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’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!

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.

Yesterday I made a post professing my love for this brand of cherry tomatoes called One Sweet Tomato and for the company that produces them, called Sunset Produce, which is a division of Mastronardi Produce. As I said in my post yesterday, they are a local company (well, about 4 hours away, but to me that’s still local) and my beloved One Sweet Tomatoes, as I first suspected due to their incredible sweetness, are not genetically modified in any way. In fact, Sunset Produce was the first produce company to receive non-GMO certification from The Non-GMO Project. I learned this fact yesterday not just from scouring their website in awe that a company could be so ethical and non-evil, but from following them on Twitter where they posted that fact.

Am I laying it on thick enough yet? Nope, I don’t think so. In fact it’s about to get a lot thicker and a little more personal and convoluted by the end of this post.

Yesterday I woke up just before 6am and I saw, via the comments on the One Sweet Tomato post, which was x-posted to Live Journal, that my friend Stephy had visited their site and my new favourite tomatoes were in fact not GMO at all. And from that comment, I decided to check out their site myself, because when I get obsessed with something, I really get obsessed, as many of you can attest, and what I found on their site was a company that cares about the environment (they use energy saving bulbs in their warehouses during the winter but skylights the rest of the year to cut down on energy consumption, for example), a company that cares about feeding families healthy, quality foods and inadvertently, a company staffed by extremely nice people.

By the time I was finished looking at the site, I was clicking on the “Careers” section because I was ready to start working in the greenhouse! I, Sunny Crittenden, whose life goal it has been for her 31 years of existence, was willing to throw slackerdom to the wind and get a  j o b . I mean, nevermind that they’re 4 hours away, I was going to make Blake get a new job too. In fact, they happened to be looking for a sys admin, so that was actually kind of doable.

But then I realized I was probably being delusional from a lack of sleep and decided to use their contact form to profess my love for their products and their company, tell them that despite the fact that their One Sweet Peppers were on sale this week at Foodland, our tiny local Foodland didn’t carry them (boooo) and to ask if they were going to include their non-GMO certification on their packaging anytime soon. I also told them that I’d made a post about their One Sweet Tomatoes on my site and threw them a link.

About half an hour later, I get an e-mail back from Chris Veillon, the Director of Marketing for the company. Fancy that, an e-mail from a real live person. At 7am no less! He gave me a run down of the chain of command in a grocery store and how to request their products in our local Foodland, said that they were working on packaging redesign to include their non-GMO status and “Please send me your mailing address and I would be glad to send you a small care package of the best SUNSET® produce there is for you and your family to enjoy.“

So impressed with this person and the offer of awesome free produce to a random stranger who just likes their tomatoes, I e-mailed him back with a few thoughts on the importance of non-GMO packaging (likely not telling him anything he didn’t already know, heh), that I would most definitely speak to the produce manager of our local grocery store to see if we could get more of their products in our produce section and of course, my address for this mysterious, yet I could tell it on my bones, awesome care package.

Well, I never heard back after that, but that’s probably because Chris is a busy guy.

Now here’s where things get personal and convoluted. The more I milled the whole morning’s experience, being steeped in Sunset Produce mania, around in my head, the more excited I became and by the time Blake woke up I had practically pounced on him to share all of this new information I had just discovered because hey, that’s what I do. So then I got him checking out their website and agreeing that they are, as I had told him, full of awesomesauce.

Well Blake had the day off because yesterday I had a date with a nutritionist (synchronicity!) and an unfortunate date with a dentist and because I don’t drive or really leave the house alone, Blake takes vacation days when I have appointments. The appointments? Neither here nor there really. I got accepted into the metabolic workshop I was hoping for and it’ll start in either June or August. It will be 10 weeks long, every Tuesday for 2 hours, and from what was described it’ll be really comprehensive. Cool. Looking forward to it. I want to know more about food and what it does inside our bodies, especially having to due with the metabolism as mine was adversely affected by medication a couple of years ago resulting in crazy, unfair weight gain and high cholesterol, as you all know. Dentist? NOt all that exciting either. I have a small cavity on the left side in one of my molars. This is actually a small victory because it’s my first cavity in over 2 years, whereas prior to that, when I was drinking 2.5L of Coke every day, I spent about a million agonizing hours in the dentist’s chair while I racked up a good $8,000 in (insured) dental bills.

But as I said, the appointments themselves, not all that important, which is why they don’t get their own posts. What IS important is that Blake and I had a lot of time to talk yesterday and our talking mostly had to do with that sys admin position at Sunset Produce. He was just as stoked about the company as I was and this is part of the reason he and I get along so well, when we believe in something, we go full tilt and by halfway through the day, we decided that we’d like a shot at becoming a Sunset Produce family. We looked up the town where they were located and much to our surprise, we found that they were actively recruiting people just like us to help come populate it. We also found out that it’s the southern-most town in Ontario, meaning much milder winters than we have here, and it’s really close to the Detroit/Windsor border crossing so when Blake’s mother decides to stop being an impossible shrew, visiting would happen much more frequently (she lives just outside of Detroit – for those new to Sunnyland, Blake is American and from MI) and it would make things easier as far as getting together when Blake’s sisters come into town from CA.

There’s also a ferry that’ll take us to Ohio, if we ever wanted to go, although my friend Kevin, when told this, said “I’m not sure that’s a benefit,” but WHATEVER KEVIN, Blake & I met in Ohio 9 years ago this fall so it holds a special place in our hearts.

So Blake & I keep getting each other more and more excited about the prospect of making this actually happen and what finally undid us was going to Realtor.ca and looking to see what the housing market is like down there. To make a long story short, there is a hell of a lot more bang for our buck down there than there is anywhere even close to up here. In fact, after spending several hours looking at houses, I finally found the one I want, which is within our budget, pending the sys admin position pays at least what Blake’s making now, and it is literally my dream house – at least from the pics. I’ve always wanted a pool, this house has one. I’ve always wanted a Victorian house, this house is one. This house is in town, where I can walk to things. There is an elementary school within a closer walking distance than the kids have now.

Now, it’s actually not in the same town as the Sunset Produce headquarters, but Blake’s commute would only be about 10 or 15 minutes and Blake & I actually have a little bit of history with this town too. It’s called Leamington, which probably means nothing to any of you, but it was the one of, if not THE first stop on the XL Indie Tour which Scratching Post was a part of, which I worked the entirety of for them and this particular location was the first time Blake and I ever really hung out. We would be engaged a few months later and married the following summer.

