We went to the feed store and bought the cats food. The cats are happy.

We went to the market and bought two weeks worth of cow and pig. The freezer and the humans are happy.

Then we met up with D&M (what should I call you guys?) at Buffet Palace on West Gate for lunch. I ate a ton of sushi. I didn’t even look at the rest of the buffet. I was there for the sushi and hanging out with some friends. My stomach and heart are happy.

And D loaned me an Acer Aspire Netbook! I have poked at it just enough to figure out which of my portable data devices best works to move files to it for reading on the couch. I was going to go buy a thumbnail drive today, but seriously, I have all manner of things that hold large amounts of data, so it seemed silly to get something new. The camera ended up being the best “portable hard drive” for the job, so I’ll use that for now. I’ve got some books on the netbook, and tonight, I shall be reading on the couch! Woo hoo!

Yup, I have totally cool friends. Now I can see whether or not being able to read and write away from the massive distraction of the internet (and email and everything else) at my desk means I get any more reading and writing done, as well as how well I like using a portable computer … without going to buy one first and finding out I don’t like it, or it doesn’t really mean I get more reading and writing done. I actually think moving away from the desk is going to mean some serious actual work gets done, because I have SO many distractions at the desktop, and I am SO easily distracted. Why, I might even leave the house and go to the library with the thing to totally get away from household distractions (i.e. cats, barking dogs, and so on) altogether! You never know! It could happen! Why, seeing as Austin has WiFi downtown, I might even post something from out in the world (like that won’t be a distraction)!

I’ll probably be babbling more later, but right now, the netbook is charging and my stomach is still digesting that ton of sushi, so I believe I’m going to go have a little nap. Stayed up too late last night and got up too early this morning. A little dose of snoozing will be good right about now.

It’s Friday. Friday night is pizza night. Friday night is always the night I make pizza. This is one of the rare, never-wavering and stable events in the lives of everyone at Casa de Orb.

So why is it I have fillet mignon coming to room temperature on the work table, a fresh veggie salad and homemade salad dressing chilling in the fridge, and snow peas and mushrooms waiting to be sauteed? Why did I just spend the last hour prepping these thing for dinner tonight?

Well, apparently, I forgot it was Friday.

The truly stupid thing about this is that I know very well tomorrow is Saturday. I have been talking with friends about various plans we all have tomorrow, well aware the entire time that these plans were taking place tomorrow … and that tomorrow is Saturday.

Yet I completely and totally forgot it was Friday and that Friday is pizza night, as it has been for so long, I no longer remember when it began.

I doubt there will be much complaining from the other human who lives here. Steak beats pizza any day of the week.

Four times I have risen from my desk chair in the last 30 minutes and gone to the living room to take some aspirin to ease the headache threatening to split my skull open. Four times I have come back from the living room having forgotten to take the aspirin.

Not that I just walked to the living room and turned around and came right back to my desk. No, I got distracted by other things to do. Things apparently more interesting and important than taking the aspirin to quench the pounding in my head.

The first time, I clipped my fingernails and toenails.

The second time, I sat down and read an article in an art magazine.

The third time, I filed my fingernails and toenails.

The fourth time, I cleaned the Ionic Breeze.

And of course, during the coming and going of each trip from den to living room, I had to stop and play with the wild and rambunctious cats in the kitchen.

I am now going to make one final trip to the living room to take some aspirin. This time, I am going to carry along my mug-o-water and the empty aspirin bottle that is sitting on my desk. Perhaps with such unsubtle reminders in hand, I will not forget what I went to the living room to do and the aspirin might make it into my mouth, enter my digestive system and bloodstream, and knock out this awful headache.

One can only hope nothing interesting distracts me on my way to and fro. I seem to be just a little bit prone to distraction today, or perhaps I am actually becoming senile.

I need an old laptop or a netbook. This is now no longer a want. It’s an actual need. I can even prove I need this!

