2000 Archive

2000 Archive – 37,966 words.

March 2000

March 1st

Hi. My name isn’t really Rubber Wedge (a.k.a. Blogeois) but it fits so I’m sticking with it for now. I gave months of thought to whether online journals are a good idea and I just won’t know if it works for me until I try it. Writing is a good thing for me and I don’t get enough personal time to write for myself. This will be an attempt to correct that. Thanks for the idea go to Ed. He’s a kind of personal hero to me.

I work as a technical support representative for an online company. I answer technical email all day about a particular software program. There are good and bad things about working online. The good: Good pay, no boss looking over your shoulder, you can come to work naked and unshaven. The bad: The job feels like it is 24 hours a day on the days you work, office politics still exist even over email, and you have a tendency to let yourself go. I have held this job for over a year and I am surprised to find that I have let myself go. I only wear makeup when I suspect a neighbor will drop by or if I scare myself badly enough in the mirror. I still wear color coordinated clothing but lately, I have wanted to forego that and wear the equivalent to old-man-golf-clothes. I’m amazed how I desperately need to shower every 28 hours even if the most strenuous thing I have done all day is reply to 200 emails and lift 3 cups of coffee.

Letting myself go has carried over to outside of my work days. I found myself driving to a grocery store the other day with bed-head. Completely forgot to check myself before leaving the house. I was amazed that my husband, WS, didn’t say anything.

(BONUS HINT: I don’t think he has ever noticed these things.)

Last year, we had a house built. It was a year in planning and building and we got exactly what we wanted. The builders really let us go hog-wild with the modifications to the place and we took complete advantage of the situation. There isn’t another house in the development like ours. Unfortunately, I think we gave them so much grief that they are not allowing anyone else to make changes in their floor plans and the rest of the houses look like cookie-cutter homes. We regularly walk through the other houses as they are being built and they are all the same inside. Boring.

Because we spent so much on the house structure and modifications (not to mention a nasty tax bill coming due…but we won’t talk about that now), we didn’t have much money left. Our front yard came pre-landscaped by the builder and we added to it with plants we moved from the rental house we lived in for eight years previous. The back and side yards are our responsibility. Now that the weather will soon turn nice, we have to do something about the muddy quagmire that it is on extremely limited funds. I love gardening but it is going to be a very tight financial year and I’ll be lucky to afford a petunia or two. This does not make me too happy. I’ve upped my dose of Saint John’s Wort.

There’s lot to say for the anonymity of the Internet. A person can be online, chatting for years to people around the world and no one really knows who they are unless they are chatting to their own siblings or relatives. These people can say things like, “My boss is a big, fat pig” and no one will think twice about it. They can’t really say something like, “Mom is a big, fat pig” to their own siblings or relatives because, even if she is a big, fat pig, somehow, it will get back to her and there will be hell to pay.

It’s the same thing when talking about your boss. If no one knows you, you can say what you want, like, “My mom is a big, fat pig,” and no one cares, however, if you are not really anonymous online and your boss and or/co-workers know that, you can’t say what you want to about your boss because your boss might be reading it. In fact, your boss may just be looking for that little something to hold against that employee and if that person should say online somewhere, “My boss is a big, fat pig,” there could be hell to pay, whether it be true or not.

I think that is all I have to say about that.

My husband, WS, is in the process of being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. We have suspected it for about two years. Unfortunately, it can take up to fifteen years to make a positive diagnosis and there is no medication you can take until you are positively diagnosed and then, it’s nearly too late. The positive things are that no one ever dies from MS and it doesn’t affect the brain. The bad things about MS is that it eats away your nerve endings in your spine and you lose mobility. Take note: This is a pretty bastardized version of what MS is all about.

WS is in the middle of an exacerbation. This is a MS occurrence or spell. These last anywhere from 3 weeks to 4 months and robs him of feeling in his legs. His last episode removed all feeling in his feet from his ankles to his toes permanently. He had initially lost all feeling up to his hips. His thoughts on owning and driving a motorcycle are gone. The mountain bike of his dreams: Poof. His size 15 roller blades continue to gather dust as does his baseball mitt and basketball. He was never, ever, an active person anyway.

His most current exacerbation has removed all feeling in his right leg to his hip.

Nothing is there. He has to drag his leg to get around. It isn’t pretty and although MS doesn’t affect the brain, depression, mood swings, and stress over what is happening does affect him emotionally. He says he’s becoming an invalid, a cripple, handicapped. So what, I say. We’re all handicapped in some way: stupidity, looks, personality, poor eyesight, etc. And it takes strength for all us handicapped people to get out of bed everyday and face the world. Having MS isn’t any different than having bad teeth, or asthma, or weighing 500 pounds, or refusing to live in reality.

He doesn’t believe me. The next fifteen years ought to be fun.

I’ve just realized that everything I’ve written so far is depressing. As soon as I find something that isn’t depressing, I’ll jot it down here.

Wait a minute, that was also depressing. Okay, I’ll need to work on this.

Okay, I think I understand why WS is having his personal medical crisis. This is Revenge of The Man Damned month and while we didn’t publicly Damn The Man too much last month during Damn The Man month, we did bitch and whine a lot about our upcoming tax bill. Looks like The Man retaliated and wants an arm and a leg in return. Or in WS’s case, just a leg.

Possible future situation: How do you get a 6 foot 6 inch, 350 pound individual up and down a flight of stairs should both his legs go away? Raising the Mammoth may have been easier.

Eight days into WS’s latest MS thing and I can tell he is tired and bored of not being able to walk without dragging or flopping his right leg around. When he gets tired, he gets snappish and I have been snapped at countless times over the last two days. I have also been forced to do nearly everything by myself this past week and I’m feeling pretty sorry for myself. To think that this will be the rest of my next 30 years is disheartening right now.

In looking up from the keyboard, searching for the right words to express myself and while staring at a closet door, I have noticed that the wood grain pattern has created a perfected formed set of breasts with erect nipples. Disgusting. I think I need some sleep.

April 2000

April 4th

It’s MRI day for WS. He’s been able to walk around for the last couple of days and doesn’t look like a gimp much anymore. Black humor has been very effective at getting us this far. Talking about both of our future lives in wheelchairs, nurses trying to keep us from parking our chairs on each other’s oxygen tubes, getting tangled in life support equipment, fighting over the last of the oatmeal and lime Jell-O, etc. It’s been a riot really.

If he is real good today throughout the 2 hour MRI procedure and doesn’t swallow and screw up the pictures (the hardest part), then we get to go back to the doctor and wait around for the results. Or he could go get a spinal tap or two to find out quicker. Which would you pick? By the way, a MRI for a person as large as WS takes nearly three hours and they will screw it up anyway and require that you go back to do part of it all over again. This is something they do not tell you beforehand. My advice to spouses and/or significant others going along: Take a book along to read. A big book. Like War and Peace. Or your tax stuff. Maybe the tax stuff for all your neighbors too. Or better yet, refuse to go in the first place. This will be three hours of your life that you can never get back.

He’s told about 6 or 7 people now about his MS. He’s learning to be comfortable with this. People all react the same. They say things they never mean like, “I’m so sorry.” and “Let me know if you need anything.” That is the obligatory thing to say. It’s not meant to be taken at face value. I learned this from my mother’s experience going through my father’s long, long, LONG, illness and hospitalization. She actually tried to call in on all those “Let me know if you need anything.” offers. She had hundreds of them. And not a single one came through. Not one. My brothers and sister and I heard the same thing when my mother died and we learned the same lesson then: People feel obligated to say something, say anything, but they don’t really mean it. Get over it.

April 5th

I had the crappiest day ever yesterday for some reason. It began the exact second I opened my eyes in the morning. The fact that I was driving through Portland on the freeway when I finally opened my eyes may have had something to do with it. I had one of those bad biorhythm days or something. I dropped stuff all day, I ran into things and people, I banged my toes and shins on things, I smashed two fingers in two separate incidents. I stabbed myself in the boob with the car window – not an easy feat. I tripped running to the phone. I dropped the phone. I felt just plain mean and ornery after sitting at Portland Imaging for three hours waiting for WS to get through his MRI. Then he argued with me throughout the drive back to Vancouver. I believe this was shortly after I started using hand signals at the other drivers. It wasn’t my fault that they are all incompetent but I thought I should point it out to each and every one of them. Should a cop have pulled me over, I would have told him what he could do with himself as well. I was feeling rather reckless.

Later in the afternoon, out from under WS’s watchful eye, I treated myself to a Starbucks Venti Caramel Macciato with Soy, a blueberry oat muffin, a chocolate bar, and a slice of pumpkin loaf, all of which I wolfed down like it was my first meal in days. Much later that evening, I ended up with a raging case of the shits, probably due to all the crap I ate from Starbucks. I can’t remember when I last ate that much sugary sweet stuff and it probably served me right. So my crappy day literally turned into a crappy evening. I did feel better emotionally though.

Today, I kicked some major ass doing yard related work. I’m in the process of building a brick and mortar patio in side yard. I have all but the two steps leading up to it done. This is a project I am doing completely alone and this means I have to haul gravel, sand, brick, pressure-treated boards, and bags of mortar around by myself as well as dig the one-foot deep patio foundation. No, it hasn’t been fun, but the results have been worth it so far. Today, I worked on digging out one of the two remaining patio steps, planted five of nine trees in the back yard, unloaded more bags of sand and dozens of brick from the car, and had 200 square feet of concrete poured for a walkway. I was damned productive. I had to be. Tomorrow, WS has to go back for more MRI tests because they screwed up half of them on Tuesday.

April 7th

I’ve decided that I am a person who needs to physically exhaust themselves before they can even begin to relax. It’s just not fun to sit around relaxing and not doing anything if I know there are a billion things to do that only I can accomplish. Like today. It was a fairly nice day; foggy in the morning, sunny and warm in the afternoon. I could have sat around and had tea and crumpets all morning, but instead, I guilt-tripped myself into planting more trees, hauling more gravel to the side yard, raking out huge dirt clods, and pulling weeds, not to mention mowing the grass and clipping dead flowers. The problem is that by the time I relax, it’s only because I run out of daylight to see by and then I get pissed off about hours wasted just because it’s dark. I’ll be looking online for some of those monster flood lights next week. And maybe, if I finish all those billion things in a timely manner, I’ll finally be able to sit back and relax for once. Until something else comes up.

Semi-annual stock bonuses were given out today by my employer. I did pretty well this time around. I love my job. It helps that I’m on vacation this week. After the last 3 weeks with WS’s medical mystery and the fact that I have not taken or gone on a vacation since 1985, I really, REALLY needed time off. Besides, someone had to plant all those trees. That makes only 999,999,999 things left for me to do.

April 10th

It’s Monday and WS is back to work. He’s walking much better now and is able to drive okay. He also has lost ten pounds in the last three weeks. This is probably due to his better eating habits. Once upon a time, about 4 years ago, I was diagnosed with a severe dairy allergy. This meant no eating anything with milk in it.

Unfortunately, eighty-five percent of the processed food in the United States has milk or a milk derivative in it. It was extremely hard to not eat something that had dairy in it. WS was no support whatsoever and often would eat things like pizza and ice cream in front of me. Now the tables have turned. MS requires that you eliminate dairy from your diet as well as all fatty foods, beef, sugar, white flour, caffeine, alcohol, and in some cases, wheat. For me, it’s like a dream come true. I can finally eat the way I want to and in a way that is best for my allergy. For WS, it’s been a matter of getting his head in the right place and realizing that he has two choices: Eat what you want and aggravate the MS and lose your ability to walk and/or see, or eat what doesn’t bother MS and reduce the frequency and level of MS exacerbations.
April 27th we find out if WS has MS officially. Portland Imaging had him go back to re-do half of his MRI tests and one of the nurses hinted that this was often because they needed a better view of herniated discs in the spine. While this would not be any fun either, it sure would be a lot more pleasant to go through than MS would be. Here are some of the symptoms of MS:

• difficulty in walking
• abnormal sensations including numbness and “pins and needles”
• eye pain and loss of vision
• tremor
• weakness
• difficulty swallowing
• lack of coordination
• seizures
• bladder and bowel dysfunction
• hearing problems
• itching
• sexual dysfunction
• slurred speech or other speech effects
• sudden onset of paralysis (may seem similar to a stroke)
• a reduction in the ability to think, reason, and remember

April 13th

I have nearly finished my outdoor project for spring – the building of a 30 foot by 9 foot brick patio and steps. Since WS is permanently out of the picture for doing any strenuous work, I have done all the work myself over the last month. Definitely not fun, but the results are worth it. All the brick and mortar is in place and 2 of the 3 sides are landscaped with ferns, hosta, bleeding heart, and mossy rocks. Once these plants grow up and fill in, it will be a cool, relaxing paradise of sorts. Once our neighbors on that side are ready to have a fence built, it will be quiet and private as well. Or at least during the times that they aren’t running their air conditioner or don’t have smelly trash. I built this patio on the side of our house and unfortunately, our neighbor’s air conditioner and trash cans sit on that side as well. But, I plan on having several seating areas around the backyard so if one is noisy or smelly, I can always move to a different one.

Accepting that I’m now responsible for all the heavy labor projects and/or activities for the rest of WS’s life has been a heavy load to adjust to (no pun intended). I know that I can probably handle it, but there’s 5 percent of my brain that says there’s no way you can do everything. I’m trying not to listen to that part. I know that at my age I still have a lot of good, hard years left and that I’m not afraid to break a fingernail. Or a finger. Sometimes I just wish that life was easy for me once in a while but life is not fair and I should not expect it to be.

Merlin, my scanner, is dead. I have no idea when this happened. The mechanism inside is totally frozen up. I’ve used this thing about 25 times total over the last 3 years. This was not what I paid $300 for. Okay, so it was a birthday present and I didn’t actually pay the $300 out of my own pocket but it doesn’t make me any happier. I can only imagine what the cost will be to fix this thing. Maybe next year I’ll invest in a good digital camera instead. Until then, no pictures will show up here.

April 14th

The IRS took the bite out of us today. Taxes were mailed along with a check for a thousand dollars. We still owe them six thousand to be paid in monthly payments of three hundred dollars until we die or something like that. I hope they are happy. We originally owed eleven thousand dollars but were able to come up with some creative, yet legal, tax deductions.

The stock market took a dump today. I figure we lost about six thousand dollars. Coincidence? Hmmm…

My boss sent me an email asking how WS and I were doing. She said she had been thinking about us. That was nice and totally unexpected. One neighbor we told about the MS thing to hardly speaks to us anymore. I saw the terror in his eyes when we told him. He got those “scared wild-horse eyes” and I don’t think it was because I told him I would kick his ass if he didn’t stop picking on WS for not helping me unload two hundred bricks from the trunk of the car. My boss’s email sounded very sincere and it made me think that maybe some people do care. I think that makes a total of four.

April 17th

What a difference one stock market day can make. Last Friday, we lost six thousand dollars in one nasty trading day. Today, we gained back all six thousand plus another thousand. Now, if only we had been out Friday and in today, that would have put us over eighty thousand total in the 401K and made for an incredible month. As it sits, we have made just over nine percent this month, well over the three percent required to assure retirement in seven years.

Enough stock talk. I was able to make some good trades today with various neighbors who are trying to get their yards in shape this spring. Most of the houses in this new development do not have a backyard in place. Most are nothing but mud holes after the winter rains. Today, I was able to print out some sorely-needed Oregon tax forms for someone desperately in need of them in exchange for some bobcat work next week. We have 3 huge rocks (two or three hundred pounds each) sitting in the middle of our backyard that need moved. I also arranged for use of a big rototiller in May and the use of spackling tools and instruction on finishing our garage at the end of May. Not bad for a long walk around the ‘hood this evening. It must be the full moon. And now you see what kinds of projects I’m lining myself up for in the coming months. I swear, in a couple of years, I will know how to do everything pertaining to home ownership and hope to put Bob Villa out of business.

April 18th

I’m off from work today and only had plans to work on a new journal page design. It was supposed to rain today as it was for the last 3 days, but once again, the weathermen are wrong. It’s sunny outside so I felt obligated to putter around outside. I want their job. I could stand to make 80K a year to be wrong 50 percent of the time.

So after puttering, I finally got to the task of creating a new opening page for my journal. I like it. It’s MUCH better than the boring old one that had about as much appeal as creamed corn.

Somehow, I was able to convince P to update his money page on his personal web page. Don’t ask me how that happened. I’ve been ragging on him for the last 10 months to update his stock plan information. Today was the right day, I guess. So while I am whining for him to come out and look at the full moon rising, he’s waving me off because he is writing half a novel’s worth of information for his money page. Geez, all I expected was a short paragraph. It will be uploaded soon. Perhaps it pays to henpeck…naw.

April 19th

A work day and still no rain. The weathermen really suck up here in Portland and Southwest Washington. They’ve been wrong for 5 days straight. I want to work outside in the nice weather but my work email keeps me chained to my desk. My new journal/web cam page isn’t helping either. If it wasn’t for the eagle eyes of Ed and others, I’d be lost. Thanks everyone. You can all stop sending me email now telling me it looks like crap on your Linux/mac/opus/dos/nintendo systems.

My neighbor is working hard on a massive outdoor project. Both our backyards have a dramatic slope off into the lots behind us. We jumped on the chance to have a rock wall built last fall. It only cost us $200 and one broken finger. My neighbor didn’t want to do all that work at the time. Now she is digging into the hillside to create a terrace and bracing the dirt slope with 6×6 landscape timbers. It makes my brick patio I built last month look like child’s play. She’s doing all the work herself and somewhat like myself, she isn’t getting much in the way of support or help from her husband. It’s hard to see things mentally or get excited about something until the project reaches a certain point. I don’t think she is there just yet.

I want to go over and watch her progress (we don’t have a fence between us yet) but I think her husband feels that I’m just encouraging her to work harder and spend more on materials and tools. I think I’ll take over beer the next time. Everyone always feels better after a case or two of beer.

April 21st

Anything and everything that can possibly go wrong today is going wrong. I feel as though I’m having the worst day on the planet possible to any one individual. My bio-rhythm must be way, WAY off. To make matters worse, I have totally trashed the house looking for a single receipt for a large tree I had delivered last August. I have every receipt for every single plant and seed packet I have bought since 1992. Yet this one receipt I cannot find. And I MUST find it because the tree is dead and the nursery will replace it within one year IF you have the receipt. We are talking a $200 dollar tree here. I can’t just write it off. It is very strange as well as I have never had a plant die on me.

To make matters even worse yet, WS seems to be having just as bad of a day and can’t find things he is looking for either. Maybe we have a black hole in our house. If so, I believe it to be located in WS’s office since most of what enters his office is never seen or heard from again.

Things didn’t get any better as the day wore on until someone told us to have a good Easter weekend. Off the top of my head and considering the kind of mood I was in, I shot back, “Thank you! I will because we found the body!” and strolled out of Fred Meyer’s with a shit-eating grin on my face. The day had just improved a bit.

April 23rd

Today, I thought I would review all the good things that have happened so far this weekend. So often I dwell on the bad things because I’m only happy when it rains (pour your misery down on me…and all that).

• Portland Nursery gave me a $125.00 credit for a dead tree
• WS found the video for Golden Earring’s Twilight Zone online, downloaded it, and burned it to CD
• It’s been raining on and off for two days
• I’ve started getting personal email for a change
• The Cuban boy story that has removed any shred of enjoyment in watching the news may be finally coming to an end
• The bathrooms are clean
• I’m considering going for Master Gardener certification from WSU
• No one has uttered the words: Pro-Wrestling
• For once, neighbors are borrowing and returning my tools instead of the other way around or not returning them at all
I finally feel like I am getting ahead.

April 25th

Today is the last official day of denial for WS. Tomorrow, should the doctors have a solid diagnosis, he will most likely be told that he has MS. If the doctors have a solid diagnosis…and his test results. WS called to verify his appointment yesterday and they didn’t have his x-rays from Portland Imaging yet. Good Grief! His MRIs were only taken 3 weeks ago! One thing we have learned about Portland Imaging: They Are Incompetent. Once look at all the blonde ex-models working behind the counter (and snapping at each other as I witnessed for 3 hours) and you can understand where some of the incompetency comes from. To call them all bimbos would be an insult to all bimbos.

WS has taken his potential diagnosis to heart over the last 3 weeks and has cut out all the foods that are known to aggravate MS. Now, if you know WS like I know WS, this phase will only last for as long as it takes for the novelty to wear off. Yep, that’s him. And I have also learned that no amount of nagging will help. He’s on his own with this one.

