Testing posting from my G1

Things the candidates didn’t suggest last night when they were asked what they could ask every American to do to help with the various crises we’re facing today:

Oil/Energy crisis:

Check your tire pressure and remove excess weight from your car.
If you don’t know how to check your own tire pressure, get someone to show you.
Don’t speed.

Television viewers of the debates could watch it with their families or friends – don’t turn the debate on 3 different TVs in the house.

Healthcare cost crisis:

Take a walk.

It’s Autumn; eat an apple (instead of a donut).

Try to go to bed half an hour early tonight.

Wash your hands after you pee and before you eat.

Get a flu shot.
Take an appropriate vitamin.
Take the stairs instead of an elevator.

Financial crisis:

Put an extra $10 in your savings account this month, and if you don’t have one, open one up.

Shake any loose change out of your couch and put that into savings, too.

I haven’t done any of these things yet myself except washing my hands, but I’m going to make a point of doing all of them this month (and every month thereafter). Does anyone else have ideas?

I'll try again at the show with Jim and a better camera. This is the best my mother could do. But she really wanted a photo she could show the ladies in her swimming class.

If they can see it, so can LJ-land.

I spent the weekend in Mass for a cat show and banquet and mostly just to see Dan because I love him.

On the way to the banquet, Dan pulled into some park and I asked him what the heck he was doing. He said he wanted to show me the park, and I told him we didn't have time, we were late for dinner.... so he kept driving.

Before we went inside the banquet hall for dinner, he proposed, and gave me the ring you see here. Then we called our parents, had dinner, drank ourselves silly, had a great time and went home.

Heather, my sister in law, made the ring. I'm going to ask Jim to take a good photo of the ring this weekend and when I do, I'll post it here.

stuff I got done this weekend:

took my meds faithfully for my very bad UTI. It's getting better.

Took out all the trash I've accumulated packing.

Looked at 3 condos.

Cleaned the bathroom.

4 loads of laundry.

Moved all the big furniture to my parents' garage.

Gave Robin a bath.


why do I feel so useless?

This weekend I went to a cat show in Erie Pennsylvania.  It was a celebration-type show, the last one of the season... and it was really a lot of fun.  We got to have dinner at the Erie Zoo, and part of the dinner, which was a fundraising event and a celebration of their new (unfinished) tiger habitat, was a private tour of their big cats.

It's been a while.

I've sat down two or three times since I last wrote here to update it, and every time I come up blank. I'm blank again today but I'm going to try to talk myself through it.

Dan seems too good to be true sometimes. Our "third date" was a four day trip out to Massachusetts just after Thanksgiving. We went to a WWII floating museum (I would like it better in warmer weather), we went to the Boston Science Center (LOVED it!), we had brunch with his mom and her husband, we met his friends at a bar in Pawtucket to eat and watch the Patriots game. We watched some movies, bought him a humidifier, and I cuddled with his kitties. He let me watch Anne of Green Gables while he cooked dinner for me.

Our "fourth date" was last weekend - Dan came back to MI for four days. We shopped for a vacuum cleaner (semi-successfully), ate a half pound of chocolate covered-cherries from Schakolade, watched Caddyshack, Gilda, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, had dinner with the woman who caused us to meet, wasted an hour at Crazy Wisdom and then to make up for it, I tagged along to Vault of Midnight (where I was afraid to touch anything, even though I was trying really hard to be a good sport), met my bosses for coffee, had dinner with my parents, and spent New Years Eve in the same basement where I always spend New Years Eve (well, not every year, but the best years). My bosses loved him, my mother hugged him, and my friends invited him to play a game that involved dwarves and elves and ten-sided dice. Good thing everyone likes him, since I'm going to keep him.

Work is just incredibly stressful for a lot of reasons - I think the shortest explanation would be that my bosses are still learning how to be bosses, and I'm still learning how to cope with a less stable work situation. I love having the pug puppy running around the office, and I love wearing jeans, but I still don't know if I can make it work. Things like the lack of group insurance scare me and depress me and cause me an incredible amount of anxiety. I guess I just don't know if I can make this work for me or not.

Aside from work and Dan, it's cats. And there really isn't much to share there.

( A video of my brother chalking... )

I haven't been paying much attention to this thing for a long time. Or checking other journals. A brief skim showed me that some people have had some major life changes while I was off on my own.

The job change is a big shift for me. I like it, I like it a lot, really, but it's much more difficult and MUCH more stressful and it's starting to take a toll on me. Being with such a small group of co-workers is very different; we celebrate each other's birthdays with a lot more feeling and effort than at The Dyke, we celebrate each other's KIDS birthdays; we just seem to share in each other's lives a lot more.

