Today is a beautiful Saturday. I've got so much to do before 6:00 but I've got a raging headache that is keeping my head stuck to the couch. Come on come on come ON!!

Today is moving slooooowwly. I have lots of energy right now and I'm hoping it's not fleeting because I have a good amount of time scheduled for the gym tonight. I'd like to expend it there rather than by spinning in my chair.

Hi Mom. I hope you are enjoying your mental health day today.

Sometimes it feels good to tweak a color on your blog. For some reason. It's like getting new shoes. You forget for a while and then "aha! that's different..."

Overhearing Marketing people strategizing on my floor makes me want to barf a little. They're currently debating whether the phrase "the best" brings enough excitement into their campaign. I'm so glad it isn't my job to try and make garbage bags exciting. Know what would make garbage bags exciting? Ones that would take themsleves out to the alley when they were full. Incorporate some intelligence into them. That's what would be exciting. Naoko said it right: "Taking out the garbage is for suckers." Marketing it might be as well.

So glad my job is fact-based.

I walked home from downtown last night and now my feets are too swollen for my high heels. : |

I hate David Blaine. Seriously. What an idiot.

Sorry I haven't been a bloggin' lately. For the past three weeks I've been pretty involved with this fitness/weight loss community website and it requires that I do some bloggin' there as well, so... So you know, I'm spread a little thin on this interweb.

But it's really fun. So it's not like I've been in pain or anything. I'm learning a lot too. FYI - today I had 70 grams of protein and 32 grams of fat. Yesterday was 77 and 26 respectively. That's below the daily recommendation for fat, and is a bad idea unless I want to end up feeling like crap.

Oh, speaking of feeling like crap - anyone who's ever shared a house or apartment with me can tell you that I have issues when it comes to sleeping. Really just issues when it comes to waking up. That's the big issue.

So today I went to an actual sleep specialist per recommendation of my doctor. For the past three weeks in prep for this appointment we've been logging my sleep. Turns out I average 10 hours per night. That's totally unfortunate if I ever want to have a social life or children. Anyhow, despite these 10 hour nights, I've got four alarms that I tend to ignore for about four hours on average. I've been physically pulled out of bed and will fall asleep in the middle of the bedroom floor. I will turn off all four alarms without remembering. I have conversations on the telephone without remembering. It's just disastrous. Maybe some day even dangerous.

Anyhow, Doctor today diagnosed me with idiosyncratic hypersomnia, confused arousal, and extreme sleep inertia.

Awesome. So I can maybe use one of those three as an excuse the next time I don't wake up in time for work?

In October I have to go in for a 24 hour study in which they hook wires and suction cups to me and tell me to sporadically take naps. I'm really looking forward to it.

awesome

Fey a hit as Palin on 'SNL' premiere

Ew ew! Poo poo pooooo! creationism? aerial hunting?

Typing with wet nails. Watching an episode of Mad Men. Got a feeling life would be a lot better if I were to dress up more often as if it were halloween. I mean, maybe in the office I could only get away with minor time periods, or a subliminal peacock here and there... but.

Man.

Today was just... such... another day.

camera obscura save me from inappropriate outbursts

ants555ants: i'm having a hard time holding my temper today.
ants555ants: i have cute music blasting in my headphones to try to counteract my bad attitude.
orinbnork: hehe
ants555ants: someone has a candy dish out on the cabinet by my cube
ants555ants: my back is to it
ants555ants: and all day
ants555ants: every day
ants555ants: i hear people rummaging through it, looking for a particular kind of candy
orinbnork: that sucks
ants555ants: and I want to turn around and cuss them out for being so annoying and piggy
ants555ants: like "just effing take one!"
orinbnork: why don't you hide the dish?
ants555ants: because it's walt's dish
ants555ants: he refills it every morning
orinbnork: you should start eating all of the candy every morning

Man I am so freaking crabby with people today! Being out of the office for a few days leads you to forget how to shut things out. I need an aquarium at my desk. Or something.

