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.

I just drove our new car for the first time. I went to the grocery store, put things in my basket (very fast as I was FREAKING THE FUCK OUT INSIDE MY BRAIN), made small talk with the cashier guy who reminds me a lot of my friend Scooter, paid with my DEBIT CARD (which is a great source of anxiety), packed up my own bag and DROVE HOME.

I’m shaking. It took 2 Ativan and a lot of Twitter encouragement but dammit, I wanted pie and I went to the goddamn store and got me some motherfucking PIE.

And y’know what? I was so proud of myself that I got CAKE too. And crumpets, pretzels, watermelon for the kids and baby cans of gingerale.

I’ve been to the grocery store with Blake 100 times and it’s only about 3 minutes from our house, but I went down the wrong street and got lost-ish which made me sorta panic, but then I got on Yonge St. and knew the grocery store was up the road (I’d missed the grocery store’s street by about 2 or 3 streets – oops) so I didn’t freak out. I mean, the town’s only so big and it’s pretty much impossible to REALLY get lost.

It also took me like, 10 minutes to figure out how to work the car. I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to move the seat up or how to turn the lights on but I finally got it. Also our car has like, D3, D2 and DL and I have no idea what that means so I just picked D3, which was the closest one to N and went with it. I probably did it wrong but it worked so, whatever.

Blake’s gonna be pissed that I bought fairly useless stuff with his money, but again, whatever, I FUCKING DID IT and that’s what matters.

Now I’m going to allow myself to freak out and cry and y’know what else? I got pie AND cake and I’m going to fucking eat BOTH of them and then I’m gonna go to bed. Yeah, you heard me, BOTH OF THEM.

The end.

Edit: Okay, so I was too full after the pie to actually eat the cake, but dammit, pretend I did! And for those who may be curious, it was lemon meringue pie & chocolate cake.

I’m so sappy and ridiculously proud of my community both online and meatside right now, I could honestly cry. Thank you so much to my online friends for voting for a town you’ve never been to or maybe even heard of, being a 1700 population town up against a 10,000 population town, we REALLY needed your votes!

Here on the ground, the town had 24 hour voting stations set up at the community centre, the rec centre, a couple of restaurants and the library and everyone was up all night voting, eating together, listening to music and just being a great community.

Here at Sunnyland, Madison and I started voting at noon yesterday and she went to bed this morning around 5:30am, which I made it to about 7:30am. Madison set an alarm to be up for the last hour & a half of voting because once I explained to her about town pride, not unlike the lemon tree episode of The Simspons, she really got into it and I couldn’t be more proud of her. Blake voted from work and again between after dinner and his bedtime yesterday and again this morning.

So what happens next? We have to watch TSN tonight at 6pm EST to see who won. The whole town is gathering somewhere to watch apparently, but I’m not sure where. Probably a few places. We’ll be watching from home.

Anyway, that’s the scoop! Thanks again for everything, you guys are awesome!

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!

I don’t know what I did, but I can’t believe the amount of blessings coming into my life right now. The pessimist in me is waiting for the other shoe to drop, but the optimist in me, who is winning out these days, is just going with it with immense gratitude.

Today a package came from Amazon. An anonymous gift. So a huge THANK YOU to whomever sent it, it was quite the surprise! And much appreciated. If you’ve been reading, I actually broke down and bought Nobody’s Daughter from Wal*Mart last Friday but I kept the receipt in case something went wrong with Wes’ Zhu Zhu pet, so I can return the extra copy. Thank you again though, anonymous person, everything you chose from my wishlist was just perfect and I cannot thank you enough. <3 (The book Neon Angel, which is Cherie Currie’s account of The Runaways and a book about photographing art and collectibles were the other two things, if anyone’s curious. Can’t wait to read both. :o))

Now the next order of business is something that I’ve been wanting to write about for a while, but wanted to wait until the story had reached its conclusion before I did. Do you remember the cat ring that I bought on Etsy in May? I know I linked it but I’m not sure if anyone actually clicked the link.

Well, it was from a seller called Freedom Jewelry USA who went so above and beyond that I couldn’t even believe it.