Leamington is probably best known for being where Heinz ketchup is made, which is no surprise since the next town over, Kingsville, where Sunset Produce is located, is where all the greenhouses are in this province (more or less). As a result of this type of industry, Leamington and I’m gonna assume Kingsville too, has a high latino population and Blake was so stoked when we went on Google Street View and found all kinds of “authentic” Mexican restaurants and grocery stores. Another positive aspect to this is that, say all of this does magically happen for us and Blake gets the job and we get the house and the universe aligns etc etc? It would mean that our kids would go to a school with mixed ethnicities. (And why is spellcheck saying that’s not a word?) Where we are now is…as whitewashed as it comes, as were all the little towns I grew up in and it only gets whiter the further North you go. Now don’t get me wrong, I like white people, but when all you see growing up are people who look like you, it can lead to being less open-minded, less accepting and less tolerant and we’re trying to raise open-minded, accepting and tolerant kids. Spanish is spoken in this house just as much as French is, we eat Thai and Chinese and Mexican food, but obviously that’s not the same as being raised in an area where every single person in the whole town is the same skintone as you. Blake, growing up right outside Detroit, grew up with ethnic diversity and finds living here really strange because there just isn’t that up here outside of the major metropolitan areas. But even then, Barrie’s pretty big, but still probably 80% white. When we’ve talked about moving before, ethnic diversity and different cultures have both been important to Blake, but living in a small town has always been important to me and in Ontario you don’t really get to have both – except in Leamington, which is something I noticed about it the first and only time I’ve ever been there.

So this is what Blake and I have decided to start working toward. The first step is to get a foot in the door with Sunset Produce and get Blake an interview for the sys admin position. Blake is very very smart and I’m convinced that if he can get an interview, he can make this happen. If all goes well there, he’s going to tell them he can start immediately, which will be extremely expensive and inconvenient considering he’ll have to live at a hotel or something down there during the week and come up here on weekends to help me do groceries and get the mail & stuff, until we sell this house. And unfortunately, this house needs a little “lipstick & rouge” to be able to sell too, which I guess I’ll do myself while he’s down there working, if this all comes to fruition. Then there’s the matter of selling this house while buying another house, which we realize people do all the time, we just have absolutely no idea how that works. And people, I really really REALLY want the house I linked. The location is perfect, it has everything I want (at least by the description and pictures) – it is the “forever home”.

Yes, we will be over 5 hours away from my dad, Lisa and my little sisters, but honestly, we only really see them once or twice a year (one of those times being Xmas) and they’re both on Facebook so I’m not too worried about that. We will be about 3 hours away from Alex & Ronny who are pretty much our only “real life” friends and that’ll suck, but I think their goal is to end up in Toronto anyway, so that’s only about 2 hours away and they’ll be passing right through our town pretty much to visit Ronny’s family in MI, so there’s always that. And again, I talk to both of them online more than we see them offline, so I’m not all that worried about them either. I’m not sure how far away we’ll be from my mom, I’m gonna guess 3 hours, which is about double how far way we are now, which will suck and will make Xmas a little more complicated, but I’m sure it can be worked around easily enough. Again, I talk to her on Facebook or e-mail more than in person anyway, so I’m sure we’ll survive.

Blake and I really really want this. Madison really really wants this too (we showed her the house, the town, everything) and says the house I want is “one dishwasher away from being perfect”. Wes…has no clue we’re even thinking about this, but when we moved up here when Madison was more or less the same age, she survived, so I’m sure he will too.

And about me working in the Sunset greenhouses if this happens and there’s an opening? I don’t think I’m kidding about that. As anyone who reads this blog knows, I really like to grow things. When it came to college, it was literally a toss up between going to school for herbalism and working in a local greenhouse that only grew herbs or advertising. There was more money in advertising and a lot less schooling. Anyway, as far as a job, I’m not making any promises, I’m just saying it’s a consideration. We want to be a Sunset Produce family.

So that’s my big news of yesterday that I wasn’t sure I’d write about for fear of jinxing ourselves.

My big news of today is not as life-altering but is still exciting nonetheless. My care package from Sunset Produce came! That Chris Veillon doesn’t fool around!

Last night I woke up at 3am, after going to bed at 11pm and couldn’t get back to sleep, which seems to be my current pattern of (not) sleeping. Not a huge deal, this happens every spring and every fall, but that means I’m assuming I was having a nap when the delivery came because I never heard the door.

When Madison came home from school, she came in carrying this styrofoam cooler about as long as my coffee table and almost as wide. Immediately I knew what it was because what else would need to be kept cool? And oh man, was I excited. I got out my trusty exacto knife and sliced apart the tape holding the lid onto the bottom and then I carefully opened it up to see what was inside.

What was inside was a whole lot of bubble wrap (which I’ll keep and use to wrap paintings with) with Chris’ card on top, which I’ve cropped here so a million people don’t call his office asking for care packages too:

I unwrapped everything inside the cooler and tried to make a nifty display to show you all, but the light in my office sucks and I didn’t really do a good job, so this is going to be a slightly pic-intensive post.

Madison & I each took an armload into the kitchen and I took pictures of one thing, then I’d hand it off to her to put away in the fridge. First up is two more containers of One Sweet Tomatoes, which I cannot stress enough, are absolutely amazing. In fact, that’s what I had for dinner last night while we watched LOST, a caesar salad with a side of One Sweet Tomatoes.

And the timing of these two containers couldn’t be better because the one container I have left in the fridge is getting a little soft and there aren’t any more at the grocery store because we literally bought all they had over the last two weeks.

Next up is MINZANO tomatoes which even have their own website because for whatever reason they are just that special. I’m very curious about these.

Then comes Campari tomatoes, which, from what I understand is what Sunset’s best known for. They aren’t as big as the random Ontario hot house tomatoes I have in my fridge (I unfortunately just bought like, 6 of them – oops) but their colour is a LOT nicer and I’m thinking that I’m going to try them tomorrow night when I plan on having P.L.T.’s for dinner. (“P” is for “peameal bacon”….which I’m really sick of explaining so just Wiki it.)

Then we have a pack of 3 sweet bell peppers, which Blake is turning into fajitas as I type this. He just walked in here a few minutes ago freaking out at how flavourful they are, so already they’re a big hit and I happen to know that our local grocery store has these because that’s what “Compliments” brand is.

Now comes the mini cucumbers, which are like English cucumbers in that the skin is edible. I plan to send these with the kids in their lunch because I think it’d be a waste to cut them up into slices or into a salad. These look like they’re meant to just eat plain.

Now here’s the thing about the next items. I hate peppers. Like a lot. When I was little I would eat them raw with dip and be totally fine, but as an adult they just never worked out for me. I pick them out of stir-fries and am sometimes offended that they’re even IN my stir-fry, I can’t stand spaghetti sauce if there’s even the tracest amount of peppers in it and often other things with peppers in it gives me a headache, so I avoid them like the plague.

That said, after trying the One Sweet Tomatoes and loving them, when I saw that the same company made One Sweet Peppers and they happened to be on sale this week, I’d fully intended to try them. However as I mentioned, our grocery store didn’t have them, so I couldn’t, but I was pleased to find that Chris had included two containers of them in our care package because if I’m ever going to like peppers, these are going to be the ones.

