Someday…

I can’t sleep and it’s driving me bonkers. Also, the pen I’ve been using doesn’t glide very well; it makes my writing look stilted and amateur. The nib keeps digging into the paper, which I find quite annoying because I don’t think I press that hard. Grip, yes. But then I always grip pens hard, so that’s nothing new.

Hmm.

Well, I guess I should try to get some sleep now as it’s after midnight and I do have to work in the morning. *sigh* If only I could pack the kids off to daycare so I could stay home and write. But then, that’s the dream.

Someday…

(c) 2012. All rights reserved.

Well, I’ve done it…

I entered The Lokana Chronicles in the Dundee International Book Prize last night.  Hitting ‘send’ on that email was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but I did it in the end and now all I have to do is sit back and wait.  And not hold my breath.

Thus begins my (presumably) soul-sucking journey toward publication because, let’s face it, I’m not sure I really want to go to all the effort it will take to do the self-publishing thing.  I know several people who have done it and are doing so successfully, but I’m not sure that I’m cut out for it.  I’d love to sell my book to a Big 6 publisher, but I’m not holding my breath on it.  I hope I’m prepared for all the rejections I know will come, but I’m also hoping that the stars will miraculously align in my favor and my journey will be a relatively quick and painless one.

No, I’m not on drugs.  Unless sleep deprivation counts as a drug and if that’s the case, then I’ve been stoned out of my gourd for the last two years.  But I’m pretty sure that’s not the case, no matter how much it feels like it is some days.

In other news, after much time spent beating my head against a cyber-wall while trying to format with a nasty cold, my poetry anthology is coming along quite nicely.  Now I just need to get the proof copy ordered and make sure it looks okay.  Here’s hoping!

Also?  Tax season – and Monday – totally kicked my butt today.  Way to go, Monday.

And now, I think it’s time for bed.  Assuming, that is, that I can sleep.  I’ve been having trouble with that lately.  Maybe I’ll just stay up a little while longer and look up people to query…

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

I’ve been interviewed!

That’s right, I’ve been interviewed again!  This time the Grand Inquisitor was none other than the Alliance’s resident Lady Midnight Marauder, Katrina Anne Jack.  You can read the interview over at her blog.  Meanwhile, be sure to check out her book, The Land of Midnight Days!

In other news, the editing continues.  I’ve finished revising the first fourth of the book and am ready to get cracking on the rest of it.  Now if only I could find some spare time in the evenings!  There just aren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish everything I need to get done as well as everything I want to get done.  Oh, if only needs and wants were always the same!

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

Home at last!

Yay, I’m at home!  I love being at home because it’s not work.  I love my job, it’s just that I’m really loving my home-with-the-family time lately.  Also, I’m tired tonight, so it’s a good thing I don’t have to be working right now.  Not that I got much done earlier…

But since I’m feeling particularly whiny about the state of tax season this year, I thought I’d write a little more about my lovely ordeal with the Social Security Administration yesterday.  I know I already said that I was thoroughly irritated with them by the time I got a real live person on the phone, and here’s why:

• 1:46 p.m.  Between my kids, my dad, and the government, it’s been a headache-inducing sort of day, and mine’s a doozy.

1:55 p.m.  It’s official: I really, REALLY hate calling numbers where you have to talk to a recording.  Yes, that means you, U.S. Government.

1:56 p.m.  “Our automated system can handle many tasks quickly.”  No, no it can’t.  Shut up and put me on the phone with an actual person already!

1:56 p.m.  And shut up so I can complain aloud to my coworkers!

1:57 p.m.  AAARRRGGHH!  IT WON’T SHUT UP!!!  SHOOT ME NOW!

• 2:02 p.m.  “Please say and spell your mother’s maiden name.  If you don’t know what it is, just say none.”  Seriously?  Who doesn’t know that?

2:02 p.m.  Yay!  Hold music!  THANK GOD!

• 2:05 p.m.  Okay, so this hold music really, really sucks, but at least it’s less annoying than the stupid recording I was talking to a few minutes ago.

2:06 p.m.  I nearly screamed at the stupid recording when it didn’t understand my name.  It’s a freaking letter!  It’s not that complicated!

