This sucks. This sucks so hard.

I’m on Blake’s computer right now because mine…is FUBAR. It was/is a MacBook that was about 6 years old, I’d guess, that I was given when it was about 4. At the time, Blake had built me a new computer so he put Windows on it so the kids could play Sims 3 on it and I just used my big box.

Fast forward about 2 years and he says, “y’know…the Mac is actually a little better than your desktop and it’s a laptop so you should use that” and I reluctantly did, giving my desktop to the kids so they could play Spore and Sims 3. (The reason we were running Windows on the Mac was because I couldn’t get Spore or Sims 3 installed on it using Mac OS but both worked fine with Windows, I don’t know why this is.)

So I used the Mac for about 4 or 5 months and had *just* gotten it broken in and all set up the way I wanted it and then last week I woke up and the Mac wouldn’t wake up. I shook the mouse, pressed every key on the keyboard, closed and opened it and finally had to do a hard reset. When it started up again, it was running slow as molasses. iTunes was unusable, FireFox was also unusable yet somehow TweetDeck was working fine. It wouldn’t restart of its own accord to I had to do about 5 hard resets until I called Blake at work in tears not knowing what else to do. He suggested that I use IE to download Chrome, so I did and Chrome seemed to be working okay, so I made that the default browser and imported my FireFox bookmarks. But iTunes still wouldn’t work, it would load up but you couldn’t make it play or press any buttons. Then I tried to open Photoshop, which I use pretty much every day, and it wouldn’t load due to a program error, even though it was working fine the day before.

So I put up with this wonky machine until yesterday when I backed up all my stuff and Blake wiped it, with the intent of putting Windows 7 on it, which he had had on it at one point when the kids were using it but the key expired or whatever because it was only a trial, so he had to put XP on it, which was on it when I began using it. (Yes, using Bootrcamp, which I’m told isn’t the most stable, but what the hell else is there?)

Well, he couldn’t get Win7 on it because he was using a key from work and I guess the computer had to be on the network to authenticate or something so that was a bust and that’s when he tried to put XP back on it. It kept freezing during the install and then when it was installed, trying to put other programs on it, like Photoshop, it would freezer and stall out and he’d have to start over and finally he got maybe 4 progs on it, one being iTunes and another being FireFox (which I prefer because of all the extensions) and they were doing the same things they were doing on Thursday so basically my computer is totally fucked, meaning that I basically no longer have one.

What sucks is that I have absolutely zero way to get a new computer so my only temporary solution is to hijack Blake’s for now, but for how long? He needs a computer too and this is the one I won at Camwhores expressly FOR him so I can’t just take it back (and if I did, what the hell is he going to use?)

So I don’t know what to do.

Sometimes, because Camwhores buys so much shit from them, Dell gives Kevin a deal on computers but there aren’t any right now and I wouldn’t have the money for one even if there was one.

Long story short: I’m completely fucked and have no way of updating my cam, doing shows or running my business and I’m at a loss as to what to do and freaking out completely.

So the itty bitty town I live in (population 1700) is in this contest by TSN and Kraft where they could win $25,000 to upgrade our rec centre’s facilities which we are in DESPERATE need of.

How it works is that for the next 24-hours (voting started at noon, my time and ends at noon tomorrow) you can vote for either us (Elmvale) or another town called Brighton (population a lot more than 1700) which I’M TOLD ALREADY HAS A TOWN POOL SO TO HELL WITH THEM and whoever gets the most votes win.

And that’s where you come in. We need your votes! And the beauty of it, my lovely internet-addicted friends? Is that you can vote AS MANY TIMES AS YOU WANT between now and noon tomorrow. As long as you’re not voting by mechanical means (prevented by a captcha), you can vote as many times as you possibly can and WE NEED YOUR VOTES!

So please, vote once, vote twice, vote a million times! Our community deserves it.

Thanks in advance! I’ll update everyone on if we won or not after the contest is over. :o) GO VOTE! VOTE VOTE VOTE!

This morning I blipped Tequila by the Champs and told everyone on Blip.fm & Twitter to do the @peeweeherman dance.

AND GUESS WHAT?

Pee-wee Herman himself retweeted my blip, causing like, a million people to do the same AND he posted it on Facebook too. So I’m like, semi-famous right now.

