Category: Ramblings

I’ll never be your beast of burden

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): You may soon have a dream of beating up the person you were five years ago. This would be a good omen. It means you’re ready to wean yourself completely from a stale old self-image. If you dream of feeding caviar and champagne to a donkey, it’s also a positive sign. It means you’re beginning to recognize that the hard-working beast in you needs to be treated more luxuriously. And if you dream of yelling at a bunch of kids to go clean up their messy bedrooms, Leo, that’s an auspicious portent as well. It signifies your readiness to discipline the irresponsible habits and organize the unruly impulses of your inner child.

I try not to post my horoscopes too often, but this one amused me enough, and I wanted to analyze it a little. Beating myself up, eh? Well, okay. As long as it means I’m not just changing my self-image, but I’m also actually changing, too. I am still trying to better myself, strengthen myself, learn to trust again, and (more importantly) learn to trust properly. That would be better than who I was about 5 years ago, if I can keep changing in those areas. But sorry inner beast of burden, you’ll have to deal without caviar. You know you’re allergic to anything fish/seafood related. But how about I dream of feeding you Godiva chocolates instead? Or even better – how about delicious New York Strip steaks and salads? Mmmm. Poor inner child. She’s been through a rough time lately. We’ve been doing a lot of cleaning. But organization? I’m not sure if we’re ready for that one yet. We’ll see.

For some reason, it seems that the LJ feed of my journal hasn’t updated in over a week. I poked around some yesterday, and found a thread from a girl who had a similar problem a few months back. I tried the things that she did to fix it – we’ll see if that does anything for me. At least I know that the feed validates as RSS now. It did before, but there were 2 warnings that shouldn’t have affected anything, but knowing LJ they probably did. 😉 haha. Hopefully this fixes it, though. If not, I know what post was the last one it read. I’ll temp mark the next post as a draft until LJ takes the rest of the feed, see if maybe that doesn’t work – if maybe there’s something wrong with that individual post. Which wouldn’t surprise me either.

I need to call my doctor’s office and see if they’ve heard anything on my MRI, since they’ve suddenly become incapable of calling me since my last visit. I need to schedule my follow up appointment, anyway, since that wasn’t done when I was in there before. When I go in again, I can check to see if I’ve lost any weight, and I can also coordinate my home scale with the one at the doctor’s office so I know the results are accurate. I feel like I’ve lost weight, and the scale has moved backwards some so this is good. Finally. Whee! I also need to find and get an appt with another doctor – but I won’t go into the details of that one here since it’s a little too personal. (Appt made.)

I want to completely reconstruct another site I maintain. A few weeks ago, I spent a few hours while I was teaching myself some CSS, writing an index page all in one file. After I had it looking exactly how I wanted, then I went back and split it up into the appropriate CSS, header, and footer files. I learn better that way, seeing it all in one file at first, working how it should, being able to tweak things in one place before breaking it down into the proper components so it can run the entire site. The only problem… the site that I want to rebuild now is a blog. I am just barely learning CSS, and know minimal amounts of PHP. Trying to throw in all the right stuff I need to make a blog work? Yeah. I don’t think I’m ready for that. But if anyone wants to take pity on me and help… haha. Just be warned it probably won’t be an easy ordeal. And I should still probably make a generic layout of the site first, to show how I want it to end up, even though it won’t work at all in WordPress. Probably. Maybe. I don’t know. This stuff confuses me. :-$

I’m spending most of the work day today writing procedural manuals. Oh joy! But seriously, if they help out and make it easier for someone else to do my job while I’m on vacation, I guess I can do it. It just would have been nice if the manuals were already written. I had to be trained one-on-one and take notes, the old fashioned way. So did most of the people in this position before me. I will still train my co-worker one-on-one, but at least she’ll have a manual to refer to when she gets confused, instead of sitting there trying to figure out what she meant in the notes she took?

There was more that I was going to ramble about today, I think. But it seems that my tongue is swollen in one small part, but that is starting to spread. So I think I need to go google that to see what on earth could be going on. O.o I don’t think it’s an allergic reaction, because I haven’t eaten or drank anything different. In fact, since I’m bringing Slim Fast to work, it’s exactly the same thing I’ve had for lunch for the last 3 weeks.

You don’t have to be picture perfect

Little by little, my room is becoming very vacant. I already did a ton of cleaning, going through boxes of crap and sorting out what I did and didn’t actually *need* a few months ago, prior to Emily’s visit. Now I’m going through the last remaining boxes, plus I’m moving all the furniture out of my bedroom and into the spare room. Eventually, everything will come out of my room so we can lay new flooring. But for now, I’m getting enough furniture out of the room so we don’t have to keep moving things around while we’re painting the ceiling and walls. It’s strange seeing my room emptied out little by little; but it’s also … invigorating. Freeing. So much baggage disappearing, that I didn’t even realise was there. I have a hunch I’m going to end up going through the boxes of things I kept yet again, likely trashing/donating/recycling even more. The less junk I have, the better, right?

