Category: Life

Three Kings last night. I liked it a lot, though I probably would have liked it a lot more if we hadn’t had to keep pausing it – first because of phone calls, and then because Fred wanted a swim break. The pool was 62 last night, by the way, and it was raining rather heavily, but because he’d had a big dinner Fred felt he needed to work it off in the pool. Good movie, though wasn’t I surprised at the very end that David O. Spanking the Monkey Russell had written and directed it. For some reason, I’d gotten it into my head that Spike Jonze had; obviously I got it mixed up with Being John Malkovich. Which incidentally comes out May 2nd, and I can’t wait to see it. Fred just called and informed me that we’ll be getting a cable modem on Monday. We’ve been waiting for what seems like forever to get something faster than our dial-up access, and they finally made it available in our neighborhood. It’s $50 for each of us, but since we won’t need those ISPs or extra phone lines, it’ll all work out. Bargain, eh? Of course, I’m so clueless when it comes to that sort of thing, that Fred had to boil it down to simplest terms for me: "You know how fast everything is at work?" "Yeah?" "This will be twice as fast." Now that, my friends, is wickedly fast. Just in time, too, since I’ll have all that sitting-around-and-surfing time on my hands in a few weeks!
—–]]>

did tell him I’d call!" My husband, the diplomat. So, Fred is on a reading kick. He can go for months without reading much, and then go on a spree where he reads a book a day. Over the weekend, he took the spud to a used bookstore and bought a bunch for he and I to read; she bought three or four for herself. Instead of watching Pushing Tin with me last night he sat in the bathtub (we have an oversized whirlpool tub) and read. He didn’t miss much in that movie, I’ll tell you. I really wanted to like it, because I like Billy Bob Thornton and REALLY like John Cusack. But it was excruciatingly pointless and by the end I was yelling "Fucking christ, END ALREADY!" at the TV. The irony is that I rented the movie because I thought Fred wanted to see it. One of our government customers is driving me nuts. She called this morning and placed an order for software. Then she called back and wanted to know what exactly they had paid for. I explained fifteen times that they were paying for software five of their employees had downloaded several months back. "I thought I was buying a license," she said. "Well, yes, a license for the software they’re using," I said. "They downloaded it in December, and now you’re paying for it, so it’s legal for them to keep using it." "But I was paying for a license, not the software, I thought." "You paid for the software; the license is proof that you paid for it." She just didn’t get it, and I couldn’t find the magical words to make her understand. Two more weeeeeks, two more weeeeeks, twoooooo mooooooore weeeeeeks. I can’t be out of here soon enough, folks. —–]]>

Firsts First pet. I was an Air Force brat growing up, which meant that no sooner would we get a dog than we’d have to give it away when we moved. The first pets Debbie and I got – for Christmas – were a couple of female hamsters we named Laverne and Shirley. Laverne was mine, Shirley was Debbie’s. We had hours of fun, teaching them to climb steps, and shutting our bedroom door and letting them run around. If I recall correctly, we even had one of those hollow balls you put hamsters (or gerbils or mice or rats) in and let them run around safely. Those hamsters lived forever, it seemed. We got them when I was about 10, and I’m pretty sure Laverne was alive until I was about 14. Laverne was the first to die, and Debbie and I were hugely traumatized, but took solace in the knowledge that Laverne had died doing what she loved most – eating. She died with a piece of food hanging out of her mouth. Before we got the hamsters, though, we got Taffy, who also lived a long, long time. 15 years, maybe? Every evening just before we sat down to dinner, Taffy would be fed, and while we ate, we could hear her eating. We knew she was done eating when she belched loudly. After she ate, she’d wander around under the dinner table hoping to find crumbs of dropped food, and licking any bare toes she saw along the way. You could figure out where she was by the disgusted "Taffy!"s spoken by the lucky lickees. She was a great dog, always willing to go for a walk with you, and always eager to chase down the squirrels in the back yard. She was our little guard dog, always howling frantically when someone came to the door, whether they be friend or foe. Except for the time someone broke into my parents’ house in the middle of the night. Taffy let out one bark, and