Archive for July, 2008
WTF people?
Jul 29th
I was reading a few blogs, and then linking to more and reading them and on and on….err…I mean….I was WORKING! Yes. Ahem. And then suddenly, I went to scroll down a page I was reading (using my mouse, not the sidebar), and the whole window (with like 20 tabs) closed. It was supposed to give me a warning! Actually, before the warning it was supposed to wait for me to TELL IT I wanted it to close. And THEN I was supposed to get a warning asking me if I wanted to close all the tabs. It did neither of these things. And because I don’t get to use Firefox at work (everyone should use Firefox – it is THE BOMB), it didn’t ask me if I wanted to restore my session when I went to open it back up. And God knows that I can’t even remember what site I was reading, much less what the other 19 tabs were or how I got to any of them. So now I am telling the internets about it because I don’t feel like expending the energy to find them all again. That is a procrastination project for later.
So, internets, did you get that? I’m very mad at you for closing all my tabs without at least giving me a warning. That was not a nice thing to do on a Tuesday that has felt about 900 hours long.
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In unrelated news, I thought I would give you a quick run-down on the book I’m reading. I’m not quite half-way through it yet, but I need to finish it by Thursday (it’s a 1 week only, no renewals, no reserves book). It’s an interesting variation from your standard science fiction, and I like it a lot more than I usually like science fiction (maybe I’ve just been reading the wrong stuff). The gist of it is that this alien life form comes to Earth and takes over human bodies. The aliens are called “souls” and they basically get implanted in your brain and can access all your memories and stuff. Most people’s actual personalities disappear when the soul takes over, but the book is about a woman who doesn’t give up the consciousness fight when they put a soul in her. Like I said, I haven’t finished it, but so far I would recommend it. It’s got a really good story-line, and the characters are pretty believable. Of course it’s sci-fi, so there are a couple things that are a little out there, but that’s to be expected. And it’s a pretty quick read so far, even though the hard-cover copy I got from the library is 619 pages. Check it out. The Host, by Stephenie Meyer.
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I was trying to think of something witty to close this entry, but it’s just not happening. 8 hours of insurance will do that to a person.
Blah…
Jul 28th
I’m sorry for the lack of posting lately. I’ve been feeling very blah recently, and so didn’t get around to writing anything. Plus our “computer/spare room” has been pretty much taken over by my wedding dress, which I don’t really know what to do with. So I don’t go in there much.
We had an awesome weekend visiting friends in the Cities, and we apparently avoided some nasty traffic on the way home because only a few hours after we drove up 35E a portion of a bridge passing overhead collapsed onto it. You would think they would be watching the bridges around there a little closer, but who knows what happened. Anyway, it was like 4 or 5 hours after we had passed through that it happened, so it’s not like it was the car right behind us or anything. It’s hardly even worth mentioning, except that my life is rather boring lately and so I have to reach to find anything interesting to write about.
We are in Duluth from now until the 3rd week in August, when I will be driving to New York for a friend’s wedding. I’m very very excited about that trip, but we figured out how much it’s going to cost us, and holy crap! Traveling that far is expensive! Even in my little car that gets fabulous gas milage (42 mpg the weekend we went to Fargo and back). Oh well. It will be worth it, I’m quite certain.
I still haven’t figured out the photo posting, and Ryan’s response was “um, I’m not sure” and then to promptly forget that I even asked, so he’s been no help. I think it has something to do with the fact that we host the totallyserial website on our own server (who am I kidding?? Ryan hosts it on HIS server), and the photos aren’t on the server. That’s about all I’ve figured out though. So there will be some harrassing until he tells me what I need to do. A person can’t blog without photos. It’s inhumane.
Well, it’s about 5 minutes till quitting time. Thank God. Time to go home and zone out while watching Jon & Kate + 8 and reading my latest library find, The Host.
And the questions (and answers) continue
Jul 11th
I’m in a slightly better mood today (I got paid and it’s Friday), so I thought I would finish* answering questions!
