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December 30, 2005
Hello from very snowy Hopkins, Minnesota
Wow, it's been more than a week since I last posted... My parents' living room just isn't the best place for this. There are too many people walking around and trying to talk to me. However, I figured it might be nice to post once more in 2005.
This has been the busiest week of my year, I swear. Lauren and I just had a discussion wherein we agreed that next time we visit Minnesota, we will NOT attempt to replicate this whole "see each person individually over the course of a week" crap. Next time, we'll have ONE get together for all our friends and ONE get together for our family, and the rest of the week we can spend with my parents and brothers and running errands and getting to go the places we want to go. We had a lot of stuff to get done this week, and a lot of it didn't happen. I didn't get to see about half the people who I intended to see. Our New Year's wine-tasting party idea turned out to be a bust. And I'm cranky as hell.
I think I'm going to leave it at that. I'm cranky, I've enjoyed being away from Ohio, the end.
I'll leave you with a picture that Lauren took of my parents' menorah on the 27th.
Oh yeah, and today I got to take my 17 year old brother clothes shopping. He's quite the cutie when he wants to be. That was fun. Especially since I was spending someone else's money to dress him.
See how cute?
Posted to Miscellaneous at 07:19 PM | Comments (2)
December 22, 2005
title. subject. annoyance.
36 hours from now, I'll be arriving at my parents' house. With Lauren, this time. I'm so excited! I'm less excited about leaving for the airport at 3:30 in the morning on Saturday, but the outcome certainly makes it worth it. My tummy is all floppy inside because I'm so excited.
Also, the building is wonderfully quiet. Most of the students are gone, as the last final was held today and students have to be out by 9 am tomorrow. It's been getting progressively quieter all week, and I love it. The only loud noises today have been people letting their suitcases fall down the echo-y staircase that shares a wall with our living room and the occasional piano-playing.
We also decided to remedy the pathetic-ness of not having any New Year's plans by having a get-together of our own. And because our parties usually suck, we're making it a wine tasting. I'm nervous that everyone already has plans, which is likely considering the aforementioned lack of invites, but it's worth a shot. (And if you live in the Twin Cities and weren't invited, please let me know. I'm sure it was just an oversight, not a snub.)
The only other thing going on right now is that I forgot to do my Hebrew final, which was due today at 2 pm. Oops. Good thing I'm not taking the class for a grade, huh? I was too busy cleaning the apartment and doing nothing to do the exam. Mostly the doing nothing part.
Oh, and I know more than 15 people are reading this, because my counter goes up about 20-30 hits a day. So go ahead and add yourself to my Frappr map already. Please?
Posted to Miscellaneous at 09:10 PM | Comments (5)
December 21, 2005
a matching set of pots and Jewish silverware... what's next?
So, I realized that I left y'all hanging about our Monday night shopping trip. It was a very successful, if expensive, excursion, and we are now the proud owners of a set of matching cookware that is not from a small-town grocery store, actual glass glasses, salt and pepper shakers that are not dirty acrylic hand-me-downs, and nice silverware (which I would post a picture of, since that's a bad picture, but my digital camera is broken).
All we need now is good knives. Oh, and a spice rack. And about a million other things that can wait for a lot longer. And one of those flexi cutting boards.
Honestly, we're trying to be reasonable and not throw away money now that we have some for the first time EVER, but it feels nice to have some things that aren't hand-me-downs. Not because these new things are new, but because they're ours. We didn't get a lot of this kind of stuff for our wedding, so these are the first things we own that are things we picked out together and purchased for ourselves. It feels like we're building a home, which is really nice.
Now I just have to fight my cheap, tight-ass instincts and not freak out every time we buy toilet paper for the next month just because we spent a couple hundred dollars recently on household items.
Posted to Nesting at 02:14 AM | Comments (0)
December 20, 2005
I bet that in this field, they don't use MTV show names as the titles of interview prep programs
It occurred to me today that I haven't done a job interview in over a year and a half, and I may want to go over my list of common questions and prepare some answers before next week. This time, I have extra things to consider as well. How do I account for the past 12 months of unemployment? What do I say about leaving Herzl early in 2001? The latter will surely come up, as that job is the most clearly related to the one I'm interviewing for. And what about other common interview questions? My weaknesses ("areas for growth") have certainly changed since the spring of 2004, so what are they now? And how will this interview be different than a student affairs interview? Can I be as honest about myself as I would be interviewing in that arena? Do I talk about having AS? Do I mention that I'd rather not start immediately if they ask me about that, or do I save it for when I get a job offer? Am I an idiot for posting these concerns on my website?