2:23 p.m.  But I don’t want to paper file my return!  I think I’ll try to e-file it again (for the fourth time).  Maybe this time it won’t be rejected.

2:42 p.m.  I can hope, anyway.  I really, really hope it won’t be rejected this time.  *crosses fingers*

Yeah, my return was rejected.  Again.  But at least this time I think I know why, and it has something to do with the info I dug up last night that I didn’t know about before, so maybe tomorrow when Randy goes over things again, he’ll be able to fix it and then we can e-file our return and it won’t be rejected and we can get our refund so that we can start doing things around the house again and perhaps I can stop writing in hugely long run-on sentences or maybe not but perhaps.

Also, it’s really cold in here.  Again.  Like it’s been all the rest of this God-forsaken winter.  I can’t wait till June.  On the other hand, I saw this really great Heart of the City strip tonight:

Aunt Melissa sent it home with me for Greg.  He got a real bang out of it.

And now, off to bed!

(c) 2010.  All rights reserved.

It finally happened…

…I finally found a book that, upon rereading, disappointed me.  I just finished Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn, which I probably read sometime in late elementary school or early middle school (I don’t remember exactly, because it was a long time ago, so give me a break).  At any rate, I think I must have read it when I was at an age to identify with some of the characters.  There’s Molly, who is 12; her younger brother, Michael, who is 10; her mother, Jean; her stepfather, Dave; and her step-sister, Heather, who is 7.  They move from Baltimore to this little country church, complete with graveyard, where Heather happens to befriend the ghost of a little girl who was just her age and even had the same initials.  Both their mothers had died in fires and they became fast friends.  Heather was not overly accepting of her father moving on with another woman, let alone of the woman herself (or Michael or Molly).  Half the book involved Molly, Michael, and Heather fighting and then their parents ended up fighting.  Molly felt like no one believed her because Dave and Jean (especially Dave) always took Heather’s side and after a while, this kind of got on my nerves, but not nearly as much as Dave himself did.  He was always making excuses for Heather’s bad behavior, saying things like, “Well, she’s just an unusually sensitive little girl,” or, “She’s suffered a loss and just needs love and understanding.”  Well, yes, but that only takes you so far in life.  I guess that’s the part that bothered me: no matter what she did that was wrong (and plenty of it was horrible), he was always making excuses for her and he seemed completely blind to the fact that he was being played, that she wasn’t nearly as innocent as he thought.  Now yes, she is just a little girl and yes, this is just a story, but it reminded me of one too many people I know in real life who have that same attitude of, “Well, I’ve suffered a loss, so you all should feel sorry for me and let me have my way” and blah blah blah…Apparently I couldn’t identify with anyone in the story this time around and I actually found myself growing mildly offended.  Isn’t it funny how our perceptions of things change over time?

In other news, we’re off to the courthouse this afternoon to get our marriage license.  Yay!  My aunt is going to meet us there and be our witness and then we’re all going out for supper afterwards.  Her mother-in-law is in town visiting and I’m really looking forward to having supper with her.  She and her husband were like second grandparents to me growing up and I haven’t seen her in a long time, so I hope we’ll have a good visit.  Evidently she was under the  mistaken impression, though, that supper tonight was supposed to be in celebration of my engagement and she didn’t want to intrude, so my aunt had to convince her that she was invited and that she wasn’t intruding on anything.  Besides, anything to celebrate our engagement would have been done a long time ago, like right after we got engaged.  I don’t want her to feel like she’s not welcome because she was the reason I suggested going out for supper in the first place, so I hope she’ll have fun.

Oh, I need some more medicine!  I woke up with a killer headache this morning and it just won’t go away.  I need a pop.  For the headache.  Yes, that’s it, for the headache…

Sixty days till September 26…

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

Everything you ever wanted to know about running a garage sale

Today was the annual City-Wide Garage Sale in Reinbeck.  We had one.  Needless to say, it was a long week.  We got the garage swept out last Sunday, carried things into the garage Wednesday night, set things up Thursday night, and priced everything last night.  We were up till after 11:00 p.m. every night this week and then I had to crawl out of my nice warm bed at 6:00 a.m. this morning to get the signs put up so people would know we were having a sale.  The city always puts out a map of people having sales and then they have the maps at Casey’s and Trunck’s.  It costs $5 to have your name put on the map, but it’s worth it because then people know where all the sales are.  We paid our $5 and when Greg went to Casey’s this morning to get some pop and a couple of the maps, he discovered that they had left our house off.  So we paid $5 for nothing.  I guess it’s a good thing my signs held up…