See?
(Click to enlarge.)

My life is now complete.

My friend Jay Holben linked this in Facebook this afternoon and I just got around to watching it now. Pretty interesting stuff. It’s a year old, so you might have seen it and I’m sure the stats have changed, but still interesting I think. Anyway, the text moves faster than I could read, so I suggest pausing when necessary and also possibly viewing the video in a larger size than I’ve embedded here. Here’s the YouTube link to the video.

So, is social media a fad? Even before watching this video I would have said “absolutely not”. The world’s changing and I feel really privileged to be alive at this point in history when the world’s changing changing changing and doing it faster than a lot of people can even keep up. I mean, how many people reading this can even figure out their Facebook’s privacy settings? (Take a look at Time magazine this week, that’s the cover story.)

I dunno, I just like this stuff a lot so I thought I’d share the video. I’m too tired to make a real post about it, so excuse me for not being my normal verbose self tonight…

Edit: Here’s this year’s version of the same video with updated stats, it was released this month.

Thoughts on optimism, Facebook and digital intimacy.

That is what I’m doing right now. It is something I’m exceptionally good at, as I just posted on Twitter. If procrastination was a marketable skill, I’d be rollin’ in cheddar.

Blake is currently at my mom’s boyfriend’s cottage dropping the kids off for March Break and I’m pretty much sitting here waiting for him to come home because I want to watch movies and work on my ACEOs, but we usually watch movies together because…well, because we only watch movies in my office and I’m always in my office and if I’m not watching the TV, I don’t like it on while I’m doing other stuff, so if I watch a movie without Blake, there’s a good chance he’ll never see it unless I liked it enough to watch it twice. (Which is often the case, I love movies, but not always.)

Right now we have Pandorum and The Hurt Locker to watch, plus Friday night’s Caprica, which I can’t watch without him. The Hurt Locker I probably could because it’s a war movie and he doesn’t like those, but I don’t know when he’ll be home and I think it’s too late to start a movie right now because he’d walk in partway through and not be able to pick up what’s going on, necessarily.

SO COMPLICATED, I know.

So instead of doing what I want to be doing, I’m writing a blog post about basically nothing…or at least that’s how I’m going into it.

I was just thinking though, because Blake’s with my mom and John right now, about my mom and John getting married. I have absolutely no idea how their relationship is (which is weird because historically, I would), so I don’t even know if marriage would be a possibility, but for a moment there I had a flash of a summer wedding and in it, I was sitting in a seat in the middle of “the bride’s side”, away from the rest of my family, and I was happy. It’s lame, I know, but I like John and I like his son Chris and I’m really rooting for him and my mom. As I’ve mentioned before, I just like who she is and who she’s become since she’s been with him. And I think she’s been good for him too, from what I understand. He makes art now, really really beautiful art, and from what I’ve been told, that was my mom’s influence. And the best part of him making art is that they sell their art together. For the first time in like EVER, my mom finally has an honest to god partner in crime and I think that’s fucking awesome. With my step-dad and Keith, I could never envision my mother growing old with either of them, and my bio-dad was obviously a bust, but with John I can totally see it and the whole idea of it just makes me so happy I could cry. In fact, I kind of am.

I don’t really talk to my mom that much anymore, not like we used to (we used to talk on the phone for several hours a day, every day), but I wonder about her moods when she’s with John. My mother’s kind of infamous for being self-deprecating and moody and kind of a bitch (I come by it honestly…) and all my life she’s been prone to bouts of intense, crippling depression, but now, at least on the surface, that seems to be less of a problem now that she’s with John.

I’m kind of morbid though. I often worry about my mother dying of cancer, both because it’s in my family but also because she’s been smoking for a bazillion years and her own father died of esophageal (holy crap, I spelled that right on the first try!) cancer due to smoking. Sometimes when I’m just sitting here by myself, I think about taking John aside one day and asking him, “are you going to look after her when she finds out she has cancer?” because I think if the answer to that is no, he needs to go. But I think the answer would be “yes”. He so obviously loves the shit out of my mother that I really do think that, whether they get married or not (since my mother has often said she has no desire to get married again), this is a “forever thing”.

And that makes me happy.

