A day or so after I posted this, I received an email from my mom. “Surplus notecards?” she asked. “I’ll take them!” She’s in charge of a membership care committee at church, and they’re forever looking for blank notecards to send to people.

So I dutifully bundled up all the extra notecards that aren’t the type with sarcastic wit (I’m saving those for *me*!) or otherwise not appropriate to be sent by a church group, and stuck the bag on the dining room table to take with me next time I met her. And I racked my brain, trying to figure out if I’d mentioned the overflowing drawer to her in an email or in passing.

And then a second email came, where she mentioned that I had a slight error in my ‘all about me’ page – my sisters’ and my names weren’t just in the Top Ten. They were the Top Three, for the five years during which we were born.

The light bulb went on, finally. Even though I’ve dropped hints, and even sent them a link to an entry or two before, my mom was now reading my journal (Hi mom!).

It’s not as if I’ve written this to hide anything. I’ve always tried to write it so that I wouldn’t be worried if anyone I knew read it. But still, there was this little momentary surprise when she sent me those emails, and even more of a jolt when she mentioned in passing that one of my sisters showed her how to get here (hi sis!) too.

“It seems just a bit narcissist,” my mom commented at one point during the conversation, and I suppose that in a way it is. I write this with the expectation that it will be read by more than just myself. I write for an audience, because after all, what’s the point of posting all of this online if no one were to ever see it? Despite any pure and noble intentions that we who post our lives online may say in protest, it all boils down to the fact that we want someone – anyone – to read what we write, so that we become a little bit larger than our own ordinary selves. I don’t mean that in a bad way, so please don’t take this as condemnation – after all, I’m just as much a practitioner as the rest. I mean it in a positive way – the collective sharing of our daily lives and thoughts as a way of joining strangers together, no matter how tenuous the link.

I still keep my own, personal journal – partly on paper, and partly on the computer. Were someone to ever try to compile my memoirs (such as they are), I would not envy them the task of piecing together all three components – this and my two private journal counterparts. I may go for days without writing in the private one, but it is often that what I post online is a modified version of that which I record on paper (minus the things that I write only for me).

I have read journals written by people who bare their souls, and I have read the little ‘about me’ pages where they ask (sometimes politely, and sometimes a bit more forcefully) that people who actually know them in real life not read. And I often wonder why it is that these people do not realize that asking someone to not read their words is akin to setting a plate of fresh-from-the-oven chocolate chip cookies in front of a five-year old, giving them a stern warning not to touch, and then walking out of the room. It is human nature to rebel against what we are told to do. If told not to read something, then that makes it all the more imperative that it must be read (a tactic that might just work if teachers tried it on some of those dull and lengthy tomes we were forced to endure back in high school, by the way. Just a thought).

I keep writing because I enjoy spilling the words out into that clean white notepad window. I write because sometimes it helps me to find the humor in situations that I encounter. I write because maybe the people who know me outside of these pages will learn a little bit more about me, and the people who only know me through these words will find something that interests them; something that strikes a chord and makes them say ‘yeah. Me too.’

I write this because this is who I am, and it’s the best way I have to share.

Last night we went to see BareNaked Ladies in concert – and what an amazing show! They seemed to be having a wonderful time (and if they weren’t they were doing a pretty darn good job of faking it). They sang a wide range of songs from all of their albums, and even tossed in a few new ones, just to give us all something to look forward to for the next album. Between sets, they’d break into stand-up comedy, and even the occasional ad-libbed song, including a rather hysterical number about bugs in California. We sang along, we danced, we laughed, and we had fun.

The show was well worth the money, the drive to get there, and the nearly two hours of pre-show bands we had to sit through. Their opening act was The Proclaimers, a band known for exactly one song in this country (that would be “I Would Walk 500 Miles”, featured in ‘Benny and Joon’). Apparently they’re bigger in the UK than they are here (which would suggest that perhaps they were a two-hit wonder over there? Who knows). They were preceded by a woman in a rather unattractive jean skirt decorated with huge pink applique flowers who had a beautiful voice, but seemed capable of singing only one tune. Oh, she tried to pretend they were different songs by announcing different titles before she started it again. It was a lovely tune the first time around, but not quite so lovely after half a dozen renditions of it.

