I realized one night that I wasn't doing ANY kind of journalling any more, either here or on paper. And I love paper journals. The problem was mostly that I don't have a convenient and comfy place to write at home, and I'm usually tired by the end of the day, so I'd think about writing but never get around to it. So now, I've cleaned up my dried fountain pen and carry my paper journal with me, so I've been writing a lot during lunch. Everything's still fresh in my head then and I'm usually chewing actively on something during the day anyhow. My handwriting still bites, especially when I try to keep up with my thoughts.

Fountain pens are a lot different than ball points - you never really apply pressure, the pen just glides over the paper and leaves ink behind. If you try to apply regular writing pressure, you'll mess up your nib. Last time I was shopping for pens, I came across a neat article about how your fountain pen gets personalized as you use it, that the way you handle it shapes the nib to your use and you shouldn't loan out fountain pens. I knew that just from seeing people mash the nib into the paper, but I didn't know it was a more subtle thing as well. Neat.

Heh, I need to get a bird bath heater - I went outside today to refill the ground feeder and the water was just a big chunk of ice.

I've got quite the backyard wildlife feeding thing going on now. I originally wanted to attract squirrels, because hand-feeding the local squirrel population has long been a family tradition. I have one regular and a couple drive-by squirrels, in addition to a small flock of cardinals, mourning doves, a bazillion sparrows and a budgie. I think that one escaped from a nearby home, although apparently escaped budgies do live in the wild quite well, so I hope my feeder is helping this one make it through winter.

I also have a couple birds I haven't identified yet. I bought an Audubon field guide and found the Dark-eyed Junco, but the big grackley, starlingy birds that fight noisily over the squirrel feed still need to be identified.

I'm buying the feed by the 20# bag now, stored in five-gallon buckets in the living room - now if I can just find bulk peanuts. Half of squirrel feed is corn, and my squirrels don't seem to be big corn fans. At least, there's a lot of it left over after the rest is picked out, and it never gets eaten. I'm trying to tailor my feeds to the exact prefs of my visitors. The cardinals love the black-oil sunflower and the safflower, as do the squirrels, so the bird feed is heavily weighted towards that. I'd make it ALL that, but the sparrows and mourning doves like the lighter stuff in the general wild bird mix, so I'm not cutting it out altogether. I have a ground frame, for the ground feeders, a small hanging feeder for the cardinals, and a dog bowl for the squirrels. Dad's making me a 'fly-through platform' feeder - like the bin feeders you usually see, except there's a large screen bottom and just a roof over it, so the birds can fly in and out and enjoy the open space. Not many of the local birds seem to be big on the close perch feeding of your average feeder.

The way I have my computer set up, it's kind of annoying to get in and out of the patio door, so I'm thinking of redoing the room to create a little area for coming in and out of the patio behind the couch. A spot I can put a rug to wipe my feet and the buckets of feed, with enough room to get in and out without worrying about tripping over something. I wish I knew what to do with my L-shaped room. I suppose I can make the far end more of an office/desk area, but the room still seems oddly off balance. Maybe moving the sofa will give me some more ideas about space planning.

I've been coming up with decorating ideas for my rooms - a sage green/taupe Asian look for the dining room, a rich red/gold look for the library/craft room, a light old ivory/blue color scheme for my bedroom. Now I just have to declutter and clean the house so I can even think of trying to paint. The dining room is still my best bet, since there's very little furniture in it, although the bedroom with its door that can be closed wouldn't be a bad place to start (cats, fur, terrible curiousity...). The library's really empty -- except for the bazillion books I just finished putting up and organizing.*whimper* But it's fun coming up with ideas.

I'm trying to start this year off well, work on some new habits to get my life and house in order. When I stopped by my shrink for my quarterly med check, I mentioned that I was kinda in a funk, mostly about how I felt I was sliding, losing that ability to follow through with household chores. Then I started talking about what I *had* accomplished and by the time I was done, I was pretty excited about that and realized that maybe I wasn't a complete mess after all. The bills got paid by the 5th, I'd made some progress on long-term projects, even if it had taken way long than originally planned.