then Debbie yelled "Shut up, Taffy!" (since Taffy was prone to bark at nothing in the middle of the night) and Taffy crawled under Debbie’s bed for the duration of the break-in. First love. Donny Osmond. Oh Donny, the pain lingers; how, oh, how could you have forsaken me for that chick you married? I had a pillowcase with your face on it. I bought every magazine that ever thought about printing your name. I LOVED you Donny, with a white-hot passion, and you have the nerve to not only marry someone else, but be happy lo these many years later. She’ll never be as good to you as I could’ve been, Donny. First kiss. I was 16 and had finally gotten over Donny Osmond (okay, maybe it didn’t take quite that long). I went out on a date to the movies with the boy who ended up being my very first boyfriend. After the movie, we went back to my parents’ house and talked. I waited, but he never kissed me. The next night, as I was leaving work, I invited him over again. We sat out in the back yard on the picnic table, and FINALLY he turned to me and said "Can I kiss you?" Yeah, it sounds all sweet, but it was really dorky and I was horribly embarrassed. He was a very bad kisser, of the sort who would come at you with his mouth gaping wide open like a dying fish gasping for air. Gah. First job. My first job (aside from the babysitting of my youth, of course) was as a carhop/ waitress at The Hi-Hat III Drive-In. I was paid what I was told was "student minimum" wage, and my boss was a total control freak. The best night I ever worked there was the night he was gone to a wedding. The customers were pretty cool, except for the families who would come in with five kids, have excruciatingly detailed orders, and then leave a fifty-cent tip. Though in retrospect, it was probably all they could afford. The food at The Hi-Hat was hardly haute cuisine. I worked there for about 8 months, until I got my driver’s license and got a job at McDonald’s. First car.

I had this car from the age of about 17, until I was 19 and the transmission got itself majorly fucked up. I went wild with the bumper stickers, as you can see, and the banner across the inside of the back window says "Ollie for President." That would be Oliver North. To this day, I have the license plate memorized (back in The Day, when you used your Gulf Oil credit card to pay for gas, you had to give them your license plate number with your signature). Back in my Diet Pepsi days, I left a full plastic bottle of Diet Pepsi on the floor in the back seat for the entire winter. One spring day, my former friend Denise was sitting in the back seat, and Liz was sitting in the front seat – I, of course, was driving. We heard a tremendous bang, and after much screaming and shrieking, discovered that the Diet Pepsi bottle had exploded all over Denise, fortunately not maiming her. Oh, it was a brown Chevette, but I’m not sure of the year. ’82, maybe. First concert. Judas Priest and Great White. I was a Freshman in high school, and my parents bought tickets to the concert for us; I think it was a birthday present to Debbie. I haven’t got a clue in the world why they bought us the tickets – I was never a fan of Judas Priest, then or now. All I really remember is chewing a pack of gum, a piece at a time, and then spitting the old gum out onto the people sitting in the rows below us. Mature, eh? Oh, now that I think of it, my first actual concert was Shaun Cassidy. Debbie and our cousin Kim were big Shaun Cassidy fans, and weren’t we excited at the thought of seeing him play in Portland. My mother and aunt Nikki went with us to the concert, along with my brother Tracy. Shaun came out dressed as the janitor, adjusted the microphone – which tipped Debbie off to the fact that it was Shaun – and then tore off his janitor uniform and began singing Hey Deenie. First place you lived (that you remember). The first place I remember living was in base housing at Kinchloe Air Force Base in Michigan. I don’t know how long we lived there, but it seems like a good three or four years. I can close my eyes and remember almost the entire layout of the house, along with the backyard, and the route to school. That’s where we lived when I started school, and I recall walking to and from school. I’d love to go back there, but I heard that they closed the base and made it into a prison. First place you lived ‘on your own’ The very first time I moved out was the summer after I turned 18, and graduated from high school. One night, I said "fuck it", packed my bags, and moved into a dilapidated house with three guys in Durham (note to the interested – Durham is where Stephen King grew up). I was working third shift – midnight to 8 am – at a convenience store, and my rent was $25 a