30 days of blogging - Day 3

My favorite TV show.

This is actually a pretty easy one. If I had to pick my favorite of all time it is most certainly Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Oh, go ahead, laugh if you must but Buffy is listed as number THREE on the Top Cult TV Shows of All Time list. Falling only behind Star Trek and The X-Files. (I was also an avid X-Phile in my early HS years. So maybe I am a big dork.) Okay, so not maybe... I am a big dork. Not only do I own all seven seasons of Buffy on DVD, I also own an extensive collection of books based on the series, several comics (courtesy of my BFF), The Sunnydale High Yearbook (no, really...), and some other items. I used to have this really neat black tank top that had a cross on it but I, uh, outgrew it (literally). I still have my necklace with a wooden stake charm.

Okay... you can laugh.

30 days of blogging - Day 2

Day two - my favorite movie. Again, it's impossible to choose just one. So I guess I'll just have to list a few.

Evolution
Dogma
The entire Harry Potter series
Girl, Interrupted
Independence Day
Men in Black
How High
All three Friday movies
The Matrix
City of Angels (also one of my favorite soundtracks)
The Emperor's New Groove

30 days of blogging - Day 1

So... my favorite song. Do I have to pick one?? That's impossible. How about a few from my favorite artists? :P

Metallica - Fade to Black, Orion, Seek & Destroy
Ani Difranco - Fire Door & Swan Dive
Disturbed - Droppin' Plates & The Sickness
Steve Miller Band - The Joker
Creedence Clearwater Revival - Fortunate Son
The Rolling Stones - Miss You, Beast of Burden, Sympathy for the Devil
U2 - Mysterious Ways

Ugh. I know there are plenty more songs that I could listen to over and over and over again but I can't think right now. It's hard to listen to some of my favorite older rock and roll songs because they remind me of my dad. :-/ He was a huge influence on my taste in music.

because I suck at blogging these days...

Maybe this will make the month fly by. It would be nice.

Day 1 - your favorite song
Day 2 - your favorite movie
Day 3 - your favorite television program
Day 4 - your favorite book
Day 5 - your favorite quote
Day 6 - 20 of your favorite things
Day 7 - a photo that makes you happy
Day 8 - a photo that makes you angry/sad
Day 9 - a photo you took
Day 10 - a photo taken over 10 years ago of you
Day 11 - a photo of you recently
Day 12 - something you are OCD about
Day 13 - a fictional book
Day 14 - a non-fictional book
Day 15 - your dream house
Day 16 - a song that makes you cry (or nearly)
Day 17 - an art piece (drawing, sculpture, painting, etc)
Day 18 - my wedding/future wedding/past wedding
Day 19 - a talent of yours
Day 20 - a hobby of yours
Day 21 - a recipe
Day 22 - a website
Day 23 - a youtube video
Day 24 - where you live
Day 25 - your day, in great detail
Day 26 - your week, in great detail
Day 27 - your worst habit
Day 28 - what's in your handbag/purse
Day 29 - hopes, dreams, and plans for the next 365 days
Day 30 - a dream for the future

woe is Auntie Wissa...

It has become a traditon for the past... I don't know how many years now... for me to bake and decorate birthday cakes for pretty much everyone in the family. For the adults, it's pretty much "what flavor do you want?" But for the kids, I get specifics and I get creative. Or, I try anyway. For Madison's second birthday last year, I was adamant about making her cake into the shape of a '2'. And I did. And for an amateur, I think I did a pretty darn good job!



I've collected some Wilton cake tools to help me better my "skills" along the way. To minimize my frustrations and to amp up my pride a bit. It does boost the ego to see the kids' faces light up.

When my niece Dede saw what I did with Madison's 2nd birthday cake, she immediately began thinking about what she wanted for her 12th birthday cake in June. Which, at the time, wasn't for another seven months. It wasn't long after that she told me that she wanted a rainbow cake. My wheels have been spinning ever since.