Today was a good mental health day. We got breakfast and read papers and went into shops, took naps and cleaned up the house. Think I've found an allergy medicine that will work for this year's hay fever and I can breathe again. Ate way too many cheetos tonight. Otherwise, I feel good things are coming.

What kind of leaf is this? I found it in one of the community gardens in the neighborhood this morning. It's a little larger than a quarter. I kind of love it.

Moms, please excuse the f bomb. This was too funny to not redistribute:



Really glad to have come in to that in my work inbox. I'm sitting at my desk but I believe I might actually be sleep walking. Sleep working. I've been having issues with sleep lately most of my life. It's incredibly hard to change states. From wake to sleep. Sleep to awake. The result is either eleven hours of sleep or four hours of sleep. Every part of my body hurts this morning.

Back in town from Michigan where we were helping pull some things together for Z's grandma's memorial service on Thursday. Sorting through undated photos and dated letters, newspaper clippings and dance cards got me to thinking I should make a more conscious effort to organize and document my own life. This evening I pulled out dusty folders and boxes. Flipped through letters and cards. Drawings. Photos. Nothing is sequential. Nothing is dated. Everything has multiple homes. A millipede ran out from under one of the piles. Shortly after that I packed everything back into folders and boxes and put them back where I found them. My conclusion: I've done a better job of holding on to correspondence from family members than I thought I have. Didn't do as good a job as I could have. Did a poor job of holding on to important letters from important friends. And I am still disorganized. Another day. I'd like, at least, for everything to eventually be in one place. Or maybe that's an unlucky idea. Another day.

Can someone please please redo this but pair it with the original hamsterdance song? Please!

It won't stop being funny!

Stop the presses. I actually just stopped working for a good half hour so I could read up on Sara Palin. I'm feeling mildly insulted by our general election politics. Here are some choice quotes from message boards of the past hour:

"According to Wikipedia she eats moose burgers."

"Twenty bucks says Lorne Michaels gets Tina Fey to play her on SNL. It's uncanny!"

"I'm looking at him right now, and I see perfection," Palin said. "Yeah, he has an extra chromosome. I keep thinking, in our world, what is normal and what is perfect?"
"Thank God he's not gay, amirite?" she added.

Biden is gonna have to work to win my interest after making a sports joke at the beginning of his speech last night. Really? I get enough of that in the real world.

Oh beauuuutiful for pilgrim's feet....

Gosh I just realized my blog is all babies lately. I swear to you I'm not all baby crazy. They just seem to be around. I still have plans. I still need to get to six flags and the grand canyon and that teepee motel on route 66.

Look at this picture of my friend's baby. There's a whole gallery of him and I'm laughing out loud he's so freaking cute. This is what you get when you cross a korean and a blonde girl, folks. : )

Today was very autumnal. But otherwise I can't really think of much. Walked through the day like a zombie. A bit hungover from the fresh airs, perhaps. More sleep might do me good. I'm feeling like I should be feeling more these days.

And my sentences are all out of order.

I had a dream last night that Prince was on Project Runway. And they had to make an outfit for him. But Prince was a very tiny ladyboy in the dream. As off the wall as this all seems, I suppose it's not all that far fetched.

2.5 more hours today. I'm so antsy to
get
outside.

I've been forgetting to post photos. The babies have moved here to Chicago, and Z has been testing out his camera. Here are my favorites:

This baby is stupid cute:



So is this one:



And this one:


Poor Fan. We found out she has a severe latex allergy after doctor Lia put a band-aid on her bare buns. Hence the lampshade.


And this... this picture was just taken because I liked the way the stripes on the paper folded together on the small box. Pretty presents are nice. Happy birthday Erica!



And this is a mischevious squirrel puss:



The rest of the photos are over here <---

Ew. Why is blogger making the photos all pixely when it resizes them? Barf! Like I have time to resize these things myself. But apparently if you want things done right you have to do it yourself.... waah waah waahh waah

Ladies and gentlemen, something to ease your mondays:

----> My favorite Onion article ever. <----

Puff puff!