So I'm tracking all my expenditures in Quicken so I know where my money goes. Then I want to figure out how much I can start auto-deducting into savings from my paycheck, bump up my 401K deductions, maybe see a financial planner to come up with an investment plan. I've been pretty good about tracking my money so far - it takes 21-28 repetitions to learn a new habit, so I should be set by the end of the month.

I've also finally gotten my library in order! The extra bookcase really helped and I figured out a sorting trick with the paperbacks that let me finish it up in an evening. Looks like everything's going to fit on the shelves, with a little elbow room. And the floor creaks again! (I was starting to worry that I was overloading the floor when it stopped after I loaded all the books into that room) I still have work to do on the other half (the craft side) of the room, but the library is ready to go!

Of course, just as I'm getting the upstairs in order, the rest of the living space is a mess. At least the Container Store is having their seasonal elfa sale so I can build a mail/shoes/keys/recharger station in that odd nook I have at the entrance. That spot is such a disaster area right now....

In the spirit of maigrey's flylady enthusiasm, I'm taking a second look at everything that I keep around here and deciding whether I need it and whether I'm using it the best possible way. For instance, I have scissors in every room, because I got tired of wondering where I'd left them *this* time. The kitchen scissors were in the junk drawer, which means they're behind me when I'm opening things at the counter - so now I've moved them up to the corner cabinet, where I'd already done the same with the can opener. :) (My utensil drawer is also on the "wrong" side of the kitchen, although the silverware and knives are handy.)

It's not until you really think about stuff like that that you make real headway, in decluttering or in managing your ADD. The grief I used to go through because I was always playing "hunt the scissors/nail clippers/pen/tape measure"... It's not important that I remember where I used one of these things last! It's important that I have them accessible when I need them, without wasting time or effort! And if the proper storage place for something is right at hand, you'll actually return it to that spot, as opposed to needing to walk downstairs or to another room to do so.

So that's what I'm doing right now - everything is completely and utterly unpacked, and needs to get a permanent home or get tossed. Baby steps, to be sure, but I'm really going to try and keep this going until I feel I can sustain a certain level of organization and cleanliness.

Gah. Okay, okay, I know it's a good thing that the lady who mans the snack alcove downstairs knows what I get every morning and wants to make sure it's stocked. But goddamn, I didn't intend to make her my new best friend. If I change my mind in the morning, she wants to chat about it and discuss it and I have to justify it (or at least explain it) to her and I'm not INTERESTED in conversation that early in the morning. Brain no make words yet, and she won't just shut the hell up and ring me up so I can be on my half-conscious way.

"So, do you like the grapefruit juice?"
*ungh* *need food* *take payment, let me go*
"Because I know we were kinda low earlier..."
*TAKE PAYMENT. ME GO NOW*
"...And I wanted to be sure that...."
GAHHHHHHHHH!

This is the Breakfast Lady. I don't ever *want* to talk to her. Because I don't want to talk to ANYONE at that time of day. If it were lunch, sure, I'd give in to her demands for rapport, so I'd know there'd always be a piece of german chocolate cake left, but this is breakfast. If she's out of my usual food, I'll track down a vending machine or soldier on without. That's less work and less disruptive to me than trying to form conversation or answers to her questions.

So it's been about a year since I was diagnosed with ADD - I had a routine maintenance appt with my doc last night and it always reminds me how much better it's been, how much more stable I feel since I became aware of and treated the ADD.

One of the things I told him was how my life seemed to be in one of those weird times of confluence, where everything falls into place. I've been puttering around with the unpacking of the house (I've been there a year and the 35 book boxes are still taking up half my living room) and replacing / fixing my computer for forever and finally, it all just clicked. The slow wearing away at the library unpacking and IKEA bookshelf installs has paid off with a nice clean, open library awaiting my books. When an "extra" paycheck came up, I took about a day to decide to order a new computer so that I could load the library database software I wanted, so I can scan the books in downstairs before hauling them upstairs to the library. The new computer came this past weekend and it's beyooooutiful. This coming weekend, I'm going to split my time between processing the books into the library and re-genning my old machine.

The old box will be my mom's birthday present - it's a nice little machine, still speedy and roomy. I just outgrew it. But Mom and Dad have been thinking about getting a computer for a while and I think this will ease them into the notion. And I know Mom will enjoy being online. I can see her getting into the online communities and meeting new people.

maigrey helped set up my boxen for file sharing so we could dump the old into the new (and oooh it just rattles around its big new home!). Took several hours, but it finished before I had to go to bed. I owe her a batch of (healthy, fat free?) baked goods for that! (And shush, maigrey, I have spoken!)