The amphitheater where they played is located in the middle of nowhere (or the middle of Yuba County – take your pick). It took over an hour to drive there. We’d left early, intending to find someplace nearby to eat dinner. We even passed by a little hamburger grill on the way (and what a place! Hamburgers, shakes, fries, and to top it all off, they were selling weaner pigs! As in real live baby pigs. We’re talking right smack dab in the middle of farm country, folks). Turns out we had to keep on driving even further after we reached the amphitheater before we finally wound up in one of the tiny little towns in that area and chose a small local restaurant, purely at random, at which to dine.

It was about what one might expect from a small-town diner. Canned green beans, instant mashed potatoes, salad composed entirely of iceberg lettuce, and everything on the menu either deep fried, or swimming in some sort of sauce. When I asked how the fish of the day was cooked, the waitress gave me an odd look. “Grilled,” she replied, with the ‘how else would it be cooked?’ implied but not spoken.

Despite the fact that the food was mediocre, it was still a good dinner. It’s always fun to eat in places like this, with avocado-green covered chairs from the 70’s, flowered vinyl on the tables, and faded wallpaper on the walls of what appeared to a converted mobile home. You just can’t find an atmosphere like that in any town with a population over a few thousand.

We drove home with Maroon playing on the CD player, still singing along. Next time they come to town, we’ll definitely be back.

One of the things we got for wedding presents were a small handful of cat beds. After all, with seven cats, one can never have too many cat beds – and now there are plenty for both upstairs and down. It’s a fairly regular thing now to find at least two or three of the little foam cups occupied – especially the one I put in the dining room, where the sun creates one of Sebastian’s favorite warm spots for afternoon napping.

Allegra, however, is not to be seduced by these new and squishy napping spots. She insists on keeping to her old standbys – a rather squashed cardboard box that we actually moved with us just for her (it lives in the bedroom), and a much smaller box that I use to collect miscellaneous mail, bills to pay, etc. It sits on the desk behind me in the home office, and when I’m at my computer, I quite often hear the soft sound of snoring emanating from that box. The smaller the box she can squash herself into, the happier she is.

I have to admit that I’m one of those crazy cat ladies who calls her pets silly little names. The words sort of come out of my mouth without my giving it much thought, and the cats don’t seem to care one way or another, as long as I’m willing to give them the attention they want.

Lately, however, I’ve been doing it more on purpose and less on accident, simply because it’s fun to see Richard’s reaction to the latest inane babble I can come up with. He turns to me with that ‘what did you say?’ incredulous expression on his face, before we both burst into laughter.

My best one so far has been ‘fuzzy window beans’. Don’t ask me – it just popped out of my mouth. Now it keeps coming up from one or the other of us, and *everything* related to the cats now has to have ‘fuzzy’ and / or ‘bean’ in it somehow.

I think I may live to regret this. Hmm…

One of these days I’m going to figure out what it is I want to be when I grow up. I’m sure it will happen eventually. If I’m really lucky, it’ll happen in time for me to find a job in that field.

I’ve realized for quite some time now that I really don’t want to be a code nerd anymore. If it was the kind of thing where I could sit at a little computer and play with databases all day I’d be so happy. Problem is, it isn’t quite like that anymore (I’d say it’s not like the old days, but when the ‘old days’, to me, are only 3 years ago, somehow it loses a bit). There are a lot of other languages I’d need to learn that, quite frankly, I have no interest in learning. Richard’s signed up for an online java course and seems to be having a wonderful time learning how to do that kind of thing. I’ve tried to work up some enthusiasm for myself, but have had no luck. What HTML I know has been used on these pages, and while I do enjoy puttering around on my website, learning how to do something else cool every few weeks, I simply don’t know enough to be marketable at it, nor do I really want to know that much.

It’s a frustrating situation to be in, especially since I’m currently looking for a new job and not having much success at it. Things that sound appealing are things for which I have absolutely no experience, and what I’ve got experience in isn’t really what anyone is looking for these days….unless I’d be willing to do the 2-3 hour commute at morning and night.

Grumble.

I love this picture of Rebecca. It always makes people do a double-take. I didn’t actually take that picture – it showed up one day when I picked up the developed film. Turns out my roommates took it because they knew I’d want the shot. I took others of her doing this same position, even against a wall (with her back-end up on the wall and the front end on the floor), but this is the best one. She’s always been a bit odd about how she positions herself, though. She’s very good at ‘dead cat’ poses, where she sits with all four feet neatly curled underneath her , and then just sort of falls to one side, eyes wide and glassy so that when you see her, you have to touch her, just to make sure. She’s managed to get poor Richard a number of times already with her odd little postures.

