but I am not, I am over here writing. I am the queen of procrastination. RAW’s mom is the opposite. I don’t think procrastination is even in her vocabulary. I think I should learn something from her.
It was Thanksgiving the other day. Just like last year we did the choreographed family transfer. On Wednesday RAW comes to work with Hollace (who was off most of last week) and we have lunch. He then leaves for Fort Wayne and Hollace and I go home. I work the afternoon at home. On Thursday morning, Hollace and I head out to Crown Point and RAW and his mom head to Crown Point and we converge on my parents. We eat. RAW, Hollace and Dorothy then head out to the hotel where Hollace and RAW use the swimming pool. I hang at mom’s for a bit longer before heading out to the hotel to meet them. The next morning we hit the hotel breakfast then we all head back to mom’s where RAW and his mom say goodbye and head back to Fort Wayne and me and Hollace hang out.
This year apparently I never let anyone in on my plans on staying in Crown Point Friday and leave Saturday morning. I wanted to give Sherry a proper visit. I met her for lunch on Friday. Between her, mom and RAW, everyone thought I was leaving on Friday. I guess they can’t read minds.
Of course after I let them all know of my plans I had second doubts about staying LOL. Maybe I should leave Friday evening. In the end I didn’t. Me and Hollace went to Sherry’s and watched a movie. We came home and watched a movie with mom. We left this morning and are now home, home.
It sucks seeing everyone get so old. Mom’s kitchen and dining room are really hallways. With my big dad and his cane and grama and her walker, it was hard to move around.
Next weekend I will be back in Crown Point but this time the four Fortuna daughers reunite. Paula comes to town and Pam, Cindy and I are all going to hang with her at mom’s. Sleeping at mom’s is next to miserable where there is more then one of us. There is only one good bed to sleep in. The other two beds up stairs are original–35 year old beds and mattresses. The last time I sleep on one of those I was so afraid the whole bed would collapse and I would of been horrified. Another time I slept on one of those beds, I woke with a bad back that took 2 weeks to recover from. Tonight I bought a 4-1 Coleman air mattress. We need something here at home so I felt justified in the purchase. I keep a queen size air mattress at mom’s but it sucks so to speak. It isn’t comfortable and loses air so I don’t like it.
Well, my daughter is officially spoiled rotten mainly because I am. I just got a new iPod touch. My other one is only a year old but I had less then 2 gig of space left on it and I got tired of deleting stuff so I got a 64 gig one. If they had that size a year ago I would of bought it then but 32 gig was the biggest and I knew I was going to be a tad bit small. Of course getting this one means Hollace gets my old one and she is beyond thrilled. She is always trying to comandeer mine. Now starts the chain reaction of computer events to get what she wants on it on it.
First I need to reformat the other computer and reinstall everything. Then get the stuff off her old iPod on that computer. I don’t really want to mess with it but it has to be done. That computer is driving RAW and Hollace nuts because it is slow and messed up. But I don’t want to get Hollace’s touch all set up there if I am only going to be formatting.
I suppose I better get that process started then I will get started on my Xmas card.
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Sisters - November 24, 2009 -
December 5 is the day I arranged with Pam and Cindy to meet at the mall in Milwaukee for a little sisterly bonding and shopping. That day also turns out to be the school art fair and booksale and the day Artworks is selling off all their stuff before closing.
Today I found out Paula is flying out from Baltimore for a visit home. She is only home for the weekend so that more than likely means she will only be staying at mom and dad’s. So that means we will go out there to see her there. I don’t know about Pam and Cindy though (they live 5 hours from mom’s). Will they come home too? If they do, then all 4 of us can go shopping down there.
It is already unpleasant staying at the folks house. There is really only one decent bed. Where does everyone sleep. I am old and grumpy to sleep in the old childhood beds. What if Pam and Cindy decide to come home too? We are all too cheap to get hotel rooms.
I am off on Friday the 4th for my shop till you drop day. Paula could use a ride from the airport. The problem is that airport she is flying in is 2 hours away from me (closer to mom’s) and her flight gets in at 9am so that means more like 3 hours and rush hour frustrations. She is ok taking the bus to mom’s. Is that bad of me to let her?