Shawna from Pickles & Dimes asked how Ryan and I met. This answer will expose the true dorks we are. Well, maybe not TOTALLY. There are still a few dorkier things, but we won’t get into that. ;-) Ryan and I met in college, which is pretty typical I think for people our age. We met in an extra-curricular activity, which is also pretty typical. What is perhaps not typical is that the activity was pepband (or “athletic band” as the hoity-toities like to call it). And this was not some group that met once a week for practice and maybe went to a hockey game here or a basketball game there (side-note – I HATE playing pepband for basketball. Mostly because I hate basketball). My freshman year we played 72 games, aside from practices most Friday afternoons. That was in a season that started in September with football and ended in March with hockey/basketball. It was nuts. And the 30 of us in the group became very close over the next few years. At our wedding in June, a friend noted that out of the 3.5 tables of “pepband” friends that were there, only 2 or 3 of them had married or were dating outside of the group. But when you spend every weekend together for 3 or 4 years, I guess that’s what happens. We all still come back once or twice a year for “alumni” weekends, even though our college isn’t big into homecoming for alumni or anything. We just all loved it so much (and no, we aren’t music majors – hardly any of the pepband group was…they were too good for us ;-)).
Oh, and because I’m sure you are curious, Ryan plays trombone and I started on flute and switched to trombone my junior year. It’s a much more “me” instrument. Loud and kind of clumsy. Oh, and answering this question also gives me an excuse to give a shout out to all of you that were going to (or did) watch a band over the 4th – yay! Yay band kids!
Aunt Janice (also not a current blogger, but SHOULD BE!!) asked what my favorite memory of my grandpa and grandma’s old house was (it burned down in the early 90s, I believe – I was just a kid, so the exact year is always fuzzy for me). I would have to say that playing in the front yard at their house was always the best. They had this huge old house that used to be a hospital, and it had these open balconies out front that we would climb in and out of (they were on the 1st floor – not too high). We also would climb this birch tree they had in the front yard, and I remember thinking I was SO HIGH, but in retrospect I probably wasn’t. LOL. But I loved so many things about that house. I loved the cat, Garfield. I loved Christmases, which were crazy even then (my mom has 7 younger siblings). I have seen videos and pictures of us all there at Christmas, and it just makes me grin, remembering dancing around to the old records, and everyone gathering in the living room to open gifts. I loved playing with the neighbor kids down by the river, or playing baseball in the field out back. It was all good times. So yah…picking one memory is hard! I feel lucky that I’m old enough to have memories of that house.
Slynnro asked what is the most exciting thing that has happened to me. I have to admit, I lead a pretty ordinary life. I grew up in a small town, went to college in a good-sized but still not huge city, and while I did live in a few other places in my life, I haven’t done anything truly extraordinary. But I kind of like it like that. I guess I would have to say that when I moved out to Delaware after graduating college with nothing but the name of my new roommate (a guy I had never met before) and an address for where the apartment was, that was pretty exciting. Ryan actually was one of the 3 people that helped me move…we had a small car, a Jeep and a small hand-made trailer full of my stuff, and I moved out to Delaware with no job. I lived out there for 10 months, and I loved it. I eventually found and worked 2 retail jobs – at the Godiva in the Christiana Mall, and at Boscov’s Department store. I liked both jobs. I also was volunteering at the “national office” of the National Catholic Student Coalition, of which I was an executive board member. That is the reason I went out there in the first place – they needed someone to come out and help through the summer while all of the students were gone. So yah. It turned out to be a really fantastic experience – I got to travel on the East Coast a bit, and I got to live somewhere with a LOT of history. In Minnesota, if something is 100 years old we are all amazed. I mean, the state’s only 150 years old…but out there…100 years old is nothing! I loved that.
Her second question was about the blog title. And yes, it totally is a reference to South Park. You can read the story here. :-)
Karen asked me if I thought that if the entire world would pay it forward we would have world peace. And I think we would get pretty darn close.
Jenny H asked if I like to watch sports, so I’ll give you my personal breakdown: I love to watch hockey on TV and live (I am from Minnesota, after all). I watch professional hockey sometimes, but I really like college and high school hockey. I watch women’s college hockey because my college has won the Division 1 NCAA title half of the times it’s been played for. They are awesome, and could kick most mens’ teams asses if it was truly a skill competition. But I digress. I also really like football, but I like it more on TV than live (although we went to a Vikings game last fall and it was AWESOME). It’s easier for me to follow on TV. I watch Twins baseball (and listen to it on the radio) because Ryan LOVES the Twins. They are his favorite team of any sport, I think (correct me if I’m wrong, honey). But I’m not a huge fan of baseball. I like it more now than I used to, but I still don’t get too excited about it. I do like going to games, though. I do not watch basketball (hate basketball – it’s ok for other people to like it. I just don’t). I don’t watch soccer because I don’t really understand anything that’s going on (it hasn’t caught on this far north – we are all too obsessed with hockey year round). I can’t think of any other sports that a lot of people watch…also I’ve rambled enough.