She’s lying on a bright yellow couch that was, and will probably always be, one of my favorite pieces of furniture. When we moved out of the dorms into our first apartment, it came furnished, with hideous lamps and end tables and a sofa covered in a green burlap that made you itch if you sat on it with any bare skin touching the fabric at all. The next year I went thrift-store-scrounging and found this sofa. It cost me $30. When we took it out of the truck to carry it up the stairs to the apartment, it was extremely sunny outside and the yellow was so bright it practically blinded us.

It was eight feet long (I know this because we had to measure it when we moved). It didn’t matter how dismal and dark the room was we put it in – with that yellow sofa, the whole room woke up and looked cheerful. The cushions didn’t quite fit so there was always a gap of several inches on one side or the other, but full-grown adults could stretch out and sleep on it.

My mom always wanted a church pew, and when the church we attended was replacing their old ones, she finally got her wish. Of course, when they moved and bought their house six or seven years ago, one of the requirements was that it had a wall long enough to accommodate the pew. Prior to college I might have teased my mom about this, but after the yellow couch I knew too well what she was looking for. The reason I knew the length of that couch was so because whenever I moved, one of the main requirements of the new apartment was that it had one wall that could accommodate that bright yellow couch.

After I graduated from college, I got a whim to get ‘real’ furniture and purchased a slate-blue living room set. This necessitated giving away the yellow couch, and a friend took it in for a number of years before finally relinquishing it to the dumpster.

It was old and stained and the cushions sagged and it was a large annoyance to find living spaces with a long enough wall for it, but still, there are days when I really miss that yellow couch.

We finally broke down and bought Norton anti-everything software. Richard came home yesterday with that and something else whose name escapes me but will, he assures me, help protect our little local network he’s been busily creating. Every once in a while he tells me excitedly about how he managed to tweak the framus a tad more to the left of the widget on our network and I nod and say “That’s nice dear” because I really have no clue – all I care is that I can turn on my computer and connect to the outside world, and that if I want to print something the only stumbling block in my way should be if there’s no paper in the printer – but it seems to make him so happy that he’s done whatever it is he did, and a wife should always be supportive (okay, you can quit gagging now).

Buying Norton stuff is a good thing, because for all the years I’ve had this computer of mine, it has never had any anti-virus software. It was always one of those things I kept meaning to get around to, but in the starving grad student years and then the early starving computer nerd years there were always things a tad more important to spend my money on, like the phone bill or the electricity or cat litter. Yeah, I was nervous, but then I’ve been extra careful on this computer and so far I guess I was just incredibly lucky. I realize it only takes one time (sort of like how you can get pregnant with only one time, but then I never ended up doing that either, so I’d say my track record is quite shiny at this point, oh yes). Luckily all the viruses always go to my work email, read only on my work computer where anti-virus software sits on my email and makes it take extra-long to download – especially when I’m trying to download it over one of my favorite 2600 baud connections over a hotel phone line late at night and I have a lot of things more important to do than to download the latest exciting sales pitch from the Big Fish (like maybe sleep or play Civilization or something). And this special make-it-slow anti-virus software on the work computer does things like send me the infected email twice – once with the virus, and once without it, and a huge bold ‘VIRUS DISABLED’ added to the subject line so I know right away that here is an evil thing and I must delete it immediately.

So anyway, Norton software. Installed, run, and boy does that stuff take forever to run! I had to resort to going downstairs and cooking dinner while it updated my registry in a more efficient manner (it just wouldn’t do to have an inefficient registry, you see), and even then it still took a lot of thumb-twiddling before my computer finally wanted to reboot and talk nice to me again. And now when my email runs, there’s this nifty little icon that shows up in the tray at the bottom of the screen indicating that it is doing a virus scan, and when I open any document off my hard drive it does a little virus scan, and when I go to empty my recycle bin it has suddenly become much more complicated that merely clicking ’empty bin’ because now I have to care about a lot of other commands. Urk.

But at least my computer is now all safely protected and disk-doctored and speed-scanned and anti-virused. The only thing it’s in danger from now is the inevitable. What’s that, you ask? Well….I’m the one with seven shedding cats. Draw your own conclusions from that. ;-)

I have sunburns on the back of my knees! My arms are a little toasted, but the worst of it is on the back of my legs. Makes sitting on things rather interesting – I end up perching on the very edge of the chair and hunching forward (posture, schmosture!), and occasionally muttering ‘ow!’ under my breath.

