Two more days of phone-sitting, and then this job is done.

I meant to bring my short story to work on today and I totally forgot it. Grumble. Oh well. I guess today I'll catch up on all that TWoP reading I couldn't get to last week, and I'll write tomorrow. It's not like I won't have plenty of time to write after tomorrow, anyway.

I did remember to bring my knitting, at least. Today I just might finish the shawl that might be Miss Tess's bridesmaid shawl or might just be a pretty addition to my own wardrobe, depending on what color scheme we settle on. I'm ready to start pushing Matt toward colors that will coordinate with the shawl, though, because that thing has been a bitch to knit.

The weekend: Matt and I saw Walk the Line at the dollar movies, and it was good. I also watched Battlestar Galactica, and it was fracking awesome. Yesterday I cleaned and cooked and worked on organizing my bathroom, and managed to clear off an entire shelf for Matt, which for me was quite the accomplishment. It meant letting go of and throwing out many bottles of various product with thismuch (*holds thumb and forefinger close together*) stuff left in the bottom that I kept because I knew I'd get around to emptying into the newer bottles someday. My relief at being rid of the clutter outweighs my guilt at being wasteful. And hey, there's room for Matt's stuff in the bathroom now, finally. Go team me!

Speaking of, since after tomorrow I'll no longer have a job to carpool to, Matt's coming home with me tomorrow night to stay at the house and drive my car until he can finally get his truck back into drivable condition. I'm excited, but also a little nervous. It will be interesting having him there for that long, almost like a dry run for the marriage. Of course, he'll be sleeping on the sleeper sofa, which with the early hours he keeps means I'm not going to have access to my living room in the evenings; but fortunately my mom and I watch most of the same shows during the week, so I can just hang out with her until my bedtime rolls around. At any rate, things will simple up so much once we're married and sharing a bedroom.

Still here!

The movers are gone, and so is the server, and my internet is still here! Yay! I don't have to be all cut off from the world!

Also, I finally talked to my temp agency and they sounded pretty optimistic about putting me right back to work when I'm ready. So once I'm done here I'm going to take a solid week-and-a-half off to rest and write and get stuff done at home and just not worry about the job sitch. Again yay!

The Substance of Things Hoped For

Well, this is it. Most everything's packed and the movers are here. I've done all the work I can do--now I'm just hanging out, keeping an eye on the movers and babysitting the phones. I brought my knitting, and plenty of stuff to read, and Matt's promised to come keep me company after he gets off work. The movers have also promised to take their sweet time getting to the server room, but once the server goes, so goes my internet. I miss it already. I miss this place already. It's a sad day.

Oh well. Life goes on. I'll submit my resume to places, keep in touch with the temp agency, and hope for the best. As for the 'net, I still have access to my mom's computer, gorram slow thing that it is, so I won't be completely out of touch. Maybe once Matt gets moved out to the house we'll all be able to go in together on DSL. That's a little way down the road yet, though.

Speaking of Matt moving, he finally talked to his leasing office, and even with giving two months notice, if they can't find someone to take over his apartment by the time he's ready to move out, he'll have to keep paying for it until his lease expires. But! Last night, there we were hanging out on his patio when a woman from the other side of the complex walked up to say that she wants to relocate to a more energy-efficient apartment in two months when her lease expires, and the office told her to talk to Matt. Once they were done interviewing each other and exchanging contact info, she said she wants to shop around a little more and think it over, but that she'll let us know by Tuesday. *crosses fingers and prays*

Also: after he made some crack about me not being willing to elope, I reminded him for the umpteenth time that I would happily elope as long as I and my family still get to have a wedding later on, and I could practically see the gears in his head turning. I've also been researching Irish and German wedding customs to possibly include in our wedding, and one German custom is for the couple to have a civil ceremony for themselves first, and then have the big religious ceremony for the family later, albeit only three days later. Still, no reason we couldn't stretch that out a few months. So don't be too shocked if we end up just getting married and having him move in with me instead of having him rent separate quarters from my mom.

This post is already getting long, but it might be my last one for a while, so I might as well keep going.

Things I'm Hoping For

That I'll have enough savings and temp work and knitting/gift basket business to tide me over until after the wedding, so that I'll still have time to do things like plan my wedding and fix up my place (see below) and write my novel.

