Work today sucked, and not in the happy fun way. I had a few horrible coughing fits, and the worst one prompted a couple of people (including my lead) to ask if I was going to be okay, if I needed a break off the phones, etc. I told them the truth — that this is what happens when I don’t take my codeine cough syrup on time, and I would be okay as soon as it kicked in. Relatively speaking, anyway.

There’s good news and bad news this weekend…

Good news: I have a 3-day weekend!
Bad news: I’m too sick to enjoy it.

Good news: The demonspawn will be away at the beach all weekend.
Bad news: The demonspawn (and Dustin) will be sleeping here tonight so they can leave at dawn.

Good news: Tomorrow is our country’s 232nd birthday!
Bad news: For some reason, oodles of idiots will celebrate this by blowing shit up.

I really hate fireworks. Always have. I’d love it if all fireworks were illegal, other than the professional displays. And even those are obnoxious, but at least they only take place briefly, and end at a reasonable hour of the evening…unlike the idiots who buy fireworks to set off for days/nights on end. I have ZERO sympathy for anyone who is injured by fireworks, especially the ones that are illegal in Oregon but are brought across the state border from Washington and blown up here.

Go celebrate our Independence Day by lighting fire to a barbeque or the candles of a birthday cake for America, not explosives.

My wonderful Number One Internet Fanboy sent me an e-card from the best e-card site EVER. There’s something in flavors of Deranged, So Not Okay, and Fraked-Up for everyone at WrongCards.

I’m done with the Dark Ages and moving promptly along through the Middle Ages in my Netflix queue. Then I’ll be watching every documentary on the British royal family that I haven’t seen yet (only 5 of them…no surprise, although I’m boycotting most of the Diana flicks as nothing more than pandering to the almighty dollar). And a few other topics upcoming in the queue are: abortion, eight of the American Experience series, profanity, “alternative” relationships (LGBT, polyamory, swinging), submarines, Nikola Tesla, wild animals, body art, religion & anti-religion, taboos in general, death, apocalyptic movies & documentaries, Mae West movies, the paranormal, a scattering of horror flicks, a TV series I never got to see all of (Earth 2) and a TV series I never got to see at all (Space: Above & Beyond). My interests are just a wee bit eclectic, you might say.

The pretty crochet jacket I’m about halfway done with will be too small for me, so I’m going to give it to Geoffrey’s sister, probably for Yule. I really like the pattern, though, and I have tons of the yarn left, so I’m hoping to make one for me, too — I just have to up-gauge the pattern, which isn’t hard once you have nearly 20 years of crocheting experience under your belt! With any luck, I’ll have it done by July.

Having thoroughly enjoyed Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, and Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach, I’m looking forward to getting a copy of her newest book, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (although I think she should have stuck with the title starting with a 5-letter word, and called it “Boink”).

I’ve started planning the road trip that Lyse & I will be taking the week after my birthday in June …and somebody needs to email me back about the suggestions I made. Since the Oregon Vortex is the core attraction (and it IS highly nifty!), I’ve been looking for other fun places in southern Oregon to visit…and I’ve come to the conclusion that southern Oregon is mainly for people who like to hunt, fish, hike, kayak, spelunk, and otherwise exhaust themselves with outdoorsy activities. Not exactly Lil- and Lyse-friendly type stuff…but hopefully we’ll stumble across enough pioneer cemeteries and other off-beat spots to make up for it. So far it looks like RoadsideAmerica is a good site to look for strange tourist attractions…someday I will take the Stonehenges of America tour. *GRIN*

It’s kind of depressing, though, that I’ve already seen at least half the sites listed in the Oregon section of RoadsideAmerica. Then again, we do have a weird little state…and I still have most of the Washington sites yet to visit!

My blog is having its first birthday today! (Yes, it’s four years old, but today is the first time there’s been a February 29th since my very first post in this blog, so it’s still a first birthday.)

I’ve been blogging for a lot longer than 4 years, but the massive meltdown of Diary-X back in ‘06 killed all my previous stuff. C’est la vie, and all that. I haven’t missed any of those posts, not when there’s so much keeping me happily occupied in the present.