Almost all of my gardening notes and information is in digital form. Almost all my knitting books and patterns are in digital form. There are oodles of books, reports, and scholarly papers (as well as legislation) that I read regularly, and almost all of them are in digital form. I need to be able to access these things somewhere other than at my computer desk. I can’t possibly sit at my desk and read and do the things I want to do. My desk isn’t that comfortable, and I hate being stuck in the den all the time.

Additionally, I write. A lot. I write far more than ever gets posted anywhere online. The last few weeks several people have prodded me about writing a book. People have been prodding me to write a book for years. I would like to write a book (if I could ever decide what to write about), but I do not want to have to sit at my desk in the den to do it. It’s just not conducive to creatively writing for long periods, and I do most of my best thinking in other places … like the living room, the kitchen, and the front porch. It would be great to be able to write when the thought hits me, no matter where I am, and my hand just don’t do handwriting well at all anymore. Never really did, if truth be told, but my crappy handwriting has only gotten crappier, and my hands start hurting after a very short period of time spent with pen and paper. Typing is easier and, for me, way WAY faster (and more legible).

The time has come to admit that having some way to access and create data away from my desk is a need and not a want. The laptop/netbook doesn’t even have to be anything terribly fancy. Al it has to do is be able to read PDF files, open JPG files, and run some kind of word processing software (itself not needing to be anything fancier than Notebook or Textpad). It would be nice if it could wirelessly connect to my computer in some way and access the internet, but it wouldn’t be that much of a problem if it didn’t. I really just need a small, portable, barebones way to read and write and look at (but not necessarily edit) images. Therefore, whatever it is I am looking for doesn’t have to be some state-of-the-art newest possible technology that’s going to cost an arm and a leg. I’m looking for something cheap and likely used … though if there is a cheap option that is new, that would be cool too.

So … suggestions? What should I be looking at or thinking about? Don’t even ask about a budget. There really isn’t one. I might be able to pull together a little money, but likely not hundreds of dollars. Definitely not more than a couple hundred dollars. The less spent the better actually, since even though this would be really useful to me, it’s not exactly a life-or-death sort of thing. I can continue to live without it.

I really want to start seriously considering writing a book of some sort, and I think this may be a crucial key to doing so (not to mention being able to read all the stuff I read somewhere other than at my desk). Too many distractions at the desk, it’s not at all comfortable (no matter what I do to improve it), and the den is less than conducive to creativity. So I need to be freed from my desk and from having to write with pen and paper when not at my desk. It would make my life entirely different, and I think it would lead to greater creative output.

And if anyone has such a device lying around not being used and would like to donate to the cause or is willing to barter for it (I hear I’m a pretty good knitter and seamstress and graphic designer/artist – and I’m not entirely cash barren at the moment), let me know. Maybe we can work something out.

I can feel the season slowly starting to change. It’s in the air. Just a hint of crispness. The promise of cooler weather on the horizon.

Sure, it’s still 80ºF when I wake up before dawn, and it will be over 100ºF at some point today, but it’s there in the morning air. I can feel it.

Fall is coming. Fall is coming!

Could the porch chops ever just fit in the frying pan without it being some kind of jig-saw puzzle of doom designed to test the length of my anger fuse?!

I either need to buy a larger skillet or buy smaller porch chops. Unfortunately, my skillet is already quite large, and I bought the two smallest pork chops the Richardsons had available.

Seriously, HUGE pork chops from HUGE lean pigs.

I didn’t have to watch the allergy report on the news this morning. My nose informed me moments after my eyes opened … there’s something in the air. I have been sneezing my brains out all day. It’s mold spores, of course. My nose, it hates the mold spores like nothing else.

