Manic Monday

In an effort to post a bit more regularly*, I have stolen Kelly Hashway's Monday Mishmash idea.

I think the basic idea is that you just list some of things that are on your mind. So here goes.

1. My dates went very well. Open mic night was fun. I was unaware that Caffe A La Mode does that every Friday. Saturday I exposed my epic nerdness by taking Drummerboy geocaching. Then we had dinner and went to see that Dad vs. Stepdad movie, which was pretty funny. I installed Spotify on Drummerboy's phone and have been sending him playlists of mostly gothic country music. 

2. Everything in the office is electrocuting me. Everything. This is a problem. 

THE FREAKING PLANTS ARE EVEN ELECTROCUTING ME. 

3. Westley and the Witches is one of the best pieces of middle grade fiction IN THE WORLD.*** 

And yet somehow, no one has reviewed it yet. Therefore, I have declared that the first person to review it on Amazon or Goodreads will receive a REAL LIFE PRIZE. 
You may also have a free hard copy of the book if you so desire. I will send it to you. You will, however, need to read the first two books as well. I will also send you those if you don't have them. Your prize will be commensurate with the quality of your book review.

4. Triple Town. This game is taking over my life. Like I need a 12 step program at this point. 

That's all I got. Hope y'all are having a good Monday, especially those of you who actually got the day off. 










* because I'm sure you readers are all desperate for me to post more**

*** this may be slightly inaccurate













** sarcasm

They tried sodium amytal on him three years ago trying to find out where he buried a Princeton student. He gave them a recipe for dip.

Just a quick post to let y'all know I'm still here and ok, 'cause I got a couple emails inquiring as to my well-being. 

Not much to report. Christmas was not nearly as exciting as last year. 

Got some excellent booty from Mum Santa.

Mum and Lil Sis, in their attempts to drag me into the 21st century, also surprised me with a Kindle Fire, the screen of which I have been compulsively cleaning ever since. (And also re-reading Red Dragon).

 I feel like my old college roommate when he got his Mac laptop--he rarely let anyone touch it, and if you were allowed to touch it, you had to go wash your hands first with the most dehydrating soap that we had in the bathroom.

Pretty sure I also gained back all the weight I may have lost the last month or so, as I have been compulsively over-eating since Tuesday. ...A good thing?

Hope the rest of you had a lovely Christmas!

::slithers back into corner to polish kindle::

Shake a leg Junior! Thank God your mammy died givin' birth. If she'd have seen you, she'd have died o' shame.

Clytie is a genius. Inspired by her blog post, I made this:

That's a Van's low-cal waffle (70 calories), 2 small spoonfuls of Edy's slow-churned caramel delight ice cream (40ish cals), and just a little sugar free maple syrup (it's 15 cals per 1/4 cup and I think I barely used a tbsp, so I guess it's like 4 calories?). 

A nice size Belgian waffle sundae for a grand total of 114 calories. 

But I shouldn't even be eating that. I've zeppelined right back up to 108 lbs (BMI 20.4) and I feel anxious and cold-sweat-ish whenever I have to go out where people can see me. Such as leaving my bedroom and being seen by Mum or Little Sis on the way to the bathroom. I've been wearing hardly anything but oversized sweaters and sweatpants to cover up the largeness. 

This is my reward for my attempts at Recovery. I haven't BINGE binged in a loooooong time. As in the fill-my-pockets-with-as-much-junk-food-as-I-can-manage-and-hide-in-my-bedroom-stuffing-my-face-in-the-middle-of-the-night kind of bingeing. I haven't done that in WEEKS. For the most part, I've eaten below what a normal person should eat. And somehow I have managed to gain roughly 8 lbs since the beginning of the summer. 

No matter what I do--eat normal, restrict, fast, starve, workout--I'm still gaining weight. Every week I go to weigh myself and no matter whether it's been a bad week or a good week food and exercise-wise, I'm still gaining weight. 

I AM GOING TO HAVE A MOTHERTRUCKING NERVOUS BREAKDOWN. Seriously. This makes me want to do very bad things for which I do not have money. 

>:(

My printer at work is accosting me. 

Y'all are familiar with my issues with electronics and conspiracy-theory-paranoia by now. Sometimes I wonder if maybe I'm unknowingly part of some secret government experiment. (I've been watching a lot of the X Files, if you can't tell--I got seasons 6 and 7 on DVD for like $15 each. :D)

Either yes, the government is experimenting on me; I generate lots of radiation naturally; or my office is haunted. 

