

Writing...

I have been wasting a lot of time posting silly little game-related blogs over at mmorpg.com. I guess getting views and comments there started getting to my head. I am kind of bored with the games (mmo games, specifically) and with trying to find something to say about them. I have other things on my mind.

We're starting a business. I am planning on doing NaNoWriMo as a start to my fiction-writing career.

Career?! Ha! That's getting ahead of myself. Maybe I should call it a hobby.

I am going to work on some world-building before November gets here.

Long time, no blog

I can't believe September is more than half over. Only a third of the month left to go before October. Things have just been moving on so fast, we have hardly had a chance to catch up.

Since I last wrote, we sold our house and moved to Pennsylvania. In fact, we've moved twice in September, since we now own a building with two apartments, and we first moved into one and then from there into the other. I am so tired of moving things. Once everything is settled in its place, it is staying there for good!

My mother is coming to visit this weekend. We're trying to get the apartments in order before she arrives. It's a lot of work, since we're still figuring out where things will go.

Right now, I just want to get a shower and go to sleep, but I am still trying to get kids in bed for the night. The littlest one is standing outside the bedroom door saying, "No" over and over because she doesn't want to stay in her bed. I am trying to stand firm on this. She just can't sleep with us anymore. She's getting too big and we miss our sex life.

Silly little quiz thing... My Inner European

Your Inner European is French!

Smart and sophisticated. You have the best of everything - at least, *you* think so.

Who's Your Inner European?

Monday Morning Joys

It's very quiet this morning. My husband has gone to work and the kids are all still asleep. I can hear my 16 year old snoring in the basement-- he must have been watching TV late last night. Otherwise, the only sounds are the AC running, the clicking of the keys as I type this, and the soft murmur of the hard drive as I run scans. This is Monday Morning Maintenance, and not just for the laptop.

I am reading e-mail while my computer rids itself of the usual tracking cookies and the less usual spyware that someone picked up for me somewhere out there on the web. I am guessing it was one of the kids. My time on the web is pretty much limited to a handful of sites, so I generally don't pick up spyware without help.

It's rainy here this morning. The sky is a flat, grayish white. It looks like the sky texture failed to load. It's a fine day, nonetheless. When it's been hazy, hot, and humid for a couple of weeks, a little rain is a nice break.

The basil I have in the planter on the front steps looks better for having been rained on; it was looking a little tired yesterday. I don't think the rain will help the cabbage in a container on the back deck, though. I think bugs finally killed it. I will have to replant that pot with something else, I guess.

I'll have to go to the store this morning to get milk. I am drinking my coffee this morning with one of those flavored, pre-creamed instant coffees as the creamer. It's not too bad, really, but it's not the same.

I've got a toddler up now. She gave me a hug, and then went in and turned on the TV. It was left on whatever channel my husband was watching last night, so I switched it to Nickelodeon, and now she's watching Wonder Pets. She was very excited to see that it was on. I have turned this particular show off on at least one occasion when it was grating on my nerves. The Wonder Pets kept saying "herd of sheep" rather than "flock of sheep", and there came a point when I couldn't stand it anymore.

She won't be watching TV too long this morning before I drag her off to the store with me to get milk and bread. In the meantime, I am going to sit here with my coffee and work on the Teliya Nevashi Babel text.

A completely useless but amazingly accurate post

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Mineral oil submerged PC... Fun, fun!

A Few Random Words

I am using this laptop as a radio to listen to NPR. Specifically, I am listening to WHYY out of Philadelphia. I also listen to WYPR out of Baltimore, but I just happened to decide to turn it on around 9am this morning, when WHYY has the BBC Newshour. That was the deciding factor this morning.

I <3 BBC News.

I am supposed to be cleaning house today, but it isn't going as well as I would have liked. My allergies and my toddler are both acting up.

I Need to Fix My Template and Other Tales From the Lazy Side

I changed my layout some time ago but haven't yet finished editing the template to my liking. I have links to add and maybe a little more customization to add. I just can't seem to make myself do it. In the grand scheme of things, it's pretty trivial, but I'd like to have it done. I just haven't felt like doing it.

I think I have driven away what few readers I had from my Yahoo 360 blog. I set it to be readable by "friends", which kind of limited my audience right out of the gate, but then I went through a string of posts that were essentially screenshots of my Lineage 2 character with commentary on my outfit in each. I just got another set of armor upgrades, so it may be time to go annoy my Yahoo "Friends" some more. I realize it is a stupid thing to post about that has no meaning in the real world or to anyone at all but me, but posting about it means that I am not talking about it "in real life", so it keeps me from being as boring as I could be.

I was going to write poetry for my myspace blog, but after the first post of bad haiku, I got distracted with writing stories elsewhere instead. I started a story about the joy of marriage, tentatively titled, "Why Do I Need A Mirror When I Have You?" and then last night, I started a second story about aliens stranded on Earth.

I have a sick toddler sleeping on me. I need to take her to the doctor. I was up half the night with her, so sleeping seems like a good idea to me. I guess I'll get dressed and drive up to the doctor's office to get an appointment. Experience has taught me that calling would mean getting a busy signal til noon, then the answering service from noon til 1, and then I might get an appointment some time after that. Going in is faster and more productive.

Off I go!

Captured Lightning: 2.2 million volt Lichtenberg Figure

Milk Miracle Aug 21 2006

I am just a sucker for weird, cool stuff that happens out there in the world.

Spore 35min Demonstration from The GDCe

PS3 Song

This made me giggle.

Friends don't let friends post drunk.

Luckily, I don't have any friends here right now. I had a little Guiness with dinner at the local Irish pub and then we went and picked up some tequila, orange juice and grenadine,and I demonstrated how to make a tequila sunrise. It's been a good long time since I mixed drinks, and the only time I've made this before was when I ended up bartending at the bowling alley for a while.

I've never actually had tequila before. This isn't half bad.