The listing for the ring was a size 8 and me knowing nothing about ring sizing, used an online ring size converter thing that told me my ring size was 10. So that’s what I asked her to make me and she gladly obliged.

Well when the ring got here, I tried it on and it fell off of each and every one of my fingers because it was HUGE. So I left her feedback saying how great her customer service was and everything and then I convo’d her and said that I must have screwed up the size (which I didn’t, the converter was wrong, we discovered) because it’s too big, but if I took it to a jeweler, would they be able to size it for me? She said that she’d prefer to do it herself and that I should send the ring back, she’d recast it in the proper size and send it back to me. All for the cost of reshipping.

Now, me being a skeptic, I was kinda thinking this could be a scam, but I sent the ring back anyway, along with two ribbons that were the circumference of the finger I wanted to wear the ring on, one tied in a loop, one straight, and waited for her to receive them and tell me what my ring size actually was.

So she got the ring back and told me that my ring size was “about a 9″, so I asked her if there was such a thing as an 8.5 because then I can wear the ring now and still be able to wear it as I lose this extra weight of mine.

So that’s what she did and then she sent it back. I got it late last week, tried it on and while it was a teensy bit too big still, it’ll get the job done (as a faux wedding ring at the Square Foot Show since my wedding ring doesn’t fit right now). I was so in awe of how nice she was and easy to deal with and just the whole situation that instead of the $1.50 postage she wanted, I gave her $15 instead because this was just so awesome of her.

Here’s the ring, my wedding ring that fits INSIDE the ring because I was damn near anorexic when I got married, and some shots of my Hello Kitty wedding ring because I’ve never posted proper pictures of it and I know people are curious about it:

My wedding ring was cast in white gold from an actual Hello Kitty ring sold by Sanrio a really long time ago that Blake jumped through hoops to try to find. The diamond is one of his mother’s. Even if it did fit, I wouldn’t wear it because I actually hate wearing rings, I find them all too heavy on my fingers, like when I’m typing or drawing, but I like to wear them if I’m going out somewhere, like The Square Foot Show. I’m bummed my wedding ring doesn’t fit right now, but I refuse to have it resized because to me, that’s like admitting defeat and accepting the size I am, which I will not do.

Anyway, the girl who is Freedom Jewelry USA was great and totally went above and beyond for a perfect stranger, so definitely take a look around her shop and if you like what you see, add her to your favourites!

Like I said, I’m not sure what I did karmically to deserve so much awesome in my life right now, but I am absolutely grateful for it all and want to shout it from the rooftops. For once in my life, I’m actually loving my life, which is definitely a new thing that I hope continues.

So thanks. To all of you. To the whole world. <3

This is my sign. Blake screwed it to the outer wall of our house, right beside the “front” door, so that everyone who enters will know the deal.

Before it was put in place, I asked Blake, “do you agree with it?” and he said “absolutely”.

After it was put in place, Madison read it and said she liked it. I said to her, “but do you agree with it?” and she said, “yes, even though I probably do a lot of shitty things that you write about”, to which I replied, “not really” because there was only one shitty thing she’s done so far that I found was worth writing about and I made it a friends only post on LJ. (She stole a necklace of mine that my grama gave to me which my grampa, now dead, gave to her, that had a HUGE crystal pendant and then some kid stole it out of her desk so now it’s lost forever.) Anyway, she & I agreed that that was probably the shittiest thing she’s ever done.

Anyway, if you’ve been reading my site for any length of time, you’ve probably seen me say what’s on this sign multiple times because it’s true. I write about pretty much everything that happens in my life, or at least the important stuff and often times, “the important stuff” is the shitty things people do. I can’t say that I write about all of these things publicly all the time, but they are usually written about either on my site, my LJ (publicly or friends only) or my paper journal, but usually online in some way, shape or form. That’s just what I do. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last 10 years of my life and if you have a problem with it, don’t be in my life. It’s really that simple. And really, is it so hard to be a decent person who doesn’t do shitty things? Because if that’s difficult for you, we probably don’t want you in our lives anyway. And that is a sentiment shared by everyone in the Sunny, Blake, Madison & Wes Crittenden family. I know this because I ASKED.