Since I inadvertently had a 1300 calorie breakfast this morning (don’t even ask), my dinner plans are to have a veggie/cheese platter of One Sweet Tomatoes, Minzano tomatoes, some English cucumber I already have cut up in the fridge, some havarti cheese,  Wheat Thins and these One Sweet Peppers.

And finally this brings us to our last item which excites me even though I probably won’t be the one eating them due to my aforementioned dislike of peppers (everyone else in the house likes them though, so they will get eaten, likely with gusto):

They are MYSTERIOUSLY sweet long peppers.
And they look really cool too, that’s what excited me about them – I just think they’re absolutely beautiful.

Obviously they’re long and shiny and very very red. I’m probably going to try these, but I won’t be too surprised at all if I don’t like them because they look very….peppery.

Anyway, this gigantic post was brought to you by Sunset Produce and I will try to keep everyone abreast of the job situation and what everyone thinks of our little bounty here once we’ve tried everything. And if you’ll excuse me, I have a thank you e-mail to write.

And now for something completely different, I give you the musical stylings of my best friend, Alexandria Gillespie:

And now onto other things…

Blake & I had a pretty wicked fight last night where he called me a “bigot” due to a misunderstanding about whether or not I accepted people who identify as gender neutral as valid (I do) and we were up until about 3am talking about it. There are 2 things you never ever call me, ever: 1. A “cunt”, unless you’re being playful and 2. A bigot because I accept everyone for whoever or whatever they are or say they are. I am very much a live and let live kinda person and it killed me last night that the person in the world who knows me best and loves me the most would call me such a thing when they should know me better than to think that was true in any capacity.

But everything’s okay now and the misunderstanding has been cleared up.

Yesterday was a pretty rough day emotionally between that situation, thinking earlier in the day that Blake was mad at me and ignoring me for reasons I couldn’t fathom and because I watched the series finale of Six Feet Under which utterly destroyed me for most of the afternoon. Not to mention the fact that I’m not the most emotionally stable person these days and I’ve been “bleeding brown” for the last week & a half despite only being halfway through my last month of birth control pills. (For those not in the know, I take them for 3 months non-stop, without a period, then have a period and repeat because of my endometriosis. The last month and the period following it is always brutal and requires lots and lots of drugs.)

I think when I see my shrink on the 8th, I’m going to ask her to up my medication because clearly I’m not stable right now. The normal dose for my mood stabilizer is 4 pills a day (I forget the mg dosage) and I currently take 3. I’m thinking I should probably be at 4. I’m also going to ask her for a new anti-anxiety medication because the clonazepam doesn’t seem to be cutting it these days. I usually take 2 before I go to sleep to curb “racing thoughts” and I can take it during the day if I’m having anxiety, but lately I’ve been having to take 3 or 4 just to get to sleep and some days I need to take 2 of them, plus Ativan (lorazepam) to keep my anxiety somewhat under control. I’ve heard good things about Xanax so maybe she’ll put me on that. She’s no doubt going to ask me what I think is causing the anxiety and I honest to god have no idea. I mean, normally I’m good at pinpointing things like that, but this is just coming straight out of left field. Yeah, I’m really stressed out about Wes’ birthday party, but I’ve been at that level of stress before and I’ve never had a problem with keeping things under control with the medications available to me. So I dunno.

And I haven’t been depressed, necessarily, but sad and unmotivated. Kinda numb and neutral. I have two paintings I should be working on right now, one that’s been in the works for over a year now, and while they sit on my coffee table waiting to be completed, I don’t seem to have the drive right now to work on them.

And Etsy…holy shit, Etsy. At the suggestion of my internet buddy, Ashley, whose grandmother sells aprons on Etsy and has for quite some time, I spent most of this week in the Etsy forums (and chat) talking to people and learning as much as I can and really, selling on Etsy has about as many tricks and rules as selling on eBay, which is a site I completely hate. Now, I’m not going to abandon Etsy, I still think it’s the best venue for my work at this time, but the suggestions as far as getting sales are VAST and there’s a lot more marketing involved than I’d previously anticipated. Naively, I figured I’d just list stuff and walk away, but oh ho ho, that is so not how Etsy works.

First, there’s the renewing game. With how Etsy’s search results work, which they’re actually in the process of tweaking but that’s kind of besides the point, it’s easy for your items to get buried if they haven’t been recently put up so what people do is they “renew” items, which pretty much means relisting them again so they show up at the top of the search results and stay on the main page and thus, more visible, longer. This of course costs $0.20, the same as listing an item to begin with. Most people, or at least the successful ones, renew several items per day, every single day. This week I’ve been doing that myself with mixed results, yes my hearts and views have gone up, but no sales have come from it.

Everyone on Etsy says to be patient, some people go 6 months to a year before making their first sale. That’s not exactly encouraging, but at least I know it’s not just me or what I’m selling. In fact a lot of the threads in the Etsy forums are about how sales are down for just about everyone due to the economy taking a giant shit.

But back to promotion. So Etsy gives you a couple of tools for promoting your shop. One is the “Etsy mini”, which you can see in my shop here on my site because I added it the other day. You can add this to various blogs and websites etc. but really, the only venue I have for this item is here on my site. The other tool they give you is a Facebook app that adds a tab to your profile or fan page (another reason to go the fan page route rather than a group) that basically shows your entire shop. It’s actually pretty cool and you can see it in action on my fan page. (I added it to my personal profile as well.) But that’s really the only tools Etsy gives you for promoting your shop.

Advice from other people though, well, there’s plenty. Some suggest that your personal avatar (your user icon) should be a picture of something you sell because if you post in the forums and they like the item in your avatar, they’re more likely to visit your shop. And buyers DO read the forums apparently. On the same token however, if they don’t like the item in your avatar, they may pass your shop over. That’s why I’ve chosen to stick with the picture of myself that I’ve had on Etsy since I opened my account a few years ago. Well that and Etsy won’t seem to let me change it. Using a picture of yourself, especially an interesting one, was also recommended in several threads.

Other  buts of advice were to make sure your spelling and grammar are impeccable, which I absolutely agree with, and to make your shop announcement interesting but not too long. Honestly, mine is probably too long. The other bit of advice to do with this was to make sure you fill out your shop’s policies in full and be as clear (and as entertaining) as possible. Also, filling out your personal profile is something you want to do as well because apparently people actually read those. (I haven’t really filled mine out yet, but I plan on it.) Some people suggested that in your personal profile or in the first section of your shop policies, you discuss your creative process and how each item is made. I still have to do that too, but as some people pointed out after that piece of advice popped up in the forums, you don’t want to give away too much because that can lead to copycats.

