So I finally go get to have a talk with the new VP of us. I discuss my medical situation, about how I had my large intestine removed and how I can't lift more than 20 pounds.

Him: "You're really handicapped!"

Me: *boggle*

Excuse me? Handicapped? Um, no. My friend Dave's wife Christina is handicapped. Inconvenienced occasionally, yeah, but that's it.

So, to numb my disbelieving rage, I am about to crack open a new bottle of Jack Daniels. I think decisions are going to be made in the not too distant future.

I'm tired a lot lately. I go to bed tired, and I wake up tired. I'm second-guessing myself a lot right now, and that leads to strange dreams where my cats are being hurt and I can't do anything about it, and I wake up exhausted.

I know what I probably should do. I'm just nervous about doing it, which is the other reason I'm exhausted.

Project for the moment - Go through my older CDs and re-rip them.

I've been making MP3s since 1999, when the technology was fairly new. Some of my oldest MP3s are still in 96kbps format, since that was the best you could get then. Now I'm going through the CDs I still own and re-ripping them at 192kbps. Should take me several hours.

From Jeannie, who deals with twice as many idiots as I do in a day...

"We need an invention that when the idiot on the other end of the phone is being stupid, you can zap them with electricity. Zap! Sorry, wrong answer. Please engage your brain and try again."

Hell. Yeah.

burning my eyes out because my Virgo-ness insists that I stay up to fix problems NetFlix made with my queue by sending shit out of order and randomly taking stuff out and saying it's "not available"

OK...

1) Bought my Dragon*Con tickets.
2) Paid Janice for my half of the hotel
3) Bought my Nobuo Uematsu convert tickets (got GREAT seats, 3rd and 4th row of the first balcony) AND got discount parking passes
4) Will look into a hotel after I pay off more of the credit card.

That's June and September taken care of. ;-)

Seeing Sin City today, then seeing an old high school friend give a classical guitar concert tomorrow. Hopefully it'll help me take my mind off of stress.

Republished because of a shit comment. One more of those, and no comments will be allowed, period.

More pics!

Purr-fect, weighing in at exactly 8 ounces
Lion, weighs 8 5/8ths ounces
The camera-shy Lamb, 8 3/8ths ounces
And Daffodil, the heavyweight champ at 9 3/8ths ounces Yeah, he'll need a new name. ;-)

And I caught Kahvi and Sweet Thing curled up on the bed, in exactly opposite directions. They say it's a twin thing, we wouldn't understand...

Bourbon Congratulations! You're 113 proof, with specific scores in beer (60) , wine (83), and liquor (69).

Screw all that namby-pamby chick stuff, you're going straight for the bottle and a shot glass! It'll take more than a few shots of Wild Turkey or 99 Bananas before you start seeing pink elephants. You know how to handle your alcohol, and yourself at parties.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 28% on proof You scored higher than 87% on beer index You scored higher than 87% on wine index You scored higher than 87% on liquor index

Link: The Alcohol Knowledge Test written by hoppersplit on Ok Cupid

Hell yeah it's a good day.

Hooked up my new Logitech digital speakers, and I am frequently orgasmic from the experience. This, my friends is how music should be heard. So far there has been no interference from the massive BASS I have vibrating out from under the computer desk. No fuzziness from any guitar solos or lyrical content.

Then I go to Mom and Dad's, to help celebrate my brother and sister-in-law's 40th birthdays. Dad makes ribs. I die and go to heaven eating. I now have extra ribs in my fridge which I plan to take to work, microwave so everyone can smell them, and eat like the barbarian I am.

Now I am finishing off the last of the Jack Daniels, blasting the Black Mages through my new speakers *music-gasm*, and planning to play on Aardwolf until I can't type anymore.

Yeah, good day. :-)

KITTENS!!!

Pile o' newborn kittens
Another pile o' newborn kittens
Between the three pics, you can see everyone's face.

Proud and exhausted new mom
Also a very watchful and protectful new mom
She really won't let us get too close to them yet

There's 4, born sometime last night. For now, they're Daffodil (the orange and white one), Purrfect (the one who's an exact copy of Mom), and Lion and Lamb (the two black and white ones).

