Stuff

Don't you hate when…

you start a pile of blog posts and never actually finish or post them? Yeah, sorry about that.

I’ve been trying to catch up… edits, websites, birthday parties (both T and I turned a rather traumatic number this month), computer issues, it goes on. I keep setting dates, thinking *this* is the last day I’ve got too much on the go and I’ll finally take a bit of a break, and then something else comes up. argh.

But I think I’m finally there. The websites hanging over my head are live (including mine, which you’ll notice the new colours in here match my design. :D ), the books I need to finalize in December are either sitting in my inbox waiting for final proofs or with the final line editor, and the housework is mostly caught up. (Tho, there is the small matter of a couple of loads of laundry waiting to be done. :) )

So, now I have time to beta-read a friend’s latest novel, which I’m vastly looking forward to, and I officially don’t have any more excuses not to get back to writing, which is something I’ve been trying to do since at least August… And read… oh, I miss reading for fun. You might remember that I got completely caught up in a certain trilogy last week *grin* and I realized how much I miss it. I’ve never not had a book on the go since I learned to read, and this not making time for reading is not good.

Hm. I guess I also don’t have any more excuses to avoid the treadmill, either…

Geekery Reading

Curse you, Emily Giffin

In the past four days, I have devoured all three of your books. I laughed. I cried. I did nothing but read. (And I *never* cry at books. :P )

I have edits to do, excerpts to format, laundry to launder, housework to clean, websites to code and a T who’s waiting for his birthday dinner. And have I done *any* of that? No. I read. I read your books.

I couldn’t put them down.

And now my house is a mess and people are waiting for their edits and I’m completely behind. Not to mention a hungry T.

Not fair.

PS. If you ever decide to submit to any of the publishing houses I work for now or will in the future, it’s Laurie Rauch. R-A-U-C-H. :D

Editing Stuff Writing

Freaking out just a wee bit

So, I finally got around to taking my laptop in to get fixed. I thought, okay, a couple of days, maybe a week and it’ll be back in my control-freak, separation anxiety, holy crap, I just gave away my life hands.

Turns out? It’s going to be at least three to four weeks before they’ll be able to get it back to me. Three to four weeks. I’m going insane.  Yes, I’ve backed everything up on it… in three separate places…just in case I get the refurbished replacement (it’s hardware issues, not software issues), but still… it’s familiar, it’s organized the way I want it, it’s easy access to emails.

Fortunately,  I have a work laptop as backup for laptop use (possibly two, if I do something that I haven’t decided is a good idea tomorrow…), and I’ll be able to get rid of much of the extra crap I had downloaded and stored on that poor little thing.

But still… I miss my laptop. :(

And, as if that isn’t enough anxiety, my alter ego is waiting on some news… from a couple of sources…my work life is in a little bit of uncertainty and I have a smidge of insomnia, which tends to take hold when I’m stressed. So I’m a little on edge. *grin*

So, let me ask you… what do you do to relax? I’ve tried Yoga Nidra, which actually makes me more awake when I’m done, and reruns of Beverly Hills 90210, and neither are getting me in the zen state I’m craving… any suggestions?

Stuff

Halloween, bah-humbug

Normally, I love a little dress up. Decorate the house, play a little scary music, hand out candy, the whole shebang.

But this year, I just couldn’t get into the spirit. My plan was to play Halloween Scrooge. I was working this afternoon, so I had every intention of turning out all the lights and hiding in the back of the house while I did my thang. Until about 4 p.m. when T decided that he wanted to do the candy thing (tho, I was *not* allowed to decorate. Spoil sport. ;) ) Admittedly, I’ve tried to hand out candy before in this house. I decorated. Bought a tonne of candy. And I had a grand total of zero kids come to the door. So, you can see why I wasn’t overly excited to do it again.

But, since it’s rare that I can get T into any kind of holiday spirit, I indulged him. And there has been an influx of small-kid families lately, so I thought we should get a nice turnout. So, off we went to pick up candy. Fortunately, I talked him into buying stuff we both really liked so we could eat the leftovers. Except, he also bought Coffee Crisp. Blech.

So, we turned on all the lights, opened the door, put the bowl of chocolate, nibs and potato chips on the front stairs and waited.

And waited.

So far? Eight kids showed up.  Eight. Wow.

So now, tons of candy and me with a wedding I need to look smashing for  next month. And I’m weak, so weak when it comes to chocolate.

Bah humbug.

Geekery

Geek-lite

So, I’ve always considered myself a complete and total geek. A nerd girl. I mean, it’s in the name, right?

Until today.