That I'll finish my short story within the next few weeks and sell it and get myself another writing credit for my query letters.

That I'll get back into a regular workout routine so I can start keeping up with Matt. Boy's lost quite a bit of weight and he's looking goooood. I've got to step up my game before he gets too hot for me.

That I'll be able to satisfy my nesting instincts, which have kicked themselves into high gear. I have a three-fold plan to do this. Step one is to de-clutter my place and put everything of potential value up on eBay. Step two is to sell everything else in a garage sale (and then either Freecycle the rest or give it to Goodwill). Step three is to use all of the proceeds to buy a real refrigerator (as opposed to the teeny dorm fridge I'm using now), a kitchen cart (and maybe a baker's rack, too) and, hopefully, enough paint and sewing material to at least re-do my ugly bedroom. No, it's not an original plan. It's a Clean House plan. But it's a plan, nonetheless.

I keep telling myself that I'm just going back to the plan that I had before I fell into this job, which I never dreamed would last an entire year. Said plan is thus: temp, write, get married. Then go from there. I don't think it's a bad plan. Sad as I am about losing the job, I'm relieved to be getting back on track. I'm relieved that I'll get to be a writer again.

Maybe it's not such a sad day, after all.

I'm meeeeellllting!

Slowly but surely, an inch or so at a time. I caught a gander at myself in the mirror this morning as I was getting dressed and noticed, for the first time, a distinct lack of love handles. Yippee! Of course, they're still there when I sit down (especially with the slouchy, slumpy way I sit), but when I stand up, it's uninterrupted curves, baby! *preens*

The fat is coming off slowly, but it is coming off, and without working out (and with the Valentine chocolates I got from Matt), which, as I've said before, is extremely encouraging. But one plus to being out of work in less than a week is that I'll have plenty of time to exercise, so that should speed up the process. I'm actually starting to fear that I'll have lost so much weight by the time I go to have my wedding dress fitted that they won't be able to take it up that much. Yes, there are definitely worse problems to have, but still, 'twould suck if that were the case. This is what I get for ordering my dress so early. Darn my gun-jumping enthusiasm.

In other news, the sun's finally out, the snow is melting, and that's quite enough winter for me for one year, thanks. Spring, you can move in now. Winter, skedaddle. You have my permission to come back around Christmas, but that's it. We're through.

Coming Attractions

Weird weekend. Winter finally decided to show up here in Oklahoma and shut us all down for the weekend with a coat of ice. The most exciting thing that happened was that I hung shelves in my bathroom. Yee. Haw.

I also watched The Jacket, a neat little movie that reminded me a little of Donnie Darko. Not in plot or tone, but in the way that when it was finished it made me go, "Huh. Well that was neat." It also had a bit of that Owl Creek Bridge relevance that I was talking about the other day. I need to watch it again to figure some things out. And to gawk some more at Adrien Brody's naked man-flesh.

Today begins my last full week at this job, which is sad, but I think it will stay too hectic to allow me to get in too much of a funk. Boss Lady's been at it again, e-mailing her contacts to see if anybody has a job they can recommend me for, and she got one nibble, so I'll send in my resume and see how that plays out. Otherwise, here's hoping the temp agency won't take too long in putting me back to work.

I'll probably be falling out of touch in the coming weeks, since my 'net access will be pretty limited. So look for fewer updates here, and don't expect me to keep up with your blog, if you have one. Probably the best way to keep in touch with me during my unemployed stint(s) will be through e-mail. Matt and I have talked about splurging on high speed access once we're married, but that's still a ways down the road. I'll try to still update here at least once a week, and I'll update the wedding blog as often as there's anything worth updating about.

I'll also make another go at the gift basket biz. It'll be tough, since I don't have the funds to update my inventory unless and until somebody buys something, but Matt says I'm not allowed to give up yet. I'll probably change the focus more to my knitted stuff, purses and such. Eh, I'll figure something out. So between that, the wedding planning, the home organizing and the novel writing, I ought to stay plenty busy in between jobs. No idle hands for me.

I'm going to miss my job, though. Sigh.