*Gahd, I have a lot to say about all of these questions. It appears as though I will have to continue the answering another day, because this is just crazy! But there are only about 4 left, so that should be an easy start to blogging next week, right?
Have a great weekend, everyone! I’ll be back with pictures from the wedding and family visiting next week!
PS. I am aware that I may as well have just said where I went to college, but I didn’t feel like typing it out, OK? Also, I want to make you work a little harder to figure it out. ;-)
I’m in a pissy mood today…
Jul 9th
So no questions, although I do want to get to them this week – I swear! Maybe tonight after a beer or 2.
The reason I’m pissy is because of my work. One of the owners of our smallish company does the payroll himself. They went to direct deposit within the past year or so. Since they did that, we’ve been paid late about 4 times or so. And these aren’t “oh I got deathly ill the day before payday and couldn’t make it to the computer.” They were “I have too much sh*# to do, and can’t be bothered to make sure I get payroll done by 3pm the day before payday, so you all are getting screwed over.” I could understand the sick excuse. I cannot stand (or understand) the too-busy excuse. Hire it out to a company that does payroll if it’s so time consuming. The thing is, most of us are “salaried” anyway, and so our paychecks are the exact same from payperiod to payperiod. It’s not that complicated.
I think part of the problem (who am I kidding? probably the entire problem) is that the bosses don’t live paycheck to paycheck like some of the rest of us (I know I should be budgeting better, but that’s an entirely different discussion and does not make this an ok thing to do). And so they don’t understand why it’s important. Also, it’s rather intimidating to go yell at your boss when they are screwing up, considering they control your raises and other information. So no one really talks to him about it. But you wouldn’t think we would need to. You would think that respect for your employees would be enough to make sure you get this done on time.
Bah. I’m probably not making much sense because I’m so pissed about this. Sure, it’s only 1 day, but that’s one more day without groceries. One more day without gas for the car. Grr. And thank God I don’t have bill withdrawals that happen right on the 10th (which is when payday is supposed to be). Because that would be a huge mess. Other people in my office aren’t so lucky.
So, in conclusion: if you are in charge of making sure an office full of people get paid on time (or even if it’s only one person) GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER AND DO IT ALREADY. Ahem. Sorry for the yelling. I’ll go back to my corner now.
I’m overwhelmed with the comments! Also: A WINNER!
Jul 7th
First of all, congratulations to Maggie from and the duck said…! She was the winner of the pay it forward contest here, and will be sometime soonish receiving a package from me! Yay! I promise not to let my issues with the post office interfere with getting your gift out, Maggie!
I have to say that at least from my perspective I think this Pay It Forward contest was a huge success! I found a whole lot of blogs that I want to go back and check out, and as a bonus we got some excellent questions and such! So, let’s get on with the answering, shall we? This will have to be in a couple installments, because God knows I can’t just give short one-word answers. I’m not Ryan, for goodness sakes! ;-) (Love you, honey!)
MzEll asked what books are on my (our?) to read list/shelf/table. First of all, let me just say that I LOVE to read. And I very often get recommendations for books off of other people’s blogs. But right now I’m reading Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books. They are pretty amusing – they remind me of Douglas Adams, who I love. I think there’s a couple Stephen King books out there that I haven’t read yet, and those are always on my list. Plus there’s a list of books that people recommended to me on my last blog (I recently moved over from xanga) that I have yet to get to. An ambitious list, I know. Ryan’s list is just as long if not longer…and in between everything else he wants to read I’m trying to convince him to finish the Stephen Kind Dark Tower series, since he’s really into fantasy books.