So this is how my morning went:

  • 7:32 – I would much rather be going around town checking out garage sales than sitting out here in the blistering cold running my own garage sale.
  • 7:34 – And by blistering cold, I am, of course, referring to the parts of me not right in front of the heater.
  • 8:02 – Come on, people, BUY MY STUFF!!!  See?  Three exclamation marks.  Just buy it.  You know you want to.
  • 8:05 – My policy should be, “If you look at it, you buy it.”  Then maybe I’d get done in time to do some shopping myself.
  • 8:06 – I should have brought my computer out with me.  Then I would be entertained and my lap would be warm.  Yay warm!
  • 8:28 – Hooray!  A sale of some consequence at long last!  Woo!
  • 8:35 – It’s always nice to get repeat customers!
  • 8:56 – Have officially given up all hope of keeping track of items sold.  Managed to get two items on the list before giving up.
  • 8:57 – Am now channeling Bridget Jones.  Must lose weight.  Must also try to forget about yummy Daniel Cleaver.
  • 9:18 – I should have a no smoking sign up.  Someone came in with a lit cigarette.  Yuck!
  • 10:01 – There be donuts in the house.  Why is it that everything yummy is so bad for you?
  • 10:45 – Okay, so it’s not winter-coat-and-coveralls cold anymore, but it’s still darn chilly.  And the lovely heater is making me sleepy.
  • 12:25 – Our heaters died. 😦  Apparently we blew a fuse.  But then it was Greg to the rescue and now the heat has been restored!  YAY!! 🙂
  • 12:26 – My jaw hurts.
  • 12:29 – With my trusty  heater by my side, I’ll never be cold again!  I sorta feel like I’m camping, but without the s’mores.
  • 12:33 – You know, s’mores sound good.  I need s’mores.  Where are all the s’mores when you really need them?
  • 1:01 – Have you ever been high as a kite and then gone garage saling?  Well, my neighbor sure seems to enjoy it!
  • 1:27 – Please, dear high-as-a-kite neighbor lady, don’t come back till you’ve sobered up.  You digging through my knives makes me nervous!
  • 1:39 – Tick, tock, tick, tock…Come on, two o’clock, hurry up and get here so I can close up and do something fun!

It’s amazing what brings out the kooks in town.  There’s an apartment complex next door to our house and one of the tenants came over to see what we had for sale.  “Whoa, it’s like a little store!” she exclaimed upon entering, holding a glass of questionable contents (orange juice for sure, but Lord only knows what else).  “Oh, I love your lamp!  I want this lamp.  I’ll be back for it.  You guys have exactly what I need, I swear.  You really do.  You have everything I need.  I’ll be back.  Oh, I love this lamp!  I want your lamp.”  After several painful minutes of her seriously disorganized (I can’t think of the word I want, sorry) rambling, she finally left, only to return about a half hour later with her rather annoying (and awfully overweight) dog in tow.  She wasn’t quite as high when she came back, thankfully, but still, when she went pawing through the box of miscellaneous knives, Teresa and I got a little nervous (Greg’s mom came up for the weekend and sat with me through most of the sale).  This time, psycho neighbor lady picked up one of a two-pot set (she only wanted the one – they were a buck for the pair), a handful of knives, and a can opener, set them down near the check-out, and went to let her dog relieve itself (hopefully in someone else’s yard).  “But I’ll be right back.  And I really want that lamp, but if you sell it to someone else, you go right ahead, it’s okay.  But if you don’t, I’ll take it.”  Gee, lady, thanks; I’m so glad I have your permission to sell my lamp.  *sigh*  Some people.  While she was amusing in her own “special” way, I wasn’t too disappointed that she completely forgot about coming back to our garage sale.

Greg had to work today, so he didn’t get to enjoy watching the people come and go.  He did, however, rig something up so that we could still run the heaters after we blew a fuse in the garage.  He grabbed his heavy-duty extension cord and plugged it in at the house, then rolled it out to the garage to plug in one of the two heaters we’d been using.  That was nice.  But apparently we must have blown another one in the house because when I sat down to count the take in the dining room, the light wouldn’t turn on.  There’s no way we blew out nine lightbulbs at once, so we must have blown another fuse running that heater.  *sigh*  Oh, well.  At least we were warm.

