Category Archives: Stuff

Tentative

The Cleveland Cavaliers have forced a Game 7 in the NBA Finals against the Golden State Warriors. Nobody can deny that the Warriors have dominated the NBA for the past couple of years because numbers don’t lie. Last year, the Cavs faced the Warriors in the Finals and were beaten in six games. Two amazing victories and four heartbreaking losses.

And here we are again.

As it stands right now, it’s 3-3. No team has ever been up 3-1 in the Finals and lost it, so the Cavs are poised to make history in more ways than one. You see, Cleveland hasn’t won a championship in any major sport since 1964.

That’s 11 years before I was born. [this is the 3rd time I have edited this because I have forgotten simple arithmetic]

I was born and raised in Ravenna, Ohio. It’s a sleepy, small town about 45 minutes southeast of Cleveland. Most of the people there support the Cleveland sports teams, and I have never known a professional sports championship from any of “my” teams. In fact, it’s often very much the reverse.

There is “the Drive.” There is “the Fumble.” There is “the Shot.” And then there is whatever it was that fucked the Indians in their World Series bids over the years (I’m actually a Mets fan and have been since 1986, so apologies to my Cleveland peeps for not being with them 100%).

So what do we do now, being 48 minutes away from the end? Do we dare hope that maybe, just maybe LeBron James and his team will do what feels literally impossible and bring a championship home to Cleveland? What does Cleveland even DO if that happens? So much of the city’s identity is built on despair. We’re afraid to hope for the best because we know, at a cellular level, that it will never, ever happen.

But it might!

We have hope. We have faith. Cleveland sports fans are the very definition of faith. An agnostic myself, I’m skeptical of anything I can’t really find evidence for. Sure, there might be a God out there somewhere, but I’m not really buying it. Same with Cleveland sports. There might be a championship out there, but we are none of us convinced. Still, we hope. We show up. We buy tickets and t-shirts and those foam fingers and stale popcorn and we show up. We yell, we scream, we boo, we cheer, we laugh and we cry. We believe. We have faith. It’s tenuous, it’s shaky, but it’s there. We. Believe.

Faith means showing up even when you are convinced the outcome is not in your favor. Faith is Charlie Brown giving Lucy the football because maybe this time, MAYBE THIS TIME, she won’t be a total cunt about it and he will finally get to kick it. Faith is hope.

I honestly don’t care that much either way about NBA basketball. But I understand symbolism and what this would mean to a place that I call home (despite having lived in the wilds of suburban New Jersey for over 17 years). Ohio is shaped like a heart, and that’s where mine is.

So we go into tomorrow, Father’s Day, with hope. It’s the kind of hope that you almost have to deny. It makes your skin hurt, with the apprehension and the heady mix of joy and anticipated pain that we’re all going to feel when Cleveland takes the court in enemy territory. Golden State might have the skill, but I guarantee you that nobody, and I mean NO GODDAMNED BODY in the history of the entire world, ever, wants a victory more than those Cleveland Cavaliers do. Sometimes, wanting it hard enough can make it happen.

I will likely spend tomorrow feeling like I want to jump out of my skin. I probably won’t watch the game, because when I do, Basketball Rachel comes out and she scares children. I’m not into praying, but I might try that. What I probably will end up doing, is the same thing I always do on Sunday nights: I’ll be sat on the sofa, reading a book and checking scores on my phone while What’s-His-Name watches something completely devoid of any cultural relevancy. Whatever happens tomorrow night is up to LeBron James and his teammates. I can’t think too hard about it.

I can only hope.

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Yeah, so…

I dunno, y’all. Well, the both of you who still read this thing. Between Facebook and Twitter and a couple of other things I do on the internet, I run out of words by the time I think “hmmmm. Blog.”

Things are good. Life is relatively drama-free and happy, which of course means I have nothing really to write about. Jillian started preschool last month and loves it so much that I can threaten to keep her home from school AS A PUNISHMENT. That’s possibly the most awesome parenting perk I have come across so far.

She loves school. LOVES IT. So much so that she runs into the place in the morning and cries when I come to pick her up. Totally the opposite of most of the other kids.

