dianaschnuth

Never doubt the impact of a good advertising campaign.

Wonder Woman, Superman remixed in French anti-AIDS posters

In contrast to last night’s marathon theological websurfing, this evening I took a two-and-a-half hour nap in the recliner. So, not much to report there.

Oh, I was looking through one of my handwritten journals from 1997 last night, and found a printout from the old scale at the Woodland Small in BG. In November of 1997, I weighed 197 pounds. The scale said I was 35 pounds overweight, which I still think is a crock, considering my height and build. But, yeah, in another five pounds or so, I’ll be at my seven-years-ago weight. (Good lord; I gained fifty pounds in seven years! That’s disgusting.)

It’s interesting reading my old journals. The really interesting ones are still at home in Parma (I hope), from high school and middle school and even elementary school. Chronicles of my tonsillectomy, the Challenger disaster, my crush on my 40-something middle school choir director, my annual February depression, joining high school band, getting college rejection letters, and everything in between. I was a seriously depressed kid; in today’s terms, I might have even been put on medication (if my Mom had realized how depressed I was, that is. Either I hid it from her well, or she was completely in denial).

Is there a way to archive this LiveJournal stuff off of their server? Not that I want to jinx LJ, but I’ve never been comfortable having something important on a remote server without a backup. If I’m going to put my journaling online instead of in an actual journal (which I’ve found is much more fun, and just as cathartic, if a bit more topically restrictive), I want to have the option of backing it up without printing the whole damn thing out or just saving the HTML.

My stepdad, Tom, used to tell Mom that his journal was always open to her to read. She didn’t feel the same about hers, and I think he respected her privacy in that. She just couldn’t grasp the concept of having a non-private journal—to her (and to me, until recently), a journal was a place where you wrote things you couldn’t tell anyone. Both of us were at our most prolific journaling when we were miserable, which is kind of unfortunate in retrospect. Makes it seem like our lives were simply unbearable, when in fact it was only certain stretches that were bad. The happy moments didn’t always get chronicled, and the “normal” moment virtually never did.

That’s one reason why I’ve been trying to write in my LJ fairly often, even if it’s about nothing interesting: just to remind myself later what it was like to be “normal” in my late 20’s. Once we have kids, Aaron and I, our lives are going to change forever—or for a sufficiently long time, anyway—and it’ll be interesting to go back and remember what it was like to have lazy evenings sleeping in the recliner. 🙂

edit: Oh, I figured out how to export my LJ as XML. I had to do it by month, but that’s just as well, since that’s how I would have wanted to do it, anyway. So, I now have backups of my entries, even though they don’t seem to have paragraph or line breaks. D’oh!

snicked from Dan‘s sister Elizabeth:

You are Kermit the Frog.
You are reliable, responsible and caring.  And you
have a habit of waving your arms about
maniacally.

FAVORITE EXPRESSIONS:
“Hi ho!” “Yaaay!” and
“Sheesh!”
FAVORITE MOVIE:
“How Green Was My Mother”

LAST BOOK READ:
“Surfin’ the Webfoot: A Frog’s Guide to the
Internet”

HOBBIES:
Sitting in the swamp playing banjo.

QUOTE:
“Hmm, my banjo is wet.”

What Muppet are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Even though I marched two parades over the weekend, I’m still not sure how that, combined with eating three pieces of pizza, made me lose almost three pounds this week. ::shrug::

It’s goddamned hot tonight. I’m even wearing one of my new tank tops from Fashion Bug (yay, $9.99 shirts!), and sitting in the basement, and I’m still sweltering. Yeesh. Aaron’s gotta be having a fun time at work tonight.

I didn’t have a whole lot I wanted to accomplish today, which is good, since I took another 90-minute nap this evening. —Oh, but I did want to boil some eggs. Hang on… I’ll be right back.

*pauses Winamp, runs upstairs and puts eggs on to boil, sets timer*
*waters plants and takes ailing begonia upstairs to better window*

OK, I’m back. Damn, our stove is boil-a-rific. I’m not used to electric yet; this thing gets water boiling in, like, three minutes. Crazy. Must be one of those stoves Emeril talks about when he tells you to use your knobs.

Saturday night up in Michigan was actually quite a good time, watching drum corps videos and DVDs on a projection screen in Russ’s garage in Clawson. Been a long, long time since I attended a drum corps party. This weekend, though, I’m planning to take a weekend off from corps instead of going up to the show in Kalamazoo. I’ve had enough of driving to Michigan for corps for a while. On August 7, I have to go up and carpool to Grand Haven for the Coast Guard parade and performance, stay up there overnight, and drive back on Sunday. I may take a personal day on that Monday, just so I feel like I’ve had a weekend. And before that, there’s the Bluecoats’ home show in Massillon (Canton). Since I’m skipping out on K-Zoo, I’m definitely going to that one, even though it’s two hours away on a Sunday night. Hopefully I’ll be able to get someone to go with me.

In other news, I have the last week of this month off. Yay, vacation! Aaron has it off, too, and the following week, as well. We still haven’t figured out where we’re going, although the consensus is that we want to use the tent we got for our wedding (and, no, we’re not doing a backyard campout). Bring the lawn chairs-in-a-bag, the picnic basket (maybe), do some hiking, maybe some swimming… not sure where yet, though. Should be fun, anyway. I’m ready for a week off.

Hmm. Better go check on those eggs.

Again, not much to report. Finished looking up addresses at work and began changing them and printing out new envelopes for some of the more vital stuff (like titles and deeds and such). Not quite as tedious. Came home, ate dinner, watched the news, took a nap. Bought a magazine subscription from a black girl collecting points toward a scholarship. Talked to Beth over IM. Downloaded a pop-up blocker. Posted to LJ. That’s my day, pathetic though it may be.

I think I’m going to start devoting one evening a week to photographing outdoors. I figure, maybe come home, hang with Aaron until he goes to work, eat a quick dinner, don’t watch the news, and go out to one of the metroparks—maybe Wildwood or Swan Creek or even Oak Openings—for some evening photography. Burn off at least one full roll of film. Bring all the lenses I can, or go with a project in mind. Maybe make a list: landscapes, reflections, panning with rollerbladers and cyclists, close-ups, patterns, structures. Maybe go black-and-white one week, color another, and splurge on infrared another. (Oak Openings in infrared would be soooo cool with all the trees and foliage around the lake there.)

It seems that I now have seasonal hobbies. Photography in the summer, gardening in the spring, candles in the winter. Or maybe it’s just per my whims, rather than per the seasons. That’s probably closer to the truth.

Sorry that this LJ thing has become so… unfocused. For a while, I was being all introspective and philosophical with my entries, especially when I was just putting entries directly on my site, before I went to LJ; but now it’s really become more of a “this is what I did today” thing. Not that my friends from faraway don’t want to know what I’m up to, but… it just seems so… normal. I mean, if you look at LiveJournal entries, 90% of the LJs out there (not blogs in general: LiveJournals specifically) are about random daily crap. That’s not what I want to read if I browse to a stranger’s journal; I want to read about their thoughts and their philosophies and their weirdnesses. Of course, I’m like that. ::smirk::

I think that’s all I’ve got for today.