Optimist Under Siege

Is it bad that I just finished (and, except for a couple of exceptions, started) my Christmas shopping today? I just kept thinking I had another couple of months before the holidays. Isn’t Christmas supposed to be in February?! Seriously!

But hey, at least I’m DONE now. (It feels so good to say that!)

Of course, I was Christmas shopping at Starbucks because there have been a couple of days lately where the heat in our apartment wasn’t really working. This is me a few days ago. It is not staged…this is actually how I was sitting and working!



Now it’s snowing, but at least the heat has come on (and, in case you forgot, my Christmas shopping is done!).

I cooked an early Thanksgiving dinner for my mother and husband this year. I admit that I didn’t actually make a turkey (which I don’t really like that much anyway!), but we had sweet potatoes, stuffing, apple pie and other yummy stuff. It was actually rather satisfying putting it all together (yeah me!). And we got to use the good china and wine glasses…woo hoo! Here are some pics.





And this is what my husband did for most of the occasion…

A good time was had all around!

Guess what we were for Halloween!

Here are some hints. Yes, I’m a cat. Yes, my husband is a cat also, but he happens to be a dead cat.

Additional hint…yes, we are dorks. Yes, this has something to do with quantum physics.

That’s right, we’re Schrodinger’s cat!!!

The 2 whole people who understood our esoteric costume thought it was hilarious. Everyone else were basically like, “hey…nice cat and zombie costumes…whatever.”

That’s okay. We amused ourselves at least!

P.S. We’re leaving for a trip to London and Edinburgh tomorrow. So there will be a slight pause in blogging. See you all in about a week!

If you work at home, and even if you don’t, it’s pretty safe to say that you have at one time or another been victim to (*dum dum dum*- scary music) Mental Tangents. You get some kind of idea in your head and you just can’t seem to drop it, even though the more rational part of you knows you should have given it up hours ago.

Case in point. Last night I came to the realization that this weekend is labor day weekend and hey, wouldn’t it be nice to go somewhere relaxing? So this morning I stumbled out of bed and headed straight to my computer (without passing Go, collecting $200, or brushing my teeth). I was determined to find a relaxing, low-key vacation house/hotel/motel/inn/whatever that didn’t cost too much, was easy to get to, and wasn’t already all booked up. At this point, I’m sure some of you are already rolling your eyes at me because of the outrageous criteria I set for myself (low cost and not booked already? yeah, right).

But remember, this is a mental tangent, and once you find yourself caught up in one, it’s not always easy to have a clear perspective and nearly impossible to tear yourself away.

So I spent, well, let’s just say a significant portion of what might have otherwise been a very productive morning surfing random spam-filled last minute vacation sites to find just what I was looking for.

Surprise news flash: I was unsuccessful! At some point I forced myself to get up, brush my teeth, pack up my laptop, and LEAVE THE HOUSE, thereby physically leaving my mental tangent behind me.

And here I am at Starbucks trying to make up for lost time. Like Aesop’s fables, let this be a lesson to you. Be wary of those mental tangents! They’re always out there just waiting to suck your time away!

This was my birthday chocolate! Even the writing is edible!

So Wednesday was my birthday. I officially turned 29, still safely a gal in her twenties (thank you very much!). I received the requisite singing of happy birthday from my mom, which has always been an especially funny tradition considering that most of the members of my family (my mother and myself both definitely included) can NOT sing. Seriously, there’s no carrying of tunes going on at family gatherings. Except for my Aunt Linnea, but that’s cheating because she married in, being lucky enough to get her singing genes from somewhere else!

Anyway, this whole birthday thing made me reflect upon what kinds of things I would actually want to receive as gifts. I very much appreciate the fabulous dinner and rich chocolate my husband was good enough to shower upon me, and I will certainly appreciate any other gifts which come my way. But I realized that what I wish my family and/or friends would give me for my birthday is, as they say in the American Express commercials, “priceless.” Instead of gifts, I wish people would agree to participate in and comment on one my sites, blogs or forums, say twice a month. This would be better than any other gift I can think of, just to get the website ball rolling a little faster. And to make me feel that all my thoughts are not just being lost in the void of cyberspace.

That would be an amazingly thoughtful birthday gift. Sadly, I’m a little afraid to ask because I know that in today’s society time tends to be more of an issue than money. It’s a good idea anyway! So if anyone wants to get me a gift and happens to read this, now you know what I want.

P.S. This would work for Christmas presents too! *hint hint*

What are you doing on the computer on this vacation day anyway? (Don’t ask what *I’m* doing on the computer!) Go out, barbecue, set off fireworks (they’re legal in New Hampshire, a tip for any other New Englanders out there!), frolic, be merry!

I think it’s time I took my own advice…

(And I take it back…no time is a bad time to read my blog! Read away!)

It’s fun to have an internet connection while we’re traveling in France. Currently in Aix-en-Provence in southern France, we are in yet another hotel room which does not have any sort of shower curtain. Now I understand that it’s a cultural difference, etc. etc., but that cultural difference tends to leave a decent size puddle of water on the bathroom floor! Maybe I’m just a messy American showerer.

Aix-en-Provence and Avignon are the two cities we’ve visited that we’d most like to live in given the chance. I loved Carcassonne (which I saw for the second time), but the cool part of it (the medieval walled city) is a large tourist trap. Hey, don’t get me wrong, I was a tourist in that trap!