Then comes other forms of marketing that you do off-site. The main gist of most of these promotional topics was that you shouldn’t rely on Etsy’s current market to make your sales, you should concentrate on bringing outside people from your world into your Etsy shop and there are literally a million ways to do this. One suggestion, which I’d already planned on, was to register a domain name and have it point to your Etsy shop so people can find you easier and your Googlability goes up. Another suggestion was to create bookmarks or postcards or other small items with the url to your shop and give a stack of whatever those items are to your family, friends and co-workers to hand out for you. Most people can do this with whatever kind of printer they have at home. I don’t have a printer (well, not one that really works anyway) so this isn’t an option for me yet, but it’s something that I’ve been giving a great deal of thought to.

More suggestions came in the form of advertising on the internet, like with Facebook ads and advertising on blogs. That’s too rich for my blood, so I’m not going to do that, but apparently it works. One woman said that she makes postcard-sized business cards with her Etsy shop’s url on them and she goes to Barnes & Noble once a month to insert these cards into all of the craft magazines. She swears this works. (I’m skeptical, but it’s still an interesting idea.)

There is just this whole world of Etsy that I never knew existed until I started reading the forums and while a lot of it is really just good common sense marketing, there are levels to it I’d  never even considered, like advertising outside of the internet or playing the “renewing” game. My brain is pretty fried from absorbing all of this information, but I’m determined to put some of it into practice over the weekend, especially simple things like coming up with a wicked bio for my personal profile page.

Oh and more things to consider is your “relevancy”, which is part of Etsy’s new, experimental search system. LIke, for your titles, you should say what the thing is and then what it’s called. For example my titles for items were originally just what I called them, like “just like honey”, but after readong more about it, I changed them to “Original Painting – just like honey” because people search for original paintings, they don’t search for “just like honey”. And then there’s also your tags, which you have two sets of. One is categorical as far as what your item is and one is based on the materials used in the item. There’s like, a whole science to using tags, which I understand due to using tags and metatags for search engine optimization on websites, but when my mom starts selling on Etsy, I may have to help her with that.

And Etsy even has RULES on tags. For example, you can’t tag something “valentines day” because it would make a nice Valentine’s Day gift, you can only tag it with that if it’s something Valentine’s related like a heart-shaped soap or a hand-made V-Day card. There’s even a similar rule pertaining to tagging your items by colour, which admittedly I don’t fully understand but I’ll look into it more when I start selling my ACEOs by colour.

Isn’t all this shit crazy though? I mean, who knew Etsy was this complicated? I certainly didn’t. I gotta say, my inner ad geek is kinda loving it though and I can’t wait to have a little bit of capital to spend on things like advertising.

And speaking of Etsy, I still need a banner! E-mail me your 760 x 100 px submissions by February 20th and if I like yours enough to use it, I’ll PayPal you $20! Sunny@SunnyCrittenden.com!

Anyway, that’s what’s been on my mind this week. Blake’s going to be here any minute with our lunch, so I better wrap this up, but chances are I’ll write more later because my brain’s been all over the place and I have shit to say!

Well said, my friend.

(HugNation was raided by 4chan today, which is the context of the above video. For the full archive, click here.)

Ooooooh my god I’m all over the place right now. See, Blake and I have these marathon conversations about life and creativity and expression that are both brain numbing and inspiring at the same time. I love when we talk like this, but unfortunately it’s almost always late at night and by the time we’re done, we’re both exhausted. He’s gone to bed but my brain’s going a mile a minute.

Here’s the thing: I feel like I’ve kind of been in a rut for maybe the past year. Being on proper meds and getting my bipolar disorder under control (more or less) has caused me to change some of my habits. For example, I’m not longer hypergraphic. Prior to getting my meds in order, I would go through a paper notebook usually once a month and I would literally spend like, 4 hours a day just writing writing writing. But now I don’t do that anymore. I still keep a paper journal but I only write in it maybe twice a month and each entry only ends up being a 2 page, bare bones account of what’s happening in my life at the moment rather than a sweeping saga like they were before. Likewise, my blog entries have become a lot more sanitized than they’ve ever been before and Blake & I agreed tonight that that’s somewhat of a problem because I write to process things and if I’m not writing, I’m not processing things, I’m keeping it all inside and that’s A) Not good for me, and B) Not me. At all.

The problem is that for some reason I began self-censoring myself, and rather harshly, and I don’t really know why I started doing that and now it’s gotten to the point where I’m completely frustrated by it. Blogging is like, the fucking wild wild West and there aren’t really any established rules on what you can and cannot write about or more importantly WHO you can and cannot write about. All of that is really left up to the writer and over the past year or so I’ve had trouble reconciling what’s right and what’s wrong as far as what I can write about that’s happening in my life.

Certain people – well, really only one – have asked me specifically not to write about them, not to even mention them, and I’ve honoured that…but there’s a “but” coming. The person who specifically asked me not to write about them no longer deserves that kind of respect and as it turns out, never really did in the first place. With the exception of that one person, my policy has always been that if you are a part of my life, I’m going to write about you at some point, plain & simple, because to do otherwise is self-censorship and that makes me a sad panda, it really does. The other policy I’ve always had with this whole blogging thing is that if you don’t want to be portrayed as a douche, don’t do douchey things. I mean, I think that too is also a pretty simple concept, don’t you agree?

So self-censorship…obviously there has to be some but I think I drew my line in such a way that it left me very little wiggle room and I just don’t write the way I used to and I hate that. I like being an open book, I like being a ridiculously honest person, I like that part of me and this week I realized that I’ve lost a lot of that and dammit, I want it back. My moods are stable, my meds are working, my light therapy is working, I’m making progress in so many areas as far as immersion therapy, it’s time to reclaim certain aspects of myself I put on hold for so long.

For example, a large part of the reason I left Camwhores 2 years ago was because I wasn’t stable and I didn’t really trust myself to have an outlet to instantly broadcast anything I wanted to. Near the end there, I was sad one day and I posted a picture of myself crying – for the first time in my (at the time) 7 year camming history. That was when I realized that I needed to reign myself in and get better before I could go on. I hope that makes sense.

During that time, as most of you know if you’ve been reading along, I stopped writing about certain things. For a few months there my entire Live Journal was just Loud Twitter updates because that’s all I could handle at the time. I stopped seeing the world in the unique way I normally would.

But I’m okay now, or close to it. I’m stronger. I trust myself and my own judgment and it’s time to jump on the floor and bang on the ceiling  with a broom (as my shrink puts it) and maybe shake some things up. Wake up my little readership and get them writing again themselves as so many seem to have abandoned their blogs and Live Journal for Facebook and Twitter. Have opinions. Talk to me.