So, what this means is he is no longer eating any beef, limited chicken, NO wheat or any products that contain wheat or wheat flour, NO sugar, NO caffeine, NO fatty and/or fried foods, no alcohol, and NO partially hydrogzinated oils. Basically, he eats LOTS of rice and rice products like rice pasta, LOTS of fish, veggies, fruit, some corn products, herbal tea, and the occasional root beer. Fortunately, I like all these and as an added benefit, WS has lost 30 pounds in 3 weeks. Not that you can tell just yet. He was a B-I-G boy.

With every passing hour today, I have this increasing feeling that after tomorrow, nothing will ever be the same again. Not that it ever is, but it just feels like something big will happen. I hate these kinds of feelings. It basically means I will get no sleep tonight and I’ll be all cranky and probably start my period or something right there in the doctor’s office. No white pants for me tomorrow.

April 27th

No sign of MS. That is what the MRI tests show. Nothing there but a few compressed and herniated discs and a couple of pinched nerves. The spinal lesion that he had 6 years ago and started this whole MS fear, is completely gone. However, they are certain that compressed discs and pinched nerves in that location do not cause foot drop, loss of total feeling in the legs, and double vision. Result? More MRIs, this time of the brain. If MS is lurking anywhere, that is where it may be hiding. The doctors were baffled as to why East Portland Imaging didn’t do the cranial MRI the first or second time around. Incompetence, I assured them and they somewhat agreed. That series of tests take place in 3 weeks. The wait continues.

Without the threat of MS looming in our immediate future, we shopped for more trees for our backyard and watched a borrowed movie. The Sixth Sense was amazing. The first intelligent thriller I have ever seen. At no time during the entire film was my intelligence insulted. Nor was it cutsy because there are children in it. 2 thumbs way up. This will be a definite purchase and I highly recommend it to anyone. It almost wipes out that horrid memory of being forced to watch Ace Ventura last month.
B-I-T-C-H! Why are you being like this?? That was directed at someone I know.

Someone who let something go right to their head. Someone who is no more suited to be this than I am the Princess of Canada. They know who I’m talking about but will assume I’m referring to someone else. I’m not.

April 29th

This has been one S-L-O-W month, or maybe I just love turmoil. I’m very anxious for April to be finished with. Aprils are generally not good months for me. Neither are Octobers for some reason. I get most of my traffic tickets in April and October (one year I got 4 tickets in October alone). I’ve always gotten bad haircuts or perms in April. I’ve lost perfectly crappy jobs in April. Then there is the whole tax time thing. May starts Monday. Let’s hear it for May!

I just realized how badly I miss 80′s big hair band videos. I don’t know where that came from but I’d be willing to bet that menopause is just around the corner.

I am very happy to add Celestina to my short, but highly entertaining list of Journal Friends. Today, she talked about feeling like JiggyPuff. I’ve had days just like that but then I discovered fiber.

May 2000

May 1st

WooHoo! May first! May Day. Official kick-off of the boating season in the Pacific Northwest. A new month and maybe most importantly, PAYDAY! I’ve got about 20 more trees to buy and a fence to build this month. The empty lot behind us still has not sold so it’s not like we have people peering down into our backyard yet but we want to get as many trees planted back there as possible before construction begins. The developers have already changed their original plans for this development once and built much bigger houses on much smaller lots than they were originally allows to by Clark County construction code so we figure since they found a way to get around the building codes, they’ll probably end up putting up a four story house right behind us and block our view of Mt. St. Helens (as they did with Mt. Hood last month).

For future reference, do not eat potato chips immediately followed by soy chocolate chip ice cream. The two just do not mix well and you WILL spend considerable amounts of time in the bathroom. I can assure you that the time will not be spent plucking your eyebrows.

May 2nd

Over the weekend, a neighbor told us that a visiting friend referred to us as “the Anal Gardeners” because we keep up our landscaped front yard. Everyone in this development got a landscaped front yard. It’s just that most people let theirs go and by now, some look fairly dead. I’ve had a few days to digest this label and I still don’t know what to think of it. I rename neighbors all the time so it is only fair that they name us as well. My first thought was that he probably figured we were a couple of 70 year olds with nothing more exciting to do in our lives. Okay, so we are nerds with nothing more exciting to do in our lives.

Then I countered that with knowing that most people who poke fun at people who garden have the most incredibly overgrown, weed-infested, toy-strewn, and dog-turd encrusted yards themselves because they don’t care and all their neighbors hate them. I think that is a perfectly normal reaction and probably a fairly accurate assumption.

Today, I’m looking at our yard and thinking maybe we are anal gardeners and maybe I ought to rip half the plants out of it. Feeling foolish after thinking that, I have chosen instead to keep the front door closed and the blinds shut and sit around being depressed about it for a few hours. It’s too wet to go out and garden anyway.

Right now, I’m listening to Ed’s music and realizing that I MUST have his CD. You really should listen to a track or two from his web site. Don’t say I didn’t nag you about it when he’s all that and a bag of chips.

I haven’t been reading anything lately. A book, I mean. This is highly unusual. I can’t honestly remember a time when I didn’t have a stack of books to go through. Yes, I’m stressed and overworked. That hasn’t stopped me before. I did finish Ken Follett’s “A Place Called Freedom” in March and was sorely disappointed in it. His novel, “Pillars of the Earth” was a masterpiece. Then he writes this “A Place Called Freedom” romance novel crap. I picked up his “A Dangerous Fortune” at a book sale recently, but after reading a few pages, this sounds like it was just written in order to pay off the Jag or something. I hate it when authors sell out.

May 3rd

For everyone who has asked us why we haven’t given out our new address, you may want to know that we are officially hiding out. You are in good company, however. We are also hiding out from the Census Police. We are not hiding out from our creditors. They contact us regularly through our P.O. Box and we contact them back. No worry about face-to-face contact there.

WS has an anti-social anxiety problem. He knows it. I know it. He hates being around people and I suspect I’m am sometimes included in that group. There is medication you can take for this behavior. Side effects include sleeplessness, weight loss, lethargy, and depression. Oh boy. Just what I want to do; trade one personality type for a worse one.

His behavior has rubbed off on me a little bit and I find it hard to want to go out to see people for the last year. It does, in no way, mean I don’t care for some people. In fact, I care intensely for some people but I won’t embarrass myself by confessing whom exactly these people are. BONUS HINT: It’s no one related to me.

So I see people in the neighborhood, at the grocery store, the nurseries, and any restaurants we go to, but that is about it. I am just as responsible for this as he is. My job is responsible for this as well but I really like the idea of my job. It’s the people that I could do without.

I’ve been eating too much crap lately. I’ll blame that on Aunt Flo. I also quit taking vitamins. Actually, I just can’t remember to take all 7 of them everyday and I think I’m paying for that now. I have felt crappy since Sunday and my head is fuzzy. Oh yeah. I am trying to quit caffeine too. What a joke! I NEED caffeine. In fact, I’d sell my half of my soul for a Grande Soy Caramel Macciatto right now. Oh yes, I’m addicted.

May 4th

I am very upset! It has taken me 10 months to finally lure some wildlife (in the form of birds) back into our yard due to all the heavy construction going on in the development and I was enjoying them at the 6 foot tall birdfeeder for all of 4 days when out of the blue comes the neighbor’s cat. The one they don’t seem to care about and lives outside 24/7. Before I could get out to the feeder, he had jumped 6 feet up the platform, snagged a yellow goldfinch and hauled ass back across the street with the bird squawking in the cat’s jaws the entire time.

Not more than 20 minutes later, I caught the cat back out at the feeder again! This time I doused it heavily with a huge glass of ice water. This is going to be a problem.

In 2 weeks we get a fence, but now that the cat knows that it’s free mealtime in our backyard, a wood fence isn’t going to stop him. I just may have to invest in a pellet gun after all. I love cats, better than birds, but NO ONE dicks with my wildlife, especially when I worked so hard to create a tree-filled backyard for them.
I’ll be willing to bet I’ll end up taking down all the feeders. There goes a hundred dollars down the drain. No use talking to the cat owners. They have already stated that they could care less what the cat does. It’s licensed and fixed and that is all they think they are required to do. If I could catch the cat, I’d put a bell or something on him, but he’s partly wild and no one can touch him without him going totally ballistic and scarring people for life.

Damn it, Damn It, Damn It!! I have to figure out something!

Speaking of wildlife, we have tree frogs here. Two of them had taken up residence outside our front door. Skippy, the wonder frog, has since moved out on his own. I assume he is one of the loud frogs we hear every night from the side yard. Skip-ette, is a different story. She has never seemed to grow in size, she stays out for days on end meaning we don’t see her for days instead of every evening, and she doesn’t seem to want to leave the nest. This can only mean one thing: Skip-ette is doing crack. Skip-ette, the CrackWhore frog. We always get the misfit wildlife. Why is that? I shared this insight with a neighbor recently. She laughed…nervously.

Do you ever get the feeling that your spirit is dying? I have been feeling that lately. I suppose I’ll have to install AOL’s ICQ program soon so I can share this info with some stranger. Ick!

May 7th

Okay. We’ve figured out the bird/cat situation. We now have a bird feeder that is about 9 feet above the ground. It’s a good-looking wrought iron and cedar thing and the goldfinches are back. On a related note, I have found a dead shrew mole or mouse somewhere in our yard every day now for the past 6 days. Every day, it’s the hunt for the Dead Mole of the Day. It’s like a game now. So, is a cat bad if he snags birds AND moles? I’m still thinking on this one.

No, I’m not installing ICQ.

I collected on the 125 dollar credit that Portland Nursery owed me today. Bought an entire carload of sizable rhododendrons and planting compost. The trunk was crammed full! Total cost to me: 12 minutes driving time, a minuscule amount of gasoline, and 11 bucks. I was feeling pretty good about myself after that.

So, we planted all those rhodies and now I’m feeling the pain. So, I needed soy ice cream. Must be some kind of weird fuzzy logic. We also got a wheat- and dairy-free brownie mix and damn! If those brownies aren’t tasty!! I’m am truly impressed!

WS continues to eat good and lose weight. I have not lost a pound and I am eating what he is eating. Ever since I turned 42, my body has betrayed me and won’t do anything I ask of it. I have to face it. I’m a fat, middle-aged woman. But my hair was well-behaved today and very soft and shiny.

Okay, things are getting weird now. Time to go watch The Spy Who Shagged Me again.

May 8th

It’s time for my annual 18-month long bout of depression. Actually, I’m a month past due. I have no idea what causes this other than living in a hectic and stressful world. I thought I would bring it up with my doctor the next time I saw her, but I received a letter a few weeks ago from Kaiser saying that she took a position with a hospital somewhere and I would have to find a new doctor. I tried finding a new doctor today. Kaiser Permanente doesn’t want to tell you about their doctors’ personalities or philosophies. They can only talk about what school they went to. I could care less what school they went to.

Then they directed me to the Kaiser Permanente web site where I can look at their doctors’ pictures if I want to. Oh boy. Was that helpful. NOT! They all look like mug shots!

So I’ll just wallow in self-pity while the rest of my low self-esteem dashes itself upon the rocks of despair. Or maybe I’ll feel better tomorrow. If I can sleep. Who knows? No, I’m still not installing ICQ although it is sometimes very tempting just so I can talk to someone who isn’t parked permanently in front of a TV. Like AOLers.

Hmmm…I didn’t need that visual. This is pathetic.

The main reason I won’t install ICQ is because it crashes my system every time I try to install and use it. It is completely incapable with the crappy software program I have to use for my job. Sure, some of my other co-workers can use ICQ and this other software together, but they also run other crappy software programs like Outlook and WWF games and then complain about all the viruses they get. Nope, it’s not going to happen here, my friends.

So, I guess I’ll just miss out on social interaction. Like that would be anything new. I have to admit that sometimes I get very lonely here behind the screen and I lack the social skills required to change that. It’s gotten worse since I’ve been married. WS refuses to be social and any social skills that I originally had are all but gone now. Thank gawd they aren’t something you put on a resume’ or anything.

Well, 2 more hours of work to go. I’ve slept pretty crappy for the last 2 months and every night I hope that this will be the night that ends my insomnia. I have no problem getting to sleep; it’s staying asleep that is the problem. My brain just does not shut off. I think that is what death is for.

May 9th

It’s my day off. Or it is supposed to be. I woke up to 40 tech support emails in my in tray this morning. A few hours after reporting it to my “manager”, they were re-routed to co-workers who are working today and the screw-up doesn’t look like it affected my overall monthly email response time. I’m a stickler for keeping my email response time low. It’s how I monitor myself. My co-workers don’t care about their response time and my superiors tell me that no one pays any attention to response time. Yet, we are expected to reply to all tech support emails within 24 hours. How can “no one” care about email response time but expect us to email replies in 24 hours? It doesn’t make sense. My response time is currently 3 hours. Everyone else’s average is anywhere from 6 hours to 75 hours. I have no life and that is about the only thing I don’t care about. Keeping my response time low makes me happy. I can’t seem to explain this to my “manager” or my superiors.

The company I work for is getting ready to change the way the technical support department handles email. It’s both exciting and scary. It looks like we’ll be adding chat and voice phone to our heavy schedule. I cannot, in any way, shape, or form, handle voice calls. I totally freeze up. My brain stops. It’s like being back in school and freezing up on test days. This has plagued me all my life, from kindergarten thru college. I have tried working through it but to no avail. If I am required to take tech support voice calls, I will fail miserably. It could be the end of my current job for me. Too bad because I really liked the idea of my job. Perhaps I should look around for something similar in the job market just in case.

For some reason, WS wanted me to take him to work today. It’s a guy thing. If you don’t get there by 7 a.m., you don’t get a good parking space, meaning the front end spots where you can sit in your cube (otherwise known as calf-fattening pens) and admire your car all day. He wanted to sleep a little late today but didn’t want to park in a crappy spot. He didn’t want to park at all it seems.

Before coming back home from dropping him off, I stopped at Fred Meyers and picked up salad stuff, hair color, a couple of baskets and a few other frivolous things. What I really wanted to do was to drive straight to Jack-In-The-Box and scarf on some tacos with extra sauce. We haven’t been to Jack’s since January and with WS being “oh so healthy” lately, it doesn’t look like any trips to Jack’s will be coming anytime soon. If I want to go, I’ll have to go by myself. I’m starting to get visions of fat women stopping by donut shops and eating dozens of donuts before coming home. It’s that visual that stops me cold. I’m really craving French fries too.

We’re waiting to get an appointment to go back to WS’s neurologist. He had his cranial MRI yesterday. Nothing yet.

May 10th

Back to work today. I got a nice fuzzy email from Ed. It’s nice to know that someone is reading the words from my head. I’m afraid I vented about the pitfalls of my job to him. I’ll blame it on the insomnia today. Sorry Ed.

I planned on taking WS to see Gladiator with me yesterday, but he shut me down. Mumbled something about having to find out when it was playing first and where it was playing first and getting something to eat first, picking up the mail, blah, blah, blah. I was trying to be spontaneous. He wasn’t clear. So we didn’t go. Later I found out he wanted to go. He is deep within his engineer-ese mode and hasn’t spoken clearly to anyone outside of H/P since last December. He has no idea what I am talking about when I say this. He also has no idea of what I am talking about 99 percent of the time. So I’m left to talk to him in the most basic of verbal communication skills. This consists mostly of grunts and raised eyebrows. He misses most of these too. Due to the stress of his job and physical condition, he is very self-centered right now. He would reply back that I am the self-centered one. This is about the only conversation we have anymore unless I bring up gardening issues which bore him silly.

Our 30+ pound cat has a vet appointment today. Ian is so big he can’t clean his butt after using the cat box. The vet is going to shave his butt to help make things a little less likely to stick back there. Nothing like waking up in the morning and finding poopy butt smears all over the house.

Getting Ian into the cat carrier is always an adventure. It’s like trying to grab a greased squealing pig and trying to cram it into a Kleenex box. I suspect we’ll be arriving a bit late for his appointment.

May 11th

Hey! I finally got some sleep! In fact, I slept until 1:30 in the afternoon. Never mind that I went to bed at 2 a.m. the night before and tossed and turned until 9 a.m. The hail outside woke me up. Thank goodness for Pacific Northwest spring weather. So, do I feel better? Probably. I don’t know. I’m cutting caffeine out of my life and all I want is coffee. There is only decaf in the house. I miss having an empty bag of whole bean vanilla macadamia coffee sitting around here somewhere. Just the smell from the inside of that bag made me happy. Simple things for simple minds, I guess.

No, wait! I can do something about this. I’ve got about 25 bucks left. I can order Lion coffee online. One bag of Vanilla Macadamia Whole Bean coffee coming up. You are witnessing addiction in all it’s horrible glory.

Now, that wasn’t painful at all. Even the part about paying for extra fast delivery. I wonder if I can somehow claim this on my income tax next year. This is, after all, the direct result of a stress-laden job. I have often thought recently that since I am now making more than I have at any job I have had in the past, that this would be a great time to start up a good, healthy heroin habit. Then I can puke everything away and either kill myself or find some bleeding-heart types to mooch off of for the rest of my life. I think the key here is to never look back.

Looking back, I’ve had a pretty exciting life once I got away from all the childhood abuse. I’ve briefly trained for the Olympics, done the christian wife thing, divorced, got abortions, raced cars, eaten cat food to survive, watched friends die, been a meat cutter, a baker, a mistress, a secretary, a body builder, and now a software technician and caffeine addict. I’ve just never seen the point of getting into illegal drugs. Until now. But I guess nothing is more pathetic than a middle aged woman discovering crack for the first time.

Just watched part of a VH1 “Where Are They Now?” on big-hair bands of the 80′s. I really miss this time frame. And I really hate that I miss them because in my mind, that makes me old. I just can’t get excited about rap artists today and Rob Zombie, well, he’s cool but not in a sexual way.

Woohoo! Thai food for dinner! I really need to find a replacement for food.

May 13th

I’m back to getting no sleep. It could have had something to do with the big argument WS and I had yesterday. After leaving the house in a huff, with only my house keys, chap stick, and asthma inhaler, I realized I really have no where to go should I decide to leave. This really doesn’t bother me though. I’ve left relationships before with nothing but the clothes on my back and I’ve survived just fine. At least I felt somewhat safer walking about northeast Clark county than I ever did walking around our old neighborhood. The thing is, in the old neighborhood, there were lots of places to hang around. Out here, it’s a much longer walk to civilization and if you hang around very long in one place before you get to civilization, you’re just as likely to get eaten by packs of coyotes.

So, from a distance I watched WS drive around looking for me (for some reason), and finally walked back home, let myself in, and sat in the dark. After a while, WS came back home and I am fairly certain that if I had said a word or cleared my throat, he would have jumped through the ceiling. Instead, I just sat there and listened to him wander around the house. When he pulled out the handgun and looked at it for a few minutes, I knew right then I’ll have to sell it. Even in my deepest depression, I never think about the gun but this is me and that was him.

Much later, after he found me sitting there, I suggested that perhaps we ought to think about me moving out. Will I? It’s too early to tell. He suggested that this would be a bad idea but offered that maybe we could both stay here as housemates if I was so determined to end this relationship. I already feel that we are nothing more than housemates and said so. He said it could be on more of an official level. Separate bedrooms is how I take that.

Okay, so this is very much like how I figured things would end up. I could do much worse. In fact, I have gone through much, much worse. Do I really think that we will go through with this? No. But I’ll bet that the next few days won’t be very much fun.
We have a dinner invitation for tonight at a good neighbor’s house. Once again, I’ll have to become what the situation calls for: the friendly, loving, outgoing wife of a software enginerd. Lights. Camera. Action!

May 14th

What a difference a day makes. The lines of communication are open and we’ve talked about a lot (effectively using up my day off as well). I won’t be finding my own place and WS will start picking up the slack around here. Do I think it will last? Tune in 3 months from now, same time, same channel, and I’ll probably be whining again. Are we just housemates now? No, not that I don’t feel like we aren’t but that’s a physical thing that we can’t do anything about.

Dinner was nice. Rob and Angie, the neighborhood vegans, invited us for dinner because we took care of their dog when they were on vacation in Mexico last week. We played Balderdash and found it a good game for forcing your brain to work. I could use this game strategy when working on the web page. Unfortunately, I can’t use in my day-to-day job. I don’t think my boss would appreciate me sending some idiot AOLer a tech email telling him/her that the art of reinstalling a software program is to wave your hand under the genitals of a male llama at exactly 3:12 p.m. and yodel “I’M REINSTALLING THIS MAGNIFICANT PIECE OF SOFTWARE IN ORDER TO ATTRACT ALIENS FROM BOONSFAR!” Wa-La! Installation has taken place. Or something.

