The thing about salads is I don't really like them. Except Super Supper Salads, which are Very Best.
Super Supper Salads, as you might guess, are a dinner salad. They're very easy to make. You take a couple kinds of lettuce and toss them together on a dinner plate. You put a spoonful of tuna fish (I mix mine up into tuna salad, which probably loses in the health benefits side but wins in the taste department) in the middle of this. You drop some tomato eighths artistically around the edges of the plate, alternating with quarters of a hard-boiled egg. You grate a bit of cheese over this, fetch four Ritz crackers from the pantry, and et voila, you have dinner!
In fact, usually you have too much dinner. :) Salad dressing isn't really required, because you have bunches of flavors mixing up and it's not all dry, which is, I think, the main reason people use dressing. Lettuce is sort of ... dull.
Anyway, yum!
So I'm working on this book submission for a writing contest, and I have as usual seized up when it comes to the 'by' part. I have this very fine name here at my disposal: Catherine Eileen Murphy. I thought for a long time that Catherine E. Murphy would look splendid on a book cover.
Except when people see the name Catherine, they diminutize it to Cathy, and I truly hate being called Cathy. Of all the diminutives of Catherine that there are, I *really* loathe that one. It's a fine name for other people, but it's *not* my name and I *hate* being called by it.
So that makes me want to avoid Catherine.
Catie Murphy is what I'm really called, of course, but that just doesn't look very grown-up after the 'by'.
Laura has suggested -- no, I stand corrected; Ben, Laura's SO who doesn't have a webpage, has suggested C.E. Murphy.
I'm looking at that on this title page thing.
I'm thinking, you know, I kind of like that. That looks pretty good. C.E. Murphy. Yeah.
I was just outside walking Chantico.
I happened to glance up to see a brilliantly yellow and black butterfly fluttering from a tree, and very suddenly, I became tremendously *aware* of all the vivid colors I was seeing.
The sky is deeper than sky blue; a few random twists of clouds contrast very brightly against it. The buildings here are a red-brown, reflecting sunlight on one side, made rich by shadow on the other. Leaves are still new, fading a little from spring-green, but not yet darkened to summer shades. Dandelions are making small bright spots of yellow, and a lilac tree literally explodes pink blossoms in a shower against fresh grass.
And the butterfly skittered around, bringing it all together.
Sooooooo hungry! I should, like, eat something. o.o
Gnaaah. Was up til midnight last night, working on a synopsis. Writing synopses is *hard*. I wrote 5 pages in 2 hours. Gnaah!
Ok, I need to go get some fud.
Baby pictures! My cousin Moira had a baby boy, Edward Hugh Ireland, on March 10th. Isn't he a cutie? *laugh* I think he's a cutie! Hee hee hee!
In other news, the chiro says my back is improving rapidly and next week he'll give me some real exercises to do. Yay me! :)
Let's see. Screen doors for the front and back doors, fix the unbalanced washing machine, fix the leaking dishwasher, fix the heat that won't turn off in the basement, fix the leak that has sprung in the downstairs floor. Oh, the screen on the living room window is bent out of shape, too.
Except the landlord isn't in. Frell.
Chantico can certainly take a Very Long Time to decide Just The Right Place To Pee. In the meantime, while she was looking for Just The Right Place, I had a sneezing frenzy. My throat and ears itch now. *snivel* I *hate* allergies.
On the positive side, sneezing no longer makes my back seize up, which I still haven't gotten used to.
Oh, gawd, I have to call the landlord. Our floor in the computer room seems to have sprung a leak. Well, something's sprung a leak, anyway, and the floor's sopped. Glah, I wonder where their number is.
AUGH the house is such a mess and Laura and Ben will be here Saturday night. AUGH. :P
Bwahahah! I have the POWER! I have a LASER PRINTER!
*beam* My birthday present, a few days early. This way I can print out some stuff for a writing contest which has a deadline of the 1st. Woot! Go me! And, er, go Ted and Shaun, who bought me the laser printer for my birthday. Go Ted and Shaun! *beam*
It prints real fast and real good. *beam*
Back from the popper.
Ow. Probably in an hour or two the ow will be reduced, but right now, ow. He did something to my back which made it hurt *more* instead of *less* to lift my leg, and said, "Oops, that wasn't supposed to happen," or words very much to that effect. Well, no shit, Sherlock. :P He put it back so it hurt more or less as much as it had in the first place (it's hard to gauge, after your back's been heated up and popped), but now it's pretty bloody tender.
On the plus side, though, people on Too are now singing The Music Man, and being generally silly, so I guess life can't be all bad. :)
Okay, so this is actually really pretty annoying.
I was supposed to have two fairly major projects at work, starting mid-May and running to the first week of July. In a fit of efficiency, I got all my bugs cleaned up and I literally have nothing hanging over my head.
And my projects got pushed back three weeks.
So I'm kind of sitting and spinning here, working on some smaller stuff, but wow, it's really kind of annoying. Gnf.
Bah. I slept really really badly last night. I flopped and turned and flopped and drifted without really sleeping, and woke up repeatedly, and finally looked at the clock, thinking that if it was around 5am as I suspected it might be, I might just get up, because I wasn't getting any decent sleep anyway.