There weren’t many people out today for the garage sales, not that you would know it from talking to Greg.  Every time I talked to him, he told me about the bumper-to-bumper traffic on Randall Street.  Trouble is, we’re not on Randall Street!  My theory is that people started up on Valley Drive and out in Eastgate and over on Hillcrest and Ridge Streets and then by the time they got done with all the rich people’s houses, they were too tired, too broke, or too tired and too broke to come over to the west side of town and visit our lowly establishment.  For Pete’s sake, we had good stuff, dammit!  It’s not like we’re in the poorhouse.

Okay, end rant.  I just was not real patient with people this morning.  I mean, I was, it’s just that I was dissatisfied with how long they were taking to get out to our house.  Our biggest crowd consisted of four people who happened to wander in at the same time.  And then there was one lady who came in with her kids and her son was just a terror!  He was tearing things apart all over the place and she really wasn’t a lot better, but then she was just like, “Well, come on, we’re going,” and didn’t reprimand him once or tell him to behave and keep his hands to himself or anything.  And then he wanted a toy and she wouldn’t buy it for him because it was part of a bag and he only wanted the one, so he threw a temper tantrum, clearly expecting it to work.  If I’d behaved like that, my mother would have given me the spanking of a lifetime when we got home.  She didn’t buy him the toy, at least, and I was glad when they were gone.

There were a couple people that came in like that, who were worse-behaved than the kids.  That always gets me.  This one gal came in with her sister and they were looking at Greg’s Jeff Gordon jacket.  The one woman ended up buying it, but her sister was trying to talk her out of it.  She used the very tips of her fingers to pick it up and look at it quick, and then she asked if we had any hand sanitizer she could use.  She dropped the jacket in a heap on the table and then brushed her hands together, as if the jacket was filthy and she couldn’t stand the thought of being contaminated by it.  She said if it had been a Dale Earnhardt, Jr. jacket, she would have been all over it like white on rice and I thought, “Gee, lady, aren’t you a little old to be acting like a middle schooler?”

Hmm, it seems that the battery in my laptop is about to go dead, so I should probably wrap this up.  I have a headache anyway and need to go take some more something for it.  Some food, perhaps; all I’ve had today were a handful of Mike & Ike’s and a few slices of summer sausage, washed down with a lovely bottle of Dr. Pepper, because clearly, I’m a health food junkie.

Oh, and happy Mother’s Day!

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

No news

Sorry.  There’s just not much to tell lately.  I really haven’t felt like writing all that much, which is rather odd for me.

So to update, we’ve finally settled on the bridesmaid dresses.  Yay!  One thing down, 970 million more to go.  Um, I’m being confirmed at church Saturday night.  And my tummy hurts.  Apparently all the antacid I took after lunch hasn’t kicked in yet.  It really needs to, though, cuz I’ve had awful heartburn since yesterday and it needs to go away.

I actually made some progress on my type-up-all-my-old-stories project.  I got one all typed up and I started on another one.  Oh my God.  Seriously.  I knew they were bad, but holy crap, I didn’t realize the exact extent of the horror.  Yikes!  I should be shot for writing such utter drivel.  Aside from the fact that every time someone asks my character to tell them about herself, she gives them her life story in one paragraph, well, there are really no words to describe just how bad it was.  I kept making remarks like, “It’s a good thing I never got knocked up at fifteen like some people do because I’d have stuck my kid with a truly heinous name,” or, “You have got to be kidding me.  What the hell was I thinking?!”  And I thought these were good once upon a time?  I was out of my freaking mind!  Greg asked me why I was typing them all up if they were so bad.  I told him it was so that I had a record of what I used to write.  “Oh, so you’re not going to have them published?” he asked.  “Oh, HELL no!”  I replied.  “I’d die of embarrassment!”

And I would.  They are true horrors.  *shudders*  And yet, I keep on going…

We got 8 inches of swearing Sunday.  This is April, dammit.  That’s not supposed to happen.  When they said April showers bring May flowers, they meant rain!  Not white crap!  NO MORE WHITE CRAP!!