week. As you can imagine, this place was a real prize. There was a huge gap between the door and the frame, and it wouldn’t have surprised me to wake up and find field mice wandering through the living room. Since one of my roommates worked 9 to 5, he let me use his bed to sleep in while he was at work. On the days he didn’t work, I slept on a crappy couch in the living room. I made it about two months before I called and asked my Mom if I could move back in. First plane trip. I’m fairly certain the first plane trip I ever took was from Los Angeles to Guam, where we lived for two years. I don’t remember much about the flight, except that we had a layover in Hawaii for a long time, and there was a woman flying alone with a girl my age (7) and a baby, and my mother – for some unknown reason – thought she’d help out by keeping the girl occupied, and offered her my coloring book. The girl then found the ONE PICTURE in the entire coloring book I’d been saving to color when I could do it justice – obviously much pain still lives on in the memory, people – and the girl SCRIBBLED ON THE PICTURE. Yes she did, the little bitch. My life has not been the same since. It was a picture of Bambi and Thumper. First alcoholic drink. It was my 17th birthday, and my friends took me out to dinner at Pizza Hut. We ordered a pitcher of Pepsi, and in a completely unsubtle manner the ringleader, Wendy, poured rum from a bottle in her purse into a cup, and dumped it into the pitcher. When we left Pizza Hut, I was claiming that my legs felt funny and my lips were numb, and I couldn’t have possibly had more than a shot glass worth of rum. Yes, I’ve always been a lightweight. —–

]]>

Bose Wave radio – as long as I remember that, the rest of the stuff can go hang. I spent half an hour or so at Office Depot picking up office supplies for the new marketing chick who starts on Monday – stapler, tape dispenser, rolodex, stuff like that. Exciting, eh? Then I spent another half hour cleaning out the supply cabinet – good god we’ve got way too much crap crammed in there – and yet another half hour ordering a second supply cabinet to put all the extra wires and keyboards tossed around the supply room in (does that sentence make sense?). I’m embarrassed to admit that I really like the new Kid Rock song "Only God Knows Why." I’m not the slightest bit of a Kid Rock fan, but I really really like this song, with the electronic tickles all the way through. Which reminds me – I ordered a bunch of books from half.com yesterday (Kid Rock reminds me of half.com because I went there to see how much his cd would cost there) (just so you know I’m not the kind of gal who goes off on wild tangents for no reason – ha!) and didn’t notice until Fred pointed it out that apparently half.com will be handing out my home address to a bunch of strangers. I’m not the spaz Fred is, so I’m not worried that some mad book-seller will come and murder me in my sleep (besides, we have an alarm system), but next time I’ll definitely use my work address. Yes, I know it won’t be my work address for much longer, but Fred will be here and he can bring my packages home like a good servant boy. With all the rain we got over the first part of the week, the pool filled almost to the top, and on Wednesday Fred decided it was time to drain some of the water off the top. So he started the draining, and went inside and messed around on his computer and checked on dinner and talked to his father, and pretty much forgot to stop draining the pool. Luckily, it was only about three inches lower than he’d meant to drain it. Then he and the spud went swimming yesterday, since the pool’s up to a sultry 66. Another 9 degrees, and I’ll be swimming! It’s supposed to cool off this weekend, though. I was taking a bath last night, and the kitten was walking around the edge of the tub losing her mind because she’s fascinated with water, just totally mesmerized, so she’d sit and dip her paw in the water, then shake off the excess water and lick her paw, then jump to another corner of the tub and do it all over again. I had stopped watching her, was just sitting there reading, when I heard a splash and felt a frantic kitty paw on my back. She’d been trying to jump from one corner to another, not realizing the corner she was attempting to jump to had boxes of bath beads sitting there, and so instead of landing where she wanted, she jumped, hit the boxes, and fell into the water. As soon as I figured out what was going on, I reached back and helped her out of the water, and she jumped down onto the bath mat, looking like a drowned rat. I yelled for Fred, who came and dried her off, and then she sat there for ten minutes or so grooming herself. Wet cats are just the stinkiest things in the world. The funniest thing is that she’d just fallen in the tub when Fred was taking a bath the night before. You’d think she’d’ve learned her lesson. —–]]>

