The rain...

It's raining....not hard...not regularly.....but the skies are angry and laden...and i love it! i'm indulgent this evening - wine, candles and The Cure....so very 15 of me...lol.....Tasha and i had dinner tonight that mainly consisted of me and a bottle of wine - i'm certain there was a little food involved.....i'm a little melancholy....a little angry.....a little...hmmmm....not so sure....something....angst-y......whatever....i'm enjoying the night....though....a call from a friend gave me a little unrest....something about his tone was just unsettling and it made me ache a little.....nothing another glass of wine and Disintegration won't cure, i'm sure.....anyway, that's enough nebulous insanity from me for tonight, i think....

Long day...

Today was a particularly long day for me and I am spent. I don't have much time as I need to spend the last 10 minutes of today tending to the plant life on the balcony.....

I've been struggling with very confrontational feelings today. My emotions have run the gamut from extreme hostility and resentment to despair....I think I am just feeling overwhelmed and its nothing a good nights sleep won't remedy.

Today was certainly a test. I just need to take a deep breath and clear my mind for a while....I'd write more, but I'm running out of time...sigh...Tomorrow maybe...though hopefully by then this will all have passed....

Peace...

How I'm Spending My Summer...

I still can't find a new job here...I'm guessing I'll be relocating....Indianapolis?....Dubuque? While I would love to live near the Tx. clan, (and Dallas is experiencing job growth and has a lower cost of living) its just too darn hot there....and I don't like chiggers...or fire ants...or scorpions....LOL....I feel weird about leaving the area but not really. I mean some part of me really wants to get the heck outta here. Chicago is a nice place I suppose but I'm not really attached. Only to people, not to the place - at all....And it would be nice to experience something new and different. I've always wanted to live elsewhere - its part of the reason I chose to go to school online. In this economy, one has to be flexible....

So, I know the summer is just beginning and I don't actually get a "summer" per se - I'll be in school and working like normal but I hope I can devote some extra time to my HTML/CSS skills. It's all self taught so its slow - on top of not having much in the way of free time. Especially now.

I've been working on a couple of side projects in building sites - they're nothing special by any means, and mainly just silly things - I just wish my skills were a little better....I love building silly sites of no consequence....Sorry, just random thoughts here....

My last two classes of my BA are killer with all their assignments. I've got a group project coming up and I haven't devoted any time to it yet...UGH...and three papers every week!!! My group is going to kill me. I haven't read any of my chapters this week which means MASSIVE cramming this weekend. :( I'm already pissed off that my GPA fell to a 3.75 when I had maintained a 4.0 for the last year and a half. I don't need it to fall off any further!!

I so can't wait to graduate. The end of August cannot come fast enough!! Granted it means starting my MBA but at least I'll have that coveted piece of paper - finally!

Gnomes...

We're all aware of underwear and sock gnomes, right? Well, I've got a new breed living in my apartment. Diet Coke Gnomes...I don't normally keep soda in the house - I can be a bit of an addict. But recently I had a can in the fridge from having ordered dinner and a couple of cans of Diet Coke...I drank one can with dinner that evening and was saving the extra can for later consumption...Later consumption was supposed to happen a couple of nights ago....It was a hot, rather sticky evening and I was really looking forward to a very cold can of Diet Coke - mmmmmmmm...I opened the fridge and couldn't find it. So I decided to dig (since I've been single, the fridge is more like a large box to store things I mainly am not interested in and/or to keep beverages cold)...I manuvered through the landfill - past the old bathtub and the aged tires, still no Diet Coke...Then I started to get annoyed...Where the F is my coke???? I mean seriously... I pulled everything out. Looked under a two year old jar of olives just to be sure it hadn't shrunk...Still, no can...And then it hit me. I have become infested with Diet Coke Gnomes...At that point, I realized that all hope was lost and I just needed to put the stuff back in the fridge and give up. There is no hope once the DC Gnomes have visited....

The best laid plans...

This is Riley - my beautiful angel...we met today for the very first time...and I fell in love with my snuggly little monkey...sigh....that kid has got me wrapped around her tiny little fingers already...

