This color scheme works better with the balloon, I think. I shall be playing off and on for the next few days...

Bored...

Bored, and more bored.  So, with apologies to the Beverly Hillbillies...

 

Come and listen to my tale 'bout a man named Jerry

He was sorta tall, and really kinda hairy.

He left one day lookin' for a girl to wed,

But he tripped on a root and hit his head instead

 

"OW!" he said

"Darn Root!"

"Gosh Darn Tree"

 

Well, what do you know? Ol' Jerry lost his mind

He wandered far and wide, and some folks wasn't kind

He looked far and wide and couldn't remember why,

'til some pretty girl came up and said, "Oh, Hi."

 

"Wow!" he said

"You're cute."

"Let's get hitched."

 

And my tale ends there because I ran out of verses.  If you want to play, pick a TV theme song of your choice and continue the story.  Leave me a comment so I know where to read.

 

OK. I have lots to say, but I don't feel like typing it all tonight, especially since it looks like I won't have anything to do tomorrow at work.

But I do want to say that I'm corresponding with someone new on eHarmony. He is a plain-looking computer geek from the midwest who's hobbies include cross stich and fly fishing. In short, he's my kind of guy.

I'm not getting my hopes up, but yeah.

Oh, and I bought a gallon of iced tea tonight (Community, which is really the best on earth), and when I set it dow on the table when I got home, the jug just split along the bottom. That made me sad.

And Studio 60 actually had some plot this week. what a novelty!

Oh, and I'm loving The Amazing Race this season as well. Especially the couple from Kentucky, even if they are a characature of Appalachian folks.

Have no fear...

This is an intermediate step. The final product will not be so...glaring.

Stuff

I have an earache.  There is nothing quite so miserable as sitting at work with nothing to do with an earache. 

 

In other news, I finished a pillow last night.  I wish I had a digital camera so I could show off my handiwork (not that there is all that much to see - it's just a simple pillow).  I know it makes me a geek, but I'm proud of myself.

 

Why do people ruin tea with high fructose corn syrup?  It makes it taste fake.  Community makes iced tea with cane sugar, and it is good.

 

I had a weird dream last night.  I dreamed I lived in apartment with my boss and his wife (keep in mind that my boss is gay, so there would be no way this would happen).  She was a world class runner, and they had three kids, two boys and a girl.  The two boys went to a different pediatrician than the girl (this was actually the subject of a protracted conversation in the dream).  We lived in a huge apartment complex with a bunch of other people I knew.  The maintenance guy for the complex was the boyfriend of my crack whore neighbor in Pittsburgh (he didn't use crack, but he was addicted to something).  He had a crush on me, and my boss's wife warned me not to climb over the fence in the back yard because he would try to flirt with me.

 

I don't want to think about what that means.

 

Is it Friday yet?

 

 

I have my car! YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Is that enough exclamation points?

I think I've been having transmission problems for the past several months, and didn't realize it. All the weird noises, the seemingly bad alignment, and all that other stuff are all gone. I've never had a car with a computer thingy before, so I guess I didn't recognize the transmission problems for what they were.

I'm a little frustrated at work right now. Kind of a long story as to why, but I am. I'm still the happiest I've been in any job, though.

I have a really weird rash. At first I thought it was bug bites, but now the skin around the little bumps is bruising. never had that with bug bites. If it isn't better tomorrow, I guess I'll call the dermatologist. Blah.

Finally, Studio 60 suffers from the same problem as my writing - great characters, no plot. But Matthew Perry is kind of like Rob Morrow for me - I'd watch him in pretty much anything.

Go read this. Absolutely beautiful.

I also learned on the PBS show on hippos that they are related to both cows and dolphins. Which is weird and cool.

And I learned that I never want to hear the sound of hippos defacating again in my whole life.

Just a quick comment while I wait for the mechanic to call

What do you think of this dress for a semi-formal (but pretty dressy) office Christmas party? I'm just looking right now, since Kenny the transmission guy pretty much owns my next two paychecks, but it never hurts to look early. There was another dress similar to this one that I liked, but it was sleeveless. I thought that I could wear that one with a wrap, but that might be too much.

The dress is $100 which is kind of a lot, but I don't think I'm going to find anything for less than that. I looked on eBay tonight, just to look, and apparently eBay sellers think that women who are larger than average should either wear a caftan whenever they go out in public, or that they should dress like they are really size 2's and make themselves look utterly ridiculous.

Just my rant on a Sunday night...

First, go read TG's blog entry in celebration of her and her husband's 11th anniversary. I was really touched by what she wrote.

Second, I am watching a program on PBS about hippopotamuses. When I was little and tripping over my own feet (as opposed to now, when I am big and tripping over my own feet), my mom used to say that I was as graceful as a baby hippo. Well, in the water, baby hippos really are graceful. Huh. Who knew it was a compliment?