Hmmm…Mother’s Day. Memories of being recruited to pull weeds and grass out of my mother’s rose beds. She only planted extra thorny roses. She never took care of them either or even paid any attention to them, but every Mother’s Day, us kids would have to spend 6 hours+ pulling 3 foot-high Bermuda grass out of the beds so she could briefly see what she spent the rest of the year ignoring. That was her Mother’s Day tradition. And every Mother’s Day, I automatically feel like pulling weeds. WS and I don’t celebrate Mother’s Day anymore. We used to call it Non-Mother’s Day and celebrate with dinner out and maybe visit a garden center. But that was years ago. I don’t even think that he knows it’s Mother’s Day today and honestly, I don’t think he would even care.

May 15th

Absolutely nothing is happening today. I’m off today because I agreed to work all of next weekend. Nearly every employee of the company I work for is going on party buses to Mexico for the weekend but I can’t go because of WS’s condition. I think only one other employee isn’t going out of 100 employees of the online company I work for. Am I bitter? Nah, I’ve been to various parts of Mexico about 30 times. Nothing new there. It’ll be hot anyway. Ugh.

We were supposed to have our fence put up this weekend. The fence company now says it will be Wednesday or Thursday. All the rain last week caused problems with other jobs and delayed everything for a week. Whatever. I don’t want to hear excuses. I’m real tired of excuses. We’ve heard them for the past 10 and 1/2 months from the building contractors, the concrete company, the flooring company, and now the fencing company. I am in no mood to be patient or polite anymore. I’ll never make it in society circles with this attitude. My coffee should be arriving sometime this week. All I have to say is that it had not better be late.

I just found out from a group of people in our neighborhood that the main salesman for our housing development is a racist. He blatantly discourages minorities from purchasing homes in this development, going as far as point-blank telling people that certain streets might be better for them than others because they are trying to keep all the minorities that slip through the cracks together. To say that I was furious when I heard this was an understatement. Had I known that this crap was going on, I would have outright refused to have anything to do with this home building company. The salesman, Chuck, is on my permanent shitlist. He’s a greasy-looking used car salesman type (everyone agrees) and is only friendly when someone is in the midst of buying a house. Because he is the main salesman, you don’t get much choice in having to deal with him. Before and after the sale, you are lucky if he grunts in your general direction. Most neighbors here that he has written up contracts for, he won’t even talk to anymore. How I could have been blind to this is fairly pathetic on my part. I’m usually much more tuned in on stuff like this. I have no excuse. But WS is making up a Rant List on several companies that he feels deserving of some major slamming. I think it’s safe to say that you’ll be hearing more on this at a later date.

May 17th

I plan on being heavily under the influence of caffeine today. My coffee order came in late last night. In fact, until I go through the new email client software change that the company I work for is changing to, I plan on doing caffeine nearly every day. Stressful times are rapidly coming up and I feel that I will need to be sharp to keep up.

One of our cats just will NOT leave me alone today. This doesn’t make it easy to work. Zooot insists on touching me or sitting on my lap constantly. She must be having a low self-esteem day…or she knows something that I don’t. They say (I don’t know exactly who “They” are) that animals know when things are about to happen. Maybe I’ll be mugged going out to the mailbox. Maybe I’ll have a heart attack while walking the neighbor’s dog today. Maybe I’m just being a drama queen. I think this is more the case and I think my cat just wants my coffee.

I tried to rescue a baby rabbit the other day. We were walking around the neighborhood when we heard a squealing noise behind us. Tiger, another neighbor’s cat, had attacked a baby rabbit and was about to eat it or something. We grabbed the cat and I tried to get the rabbit to run off into the thick part of the field down by the creek but it wouldn’t budge. It had two sizable wounds on it’s back but I knew that if I left it, Tiger would be back to finish it off. So, taking the fact that I would have to touch it and risk it biting me or passing the Hanta virus to me, I grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and under it’s back feet and carried it to the thick brush out into the field. Then I had to prod it to get it to hop into the brush and out from the open area. Then we carried Tiger back to his home on the other side of the development.

I know the rabbit probably didn’t make it. Cat bites and scratches always become infected. This rabbit was very young and wild things have a tendency to give up on life rather easily when injured or when you decide to try to nurse it back to health on your own. Plus I touched it and transferred human smell to it. I also have no idea where exactly it’s home was. A few hours later, the coyote pack that lives down by the creek was howling really close to our housing development. It was pretty safe to say that they found the baby rabbit. Wouldn’t be much meat on those bones. Well, I tried anyway.

May 18th

Today, Deiter – my computer, is getting a lobotomy. He is overdue and has been threatening to crash severely about every half hour for the last 3 weeks. I just have not had the time to schedule his operation any sooner than today. I will not miss his personality. I never get emotionally attached to my computers anymore after gleefully ripping apart my last machine – Gizmo, the PC from Hell.

I’ll be using WS’s computer, Rasputin, if I need to for anything (i.e. getting my daily Age of Kings fix). He’s working at home today and really does have some H/P work to do on his machine so in reality, I probably won’t be able to get close to a computer all day.

We had 3 day old rock lobster last night as a late night dinner. My stomach is now making very interesting sounds. If I die of food poisoning anytime in the next few days, please tell everyone it wasn’t my fault that we didn’t eat it sooner.

We’re getting along pretty good now. There is only a touch of strain when we are in the same room. We talk. I don’t talk much about frivolous things anymore. We hug. I don’t think anything sexual of it. We kiss. He smells garlicky quite a bit. That is as far as anything goes. I’m not complaining.

Lifetime Fencing sunk our fence posts today. A week from today and we’ll have a fence up. After that, only a few more trees to go and we will have effectively shut ourselves off from the neighbors. Not that there is anything wrong with our neighbors, it’s just that we don’t like to see then every single day. It’s bad enough that we have to hear them. Some much worse than others. They probably think the same, if not worse, of us. My sinuses bother me all the time and it can’t be too lovely hearing me blow my nose every morning. Yums!

May 19th

Deiter is back and running a bit faster now with no hiccups. Sometimes it just takes a good whack upside the head and bleeding out the ears to straighten one’s self out. The total operation took over 9 hours. I can’t be sure that WS wasn’t visiting the Stock Market sites or CDNow half of that time, but I was very happy that he cleaned up my desk after he was done.

I got a pretty cool email today from Ed letting me know that CRAPCO, the Comedy Connection web site had an opening for a writer/contributor. No pay but who cares when it’s great online work that frees your mind and lets you rant and rave all you want. I think they even allow some 4-letter words like “work” and “type”. Naturally, I applied immediately and hope I’ll hear something back. I really need something entertaining to counterbalance the technical support work I do for an online company.
Male Incontinence. Now there’s a subject that deserves to have some research dollars thrown at it. They can throw me a few dollars for laundry soap too.

May 21st

Two straight days working down. Two more to go. If you haven’t joined us recently, the entire company I work for has taken the weekend off to take everyone to Mexico for drinking and gambling. 2 other tech support minions and myself didn’t get to go for reasons of our own. Some brilliant employee decided to release a mass emailing this same weekend. It was supposed to be a “light” load today. I’m sure no one will care though.

WS just discovered that his stereo receiver is dead. Probably due to all the crap we have plugged into it. And maybe because it’s 12 years old or something. I think he expects me to pull a thousand dollars outta my butt so he can run out and buy a new one immediately. He’s probably in his office right now looking up receivers online. Sorry, pal. Electronic equipment isn’t in the budget until this coming winter. There are dozens of things higher on the priority list (that he made up earlier this year) like any furniture at all. Other than our office chair, we sit on the floor around here. Don’t own a couch, another chair, a kitchen table, a rug…nothing. But the place is great for holding hoe-downs and square dances…

I have just officially banished all cats from my office. Zooot, the insecure one, just flayed open my legs in a poor attempt to jump up on my lap. I was not wearing much down there. Now I’m wearing cotton gauze and bandages. It’s terribly attractive. Bad Cat!

May 23rd

It’s official. WS has Multiple Sclerosis. Most likely the Relapsing-remitting form of the disease. MS sounds so horrible to the uneducated, but unless one has the Primary progressive form, it actually isn’t that bad. No one dies from MS. It’s more emotional than physical and that is due to depression and how society views MS sufferers. A good place to get the basics on MS is at the Multiple Sclerosis FAQ. WS has been given all the literature for the top 3 medications for possible control of MS and he’ll have to make the decision on which one he’ll have to begin taking. All of them are injections. Fun!

We got to go through the MRI brain x-rays side-by-side with the doctor (all 50 scans) and I was finding the MS brain lesions just as fast as he was. I’ve been educating myself online on brain scans and the doc was obviously impressed. I guess my alt.tasteless background is finally coming to some good use.

I’ve already received 2 emails from people asking, “How are you going to deal with this?” All I can tell people is this: Life has never dealt me a fair hand. I don’t expect it to start playing fair now. MS is really no different than having asthma. I was diagnosed with asthma 9 years ago. MS and asthma are similar in that no one really dies from asthma or MS, certain things can trigger attacks, it can get progressively worse or not as you get older, and attacks can be debilitating for a few days to a few weeks and affect one’s ability to get around. We’ve learned how to get along with asthma just fine and we don’t even think about it 99.9 percent of the time. MS will just be another adventure in living with the added bonus of being able to hold it over people’s heads when and if certain people give WS a hard time. We could say, for example, “It sure is manly to pick on someone with MS, don’t you think? How would you like his wife with asthma to come over there and kick your ass for you?” This usually gets the kind of attention we live for…

In other news, I’ve had a salsa craving for 5 days straight now. Luckily, I’ve been able to enjoy salsa nearly every day for the past week so it’s not like one of those cravings that I can’t do anything about. No, I’m not pregnant. It would have to be another immaculate conception and the world has had enough problems believing the first one.

WS got me an optical mouse and a week ago, I had to have my keyboard replaced. I am the only person I know that actually wears out keyboards and mouse balls. The mouse is pretty cool. It’s silver in color and has a red laser on the bottom of it. No more linty mouse balls!

May 25th

Woohoo! We got a fence today. Finally, I can keep the neighbor’s Labradors out of the muddy rice patty we call the backyard. Finally, I won’t have to listen later to how dogs have ruined carpets by tracking in mud on their feet (why were they in my yard anyway?) No more bitching about weeds blowing over into other yards. No more will I have to look at half-finished projects, nor them look over at mine. No more feeling obligated to talk to them each and every time we are all outside. Finally, a small bit of privacy.

Things are getting weird in the neighborhood already. We’ve witnessed some child abuse, heard more child abuse, seen several family fights and one eventual divorce, several near accidents, had our eardrums blown out by various car alarms (at 5 a.m.) and children blowing whistles (all hours), and get to watch a neighbor guts fish in his front yard every couple of weeks. We’ve heard the inklings of disgruntled neighbors living next to slobs, have taken bets on the upcoming pregnancies of a couple of strongly religious women, and have pilfered construction materials abandoned by the development contractors.

We’re also watching as natural resources in the area, i.e. boulders and large rocks, get sucked up by a few people who plan on building impressive waterfalls on their properties. You haven’t witnessed a neighborhood feud until you start watching people come out at midnight to start hauling boulders around. I predicted this would get nasty before it was all over and things are just about to bubble over. The video camera just may have to be pulled out of retirement for this. When interest levels drop off again, I’ll probably do a rant on life here.

Speaking of rants, I finally completed my first one for Comedy Connection and mailed it off to Ed for editing. Things have been very hectic this week and my brain just would not function. Okay, that was a poor excuse. The real reason I had such a tough time writing it was because my job has turned my brain to creamed corn. It’ll take a little while to get back into the swing of thinking and writing decently again. This journal has helped a lot.

May 26th

Here’s a test of this web page without using style sheet HTML code and I am hoping that Netscape and Mac users can read it now. If not, let me know so I try to figure out what is screwed up. I still don’t get the point of style sheets.

The fence guys have to come back out to redo both ours and our neighbors gates. Wrong size, wrong hardware, forgot to nail boards down, you name it. They did a great job on the fence part. I think they were trying to rush through the gate part so they could get off work early. Memorial Day weekend officially starts today and they are probably off for 3 or 4 days.

WS finally read through past installments of this journal late last night. I warned him that he wouldn’t find anything flattering in here and he was fine with that. It’s mentioning the neighbors that he is concerned about. Most of the neighbors don’t like me much anyway and the really bad ones don’t own computers, maybe don’t even believe in computers. We all live so close to each other, perhaps it is best if we all know what we think of each other. Sounds good on paper, doesn’t it? Too bad reality can’t be this simple.

I’ve just been informed that the new journal page code works for Mac users. Thanks, kristian!

It’s pretty busy around here today. The electricians were here for 4 hours giving us more power outlets for the hell of it. No more worrying about the incompatibilities of x-mas lights and blow dryers. The flooring guy came back to re-lay the flooring on our stairs. Unfortunately, the material he brought with him was unacceptable and just as bad as the stuff they just removed 2 weeks ago. He’ll be back next Tuesday with some new stuff. The fence guys will be back tomorrow or Monday to fix or replace the gate they hung yesterday. It’s wrong. Very wrong.

May 27th

The mandatory meeting I was scheduled to attend today was cancelled at the last minute due to a death in a family. Isn’t that just like some people? Go and screw up a perfectly good holiday weekend? How will anyone ever enjoy this holiday again? Or maybe it will be cause for extra celebration next year. I don’t know.

Still, it caused a bit of a problem with me. I was invited to do something today and had to cancel weeks ago because of the meeting. Now the meeting is cancelled and I can’t reschedule the other thing because it took place last night and a couple of hundred miles away. Typical.

I’m nearly finished with my second rant this week. Reading an old book on the workings of National Lampoon really electric shocks my brain into use. I’m trying to pace myself with both the reading and my writing so I don’t burn out this latest creative streak.

Memorial Day weekend. I really don’t like long weekends. I always have to work 2 of the 3 days and WS stays up until 4 am, sleeps until noon, and then complains about a) not getting enough sleep, or b) sleeping too late. Later next week, he’ll have realized how stupid his sleep schedule was when he starts feeling the affects on his MS. It’s a vicious cycle and he just doesn’t have the personal discipline to control himself.

I’m really tired of the month of May.

May 28th

I feel like crap today. Thanks Mother Nature. I also finally figured out why tampon companies charge so much for their product: Because they can.

May 30th

Feeling pretty good today. I took a tip from Celestina’s journal about drinking black cherry juice for menstrual cramps and I am glad to say that I haven’t taken a Midol or aspirin since very early Monday morning. I did have a small case of explosive diarrhea for a few hours while I was trying to watch Titanic (for the first and last time ever) and I’m not sure if it was due to the cherry juice or the movie.

I have professed to numerous people that I would never watch Titanic. I nearly always stick to my word. But something told me that someday, I just might have to know something about this movie and I didn’t want to feel uneducated like I am about Caddy shack, Gone With The Wind, The Godfather, and Saturday Night Fever. I’m also getting tired of trivia questions about Titanic that I can’t answer that seem to be cropping up everywhere. Damn you, Alex Tribec. I’ll be ready next time around.
We rented and watch Dogma (yawn) and Office Space (double yawn) over the weekend. Both of them have good, humorous lines in them, but that doesn’t save either movie from huge plot holes and plain stupidity. None of these movies are going to show up on our “Movies to Purchase” list. Maybe these movies weren’t supposed to have plots? If not, why should I have to pay to see them? This is not entertainment to me but blame me for paying the rent to see them in the first place. Sounds like someone really has someone over a barrel here.

I’ve been reading a lot about Vitamin C lately and all the benefits of it (it helps everything!) but every time I take it, I break out in bad acne. I am not happy about this and as soon as I find another doctor, I need to ask them about this. Nothing worse than a fat, middle-aged woman with a case of pizza face when all I want is to look like Michelle Pfieffer.

May 31st

What a day so far. My cable modem has been up and down all day and apparently, the company I work for has sent out a 10+ billion mass emailing or something because I have been swamped with technical support email all day. Great for the paycheck, bad if I wanted to have a life today, frustrating if I wanted to send out replies to any email. The email just keeps flooding in but no one will admit to sending out a mass email. I’m getting very frustrated and will need to take a break here soon. When I come back from going postal or whatever I decide to do during that time, I’ll probably have close to 100 emails waiting to be answered. What makes me feel better is knowing that everyone else working at 100% today is getting just as many emails and probably falling behind in their work.

Ordered bark dust for Friday delivery. The weekend is supposed to be nice and dry. While I do have a company meeting Saturday afternoon, I should be able to move 7 yards of dumped bark dust into the backyard between Friday night and Sunday afternoon. I’m toying with ordering a couple of pallets of retaining wall blocks too. 112 blocks to a pallet @ $1.18 per brick. The bricks are 1 foot wide by about 6-8 inches tall. I need 87 feet total feet at a height of 2 feet. Anyone want to do the math to figure out exactly how many bricks I need?

Not a single one of the 17 cement places I have called have called me back. Last week, I learned that 360 square feet of concrete walkways isn’t enough work to make most cement construction places bother. Seems you need 7000 square feet of concrete work done before most places will even give you the time of day. So, how in the hell do people get patios and walkways poured on their property? Most people don’t even have 7000 square feet to their entire lot? This is so frustrating. It’s like no one in the concrete construction industry wants to talk to me and no one wants my money. I wonder if WS would have this much trouble if he were doing the calling.
Design Toscano still can’t fill my order from March. Backorder, backorder, backorder is all I hear. Earlier this month, they sent out postcards that customers had to return promptly or else they would cancel your order. I returned my postcard the very next day. Sure enough, they cancelled the order anyway…until I nearly screamed at them over the phone. Nice little way of getting rid of too many orders for merchandise they can’t get their hands on. Order is back on and the new delivery date is June 9th. Yeah, I’ve heard this story before.

Started work on a 3rd rant for The Comedy Connection. I hate endings. I can never come up with a good one. I posted the last one on the Rant page and unless I can come up with a better ending, it’s done. Once again, just when I think I get a breather, my job sucks the life force from my brain. I need some Office Space (the movie) sound clips.

WS received his new car tires today. He orders his Pirellis online. Brave man, he is.

June 2000

June 2nd

This is going to be a hectic day. Delivery of 7 yards of bark dust will be happening momentarily. The fence guys will be here to fix our gate momentarily. I’m slightly behind on my job and I’m working on my third rant. I also have vacuuming to do, a dishwasher to empty, laundry to finish, bills to pay, a budget to balance, a bird feeder to refill, and a neighbor’s dog to walk around noon. Did I forget anything? Probably.

Okay, the dog has been walked, half the bark dust moved, and I’m nearly caught up with my job. The fence guys haven’t made an appearance as of yet even though they promised to be here early this morning. The flooring guy still hasn’t called back to let us know what and when they plan on finishing our inside stairs and not a single concrete company has called me back yet on a cement estimate. Can you tell I’m working myself up for yet another rant in the future? I could do an entire chapter on construction companies alone with fairly little effort.

June 3rd

In between work hours yesterday, I moved 6 of the 7 yards of bark dust to the backyard from our driveway where it was delivered to, walked the neighbor’s dog, finished laundry, water sealed about 1/6th of our new fence, played hardball with the fence guys who were late and in foul moods, dug a hole for a future fountain, and drank about 7 gallons of water. The result is that the place looks great but I am exhausted, sore, and have bark dust splinters in my toes and forearms. If I should die of flesh-eating bacteria because of infected splinters, please tell the world not to dick around with fresh bark dust. The Pacific Northwest has more cases of that deadly bacteria than anywhere else in the world and no one really knows what causes it.

I have to get up at 8 am (about 24 hours earlier than I usually get up on a Saturday, my only weekend day off) because I got wrangled into helping plan some neighborhood 4th of July barbeque. Actually, we’ll (WS and I) volunteer to print out the flyers but I refuse to help plan out anything else. I’m just not the social butterfly type and there are plenty of those kinds in this neighborhood with nothing better to do anyway.

My life is complete. I finally found Kuala Lumpur on the world map. I figured since I’m vaguely mentioning it in a future rant, I really should look it up. Yes, it’s true. I have no life.

June 5th

Damn @home.com has been more down than up in the last few days making it a living hell trying to work or do anything else of any importance on the computer. I’ll make this short in an attempt to get it uploaded before…DAMN IT! It just went down AGAIN!

