sueeeus

I decided to make a new theme, to remind me of happy blue skies.  I’m still working on it, but it’s a nice change of pace and I can switch back to the old standard at any time.  This is a swanky theme by some smart dude in Germany, with a scheme/skin that I made to go along with it.  His link is in the footer.  Now I’ve got ideas for more schemes, but they’re so time consuming, and of course, we all know, I’ve got plenty of that.

NOT!!!

And DRAT!  Now I see that it produces javascript errors in IE.  So much for designing in FireFox and assuming it would work correctly in IE.  Another day.  I haven’t the time to figure it out today.  Double Drat!!

It has been an odd day. I forgot to take my loratadine last night, and spent the morning miserable with a gunked up throat. Dust mite allergy. Bah. I fumbled about in my desk and found some chlor-trimeton, which I know is strong for me, but I took it anyway. I then spent the day in a loopy fog, and felt short of breath all day. I came home a couple of hours early, with the intention of sleeping it off, but as usual, found other things to distract me. The effects of that dose didn’t wear off until 9 p.m., a full twelve hours after ingestion. Bah! The dizziness, anxiety, and shortness of breath were unsettling, and I don’t plan to take that stuff again. Ever.

I heard a knock at the front door. Odd. We never have visitors, and it’s late. A man holding a clipboard tried to explain to me that he was representing a charitable organization that is lobbying for health care improvements for low income people. Fine. I asked questions and he had lots of papers that he rifled through and spoke about, but they didn’t make much sense to me, so I asked more questions and tried to read the things he was pointing out. I asked if the organization was a 501(3)c, and he said yes, so I told him that I give at the office and I can look into designating it through my work contributions plan. He said he was collecting signatures and money, and I said I wouldn’t mind signing the petition, but I wasn’t prepared to give him any money. I barely finished the sentence and he whipped around and left, without even saying adieu. So. I wonder if he was working an elaborate scam, or if he was just tired, cold, and not in the mood to try to beg for donations from a penny pinching engineer. He left me a flyer that looks reasonably legit. The whole time he was standing there, I was trying to keep my son from going outside, and I had horrible visions of the stranger casing my home or nabbing my child. My gut feel was distrust and suspicion. And I am torn between feeling guilty and cheap, and feeling indignant for being treated rudely. Bah. To be able to discern honesty would be a very good thing.

Meanwhile, in other unrelated, or somewhat related news (related only because these things happened today), I wasted the entire evening fiddling with my blog. I found a swanky new theme and tested it on my hard drive, then implemented it on the server. Wouldn’t you know, the server implementation threw an error, and I am at a loss as to how to fix it. And I can’t put any further effort into it, because I am already racked with guilt over the time I’ve wasted. Racked Wracked Bah!

BAH I say.

Let me see…

Shall I whinge on the latest examples of Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars   (Except, I am an Aries, after all, and the gender barrier doesn’t always hold true.)

Or, perhaps, a whinge on the goings on and at the office   I think not.  It’s best to keep a separation of work and blog, in my case.  And besides, Mr. Gadget is quite good at bearing the brunt of my work whinges.  We unload our respective work whinges at the end of the day, as the need arises.

Shall I muse over the complexity of the endocrine system, and all that entails   I think not.  Oh, maybe just a little.  The fact that I have phases of oily, pimply skin, mixed levels of unwarranted depression or melancholy, and even moments of snarly ungracious attitude, I think hormones are busy at work, doing their thing, wreaking havoc as they wrestle for their place in the confines of this earthen vessel they call home.

Shall I lament over the state of the lives of the people I love, friends and family both Nay, such things are far too private for the blogosphere.

Shall I mention how glad I am that it has finally rained  

What about my fall lineup   Cargo pants and red shoes.  Red shoes!  (Fashion is no longer my thing.  Function.  Comfort.  It’s all about function and comfort.)