I’d been going through serious, serious withdrawal thanks to Sympatico Unplugged (my Internet provider) who don’t believe in a) providing the service I pay for, and b) actually answering their technical support phone lines. I spent the better part of a week and a half on hold (minimum four hours a night), only to find out that when I finally got through to a live person, having survived the violence-inducing hold music, the department I needed to get through to had already closed for the night. (funny that they always seemed to close *just* before I got through.) Of course, since they deprived me of almost half a month’s worth of service, I’m going to be depriving them of almost half their fee this month. See how they like it.

So, internet-withdrawal plus a last-minute offer to geek out for two days (and wireless access!), had me attending the Free Software and Open Source Symposium. I totally didn’t know what to expect from this… and I confess I spent most of yesterday feeling a little like Charlie Brown listening to any adult (wah-wah-wah-wah… ;) )… but I realized that I am so not a geek. I’m geek lite. Semi-geek. I’m quasi-geek. I’m the margarine of geek. I’m the Diet Coke of geek. Just one calorie, not geek enough. (tho, I think the fact that I just quoted Austin Powers may make me a little more geek than I think. ;) )
These guys? (and I say guys, cuz I was definitely in the minority gender-wise *grin*) They were hard-core. They threw around sayings like “dogfooding your access” (yeah, it was explained to me and I *still* don’t get it.) and.. you know, I was trying to remember other sayings, but so much of it went over my head, I can’t even tell you other things to prove my point. But Derek, who’s one of the instructors in the class where I TA has a great sum up of the two days, complete with some non-geek-friendly words.

Today went a lot better. The lectures I went to were things I could relate to (like a new javascript toolkit called dojo, which has some supercool features and how to build and participate in a strong community successfully.) And in all, I’m glad I went.

But I’m still nowhere near as nerdy as I thought I was.

Geekery Grammar

Woohoo! :)


You Scored an A


You got 10/10 questions correct.

It’s pretty obvious that you don’t make basic grammatical errors.
If anything, you’re annoyed when people make simple mistakes on their blogs.
As far as people with bad grammar go, you know they’re only human.
And it’s humanity and its current condition that truly disturb you sometimes.

The It’s Its There Their They’re Quiz
Stuff

This is why I shouldn't take a vacation

I’ve been working crazy hours for months and months now, and for the first time in I don’t know how long, I had three whole days in a row where I wasn’t scheduled at one job or another. So, we packed up the car and headed down to Buffalo for a little cross-border shopping (hey, it’s an at-par dollar, can you blame us? :) )

I left my laptop at home, determined to not think about work, and just relax while we were away. We rented a  hotel room with a jacuzzi in the suite, and other than driving around trying to find stores that didn’t exist (like a certain sprawl-mart that had a big empty lot where it was supposed to be), it was a pretty relaxing few days of shopping, eating, and just sitting in the hot tub doing absolutely nothing.

I gotta tell ya, it was pretty awesome, and very, very needed.

The problem is? My body, which has been on high-stress, go-go-go mode for so long, finally wound down and said, hey, woohoo! I can relax now. And it relaxed right out of keeping my immune system on “fight everything, I don’t have time to be sick” mode.

So, this morning, I woke up feeling like absolute crap. I have a fever and a serious cold. And I’m actually working around people today, so I’m sneezing all over them. They’re gonna hate me when I pass this cold on to them.

What’s even more fun is trying to explain stuff when my brain is totally swimmy.

At the very least, it’s a pretty good excuse to take a couple more days off and do nothing but eat chicken soup and read all the books I bought…

Stuff

Thinking in a whole lotta pink

I was a little iffy on the layout around here, and just as I was playing around, trying to find a new template in the very limited offerings of the free WordPress blog, I came across this site which encourages bloggers to go Pink for October, to boost support and awareness for Breast Cancer month.

So, I’ve gone pink. It might be a little too much pink… I’m not quite sure yet. We’ll see.

For now, pink it up. :)

Stuff

Let's talk Idol

Most of the blogs I frequent, and I confess, it’s been rather limited lately with all that I’ve had going on, pretty much don’t talk Canadian Idol. Granted, it’s probably because a rather high percentage *aren’t* Canadian, but there you go.

I confess, I was a little bitter this year when my favourite went home in week six. I was a Greg fan all the way (though, I don’t recall liking him at all in top 32 last year…), and his leaving marked the first time in Idol history – Canadian and American – that I didn’t call who was going to win. I called Melissa O’Neill right from her first audition…

But sitting here watching the finale, I’m having a tough time making a call. Completely and totally, Brian deserves to win. They wrote the song for him (you can usually tell by ‘the song’ who the judges/producers want to win…), and he’s been kicking ass just about every time he’s performed over the past few weeks. (And his Hallelujah tonight gave me shivers)

But Jaydee… ah, he’s an anomaly. He’s adorable. Zack called it a few weeks… as soon as Hollywood comes knocking he’s gonna be wiping the floor with Zac “look, I’m not gay, see I have a girlfriend, she’s naked and everything’ Efron. And the giant voice that comes out of him is you gotta hear it to believe it. Unfortunately, tonight, he’s sorta been personifying the term “choke”.