So I’ll stop being sappy about my mother now…I’m sure it’s revolting. It’s just hard to explain how our relationship is. Whether we talk every day or not, whether she’s with someone or not, whether I’m living with her or not, until I got married myself, it’s always felt like my mom & I against the world to some degree or another and it feels good to detach in a positive way, with positive results for both of us. Like I said, it’s hard to explain.

In other news, I guess I should talk publicly about something else that’s happening in my life. Wayne & Judy, our neighbours, and Blake & I, are no longer friends. Due to reasons that I don’t believe should be public knowledge, I started trying to detach myself from them as sort of a New Year’s resolution because I just couldn’t abide by some of the things they were doing anymore and because the relationship was becoming more and more parasitic.

At the end of February, I got fed up with some of the stuff that was happening next door and I unloaded some of it in a protected, friends only post on Live Journal. Unfortunately I came to find that there is at least one person on my Live Journal friends list who doesn’t like me very much and who decided to find Judy’s daughter Ashley on my Facebook friends list (which was public, unbeknownst to me) and paste my post into a message to her. Wayne & Judy happened to be dropping Ashley off in Toronto when this message was sent and Ashley printed them off a copy.

That night Judy came to my house, wouldn’t listen to a word I said and made it quite clear that we were no longer friends. Honestly, I don’t blame her for that, I probably would have felt the same way. She & Wayne have every right to be mad at me for saying some of the things I said, especially when I called them stupid and that I wished they would move, which is what Judy mostly seemed to be upset by.

I took precautions to make sure I didn’t hurt anyone with my post and someone circumvented that in a malicious way that hurt not me, not Blake – because realistically we were trying to detach from Wayne & Judy anyway – but 4 people who were strangers to them and didn’t deserve that: Wayne, Judy, Ashley and inadvertently Judy’s 9 year old daughter Courtney as well.

Yes, I take partial blame for the incident because I was the one who wrote the words and I was the one who added this malicious person whose identity I don’t know to my Live Journal friends list because I used to have a policy where if someone added me, I’d just add them back and that has resulted in a rather large friends list, but one I thought I could trust considering that most of the people who are on it have been on it for several years. It’s been a very rare occurrence over the last several years that I would add anyone new, unless they were vouched for by someone I trust.

Regardless, I put the bulk of the blame on the person who sent Ashley the post because what I did was venting to my friends, which everyone on planet Earth does, whereas what the person did who sent Ashley the post was flat out trying to be malicious toward me, but they ultimately ended up being malicious to 4 people they don’t know from Adam. I went out of my way to try not to hurt anyone, and this person went out of their way to try and hurt someone, not even bothering to think about collateral damage. (Or maybe they did, in which case they’re an even bigger douchebag.)

Since Judy would only let me look at the printout for a few seconds, I’m not even sure if what they saw was what I actually wrote. For all I know, this malicious person threw in a few extra jabs or put other words in my mouth. Since I printed out the post myself so Madison could read it and know what was going on, I know it’s 3 pages long (in Word) and what Judy had in her hand was also 3 pages long. However, Judy’s copy had more text on the 3rd page than I had in the copy I printed out, so I’m really wondering if the person who did this didn’t add some of their own flavour to it. Not being friends with Wayne & Judy anymore, I’ll never know. What I do know, however, is that the person who did this did not include the comments on the post, which would have been the proper, fair thing to do. Had they have done that, Wayne, Judy & Ashley would have seen that there were some damning comments that I disagreed with and thus, didn’t reply to. The only ones I replied to were the ones that concerned a fairly minor matter pertaining to Wayne & Judy and something they were already aware of my opinion on.

As with everything I write, I stand by my words, I don’t regret writing them and I don’t feel guilty that Wayne & Judy read them because I didn’t do anything wrong, the person who sent my post to Ashley did, and I certainly didn’t misrepresent them in any way. If anything, I held back in that post and I’ve been holding back in regards to them for a very long time.

What I do regret is my past policy of being trusting enough to add just about anyone to my Live Journal friends list and that is a mistake I won’t be repeating again. There’s no way to know who the person is who betrayed my trust and if I cut my friends list, chances are I wouldn’t remove the person who did this and that would make for one smug hater, so that’s not what I’m going to do. In fact, I’m not going to do anything but continue to be me and do what I do  and I’ve made my Facebook friends list not public. I suggest everyone else do the same, because really, why should strangers even have access to that list of people anyway? To change yours, go to “Account” on the top right of your Facebook page and play with the privacy settings. You may find that a lot of them, due to Facebook changing some things a few months ago, are not how you had them set originally and you may want to rectify that. Another way to make your Facebook friends list not public is by going to your profile and look at where your friends are displayed. There is a pencil icon there and if you click it, there’s the option to uncheck the part that says “show friends list to everyone” and if you uncheck that, your friends list will be visible only to those already on your friends list.