It was 3. :P
So I flopped and tossed and turned some more and eventually got some pathetic amount of sleep and blah. Yucko.
OTOH, I got my leavebehind I was supposed to write written, and Sarah got hers written, and I converted my screenplay Nothing Ventured to Final Draft and sent it off to Nichole, and . . . well. We'll see what happens next. If I'm lucky she'll want me to re-write it. :)
Uh. Other than that, I donno anything.
Well, Final-Draftized versions of Legion and First Woman have been sent off to Nichole in LA; we'll see what happens next.
Meantime, we're putting together some other leavebehinds for Nichole to look at, 'cause we have y'know, a billion ideas and Nichole said she wanted to see them, so. ;)
By LJ user Afke aka Frozen Rain
I think I came out Kahvi last time, too. Uh, Winnowill, Cutter, Skywise and Bearclaw were my runners-up. o.O
Happy Henry day!
I need to get some post-it notes so I can keep a hashmark of how many glasses of water I drink a day. I can't think of any other way to try to remind myself to drink enough water (posting it on the blog is just way too much trouble).
Off to walk the dog and clean the kitty litter box. Boy, do I know how to have fun or what?
"Alaska has about one registered pilot for every 58 residents, six times as many pilots per capita and 14 times as many airplanes per capita as the rest of the United States."
I swear to God, every single one of those privately owned small planes has flown over our house today. O.O It's like living under the Blitzkreig. BZZZZZZNNNNNEEEEEOOOOOOOOWWW!
So did I explain all about the muscle in my butt that hurts? No, I see I didn't.
I went in on Friday and I said, "My back doesn't hurt or even ache, really, but there's a muscle here at the bottom of my butt that's really painful." And Dr. Woody (that's his name, don't look at me like that) said, "Oh yeah? And it does down all the way to the back of your knee?" And I said, "Nah, it's just right there at the bottom of my butt," and he said, "Well, that's good! It could go all the way down to the bottom of your foot! But we don't want that to happen."
I agreed emphatically.
So he poked my back on the left side and said, "That hurt?" and I said, "Nope." And he poked my back in the same place on the right side, and I said, "GNNAAHAHGH!" Dr. Woody says, "That's referral pain!" in entirely too cheerful a voice.
Referral pain is where a nerve is pinched in one place, but the pain or discomfort is translated down the nerve and manifests itself in another place. My pinched shoulder that I had for years and years manifested a lot of referral pain: my *shoulder* wouldn't hurt, but my elbow and pinky finger would, because it was the ulnar nerve that was pinched, and that runs from behind the shoulderblade down through the pinky.
The same thing is happening to this muscle in my butt. Except it's not the muscle, it's the nerve. It *feels* like a . . . strained muscle. Like the muscle is too tight and can't be pulled loose; you know how muscles sometimes feel like they need to pop a little to loosen up and get back into shape? That's what this feels like.
But it's *caused* by the fact that the nerve in my 5th lumbar is pinched. This nerve, Dr. Woody said, "is about the thickness of your pinky finger."
This made me stare at my pinky and kind of go 'gaaaah'.
Dr. Woody pushed my back around some, and after several crunches, said, "Ah, there we go," although *I* didn't feel anything different. However, the nerve pain has subsided. It hasn't gone away, but it's not cramping up like it was, so that's good. If I stretch or breathe deeply or bend from a sitting position, I can still feel it and it feels sort of squidgy and wrong and uncomfortable, but hopefully after a couple more pops that'll go away.
My spine drifts 19mm to the right, from about the bottom of the breastbone down. That's about 3/4ths of an inch drift in about 16 inches of spine.
No wonder I'm fucked up.
In other news, the other day Mom said, "You need to get a place with a lawn," because we have the puppy, and I said, "We can't afford to buy a place and nobody would rent to us, not with two cats and a dog," and Mom said, "I'd rent to you!" I said, "Well, yeah, but you don't have anywhere to rent."
So yesterday Mom called up and said she and Dad went and looked at a duplex that's for sale (the whole of it) and said that they were thinking about maybe seeing about buying it and renting half of it to us. O.O
We drove by it and it's in a great location and it looks like a nice little duplex. It's smaller than the place we're in (and there's not enough room in THIS place for all our stuff), but y'know, hey, that could maybe be kinda cool. Fortunately, I like my parents. :) It'd make Sunday morning waffles easier! *giggle*
Ooh! I now have my business cards ordered for On Your Left! Dad came by with a rendering of the card; he'd been over at the printer's and the printer guy said, "Oh! Hey, you can bring this over to your daughter," and so Dad did. And Dad liked the design a whole lot, and said so several times when he brought the rendering over to me. He said, "You should enter it in the contest!"
And I said, "What contest?"
And he said, "I don't know, but there's *got* to be a contest." Which made me laugh and laugh and laugh.
the part that hurts the worst now is my upper right ... I don't even know what muscle it is. Below the glute. Upper hamstrings, I guess. It just feels like a knot that won't unknot, and when I try to move much, it spasms.
Ice. Hopefully ice is my friend.
Kithair, yesterday. I can't decide if it's another i-look-like-a-boy photo, or if I just look three quarters dead, which is about how I felt.
Aaah. I have reached that magical point at which my back feels sufficiently better that I suddenly think I'm healed.
