Category: general

I’m pretty happy right now.

I have a sweet handsome wonderful husband, good friends, everything I need to live, some nice things I don’t need, a rewarding job, a good job prospect, online communities I enjoy, stuff like that. I’ve also managed to start doing some good things for myself, like giving up caffeine, and now dieting. Further, I’m working towards being able to have children by going to the doctor and undergoing hormone therapy.

However, there are still places in which I feel deficient.

While writing a comment on Sam’s blog this morning, I pretty much laid out my biggest weakness in writing: structure/plot. This has always been the stumbling block whenever I’ve tried to create anything longer than a post for the AMRN. Short stories, novels…they both suffer from a lack of organization and substance. My characters are great, and their development is not really an issue. But I need to figure out what it is that causes them to develop.

I’m okay at web design. I know enough to get by. But I’m not a web geek by any means. I feel that I would like to learn enough to be able to do all sorts of cool things–and be cross-platform compatible while doing them.

Geek stuff in general, I’d like to know more about. I’d like to be able to dynamically update and export my favorites lists so they would display on my website. (I don’t even know if that’s possible.) Really, I’d like my website to be the Definitive Repository of Me, easy to update, comprehensive. It’s far from that point; I would really need my own custom code to do everything I want. CMSes are great, but kind of cumbersome when you know enough about code to be able to imagine how it could be done better. I feel the same way about the AMRN. There is so much I would like to see done with the site, not the least of which a database that can be referenced both from the boards and from the main page. But I just don’t know enough.

I watch a lot of anime these days, and listen to anime music, but I have pretty much halted my study of the Japanese language. I miss it. I want to become as fluent as possible for a non-native speaker learning the language in adulthood, and I know that I am very far from that point. (And while we’re dreaming, I’d also like to learn more languages. Mandarin and Cantonese, Korean, French–I’ve pretty much forgotten everything, Spanish, German. More. I’m interested in what makes languages tick.)

While my diet is successful so far, and I’m feeling better about my health, I haven’t been exercising properly at all. I really need to do this. If I am able to conceive, I want to be healthy when I do it. I want to be a mom who is active, not one who sits on the sidelines because she’s too tired or too inflexible or too big or whatever.

I haven’t been doing FlyLady “properly”. I manage, for the most part, to keep my sink clean, and I pick up after myself, but I don’t have routines in place for keeping things tidy, and my apartment is covered in a layer of dust.

I’m also not very good about getting lunches and dinners ready every day. This is something I really want to improve on, so that we can save money on eating out, and so we can both eat healthier.

There are plenty of other things I’d like to do as well, and don’t.

The commonality here is simply time management. To get better at things, I have to actually do them. Practice makes perfect–or at least, the best you can be. I don’t practice anything at all.

When I decide to try something out, I tend to go overboard in the beginning because I’m excited about changing myself. After awhile, be it days, weeks, or months, I burn out, and go back to my normal life. This obviously isn’t the way to change myself.

What I need to do is start building habits into my daily routine. Habits like practicing writing, tidying up, studying Japanese, working out. And I need to build in some time for organizing this–what FlyLady calls “Desk Day”. I can’t do anything if I don’t have a plan for it. For instance, “study Japanese” is extraordinarily vague. Study what? I need to think about what is all involved in the study of a language, and work out what sorts of things I can do each day to practice and reinforce my knowledge. But creating a year-long (or whatever) lesson plan can’t happen all in one day–or I’d burn out again. So I need to make a date with myself to “plan how to study Japanese”.

I don’t want to look back at this part of my life someday, like I now look back at my high school and college days, and think, “I had so much time then. Why didn’t I use it for anything?” I want to learn and better myself. But I need to make a plan.

The best idea is to add routines gradually. My current evening routine is:

1. Clean up dinner dishes
2. Start dishwasher
3. Brush teeth and change into nightclothes
4. Set out clothes for next day

My current morning routine is:

1. Get up
2. Weigh myself and put weight into DietPower
3. Take vitamins and hormones
4. Take shower
5. Put on clothes
6. Eat breakfast
7. Sit around online until it’s time for work

I don’t have an after-work routine, and, as you can see, the dishwasher just gets unloaded whenever I feel like it :> I also don’t have a specific time of day to do laundry. (I’m doing it all right now–yuck.) I’d rather have a time of day to do laundry, and just do a load every day it was necessary. In other words…break the job down into more manageable chunks.

The dishwasher, laundry, and exercise are big priorities right now. If I have a time that I’m supposed to do things, I think I would be more likely to do them; rather than just thinking “Yeah, I really should exercise sometime”, I’d be thinking, “Oops, it’s time to exercise!”