Anyway, both Aix and Avignon have cute towns and a fun, active vibe. On the downside, my husband and I went out for a drink at an Irish bar (of all places!) after dinner last night in Aix and it really made me miss the American bans on smoking in bars and restaurants. I don’t miss coming home smelling like smoke one bit! The other funny thing we came across is that the bar offered beers in pints and half pints. And how funny are those little tiny half pint beers! No wonder they have to smoke, to have something to do once the beer is gone!

A tout a l’heure!

I have a very smart husband. Who knew?

Case in point came earlier this week on my birthday. My actual birthday was Monday, but we celebrated early on Saturday night by going out dancing with some friends. So when my technical birthday came by on Monday, which is usually the night my husband goes off to a friend’s house to play World of Warcraft with a group of friends, he asked me if I wanted to do something else (even though we’d already officially celebrated my birthday). It seemed silly to ask him to miss his weekly WOW fun since we’d already celebrated my birthday anyway. I told him to go play with his friends.

Since I was using the laptop during the day (which he would need in order to play), I agreed to meet my husband halfway between our apartment and his workplace to give it to him. On the walk I was beginning to feel a little bit sad that I wasn’t going to do anything on my birthday. I knew it was stupid, and certainly unwarranted since I had definitely already celebrated it, but it was true.

So how did I know my husband was so smart? He greeted me with flowers and said he realized that he can’t go play with his friends on my birthday. No matter what I said. I was secretly happy about it and we went out to dinner. Good husband!

On the working at home front, things are going well but I had a pretty frustrating week. I have been working on reformatting my websites with CSS-Cascading Style Sheets- (and redesigning the layouts to be more professional) so that they would look better and appear in a more predictable manner across different browsers. I of course, as I mentioned in my last entry, use Safari, that great bastion of Appleness, but I know that the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily do the same!

I’ve been learning and using CSS as I go along and it’s been a wonderful, ever better learning curve, but I’m still new at it and so it’s a bit on the slow and arduous side. I do look forward to wowing (can I used that as a word, wowing?) you all with my fabulous new design. Eventually.

As I sit on my couch on this bright (but still way too cold!) Sunday morning, I write this entry to the lovely background noise of the God of War, Aries, trying to clobber Kratos in an epic battle. Ah yes, it’s great fun living with a video game lover! I, of course, am WAY too cool for video games. Oh yeah…except maybe for Dynasty Warriors. But that’s it. Well, Diablo II and World of Warcraft aren’t so bad. And I suppose Kingdom Hearts is actually pretty cool. That one is a neat girly video game using the heros and villains of Disney movies. I totally rescued Alice from the Queen of Hearts!

And once again, the realization sets in that maybe, just maybe, I’m not just a nerd, but might also have a bit of dorkiness in my soul. You’ll never get me to admit it though!

The problem with video games and I is that we just don’t have a long history together. We only started dating (video games and I) about a year after I met my husband, Eric. Coincidence? Perhaps not! Anyway, while Eric has had a video game love affair for many years now, I’m really just past the awkward stage where silences have become comfortable between video games and I. You know what I mean?

I enjoy certain games, as I mentioned above, but still have trouble with a few relatively unimportant things like moving. This particular skill seems to come up on a regular basis, unfortunately. But seriously, I don’t always get to face the monsters when there are cliffs and jumping involved because I can’t GET to the monsters. It makes things difficult!

Perhaps I’ll just have to give up video games and move on to lesser pursuits like reading or learning stuff. Sad, but true. Anyway, I hope everyone’s having a fabulous Easter whether or not you get to enjoy the singular pleasure of watching a devout video gamer strut his stuff. Eat chocolate, search for eggs, and be merry!

Easter is this weekend and it’s made me nostalgic for past Easter holidays. My family was never particularly religious, but we had a wonderful time celebrating the Easter bunny, Easter eggs, and Easter candy/toys! The highlight of the holiday was always my Uncle Bruce’s Easter egg hunt. He used to devise an elaborate, very well planned, massively scaled Easter egg hunt. On Easter afternoon my entire extended family would descend upon his house and ready ourselves for the challenge.

Now, the egg hunt was by no means simply a matter for myself and my three (and later four) cousins. Oh no! This hunt was for everyone, from the small girls to the big burly male adults (burly might be a bit of an overstatement here!). Each family member had a specific egg color assigned to them and those eggs would be hidden by Bruce as was befitting your skill level. If you were 5, your eggs were probably scattered in the grass. If you were 45, your eggs were probably just barely visible and possibly 6 or more feet off the ground! In addition to the candy you would find inside the eggs, there were also eggs containing slips of paper with numbers written on them. The numbers corresponded to prizes ranging from Godiva chocolate to cases of beer (again, age appropriate!). Then, there were special eggs that anyone could find. That put an added twist on events!

One of the best things about Bruce’s annual Easter egg hunts was the participation of the adults. One of my favorite pictures of my father is from the Easter egg hunt. Here’s my dad, over six feet, a big guy walking through the yard hunting for Easter eggs with a cute little pink basket! It’s such a funny image, and it just goes to show how good of a sport he was!

Well, I hope everyone has a fantastic Easter! Prepare yourselves…the bunny’s coming!