Keiran – Page 43 – Puzzle I Am

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.

It took all the strength I had not to fall apart

Fact 12: I’m a survivor of sexual violence.

Before I fact it up for today… can I just say how much I love “House”? Because oh my god I do. Hah. And for today’s fact – a warning. I’m sticking with the serious theme of facts I’ve been on lately.

Fact 12: I’m a survivor of sexual violence.

When I was 4 years old, an elderly lady owned the house next door. She often had Ricky, who lived down the street, come over to take care of her gardening — mow the lawn, keep the bushes trimmed, etc. One nice summer day, she was out at the store, I was playing in the front yard by myself when Ricky walked by. He invited me to help him with the plants in the backyard, and I decided it sounded like fun. I don’t know exactly how old Ricky was, but he was at least 10 years older than me. My neighbor had her backyard porch surrounded by a 8 or 10 foot wooden fence & bushes that were equally as tall, so if you were on the porch, no one could see you from any other yard. While we were back there, watering the bush beside her back door, he sexually abused me. I will leave out the graphic details, but it was mainly touching me in my private areas, and encouraging me to do the same to him — no intercourse. I kind of thought it was a game, but at the same time I knew there was something bad/wrong about it. I can only recall it happening that one time, but, he made me promise not to tell, and I didn’t, pushing the memory to the back of my mind.

When I was 13, my best friend (the one mentioned in fact 11) was dating a guy, Dan who lived two blocks over from us. The side of my house has a mini stone wall that juts out, so you can’t see the side of the house from the front. We had always played behind the wall for as long as I can remember, and I was back there one day when Dan cornered me. He started coming on to me, telling me how badly he wanted me, and attempted to rape me. I somehow managed to get away from him (my knee making contact with his groin helped my escape) and he stayed away from our block for a few weeks … he even broke up with Becky so he didn’t have to come around anymore. When he finally did come by again, he began to taunt me some, but he picked the wrong day to do that. He didn’t notice that I had been working on some wood — that I had a small handsaw in my hand. My previously mentioned time-bomb temper flared, and I took off after him, slashing at him with the saw. He managed to get away with only a few scrapes, and I got grounded for a month … but I still wouldn’t tell *why* I had attacked him — I thought if people knew what he had tried with me, that they would think I was “bad.” I did finally get some counseling a few years later, though.

Thank you eshopping!

About 6 weeks ago I “forced” my mother to sign up with Netflix via American Airlines eshopping program and my frequent flyer number. The points just posted, and I now have a free flight! At the time I was 1485 points away from a free flight, and signing up for Netflix earns you 1500 points. I couldn’t do it myself, since I was already a member. She didn’t want to at first, but she’s been enjoying getting her British TV shows via the mail since then. Hahaha. And, apparently, she’s been doing more eshopping with my miles number, so I should have even more miles hitting soon, starting me on the long journey to earning a second free flight. Woo!