So that’s my sign. Probably the first of many. As I pointed out to Blake, I am now the crazy neighbour who makes signs. :oD So be it.

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.

Thank you thank you thank you to everyone who signed up for Camwhores last month using my affiliate link! Thanks to you guys, and my hard work, I WON THE LAPTOP FOR BLAKE! This is what it looks like (it’s the red one):

Here are the specs:

• Dell’s hottest new laptop: their Inspiron 14z
• Windows 7 Home Premium
• Intel Pentium Dual Core SU4100 CPU
• Big bright 14″ high definition display
• 3GB of RAM
• 250GB of drive space
• Wireless internet access
• Built in 1.3 Megapixel Webcam
• 8x CD/DVD burner
• Hot cherry red color
• Memory card reader (upload pictures directly from your digital camera’s memory card)
• 5 hours of battery life (11 hours if you buy an optional larger battery)

I know absolutely nothing about computers so I don’t know if that’s good or not, but I do know that it’s a hell of a lot better than what he’s using currently, so YAY! Thanks Camwhores! Thanks everyone! Couldn’t have done it without ya! On the same token, I hope the few of you who signed up or who were already members enjoyed my streaming shows last month, I had a lot of fun doing them. :o)

Anyway, that’s that, I WON! I AM A WINNAR! YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!

So I guess this is basically a State of the Uterus address. Only gonna explain where I feel the need and it’s in no particular order. :o)

- I’m annoyed at my mom and she knows it.

- Blake’s having issues with his mom and I don’t even know what’s going on now.

- I’ve been playing a lot of Warcraft. New guilds are exciting. I’m playing a new faction, more or less, so a lot of the game is still new to me. I only played Horde a few times and always with a clone of the same character. Belf/shadow priest/Endometria. At least 3 times. But only to like, level 2 tops 2 times and late 30′s once. I made a million toons that I got to 10 or 15 when I played Warcraft before, but they were Alliance and I think Alliance is a lot easier, at least to get around. I feel completely lost, Horde-side. We’re playing on a PvP server, which, to the people reading this who don’t play WoW, means “player vs player” and most people, including me, find it harder to level a toon to the 70′s or 80′s, especially if you rely on soloing (playing alone) for most of your play time because there are people who are 10 million times more skilled than your average world monster or creature you have to kill, trying to gank your ass and camp it. Camping it means that they wait for you to resurrect yourself so they can do it again…and again….and again.

Word from my high level guildmates who are starting to have to go in the “flagged” areas to do their questing, this server appears to be more Alliance than Horde, meaning we’re outnumbered, which sucks and intimidates me. I don’t know if our server name is an Alliance name or a Horde name, but last time Blake & I  played on a PvE server (except for The Cotton Pwnies days) with an Alliance name and Alliance definitely outnumbered the Horde the whole time. Soooo, I fear that maybe we picked an Alliance named server to play Horde on and that there are enough geeks who know the difference and choose their factions accordingly and our PvP time is going to be a losing battle. I figure though, regardless of that, we’re getting to the point where everyone’s really close to 20 (the level you more or less have to quest in flagged areas)  and if we group quest, we’ll all have a better survival rate and get picked on less frequently.

We use a program called Ventrillo that allows us to speak to our guildmates (who are logged in) using a headset, which will also help (if people start using it, which I’m bad for too because I just really don’t like talking, so I just listen and type instead).

Last night we ran our first guild instance/dungeon, which took longer than it should have, but for the first time any of us had ever played together, I think we did a pretty good job. Some of our guildmates have been doing random PUG (pick up group) instances without us, to get gear I guess, but a few of us (Stephy/hunter, her husband K (holy priest – so heals), Warcorp (tankadin), me (face melter) & Blake (troll shaman, mon) waited to do it together and I think that’s awesome. I can’t wait to do harder stuff with these guys, like instances that take a whole Saturday and bosses that actually need strategy and MORE DOTS to take down. :oD K did a really good job of telling us where to go so we didn’t get lost. (Which I found impressive because I didn’t know where the hell we were half the time because I’d only even done Wailing Caverns like, once, and we didn’t finish it.)