I managed to do this because the front of me was facing towards the bricks and therefore safe from the sun’s dastardly rays….and it probably didn’t hurt that the front of me was also getting a fairly liberal coating of brick mortar too (which, I’m sure, has an SPF of at least 35). See, a few weeks ago while at church, Richard and I were accosted by a Clipboard-Carrying Woman and before we knew it we had volunteered to come help lay bricks for the front of the church, where the bulk of the restoration is taking place these days. The church in question has been undergoing restoration for at least several years now (it’s a Genuine Antique Building!), with most of the work being done by volunteers. They’ve done an amazing job of it so far (although the cyclone fencing and construction debris where the front entrance used to be was not exactly reassuring when we first showed Richard’s parents were the wedding would be held), and now they are left with the roof, and the bricks.

I don’t think I’ll be rushing off to become a brick-laying apprentice any time soon, but it wasn’t all that bad. It’s sort of the grown-up version of making mud pies, really. You slap a little mud down, you squish it with a cool triangle shaped trowel, and then you smash a brick in the middle of it and whack it repeatedly with a rubber mallet until it’s in just the right place (determined by judicial application of a large and mortar-speckled balance), and then you grab some more mud and you squash it down in between the bricks with your fingers (they had little tools for this but using fingers is soooo much more fun!) and occasionally you brush the hair out of your eyes (and the mortar into your hair) and then you do it all again. And then some more. And then you go grab more bricks and you keep doing it until they run out of mortar and golly gee shucks you have to stop for the day.

So because of all the playing in mud and slapping bricks around, I’m pretty worn out. Well, it doesn’t help that neither of us got much sleep because we were up really late last night (before having to get up really early this morning – wince). I’m not sure what Richard was up to (although he was mumbling things about ftp and servers and things) but I was happily redesigning my home page, and even though I turned off my computer at slightly after midnight (honest, I really did, and actually did get into bed and everything), I couldn’t stand it so I got back out of bed and spent another hour or two finishing it up.

Before I went to bed the first time I was mumbling about making the final changes and Richard grinned at me and told me he’d see me in a few minutes. I thought he meant he was coming to bed too. When I shuffled back into the computer room a few minutes later to turn the computer back on and keep working, he grinned at me again, having had no intention of coming to bed anytime soon – probably because he was working on some sort of network thingmajig.

Ah, computer nerds in love.

On Wednesday, the highlight of my exciting afternoon was when I vacuumed out the drawers on my half of the office (a slightly less scream-and-stomp-around highlight than yesterday’s). While Richard may be perfectly happy letting all his miscellaneous stuff cohabitate with sawdust, I am not so accepting, and the reason I have been allowing myself to believe that the reason why I’ve been a lazy slob and not yet moved all the rest of my stuff into the office drawers for weeks now is simply that they were full of sawdust and needed to be cleaned. Of course, once I vacuumed them then I no longer had an excuse, so after no small amount of grumbling (which was inconveniently ignored by the cats) I slumped off to the guest room to collect all the remaining things and laid them out on one of the office desks.

Here is when I discovered that I could open my very own card shop. I have an entire drawer full of note cards and stationary! Some of this stuff is in boxes that haven’t even had the plastic covering removed. An entire drawer full of stationary and I Never Write Letters!

Some of it is because my mom gives us a box of Thank You cards every year for Christmas, and one or two of the packages were bought by myself in a weak moment (mainly because they had something feline that was just too cute to pass up, or some other flimsy excuse). But the rest has simply just accumulated over the years, and now I am stuck with trying to figure out just what the heck to do with it all.

I can’t just throw it out. One does not throw out perfectly good stationary (It’s sort of akin to tossing books into the trash which, as anyone knows, is one of the lesser mortal sins). And I can’t really give it as gifts to other people because most of the boxes are a bit squashed from having been forced into an already too full drawer of other similarly sized boxes. And there is no way, even if really did try to sit down and do it, that I could write that many letters. People hear from me once a year, at Christmas. If I type the letter, everyone gets the news. If I have to hand-write it into the cards, only the first half of the people get all the juicy tidbits, while the others have to content themselves with ‘Merry Christmas – hope your year has been as exciting as mine!’ because my hand gets wayyyy too tired to write out a page and a half of chatty blather in that many cards.

I’m thinking I’ll just leave it in the drawer for now. Perhaps years from now I’ll be suddenly struck with a letter writing jones, and well, I’ll be all set.