My 7 1/2 year old neice.



When did she get so big? *cries*

It's not that I don't have internet access at work, it's that I'm still feeling out what's kosher and what's not. I basically check my email and a couple of news sites a couple of times a day, and leave it at that. I don't see my co-workers doing a lot of extraneous browsing, so I don't want to make waves. Yet.

So far, so good. After making sure my boss understood that I wasn't there to be an Admin for the Director of IT but a Help Desk person, I didn't get asked to schedule shit or get her mail anymore and learned how to do more help desk stuff.

And it turns out that I will get paid for one week by Edens & Avant (yes, I'll fix the link later) next week, so I went ahead and bought myself the vaccuum cleaner I need, then took out Mom and Dad to Longhorn's last night. I won't have time today, but tomorrow I'll swing by Best Buy and get some new computer speakers. I'm also considering a flash drive (or 3) for home backup purposes... My MP3 collection is 7.74GB and growing, and some of the stuff in there would be a pain in the ass to replace. I'll see what they have. If not, I'll just buy another spindle of CDs and get to work.

Last weekend, being bored, I went out and bought a new game, Final Fantasy IX.

LOVE it. Love it love it love it. It's so funny and so lighthearted but with serious tones at the same time. I've blown through disk 1 in record time, I'm sure, but everything's so gorgeous I won't mind at all if I have to start over.

And Vivi... that's me. That's me before I found my voice and the courage to use it. I can't wait to see the whole thing through.

Your anime hair color is blue.


What is your anime hair color?
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Home early from work with a sinus infection. 875mg of Augmenten twice a day for the next 10 days should kill it dead.

Don't have AIM on... Linda has to learn how to cope at work without me. She's quite capable, just needs some self-confidence.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm about to go waste obscene amount of time here, playing Lone Wolf. Think "Choose Your Own Adventure" on steriods, on the web. Thank you, JT, for showing me this.

Finally gotten out of my slump enough to write some. A bit here, some scribble in my notebook there, but it's something.

I'm also slowly taking things out of my office and deleting them off of that hard drive. I'd rather not take the chance of leaving anything behind that someone could come back after me with later.

Did my taxes Sunday, and I'll be getting around $900 back between state and federal. Unfortunately, instead of being able to spend it on things I need like a new winter coat, a vaccuum that's good for hardwood floors, or new computer speakers, I'm going to have to use it to pay bills because of the difference between Nexsen Pruet's and Edens & Avants' pay schedule.

Borrow from Dawn:

Bold means you've read the whole book, italicized means you've read part of it.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift - Required reading in high school
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer - see above
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne - see above
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank - gosh, we read this in middle school
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck - required for high school
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy - CRAP book, required for high school
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire - required for high school
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque - required for high school
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding - read it in middle school the first time
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway - required for high school, what garbage
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison - read it in middle school
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou - also read it in middle school
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson - read it in middle school
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath - Our middle school library had a little bit of everything
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder - Many, many times since elementary school
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood - just recently... not as good as people told me it was
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein - sometime in high school, it's eh
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes - read it for middle school
#111 Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret, Judy Blume
#112 the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling
#113 The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare
#114 A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle - zillions of times since I was in the single-digits of age
#115 The Witches of Worm, Zilpha Keatly Snyder
#116 120 Days of Sodom, the Marquis de Sade

Your Brain is 60.00% Female, 40.00% Male

Your brain is a healthy mix of male and female You are both sensitive and savvy Rational and reasonable, you tend to keep level headed But you also tend to wear your heart on your sleeve

What Gender Is Your Brain?

The reason I've been stressed the last few weeks?

Job interviews.

The result?

I've got a verbal acceptance in. Will make everything official in a business day or two.

(works on my goodbye email)

(rewrites my goodbye email)

(edits my goodbye email)

Hmmm... looks like I'm gonna need those two weeks to get this one right. ;-)