Random recent news of the last week (-ish): A band of guerrilla Girl Scouts ambushed me and made off with $21, leaving 6 boxes of strange discs behind…I may have to see if the items are edible, or simply decorative (ah, who am I kidding? I’ve already eaten half a box of Samoas). In late March, Lyse is going back to the South to visit her momma for 10 days, during which time her 2 cats and my 3 cats will be forced to co-exist under the same roof (stay tuned for grudge-match film clips in early April — Lyse suspects the fights between Hasani and Gizmo, over who gets my lap, will be epic). My digital camera finally died after many years of service…and having been dropped approximately 74 times. Jonathan looks so cute in the “My First St. Patrick’s Day” footed pajamas that I got him (with shamrocks on the bottom of the feet!!! — one saying, “Kiss me” and the other, “I’m Irish”), that it really ticks me off that the camera is broken. Also, my new spectacles have arrived, and because of the lack of photographic ability, I can’t show you how fabulous they look (it will surprise no one, I’m sure, to hear they both have purple frames — and the sunglasses have purple lenses, too!). My hair is red again…very, very red. Murph is still a big ol’ letch who makes me smile like a giant dork over his appreciation of my form and figure (but damn, that boy can hug like nobody’s business). Claim Jumper is a vastly overrated eatery; the food was good, but it wasn’t spectacularly good, and the prices were outrageous (and even on a weeknight, the wait is utterly ridiculous). Yarnia is the bestest store ever…and it’s only 12 blocks from my house!!!

Normally I like my job, but today? Work SUCKED. Had to work at the “hot site” (which I become more and more convinced is their way of trying to make the back half of an office the size of a walk-in closet seem appealing). Almost got shin-splints from walking to the Siberia that is the smoking area. Soon after arriving, was advised that I was being forced to work a 10-hour day due to our department being understaffed (at least everyone else in the department got smacked with that, too). Then I got a “ticket” (just a warning, no fine involved) for parking where I supposedly shouldn’t have. Whatever. My not-caring face, let me show you it.

When I got home, I got to help rescue a hamster. One of Anxiety’s new baby hamsters quite stupidly jam-packed his Habitrail tube full of bedding, getting himself stuck in the process. Can you imagine the idiocy?! Omigawd, it would be like a human being wrapping themselves in a futon mattress and wedging themselves in the hallway between the bedroom and the kitchen! I had to take half the damned cage apart to get his pathetic little rodent ass out of there. This is why, if I must pick a favorite snake snack, I like gerbils best — compared to hamsters, they’re freaking rocket scientists.

To ensure that my evening was far better than my day, Geoffrey and I decided to go out to dinner. Anxiety came along (since it would have been rude to leave her home, and she deserved a treat for getting almost all A’s & B’s on her semester report card). However, I started really, really regretting adding unlimited text-messaging to the phone plan and then letting her get a text-message alert sound of a cougar screaming, as I got to hear it, repeatedly, right behind me on the drive out to the restaurant. Every 35 fraking seconds.

The drive out was scenic. By which I mean, my car was the USS Failship and I was the jaunty Captain, as I made my way from SE Holgate to SE Woodstock via the goram Sellwood neighborhood. Never mind how. Honestly, I’m not even sure, myself — I’m almost always really good with directions, especially since I’ve been to that restaurant a dozen times. Must have been the 10-hour workday at the craptabulous “hot site.”

Dinner was yummy. Luscious meat-juice-dripping rare cow flesh. And teasing the CDO teenager about folding the cloth napkins precisely afterward, and threatening to assail her with behaviors that would drive your typical obsessive-compulsive batshit crazy — such as tilting every picture frame in the house just slightly off-kilter, or altering the hem of her clothes so each item is an inch shorter on one side than the other. She threatened to kill me repeatedly, especially after I suggested telling her boyfriend that if he really loved her, he’d quit buying her jewelry and get her tickets to the Hannah Montana concert.

Teenagers are so much fun. I don’t know why they get such a bad rap! I think everyone should torturehave one or two around the place. *evil grin*

When we got home, I took the Portland Mercury 20085 Sex Survey. It was vastly amusing, except when I thought about how dreadfully boring some of my answers were. Le sigh. Now I will go have more wild-and-crazy fun in my living room, crocheting Celtic knotwork while fighting over who gets the TV remote. Living on the edge, baby.

Saturday is mostly a blur, since I had the misfortune to not have penciled in some sleep time after my graveyard shift Friday night, so by the time I got to bed on Saturday night I’d been up for something like 32 hours. Even with repeated trips to Starbucks to obtain copious quantities of caffeine, it was not pretty. Things just kept getting more and more surreal.

I rented a car for my trip to Seattle to visit Maggy, because my car has almost two hundred thousand miles on it and can barely make it up the hill near the zoo on Highway 26. I think the car I rented was a Ford. It was very red and very shiny and went really, really fast. I can’t count how many times I freaked out because I glanced at the speedometer and discovered I was doing 80 mph, completely unintentionally.

But that was okay, because freeway drivers in Seattle are special. Apparently they think doing 70 mph on the freeway in heavy traffic is normal. Perhaps even acceptable (WTF?!). I couldn’t decide whether to be more astonished or terrified, and settled for singing along with the radio very loudly and dedicating each song to whatever god would please just let me live to see my children again.

