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 ...