Specifically, my printer is haunted, and it's only haunted when I'm alone in the office. 

Look at it there, being Evil while my back is turned.

I'll just be sitting there, going about my daily business, the printer only doing things and making noise when I print stuff. 

And then, usually in the middle of a brief lull in the office work, the printer will yell at me. 

It kind of reminds me of my old car (the 2000 Jeep Grand Spastic Limited)--I'd be driving along, all alone in the car, and the passenger window would just go down all by itself. (And that was just the beginning of that car's Madness...)

The bathroom in my old house did something similar as well. Mum and I got to talking about that this weekend, actually. We moved out of that house in 2001, and I still miss it. 

The downstairs bathroom had a vent in the ceiling that would scream at you when you turned the light on. It was customary for those of us who were familiar with this to send ignorant visitors into that bathroom and wait outside to hear their horrified reactions. The vent did not automatically scream at you when the light went on--sometimes it would start shrieking immediately, sometimes it wouldn't scream at all. The best ever was when the vent would wait before it started screaming, giving the person in the bathroom time to sit down on the loo and relax before being frightened out of their wits. 

I've been trawling around youtube for like an hour trying to find something that sounds similar to the screaming bathroom vent, but there's nothing. It kind of a little bit sounds like the noise you hear in this vid, when you let the mouse hover over the "play" button.

Only in the bathroom it was more drawn out. 

Watch that video. If you don't find the letter in place of "H" to be funny, I question your sense of humour. 

<3

I wouldn't eat anything that color unless it came out of a cereal box.

 Remember that delicious guy I saw a few times at the gym? I got a better look at him a while back and he wasn't as hot as he looked from farther away. But then today I saw him close up, and he had his hair down.

Only an older Brian May.

More like that.

But since he's not Brian May, I wasn't too sure how I felt about the look.

Brian May is a f**king GOD. Or he's at least in the in the top 10 on the list of Greatest Humans of All Time. 

don't question it

If you don't know who Brian May is, SHAME on you!!

Aside from being half of the genius that was Queen, he's invented all sorts of music-type equipment, is an animal activist, and he has a frigging PhD in astrophysics.

W    T    F

Speaking of boys.... Friend brought up the crush last weekend. (He's her cousin.)  Apparently he was intimidated by my dizzying intellect.

-________________-

Where are the nice decent men? I don't think I ask for all that much in a man. I don't need someone who looks like a rock star, I don't want an intellectual, I don't care about how much money he makes or what kind of car he drives or how much porn he looks at. I just want a gentleman, and a man who could build me a house with his bare hands, and who likes to sit in his recliner with a six pack and watch sports on Sundays, and who enjoys being loud with his buddies and having a cigar while barbecuing.

It's really not all that much to ask, for feck's sake.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

It really ticks me off that these things seem to only have a lifespan of one year. I use it in my car, to connect the ipod to the radio. I've gone through 3 of them because after a year or so, they just stop working.

Like seriously, it's BS. Such a simple little thing--why the heck can't it work for more than 12 months?!? It's not like it's some crazy complicated high-tech thing. It's an effing audio adapter. These things have been around in some form or another for like a hundred years. AND I NEED MY IPOD TO WORK IN MY CAR.

Ipods are a really brilliant little invention, don't y'all think? And I'm not really crazy about technology and gadget-type things, but being able to carry 14 days' worth of music around in a thing that's the same size as my cell phone is pretty rad. I remember the days of airplane travel in which I had to drag a 5-pound case of cassettes, and then the even heavier CD case in my carry-on bag. I couldn't settle on just a few CD's, because I'm like ADDDJ with music--I can switch from Beethoven to Abba to Slayer to Lady Gaga to Rob Zombie to Cab Calloway to Tarja to Queen to Leadbelly to Marilyn Manson to Brahms and back again like 25 times on a 2-hour car ride.

(I nearly soiled myself the first time I saw that.)

The DVR is pretty rad, too. I'm only just getting the hang of it, but it's pretty exciting to be able to have 100+ hours of Law & Order SVU available in that little box whenever I want to watch it.

But I have to say that my favourite modern invention--the one that makes me shudder when I think of what it was like to live without it--is the dishwasher.

F**king genius.

