college, roadtrips 1 Comment

Home On The Range

We go camping at Harrison Lake tomorrow afternoon. Neither myself nor Aaron have been really camping since Scouts back in elementary school 1, so this should be fun.

We’ve got our s’mores action going on, our new king-size air mattress to go in our never-used dome tent we got as a wedding present back in 2003, our lawn chairs and bug spray and swimsuits and sunscreen and everything (hopefully) to help us get our camping fun on.

I hope this doesn’t suck. This is more of a trial run, hence why we’re only camping for one night. If we enjoy camping, maybe we’ll do it more often. Until we’re sure, though, 3pm Sunday through noonish Monday should be a sufficient getaway.

Update, Sunday @ noon: It’s been raining since 8am. Chance of scattered thunderstorms all afternoon, all evening, and all night. Prospects aren’t looking good… but maybe we’ll pack up the car and head out, anyway, to see what Harrison Lake is like. We’ll see how things pan out….

1 This, of course, is not including the ill-fated October camping trip of the girls of 2nd floor Kohl Hall back in 1999. Amy and I were the only people with competent fire-building skills, and our RA had to purchase firewood from a neighboring RV camper. An unseasonably warm October turned coats that night, and none of us got any sleep that chilly autumn night. What had started as an “I don’t want to *know* if you have alcohol in your tent, *wink-wink*” party night ended as a 5am “Let’s get back to the dorm and get some sleep” morning.

randomness 2 Comments

I Did It All For The Nookie

My husband is on vacation for the next two weeks. We should be having snoo-snoo EVERY NIGHT, given that we usually see one another for a grand total of 15 minutes on the weekdays, and this Evening Togetherness thing is quite a treat.

Instead? Yesterday I made myself too much dinner, and ended up too full to… well, you know. This evening, I’ve been totally exhausted, on top of having the most fascinatingly uncomfortable gas cramps. (TMI? Yeah, I know.)

So, yeah. I feel like a doofus. Tomorrow is aikido and zen meditation, both of which I should really attend, since I didn’t go at all last week. But that means I won’t get home until 9pm. Assuming I don’t feel like this tomorrow evening, that is; if I do, there’s no way in hell I’m going to aikido.

Dammit. I go off The Pill to get my libido back and stop being so goddamn cranky, and now we can’t even manage to have Happy Time at all.

*sigh*

I have another week and a half to get my mojo going. Plus a camping trip on Sunday. If that doesn’t at least engender some grab-ass… I dunno.

randomness

Ambiguity

When blogs first went mainstream several years back, there were a couple of complete strangers whose blogs intrigued me. Not because we had a lot in common — I don’t know that we had *anything* in common — but because their designs were eyecatching, and mainly because the authors were so intentionally vague. The ambiguity of their posts made me wonder about them, and read more. Eventually, I found answers to some of my more basic questions: age, orientation, relationship status, things like that. But the topics of each post remained purposefully unknown.

I don’t have very many vague strangers whose blogs I read anymore; most of them are either not vague at all (except with given names), or they’ve gone AWOL. One person whose blog I used to frequent has stopped blogging altogether; I grew bored with another’s continual daily two-line ultra-depressed teasers with no informational or emotional payoff. With the advent of friends-locked entries and (relatively) secure social networking sites (and a distinct lack of interesting design in free blogs, which was what drew me to view certain blogs in the first place), there’s little chance I’ll ever completely recapture the odd sort of voyeurism I once enjoyed.

Every now and then, though, I read an intentionally vague entry by an acquaintance or a complete stranger, and I’m reminded of that delicious confusion in putting the puzzle together. “Isn’t he living with his wife? Don’t they have a kid? Why is he mentioning seeking out sexual relationships, then? Who is [insert cryptic name here], and how does he know her?” And so forth.

Many people are more guarded about their secrets than I.

webdesign 1 Comment

Nuts-N’-Bolts

For the love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Why must I have these fantastic ideas like, Let’s put the menu for my portfolio site in the bottom left corner! That way, I won’t be able to use the standard nested unordered list to stylize my menu, and I’ll have to come up with some effed up way to rig it! Yeah, that sounds like fun!

I feel like the answer is obvious, yet it eludes me. I’m sure that a.) it’s just a little late at night for actual mental activity to be successful, and b.) upon a proper Googling later, the answer will present itself.

In the meantime, anyone who’d care to school me on how daft I’m being right now is welcome to take a gander at my portfolio in progress. I just want the goddamn submenus to stay visible. *sigh*

It’s a very basic problem. I just need more sleep to conquer it.

ruminations

Motivation

Back when I was in college, I had a hard time making myself go to class. (Hence that 7-year Bachelors Degree that should have taken four.) Once I got to my Sophomore or Junior year, I started a juvenile but helpful system to reinforce good behavior: I printed out a monthly calendar, with my class schedule listed on each weekday, and stuck a small happy-face sticker on each day where I went to all my scheduled classes. If, by the end of the week, I had happy-face stickers on every day, I would stick a large “Special Sticker” to the calendar as a reward and a reminder that I had succeeded for that week. Sometimes it would be a sticker of my own, but sometimes my roommate Amy would present me with my Special Sticker for the week, if she was duly impressed.

As I recall, I rarely got Special Stickers — maybe once a month, if that. Even so, the sticker system really did help me go to more classes. I’d look at my calendar and remind myself that if I could just make myself sit through [insert pointless 2:30 class here], I’d get my sticker for the day. Seems silly, but it worked. Even when I didn’t get a Special Sticker for the week, I could see the classes I’d ticked off on each day and say, well, I was only one class away from a Special Sticker this week!

Well, with me trying to focus on only a few things at a time these days, I decided that I would revisit the calendar-sticker strategy. I have a calendar by my desk with a list of daily to-do items: work on my portfolio, follow up with job apps, do one daily chore, wash dishes, walk for 45 minutes, and aikido once a week. I’ve pruned back a little, since I wasn’t able to do everything I wanted to do in an evening — now I’ll either work on my portfolio or follow up on a job app, for instance, but not both. Yet, I hadn’t gotten a daily sticker after over a week of trying my new-old system of reinforcement.

Last night, I looked at my daily list, and realized that I just had to do a daily chore and I’d get a sticker. So, pretty late at night, by the time I should have been having my Quiet Time and getting ready for bed, I cleared the remainder of the crap out of the suitcase that’s been sitting by my bed for two months, put it away, and counted my chore complete. Yay, sticker!!

Sure, it seems small and silly and childish… but, if it works, I’m all for it. It shouldn’t have been such an impetus ten years ago, either, but it was. It’s all part of taking joy in the small things, I suppose.

After I finish my new portfolio and secure a new job, I can shift to a new focus: writing, or genealogy, or whatever strikes my fancy in another month or so. Then I’ll set myself another reachable goal, lay out daily mini-goals like I have now, rinse and repeat. Eventually, I shouldn’t need my sticker system to keep me focused on-task. That’s the hope, anyway.