Ever had a week, an entire week, where you felt unable to do anything besides eat, sleep, and a minimal amount of work? I can almost see a good number of you nodding. A show of hands? Good, so I'm not alone.
This last week was that kind of week for me. After Monday (when I ran a couple of errands before heading to work—like getting one of my rear tires fixed after it had a run-in with a nail) I felt I couldn't do anything besides eat, sleep and do the minimum amount of work to make sure that everyone knew I was still alive. No writing. No designing. Nothing. It was as though every creative thought in my brain had evaporated.
What a crappy feeling.
It would be too easy to peg that bug that laid me out mid-week, but it didn't help that I moved my office at work right after recovering from the worst effects of said bug. The new space is smaller than what I had, and was designed and built using kitchen supplies. That is, instead of a desk and a hutch to place stuff, I have counter space (which looks much like the countertops in my parents' kitchen) and kitchen cabinets. Oh, the "witty" comments I have had to endure! The countertops are too tall or the chair I have is too small; take your pick. If that plus a couple of niggling issues I won't go into here get fixed, it'll be a pleasant place to work. Now though it's merely tolerable.
I guess the point of it is that I'm not as able to deal with change as effortlessly as I used to. You figure that someone who moved a total of six times before turning 20 would have had that change thing down by now. Maybe I'm getting old, and the fact of change is affecting me in ways I'd never seen before.
So what am I doing to help me get over this crappy week of mine? Yep, change. A couple friends and I are starting a friendly competition amongst ourselves to write at least 500 words a day. I'll be posting whatever I write in friends-only posts on the LiveJournal, so if I have you as a LJ friend, then you can follow along with my ramblings. Given how much the other two write (and write) I'm likely destined to lose the competition, but I'm still fuzzy on the rules anyway. Of course, I've been fuzzy on everything lately, so who could blame me?
I wonder if my random gripings here will count towards my total? Hmm...
I talked with my brother earlier this evening, during which he decided to pass the phone to his daughter. After a minute or so of listening to her say "Mikey" over and over, much to my chagrin, I decided it was time to talk to my brother again. Which led to to this exchange:
Me: "Okay honey, give the phone back to your daddy."
Her: "Why?"
I know that at least one reader has gone on record regarding his belief that children are evil. I think that they're just too cute to know any better...
Well, I'm back from New York the State, but not without some nasty bug that I picked up while I was up there. So I'm sitting here feeling awful but knowing that I can't get to sleep yet, no matter how much I may want to (and I'm apparently sick enough to hit send when I didn't want to either, hence the horribly broken page for anyone trying to hit the page as I'm finishing writing this...). However, it was a fun trip.
Some points/thoughs/highlights from the trip:
- I didn't originally leave Raleigh a midnight as was planned, since we (I had driven over to my parents' place and we were going to drive up together) wanted to wait out the last of the snowstorms that were rattling the Northeast. So we left around 6:00am. I do remember stepping into my parents upstairs bathroom after waking up around 3:30, looking at a book titled "How to Build and Design Patios" and reading it as "How to Build and Design Pathos". My brain works in funny ways sometimes...
- We stopped roughly halfway through the trip at a Cracker Barrel that my mom swore up and down was in Delaware. I started getting skeptical when I climbed out of the vehicle to see a Maryland flag flying from a hotel next to the restaurant. I was right; the Cracker Barrel was a good 30 miles from the Delaware border.
- Speaking of the First State, is there actually anything in Delaware? Granted, I-95 only goes through a small corner of the state, but I couldn't see anything of note besides a giant bridge as you're leaving the state and an excuse to milk the driver for 6 bucks over roughly 30 miles of road. Any Delawarians (Delawegians?) out there want to set the record straight?
- I know that I don't want to live in New York, no matter how gorgeous the countryside is.
- Some people get jet lag. I get time lag from trying to function on a "normal" schedule. This was the probable cause behind the hour-long nap I took in the rental van during the birthday party on Saturday. The large number of people in the living room may have had something to do with it too, but I'm not going to say that... ;)
- The highlight of my trip came on Saturday. I was taking some pictures of my niece after she was done with one salvo of presents (and there were a lot of presents!) when she decided that my camera was interesting. This led to the best picture I took all weekend: an extreme close-up with her face filling up the frame. I liked it, so I hit the review button on my camera and showed her the picture. She was enthralled, so I started going back through the rest of the pictures I had taken up to that point. I don't know if she knew what she was looking at, but there were lots of pretty colors there to hold her interest. It was the only point during the trip that I got a glimpse of the wonder with which she sees everything, and it's intoxicating.
As you can probably guess, I do have pictures, and as soon as I feel good enough to deal with them (it's easier to write than it is to finesse the pictures one-by-one in a graphics program—at least for me) I'll start putting them up. Hopefully you'll find them interesting.
Every so often, maybe every few months or so, I go through a short period of time where I feel drained, both creatively and energetically. I'm going through one of those times now. If I subscribed to the concept of biorhythms better I'd have a better explanation for what I'm feeling, but "low tide" seems to sum it up nicely. Now, it is said that the best way to get rid of this kind of doldrum is to get away from everything for a while.
That's exactly what I am going to do this weekend.
To be specific, I'll be driving to New York, the State for the weekend to visit my brother and his wife, as their daughter will be turning two on Saturday (that would be two years old, not acting as the pivot in the double play). I even got her a "story lantern" as a gift; it's a hurricane-lamp-shaped object that will flip pictures of nursery rhymes while telling the story behind them. At least, that's it works in theory; the batteries in the one I bought are dead, so I'll need to replace them before I can tell for sure.
The lantern must be telling me something.
