Sweet Catastrophe

I thought this was my computer. Apparently I was misinformed.

This is where she spends a good majority of her day– either sitting so that I can’t see the screen, or sitting with her rear against my mouse so that I have to move it unnaturally far away just to use it.

(Note: You can sorta see her flap of extra tummy skin here. When she sits right she looks like she has cow udders!)

I also thought this was my chair. Again, what a silly human thought.

Yup, she’s delightfully comfy despite my ass in her face.

But at least she offers entertainment:

Of course right after I cut off the camera she tried to hardcore bite the screen which was hilarious!

And just for good measure, some other cute kitty pics behind the cut!

Read the rest of this entry »

I get witnessed to fairly often at work; it’s just a part of working with the public, ya know? I don’t mind, while I’m very much not a fan of organized religion myself, I understand where these people are coming from and what they’re doing.

Of course, occasionally I get a serious fanatic who makes me uncomfortable and has me wishing for a pain-in-the-ass customer to come along and steal me away.

I also regularly get those folks who think religion, the government, and anything else you could refer to as an institution– is a crock of shit.

Today I got one of each. At the same time.

Religious Guy comes through first and in the middle of me explaining to him where he should look in the store for something he interrupts me and starts questioning me. I always just go along. It’s the easiest way to deal when I’m at work because I’m obligated to stay pleasant and this way they generally go through their spiel and go along their way. Anyway, I realize this one is a little eccentric when he gives me his card and starts in about empowering my possessions by giving them up to save others *raised eyebrow* Mercy you should just check out the poorly-designed site and look through a bit of the crazy. You can see by the url this is one of those ‘the end is here’ type deals.

Anyway, while he’s off shopping I get the other guy, we’ll just call him Angry Guy, comes through my line. This guy isn’t so bad, honestly, but he’s fallen on some seriously hard times himself so his thoughts are leaning on the angry side. He comes through and he’s chatting with me and JJ about who to talk to about a job in the store because he’s already put in an application. Religious Guy makes it to my line and tries to begin his spiel with Angry Guy. Angry Guy politely says no thanks but Religious Guy is pushing and I’m paraphrasing, but Angry Guy says something to the effect of, “Ya know, when people like you knock on my door I come to the door with my gun aimed and tell them to get the eff off my property.” Religious Guy is confused! But then they each start babbling about random stuff and I hear Religious Guy say something about how he’s seen 6 possessions *raised eyebrow* and all these other random things. He finally gives up and finishes paying for his stuff.

JJ has to go outside and help Religious Guy load a few pieces of lumber. Angry Guy stays at my register chatting. Again, Angry Guy wasn’t so bad. He told me about how he got stuck in his current crappy situation, he explained his thoughts on what Religious Guy had to say, and we chatted about some things he does on the internet (some articles he’s done and such). At the base of it all, he’s more where my thoughts lie with everything, but he was still a little extreme, deciding that those who claimed to have seen Jesus walk on water were high on something and he was really just walking on a wet road….anyhow, the issue was this: he stood at my register for almost an hour. It was a little slow, but still, even through other customers coming through he stood there continuing to say whatever he had to say. All the while, JJ is stuck outside with Religious Guy doing the same thing to him!!

Finally Angry Guy decided to leave about the same time Religious Guy drove off and JJ came in and we just looked at each other and cracked up. JJ asked what the hell just happened there and I said, “I don’t know but I feel like you and I just got caught in the middle of some epic battle between good and evil…I don’t know who won, but I’m pretty sure we lost.”

It was just an honestly mind-boggling experience to get them both at the same time and watch them interact before they split up and stood around talking for an hour…my mind is still reeling a little.

From IMDB:

Set on a colorful Greek island, the plot serves as a background for a wealth of great ABBA songs which are used in remarkably appropriate ways. A young woman about to be married discovers that any one of three men could be her father. She invites all three to the wedding without telling her mother, Donna, who was once the lead singer of Donna and the Dynamos. In the meantime, Donna has invited her backup singers, Rosie and Tanya.

The short of it– Nope.

Okay, so I didn’t watch expecting to love or even truly enjoy the movie, but you know sometimes movies like this are just worth watching once for simple entertainment.

Notsomuch with this one.