So it burst my bubble when I found out that they are going to visit BIL's parents from the 7th through the 21st. Dede's birthday is the 19th. I know that doesn't mean I can't bake her a cake but I can't help but feel a little deflated. BIL's parents are well off with an extravagant house and the like. They'll most likely treat her to whatever gift(s) she wants. She'll probably have the 12th birthday party of a lifetime. A silly rainbow birthday cake will probably be 'whoopity doo' in comparison. Maybe I should talk to my sister about doing something the weekend beforehand. The tiny voice inside my head screams that my BIL picked these dates out of spite. I can count on one hand how many of my nieces' and nephews' birthdays I've missed collectively. And those were due to a significant geographical difference or, you know, something like this.

I know, I know. Pity party for Liss. But they are the closest things I have to children of my own. Of course I'm going to be a little greedy/possessive/selfish over them. [sigh] I guess I should go back to Kindergarten and relearn how to share.

In the meantime, I am imagining something like this. I even considered buying a star-shaped cake pan. Because stars = YAY.

thank you AOL radio

I used to think a couple of the local rock stations were absolutely awesome because they had a segment at night that they called "Mandatory Metallica" where they played five or six Metallica songs back to back. (One also used to have a "Mandatory Maynard" segment where they did the same thing with Tool songs.)

But AOL Radio takes the cake. They have an All Metallica All the Time channel. Absolutely genius.

Thank you, AOL Radio. Thank you.

proof positive

No matter how you slice it, treating and loving someone else's kids like they are your own is never the same. The bond isn't the same. The love isn't the same.

Lately my niece has been acting super bratty towards me. Whenever I so much as talk to her she starts crying or acts plain ugly to me. I can't really fault her for it, she's only 18 months old after all, but it still hurts my heart. It hurts my heart because no matter how much I want to pretend that my nieces and nephews are enough for me it simply isn't. I want a child of my own. I want that bond that doesn't compare to any other bond. I want the smile that lights up a room when I walk in.

I guess I'm just selfish. And maybe hypersensitive today.

I let myself run out of meds like a dumbass and now I'm paying for it. Hopefully I'll be back to normal in a few days. In the meantime I am going to drown myself in too much Guitar Hero Metallica. I'm currently downloading the entire Death Magnetic album. Maybe my husband will spend some time playing it with me instead of spending much of his off time on the computer playing Diablo. I shudder to think how little time he's going to spend with me when he gets a new card for WoW. Some days I'm just more needy than others.

Completely random and off topic: The Monkey won tickets to Bama Jam today. It's just too bad I'm NOT a country music fan. Not even a little bit. The only band that's playing that even remotely interests me is the Black Crowes. And maybe Kid Rock. Though Kid Rock is favoring towards country lately and, again, I am NOT a country music fan. And, honestly, have never been that big on Kid Rock, either. We discussed selling the tickets. They're going for $180 a piece right now. We could always knock off some of that and have a better chance at getting rid of them. However, we don't know if we could get into trouble for selling tickets that he won. Our second option would be to just say screw it and use the tickets. The third, and probably best option, would be to give the tickets to my sister and BIL. Since they both LOVE country music and they have friends that are going. WWYD?

Quick! Someone get a pail of water!

This is a response I got from Toughlove on my last post:

I have one thought for you.

Tubal Ligation.

If you can't handle having blood drawn and are obviously seriously psychiatrically disabled, what kind of a parent would you make?

NO WIRE HANGERS!

She posted that in response to my comment from Donna's entry in which she posted a nasty comment Anonymously. Now she is registered with Blogger so she can continue to spread her nastiness and discord all through cyberspace.

Does anyone else find this absolutely gut-bustingly hilarious?? I mean, even through my years on Fertility Friend (and you all KNOW the drama that used to erupt there almost daily) I never once got flamed or picked on or anything. I don't think I've been in a flame war since my age still had the word 'teen' in it. I find it particularly amusing that GROWN women still stoop to such levels. The worst part? People like that are breeding. Natural selection is truly dead! :P

Notice how she focused on she specifically focused her comments towards aspects of my life that cause me regular emotional pain. But no worries. I'm suddenly reminded of a quote from the Wizard of Oz. Remember when Glinda the Good Witch of the North tells the Wicked Witch of the West "You have no power here! Now begone, before somebody drops a house on you!" It seems wicked appropriate right about now.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled program. :)

wooooo to the hooooo!