Up, down, up, down. @home is a pain in the ass tonight. Tomorrow, some guy from AT$T is coming by to see what the problem is. They say that there is definitely a problem in the connection from the junction box to our house or something like that. We’ll see how that goes. WS works at home tomorrow so he’ll be around to grill the guy with all those pertinent enginerd-type questions.

We’ve really been driving ourselves hard in the last few days with working around the house. Working in the back and side yard mainly. This has really taken a toll on my body and I’m very, very sore at the moment. My hands hurt the worst though. I put in a small fountain in one of the side yards Sunday. It’s made out of feather stone (pumice rock) but it really isn’t all that light in weight. The bad part is that if you touch it without gloves on, it takes your skin right off. I was a bloody mess before I even realized it and now my hands look like I’ve been in a motorcycle accident or something with all the scrapes and scabs forming. Yums!

The Blazers lost their bid for the NBA Championships and not a moment too soon. I am sick to death of hearing about them and their whining.

It’s supposed to rain tomorrow. Actually, it was supposed to rain today but didn’t. I’m really looking forward to a good long week of rain. Can’t afford too high of a water bill just yet. What I am really looking forward to is the fall season. For the last 2 summers, we have totally been immersed in having this house built and completely ignored the summer season. It’s nice to have a diversion during the hot months but this summer, we’re pretty well settled in and it wouldn’t hurt me none to skip yet another summer. Who likes sweaty, fat bodies anyway?

June 6th

It’s raining softly outside and that makes me very happy. It’s the reason I moved here. After a week or more of hot, dry weather, rain is exactly what this area needed to wash everything down. Allegedly, it’s going to rain all week. Please, oh please…

Did you ever want to talk about something or write about someone or something that happened but you can’t because you suspect that those people will read about it and it could affect your future relationship with those involved? I hate that.

I got the coolest catalog I’ve seen in years today. Smarthome.com. It’s got tons of X10 stuff so you can run your entire house from your phone and/or computer. Voice recognition stuff. IR (Infa-Red) stuff. Security camera stuff. Oh yes, I now know where I want to channel my future earnings.

For some reason, I feel like spending money I don’t have and I want to spend it on creature comforts. I feel like we finally deserve it after working like dogs on this house over the past 10 months with painting, dry walling, landscaping, rewiring, organizing, etc. We haven’t taken any time off and very, very few days have gone by without us working on something house-related. Now I want a second TV and satellite receiver for the bedroom, in-wall speakers throughout the place, a chair for my office, and a rug for the library. Unfortunately, I have $23 to my name.

Words of wisdom: Terra chips are the cat’s pajamas and good salsa cures all.

Mel-TV’s web cam caught an image of Mel’s deceased mother. She was very close to her mother and is somewhat disturbed by the image which you can see on her web site. She invites commentary on what you see. I think it’s kind of cool and I get a warm fuzzy from looking at the pic.

June 7th

Severe Whiner mode *ON*
I’m disappointed with myself. For the last week, I’ve been getting really flustered with work. Most of this is due to some really nasty emails I’ve been getting through my job from people who should not be using a computer in the first place. Of course, they take it out on us technical support representatives but there is no reason to use every foul word known to man or to threaten to slash some throats if they can find us. I’ve had to send some of these threatening letters to a manager to handle, knowing full well that this manager is so swamped with work and is being pulled in so many directions that he probably won’t even see the email to answer it in several weeks. Another reason for the flustered feeling is that some co-workers are days and days behind on their work (for some reason) and for weeks, I have been getting their old email re-owned to me. This means my response time gets all whacked out because I inherit the time that the email was sitting around not being answered. As a result, I personally feel that I have to work that much harder to get my email response time back down to what I consider my “normal” time. This has been going on for weeks and it seems like it was just today that someone mentioned it. Of course, response time isn’t supposed to mean anything and we aren’t supposed to look at it or worry about it. But I do. That is who and what I am and it’s important to me. And when someone says that I take it too personal, it’s because to me, it IS personal and that reason alone shouldn’t discount how I feel about it. By saying that someone takes something too personal is like saying how they feel about something doesn’t matter and that is degrading. I found myself thinking about Prozac today or Midol PMS formula (even though I’m not PMSing) or something that will calm my nerves in a similar fashion. This is definitely not a time to get weird and think strange thoughts and that is why I disappointed myself. In fact, the thought that I have been getting flustered pisses me off. Yes, I need a vacation. I haven’t taken any days off since November and even then, I did nothing but fret about losing my job because WS took me away for 2 days for our 10 year wedding anniversary. Now, I work 4 days a week for an Internet company, which for the most part I love, and 3 days a week I take care of WS who has trouble walking.

Last weekend, I found out that a co-worker is being phased out. In every job I have held and that makes 14 jobs in my lifetime, I have always been told when someone is about to get fired or “phased out.” And every single time, it wasn’t just that one co-worker who was found without a job. Last night, I dreamed it was really me who got “phased out.” I’ve been in a state of dread all day.

I’ve also come to realize that last February, when I asked to work 4 days a week instead of 5, that I traded my seniority at my job for that day off. No one told me that this is what would happen. The result is that I feel somewhat worthless to the company and it has taken a major hit to my morale.

In non-work related news, I just found out that there were 2 budget spreadsheets on my computer. WS knew about it but for some reason, didn’t get rid of one of them. Naturally, I was using the wrong one and have been happily paying for things using a budget that looked to have a lot of money in it. It didn’t and now, I’m happily waiting for all the bounced checks to come in along with the insufficient check charges of which I won’t be able to pay for either. Yesterday, I was whining about having $23 to my name. Today, make that -$281. Oopsie!

Okay, I’ve probably said enough to get me into hot water. I’ll stop now except to mention that I’m sure Mr. Gates is having a much worse day than I am.
Severe Whiner mode *OFF*

June 8th

Okay. I’m not being a whiner today. I got it all off my chest yesterday.

June 9th

Wow. Cruising right along in the month of June. It’s the 9th already and that is pretty cool. Since it is cloudy, cool, and showery outside, it’s easy to imagine that this is the fall season; a time of year I love, now that I can enjoy them. Growing up in Phoenix, Arizona, there is no fall season. Or I suppose you could call winters there the fall season since it doesn’t get anywhere near as cold as it does here, but since palm trees and cactus don’t turn color (unless they are dead), you don’t get the same “fall-is-in-the-air” kind of feeling. Sure, the rattlesnakes and lizards aren’t as plentiful during the “fall” season in Phoenix but again, somehow it’s just not the same.

A co-worker of mine, Haplo, finally got his web cam up and running. If he puts up an email address, write to him and tell him how much he looks like Jesus with glasses.

Last week, in the mail, I received a bunch of information from Chrysler about their PT Cruiser vehicle. I’ll admit, this is a car that either you like the look of or you hate it. I happen to like it and have been asking around for information on the PT Cruiser since I first saw pictures of it in September of 1998. However, if I didn’t want to own something that everyone and their brother will have shortly, I’d probably buy one. I like them. Or I should say, I like parts of the car. I HATE the door handles (they look just like old VW door handles) and I DISPISE that they only put a 4 cylinder in it, although rumors are that next year they will offer a turbo 4. The only way I would really buy one would be if I had a minimum of $7000 extra for body work, a new paint job, and suspension work. I’d shave the door handles, make it a 2-door instead of a 4-door, French in the grill, license plates, lighting, and antenna and round out some of the more abrupt curves. Then it would be repainted in a good color and have some decent sized rims and tires put on. Yesterday in the mail, I got a package from Chrysler and in it was a PT Cruiser hot wheels car. I have to admit it’s pretty cool. Reportedly, they are already collector’s items. Well, until everyone and their brother gets one…

Back to work.

June 10th

After reading kristian’s journal yesterday, I realize now that we’re recluses. And you know what? It’s pretty cool at the moment. I don’t feel obligated to be at the beck-and-call of neighbors and family, and anyone who would consider us friends of theirs can get a hold of us through email. It is a big relief not to have to make many public appearances anymore, especially when WS absolutely despises being social. Who knows what he is apt to do or who he’ll piss off with the kind of attitude he carries around whenever I force him to be social *shudder*. It’s not worth going through that but, you know, that’s okay. It’s like the Internet and email was made for us and in that form of activity, we’re positively social butterflies!

For some reason, I just pictured WS in a butterfly outfit and nearly wet myself laughing so hard. Whenever I always thought of being a hermit before, and I have thought about it for years, I figured it would be like living out in the wilderness somewhere, dressed in animal skins, and eating berries and rodents to survive. The whole Ayla and Clan of the Cave Bear bit. Now, all I want is to have lots of land around me that no one else can touch and a connection to the Internet so I won’t feel like there is something terribly wrong with me by not interacting with other humans. Is no face-to-face contact with other people a bad thing? Probably to kids and people who are unstable. Am I unstable now because I don’t interact much? Well, if I start blowing snot-rockets, scratching myself inappropriately in public, and searching for nits to eat in other people’s hair, perhaps I will have gone too far. In the meantime, I’ll try to keep myself in check.

Late yesterday, I started putting together a web page that contains all the web cams of my co-workers so we can watch each other work if we feel like it. After I put it online, I let about 9 people know about it including my boss. Everyone seems to like it so far. I know some of the other employees have web cams and I hope to be able to add them as soon as they feel comfortable with it.

It’s Rose Festival time here in Portland, Oregon. That means a month of activities, parades, and a billion people. Okay, you can all go home now.

June 11th

Hell has frozen over. I have installed ICQ. Ed has been kind enough to educate me on some of the finer points of ICQ use and hasn’t taken advantage of my ignorant newbie status (meaning I DON’T KNOW HOW TO DO ANYTHING!.) He’s smarter than your average bear. In the meantime, WS is seriously concerned about me and my decision to install this thing. I’m wondering a little about it myself as my system resources take a major hit when I run the thing.

June 13th

I met someone yesterday. Michael was tall, dark, and smart as a whip. He had a great job as a lobbyist for the local government, cash coming out the wazoo, his own house, a pool, a home theatre, everything a bachelor would dream of. Our relationship was really hitting it off as we share the same interests and aren’t terribly social and the best part was, WS didn’t have a clue.

And then suddenly, before I knew what happened, Michael died. Before my very eyes. And there was nothing I could do about it except to restart and show WS. You see, Michael was my very first Sim and even though I bought him nearly everything, he went and died on me anyway. Perhaps I didn’t let him buy enough pizza. Maybe he swam too long and got all pruny. Perhaps he was really lusting after the pool table that I kept him away from. Whatever it was, it hurt to watch him die over and over again, so I deleted his existence. My next Sim will definitely be female. Men suck.

June 16th

I was so traumatized by my first Sim’s death that I haven’t been able to write anything. How’s that for an excuse? Okay, it sucks but that’s my story and for the time being, I’m sticking to it. I’ve been hard at work watching workmen in our backyard laying forms for our cement walkways and additional patio space. It will be pretty cool once the cement goes in on Monday. It’ll also officially put me into much more debt than I can mentally handle and I’ve been doing nothing but fretting about it for the last few days. Such is the life of a homeowner, I guess, which is exactly why I never wanted to become one. And again, for the record and for the 2182nd time, I didn’t want to buy a house. Ever. This whole thing was WS’s idea and I’m quite sure by now that he is very, very tired of hearing me whine about that decision. So I’ll wait a few more days before I mention it again…

Of course, I have re-visited the Sims game. After witnessing Michael die off one last time, I sighed heavily and had his house bulldozed to the ground. Then I started a new house, this time with two female Sims. They’re kicking ass, get along great and taught me that I need to decorate and furnish things with their hard-earned money, something that Michael failed to mention (probably because he was too busy crying over the lack of a spooge receptacle). These girls are quickly amassing serious bucks in savings, the best furniture money can buy, and toys to play with and impress their friends. My god, they even have social lives! Since I don’t have one (a social life), I’m still not sure how they are pulling off this one but hey, if no one dies on me, whatever works is fine with me.

My neighbor lost their cat last week during all the rain and they have now officially written it off. Oliver was pretty cool and laid back. Too bad they had him de-clawed before allowing him to live outside. I suspect the coyotes got him, not that claws would have helped much if that was the case. My neighbors are already talking about getting another kitten. They’ll probably repeat the de-clawing/life outside mistake. Sad.

The last lot on our street was sold 2 weeks ago and they bulldozed it late yesterday, getting it ready to lay and pour the foundation. The developer here is practically giving away home lots now since the home buying market turned sour a few months ago. This new house is being built much different than the rest of the homes in this development: sitting higher on the lot, building a detached garage, two driveways, etc. It makes for a neighborhood that doesn’t look like a cookie-cutter neighborhood, like in Edward Scissorhands, but it kind of pisses off all the people who wanted similar things with their homes before they were built but were denied. Oh yes, there is probably enough evidence for lawsuits now if someone wanted to take the time. It won’t be us.

June 18th

I’m trying to do too many things at once right now. Getting concrete poured tomorrow and already fighting with the contractor to give me a copy of the contract, doing yard work, staining fences, moving bark dust, answering email and ICQ messages. It’s my turn to clean all the bathrooms and I need to get the trash out and move a bunch of big rocks out back. Need to erect the other bird feeder (with a nifty 3 foot extension pole guaranteed to be cat-proof) and baby-sit WS who is going through emotional worry with the cement contractor. Oh, did I mention I’ve had to get up at nearly the crack of dawn the last 4 days so I can let the contractor into the backyard, then I have to stay up in case he needs to pee in my toilet? All this after working until after midnight nearly every night. Then there is laundry, the fridge to clean out, the 1 year house warranty list to write up, sheets to change, the budget to re-figure, yellow-jacket bait cans to set out, and vacuuming to do. I am fried right now.

My hunch was correct: My neighbors are on to this journal and anything I might have to say about them in it. Not that I would say anything bad about them. Nope. Not me. I just don’t do that kind of thing. And if I do for some reason in the future, not to say that I ever would because I just wouldn’t, it will all be encrypted somehow. Not that I’d ever have to do that…

I was craving hotdogs last week. So WS bought me some for my lunches. I had 2 last night and 2 today for lunch. Now, I’m feeling pretty gassy. There’s another couple of things I need to do: Take some Gas-X, write up a grocery list and make sure I add Gas-X to it.

Oh, and happy sperm day.

June 19th

What a nightmare today has been. The woes of homeownership and dealing with construction contractors:
1. @home cable modem goes down at 6 AM.
2. NetZero free email service starts flaking out a few hours later.
3. Cement contractor supposed to be here at 8 AM, ends up showing up at 10:30 AM, a mere half an hour before the cement was scheduled to arrive.
4. Our ultra-expensive contractor-grade garden hose that is guaranteed for life, blows out in two places.
5. Cement contractor promised 2 concrete finishers to work the concrete. Only one arrives.
6. They run out of cement. The contract lists $97.00 for extra concrete but no more cement arrives.
7. By 3:00 PM, the cement is setting up so fast, they can’t work it any longer and contractor runs to Home Base to pick up a bag of patch concrete.
8. Cement is hardening by the second and the expansion joint lines are hastily drawn in very wavy, making it look like a 4-year old drew them.
9. Cement is getting nearly hard and broom finish can’t be applied correctly without patch concrete material.
10. Contractor’s wife comes to pick up payment for job and WS tells her how unhappy we are and that we won’t be paying her today. She takes one quick look at it and leaves.
11. Contractor finally starts scrambling to try to fix the screw job without much success. Two cement finishers might have been able to get the job done correctly before the cement started hardening. WS starts reading the contract with a fine toothed comb.
12. At 4:00 PM, about 250 square feet of the total 454 square feet of cement looks bad. I look up the Better Business Bureau serving Portland and Southwest Washington in preparation for reporting one Unique Designs of 9117 NE 100th Street, Vancouver, Washington, 98662 and one David Kay and one Kim Kay.
13. We’ll evaluate what options we have at the end of the day and given what David Kay, the cement contractor, has to say for himself. The contract allows for arbitration only, no court cases allowed, which is standard for contractor work in the state of Washington. It’s always possible that once the cement dries completely, it will look okay. I am still hopeful.

June 20th

Well, there’s good news about our cement pouring incident yesterday and there’s bad news. The good news is that the company name, Unique Designs, isn’t just a clever name. We certainly got something unique!

The bad news is that it looks so awful that our contractor neighbor, who does this kind of thing for a living, took one look at it and was stunned. This guy is never at a loss for words but he was speechless. When he finally regained his composure, he agreed that nothing short of jack hammering the cement out and replacing it could fix it. As he so eloquently put it, “You can’t polish a turd.” Our feelings exactly.

Step one was to take pictures of the mess. LOTS of pictures. Then we video taped it as a backup. Next, is calling the company and expressing our dissatisfaction. WS is doing that right now. Let’s listen in, shall we?

“..and it’s already cracking and nothing is being done to cure it correctly and I don’t see any alternative to ripping it out and starting all over.”

“Well, you’ll have to talk to Dave about it. He hasn’t shown up there yet?”

“No, no sign of him yet this morning.”

“Well, you’ll have to talk to him and see what he thinks and if he agrees with you.”

No sir, it’s not going to be pretty anyway you look at it. So we wait for Dave. The only good thing so far is that we haven’t paid a penny and we intend for it to stay that way until this is corrected. After all, money is the only way a person can voice their opinion nowadays, we believe.

Update: 13:42 Tues So they’ve agreed to jack hammering nearly the entire job out and hauling it away and repairing the concrete at no additional cost. Plus, they will add an additional work crew to finish the cement properly. They begin jack hammering tomorrow. No time set which is good because they have yet to stick with any time schedule anyway. Why are we giving them a second shot at this? I don’t know, but it’s not cost us a penny yet and we have a ton of evidence of their incompetency thus far.

June 21st

The jack hammering and removal of the Cement-Pour-From-Hell has begun. Actually, we’re surprised that the contractor even came back. It doesn’t look like it will be very hard to remove the cement. It’s breaking up pretty easily and they have a truck backed into the empty lot behind us to throw it in. Of course, it looks easy to me because I’m not the one doing the work.

I have the blinds closed today and all the doors locked. This includes the back sliding door as I am very tired of letting the workers have run of my kitchen and bathrooms while tracking shit all over. I feel that I have already given them enough and they fucked up. They can find their own water out of the garden hose and there are several Port-o-Johns sitting around the neighborhood for all construction workers to use. Of course, when WS gets home from work, he’ll probably open the house back up to them. Whatever. It’s just different when I’m the only one here and there are disgruntled people working in my yard. I definitely wouldn’t do well during a house remodeling job and I hope to never have to find out.

I also have the place looking like no one is here because when they do know someone is here, they get to talking, especially Dave, and their work ethic tends to fall off. Meaning, Dave gets so busy telling us about some personal anecdotes, that he doesn’t pay attention to the job at hand. We don’t want to continue to encourage that behavior at this point.

And finally, I don’t feel like I’ve had a day off since this whole thing began last Thursday. I’ve had days off work but then I’ve had to baby-sit a cement contractor crew and stress over the crap that they tried to pull on us, not to mention listening to them assure me every day that they would be leaving early that day. They haven’t left before 6 PM any day that they’ve been here so far and this whole thing was only supposed to take a day and a half.

June 22nd

Woohoo! Finally a day off from cement contractor hell! They came and got rid of the remaining jack hammered cement chunks early this morning and have left for the day. They’ll be back tomorrow to re-lay the cement forms but for today, I am off work and finally get to do all those things on my list that I complained about last Sunday. If I have time, I might even squeeze some time in for working on my next rant for CrapCo.
Saw an old man plowing through stop signs this morning while taking WS to work. A few minutes later, he returned and once again, never stopped at the stop signs.

Scary.

Got a Clean Water Program bill today from the Clark County Treasurers office for $33.00. This is the kind of crap you have to put up with when you live outside the city limits. A couple of months ago, we got a bill for thirty-some bucks for street lighting. The treasurer’s office really has a good racket going on out here.
We finally got a letter from the IRS. Absolutely no mention of the payment arrangement form we filled out and sent in. Just a nice little bill for $5800.00. C’mon, you fat, government fucks. Get off your asses, find the paperwork, and do this right. Don’t make us come down there…

A couple more forests close to us got cut down over the weekend, forcing deer to wander through our development. Or so says one of the residents. We haven’t personally witnessed the reported group of 2 bucks and 3 doe running through anyone’s backyard at 7 am yet because I’d like to keep sleeping around then. It’s been rumored that if something were to happen to the deer and they ended up in someone’s freezer, no one would be the wiser. Gawd, I hate that mentality.
Speaking of wildlife, we continue to get birds visiting our 10 foot tall birdfeeder ranging from brilliant yellow Goldfinches (the Washington state bird), red house finches, blue jays, robins, black-headed grosbeaks, junco, and a couple of birds we have no idea what are. We keep a bird book and a pair of binoculars (snocs) by the backdoor now. No, we aren’t old and waiting for death. It’s cheap entertainment. Especially when one owes the IRS $6000 due immediately.