There’s really not a plot here, just some vague storyline pieced together weakly just as a setup for the next ABBA song. Unfortunately, you can’t even skip the songs since you never know when they’ll break for dialogue.

And Meryl Streep’s character spazzes out and reacts to everything as a teenager would and it’s just awful trying to watch someone her age act that way.

The only thing I enjoyed about the movie was watching Amanda Seyfried in a role that was really cute for her. I enjoyed her character– she played the part well.

And of course the three possible fathers were fun. Other than that it was just painful.

So if you think you might as well succumb to the hype ’cause it’ll probably be cute and somewhat entertaining, don’t bother ;)

I’m not at ALL making resolutions for next year. However, I do have goals in mind but I’m starting work on them now.

I’ve already lost a few pounds just from cutting sodas out of my diet (it’s amazing what you can go without when you go broke) and my next goal is to start working out when I wake up. If I can’t sleep past 9am anyway, I might as well be taking advantage of that. I’m giving myself another week for my body to get used to getting straight out of bed at 9 and then I’ll decide what I’m going to be doing every morning after Willow’s shots.

The amazing Los Angelista is giving a chance to win what I think would be the perfect morning workout for me! A Wii Fit! I just know a Wii Fit would be the perfect way for me to workout! If nothing else, I’ll be stuck on it until I set records on everything available and by then I’ll be well into a routine of working out in the mornings!

I’m so terribly interested in working through all the categories: Yoga, Aerobics, Strength Training, and Balance– most of all I really want to try out the Yoga!

So here’s hoping some of that old luck pops back up for me!!

I’m taking next semester off to take on more hours at work and finally take care of all my dental needs and hopefully get new glasses as well. This weekend I weeded through my insurance to really try to decipher everything and figure up what would really be covered. All my vision stuff is pretty clear-cut, but the dental stuff is ridiculous! Everything is listed individually in technical terms so there’s something like eleven pages of listed procedures and stuff and I have no idea which of them pertain to the different things I’ll be charged for in conjunction with having my wisdom teeth removed. There are a few obvious ones and I found the cavity filling as well, but the other stuff is completely over my head and searching online just takes me to other insurance listings. The percentages they’ll cover in my first year are pretty low anyway so I decided to just forget what insurance will cover and plan to cover the whole thing myself when I figure it all up. Of course it’ll all end up costing more than I figure up (since there will inevitably be more involved than I plan for) so if I plan that way, I should break even…I hope.

So this is what I hope to be spending money on next year:

New Car: About $18,000 would cover my ideal car plus taxes and warranty package. The more I get from insurance, the better. Of course, I’m hoping not to be making payments on anything, but I’m willing….and sort of able.

Cavity: I’m saying about $200 total here. That’ll be my initial visit, x-rays, and the actual filling all together. I hope. This is priority #1 in February when that aspect of my dental kicks in. I’ll save a portion of my paycheck to cover half and then pay them half after the next check. They should be accepting of that.

Wisdom Teeth: From everything I’ve looked into, I’m going to say about $2,000. I don’t know how I’ll manage that one, but it’s so got to be done. There’s definitely going to have to be some sort of payment plan for that to happen. X-rays will probably show that I only have three of them, and if that’s the case I may only have to have the bottom two removed. Unfortunately one of them in definitely impacted and the other will really be up to the dentist whether or not he considers it impacted. So it won’t be a cut-and-dry removal, which will drive my costs up as well.

Glasses: My insurance covers a flat $150 here so it’s really up to what I can find. My lenses are really thick and have to go through a process that I can’t remember the name of right now to shrink them down so they’ll fit properly in frames. I got a quote last time that for that plus some basic frames I’d be looking at around $400, so that’s what I’m expecting to pay out of pocket since I plan to get frames I actually like.

Lasik: About $1400 per eye. But I get some sort of discount through my insurance, but I have to call to find out how much and I’m really not ready to be getting constant phone calls about that. This is something I really want to do. Now that it’s become so common, I’m really comfortable with the idea. Did you know the procedure only takes about 15 minutes? 15 minutes and I could potentially correct my vision for life. With my vision as is, I know I’ll hit a point fairly early on where I can no longer utilize this surgery either at all, or without still having to wear contacts anyway. I’d really like to have it done before I reach that point. Of course, I still need to have a consultation and find out if I would still need reading glasses or anything like that before I decide if it would be worth it, but it’s certainly something I want to actively look into.