I don’t know what is going on. What ever ends up happening, it better not snow.
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well it makes me ADD at least.
Let see, right now I have 10 tabs open. Most of them are design inspiration sites and I am sucking them up. No I am not, I want to suck them up but as soon as one item grabs my attention I jump to another one and go “oh wow, cool” then I move to another tab. But wait, my new pocket camcorder I just got needs a firmware update. Wait there is a new photo project announced at Utata. It is based on a photographer featured in a Salon 11 months ago. I never read that one—off to read….I got too many tabs open. Lets close some but wait this design inspiration site looks cool, click that link—boing another tab opens—cool. Did that firmware update finish downloading. Why can’t I see the SD card for the camera on my computer? Open another tab so I can do a search on why that might be. Lets see, lets write a list of things I want to do this weekend. The weather is suppose to be nice, definitely plan on a walk. I need music but everything I have is distracting. Lets put on classical. Oooh, that design link has something on motion graphics. I need to fire up Lynda.com and do some tutorials right now. I still have 8 tabs open. Wonder how long after I start my tutorial before I fall asleep in this chair. Where is my storyboard for my planned video art. Didn’t I start a list at work of things I got to do. Oh yeah, I need to stock my purse with Tootsie Pops. Should probably do it right now. No put it on a list. Found the story board but I should look at the book I just got on goofy photo projects. I need to find some needlenose pliers so I can bend my cheap forks into photo easles (no kidding, found it in that book). RAW just dropped off two of his prescriptions that I need to get refilled on Caremark. Got to get to JCP to use my $10 coupon. Did I write that on my list. I think I will try and close those design tabs. Oh and while all of this is going on, I decide to take a moment to write about it here. It is going on 1:00 a.m. Time for bed. Yeah right now with my head swimming. Maybe I will put on a Lynda.com tutorial.
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I just woke up from a 5 minute nap. I am trying to cram in as many Lynda.com tutorials as I can until the 23rd. I would make a horrible student. While I for the most part can live quite effectively on 6 hour of sleep and rarely nap, put me in front of someone trying to teach me something or a text book, I am out lickety-split! I don’t know how Sherry is doing it.
Yesterday while watching CBS Sunday Morning I discovered the virtual toast app call Toast It! (or something like that, I don’t have it in front of me). It is an app for my iPod touch that makes toast and lets you put on yummy (and not so yummy) toppings. I can now have my peanutbutter english muffin every day and not get fat!
Why I am bringing this up is because while playing with this silly little app I realized my video art projects don’t have to be so serious like I think I was envisioning with the poetry and such but quirky and fun like the storyboard I developed yesterday called Ode to Toast.
This weekend I spent lots of money online shopping. I have 10 packages coming soon and only one of them is a Christmas present. While I have a cool new watch coming and some Fiestaware dishes I couldn’t find in the stores coming, most of what I am expecting is printer related, ink for 2 printers and 13×19 card stock. Yes it is that time of year to gear up for the Christmas card and calendars! Seriously though, I am getting tired of putting the amount of money I have to for that printer. Next year I will have to rethink how I output the annual card and calendars.
My kid is spoiled. I am getting her addicted to having the cool, funky and fun stuff. This weekend we were on the hunt for an Ugly Doll, more specifically Ugly Dog. I don’t think I am sending the right message about wanting and getting stuff. I am sure I am messing up my kid. While I am reinventing myself in other ways, I need to do something about my parenting or teaching moments. I sense I could get heavy here with this topic and I need to but not in this quick post. Remember I just woke up.
Today went to Steak n Shake with Joann and her cronies. We went last week for Deb’s birthday and this week for Marilyn’s. Last week after some research I found the most WW point friendly meal that I had any interest in eating. I was looking forward to eating it again a week later. Wouldn’t ya know they changed the menus within the week and my burger wasn’t on it any longer! They made me one anyway but sheesh.
Today was my 17th anniversary at Abbott.
seriously, still love typing on this new keyboard and my nails are still short so here I go….wheeeee!