So that’s currently what’s happening in my life right now, or at least one of the bigger things. It’s unfortunate that Wayne & Judy are in the process of losing their house because their mortgager is selling it out from under them (which I guess can happen when your mortgage is held by a person rather than a bank, depending on your contract – which they broke anyway, but that’s a whole other thing) but I’m glad that they’ll be moving soon, not because of what’s happened between us, but because as I said in the beginning, our relationship with them was becoming more and more parasitic and we were trying to detach from them before all of this blew up anyway.

Truthfully, I think their mortgager is going to have a hard time making any kind of profit on that house as it’s badly in need of some expensive work, like the kitchen needs to be redone pretty much from scratch, but he seems pretty committed to selling so who knows what’s going to happen. Blake & I’s theory is that the mortgager was waiting until the spring to evict Wayne & Judy because we think it might be illegal to evict someone in the winter.  Either way, we’re hoping it happens sooner rather than later because it’s going to make for a really uncomfortable spring & summer when they’re on their deck drinking beer every spare second they have and their deck overlooks both our front yard and back yard, giving us absolutely zero privacy from these people.

Even prior to us becoming friends, I was scared to do anything in my garden in case they started talking to me (which happened constantly) and now I’m back at square one in that regard, unless the mortgager evicts soon.

What else? Well, there’s one thing in the works that I’m not going to write about because apparently there are people out there who would like to sabotage my life, but if/when it happens, you’ll know about it.

I guess the only other news is that last week or the week before, I ordered the seeds for the vegetable garden Blake and I decided we were going to do this year. This house came with a vegetable garden already, which is about 12-14 feet wide by about 4 & a half, maybe 5 feet long. We’d talked about doing veggies before but ultimately it came down to money, time and energy that we didn’t have so we couldn’t do it. The garden, since it’s been unused for the past 5 years, is completely full of weeds and will need at least a day’s worth of digging to become usable and Blake’s committed to helping me do this, so I ordered the seeds and when they come, a lot of them will be started indoors because apparently some of them need to be.

I don’t know anything about growing vegetables or even if we have enough room for everything I ordered, but I figured I’d just approach this like I approached the front yard garden: trial & error. Here’s what I ordered:

Royal Burgundy Beans (2 packets of seeds)
These beans are cool because they’re purple when they’re raw, but they turn green when they’re cooked. They also grow in a bush rather than a vine, so I won’t need to stake them.

Napoli Carrots (1 packet of seeds)
I just picked these ones because they sounded the yummiest when I was looking through the Vesey’s catalogue. I only got one packet of seeds because each packet had something like 1000 seeds or something and I figured 1000 seeds would mean 1000 carrots and we don’t need that many!

Thunder Cucumbers (1 packet of seeds)
Again, I just picked these ones because of the write-up about them in the catalogue. Apparently they’re resistant to most of the things cucumbers have problems with, so that’s mostly why I chose them, but I also chose them because they looked the most like the cucumbers I buy in the store. I’m worried that we won’t have room for these because I’ve seen how cucumbers grow and it seems like they need a lot of room, but I figured I could plant them along the top of the garden and let them grow out onto the 2 feet of grass between the garden and the house and that we could just lift the vines if Blake needed to mow the lawn there.

Simpson Elite Lettuce (2 packets)
We at a lot of salads in the summer and I’ve grown this before, in the front garden. It’s a leaf lettuce and if you want a salad, you just go out to the garden, cut off as much as you need and you’re good to go!

Parade Green Onions (1 packet)
We use green onions a lot, from stir fry to garlic pasta to spaghetti sauce, so I figured I’d try growing them.

