08-31-04

However, I don't really believe that it will still work the next time that I turn on my computer.

Oh my gosh, I think I just actually set up a wireless network!

Lest you think I've gone geek, rest assured that this was accomplished by studying the manual for 12 hours*, lots of dumbfounded staring, and wishing upon a star.

I had a number of other things that I wanted to write about (the least of which being that Whole Foods has about 40 kinds of granola in bulk, which is a kind of overwhelming if you just want a little granola to put in your yogurt (but not a whole box of granola, because you know you'd never eat it all), and you can't think of anywhere else that would sell bulk granola), but I have to, um, get dressed. Among other things.

Three cheers for laziness on a Tuesday morning!





*Well, I DID start working on it last night, but I had quite a sizeable break while I read and slept and went for a walk and ate breakfast and generally did a lot of things that are more enjoyable than being frustrated by the fact that the stupid little light on my wireless card wouldn't turn on.


np: Super Furry Animals-Hello Sunshine

11:28 a.m.

08-26-04

Telegram Sam is my main man.

#1: The other night I befriended a pregnant cat on my walk home from work, whose tags said that she lives only a few houses down from me. She seemed to really like me and kept rubbing against my ankles and standing up on her little hind legs so I would pet her, and I'm hoping that she'll let me see her kittens after they're born. But not just after they're born, because newborn kittens are disgusting little monsters (as most newborn things are), and I only like things that are attractive, which is why I can't ever have a baby.

The cat and I (her name wasn't on her tag, unless her name is McHenner, which I sincerely hope it isn't) saw a pizza delivery man wandering the neighborhood and yelling "Dominoes!" towards various houses. It seemed a little odd, because I thought that most people give out their whole address when ordering a pizza, not just the name of their street. I know that when I order a pizza, I like to be very, very sure that it is going to reach me.

#2: I made the most delicious mess of things mixed with couscous yesterday. At first I just thought I'd mix it with chickpeas and the grape tomatoes and cucumbers that I stole from my parents' garden, then I decided to marinate the tomatoes and cucumbers in balsamic vinegar for a while. Then I looked through the cupboards and found about 15 raisins (I'm kind of surprised that I even bothered to move them) and some sunflower seeds, and decided to throw those in, and then I remembered that I had frozen corn, and there was some kind of shredded white cheese (I think that it was a romano/asiago/mozzeralla blend, but for some unknown reason it was no longer in its original package, so it could've been anything white) in the refrigerator that was about to go bad. And honestly, the cheese didn't really do that much for it. But everything else was good, and I think that I'm going to make it again tomorrow, except that I am going to add sundried tomatoes and feta cheese and leave out the corn and mystery cheese (it's gone now, anyway), assuming that I actually go to the store as is my current plan.

Actually, I'm just happy that I was able to make something edible, as I haven't gotten groceries since August 13, except for the other night when I went to the store to buy milk (because I think that the fridge wasn't cold enough, because nothing ever seemed to get very cold. I kept turning it up a little every day, and now it is on the maximum coldness level. The milk was cold when I poured it on my cereal this morning, and nothing is freezing, so I guess I'll just leave it there).

#3: I keep getting mysterious phone calls. Getting phone calls from people that aren't my parents is always mysterious, but they are usually wrong numbers. This person calls repeatedly, though, usually when I am at work, and once they called very early in the morning and my phone was in another room so I didn't hear it. They never leave a message, and a reverse directory lookup states that the number is from Howell, Michigan, where I am 100% sure that I don't know anyone.

#4: I think that I am going to go to Lake Huron this weekend, since I realized that I've never seen Lake Huron except for at the very top of lower Michigan where it connects to Lake Michigan. And I've never been in the thumb area at all, either. Both of those things are a little pathetic.


np: work

5:46 p.m.

08-24-04

Living alone probably just means that I won't talk to anyone while I'm not at work for the next seven days.