Testing

I'm just trying to find out if the mail-to-blog feature on Blogger works.  I set it up a while ago, but never actually used it.  I'm bored enough to try it now, though. 

 

Remember my obsession with crocheting scarves back when I was unemployed.  Yeah, I abandoned that.  I'm now making pillows.  Why, you may ask?  Something to do that doesn't involve my car.

 

Speaking of which, I should be getting it back tomorrow.  Finally.  Since I haven't been able to get to the grocery store in three weeks, I've pretty much been living on delivery food for dinner.  I'm really tired of pizza.  Though this weekend, I ordered a couple of salads from a place on Highland.  Really, really good.

 

Oh, and Amazon's candy store is evil.  The sucked me in with a link on my entry page.  All I have to say is that it's a good thing all my spare money this month is going to Kenny the transmission guy.

 

Finally, if your PBS station carries GlobeTrekker, you must watch it.  It is far and away the best travel show I have ever seen, better even than Rick Steeves.  I think it's because the hosts are young, and they do a lot of hiking.  I could never do the trips they do (the van incident when I was in college ensured that a walk of more than a few miles is pretty much out of the question now), but they are cool to watch.

 

So, I'm going to go take a shower just because, order a pizza, and settle in for the night.  And tomorrow, you shall get to witness my virtual happy dance.

A little change...

So, things look a little different around here, huh? I signed up for Blogger Beta yesterday. I mainly signed up because I wanted the labels you see at the end of the post. I have actually been thinking of switching to Live Journal or Typepad to get them, but now I don't have to.

The very, very pink layout will not last forever. This weekend I plan to play around with it and make it look less...adolescent. I don't have anything better to do unless my car is actually fixed.

I really, really hope my car is fixed.

One of the things I really regret in my life is that I never got to have an adult relationship with my parents. They went from being my mom and dad to being people I had to take care of. When I see my friends interact with their parents, I really am jealous of them. Even if they are arguing, they are doing it as fellow adults, with no one in the dominant position. I never got that.

Now, I don't regret having to do the role reversal thing at an earlier age than most. I loved my parents, and I would have done anything they asked me to. I even offered to transfer to a college closer to home, but they wouldn't let me.