Bitter Mike called late Sunday night and promises to get back to me about a good weekend for visiting. We both got busy right after our last volley of emails, and I'm glad his life is settling down again into something less crazy. Looking forward to seeing him again before the year is out.

I should start writing here again. I keep thinking of things I'd like to write, as they happen, but until they hook to interface directly into my thoughts, I'll probably always be a little sketchy with the updates.

Oh, and the new Krispy Kreme is still under construction.

Friday, maigrey called me out for some sushi and I showed off the new GPSr. Turns out the sushi place wasn't far from one of the geocaches and we decided to swing by, just to see how using the GPSr features worked out. Turns out that it was this partial coordinate set - when you joined the local geocachers' Yahoo group, you got the rest. And I hadn't added that modification in yet, so we were still going off the partial coordinates, which put the cache in the middle of someone's home, most likely. I think we'll give it another try soon, with the real waypoint. Still, it was kinda fun just driving around looking for it.

I think I'm going to research a good handful of sites for Saturday and make a day of it. I'm already assembling a "geocaching pack" and I'm all excited. :)

Woot! I had a delightful little impulse moment yesterday - went out and bought a GPS so I can take up geocaching. There are a ton of sites in the Chicago area, probably because we have non-Federal forest preserves up the ying-yang out here. Can't swing a dead cat without hitting one. So I think I'll try to find one of the easy ones closest to my home, and maybe take the guys out to it Saturday if they're interested.

Helpful Hint #12931 : Don't have your gynecologist fax the results of your gonorrhea and herpes tests to your work fax machine.

Or at least be there to pick it up when it comes in.

(Heh, the things you find out about people as you wait for a printout.)

I talked to SoilGuy yesterday for the first time in two months. He's a guy I met on match.com - we talked on the phone a few times, went out twice. For some reason, I decided I *did* want to open up that can of worms again and got in touch with him.

Turns out he's dated (and broken up with) someone in the interim and he now has a correspondence going with another woman and it's going well. It's not as bad as I thought, though. The call kinda cemented the feeling that it wouldn't have worked out with us anyhow. He's a decent guy, but I guess I really do need to feel a serious spark there before I'll let someone in. And there really wasn't one there right off the bat. Besides, our conversations are still awkward, and that's not a good sign.

But he was the only bite I've gotten since breaking up with the Deek a couple years ago. I guess I just wanted to make sure I was giving him a fair shake.

Everything's in Kansas black-and-white.
Circumstances have clicked her heels
three times
and sent her home

Fallen, like Lucifer of old
from a heaven
of brains,
heart and courage

Her Tin Woodsman walks away with a heart
Her Lion fails her
and she's left with a nice pair of shoes
and Kansas black-and-white

But she smiles, sad and small,
as the ghosts of ruby slippers
leave jet trails
beyond the monochrome

Gah! I give up. I'm going to poll my friends for a decent local computer shop, drag my box in and say "Please make work!" The CD drive just died, the video card doesn't seem happy and the new Maxtor drive has been excommunicated by my motherboard. I know I'll need a new motherboard and possibly a new CD drive. I have friends who are good at this kind of thing, but part of me just wants someone professional to "please make work".

I stopped by my parents' house Saturday. Mom had surgery on her hand Friday and I wanted to check in on her. (The knife block got knocked off the counter and Mom reached out to grab it. Bad idea. Slash across the fingers of her right hand to the bone. The microsurgery was to neaten up the natural healing and correct one of the fingers that had gone numb.)

My nephew C was there, too. He's 3, 4 now and talking reasonably well. He still gets inadvertantly spoiled a lot. It's hard not to buy him stuff just for the heck of it. I mean, I buy toys for ME all the time, why not him, too? But he's getting to expect to get what he wants, so I'm trying to curb myself and Dad and I are trying to slow down Mom.