She got glasses. LOVES THE GLASSES. I understand that completely, having been the one kid who was pissed about having straight teeth and thus no need for braces. I wanted braces SO BADLY. You know, because I wasn’t nerdy ENOUGH, what with the bizarre hair and lack of fashion sense and 4.0 GPA and band. Braces would have rounded that picture out nicely.

The house is 99% done. That went surprisingly well, all things considered. It’s so nice to have a giant bedroom and space to move around in the bathroom and all that jazz. We finally got blinds on the windows, a full three months after we ordered them. Huge improvement. We ditched our cable and got FiOS. Mostly because I have hated the cable since we moved here three years ago and also because we had a bit of a windy day which blew the cable off the house and it took them FOUR DAYS to come fix it. Not acceptable. So now we are happy FiOS customers, and we get MORE CHANNELS for LESS MONEY. Why we let Cablevision screw us for three years, I will never know. I get BBCAmerica again, which was pretty much my goal in life.

I still knit. Actually, at the moment I am working on a blanket that has 243953445346 different colors and thus 23423523451 million ends to weave in. It’s one of those things that seemed like a good idea from the picture, then I started it and got about 75% of the way through it before I realized what sort of hell it was going to be. Oh well. It will be done eventually and then I can start and not finish a bunch of other things!

I’m still going to the gym. A lot. A very lot. It’s… well… it’s fucking frustrating, is what it is. I get on the elliptical and get all horrible and sweaty and gross for an hour almost every day and the scale isn’t really budging all that much. It sucks. I have noticed that my face is a bit thinner and my ass is changing shape a little bit, but dammit – I want that scale to reflect my hard work, too. I know I need to add weights more than once a week and I should probably radically overhaul my [not bad, actually] eating, but I would think that the work I’m putting it would show up a little more readily. Still, I keep at it. I have gently started running again, after issues with shinsplints and stress fractures, and that seems to be going okay. I think I’m going to start racing, which should be fun. Ideally, I’d like to do a marathon in 2012, preferably Paris. Big dreams.

Aside from those things, I don’t have much else to report. I need to find the focus to sit and write, since I have a lot of ideas but I can’t seem to make them do anything. It’s probably some kind of ADHD, which is exacerbated by my internetting, but whaddaya gonna do?

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Brr!

Didn’t feel like we had much of a summer this year. The first part was cold and damp, the next part was way too hot and overly-humid, and then as soon as Labor Day happened, we ended up in Fall. Bleh.

Could be worse, I suppose. My friends in Denver woke up to snow the other day and that’s just wrong.

Right now, it’s 62 degrees in my house and my hands are cold. My feet, too, but I’m too lazy to go unearth my slippers from the depths of my closet. I should turn the heat on, but I’m resisting! Every day I resist turning the heat on means a potentially lower utility bill! RESIST!

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Next move

I wonder what Squeaky Fromme will do now that she’s ‘free.’ Apparently she was granted parole for good conduct or whatever the hell they call it, but the AP rundown of her prison career doesn’t read like that of a model inmate. Weirdness.

All that Manson Family stuff happened six years before I was born, but I have always found the story fascinating. That kind of killing is always fascinating in a morbid way, but the circus that surrounded it all is where my attention has always gone. From the protests outside the courtroom to the protests INSIDE the courtroom, all of that is just so amazing to me.


Especially now, where the news cycle is soooo short – I wonder how it would have all played out had it happened in 2009 and not 1969. We would have had live feeds from Sharon Tate’s house, leaked cell-phone images of the crime scene, up-to-the-second Twitter feeds, the whole mess. Would that make it more or less horrible?

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Things I’ve been doing

1. Listening to Thriller. I revisited it as a tribute to Michael Jackson and I am amazed at how well it holds up. Amazed. It’s excellent music for cleaning the house, too.

2. Not writing blog posts (duh). I have come to the realization that although my life isn’t boring to live, once I start writing stuff down… whoa. BORING. It’s boring as hell to write about, so I can only imagine it is at least twice as boring to read about. However…

3. Gardening! Well, not so much gardening as much as ‘sticking seeds in the ground to see what happens.’ The lettuce was pulled out weeks ago because it bolted a lot faster than I expected it too. Oh well. The scallions are just hanging on, so we’re about at the end of that. I planted peppers, which are… slackers. I’m not sure how well they’re going to do. But the tomatoes… oh the tomatoes. We’re going to have a lot. 38 plants and they’re all THRIVING. I also have cucumbers. I’ve never grown them, so I am not familiar with how they grow but… I have a few that are as big around as my daughter’s entire body but they’re only about 4 inches long. Weird.