Shall I ramble on about one of my latest goals   The art of zen blogging   Zen is about simplicity, is it not   Zen blogging.  It’s nothing more than a feeble attempt at a positive spin on the fact that I don’t can’t shouldn’t spend quite so much time at the computer.  Therefore, in the interest of simplifying my life, I might not be spending as much time reading and writing in the blogosphere.

Actually, it’s a guilt thing.  The child, he cries.  Wails!  When I sit down at my desk, he cries.  Tears.  Tears!  “Mama, you should be with me, not that STUPID COMPUTER!” I read from his tearful, pained expression.  No, he’s not talking yet.  But that’s what he’s saying.  I’m certain of it.

I am using WordPress as a blogging tool, which I like very much.  I even migrated my family’s personal web site and message board to WordPress recently.  However.  There are times when it doesn’t work well or efficiently, and I’m not sure how much is related to my hosting situation, and how much is related to WordPress itself.  I’ve read on the WP technical support forums that there have been complaints of extremely slow performance with the latest version, which I’m using.  I’ve also read reviews from other forums that rate my particular hosting service as downright awful.  In either case, it’s frustrating when it’s slow, or doesn’t even respond. 

Some day, when I’m smart enough (or driven enough) to rectify the situation, I’ll make some changes, but for now, I’m not interested in fighting this particular battle.  So, my blog availability may be sporadic, and for this, I apologize (to my extensive readership –cough– ).

Is readership a word   I can’t be bothered with looking it up at present.  Although I find it interesting, and disheartening, that my vocabulary has deteriorated dramatically with age.  However, I theorize that it’s not so much age related as it is usage-related.  I think language skills tend to be ‘use it or lose it’ skills, that need to be continually exercised in order to maintain.

Once upon a time there was a blog. And then there were more. And more and more and more. One day, a fine blogger named Blackbird started a fun game called Show and Tell. Oh, the bloggers who liked to play along! Show me a chicken, said Blackbird. And some bloggers did. One day, another blogger, who was very far behind in blog happenings, happened upon (name withheld for privacy), where she exclaimed, “What a fine chicken!” (or something to that effect). In nearly a blink of an eye, said chicken took flight, and made its way across the miles. The flight was long, the journey was arduous, but the weary chook is home to roost, happily in my kitchen.

The end.

I am constantly amazed, and grateful, at the sense of community and connectedness that blogging brings into my life. Truly, it’s a beautiful thing.

Thank you!! This fine bird is holding an assortment of tea bags, and is quite content passing the time with Cookie Monster. Oh the tales they tell. The wild and crazy goings on of the Sueeus kitchen.

In all honesty, I have a warm spot in my heart for a kitchen chicken, as there was a white hen crock perched atop a shelf in my mother’s kitchen for as long as I can remember. Nostalgia. 🙂

I didn’t even mention the part about the kindness and generosity of fine people out there. I’m astounded and blessed.

(Thank you again!!)

I noticed today that WordPress strongly recommended an upgrade, for security reasons.  As I’ve been plagued with spam, I decided to upgrade.  The thing is, my server has this fancy helpful interactive ftp doohickey for transferring files, but it’s not well suited to efficient updates of multitudes of files.  It’s more of a one by one thing.  So.  I had to find another way, which meant learning whether an old fashioned ftp thingymajiggy like we used back when unix was the only thing available, and which worked great, by the way…  That sentence ran on way too long for me to even attempt to figure out what I was trying to say… Anyway, I did find something called SmartFTP, and woohoo, it’s free!  It works like A DREAM!  Almost no learning curve necessary, and voila.  My bazillion little files that make this fabulous WordPress blog run, are now updated with the latest and greatest.

We shall see if the spammers are inhibited.  I’ve turned the comments feature back on.

Did I mention that during my upgrade, my very helpful sidekick, who loves buttons of any sort, pressed the power button on my computer   Oh.  Well.  Slight interruption in the otherwise efficient process.  And where was Mr. Gadget during this   After all, I had told him that I needed to install an upgrade this evening.  Did I need to spell out the translation that it would be nice if he could actually watch Mr. Busy Body for a few minutes.