This would be a really be a dumb time to stop going to the chiro. Don't let me. :)
The good news is I was able to sleep almost normally last night. I was able to turn over several times -- yes, I had to wake up to do that, but night before I woke up and was *unable* to turn over, so that's definitely an improvement. And this morning I was able to get out of bed relatively pain free (this is not the same as pain free, but it's nothing like white-lipped nausea like I had yesterday), and move around if not normally, at least less painfully.
The bad news is that the pain has moved into my right butt cheek, where it spasms violently when I sit down. :P I still haven't figured out how to get my socks on this morning, because bending that way makes it go SKREEEEEE. I'm still relying on the back support thing, 'cause it makes me feel safer. I don't want to use it past tomorrow, though, because I don't want to start really relying on it. My back muscles will never get stronger again if I do that. :/ Of course, otoh, if I can't *walk* without it ... :}
In other news . . . you know, there is no other news. I'm sure this is all very exciting to read about, but at least it's some small degree of usefulness towards keeping my sanity. :)
I wish my butt would stop spasming. o.o
I noticed a while ago that I want to bake, when I get stressed. Yesterday, I hauled out two sticks of butter so I could make cookies or brownies, realized I was doing it, and thought, "Comfort baking!" It's not even so much about *eating* what I bake. It's just that I find baking to be, well, comforting.
I decided what I should do is send most of what I bake to work with Ted or Shaun so that it's not here for me to pig out on. That way I can get my comfort baking in without getting fatter. :)
Or, as Mom suggested, I could find another comfort activity. :)
jesus christ on a pogo stick on tuesday.
just got back from the chiro. he got some pretty profound (re: excrutiating) pops from my lower back/tailbone, the exciting result of which is that i'm barely able to walk. it's not that he did something hideous; it's that my poor back muscles are *so* exhausted they just can't hold me up. he gave me a back support belt because I almost literally couldn't walk without holding my back like a pregnant woman. I could fumble a step or two, and then I had to grab on. Just no support left in my poor muscles. God.
Anyway, the back support renders me capable of walking, which is nice. He said it's okay to sleep in it, loosened up some, if I can; he says that'd be good for me. Given that waking up this morning and trying to get out of bed -- well. I had never actually _seen_ 'white with pain' in action before. It's not pretty. It's one of those things, like being attacked by a hawk, which one reads about but doesn't normally experience, and it proves that when it is experienced, it really *is* scary as hell (well, being attacked by a hawk is; being white with pain is just ugly).
Although instead of icing it before trying to get out of bed tomorrow morning, I think I'll use the heat pad. Ice reduces swelling but heat relaxes spasms, and I was spasming.
I've never been this badly injured in my life. It *sucks*.
You know, all I've got to talk about is the various kinds of pain I'm in. Maybe I won't bother. :P
just got back from the chiropractor. he took pictures of my spine and showed me where it's screwed up and then crunched me and now i have different pain in a different place. he managed one significant crunch which feels eight thousand times better, sort of in the upper part of my lower back on the left side. the lower stuff is still pretty painful, especially on the right side. but i go back again tomorrow, and i'm bloody well going to keep going back until my spine no longer wanders off to the right from my breastbone to my tailbone.
oh, this is exciting. i've gone from spasms to heartbeat-paced throbs of pain when i try to move.
and i didn't take any dayquil and it's up three flights of stairs and i just can't bring myself to do that again. i went up and got my muscle relaxants (took the last one, wah) and a couple aspirin, none of which i have any faith in.
some small part of my brain is convinced that if only i can drink enough water, it will make my muscles loosen up.
i think the animals are up there being very bad, but i can't handle them right now. this *sucks*. :þ
wow, pain. sort of slow luxurious spasms around my tailbone. lying down seems to alleviate them. anything else -- walking, standing, sitting, translating from one of any of those activities to another -- causes exquisite slow pain.
and i am still ms. dehydration lass.
chiro appt at 9. hope he can help. or at *least* maybe he'll give me some good drugs. jeezus.
Angie says she can see the comments on NS4 now, which means all the problematic pages should now be fixed. Hah. *beam*
I am Ms. Dehydration Lass today. I've drunk ... I think this is my 8th 8oz cup of water, plus 8oz of juice and 16oz of milk today, and I'm *still* dehydrated. The skin at the corner of my left eye is red and salty and painful, which I think must be due to dehydration; I sort of wish I could lick it, because that seems like the sort of thing that would make it feel better. Except of course it wouldn't, but, er, right. This is probably the same kind of mental placement that makes me convinced that when I get a gassy tummy, that the obvious thing to do is stick a hypodermic needle in and draw the pain out. Which you really didn't want to know. It's probably as well I didn't live in an era when trepanation was a relatively common practice, or I'd have grown up to be a trepaner. _Any_way. Last night and the night before my eyes were coated in sleep. Not very darned much liquid in my tears right now.
There's a Saturday writeup at on your left now. Hm. Should that be linked to the actual entry? Opinions? Anyone? Anyone?
I hafta pee. 'scuze me.
Incidentally, although I'm somewhat hesitant to make any promises, the comments pages should no longer crash Netscape.