Now on the one hand, the fact my sinuses and lungs are open enough to react to something in the air enough to cause sneezing is a good thing, considering I had quite a little infection going on in my nasal passages last week. Also, the sneezing and coughing is a good thing right now, because it’s helping clear out the last of that gunk. On the other hand, having just had a sinus infection and my immune system taking a beating for it, I am in a bad position right now. It wouldn’t take much for the infection, which I doubt is 100% cleared up yet, to flare up again. I won’t be able to kick it by myself a second time so soon without seeing a doctor. So I’ll be spraying things up my nose and taking pills and keeping my fingers crossed. As long as I am still sneezing, it’s all good. When I stop sneezing, because I can’t freaking sneeze, that’s when the problems start.

I actually feel pretty good today. Not great. Still not 100% at all, but pretty damn good. It feels good to feel good!

Since I am nattering on about my health, I might as well give you an update on my poor busted toe. It’s getting better! I have continued to do physical therapy on it to try to regain full movement, and it seems to be working. Stretching, flexing, bending, and making the poor thing work out against its will sucks, as any physical therapy after an injury does. It hurts. Thank goodness it’s just a toe. I can work it until it bothers me, and then I can put on shoes and ignore it. But it’s coming along, which makes me happy. I have always had really flexible and agile toes, and while it would be easier and less annoying to just let the thing heal however it wants to heal, even if that means it gets stiff and non-flexible, I’ve discovered that if one toe on my foot won’t bend, none of them will. Very strange, and I won’t have it. I like using my monkey feet to pick things up off the floor. Saves my poor back.

And other than that, I don’t have anything to report. I’m a little low energy today, and I don’t seem to be getting much of anything done. To be honest, there isn’t much to get done, though you know there’s always some housework I could be doing. I’m feeling lazy though and a little woozy in the head from the allergy pill, so it’s likely I will continue to not get much done today.

I’m sure I’ll make up for it at a later date. I always do.

One of the things I did to that damn canvas this afternoon is taking forever to dry. Looks like I will have to let it sit overnight. So much for making myself get it done by sunset today! Oh well, didn’t know the stuff I was going to use was sooooo slow drying. Live and learn.

In other news, I am feeling much better, but I am still so tired that staying awake, even when I have had plenty of sleep, feels nearly impossible. What gives with this heavy fatigue?!

I’m going to go do the dishes, plan dinner, and as soon as we have eaten tonight, I am going to allow myself to crash into a (hopefully) blissful sleep. I hope I don’t fall asleep too early, because I’d love to watch some news and The Daily Show, but that’s what DVR’s are for, right? Though I have to tell you, time-shifted news programs aren’t all that interesting. News is only good when fresh.

Man, I would love to take a nap, but it’s way too late in the day for that. If I can only keep moving for a few more hours!

“Health care is not a right!”

For anyone who has ever typed or uttered that statement, let me translate it for you into the phrase you should be using — its actual meaning:

“You don’t have the right to live!”

If health care isn’t a right, then that’s what these people are saying … that there are people who have no right to live, people who, one can presume, they feel are less than them in some way. That certainly sounds more harsh than simply saying health care isn’t a right, but it’s significantly more honest. If someone truly feels health care isn’t a right, and that people can and should be denied health care for any reason they personally see fit, then they should own that attitude and be honest about it.

Furthermore, I would also like to address the “I don’t want to pay for some fat slob sitting on his couch stuffing bags of Doritos, packaged of Twinkies, and six-packs of beer down this throat while slowly killing themselves with cigarettes” attitude. I can guarantee you there are fat slobs sitting on couches right now stuffing all manner of crap down their throats, chain smoking, and never exercising who do, in fact, have jobs and health insurance … and the people buying insurance from the same company as these supposed fat, unhealthy slobs are already paying for that person’s unwise health decisions and subsequent health issues.

It’s as if people seem to believe that everyone who has health insurance is out there jogging a few miles every day and eating totally organic vegan meals and would never, ever do anything that might harm their health. If this were true, America wouldn’t be one of the fattest nations on the planet, heart disease wouldn’t kill nearly as many Americans as it does, and McDonalds would have gone out of business ages ago. The poor, unemployed, and disadvantaged are not the only ones who don’t take care of their bodies as well as they should (sometimes they do a better job of it, in fact), and if someone has insurance, they are paying for their fellow insured’s bad diets and slothful ways.