Husbands.  Sigh.  It’s not as though I work full time myself.  Or change thirty diapers to his one.  Or prepare all the meals.  Or do all the laundry.  Or put it all away.  Or anything like that.   I’m a woman.  These are my jobs.

Duh.

Having uttered something recently to the effect that ‘I hate computers’ and all things related, the computing gods have retaliated swiftly, raining brimstone and fire on my humble little holdings. 

Brimstone and fire in the form of excessive bandwidth consumption hailed from who knows whence.  In my own paranoia, I wonder if I might be the one causing such havoc, with some sort of infection in my home LAN environment that is beyond my understanding and capabilities to detect and obliterate.  I have a firewall!  I do!  It’s configured to protect me.  At least, I think it is.  I hope it is.  I followed the instructions.  I know it is.  But what of the interim between this new firewall installation and configuration, and time as I knew it, before   I’ve been running with a few different layers of protection.  SpyBot Search and Destroy.  AVG.  AdAware.  (I think.)  Windows XP built in firewall.  But that’s it.

The evil storm consumed over 300 GIGabytes in the last 9 days.  NINE DAYS!  I doubt I’ve had 3 GB in my entire blogging life.  I recently installed my firewall.  It’s too close for comfort and has left me squirming.  What did I do   Did I do anything   I don’t think I did anything.

I’m so damn paranoid.  How I hate it when thinks go amuck.  I am very much pleased with the service I get from my hosting company.  They’ve been excellent.  What is happening now   I can’t stand not knowing.  And not being able to do anything about it. 

One thing I can do is control comments.  I’ve changed my blog properties to force registration upon commenters.  I have so few non-spam visitors.  I hope my blog friends won’t mind. 

I may eventually turn off comments altogether.  Why do people spam   It makes me sick inside, that they do these malicious things that make life so unpleasant for the rest of us decent, simple, trying-to-be-kind people…  I am SO exasperated!

I don’t blog for the general public, and I haven’t got a big ‘following’, which suits me fine.  It does feel nice when kind people make kind comments, but if I must, I will shut it down or make it private or do whatever must be done to protect my good standing with my hosting company.  I am responsible for some bonafide web sites out there, that real people, businesses, and communities use and depend on, and I can’t have anything that has anything to do with my own personal web sites bringing them down. 

Blog spam may not be the culprit, but it is very annoying.  I spend more time cleaning out spam and whinging about it, than enjoying the journey of writing out my thoughts and feelings and dealing with my day to day me-ness.  Which is why I blog.  At least, why I want to blog.

All that said, my web sites will all be down tomorrow, as their host servers are being re-located.

…or…  …List Friday…   …or…   …catching up…

• It’s Friday.  I’m taking a vacation day today, because I’m in a use it or lose it situation again.  Some time ago, our company switched its vacation accrual policy so that it accrues constantly instead of once a year.  We can have up to two year’s worth of vacation accrued at any time, but it caps off if we don’t use it by the time the hours accumulate.  My number is 320 hours, and yes, I know it’s pathetic that I have that much time saved up.  I had planned to use it up as part of my maternity leave and return to work schedule, but I ended up working from home and the baby slept all day and the job demanded so much at that time, etc etc etc.  So, I didn’t end up using it, and it accrued.  And it keeps accruing.  And Mr. Gadget’s job gives him only one paltry week a year, so it’s difficult for us to plan much of a hiatus as a family.  I treat myself to a day off here and there, during which I do whatever I want.  Which is usually catching up on housework, running errands, and blogging.  Because these things help settle me.  A clean and tidy home.  No loose ends.  These things bring harmony to my life. 
• Today, I plan to catch up on blogging.  I’ve been away for a while…  …Not so much away, but I have a toddler and a full time job and a household to run, so I don’t get much time to blog.  Plus, my husband recently rattled off some statistic that he heard on the radio about blogging interfering with couples, marriages, or some such blather.  (He made it up, but it was his special way of telling me that he thinks I spend too much time blogging, or really, that he wants more attention.)Things I’d like to blog about today:
1. The wonder of feeling connected.  Check.  Did that already.
2. My silly bathroom window situation.  Check.  Did that already.
3. Sleep apnea.
4. Coffee, and, even better, the gorgeous receptacle that holds it this morning.
5. The things that I want or need to do today.