The short version:
I finished the ride Saturday, 60 miles. Yesterday I had to throw in the towel 23 miles in, because my back started spasming almost as soon as I got on my bike. But I did *83* miles! Which is twice as far as any ride I've ever gone on, so I'm pretty darned proud of myself.
There'll be a much, much longer writeup at OYL later today or tomorrow. :)
I got the odometer on the bike, it works, and now I'm going to bed. See you all on Monday!
Gnrt. I am apparently not very good at house-training a puppy. I'm certainly very tired of her whining and me bringing her out six times only for her to do nothing but snuffle around, and then when I finally give up and fail to believe her, having her shit on the floor.
Sarah says Chantico is the puppy who cried wolf. Heh. :}
I went and got a new odometer, but the kind of jerky guy at the bike shop didn't have time to install it for me (the fact that he's a jerk and the fact that there wasn't time aren't exactly related), and I sort of stare at it all with mindless incompetence. I'm pretty sure it's not that hard to put together. I just look at it and it makes me grumpy (which is exactly how my father approaches construction projects, which he hates) and any competence I have for dealing with it goes right out the window. :P Maybe in a few minutes I'll go give it another try. Or maybe Shaun will come home soon and rescue me from my own bad temper.
I'm going to take a bath, and aspirin, and go to bed early tonight. I have to get up at like 5:30. Ugh. Get up at 5:30 and then take a 60 mile bike ride. I must be out of my mind. :)
Plus, I was a great white sloth this morning. Ted's stupid alarm, which I don't know how to turn off, went off at 6:30, a time at which I was utterly unprepared to wake up. I beat on it; it went off again 9 minutes later; I beat on it some more, pushing all the buttons I could find around (I did this yesterday, too, and inadvertantly turned it up quite a lot, so today not only could I not turn it off, but it was extremely loud and unstoppable) and eventually managed to turn it off, but didn't believe I had, so I went back to sleep with the expectation that 9 minutes later I would be wakened again.
I woke up very briefly at 7:23, to my great surprise, since I expected it to be about 6:57. Much of my brain thought I'd gotten up, and I dreamed of wakeful things, so I was even *more* surprised to struggle out of sleep at 7:53 and still be in bed. I managed to get up at about five after eight, and told the cats, who were meowing demandingly, that I was a great white sloth. While I stood vacantly in the shower I remembered I'd been going to shave my legs this morning. I guess I'll have to do that tonight. Maybe I'll take a bubble bath. :)
That was *way* more information than you wanted to know, wasn't it?
I apparently revert to bachelorhood instantaneously.
Last night -- I didn't mean to do this, but I got caught up RPing on Maddock -- I bailed on having a real dinner and made mac&cheese, which is exactly what Ted says I'd eat if he weren't around to feed me.
Something similar happened this morning, but I can't remember what. Oh, I know. I had no clean glasses (this is not because of sudden bachelorhood, but is rather because of a puppy who makes a mess of the kitchen floor, making everyone deeply reluctant to go in there to do anything, like the dishes) so instead of washing a glass I took the entire bottle of cranapple juice and brought it downstairs with me for breakfast. Now, there was only about 14oz of juice left, and I had, uh, yesterday's juice glass, downstairs, but...
How guy of me.
Attack of the Clones was a very Star Wars like movie. :) It had some terrible, terrible dialog and some fantastic FX, and some scenes that made me laugh and clap and cheer, so, well, yeah. Star Wars. :) It was too long; someone needs to tell moviemakers that longer is not necessarily better. I've gone to several movies recently (including SW and Spider-Man) that during the movie I thought, "Boy, this is long," and that's not a good thought to have during a movie, IMHO. However, I enjoyed it overall, and Hayden Christensen wasn't as unpleasant as I feared he'd be, and Yoda, well, Yoda rocks. *hee hee hee* Yeah. It's a matinee show, of course, but it really *is* a matinee show. That's what Star Wars *is*. So it's worth it. :)
Now I'm hungry, but the puppy has gone to sleep and I am loathe to move for fear of waking her. Humans are so weird.
I am aaawww awwone! Ted has flown off to Pittsburg for his work, and Shaun has been working ninety thousand hour (Title Wave is moving, and the contractors are lazy gits who haven't gotten most of the work done, so Shaun's been putting in *major* overtime) and it's just me, two kitties and a puppy.
The latter of whom is chewing on a rock. Puppies are very weird.
Um. I don't know much else. I'm supposed to go on a 120 mile bike ride, the fundraiser for the American Lung Association thing, this weekend, but I'm a little panicked as to what to do about Chantico. Shaun's hours are too long for her to be locked up all alone. I might ask Mom and Dad if they can take care of her for the weekend. *wibble*
*wibble*
*wibble*
SO COOL! *bwahahahaha*
As Ted and I were on our way out the door, Emily called. Emily called to say she'd been in her union meeting, which was VERY BORING, and so she'd begun reading the liner notes for Urban Family Dog's new CD, 3-Finger Charlie, and it had all the individual band members and their thanks-to blurbs, and then it had a thanks-to blurb from UFD as a whole. They thanked wives and Scott P...I forget his last name. Scott who's the promoter at 14 Below, and Tony and, as Emily said, "blah blah blah," and "James Marsters, Zero, St. Emily & Catie."
OH MY GOD!!!!
