I realized earlier today what was causing the issues I was having last night (that therefore caused the previous entry). The realization made me feel like a complete noob, as the issue was user error, natch. Making silly mistakes is an inevitability of humandom, but being a technical person who deals with code and such for a good 70% of my waking hours, the silly mistakes make me feel like a complete moron. At least for a little while. And then I move on to the next thing...

Being my reading list. This is the whole reason I went through this silly upgrade to begin with - my wonderful host PowWeb was conglomeratized, and therefore had some "upgrades" and "moves" on the back-end. This screwed up a good portion of my site. Never the complainer (hah!), I took it upon myself to fix the issues. Only, the original issue isn't fixed at all. But at least I'm closer to fixing it! Maybe!

In other non-geeky news, I have 9 days left until I leave for NYC etc. Have I mentioned what little planning I have done? I am attending a wedding in a magical little place called Northampton, MA, and I haven't anything to wear. What shall I do? Wait until the last second to go shopping, of course. And pray and hope that I may find something flattering, comfortable, nice, inexpensive, and perfect in the little amount of time I actually want to spend in a place of clothing. I hate shopping for clothes, and therefore avoid doing so unless absolutely necessary. Would it be horrible to wear pants and a t-shirt, stick a tiara on my head and go all east-coast hipster? My big problem is that I'm too much of an etiquette nerd to do this to my poor hosts. I shall have a pedicure and wax before I leave, and I'm sure my lower extremities will be all the better for it. Plus, a skirt/dress will be in order.

Since there is such a riotous amount of stuff going on between now and then, I'm sure I'll be posting procrastination entries every half-hour when at home. Tah!

PS. It's been one month since I stopped smoking. And I'm still ... uhm ... not smoking. Yay me.

Comments (4)

Oh MT, I paid for your license so I could use you to my liking, which is much more than I've done with many other unnamed software packages. The upgrade to 3.1 went fine; in fact, I was amazed at the ease of the whole process. However, I am very much saddened by this turn of events. Thank goodness I had the foresight of one whose back was burned by the hindsight of many poorly written upgrades - I backed up all of my data. At least, all of the data and files that matter. But here I am, late on a Sunday night, with no way of posting normally - I have to go through 3 screens to trick your little backend into forcing my words out onto the internets. And it's not like I have plenty of other stuff on which I should be spending my time, either. Oh, I'm sure I'll get all of your code prettified tomorrow, but the point is why should I? I spent money, in hopes that software that was no longer in beta would indeed be more stable and have better upgrade capacities - that your people would feel the need to write documentation that would vilify its own existence. I look forward to the day when you care again, really I do. So, until better times, I will give you my slightly-divided attention, and you, I hope, will give me all of your broken cgi, your loren-ipsummed perl scripts, and after rewriting code someone else was paid to do, all will be well.

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Quitters Always Win

According to QuitNet, it's been 18 days, 16 hours, 5 minutes and 56 seconds since I last smoked, probably a few minutes more by the time you read this. Through ChurchCamp, a mini-roadtrip, and hanging out at the bar, I haven't had an urge strong enough to make me start again. And not to sound boastful or self-aggrandizing, but this has really been rather easy. Not so easy I'm willing to do it over again, mind you, but a lot easier than I thought it would be. I figure this probably has something to do with me just setting my mind on quitting, then following through. Now if only I could do that in all other aspects in my life...

And Now For Something Completely Different

Last weekend, Benjamin The Husband and I decided to stop at Applebee's to eat some lunch while shopping in the mall-area. I haven't been to Applebee's in probably 2-3 years (we don't eat out at places that aren't sushi that often), and as we were waiting for the hostess to come back to seat us, I started looking at the wallflare presented for my ADD pleasure. Just above the hostess station itself were some large framed shadowboxes with high school senior photos and other misc. detritus displayed. I looked over the faces and felt a little sinking feeling in my stomach - all of the photos featured familiar faces. I glanced at the cover of the yearbook in the frame and knew immediately every peak and valley in it's embossed black design proclaiming Boise High's year ending in 1997 "In Perspective".