In my last post I mentioned something about wanting to get into poetry for my project. Everything I have looked at didn’t connect with me. Today me and the kid went to the mall. She was on the hunt for an Ugly Doll, or more specifically an Ugly Dog keychain. She only had so much money and it is the dog she really wants. No such luck. While we were in the bookstore who’s name escapes me right now (it begins with B like they all seem to do, it isn’t Boarders, it is the other one) I seen a poetry book, Best American Poetry 2009. The few pages I seen looked like something I can connect with and get and be visual with. I didn’t really look at it too long so I don’t know how I can tell I can connect with it or not but it looked promising. I will have to look it up online.
My objective to go to the mall was to go to Macys so I could get some more Fiestaware. I absolutely had to have a set in Lemongrass and while I was at it, I didn’t have turquoise. I also picked up a fruit bowl and a small dinner plate in the Lemongrass. I really need and want some more 9″ rimmed soup bowls. I have 4 and want at least 2 more. Macys didn’t have any. I just got done with some online shopping and was able to score me some other items I was looking for like one more jumbo mug and one more small dinner plate. Still no luck with the 9″ rimmed soup bowls. Megachina seems to have a wide variety of Fiestaware but their shipping is too high. Hopefully JCP has some. JCP in fact is where I got reinfected with the Fiestaware bug when a catalog showed up featuring the new LemonGrass color.
On Friday I was taking my walk when I was on a technology high. Everything was good, my iPod touch was perfectly sorted and I just discovered the Genius Mixes on there. I have been enjoying Genius Mixes on iTunes and didn’t realize they transferred to the iPod too, sweet. By Friday evening I realized my Genius Mixes on iTunes was blank, not showing. I did some online sleuthing and tried a few things to try and get it back online and now they are gone completely! I wasted a few more hours and am still coming up empty handed. No one out there seems to know how to restore it. I think it went bye-bye last week when I updated the OS to 10.6.2. I hope they come back.
Well I am off now to get some Lynda.com tutorials done. How funny is it that the last time I signed up for a month of Lynda.com was back in March. It is one of those deals that if you don’t cancel, it will keep billing you month after month. March was when my CC expired so I thought it was perfect time to sign up since it won’t auto roll over if I didn’t cancel in time. A couple weeks ago I wanted to do it again and got the ok to expense it to work but I would have to be careful with the roll over since my CC wasn’t going to expire this time.
Then I got a letter in the mail from my CC company. Apparently some CC info was compromised across the board so they are canceling all cards and sending us new ones. My card on file at Lynda.com will be expiring!
I think that is too ironic and too funny.
Goals - November 14, 2009 -
I got a goal to lose 0.2 lbs of weight by next Wednesday so I can get my 25 lb weight at WW. The last few weeks haven’t been good as far as WW goes. I was up .8, then steady, then up .2. Then last week I was down 3.4! That put me .2 from my 25 lbs goal. Three lbs after that will be my 10% which will be another achievement. Do the math, you can now know where I started from (gulp).
This week I have been on a high of self confidence or something. Remember back in September when that Energy emercial job kicked my butt. I was at a low low point, so much so that I bought 2 books on boosting self confidence LOL.
Now I am on the opposite end of that spectrum. I am extremely busy and having fun juggling jobs coming at me at all angles. I did some little emercials for public affairs and they can’t say enough nice things about them. I just finished a story board for a youtube video for a charitable job for Cancer Awareness that I think will turn out nice for the little money I have to do it. The difference between those jobs and the Energy one from September is no creative director. I like RB the CD but she obviously undermines my confidence. Next week I have a mysterious job on my schedule that eats up the next 2 weeks. It is one that is driven by RB. Hopefully my self confidence momentum will keep me going.
Back to goals. I am setting myself up for some lofty personal multimedia art goals as evident by what I plan on spending some of my profit sharing money on. I so far bought a midi keyboard for making music in GarageBand. I plan an update to GarageBand so I can learn how to play it (and to get Hollace’s feet wet as far as playing guitar like she wants). I am planning on upgrading Adobe Creative Suite to the Production bundle so I can get AfterEffects updated (really working with an old version here at home) and looking to get a little flip camcorder to carry with me to gather video footage. Apparently I am gearing up to do art video using my own footage and making my own music. Learning how to write poetry is back on the radar as well which would be the basis of these little video/animations but I suppose I should learn to appreciate poetry first so that part of the equation may have to wait. I got enough project material to wrangle for now.