Super Sugar Snap Peas (1 seed packet)
These are Madison and I’s favourite but they’re so expensive to get from the grocery store. Growing your own means that they’ll be ready to eat in July and from what I remember about peas, they don’t grow continuously throughout the season, so at least we’ll have all the peas we can eat in July! Madison and I just eat them, pod & all, but they can also be thrown in stir fry too if we get sick of eating them. I think these will need to be staked.

Fat & Sassy Peppers (1 seed packet)
These are just red & green sweet peppers and will need to be started indoors. As long as I cut them up for them, the kids love eating peppers raw and Blake likes to put them in salad, so I figured they would be worth the trouble. (I hate peppers with a passion.) I think these will need to be staked too.

Purple Star Peppers (1 seed packet)
Just sweet peppers that happen to be purple. I thought the kids would get a kick out of them so I figured we’d do half a row of the normal ones above and half a row of these ones. These’ll need to be started indoors as soon as the seeds arrive and will need to be staked as well. (Where do you even buy stakes? The garden centre at Wal*Mart should have those, right?)

Bobcat Tomatoes (1 seed packet)
I picked these because their write up and picture in the catalogue sounded the yummiest. I debated a lot on whether or not to start tomatoes from seed or just to buy plants from the garden centre, but in the end seeds won out because they’re cheaper and I can easily just start them indoors and make my own plants that’ll be ready for planting at the end of May. These will have to be staked too, I’m pretty sure.

Sugary Cherry Tomatoes (1 seed packet)
I love cherry tomatoes in salads, they’re like, my favourite part (well, that and the cheese chunks I throw in salads), so we had to grow these. Again, I could have gotten plants from the garden centre, but seeds were cheaper than plants would be and I have enough room to start the peppers and tomatoes this month so they’ll be ready for planting at the end of May. I’m pretty sure these ones will have to be staked too, once they get big enough, although I grew similar tomatoes last year in pots on my porch and didn’t stake them, so I’m not sure. The ones I grew last year were on a vine, I don’t know how these ones grow.

Luckily, Veseys sends you a growing guide when you order veggie seeds from them and that’ll tell me everything I need to know about all of this stuff. Again, I’m a bit worried about space, but I think with proper planning we should be okay and if all else fails, I can just grow the tomatoes in containers on the porch as long as I fertilize them well. I’ll have to invest in some containers though, as what I have will be too small, except for one pot.

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to the veggie garden this year. I love the idea of growing your own food and while we spent $50 on seeds, I know we’ll end up saving a lot of money in the long run from not buying produce at the grocery store.

Annnnnd I was going to start writing about my front yard garden but y’know what? This is really really long and I’ll do that when the seeds for THAT get here.

Have a wonderful Sunday!

Oooooh what a week it’s been.

First of all, I’m menstruating, which is always fun and because I’m menstruating I’m taking insane amounts of codeine which has made me extremely constipated and I know that’s probably TMI but I don’t fucking care. The stool softeners? They are ineffective and I’m cranky because I literally have something up my ass. Aren’t you glad I shared?

Also making me cranky is the fact that my site has been down for a lot of this week and while that’s not really a huge deal since I x-post everything to Live Journal anyway and haven’t had a whole lot to say, it really sucks because my e-mail is on the same server as my site, so when my site’s down, it probably means I have no e-mail either. So my apologies if you’ve left comments on LJ or have sent me e-mail this week and I haven’t replied, I haven’t been getting my LJ notifications (obviously) and while I’ve been trying my best, it’s hard to remember who I’ve replied to and where so again, I’m sorry. Some people have asked about my host as they’ve seen me bitching about this all week on Twitter and I’m hosted by my friend Kevin, who is the co-owner of Camwhores.com, and he hosts me for free so I try not to complain. It’s not his fault the server took a shit this week and I know he’s been working extra hard trying to fix it, so when I complain, I’m not complaining about my hosting provider, Kevin is great and I love him, I’m just bitching because I’m bitching.

And speaking of my site, in the last 30 days I’ve had almost 3,000 unique visitors , which is actually a record since I began keeping stats just over a year ago. So hello new people! My name is Sunny and I’m not nearly as whiny or insane as I probably sound in this post. If you’d like to know more about me, there’s a page for that and while I update my site usually once a week or so, I update my Live Journal just about every day so if you’re bored, you might want to check that out too. Anonymous comments are turned off on my Live Journal because some people are pricks and while comments are moderated on my site, I’ll approve and reply to just about all of them as long as you’re not being an asshole. I’m done with giving assholes a forum, there are an infinite number of sites on the internet to be an asshole on, take The Forum [NSFW] for example, and I just don’t need to put up with them here.