I want to write about the things that are actually happening in my life again. Y’know the expression “dance like no one’s watching”? Well I’m going to write like no one’s reading. Until tonight I had so much fear and I don’t even know where it came from. I had fear about writing about Wayne & Judy in case Judy’s daughter Ashley was reading and her interpretation in telling them about it would be negative. I had fear about writing about my mother for fear of her getting pissed off at me. I had fear about writing about Blake’s mother because I know she reads and she’s the one who asked me (through Blake) specifically never to even mention her online. But in talking to Blake tonight, we sort of found the problem. When I first started writing publicly about my life, the internet was still relatively small and no one I really knew, except for Blake and some of the Scratching Post kids, was reading the things I wrote. And then my mom got online. And then Blake’s mom started reading. And now Blake’s co-workers are reading. And with all of these people reading, I kind of froze, almost like stage fright, and now I’m in this stupid rut of mine.

But Blake and I talked about it and he said to me that who is he to tell me what I can and can’t write about? And who is anyone else to tell me the same? People have to trust my judgment and if they don’t like what’s being written about them they either have to, as I said, stop doing douchey things, or start doing things to portray themselves in a better light. All I do is write what I see and feel, I simply write the truth. If I want to tell you that last night Wayne & Judy drank 28 beer and Wayne was so drunk he pissed all over the floor and toilet seat, well dammit, I’m going to because that’s what happened. If Wayne doesn’t want me writing about something like that, then don’t fucking do it. (Although honestly, I doubt Wayne would care and the incident was actually really funny. Plus they don’t even have internet and wouldn’t read a post even this long so I don’t think they’d see it or care if they did.)

So, starting today, right now, I’m going to once again be more open and honest about the happenings of my life and that includes everyone in it. People who are truly my friends and really know me will totally understand and be totally on board with this, others…well they may not be but that’s just too damn bad. I’m done censoring myself out of respect for people who don’t deserve that respect. What am I talking about? Well, keep reading, here’s where things start getting  juicy.

But where to even start? I guess the biggest thing happening in our lives right now, or at least the biggest conflict is Blake’s mother, Brooke. Right now Blake and Brooke are battling via e-mail over comments she made about me when Blake was in Michigan last month. See, when I first met Brooke – 8 years ago now – I thought she was pretty cool but that facade quickly dissipated and I found myself in a monster-in-law type of situation. I don’t even know where it all began, really, this has been an issue that long, but maybe I should start with after Blake & I got married because I don’t feel like telling the tale of our actual wedding which neither of our mothers were invited to.

After Blake and I got married and I was pregnant with Wes, Brooke would call the house constantly and if I picked up the phone it would either be something inane like what size of clothes Madison wore because she was out shopping at the time and saw something Madison might look cute in – despite the fact that we’d told her Madison’s size at least 5 times prior to that and strangely these cute things for Madison never seemed to appear. In other words, these calls were just calls to call. To this day I don’t even know what their purpose was. Other times when I’d pick up the phone, she’d give me all kinds of bad and unwanted advice and would basically tell me that I wasn’t doing enough as a wife and mother, so I stopped answering the phone.

But here’s the thing: I’ve never really been a phone person, that’s just not how I communicate, so it was a special effort to answer the phone for her in the first place so to be put down just about every time I did, didn’t really encourage me to keep taking the calls. See what I’m saying?

So once I stopped taking the calls – and again, keep in mind that I don’t take calls from pretty much anyone – that’s when she’d start calling Blake on his cell and complain that I never answered the phone. Well gee lady, I wonder why. Blake explained to her that I’m not just a phone person – for YEARS – but the complaints didn’t stop until about two years ago. Without going into huge detail (maybe I will one day, just not tonight), about two years ago Blake and Brooke had basically an e-mail war that lasted almost a year. I can’t even remember how it got resolved off the top of my head, but it did and ever since, I’ve done my best to continue being nothing but nice to this woman. I answer her e-mails, we send each other Growing Gifts and things like that on Facebook with little notes attached and while it all seems like minor communication on the surface, it’s actually huge for me and here I thought after 6 years of her flat out disliking me and flat out saying that I wasn’t good enough for her son and that Blake wasn’t living up to his full potential because of me etc. that she was finally starting to get to know me and maybe even liking me. In fact, I think it was her last visit last fall where she gave me a gift of these neat tin ladies with great quotes on them that I have hanging in my office. I thought that after all these years, we were finally starting to make progress and maybe even bond a little bit.

But then Blake’s cousin’s wife died and he had to go to Michigan for the funeral last month and on one of the nights he was there, his mom got two drinks into her and just let loose saying all kinds of negative things about me. Want a list? Here it is:

• *Everyone* has mental illness, the people she knows who are mentally ill are worse off than me and they can do things I can’t, like work. (“my whole family was mentally ill and half were institutionalized and we could all work. . .”)

• She’s scared I’m taking advantage of Blake. That I “make” him do everything. (When in reality I don’t “make” him do anything and while he does do more than I do, I don’t exactly sit at home and eat bon bons either. I mean, who did she think was looking after the kids, the house and the dogs while Blake was in Michigan?)

• She claims she doesn’t read my site or anything but she’s pissed because I apparently made a blog post where I said that because I stay home and I’m an artist I’m better than people who work. (“she said that you were basically saying how much better you are than people who get up with their kids every day and how much better you are than people who have jobs. She basically said you were saying you’re an artist and anyone who works or takes care of kids all day is a sell out and not as good as you”. This one baffles me BECAUSE THAT SOUNDS SOOOO MUCH LIKE SOMETHING I’D SAY, so I asked Blake to get more info but there was none to be had.)

• Blake said she said, “I may have neglected to tell Joyce the part about you not wanting the present because you wanted the kids treated as equals” or something like that. This is a long dead issue but Joyce is Blake’s mom’s best friend and she wanted to buy a savings bond for Blake’s “first born child” and we freaked because we want our kids treated as equals and Wes was NOT Blake’s first child. Blake’s mom hounded us forEVER about getting Wes an American SSN so they could buy bonds for him, but Joyce supposedly had no intentions of getting any for Madison, so we cut her out of our lives and said thanks but no thanks. According to Blake: “Joyce never knew we had an issue with anything, so we were just ungrateful fucks.”

• She wants to get our kids AMERICAN FUCKING PASSPORTS for Xmas. When I asked why, Blake said “she thinks that being Canadian will hold them back in life, but if they have official US docs they will magically be better off”.

For the last two years I have been nothing but nice to this woman. I’ve met her half way as much as I’m capable of. I reply to every non-fwd e-mail she sends me. I write on her Facebook wall. I send her Growing Gifts. I used to play Scrabble with her on Facebook until Blake told me she uses a program to cheat. I do way more for her than she does for me as far as meeting someone halfway and this is the shit we get? It’s obvious that she still has a deep dislike for me, the same dislike she’s had since day one, meaning that all of the stuff we’ve been doing together that I thought was progress was all meaningless and phony on her end. Here I was being genuine and trying my best to be what I thought she wanted me to be but the whole time she was reading my site and feeling negative about all the things I do. She was a troll, by my definition, she just doesn’t leave comments (to my knowledge).