Also, we're so understaffed for this workload right now that we all work too many hours, and when we do leave we go home and get on the computer and keep working, so they're starting to be my *only* friends, which I don't like at all because I have wonderful friends I never see and I miss them.

If you're reading this, I miss you.

My little street in South Lyon is so beautiful right now with maple leaves everywhere, and if I hadn't lost the cable that connects my camera to my computer, I would take photos and post them here. I like my little house, I'm happy to rent it for now, but I have pretty much made up my mind not to buy it, so if she manages to sell the place I'll be looking for a new home again.

There is a new guy. He doesn't live around here. He has one and a half cats. He sends flowers to my office and he's flying in next weekend just to have dinner with me. I like him, a lot, and so far he likes me and because of that I don't want to talk about him or think about him too much because I don't want to mess it up.

I don't want to be negative, and I honestly don't mean this in a condemning sort of way, but I've had a long string of relationships that were these casual things, in which the guys I was with were actually going out of their way to make sure I knew how unimportant I was in the grand scheme of things, a fine fuck, good conversation, but that's all.

(There's a lot to be said for a fine fuck and a good conversation.)

I don't want to fall into a trap where this guy is offering me something a little different from what I've been experiencing and I'm all over it just because it's different, without stopping to think, "Is this what I want?" So I ask myself, once in a while, if this is what I want.

See, and I'm talking about him and I said I didn't want to do that.

Kitties are doing well; neither Pavanne nor Ricky do as well in the ring as JD did and I'm finding I don't mind. They might not get national wins, but they'll at least have high regional wins and they're happy showing and they look wonderful and that's perfect.

I do not like the Wellbutrin XL generic which came out back in January. I've been struggling since then with insurance, which doesn't want to cover the brand stuff anymore now that there's a generic out, and also with trying to understand how it doesn't work, and why that might be. My doctor thinks my body doesn't absorb it. I've swapped back and forth between WBXL and Generic WBXL from month to month, but my concentration is suffering, my energy is suffering, and my mood is suffering. And I really want this job to work, and I really want this relationship to work, and I felt like being off of the WB was making that much harder for me, so finally I asked my doctor if I could switch to the old-school Wellbutrin that you take 3 times a day, generic, because I know THAT generic works for me. It's working. It's working better than the XL formula, actually. The fact that it's working is motivation enough for me to be a good girl and take it 3 times a day.

(Obviously I had to throw something in there about kitties and drugs, otherwise you'd be wondering who hijacked my journal.)

In the last month, when I stop to ask myself if I'm content, I've been overwhelmed with my own contentment. I don't have time to revel in it, though, not with this job.

Now work.

Dad had sick kittens to nurse, Ricky was tired last weekend, and I was tired from work this week, and Ohio has become the sixth Great Lake, so we stayed home from Medina this weekend, and I crawled into bed for basically the entire weekend.

I was going to look for an Eastern-themed floral print to use as a centerpiece for my living room decorations (because I have all these Buddhas and maneki-nekos and money frogs and I wanted something that they would like to share the room with), but I found some old Gwen Frostic note cards, and a Gwen Frostic poetry book with a broken spine that one of my parents bought before I was born, and I took them all apart, bought some new cards and a lot of inexpensive frames and used those to decorate the living room instead. It's not Eastern at all, it's Northern Michigan, but the Buddhas like it. So do I.

My dining room decor theme is apparently handmade stuff old ladies gave or sold to me: Grandma Hiemstra gave me a doily, and Grandma Jens gave me a box full of tablecloths and four hand-needle pointed seat cushions for my dining room chairs. I bought handmade place mats at the Garden State show in a floral theme, and there's a matching table runner on the sideboard with flowers and wine decorations on it. And Mom re-stained the table and chairs (she's 60, she can be an old lady now).

At work we don't have easy access to a lot of restaurants like we used to back at the Dyke, nor do we have vending machines or a full sized refrigerator (yet) so we tend to stockpile dry food so we don't have to go out for lunch or dinner if we don't want to. We have an expresso machine and a japanese water-boiler thing that keeps 4 liters of water at boiling temp all the time, which is wonderful. The 18 year olds do the grocery shopping for us, which might explain how we ended up with the best-stocked dorm room ever... soda and bottled water and juice, oatmeal packets, chips and crackers and popcorn, every Hostess cupcake/twinkie product ever made, raisins, yogurt covered raisins, dried pineapple and mango and papaya, cans of soup, Nutella, cookies galore... all that's missing is Ramen and Easy-Mac and that's only because they haven't been on sale yet. We haven't finished remodeling, so we have a dorm-sized fridge too, and part of the reason we're relying on the food storage here is because we can't fit six packed lunches into the fridge every day.