My palette arrived today! I am really excited and SO eager to try it out! Honestly the picture doesn't do it justice. It's a very big palette; much bigger than all the others I already have. And the colors are just...wow. I'm even more eager to try out Absinthe and Mayhem now. Bring on St. Patty's Day eyes! Scandal is also very gorgeous and even Roach is pretty despite of the name. Later I think I'll do color swatches on my arm. Now I am going to surf YouTube in search of some looks to try out. Yay!

[squeeeee!]

I've obsessively checked eBay on a daily basis (usually more than once a day) for the Urban Decay Book of Shadows palette since Sephora stopped carrying it. Unfortunately, not many sellers offered the Buy it Now option because it's such a hot item and people bid on it like CRAZY. It sold for $45 at Sephora and it's now selling on eBay for almost three times its original cost! People are making a killing!

Today, I did my usual scan and found an auction ending in five hours. The price was at a reasonable $55. So I watched it like a hawk all afternoon. With an hour left to go there were only five bids and the price was only up to $65. With 30 seconds to go (yep, I'm one of those eBayers...[snicker]) I placed my proxy bid and won the item. I know I'm paying more than what it's truly worth but I have been so desperate for this palette! The colors I'm most interested in are Mayhem and Absinthe. I can't wait until it arrives! (And it should arrive quickly because the seller is in Gulfport, MS which isn't very far from me.)

Hooray!

this, that, and the other

So I actually enjoyed Twilight quite a bit. The book wasn't really all that great on the descriptive side of things so instead of going to the movie and saying "Yes! That's exactly how I pictured Bella and Edward!" I was more or less going "Ah...yeah, that's about what I pictured they'd look like." The movie followed the book for the most part but since I'd just finished reading the book the night before we saw the movie I kept whispering to The Monkey "That so is not how it happened in the book." whenever something went way off track. I am sure I got on his nerves once or twice, but oh well. :-P

After reading the first two books, I will admit to being completely hooked. It was more or less the compulsive desire to hear the rest of the story. I finished New Moon late Sunday evening and went to Wal-Mart Monday morning to get the third book, Eclipse. Wouldn't you know it, after the movie came out people flocked to Wal-Mart and bought all the books from the series! Wal-Mart was completely cleaened out. I was so anxious to read the following two installments that I drug my sister to Dothan to go to Barnes & Noble at 5:30 in the evening. It was nice to take a trip out without The Monkey breathing down my neck. Barnes & Noble is adjacent to Ulta. My last two trips to Dothan were with The Monkey and he absolutely WILL NOT allow me to enter that store. (For the record, he has good reason. Ulta quickly became a big vice for me last Christmas. [meep!]) So Michelle and I, after my gleeful purchase at B&N, walked next door and oogled all the girlie goodies in Ulta. I wound up buying Urban Decay's Brow Box in Brown Sugar. I had my eyebrows waxed about two weeks ago and the girl that did them was a little over-zealous with the plucking. (I knew I should've waited for the girl that did them last time as she did a phenomenal job. Live and learn, I suppose.) At any rate, my right brow was marginally shorter and thinner than my left. The brow kit I bought not only solved that problem but also made me take notice of how much difference enhancing your eyebrows can make! At least my manic spending spree wasn't severely over the top. :-P

Thanksgiving was a nice change of pace this year. We had less guests than last year so it wasn't as busy. I helped my mom prepare a lot of the more time consuming dishes on Wednesday as well as finishing up the baking. So Thursday was pretty leisurely as far as holiday madness goes. Dinner was, as expected, fantastic. I ate WAY too much for my own good, I'm sure. My Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Pie was to die for as was my aunt's pumpkin pie (made with fresh pumpkin) and my sister's Pumpkin Dump Cake. I'm sure I gained a solid five pounds in two days. I'm staying off the scale, though. I read quite a bit while everyone mulled around in the garage. I became quite engrossed in Breaking Dawn and it was difficult to put it down long enough to socialize with the family. So now the countdown 'til Christmas begins. I'm still feeling uneasy about the holidays this year. I'm fully expecting to fall into a rapid downward spiral. Post-holiday blues. Then again, I should be on meds by then so who knows? Maybe I'll get lucky.

