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!!!

A couple weeks ago, I didn’t even know who Sarah Silverman was. This, however, made me an instant fan:

I also didn’t know who Jimmy Kimmel was. (I still don’t, really, other than “he’s some guy on TV who apparently dates Sarah Silverman.”) But while Sarah’s video was hilarious — and made me laugh more than anything since seeing a picture of my ex who’d gotten fat — Jimmy’s rebuttal is utterly epic:

What put it over the top for me was Josh Groban. (For the sadly ignorant, he’s the cute guy at the piano with the utterly awesome voice. This guy could sing the phone book to me and I’d get wet.)

(And considering my last post, I thought I’d mention that watching these videos, and blogging about it, was the only thing I did online today. Bye now!)

I think I’ve been spending too much time online lately. (Considering that I spend much less time online than I did 6 or 12 months ago, that might be a vaguely odd statement, but bear with me.)

For the foreseeable future, I’ll be working 6-day weeks due to personnel shortages at work. Between that and my desire to actually accomplish a bit more at home — including my half-dozen crochet projects that need to be finished — it’s becoming imperative that I actually do less monitor-staring and more everything-else.

If anything particularly interesting comes up, I’ll blog about it. Or I might just Twitter about it. At the very least, I’ll grouse to the cats about it. And then maybe they can blog it for me.

Filed my taxes. The good news: I filed honestly, and I get a (fairly decent) refund. The bad news: If I’d told just one teensy little lie, I could have increased the refund by around 40%.

But I said to myself, “Big bucks, or not fucking with the IRS? Which do I choose?” It was not rocket science.

The refund is still enough that I don’t feel (too) bad about my attack of conscience. I changed my W-4’s at work at the beginning of this year, with an eye toward getting a decent refund next year, too.

Look, I’m being all mature and shit. Go me.

This is for my honor roll student, Anxiety:

And just one other thing…

Did you lose the game? *evil grin*

Today I did not get any of the cool things on my Valentine’s list. I did get a lovely card and a huge slice of plain cheesecake (the way it’s supposed to be!) from Geoffrey. I almost missed the card, as I am a zombie in the morning; my routine begins thusly:

And now for something completely TMI…

You know you’re old if that made you laugh. Now, on to the “holiday” crap…

What do women really want for Valentine’s Day? I don’t know and I don’t care. Commercials tell us that women want:

• candy (if I want gooey & sticky, it involves sex, not processed sugar)
• flowers (so, explain to me again, how giving me something that dies in a few days expresses your feelings for me?)
• diamonds (you spent HOW much on a chunk of shiny carbon?! do you know how many BOOKS that could have paid for?!!)

Here’s what I want — for any holiday, really. (Hell, it’s what I want any day of the goram year.)

• A dinner that does not require I cook or clean
• A shopping spree at Powell’s
• An hour-long foot rub
• An outrageously-expensive purple vacuum cleaner (oh, wait, no…that’s what I want for my birthday)
• Some kind of sinfully-yummy alcoholic beverage
• A cigarette that I can smoke somewhere with an ambient temperature above 55F
• Mind-blowing sex
• More mind-blowing sex

I mean, really — which list sounds better? I’ve never been a pink-hearts-and-flowers kind of gal. Hey, I’m living with a man whose idea of romance is along the lines of this:

And I love him — and his sense of humor — profoundly. Even if he does have a Netflix queue full of the worst horror movies known to mankind. *perky grin*

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.

If I don’t get a good night’s sleep at some point over this weekend, I may have to break out the battle-axe for a little good ol’ fashioned Norse warbitch rampage.

Getting new ringtones is nifty! Getting new ringtones and then remembering that not that many people call me because I’m not very fond of talking on the phone kinda rains on the parade. (But at least I’ll be amused every time my demonspawn call — since their ringtone is “Teenagers” by My Chemical Romance. *evil grin*)

My bad knee is really starting to hate the clutch in my car. I may have to get an automatic for the next vehicle…damnit, manuals get better mileage, and I feel so lazy when I drive an automatic anymore!

I love Netflix again. Why? Because this week I got a nifty documentary about Stonehenge — just the thing to watch while I’m re-reading Hengeworld — and the next DVD they’re sending me is Lost Treasures of the Ancient World: The Celts. (I really hope it doesn’t suck. You never can tell with documentaries. Some of them are terrific, some are atrocious. But I’ve noticed that if Leonard Nimoy is the narrator, it’s probably a good one.)

Now that the hamster babies are 6 weeks old, I can tell that I was terribly mistaken regarding their genders. Now it’s pretty obvious that we have 2 boys and 1 girl. First thing on the agenda after I wake up Saturday is buying another cage so we can segregate the genders. Damn, kittens are much easier to determine gender! (Under a boy kitten’s tail, it looks like an exclamation point; under a girl kitten’s tail, it looks like a semi-colon. It’s very easy to see the difference if you compare them.)

I have no idea who Sarah Silverman is, but I love this video.

I want a cinnamon roll, warm and gooey and covered in sticky icing. Good thing there’s a 24-hour McD’s on the way to Geoffrey’s work.

It’s PURPLE!!!

I’m still trying to figure out how all the gadgets & settings work. That’s the only thing I dislike about getting something new. (Now that I think about it, this may be a big part of the reason I haven’t dated anyone new in 3 years. *smirk*)

Now I must go shop ringtones…