And of course, the ultimate interview question: why did I get so many pimples when I had PMS last week that just won't go away?
Posted to Hardly Working at 10:44 PM | Comments (0)
December 19, 2005
Believe it or not, I find this topic enthralling
Remember my excitement over getting new silverware? Unfortunately, the silverware turned out to be low quality as one would expect silverware from K-Mart to be. We have to return it. And resume the search for silverware we both like.
We will be making a different "grownup" purchase today, however. Two of our pots have had to be thrown out in the last week because the teflon is shedding. We've decided that it's a sign that it's time for some good, grownup cookware. Our plan has always been to make due with our crappy quality stuff and our hand-me-downs until they're unusable and then replace them with the good stuff, so it's now time.
We need to spend this evening out the house anyway because the co-op downstairs will be shutting down for the semester, and since we can hear every word they say down there, tonight's noise may just kill us if we stay home. So today we're going to Bed, Bath, & Beyond and getting a nice Calphalon set. We'll keep some the pieces we have that are still good, but we're getting a whole new set. Thank goodness we've been doing well with not over-spending lately, because even with 20%, that's a big purchase.
Unfortunately, however, this means that we'll have to put off buying knives for awhile. We really need decent, new knives, but ours still work well enough that we can cook, so it's a lower priority.
Oh my goodness, I just wrote an entire entry about purchasing cookware, silverware, and knives. I'm so boring.
Posted to Nesting at 12:56 PM | Comments (1)
December 18, 2005
sof.
The website is done. Or at least, it's as done as it's gonna be. I've had enough of messing with the Rebecca/Characters/Album/History pages. I've also had enough of messing with my flickr account, which has shown me how boring my life has been in the last 5 months.
(I say that now, but check back with me in two days. I'm sure I'll be tinkering again.)
And now that I'm done spending every minute of my day on flickr, I can resume life again. Just in time to spend the week with Lauren while she has a lot of free time, which is nice. And then we go home for 9 days. Nine very, very busy days.
Assuming I can get some sleep in the next week, the last two weeks of 2005 are going to be happy.
Posted to Miscellaneous at 01:36 AM | Comments (0)
December 13, 2005
reaching out for human contact
Unrelated things that I believe are worth mentioning:
That's all I have to say today.
Posted to Miscellaneous at 11:48 AM | Comments (4)
December 11, 2005
vectors make me tired
I finally, FINALLY got around to doing SOMETHING with my layout. I don't know why it took me almost 6 months, but it did. It still needs a little tweaking, but it's a start.
Posted to Miscellaneous at 05:23 PM | Comments (4)
December 10, 2005
Now you'll find out how nerdy I REALLY am
I have discovered heaven. True, pure heaven.
One of my crazy fears -- I know I have many, but this is a big one -- is that of fire destroying my house and causing me to loose my collections. The problem is, I don't collect things like figurines, I collect (hoarde, actually) information and memories. Over the last year or so, I've found myself trying to get ALL the crap I never want to lose onto the computer (and backed up on DVDs or online, of course) so that if I can only grab one thing on my way out the door, it's the computer. I probably didn't mention that that's why I scanned every photo I own in the entry I wrote about doing that, but that's why.
Anyway, besides my music, my papers from college, my old website designs, and my photos, the only other collection I've ever cared much about is my books. Some of them would be irreplaceable if destroyed because they contain messages from old babysitters or because they're old editions from my childhood. Mainly, though, I worry that I'll never be able to recreate my book collection because I won't know which books I had.
Earlier this year, I spent a lot of time searching for a service where I could record my library. I found software that would do that, but most of them were a lot more complex than I was looking for, as well as too expensive, and not very conducive to saving the list if the hard drive died. In the end, I set to work creating an Excel spreadsheet (see previous entry for more on my love of spreadsheets), but it was very time consuming because, for some reason, I felt compelled to enter in the names of the publishers, the copyright date, and every identifying detail that could ever be necessary in, for instance, a works cited list. It got to be too much very quickly and I stopped before I even hit 20 books. So I gave up. I tried to put it out of my mind and instead focused on worrying about cataloguing our DVD collection, which is pretty stupid since there's only one movie I really care about replacing. But I managed to let the book thing go. Sort of.
Until yesterday.
Yesterday when I was looking at some blogs belonging to lesbian parents, I noticed an item on one blog's sidebar that said, "Random books from _______'s library. Powered by Library Thing."