• I have sleep apnea.  What a DRAG!  I have probably been living with it for many years.  Now I’m making cpap a part of my life.  CPAP.  Continuous Positive Air Pressure.  Or something to that effect.  It’s a machine that forces air in, keeping the airways open all night.  It takes some getting used to.  Mr. Gadget lovingly says, “May the Force be with you,” as we drift off to sleep.  It is very Darth Vaderesque.
  
  For the first several days I felt more tired than ever, but have since perused many forums and learned a few things:
1. Sleep debt.  Some people theorize that one’s sleep debt needs to be repayed, and until that is done, one won’t realize the benefits of a full night’s sleep.  Seems like a bunch of hooey to me.  How many mothers have years and years of sleep deprivation, yet function very well on limited sleep   Why would only people with sleep apnea have to repay a sleep debt, and not the general population.  Hopefully I won’t get a tirade of angry comments from the multitude of readers (ha!, do I have readers   I flatter myself, she says, with much sarcasm) about how little I know (which is true, I know very little about sleep deprivation, sleep apnea, sleep debt, and sleep disorders).
2. Humidity.  Aha, that humidifier thingy that is built in to the machine should be used.  Like an idiot, I had it set at zero, thinking I’d get cool air through these hot summer nights (oh, that reminds me, how I love Neil Diamond!), but lo, one needs heat to humidify, so now I have set it to 5, max heat, and amazingly enough, the air is not hot, but nicely moistened, and whodathunkit, I’m sleeping much better.
3. Masks.  People with allergies and general respiratory challenges that accompany germ-laden toddlers who attend day care with other germ-laden children tend to need a full face mask, because sometimes it’s nigh unto impossible to breathe through one’s nostrils.  Now I have two masks.  For bad days, the full face mask.  For days when my nostrils work, a nose-only mask.  Either way, the Force is with me.
• Today I’m drinking coffee from a bowl.  Because these bowls   I love.  And I had to have them, and I didn’t know what I could use them for, but I had to have them.  Because I love them.  They’re from Target, and they’re an exquisite crackled turquoise glaze on the inside, and a smooth matte slate color on the outside.  Zazen, they’re called.  Gorgeous!  There’s a whole line of plates, bowls, mugs (too thick around the rim, they’ll never do).  While I adore them, I couldn’t justify a set of plates.  We have many plates.  Or more bowls.  We have many bowls.  But I had to have something, so I got two of the rice bowls.  I use them for green tea, or today, for coffee.
  
  Sigh.  Coffee.  I have a Senseo machine, which is very overrated.
  
  Here it is in action.  I like the one cup at a time deal.  That works for me, as I’m usually the only coffee drinker in the vicinity.  I like the foamy froth.  That part is aesthetically pleasing.  The problem– is that it requires pods.  And pods have many problems:
1. They’re pods.  Pods.  ??
2. Pods are tres expensive.
3. Pods are too small to hold sufficient coffee to make a decent cup of appropriate volume.
4. Pod manufacturers don’t produce pods that contain good coffee.
5. Inserts that bypass the pod, thereby allowing the coffee drinker to use her own grind of respectable coffee, either don’t hold sufficient coffee to make a decent cup (and make a giant mess), or bypass the frothing effect (which is the only redeeming quality of this machine, rendering it a complete waste of time, effort, and emotion).
6. It takes two pods make a reasonable cup of coffee.
7. See items 2 and 4.
• Today, I have many things to do, besides blog.
1. Find a safe home for my chotchkies.  I still don’t know how to spell that word.  My mobile young man can now reach beyond the barrier that we temporarily placed in front of the glass cube display that they currently call home.
   