June 24th

We got the tax people straightened out and starting next month, we shell out a ridiculous sum of money to the IRS on a convenient, monthly basis. Yesterday, the cement guys finished re-laying all the cement forms for an alleged early Monday morning pour. The form look better this time around than they did last week at this time. Let’s cross our fingers and hope that the cement ends up looking better this time around too or we’ll have to repeat the whole process a third time.

Still haven’t seen any sign of deer in our neighborhood although I did find small dog tracks up on our patio yesterday. Were they dog tracks or coyote tracks. I don’t know coyotes tracks.

WS had to work over 11 hours yesterday because everyone else took the day off or something. He was a superstar. So why did he set the alarm for 7:30 this morning? I don’t know but I was the only one who got up. That is, until I go in there, wake him up and ask him. We’ve been enjoying our newly rediscovered state of poor-dom thanks to the IRS, and was able to get to bed at 8 pm twice last week. It’s weird but enjoyable going to bed early like that and has really paid off on the following hectic days. In fact, it’s so enjoyable, it almost feels sinful to lay there while it is still light outside and hear the neighborhood still buzzing with activity, lawnmowers going, power saws going, kids screaming, cars being worked on, and here we are in our little cocoon, reading or drifting off to sleep hours before anyone else even thinks about hitting the sack. We must make this a regular habit somehow.

June 28th

For the past few days, a couple of baby goldfinches have been visiting our bird feeder. One of them has absolutely no fear of people, which unfortunately translates into having no fear of cats. Last night, he was nearing hopping around on my feet when I was out in the back yard and I know I shouldn’t have, but I finally bent down and picked him up. He’s very soft but not as soft as that wild bunny I briefly rescued a few months ago. He looks okay, well fed, maybe a little too well fed, but his wings look a little weak. Perhaps he hasn’t quite got the hang of flying yet.

So as it got dark, I put him up on the top of the fence, where he likes to sit sometimes, and left him, hoping he’d go back to wherever it is that he sleeps at night. Then I dreamt of him all night and got a crappy night’s sleep. No sign of him yet this morning and that is a good thing. I hate the baby bird time of the year.

No sign of the cement guys yet. They should be taking off the cement forms today and getting all their tools and stuff out of our yard. We can hardly wait to be able to return to a normal life without construction people wandering through the place everyday.

In financial news, our home mortgage has been sold to an incompetent company who claims to have not received the insurance payment from the old mortgage and/or insurance company yet. Hence, they won’t send us our payment coupons so we can continue making our mortgage payments. But Ha! They’ll have to be smarter than that! We spent way too much time reading about all the pitfalls of mortgage companies selling mortgages to each other in hopes that the homebuyer will become confused and drop the ball somewhere along the line and the mortgage company forecloses and gets themselves a house. Not gonna happen here. Plus, they get the extra benefit of having to talk to a big, pissed off man on the phone today and just maybe, a middle-aged really pissed off woman right after that.

Aren’t home mortgages fun? Yeah, I know I’m having a ball.

June 27th

The concrete contractor came through for us yesterday and our concrete patio pad extension and walkways look as though a totally different company created them. Talk about day and night difference between the results now and the results as of a week ago. They really did stand behind their work and made last week’s major screw-up right. We are very happy, especially after the highly stressful weekend we spent worrying about how it was going to end up.

We were so stressed about the concrete work, that we hardly slept all weekend and I ended up with a raging case of diarhea, WS with a case of constipation. I guess that sums it all up for us, when things gets tough, WS stops up and I let it flow.

Today, it’s period cramp time. The black cherry juice isn’t doing it for me and I had to supplement the juice with a couple of Midol tablets. I’m not giving up on the juice though. I like it too much and was kinda looking forward to drinking it during this time.

Last night, one of our cats, Crits, jumped from the library loft ledge down to the hardwood entryway floor. It was about 16 or 17 feet. It looks like she might have strained a few muscles doing it and has tender feet today. She’s nearly 11 years old and if any of our cats would do something this stupid, it would be her. I’ll be keeping a close eye on her for the next few days to make sure she didn’t do anything really bad in which she’ll end up with a vet visit, but I’m fairly confident that she’s okay now.

June 29th

One more day until vacation. Yeah, I’m actually taking one this year. No, I’m not going anywhere. I’m not in the habit of taking vacations probably because growing up, my family never took vacations. They believed that work was all there was in life. In my late 20′s, at the meat cutter job, I was forced to take vacations or risk being locked in the big refridgerator every day with John Huff, the hideiously ugly regional meat department supervisor. Yes, this was just before sexual harassment became “illegal.” A couple of those incidents, involving LOTS of groping and torn uniforms later, and I learned my lesson and took 2 weeks vacation during the time that Mr. Huff was scheduled to be in our region.

We’ve been invited to four different 4th of July parties. This is stunning considering that we’re basically hermits. Two of them are neighborhood related and because people here don’t know us that much, I guess those two don’t count. We’re holding out for the best offer. WS is holding out for a signing bonus.

I learned the key to using black cherry juice for menstrual cramps. It doesn’t work for the first 10-12 hours of my heaviest cramping. Everything after that is heaven. It really does work! Thanks again, Celestina.

A couple of days ago, kristian posted a rant in his journal (weblog – whatever) about his disillusionment of Canadians and how they thought about people here in the states. He’s been living in Vancouver for a couple of years now. It was kinda sad to read because I know that he really wanted to live in Canada for a long time and it sounds like he’ll be moving back to the states permanently after he’s out of college. Just letting you know, Kris, that I’m thinking about you and Canada. I’m wondering if now, had WS not been diagnosed with MS, if I would have gone through the same process of having my eyes opened once I got there.
Finally, the cement guys are here to remove the concrete forms. Don’t know why they didn’t show up yesterday but now I have to babysit them once more on my day off and it’s fairly annoying having them beg to use the bathroom every twenty minutes or ask for more ice water, while tracking mud through the kitchen. My thinking is, if you don’t ask for water, you won’t ask to use the bathroom. Or do all construction workers have bumblebee-sized bladders? I may just keep the blinds closed and keep a low profile until they’re gone. In the meantime, I can re-visit the new Sims game I started last night. No details yet, but I have finally gotten a bachelor to survive long enough while keeping the dreaded social life high. And if I had his lifestyle right now, I’d kill myself.
June 30th

13 hours until vacation time. Yes, I’m being weird about this and am counting down the hours. I don’t know why. It’s not like I’m going anywhere. Oh! It’s the coffee’s fault! Yes, let’s blame the coffee, especially since it’s been 2 weeks since I last had caffeine. Let’s blame WS for that. Hmmm…I seem to be blaming everyone else for everything today. Well, in that case, let’s not forget what tomorrow, July 1st, brings. DAMN THE MALT LIQUOR MONTH! WOOHOO! Yes, you and your loved ones can drink all the Malt Liquor beverages you want (and/or all the Malt Liquor beverages your financial situation can afford) and blame everything on the consuption of said Malt Liquor beverages by simply uttering the words, “Damn The Malt Liquor,” and thus eliminating any blame for any silly act or activity you may find yourself involved in.
Pretty cool, huh? Yeah, just once would I like to see on TV, maybe on CNN, some celebrity being forcefully hauled away in handcuffs, screaming, “DAMN THE MALT LIQUOR!” That would be neat-o and give me a warm fuzzy.
Well then. I have some writing to do today of which I have barely begun. That was the real reason for breaking out the coffee. But as it is, I don’t really feel like it. I wonder if Dave Barry has days like this. He knows he has a deadline, but he just doesn’t feel like writing. I’ll bet in that case, he just turns in some past piece he’s done and because he’s big and famous and perhaps throws a small temper tandrum or brings up his celebrity status or mentions his thoughts on moving on to a different publication, his editor lets him get away with it. Now if this were tomorrow, I could just blame the Malt Liquor…

July 2000

July 4th

On vacation and doing manual labor around the house. I’ll be checking in periodically through July 10th.

July 8th

On vacation until July 10th.

What I did on my summer vacation:

(Monday) Moved 12 yards of delivered bark dust into the back yard. (Tuesday) Watched 2 dozen kids nearly set everything and everyone on fire at a 4th of July party. (Wednesday) Wandered through Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood and trampled around in the snow. (Thursday) Drove to Tillamook Cheese Factory, then drove to Newport just because. Backtracked to Depoe Bay and took a whale watching tour in a Zodiac inflatable boat. Got close to a whale. Backtracked to a couple of secluded beaches and finally back to Cannon Beach for dinner. (Friday) Saw “The Perfect Storm.” Good special effects. Take your Dramamine. (Saturday) Did some landscape repairs in the back yard. Yes, I’m having fun. So THIS is what a vacation is all about…

July 9th

To give myself a final treat for the end of my vacation, I decided to color my hair yesterday. It had lightened up quite a bit this summer with all the work I had been doing outside on the sunny days but it was starting to look very streaky and I didn’t really like it. So I choose a golden brown semi-permanent (washes out in 18 to 22 shampoos) hair color that I had used in the past. I have been coloring my hair on and off since 1985 when I wanted to see for myself if blondes have more fun (they definitely do!) and went back to my natural color of reddish brown in 1991. During that time and about 3 times a year, I went the entire range of white-blonde to deep mahogany red. Nothing prepared me for the experience I had yesterday.

First, the hair color lotion mixture never really thickened up like it is supposed to. Second, it was turning grayish black on my head. No worries, since the instructions say in BOLD print: COLOR DURING DEVELOPMENT IS NOT INDICATIVE OF END RESULT COLOR. Third, when I was washing it out, it wouldn’t rinse out very well and instead, my hair clumped up into a tangled mass that I can only describe as feeling like a rat’s nest. If you have never had the opportunity to feel a rat’s nest, I’ll let you know the next time my hair feels like one and will gladly let you feel it. Finally, after getting it rinsed out completely, then applying the conditioning lotion, rinsing again, I was shocked to see in the mirror that my hair was completely midnight black in color with no shine whatsoever to it. My head was fucked up.

Remembering that this hair color is semi-permanent (washes out in 18 to 22 shampoos), I proceeding back into the shower and washed my hair 8 separate times. Once back out of the shower and seeing absolutely no reduction in the black color, I re-washed my hair in the bathroom sink an additional 2 times. No change. What the ….?
Okay fine. I’ll live with it….until I got up this morning, looked in the mirror and realized that I’m quite probably the ugliest person on the planet with this black hair. No, this just won’t do. So it’s back into the shower for another 5 shampoos. No difference. Okay, back to the drug store for another box of hair color, this time a slightly lighter color still and a backup box just in case. I wore a hat. Nearly all of my hair was hidden under it mostly because I didn’t want to scare anyone.

To spare you the long drawn out process of coloring, washing, re-washing, re-washing again, and still more re-washing until my scalp started throbbing and turned red and angry-looking, there was absolutely no change in this black color. I think something affected my hair’s chemical structure so that it became so porous and sucked every iota of color out of the hair color mixture to an extreme measure. Either that, or I got two bad hair color boxes from 2 different stores in 2 different months and just had a bad weekend.

So my choices now are: A) let it grow/shampoo/wear out or B) buy a box of hair color stripper, let it have it’s way with my head even though the stuff is very, very harsh on hair and then color it something that I can live with in the hopes that it turns out okay, or C) go crying and whining to some hair salon and hand over the cash to have them “fix” it. I think I’ll opt for A. I might be able to live with this for a while. Or at least until I get up tomorrow morning, look in the mirror again and tell my head, “Welcome back from vacation!”

July 10th

Hair color Survivor Series: Day 3

I awoke today after a good night’s sleep and set about my tasks for the day. No, I didn’t have to build a shelter, hunt for food, or find banana leaves in which to weave a thong to wear. I was on a mission to rid my head of the dreaded midnight black hair color that has plagued me since the disastrous last Saturday afternoon.

I have chosen of my own free will to remain isolated and out of the public eye until my hair returns to it’s normal color. I have gathered all the things around me that I will need on this Hair color Survivor adventure in hope, not of winning a million dollars, but of winning back my pride and self confidence as a brunette.

Knowing that I would have to be cunning and have my wits about me later in the day, I ignored the obvious mar to my head for the first half of the day, instead focusing on work. As morning turned to early afternoon, I could sense my mind drifting to the shower and a fresh bottle of shampoo awaiting me. As I meticulously completely my daily tasks, my mind wandered to a happier time when my hair was soft and clean and lighter in color and when I was free to come and go as I pleased, carefree in nature and one with my hair.

Finally, I could stand it no longer and I jumped into the hot, steamy shower and cracked open the shampoo. Twice, I vigorously shampooed each and every strand of hair and followed up with a daily, clarifying conditioner, hoping that in just minutes, when I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, my hair will have returned to normal.
But I was to be denied again. No change. It’s still black and coarse. I have the equivalent of long pubic hair on my head. Another day that I have chosen to remain inside, away from public viewing, and wondering how many more days I will have to endure and if I have what it takes to be a Hair color Survivor…

July 11th

Hair color Survivor Series: Day 4

No change. The magic Repair-Hair fairy didn’t visit me last night. 3 more shampooing using both Ivory bar soap and Generic Paul Mitchell Shampoo One followed by lots of conditioner in hopes that it will prevent my hair from falling out.

My challenge tomorrow will be to search the Internet for information on why this might have happened and to possibly call Clairol to demand answers. The last time I did this back in the late ’80′s, the hair color company was all too willing to blame it on my hair condition, the water in the area, the shower spray pattern, the lunar phase of the day, anything but a screw up in their product. I’m not too hopeful.

So far, I’ve remained inside since Saturday with little to no problem. I’ve got plenty of chicken-flavored food and fish, lots of rice, and some veggies. I’ve stocked up on shampoo, conditioner, and soap and if absolutely necessary, I’ve got hats. LOTS of hats. I also have a lot of things to do inside to keep me busy and my mind off my head.

July 13th

Hair color Survivor Series: Day 6

Add another 12 shampooing to my black hair. What’s this?? A hint of dark brown peeking through the black strands? Oh yes I think so! This entices me back to the bathroom sink for a couple more washings for good measure. So far, I’ve used an entire bottle of generic Paul Mitchell Shampoo One shampoo, half a bottle of generic Paul Mitchell conditioner, half a bottle of VO5 Freesia shampoo, a quarter of a bottle of Swiss Formula Pear and Vanilla shampoo and conditioner and a third of a bar of plain Ivory soap, resulting in 28 hair washings and my head feels them all. I also had a solid 3 inches of length cut off since the ends were dry anyway and all the washing weren’t doing anything better for them. Still, I am not giving up hope that a majority of this black stuff will wash out and I’ll feel comfortable enough to walk around in public once more.

Speaking of walking around in public, I’ve committed myself to attend a memorial gathering on Sunday for a co-worker who died a week ago. What is not very public knowledge is that this co-worker treated us technical support employees pretty poorly. So why am I going? To pay my last respects. Gee, you don’t think I’m that hard-hearted, do you?

So, I’ll be going. Black hair and all. If anyone asks, I can tell them that out of respect for the deceased, I choose to display my grief by reconstructing my head to look similar to that of a charcoal briquette. Hmmm, I think I can live with that one.

July 16th

Hair color Survivor Series: Day 9

Add another 10 shampooing to my hair and finally, FINALLY, brown is definitely showing now. Almost all the black color has faded and I’ve got a nearly acceptable shade of brown. Friday evening I went out front of our house for the first time without a hat in over a week and one of my neighbors did a double take, then a triple take, but was polite enough to not say anything. That got me back inside and back to the shampoo bottle. By bedtime, I could see a visible difference in color.

Around midnight Friday as I was finishing up work, WS suggested that we take a drive up the Washington coast Saturday, looking for potential retirement property. He’s on a big beach kick now and thinks he likes it. You can color me floored as he never cared for the beach before and in fact, hated the whole idea of going to the beach. So we never did. In years. We live 2 hours from the ocean and we just never went there. This is just a small peek at what it is like living with a man who hates everything. But so far this year, we’ve hit the beach twice and ever since going whale-watching 2 weeks ago, he thinks he likes the beach well enough to live out his years there. Yes, there will be obstacles to living there but let’s not talk about those right now and just enjoy seeing a hate-filled man going through the motions of liking something for once.

So we left before 7 a.m. and headed north up to Chehalis, Washington before turning west and hitting the coastal city of Ocean Shores. What a waste of time. The crappiest paved roads on the planet, absolutely NO trees and about a sickenly tourist-y as you can get. Not what we were looking for. So we headed north up the coast for a few more hours until we found a place called Kalaloch Lodge and cabins. It’s right on the coast and in the Olympia Rain Forest area. Oh yes! I think we just may be finding some time to spend here in the future. Rocky beaches, tons (and I do mean TONS) of bleached white driftwood, wildlife, misty foggy skies, everything you’d ever seen on a northern Washington coast postcard. Beautiful and WS loved it!

We continued up the coast as far as we could until we had to jog around some Indian reservations that don’t have public access to the coastline and then backtracked to Neah Bay. More Indian reservation land and found out that there is no access to Cape Flattery, the most northwestern point of the United States. Now, why would they advertise that if you couldn’t get to it? Annoying.

We then headed east along the northern coast of Washington, and within sight of Canada’s Vancouver Island’s mountainous coastline, to Port Angeles. By this time, it was already evening and we had nearly a 5 hour drive home ahead of us. Now that we’ve eliminated the entire southern Washington coastline for future visits, we’ll be back to explore the Kalaloch area again and more of Port Angeles and Port Townsend as well. We turned back south and hauled ass through the Hood Canal area back down to Olympia and hooked up with a couple of cars doing 80 mph and were back home just before 1 a.m.. Being as I do 99.8 percent of the driving, to say that I’m completely burnt would be an understatement, but I will say that I went the entire trip without wearing a hat. It was nice for a change.

July 19th

Hair color Survivor Series: Day 12

Add only another 4 shampooing to my formerly black hair. It’s a solid dark brown now, a little lighter than the color of Hershey’s chocolate syrup, and a color I feel comfortable with. Thanks to everyone who stuck with me on this vain aspect of my life and for everyone who cast their vote on what I should do with it. Shaving my head nearly won out, and would certainly have been a very possible option should that dull black hair color not have washed out. I’ll let the whole experience be a lesson to me on not taking better care of my hair and allowing it to become dry, brittle and porous before choosing to color it again. Any and all gifts I receive from this day forward should always include a bottle of good hair conditioner. I’ll shut up about all this tomorrow.

Now onto the REAL Survivor series and other web site information: Yes, I heard that Gervase, the number-one dickhead on the Survivor series, reportedly won the competition. A hacker was able to break into the Survivor web site and discover that all but Gervase had a red X on his picture, signifying that he was the last one off the island. No, I don’t believe it anymore than I believe that Keiko is dead. Yesterday, for the second time in a week, Teleport and the Oregon Coast Aquarium’s web site was hacked into and the main page read that Free Willy was dead. I can only imagine all the disappointed children around the world sobbing when they read or heard that news. Welcome to the real world, kiddies! This is how some people get their kicks nowadays and should teach you to question everything you read or hear.

Last night, while we were eating dinner in front of the TV, WS glanced out to the backyard and saw a big group of birds wandering around in our bark dust. I jumped up to look and saw that they were quail, a entire flock of them. Too cool! A minute later and they all took off, flying across the yard and eventually out of the development. I didn’t know that quail could fly so well. It originally looked like a big group of prairie chickens or something out there as they weren’t small at all. They also kicked up a bunch of bark dust and pooped all over but I’d welcome them back anytime. It really was pretty cool.