So! I’m going to work on following these routines next week:

Morning

1. Get up
2. Weigh myself and put weight into DietPower
3. Take vitamins and hormones
4. Take shower
5. Put on clothes
6. Eat breakfast
7. Unload dishwasher
8. Set out Sean’s lunch bag

After Work

1. Do a load of laundry
2. Walk around apartment complex for 30 minutes
3. Plan and start dinner

After Dinner

1. Clean up dishes
2. Make Sean’s lunch for tomorrow
3. Load and start dishwasher
4. Shine sink
5. Brush teeth and change into nightclothes
6. Lay out clothes for tomorrow

That’s all I’ll ask of myself. Tuesday will be a little different since I have a job interview instead of work, but I’ll treat the interview as though it were my job and adjust accordingly. This will get me used to taking care of the dishes and laundry and start me on some simple exercise. Hopefully it’ll work out well.

Once I’m used to this routine, I’ll start adding in the rest of the stuff, like menu planning, grocery shopping, cleaning and the big stuff: practicing my writing, web design, and Japanese.

I want to improve myself, and I don’t want to just burn out again. Hopefully I’m starting small enough.

I haven’t exercised lately at all, but I’ve been sticking to my diet. I feel like I keep being allocated way too many calories to eat in a day, and I don’t end up eating them all, usually. (Today, for example, I’m allowed 1902 calories. That’s kind of scary.)

I figure I won’t worry about trying to match their calorie limit, as long as I don’t go over. That was Sam’s advice, and I dunno, I tend to trust Sam ;>

My weight has gone down another half pound since yesterday, meaning my total weight loss since October 3 is 7.5 pounds. That’s pretty good :D

Dr. Chudgar had me do some labwork at Mullins, and I told Mom what the out of range numbers were. She said that it’s not too bad, that I seem to have some allergies. She also said that my cholesterol and lipids could stand to go down, and she suggested eating oatmeal and sushi. I’m game for that :D

I’m going to be finding a regular practitioner soon, and set up some kind of introductory appointment with him/her, so hopefully I’ll get more advice then.

After I get that out of the way, the next thing I want to focus on is finding a good dentist.

Hopefully I can get Sean to go to the doctor and dentist, too.

Well, this is nice.

Assuming Episode III rocks (please, Episode III, rock!), AFI will have set themselves up to look brilliant and discerning.

Honestly, Lucas did change our lives with Star Wars, and he has changed the film industry for as long as he’s been involved in it with his search for cutting-edge special effects techniques. I don’t begrudge him the award.

Small amazing things happen all the time. For instance, right now we’ve got scientists who are altering bacteria to cause it to eat the caffeine right out of a coffee plant. (Is that cool or what?)

But I would have to say that the coolest science news I’ve heard recently–perhaps ever?–is the development of magnetized-beam plasma propulsion, which could presumably get a mission from Earth to Mars and back in 90 days.

90.

DAYS!

This is so awesome. I love being around to see all this cool stuff happen.

Today is good.

I just feel content, and ready to take on anything.

It’s at least partially because fall is here.

The leaves are turning, all of a sudden. But what I love the most is the slight crispness in the air, the gently biting breeze. I love that when I left work today and walked outside, it was cooler out there than inside.

I love that I wore long sleeves and didn’t feel hot.

I love that I haven’t had the air conditioning on in our apartment for two days. I just have the windows open and the fans blowing. I love that I can hear the water fountain in the pond, the ducks quack-mumbling quietly in the grass below my window. I love that gusts of wind blow sweet cool air through my apartment.

I love fall. I love the feeling of change, the feeling that something exciting is beginning. I love the comfort of life getting ready to take a nap. I love that I can fully appreciate the transition, that I’ll still be here when the world’s asleep, that I’ll get to see what the slumbering giant is missing.

I leave you all with this sweet fall picture of my nephew Logan. (Click for the enlargement.) In Kentucky, they already get to wear jackets!

Bill O’Reilly says that this sexual harassment suit against him is part of an extortion scheme in which Mackris and her lawyers attempted to get him to pay them $60 million.

I hear big numbers like that a lot, so I didn’t really pause the first time I saw the figure. It was only after awhile that it really sunk in.

Sixty.

Million.

Dollars.

Supposedly that’s what they’re asking for in the lawsuit, too, though I can’t confirm that anywhere.

At any rate, AJ told me about this earlier, but I was waiting until I found a decent article before posting about it. Here’s one, from MSN.

