Snarke

Too Cute!

Today was Grandparents and Special Friends day at my friend Fiona (Wendy's daughter)'s school.  Since Fiona's grandparents all live very far away and Wendy and John both had to work, I decided to go so that Fiona would have someone special in the audience.  I ended up being both Fiona's special friend and a special friend to Fiona's best friend Annabelle (who didn't have anybody in the audience) and can I just say? The program was super cute. 

The kids recited a couple of poems and sang a couple of songs and then Fiona and Annabelle showed me around their classroom and all of the things they like to play with when they aren't busy "learning and learning and learning" and can I just say? I want my own kindergartener.  Right now. 

I can't wait to tell Will when he gets home from work.  He'll be thrilled!

Help?

How do you fall asleep when your brain won't stop thinking?  Last night I may or may not have stomped into the computer room and shouted "This is how people accidentally overdose on sleeping pills!" and then burst into tears at three in the morning to a WoWing Will.  I've been taking Advil PM for a couple of nights now--only half the reccommended adult dose--and last night, my one little pill just wasn't working.  Now I know that taking a second pill when the reccommended dose is two pills isn't a huge deal especially when it has been three hours since the first one was swallowed, but by three in the morning I was all the way past rational though and into full on "I can't sleep! Why can't I sleep? I need sleep! Fall asleep brain!" psychosis. 

To give Will some credit, he turned off his game immediately and crawled into bed with me.  No grief, no "I'll be right there."  Just "my poor girl" and "here, move me however you want me and you just get comfortable" and "how can I help?" and "it's okay, you can wipe your nose on my arm." 

We talked a little bit about why I couldn't sleep--a rough "cycle" this month, stress about work and bills and Typepad not being as awesome as I remember it (that is a whole other post) and his family spending the holidays in our apartment and before I knew it, I was finally drifting off. 

He really is a good fiance.

Still though--how do you fall asleep when your brain won't shut off?  Do you have a nightly "get ready for bed" routine?  Do you do the whole warm milk and small snack of something containing tryptophan?  Warm bath? Herbal tea? What?

Really I'll try just about anything right now, including an anvil to the head.

Today is a productive day.

Today you will find me lying stretched out on the couch in my pajamas with a cozy blanket and my laptop.  I have not showered.  My hair (which, yes, is gross when not washed every day) is pulled back in an old scrunchy.  The cat is draped across my feet. 

Today I am nursing one hell of a that time of the month.  Yesterday, no joke, the only position I found any comfort in was this weird frog-esque yoga-y pose that felt halfway between being curled up in a ball and halfway between "oops, I meant to sit cross legged on the floor and somehow face planted into the carpet." Honestly? I haven't had one of those days since long before I began taking the daily "no baby" pills.  I can't say it is a sensation that I have missed.

Today I am also nursing an "I have a hell of a lot to get done, like, last week."  And sometimes when you hit the workload overload that I hit this week (which, really, is my own fault), the only thing you can do is curl up on the couch, turn on something you've seen a billion times and just...work.  Get it done.  Worry about the rest tomorrow.

I'm really grateful that I work freelance and that I am able to wear my grungy sweats/pajamas and not shower and just focus on the work when I need to.  The idea of wearing real pants right now--no.  The idea of being around other people right now--no.  The idea of having to sit in a chair right now--no.  Get stuff done and screw the formalities--yes. 

Oddly, I'm usually better able to focus on work when I make the effort to get up, get dressed in halfway decent closed and force myself to keep my butt in the chair.  Today, though, no. 

In better news, last night we went grocery shopping.  Have I mentioned how much I love Winco?  While Will did homework in the car, I filled a grocery cart with real food and still the total only came out to $137.  The same amount of groceries at Albertson's or Safeway would have easily been $200 or more.  And? now we have more to eat in our house than beef and top ramen and no, I'm not even kidding.  That's where we were at yesterday.  Roughly twenty pounds of beef in the fridge and five packages of ramen in the cupboard.  I'm so glad we went shopping!  Because honestly I was about five minutes away from discovering what top ramen with round steak would have tasted like. 