I mean it's not a huge deal having to wash your own dishes. I had no dishwasher for the 3 and a half years I lived in Philadelphia. And we had no dishwasher in Ireland (the "dishwasher" was generally the youngest person staying in the house). My roommates in Phila. totally SUCKED at washing dishes. Most of the time they just wouldn't bother, which brought out my Dragon Rage. And then when they did do it, they complained about how much it sucked, which was understandable because they were all doing it wrong--sitting there with the water running and washing each individual thing one at a time with the sponge.

No.

Get your gloves on, toss all the dirty stuff into the sink, dribble some dish soap on it, and fill the sink with scalding hot water. Then all you have to do is just push the dishes round the sink a bit and then take them out and put them in the drying rack. When I showed my roommates that, you would have thought from their reactions that I had just showed them how to turn water into a 40.

Of course you could just skip all of that and get a dishwasher.

Now I know I'm a bit psychotic about my dishwasher, but when you love something that much I think you should take care of it, and take pride in making it do its job Properly. The dishwasher is a glorious thing--it should be treated with reverence. But apparently some people are so simple they can't even operate the dishwasher without catastrophe.

By that I mean Little Sis.

She's the youngest in the family, and there's a pretty big gap between us (I'm the next oldest). Mum was kind of older when she had Lil Sis, and I think at that point she had just totally had it with parenting. Whereas Big Sisters #1 and #2 and I grew up with Super-Strict-Dictator-Mum, Little Sis got Whatever-Just-Do-What-You-Want-Mum.

I'm not complaining--Mum's rules coupled with her total lack of emotional guidance made me self-sufficient at an extremely young age. I knew how to take care of personal hygiene, clean house, do my laundry, con people into giving me rides, and feed myself all without assistance well before I hit age 10.

Little Sis, who just turned 17 last week, can do none of those things. She can't even work the dishwasher.

I'm pretty sure most people--even those without dishwashers--can tell the difference between dish soap and dishwasher soap.

It's not like it would be cataclysmic if you were washing dishes manually and ended up using the Cascade instead of the Fairy Liquid. HOWEVER, it IS cataclysmic when you put the Fairy Liquid into the dishwasher.

Dish soap has magic powers.

EVIL magic powers. After Lil Sis put the dishwasher on, we all came downstairs the next morning to discover that the entire kitchen was covered in bubbles and foam. It was like something out of a campy kids movie, complete with the cats up on the counter looking at the soap with horror, and then glaring at us as though we were the most moronic creatures ever to walk the earth since Sarah Palin. (It was breakfast-time and they could not access their food bowls, which means the Humans Have Failed Epically.)

Except it wasn't really that funny in real life.

Only two options left: suicide or become a television weatherman.

Since the television doesn't feel it is necessary to include the good music, I shall announce the Grammy winners here. 

Best Classical Album - Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra playing Verdi's Requiem.  They also won Best Choral Performance. Well deserved.

Best Orchestral Performance - Daugherty: Metropolis Symphony; Deus Ex Machina - Giancarlo Guerrero with the Nashville Symphony

Best Instrumental Soloist - Mitsuko Uchida - Mozart's Piano Concertos 23 and 24 (with the Cleveland Orchestra)

Best Instrumental Soloist without orchestra - Paul Jacobs - Messiaen: Livre Du Saint-Sacrement

Best Chamber Music - The Parker Quintet playing Ligeti's String Quartets 1 & 2

Those were the good ones, anyway. 

I made a vlog in which I brought the camera up into the attic, and there was nice music (Marin Marais), machetes, and horror-film worthy shots of the attic door. But for some reason my camera decided to eat most of it, leaving me with only the first 10 seconds. 

This is why I prefer film. If you screw up your 16mm movie, at least you know it was probably something YOU did wrong, rather than the camera being possessed by evil technology demons that can think for themselves. 

I'm not so good with technology. The fact that I can operate a computer without anything catching fire or exploding is a pretty epic achievement. I'm still trying to wrap my head around itunes and the fact that I can carry 14 days worth of music around in my pocket. (Actually 13 days and 8 hours, if you played all the music in my itunes.)

I am both frightened by and in awe of electricity. Perhaps this is why electronic things tend to malfunction around me?

 

Electrical outlets seem to have a particular hatred for me. 

Even radios stop working when i get too close.

The effing radio in the car even goes funny sometimes. And I swear to god, half the street lights on the road go out right when I drive past them. 