Worse, she seems to think she has to “enlighten” Blake on what a horrible person I am because he’s apparently too stupid or naive to see it and that’s completely insulting to him.

Again – and I cannot stress this enough – until this very moment I have been nothing but kind and humble towards Blake’s mother. When she cornered me in her kitchen a few years ago (the last time we went to Michigan) to literally tell me that Blake is such & such a way and that I’m holding him back from his true potential, I took it in stride and never fought back or stood up for myself or anything. I just took it. (I’m not good with confrontation.) She pulled a similar move in my own kitchen a few years ago as well and it was the same thing, I just said something neutral and walked out of the room. I have never been hostile or negative or anything like that towards this woman EVER and as I said, within the past two years here I was being honest and thoughtful and trying to build a relationship and the second she gets Blake alone, she tears me down.

I think Blake was more upset about the things she said than I was. I was hurt by them, yes, because I honestly thought we were building a relationship here and her actions were genuine and when I found out they were just an act, it stung because I was making an honest effort…and it apparently got me nowhere. When Blake got home, he said that he’d let the dust settle from the funeral and when things had calmed down, he’d e-mail his mom and settle this shit once and for all. I don’t know how many e-mails have flown back and forth at this point, but the first e-mail went out last weekend and they’re still battling it out so who knows when this is going to be over or if it’s ever going to be over. I mean godammit, Blake and I have been together for 8 fucking years, we have a solid relationship and a happy marriage that works, I’m here to stay. At some point she’s going to have to accept that and accept me or we’re going to have no choice but to live our life without her – and that’s pretty much what Blake’s been saying in the e-mails from what I understand.

What he’s leaving out though, is that she also needs to accept Blake for who he is. Blake has a job he loves in a field he loves and he even acknowledges the fact that he wouldn’t be where he is right now – and be happy – without me. Blake’s mom, according to Blake, expects him to have made his first million by now and have a trophy wife who will host Superbowl parties, attend dinner meetings and have a power career of her own. While we’re happy and accept each other for who we are, we have Blake’s mom who sees both of us as nothing but a disappointment.

And did you know that when I was in the hospital in 2006 because I was having a psychotic episode Brooke’s advice to Blake was to pack up the kids, drive down to her house in Michigan and fucking LEAVE ME? I mean what reality does this woman even live in?

She says she doesn’t even know me because she’s only met me about a dozen times, but at the same time, she’s been reading my site since Blake and I got together and I’ve most definitely met her more than a dozen times and while she claims she hasn’t gotten to know me well enough to love me, she’s certainly displayed that she’s gotten to know me well enough to dislike me and feel negatively towards me.

Blake’s been saying this the whole time we’ve been married: that there is nothing I can do to please his mother because I’m simply not the woman he was supposed to marry. Right now he’s told me to stop even trying to make an effort with her because the two years I  did try obviously got me nowhere so what’s the point? He says his mother needs to examine her feelings toward me and resolve them on her own before we can move forward and until she does that, I’ll never get anywhere with her.

I don’t know how long this is going to take. I don’t know how long this e-mail war is going to last. All I know is that I’m staying the fuck out of it and leaving it between them because there’s no place for me in this discussion even though it’s pretty much about me. I don’t know what the right thing to do is anymore – I thought I was doing it! I’d rather do nothing than misstep and at this point in time I simply give up.

The other aspect of this is that Brooke and her husband Charlie want to come up and visit but until this situation is resolved somehow that simply can’t happen. How can I have someone in my home who feels so hostile toward me? Why should I have to put up with being put down in my own comfort zone? The fact is, I don’t have to and I’m not going to and Blake completely agrees.

To expand upon that topic, according to Blake, Brooke and Charlie don’t like coming up here because they get bored. Well if you’re so bored and your grandchildren aren’t entertaining enough, then don’t fucking come up! In a recent phone conversation with his mom, which sort of turned into a fight – while he was at WORK – she said that Charlie would like to do home improvement projects with us and got all offended when Blake said that if we needed to work on the house at all, we’d probably enlist the help of Phil (my dad) because he’s only an hour & a half away and he does this shit for a living, every single day and has a truck if we need lumber or drywall and a million other reasons. Well Brooke took great offense to this for some reason and started a fight about it, saying how Charlie (her husband, if that wasn’t clear) put in someone’s window in something like, an hour or whatever and Blake was just like “where the fuck is this even coming from?” I mean the fact of the matter is, we don’t really DO home improvement projects and we’re certainly not going to call on Charlie to drive 5 hours up here to like, paint our living room ceiling or tile our shower. We’re not going to start a home improvement project when we have company coming (them) and we don’t have the money to just start a home improvement project when they want to come up just so Charlie will be entertained. It just doesn’t make any sense.

But where did this all come from? Well I talked to Blake shortly after his mom had called and he told me about it and I told him exactly where it was coming from: that day or the day before I’d made a post about us moving on Live Journal and how we’d need to fix up our house a bit to sell it and that Wayne had offered to help. THAT is where it all came from, I’m fairly certain. But the thing Blake and I both wonder is: does Charlie even know she’s saying all of this stuff on his behalf? We kind of doubt it. Charlie, as far as I’ve ever been able to tell and Blake agrees, is a pretty laid back, go with the flow, sit & chat kinda guy. It was certainly news to both of us that he suddenly wanted to help us drywall our bathroom because he’s bored out of his skull when he comes up otherwise.

The other issue with them coming up, according to these phone calls Blake gets from his mother while he’s at work, is that it’s too expensive. See, they can’t stay at our house because 1) Our house is very small and our futon isn’t very comfortable, 2) Charlie’s apparently allergic to our dogs and 3) I don’t really want to be alone in the house with them when Blake & the kids go to school and work because his mom corners me, talks down to me and puts me down, so that means they have to stay at a hotel or do what they did last time they came up (for a week) and get a time share somewhere. And this is apparently where the boredom sets in. While the kids are at school and Blake’s at work, they’re left to their own devices and they get bored. I don’t really know what I can do about that. If it were me, I’d do some Googling to see what was around and find something to do, but by the sounds of it, that thought’s never crossed Brooke’s mind. She’d rather complain that they’re bored.

So if it’s boring and too expensive, then I say don’t fucking come up! Plain & simple. If it’s such a chore, such a bother for you to come up to spend money only to not have a good time, then why bother? I mean I don’t have a solution to either problem and neither does Blake. I’m sorry my house isn’t bigger? I’m sorry Charlie’s allergic to my dogs? I’m sorry our kids aren’t entertaining enough for you? I mean what are we supposed to say to that?