4. Beer. Our first batch of homebrew came out AMAZING. So the second batch was brewed last Thursday and we’re hoping our beginner’s luck holds out for that. We have decided that we need a boiler for outside though, because the house was stinky for four entire days. This will also help when the tomatoes arrive, because the thought of canning tomatoes in my sweat lodge of a kitchen makes me want to cry.

5. Potty-training. Jillian is getting the hang of peeing, and the pooping is coming along as well. I can’t get her to dress/undress herself yet – she is content to let me do it. Hmm. Still, not having to change diapers except for naptime/bedtime is a wonderful thing.

6. Knitting. I’m working on Preppy Sock #2, which is almost done. I turned the heel the other day and now it’s just a matter of getting to the end. I started this pair way back in March, so it’s about time. Then I can move on to something else, like…. more socks. Actually, I’m going to knit a new sweater for Jillian who refuses to stop growing and has outgrown the one I made for her two years ago.

7. Party planning. Jillian’s 3rd birthday is at the end of this month. I am gobsmacked that she’s already three! In one sense, it feels like she just got here, but in another, it’s getting difficult to remember what life was like without her. She’s talking (constantly) and growing (constantly) and learning stuff and just being delightful.

8. Working out. Because $40/hour for a personal trainer is a bit expensive, we have acquired a lot of the tools I was using at the gym and can work out at home. We have BodyBars, medicine balls, resistance bands, and sometime in the next week or so, we’ll have dumbbells. I also have a treadmill and a stability ball, so there is no excuse at all, ever, for me to not be working out. I worked out in the backyard with Freddie on Saturday and I’m pleased to note that 2 days later, he is still hurting a bit. Story of my life – I know what I need to do… I just need to do it. I’m trying to build up my running stamina and I’m planning to start working with a swim coach…. and Freddie wants to buy me a bike because he thinks I’m going to be ready for a triathlon next year. Errrrrr….. I’m not so sure about that. There is one at Cedar Point that I would LOVE to go to, but I was thinking more along the lines of Freddie doing it. Turns out he thinks I should do it. I suppose it would be fitting. There are few places on Earth that I love the way I love Cedar Point.

9. Maybe getting a dog. We have been talking about getting a dog for awhile now, and we finally found a few that we like on Petfinder. The application process is interesting – it’s no wonder people just go out and buy dogs because it seems like there are a lot of hoops to jump through to get one through a rescue. It should be the other way around, i think. Still, we’ll see. The dog we’re interested in is a Border Collie/Whippet mix, which translates into HIGH ENERGY OMG! But I have a three-year-old, so they will match up well.

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OMGWTFBBQMSGNYERADAR???

Sooooooooo….. that catastrophic data loss I had last week? Where my user profile appeared to be deleted and I proceeded to LOSE MY FREAKING MIND because I thought I’d lost all my music and pictures?

Apparently it didn’t actually happen.

After five full days of freaking right out and then restoring the data (twice!) and MANUALLY deleting 18,000 song files that were copied somehow by the restore, I finally felt confident enough to take the computer out of backup mode and re-start it.

So I held my breath, crossed my fingers, and hit ‘restart.’

Since I am superstitious and computer fuck-ups tend to make me a wee bit homicidal, I didn’t sit around to watch the beeping and booping and whirring and whatnot of the restart. I went into another room altogether to wait a few minutes. I might have prayed a little bit. Maybe.

I gathered up whatever remained of my wits and tiptoed cautiously back to the table.

And.

It was all back. ALL OF IT. My old desktop photo, all the crap bookmarks/shortcuts on the desktop… all of it. As if nothing had ever happened.

I am so confused. Grateful, sure. But confused as all get-out because WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED in the first place? I went through five full days of losing my shit for NO GOOD REASON? I like to at least have a reason when I lose my mind, you know?