Anyway…

This week Blake and I watched the movie Precious, but Blake reviewed it for Buttercup and his article will be going up tonight at around 1am so I won’t say anything about it other than I liked it and I agree with Blake’s assessment of the film.

Also this week I worked on my ATCs a bit and just about had a coronary because I spent hours and hours and hours meticulously drawing and shading miniature versions of my girls and then I used a Micron Pigma pen (02) to outline their mouths and noses so I’d be able to see them after I painted their faces with a flesh colour. I do this on my regular sized girls every time and didn’t figure it would be a problem. BUT IT WAS. A HUGE problem. I went to paint their faces with the flesh colour and the ink fucking RAN! That has never happened to me before and these pens are supposed to be waterproof and archival so WTF? So I stopped painting faces with the second girl and decided to let the ink “cure” over night and when I tried painting their faces the next day, everything was totally fine. I ruined 2 of 8, which sucks because I worked really hard on them, but at least I didn’t ruin the whole batch. Currently they’re still sitting on my desk with freshly painted eyes and faces awaiting hair colour and dresses. Truthfully, I haven’t kept working on them because I got distracted by another project…

This other project…well, I don’t really want to talk about it too much because I always do that (I suck at keeping things secret) and because I always do that and give too much away, I self-sabotage and never finish anything. Here’s the gist: I had a dream on Monday that was so vivid and so surreal that as soon as my eyes opened I flew out of bed and just began writing down every detail I could remember. Then that afternoon I fleshed it out a bit more and when Blake got home I showed him my scrawls to see what he thought and he thought it was brilliant, which was reassuring because I never know if my ideas are brilliant or stupid.  I thought about the story over the next couple of days, slightly intimidated by it but Blake threatened that if I didn’t write it, he would, and he wouldn’t do as good of a job as I would because I saw it all unfold in front of my eyes in the dream and for some reason, I think this is a story that needs to be told. I think it’s a story that’s never been told before, but then again, I’m not exactly well read so I could be talking out my ass there. Anyway, yesterday I actually started writing the thing and somehow, in the span of a couple of hours, I had 10 pages typed out, today I added 4 more and this story, that was only supposed to be a “short story” is turning into a novella. Honestly, I don’t know where it’s coming from but it’s a refreshing feeling and I’m enjoying the writing process more than I’ve enjoyed writing in a long time. I have no idea what I’m going to do with it when it’s done, but I’m trying not to worry about that and just fucking write the thing.

So often I sabotage myself by, like I said, explaining a project so much on here that I feel like I’ve completed the project or that just having the idea “out there” is enough for me. And I often get caught up in my fear of success. As much as people accuse me of being an attention whore, the opposite is actually true. I fear the spotlight like nobody’s business and when it comes to creative work, writing in particular, I fear criticism and thus I don’t often put very much out for critics. Even as I write this story, there’s this little negative voice in the back of my head telling me how much it sucks or how implausible the story is or how flimsy my characters are and all kinds of wonderful things like that. And it’s one thing for my own inner critic to say these things, but it’s a whole other thing for other people to say them. Since I’ve never really put anything out there for that kind of scrutiny (and yes, I realize that I put myself “out there” constantly with my site and my cam and all that, this is different) I don’t know how I’d deal with it and a fear of the unknown suddenly surfaces.

But right now all the story is, is 14 pages on my MacBook that no one’s seen but Blake and until it’s finished, that’s all it will be.

This week I also taught Wayne & Judy how to use Facebook, to the best of my ability. Right now they can’t afford internet but they have a wireless card in their computer so Blake built a booster on our wireless router and set them up with the password for the network so they have internet…some of the time. Most of the time they don’t get a signal, but this week they’ve actually had a strong signal for some reason and thus, they’ve been calling me every day to show them how to do things on the Facebook accounts I set up for them last week. Today Judy was asking me how to play FarmVille because a few of her friends sent her FarmVille gifts and since I have that application blocked on my own Facebook, I didn’t really know what to tell her. She also called me yesterday afternoon to tell me that she figured out how to comment on people’s status messages, which I thought was cute because she was so proud of herself for figuring it out.