What comes to mind is what my mother used to say to me when I was a kid and complained of boredom. She said, rather nastily I might add, “I’m not your entertainer!” and dammit I’m not. If you can’t keep yourself occupied, that isn’t my problem. Complaining about it to us isn’t going to solve your issue, you have to be proactive and go see what’s out there or I dunno, stay home!

I don’t know how to move forward from here. Everything is so convoluted at this point that I worry there’s no turning back. The harder Blake pushes the subject, I think the more his mother is going to resent me, but at the same time, I think he has no other choice than to bring this all up to the surface and address it rather than smile while staring daggers, know what I mean?

And of course Brooke is going to read this post and probably flip out but at this point I don’t even care. Blake doesn’t either. He told me tonight to write whatever I felt I needed to write and I think that’s what I’ve done here, as far as his mother is concerned. Until this whole thing blows over or runs its course or does whatever it’s going to do, I’m just gonna lay low, observe and, for the most part, keep my damn mouth shut on the subject. I wish I had a crystal ball so I knew how this was going to play out, but I don’t and I hate not knowing what to expect, I hate not knowing what to do. Is this post going to make anything better? Definitely not, but I’m sick and tired of pretending this aspect of my life doesn’t exist when it’s been a problem for the entire 8 years Blake and I have been together. It’s a constant drain on both of us and a huge source of anxiety for me. Every time I even think of Blake getting another e-mail from his mom, I have to pop an Ativan because my stomach knots up.

But enough about THAT drama I’ve said what I need to say right now and that’s just what is going on and yeah, Brooke will be making an appearance in my writings again at some point, but that’s enough for now. In the meantime, wanna know what else is going on in my life? Well my friend Jesse has pretty much abandoned me. I’ve sent him e-mails, I’ve written on his Facebook wall several times, I’ve sent him messages on Yahoo, I’ve tried to add him to Last.fm but he won’t add me back….I haven’t seen him since like, the winter and I don’t even know why this is happening. Blake’s talked to him and Jesse claims he’s not mad at Blake or myself, he’s just been “busy” and “doesn’t get online very often anymore”.

Blake went over to Jesse’s house on Saturday to retrieve the CDs he’d borrowed from us because I’m so convinced he’s distancing himself from us on purpose I wanted to get them back before he moved or something and he was apparently all sunshine and lollipops. He said he’d get online and e-mail me, but so far that hasn’t happened and I don’t expect it will.

I don’t like thinking bad things about my friends, but the only reason I can think of for Jesse blowing us off like this is the fact that I don’t smoke pot anymore, so I can’t be his stoner buddy and there’s no smoking in our house anymore so we can’t sit around smoking and talking like we used to. He used to come over at least twice a week, I’d talk to him usually every day on Yahoo, what happened?

The last time I talked to him was on Yahoo at the end of June because I asked him to come to the Hypercube event with us and he said he’d ask for that day off and we haven’t spoken since despite my attempts. Something’s going on there and I don’t know what and while it used to bother me, I’m at the point where I guess Jesse’s been moved into the “acquaintance” category and out of the “friend” category for the time being and that’s why I wanted all my CDs back. It was a “closure” kinda deal for me. Now Jesse can fuck off and do his own thing and I’m not even going to worry about it anymore. If I see him in the grocery store, I’ll talk to him, but I’m not gonna chase him down anymore or make myself crazy wondering what I did wrong. I’m just going to take him at his word that I didn’t do anything wrong and leave it at that.

In other news, Alex and I had our first fight last week. Here’s what happened: Blip.fm posted on Twitter excessively drives me nuts and Ronny is the worst offender on my list. But I love him so I just put up with it and grumble to myself when he’s on a Blip marathon and scroll past them or ignore Twitter until he’s gone to bed. But one day last week, I checked my Facebook live feed and there, from Ronny were a bunch of Blips. Now here’s the other thing about Ronny and I, for some reason Ronny tends to bring out the snark in me, so I commented on one of the Blips on Facebook and said something like “Are you seriously going to make me put up with these here too?” thinking he was posting tweets to Facebook and not realizing it was a Blip application that I could block. I thought in order to not see them, I would have to block Ronny altogether and I didn’t want to have to do that.

So anyway, I got busy talking to Blake or doing something, I can’t remember, and when I opened up TweetDeck, here were these bitchy, passive-aggressive Blips from Alex that were most definitely directed at me. So me, always one to make matters better because I’m talented like that, I posted a Blip of my own…of the Bloodhound Gang’s “I Hope You Die” and mimicked one of Alex’s passive-aggressive Blips in my message to which Alex replied “……..” and then “You’re a real bitch sometimes,” or something to that effect. I replied with “At least I’m honest,” and then a few second later I said something about how I’d rather be a bitch upfront than a passive-aggressive one and that’s when Alex announced that she was too “tired and cranky for this bull” and that was the last I heard from her on Twitter.

So after that I checked my e-mail and there were Facebook notifications where Ronny and Alex had commented on my original Facebook Blip comment saying that it was an app and I could block it and that no one was “forcing” me to do anything. I commented back, even though both of them had gone to bed, that I hadn’t realized it was an app, that I thought I’d have to block Ronny altogether and I apologized for the misunderstanding. Then, later that night I got thinking about it and while yes, Alex was a bitch too, I started it, so I decided to be the first to apologize so we could forget this ever happened. So, I texted Alex with “I’m sorry. I love you.” at like, 1am so she’d get it in the morning and when I woke up the next day, there was a text on my phone from Alex saying the same thing. Everything’s cool now and I think we just caught each other on bad days, but it was just a weird situation because Alex and I had never fought before and I’m glad we have the kind of relationship where we can just apologize to each other and let bygones be bygones. I was proud of us that day. So many women love to let drama like that play out for as long as possible and make it snowball and I really dig that neither she nor I are that type of woman. Or maybe we are a little bit, but at least we both value our friendship enough to just step back and be cool about things. I love Alex.