I've been thinking about that lately because I see friends around my age having to face those things now. And even though it's difficult, they are so much better equipped to deal with it than I was at 21. I honestly believe that, beyond the maturity factor, it's because they were able to get to know their parents on an adult level. It may sound cold, but I think that being able to have that...change in status, I guess, gives you a chance to be more objective. They had the chance to get to know their parents without being dependent upon them. For me, one minute I was asking my parents for money so I could go to the movies on the weekend, and the next I was having to help with transfers, do all the shopping and cooking, and other things I choose not to mention. There was no transition. And all you English majors out there (who seem to make up most of my readership) know that without transitions, things get rocky.


~~~~~~~~~


On a completely unrelated note, I'm still without a car. The transmission guy hasn't started working on it yet. He said he may be able to get it done tomorrow, but Monday is the more likely scenario. I really hate this. My current ride won't stop at the grocery store for me, so I'm down to ramen noodles, unless I order pizza like I did tonight. Plus she smokes. She does open her window, but she also opens the sunroof, and the smoke that goes out the window just comes right in the sunroof. I hate smelling like smoke all day.

I had the weirdest dream. It actually woke me up, and I've been up for about an hour now.

I don't remember all of it, but apparently I was working on some kind of student newspaper. I was not an editor, but I seemed to be doing an awful lot of the editorial functions. The editor-in-cheif was my boss at the Evil Empire (my last job). I vaguely recognized the other two staff I really saw, but they seemed to be more composite characters than anything else.

Well, EE Boss gathered the whole staff together (there were an awful lot of people for a student paper), and confronted me about buying myself new dishes, when I had two perfectly serviceable, unmatched plates I could use. She called me a hypocrite for spending my money on something so frivolous, and asked me what I had to say about it. I said that the dishes only cost $15 dollars, and that I really needed them (the dishes actually cost $25 in real life, if you are interested). She went on to goad me into a confrontation by telling me that if I was such a hypocrite, buying new dishes when some people didn't even have food, then I didn't deserve to be on her staff.

Well, I blew up at that. I told her she had no right to judge me, and I told her that I had done far more that what my job description entailed. She asked me, "Like what," and I responded by telling her about all the editorial dutites I did, and how I never complained that I was doing that despite the fact that I was not an editor, and I told her about how I had to retype one co-worker's articles because she refused to use a computer, and I fussed about how some other people could take a whole day to just write the text of an editorial cartoon, but I got yelled at for taking too long if it took me more than an hour to do a whole layout. Well, EE Boss forced me to name names, so I pointed out the two people who I vaguely recognized. She then basically forced a confrontation with them, in front of everyone else. So I got into an argument with them, which eventually led to me telling EE Boss, that this conversation should have taken place in her office behind closed doors.

Now, I don't quite know what it all meant, but I think it was my subconscinence's way of confronting the various facets of my personality, while also getting a dig in to EE Boss for having a personnel conversation with me with a co-worker present, which was very unprofessional.

I need to think about this some more.

SOOO BORED!

That is all.

When I did the therapy thing, one of the things I talked about with my shrink was the fact that it is really, really hard for me to depend on other people for help. After going through the whole "it makes me feel inadequate" thing (which it does, but that's another story), the root reason is that I learned early on that I can't depend on other people. Whenever I'd ask a teacher for help with something, they would always put me off to help other people, and they would never quite make it back to me. When I tried to get my 8th grade math teacher to help me with Algebra, she declared that if I was smart enough to go to the gifted program one day a week, I was smart enough to figure things out on my own. In high school, my "friends" really just used me for their own purposes, and ignored me at other times. All those experiences, when accumulated, just made me think that I wasn't allowed to depend on other people, and when I tried to, I'd be hurt.

Today, a co-worker was supposed to give me a ride to work. She told me on Friday that she would pick me up at 9:45. I went outside and was waiting for her at 9:50. I waited in all the construction dust for a good 20 minutes before I went back into the apartment. I checked my messages, and she left me a message at 10:02, apologizing for telling me the wrong time, because she really meant 10:15. So I waited until 10:28 (down here, "on time" is just a figure of speech) and went back outside. I sat on the steps waiting for another 20 minutes, until I gave up and went back inside. There was another message, which she left at 10:30, saying "well, I guess you got a ride with someone else, so I'm heading in. Call me if you need to." Well, I called her and left her a message saying that I would just take the floating holiday I have from Labor Day today. She called me back about 15 minutes later (about 11:10) saying that she didn't want me to waste the holiday, and she'd come get me. She said she was leaving in 2 minutes.

So I went and took my trash out, and went back to sit on the steps to wait. It was 25 minutes until she got there. Even in heavy traffic, it shouldn't take 25 minutes. In fact, coming back only took 10. I didn't get here until noon.

Now granted, it is a very slow day. But it just frustrates me when people show that little consideration. If I know someone is coming for me, I will be outside waiting for them, so they don't have to wait for me. If I am picking someone up, I am on time, even if it isn't convenient for me.

This is why I hate depending on other people. I didn't even get to have a cup of tea this morning because I was thought I was running late. And now my mouth tastes like dirt and I'm probably going to be coughing up construction dust for the next year.

Today sucks.

Oh, I'll write about my car later on.

So I'm sitting here reading, with the TV on "Cops" in the background. I'm half listening, and the police officers start naming streets during a pursuit. I said to myself, "Gee, those sound like the streets in the neighborhood I lived in in Pittsburgh before I moved here." Then I heard one of the officers quote the speed they were traveling, and he had a distinct Pittsburgh accent. And I said, "Hey, that is the neighborhood I lived in in Pittsburgh before I moved here." And in fact, I knew the girlfriend and mother of the guy they were chasing - they lived a few houses down from me, on the other side of the railroad tressle (the worse side of a bad neighborhood).

There is nothing like seeing your old house on "Cops" to make you feel...either crappy that you ever lived there or grateful that you no longer do.

In my defense, the apartment was OK, and the rent was dirt cheap.

Just wanted to share

So, I'm way stressed about stuff right now. And in light of that, I'm thinking about changing my blog layout. What color scheme should I use?

Help!

OK, blogosphere, time for you to play...

DICTATE SHERYL'S LIFE!

So here's the situation. The transmission guy says that my car needs a complete overhaul, which will cost $1400 (which is less than the guy who did the overhaul on my Oldsmobile charged 12 years ago, but that's another story). Now, I can pay to have that done within three weeks (four if I want to eat). The car has 141,000 miles on it, but it's in good shape - no mechanical problems other than this. Plus, I love it a whole lot.

On the minus side, the car is almost 10 years old. And, it has 141,000 miles on it.

Now, I may be able to get financing to buy a new car now, but I will get an absolutely craptastic interest rate. If I can make my car last another 6-8 months, I will get a much, much better rate because my student loans will be caught up. Not to mention I can open a credit card and start using it and paying on it between now and then, which will also help.

Keeping in mind that I am not planning to drive my car anywhere of any distance (the farthest I can see myself going would be Houston, and that's doubtful), and keeping in mind that I love my car, what should I do?

If you are interested in these details, if I claim my car is in good condition, the trade in value is about $850, and the resale value is about $1500.

OK....Go!