I was trying to post some videos from YouTube, but it didn't work. I tried putting in the Google account info, since I migrated everything to "The New Blogger", but that didn't work either. I've decided I'll just post links with commentary for now.

Lineage 2 "Cotton Eye Joe" video ... It makes me smile. It also makes me want to go play L2.
This (WoW) video is pretty mediocre, but Elaina loves doing the chicken dance, so... I put it here so I could find it for her again.
Pure nostalgia for us oldtimers. Original EverQuest intro movie from 1999.
Some people apparently thought this was inappropriate, but I thought it was cute ...

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.

Craziness

I've been so up and down over the last few days. Last month's mortgage payment got screwed up between the mortgage company and the bank. A partial payment we'd made ended up getting applied to escrow, so it wasn't counted, and then I mailed a check (priority mail) for the other part of the payment, but when I called and talked to a rep to make sure the two payments were properly combined, they said they hadn't gotten it, so I made a payment over the phone and called the bank to put a stop payment on the check, and the bank apparently stopped BOTH payments. None of the money paid in November counted, so when I paid my payment on Dec. 1, it was applied to November, and now they say we owe another whole payment for December.

Great.

So, the whole time I was working at the bowling alley, I was thinking that I was going to pay back the school so I wouldn't have any troubl registering, but it got put off and put off and, you guessed it, I can't register now. Gotta wait til I have the money on Monday... BUT... There's a always a "but"! Two of the four of the classes I was going to register for have only 1 or 2 seats available. So I guess I pray I can get in on Monday.

Yay.

I don't know how we're going to manage to get anything for the kids for Christmas. I mostly worry about the little ones. I don't want them to think Santa forgot them or that they were too naughty for Santa to bring presents. I have some ideas though. I think I could do it all on about $50.

I have been applying for jobs. I applied for 3 today. But even if I start tomorrow, I won't get the money for Christmas. I have some other projects I am working on that might get me some money, but not enough fast enough.

Just gotta keep plugging away at it.

A few short years ago we had 4 times the income we have now and we never appreciated it. I have learned so much from all we've been through.

A dumb quiz and an actual post

You Should Learn Japanese

You're cutting edge, and you are ready to delve into wacky Japanese culture. From Engrish to eating contests, you're born to be a crazy gaijin. Saiko!

What Language Should You Learn?

This was one quiz that I just couldn't resist. As much as I enjoy dabbling in new tongues, why not get a little advice on which to pick next? And Japanese is a fine pick... But I'd have said that about almost any result I could have gotten. I'm a language slut.

Lately I have been finding my inability to read Korean or Arabic particularly annoying. All I can say is that being illiterate must truly suck, since my little taste of it has been aggravating. So those two are pretty high on my list of languages to at least get a basic grasp of.

I am also interested in learning a couple of Celtic languages. I have been hacking away at Irish (Gaeilge) on the Goidelic side and have taken an interest in Cornish on the Brythonic side as well. Of course, it would seem that Irish and Welsh would be a more sensible pair, both being living languages, or Manx and Cornish, if I wanted to go for the languages that have fallen out of common usage. And now that I think of it, the latter pair has some charm in my mind. Of course, resources are far more easily found for the former.

I already have a pretty decent background in Romance languages. Wouldn't Catalan be interesting? Or perhaps I could rekindle the passionate love affair I once had with Italian...

Oh, I could go on like this for days! Bahasa Indonesia! Cherokee! Swahili! Nepali! Tamil! Greek! Czech! and on and on and on...

In reality, I can't hope to get even a good, solid conversational grasp of all these languages. Obviously, choices have to be made. Learning any language to even basic proficiency takes work and some commitment to see it through.

Two semesters of Spanish are required for my degree, and while I could, in theory, have my existing credits applied to that, I think I want to take those classes to brush up, and to help me get a tighter grasp on what has been slipping through my fingers all these years. Beyond that initial choice, I will have to weigh the contenders for my attention.

Hitting a few topics

This morning I went down to the local community college and changed my major. My advisor wasn't in, so I couldn't sign up for classes, but I am supposed to meet with her tomorrow afternoon for that. I was on the fence between a couple of choices on my major because I thought they didn't have exactly what I was interested in. I wanted to take a "connected" degree that would allow me to move to a 4 year institution for my B.A. after finishing the first two years at DelTech, and I knew I was interested in education. The two connected degree programs I was aware of were Math Secondary Ed. and Early Childhood Ed. (0-K), while I was really interested in Elementary Ed (1-6) or foreign language education at the secondary level.

I was a Math Ed. major before I switched to Visual Communications in a fit of stupidity. I am actually good at math. I got a C in Calculus I a couple of years ago, after 17 years without any math classes at all, and that was the REAL Calculus, not the business Calculus course that just requires you to memorize formulas. The problem is that I don't love math, and I realized that the last thing I wanted to do was take Calculus II or any of the math beyond that. But I was willing to do that if I had to in order to get a career started. I figured I could pick up, say, Spanish Ed. at a later date.

Then I found out that Early Childhood Ed was also a connected degree option. That seemed closer to what I was interested in. When I was setting up my appointment to talk to my advisor, I told them Early Childhood Ed. was most likely what I wanted to do, though I was still considering returning to the Math Ed.

So, I got there this morning and sat down and told the nice lady that I was interested in a connected degree and was looking at early childhood education, and she put two papers in front of me and began explaining whatwas available. She pushed one paper toward me and explained that I could go on to the University of Delaware, Delaware State University, or Wilmington College for my BA in early childhood ed, and that I could teach birth through Kindergarten if I chose either of the universities or through second grade if I went on to Wilmington College.

Then she moved on to the second paper and said they had another program for Elementary Ed. (grades 1-6). I couldn't believe it! She said most people were unaware that they had this program, and I told her that I was one of those unaware people. It doesn't transfer to the University of Delaware, but it does transfer to either DelState or Wilmington College. So, that's what I signed up for, and I left there overjoyed at having found this opportunity.