This weekend was chock full of supposed activities...Not only was I to have a date, but I was homework free and I was going to meet my niece for the first time, as well as replace my toilet seat and a host of other household chores....I was pretty worn out on Friday night so I decided to lay low after work...Saturday rolled around and I was up and at 'em first thing in the morning. Breakfast with mom and sis, errands and then home in time to do a quick load of laundry before getting ready for my date.

We were going to go to an outdoor festival in a neighboring town but the weather was taking a turn for the worse so we settled on a bar in between our respective homes...and that's when a tornado hit the southern suburbs causing my date to worry about safety and cancel on me as I was about to walk out the door. Not sure how I felt about this, to be honest...Granted it wasn't my apartment in the path of the tornado but nor were we headed into its path so I dunno - seemed a little wussy to me...I don't think I'm going to bother trying again with this one...

The good news is that after two trips to the hardware store I have successfully installed a new toilet seat...I know this may not seem like much to some but it was a huge leap for me. The only casualty was one broken nail! I have to admit, I'm pretty proud. Next will be the shower head...

Anyway, like I said, I met my monkey for the first time today. She's all of about 6 pounds and so adorably cute its not even funny. I'm completely smitten. She slept in my arms for about two hours and the only reason I relinquished her was because I had to use the bathroom. She's a funny thing - she's so noisy, she snores and murmurs while she sleeps, its overwhelmingly cute...sigh...Oh Riley you're already the apple of your aunts eye...

While visiting the baby my brother scared me into some serious rethinking of my law school plans...I'm not sure that my plan is the wisest and I need to think about this seriously. He brought up some good points that I hadn't considered. The school I want to go to is very expensive and for what I'll take out in loans (over $75K) over the three years I'd be going part time, I could take out enough to live on and go full time to be done even faster....Just when I thought I had a plan...

Back to the drawing board...

The reasons for keeping the lights out....

There are good reasons for NOT putting in the light bulbs....for example, the cat puke on the carpet that I'm avoiding....The pile of mail on the kitchen table....My own reflection after a number of beers and a hard day at the office....

I think that drunk texting is less of a sport than drunk dialing...I'm quite skilled at the drunk dial....I have yet to learn the finesse of drunk texting...I think you're not supposed to announce that you are drunk...I believe one should just start the rambling and let the reader then discover that you, the sender, are wasted....If nothing else, it will add an element of surprise to whatever was originally sent or maybe not....In my case no one would be surprised that I was rambling while texting or drunk and texting...or drunk rambling and texting....

Or drunk blogging....I should probably stop...sigh....

Let there be light...

I have this aversion to changing light bulbs. It's about as irrational as my fear of spiders. I know this. I will go to great lengths to avoid changing burnt out bulbs...it annoys me, too...sigh...I stumble and trip over things - all because I can't see because the bulbs are burned out...

But tonight is different. Tonight is one of the first nights, in a year, that I've actually changed some of the light bulbs in my apartment. I have been living in darkness for months. The strings of lights I have around the ceiling went dark months ago and since then, more and more of the bulbs throughout my apartment have been dying....I have excused it as "mood" lighting and I've been supplementing the lengthening daylight with candles, or sometimes the television...

I don't know what did it for me today but I started to replace the bulbs - from the one above the stove to the ones in my hallway...I didn't wake up and think, oh I need to change the light bulbs...It wasn't like that...maybe its finally the remainder of becoming self sufficient...or maybe the last time I stubbed my toes or tripped over shoes hit home harder than I thought...

Somehow, and I don't yet know exactly how, but somehow - this feels oddly significant....

My next date..

Ok, here are some guidelines for the next guy I go out with:

1) He must have read at least one book, in his lifetime, on purpose and for no other purpose than to have read it. Manuals and atlases do NOT count....

2) He must be able to use and/or understand polysyllabic words. I will NOT accept multi-syllable grunts....

3) He must have showered at least sometime in the last 24 hour period. There are NO exceptions to this.