SO confused. And now I’m going to constantly be worried that this will happen again. I know it’s not a tragedy, since I do have backup, but I don’t need this kind of anxiety! I create enough on my own, dammit!

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A test of my emergency coping system

This is only a test, I hope.

I woke up this morning and opened up the computer to find that it had somehow killed everything. EVERYTHING. Music? Gone. Photos? Gone. Everything, everything, everything, gone, gone, gone.

Any programs I’d installed were intact, which was weird, but any data/settings? GONE.

How does this happen? Nobody seems to know. I think Bill Gates got mad at me the other day for telling Windows Vista to shut up. I’m SORRY, okay?

This has created a weird space in my head. This weird space is occupied by the thought that I am incredibly thankful for Howard Stern. Why? Well.

Freddie enjoys the comedy stylings of Howard Stern. I don’t really understand this, since I find him boring and repetitive (not to mention puerile and lowest-common-denominator). So Freddie listens to Howard on the radio. And one of the companies that advertises on Howard’s radio show is for a PC backup service, of which we are customers.

So, when the thing is finished restoring everything I had lost this morning, we’ll see if we’re getting our money’s worth (we’re at 68% restored at the moment). And then I will not say anything derogatory about Howard Stern or his fans for at least a week.

The real test today is to see how well I keep it together. I have been hanging on to my sanity by a very fine thread for quite some time now, since things in my house insist upon requiring repair, which costs me money. It would be one thing if everything was broken at once, but it’s not like that. Something breaks, I get it fixed (because of course it’s a fix that is outside even my crafty MacGuyver skills), I pay for it, and then something else goes. This has been going on since October and I am pretty sure I’m close to my limit of being able to cope without being medicated.

This constant feeling of “NOW WHAT” is going to be the death of me. I’m trying to be all Zen or whatever happy-clappy coping bullshit, but it’s difficult. VERY difficult. I just keep breathing, keep moving, keep rolling. Four years ago, when I was Professionally Crazy, this would have been the end of me. But I know I’ll get through it if I just keep moving.

Drugs would be more efficient, of course, but I am becoming increasingly anti-pharmie in my old age. I don’t want to be That Girl who takes pills for everything because she can’t cope, can’t sleep, can’t get out of bed. I can do all of those things.

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The rage, the rage, the rage is calling

My internet service is not the greatest. It comes and goes, usually without reason or pattern. This is not a good thing.

It went out again today. Told me there was a problem with the DNS, and… the error message directed me to a website for more info. When I couldn’t access the internet. Well played, Microsoft Vista. Well played, indeed.

Shut UP, Microsoft Vista.

So… the internet was out and so was the phone (VoIP), which meant I had to not only locate, but use my cell phone. This is a challenge in many ways: once the phone is located, I have to hope it’s charged. Otherwise, I am tethered to the nearest plug while it charges. The Deafness factor does not help this, nor does the Toddler Factor.

Phone was found, was medium-charged, and because I’m stupid, I called the cable company and opted to allow it to walk me through the troubleshooting steps with the automated system. DON’T EVER TRY THIS if you cannot handle stupidity.

Eventually, I gave up trying to make the thing understand me when I said “continue” and I got a human on the phone. Who could not hear me because the phone was breaking up. I suppose this is what one can expect when one has a $7 cell phone.

I gave up. Had some lunch. Decided to give it another shot and here we are. But for how long?

As much as I love and adore my computer and my Imaginary Internet Friends who live inside it, I could probably be perfectly happy living without this shiny machine. But I don’t want to find out for sure.

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Shellshock

Note to self – never go to Target in December.

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Thankful

I am thankful for my husband, my lovely and hilarious daughter, and for the fact that we are all healthy, have [more than] enough to eat, a house to live in and stuff to do. I am thankful that we have elected a President I can believe in, and I hope he will help turn us back in a more positive direction. I am thankful for my parents, who are slowly losing their minds and have therefore become extremely entertaining in recent years. I am thankful for my friends, of both the Real and Imaginary Internet variety, for providing me with entertainment, solidarity, information, and unwavering support. I am thankful for so many things. Happy Thanksgiving!

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