This weekend I plan on going over there and if they have a strong enough signal, I’m going to set them up with FireFox, add all of the bookmark tabs that they’ll ever need and delete their shortcuts for Internet Explorer altogether. Yes, I realize Chrome is the new big thing but I haven’t used it myself yet and I want them to quit clicking on stupid pop up ads that tell them they have a virus, causing them to freak out and call me. Oh and I changed all of their homepages (they have 3 profiles on Windows, one for Wayne, one for Judy and one for Courtney) to Google so now how they get to Facebook is by typing “www.Facebook.com” INTO Google and going to the first search result. *headdesk* I don’t really blame them though, their Internet Explorer has/had so many toolbars on it for some reason that it had 3 possible inputs for a url and no doubt they chose the wrong one many many times. I got rid of the Ask Jeeves one, but since I don’t use IE and haven’t in many many years, I wasn’t sure how to get rid of the others and it’s difficult to tweak anything when they’re over your shoulder asking what you’re doing every 30 seconds. So, setting them up with FireFox and breaking their IE habit seems like the best thing to do. I also set them up with Gmail accounts and I’m going to try and get them in the habit of checking their e-mail as often as they check their Facebook so they understand how Facebook’s e-mail notifications work. Instead of Google, I’ll probably make Gmail their homepages for that reason.

I’m not a very patient person and my patience in teaching them how to use the internet is surprising even myself.

This week I got a call from the mental health clinic saying that they wanted to set me up with an appointment for another doctor who I think is a nutritionist or something. Are nutritionists doctors? This woman has “Dr.” in front of her last name and she runs a metabolic sumpin-er-other clinic where I see my shrink and I requested to get in on that when a spot opened up because the meds they had me on has slowed down my metabolism and while I’m still eating my eggs every day to help boost my metabolism, progress has been slow and this clinic is all about how to switch your metabolism around and lose weight. Apparently it’s 6 or 8 weeks and it’s in a group setting (oh yay) once a week in the afternoons. I’m assuming the new group starts in the new year and my appointment with this new doctor is on the 29th.

Before I called them back, I checked with Blake to make sure he was okay with using his days off to take me to this thing and he was, so I called and made the appointment with the new doctor. I guess she’ll like, assess me or something, I have no idea. Maybe there’s even a chance I can’t get into the clinic because I’m not fat enough. I don’t know how these things work.

And speaking of mental health…since some folks have been asking…no I have not been driving anywhere. I have not been doing my immersion therapy. I have not been checking the mail. I have also been neglecting my light therapy and had a really bad day earlier this week, so starting Monday the lightbox is going back on my desk and I’m going to start using it again. As for immersion therapy…I’m just done with it. I don’t even care anymore. I can go places, like with Blake or even with Judy, and be okay. I haven’t had a panic attack in public since the spring and I think I’ve made all the progress I’m going to make right now. I have zero desire to drive the car, in fact I hate the car and the mere thought of driving, so fuck it, I’m done. Maybe I’ll pick it up again in the spring, maybe I won’t. I’ve decided that in the end it simply doesn’t matter and that I’m fine where I am. So that’s that.

Anyway, this is a really long fucking post about basically nothing so I’m going to end it here and get back to work on my story.

Hullo internets. I am typing this post instead of having a nap (I tried) or working on my painting (I tried that too) because really, I don’t have a whole lot else to do at the moment and the things I do have to do, I don’t wanna do, so here I am.

I don’t know what it is about this painting that makes me not want to work on it. It’s been sitting on my coffee table since the end of September half-finished and I sit here and I stare at it and as I’m trying to fall asleep, I think about it, but there doesn’t seem to be any goddamn resolution to the sucker that it just sits there some more. I’ve shown pictures, it’s the one I’ve dubbed “The Two Sunnies”. The background is done, the two girls are done, now I need to add the elements to tie the whole thing together, sign it, slap a couple of coats of varnish on it and it’d be done, but I still can’t seem to find those slippery elements to tie the whole thing together. I keep thinking about doing hearts hanging from strings like I’ve done in older paintings, with the happy site being bright magenta hearts and the sad side being black hearts with skulls but for some reason I keep rejecting that idea. In the beginning I wanted to add the sentences “Je suis heureuse”/”Je suis triste” above their heads but that wouldn’t leave very much room for embellishment of any kind and I think that would make the painting too plain. Just now I was thinking that it’d be cool to glue a bunch of pills, like stars, to the left (happy) side and have them taper off on the right (sad) side but my pills aren’t the right colours, Blake would probably kill me for using my pills to do that since he pays for them and I don’t even have enough to do that anyway. Yeah, I could do paper pills but there’s no fun in that so the pill idea is officially dead.