Busy, busy, busy. I got my Christmas card idea figured out. Wait, did I already blog about that? Actually regular writing in this blog has been an unspoken goal as well. I figure the more I write whether or not it is blathering on like I do here, the better for storytelling skills which then go back to the art video project again.
Yep something is brewing. Stay tuned.
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I have 3 active lists on my desk right now and one I must of forgotten at work. I wrote that one while at work yesterday and it had benign things on it like eat a banana (which I haven’t) and, um, a I can’t remember, I don’t have it in front of me. Last night instead of leaving it on my desk at home, I thought I might bring it to work so I am not prompted to write another one like it and refer to and add to it instead. And then I forget it, I am so lost. LOL
It is time to start getting ready for the Christmas card and the calendars. I am gearing up for printer frustration and expense. I got to order the ink. Right now I am trying to finish up a photo framing project I am doing on my watch collection. I have a thing for these 9 panel frames at Target. I originally got one for a color project I did, now I am doing the watches. And while looking at the frame against the wall I came up with another project for the frame so I guess I will get another one.
oooh, oooh, I just thought of something I want to add to a list. Got to get it out of my head and on to paper asap then it is preserved until I can do it. No need to clutter up my brain any more then it is right.
I just ran out of steam and it is time for bed so I guess I will sign off for now. Still digging the keyboard and my nails are still short. Typing is fun!
listening to: Boogie Nights by Heatwave –ooh disco from the 70s
My fingernails are short and the new keyboard is fun to type on.
I guess I can stop giving Mozart credit for my creative ideas. Last year within 30 seconds of putting Mozart on, I came up with that card. Yesterday I went for a walk at lunch. Instead of putting This Amercian Life on as is my usual walking accompaniment, I put on some tunes. The temp according to The Weather Channel said it was 53. Kind of cool but for some reason it felt glorious. And since the time change, the mid day sun is already hanging off to the side–you can’t beat autumn light. Anyway I take off for my walk and wondered if I should put some thought to this year’s Xmas card. I almost said nah, I still have time to worry about it but then before I could talk myself out of it, I came up with my idea. Of course my idea is top secret at this point.
Tomorrow we go to Indiana to see Steely Dan at the Holiday Star Theater. It should be a good show.
Yesterday I got my USB musical keyboard. Hollace spent the next hour having fun making music. It is going to be fun. If I get the latest version of Garage Band, I can maybe learn how to play the piano with it. I am thinking of getting the upgrade for the guitar lessons for Hollace. I say give that a try and if she really gets into it we can get her a real guitar and some real lessons. I am thinking this Christmas’s theme is going to be music.
Last night apparently the monitor fairies came visiting at work. First I was slightly upset that my monitors had been left on (I make it a big point to turn them off every night unlike everyone else in the office) then I realized that my old CRT was gone and in its place was a wide screen LCD. I then spent the next hour rearranging my desktops. The resolution was set tighter then it was so the other monitor was off too. I really gained a lot of real estate. I finally got them tweeked to perfection when I realized in a week or two my new Mac Pro is coming and I finally ditch the damn Windows machine, so really what was the point.
Tonight we went to the College of Lake County for their art museum’s show opening. It was a show of art from their faculty. They have a little food to nosh on and live music. We never get out and this was free and hopefully some inspiration can be gained. Ran into Diana from ArtWorks there. I guess Artworks is finally closing their doors and just keeping Bubba the Bus. I have no idea how they had been able to hang on as long as they had. We first became aware of ArtWorks when Hollace was 2!