I kinda think it’s funny that we’re playing in a Camwhores guild. Some companies have their softball teams, we have our WoW guild!

- I have the shits and have been up since 6am. This means I’m probably going to sleep most of the day since I don’t think we went to bed until about 12:45am. Oops.

- Tonight is my first yoga class and I’m terrified. Blake doesn’t even know how long the class is and he says that it’s Hatha yoga, whatever that means. Probably the only 3 things I’m going to accomplish today is looking up what that means, having a shower and sleeping. Especially since I believe it’s supposed to rain all day, or at least threatening to. The rest of the time will be spent being neurotic, or more to the point, sitting on WoW just chatting with people while I wait for an herb supplier in Silvermoon City spawn herbs that I can then sell to other people on the Auction House for a ridiculous amount of gold. (The economy on this server is absolutely fucked.)

- My friends in Oregon, Robert and Robin Peate, are like, having a baby as I type this, at home! I just think that’s so exciting and while I know updating LJ or Facebook isn’t or shouldn’t be high on the priority list during this time, I can’t help but refresh anyway.

- I have not touched a paintbrush in at least a week. Nothing is finished. Nothing is close to finished except for my sign, and I don’t care. Can’t say when I’ll pick up a paintbrush again. Maybe when we have good movies to watch while I paint. Maybe not until the novelty of WoW wears off. Really, I should be painting and then while things dry play WoW, but I’m still working on my productivity management system.

- My front garden has bachelor’s buttons galore but no cosmos yet and the “new” part at the bottom of the garden is taking it’s sweet time growing in. Veggie garden is leaving me unimpressed. My tomato plants are finally thriving and next weekend we have to tie the plants to the cages. My peppers are piddly in comparison and I’m worried we’re not going to get a very big yield there. Lettuce is starting to poke its head up and I’m thinking we may have planted the seeds too deep. Maybe I worry too much. None of the herbs are showing life but the garden’s full of weeds and I don’t know what’s good plant from bad so until things start growing and looking like the pictures on the seed packs, I’m not sending the kids out to weed. The beans are growing like crazy, as are the peas, which needed a stake/string trellis to grow up like, last weekend but obviously we had to do other things. The carrots are showing no signs of life. Neither are the onions.

Anyway, when there’s anything interesting to take pictures of, I’ll do so. Right now both gardens are pretty unimpressive, but I’m learning a lot just by watching, like plant lettuce shallowly and maybe skip the peppers next year.

- Our neighbour to the right, who owns the bar in town, has a for sale sign on his front lawn. So does Wayne & Judy’s old house to the left of us. And the empty lot next to that house has a for sale sign too. That only leaves us and the old lady on the corner in our little section of the road who aren’t for sale. I’m hoping a developer or someone wants all that space and offers us crazy money for our house so we can move. Hey, it could happen!

- I’ve been severely neglecting Twitter.

- I’ve been reading Eat, Pray, Love and am ashamed to report that I’m actually liking it so far. I didn’t want to like it, being basically an “Oprah book”, but I can’t help it, I do. I read the Oprah Biography by Kitty Kelley and I’ll probably never be able to see Oprah the same way again. That was a good read too.

- I was supposed to do a show on Camwhores last night but my vagina started bleeding on Sunday night so that kinda put a damper on things and I had to cancel. I’m still bleeding and just not really in the mood to be on cam, so the show’s been put off indefinitely. I was supposed to bleed all month, which is traditionally what happens, but this month I only bled for 3 days and then a bit of light light light spotting sporadically until yesterday. I’m not sure what’s going to happen when I take my 7 day break from the pill, which will be in 3 days. Anyway, I plan on hanging out on Camwhores for a bit after I post this, if anyone else is around. I won’t be updating my cam, but I’ll sit & chat for a bit.

And I guess that’s really all I have to say at the moment. Things are busy and hectic and complicated but we’re having fun being nerds at the same time and things should calm down once the kids are out of school for the summer.