As far as I can tell, thesmokinggun.com does not have a copy of O’Reilly’s complaint. However, Matt Drudge does, and here it is. (Is there a particular reason why thesmokinggun.com would be uninterested in O’Reilly’s countersuit? Hmm.)

Of course, I have no idea who’s telling the truth here. AJ says that the purported O’Reilly quotes from Mackris’ suit don’t sound like anything O’Reilly would say–that O’Reilly’s speech is more sophisticated. I don’t watch The O’Reilly Factor, so I can’t really comment on that, but I do think it’s dangerous to assume that how someone speaks on a scripted television show is how they will speak casually.

The idea that a woman would lie about this, would write pages and pages of allegations that appall the reader and garner her the sympathy of all women, would use sexual harrassment–a serious and sickening issue–in order to make some money, is despicable. And the idea that a man would do this to a woman, would ignore her protests and force his way into her private life, using her as a sex toy, stringing her along with promotions and raises and all the while threatening to ruin her, is also despicable.

So no matter who’s lying here, somebody is despicable, and I hope the courts can ferret out who it is.

This Croatian bank teller rules.

I thought I’d embrace sexuality with my followup post, and point out two items that are presented as being for children, and yet…somehow…are not.

Of course, the previous post has me thinking a lot about sexual harrassment, so I wanted to ask my little readership (that’s not a crack about the size of your genitalia!) if you think I should have a separate section for more “profane” things.

When I was younger, I was on a friend’s email list. He used to send out really funny jokes, but he also sent out sexual ones. At the time, I wasn’t very open-minded, and the jokes really bothered me. I asked him if he could make two separate email lists, one for sending regular jokes, and one for sending everything. He said that was too much of a bother, and that it wasn’t his job to protect his readers from the real world. I replied that it wasn’t his job to shatter his readers’ innocence, either, and that if he truly considered me a friend, he would consider my suggestion.

Of course, I’m pretty sure most of the people who read this site aren’t “innocent” and don’t really give a flip, but I don’t want to bother anybody :/

When I first started reading this, I thought, “It’s no big deal, he’s just being a little too friendly. I’ve had weird discussions with people before where they go a little too far and then realize it and stop.”

But then it just kept going, and going, and going, until he was calling her up to aid in his masturbation. I don’t know why she didn’t just hang up on him. I guess she was scared of what he might do to her and her career. But I’m sure it was humiliating to be granted all these perks and raises by a man who thought of her as a masturbation aid.

I mean, this might all be a lie. Andrea Mackris might have sat at home and scoured the web for badly-written sex stories, then compiled them all into her testimony.

But it also might be true.

And that really bothers me. Do men not understand that women feel violated by this? Does this sort of thing happen a lot?

I’m into sex, and sex stories, and fantasies, and things of that nature…but if someone’s uncomfortable with it, I’m not going to keep banging away at them for my own pleasure. Especially not if I’m in a position of power over them.

I can see how that position of power would make sexual domination very appealing, though.

Pretty disturbing :/

And he is teh funnay!

Understanding people are necessary to perpetuate assholes in the species. And assholes are necessary for the good of the breed as a hole because without them, we are forced into introspective self-examination of the kind that eventually leads to the kind of extended Disney Theme Park existence that Jean-Luc Picard talks about so longingly in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Admit it, after you got finished having sex with supermodels on holodecks, you’d get bored out of your skull in the Federation.

eheheheh.

I’ve been involved in some interesting discussions over on Luke’s blog lately. I’m not sure if I want to go so far as to write full-blown posts here about any of the topics, but I may. They are all three–the environment, writing/art, and religion–pretty interesting (and combustible) topics.

I’m really glad I’ve found Luke’s blog. I feel like I’ve stumbled across an enclave of thinkers. It’s nice to be welcome there.

I thought this was definitely worth looking at. I’m not trying to incite panic or anything. Just keep your eyes open until after the election.

Of course you realize that the next step is to…beat my high score x_x

Today’s calorie allowance is 1713! Doesn’t that seem ridiculous, in a weight-loss scenario?

I have 742 calories in my “bank”, meaning I’ve eaten 742 fewer calories than I’ve been allowed since I started on the 3rd. Is DietPower trying to get me to eat them? Or what? You’d think, once it noticed I was eating less, that it would match the allowance to what I was eating…unless it thinks I’m starving myself…

Maybe if it knew how tall I was it would realize I don’t need that many calories…

I’m perplexed!

In other news…

I have several in-person job interviews (for the same job, on the same day) coming up next week. Wish me luck!

“Just look at what Tenenbaum did as South Carolina’s Superintendent of Skuulz.”

Yes, I’ve heard this radio ad way too many times.

I think the narrator’s accent is hilarious.