I stopped by where my husband works and gave him a big hug and told him about it. We stood outside and talked. He seemed a little down, but the hug made him smile. The weather is perfect, I am really excited about school, and things really are ok for the moment, and I wanted him to be as happy as I am today. I did a little twirl there in the parking lot and sang "The hills are alive with the sound of music," and he laughed and told me I was a goofball. It was good to hear him laugh.

My mom just called. I have a shirt and a bowl that I borrowed from her, and we're going exchange rice-- I bought a large quantity of jasmine rice and she bought a large quantity of basmati rice, so we're going to trade a little rice.

I posted recently about "An Overdue Apology". Well, the guy in question called me on the phone last week to apologize again. I am afraid I was a little rude to him. Apparently he's wanted to get this off his chest for years, but I have spent all those years coming to terms with stuff that happened, and learning to live with it, so calling me to apologize again just made those old wounds hurt again. I laid in bed that night, snuggling my baby and crying for the babies that I loved and didn't meet. I hope he feels better now and will just stay away from me so that I can get on with being ok.

I can't fix the past. I can only make peace with it. But that's a fragile cease-fire at best, made possible only by my desire to look forward and let the past stay in the past, where it belongs. I certainly don't need anyone calling me back there to the time that broke me into a million jagged pieces when I finally have most of my pieces glued back in place.

Lasagne. Yum.

I made a really tasty cheese lasagna today. It turns out the the meat in lasagna is pretty unnecessary. I used a 24 oz. tub of cottage cheese, a 15. oz tub of ricotta, about 3/4 c. of grated parmesan and romano (sprinkle cheese, as my kids call it), and about half a pound of mozzarella all mixed together with an egg and a couple of dashes of basil. I used sauce from a jar, boiled up some noodles and constructed the lasagna in one of my white casserole dishes, putting the shredded the other half pound of mozzarella on the top.

Now I am going to get back down to some NaNoWriMo writing. It's going pretty well, but I have a lot of ground to make up. The new story is a lot more fun than the one I started with.

An overdue apology

I few days ago, I had a strange experience. I was at the grocery store, buying a few things for lunch, when an ex-boyfriend who figured largely in why I am such a screwed up individual walked up and started talking to me. After a little small talk, he apologized for screwing up my life. I told him I was 34 now, and was over it, and it was at that moment that I realized that I was right. I really am ok now. He said he didn't know how much it meant now, but I said that he thought enough to say it, and that had to mean something. It was, on the whole, a strange thing, but I think actually getting an apology really does mean something to me. It doesn't change anything, but at least I know that at least one other person out there has given some thought to things that happened to me. And, in the end, I am okay.

One little post about Tapioca...

I post one little thing about tapioca, and suddenly Google Ads is matching me up with "Aging", "Senior Chat" and "Women over 40". Ah, well... A few days ago, it was showing ads matching "Islam Jihad" and so on, as if my blog, on the whole, was of particular interest to Muslims or jihadis. And then, of course, for quite a long time before that, it had my content pegged as the kind of thing that you'd attach ads for HipHop to.

Watching what comes up on my Google Ads is getting to be some sort of weird hobby of mine. It makes me want to post things about rare species of birds and extreme babysitting, just to see what their program thinks would be a good match for my content.

Which reminds me... I have another site, mmorpg related, that I have broken completely. I originally signed up for the Google Ads for that site, and just added them here when I saw a link to them on the blogger.com site. I need to fix my other site so that I can enjoy the wonder and joy that is Google ads.

I love Blogger, by the way. I have had blog/journal/diary type things elsewhere, but this remains the one I actually use.

Oh, and my display name... I saw my randomly generated Spammer name and thought it was funny. A few days later, it was still funny, so I thought I would use it for a while.

NaNoWriMo Notes

On Day 3, I scrapped everything I had written and started over. I wrote 600 words in under an hour, which isn't exactly blazing speed, but is a much better start than I had. I figured I could afford to scrap the mere 800 words I had written in the first two days for a better foundation. It is a bad sign when you're only 800 words in and you are already tired of the story you are writing. The new idea is going to make it much easier for me to reach that 50k goal. Instead of trying to hash out a bad fantasy novel, which has never been a genre that I had any talent for, I am going to write porn. I am not even going to call it "erotica" because that might make it sound like it was supposed to have some sort of literary merit. But no, it is just going to have a lot of explicit content, cramming in as many of my own pet perversions as I possibly can.

600 words in and noone has taken off their clothes yet. It looks like it will be at least another 600 words before the first person gets undressed... And I am really looking forward to getting there.

Yeah, this is going to go a lot better.

No time to think today, but I will say this...

Tapioca pudding is lumpy comfort in a bowl.

Because One Randomly Generated Name Is Never Enough

Your Japanese Name Is...

Kaida Anenokoji

What's your Japanese Name?

Your French Name is:

Céline Galland

What's Your French Name?

Your Hawaiian Name is:

Lokelani Kiele

What's your Hawaiian Name?

Your 1920's Name is:

Vivienne Leota

What's Your 1920's Name?

Your Irish Name Is...

Grainne O'Brien

What's your Irish Name?

My Your Easter Bunny Name is: is Posey Hoppity.
Take Are You Worthy of Bunny-dom? today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.

My spammer name is Extraterrestrial Q. Euclid.

Enter your name to get yours:

The calendar says I am 34, but...

You Are 24 Years Old

Under 12: You are a kid at heart. You still have an optimistic life view - and you look at the world with awe. 13-19: You are a teenager at heart. You question authority and are still trying to find your place in this world. 20-29: You are a twentysomething at heart. You feel excited about what's to come... love, work, and new experiences. 30-39: You are a thirtysomething at heart. You've had a taste of success and true love, but you want more! 40+: You are a mature adult. You've been through most of the ups and downs of life already. Now you get to sit back and relax.

What Age Do You Act?

I can live with that. I am not sure I agree, but I can live with it.

Why?

Why do I always start dialing my own phone number when I try to call someone else?

E.T. phone home! And so do I... Except that the phone is always busy when I try to call me.