This particular article is excellent, in my opinion, but don’t bother to go read it if you’re not interested in the Elian Gonzalez brouhaha. The weather is driving me nuts. Tuesday the high was 55. Yesterday, 65, and today it’s supposed to be 75. I have ivy I need to plant, and I’d like to get my catnip and morning glory seeds planted and put out, but there was a fairly heavy frost yesterday morning, and I’d rather my ivy not die as soon as I get it planted. It’s APRIL, for crying out loud, isn’t it supposed to be in the 80s every day here in the heart of dixie? Fred spent an hour on the phone with his father last night, trying to figure out why his computer wouldn’t work. By the time he hung up, he was swearing up and down that he was never going to buy his father a computer again. His father was impressed, though, at the extent of Fred’s computer knowledge. I think when you’re a parent, you assume you know more than your kids do, and I bet you keep assuming that as they grow up. There’s so much Fred knows about computers, in an area where his father is clueless. I bet it was a little humbling. Could I have used the words "bet" or "think" a few more times in that paragraph? I bet not, I think. Okay, I know y’all are only here for the cat stories, so here’s one. I don’t think Fancypants’ neutering "took", if you know what I mean. He’s the horniest acting cat I’ve ever seen. I caught him trying to mount the kitten again Monday, and then when I was sitting in the living room reading before work Tuesday, he jumped up beside me and fell back against me so that I could rub his tummy. The spud put her backpack and sweatshirt on the couch and wandered off to get something out of her room, and while she was gone the kitten jumped up and settled down on her sweatshirt. You can’t leave anything warm and soft sitting anywhere for more than ten seconds in this house without a cat taking it over. Anyway, Fancypants eyed the kitten, hopped up beside her, and then leaned back so that his hind legs were sticking straight up in the air. Slowly, he began licking himself until something interesting, uh, came up. Lifting his head, his pupils all big and dark with desire, he gave her an amorous come-hither look as if to say Want some candy, little girl? She gave him a blank look, with a cartoon question mark hanging over her little head. That’s when I threw a pillow at him and ran him off. Gives me good practice for running the boys off when the spud gets older. ]]>

Staples‘ search engine is head and shoulders above Office Depot and Office Max. Whereas Office Depot’s search engine said "Compressed Air? What’s that?", Staples‘ search engine said "Compressed air? You want compressed air, we got compressed air! Here, here are 30 different kinds of compressed air! Pick one!" Ooh, a lady is standing in the parking lot giving her significant other/ co-worker all kinds of hell. I think he’s more than a co-worker, ’cause she’s all in his space. Her hands are flying all over the place. Is that a girl thing, the hands waving all over the place when you get upset? I know I do it, when I’m mad and when I’m excited, too. Hey, he’s laughing at her. Now she’s playing with his hair. I guess there’ll be no physical fisticuffs for me to go break up. Not that I really would, you understand. So I’ve actually done some work this morning – I straightened off the shelves off the bookcase in my office, tossing a lot of useless crap no one needs. That took me all of about 5 minutes, and then I spent 15 minutes looking for a form "Thanks but no thanks" letter to send out to the zillions of people who mailed and faxed their resumes in response to our ad in the paper a month ago. I found a form letter to follow, but lost interest in that, and then spent an hour surfing on Office Depot and Staples ordering office supplies. (Damn, Staples charges almost $9 a 12-pack for Coke! There goes that idea… Talk about your prohibitively expensive!) Now I’m back on Office Depot, looking for a desk for the marketing chick who will begin work on Monday. Now I’m getting annoyed ’cause she’ll need a phone too, the bitch (kidding), and Office Depot doesn’t apparently deign to carry just PHONES, simple one-line phones, nosiree, that would make too much sense, wouldn’t it?! Grrrr. So I left work around noon yesterday and wandered around the house, picking stuff up and putting it away or tossing it in the trash, and then I watched the last movie I rented Friday and hadn’t yet watched, The Opposite of Sex. To my surprise, I really liked it. I like Christina Ricci, despite the smack-me face. Then last night, Fred, the spud and I watched Star Wars: Episode 1, and while I thought it was pretty good, I didn’t fall in love with it the way Fred did. I would have been more impressed, I think, if I had seen it in a movie theater. I’m glad to have seen it, though. —–]]>

Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, which came out on video today. I wandered around the store searching in vain for the DVD before giving up and grabbing a tape. Once I arrived back at the office, Fred told me Lucas isn’t releasing any of them on DVD ’til they’re all made. Would’ve been nice to know! Who’s the Einstein who decided it would be a good idea for Diane Sawyer to interview Elian Gonzalez? And further, which Einstein on the Gonzalez side allowed her access to the poor kid? Why don’t they just send the kid back to his father and be done with it, for crying out loud. Diane Sawyer is so uncomfortable around kids, it’s laughable. What, she’s a woman so she’ll have a good rapport with kids? Anyone who’s seen her with the Dilley sextuplets knows how untrue that is. Those Dilleys sure are cute, though. So, can someone define middle-class for me? Fred swears up and down that the neighborhood we live in is a lower-middle-class neighborhood, and to me that’s far from correct. We live in an almost 3,000 square foot house, and while we have the largest model the builder offered at the time, the houses around us are far from tiny. To me, it’s an upper-middle if not lower-upper class neighborhood; everyone who lives around us has two or more vehicles, and they’re nice ones, too. The car I had when we moved into the house – a ’90 or ’91 Ford Tempo – was far and away the only crappy car in the neighborhood. And, besides: we have a POOL. I’ve always thought I grew up in a solidly middle-class home and neighborhood. There were four of us kids, and we may not have always had every single thing we wanted (unlike a very spoiled spud), but we never came close to starving or going around in ratty clothes (unless we wanted to, of course). My father kept a strict eye on the thermostat in the winter, and we had a wood stove in the basement, so if you were upstairs in my room you’d be cold, but if you were in the basement, you’d be sweating your ass off. We didn’t go without, but my parents didn’t buy unnecessary things, either. They didn’t have a snow-blower the entire time I was growing up, because – hell – they had kids to shovel, didn’t they? Not that I remember doing all that much shoveling; I think my Dad took care of most of it. When first we moved into the house where I lived from sixth grade on, the driveway was a dirt driveway. My parents had the driveway paved eventually and didn’t we think we were the shit, skating back and forth on that driveway. I recall my cousin Kim spending the night once, and our parents went out to eat, so Debbie, Kim and I skated around on the driveway in our nightgowns and struck hitchhiking poses as cars drove by. The house we moved into had three bedrooms, one bathroom, and an unfinished basement. Debbie and I shared a room for a few years. Eventually, my father finished the basement with pine wood walls, and Debbie and I had our bedrooms down there. Tracy, being the oldest (six years older than I, eight older than Debbie) was responsible for watching us while my parents worked. For the first year we lived in that house, now that I think about it, my father was finishing out his last year of service in the Air Force. So it was the four of us and my mother. Ah, I’ve rambled off the point once again; I do that a lot, don’t I? I don’t know what my point was supposed to be actually, maybe a simple comparison between what Fred considers middle class and what I consider middle class. Of course, his father lives in a huge house on the mountain and was able to retire at the age of 55, so what does he know? 🙂 I think I’ll probably be putting most of my archives back up this weekend; I don’t want to wait until the end of April. People are coming to the site and not finding old entries to poke through, so they aren’t staying long; I don’t like that. So I’m going to toss the old entries back up (the cd was behind my desk, under a stuffed Coke reindeer; told you I’d find it! – and almost everything not backed up to disk was on my computer at work. Let me tell you, I was RELIEVED.) this weekend. ]]>