I’m growing tired of all the health care debate and hate. As I said last week, no matter if a bill passes or what the bill says, it will likely not make any difference in my life at all. I will no doubt find myself in the same position I am in now with little to no health care, health issues that will never be addressed or treated, and a shorter lifespan because if it. I guess that makes me one of the people who don’t have a right to live.

I began my morning bemoaning the fact I had taken a misstep on a canvas I have been working on^†. I even started a whining post about how I’d moved ahead, applied some paint, and now hated the outcome from which there was no turning back.

Instead of posting it, I closed the browser window, saw Lin off to work, and then carried the canvas into the back yard and applied even more of the same paint. I didn’t expect that to make any difference in my feelings toward having yet one more canvas not headed in the direction I initially intended it to go, but lo and behold, the new direction I just found isn’t so bad after all. In fact, I think I like it.

Since I had a really busy Sunday (very unusual for me), I think I will be taking today off from my normal life and spending more time with the canvas today. In fact, my goal is to have it declared finished by the time the sun sets. I really need to start pressing myself more on getting paintings finished … or rather … being able to declare something finished instead of working it to death (at which point I always declare it hideous and ruined).

Today’s mission, which I have chosen to accept is to put things on that canvas and have something that could be hung on a wall by the end of the day. No plan. No intentions. No thoughts in my head about the finished project. I’m just going to play with the stuff I have available to play with and get messy. I’m going to have fun with it, if I have to forced myself to do so. Yes, today I am going to pretend I am five years old and just got my first real art supplies.

And when I am done, no matter how much I hate it, I promise to post a photo of the finished product.

1. † Actually, I began my morning bemoaning the fact I have three cats who think waking me up 30 minutes before my alarm goes off is acceptable, but that’s a daily complaint, isn’t it? [↩]

I laid down to take a little nap at 5:30 pm yesterday. My alarm went off an hour later. I hit the snooze button for another hour, then I turned off the alarm. Lin tried to wake me up at some point. All I remember is telling him I didn’t want to get up and “sleeping feels good.” I slept until 5 am this morning.

I might have slept even longer, were it not for the cats. One cat in particular successefully managed to take me from completely asleep to wide awake in a matter of a second. How did little Tora succeed at rousing me so quickly? No, not a cat fart in the face this time.

There is a very large and very heavy antique mirror on my chest of drawers. It’s the sort that would normally be hung on the wall, but I have had it sitting on the chest of drawers and leaned against the wall since we moved into the house 6 years ago. It has never once budged … until this morning when, cat-assisted, it fell forward and hit the edge of the bed with a very loud WHUMP.

Now it’s a damn good thing my hands, arms, legs, feet, or head wasn’t anywhere near the edge of the bed when that happened, because I am 100% certain that heavy and large mirror with the heavy and large wooden frame would have broken any bone it came into contact with after falling as far as it did. I suppose it’s also lucky no cats were in its path as well, but at the moment, I wasn’t especially concerned about any murderous cats who might get injured in the course of trying to off me. So, good thing Lin fell asleep on the couch last night, which means I was pleasantly sprawled out in the middle of the bed and not draped over the side as I usually am. Still gave me quite a start to my morning though.

Amazingly, the mirror itself didn’t break. I’ve had a couple of large modern mirrors break, and they did so easily, with only a little bump or slight pressure. Antique mirrors? Apparently tough enough to survive a long fall and wake the sleeping dead.

And how did I know it was Tora that did the evil deed? There were no sounds of other cats scurrying away, and she was sitting beside the previous upright location of the mirror frame staring at me. Not running away like cats do when they do something bad either. Just sitting there … staring. When Tora first came to live with us, I posted a photo of her, and one of my LJ friends noted that she looked like the sort of cat that would kill a person while they slept. At the time, I didn’t want to believe it, but now? Yup, she’s pure evil!