*falls over, kicking feet* OH MY GOD!!! *LAUGH* Isn't that COOL?! We were reduced to saying, "OH MY GOD!" at each other for several minutes. *cackle* Emily said she said, "Oh my God!" out loud in her meeting, and all the people at her table turned to look at her curiously. *laugh* Oh my god! HEE HEE HEE HEE! *bwahahahah*! HEE HEE HEE!! :) :) :)!!! *kicks feet MORE*!
BWAHAHAHAH!
Now I am all dented a second time! Three of my teefs have new seals on them! Now they will not rot away!
(Ok, so I'm easily excited. Overlook the gratuitous use of exclamation points and all is well.)
Minor accomplishments: got counters which don't repeat hits for House of Cards and On Your Left, and, er, watched Buffy. And sort of had a little comic shop accident where I bought issues 5-13 (or something like that) of X-Treme X-Men, so I can scan in the Gambit stuff.
I'm such a geek. :)
We have the WUSSIEST puppy! Chantico was once more Utterly Routed by Moby, the Jack Russell puppy who lives across the parking lot. YII YII YII YII YII! *Jeez*!
Yay! Sort of.
Denmark was right; GreyMatter's bloody paragraph tags were screwing up the nesting and making weak, lame-ass Netscape crash.
I've fixed the nesting errors in the last 10 days worth of entries. However, the comments pages and probably the archives pages are still not working. I'll try to fix this, but not today, since I've already spent the *entire* day so far trying to fix my damned page, and I have real work to do, too.
Long and the short of it is, for the moment if you want to leave comments, you'll have to use IE, Opera or Mozilla. Or, well, NS6.
Despite all this trouble, I really kinda like the new layout. And it made Kent say, "Okay, you now officially suck, Kit. Bleh, that's good." And Garrett said, "Oh, /nice/," and so I am very happy. *beam*
Now I have half of Too trying to figure out why my site is crashing NS4. :)
Chanti didn't escape the kitchen. It was the cats sounding like a herd of elephants upstairs, not the dog. :)
Did I say something about moral superiority? Nevermind, I've thrown it all out the window.
I've also apparently designed a site which causes an exe failure in Netscape 4, for no reason that I can fathom. The code is checking out okay, and it works on the non-GreyMatter pages.
Plus, I was rightfully (and politely) slammed this morning. I slink off and look embarrassed now. :)
I've just paid off the last of our 2001 taxes. Unfortunately, now I have to pay the 2002 taxes . . .
Mom and Dad are back from DC! Mom caught a foul ball at a Mariners' game! Well, 'caught' for the value of 'caught' that means she ducked to the side, covering her head as the ball flew at her, and it landed *smack* between her feet. Didn't bounce, didn't roll, just hit the cement, dead ball, between her feet. *laugh* So she's got a baseball from a pro ball game now. *grin* I forget who hit it, Ricky somebody who plays for the Red Sox who is an old guy (he's 43!) who talks to himself, and about himself, in the third person while he's playing. :)
Shit, I think Chantico just got out of the kitchen.
"Oh, look! Performance art! How *pretentious*!"
I get some of that feeling from sites like The Fray and many of the people who write for it. Despite this, inevitably, I once again find myself wanting to Be Like Mike, or whatever.
I could presumably avoid this spiral by never going anywhere on the net but Salon.com and to the pages of people I actually know, but gosh, what's life without a little angst, or something?
Or maybe it's just that I really want to use teeny tiny fonts on my webpage and my moral superiority won't let me do it. :)
A muscle relaxant and three aspirin later my back more or less doesn't hurt anymore. I need to figure out if my insurance covers chiro, or acupuncture, or *something*. I'm completely at a loss for what my insurance is and does, though, and I find it all very nerve-wracking. :/
*whimper* My back really, really hurts. I knew it hurt, but it wasn't until Ted came home for lunch and I had to face Chantico (who had peed on the kitchen floor despite being out for twenty minutes at a time twice in the last two hours, :( ) that I realized that it hurt so much I was exhausted. And now I just feel like curling up in a pit and whimpering. :(
We're no longer in default on any of our student loans.
*does a little dance*
The new payments on Ted's loan are a little higher than I hoped (like, $5 more than I hoped), but, well, we can handle $5. :)
Yay us. :)
It was a nice weekend. It was absolutely *beautiful* today, and Ted and I drove out to near Girdwood and biked the 6 mile old road (now a bike path) from Bird Point down to Girdwood, and then back again. It was a very nice ride. And we went shopping and went out to dinner and took a nap; I don't remember the last time we spent a whole actual *day* together. It was really really nice.
I forgot to tell the story about the car that stalled the other day. We were driving down C Street, and at the corner of C and Northern Lights, which is a fairly significant intersection, there was a car stalled with its hood open and its lights blinking. We said, "Ooh, that's a bad place for a car to stall," and went around it.
And as we turned the corner, we saw four Big Burly Men coming over from the Gold's Gym that's at the corner of C and Northern Lights. Three of them were in string tank-tops and shorts; the fourth was in a blue t-shirt and was probably the driver of the car. They were all grinning a lot, and they were clearly going to Go Move This Car.