My niece turned a year old this past Tuesday. We haven't celebrated with cake and singing Happy Birthday yet because she's been sick. She started running a fever on Friday and when it hadn't let up by Monday my sister took her to the pediatrician. She was diagnosed with a double ear infection and given a course of antibiotics. The poor thing hasn't been herself at all. She's been up at night wanting to nurse (even though she doesn't nurse much at all these days) mostly for comfort. She's not the smiley, happy baby that we're all accustomed to. And she's been napping almost constantly! On Tuesday she woke up around 9:00 and was back out by 10:00 and slept until 1:00-ish. Poor baby! So Michelle is planning on baking her a cake and doing the 'birthday thing' sometime this week. She did enjoy her first Thanksgiving, though! :-)

Speaking of birthdays, mine is right around the corner. I'm not sure what we're doing (if we do anything at all, that is). I was contemplating drinking myself into oblivion. One last hurrah before I'm back on meds and have to stay away from alcohol indefinitely. One year closer to the big three-oh. Sometimes I don't feel as old as I am. Other times (like when we went to see Twilight and I was surrounded by people at least 10 years younger than me) I really, really feel it.

In the waiting line...

Another month in 2008 come and gone. And now October is already half over and I really don't have much to report. Tony's 35th birthday came and went. He's 35 and still no kids. It doesn't seem to bother him so I try not to let it bother me. We didn't do anything all that special. I baked him a four layer carrot cake with homemade cream cheese icing. It was delicious. I bought all the ingredients and my sister made him a wonderful lasagne dinner, per his request. He wanted World of Warcraft for his birthday but we kind of didn't have the money and he didn't hold up his end of the 'bargain' by getting a job. (We're both still fabulously unemployed.) When he didn't receive a gift from me first thing in the morning, he was convinced he wasn't getting anything. But I'm a big ol' sucker for my Monkey and Michelle and I made a trip to Walmart after supper to alledgedly pick up laundry detergent. I surprised him with the game after we had cake. He's massively addicted already, of course. He gets online every night and plays with his brother and two of their good friends. At least he's social in some aspect, right? So that was that.
The month of September also found my just barely 10 month old niece WALKING! She was so wobbly at first we joked and said she looked like a staggering drunk. But she's so smart and she mastered it in a couple of weeks and now she zooms across the living room and only falls down occasionally. She's almost completely abandoned crawling all together in favor of her new found mode of locomotion. She really is a delight and I'm just amazed that she'll be a year old in a month and 10 days!
Nothing else spectacular has been going on. My sister has developed a serious Webkinz habit. She's collected about three dozen of her own, not including her childrens'. They have roughly a dozen each. I wasn't real big on the whole thing and at first just bought the Cheeky Monkey because it was really cute and I thought it would be equally as cute to name it Tony after my Monkey. I stuck with the one since July until I saw the Lil' Kinz Monkey in Walgreens one day. I HAD to have it. Then I bought the regular Monkey. The Lil' Kinz Monkey is named Junior and the bigger version of Junior is George (as in Curious...). I was happy having a little house with three little monkeys and that was that. I planned on buying the Love Monkey in December when it's released and naming it Melissa just because. But then Webkinz came out with a whole Haunted House room theme for Halloween. This prompted me to purchase the bat and name it Leilah (it means 'dark beauty) and decorate her room with all the cool haunted house themed items. Today I absolutely HAD to have the Whimsical Dragon which I named Mysti. My collection is complete for a little while.