I went to my parents' house this weekend, because my grandparents that live in South Carolina were around. And also because I was tired of seeing my roommate take a lamp out to her car, and then sit on the couch for 20 minutes complaining about how moving takes forever and how it wasn't fair that I was mostly done when she had so much more to do (because it was totally fair, since I started packing on Monday and she didn't do anything until Thursday night). And also because my parents had fresh cucumbers and tomatoes and grape tomatoes from their garden, and peaches from a nearby orchard.

But now I am back in my new apartment (not literally, as we won't have internet access there until Monday), and my roommate is on vacation with her family until next Tuesday, meaning that I get to finally realize my dream of living alone! But only for one week. Tonight I plan on celebrating living alone by unpacking things, possibly going to the grocery store (it depends on whether or not the milk is sour), and watching Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, during which I may or may not snack. I am a wild and crazy gal.

ps: happy thirtieth wedding anniversary mom & dad!


np: work

8:02 p.m.

08-19-04

Hoping all the verses rhyme & the very best of choruses.

Day I am moving into new apartment: tomorrow.

Day the electric company can come and turn on the electricity: Tuesday, between noon and four.

Ummmm . . . well, at least I don't have to work again until Tuesday night.

Today I spent most of the day avoiding packing by eating pretty much continuously. Which makes me a little sad, because the other day I discovered that I've lost enough weight that my favorite pants fall off (& I mean that very, very literally) if I try to walk anywhere while wearing them. Which also makes me a little sad because I love those pants, and it took me a long time to find plain brown pants that weren't way too long for me, and even if I were to find more brown pants that I like, I don't have enough money to buy new ones.

Oh look, now I am procrastinating by diarylanding*. And soon I will be procrastinating by watching The Andy Griffith Show.



*This word WILL become a verb. It WILL!


np: Fountains of Wayne-Better Things

8:53 p.m.

08-16-04

More exclamation points mean more exclamations!

I just discovered that the phone at my desk can ring while I'm already using it to talk to someone else! It was quite exciting and bewildering. More bewildering, though, was the fact that I successfully put the first person on hold, answered the second call and put that person on hold, answered the question of the person who had been standing at my desk before the phone rang, then re-answered both calls and answered those questions! I mean, I worked here three months before I first successfully transferred a call, and here I am suddenly (and mysteriously) dealing with multiple lines with no difficulty at all!

Before work, I went to the post office because I made half.com sale for the first time in forever. Most of what I'm selling are textbooks, though, so I guess it would make sense that I seem to only sell things around the time that school is starting. (Although, why people wouldn't want to take a book like Race and the Rise of Standard American with them on vacation is beyond me. Oh, wait, I guess I do kind of understand.) More important than the sale, though, is that this marks the first time that I've ever sold something on half.com for more than I initially paid for it. The sticker on the back said, $23.80, but some girl in California is paying me $25 for it! I am going to use that $1.20 well.


np: work

3:19 p.m.

08-13-04

I'm moving in exactly one week!

I keep looking around and thinking that I don't have that much stuff so packing shouldn't be that big of a deal, but last year it took forever. Although I guess at least part of the reason that I remember moving/packing as being such a huge pain is because last year I moved in April and then again in August. And because I moved everything almost entirely by myself both times (well, my dad did sort of help me move into this house in August, but I had to move everything out of my room in the co-op and into storage for a week before I could move in here). This year my parents (at least my dad) are coming to help! And then they will take me out for dinner! By this time next week I will have eaten a real meal, and not something like frozen corn and Morningstar Farms Chik'n nuggets!

Anyway. I'm happy about moving, even though I like this neighborhood and its proximity to the arb. I'm tired of this room.


np: Super Furry Animals-Y Teimlad

7:50 p.m.

08-13-04

So I jumped the fence and went out west.

