Smustle Face

Hello! I just spent the evening playing Sims and had to share the smustle face, for all of you who aren't Sims people. Because it's funny. And because everyone should be a Sims person, and if a Smustle face can't help to convince you to be one, then nothing will.

Isn't that a fantastic face? That's Ainsley Rhodes, who is currently in college studying something science related. She's super shy, but even she can't resist a good smustle (which is a group line dance kind of thing. Think the dance from Michael Jackson's Thriller video and you won't be far off). Ah, I love the Sims.

Anyway, for all of you who don't care about the Sims, I apologize for this boring post. And shame on you, because you should play it - it's fun. Also, it's almost 10:00 and I am still up and on the computer, which Sarah could tell you is very unusual for me on a weeknight (because I'm a wuss who needs at least 8 hours of sleep a night), and that probably explains this weird mood I'm in. Don't worry - I'll be back to normal tomorrow. Whew!

Also, before I go, my friend Jamie is getting a new car this week. Yay! And I get to receive one of the first rides. Fun!

Okay, I'm off to bed now. Next time I'll post something when I'm not feeling all weird from impending sleep deprivation. Later!

Six Years Ago

Six years ago last night, at about 11:55 p.m., I was woken up to the phone ringing. It was the pastor (or reverend or whatever he was called) from the nursing home where my Mom was living, telling me that she had died. This wasn't unexpected, because she had brain tumors and she had slipped out of consciousness, so we knew it was coming - otherwise my phone would have been downstairs, instead of upstairs on my end table. I held it together long enough to call my sister and tell her (actually, I spoke to her husband), and then my oldest brother, and when I hung up, I remember doubling over like someone had just stabbed me in the gut. About ten minutes later, my sister and her husband, and my oldest brother and his daughter, showed up at my house, because I was alone and they didn't want me to be. To this day, that remains the one thing that they have done that I will always remember. They didn't let me be alone on the night our mother died.

That whole next week was seven kinds of hell, from going to the funeral home and talking about the service and the casket and the whole arrangment deal, to the days between then and the actual funeral to, of course, the funeral itself on Thursday, followed by the internment of her ashes (she wanted to be cremated, and had picked out her urn herself - a green marble one) on Friday. She died on a Saturday night, and that hellish week lasted until Friday. I don't know how I made it through.

Also, the Sunday after she died was Easter, so you can imagine the rotten associations I had with that day for a while. But Easter moves around every year, and even though the 22nd was again on a Saturday this year, Easter was the week before. So I have mostly lost my bad associations with the holiday. I can go to my sister's house for dinner now without feeling like I need to hide in my house and grieve instead, so that's good.

Anyway, it's the first thing in the morning and I'm writing this before I'm fully awake, which is not a good thing, so I'm just going to wrap it up here and say: I love you Mom. I think about you every single day of my life, and although the pain finally lessened enough where I can live with your loss, there isn't a moment that goes by that I don't wish my phone could ring with you on the other end, or that I could go pick you up on a Saturday, like I used to, and bring you home to spend the day with me. You were my mother and my best friend, and I feel your loss always.

And since I don't have a more recent picture of her in electronic form, here is her graduation picture, which you already saw on her birthday.

Old Now

A concrete sign that I am officially old:

I have to wear these all the time. I had glasses before, but I'm near sighted and it wasn't bad last time I was at the eye doctor, so I only had to wear them for distance things - mostly driving. These I have to wear ALL THE TIME! Sigh. And I already have gray hair, and greasy things make me burp - what's next?

Being old is going to suck, huh.

Flowers

Apparently blogger just wanted me to split my pictures up into two posts. Ooookay. So here, for your enjoyment, are my confused Christmas cactus and my pretty yellow Daffodils.

Pictures of Now

Here are pictures of some things that I did today or that are making me happy today:

I gave blood today, so be nice to me. The Red Cross says you have to!