Other than that, it was a delightful visit! Maggy has the prettiest brown eyes, and I kept catching myself just wanting to stare at them. And she hugs so well that it took a bit of self-restraint to not just keep hugging her. Our conversation went all over the place, in the most delightful ways, and I’m sure I talked entirely too much. I want to say about a thousand brilliant things about the day, but I’m about to fall asleep. Damnit.

It’s been said that Portland is an incestuous little town, and examples pop up frequently to suggest that this is true. For instance, my new job (starting the 14th) is at the same place where Molly works — and Lyse just got hired on at the same place where Robert (the World’s Best Ex) works! She interviewed this morning, and was emailed an offer letter this afternoon!

All together now: congratulations, Lyse!

In other job news, I was given the option of taking next week off entirely, since the scheduling manager had all the shifts covered that needed to be, and said if I didn’t actually want to work, they wouldn’t schedule me. I (quite happily) agreed to my last day being this upcoming Friday. They reassured me that I was welcome to come back if my new job didn’t work out…but it’s going to work out. I’ve got my mind made up that I’m going to love my new job…and if for any reason I should be reluctant to love it, the paychecks (or, more accurately, what they represent as improvements in my life) will keep me focused on the positives.

And actually, I do think I’m going to love it! (Especially if I can get a bunch of graveyard shifts…for that sweet shift differential!)

I gave my notice at work, and the funny guy manager made a special point of telling me that if my new job didn’t work out, I was always welcome to work there again. There are 2 female managers (the nice-but-uptight one, and the shrill one) and 3 male managers (the funny one, the charming one, and the cute one). As I was about to clock out this afternoon, the cute guy manager asked me how many tattoos I have, and I cheerfully replied, “Five.” The nice-but-uptight female manager looked shocked and disapproving, so I couldn’t resist adding that when my eldest turned 18, we got “mommy-and-me” matching tattoos. I think if I’d mentioned my piercings, my two boyfriends, or the nude photo shoot I did when I was 28, she would have fainted dead away. (If I didn’t have a strict policy about not mentioning my personal life at work any more than I absolutely have to, that is. But damn, sometimes it’s sooo tempting!)

Anyhoo, yesterday some apparently-famous rappers (who I’d never heard of) came in to the restaurant while I was working. They seemed like any other rowdy, arrogant customers — other than having one guy following the rest around with a videocam, or the manager who apparently recognized a couple of them and asked for their autographs for his teenage sons. It was Young Buck and most of G-Unit (minus 50 Cent). All I can say is that I was underwhelmed by their public behavior. Lyse was astonished by my blase attitude toward it, but hey — this is Portland! I’ve seen Art Alexakis shopping at Lloyd Center, for crying out loud. (He’s damned good-looking for a man his age, and with his history, I must say.)

I’m just really glad it’s the weekend…I’m pretty wiped out. Other than taking my Number One Internet Fanboy and his lovely lady out to dinner tomorrow night, I’m going to do as little as possible.

I knew Saturday was going to be a busy day, since there were a bunch of errands to run. Geoffrey had left the house early on an errand of his own, and when he got back, Lyse and Anxiety and I loaded ourselves into the car. We grabbed coffee and a bite to eat, then dropped Anxiety off at school so she could complete the service hours she needs for her 8th-grade requirements to graduate (and to go to Catalina Island for the 8th-grade trip next month!). The day looked promising, not too rainy, but after dropping off Anxiety the weather started turning less hospitable. I didn’t mind; if I have to do shopping (which I generally hate), I’d rather do it when there will be less people out on the streets and in the stores.

Unfortunately, this is Portland, and rain doesn’t deter as many people from leaving their homes as I might wish. We picked up Geoffrey since he’d decided it would be fun to hang out with us crazy gals while running errands (and because we wuv him!). The grocery store was about as crowded as usual for a Saturday afternoon, but we slogged through the shopping. Then we headed to the feed store.

And now for something completely TMI…

In lovely Portland, Oregon today, we’ve run the gamut of weather… early this morning, it was sunny. Then it turned overcast & drizzly… then it got sunny again, and then it got cloudy again and started pouring down rain. The rain varied as the afternoon wore on, and just after an enchanting 20 minutes of watching the raccoons hunting for worms to eat in the neighbor’s backyard (I was 10 feet away from a wild raccoon! it was soooo cool!), it started hailing. Whee! I love Oregon. If you don’t like the weather, wait a while and it’ll change to suit you.

In other news, my feet are beginning to get used to the grind of the new job. But I have possibilities percolating…we’ll see how things work out.

First, the rant. Then the humor…

Anxiety was given an assignment to write a story, using one of the suggestions of topics from a paper titled, “How To Build Global Community.” (Isn’t “global community” — aka “a world government” — one of the signs of the Anti-Christ? Yeah, it sure is…) The suggestions included such tidbits as:

And now for something completely TMI…