Sara asked what I think the biggest problem is in the world and why, and how would I suggest fixing it. This is a hard one. The world has a lot of problems. But I think that I would have to say that most of them stem from people not caring about other people. Or not caring enough. If people cared more they would share what they have with the people that need. And they would be more tolerant of people that are different than they are. To use a cliche, can’t we all just get along? How to fix it is the real issue. I just heard the people on the radio talking about how they think Minnesota Nice is falling by the wayside…I feel like the whole world is kind of going that direction. People are so concerned about themselves and their own welfare they don’t stop to think about the people they could be helping (or at least not hurting). And I’m included in that group that doesn’t think enough. It’s sad, really.
Aunt Lois (no blog, but she should definitely start one! ;-)) asked 2 questions technically. To answer the first about entering the contest - that is correct. All you have to do is comment. So good job! She also asked what I would buy if I was putting together my own care package from Target. I would have to say that it would include a book – probably a light beach read, but whatever caught my attention would work. There would also be snacks, obviously. Oh, and chapstick and a pair of cheap sunglasses, because I couldn’t survive without my chapstick, and I lose a pair of sunglasses about once a month, so it’s always good to have extras. And maybe a deck of cards. Not that I need more decks of cards, but I LOVE playing card games and so it would be appropriate, I think. So yah…that’s it.
Michelle wanted to know what my favorite thing to do in the cities is. Aside from visiting family and friends, which is a total cop-out answer, I really like going to see shows down there. My mom, sisters, aunts and a couple cousins went to see Jesus Christ Superstar at the Orpheum this May, and it was totally fabulous. The same guy that played Jesus in the movie was playing him in the show, and his voice still sounds just as amazing. I can tell you right now that Ryan’s favorite thing to do is go to Twins games. We don’t make it to very many of them since we don’t live down there, but he loves the Twins and really likes going to games, and I like going too (I’m not as much a fan of watching them on TV). I think we might go this weekend actually! Woo hoo!
NotAMeanGirl didn’t technically ask a question, but I had to comment anyway that my nephew/godson’s birthday is the 4th of July too! He turned 9 this year. It’s crazy. I have decided that if you have to have your birthday on a holiday that one is the way to go – everyone has it off work and is celebrating anyway, but it’s not a typical present holiday so it’s not like Christmas where it all gets combined. Plus, FIREWORKS!!
Missy wants to know what blog I would read if I could only read one for the rest of my life, and OMG is this the hardest question I’ve ever answered. It is interesting, because I’ve been blogging for a few years now (or 4 or 5…whatever), and I only really got into reading other blogs within the last year or so. And I’m hooked. But I’ve noticed that my favorites to read change with what’s going on in my life. When I was planning my wedding I LOVED any blog that had anything to do with weddings. People planning their own, instructions on DIY projects, anything. Before I was in a serious relationship, I really liked blogs about other singles around the country. Now I find myself reading blogs written by a lot of newlyweds, although I have to admit that I really like a lot of the mom-blogs I’ve found out there too (NO MOM, I’M NOT PREGNANT, AND I WON’T BE FOR SOME TIME). To choose just one for the rest of my life…wow. I don’t know. I really really like Jess from Duwaxloolu, and Swistle (would I get to read the other blogs she writes on too???), Shauna from Pickles & Dimes and Tessie from Messing With Texas lately, and now I’ve got about 40 other blogs that I hadn’t yet checked out to start looking at. I don’t think I would choose anyone that I know in real life, because I could just talk to them to get updates…I’ll have to think about this one and come back….
And 4 days later (I started this entry last week) I still can’t decide. Probably either Duwaxloolu or Pickles & Dimes, because I’ve been reading them the longest of my current favorites, and they seem like nice, down-to-earth but still very funny women.
Fiona Picklebottom (who has an awesome online name, btw) asked how many 5-pound sacks of potatoes would you have to stack on the top of the downward-leaning side of the Leaning Tower of Pisa to completely topple it. I would have to say 429. Minus 1 medium sized potato. Actually, I have no idea, but it sounded like a good guess, don’t you think?
That is all the questions I can answer for now – work calls, and I need to get this posted so that I can notify Maggie that she won! I will be back to answer more questions later this week. Also, next weekend is a wedding in my very-small-hometown-next-to-Canada, which should result in some good stories and maybe some photos! Yay photos! All of my sisters will be there, so it should be fabulous!
Sorry for the random updates to the entry. I saw a typo…then I saw something I wanted to rephrase…then I saw that I was missing one of my favorite blogs from my list of favorites…and on and on…