I liked that a lot. *beam*
Friday we went out to dinner with Shaun's parents, and went to Lone Star, which is a steakhouse. Yesterday we went out to Tony Roma's, and Ted, who had eaten Burger King for lunch, didn't eat much of the bacon-cheeseburger he ordered. I asked if he was feeling okay, and he said, "Yeah, I've just had a lot of flame-broiled beef in the last twenty-four hours."
o.O
That made me laugh a lot, too. :)
It also reminds me of the time that he was saying he needed to get a wall-hung spice rack (Ted does the cooking at our house), only he said well-hung spice rack. *giggles* I've never let him live that down.
Nor have I let him live down the time that he was making lemon-pepper chicken, only he said lemon-pecker chicken. *helpless laughter*
Anyway, so this evening after doing all the other stuff I watched Tracker (first part of the season finale, which, irritatingly, is having nothing to do with the Overall Plot for the series, which, well, ok, you don't want to finish it all up at the end of first season, but still, grmph) and made cookies, which are pretty good, and Ted gave Chantico a bath. She's gotten VERY LARGE. Not, I think, because of the bath, but she has. :)
I should go check on the cookies. More bike blogging here.
The morning so far:
Chanti made a horrible, horrible mess of the kitchen last night. I cleaned up a lot of it this morning and then Ted finished, and mopped. She'd been outside several times, but she didn't seem to want to go to the bathroom. Ted came in with her and said, "If you pee in the kitchen now, I'm going to beat you within an inch of your life."
So she peed on the carpet in the corner of the living room.
In about 90 minutes, I'm going to go biking. Yesterday I did 16 miles (causing me to want to sing:
You bike sixteen miles
and what do you get?
another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go!
I sold my soul to the company sto'.
which everyone is no doubt *deeply* grateful for) and today I think I'll bike the whole coastal trail; I'll leave my house and head up towards town, which is about a 5 mile bike ride, then come back and then go out to Kincaid, so the total should be somewhere around 24 miles. I already have bike butt. I might not be able to move tomorrow. :)
I read the X-Treme X-Men GN last night, and had X-Men dreams, and today I am really wanting to grow up to be an X-Man.
Ted and I went out to dinner last night with Shaun's parents. *laugh* Shaun couldn't get off work, but we had a very fine time without him! We went to Lone Star, where they'd never been, and ate a lot and laughed a lot and generally had a good time full of silliness. Shaun's parents are *very* silly.
Next week I'm going to see Attack of the Clones with twenty other people. I haven't done that since -- er. Since Star Wars, actually. Since the re-releases of the original 3 films in 199whateveritwas. :) Cool!
I wonder if 3:30 is a nice time to bail from work early and go bike riding.
I think it is.
Later.
Oh goody. A tax bill from the state of California.
I suppose the good news is it's a hundred dollars or so less than I thought it would be. The bad news is we don't have all that and a bag of chips to send them, of course. I guess I'll send them half. This should be better, from their point of view, than a kick in the teeth with a frozen mukluk.
Of course, from my point of view it's a lot *like* a kick in the teeth with a frozen mukluk.
(I am surprised at how many hits you get on Google if you type in frozen mukluk. About 230. None of them, however, are a photo of an actual frozen mukluk, so you'll have to make do with a photo of some unfrozen ones.)
Yay me, I figured out how to delete extraneous copies of the same comment. It's not very hard. Just edit the entry and there's an option to delete comments. Et voila. The only problem is you have to actually scroll down the page to find the delete option, which took me several tries to do.
The bread's almost done baking. It smells really good and I'm really hungry.
Also, I didn't get to the gym this morning. This is in part because my stupid cheap-ass alarm clock (which has lasted 2 years, which is about 18 months longer than I expected it to, really) is too dead to set the alarm on anymore, and in part because Ted had a migraine this morning and I wasn't about to ask him to get up and drive me to the fucking gym.
*God*, I'm in a shitty mood.
You know, no matter how cheerful I am when I get up, it's pretty much totally fucked by having to spend twenty minutes cleaning up dog shit. And last night somebody left a bag of jolly ranchers on the counter, which the cats helpfully knocked off the counter and into the kitchen, so this morning besides dog shit there were also sticky nasty jolly ranchers to clean up off the floor.
Furthermore, Chanti, having emptied her bladder on the floor while people are showering, has no interest in going outside to pee when I take her out, which means she is more or less not going to the bathroom in the morning until she takes a dump inside again.
I am not having fun with this.
So Geoff, my old coworker from IAI, saw us at the Bear Tooth a couple of days ago and this reminded him to add us to the happy hour mailing list. This morning, having been added, there was an intro:
Catie "Mizkit" Murphy & Ted Lee - Alumni from the glory days of Internet Alaska. Also recovering semi-recent Californians. (Welcome back to the Great State!) http://mizkit.com for artful online self-disclosure... :)
Artful online self-disclosure.
*eyes my previous entry*
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
Flattering, in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way, but riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. :)
I am tired of cleaning up dog shit, too. And for some reason Zilli's decided he'd rather crap on the floor instead of in the litter box. I've spent the last half hour cleaning up animal poop. Half of that was spent cleaning the kitchen. When I was done with the kitchen I discovered that darling little Chantico, who had not deigned to go to the bathroom at all when I brought her out immediately before beginning to clean, had taken a dump in the foyer.
On the one hand I am grateful that she didn't do it on the rug. On the other hand.