I almost died, I swear. My breathing stopped and I thought I was going to implode.
I'm not kidding, I couldn't handle the excitement. I had to bookmark the Library Thing website and set it aside until my poor little heart could take it. Tonight, when Lauren spent a few hours in the lounge at a building program, I began The Project to End All Projects. I entered in our entire library.
Now, to be fair, I didn't realize until way too late that you could enter in the ISBN and get the EXACT book, if it was available. So a lot of those are incorrect editions or printings. Also, somewhere around 10 books couldn't be found at all, and I was stupid enough to not pay attention to which ones those were. At some point I'll have to go back and put those in manually. Some of them are missing data about authors, too, so that needs fixing. And I'm sure there are a few books scattered around the apartment that I've missed. But in the end, what counts is that OUR LIBRARY IS PRESERVED FOR ALL ETERNITY!
And with tags. Oh my goodness how I love tags. Tags are the best thing ever invented on the web.
My library is online. With tags. And my amazon.com wishlist has been all organized in categories (not as good as tags, but good). I'm so worked up that I'm not going to be able to sleep tonight.
Posted to Books at 03:21 AM | Comments (4)
December 09, 2005
I love any excuse to use Excel, but...
Oh my goodness, it's almost that time already...
Today I was skimming my friends' page over on LJ and someone in the same field as Lauren said something about a job search. And it hit me. It's almost that time in student affairs. I guess, to be more specific, it's almost that time in ResLife, where the search period seems to start a little earlier because of OPE.
Last year, Lauren went ONLY to ACPA, which wasn't until April 1st. It was a huge pain in the butt for both of us. I don't think Lauren minded much, but I hated it because from the day she arrived at ACPA, I hardly saw her for two months while she was interviewing all over the place. ACPA is in mid-March this year, so things are going to be on the move even sooner.
This year, however, things will be different. In some ways, Lauren's search will be narrower. She's searching exclusively by location, as we plan to stay in Oberlin in she doesn't get a job in a specific place. In other ways, the search will be broader, as she is open to both ResLife AND other areas of Student Affairs nwo (as opposed to last year, when it was Activities/Orientation or bust).
Anyway, because she's looking at ResLife, that puts OPE into the equation. That placement exchange is the first weekend of March. Early (discounted) registration for that ends a month from today. And early ACPA registration ends in a month and a half, although her work is paying for that one, so I don't really care. This all means... it's time. It's time to register. It's time to update the resume. It's time to work on cover letters. And, as Lauren's Personal Assistant (I have to earn my keep somehow), it's time for me to start color-coding folders and doing my thing (please note that I barely resisted using the word "thang" just now). The thing that made Lauren the most organized person in the entire ACPA placement system last year.
Spreadsheets, here I come.
Posted to Lauren at 04:30 PM | Comments (2)
December 08, 2005
I don't know why, but...
I think I have a crush on Michael Chiarello. Even if he is a stinky yucky boy.
That is all.
Posted to Miscellaneous at 03:08 PM | Comments (0)
babies! babiesbabiesbabiesbabies!
Last night I made Lauren take me to the bookstore so I could look at
Taking Charge of Your Fertility and so I could compare The Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy for Lesbians and The Essential Guide to Lesbian Conception, Pregnancy, and Birth (the former is wonderful; the latter sucks and was immediately removed from my amazon.com wishlist upon returning home).
No, we're not having a baby. Not now, not in the next year. Probably not even in the next two years. So much needs to happen before we can start that -- IF we decide to go the route of me being pregnant, I need to lose weight, I need to do some intense EMDR and/or hypnotherapy on needles, and we need to have a substantially higher income. In the mean time, however, it does feel time to start doing some real research. Not blog reading. Not random searches on the web. Real research.
Anyway, I was really impressed by what I was reading. So thorough. Written so I understand what's being said. And also, I was impressed with myself. I only got grossed out once, and it was during a conversation with Lauren about what I was reading rather than while reading the book itself. Major major improvement for me.
I also looked at The Baby Name Wizard, which was a lot of fun, but not as much fun as I was hoping for. It had both of the girl names Lauren and I have picked out, but I didn't like any of the suggested sibling names for them. It didn't have the boy name I like, and the boy names that Lauren and I both like and agree on are far too popular. The end. I'm sure I'll look at it more, but I think I got what I could out of it. After all, I've been reading baby name books since I was 7, so most of what was in there wasn't new. Only the sibling name suggestions were really new.