More from Suckville

Also, it's cold in the boss's office, I can't find the thermostat controls, and my frozen digits are making it hard to type.

Also also, the phones are practically non-stop, and most of the calls are for Boss Lady, and they're all of course RILLY URGENT OMGWTFBBQ!!!! At least until I tell them about her appendix, and then of course it can wait till Monday.

I hope today isn't an indication of what my last two weeks here are going to be like, but I guess if they keep on sucking that will make it easier to let go of this place and move on.

OMG today SUCKS so far. It's certainly the most stressful morning I've had in quite some time. It started with an incredibly stressed out Matt being incredibly surly because he feared our stopping to get gas would make him late for work (and that the fumes from the gasoline that splashed onto my glove was going to make him sick, or something). And then when he dropped me off to work, before I could even finish saying goodbye and trying to talk him into some semblance of calm before sending him back into the morning traffic, the New Gal showed up at my carside all with the questions already. And the questions didn't stop until a few minutes ago when Marketing Gal showed up and they went to grab some coffee. I couldn't even get time to make myself some coffee and eat my breakfast. Oy.

Now I'm on Boss Lady's computer--she called in sick today and is actually on her way to the hospital, thinking she might have appendicits, so somebody's definitely having a worse morning than I am today. I finally just turned my computer over to NG so she could practice processing new members and I could get away from her long enough to scarf down my oatmeal.

I'm slightly less grumpy now that I've eaten and gotten a few minutes of quiet time, but only slightly. I might need to force myself to do another Gratitude Journal entry today to gain myself some perspective. Or maybe I'll just revel in the grumpiness. The grumpiness is kind of comforting, in its own way.

Gratitude Journal, vol. 3: Being grateful that clever titles aren't mandatory

Things for which I'm grateful:

1. Matt, as usual. He's so sweet sometimes it hurts. Of course, he's also such a total guy sometimes that it balances out the sweetness and makes it bearable. And vice versa. Either way, I'm glad I get to marry him.
   
   
2. Hair dye. It's not that I mind looking older, but I do mind not looking the age I still think I am in my head, and my white hairs keep betraying my lack of wrinkles. Thankfully that's an easy fix.
   
   
3. Speaking of getting older, I'm grateful that James Marsters is still gorgeous. Even in pink.
   
   
4. That I got to be in this job long enough to learn new skill sets that I can put on my resume. And that my boss likes me well enough to write me a glowing letter of recommendation.
   
   
5. That in a couple of weeks I'm going to get to take a well earned rest. By then I'll have worked here 11 and a half months without a vacation. I'm ready for a bit of time off, even if it's just a week. Hopefully, it will be just a week.

And the contestant is...

Remember that challenge I issued a month or so ago, to take bad lines from SF submissions and turn them into something workable? I had one taker, and that would be Garnigal, whose entry was so amusing that I'm sure she would have smoked the competition, had there been any. As I promised (I know, it took me long enough), here 'tis:

'Something must have happened, since it's not like her to come back naked and not aware of anything.'*

Bob looked worriedly down the hall. His sister had stumbled into him on her way to her room,
clutching a blanket to her naked form and avoiding eye contact.

'Aww, I'm sure she's fine, Bobby. It's just a phase.'

He looked in disbelief at his stepmother, who was still engrossed in her Flare magazine.

'She was naked! She ran right into me and didn't say a word! That's not fine!'

'Bobby!' Leanne scolded, looking sharply at the ten year old. 'She's only two. When you are a baby, you sometimes go through those stages. I'm sure your father could tell us stories about you running around naked too.'

Bob decided not to make a big deal about it any more.

*Line from original SF submission

A formula for TMI

Girly TMI = pain

Filing = extended time on my feet

Girly TMI =/= getting any filing done today

OR

"Dear Gym Coach Office Supervisor:

Please excuse Jean from dodge ball filing today, as she is not feeling well this time of the month.

Thank you,
Jean's doctor uterus"

My genre- and chore-filled weekend

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Grey's Anatomy and Battlestar Galactica.

I watched Grey's Anatomy last night. I've been told multiple times that I should be watching this show, but I always respond that I'm too busy prepping my lunch for Monday and getting ready for bed. I usually catch the first five minutes or so, and I'm always intrigued, but once the opening credits come on I always dutifully turn off the TV and start puttering around, getting myself ready for Monday morning.