Oops

I wanted to get up at eight this morning and go for a run (aka re-start Couch to 5K that I flaked out on a few months ago) and then get straight to work.  I know myself well enough to know that I need a couple of hours in the morning to get my brain together before I'll settle in and I have a lot to accomplish today. 

Instead I didn't wake up until 9:30.  Oops. 

What's Up With That?

What is it about guys and them having to prove to the people who probably aren't thinking about them at all that they are the most badass whatevers in the room?  Last night Will stayed up all night long playing World of Warcraft because he couldn't let those "high school losers" think that they were more dedicated to the game than he is.  I'm pretty sure those "high school losers" don't spend a lot of time contemplating Will's Warcraft dedication, but Will had to prove that he was just as dedicated to levelling his character as they were...even though they weren't comparing themselves to him. Or probably thinking about him at all.

I am having a hard time not pitying a 27 year old man who feels like he has to prove his betterness to people ten years younger than he is. 

I, on the other hand, slept in until noon.  Oops.  I woke up full of motivation to get a ton of work done today.  I took a shower and got dressed and was practically itching to get to work.  Then? I sat down at the computer and...um....well, I've surfed some blogs, caught up on the Cheezburger site and chased the cat around the house a little.  Why is it that I only feel motivated when I am not faced with my work? What is that about? 

Yum.

Last night we went to see Quantum of Solace and there was run-nang!  Seriously.  If you told me "hey, they are making a movie in which Daniel Craig does nothing but run, jump and climb on stuff for two hours" I would say "how soon can I fandango my tickets?" 

The movie itself was really good.  Look, I know James Bond is a badass and all, but pre-Craig, the only experience I have with him was Live and Let Die, which was shown on television once when I was ten and a couple of the Pierce Brosnan Bonds.  Can I just say? Daniel Craig kicks Pierce Brosnan's ass.  No joke.  I know that Sean Connery is supposed to be the epitome of Bond, but for me, all future Bonds will be judged against Daniel Craig. 

Also?  Is it bad that I am just a tiny bit excited for the next Fast and the Furious movie?  There was a preview for it last night and can I just say? Mmmmm.  Vin Diesel. 

Poor Will.  He never gets to go to chick flicks and drool over the women.  It really isn't fair for the poor guy.

Um. Shudder.

This entry is not for the easily skeeved.  Seriously.

Somehow Fridays have become laundry days in our house so this morning, instead of going back to bed after Will left for school like I desperately wanted to do, I stayed up and got to work.  I have found that the later I wait to start doing laundry, the more likely it will be that I will have to make small talk with my neighbors (who, for the most part, I actually do like, but sometimes just don't feel like chatting).  After sorting our mound o'laundry, I shoved my feet in some shoes and headed out to the laundry room with a load of whites. 

I was standing at the door and fishing the laundry room key out of my pocket when I felt....it.  You know how you can just tell when someone invades your personal space?  And you know how when that person invades your personal space, even before you see them, you can kind of tell whether they are friendly or whether they are....leering?  Yeah.  I got one of those feelings.  Except that, as far as I could tell, I was the only person out and about.  So I froze. 

It took me a good couple of minutes to gather up the guts to turn around to see who was....looming. And leering. At me.  Finally I started to turn around and came nose to web with this:

This picture? Does not really do the thing justice.  He...she...it?  Would probably take up most of my palm...you know, if I had the guts to actually let the thing touch me.  Yuuggghhh.  Of course I had to run and grab the fancy schmancy camera that Will bought for my birthday.  Technically? It's our camera, but whatever. 

Look, I really hate spiders.  Like, really hate spiders.  I do not trust anything that needs more than four limbs to move (or less than two, but we'll talk about snakes some other time).  I kind of wish I had the guts to smash the crap out of the thing.  I, however, subscribe to my friend Abbott's school of thought:  If it's inside, it's in my house and therefore it is trespassing and therefore I can kill it if I see fit.  If it's outside, however, then I'm in its house and I should show some respect.  So, I left it alone.  Except for trying to steal its soul with my camera, which I think I did quite nicely.  Check it out:

Tell me that face isn't saying "mmmmmmm, a morning snack!"  Someone call Hagrid because one of Aragog's relatives has escaped. 