It's a good thing these are only around at Easter, because yum. But wow, are they fattening.

My flannel pajama pants have monkey heads on them. I love my monkey head pajamas.

I got the Sims 2 family fun stuff pack today. Fun!

And I immediately set to redecorating my Sims' kids' rooms. First up - the castle theme for their little boy's room. Cute!

Next up, an underwater themed nursery. Aww! I love the waves and the fish.

I want a jellyfish lamp. I wonder if they make them for real people?

How did my Sims repay me for buying all the cool stuff for their kids' rooms? They had twins. Sigh. And now they both want to have TEN kids. And I think I'm going to let them try. I am insane.

Okay, I also wanted to show you pictures of my daffodils (of which there are more than there were last time I posted pictures), because they make me happy, and of my Christmas cactus, which is confused and blooming, even though it is four months past Christmas, but blogger isn't actually uploading pictures anymore. So you'll have to imagine those.

And now I'm off. I have Sims to play and papers to edit. Happy Tuesday!

Way Too Busy

I'm sorry I haven't been updating here lately. I've just been so busy, I can't even describe. Working, editing, going to class, doing a metric ton of homework - yuck. It's taking all of my time, and none of it is fun (but at least the editing, when I somehow manage to get it done by next Friday, will bring me some extra money). And I have a large project to do for my animation class that is due on Monday, and I haven't even started it yet, so guess what I'm going to be doing the rest of the day? Sigh. And I can tell how much I don't want to do it, because suddenly I would rather do so many other things, such as...cleaning. Yuck. I am the queen of procrastinators.

Anyway, since this entry could be considered another thing that I am doing to put off my homework, I am going to end this sorry excuse for an entry with a few pictures from the last couple of days. Enjoy! And think of me, when you're off doing your fun Saturday things, and I'm sitting here doing my horrible homework.

Daffodils are my favorite spring flower. These are sitting on my desk, and they smell heavenly.

The weeds in front of my porch are being taken over by ladybugs. There are a ton of them out there!

Bernie, laying in the grass next to my house (next to a piece of siding that fell down over the winter and needs to be put back on the house).

Willow standing on the side lawn, looking gorgeous (this is my new favorite picture of her).

Oddities

Sarah and I were talking before we finished our lunch break today, and the conversation turned to strange things we do, and I thought it might be interesting to list some of my oddities here. You can read them and maybe go, "Hey, I do that too!" Or "Wow, she's weird." Whichever. Enjoy!

I count stairs whever I'm going up or down them. It's not a conscious thing, it just happens. Sometimes it'll get worse than that and I'll start counting all of the steps that I take on the ground or floor once I'm off the stairs. Then I have to make myself think of something else so that I'll stop.

This started when I was a kid: I thought for some reason that it was bad luck to turn the light out at night if the (digital) clock was on an odd number. Except if it ended in a 5 - that was safe. So if I was going to bed and the time was 9:03, I'd have to wait until 9:04 before I could shut the light off. For some reason I still do that, even though I know it's not bad luck. (Yes, I know I'm weird.)

I trace things in my mind. Not everything - only certain shapes. The worst are jackets or shirt collars. For jackets I'll trace the line of the lapel from one side of the jacket to the other, then down to the bottom of the jacket and back around to the front, where I'll start again. For shirt collars (like a dress shirt collar), I'll trace it from the top of the front, down to the corner, around the back and back up to the other side. Again, once I start, I have to make myself stop. It's not just those things that I trace in my mind, but those are the worst. I'll also trace rectangles and odd shapes.

Not as odd as those, but the next one I thought of is that I twirl my hair with my left hand, usually only when I'm bored or stressed. I've also been known to bite my bottom lip when I'm nervous.

I also can't stand to have the windshield wipers going faster than they need to be. The wipers scraping against a mostly dry windshield drive me nuts.