Saturday night, which those who follow me on Twitter already know, Blake & I went over to Wayne & Judy’s to play euchre and drink a little bit…or in their case, drink a lot. Apparently they started drinking at around 6pm, we showed up at 9pm. Blake & I don’t really drink that much or that often, so he had a 6-pack of beer and I had two 4-packs of Mike’s Hard lemonade. Wayne’s one of these guys who thinks men are superior to women so he always wants it to be men against women and…Judy & I beat them 5 games-0. Wayne knows the game now and at least 3 times renegged and once he decided to go alone on a hand that had NO trump whatsoever. He said “Blake, ya gotta trust me, this hand is ours,” and Blake was like “Wayne, if you don’t have the best hand ever and win this, I’m gonna punch you,”…and then it turned out he had NO trump while Blake had a hand that was almost entirely trump. Since Blake couldn’t really punch Wayne, I did. Later that night, as Wayne got more and more drunk, he wobbled upstairs and when he came down he started bitching at Judy that they need to change the plate cover on the light switch in the bathroom because when he’s drunk he can never find the switch to turn it on. (Their light switch cover is bumpy and has frogs on it and it makes the switch a bit recessed.) And then he tells us that as he was peeing in the dark, all of a sudden he started peeing on the seat. So we were all like, “why didn’t you have the seat up?” and he slurred “oh I never do that, I don’t have to” and I was like, “well if you’re pissing on the seat then apparently you do!” None of us were sure if he was serious or not about peeing on the seat, so all 4 of us went up there to investigate and lo & behold there was piss all over the seat and a huge puddle all over the floor. I don’t think he actually got ANY in the bowl. From that point on, especially because they have a cracked, squishy toilet seat, I went over to my house to pee. But it didn’t really matter because by that point Wayne was so drunk he was practically passing out at the kitchen table, so shortly after the bathroom incident, Blake and I left to go back to our house and while I tried to drink the rest of my Mike’s Hard and actually get drunk like everyone else, I just wasn’t into it so I dumped mine. We tried to play a game of Monopoly but I was just too tired and not really feeling well so we packed it up and I went to bed instead.

Sunday I was hung over which I think is totally unfair since I didn’t even get drunk the night before. Because I felt like crap, I basically just slept most of the day and rested up for the Mad Men finale (which was excellent).

And then of course, after Mad Men was over, Blake and I started our marathon conversation on blogging, creativity and life in general which brings us back full circle. The fact of the matter is, I’m not painting right now because I’m discouraged but that doesn’t mean I can’t be creative in other ways. I’ve got a short story bordering on a novella sitting here that I could be working on. I don’t know if anything will ever come of it, but it’s here waiting for me to write it. I have a million stories from my past left to tell and a new audience to tell some of the ones I’ve told before to. There’s no reason for me to remain in this rut and to become stagnant, waiting around for something to happen.

Another thing my mom used to say about boredom was that only boring people get bored, and the thing is, I’m not boring, I have this wicked imagination to keep me entertained so I might as well use it.

And I think that’s all I have to say.

PS. This entry is 6300 words long.

PPS. This entry was supposed to be posted at about 3:30am but our ISP had an internet outage so that’s why it’s being posted this morning.

I’m exhausted, I don’t even know why I’m writing this.

This morning I had to get up early so we could be in Toronto for my 11:30am post-op appointment with the endometriosis specialist who did my surgery in August. Getting up early kinda sucked because I had trouble sleeping the night before, but it was free hashbrown day at Tim Horton’s if you bought a breakfast sandwich and their bacon & egg breakfast biscuits are soooooooo good and I hadn’t had one in about 6 months. So at least the day started off okay despite the suckage of early rising.

It took us forever to get to the Dr.’s office because of construction but we finally got there and I barely even got to sit down in the waiting room before they called my name.

First, here’s the post-op report (most of which I don’t understand) and then I’ll get into what the resident told me about the surgery:

Page 3 just says that the anesthesia was reversed and I was taken to the recovery room.

So long story short on the post-op report is that things were pretty fucked up in there, in fact the resident said flat out it was the worst he’s ever seen (no idea how long he’s been a resident). There was endo on and in my bowels, colon and bladder…just, as you can read, everywhere. What was interesting though is that they cut some nerves in there somewhere without asking me beforehand if I was okay with that. I am okay with that, but I find it a little strange that this part of the surgery wasn’t explained to me in the beginning. The resident who was explaining how the surgery went mentioned it (I forget what it’s called and I’ve stopped trying to make sense of the above report) and said it like I knew what he was talking about. When I said no, Dr. Leyland didn’t explain that to me beforehand, he looked a little embarrassed and explained that they cut these nerves in there so that when the endo grows back, which it inevitably will, I shouldn’t be in as much pain and in the meantime, my periods should be less painful both with the removal of all the disease they could find and these severed nerves, but that it could take 3-6 months for the effect to kick in. (I don’t know why.)

But of course, they don’t want the disease to grow at the rate it had been over the past 8 years, so to slow the growth I’m on a birth control pill continuously for 3 months, then I’ll have a period, go back on the pill for 3 months and repeat for a year. Then they want me to come back. If the pill doesn’t lessen the pain of my periods, they’re going to try an IUD that secretes the same(ish?) kind of hormones as the birth control pill but in different amounts.

All in all, I’m optimistic. I got emotional in the car when we left because already I’ve been able to do a few things that I haven’t been able to do for a long time because I’ve always been in too much pain, like dance around my house.

On the way home, Blake asked if I minded if we stopped off at his work because he had to change some data tapes and he said it would only take 10 minutes. I asked him what was in it for me and he asked what I wanted and I decided on a cherry slush from Dairy Queen. So he went into the mall and into work (his work is the top floor of a mall) while I baked in the car and tweeted like a crazy person and came up with the most brilliant idea ever which I shared with him when he finally came out with my slush: we had enough time to spend an hour & a half at the beach before the kids got home from school.

So that’s what we did. We got home, got our pool noodles, towels and swimming attire and headed off to Wasaga Beach, which is about 10 minutes from our house and, as I’ve maybe mentioned before, is like, the longest fresh water beach in the world. I took this pic with my phone and sent it to Twitter:

We walked out into the water, which was cold, but felt soooooo good after being in the hot car all day and floated there, just talking about random stuff for about an hour and then we got cold so we decided to get out and go to the grocery store to grab some stuff for dinner. That’s one of the cool things about Wasaga Beach, you can walk into the grocery store with wet hair and a damp towel wrapped around you and no one really cares.

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I’m addicted right now to these shishkabobs they sell at the meat section of a certain chain of grocery stores and that’s what we intended to get but instead, we got these steaks that were marinated in the same stuff as the shishkabobs (which I think may contain crack). We said hi to Wayne, who works at the grocery store, then we got in the car and went home.

There was still about 15 minutes until the kids were going to be home from school so Blake and I HAD THE MARITAL RELATIONS IN THE DAY TIME and then the kids came home and we bragged about going to the beach. they were not pleased with us.

Then I went over & hung out with my neighbour Judy for a bit while Blake made dinner. The marinated steaks were okay, nowhere near as awesome as the shishkabobs, but still pretty good and Blake also did garlic butter potatoes on the BBQ so dinner was more or less amazing.

Thennnnnnnnn nothing happened, we just screwed around online and bugged the children and I watched Deal or No Deal with Wayne and then it was time to come back home to watch the season premiere of 90210 and now here I sit writing this post.

So as the title says, today was a pretty good day. Tomorrow I can sleep in, maybe get some painting done and watch a few movies and then it’s the weekend! Yay!

THE END.