This is nerve-wracking when your only job qualifications are for office positions. I am not exaggerating--EVERY SINGLE OFFICE COMPUTER I have ever used has had something go wrong with it within a week of me touching it. And the other people in the office will all swear that the computer was totally fine before. In my current job, I have definitive proof.  

2 weeks after I started working for the Boss, my computer began to act weird. Word would just quit for no reason. The program we use to keep track of cases would spazz and freeze the computer. And the accounting program was on technological crack. 

So we got a new computer for Boss, and he gave me his old (but still relatively new) computer. That one went nuts as well. Then 2 weeks ago, I got a whole new computer. Brand new. 

Guess what. 

It's not working. 

And they can't fix it. The regular tech guy, and the tech guy for the fancy program we use have been trying non-stop since last Wednesday. The Boss is getting suspicious, but he can't admit it because that's like admitting I have supernatural powers. It's the same with Mum. She knows things inexplicably break around me, but she will still verbally insist that it's all in my head. Even when I killed her Blackberry. 

This problem is most fun in winter. I seem to attract an abnormal amount of static electricity. It doesn't bother me so much personally, with the exception of my bed. I had to get rid of my fleece blankets because they more or less electrocuted me every time I moved.

But other than that, I don't get shocked too much. Instead, I become a living breathing Tesla coil.

I will zap you right out of existence.

Little Sis's cat, Daisy will not go anywhere near me unless she's standing on a surface that is not a conductor. 

I'm still deflating from the weekend binge, so I'm not conducting as much electricity as I usually would. Which is a good thing, because I plan on going to the gym for at least an hour on the elliptical. Electronic gym equipment malfunctions around me as well. At least at Planet Fitness, everything is on a hard floor. 

But at home, with the treadmill on a carpet, I tend to zap anything within a 6-foot radius. And if I run fast enough, I can short out the whole basement. 

Smash the control machine.

Started SGD today with Oxymoron. So far so good. Ended the day at 350 rather than 400 but meh, it's close enough. Especially since I couldn't get to the gym because of the ice/snow/sleet/hail/armageddon storm that is blanketing the whole of the continental US. 

Sometimes when I partake of certain herbal sleep remedies, I end up having a little bit too much. There's a very, very fine line between Sleepy-Mich and Government-Conspiracy-Theory-Epic-Panic-Mode-Mich. 

For anyone who is prone to this kind of paranoia, never ever read this book.

Like omg PANIC. 

I don't know why we're panicking, but we're gonna panic good and proper. 

These incidents have only led to extremes a handful of times. There was one night, allegedly, in which I came home drunk and herbalized and panicked when I found Little Sis video-chatting on the computer. She left the webcam turned on even when she wasn't using the computer, and I disagreed with this because the government is watching us through our idle web cam, and listening to everything we say. 

So naturally I yanked the web cam out of the computer and ran off with it. Sis says I "hid it" somewhere so the government couldn't see anything. That was like 2 years ago and we never found the web cam. I remember none of this. 

Then there was that time in college when we hot-boxed the bunk beds in my friend's dorm room. We had run out of our own stuff, so Friend called his roommate and asked if we could have some of his. Sure, Roommate said, it's in the top drawer. 

Roommate calls back 10 minutes later and says OH MY GOD, please tell me you took some of the stuff in the bag on the LEFT side of the drawer...

We had already smoked out of the bag on the right. 

The last thing I remember is getting incredibly distraught over the fact that Friend had three televisions in his living room, so he could watch tv, watch a dvd, and play video games all at the same time. 

Friend said that he went to the bathroom and when he came back, I was gone. My roommate said she found me passed out in the closet of our bedroom with my blankets and pillows in there with me. 

This, my friends, is why no one should do angel dust. Ever. Although I do miss Philadelphia when I remember times like these. No other city does crazy like Philadelphia. 

*~*~***~*~*~*

And you have to watch Part 2. 


<3 the IT Crowd. They need to bring that show over to the States like now. 

Harumph

Last night, our prof kept us 20 minutes late again. >:(

The class next door was watching the Fellowship of the Ring. I could tell exactly what part of the movie they were at just by the music.

I downloaded the free version of the My Fitness Pal app onto my Palm, but I have yet to use it. Oddly enough, it doesn't work whenever I try to get it to log my activity. -_- Electronics rarely work properly around me. I must emit low levels of radiation or something. Other people have actually noticed the odd effect I have on computers, phones, fax machines, televisions, xerox machines, dvd players, cable boxes........ it goes on and on. My favorite was the time I went over to my cousin's house and immediately after I walked in the door, all the power went out.