And those are all I can think of right now, although I'm sure there are more! If anyone reading this wants to share their own oddities with me, or tell me, hey! They do that too! I'd love to hear about it - comment away! (Please comment? Your silence is deafening out there. And when you're done, go read Sarah's blog and comment to her. She's getting a deafening silence on her site too.)

Happy Birthday Wayne

Today is (would be) my step-father's birthday. He would have been 70 years old today. Man, I can't believe that. I also can't believe that he's been gone since 1993. I love you Wayne, and I miss you everyday.

Biggest Loser

One of my coworkers had a brain storm a couple weeks ago. She thought it would be a good idea to have a weight loss challenge at work, modeled after the biggest loser TV show, modified for office use. Basically, people would pay $5 to enter, they would weigh in with the receptionist in our office, and would set a goal for how much they want to lose over a two month period. At the end of that time, the person who loses the highest percentage of their goal (including going over, so if you set a goal to lose 10 pounds and lose more than that, than your percentage would be over 100%) will win the money. We had 17 people sign up, so the pot is at $70. Not bad.

I signed up.

I went back and forth on whether or not I wanted to. I want to lose weight, for sure - for those of you who don't know me, I won't post a before picture (unless maybe I get brave when I'm done losing the weight), but know that I want to lose somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 pounds (maybe more) (oh, and not in two months - overall. In two months, I set a goal of 18 pounds). Fun.

So yes, I wanted to lose the weight, and I wasn't doing very well at it on my own (the call of junk food was much more powerful than the desire to once again be thin). But if I joined this challenge I would have to weigh in with someone I work with. Meaning they would know how much I currently weigh. (shudder) But I thought about it for a few days, and I finally bit the bullet, paid my $5 and joined. Whew. The first weigh in is done, and that one is the worst - from here on out the number will only get smaller.

And I'm one day into the challenge, and so far I'm doing great. Here's hoping I keep it up.

And don't worry - this isn't going to become a weight loss blog. It is in the forefront of my mind, though, so I will mention it from time to time. And for some reason now I feel compelled to tell you how I gained all this weight in the first place.

I've always had to fight to keep a reasonable weight. When I was in high school, I was a slim 135 or so (only about ten pounds over my ideal), but I thought I was oh so fat. The dramatics of teenager-dom. Once I got out of school and started working for a living, the weight went up a bit, peaking at 165. When I got there I joined Nutri-System, paid a small fortune and lost 40 pounds to get to my ideal of 125. I was a size 4! It was great. And I managed to maintain for a while - not 125, but I stayed at or under 140 for a long while, which was fine with me.

Then my mother started getting sick, and eventually she developed brain tumors and was going to die. Stress is not a friend to weight loss, let me tell you. Neither is depression, and when my Mom died, I went into a depression that it took me 2 1/2 years to climb out of. And I ate my way through it, so woo! That 140 didn't stay for long, and it hasn't been seen in about seven years.

Well, the bad stuff is in the past, and I am happier now than I have been since my Mom started getting sick in about 1996. There is no longer any reason to hold on to the weight, no longer any stress or depression reason to keep overeating. Now it's just habit. And that habit is going to be broken. I have a ways to go, and I'm going to do it right, so it's going to take a while to get back to that comfortable 125-140 range. Like I said, this is not going to become a weight loss blog, but I will probably be posting small updates from time to time (hopefully one of those posts won't be that I quit working toward my goal). I did great yesterday (and lost two pounds overnight, woo! I know that was just water weight and that I won't continue to lose something everyday, but it was great to see it this morning), and I am going to work hard to do great most everyday from here on out, and if Jamie and Sarah don't mind, I will be bugging them to tell me no when I want to eat something I shouldn't. They saved me from scarfing a bunch of angel food cake last night, for which I am very grateful.

And when the weight is all off, maybe I'll post an after picture. I can't promise a before, though. We'll see. And if any of my three or four readers (I love you all! Thanks for reading me!) want to give me support through my comments from time to time, I would appreciate it more than you know.