But last night, I stayed put and watched the whole thing. Wow, is all I can say. I guess I'll have to start getting my lunch made earlier from now on, because I do need to be watching this show.

Not that it made a difference last night, since I had the worst case of insomnia that I've had in quite a while. Not just because I kept seeing Kyle Chandler get blown to bits on repeat in my mind's eye, although that sure didn't help. I think spending my Sunday cleaning instead of relaxing simply got me too wired to sleep. But at least my place is clean! I didn't get any writing done, alas and shame on me, but I did get my new towel rack assembled, so go team me for that much, anyway.

Oh, but I did write a Valentine's poem for Matt. Well, I wrote it the other day, but I edited the heck out of it yesterday. It's still totally sappy and schmaltzy and I wouldn't show it to anyone but him, but it's straight from the heart. I typed it up and put it in a homemade card, which I'll present to him tomorrow along with a batch of low carb, sugar free peanut butter cookies that I also baked for him yesterday. These, by the way, taste much yummier than they sound.

Saturday wasn't that noteworthy, but it was pleasant enough. The weather was weird--winter finally decided to put in an appearance here in NE Oklahoma, but it gave a very scattered and confused performance and couldn't decide whether to command the scene and let it snow or cede the stage to Spring. But it came in with a lot of bluster, I'll give it that.

Matt and I braved the smattering of flurries to go wander around Michael's and look at yarns and silk flowers and the wedding craft aisles, hoping to come to some kind of consensus about a color scheme. Which, we didn't. Sigh. Then it was back to his place to watch Versus. I gotta tell you, I don't know if there's a name for this genre, but I'm loving these weird Japanese fantasy-horror-action movies that are just like live-action anime. And I didn't even know this one had zombies! Awesome! Zombies make everything better. Just ask George R. R. Martin.

Working backward through the weekend, this brings us to Friday night, which was pretty much as I said it would be, except my brandy lacked the hot chocolate and impaired my motor skills enough that I was afraid to try giving myself that pedicure. Oh, and [BSG SPOIILER ALERT]Billy's dead, thank you so much, you right bloody bastards. Just as I was really starting to love that poor kid. I already liked him better than Apollo and can't imagine why Dualla would dump that sweetie for Major Issues, but he's dead now, so what does it matter?[/SPOILER] Then again, I've just never been able to get invested in Lee. Starbuck either, util just recently. I know they're the ones that we're all supposed to be the most invested in, but for me it's always been about Boomer and Roslin and Bill and Helo and Gaius and Six and, yes, Billy and Dee. And now they've taken the last away and it feels like they're trying to force me to care about Lee, but I just can't. I've tried, and I can care about him for Bill's sake, and Kara's sake, and maybe even for Dualla's sake, but for his own sake, I just don't care. I'm sorry.

So today, work. I need to get my filing done, since the new gal will be here Wednesday and I'll probably be busy training her. I'm taking off early this afternoon and Matt's coming out to the house for a couple of days. Tomorrow's going to be a pretty low-key V-day, just hanging around the house together, but Wednesday night he's taking me out to dinner. He won't tell me where, it's a surprise. It's always a surprise when he takes me out, but it's always a pleasant surprise, and I'm looking forward to it. If you have V-day plans, I hope they're all you want them to be. And if not, I at least hope you get to partake of some good chocolate tomorrow.

A Lost Ramble

I haven't done a fandom post in a while, so I'm a little rusty. Bear with me.

I hope this isn't too obvious to too many people, but I can't ignore the book that Locke was (presumably) searching through for another missing filmstrip: An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge. In case you don't know, this is the story of a Confederate soldier who is about to be hung from a bridge during the Civil War. As the Union soldiers go to hang him, the rope snaps, and he plunges into the river below and swims away to freedom. Eventually he makes his way back home to his plantation, and his wife, who is waiting for him with open arms. Just as he's about to reach her for an embrace...

SNAP! The rope pulls taught and he is hung. His reprieve from death and everything that happened thereafter was merely an elaborate hallucination in his final moments.

Hmmm.