The First Day of Ramadan

Today is the first day of fasting for Ramadan for Muslims in North America. I realize that doesn't matter a whole hell of a lot to other people, but I thought I would mention it. If your Muslim co-worker is getting a little testy with you come 3pm, try to be sympathetic and don't offer him a Snickers.

I am sick. I am feeling a little better than yesterday, but that just means I have gone from feeling like shit to feeling like crap. I still have wall-to-wall chest congestion.

Bleh.

I have got a lot on my plate today and tomorrow. After that is a four day weekend, and I have little hope of getting anything done with the kids running around. Two of the six may be leaving Friday night with the ex, but that's not much help. Those are 2 of the three oldest, and the three youngest are the difficult ones. Those three feel like six.

So, what's on my plate? Laundry. TONS of laundry. General housecleaning. Job hunting. Rearranging my various websites and starting a complete overhaul on at least one. And then there's dinner and kids' homework and the neverending demands of a 5-month-old. Somewhere in there, I need to go to the store for groceries and diapers.

I plan on creating a couple of more blogs. I want to move my Jaaje blog off of angelfire, and perhaps create another blog for language sketches and other language-related thoughts. But, on the other hand, I don't want to spread myself too thin, either, so maybe I'll bring all my linguistic nonsense here.

New sales today at the closest grocery store. I guess I'll go see if they have anything good. Last week I got a nice salmon fillet that I broiled with salt, pepper, and a little fresh lime juice. Yum.

My Unitarian Jihad Name...

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Sister Broadsword of Looking at All Sides of the Question.

Get yours.

If you know me, you know how well that fits. *snicker*

I haven't done this in a while...

My pirate name is:

Mad Charity Bonney

Every pirate is a little bit crazy. You, though, are more than just a little bit. You can be a little bit unpredictable, but a pirate's life is far from full of certainties, so that fits in pretty well. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from fidius.org.

You know who I am!

So, I add some Google ads here, in the hopes of offsetting the cost of broadband, and what does Google think would go well with my content? Nelly, Snoop Dogg MP3, Hip Hop, and Rap Vinyl...

LOL.

I mean.. REALLY laughing out loud.

I'm secretly a Hip Hop Goddess. That's my superhero identity. How did they find out?!

Amere's Secret Identity

Amere has a little secret... (link to image...)

That's my husband, by the way. The black-haired chick with her back to you is me as my Alliance alter ego, Janiela... We don't play WoW anymore, but I thought I'd just illustrate the point. He plays a chick in EQ too, which is what we're back to doing.

Holy Burning Lips, Batman!

I had gotten some hot peppers out of the "hot variety" bin-- 2 red cherry-type peppers, a big yellow one, and a long, crinkly green one. I didn't use them as I had originally intended, and they were starting to look a little sad on my counter, so I minced them up today, in a bowl with half an onion and some garlic (both minced as well), and some little bits of sun dried tomatoes. I was going to put some dried cilantro in there, but I can't find it for the life of me, even though I just used it last night. I thought I might squeeze a lime on it too, but I'll have to get one from the store. So, the pepper mix is in the fridge, chilling out til I get back to it.

I licked one of my fingers after chopping the peppers. Yep. They are hot. They certainly are.

My youngest, my daughter, nearly 5 months old now, scooted herself under my desk and ate the first page of one of my recent constructed language projects, which I was using as a source of vocabulary for Jaaje. In the amount of time it took me to get her a bottle, no less. She's going to be something. She's very mobile for a baby who hasn't learned to crawl yet, and she's got an uncanny knack for ending up strange places, getting into stuff not meant for her.

I need to go to the store now. I need to shop for the week, but I'm having a terrible time making my list. I should probably eat something before I go, or I'll come home with a cart full of Twinkies and Pepsi. I buy crap food when I am hungry.

Long Time, No Post

I posted about the birth of my daughter over on Little Critter Chronicles. That was just three days after my last post here. Since then, I've been battling back major depression and trying to keep myself from collapsing into a puddle of human goo. Most days, I am winning. Some days... the victory isn't so clear cut.

We seem to have serious marital problems one day, and then everything is ok the next day. But one night when we were fighting, my husband said he didn't know if he loved me anymore, and since then I've been waiting for him to tell me he really does, but I am starting to think that holding my breath for it wasn't such a good idea. Then this morning, he put an arm over me while we were in bed, and that felt so good, but I don't know if it means anything.

Actually, I think all this nailbiting over what was probably just an angry offhand comment means something. It means I've completely taken leave of my senses. What good does it do to wander around worrying about things like that which I cannot really change or fix, when I have so many other important things to do and worry about otherwise?

In other news, I've been offered a job, but I am not sure what's going on with that right now. I am waiting for them to call me to finish my pre-employment paperwork. I did the drug test and criminal background legwork a couple of weeks ago, but I haven't heard anything. I called last Friday and they told me they hadn't gotten that stuff back yet. Now it's been almost another whole week. I have no idea what's going on. It's a food service job at a state-run nursing home. The pay isn't great and I'm not all that keen on food service, but it will keep us in this house, and that's all that matters.

I'm having one of those not-so-clear-cut days, so I think I am going to turn off the computer and go do some housework. If I am going to be miserable anyway, I might as well clean.

Food. birth.

I made another batch of bread pudding a few nights ago, this time with apples and a little ginger added. It was pretty good, but definitely a fall/winter dish. Some foods have more appeal when it is cold and getting colder, and less appeal when it is warm and moving on toward hot.

My next dessert is going to be a simple one, more suitable for spring/summer-- banana pudding. It's on the menu for Sunday.

A few weeks ago, my life became somewhat easier in the evenings when I made up a calendar with a month's worth of dinners pre-scheduled on it. Between being in my last weeks of pregnancy, and the usual evening chaos, I reached a point where I was pretty exhausted and completely frazzled at dinner time, and had a hard time figuring out what I had in stock, much less what I was going to make for dinner. Now I can just look at the calendar, and know what I have and how I am going to cook it. It also helps to remind me to take things out of the freezer to thaw before I start cooking.