Granted, we’re going to have to do the painting process all over again, possibly next year. Right now we’re getting the house fixed up, then we hope to move around the first of the year; if we’ve found a new house that we like in a good location. But, by then, I’ll know how much I like this new color scheme and if I want it in my new bedroom, or want to do something completely different. I have a hunch I’m going to keep it though. The Seaside Sand color does look a lot like sand, and reminds me of some incredibly happy times last year. Surrounding myself with things and colors that evoke happy memories is a good way to keep myself in good spirits. It’s one reason I have one of the paintings that was painted especially for me here at work, and the other just above my computer monitor at home.

And on a completely different note… over the last week, my bird has laid another clutch of eggs. Three of ’em, this time around. We thought we had removed the trigger. Apparently not. Now we have to figure out what’s in the cage or environment making her want to lay the eggs. Silly bird.

ETA: The bird laid yet another egg at 6:30 pm. That brings her total up to 6 eggs over the last few months.

Make me sing, make me sound

I’m in a very ramble-y mood today… and yet I don’t really have any specific topic I want to ramble about. Therefore, this is liable to be all over the place.

I’m back to listening to my iPod at work instead of the radio. I finally had enough of the inane chatter from the DJs. One thing I’ve noticed over the past few weeks that cracks me up: it seems like every single time “Nothing But You” plays on my iPod, the song either immediately before or after it is “Train In Vain.” Considering I have it playing on a random shuffle — it’s odd that those two songs always end up together. One song, the person is trying to move on from a bad relationship, trying to get rid of the only thing they have to lose… and the other is pointing out to an ex how badly they lied. In my mind I can see it as a progression: “Train in Vain” shortly after the end of the relationship, and “Nothing But You” after they’ve got a little more time behind them, and have started to heal. And yes. I am very aware that I’m rambling about the order of songs on my iPod. I did mention that I’m ramble-y today, didn’t I?

I’ve fallen in love with Jason Sellers‘ music all over again. I imported both his “Matter of Time” and “I’m Your Man” cds onto my iPod, and I’ve been listening to them like crazy. His vocals on “Every Fire” are so beautiful; and it amuses me that it’s his ex-wife, Lee Ann Womack, singing backing vocals on that tune. It seems like that song has been playing on repeat on the jukebox in my mind.

I’m one of those people who ALWAYS has to have music on. Whether it’s the iPod, radio, or iTunes – if it’s in my control, then there’s music playing. (If none of those are on, usually I’ll have the TV on, mostly for background noise in place of music.) There’s just something about it that keeps me going, keeps me moving, keeps me focused. When I was very young (about 4-7 years old), we used to go back and forth to Shreveport to visit my Grandma once every few months. If we were in the car and the radio was off, I would pitch a fit and say I was getting carsick without the music. I can’t remember if I actually did start feeling carsick or not, but it was what I always insisted. I do, however, remember that on almost all of those trips to my Grandma’s, we would hear “Boy From New York City” at least once each direction. Since that was one of my favorite songs as a kid, I always got a kick out of that.

My memories are heavily tied into music, as well. I hear a song and can recall specific memories related to it, whether lyrically or because it was playing as whatever it was happened. “The Song Remembers When” describes my song-based memory pretty well, in fact. Music is one thing I know I can always count on. If I am depressed, I can put on sad songs to make me cry even harder, or I can put on happy, bouncy songs to try to lift my spirits. Great music always makes a road trip more fun, but I do have to be careful not to let the fast songs influence my lead foot too much.

When I was little, I had a fairly diverse group of friends, and whenever I’d hang out with them, I’d always allow them to choose the music we listened to. As a result, I was exposed to a wide variety of styles and fell in love with almost all of them. My parents used to play the likes of Roger Whitaker, ABBA, and The Carpenters on our home stereo system. My next-door neighbor’s family exposed me to country music, while she herself introduced me to Latin pop and heavy metal. (I have distinct memories of sitting on the floor of her room, listening to Menudo back in the early 80’s – yes during the days that Ricky Martin was a member.) Friends from the neighborhood, Girl Scouts, and school all introduced me to other genres, including rap, R&B, a wider spectrum of pop/Top 40/rock, etc. Through out all of it, I’d find artists I loved, others I didn’t, and amassed a pretty diverse collection of cds.

In elementary school, there was a group of us girls who would always get together at recess. We’d all gather together on swings or seesaws, and spend the entire time singing. We knew every word to the entire “Innocent Man” album by Billy Joel, as well as a good chunk of Whitney Houston and Prince songs, amongst many others. I can remember us sitting on the seesaws and singing “We Are the World“, or us on the swings singing “Mickey” at the top of our lungs as if it was only yesterday. That tradition kept up through roughly 8th grade, us gathering together before school in junior high. By then, the artists of choice had changed more into Guns N Roses, Whitesnake, etc. That was all before I completely ruined my singing voice, though. At least back then I sounded pretty decent. If I tried something like that now, people would probably offer me money to stop singing.

I could keep going and going, but I think it’s probably best for me to stop this ramble here before it goes on for pages. I will add one final note, though. If it’s not obvious how infused music is to my life by this ramble… check out the titles of the posts in this blog. So far, about 85% of them are taken from song lyrics. (The title of this post is from the song, “Andante, Andante.”)