Speaking of wildlife, our neighbor rescued a baby rabbit from the killer cat in the neighborhood. This one had significantly less injury to it than the one I tried to rescue months ago from the other killer cat in our development. However, the very next night, as I glanced out my office window just before midnight, there was the killer cat walking home with another baby rabbit in it’s jaws. I ran out there, but I couldn’t find the cat and couldn’t exactly wander around in people’s backyards looking for it. I stayed out there for a while listening to see if I could hear any rabbit squeals but didn’t hear a thing. I much as I like cats, I really, really hate this one. To make matters worse, it’s owners feel that this is part of nature. Hmmm…since when are domestic cats, forced to live outside, killing other animals, part of the natural way of things? Obviously, I disagree and to see this happening over and over again has become very traumatic to me. I’ve started having bad dreams about it and don’t feel comfortable looking out my front windows any longer. Good thing I have a backyard to live in now so I can learn to be blissfully ignorant like most people choose to be…

July 20th

Day off. Had new doctor appointment early this morning. I didn’t need to go to the doctor, it was just that my old doctor went on to better things and I had to find a new one. I guess the new one will do. She says my asthma, while under control, has been mismanaged by my former Kaiser doctor and she wants to try to get me off my ventolin inhaler and back to being active like I was before I moved to Washington. Yep, I was active and used to ski winter and summer, swim a few hours every single day, walk a lot, ride bicycles and motorcycles, climb mountains…then I moved here and became asthmatic because of the humidity and molds that are everywhere here. So she’s got me trying out a steroid inhaler and under strict orders to try very, very hard to ignore my ventolin inhaler for 2 months. I’m game.

Yesterday, WS got his first box of Avonex medication and needles. One shot a week with a big needle deep within a thigh muscle. He hasn’t got the medication video yet or the schedule of when the nurse will come out to teach us how to give the shots. Boy, I know I’m really looking forward to that.

It occurred to me a few weeks ago that I am destined to relive my mother’s life and this is fairly depressing as I couldn’t stand my mother for many reasons. My father contracted a form of Valley Fever in Phoenix in 1964. It’s usually a respiratory illness that comes from bacteria in the top layer of soil that gets stirred up into the air during construction or farming in dry desert climates. It is like having the flu for 3 solid months. I got it at the age of 10, as more than half the people in Phoenix do, and it left a little bit of scar tissue on one lung. No big deal.

My father, however, had it completely ignore his lungs and attack his spinal cord. Very rare. Just before his death in 1975, only 22 other people in the United States ever had this form of Valley Fever and all were dead. There is no cure. From 1968 thru 1975, he was hospitalized nonstop. I only saw my father twice during this 7 year period which was just fine with me. I had very good reasons to hate my father and I’ll save that for another time. In the meantime, my mother was left to raise 5 children and work a full time job. By full time, I mean 60 hour a week full time. As kids, we were literally hungry all the time, never worn clean clothes and were beat every night for no reasons whatsoever. It was her method of showing that she cared. It was also the only time she ever touched us. I wasn’t hugged by her until my wedding day and I have siblings who cannot ever remember being hugged by her.

She also didn’t believe in medical or dental care for herself or her children. Or she just didn’t have the money since everything was poured in my father’s 7 year hospital stay. All I know is that she worked all the time and spent the rest of her life at the hospital and did a pretty piss-poor job of “raising” us in the meantime. Before his illness, my father couldn’t hold a job because of his temper, so my mother worked constantly to support all of us then too. We were beat even more then because he had us during the day and handed us over to her at night. It was unbelievably horrible.

I just didn’t want to end up like her, working my entire life because my husband wouldn’t or couldn’t. I already chose to not have children, thus eliminating other mouths to feed. Now my husband is working his way to being disabled. How long will it be before he can’t walk permanently or lose his vision, hearing, or the feeling in his hands? How long before he is hospitalized for the rest of his life? Years, most likely, if ever. He will never be able to get life insurance with a label like MS around his neck. He’ll never be able to quit working for Hewlett/Packard because we could never afford his medical visits and medication without his HP benefits. This one small box of Avonex normally costs $890.00 for 4 shots worth of medication. Thanks to HP and Kaiser, it only costs us $5.

This is where the fear comes in, this is when the black clouds boil up over a person, no matter how strong they think they are. This is reality and on days like today, when WS feels like he might coming up to the edge of another exacerbation, it is hard to be strong and positive. But I know I’ll make it if I don’t think about it too much.

July 21st

Okay, enough whining. It’s Friday and I’m off at midnight. WS assures me that he won’t be dragging us out for any 600 mile trips through Washington or Oregon tomorrow on my day off. I am all too happy. I love the ocean and scenery but last Saturday’s 600+ mile drive made me feel jet lagged until the following Tuesday afternoon. Don’t ask me what I’ll be doing tomorrow, probably sleeping mostly, when I’m not cleaning the bathrooms. It’s my weekend for that.

Last Wednesday night, I had to resign from being a contributor for CrapCo due to both my ever increasing work load and WS’s health issues. I had been struggling for the last couple of weeks to get articles submitted on time and felt that I would soon be hindering the site rather than helping it. I’ll miss the bantering that goes on back and forth between Pablo, Danny, Ed, and Pam, the other writers for CrapCo and hope someday to be able to rejoin their group. Maybe even this time for pay.

My new doc has me ignoring my ventolin inhaler. Ventolin opens up your lungs so you can breathe clearly. Supposedly, I am addicted to ventolin and am supposed to use Azmacort instead. Azmacort doesn’t open up your lungs. As a steroid, it resides in your lungs and allows your bronchial tubes to remain open…after you’ve used it for a while. The problem is sitting here and not doing anything that will cause my lungs to feel like they are tightening up. Just walking up and down the stairs can do that for me. If I am not supposed to use the ventolin, I’m left not doing anything at all until the Azmacort starts working which should be about 2 months from now. Fun, huh?
Sorry, that last paragraph was whiny.

July 24th

It’s Monday. Nothing much going on so far and the neighborhood is fairly quiet. I expect that to change soon as every kid in the neighborhood converges into our next door neighbor’s inflatable kiddies pool. Yesterday, the noise level was unbearable outside. Luckily, our house is well insulated against noise but it did mean that we had to spend the entire day closed up inside. Why does it always seem like wherever we live, a daycare center has to go in next door? I guess this will teach us that next time we buy a house, don’t have a “next door.”

But because I have a fence to slop sealer on today, I’ll be outside, noisy children or not. To prevent my ears from bleeding, I’ll be wearing earplugs. I was pretty amused a couple of weeks ago when I heard that several of the other neighbors in the development routinely use earplugs both inside and outside because of the screaming kids in the area.

Got our fence gate fixed this morning. The wind used to bend the gate latch and it hasn’t been operational in 2 months. Didn’t cost anything to have it fixed by the Lifetime Fence people and it was nice to know that this was the kind of service we got for our $1000.00.

July 25th

I’m continuing to celebrate “Self-Pity Month” and blaming it on NK’s “Damn the Malt Liquor” Month. A lot of factors are converging this week to cause my low self esteem and I don’t see an end to any of them soon. On a positive note, I finished putting clear stain on our fence. That shouldn’t have to be touched or worried about for several years. It looks good.

The neighborhood has remained quiet since I mentioned it yesterday. Since I’m mentioning it again today, it will become a screaming battlefield immediately after I upload this journal’s update. Things just always work that way.
Tomorrow, I get to learn how to give WS his weekly MS medication shot should he decide he doesn’t want to do himself. This Avonex MS medication’s main side effect is flu-like symptoms for a day or two after getting a shot. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to learn how to cause my significant other physical pain and give him flu-like symptoms for a day or two. (Re-read journal first sentence.)

July 26th

There is something to be said about sticking your loved one with a 3-inch needle and injecting them with some drug that no one knows what the long term effects are while being coached by a medically trained nurse who is talking to us in a kindergarten voice. I nearly bawled my eyes out and even now, I am having a hard time keeping the tears from spilling over. I went with WS today to learn how to give his medication in case he couldn’t give administer it to himself and the nurse ends up making me give it to him because I was the more-nervous one. BITCH! Thank you very much. Yeah, now I know how to stab him in the thigh with a 3-inch needle. It wasn’t the physical act of sticking him, it was all emotional and it hurt. The problem is I can’t stand to touch him anymore because of what I had to do to him today. When I touch his skin, all I feel is the medication coursing through his body along side his disease. All I see is that needle stabbing into him with my hand on the other end. All I know is this guy is going to die and it isn’t going to be pretty.

Yeah, you could say that I’m having a very difficult time dealing with this. As Margaret Thatcher admonished George Bush in the emergency days after Iraq invaded Kuwait: “Now, George, this is no time to go wobbly!” I have to find the strength to handle this from somewhere. I can’t afford to go wobbly. Meanwhile, WS appears to be doing okay so far. We’ll see if he wakes up with the flu tomorrow as the medication claims is it’s biggest immediate side effect.

August 2000

August 7th

Nothing much has been happening lately around here. I finally painted our bedroom, we drove up to Anacortes, Washington, and we ate out a few times here in Vancouver. Being that we’re in the middle of a very dry spell and the temperatures are hotter than I care to think about, I never feel like doing much in August and September. I just can’t wait until fall.

August 10th

Woohoo! It’s supposed to be cloudy all day today. Unfortunately, no rain in sight and we could really, really use a good downpour. Everything is covered in dust and very dry. Depression continues. I hate summer.

We’ve been having home repairmen in and out of the place everyday this week, fixing things that weren’t done right the first time around. We’ve had the tip-out drawer fixed in the kitchen, the drain pipe to the French drain fixed in the backyard, windows and fireplace mantel looked at. We’re scheduled tomorrow to have a panel replaced on the kitchen island and Friday, they rip out the woodwork around the front door and spray insulating foam in all the places they forgot to put insulation in when they were building the place a year ago. Really, they should have listened to us back when we told them that they were forgetting the front door insulation. Now they have to fix it plus rip out and replace the woodwork not to mention make a total mess of the downstairs doing it. Repairmen are notoriously messy.

No word yet on when our flooring will be fixed. Our stairs have half-torn apart since April. It’s part of the reason for my depression. This is exactly why I didn’t want to buy a house. It’s like, the work is never-ending!

WS’s birthday is coming up. We’re going to see if he can learn how to kayak at a place in west Portland. It ought to be fun if things work out. Believe it or not, it was his idea. Scary, huh?

23/08/00 10:32 Wed

Survivor mania day. Yes, we watch it because we feel it is mindless entertainment and right now we need mindless entertainment. No, we don’t watch Big Brother because it’s stupid. I recently learned that entire sectors of the Vancouver population confuse the two shows and refuse to watch any of the Survivor episodes. Whatever. These are the same people who will fuel the need for Survivor reruns and video tape in upcoming years just as people refused to watch the Twin Peaks series when it was on TV and have now helped create Twin Peaks video and laser disc boxed sets. These sets are one of the largest series sellers of all time.

Since we get east-coast feed, we’ll begin our Survivor watching at 4:30 pm with the sure-to-be-boring preview show. In between my work breaks, I’ll be cheering for the old geezer, Rudy. Being as I am one of them, I feel that old people who aren’t afraid to speak their minds don’t have a voice these days and society as a whole always seems to want some “beautiful” person to be in the spotlight 24 hours a day. As someone who has never been nor will ever be a “beautiful” person, I tend to root for anti-beautiful people. Rudy certainly fills that bill. I also think Susan, the anti-beautiful truck driving, redneck, wife to a 500+ lb blobby couch-eating walrus, will be runner-up. I’ll be very happy to see fat naked King Richard not win.

And then finally, after tomorrow, Survivor talk around here will briefly die down until mere minutes after the Super Bowl in January when the Australian Survivor series begins. Hoo-boy, what will I do with myself all those lonely, boring months…maybe stop watching TV all together? Stranger things have happened.

23/08/00 18:10 Wed

Damn it!! Rudy is out. It’s between Kelly and fat, naked King Richard. I think Kelly’s got the million bucks because most of the tribal council hate Richard and surely won’t vote for him. If it had been between Kelly and Rudy, it could have gone either way. See ya, Rudy. It was fun watching you for the last few months.

23/08/00 19:32 Wed

Well, we can all shoot ourselves in the head now. Fat, naked, gay King Richard won it. Depression around the Cole household deepens. We’re praying for fall weather to save us.

August 14th

Thank to all of you who emailed me asking if I had died or something. No, it just feels like it. Summer depression continues and I am back to taking St. Johns Wort. Give it a few weeks.

Because I am longing for fall weather so bad, knowing that fall weather always chases away my depression, I am certain that fall will be late in coming this year. I predict summer temperatures well into October. Everyone else will think it’s great. I’ll be weeping my eyes out.

I had a mammogram last week and got my results over the weekend. Normal. Yippee. Mammograms don’t bother me in the least. It’s those “wonderful” pap smears that I avoid like the plague…

Thanks to a neighbor, I’ll be delving into flash animation stuff in the coming weeks and hope to have some small demo somewhere on my personal web page or maybe here. I think flash stuff is just the coolest thing and I’ve been wanting to get into it for nearly a year. I was under the mistaken impression that it required .cgi scripting. Wrong-o. I can do this.

August 15th

Don’t you hate it when you have something pretty cool sitting there right in front of you for the longest time and you are so busy doing any number of other things that you don’t notice that one cool thing patiently waiting for you to notice it? Well, that is exactly what I have been doing for a solid year now. My one cool thing that I haven’t been really paying attention to is our new house. Okay, wait. Lemme explain that. I’ve been whining, bitching, complaining and boasting about little more than our new house for, well, a year now. Yeah, I’ve been working like a dog to paint it, landscape it, organize it, clean it, decorate it, but I never really sit down and take it all in. I never really appreciate it because I’m always looking ahead to some time in the future when it will be finished completely. Meaning, every room, from master bath to the garage, from the front porch to the back corner of the backyard will be completely and perfectly decorated, organized and done. Unrealistic? Maybe, but then again, this me we’re talking about and if anyone can accomplish a big fat task like this, I can.

How did I get this way? Hmmm….my parents were never happy with anything, my siblings were all favored over me by all relatives, an ex-husband reassured me for years that I was destined to become a bag lady and I am currently married to a perfectionist engineer. It’s becoming more clear…

Last night, at dusk, I caught a glimpse of what it feels like to just sit for a moment outside, shut off my brain and absorb the beauty of a nicely mowed lawn, manicured landscaping and a nice cool weather breeze without the weight of my little world squashing everything out. It lasted all of about 3 minutes. I’m going to try to make it a point to touch on that feeling at least once a week. To be perfectly honest, I’m pretty ashamed of myself for not appreciating the things around me. Much like I felt during the year spent saving money and having our house built, I feel like I’ve lost an entire year of my life and just now have been plucked from somewhere else and dropped into this place. I’m finally beginning to see the things that surround me for the very first time. And I’m wondering, “Who the hell decorated this place? Not too bad.”

Well, enough of this seriousness. Outside, at the neighborhood religious fanatics house (although they are mercifully, very, very quiet about it), it’s looking like a minivan convention. No less than 5 minivans are parked out front of their house, no, make that 6 minivans and counting. What could they be celebrating on a Tuesday afternoon? Hmmm…maybe the test strip shows pink. That will make number 6 or is it 7? It’s hard to keep up.

Started going through the Flash 4 tutorial today. I’m pretty stoked about it. Do people still say “stoked”? Probably not. Whatever…

August 25th

Don’t you hate it when you say you love someone, assuming that you all have someone you love and aren’t afraid or too manly to say “I love you”, and that person, instead of looking all dreamy and goofy back at you, says something like, “Why??”

“What do you mean, why? I just do. Isn’t that enough?” I replied while we were driving home in rush hour traffic.

“No. It isn’t. What you mean, what you really mean is, While all the world completely sucks, you love me because I suck less. Right?”

Okay, he’s got me there. He sucks less than the entire sucky world. If he was a beer, he’d be a Suck Lite. If he were a yogurt, he’d be a Low Suck variety. If he were a checkout line at a grocery store, he’d be the “10 sucks or less express lane.”

Yes, ours is a strange but wonderful relationship.

August 17th

First tutorial in Flash 4 down, uh…a bunch more to go. I’ve got a few lame ideas for animations running in the back of my brain already; none of which I’m sure will see the light of day (be thankful). Had a bad day yesterday and I’m really looking forward to a better one today. Mental note: Past experience with taking St. John’s Wort every day showed it starts working in 17 days. Day 13. It’s not working.

Gave WS his MS shot last night. No, I didn’t cry, wail or carry on this time. In fact, it was kind of fun. Did I mention I had a bad day yesterday? Well…hmmm…that was a disturbing image.

WS found the video for Fatboy Slim’s “Praise Me”. The one with all the ‘tards dancing in front of a movie theatre. It’s like watching a car wreck. A 27 car, 19 semi-truck pile up on an icy freeway when the slowest driver was doing 110 mph. You want to look away, you know you should look away, b-u-t y-o-u j-u-s-t c-a-n’-t.
Damn. Now that Praise Me tune is stuck in my head and I’ll have to watch the video just one last time before bed. This ought to make for interesting dreams.

August 19th

It drizzled yesterday for about half the day and this made me very happy. Now I can go a few more days without having to water everything. It was nearly like fall was right around the corner but of course, we all know it isn’t really. It’ll be upwards of 90 degrees again next week *sigh*

A bunch of stuff I ordered to finish decorating our bedroom finally came last week and we spent last night hanging pictures, gate grates and torches and laying a rug out. It’s a virtual “Love-Pit” in there. That makes half the house done and the other half still to go. I got a big sense of accomplishment afterward which then turned embarrassing as I realized how domestic and petty it made me feel. That’s what my life has turned into: domestication. You can believe I’ll be looking to bring some unpredictable change into my life in the coming year. I already have some ideas (scary, huh?)

August 21st

Don’t you just hate those kinds of days when you feel that anything and everything you do is wrong? You can’t win, no matter what. That’s where I am tonight. Tomorrow is WS’s birthday. I began planning possible things to do for him over a month ago and he decided he wanted to learn how to kayak. Then, just a week ago, he changed his mind. I started running all those other previous possibilities through my head and realized most of them needed more time for reservations or planning. I also thought he was going to be taking the day off from work since he gets a floating holiday for his birthday. He’s going to work instead. Once again, a-birthday-is-just-like-any-other-day-of-the-week kind of mentality. It also didn’t help that I haven’t had the car alone for over 3 weeks and this has prevented me from going shopping for anything including a birthday card.

But what does it matter if it’s just another day of the week, right? Well, that’s I beg to differ. Most people who feel that their birthday is just another day of the week, have had crappy birthdays in the past and I feel it is my mission in life to give WS something better. Even if I can’t get him a birthday cake, since he can no longer eat anything made of wheat flour, dairy products, or white sugar, I should be able to do something right? Even if he’s had a bad stomach ache for 2 days and bowel problems for a week, I should be able to come through for him with flying colors, right?
Wrong. Everything to date has just been wrong.

August 26th

The Parade of Homes. An $8 per-person self-tour in Vancouver of 5 homes. Huge houses, elegantly decorated and well out of any rational person’s price range. It was my first time going to this yearly event. I was not impressed in the least. That’s because I am spoiled and go once every other year to Portland’s version of the Parade of Homes, The Street of Dreams, where the builders and decorators know how to do it right most of the time (we won’t discuss this year’s attempt). Vancouver’s version looked like a bunch of cow town houses trying to look fancy.

Saw a squirrel get hit on the road on the way to the home show. The guy tried to miss it, but didn’t and drove off. So did the car right behind it. We stopped and moved the rapidly dying squirrel out of the roadway. I don’t know why I care so much about things like that.

Watched “Meet Joe Black” last night. That movie nearly ties “Food of the Gods” for the worst movie ever made. As one of WS’s friends said about it, they could have run it through editing one more time. Yeah, to remove 2 hours and 50 minutes of the 2 hour and 57 minute movie. It was just bad. If anyone recommends it to you, run screaming the opposite direction and never think the same about that person again.

August 28th

I realized something today. I thought having an online journal would be good for me, a platform to get things off my chest and a way to do something I enjoy: writing. But it became painfully clear today that this journal has released information to the world and some people in it whom we never thought would find us. Nor care to ever find us. We felt safely anonymous but this is no longer the case and it has become disturbing to think where things may go from here because we can be found.

In re-reading past portions of this journal, I have also become aware that I whine a lot, mostly because I don’t like people but are forced to live with them, and I have become an elitist, because I don’t like people and was coerced into building and buying a house. I’m not terribly proud of either one and will be thinking over the next few days on what to do about it. I am toying with removing the online journal. Technically, I can just as easily write down everything on paper but I also enjoy typing. I know I’ll change my mind about 20 times a day over the next week or so and probably end up doing nothing different but I would like to apologize to WS for making his personal life public. I’m sorry. Neither one of us ever thought anyone from your past would look you up because of anything here.

For my whining selection today (See? I told you nothing would be different…), I’ll bitch about all the yellow-jacket wasp nests we have being built on our house. We have 4, none of which I can reach as they are all on second story roof eaves and I have no ladder big enough to even get close. The entire neighborhood has wasp nests; every house in the development has at least one fist-size nest (or larger). The wasps are building nests to get ready for winter. I am hoping that with the large number of nests in the neighborhood, this is a sign that it will be a very cold winter. Personally, I need a very cold winter so I can hole myself up in here, work, work, work, and rebuild my bank account.