Maybe this means nothing. Maybe JJ just likes to throw out meaningless fodder for internet debates, and none of this seemingly significant symbolism has any significance whatsoever. Maybe it was just a shout-out to The Twilight Zone, of which a short film version of Owl Creek Bridge served as the pilot episode. But if St. Elsewhere could turn out to be the imaginings of an autistic kid, and the life of Dick Loudon could turn out to be a nightmare of Bob Hartley, then, well. An Owl Creek sort of ending to this show won't really surprise me.

Roller Coaster of Lurve (Ooh ooh ooh!)

Weird week, fraught (yes, FRAUGHT!) with ups and downs. Friday couldn't come too soon.

Monday night I hit Target again and came home with a bounty of shelves (and a towel rack!) for my bathroom. I had every good intention of installing them and getting my organizing-fu on for Tuesday, but I only had time to get in a couple hours of writing before Matt called, sounding about as depressed and dejected as I've ever heard him sound, doing that "No, that's okay, you don't have to come over, I'll be okay" thing in a voice that says "Yes please, come over, I'm dying, come here right now." So I dropped everything and went. I don't do that often (nor does he ask (or hint for) me to), but he doesn't sound like his whole world is collapsing in on him that often, either. It was the least I could do.

Turns out he woke up with a weird pain in his side and it freaked him out and sent him on a downward spiral of fearing his own mortality, getting sick again and making me a young widow, losing his vision (he's been having some diabetes-associated vision problems -- it's correctable, but still, scary)... the usual. Plus he just rilly rilly missed me. Aw. So we hung out and snuggled and talked and he got all his fears off his chest and I listened and encouraged and promised to stick with him no matter what happens, and as he began to cheer up our conversation became less serious and more fun, and we ended up spending hours just lying around and talking about whatever. Hadn't done that in a long time. We're always so on the go and we usually only have a couple hours together a day, so we try to cram in wedding talk and DVDs and whatall. It felt really good to reconnect with him like a newly dating couple. By the time I got back home, I was pretty well over the whole organizing jones and ready to crash before the telly. So that was my Tuesday.

Wednesday and Thursday were a blur of work hecticity and wedding discussions and minor snit-inducing disagreements with the boy, the upshots of which are that we've got our wedding date and honeymoon options considerably narrowed down, and that often if he does something boneheaded and sorta jerky he comes around to realizing that he was boneheaded and jerky and corrects his own behavior fairly quickly without my having to do much more than look faintly disappointed at him, and then he's back to wonderful again. Sigh. Can't help loving that man o' mine.

Today, I'm alone at the office (for a few hours, anyway), and I've been told to save all of the membership paperwork for training the new gal, who will be flying in from the new office in DC next week to learn how to do my job. So I'm catching up on all of the clerical stuff I've been neglecting. I'm starting to wish that I brought my writing, but I'd probably be too distracted by the interwebs to work on it anyway. I did indeed start that story that I mentioned on Monday, but when my intro crept up to the thousand word mark and I didn't even get to the main action yet, I figured it's going to be bigger than I originally thought. It might even turn out to be marketable, which means I'd better not post it here after all. Well, maybe an excerpt of the rough draft, but that's all. We'll see. It's been pretty much impossible to squeeze in any more writing time since Tuesday morning, but I have high hopes for the weekend.

Not tonight, though. Tonight will bring a pedicure and a cup of hot chocolate with a shot of brandy and Battlestar Galactica and some fast & furious shawl knitting. I :heart: Fridays.

Motivation is a Fickle Mistress

...and also a big ol' tease. She got me all excited and rarin' to go this morning, and then she abandoned me to Monday apathy. Bitch.

So how was your weekend, dear reader? Mine was pleasant--not terribly exciting, but pleasant. Matt and I made a sojourn to the organic market, where he found himself in nitrate-free sausage heaven and I picked up some of that steel cut slow cooking oatmeal that that Zone guy's always going on about. That place always features a fun mix of aging yuppies, aging hippies and hip, artsy twenty-somethings, neither of which crowd we fit into, but I think we managed not to do too blantant an impersonation of sore thumbs. And you wouldn't think that of those groups it would be the hippies who are the most pushy and rude. But you would be wrong. This one woman in particular--who actually looked like she used to be a hippie but has since sold out and joined the Lexus crowd but can't quite let go of her hippie roots--literally shoved me out of her way no fewer than three times, one of which she nearly dropped a jar of peanut butter on my foot. Good times. At least she had the grace to apologize for the near-miss.