My 6-year-old daughter was very excited about the purchase of charcoal yesterday. She says she likes grilled meat, but not grilled hot dogs. Considering how picky she's been about any sort of marks on her food, I think this is a positive development. She's starting to get a little more adventurous with her eating habits.

I've got barbecue chicken on the menu for Saturday and steaks to grill on Sunday. I am looking forward to it, but I wonder if I will be here for it, or if my weekend plans will be scuttled by giving birth. Of course, if I give birth, the rest of the family will likely be eating at my mom's and I'll be eating at the hospital. The grill will still be there when I get home.

I was having all sorts of contractions last night. They got pretty strong. I was sleeping between them, but from the time I went to bed until 4am, they were strong enough to wake me up when they happened. This morning... nothing. I was hoping that today would be the day.

Tomorrow is right out. First, it is already the birthday of my mom and my sister-in-law. And my husband will be working in Philadelphia, not immediately available if I go into labor, also. Anyway, I've just about given up hope of giving birth in April at all. Maybe I've have the baby in time for Mother's Day.

Bread Pudding That Doesn't Suck

I am rather torn about whether to call this "bread pudding" or "french toast casserole". My kids seem more enthusiastic about it when I use the latter name. Anyway, this is possibly the simplest version you'll find anywhere. I made it up after reading a lot of other recipes. I consider the flavoring parts to all be flexible-- if you want more vanilla extract and less sugar, go for it. The result should be edible, and eating your mistakes is the best part of practicing at making desserts.

10 slices or so of white bread. Stale bread is just as good or better.
6 eggs
3 cups of milk (I don't bother to scald it, as some recipes suggest)
2/3 cup sugar (+/-, to taste. I've used as little as 1/2 cup and as much as 1 cup)
1/2 tsp salt
1 or 2 tsp vanilla extract.
healthy dash of cinnamon (to taste)
light dash of ground cloves (to taste)

Raisins might be good in this, but the aforementioned kids don't like raisins.

Preheat your oven to about 375F. I live at sea level, and my oven tends to run a little hot, so you may need to adjust.

The last time I made this, I made it in a 9x13 shallow baking dish. Rip up the bread and put it in the dish. Get out a nice, big mixing bowl and beat your eggs in it. Add the milk and beat that in too. To that, add the sugar, the salt, the vanilla, and the spices. Mix and mix some more. Then pour it over the bread. Feel free to push the bread around with a fork to make sure your mixture gets everywhere and soaks all the bread.

Bake for 20-30 minutes. You don't want any runny egg mixture, but you don't want it to dry out either. The last time I made this, I did put a roasting pan of water on the bottom rack of the oven, below the pudding, but I've done it without that before also. I'm not sure if it made a difference. More experimenting needed. ;)

Why cloves and not nutmeg, you ask? (A) I ran out of nutmeg quite some time ago and keep forgetting to get more, and (B) I like cloves better.

Tuesday! w00t!

I am making some effort to maintain my blogs today. I posted a new pregnancy update entry over on Little Critter Chronicles, I made some small changes to the templates of both blogs, and I updated my profile.

I've changed my username to Meep, just because it is a cute word. I am out of my dark phase, and back to being my normal, sunny self, so it seemed like a good time to give up being Prisoner #87146754. I'm not quite out of the Oubliette yet, though. I still feel like I am at the bottom of a hole with little possibility of escape, as far as my overall life situation.

I know I need to adopt a better attitude about things, but I just keep making one stupid blunder after another. Some of the things I have done have been good, but then I do something dumb like drop out of school and quit my job in the same week. WTF was I thinking?!?! That's something I have yet to even begin to repair.

I don't regret getting pregnant, but it might have been nice if I had put a little thought into planning for the baby and related downtime before the last two months of my pregnancy. Again, WTF was I thinking?!?! I was living for the moment rather than in the moment, I guess. Such a pity I didn't see the difference at the time.

I just wish I had someone else to blame for me being such an idiot. I used to blame my parents, but I'm 34 years old, for goodness' sake. I'm pretty sure that every moronic thing I've done for at least the last 10 years has been entirely on my own, without any need for outside influence.

There's not much I can do but pick myself up, dust myself off, and get back in the saddle. I am starting to feel like I can do that, so maybe there is some hope for me yet. I have a couple of subversive friends that have been encouraging me to believe that I deserve to be happy, and I am actually starting to believe that happiness is possible and I might even deserve it too.

That makes it seem as if I am not happy now. I am happy a lot of the time. This is a failing of the language. It doesn't distinguish between transient "feel good now" happiness, and happiness as a state of being. I imagine that "contentment" could be used for the latter, but I hear satisfaction and even complacency in that word, while I am looking for a word to describe a more open, active, and expansive approach to life. I will have to meditate on it, until I know the word I am looking for.

In any case, I think my next constructed language project will make that distinction right from the beginning, and not just for happiness or contentment, but for any emotional state that can become a basic personality trait or way of life.

They call me "Dances With Skillets"

I've been too pregnant and/or too lazy to do much cooking lately. I've made my standard macaroni and cheese a few times, but nothing more complicated than that. Lots of one-skillet-wonders lately-- sloppy joes, omelets, quick fried chicken (boneless, skinless breast cut into small pieces to fry), and so on. Tonight is going to be a leftover night.

Yum! Leftovers! I know there will be some turkey and some spaghetti sauce on the Second Chance Buffet tonight.

I'm craving sweets, so I think I will make some dessert too. I've got some tapioca I could turn into pudding, and a box of cake mix. But I am craving bread pudding, I think. I think we still even have some vanilla ice cream, which would be really good on top of a nice, warm bread pudding.

I hated bread pudding when I was a kid. And custard too. I guess I had to grow up to appreciate egg-heavy desserts.

My husband says that I have a 2-track mind because I'm always thinking about sex or food. I suspect there's some truth in that little jest. I spent much of the day on track 1, and now I'm running down track 2 toward dinnertime.