YAYAYAYAYAYAYA!!!! I can really tear it up sometimes!

I have to give a presentation tomorrow at the very end of the day. 4-5pm on a Friday. No one is going to want to be there. Including me. The presentation is for my boss, my boss' boss, and my boss' boss' boss. The premise of the presentation is essentially "What have you been doing since we hired you in April." I haven't been given much more to work off of other than that.

So I just finished a draft of my powerpoint presentation. I've filled it with statistics and cost savings and my proposals for process improvements. I dunno. Zach glazed over a little when I did a slide show for him. We're not allowed to use anything other than the company standard powerpoint format. It's blue on white with a logo. No beautiful gradients or transitions to distract you or even keep you awake for that matter.

Surprisingly, I'm not all that noivous. Admittedly I've got a few stumbling blocks that I kind of hope to breeze over, but... Maybe I should get all those ironed out before 4. How hard could it be to think straight for just a few hours longer?

I'm developing deep dark circles under mine eyes. Poop. No one wants to stand before their great grand boss looking like a meth addict.

Still, I don't know that I could really say I miss the days of spending hours surfing the web to fill my time.

To make matters worse, both of my shoes have started making realistic fart noises with each step I take.

I am so inordinately crabby this morning. The girl next to me is crunching loudly and people are asking me for things. UGH. For the love of God, is that necessary? You really need things from me?

I got a tetanus shot yesterday at my physical and now I feel like some flu bugs got on there with the needle. Meh. I'm going to bed early. The weather is beautiful tonight and there's a window open right over our bed. It's starting to feel like autumn already.

With my luck I'll wake up tomorrow with a stiff neck AND a sore bicep.

Remember the episode of the Simpsons when Bart got a tattoo?
"Ow" "Quit it" "Ow" "Quit it" "Ow" "Quit it"

It's kind of fun to write the date on things today.

squaw piss

Greetings from Chippewa Falls Wisconsin. I'm in a plant with no windows and my body doesn't know whether it's 5am or 5pm. People talk about the Green Bay Packers a whole lot up here. They also use the words "gosh" and "darn". Tomorrow I might get to go on a brewery tour before we head home.

I really really really want to complain about how exhausted I am, and how much administrative crap work I have to do tonight, and how I'm skipping dinner to do so, and how just totally wack wrong the world has been going lately.

But I won't.

Instead I'll tell you that if I finish my work before 11 tonight, I'm going swimming in the hotel pool.

And skipping dinner isn't all that bad, as I've been eating nothing but junk and animal parts for days and a fast could really make me feel better.

Is Mercury in retrograde, by chance?

I love it when they have the same soup in the cafeteria two days in a row. That is how soup is supposed to be eaten. Over time.

I feel like poo because of allergies. Fannie is feeling worse because of allergies. Fortuntately she doesn't have many responsibilities.

well dang

This is my first night alone in the apartment in years. Literally. And I started the night not knowing what to do with myself. I took a shower. Did my hair for no reason. Did my toes. Gave the dog half a haircut.

And then it started storming. Like serious storming. Wind was pushing on all of the closed doors like big scary men trying to get in at us. And the dog went in circles with her tail between her legs. And the storm sirens were going off. And then it started to to pour. Torrentially. I mean, my computer was laying five feet from an open window for thirty seconds and had to be toweled off. Now my space bar is sticking.

So yeah. Lots of rain, and circling dog, storm sirens, car alarms. And I can't get a single radio in the house to pick up AM stations. But from the cable that kept going in and out we were able to see that the tornado was up in Rogers Park.... and then we were able to find out when we were safe. It's a good thing we dodged it because the dog and I couldn't find our basement keys.

God. And to think I was worried about a spider showing up in the apartment while Zach was away.