So if someone wants to loan/give me $5,000 for Christmas this year, you can see it would certainly be put to good use! I would absolutely love to have all of this done by summer next year.

If I miraculously get enough for my car, I’m thinking about keeping a few thousand and only putting part down. (Like say I end up with 18000 total, I’d put 14 down and keep 4) Then I’d take care of all this medical stuff at the beginning of the year and use all of my tax return towards a big car payment in April. This way I could use Daddy to sign on the car for a good rate and I’d only be making payments at one place rather than a few different ones. I can dream, right?

Everyone is having contests on their blogs right now and I’ve been entering into tons during this holiday season.

I keep getting really excited though. On my blog dashboard I can see incoming links. A lot of these blogs have different things set up to basically link back to you when you comment– stuff like do-follow settings and plugins like Comment Luv. So I keep seeing these links to my blog on my dashboard and I think, “Oh! Maybe I won and they’ve linked to me in their winner announcement post!”

Alas, I’ve won nothing yet :-P I miss the days when I was extraordinarily lucky!

I finally got a solid night of sleep! I stayed busy from 7am until 11pm on Friday after less than 4 combined hours of sleep. I went just over two weeks without sleeping more than 2 hours at any given time. More regularly it’s been sleep 30 minutes, be awake for 30 minutes or more. It was really starting to wear me down!

Friday I slept through the night! It felt so good to finally get a decent night of rest! For the most part I slept through last night as well. I woke up with some seriously wicked heartburn that kept me up for about half an hour, but once the Zantac kicked in I was right back out.

I don’t have anything to do tomorrow so I’m looking forward to really testing this out and seeing if I can sleep a little late!

I don’t know what’s been going on to keep me from sleeping. It seems like I just haven’t been able to get to deep sleep and every little thing wakes me up and that’s it, I can’t just roll over and go back to sleep like normal.

I know we need a new mattress. The one we have is second-hand and it’s starting to sink pretty badly in the middle. I don’t know how it is that we honestly have three bed frames here but we can’t manage to get a decent mattress. So I know that’s contributing to my sleeplessness, but Willow could sneeze downstairs and I’d hear it and be wide awake! That’s just not normal for me.

I’d love to have my Sunday nap, and I know I could nap right now and really enjoy it with this rainy weather, but I’m a little worried taking a nap might throw me back off and keep me from sleeping tonight, so instead I’m off to clean the bathrooms! Cleaning toilets is so not the favorite of those two choices :-P

I’ve hated Pepsi pretty much my whole life. My mom and I used to roll our eyes dramatically at those ridiculous commercials of people saying they couldn’t tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi. Puh-lease.

I don’t do Pepsi. Period.

Or so I thought.

I’ve been craving a Pepsi for three days now. I gave in and grabbed a 20oz while I was at the grocery store–I just knew it’d go to waste though. I figured one sip and I’d have satisfied this completely random craving.

I’m almost done with the bottle :-X

If you end up with pig crap on your head as they fly over, I apologize– totally my fault.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t always jump on installing updates when they pop up for my computer, but the update that came up yesterday is absolutely necessary. If you clicked through, you’d see that it was a security update for Internet Explorer and guys, it’s a big one this time. You can read the article for more information, but essentially there’s a huge hole being exploited by hackers right now and you need this update to seal it up!

I don’t use IE regularly, but all it takes is one time, and I’m not playing around with my computer.

Coming from me– the picky eater, the girl who shies away from just about anything that could possibly be considered healthy– this may come as a shock. Quaker Oatmeal Squares is by far my absolute most favorite cereal.

It’s got such an incredible taste! It just has this subtle sweetness to it that’s so unexpected.

And of course it’s completely filling as well!

They’re great in a bowl of ice-cold milk, or just by the handful as a snack. In fact, I think I should go have a bowl now.

Edit: Oh hey! I have a terrible habit of forgetting I have cereal here when I run out of milk. I waste a lot that way, unfortunately. I just found that I had a box in the cabinet that has a sell-by date for the beginning of November and I know it was opened at least a month before that. You won’t believe it, but they weren’t stale! Lasting-power in a cereal! That’s a definite plus!