I'm really enjoying learning about this new thing. Anyone who knows me well knows that unless I'm learning about something NEW, I'm bored out of my mind. This is something new, something useful (whether we go that route someday or not), and something fun.
I'm happy.
Posted to Books & Nesting at 12:10 PM | Comments (5)
December 07, 2005
"I know of no more disagreeable situation than to be left feeling generally angry without anybody in particular to be angry at." -Frank Moore Colby
I'm not really sure why, but about 5 days ago, I woke up PISSED OFF. Not angry, not cranky, but pissed. It hasn't been willing to let up.
I sure wish I knew why, but things that would normally annoy me, make me cry, or just wear me out have me ranting and raving in ways that make zero sense about things that aren't really that big of a deal. I'm pissed about a classmate not responding to emails. I'm pissed about students playing the piano after music hours. I'm pissed about students running through the halls yelling at 2 am. I'm pissed that I haven't been able to go to the bookstore this week. I'm pissed that Lauren was on call last week. I'm pissed that food tastes yucky. I'm pissed that we should save our money and shouldn't buy chalkboards and spice racks for our kitchen. I'm pissed that we have too many books for our shelf and no space for a new one. I'm pissed that we had to rearrange our living room furniture so that we don't freeze, and I'm pissed that Lauren didn't come home to the new layout and proclaim me a design genius. I'm pissed that in order to have a baby, I'd have to lose weight and get over my needle phobia. I'm pissed that poor Lauren, who hasn't slept in forever because she was on call last week, won't stay up and talk to me. I'm pissed that Girlyman only has 2 albums out.
I could go on. But I think I'll spare us all.
I don't know what's wrong with me. It could be PMS, but it doesn't feel like it. I'm a cry-er, not a yell-er. I don't know what this is about. It's frustrating. And that pisses me off too.
Oy. Someone save me from myself.
Posted to Mental Health at 12:54 AM | Comments (2)
December 06, 2005
wasting time is an art
The last 24 hours have been quite stressful. From issues getting group homework done to cancelled classes to rearranging furniture due to freezing cold living spaces to finding out that our building is going to be without water (read: no flushing the toilet) for at LEAST 24 hours to more personal stuff... I'm gonna go nuts.
So instead of ranting about it, I think I'll post a list of the diversions that have kept me sane.
• I want to dress my iPod as a cowboy
• find out how popular the name of EVERYONE YOU KNOW has been over the last 130 years
• what if there had been a RENT sequel (written by a person with no soul)?
• these dudes really want your books to stay upright
• there are actual fancy dishes that I like at the top of this page!
• these are the cutest puppies in the universe
• I'm finally a little bit educated about the Jewish concept of afterlife
• I have my own searches saved here, but you'll have to start from scratch
• if Ohio is pop territory, why do we even fight about this here?
If you combine all that with Spider Solitaire and hitting refresh on my Yahoo mail every 15 minutes to see if a certain person has written me back and compulsively visiting my favorite message board, my day has been pretty full.
Posted to Miscellaneous at 07:33 PM | Comments (0)
December 05, 2005
We're almost grownups now!
The highlight of this past weekend: we finally got silverware.
It's not that we didn't have silverware. We had some kind of hand-me-down set of Lauren's that's very frilly and old fashioned. Not me at all. Not really Lauren either. We also had that fake bamboo silverware that I bought at Target for my freshman year of college.
When we created our registry, we chose a set that neither of us loved but didn't make either of us puke. That was a major accomplishment. In the end, though, no one got it for us and it wasn't something we wanted to buy because, like I said, neither of us loved it. So we kept putting it off.
Then on Saturday, Lauren and I went to SuperK to get ingredients for Monkey Bread and Lauren's work secret santa gift. Somehow, after walking past the silverware three times, I realized that we should actually LOOK at it. And on the bottom shelf, in a tiny box that we almost passed over, we found our brand new silverware. 18/8 stainless steel, cheaper than even the set we registered for at BB&B, interesting but still not crazy. And we BOTH actually LIKED it! We bought 2 sets of 4 servings each and we love them. They're super long and skinny and easy to hold and easy to clean and yea! Today I washed our old silverware for the last time.
Yes, I just wrote a whole entry about silverware. What's it to you?
Next on the list? We're going to buy actual glasses so that when we have dinner guests, like we did on Friday, they don't have to drink out of plastic cups from Walgreens that cost $2 for 3 cups.
Oh, and as a semi-related aside, I just followed a link to a LiveJournal group called Saucy Dwellings. I'm already an addict.