We're babysitting. This is the easy part because they're in bed. Today we taught them about the wonders of pizza, and Babe, and Woody Guthrie and glitter nail polish and gumby. I also taught Lia how to make a letter A. This means she can now write her own name. It might take some more practice, because more often than not they come out as H. But overall she seemed pretty pleased.

Here is a story she wrote on my laptop today:

ouuiihgugufuyryeuerutyt767685556769ollkjjhhgfdasa4trryuioop[teeww4ewrsdxzzty6yyyw8w8w8w8w8w7wwwjouuuixucvvvvbzsay7ss4ytfgmgryuy5errr8u3heyeyeyeyeyeyyeyeeyyyywywywgwhbbcbvvn,cmmcnmlfyyteswee5reeszxcvbb335werrekmbn6eyytrer766r4rrtyy7ywwwitittititi86i55i6i686ijghjjfjdhdherk58i9y96ruruttutirirut6i668y8turururueuttttttyuijiiugbh nmmjkkllkkjjjyyytrrfghjjklllllllhjhhgfffddsaerttpoiuyytrrewqasdfghjkk;;'zxcvfvg66eeeeee45ewqwerrttt5r4833737363673383837737337yeygfhhdvdbddvccvxcxxsdtwteeteteteetetete3trreedddawwdasdfghjklkl-0987776666655544443332211qqwweeerrtttttyyyuuuiiopp,,mmjuu77666hhhdewiooiujueeeereqqee5r66tttgyqqzzzzxxxcccvvvbbnmm,..//ttcr79888789uu9o[ihi900000000000000000000000;iii99h,,rr33334343343434343436w55ww55555ww5w5w5w5w5w5w5
frrrfffefee4ry77eeereeeeeerrr4rrt5rtrrereewweess

I'm wearing an actual dress at work today and I feel like I'm in Mad Men.
Also, ladies, hear this: Old timey full slips are the new Spanx. So much more comfortable. We need not torture ourselves. At least not all the time.

Today was also murder.
But, also, it was pay day.

Man. Today was murder. People arguing with one another about who's work I would be doing first. My psyche hurts. I'm going to go get into bed and watch the first half of Harold & Maude.

Earthquake photo #1: on CNN



I don't get it.
It's a beverage aisle.
Why is it full of fallen t.p.?

STAGED!

Actually looks kind of fun.
I would like to pounce.
Pounce pounce.

yay yay yay I got a big black shirt today! Well, ordered it, anyway.

No sir, I am not rapping.

As morbid as it might be, this is a really funny anti-fur ad done by Sheryl Lee (aka Laura Palmer).



I mean, after playing a dead girl in a two season television series and a full length movie, what else can you do with your career? Even if you were a good actress. Lucky for Kevin Kostner, they never did show his face when he played the dead guy in the Big Chill.

It's ten o'clock and I still can't seem to shake sleepiness. I've gotten a lot done so far this morning, but it's a struggle. I'm, for the most part, sleepwalking. So bizzarro. Wake up!!

In other news, man, corgies.

Last night I dreamed I was trapped in this town. Shudder.

We're heading out to lovely Kalamazoo soon for the weekend to see Moms and Naokos. We're staying in a hotel that allows dogs and has a swimming pool. I'm pumped.

I know it's weird....

...but how weird is it?

I love Ida Pearle's art. The web doesn't do it any justice. Not at all. It's all made of individual pieces of fabric and paper. And I could stare at it in person for hours. I went to one of her shows in New York and was able to stare at each piece up close. This montage of baby bunny's arrival (which was made for Dan Littleton and Elizabeth Mitchell) made me cry. No lies.

(click to see a little bigger - but definitely not big enough)

What's weird is that I'm tempted to buy this set of alphabet cards for any future baby's bedroom:

http://www.idapearle.com/g-full-13.html

Future my baby. That's what's weird. Thinking of buying something for someone who may not even ever exist. Is that crazy or do women actually start doing this kind of thing when we reach a certain point? It's just that I love Ida Pearle's stuff so much... and this is twenty six different pictures! And it's affordable - even if it is just prints. There are so many things to stare at on these images, I don't think I would ever get tired of them if I were a little one.