Two more things?

1.  Our camera ROCKS. Holy crap.
2.  Eeeeeeuuuuuuggggggggggggggggggggggghhhhhh. 

Today I am Proud and Grateful

Today I realized that I am coming up on my one year of being "on my own" financially.  Which makes me sound about 19 years old.  What I mean to say is "freelancing without a net." 

After leaving the day job I was able to get unemployment and Oregon has this great program for people who want to go into business for themselves--it allowed me to receive my six months of unemployment payments while building my freelance business instead of spending all of my time searching for a job.  It's called the Self Employment Assistance Program and without it, I'd probably be a coffee pusher again by now. It also helped that for the first four months of my unemployment we were living very cheaply while Will made quite a nice living working for a water delivery company.  Think what you will about your water delivery person but Will was up to $14/hr before we moved.  That works out to quite a bit of extra money to cover expenses while I was getting started. 

I am incredibly lucky to have had the opportunities that I have had this past year and probably luckier to have had a fiance who would rather sell a kidney than see me give up this dream I've got. 

I already wrote my "oh my god its been a year" post before I did the re-launch of this site, but it hit me that holy crap I've been self sufficient for a year.  And that? Is kind of amazing. 

Now it is going to be my turn to step up and be the supporter of my little family of two (and a half if you count the cat) and I'm not afraid of the challenge.  Instead I feel like sort of maybe a little bit I can do it.

Good Food, Cozy Weather

Today it is cold and stormy out and it is the perfect day for staying in pajamas and curling up with a blanket.  Which is why, as soon as our friends left to go back to Roseburg, I changed out of my wet "Hi, I trekked halfway around downtown Portland in the rain" clothes and into warm and cozy sweats. 

Oh yes, we went into downtown. On the train. In the rain.  Mostly because of me: I needed to grab some books from the library and our out of towners were craving Hot Lips and really, who can say no to Hot Lips?  Sure we got soaking wet, but still.  Hot Lips!

Also also? Here is my advice:  It is not a good idea to eat mexican food and pepperoni pizza within twenty four hours of each other.  Never before have Will and I wished so intensely for a two bathroom home. 

Tuesday Bloglets: The Kinks in the System Version

I just found a bunch of comments in my system that, for some reason, Typepad failed to notify me about.  My apologies to those commentors who have probably spent the last couple of weeks thinking that I was ignoring them when, in fact, I have not.  Hopefully from now on it will notify me. 

For some reason I cannot get my URL to work without the www.  It kills me to lose the readers who were used to finding me simply at snarke.net instead of www.snarke.net and I hope that they will realize the change soon.  The Typepad instructions said to set up domain masking but now all it does is send people to a page that says "this webpage is temporarily unavailable, try again later."  Arg.

I've set up my "professional" site via this typepad account and have been having some troubles getting it to work the way I want it to.  I have the domain forwarded and everything while Typepad figures out why that site isn't showing up for domain mapping.  That? Is kind of taking a while.

I realized that Typepad does not convert line breaks when it imports blogs, so if you try to read my archives it'll make you feel....um....there is an author who once wrote a sentence that was a page and a half long (and grammatically correct!).  I can't remember who it was, but I bet reading my archives will feel a little bit like that.

Also? Our friends have arrived and are now on their way to see their concert.  I like spending time with our friends but I can't help but feel a little irritated and put out and used.  We noticed today that whenever they want to ask us a favor they'll send the message to Will (who has trouble saying no).  When they want to ask us to do stuff together, they send the message to me.  Funny, I always thought that when it came time to raise teenagers they would have been birthed from my own womb. 

Today the seventh season of Scrubs is on sale at Best Buy for twenty bucks!  This has nothing to do with anything else I've written but I wanted to end this post on a positive note.