I may derail for a while, though, since there are a few non-sex, non-food related things I need to take care of. Laundry must be done! But I suppose I could do laundry without thinking about it too much. I could think about having sex in a vat of strawberry jello while I stuff dirty towels and socks into the washing machine.

Mmmm... strawberry.

Music/Sex, and Baby Links

****This first section is probably TMI****

I have come to the conclusion that auditory stimulation is necessary for me to really enjoy sex. I like to *hear* my partner and the various sounds bodies make when intimately engaged. At the same time, having music playing in the same room is a bad, bad thing. It's as if I can only experience one auditory sensation at a time, and the music always wins. Even if it music that I can't stand.

Music is a different sensation, and I forget what I was doing in bed if there's music playing where I can hear it. Heaven forbid there be other people talking where I can hear, or, worse yet, people speaking some interesting and exotic language... Then it is all over.

It might be nice if I had a more talkative partner in bed to help me stay focused on him and what he's doing, but the husband says he doesn't know what to say and he always feels silly saying anything. I mean, with me, he could say just about anything and it would be better than nothing... Oh, well.

****OK, that's enough about my ever-so-personal life****

As I've mentioned before, we're expecting a baby this spring. I've been cruising the web, looking at parenting and baby sites a lot, as a result.

I've got an interest in "babywearing" (i.e. carrying the little critter around), so I have been looking at sites related to that, and related to making the various sorts of carriers myself. Here's a couple of links in that direction: Mamatoto and Rev. Jan's.

I also found a little site on raising bilingual children: bilingualbabies.org, which I guess is a sort of extension of the Multilingual Babies forum over on BabyCenter.

And on a non-baby related note...

I added the latest edition of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook to my wishlist over at amazon.com, but until someone decides to buy that for me, allrecipes.com remains my best friend. As far as the cookbook on my wishlist, I've got a 1986 or 87 paperback edition falling apart in my kitchen, and my mom has a much older, much used ringbound edition that I've used from time to time. It's a really good "how do I make regular food" cookbook, in either edition.

I need to go make some dinner now. I am making nachos tonight. Chips, taco meat, cheddar cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, black olives, sour cream, guacamole, and salsa. Yum.

I'm going to have heartburn sooo bad tonight.

Does this even need a title?

I've been posting occasional updates on my pregnancy over on my OTHER blog. Today, I posted a belly pic from last week and a pic from the ultrasound I had in December.

I've been well distracted lately, trying to work out some things in my head. I'm getting obsessive about one or two things that I have no reason to obsess about... which I won't discuss right here, right now, since they are of a personal, sexual nature.

Count Down to Tenth Anniversary

Counting down to our tenth anniversary!

We got married in 1995. Now it is 2005.

All I can say is that I'd better get an anniversary party this year. I had this idea for a party in mind for several years, but my party planning was thrown to the wind by the pregnancy. Planning for the baby was the easy pick for my top priority. I might have time to throw something together yet. I was thinking maybe something with catering, a DJ, and dancing, but now I am thinking that a nice barbecue at the beach might be more fun, especially for all the kids.

In any case, we both deserve a party for putting up with each other for all these years. Neither of us is particularly easy to live with.

Whine whine

It's a lot easier for me to write when I have been doing something interesting, or when I have things to complain about. I've been thinking about a lot of things, though, and even thinking about writing on those topics. But those are mostly topics best kept to myself, so they won't be here.

It's not that I don't have things to complain about. I just don't have the energy or the inclination to even complain right now. That's sad, isn't it?

I could complain about my son's girlfriend and her mother. I had said that he couldn't go over to her house this weekend, and he certainly couldn't spend the night here. I told the girl's mother this when she stopped by while my son wasn't even home. They left, and came back when they saw my husband get home with my son, and my son ended up going over there. He's been there all weekend, and the more I think about it, the more pissed off I am getting. First of all, the kid is 15. He doesn't need to be spending the night at his girlfriend's house. And his girlfriend is only 13, for goodness' sake.

They aren't getting any kind of supervision over there. My husband dropped by there yesterday to offer my son the opportunity to go to work with him to earn some cash, and the two of them had locked themselves in this girl's room. I think her mother is either stupid, or is hoping that her daughter will get pregnant and end up living with us. For a while there, she had been in the habit of dropping this girl off and leaving her at our house for days with no way to reach her.

Ok, so this is bad, and we should just go get him and put an end to this. I agree. What's really steaming my clams is that I said no, my husband said yes, and then he turned around and blamed ME for the kid being over there.

WTF?!

See, I told you I could find something to complain about.

I am going to have to break out the Bitch-Enforcer costume when my son gets home from work. This crap ends now. First of all, it is just wrong, and it is a sure path to trouble. Second of all, he skipped out on his brother's birthday, and that sucks. And third of all, I told him no. I told her no. Which part of NO is so f'ing hard to understand?!

Afternoon

I seriously need a nap. It's a side effect of being pregnant, I am afraid. I get sleepy in the afternoon. I have some things I need to do before I can take a nap. I have some rented movies to return, mainly. And I should probably make dinner.

I put some salsa on to try to wake me up, but I am afraid the music isn't working. I guess I should just do what I have to do so I can have a little nap and get back down here to do something productive this evening.

Return!

I haven't posted in a long time because we didn't have internet access for a long time, but here I am now. The big news since I last wrote is that I am pregnant. Actually, I was pregnant when I last wrote, but I didn't know it. Our baby is due April 29. It looks like it is going to be a girl. We're very happy. :)

More later... I've got a kid hanging on me, waiting to play games over at cartoonnetwork.com.

A couple of little things...

Last night I was looking for a simple recipe for a basic bread pudding, so I went over to allrecipes.com (quite a good site for finding basic dishes and variations thereon, btw), where something in a sidebar caught my attention, and a couple of clicks later, I was over at this recipe for Pullum Frontonianum, which started me thinking about old school cooking-- even more old school than all those aspic dishes in my Grandmom's 1970 edition of the Betty Crocker Cookbook.