4) He will either be able to spell or know how to use spell check. There is NO Google translation for IDIOT to ENGLISH and I am not going to waste any more time deciphering incoherent text messages, emails, etc....I get enough of those from my users.

5) He will under NO circumstances think that wearing a leather jacket with Disney's Enchanted Castle patches emblazoned upon the arms is a good thing (this rule was developed on the Metra today - three guesses why). I don't care why you have the jacket. It is NOT cool. It is NOT ok.

Well, that's it for now. I'm tired. I had my admissions interview this evening and a loooong conversation with my academic adviser. I am wiped out! Night!

Direction and Google Translate....

Well, I believe that while I have not made the most out of every second since my last post, I've done pretty well. I've decided to go for my Masters in Business Administration - so I graduate on August 24th and I begin grad school on August 25th. Isn't it wonderful that I get such a generous break? Anyway, while I'm doing the grad school thing, I'm going to be working on my application to Kent law school. YAY! Hopefully, they'll want me...Its the only law school I'm really interested in attending...My plan is to graduate from the masters program and then get about 3 months off before starting the law program. I'm particularly interested in their intellectual property law area of concentration. I wish I had figured all of this out years ago! Oh well!

So after a battle with Outlook this morning (some feature was disabled due to an error that caused..blah blah blah...) I got this message from one of the users:

Have you for your message. Since I currently am not published, the incoming mails to my secretary. You can reach my Secretariat under.

Granted, it was originally written in German and I used Google Translate but I'm really not seeing where in either language this is going to make sense....I can forgive Google for missing some colloquialisms - sure....But I don't care what language this message is in it does not make sense. And why are we involving Secretariat?? He's been dead almost, what 20 years now? And I don't think I'll be reaching him unless we whip out the old ouija board....

Crowded house, crowded brain...

16 years later and they can still rock - and apparently so can I. LOL...Last Saturday Lo and I ventured down to The Vic to catch Crowded House in concert. I hadn't been to a concert since I saw...wow...Um...Shania Twain at the United Center (what an horrid venue). Anyway, the concert was fantastic though this time, rather than be down in the thick of things, we seated ourselves in the balcony...I remember the first time we saw them - we danced and sang all night long and then drifted over to Muskies and shared fries with the opening band, School of Fish. That night was amazing. And, actually, so was this past evening but for very different reasons - though, maybe not really. Lo was happy for the first time in a long time...I won't say she was happy for the first time since our first CH concert but its been a long time...Between her divorce and health issues she's really had a rough time of it and I'm so happy for her. She leaves for Austin in a couple of months but I've already decided to go down for our "anniversary" in November.

She and I met when we were 15. We sat near one another in a couple of classes and when I found out that her family wasn't doing anything for Thanksgiving (this disturbed me greatly) I invited her to our family gathering. After we both fed my grandmother's disgusting gelatinous pink coleslaw creation to the family dog, I knew I'd found a friend for life! And while we sometimes manage to go months with nary an email, we're always there for each other and we know it. She's lived in Arizona, traveled abroad and set up house on the south side of Chicago but no matter where she is, I know I can count on her. And the same holds true for her....So cheers, Lo! I love you and I am glad that happiness has found you - even though it was a long time getting there.



I Feel Possessed

She said I could never do that
But I know you can, you are in my dream
We are one person not two of a kind
And what was mine is now in your posession
I could feel you underneath my skin
As the wind rushed in
Sent the kitchen table crashing
She said nobody move
Or Ill bring the house down

I hardly know which way is up
Or which way down
People are strange God only knows
I feel possessed when you come around

It was one of those times
Wished I had a camera on me
Six foot off the ground
Well I know how that sounds
Look above you and beyond me too
That kind of view dont need an explanation
Im not lying, not asking for anything
I just want to be there when it happens again

I hardly know which way is up
Or which way down
People are strange God only knows
I feel possessed when you come round

Whenever you invade my home
Everything I know flies out the window
Its above you and beyond me too
I dont want an explanation
But Ill be there when you bring the house down

I hardly know which way is up
Or which way down
People are strange God only knows
I feel possessed when you come round
People are strange
I feel possessed when you come round