Halloween is coming up. Unfortunately my grandmother has been in the hospital for about a month due to congestive heart failure. Her heart isn't pumping enough blood through her body and it's making it hard for her to breathe and such. She has to have bypass surgery sometime next month when the doctors can get her stable enough. My parents were supposed to go down to Florida for a week beginning the weekend of Halloween which meant no Halloween party this year. I was pretty bummed but naturally I understood. However, Mom's vacation got canceled because they're having a huge sale that weekend and her boss pulled the plug on her vacation time. So now the party is tentatively back on. So I have a couple of weeks to throw together costumes for Tony and me. Something cheap and easy. I want to go as Alice from Alice in Wonderland next year and have Tony go as the Mad Hatter.
Tony is actively looking for jobs. He found something promising here in Enterprise. It's an assistant manager position at a local finance place. He's very much qualified and plans to talk to the manager on Monday when she gets back from vacation. As a back up plan, he's submitted apps to Game Stop (because he thinks it would be cool to work at a game store), RadioShack (he's worked there before) for seasonal work, and at PizzaHut and Papa John's as a delivery driver. :-p Hey, it would be income at least.
I, on the other hand, have stopped looking for work and decided to apply for disability. I put in my application today and expect to get a denial on my claim sometime in December. In the meantime, the very nice lady at the SSA office told me to contact a place called SpectraCare that offers free mental health treatment (meds included) to low/no income families. I'm calling them tomorrow. If I get approved for disability without having to go through an appeal I'll be completely amazed. But I'm honestly expecting to get denied and already have an attorney lined up for the appeal process.
In other not-so-special but really fun news for me... I got a yellow iPod Nano the other day! It's loaded up with every single song we have stored on our computer and still have 2 GB to spare. Hooray! I spent two days going through every one of our music files and retagging them using MediaMonkey so they'd all have the right artist, song title, album title, track number, and, most importantly, the album art associated with each one. It was a SERIOUS pain in my ass but totally worth it because my iPod has the cover flow feature just like iTunes. (And, yes, I am a shameless bootlegger and abuse the HELL out of Limewire every chance I get.)
And that's about it for my 'exciting' life. School is still going well. We're in week seven of this term and I have a 99% average in my Fundamentals of Networking with Lab class. Next term I'm taking two classes and the following term one class for a total of 12 credit hours for the semester. I'm going to wind up having to pay about $250 out of pocket for book and technology fees but it'll be worth it to graduate a little sooner.
Also, Ray and Michelle's PCS has been postponed until summer of next year. We're still considering moving with them depending on our situation when the time comes. I still feel like a change could do us some serious good but we'll see. A lot can change in six months, right?

Soy un perdedor

I wimped out on work yesterday. Depression sometimes gets the better of me and when I can't stop crying...well...I usually flake out on work. I'm a horrible employee.

Lately I've been daydreaming of not working at all. This is not at all feasible but I can't help it. I wish I could work from home or sell stuff on eBay or something to make money but from home. I probably lack the discipline, though.

I'm really not sure I'm satisfied with my major in school. This class in VB.net has seriously kicked my ass and this is supposed to be what I'm going to do for a living? Can't I just build websites in my spare time and get paid for it? Seriously.

I don't want to be stuck doing this for the rest of my days. It may be high time to look into moving somewhere where the economy is a bit better. Or I could always try to convince my Monkey to move to South Lake Tahoe where my BFF will hook me up with a cushy job in accounting.

Life sucks.

a new place to blog it

Contrary to what may be popular belief, I am 'hip' and I do keep a blog. In fact, I've kept one for almost nine years now. Yes, the very same blog. It's strange looking back through old entries and seeing what I was up to six years ago. But, unfortunately, I keep my LiveJournal mostly on private or friends only. And I write about everything in my LiveJournal including TTC stuff. So I decided to start posting the TTC stuff over here where my LP friends can have a gander at my meandering thoughts from time to time.

The first two entries are recent LJ entries.