Gode Cookery (Medieval and Rennaisance Cooking)
Antique Roman Dishes (Just what it says. Some odd wording here and there since the webpage author translated the recipes from the German translation into English.)

I did make bread pudding, in case you were wondering. I found a very simple recipe and made it even simpler. Actually, it came closer to a french toast casserole, and I think syrup would have been a lovely topping for it. I will have to post my version sometime soon.

Gingersnaps That Don't Suck

Cream 3/4 cup shortening [I used butter-flavored Crisco because that's what I had], 1 cup brown sugar, 1/4 cup molasses, and 1 egg till fluffy.

Sift together 1-1/4 cup sifted all-purpose flour, 2 teaspoons baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon ground ginger, 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, and 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves; stir into molasses mixture.

Form into small balls. Roll in granulated sugar [I used demerara sugar for this because I like the look/texture of the larger crystals]; place 2 inches apart on greased cookie sheet. Bake at 375 for 12 minutes [10 minutes was sufficient in my oven; at 12, the sugar started to burn.]

***

This recipe is from the 1986 edition of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book.

Bits and Pieces

First, I want to leave myself a note pointing me toward a couple of blogs: MMORPG Madness and SAB Information Center.

I'd bookmark them, but my bookmarks are already an unruly forest with thick undergrowth without adding to the mess. It may be time to archive my current bookmarks and start a new list.

Second, the daily update: Things are OK today. We're hanging in there. I feel pretty good. I've decided to do at least one thing a week that makes me happy, without any regard for whether or not other people approve. I want to do a lot more walking, hiking, and exploring, mostly. I don't know why I haven't been going out there and doing those things. They don't really cost anything, and I can do those things by myself. In fact, those things might actually be more fun for me when they come with a little solitude on the side.

In other news....

I finally figured out how to use saifun (cellophane noodles) to good advantage with stir fry. WooT! Up until this past week, all I managed to do was make a big flavorless mass with that stuff, despite my best efforts.

I also bought 3 pounds of econo-bacon, which was a mistake. It's not really sliced so much as it is randomly hacked into pieces, half of which are only fat, and the other half of which are completely lean. It didn't work out very well for eating on BLTs. I see baked beans and bean soup in our future.

I got some avocados and guacamole mix cheap from the Evil Empire... I mean, Wal-Mart. Yum.

And another week goes by...

Well, this week ended on an upswing. I think we're going to be allright. A sales job came along. It's got potential to hold us until something better comes along. I hope so, anyway.

My mother is making me crazy. She can't let me live my life, learn my lessons, and get on with things. She has to call me every day to tell me what I should be doing, even if I have already done those things on my own, or if they aren't really in my best interest. It's driving her crazy that she can't actually control me and that she can't get in there and do it all herself, so I guess it is fair, in some respect, that she's making me crazy.

I snapped at my poor husband a few minutes ago because I was typing away over here and he asked four times where the remote was. I guess I was expected to be looking for it, but I didn't, and I still don't know where the remote is.

I should stop using this as my personal whining page and quit my virtual drama queen shrieking. I just don't really express these things in real life. I say them here so that I can smile and nod in real life without feeling like I never get to have my say.

The Weekend Update

I need to start updating this a little more often. I don't actually have an audience, but if I did, I think they'd prefer to see new material more often.

I was just updating my little cafepress shop. I added a journal to the collection, featuring a drawing I did while watching TV the other night. It's funny what my hands will do while my brain isn't paying attention. I haven't really promoted the shop at all, so I haven't sold anything, but maybe someday, someone will stumble upon it and purchase something.

Come to think of it, I haven't promoted this blog, or my other ones, either, so it is no surprise that I don't have an audience. Advertising pays, I guess.

The job hunt goes on. Things aren't going as well as I had hoped, but there are still some prospects out there. I am just tired and disheartened. I am not sure where to go from here, and our time is running short. We've basically got two weeks to get it together, or that's the end of the road for us, as a family and a household. That's kind of a long story, I guess...

I have been taking my recent boredom and frustration out on the forums at berserker.org. I am not going to mention to them that I quit playing EverQuest for good earlier this week. The husband and I had another fight over the stupid game, and we decided that we didn't want to go through that kind of crap anymore. It's not worth having a silly game come between us. But that hasn't stopped me from getting on other people's nerves over there.

Another Crappy Week in Paradise

Aside from a near-brush with being an RV salesman, my husband had no luck on the job hunt this week. I didn't even have a near-brush, so I have nothing to say about that.

He had an interview at the RV place, with an interview for a far better state job scheduled for the next morning. The RV place told him that they were going to have training starting the next morning, and he couldn't be late or miss any of the three days, for any reason. So he didn't go to the training, he went to the interview.

The state people were supposed to make a decision before the end of the week, and here it is, without a word from them. I think it's a pretty sure bet that he didn't get that job either. He must suck at interviewing or something.

Lots of restaurants are looking for people. I think I will give that a try. It will still put me in contact with the general public, in a position to get pissed on by every asshat who is having a bad day, but maybe I can do it for a little while before I freak out and go postal.

I guess I should get out of here and make a last ditch effort to save our asses before the weekend.

Catching up

Being depressed doesn't go well with blogging for me. I can maintain a certain level bitchiness and complain endlessly through the keyboard, but depression is a silent, wordless state for me. I reach a point where I am too down to type. I get so far down that I don't even have it in me to complain.

You know those keychains with scorpions encased in acrylic? That's what depression feels like. I am that scorpion, wrapped up, suffocated and paralyzed in a clear case of depression. Only depression is a little more transparent than acrylic, a little harder for others to see. They might see the signs of it, and feel around the edges, but it is hard for them to judge how deep I am inside it.

We had a miscarriage. I woke up early on July 8, our anniversary, to a crampy, clumpy, bloody mess. That went on for a few days.

