dianaschnuth

I think it’s funny that, anytime I sit down to write the sort of entry I would have written in a paper journal (back in the pre-blog Dark Ages of the year 2000), I feel the need to reaffirm the fact that this is still my personal journal. This isn’t my full-time job, I’m not monetizing my blog, and I shouldn’t feel like an inferior blogger just because I keep a wide-ranging, personal journal. I’m not topical, like some of the tech blogs; I don’t craft witty and humorous essays like Dooce; I’m just making public what was once a private venture, from my first journal at age seven to my last pre-blog folders of scribbled notebook paper and “Talking to Myself” text files on my old Mac.

That said, here’s what’s going on with me:

Summer head colds suck donkey dick. I’ve gotten over my elitist “my body knows what it’s doing” rejection of OTC medication, and have instead embraced the idea of nipping this shit in the proverbial bud. Pseudoephedrine is currently my best friend, despite having to practically give a DNA sample before buying it. (You know all about the meth lab in my laundry room, right?)

Anyway, Sunday night into Monday started the sore throat, so I stayed home Monday and tried to sleep it off. The sore throat was waning by Tuesday, but I was feeling all cloudy in the head and had very dry eyes. It wasn’t until today that the scratchy throat and runny nose started up.

I watched a show on one of the geek channels a couple years ago, where a fictional British singer came down with a cold at an inopportune time; they “followed” her around, documentary-style, and interspersed graphics of what was happening in her throat and sinuses. Antibodies, mucus, inflammation, all that jazz. Tell you what, the human body can be both incredibly amazing and incredibly gross at the same time. It’s fantastic that our bodies can fight off infection like that — but the thought of it going on under my own… well, under my own nose? Eww.

So, today at work wasn’t as productive as I would have liked, and tonight at home involved me skipping Zen and kicking back in the recliner with multiple glasses of OJ, some watermelon, a box of tissues, and Civilization Revolution on the Xbox 360. Since Civ Rev mainly boils down to Civ Lite, it doesn’t take as much brainpower to play (especially on Chieftain difficulty) as previous PC-based iterations of the game, so it still worked out well with my head-cold fogginess.

Run-down as I am from this cold, this is not exactly the best time for me to be trying to make the final push to get my freelance site done, but here we are. The contract stipulated that I’d have it done by September 1st, and so I will. I just have some minor design tweaks to make, and a decent amount of content to upload — PDF files to print, video to digitize, Google Calendar schedules to create (or decide not to create). I was honestly more concerned about getting the design looking right first.

As an aside, I opted to try out WordPress as the CMS for this site, as I’m already familiar with Movable Type. OMG, I love WordPress. To be fair, though, MT is probably just as easy to use now; it’s just that I’ve been upgrading my site with all the hacks for previous versions of MT, and haven’t wanted to take the time to research what’s possible now. So, once I finally get around to moving my personal blog over to the server where my (once-again neglected) portfolio site lives, I think I’m going to do a clean install of the newest version of MT and just import all my entries and comments, rather than trying to move the whole Frankenstein blog. That’ll give me a chance to totally redo the design, too, which I’ve been itching to do for a few months. (Hey, three years is a seriously long-term relationship between me and any web page design I’ve ever done. Except the ones I’ve abandoned, and there are certainly a few of those.)

In other news, 2008 is the Year of the Cricket. Holy effing shit. We’re being overrun. Now, I know my Memaw always said that it’s bad luck to kill a cricket in the house, but she never had this many all at once. Seriously — one Saturday, Aaron and I killed easily six or seven in one evening. They’re in the laundry room (which is basically open to the crawl space under the house), and I think they’re in the walls of the basement, behind the paneling. And they’re all over the garage. They’re loud fuckers, too, and they get into the basement proper and make a real annoyance of themselves.

We have a bug bomb leftover from last year (The Year of the Moth), and we’re thinking of setting it off in the garage and seeing if that does any good. This is insane.

The rest of my life includes trying to get together with friends, despite scheduling conflicts; the unending battle to get and keep my areas of the house clean; continuing weight loss; and preparing for October’s trip to Providence for the very first 21-and-over anime convention conference. Oh, and fighting a losing battle to get my inbox to zero. I have shit in there from January 2005.

How are you doing?