Maybe I could just get it for my room. Even though I already know my alphabet pretty well.

Apparently I left my instant messaging logged in yesterday when I left work. I came in this morning to a rant from someone, chewing me out for not responding to them. Calling me shallow, etc. The rant ends with "goodbye for good."

Oops.

Guess I should remember to sign out of my instant messaging when I'm gone. Could maybe give people the wrong impression.

In lighter news, I dreamed last night that I was trying on wigs with Amy Winehouse. It was a good time. I prefer white wigs, myself. I felt they looked best on me. And on Amy.

We have a soft new rug. and Picante. And AC. And Army of Darkness is on On Demand. This is one fine evening.

Did you know that in Japan, Army of Darkness is called "Captain Supermarket?" They really have a way of coming up with much better movie titles. I heard once that the film "Nixon" was put out in Japan under the title "That Dirty Bastard." Although the internet is not confirming this for me. I like to believe it's true.

Worst night sleep ever. I'm in pain already.

Love me some dystopian sci-fi on a Sunday afternoon

I had a little too much caffeine this morning sans food and got myself all crazy. Organized my sock drawer. Flopped on the bed and speed read pages of Salinger's dialogue-only writing. And the speed at which I read it made the characters sound like maniacs. Then again, most of his characters are maniacs, aren't they?

Cleaned the house.
Pulled out old Polvo cassettes. The tapes are showing their half life in terms of quality of sound.

Then Z took me to see Wall-E tonight. Maybe he was tired of my pacing. It was good. Pretty much a children's version of Idiocracy with too many parallels to bother referencing. And minus the hooker. And a dang lot more cute overall. My favorite part is near the very end when the cockroach jumps for joy. Yeah. I'd pretty much clap and drool a that part if I didn't mind my senses. Thanks for the reccos, friends.

Unrelated. It's warm. And my body is making a kind of b.o. of summers way past. Just a different uh.. timbre, if you will. I think this is what I used to smell like when I was twenty. Zach is equating it to the fact that I ate a giant (i mean biiiigg) cheezeberger (and by that I mean real cow) in the midst of a hangover Saturday morning. Fortunately my conscience was still sleeping. Do vegetarian armpits smell different than those of omnivores?

If my brother's going to call me a hippie I may as well live up to it. Not with the cheeseburger part, but ... Smell me.

Forgot to call my grandma for her birthday again. I think I've remembered maybe one in thirty. Sigh.

Mom, aren't you proud of me?

I'm letting my hair grow out again. I have a feeling. This time it's going to be different.

I did so much in my dreams last night that I kind of feel justified in sitting around all morning.

What up this beautiful Sunday, Chicago?

Just gave the dog a haircut.  She looks silly.  We have one of those clear canister "bagless" vacuums and it looks like a second dog is trapped inside it now.   

Brother and the babies are in town tonight.  Kind of sitting around waiting for a call back.  Thinking we might not see them after all this evening.  He has a tendency to not call and let me know what's going on.  Kind of like how I apparently have a tendency to never thank him for dinners.  But, I guess, dude, he's my brother.  We're not even *supposed* to be polite to one another.  We should be happy if the other cares so much as to sit on us and fart.  Like old times.

As soon as we know for certain that those plans fell through, we'll head over to Stringbot's house warming party.  I'm feeling kind of terrified because I know we won't know anyone there.  Not real confident in my social skills as of late - even with people I do know.  Might have something to do with the fact that I don't have anything to talk about other than the tv shows I watch, the books I read, the train ride to work, the spreadsheets I spend my days studying.  Train ride to work is maybe the most exciting.  

Yeah.  I think I need to quickly either a) start studying for the GMAT so that I can maybe go back to school.   b) sign up for some guitar lessons with Rockin' Billy down the street.    The latter would be less expensive in the long run.   The thirties are turning out to be kind of boring.  Lately, at least.