Posted to Nesting at 11:21 AM | Comments (2)
December 04, 2005
Yes, I watch a lot of TV at night. But during the day the TV is off. I should get some credit for that.
The extent of my excitement about tomorrow's premiere of The Gauntlet and Wednesday's premiere of Project Runway season 2 is frightening. We're even having people over for the latter. This is all almost enough to make up for America's Next Top Model ending this week, although if the outcome is what I hear it is, I'm not sure Project Runway will be enough to console me.
Posted to Mindless Entertainment at 11:07 PM | Comments (0)
December 02, 2005
maybe doing things I don't want to do is what this is all about
I applied for a job.
That's bizarre for so many reasons. The first of which is that it's in Minnesota and starts "immediately" and... well, no "and", just that. It makes no sense of me. Another reason is that it's the first concrete step I've taken toward working in the 11 months since I quit my last job. I applied for one job that I kinda wanted back in March and didn't get it, and I applied for 2 student affairs jobs in April that I ended up rejecting before they could tell me yes or no, because I just didn't want to. And of course, there was that disaster in August where I was offered a job I never applied for and it drove me into the worst depression I've dealt with in 10 years.
But... Something about it just made me apply when I saw the listing last Friday. The HR director called me Wednesday, and I called her back today. Now I'm waiting to hear from her. I have a minute sense of dread, but mostly, I feel resigned to the idea that I'm an adult now and that I need to work and that if I take better care of myself, I can do this.
That's going to be the key. Taking care of myself. Listening to my body. Getting out if I need to, and quickly. Doing the other things that I've found to help keep me sane. Being back in Minnesota would mean I could see my therapist again regularly. I saw her over Thanksgiving break and wow, do I miss that. I could resume EMDR and deal with some of my anxiety that way. I also have a passion in my life besides my family right now, and that's important. It's a passion that, while related to the area in which I plan to work, will remain in my life whether or not I succeed at any job. That was missing during grad school.
I have this serious feeling hanging over me. Not just about this. About babies and houses and money, too. I have this feeling that this time around, it won't be a game. While that feeling is a little stifling, it's also a good thing. I'll be 25 in a month; it's time be a little more grown up. I feel good about that. It's true that if I could, I'd do exactly what I do now for the rest of my life, but I can't. I've accepted that, too.
So I still don't know why I applied for a job that logistically, I can't really accept unless Lauren and I are willing to live apart, but I did. And even though I feel kind of sick about it, I'm glad I did.
Posted to Hardly Working & Mental Health & Miscellaneous & Nesting at 06:35 PM | Comments (2)
December 01, 2005
my head is in a sparkly place, but everything goes slowly there
Oh my god I've never been this tired before in my entire life.
So last night my sensory issues were bothering me, which made trying to fall asleep nearly impossible. Lauren convinced me that I should get out of bed, calm down, and try to come back later. But I never did.
First I did some reading. Then I listened to my favorite podcast. Then I spent a ridiculous amount of time reading baby information at my favorite bulletin board. Then I remembered that I'm supposed to be participating in an online Secret Santa for that bulletin board and set out to work on one part of the project (which I cannot discuss here, as I know some of the women from that board visit my site occasionally).
And the next thing I knew, it was 4:30 am. I had to get up at 8:30 today for Hebrew, so that would have left me with 4 hours of sleep. And, I rationalized, sometimes no sleep is better than just a few hours of sleep. Plus, I've been having trouble getting motivated to go to class lately, and I didn't want to accidentally or "accidentally" sleep through it. So I just... stayed up. I worked on this present for quite awhile, interspersed with more reading and paranoid email checking. And then suddenly, it was 9 am and I was running late to get ready for class.
Anyway, I've certainly gone without sleep before, but I guess that was back in the Olden Days when I had the body of a college student. I'm an old fogey now, you know. Apparently "no sleep is better than just a little sleep" no longer holds true.
I feel like I'm walking through jello and I feel like my head is stuffed with marshmallow goo. I debated taking a nap, but I know I'll just end up not sleeping again tonight if I do that, and that would be Bad. So after scouring our fridge for caffiene, something that usually doesn't affect me but that I normally avoid anyway, I ended up buying a Mountain Dew from the vending machine. Yuck.
It's not helping yet, either. I still feel all jello-y and marshmallow-goo-ey.
And I think my completely forgetting I was in the middle of writing a journal entry to stare off into space is a good indication that this entry is complete.
Posted to Miscellaneous at 02:47 PM | Comments (0)