High Art with Ally Sheedy. I know the role was a real departure for Ally Sheedy – she hasn’t acted in forever, has she? – but despite the photographer-lesbian-drug addict role, she was still very much Ally Sheedy. She had all the same mannerisms, the shrugging one shoulder, the looking sideways while she talked, the same impish smile. I was very aware while I was watching it that she was Ally Sheedy – she didn’t get lost in the role at all. It wasn’t a bad movie, though. Speaking of people who get lost in roles, when we watched The Sixth Sense last week, I still couldn’t believe that the kid at the beginning was Donnie Wahlberg. The first time I saw the movie, in the theater, I had no idea it was him. This time, even knowing that it was him, I still couldn’t believe it. He looks nothing like himself – and he doesn’t even really sound right, either. He must have lost a lot of weight for that role, and I think they did something to his eyes, too, contacts maybe. Hell, while we’re on the topic of movies, Fred and I watched Drive Me Crazy last weekend. Yes, we love dorky high school movies, what can I say? So we were watching this very formulaic movie (halfway through, I guessed that Dee was the computer chick) and something happened that surprised Melissa Joan Hart’s (who we still call Clarissa, no matter what she’s in) character, and she made a face, spurring Fred to note, "She sure does go all slack-jawed and stupid-looking when she’s surprised, doesn’t she?" I couldn’t have put it better myself. Lord. While I was looking for those movie links on IMDB, I noticed that Melissa Joan Hart is slated to star in a remake of The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer. That’s gotta be interesting. So while we were on IRC at work this morning, another regular – let’s call him Del – who hangs out in the channel (it’s a programming geek channel, but I like the people – most of the time, anyway) was telling us that a headhunter he’d been e-mailing with had e-mailed Del and told him that he (Del) needed to change the message on his home answering machine, because it wasn’t "professional." How rude!, was our response. What does the message on your answering machine say? Del said that it was his wife saying, basically "We can’t come to the phone right now ’cause we’re ALL TIED UP, but leave a message after the beep, and we’ll give you ALL the attention you deserve." Sounds pretty harmless and kinda cute, doesn’t it? Well. Fred called me back to his office and used his speakerphone to call the Del’s home phone so we could listen to the message, and it sounds like the answering service for a sex line – she’s got a low, breathy voice, and the message is interspersed with lots of heavy breathing. As I told Fred, "What the hell is she working three jobs for? She could get a job as a sex-phone chick in ten seconds flat!" Anyway, Fred helped Del write an email to the headhunter telling him, basically, to go fuck himself. I’ll be interested to find out what the headhunter has to say to that. Y’all have a good evening, and please excuse any mis-spellings or typos; I don’t have time to proofread, because That ’70s Show is about to come on. God, I love that Hyde! Night, all. —–]]>

First for Women, I came across a story about three women who did various things to combat aging, from a chemical peel, to a makeover, to a facelift. First likes to present every story from three sides – or, I guess I should say, they like to present three ways to deal with a situation. At the beginning of each story was each woman’s eye-opener, what happened to make them realize they needed to do something. (No, I don’t know why I subscribe to this magazine either; I think it’s the three ways of dealing with marital problems they present each month which interests me) Anyway, the first woman One night, my husband of 20 years walked in the door and announced "You’re not pretty anymore. You look like an old hag. I want a divorce." This is where I, personally, would have brought up the fact that he had a tiny dick (always go for the obvious shot below the belt, I say) or just hit him over his self-righteous head with a frying pan. Not this woman. No, Barbara Beck, web site designer, went in for laser and chemical peels. Happy ending: a man in his late 20s hit on her. Next: One day I was standing in my boss’ office as she spoke to me in hushed tones. "Diane, you’re starting to look old, and it’s hurting your image. If you can’t do something about it, I’m afraid you’re going to be out of a job." Did this marketing director tell her boss to go fuck herself, or sue the company for ageism? Nope, Diane Briskin, marketing director, went the makeover route. Happy ending: she got a much better job elsewhere, hopefully telling her boss to go fuck herself on her way out. And, last: Church was over, and I was walking to get coffee with my daughter, Tashya. Across the room, I saw a woman I hadn’t seen in years smile and walk toward us. "And this must be your granddaughter," she said. Face lift. This is why I would never say to someone "So, this is your granddaughter?" I always, always