1. Last night we went to see Dodgeball, which wasn't as good as all of the bizarrely positive reviews I read about it would have me believe. As expected, there were a lot of jokes involving the word 'balls.' But it was still better than most movies, and very preferable to my usual evening activity of sitting around and doing nothing.

2. Also, there was a large group of girls in front of us who were having the most fascinating/annoying conversation ever! One was all, "I have to get married on May 26, 2007, because I like the way May 26 looks in calligraphy, and I'd have to wait for, like, a million more years for it to be on a Saturday again," but she didn't know who she was going to marry, and was starting to get worried since she now has less than three years. Then she started talking about how in sixth grade there was a boy who was a huge dork and everyone made fun of him, and she and her friends pretended that she liked him. Then she really DID start to like him, but in seventh grade he suddenly turned cute and would only date popular girls. But she liked him first! Also, she thought that it would be a good idea for her sister* to marry her (the first girl, not her sister's) boyfriend Bob (I'm not sure why she just couldn't marry Bob on May 26, 2007), because her sister's name "would sound really cute with Bob's last name." Also, the possible sister's chair was broken, and the whole group thought that it was the most hilarious thing they'd ever seen. Had they never been to the cheap theater before? At least three chairs per row are broken or have some sort of unappealing stain on them.

3. OK, so I have stupid conversations in public too.

4. This makes me proud to have a degree in linguistics. (And here is the IPA vowel chart so that you can figure out whether or not you are sexy! I am, sadly, not.)

5. I always feel like I have somehow personally failed when I can't finish books. But I've also found that forcing myself to read books that I can't interest myself in usually means that even a short book will take me several weeks to finish and after I'm done I won't remember a single thing about it.

6. I finally got the Freaks and Geeks dvds from the library! Which means this weekend will be a Freaks and Geeks party at my house! No one is invited but me.

PS: As an added bonus, here is a picture tying together the subjects of the first and last paragraphs of this entry.





*I'm assuming that the girl she was talking to was her sister, because after a brief exchange agreeing that her name really WOULD sound cute with Bob's last name, the first girl said, "Plus, our family really likes him." I guess she could've been a cousin or something, but I prefer to believe that I can figure out a person's entire life just be eavesdropping on them in a movie theater.


np: John Vanderslice-White Plains

2:26 p.m.

08-09-04

Hamtramck and Ypsilanti are my two favorite Michigan city names, even though Kalamazoo is the obvious choice.

Last night we went to see A. C. Newman in Hamtramck, which would've been better if he had actually been on the stage before 12:45am. I tried to get to the show late, because three bands in one night is at least one band too many (unless they're all bands that I actually like), but when we got there a little before 10pm the first one hadn't even started. I got up early yesterday, and like senior citizens and infants, I get cranky when I haven't had enough sleep, so by midnight I was thinking "Please let this be your last song!" before every single song that the second band played. When the singer said, "OK, we've got one more," and then consulted with the band and said, "Actually, never mind, we're not going to play another one," it might have been the happiest moment of my life.

I am the queen of mood swings, though, so when A. C. Newman played I felt happy (rather than full of rage and spite directed at some band I had never heard of until last night), and sort of gooey and sweaty as well. We left at 1:30am (before he was actually done), when I went back to being tired. It took forever to get home because I had to stop and buy milk, and also because the cruise control on my car wasn't working the way it should. It usually speeds up about 8mph after I set it, but last night it was only speeding up 2mph (so, I guess last night it was actually closer to working right than it usually is). The problem was that I'm used to setting the cruise control for 8mph slower than I actually want to go, and I couldn't seem to compensate for the little 2mph difference, so the car never went faster than 67mph all the way home (which wasn't too bad most of the time because there weren't too many other cars around. But every car that WAS out was going at least 85mph, so whenever anyone would pass us we'd just see a flash of light and hear the roar of an engine for a second, and then be left alone in the silent and dark night).