At least the headache I induced at the gym last night is gone. After staying in bed only two hours longer than I intended to this morning. :P
I'm seriously thinking that taking today off might be a good idea.
gym:
- 235 crunches
- 25 pushups
- bench press, 50lbs, 3 sets of 12
- butterfly press, 60lbs, 3 sets of 15
- lat pulldown, 50lbs, 3 sets of 15
- tricep extensions, 40lbs, 3 sets of 15 (ow)
- shoulder press, 24lbs, 3 sets of 15 (I think. coulda been 12)
- bicep curls, 12lbs, 3 sets of 15
- supersomething pulldown, 50lbs, 3 sets of 15
- back extensions, 50lbs, 3 sets of 15
- 65 crunches
Boy, is that it? It felt like a lot more than that...
Okay, this is Angie's fault. Here we have a photo of all the Rogue figurines I've collected, along with a map of which Rogue is which. This one and this one (as well as the correlating Gambit bust) are on order.
It's all Angie's fault. Somehow. I just know it is.
For something slightly less geeky and a lot cuter, here are Ted and Chantico a couple of weeks ago. Chanti is a lot bigger now. Oh, and Lucy taught Zilli her new trick. o.O
Splah. Nastygram from the state today about Ted's AK student loan. I called them up and asked why there was a nastygram and they said not to worry about it, more or less. Which is nice, I guess. It's automated paperwork, the stuff they sent out, telling us we're 150 days in default. Given that we used to be like ... a lot more than that, I thought it was weird they were sending it. But apparently it's just one of the random dates; when the computer says it's 150 days in default, it generates a letter to tell us that. Nevermind that we're coming back from being in default.
Anyway, they got the forebearance paperwork on the 17th of April and they say it's been taking a full 30 days to get it processed, so we'll probably get a couple more of those sorts of letters. At least the number of days in default are getting smaller instead of larger.
I'm tired of bills. I'm tired of a few hundred dollars here and a few hundred dollars there (like, oh, car insurance, sigh) and I'm tired of the end being in sight but never actually seeming to arrive. Which is pretty lame, because we /have/ gotten ourselves out of default on all the student loans (or will have when this last one is finished being taken care of), which is a big fat end, but ... *sigh*
I wish Chantico would lie down and go to sleep. I'm tired of puppies, too.
Chantico is SUCH a wuss! We went outside for a little walk and Moby (the Jack Russell who lives across the parking lot) and his owners were out for a walk, too, and Moby scared the holy living bejeezus out of Chanti, who ended up between my ankles SHRIEKING YII YII YII YII YII with fear. She's an *embarrassment*, I tell you, an *embarrassment*. :)
All dented! My teefs are sooooooooo clean. And the teef cleaning lady said that for the number of years it'd been since I saw a dentist (uh, seven) and the fact that I don't floss nightly (she said, "Do you floss?" and I said, "Religiously, since last Thursday when my husband went to the dentist!", and she laughed quite a lot. :)), my teeth were in pretty darned good shape. And then the dentist admired my teeth and next week I go in to have some sealants put onto 3 of them.
Sooooooo clean!
Soooooo hungry!
Did I mention that my hair has gotten to be the Annoying Length? Sometime Friday afternoon it suddenly hit the length of getting in the way. Falling in my eyes. Stuff like that. Very annoying. So I got little hair clippy things (again). These ones are gold and silver instead of black, so they look somewhat less spider-like. I feel cute in them. :)
I have the best friends. Thus far they have donated almost three quarters of the funding I need for my Talkeetna bikeride next weekend (the 18th and 19th). Tonight I'm going to go around and hit up my neighbors. :)
In the meantime, if you'd like to donate ten dollars, you can do it here. :) Please email me and let me know if you do! Thanks!
(Really, that's about all I have to say today. It's raining. I'm hungry. Nothing real exciting.)
Oop. missed being social except to say hi, but that's ok. There will no doubt be time later. :)
Saturday I sat around and read all day, despite it being a beautiful day. I did not go bike riding at all. Today I hear my mother's voice saying, "Go outside and play!" and me saying, "But Moooooooom! I'm READING!" And because it is grey and chillier today, I wish I'd listened to Mom. Except she didn't say it yesterday. :)
I got a cell phone. Ai!
I also got two more pairs of tennies, watched Tracker, and read 3 books. Those were my accomplishments for Saturday.
Sunday, I went to the gym:
- 3 sets of 15 unless otherwise noted
- 175 crunches
- 25 pushups
- leg press, 160lbs
- hip abducters, 90lbs
- inner thigh crunch, 90lbs
- leg extensions, 40lbs
- leg curls, 60lbs
- back extensions, 50lbs
- weight-free floor exercises
- mule kicks
- pelvic tucks (let's do the time warp again!)
- leg lifts
Then we cleaned house and then I took a bath and now I've logged on to the computer. :) That's all!
The weekend:
Went to dinner at Lone Star and ate WAY TOO MUCH on Friday. It was a lot of fun. :) We were celebrating Ted's raise (yay Ted!) and so we went out to dinner, then went toooooooo
Spider-Man! Spider-Man! Does whatever a spider can! Look out! Here comes Spider-Man!