err on the side of caution. Even if the woman looked 95 and was accompanied by a 5 year-old, I’d say "So, this is your daughter?" or even "So, this is your sister?" Oprah Winfrey once asked a woman when she was due, and the woman said "I’m not pregnant." I never mention a woman’s pregnancy unless I know for sure she’s pregnant, or unless she mentions it first. Anyway, Margaret Kowalski, bakery owner, went for a facelift. Happy ending: she showed one of her customers a picture of her daughter, and the customer said "You two could be sisters." Hell, I’m not against plastic surgery; if you can afford it and it makes you feel better about yourself, go to it. My gripe is that each of these women was spurred into making major changes (not, I guess, that a makeover is that much of a change) by the insensitive remarks of another person. I, myself, am so contrary that if Fred said "You’re not pretty anymore, you’re a hag" (yes, hopefully he knows better) I’d not only not have a facelift or chemical peel, I’d stop brushing my teeth, plucking my eyebrows, and whatever else I could do to make myself that much more hagg-ish. Well, I’ve got magazines to read, and naps to take. I’ll see y’all tomorrow. —–]]>

blah blah to the blah blah blah (ie: geek stuff I don’t understand). I stopped by the movie store on the way home, picked up lunch for the spud and I, and then came home. I puttered around the house for the better part of the afternoon, getting laundry done and planting the last of my lily bulbs (yes, yes, awfully late to be planting them, I know). Fred finally got home around 3 or so, and we hung around talking about work and everything before we went our separate ways, he to his computer and I to mine downstairs (not the laptop). Upon checking my email, I had three emails from readers informing me that they couldn’t seem to access anything on my page. Worried, I connected to my host, and what did I find? Everything was gone. Not moved, not placed temporarily elsewhere, just gone. Vanished. When I called my host, what helpful information did I glean? Jeez, ma’am, there’s just nothing we can do… Hey, thanks. Twenty bucks a month to have you randomly delete my shit – what a bargain! Robyn, you’re saying, smiling comfortingly, just re-upload everything from your backup files! It’s that easy! Well, yes. Yes, it would be. Except that I can’t find the cd I burned all my entries to back at the beginning of March before I deleted them from my hard drive. And since about March 1st I’ve been updating from work, then deleting the files from my hard drive… *sob* I swear, I kept meaning to back everything up, I just never got around to it. All I have on my hard drive are the main files – the main and cast pages, and that stuff. Okay, enough of the wallowing. I’ve been meaning to re-vamp this whole site, and I guess now’s the time to do it! I think for now I’m going to leave things as they are, because remodeling is a bigger task than I’d like to think about, and I really don’t have the heart for it ’til I’m done at DI and get to it for a couple of full-time days. Can y’all live for four more weeks without my archives? The rest of the page is pretty functional as is, and I think between what I did back up to cd and what’s on my computer at work, I should be able to put it together with only a few holes. Ah, well. Anyway. Fred took the kitten to have her stitches out, which took all of a minute. Now she’s walking around with her little tummy-sack hanging down. She’s full of piss and vinegar, though – more than before we took her to be fixed, even. She loves chasing the big boys around and kicking their asses with no provocation whatsoever. All the cats have been spending a lot of time outside, rolling around in the sun. Tubby in particular has been rolling in the dirt, and so his face is always stained red. Maybe I should toss him in the washer with a cup of bleach and a cup of dishwasher soap? (Note to the clueless: I’m kidding. Don’t be posting messages about my cruelty to the kitties)(Christine’s the one who’s cruel to kitties; any cruelties were influenced by her. She’s a bad influence!) I smell really good today, a combination of the shirt I’m wearing, which was dried outside, and a squirt of Sand and Sable. Sand and Sable’s been my favorite perfume for years, but I had to retire it for a few years so I wouldn’t get tired of it. Now I’m back around to using it – it and Dark Vanilla are my favorites – and every now and then I get a whiff of it, and it makes me feel nostalgic. Okay, I’m out of here, ’cause Fred and the spud are yelling at me to come watch Idle Hands. I may or may not post an entry tomorrow; if I don’t see you tomorrow, I’ll see you Monday. Y’all have a good weekend! —–]]>