And then there were the other things-- the job interviews that didn't pan out, the creditors on our backs being a pain in the ass, my mother trying to drag me into a dispute between my brothers, the kids acting like their brains fell out.

It's not been good.

My husband is off at a job interview right now. This job would be super-sweet. I am trying to believe that he'll get it in the hopes that somehow, magically, my belief will make it true. I want it to be true. It has to be. This is the best opportunity we've had come along in a good long while.

At the same time, things seem so bleak right now that I am afraid to hope, because if my hopes are dashed again, I may fall back into that deep, silent, suffocating darkness.

The Daily Bitch

Last Thursday, I picked up the power bill off the counter and said, calmly, that our disconnect date had just passed. I was told that I shouldn't read the mail because I "always worry too much."

Fast forward to this morning, when the person who accused me of worrying too much was just about to print his resume when, SURPRISE!, the lights went out.

Ah, yep. There was nothing to worry about there.

That bill has been paid now. The lights are back on. I am just wondering how much good that's going to do us when the mortgage company decides to foreclose on us. That is, as I understand it, something else I shouldn't worry about.

GRAH!

I had a dream...

Last night, I had a dream that I was sitting under a tree with a cup of milk and a plate of cookies. I was happy. Then a bird flew over and pooped in my milk.

I can't even catch a break in my dreams.

Where was I? Oh, yes...

As you might have guessed from that last post, I'm pregnant. My husband had guessed as much from my late period and obvious symptoms, but I was in denial until I gave in and took a home pregnancy test on Friday morning. I had been nauseous all Thursday night, and my breasts have been very sore, so I figured he might be right, but I was still shocked to see a positive test result.

Now that I am over the shock, I am mostly happy. I am a little scared because I have a history of miscarriages and we're still in dire straits financially. The latter problem may resolve itself soon, since my husband seems to have been kicked into gear to get himself employed now that he's going to be a papa all over again. There's not much I can do about the potential miscarriage problem except to wait and see. I really don't want to get my hopes up too much right now at a mere 5 weeks, only to have them crushed in the next couple of months.

I had gotten a job at a shoe store in the mall, but it was a disaster of monumental proportions. I freaked out and cried at work. I just can't handle dealing with the public. I really, really miss my old job at RGIS. It sucked, but it didn't suck as much as being unemployed or selling shoes.

Ah, yes. It has been so long since I last wrote that many things have transpired. There was, for example, the mess with Dixon Valve. This company called my husband and told him he had a job, and then when he drove over there for the pre-employment drug test, they told him that there was a mix-up and they could only offer him a fraction of what they'd told him and he'd have to wait to hear from human resources about it. So they sent him home. Then they called him and said that there was a miscommunication and he didn't have a job. So, he drove 70 miles (round trip) when gas was at its most expensive for nothing at all.

No, it was worse than nothing at all. Nothing is nothing. That whole mess was something. It was something sucky and horrible.

So, anyway, that's pretty typical of how things have been since I last wrote. Life keeps dangling carrots in front of our noses, then snatching them away and beating us with a stick. I figure that's one reason why the miscarriage thing has me good and spooked. I figure it would be our luck for this baby to go Dixon Valve on us.

I am not going to clutter up this blog with my pregnancy-related ramblings. I will start another blog just for all that. This one will just go back to all my usual whining.

I know it has been a while...

...but I thought I would just add this...

Attack of the laundry

I am doing laundry tonight. Lots and lots of laundry. This is probably the worst thing about having a big family. Everyone wants to wear clean clothes. What a pain!

My son and I were discussing the worst possible movie. We figure it would have to be a movie starring Sylvester Stallone and Vin Diesel as soccer players who also international secret agents who happen to both play the accordian. If you could get a poop-flinging monkey in there somewhere as your basic stupid, pointless comic relief, it might be as bad as it could possibly be.

My husband has been working on a feasibility study for a business he wants to start. It's partly an assignment for a Tech Writing class he's taking, and partly a serious study for the purpose of figuring out whether or not he can get it going. He wants to open a game shop.

Locally, there's a comics shop that sells some game stuff, and a game shop that sells a very limited selection of things, sticking almost completely to collectible card games. What he wants to do is sell a wide variety of different kinds of games-- collectible card games, role-playing games, games that use miniatures, board games and set up a LAN for people to play games in the shop. Basically, if it can be won, lost, or acted out, it will be for sale.

If I get this job that I am interviewing for on Friday and we get our financial act together, it would be cool if we could go to GenCon... you know, for research purposes. Yeah... that's the ticket. Research.

Intervooo

I got called for an interview for that CSR/sales job. I am pretty psyched. I am pretty sure I can handle the interview. I was just worried about getting past the initial screening. I have pretty much gotten over all my doubts and fears about whether or not I can handle the job. I realize now that all I have to do is continually chant my mantra: "paycheck paycheck paycheck". So, I go on Friday morning to interview for that job.

I applied for some other jobs today, and would have applied for even more if time had allowed. I am going to get a job THIS WEEK, dammit. I am so freaking tired of being broke. So many things to buy, so little money-- and that's only the necessities. I REALLY miss being able to buy the fun stuff.

It's time to go make some dinner. I have no idea what I plan on doing for dinner. Pancakes, maybe.

Back on the job trail...

So, it's back to job hunting today. There were a couple of crappy jobs in the paper that I am going to go apply for, but it was a bad week for the Sunday classifieds. You know it is a bad week when all the ads are in 2 pages of 2-inch framed boxes.

So, I am going to go apply for a job as night support staff for a home for developmentally disabled adults, and also for cashier/etc. at the cafeteria of the college I ever-so-recently dropped out of. Neither of these sounds particularly exciting, but I have done the food service thing before, and I don't really mind it.

I am sort of hoping that the CSR job I mentioned before comes through for me. I'll either get called tomorrow, or get the "Thanks, but no thanks!" letter some time this week. It might be 8 hours a day of torture, but I can stand a little torture for a decent paycheck.

Must...find...work.