I’m giving this painting one more week to come together and if it doesn’t, then it’s going in the closet to be forgotten about while I work on something else. What is that something else? Why Hester Prynne and Pearl, of course, from The Scarlet Letter, but I have to read the book first, which I’m currently working on. I guess the book no longer holds a copyright so it’s available online for free HERE if anyone, like me, has never read it but wants to. What I’m about to say will no doubt make some of you cringe, but I really really don’t like old books and what I mean by that is that I find books that are written with “older language” really hard to follow. I even tried to read Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf which isn’t even that old, but the language bored me so I never did finish it (sorry Raya!). The Scarlet Letter hasn’t been too bad so far, it’s really only when the characters are speaking that the language gets “old”, but it’s still probably the oldest book I’ve tried to read, not counting Shakespeare (*snore*) or Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It was written in 1850.

Anyway, the book’s been interesting so far. I only started Friday night though and didn’t have time to read any of it last night, so I’m only on chapter 6.

Last night Blake and I went to see 2012 which was…well, disaster-porn at its finest. The plot was totally cheesy and you had to leave reality and science at the door, but I’m glad we saw it on a big screen rather than renting it and watching it on my 13″ TV. The kids stayed with Wayne & Judy while we went and they also had a good time, especially because Courtney had a friend sleeping over so there were the 4 of them.

Today I went over to spend some time with Judy and get her set up with Gmail and Facebook and she told me that it was verified, that both of their dogs have fleas…which is something I told them 2 months ago when Lily, the golden retriever, started scratching herself bald at the base of her tail. So, since I have two bottles of flea shampoo, I brought one over for Judy and somehow she sweet-talked me into helping her bathe the dogs. She was soaked, I was soaked, the dogs were soaked, the bathroom was soaked, the hallway was soaked, the kitchen was soaked, but at least the dogs don’t have fleas anymore. I also brought over my trimmers and clipped their nails, which were really bad. Both of their dogs have white nails, so I was fine with doing them and I got them really nice and short, but I won’t do our own dogs’ nails because Hoover’s are black and I’m too freaked out about cutting the quick and I figure if Blake’s doing 1, he might as well do the other.

Anyway, after the dogs were groomed, so to speak, I helped Judy vacuum the carpet, wash all of their bedding and then put the beds back together once everything was dry. AND I didn’t have my eggs this morning so I did all of this running on empty. In fact yesterday I had my eggs for breakfast but then all I had for the rest of the day was popcorn at the movies and I keep wondering how this is going to affect my weight loss progress this week. Oh well, I’ll do better the rest of the week and as long as I don’t gain, I’m golden.

Tomorrow night is the Leonid Meteor Shower and NASA has this neat little thing that shows you when the height of it is for your viewing area. Unfortunately the peak time for us is at like, 6am Tuesday morning and while it’s supposedly going to be the best showing of the Leonids in our lifetime, I’m not sure about waking up at 5am and getting the kids up to go outside in the cold to watch. I’m seriously considering it though! I’m gonna take it up with them tomorrow after school and see if they want to. I figure I can make everyone travel mugs of hot chocolate and we can dress warmly and watch from the swings at the park across the street where there are no streetlights. We should get a pretty decent show from there, if the calculator is to be believed and the kids are up for it. Madison will probably be up for it, I’m not so sure about Wes and I’m really doubting Blake’ll be into it at all. I’ve been wrong before though.

I think I’m finally getting the plague that Blake & the kids had last week. My throat is sore, my glands are swollen and I’m pretty sure I had a fever earlier. :o/

Alright, it’s time for me to stop typing now and find something relatively productive to do. Maybe I’ll just sketch out Hester Prynne and continue ignoring this painting. Maybe I’ll just go to fucking bed.

Brooke wanted me to post an extra special update in my Live Journal. So I did. :o)

Here’s the link.