For instance, I am the Gamemeister of the family - I always bring a box of games over and generally have something new every couple months. I've been trying to get the family to play Evo, which is about keeping your dinosaurs alive until the meteor hits. C heard "dinosaurs" and insisted on playing. I explained that it was a grownup game, but that I'd find a dinosaur game for him. I found three, actually, but I didn't give them to C - they're part of the game box that comes with me when I visit, so he has something to play when we all play games. I think he appreciates them more because 1) they aren't lost in his vast piles of toys and 2) he thinks of them as something special when Auntie Raven comes to visit.

We ended the day watching Digimon on the sofabed in the back room. The Japanese make some goofy-ass anime. The plot didn't exactly tie together well, but C got a kick out of the bad guys. That's his current thing - he loves bad guys. There's probably some psychological phase that explains it, but he's into rooting for / playing the bad guy, ostensibly because they kick major butt until they're defeated in the end. Reminds me of Michael Ironside explaining why he likes to play bad guys - they only get beat up at the end, while good guys get pummelled all throughout the movie

Yesterday was just a bleary, blah day. Just before I was going to leave for work in the morning, I decided I had 5 minutes to go out and fill the bird feeder. I grabbed the seed container and headed out the patio door in my bare feet.

Seems that the "deck" in the backyard has some kind of slimey layer on it when soaked. I had one of those falls where every part of your body goes in a different direction, you wrench every joint, and manage to smack both your knee AND the opposing elbow hard on the ground. There's a huge spray of bird seed across the backyard from where the container flew open as I flung an arm out. I had birdseed in my hair and slime-smears all over my outfit. I limped upstairs, changed quickly and headed to work. Screw the birds, they can eat whatever got flung all over the deck for today.

We had another movie night Saturday. It gave me a reason to clean up the house, and pushed me a little farther down the path of "Hey, they're your friends - they want to have fun with you, not judge whether you are Martha Stewart!". I mean, the cat hair gets vaccummed up, the surfaces get a wipe-down and the clutter gets tidied, but I'm not stressing if there's a bag of junk under the coffee table, or if the book boxes are still dominating my living room corner. There were a couple dishes still in the sink. We all managed to survive.

G and B live in the city and neither of them have cars (B doesn't even drive, iirc.) so I drove in to pick them up, rather than make them traverse the entire city via public transit. B was bringing a ham, which made for a convenient excuse, but I also wanted to make them enjoy the visit more, so they'd come out more often. :) Besides, I love driving, as long as traffic doesn't suck. (There's a difference between rolling and driving!) I ended up clocking around 150 miles on Saturday - definitely worth it. And I'm becoming familiar with getting to their homes now.

We played Evo - excellent, excellent game! The auctioning system is quick, efficient and well-designed. And it's kinda fun to drive your neighbors to extinction before...well...the meteor hits and kills you all. Principle of the thing, though.

Dinner was a page out of Good Eats - country ham, baked beans, salad. The ham was salty but had a more interesting flavor than your regular city ham.

The movie M brought rocked - a bad, bad vampire film. They could never decide whether it was day or night outside. Night shots in the middle of dar kwoods were accompanied by blinding floodlights. A couple who were supposedly "stuck" in a van for the night went through 2-3 days, judging by the number of daylight/darkness switches from shot to shot. We had great fun mocking the cheesiness of it all. I'm glad we're not just watching movies until we get tired and then packing up and heading home any more, but I'm also glad we did watch at least one movie, because the MSTing is always hilarious.

We need to do this more often!

Last night, L, M and I played a game of Seafarers. L set up on of the pre-arranged scenarios and away we went! The boys were flanking an 8 wood, and my 8 was on an ore.

About three rolls in, I rolled a 7 and planted the robber on their 8. It stayed there for about the first third of the game, with the occasional return to MY 8, which I just bounced back with a soldier.

For the first third of the game, almost every roll was an 8.

No, seriously.

Eventually, L swapped out one of the dice, because it was getting that bad. Didn't help.

Oddly enough, what broke the jinx was me having mercy and using a soldier card to banish the robber to the desert. There was no way you could look at M and not have pity. After that, there were still a healthy number of 8's but we mostly kept the robber off them and the curse remained broken.

Of course, by then, I'd been waltzing all over the board with my 3:1 port and absolute shitload of constantly renewed resources while the boys had no cards to speak of. I also got way more out of my 2 grain than normal. I mean, L had a 10 GOLD, for pete's sake, and only got to use it ONCE!