August 30th

I am anti-mouse wheel person. That’s all I have to say about that.

I feel like I’m still in that “taking everything around me for granted” phase. I discussed this over dinner with WS tonight and my concerns about not being able to shake that feeling. He says he knows what I mean and that it is stress. The funny thing about this is that I have never had this kind of stress before, if that’s what it is. I don’t feel stressed, I just don’t see my surroundings. It’s just work, TV, work, eat, work, poop and sleep. The same as usual. Nothing different. I’m hoping fall weather will snap me out of this.

Speaking of fall weather, I realize I’m putting a lot of pressure on that seasonal change to brighten up my life. So don’t fuck it up for me, Autumn.

Tomorrow, they (the dorks down at Carpet USA) come to look at our flooring yet again. Seems we’ve been told a few lies about our stairs and the laminate wood pieces we’ve been waiting for. They are non-existent. So they will be trying something else. No word on when they will be fixing all the installation chips in the surface of the rest of the flooring throughout the house. Last I heard on this, they conveniently “lost” the paperwork on it. We’ve been here over a year, with absolutely NO furniture, waiting for this to be corrected. While I was okay with the delay in the past, now I’m getting annoyed with looking at blue tape marks all over the kitchen, living room, hall, library, etc not to mention half the stairs torn apart since last April.

September 2000

September 2nd

Hey now, today was productive for a day off. Ripped some new assholes at the local Starbucks for not having any soy a word (For like the 6th time in a row. One of the cashiers looked up at WS, who just stared and didn’t say a word as I was going off on everyone, and she said loudly under her breath, “Oh my god, he’s going to go postal!”), bought a remote control for the bedroom chandelier, picked up cat food (cat fud), found a French market basket for the kitchen, checked out the bullshit sales pitch at both 24 Hour Fitness and Health Experience, gathered financial information on both and chose 24 Hour for my future fitness needs, had a crappy lunch/dinner, bought a pair of tennis shoes, ran a couple of red lights, picked up mail from the p.o. box, and totally blew off buying the monthly groceries.

If all my days were this productive…I’d be broke and exhausted.

September 4th

My job is fuckin’ ridiculous today. It’s supposed to be a US holiday when people hit the highways and byways, looking for that last summer fling before sending the kids back to school and heading back to work after a 3 day weekend (for most people). Well, I think half the US took the weekend to play with the program the company I work for creates, resulting in frustration or questions that they then send to me and my technical support coworkers, who don’t get holidays off (although we do get paid for them). As of 8 pm tonight, I had already received over 200 emails and you better believe that most of them were not from happy people. When you figure that 85 percent of the emails take from 2 to 10 minutes to reply to and then do the math, it basically adds up to doing little more than working a 16 hour day.
Of course, I could thumb my nose at half of the email and work on them tomorrow on my day off like most of my coworkers do. But that will guarantee that I won’t be able to sleep well (or at all) tonight and I’ll only come back to them tomorrow just as tired and just as cranky. I swear, if I get another email asking, “How do you send an email?” or “Why don’t you have any Emimen?” a POSTAL event will occur!

September 5th

Since joining a health club last Saturday, I’ve gone twice and like it quite a bit so far. Treadmills are everything I ever hoped they would be. Yeah, it sounds like I need a life. I also need to get all this body fat off me and the thought of 30-45 minutes on a treadmill while able to watch the financial channel on several big TVs makes me wet.
Don’t you hate it when you think you are doing something right in your job only to find out that you’ve been doing it wrong all along, and all the memos that have gone out to the department were actually directed at you and then you find out and you get all embarrassed? Yeah, I hate that too.

WS is researching headphones this week for us to take to the gym (he joined too). In usual WS-fashion, he’ll research above and beyond everything anyone ever published about every headphone manufactured on the planet from headphone conception to the present. In about 4 days, I’ll be screaming at him to shut already about headphones, but you know? He always finds the best item for the best value at the best price. WS is a clever man.

I have orders to take time out to realize that I’m off work today and to enjoy it. I start winding down from work about 18 hours after I’m off. Around 8 pm, I’ll start enjoying it.

Another neighbor had their side front yard removed today and a third driveway poured. Why? I don’t know but I can guess that it may have something to do with hating to mow and water the yard over there. They’ll probably park a boat or a 5th wheel over there now and really improve the looks of the street…

Stinky Meat.net made the local news today. 3 million hits per day. Not bad. They’ve started the Stinky Meat 2 project.

September 6th

Well, that little honeymoon period with 24 Hour Fitness ended quickly. I am about 2 seconds away from requesting my money back (must be received by the corporate office in 3 business days, giving me until tomorrow to act.). Last Saturday, the day we signed up, a one Patrick Reddick wanted to put one of us on a 24/7 personalized training schedule for 6 weeks. I didn’t want to do it. WS didn’t want to do it, but WS pushed me and I finally and reluctantly agreed to get the personalized training.

Later that same day, WS gave me a lecture about never saying NO to people and how I need to start doing just that. I don’t think he had in mind for me to say no to him. After spending Saturday night tossing and turning in bed and not getting very much sleep, I confronted WS Sunday morning and told him I was saying NO to him and refusing to be pushed into doing the personalized training thing at 24 Hour Fitness. And that HE was going to do it instead of me. Okay by him and later in the day, we went over to 24 Hour Fitness to make this change in the paperwork. No problem, Patrick says. He’ll just cancel my appointment for Wednesday at 9 am and schedule WS for an appointment on Thursday at 9 am.

That’s when all the trouble started.

Sunday evening I get a phone call confirming my Wednesday appointment. Wait a minute. That appointment was cancelled. “Oh really?” they say. “Aren’t you coming in?” So I explain the change that was made and everything seemed okay.

Tuesday I get another call confirmed my appointment for Wednesday at 9 am. NO! I say. That appointment was supposed to be cancelled by Patrick and was changed to accommodate WS, who’s new appointment is Thursday at 9 am. Okay. Got it.

Wednesday morning at 9:15 am, I get a call asking where I am, that I didn’t come in for my appointment at 9 am. WS takes the call as I’m in the middle of a big email for work. WS calmly (I hate it that he can be so calm sometimes) explains that no, my appointment was supposed to have been cancelled and a new appointment was scheduled for him Thursday at 9 am. Seems Patrick didn’t cancel my appointment, didn’t tell anyone of the change, and everyone else there took it upon themselves to jump in and do their little righteous thing by making sure I knew that people were aware that I was supposed to come in but didn’t for some reason. I was beginning to feel harassed at this point.

At noon today, Wednesday, I innocently walk into 24 Hour Fitness to work out and I get stopped at the counter by Micah who says, “What’s your last name? Okay, Don was looking for you. You didn’t come in this morning for your appointment.”

Why I didn’t clammer over the counter and rip off poor Micah’s head with my teeth, I don’t know. After watching and listening to me barely keep control of my fury, I’m sure even now that he wishes that I would have just killed him then and there. I didn’t exactly let Micah have it but I made sure he sensed I was a bit unhappy. I didn’t even let loose completely on WS on the phone once I got home. I’m savoring the thought of what I’ll be saying to Patrick the next time that sorry bastard crosses my eyesight.

I didn’t stay to work out today. I was very, very upset and so came home and nearly screamed on the phone to WS, who was kind enough to call 24 Hour Fitness and attempt a second time to straighten things out, this time with Patrick’s manager. I had planned on never going back until this thing was 1) completely and totally straightened out, 2) they never call us again, and 3) I get an apology to my face, meaning I will have to go back at some point.

All conditions will be met, WS was promised. I get my face-to-face apology tomorrow morning when I accompany WS on his appointment. Until then, I remain ever skeptical because well, that’s just me.

Stinky Meat.net made the local news yesterday. 3 million hits per day. Not bad. They’ve started the Stinky Meat 2 project.

September 7th

24 Hour Fitness made good on our demands and I receive not one but three separate face-to-face apologies today. Two of them actually sounded sincere. I felt much better about the place after that and as a result, my workout today was very good. It’s been one of the few times that being a bitch has paid off.

We learned how to make Thai red curry chicken about a month ago and have been having it once a week ever since. Today, we learned that coconut milk, required in the recipe, is purely saturated fat. The recipe calls for 1 to 2 cans. The information on the side of the can says one serving equals 2 tablespoons with 13 servings per can. That’s not good. Good thing I’m currently in love with a treadmill and WS likes the stationary bike ’cause we ain’t giving up Red Curry anytime soon.

Factoid of the Day: Henry Kissinger is an honorary Harlem Globetrotter. That is just wrong.

Things I have learned about life as seen through the eyes of someone who has watched over 25 years of TV: I want blue urine and I want other people in the grocery store to be concerned about the cleanliness of our toilet bowls.

September 8th

Weird day. We both spent the night on the toilet. Good thing we now have multiple toilets instead of only one like the Pit had (The Pit is the term of affection we use for the rental house we lived in for 8 years before moving here). We ate the same things yesterday and obviously, something didn’t go over very well. WS went to work later in the afternoon, I had to spend a little more time pooping, took a nap and woke up feeling great around 6 pm with exception of my butt which is tender. Back to work for me.

Factoid of the Day: People with thin lips, particularly thin upper lips, generally are tightwads and hold onto their money. People with full lips, particularly full upper lips, generally have problems with money and/or credit cards. Damn my genes. I’m going straight to the poor farm.

September 13th

Today I talked to someone at the gym who’s wife is going through chemotherapy (is it really therapeutic to lose your hair and throw up?). He asked me how I cope with having a spouse who has a disease. I think that everyone has a disease of some kind. Some people’s are just more nasty than others. I don’t think he really wanted to hear my own thoughts on it so I told him what I felt he needed to hear. Stay positive, learn all you can about the problem, work on motivation, be patient and take some time out just for yourself every day. I didn’t tell him to use dark humor, which works perfectly for us, but is revolting for most people.

Then he told me that his wife’s parents have never exercised in their lives and he can’t get them to start. He said he was afraid of losing them both to heart attacks because they are grossly overweight, smoke, drink and eat all the time plus don’t want to hear about exercising. Nor do they want him to try to get his wife to exercise saying that on top of her cancer, she doesn’t need to workout. I was trying to look interested in his tale of woe.

I just told him that for some people, it takes a personal medical emergency or near death experience to get them to take a hard look at themselves and what they want for a future. Some people won’t change no matter what. No matter how many doctors, relatives, friends or loved ones tell them that they are going to keel over some day soon if they don’t do something, some people just don’t care. The rest of us have to accept this and this guy just couldn’t accept it so it was back to the “Stay positive, learn everything you can about it, etc…” speech.

It took WS’s positive diagnosis for him to take a good look at his life and he has decided to do something. To date, he’s lost over 50 pounds and no longer eats anything with wheat, dairy, beef or sugar in it. I, of course, remain ever skeptical on how long he will continue this. He doesn’t have any record of sticking with anything for very long but I’ll admit, this is the first thing he’s stuck with for this long.

On the subject of his weight loss, no, you really can’t see it too much yet. He’s a big guy. I love big guys. The mere thought of seeing John Goodman in person anywhere in my general vicinity makes me moist. WS does the same thing for me. It is important to note that while I do love big guys, I like living big guys. No matter how I think of it, and I’d really prefer not to, I just couldn’t get wet over a dead big guy. So I’ll be learning to love a not so big guy in the future, although, he’ll still always be a pretty big guy and if for some reason he decides to replace fat with lean muscle, he won’t look all that different, he’ll just be able to pull long lines of cars around with his teeth or something and without breaking a sweat.

It’s a Fact: The oldest business in the United States of America is the cymbal company Zildjian which was founded in Constantinople in 1623.

September 16th

Sad. It’s just sad. We have the green-est, neat-est lawn in the development…and we care. Shoot us now.

A friend from out of state is in town this weekend but he’s got a lot of socializing to do and family obligations over the next 4 days. We probably won’t see him because we’re urban hermits. But it’s okay. Our fear of furniture continues and no one likes sitting on the floor. Why is that??

Worked out at the gym around midnight last night. Either we were stupid or bored. It was really nice though. Only 7 other people there and we watched the opening ceremonies of the Olympics during those grueling 2 hours on the treadmill.

It’s a Fact: It’s not Gatorade you see in those plastic cups that all the NFL, NHL, NBA, and tennis stars are drinking. It’s pickle juice (dill or sweet, doesn’t matter) and athletes and coaches around the world swear by the stuff. Gatorade still gets the attention though.

September 26th

Lots of stress happening right now. Nothing I want to talk about just yet other than to mention that vehicles in our development were broken into and items stolen. We park in our garage with the door locked. No problems here.

It’s a Fact: The guy who ran over Stephen King a year or two ago was found dead in his trailer Monday.

September 29th

I’ve been busier than a one legged dog at a flea circus. Gawd, I hate that saying but for some reason it fit. Been working my butt off, both at my job and in my personal life. I’ve been trying to absorb my surroundings and take in some of the comforts of things around me. I’ve been going to the gym 4 days a week with WS, who continues to lose weight while I continue to gain weight. Getting the yards ready for winter, planting spring bulbs, cleaning out the garage, testing the theory that white vinegar counterbalances urine, learning new software and taking an online Flash animation class, learning to cook gourmet meals and trying to be supportive of WS in his over zealousness in watching calories and fat contents of everything, meeting Portland’s designers, programmers and media producers for a friend, discovering MP3 players for the first time and catching snippets of the Olympics at 2am. Fall is officially here and it rained all day today. My spirits would have been totally lifted had my paycheck been deposited and if I had 20 bucks to spend frivolously. So, I sat home instead most all day and tried to respond to co-worker email accusations about me “cheating” at my job. Don’t ask me what that’s all about. I take it both as a compliment and as a slight hit to my morale. Whatever…

It’s a Fact: There are 3 million bugs to every 1 person on the planet. Ewwwwwwww…..

October 2000

October 5th

“I’ve been busier than a one legged dog at a flea circus.” I said that last week. The phrase should be busier than a “one legged man in an ass kicking contest.” according to a friend of mine. Perhaps this is true, but he’s never had to live with a bonafide Arkansas redneck for 3 miserable years and listen to the guy completely slaughter the English language along with every phrase known to mankind. Or maybe he has. Probably has, now that I come to think of it. In that case, my sincere apologies to his mental health. These kinds of things scar a person for life and that explains my first sentence.

It’s a Fact: The oldest business in the United States of America is the cymbal company Zildjian which was founded in Constantinople in 1623.

October 6th

I am having the worst day in a long time (not that many of my days actually go well). We’ve been sleeping on the floor in WS’s office for a week now because…well, let’s just say there are things about having MS that no one talks about. The bedroom needed to be aired out anyway.

I sent out an email today to my co-workers basically smacking a certain LARGE group of people who use a certain HUGE ISP who advertises about instant messaging and they’ve got mail, etc… Somehow, and no one knows just how yet, somehow the email was sent to the customer from which I got the original email from. What’s more, a co-worker replied to my email yet again smacking this large group of brainwashed people and THAT email also went to the customer. Fun, fun, fun. I spent nearly 3 hours crying and worrying about whether I would lose my job or not. The email department of the company I work for is looking into why and how this happened and it looks like it was no fault of my own but the fact remains that if I didn’t have anything nice to say about this customer, I shouldn’t say anything at all. No word from the customer yet. He’s probably talking to a lawyer and will demand my job.

It’s been very, very windy here for the last 4 days. Everything is blowing down or blowing away. Half of our bark dust has blown away from our house and I have to keep watering it down to keep it.

WS isn’t having the greatest day either but he can whine about that on his own journal of which he doesn’t have.

It’s a Fact: “Weird” Al Yankovic received a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture in 1981. He also served as valedictorian of his high school at age 16.

October 9th

I’ve decided that I’m having a run of bad luck right now and it isn’t helping my depression. Nothing new there. I just have to slog through it.

It’s a Fact: The five most stolen items in a drugstore are batteries, cosmetics, film, sunglasses, and Preparation H.

October 10th

Yeah, okay. Octobers have historically been bad months for me. I don’t know why that is. I love the month of October. The air gets that crisp, fall feel to it. It starts getting cold at night but warms up in the day. The rainy season begins up here in the Pacific Northwest. People start burning wood in their fireplaces and setting pumpkins outside their doors. I start thinking of caramel apples and popcorn balls…but Octobers don’t seem to like me.

The month of October has always brought me more than what I feel is my fair share of heartache, in the form of relationship breakups, deaths in my family and/or close friends (enough so that I don’t have much family or any close friends left), traffic tickets, financial ruin and plain ol’ bad luck. The stock market always does a big belly flop and we’ve lost close to 20K so far. I’ve made an idiot of myself twice (or was it three times) already in front of my bosses and co-workers. Nearly all the new relationships that we’ve established with all our new neighbors have gone sour. And my computer is in the process of taking a big shit. Already, my new Outlook program has become corrupted, my work program, eShare, has become corrupted, and my newly reinstalled copy of Age of Empires II has become corrupted. The cause of the corruption has been narrowed down to one of two programs – a public beta version of the program the company I work for has released and that I need to run and learn in order to do my job, and/or the ICQ program, a program I also need to communicate with my co-workers, bosses, and friends.

Even though I’ve taken a few big hits to my self esteem lately, I’m continuing to try to work though it. I’m hitting the gym 4 nights a week and am considering getting back into bodybuilding just a little, I’m only 1 and 1/2 assignments behind in a Flash Animation class that I’m enjoying, WS and I are learning to become gourmet cooks and are taking a beginner’s wine appreciation course at the end of the month. I’m continuing to take my vitamins and supplements including an increased dosage of St. John’s Wort and later today, I’ll be moving everything over to Rasputin, the bigger, better computer in the house. No more using the wimpy, hand-me-down Deiter. In Rasputin, I’ve even got a CD burner and will finally, FINALLY learn how to burn CDs (something I feel that WS has hogged 100% of for the last 2 years).

So, even though October is throwing it’s weight around, I’m trying hard not to wallow in it and instead, am taking steps to use this time for some well deserved self improvement.

And thanks, Kristian. You said just what I needed to hear.

It’s a Fact: Actress Cheryl Ladd started her career as the singing voice of the character Melanie on the 1970′s cartoon Josie and the Pussycats.

October 16th

I’ve finally switched over to using Rasputin, the bigger computer in the house. WS is using Deiter and is having all kinds of problems with him. Insert snickering here and a few “I told you so” statements. I’d like to see WS do his job day in and day out on Deiter. I’ve also switched to Windows 2000 and Outlook 2000. Rasputin is louder than Deiter was and I’m still trying to get used to the louder fan noise. It’s sounds like I’m preparing for takeoff.

Oh, and the web cam is down while we find a Win2K driver for it. Worst case, we’ll move it downstairs to Nicolas, the DVD/MP3 server.

I’m on a well-needed vacation this week. Things feel very stressful at both work and home and I really need some time to think. Thinking is something I have had little to no time to do in over a year and I think everything is suffering because of it. I’m making poor judgments at my job and ignoring things here at home. And I HAVE to snap out of this long bout of depression. But I’m very, VERY happy that it’s finally fall.

Next weekend, WS and I are taking a wine appreciation class. We’re buying some culture. They’ll tell us not to buy wine with twist-off caps or clever names like Wild Strawberry and Kiwi Flinger Wine. I’m hoping they say something about wine commercials. “If you wear Dockers and regularly drape a cashmere sweater over your shoulders, you should drink this wine. If you live under a bridge and/or are a politician, you should drink that wine,” is what I’m hoping to hear. Either way, I’m looking forward to sipping, swishing and spitting in front of 14 other people.

The weekend after that, we’ve been invited to a halloweenie party, probably because the party-givers have seen our costumes and how little candy we actually hand out. Last year was great. We bought 8 bags of good quality stuff, candy bars mostly, and only handed out about a bag’s worth. Kids still refer to our house as the house with monsters. One parent tried to bribe his kid with $15 to come up and touch WS in his seven foot tall dragon outfit, but the kid wouldn’t do it. Next week, I’ll begin the annual hand-sharpening of my scythe out in the driveway. It’s a real traffic stopper.

The weekend after that, well, I’m getting too far ahead of myself so I’ll save that for later on.

It’s a Fact: On religious beliefs: In the old days, playing music that contained augmented 4th chords in any key was avoided because it was thought to invoke the Devil.

October 25th

Hi. You ever have one of those days where everything goes wrong and you wonder what the point of it all is? Okay, so have you ever had one of those days where everything goes right and you wonder what’s up with that? Yeah, well, let me tell you about one of those days ’cause I think I might have just had one.