Project one for today after breakfast will be to secure the mirror to the wall.

Lin called and wanted to know if we had to go to the market tomorrow for food. By “had” I do mean “are we are going to starve if we don’t,” because I’d already told him we needed to go. Well, he has to do some site walks tomorrow, and if we go to the market, he’ll have to do them in the afternoon, which would suck on a few levels. First it would mean having to wake up early on a Saturday and being busy all day, and second, it’s freaking hot out there in the afternoon.

I, being the wonderful and accommodating wife that I am [snort], told him we didn’t “have” to go to the market, and I could make do with what we have in the house. Or, you know, I could buy food at the grocery store like a normal person. It can’t possibly kill us to eat the same foods the rest of the planet does. So now everyone is happy. He gets to get his work done in the morning when it’s cooler. I don’t have to pretend to be human on a Saturday morning. Also we don’t have to make an extra trip next weekend to get cat food, since we can do that on our way back from the market, which we will “have” to go to next Saturday … or we will starve (as will the cats).

When we were haggling about how necessary the trip to the market was, my initial thought was to be kind to him, because it’s really been miserable in the afternoons lately with both high heat and humidity. He’s been out in it so much this week, and I know he’s tired and grumpy because of that. But then I hung up the phone and realized I now don’t really have to get up in the morning, and this makes me happy.

Oh, I’ll get up to make his coffee, but I guarantee you my still-not-feeling-100% self will immediately crawl right back into bed. Though he did say I didn’t have to get up and make him coffee, and I might just take him up on that. Not setting an alarm and sleeping in is a wonderful thing! In fact, sleep itself is so nice, I think I’ll have a nap right now.

After eating some lunch, I decided to go through the 153 drafts I had sitting around in Wordpress. It didn’t take me long to start judging them by the title alone, and by the time I got to things from last year that I had apparently never reopened after saving it as a draft, well … I just went delete happy. I now only have 19 drafts sitting around in Wordpress. Every one of those just needs to be transferred to Livejournal, because they are mostly things only of importance to me or things I decided I really don’t want to share with anyone else. In other words, a bunch of private posts.

Feeling good about getting that done. Now if I can only stick to the rule to never let something sit around in draft form for more than a week, that would be great. In fact, I should never allow myself to save things as a draft, because they rarely, if ever, end up getting posted.

What I should do this afternoon is go through the 640 links I have saved in my Read It Later list. Yeah … 640 links. I imagine I will be doing a lot of skimming and deleting without reading, and at some point I’ll just delete them all without even looking at them. If it was really important or really interesting, I bet I run across it again. I have obviously broken my rule about never letting there be more than 50 links in that list. I really need to stick to that one too.

One day I hope to deal with all the electronic trash cluttering my hard drive. Who am I kidding? One day?! It took me years to collect it all. I’m pretty sure it will take more than one day to deal with it. I think I’ll start by burning stuff off to CD that I know I want to keep, like knitting patterns. I’m embarrassed to tell you how many gigabytes of that kind of stuff I have sitting around on my computer … almost never being looked at or used. Some people horde porn. I horde knitting patterns.

I should probably be doing something else today, rather than sitting here clearing the crud from my digital life, but it has to be done from time to time, and I feel like doing it today. Baking bread can wait until tomorrow.

Anyone want to know what happens when one fills a sink with hot, soapy water, tosses in some greasy dishes, and then one starts ranting about health care online without noticing only the hot water was turned off and the cold water is still very slowly and quietly trickling into the sink?

Eventually a gathering of cats will form in the kitchen, and at the same instant the water begins to pour over the edge of the sink, said cats will begin meowing wildly alerting one to the impending disaster.

I’m going to go refill the sink now and do the dishes.

Remember, I do the stupid stuff so you don’t have to!