On Sunday I managed to completely avoid all Super Bowl hype. I spent my Super Sunday with Superman -- watching both the Smallville ep I'd missed Thursday (*sniff* bye-bye DaddyBo) and a couple eps of Lois & Clark -- and organizing all of the paper clutter that I've amassed over the last six months. Every stray piece of paper in my place got either filed, shredded or tossed. I was feeling rather super myself by the end. Oh, and I also did my taxes. I'm getting back enough to cover Matt's wedding ring. Or possibly a new refrigerator. Either way, HOORAY!

And now I suppose I should get off my arse (figuratively, at least) and spend at least a couple hours earning my keep around here. Maybe later (if the guilt will let me) I'll type up a scene (possibly the beginnings of a short story, but most likely just a stray scene) that's been floating around in my noggin all weekend and post it. Maybe. After I've at least dealt with all the crap that needs to be mailed out this week that should have gone out last week and all the new conference registrations that showed up in my e-mail this morning. I just need to woo motivation to come back and get a rise out of me again. This time hopefully she'll stick around and follow through.

Set Phasers to *STAB*

To the guy in the big white Chevy Blazer who cut me off while gabbing on his cell phone this morning: Phaser canons, pal. Just be you glad that I don't have 'em.

I did indeed get my Mega Mind pills last night, so I'm in a much more focus-y state of mind today. Huzzah!

My last day at this job got moved back to the 28th, since that's when our lease expires and there won't be any more office to come to after that day. As it is I'm probably going to have to bring a camping chair to sit on my last couple of days, as all of the furniture will have been shipped off to DC by then, so it'll just be me, a phone, and a laptop. Good times.

I guess it's high time I started working on a plan of action that involves updating my resume and kissing up to the temp agency recruiter. I'm saving money as aggressively as I can in the mean time, in case it takes them a little while to find me more work, but I'm not too worried. I've got a bit of tenure and a lot of good feedback in my file, so even though I don't have a relationship with the current recruiter, I don't think they'll let me stay idle for too long. In the mean time, I'll be pimping the hell out of all my knit goods and hawking a lot of my clutter on eBay. So I'm not worried. Everything will be just fine.

There might be a new development, too. I've been hesitant to blog about this since it's still kind of up in the air, pending Matt's ability to get out of his lease, but if he can, then he'll be moving out to Casa de Mama and renting out a room from my mom until the wedding. It'll be beneficial to everybody involved--he'll save money on rent that he can put towards various other things he's been putting off for lack of funds (among them my engagement ring), my mom will be making extra cash that she'll put toward the wedding, and I won't live 50 minutes away from my sweetie and splitting all of my time between two homes anymore, which means that I'll be in a much better position to get myself a real, full time job. This probably won't happen for a couple of months, as I think that's how much notice Matt's apartment complex requires to let him out of his lease. But it's sure going to simple things up a lot.

In other news, I finally got around to pulling up my free credit report, and lo, what a black hole of depression it turned out to be. Sigh. It seems twenty-something me's inability to manage her finances is still screwing things up for thirty-something, responsible me. That's right up there with twenty-year-old me's educational apathy and inability to make decent grades keeping thirty-year-old, straight-A-student me from getting into any honor societies. Makes me wish I could build a time machine just to go back ten years and give myself a good smack upside the head. Anyway, I sure hope this won't mess too much with our plans to consolidate all of our debts once we're married.

Bridezilla To Be

The Wedding Blog is a go.

Ugh.

I ran out of my ADD supplements last week, and I procrastinated too long on ordering more. So now its been long enough for them to completely run out of my system, which means that the day's only about two-thirds over and my brain's already fried to a nice crunchy texture and smothered in fog-sauce.

Ew.

Anyway. Hopefully there'll be a package from the vitamin shop waiting for me when I get home tonight so that I'll be able to muster up some semblance of productivity tomorrow. Or at least get through the day without wanting to curl up underneath my desk and block out all sensory input.