So, what’s Canada gonna do? Are they gonna go with cute and marketable or are they gonna go with the true sing from the heart talent?

I’m rooting for Brian, but everyone I’ve rooted for this year has gone home.

I was going to sample them for you, but most of the clips on YouTube have been pulled. This one isn’t really their best performances, but it was the only one I could find that they were both on…

It’s long, so, if you don’t want to sit through the whole thing, Jaydee starts at about 1:20 and Brian starts at 6:30…

So what do you think? Are you watching? Are you voting?

Who’s gonna be our next Idol?

Stuff

I vant to be left alone

A few weeks ago, the phone company called me with an offer to add call privacy to my line. Basically, it means, unless you identify yourself as a real person and not an autodialer or telemarketer, you’re not getting through. I gotta tell ya, it’s pretty darn cool. I went from getting as many as ten annoying calls a day to three or four a week. And when you work from home, as I do, you’re disturbed by each and every one of those calls.

The thing is, I now need to figure out what to do for my front door. I have the world’s smallest hallway. No, seriously. It’s about 3 feet by 6 feet – wide enough to open the front door and then you have a set of stairs up to the main level of the house. Add the seven trillion shoes I have next to the door, and there’s barely room to turn around, let alone swing around a cat. :) Worse, with the door closed (and locked…always… I live alone. I ain’t leaving it open for nobody), it’s usually pitch black down there. I’m not sure what they were thinking when they designed my house, but the placement of the patio doors to the balcony and the kitchen window are both blocked by giant walls, meaning that the whole left side of my main level, including the front hallway, are really dark. So, when my front door was being replaced a few months ago, I was given the option of putting a window into the door.  I jumped at the chance and it has made a huge difference as far as lighting up my house. I love that part of it.

The thing is, there’s a giant freaking window in my door. There’s no hiding and pretending I’m not home when someone knocks. It’s not like you can say, oh, I wasn’t home, when the lights are on, there’s music or tv blaring, and you can see right into my living room from the front door. (i do most of my work sitting on the couch with my laptop, so you kinda can’t miss me)

And again, there’s the whole work at home thing. So, um, I’m home a lot. Like all the time. And I get all sorts of door-marketers. Daily. Thanks, but I’m not paying you weekly to deliver advertisements to my door. I’m not interested in hearing about your really cool religion (tho, I’m sure it is really cool), and dude, if I were thinking of selling my house that I live in because some guy thinks he wants to own cheap rental property, (!!!!), I would have called a real estate agent, not waited for one to come knocking on my door.

Can I have a door privacy? You know, some kind of block on my front stairs that’ll keep you from getting to the door unless you’re actually here because I invited you? *sigh*

I’m not sure what it is about me, I must have that kind of friendly face that makes you want to open up, cuz I’ve had to deal with some serious TMI(too.much.information!) lately. (like the real estate agent… really. don’t need one. thanks.) The worst has been the guy at Mr. Sub. Despite my repeated and failed attempts to eat healthier, I’ve been finding myself there a fair bit lately. (it’s not *quite* as bad for me as Dairy Queen’s burger, fries and sundae deal :) ) But the sandwich dude who’s there every.freaking.day is really not one for keeping things to himself. I didn’t need to know that he doesn’t drink beer or that he hates fish. Or that he used to cook for John Travolta. (uh-huh). But when he stopped me from leaving, sandwich in hand, and a grumbly tumbly, to tell me about his lack of girlfriend, wife, ex-wife, good job, finances and real estate, and because of that he’s planning to go back to school to be  a truck driver, because he can get away from his newly wedded ex who he’s still completely and totally in love with… uh, dude, we’ve crossed the line. Seriously. All you needed to know about me was that I don’t like spices or mayo on my tuna sub. All I need to know about you is that I owe you $7.13. And maybe a nice comment about the weather. We are Canadian after all. But any more than that? TMI. (also, please don’t flirt with me when I’m going into another restaurant with my boyfriend. um,  we’re not holding hands cuz we’re brother and sister…)

So, while we’re sharing… (or, uh, the sandwich dude is sharing :) ), have you had any random TMI episodes lately? Anything you want to share?