At this point, the hostess was ready to seat us, and I said hurriedly (v. possibly bitchily, too), "Can you hold on a second? I need to make sure I'm not on your wall." She (all female humans younger than me now look 16, but she looked maybe 18) smiled confusedly, and looked at me like I was an idiot while I searched harder for my horrible senior photo (so horrible we never ordered prints. Oh yeah, and we were too poor at the time) in the frame. After looking for another 45 seconds, I was satisfied that my head had not made the artist's cut for the display, and was ready to leave my firmly planted spot. Until, that is, I saw that the large frame directly to the left of the original which had the same styling and "Boise High colors". However, this frame? The frame to the left? Contained photos from the choirs. Me? I was a choir geek in high school. Sure enough, at least 2 group photos in this exhibit contained my 17 and/or 16 year old self, in black and white glory. The photos, however, were small enough so that only I may know where my head and body are located. We finally sat down to eat some food.

On the way out of the restaurant, I took a hasty cameraphone shot of the atrocity, which I present to you here today. I, sir/madame am at Applebee's all. the. time. And that really kind of creeps me out.

I Would Fly Out Today, But My Arms Are Already Tired

I leave for NYC 3 weeks from today, and I still haven't secured a floor on which to sleep nor a bus ticket to NoHo, where the Pantses' wedding is taking place. I am looking forward to seeing Smith College and the grounds, as I was a little teeny bit obsessed with Sylvia Plath for a while, and they hold a lot of her original journals, photos, etc. Not like I'll have a lot of time to be all geeky about authors while my friends are pouring drinks down my throat at the WWII club. I am feeling oddly calm about this trip, though very little planning has been done by me in preparation for any of this, which really isn't the best thing ever. The whole concept of traveling has become kind of second-nature for me, and I know that things will fall into place, and I have friends that will watch my back while in the big city. However, I know I need to step back for a second and take care of some stuff before chilling out, and the whole fact that I haven't done anything is making me a bit stressed out in the back of my brain. Obvs I have many more things on which to dote until then that are taking up all of the stressful nerves in my body, so who knows when this will get done. Hrm...

...And Then There Was One

So I'm busy already. And? I got called in for jury duty next week. I don't know if I'll actually have to go in yet, but this just isn't the best time ever for something like this. And the sad thing? I've been looking forward to getting jury duty for forever. It has always seemed so exciting to me. A jury! W00T! But now? Not the best time. On top of all of this, I've got a ton of work to do before next Monday for my normal (day) job that's taking up all of my freelancing time. Maybe you can see where this is going. I won't bore you with all of the details. Just pray that I don't end up taking the work computer with me to Europe. Because really? That would really really suck.

xoxo

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Do you ever get the urge to just ram into the back of someone's car? Like not enough to hurt the passengers, but enough to damage the car just a bit? Yesterday on the way home from Chili's (more about that later), I was behind a girl in a little purple-blue car with butterflies all over. On the inside of the windows, hanging from the rearview mirror, around her license plate. The license plate itself proclaimed BTRFLYS, and with some twisted humor, a bumper-sticker notified me that the car and its occupants "stop for butterflies." This. This is the car I wanted to ram into yesterday.

As of about 10pm tonight, It will have been 7 days since I stopped smoking. Every day has come at a cost: now when I smell cigarette smoke (Ben's still smoking), it makes me nearly gag. Second-hand isn't making me want a cigarette, it's giving me a headache and throwing my mucus-making glands in my throat out of wack. Not to say I'm not having cravings, but they're more like the pangs of lonelyness after one breaks up with a really horrible boyfriend -- once enough time has come between the spurned and the sucker, the past events get slightly misty and rose-colored. I'm trying to keep everything in perspective, and I'm especially trying to continuously remember the gross taste, the funny feeling at the back of my mouth, and the icky smell of cigarettes.

I'm leaving in just an hour or so to head up to the mountains again, which will be my real non-smoking test: Churchcamp. There will be much debauchery, garunteed. Remember what I said about being really busy last week? That applied immediately to when Ben and I came down from the mountains late Monday night - A half hour after we walked in the door, my work pager went off and didn't stop until 3am the morning of the 4th. I got a scant 6 hours of sleep before it started with its beeping scales again. My aunt, uncle, and cousin showed up while we were gone in Grandjean, and in addition to the 3-day workweek, I had to fit in some website redesign, laundry, family time (me at Chili's for the 45-minutes I had available with a bottle of water), and preparations for this weekend. Though I have so much exciting stuff happening this summer, I really really can't wait until September...

Photos from the weekend at Grandjean are up on my Flickr account, and more will be posted on Sunday. For those that have called me and haven't received any reciprocation, I beg forgiveness and promise everyone phonedates next week.

xoxox

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