Okay, I think I’m done now.

But on the subject of crap, my long-awaited piece of BSB-inspired fluff is nearing completion.  Yay!  Because everyone loves a good bit of fluff, right?  Right?  You know I’m right.

*sigh*  I hope this afternoon goes by as quickly as this morning did because I just want to go home and curl up in bed.  I seem to be feeling rather averse to productivity today.  So with that, I think I’ll go back to doing quizzes on Facebook and hope that this time, stupid WordPress will post my entry when I tell it to instead of saving 90% of it as a draft and losing the rest of what I typed.  I hate when things of that sort happen.  Stupid computer glitches.  If I could remember everything that I typed, it wouldn’t be such a big deal, I guess, but my memory sucks, so there ya go.  Apparently my computer sucks, too, but I already had suspicions of that.

Friday needs to hurry up and get here.

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

Modern torture devices

I have discovered that torture devices are alive and well in the 21st century.  I had a particularly close call with one this morning.  It taunted me with its promises of better health and weight loss and for thirty agonizing moments, I succumbed to glorious images of a new and improved me.  Then, hot, sweaty, tired, and in pain, I wondered incredulously what the hell I had been thinking.  Obviously it had some sort of mind control powers that it failed to mention or it would probably not have succeeded in keeping me in its clutches for as long as it did.  In future, I will know better than to heed its siren song and fully intend to steer clear of it and any and all like devices.  What is the device of which I speak, you may be asking yourselves, so that I, too, can avoid them?  The answer, friends, is simple: the elliptical machine.

Yes, I have begun in earnest the workout regimen that I’ve been promising to start for at least the last two years.  I somehow managed to break free from the lovely warmth and comfort of my cozy bed at 5:45 a.m. this morning and engage in an arduous workout.  By arduous, of course, I mean that I set the thing to level 2 and spent thirty minutes whining about being bored, thirsty, hot, cold, tired, and sick while struggling to breathe through my nose for the first time in days.  That’s right, folks, I’m a pansy and a whiner.

But of course you already knew that.

My goal is to get into better shape and lose all the weight that I’ve gained over the last year.  Ideally, this will happen prior to September 26, but I suppose that’s too much to hope for.  Maybe I can just lose most of it by then.

I still hate mornings, though, and getting up at the ass-crack of dawn is sooooooooooo not my idea of a good time.  In fact, working out in general is not exactly my idea of a good time, in case you couldn’t tell.  I love riding my bike and going swimming and taking walks, but those are all rather difficult to do in the middle of winter.  Oh, sure, I could join a gym and do all of those things inside, but then there would be no mosquitoes to swat away, no sunburns to deal with, no bratty kids to shoo out of my way in the pool, no excess of heat and humidity…Why haven’t I joined a gym again yet?  Oh, right, because then I would miss out on enjoying nature.  Because I’m such the avid naturalist and all-around outdoorsy type.  Right.

Maybe in my dreams.

Rachael cracked me up this morning.  She came downstairs as I was about halfway through my half-hour of torture and sat down at the table to watch me, positively enthralled by what she saw.  Whether it was the idea of me working out or the fact that she had no idea what it was I was doing that kept her attention riveted on my ever-reddening face, I’m not sure.  “You look tired,” she said.  I gasped my agreement.  “I would be done now if that were me,” she continued.  I stared at her for a moment, not sure whether to laugh or cry, then told her to go play.  Greg told her that people don’t like to be observed while working out, which is true for me because I’m always afraid I’ll look like an idiot, even when I’m the only person around.  I asked him if he heard what she’d said and he replied that he hadn’t, so I told him.  He laughed.  Then he came out and said that I didn’t look as bad as he thought I would.  Apparently that’s supposed to mean that I’m in better shape than originally thought, despite the fact that I get winded running up the steps to the clerk’s office at the courthouse every day (I’ve been doing it for three years now, so you’d think I’d be used to it, but you would be wrong; and lest I make it seem like that’s a small amount of stairs, there are somewhere around two dozen steps just to get into the courthouse, then three more flights up to the clerk’s office).  I could probably have phrased all that better, but my brain seems to have fallen asleep from all that exercising I did this morning.