They were going to concede at one point after the curse was broken, but I wanted to see how the game would play out. I ended up winning with 13, more points than theirs combined.

We broke down in hysterics somewhere in the middle, too, where M was ready to jump out a window if I rolled another 8. Heck, once I rolled the dice and one kinda spun off the table but even then, we could see if there had been more room, it would've been an 8. I rerolled it and got an 8. It was preternatural.

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I'm like, the Queen of Games. I have about 40 of them, of all kinds, and I keep a tub of them in the trunk in case someone holds a game night or something. I love games. So lately, I've been thinking about cataloging them, so I pulled out every game I owned and piled them in the living room.

The Settlers of Catan boxes were bugging me. I have four boxes, all very slidey when carried. (Settlers, the 5-6 player expansion, Seafarers, Cities&Knights) Suddenly, I got the urge to combine them all into one box.

This one was kinda feeding my impulsiveness. The ADD has been better with the meds, but on occasion, I get a nice full-on whomp of obsessively needing to follow through on an impulse. I have each player's pieces from all the expansions in little partitioned boxes, the game elements are all bagged, the cards are in card boxes, and everything is tagged, color-coded by expansion. The hex tiles are all color-tagged and labelled for easy separation.

The shopping trip to get the storage containers didn't go as well as hoped - The Container Store was all out of 4x6 baggies, which are the perfect size to store the game hexes. No one else, apparently, stocks baggies. Certainly not gaming stores - why sell convenient, waterproof, sealable, see-through containers for game pieces? Madness, I tell you! The gamers want little faux-velvet drawstring bags that are bulky and cost $8! You wouldn't believe how pissed I got that I couldn't find some freakin' 4x6 baggies. I made do with other baggies, but come mid-March, I'll be haunting TCS for the new shipment and cursing my gaming stores under my breath.

Ah, damnable compulsions....

I was surprisingly productive and non-productive this weekend.

I stuck to my guns and got ready for the day before noon both days - up, showered, dressed, ready to go.

I got an organizer for my wrapping paper and accessories, packed it full and stored it in the basement.

I got a basket for my books for the living room.

I made stroganoff.

I cleaned out the hall closet and the place-I-dump-stuff-when-I-get-home nook. The closet contents were either thrown out or properly stored. All my usual pants are on hangars in the hall closet. (I change pants the moment I get home and use to throw them over the bannister.)

I bought the shelf clips for my nice bookshelves (lost the originals in the move) and a hacksaw blade holder for the shower faucet repair project. I even managed to find the proper replacement faucet cartridge. [Sears Hardware is better for parts than Home Depot!]

I managed to combine four game boxes into one closed, waterproof, see-through box. (Settlers of Catan and all the expansions)

I did laundry.

All of these are little bits that I hope to get done and STAY DONE. That's how the living areas are getting habitable - taking a small chunk, finding a place for everything, throwing away the extraneous, and keeping it that way. Kinda like that voluntary simplicity deal. Don't get me wrong, I love my stuff. But I need to stick to my essential stuff, because I'm not enjoying my stuff as much when other stuff is in the way. My clean new closet is pleasing to use, pleasing to look at, pleasing just to have. I want to keep up that idea with everything else about the house.

The library is my next project - tonight, I'm going to get the shelving up and in place at least. Then I'll work on bringing the books upstairs, a box each trip. The library is another area I want to be as simple and clean as possible. I'm going for a very clean-lined house, I think. Wood furniture, with solid-colored upholstery. Straight lines or arcs, no carving. Very Ikea-ish, but only by default.

The dining room will have an asian theme to it, I think. I already have a Chinese stair-cabinet there and the sage and gold colors will go with the bamboo and grass plants and the bonsai fountain.

I love my house. :)

That song that's been playing on the radio a lot lately, you know - the one with the chorus that ends "A circle only has one side"? It's bugging the crap out of me.

A circle has two quite distinct sides. INside and OUTside. Circles are very exclusive. Or inclusive, depending on which side you're on. There's only one face to the world. So, where do you go if you don't agree with that face? I get the impression that the song is using it as a metaphor for something good, but it gives me the willies when I think about it.