Also, just now I dripped a lot of water across the kitchen floor from the sink to the refrigerator, but I just left it there, figuring that that is as close to being mopped as that floor is going to get.


np: Sufjan Stevens-We Won't Need Legs to Stand

1:35 a.m.

08-07-04

Audrey III

I'm a little worried that this plant is about to go all little shop of horrors on me.


np: the Zombies-Care of Cell 44

11:16 a.m.

08-06-04

Noise pollution solution.

This morning while I was at work, I decided that immediately after work I was going to go buy some grape Faygo and a cd. But when I got to the diag liquor store, there wasn't any grape Faygo. I headed onwards to the record store only to discover a sign on the door that said it would be closed until from August 2 to August 8 for a staff productivity meeting. And the record store is only two storefronts away from the diag liquor store, so that was a lot of disappointment in a relatively short period of time.

Dismayed, I went home and was revived by a day-old (50% off!) fudge cookie, and inspired by Laura-Jane, I took my freshly-carved rubber stamp and headed to the arb to look for the letterbox that is hidden there. In keeping with the rest of the day's events, I didn't actually find the letterbox, but after traipsing around the arb for several hours, and petting strange dogs, and walking on the railroad tracks and through an empty soccer field, and peeling apart a milkweed and pretending that the scaly seedpod inside was a fish (just like I did when I was 8), I stood at the exact spot where I was absolutely sure that that letterbox should be, and I was filled with contentedness and thought, "Maybe there is no letterbox. Maybe there is a letterbox inside all of us."

But then I decided that there probably was a letterbox and I just couldn't find it, and meandered home.

Also, I would like to thank the following songs for making the past week livable:


np: Super Furry Animals-The Undefeated

8:37 p.m.

08-04-04

It's worse than wearing fish.

I just spent hours reading online food propaganda until I become convinced that unless I start growing my own broccoli (inside, in some kind of airtight chamber to protect it from the outside air) and eating it raw, I will die of cancer/MS/diabetes/heart disease at the age of 26. Reminding myself that in the future I should only use the internet for its three divine purposes (downloading music, reading about strangers' lives, and celebrity gossip), I turned on the tv for an irony-free half hour of simplicity and happiness, and The Andy Griffith Show was preempted for some sort of TV Land convention.

What kind of person would watch a TV Land convention special? How is there still time for two episodes of Three's Company (ugh), but not enough for one little episode of The Andy Griffith Show*? I feel a disgruntled letter to the editor coming on.





*Ok, so the other day Aunt Bea asked Andy if he liked the white beans they had for dinner, and he said, "Well, I had five bowls. If that's not a tribute to white beans, I don't know what is." Aunt Bea said something about how he should have said something if he like them, and he answered, "Eatin' speaks louder than words." I laughed so hard that it was a little embarassing. And actually, it wasn't the other day, it was several weeks ago. But I remember it like it was yesterday.


np: Super Furry Animals-Trons Mr Urdd

10:34 p.m.

08-03-04

Dusty living.

Yesterday I realized that what was once a thin layer of dust covering everything in my room had become a very thick and somewhat furry layer of dust. I decided that I would clean today, which is what I did until I realized that (a) sweeping the floor should not be a sweat-inducing activity* and (b) it's pointless to sweep while the fan is on, anyway. I did, at least, finally throw away the remainder of my African violet which died after falling out of a window last summer, when I lived in a different house. I also removed a lot of dust from my tv screen, and I'm sure that the next time I watch something I will be amazed by the colors.

I'm sure that I've mentioned before how I am easily excited by things that are boring and/or lame. Case in point: webcams from the Soo Locks! Although it's not so much the webcams as it is the movie made from yesterday's webcam images! Wooooo! Those boats are FAST!





*And I'm not sure why it was such a sweaty job, as it didn't seem that hot outside when I was walking to work later. Perhaps it was a sign that I shouldn't be cleaning. Maybe all that dust is going to save my life one of these days.


np: work

6:48 p.m.

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