In other news, the sinus infection that’s been threatening for so long finally hit with a vengeance on Friday and I spent Saturday on the couch.  I spent most of Saturday morning asleep.  Yay sleep!  We went to Ankeny this weekend and did lots of wedding planningy type things, such as picking up my wedding dress.  YAY!!!!!!  Then I (accidentally) got super-drugged-up on cold medicine and Excedrin and felt like a space cadet all of Sunday.  A word to the wise: Don’t mix two NyQuil liqui-gels with three Excedrin and a muscle relaxer.  Bad things will happen.  It was much less fun to go shopping and try on pretty dresses in my drug-induced fog than I had originally anticipated.  But I still have to have it bustled and there are still other dresses to pick out, so I suppose I can deal with it.

Yay wedding dress! 🙂

I finally got around to sending my cell phone in to be fixed.  I guess I procrastinated a bit with that.  You would think I would have gotten it taken care of right away and I did try to do just that, but then I got lazy.  Now I have to wait four to six weeks for my pretty pink phone to be usable again.  Stupid phone breakage.

And in laptop news, we finally gave up on waiting for Dell to send the cds they promised to send.  They kept pushing back the ship date and when Greg called to find out why, they told him they had the cds in stock (and they weren’t on back-order like he’d been told before) and they didn’t know why they hadn’t been sent out.  *looking very earnest*  They promised to send them out right away, overnight even.  They still never arrived.  So we finally managed to get them to send us prepaid shipping labels and we shipped it back to them.  Once they’re satisfied, they’re supposed to send me a new one with the right operating system on it.  It will probably be another month at least before that happens.  Stupid Dell.  Their computers are great, but their customer service really sucks.

My God I’m tired!  I blame the early rising this morning, the muscle relaxer I took after my lovely warm shower, and the stupid sinus infection that won’t go away.  And by won’t go away, I mean that the two doses of antibiotic I’ve taken haven’t managed to banish it yet.  WORK FASTER, MEDICINE!  I WANT TO BREATHE!

*sigh*  In the meantime, I suppose I had better get back to work, although I’m really not sure what it is that I’ll do to pass the time and keep from falling asleep.  I felt rotten enough yesterday that I toyed with the idea of calling in sick today so that I could stay home and rest up from the weekend, but I’m a goody-goody, so here I am.  At work.  Where I’m supposed to be working but am blogging as a way to put off doing anything even remotely productive instead.

Happy Tuesday!

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

On cell phones and why I’m mad at them today

So today I went to enter an appointment in the calendar on my cell phone.  I would be so lost without it that it’s just plain ridiculous.  Anyway, I was halfway through typing in the appointment when my phone shut off.  Weird.  I’d had to turn it on when I dug it out of my purse because it was off then, too.  Double weird; I hardly ever turn my phone off.  I was in a hurry because I had to eat and run some errands, so I stuffed it in my purse and was on my way.  When I got to where I have lunch, I fiddled with it again and it just kept turning itself off.  Stupid phone.  By now I was super irritated, so I contented myself with ordering lunch and reading the new Catherine Anderson book I got last weekend, annoyed at the thought of having to cut my reading shorter than I wanted so that I could stop at the cell phone store.

After eating a very quick lunch, I headed to the post office to get something in the mail and then I hurried over to the local cell phone store.  Of course, they couldn’t really do anything to help me except suggest that I go back to the store where I bought the phone and see if they could do something with it.  I’ve only had the phone since the end of November; it’s brand new!  Apparently that’s one of its problems.  My phone had just come out in November or right around then and evidently, it had some issues at first, so either it’s that and they may have to exchange my phone, or it’s a software thing and it just needs to be updated.  I’m hoping for the software thing because they can’t switch text messages and I want to keep some of them, so I don’t want to have to turn my phone back in as part of an exchange.  So I guess I get to go to Waterloo tonight with the kids to see if I can get my phone situation taken care of.  It wouldn’t be quite so bad if it wasn’t my only phone…Okay, yes it would, but whatever.  At least if I had a land line I could still call people.  I hate being phoneless.