I need to e-mail our pastor and find out his availability in August. I asked Matt to do it, since that officially falls under "groom's duties," but he was all, "You're the one with the regular computer access, why don't you do it?" Which, point. I also want to start a separate wedding blog so I don't have to keep blathering about this stuff here, and more importantly so that I can give out the URL to relatives without having them read up on my personal life. I've been meaning to do this for a while now, but I'll start, look at the state of my in box, feel guilty, and stop. And then go read TWoP, heh. Or Miss Snark. There's still guilt, but slacking off somehow engenders less guilt than using company time to work on a personal project. Which is exactly why I haven't e-mailed the pastor yet.

But today just might be the day that the wedding blog gets launched, seeing as how processing these membership applications is about to make me tear my hair out.

Oh, but there is some good news. This zone diet I'm on, if I add enough Omega 3 fish oil, which is generally recommended for homeopathic treatment of ADD anyway, will supposedly lessen the severity of both my ADD and my PMS symptoms, and could all but eliminate the latter over time. It sure sounds worth a try. *adds fish oil to shopping list* The idea of not having a monthly excuse on which to pin my irrational behavior is a little daunting, but if I could just stay sane all month long, I'll consider it a fair trade.

Target is my happy place. Even when they're cheesing me off.

Yesterday: Had a nice day off that was an unusual combination of productive and relaxing. The most noteworthy thing is that I wrote a thousand words on the novel, which, HOORAY! I haven't sat down and rattled off a thousand words in a depressingly long time. Usually it's more like trying to force about half that -- and only actually accomplishing a quarter -- before giving up and shutting off the computer in frustration. Even yesterday took an hour of staring and pouting and fretting that I shouldn't even refer to myself as a writer any more for all of the non-writing that's actually getting done before I finally started pounding the keys, and then before I knew it I'd written several pages of stuff that I didn't even hate! Yay!

Later, after dutifully paying my bills and budgeting this week's pay, I went grocery shopping, and then stopped at Target where I spent an hour shopping for lingerie and bathing suits, figuring I could get the cute stuff they put out this week while they've still got it in my size and put it all on layaway--only to learn that Target doesn't do layaway anymore. Feh. I know, I could have signed up for a Target card and gotten them on credit, but the last thing I need right now is another charge card, so I sadly put it all back. Hopefully they'll still have the bathing suit I wanted in my size by the time I can afford to pay cash for it. Grumble grumble. But then I cheered myself up by letting myself pick ten items from the $1 Spot bins, the booty of which included:

A jumprope, which I brought with me to the office and jumped rope this morning. If I can do that every day maybe I can speed up my journey from almost size 10 to actual size 10.

Two laundry bags. Matt and I both have ancient laundry bags that are falling apart, so I got a new one for each of us.

A letter tray. This will go in my entryway to help me keep track of bills and whatall.

An earring organizer. Right now I keep all my earrings in a little beaded votive holder, which is cute, but when I need to find a pair I have to dump them all out on the counter. This new thing is less cute but way more practical.

A Valentine's day gift bag and various other organizing goodies.

I also picked up from Wal-Mart a portable file organizer. I generally prefer a binder system for filing at home, but I've got too many binders taking up too much shelf space. Hopefully I can consolidate some of them into this thing. Plus it has a smaller section just for coupons and a whole big pocket for pens and scissors and such. As I picked it out I thought of you, fenwic, as it's just the sort of thing you'd recommend.

When I got home I had good intentions of putting some of my new organizing toys to work, but by then I was pretty much pooped, so I managed some light housekeeping and pet upkeep before settling in to knit and watch TV. I did not watch the State of the Union address. I did watch Gilmore Girls and Supernatural. The former continues to be frustrating, yet still pretty funny; the latter continues to be all about the eye candy. Those boys are so cute in their Men In Black suits.

Today: Got in some quality smoochies with my sweetie before work, jumped my rope, and now I'm trying to stay on top of things and not let them pile up again the way they have been lately. A lot showed up in my in box yesterday, though, and this morning's mail brought a lot of checks that need processing, so that outlook is grim. Also, my neck is stiff and I could really use a chair massage. But since that's not gonna happen, I'm gonna go fix myself some coffee as usual, and get crackin' on those checks.