I'm bringing my camera with me, but as always it's a crapshoot as to whether I actually use the thing. If I do take pictures, I'll find a way to put some of them up so you regular readers (all...um...five? of you?) can see...
It's getting close to that time of year again. In less than one week's time, thousands of people will be wearing green and get themselves stinking drunk in an effort to pretend that they are Irish. That's right; ye olde Feastday of St. Patrick. I'm nowhere near full-blooded Irish (I probably have most of Western Europe flowing through my veins; ah, that crazy metling pot called America!) but I have enough to have always felt a little thin-skinned about the "holiday."
It wasn't always this way. In grade school, I had this pine-green sweater that I would only wear on March 17th, which combined with my red hair would practically scream "I'm more Irish than any of you!" when I walked into a room (and it worked too, except for when I lived in Minnesota; I had a classmate whose name was Keiran, so I had to defer to him). Now, as I've grown to witness the sheer stupidity of green beer and watching people fawn over a country that they wouldn't give a second thought to during the rest of the year, I've soured on the feastday-as-worldwide-holiday/drunken-revelry.
Normally, during St. Patrick's Day, when someone would ask me why I'm not wearing green, I grumble "I'm Irish" and they'll get the hint. This year, I decided to submit a quickly-put-together skin to BlogSkins called "Irishesque," so when those people come to ask me this year, I can direct them there.
Hopefully, this will satifsy their curiosity enough to go back to their green beer...
Ah, to sleep a weekend away! Okay, so I didn't sleep off the entire weekend, but it felt like it. Of course, since my sinuses are doing a not-so-little timpani dance on my brain pan I still feel like sleeping, but that's another point entirely. So, what did I do with my weekend besides sleeping? I'm glad you asked...
I was able to drag myself out of bed at around 9:30 Saturday morning, as my parents had convinced me to accompany them to the Durham Kennel Club to go to a dog show that day. To backtrack, it's been nearly four months that their last dog, Sneakers, was put to sleep, and they were starting to get the itch to own another dog. Sneakers, a mix of Miniature Schnauzer, Maltese and Lhasa Apso, was a cute enough dog but was as ornery as a dog could get without being downright spiteful. With that in mind (especially with a granddaughter that would interact with the new dog) my parents researched a breed that would be naturally friendly. Their search led them to the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, and as luck would have it, the Central Carolina Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Club (breathe!) was holding an "obedience match" at the Durham Kennel Club. So, my parents got me to join them in seeing what the dogs were like.
I had never seen a Cavalier and recognized it as such before, but at first glance the breed has a fru-fru look that's second only to the poodles. That's only at first glance though. These are extremely friendly and happy dogs by nature and won't give a second thought to getting up close and personal to check you out, especially if it meant a good-natured scritch behind the ears or a snuggle. I discovered that after the dog that belonged to the couple who sat next to me (and was only there to check out other dogs of the breed) decided that I needed a friend!
What I saw of the show itself was more entertaining than I thought it was going to be as well. Maybe it was because we weren't looking at the high levels of competition that's normally seen on television, but while these dogs were well behaved, there were enough little gaffes here and there to make things...well...fun. The one I remember most was the one I couldn't see. One of the obedience tests involved all of the dogs in the test lying down at their owner's feet, then seeing if they could stay in that spot for a period of close to five minutes after the owner walked off, taking a position at the opposite end of the "stage." There was much snickering over the dog whose owner was right in front of me (it wasn't an elevated stage); apparently, the dog stood up, walked about half a length, sat down, laid back down, then started to inch across the stage until stopping after another full length, all with this "why have you abandoned me?" look on its face. It would have been more adorable if I had only been able to see it. It was fun nonetheless, and we would have stayed longer, but I was starting to feel a nap coming on, so we left. The next day, I heard that my parents had put in a bid for a Cav at one of the local breeders (okay, South Carolina isn't exactly local), so they were apparently impressed. So was I.
Sunday saw me covering for a friend's laundry emergency (i.e., my dryer worked and his didn't). I was handsomely repayed for my generosity, not only with lunch but also with the opportunity to check out the first four episodes of Haibane Renmei and to make a copies of the first two soundtracks to .hack//SIGN. Of the latter, the music is a pleasant mix of New Age and World Beat elements (as if there's much difference), and they make for a nice end-to-end listen without too many highs or lows. As for Haibane Renmei, all I can say it that it's intelligent and gorgeous, which is all I need to get me hooked on a project. I need more!
I'm having too much fun watching the site statistics from NedStats roll in. The latest? Yesterday, OM,I had a hit logged in from Croatia. Croatia?! What would people in Croatia want with this little site? Not that I'm upset by this; I'm just curious. I'm also getting a decent amount of hits from Spanish-speaking countries, but I can tell that the majority of that is coming from abordaje.net which (while it doesn't seem to be up as I'm writing now) uses a nicely modified version of "Snow and Ice". So, my top ten non-US hit list stands like this:
- Singapore
- Canada
- Spain
- (tie) Australia, United Kingdom
- The Netherlands
- (tie) Switzerland, Japan
- (four-way tie) Mexico, Sweden, Norway, Portugal
I'm pretty sure this information won't interest most of you in the slightest. But I've found this affirmation of the "World" portion of the World Wide Web to be fascinating. Now to figure out why they're coming...
Speaking of how people are getting to OM,I, I had two funny referrals over the past week that I need to share. The first was from a Google search on "camera in the mouth of a killer whale." Okay, I don't care what a killer whale's normal diet is, I'm going anywhere near its mouth. Especially with a camera. The second was from a search on BlogSkins. The referring url is the funny part: http://www.blogskins.com/search.php? for=3+column&action%3D=Go.