It’s funny how much cell phone malfunctions bother me.  It proves just exactly how dependant I am on my cell phone and when you really stop to think about it, that’s probably not a good thing.  Without my cell phone, it feels like I’m missing a limb or something, and it never used to be that way.  Then again, that was back before I had a cell phone and it’s getting harder and harder to remember those days.  The really sad thing is how I don’t know anyone’s phone number anymore.  I used to be a walking phone book, as I suspect we all were at one point.  Now, no one knows anyone’s phone number because all phone numbers are stored in our cell phones for easy, one-touch dialing.  It reminds me of what my dad always says about calculators: “That thing’ll make you stupid.”  And it’s true.  I rarely do mental math anymore because I’ve come to depend so much on my calculator’s ability to do it for me.  Any sort of addition or subtraction or anything, really, that involves carrying of numbers or anything with decimals or percents, I just can’t do without my calculator.  My brain has grown weak from lack of use.  It’s the same with phone numbers.  Unless you’re someone I talk to frequently on the phone or someone I’ve known forever and your number doesn’t change, chances are good that I no longer know your phone number.  It’s really quite sad.

But on the bright side, it’s Friday!  Hooray!  And I have a story idea!  Hooray!  And I have a book to read!  Hooray!  And possibly plans for the weekend!  Hooray! Plans that involve shopping!  Hooray!  Is anyone sick of all these exclamation marks and shouts of hooray yet?  Hooray!

🙂

I am so ready for the afternoon to be over.  Only one more hour and forty-five minutes!  Hooray!  I need to lie down…

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

Again with the snarkiness…

But this time it wasn’t mine.  Well, okay, it reminded me a lot of mine, but this time it wasn’t me, I swear.  This was an article from Wednesday’s Iowa Falls Times-Citizen, or rather, it was a letter to the editor of that newspaper.  Here is what Jory Rapp of Alden had to say:

It saddens me, as well as angers me, to think that it has become so “politically incorrect” to say, “Merry Christmas.”  We are so afraid of offending someone for one reason or another that stores won’t put Merry Christmas in their ads, school concerts are called “winter concerts,” and such ridiculous rot as that.  It seems like it’s wrong to offend everyone else; everyone, that is, except for the Christians.

If memory serves me right, wasn’t our country founded on Christian beliefs, values, and morals?  We trusted in God to establish, guide, and bless our country, yet now we spit in His face and are outraged at having Him be part of our country and its government.  Then we have the audacity to moan at the shape our country is in and ask why God allows certain things to happen.  If we would look to the Bible and the history of the Israelites, we would see what happens when people turn their backs on God, when they choose to worship other gods and idols.  We are headed down that path and if we continue to kick God out of everything, one day we will be standing in the midst of a disaster asking, “Where are you, God?” and His answer will be, “You didn’t want me around, so I left.”

This Christmas season, I will remind my children that we celebrate because God chose to send His Son to this earth as a baby to one day be the Savior of all mankind and that we are to share that gift with others.  I wish everyone a very blessed and “Merry Christmas.”

 I thought this was very well written and I pretty well agree with it.  If Ben Stein can stick up for “Merry Christmas” even though as a Jew, he doesn’t celebrate it, why can’t the rest of us?  “Season’s Greetings” has got to be about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.  The holiday is Christmas.  If you have a problem with that, go back to wherever you came from.  Or celebrate Festivus.

And now, on to snarkier matters…

It appears that the Idiot Brigade is back in full force.  I swear I got stuck behind every idiot driver in Grundy County Wednesday.  I was nearly hit by someone who decided to switch lanes without making sure there was no oncoming traffic and then again by someone who decided to take his half out of the middle while I was trying to pass him.  If he’d come any further into the left lane, he could have knocked me right off the road.  And then yesterday I was nearly run over by some idiot at a stop sign who was watching around the corner instead of right in front of him, where I happened to be walking.  Jerks.  What is it about winter that brings out the idiot in people?

On a more positive note, thank God it’s Friday!  I am so looking forward to the weekend.  No getting up for work and struggling to make it through the day, no idiots to deal with on the road because I fully intend to stay home and be exceedingly lazy, nothing but chick flicks and romance novels.  Oh, and Christmas present wrapping.  And Christmas card writing.  And maybe a little bit of 4-H paperwork.  Woo!  I love weekends!

Merry Christmas, y’all, and happy Friday!

(c) 2008.  All rights reserved.