********

Jenipurr’s Helpful Cooking Tips: When you’re making Chicken Paprika and you hit the point in the recipe when it says to add the cornstarch and you add it and suddenly you are stirring something that is bubbling and frothing and resembles something out of a scene from “The Creeping Slime Monster From the Swamps of Dispair” far more than it resembles dinner, it may occur to you that that orange box you reached for was not the cornstarch, but baking soda – this is about the point when you should turn to your ever-patient husband, who has already listened to your little ranting whine about all the ants you had to kill that day and even given you a completely unsolicited backrub in the bargain, and say ‘I think we’re going out to dinner’.

I believe I have mentioned, in this journal, my feelings on ants once or twice. But have I mentioned lately how much I loathe and despise ants? No, I don’t just ‘not like’ ants. I hate them. With a passion that grows daily the more I have to kill.

They keep coming. Nothing I do deters them. We cannot keep the cat food bowls more than halfway full because the instant one of them gets filled to the brim, it is completely overrun. I have become paranoid about leaving *anything* that might attract them out where they might find it. Last night they swarmed the kitchen counters. I couldn’t spray all of them because they were milling around one of the electric sockets and I just didn’t want to have to explain to the insurance adjustor that the house burned down because I was killing ants.

It’s gotten to the point where the Raid can travels from room to room. It does not get put away. It simply sits on the latest counter until we have need of it again. I always know where it is, since I’m usually the one who used it last.

I have an official ‘ant rag’. It’s an old stained washcloth that’s pretty much falling apart, but it’s perfect for wiping up ants and Raid. I can’t leave the bug spray on the floor because it’s slippery, and because I can’t risk one of the cats traipsing through the stuff and then licking it off their feet later. It’s usually referred to in a manner like “Dear, can you bring me the **insert favorite expletive** ant rag? We have **insert second favorite expletive** ants again!”

I have kept reminding myself that it’s just ants, and it could be far worse. I keep reminding myself that this is a new house and we are bound to get bugs. I keep muttering that the benefits of having a raised foundation far outweigh the ants. I keep insisting that I can handle this – it’s not so bad; we don’t get them every day; there really aren’t that many.

Ha! As if last night’s electric socket invasion wasn’t bad enough I walked into the master bedroom and found the mother of all swarms! There were ants covering an area several feet wide, and the worst of it is, I have no idea what they were after!!

I sprayed. I wiped. The ant rag came back nearly black with hundreds of horrid little bodies. I managed to somehow talk my stomach into settling down and kept on grimly cleaning up the carnage.

This has gone to far. Tomorrow I’m calling exterminators. Surely one of them has *got* to be able to do something to keep the nasty little creatures at bay. If they can’t, I may just break down and scream.

I hate ants. I really, really, hate ants.

Sob.

We have a huge black wrought iron plant tree in the living room that has 12 hooks. Granted, it may seem odd to some, but when filled with hanging plants, it looks really cool in the bay window, and we’ve plans to fill out that area with a few more pots hanging from the ceiling and then a few larger types placed on the floor – to give it that ‘jungle’ feel (and to give the cats something else to tip over / shred / otherwise destroy). What we’re going to do with all the plants when it’s Christmas Tree Season we’re not exactly sure – we just know we have to move them, since as any self-respecting home owner knows, ‘Bay Window’ is synonymous with ‘Christmas Tree Window’. Perhaps for the month of December, all the plants will migrate to the bay window in the master bedroom, providing the gentle sound of rustling leaves at night (as they’re ripped from their stems by those of the feline persuasion).

So anyway, the point of mentioning all these green things was to lead into the fact that this week I repotted all the ones that have been hanging there. The exciting thing about this is that…oh, okay, so there is nothing exciting at all. My life has come to this – writing about repotting plants. Um. Where was I? Oh yes. Repotted plants. The whole downstairs smelled faintly of potting soil all day – and I mean this in a good way (not a ‘euww, what’s that stinky dirt smell!’ way).

One of the plants that was supposed to be of the hanging variety is not, in fact, the dangling draping sort of greenery. Instead, in complete defiance to the little picture on the plastic sliver that was stabbed into its pot when we bought it, it insists on growing straight up instead of out and over like a well-behaved hanging plant should. This one I took pity on and put it into a new, non-hanging pot, and placed this on top of the piano (which, along with providing a nifty new place for the cats to sprawl, also provides a nice smooth surface for placing a non-drip pot, since it’s very near the window).

I’m pondering whether putting it there was wise, however, because I keep finding little bits of potting soil around that pot. While it may be perfectly safe since it won’t drip water all over my lovely new piano, the dirt is a bit annoying. The piano-lounging cats swear in complete innocence that they know nothing of how the dirt got out of the pot, but I suspect they know more than they’re letting on.