This week I have wasted a lot of time playing IT for the old computer. It would hang up while starting up. Tech Tools told me that I had hundreds of bad blocks. How many I will never know because I think the thing was going to run and keep counting for a week. Since that is the family’s computer that meant the family was coming to my newer machine to do their surfing (did I mention Hollace has a bit of a FaceBook addiction)
I eventually just reinstalled the OS and all was almost ok. It came up but both Firefox and Safari kept crashing. Trying to reinstall them turned into a big ordeal. Since I couldn’t get the browser to come up I had to go in the other room and download them. I put them on an old Firewire drive. While coping Firefox from their, I accidentally kicked the cord from the Firewire drive and corrupted the dang thing.
Now things seem ok on that old computer for right now but I guess I should probably look into getting a new hard drive
Ok, I guess that is enough typing (740 words). I have successfully wasted the whole night. As I was getting ready to start this entry, the brother of my old bosses from the photo lab IMed me and we talked for an hour. I don’t recall ever talking to him that much in real life back in the 80s! Gotta love Facebook!
My hair is wet after getting out of the shower. I am air dry kinda girl so I should be use to this but I must be getting old cause cold wet hair is bugging me.
Grrr, the old Powerbook computer is on the fritz. It won’t boot up. It could be a bad block or a hundred. I had Techtools Pro running and after 4 hours, it was only 10% done with 210 bad blocks, only 1.5 billion left to check. I then ran disk tools and it said the hard drive was ok. Tomorrow I will boot from another drive so I can rescue Hollace’s 50 images of the phoenix and RAW’s bookmarks. The bad computer is the computer the rest of the family uses. I don’t want to mess with this.
Today was Deb’s birthday so we went out to Red Lobster for lunch. I ate 3 biscuits and went over my WW points by 10 which is exactly how much 3 biscuits are. No self control, nope. I did get on the treadmill tonight to try and regain 2 of those points. But then got hungry and had a snack. I am however still sticking to my goal of only 5 of the evil candies.
Hollace’s report card came. She is a solid C student.
Hollace is commisioning me to create a web site for her. One for her Creature Club™. We have had two meeting so far. She has quite a plan for this site, one that is beyond my programming abilities. She is trying to build her own social network. Now if she could apply her ingenuity to her school work, we would have a winner.
I guess that is all she wrote. I still love this keyboard and am looking for things to type hence this post that really doesn’t say anything.
I am obsessed with time, kind of. On weekends I sleep until I wake up. After getting up at 6am on the weekdays, there is nothing getting me up on weekends unnaturally. I sleep normally until about 10:00. Of course that makes the weekend go faster. I toy with the idea of setting an alarm for 8:30 so I can have more productive weekend time and hopefully slow it down a bit.
Saturday I did get up (naturally) at 9:00 which I was thrilled with. Sunday, Daylight Savings time ended, so right there we gain an hour. I asked people on Facebook what they are doing with their hour and they all said sleep. I guess since I already sleep until I wake up I knew I wasn’t going to waste my hour unconscious. I woke up at 10 like normal but only now it was really 9.
So what did I do with my hour? I wrote my schedule down like I think I mentioned in yesterday’s post. During my hour I burned through my last two packs of Polaroid film in preparation of ‘Roid week. I say that was a successful free hour spent. I was being artsy which is my other obsession. I suppose some would consider me an artist and I do spend a lot of time doing photography but I don’t feel it necessarily. I want to feel it.
Back to time and my free hour. I can say I either spent my hour shooting Polaroids or I spent my hour at the College of Lake County checking out the art show (I ran out of time to get something submitted for it myself). While there I picked up a registration form for an artist membership. That should make me feel more artsy. Next Friday we plan on going to the opening of their next show and do the wine and cheese thing. Actually I don’t think there is wine but rather punch. There is cheese at least.
What I should of been doing in that free hour was scour the shower/tub. That has been on my to-do list the last 3 weekends now and probably should of been on my list a lot sooner then that. Because I spend all my time attempting to manage time and trying to be artsy, things like cleaning the tub never gets done. I suppose if I can successfully get myself labeled an artist, a grungy shower can be written off as one of those quirky artist things, right?
**listening to: Oxford Comma by Vampire Weekend**
oh, in case you are wondering, I did stay away from the sweets and mindless eating. I did eat 2 of those evil kisses but it was only 2 and not 20.
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