My supervisor calls me this morning to talk to me about a promotion. I figured after nixing the trip to South Dakota last month for the company and for publicly insulting an AOL user, I was on shaky ground and had, in fact, quietly faded into the woodwork and didn’t stick my email nose out there for a few weeks. Now it looks like I might get to help do some Quality Assurance in the email section of the company I work for to help with consistency, conformity and punctuality of all tech support personnel. This is key to getting solutions to the customers quickly so they think we’re all that and a side of roast beef.

So as I was trying to keep my voice steady and not gleefully jump all over the house while I was on the phone, one of the house repairmen shows up and ACTUALLY FIXED SOMETHING THAT HAS BEEN BROKEN FOR THE LAST 15 MONTHS. Unbelievable, I tell you.

A few hours later, as I was searching for something on the Internet, I ran across an old friend’s address at which point, I decided to look up some other old friends and acquaintances to see if any of them had yet embraced eSpeed. I found my old roommate who is still involved with racing (and broke my heart at one point). It’s scary how much info I located on him on the Internet, including his address, several email addresses and his place and position of employment amongst a few other things. Great information for Internet stalkers, I’m sure.

I also located an ex-brother-in-law who recently got married to a 400 lb. woman (I am NOT kidding). Dave used to be the nicest guy on the planet. Really. Then he got a job in the cotton industry in Phoenix which led to a job on the Board of Supervisors for Maricopa County in Arizona. To put it mildly, he turned into a major asshole rather quickly and he only wanted to have “yes men” surrounding him. The newlywed’s wedding pictures are plastered all over at http://members.xoom.com/csmith676/pix2.html WARNING: VERY, very graphics heavy. And it isn’t pretty either. Best wishes, Dave. Don’t be an ass to her as you have to so, so many people in your past.

So just when I’ve about had it with everything in life, things turn around. I get a promotion, get a door fixed, I find an old roommate stuck in the same rut he was in 15 years ago and an ex-relative-in-law who’s bald, yet comfortable with large women (something he professed to his family several times that he despised). What more can a person ask for? It’s been a great day!

October 20th

I despise the shape my 44-year old body has blobbed into. Sitting in front of a computer 10 hours a day for the last 2 years has had a horrible effect on whatever shape I once had, but has improved my typing and computer skills tremendously. I would like the rest of me to be in the same shape as my fingers and so I’m slowly jumping back into bodybuilding. I like bodybuilding. A lot. Back in 1980-84, I was really into it, but a trainer at Gold’s Gym in Phoenix (Camelback and Central Avenue) was mostly responsible for getting me out of it. Cory Everson, 6-time Ms. Olympia, was also partly responsible for getting me out of the sport. I met her at a AZ regional bodybuilding conference and she told me point blank that I did not have the body shape or genetics for professional bodybuilding competition. I wanted to compete back then and I was crushed. I got her autograph anyway.

This time, I’m doing it for me, not to compete but because I love the way it makes me feel and the power rush I get from it, especially when confronted by guys who are uncomfortable with beefy, muscular-looking women. It’s been a long time since I felt this good about something.

Mornings now consist of making up protein shakes, downing a couple St. John’s Wort (which finally appears to be helping my depression along with the season change and exercise 4 days a week), some brown rice and a few amino acid wafers.

Afternoons and evenings are filled with making sure we are eating enough protein and not too much in the way of carbohydrates and little to no fat. This is the way I used to eat on a regular basis before I met WS, who corrupted me with nightly pizza, ice cream and lasagna consumption.

4 days a week, I work out at the gym doing a half an hour of solid cardio training followed by an hour of weight workouts, both on machine and using free weights. After 4 weeks of this, I can feel some muscle mass building but I have so much fat on my body, I can’t see any of it yet and probably won’t see anything until next summer. I can wait.

Reading: The Truth About Money by Ric Edelman. Good reading; clever, funny, to the point but is Mr. Edelman the cheesiest-looking guy on the planet or what?

October 24th

As fast as I last wrote how I hated my blobby body, I’m already seeing results from my gym visits. I once told someone that after 8 months of aerobic step exercise, I felt I could open a can of tuna with my thighs. If I keep working out as hard as I have been over the last 7 weeks, I’ll be able to squeeze open a can with my chest muscles. Nice visual, huh?

Moving along…I saw KiMiE at the gym last Friday night. Her seeing me in shorts was probably enough to scare her into never coming to the gym late again. Too bad Kenny doesn’t do the gym thing. Of course, none of us would have worked out then. We’d all sit around and talk about his hair or something.

I’ve heard people talk about feeling recharged after coming back from a vacation and although I’m not about to say that that’s exactly how I feel, but I can tell that I was off for a week. Sure, people asking moronic questions via email still bother me, but now I just read it and say, “whatever…” before answering it as diplomatically as possible. Even morons need answers.

November 2000

November 2nd

Things have been very hectic around here so let me sum it all up quickly. Our stairs are finally fixed and finished, no word yet on the rest of the laminate flooring problems. Halloween was fun until a group of teenage boys started picking on us, pulling our monster costumes and props down and emptying 3 bowls of candy meant for trick-or-treaters. We also got threats of them returning at 1 in the morning to do damage. Nothing came of it. More than likely, this has been the last Halloween participation for us. We went dressed up to a neighborhood party 2 days before and people told us that we were too morbid and gloomy. C’mon people, it’s Halloween, not Valentine’s Day.

My new promotion is working out great and I’m doing everything I can do to be good at it. I’ve already been called a professional snitch once so I’m probably doing the job right.

WS got over a slight MS exacerbation last week with little problem. We’re going to the gym regularly and think we can see a few pipsqueak-sized muscles under all our fat. The cost of protein powder is ridiculous though so I don’t know how much longer we’ll be drinking protein shakes twice a day. We saw KiMiE working out tonight and got to talk at her for nearly an hour. We definitely don’t talk enough. Her stress level right now is through the roof!

That’s about it. I’m probably forgetting half of everything but I can assure you that it’s all boring. Oh, and I heard something about how parts of Canada “celebrate” Halloween with a two day affair filled with vandalism and something called Mat night where people steal everyone’s door mats, toss them into the streets and light them on fire. Andy, a friend of ours and ex-Canadian, told us about it. Weird.

November 5th

The hectic work pace has not slowed down. A few co-workers are behind in their work so I’m helping out with the email load which just happens to be a bit on the heavy side right now and doesn’t look like it will be lightening up anytime soon. The company I work for is gearing up for the next big version release and they just released the latest newsletter which always brings in even more email to reply to. I have this feeling that things won’t be slowing down until January.

WS frightened me a bit yesterday when out of the blue he said he’s tempted to turn the NK web site into a money-making site. I must have been pretty startled-looking because he shut up right quick and didn’t elaborate any further. No, I don’t have plans to ask him why or what his idea was.

Finally got the Age of Kings expansion pack. It’s okay in a fresh and new kind of way.

A friend of mine is talking about changing his site and taking down his online journal. In fact, I think he’s serious about it. I also think he thinks that only 3 or 4 people read his journal. That could be….but I don’t think so. He doesn’t chitchat about the weather or how one of his cats did something incredibly cute last week; he writes deep, thoughtful essays, or rants if you will, about the nature of humans and stuff that I could only WISH more people thought of. Being totally selfish, I don’t want to see his thoughts online disappear just like I don’t want to see other friends’ journals taken down. I might not want to listen to my friends in a face-to-face situation because I’m weird that way, but I enjoy reading what they have to say more than I could ever express without getting all mushy and sounding all pathetic and whiny. But a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do and only he can decide if it’s time to move on. (See? I told you I would sound pathetic).

November 9th

What a work week! That’s all I have to say about that.

I had two words for the U.S. Presidential election last Tuesday: Who cares? Today, I have two more words: What fun! All kinds of bickering going on back and forth on who won, who was cheated out of their votes and more and more news stories coming to light on how some people’s votes didn’t count anyway (just as I believe all votes by the people don’t count). I predict lots of lawsuits by voters and politicians alike before this is all over.

Woohoo! I finally finished painting one wall in our living room. Work has been so hectic lately that I don’t have much time to paint anymore than a small area at a time. It’ll be a Burnt Sienna color when it’s finished. It looks rosy or purplish on the camera though. But who am I to complain? The cam is well beyond it’s last legs and can’t be replaced until next year.

Still can’t get flu shots here due to the shortage. WS thinks he may have the flu today. I feel fine but my glands under my neck are swollen. Or maybe they are always that way and I never felt them before. What is the point of glands anyway if they just swell up when you get sick?

Why does the Phillip Morris company give money to the Meals-On-Wheels charity and care about old people not having enough food and being lonely? If Phillip Morris hadn’t killed off the old people’s friends, family and loved ones, they wouldn’t be lonely.

Watching:The Street. Wednesday nights. 9:00 pm PDT. Fox channel. Uh…interesting.

November 12th

It’s strange what things will stick in a person’s mind when they may be coming down with the flu. Is anyone else frightened by Butterball Broth in a can?

I haven’t worked out for an entire week because I’ve been taking care of WS who did seem to have the flu all week. If he gave it to me, I’m going to be very upset.

Watching: Goddamn Geezer More fun from Camp Chaos.

November 13th

Okay, I’m back on track. I didn’t catch the flu just yet and I just got back from the gym. WS has his crip tag now so we get to park up front, close to the door so we don’t freeze our asses off before getting inside the building. Nice, and with Christmas parking coming up….Oh yeah, right. Like WE ever go Christmas shopping. We’re the only people I know who decorate the hell outta everything inside and out yet don’t buy or exchange Christmas presents. No wonder our neighbors think we’re weird. The only thing we are doing for ourselves for Christmas is paying off our tax bill, which is being paid off a year and a half earlier than the IRS expected. For Easter, we plan on paying off the Demon Car. And maybe for summer vacation, we’ll get back into the Stock Market. Yeehaw! We’ll be having some fun then!

One more wall left to paint in the living room. It’s the big, long, huge wall with the most drywall imperfections so as to show off how badly I paint. I just might have to dig out a roller for that job. I hate roller painting because I despise getting micro paint splatters all over everything including myself. Years ago, the FDA pulled the food color Red #5 from foods saying it caused cancer (what doesn’t?). How much cancer-causing stuff do you suppose is in red latex paint? Now you know why I only use a roller when I have to.

I’ll be playing the Social Butterfly this week with 2, count ‘em, 2 work meetings out in the real world. You might see me at KiMiE’s Wednesday for meeting number 1. Friday’s is at the airport. I love airports. Saturday, I’ll be hitting some of the craft shops looking for Christmas decorating ideas or at least something to get me in the mood for decorating. I can’t believe I’m actually looking forward to that holiday this year. Perhaps I’ll catch punks stealing Christmas lights again like in years past, or maybe it’ll snow or something. I don’t know why I’m looking forward to it. I just am. Or else the St. John’s Wort is just working really, really well today…

November 20th

I’m definitely fighting off something. A cold or the flu or something. It’s not winning yet at this point but I have little to no energy, a headache for two days and no enthusiasm for doing anything. I’m also trying to do two jobs at once at work and doing what I consider a pretty piss-poor job of both. Nothing frustrates me more than doing a crappy job at something but until I get over this, I don’t see anything changing much. I’m just so tired.

Still have one entire wall to paint in the living room. I’ve had neither the time or energy to work on it. I made a comment to WS last week about not wanting to be painting on Thanksgiving (US holiday next Thursday) or to be looking at an unfinished paint job but that is exactly what will be happening. Oh well. Couldn’t be helped.
I keep getting probed. My computer, I mean. We installed a better program to up our security since I’m online most of the time and I seem to get probed about every 10 minutes. I find the “Outside attempt to see if a particular port is open for remote access” notifications particularly entertaining.

November 28th

Don’t you just hate it when you have a mountain of things to do, most of them being things you really, REALLY don’t want to do, and you just can’t seem to muster up the motivation to do any of them? I do too.

Is it just me or does the Michael Richards show really suck?

Do people actually buy music CDs anymore?

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, does anyone else think that “Butterball Sauce” in a can is just wrong?

December 2000

December 7th

I finally caught that cold and it was brutal. Totally lost my voice and felt like run-over crap after it came outta the butt of a 3-legged, mangy, worm-infested dog. I’m much better now but I’ve seemed to have lost my motivation. Don’t feel like working out, don’t feel like doing anything “christmas-y”, bored with TV and the Internet, couldn’t care less about stuff going on in the ‘hood including upcoming parties which I am seriously considering boycotting because I am just too tired of the neighborhood politics and moronic attitudes. It is frightening to think of how fast this neighborhood deteriorated considering it is less than 2 years old. I guess I believed WS when he said that this place would be different from our old neighborhood. The only things that haven’t come to play yet are exactly when and where the druggies and sexual molesters will move in. Oh, and no one has stolen anything from our house yet, although our next door neighbors were hit in October.

Gee, that was somewhat depressing. Good thing I’ve been remembering to take my St. John’s Wort everyday. Too bad there doesn’t seem to be a herb for motivation.

On a lighter note, I’m nearly finished painting for the year. I have a couple of touch-up spots left to do but don’t feel like doing them anytime soon. They aren’t that noticeable.

Where did all the dot com commercials go this christmas season? Out of business, that’s where. Now we’re left with all the big corporate name dot com commercials like Target.com and WalMart.com. and Gap.com who were out of the loop last christmas. Woo-fucking-Hoo. Someone needs to shoot the entire marketing company for Gap. Oh but wait. They’re not marketing for me. They’re marketing for 12-15 year old white males. Just like everything else on the planet except Senekot Natural Laxative and Super Polygrip.

Watching: Nothing. Who cares..

December 10th

I can’t understand the point of putting up xmas decorations if I’m not celebrating xmas anymore. I’ve been struggling with this for a few years now. It was easy to rationalize not putting lights up outside back in the few last years we lived at the rental house because they would simply get stolen immediately after I put them up. Here, in our new neighborhood, anyone who doesn’t put up lights, no matter how tacky looking, is considered an outcast and not quite right in the head. Like the Mormons two houses down. I guess I subconsciously hold out hope that the financial picture changes, WS has a change of heart and/or secretly has something wildly expensive planned, or that there really is a Santa. Then, all the decorations will seem more appropriate. So I put them up, spending more hours and days on them than I would like to admit and immediately afterward, I tell myself that I won’t do it again next year. I always do.

Don’t get me wrong. We could easily squeak out a gift or two to each other, as long as it was nothing outrageously spendy. It’s just we have this overwhelming and completely irrational urge to pay off our bills in place of buying birthday, anniversary or xmas gifts. We don’t even go on vacation and have yet to buy ANY furniture for our house because we are constantly telling ourselves, “Well, the $500 we could spend on a vacation or on a chair or two, would go a long way toward paying off (enter bill of choice here)..” and so we pay, pay, pay the bills and don’t do anything else. We’ve done this for years and other than being able to buy this house, I’m not sure we’ve gotten any further ahead in the game. I think resentment may begin to rear it’s ugly head in a few years.

Watching: Scrooged with Bill Murray from 1988. I drive WS insane reciting ALL of the dialog. Why is it that I completely relate to the first half of this movie?

December 13th

My humbug attitude continues. There is a lot of things going on right now around me and I wake up every morning feeling like I’ve been run over by a truck. Then I go to work and on most days, feel run over again. For the first time in my life, I feel a bit overwhelmed. I’ve never been overwhelmed in my life. By anything. And I wonder why I suddenly feel this way now. Menopause around the corner? Leftover and not-yet-dealt-with stress caused by WS buying this house (and therefore making me feel financially trapped)? Insecurity about my job and working relationships of my co-workers? Expectations of me by people around me?

Could be all of the above. Or a combination of a few. Or none of them at all. Things always seem to be more painfully felt by me around the holidays and I’m telling myself that I’m just letting things get to me. I think I’ve become so brainwashed in believing the whole happy-family “Lookie! It’s the holidays and don’t we all look like something out of Leave It To Beaver or a Gap commercial!” that when I don’t get to join in on all the spending, giving, receiving and celebrating, I feel painfully, PAINFULLY left out. And when I berate myself for being so gawd damned shallow, I feel guilty for believing and buying into the whole holiday virus in the first place

At this point, I just want the holidays to be over with. I want to see everyone crawl back into their own little worlds, not caring if the person standing next to them lives or dies. Just like it is the other 11 months out of the year. Just like it has always been throughout my entire life, holiday season or not.

Watching: Nothing. I barely have time to breathe right now. I’ll watch something in January. Maybe.

December 18th

I was so diplomatic today at work I nearly scared myself. But it had to be done. We’re in the middle of a small serf uprising, I suspect partially brought on by some co-workers taking advantage of our immediate supervisor going on vacation. I need to be able to think as clearly as I was able to today every day and so I’ll take this time to admit that over the weekend, I stopped taking a supplement called Ripped Fuel that I had taken every day for a couple of months. The stuff is really good…in the beginning. It makes you burn fat and gives you a good, clean high with lots of energy without any jitter. Like polite caffeine or speed. The problem with it I found is that after about 30 days or so, a person gets used to it and they don’t feel like they have that much energy and they get crabby. I was crabby. Very crabby. In fact, I was Very, Very crabby. Did I mention that I got crabby? Well, I did. Very much so. Not to mention that I couldn’t focus and had a bad attitude. I suspected the Ripped Fuel and I assume that most people would have taken an extra dose a day. I’m not that way. I don’t like abusing substances. I did that in high school and it wasn’t pretty for a couple of weeks.

So I put the Ripped Fuel away for a while to clear out my system and today, I actually felt better than I have in a couple of weeks. Now, if I could just remember to take my St. John’s Wort…

But don’t get me wrong. I still think christmas is a crock… We had to attend some HP holiday dinner this evening that was supposed to be stuffy and boring but luckily, most of the people who work with WS are slightly on the twisted side and we ended up telling off-color jokes, poking fun at the sad, sad, sad “Kenny G” type band that performed, and wearing name tags that showed the world our true names like “Surly”, “Grievous Bodily Harm” and “One Poor Bastard”. All the other HP employees did not find us humorous. Oh, the fun technical people have in life!

Watching: Chasing Amy on DVD. God, I have never wanted a woman to shut up so much in my entire life!

December 23rd

Santa came early. He brought me a cold. One of those really cool, yet nasty ones that fills your head with snot and threatens to shut down your lungs for a couple of days. I spent a day off swimming through a haze of Benadryl and email from co-workers asking questions and I think I got all the answers right. At least no one told me I was wrong. They’re probably telling my boss, who is on vacation this week. Really, I’m trying extra hard to fill in nicely for her. I guess I’ll find out how I did at Eval time.

On the other front, Santa brought WS a DVD player. WS was particularly good this year. No longer will he have to use Nicolas, the laptop downstairs, who’s DVD software only worked for half a movie before seizing up, requiring a system shutdown and defrag. Too much fun. We can actually view an entire movie PLUS watch all the bonus features like deleted scenes and the like. We’ve even found some DVD Easter Egg stuff on some movies like The Spy Who Shagged Me and T2. DVD Reviews has all kinds of good information on DVD Easter Eggs.

Watching: The South Park Christmas Special on DVD. Why? I don’t know.

December 30th

I’m not one of those people who never update their online journals, I just play one on the Internet.

Well, that was a fun bout with near pneumonia. I feel like I lost an entire week. In my mind, it should be the day before christmas yet here we are nearly at New Year’s eve. Strange. Can I take the christmas tree down now? I’m really tired of it. Are there any rules to when a holiday tree should be taken down? Specifically, if it’s a fake tree? I really want to jump head-first into my favorite dull, depressing-and-most-boring month of the entire year – January.

Why is it that nothing good ever happens in January? Oh sure, there is Martin Luther King, Jr day which half the nation refuses to recognize. And if you were paying attention during your christmas shopping frenzy, you would have requested that your credit card purchases be deferred until April (another “fun” month) so you won’t be getting smacked with over the limit credit card bills. Oooo and there is all the excitement over the Valentine decorations that department and grocery stores are already cramming down our throats. Other than those sorry highlights, there is nothing else. Just day after day of slogging through the month waiting for nothing. Ugh.

So, this year I’ve decided to do something about it. I’m taking time off work. Nearly two weeks. Can you believe it? I can’t remember the last time I took this much time off. And the great thing is, I still have two weeks left to take off over the course of the next year. Sometimes, life doesn’t suck. Sometimes.

Reading: The Last Dive by Bernie Chowdhury
Books out on loan: The Perfect Storm