It didn't go back on until I left. We tried the fuse box. And all the neighbors had power. It's just me.

The weekend is here once again! And once again I am hovering very close to 100 lbs. I've done awesome all week, there's NO REASON I can't do awesome all weekend. So far today I've had turkey bacon (45), and I'm going out walking instead of going on the treadmill. Must make use of the gorgeous weather before we get a freak heat wave. 'Tis clear and sunny out, and an expected high of 75 degrees. And god help me, I will get that Fitness Pal thing to work.

A New Week. A New Semester. A New Phone (!! :D). A New Darn Season (do you hear me summer?? feck off!)

I registered for a class for the Autumn semester today - Developmental Psychology. It wasn't the class I wanted, but since I'm a non-degree/post-baccalaureate or whatever I can't register early, so had to wait until today (2 days before the semester starts). I figure I've got 2 more days to keep checking back to try for Statistics or Abnormal Psych. 

I am not weighing myself today. After the abysmal weekend, I think I need a few days to get back down to what I was on Friday evening. Had turkey bacon for breakfast today (90). I need to get back on track by Thursday, when class starts. No carbs. No crap. AND NO BLOODY ICE CREAM.

I ordered a Palm Pre Plus off eBay last week. I feel like a little kid expecting a new toy. I want to take the lawn chair and camp out by the postbox like I used to when I was younger and I knew Mum had ordered something for me off a catalog. I want the Palm NOW so I can play with it!! I'm trying to distract myself by buying a skin for it. Gela Skins has so many awesome ones, Idk which one I want.  I kind of like this one because it's ridiculous:

 

There's a Van Gogh one with flowers that I also like. 

I miss my Vicodin. :*(    I'm trying to get myself pumped for the treadmill with coffee, but it's just not the same. So a word of advice to everyone: DO NOT get into the habit of exercising on painkillers. There is no worse torture than working out without them. Seriously. I've been sitting here for almost three hours DREADING getting on the treadmill. And I can only do 40 mins of power walking at the most without pharmaceutical aids. No jogging. And it's so BORING, running in place for 40 mins, with feckall to watch on the telly. 

At least I can use the clicker to change channels now. Before we got rid of the satellite, you had to set the upstairs TV on the channel you wanted in order to watch downstairs, 'cause they were hooked up to the same box or whatever. It's the same in my room - I CAN CHANGE THE CHANNEL NOW!! I'm so proud of myself; I'm getting so technologically advanced. Changing the channel on my TV, new phone with internet. 

I'm still not getting rid of the VCR. You will have to kill me first, and pry it from my cold, dead fingers. (You hear me, Mumsy!? I don't care if it's outdated!!)

I think I need a new cell phone.

Why is it that cell phones nowadays are such pieces of shite? I'm on my THIRD phone in less than a year. I want my old V back!!!
That thing was seriously the greatest phone ever. The battery lasted a week, and that was with me texting and playing on the internet all the time. It lasted three whole years before the inside screen started to go a bit funny. Then I got a Blackberry pearl, because it was pink. I had it for 24 hours before I couldn't take it anymore and went running back to the shop to return it. Then I got the EnV3, which was like the current version of the V. I went through 2 of those - both went spastic. Now I've got this thing:

I got it because it was purple, and a friend worked in the Verizon shop, so 'twas $150 less that what it should have been. But it has had multiple issues from the beginning, which included: a camera and photo gallery that are slower that Windows Vista, many many texting problems (not receiving them for 3 days, sending 5 copies of the same text to other people without my knowledge...), shutting itself off (I think ALL Verizon phones do this). And now it's just a total spaz. I can hear it in the kitchen right now, turning itself on and off over and over again.

Any of you lovely ladies in the US have a phone suggestion? I want a phone that has pretty good internet, but I don't want an iphone , a Crackberry, or a Droid. Anything else is cool.

So I was 100 lbs when I weighed myself this morning!! :D I'm not logging it in as official until the third weigh-in before bed. I've been good as far as cutting down on carbs. Yesterday I had 4 pieces of turkey bacon for breakfast (60), some roast beef cold cuts with mustard for lunch (60), a tuna salad for dinner (120), some lemonade (70), and 2 fiber bars (230). After adding in an estimate for all the Tums and a bit of turkey from Sis's sandwich, my daily total was like 550.