Hee hee hee. I really enjoyed the film a lot. There were some entirely too heavy-handed emotional moments, but the heavy-handedness was bad writing, not bad acting or bad directing. Bad *editing* I'll give you; the two scenes that stand out as the worst could have been ... well. One needed rewriting. The other one coulda been cut.
But! I thought they stayed very true to the origin stories -- and the first half of the movie was *about* origins; it was GREAT. And Tobey Maguire is soooooo cute. Ohmigod. And the webslinging was good. And there were classic Spider-Man poses. And and and. *Yeah*.
Oop, I have to go be social for a few minutes. :)
Oh, incidentally, Ted and I clocked the distance from Northern Lights & Minnesota to our house; it's about 1.3 miles. So that's how far I've been walking on the gym mornings when I report I've been walking a mile or so.
On Fridays I go to the gym and right now I have two dogs to walk when I gets home and one dog to clean up after and breakfast to get and trying to keep the dogs away from each other and a meeting at 9am and yaaagrgh!
gym:
- 50 crunches
- 25 pushups
- bench press, 50lbs, 2 sets of 15, 1 set of 8 (total muscle failure! whee!)
- butterfly press, 60lbs, 3 sets of 15
- bicep curls, 12lbs, 3 sets of 15
- shoulder press, 24lbs, 3 sets of 15
- tricep extensions, 40lbs, 3 sets of 15
I think I've found a way to more or less keep the dogs apart. One gets closed in a room while I walk the other so Chanti can't chase poor Annie up and down the stairs and around and around the foyer. I will keep Chanti with me in the office for several hours in the morning and then put her in the kitchen sometime after lunch, and bring Annie and her food down to the office so she can be with me and eat (she won't eat without her person around) and that will just have to work.
I keep thinking I have more to talk about but then when I sit down to blog I can't think of what it is! Drat!
I gymmed today instead of yesterday, because the bastards were closed yesterday morning and I had a free pass from last week or whenever it was that they were closed. So, this morning:
- 150 crunches
- 25 pushups
- leg extensions: 40lbs, 3 sets of 15
- leg curls, 60lbs, 3 sets of 15
- inner thigh crunch, 80lbs, 3 sets of 15
- hip abductors, 80lbs, 1 set of 15, 90lbs, 2 sets of 15
- butt blaster, 20lbs, 3 sets of 12
- calf raises, 50lbs, 3 sets of 15
- back extensions, 50lbs, 3 set of 15
- 50 crunches
- walked 1 mile or so
Poor Annie. Chanti just won't lay off. I have a lot more sympathy for Annie than for Chanti. *crossed eyes*
I brought my bike back to the bike shop last night and they told me it wasn't broken at all, and that I was pedaling wrong when I was trying to shift gears. The nice man was able to make it shift without a problem. I'm apparently no longer competent to ride a bicycle, which is kind of depressing. :P I tried it the way he said, and it shifted, so I guess it was me, not the bike. *sigh*
We also went shoe shopping. Now, for some women this is apparently a great joy. Me it just pisses off. I have very wide feet and on the occasions I can find tennies that fit, they're usually ugly. This time I ended up with a pair of men's black velcro sneakers, which make me feel like I've been reduced to third grade, but they fit and they're very, *very* comfortable. I want to get about nine pairs of them so when I wear these out I'll have more that fit. 7W. I wear wide shoes even in men's. Wiiiiide feets.
Ted found two pair of sneakers just right off the bat, which reminded me of the last time we went shoe shopping, when he got three pair of very nice shoes and I got none. :)
Chantico is driving me batshit.
I had some other things I was going to write about but hell if I can remember what they were, now.
I had a scientologist come knock on the door last night.
I'd never had a scientologist knock on the door. He tried to give me a book on Dianetics, and then a newsletter when I wouldn't take the book, and I said no, I wouldn't read either of them, and he said, "Well, at least you're saving us money," which I thought was very scientologish of him. o.o
Puff up! Puff up! I have just fixed all the bugs with my name on them! Wow. I'm impressed with me! This is a _good_ thing to have done, particularly since there are a bunch of major projects coming down the road and not having to worry about malingering bugs is nice! Woo me! *beam*
Oops. I found Annie. She wasn't hiding. She was stuck. :) Shaun had accidentally closed her in his room. :)
Now she and Chanti are having dominance issues under my feet. Poor Annie's got her tail utterly tucked between her legs. As Dad said, the only time he's seen it more tucked is when she's getting a bath. Poor, *poor* Annie.
Jeez o flip, man.
Woke up at about 4:45 for fear of oversleeping and lay fitfully in bed another 45 minutes or so and got up right at 5:30. Ted walked Chantico, I walked Annie (who is now hiding somewhere, the poor dog), we went and got my parents, I went to the gym . . .
. . . and it was closed. Again. Or rather, it was not open yet. Staffing problems. *grr* I will call them in a couple of hours and go wtf at them.
So I came home and went biking and it was VERY WINDY and quite cold. I did a 6 mile ride and that was definitely enough, in that wind. And my bike still hasn't got a high gear; it shifted into it twice, reluctantly, then refused to do so anymore. And some of the other gears are pretty reluctant, too. I'll call the bike shop back and see if I can get them to look at it again under the last fee, because they said it was fixed and it ain't.
Chanti's whining. I'll bring her out now.