   If it looks tres department store-ish, it’s because it is.  In point of fact, when one of the old glamorous department stores of the region closed its doors several years ago, I bought a portion of their display cubes.  I’m not so sure how I feel about them any more, but I’m not quite ready to put them on Craigslist, yet.
2. Return sundry items to Target, and p’raps find others to take their place.
3. Sort through my closet and collect items to donate, as the donations truck is making its rounds next week.
4. Housework.  The usual.  Dishes.  Laundry.  Finding shoes that a certain young man has absconded with and since forgotten.  Water plants.  Dust.  Tidy up.
5. Relocate the surface of my desk, which is buried somewhere beneath a bunch of crappe important papers and whatnot.
6. Learn to use my new camera.  Yes!  I got a new camera.  A video camera.  Oooooh.  It’s a Canon (I’ve been quite pleased with my Canon PowerShot G1 that I’ve now had forever).  Optura S1.  Yes, it was on sale.  The footage taken in daylight is exquisite.  Indoors with low lighting…  Jury’s still out on that one.  I need to read the manual and find out how to use the thing before I judge it harshly.
7. Take a timeout, just for me.  (Oh, I forgot, this entire day is a timeout, just for me.)

…and I’m spent.

A list of lists of lists.  I’m blogged out.  But by the looks of things, I should also spend a little time cleaning up my blog’s style sheet, what with the embedded lists and such.  Perhaps another day.

Yes, it’s time consuming, but I love categories!  I’m going through my imported blogger posts and categorizing them, bit by bit.  I have finished two months worth (the first and the last).  I am liking WordPress more and more.  I like the free part, and I like the ability to categorize posts and manage the blog details.  Initial setup was a bit of a struggle, though.

There are times when I get wrapped up in the same old things, like a broken record, over and over again. There are times when I think I’ve grown beyond whatever the hang-up is (and it’s usually the same old thing or set of things), then something will happen and once again I’ll find myself back there, at square one. It amazes me that I can so swiftly find myself right back at the beginning, blind sided, if it were. I’ll struggle with the thoughts and feelings for a time, and then I’ll be over it. Until the next time. I find it quite tedious. And then, it occurs to me, that I might be hormonal. Yes, that’s it. It’s usually it. It’s such a copout, to blame the endocrine system, but there it is.

Why do I blog It’s a scary thing, to put ones thoughts out there in the public realm. People can read, have thoughts, pass judgments. It’s terrifying! I don’t want to be judged. I mean, I do, in one sense, want approval. Who doesn’t It’s one of my tedious themes. Then I get over myself for a while. Until the next time. But I’m not seeking the world’s approval. Really, I’m seeking my own. I would have liked to have had my parents’ approval, but history is what it is and they are who they are, I am who I am, and I did as much as I possibly could for as long as I could to gain their approval. Now I’m just wrestling with myself. I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think that being centered takes a lot of self discipline. I think that accepting oneself does as well. Maybe it’s easier for some than others. Especially if they don’t have whacked out hormones! Again, that’s a copout. But there is some truth to that, be that as it may.

All that said, I don’t write for an audience. I write to work my thoughts out. And it’s mostly crap, because that’s often what’s in my head. Note to self: practice more self-discipline.

I would like to see myself as my son sees me. To him, I am the most beautiful woman in the world. He sees me and sees the mama he loves and the one he depends upon. He doesn’t have any notions about my size, shape, or color. He sees who I am. He sees a fun person, a loving person, a kind person, a patient person, a caring person, and sometimes a stern person. I could stand to learn much from him. It’s called unconditional love. How I want to shake the conditioning of a lifetime. It’s such ugly baggage to be saddled with. And for what No good comes of it.