Factoid

I was just perusing my ~Snerkology~ archives. Apparently, I wrote 70 entries for 2000 (I started in September), 153 entries for 2001, 99 entries for 2002, 67 entries for 2003, and 34 entries so far for 2004, for a grand total of 423 entries. Just in the journal proper, not counting this blog or "Operation::Goddess".

Who knew I had so much to say.
- posted by Laura @ 4:09 PM

 
Nauseating

Ugh. I SO need to take a shower. I just got done cleaning my cubicle. Ew ew EW. It was so nauseating in here that I could barely stand to work at my desk. I certainly didn't want to touch any surfaces or look too closely into the corners.

AcronymCo has a custodial crew that vacuums the floors and empties the trash bins and keeps the bathrooms clean, but nothing else. Cleaning one's desk is entirely up to the employee. I sit underneath an air conditioning duct, which means that dust bunnies are large and frequent, and my desk is usually significantly worse off than anyone else's. Luck of the draw when it came to seating arrangements, I guess. Certainly not good for my lungs with all these dust rodents approaching the size of guinea pigs.

I have a monthly cleaning scheduled as a recurring task on my Outlook calendar, and it came up again last Friday. I was offsite that day, so I determined to do it today. I mean, people were commenting when they stopped by my desk. I brought in a whole roll of paper towels and some 409, and after lunch I got down to business. I have (counting) twelve framed pictures that I took down and dusted, (counting) seven awards collecting dust, about a dozen various knick-knacks given to me by folks who brought souvenirs back from their visits to overseas sites, a file tree, my phone, my ten-key, the collection of Shel Silverstein books that Heather gave me for Christmas, and "The Blue Day Book", by Trevor Greive, also a Christmas present from Heather. There's also my laptop, docking station, monitor stand, keyboard, wrist rest, mouse, and mouse pad. And stuffed animals who have lost their original colors and are now an unfortunate shade of gray.

I pushed my chair out into the isle, piled everything from my desk surface on and around it, and got down to the dirty (and I do mean DIRTY) business. One swipe of the paper towel, and it was blackened. Tufts of dust and DNA and God knows what else wafted into the air with every spray of the 409. I imagine that from a distance the cloud hovering over my desk resembled Pigpen from The Peanuts. At one point I actually climbed up onto the surface of my desk so I could dust the top of my overhead bin. Shudder.

This activity seriously grossed me out. Just moments after I started, I began to feel like a film of the dust I was cleaning up actually covered every square inch of my body. I started to sweat, and soaked the hair at the back of my neck. I blackened the front of the cream colored shirt I'm wearing (what I was thinking wearing a light shirt when I knew I would be cleaning, I don't know). I cleaned every nook and cranny between the keys of my phone, my calculator, my laptop, and my external keyboard. The photos took on a whole new brightness after I cleaned the INCH of grime off of them. My trash can steadily filled with discarded paper towels. People stopped to gawk at what I was doing (and make snide remarks about safety incidents and trip hazards in the isles). The stuffed animals went in the bag with the remaining paper towels and 409, to meet their destiny at home in the washing machine.

I'm dirty, my hair is a mess, I'm sticky, and I'm hiding in my cube until it's time to bolt for the door before anyone sees me like this.


- posted by Laura @ 2:34 PM

 
Mellow

I'm listening to the "Muse II" CD that our awesome collab leader sent out to all us WordGoddesses. It's got me in a very mellow mood, which is just where I needed to be. I'm at my most comfortable, mentally, when I feel this way. I don't feel overwhelmed or urgent about everything. Stuff is just... flowing. I don't feel this way nearly often enough, I tell you what. It seems lately that either my brain is completely ramped, or it's shut off altogether. Achieving this mellow state means that I can actually THINK for once, instead of all the white noise that usually exists in my brain. I don't know why it's so hard for me to concentrate sometimes, I really don't.

I haven't been feeling... consistent today. I woke completely up as soon as I opened my eyes this morning, which is rare. And I felt amped until about 9:45 this morning, which is when the low hum of machinery out on the manufacturing floor was threatening to put me to sleep. Then, back at my desk at 10:15, I felt irritated (the time study I was trying to conduct did not go as planned and resulted in over two hours of wasted time and useless data). I was distracted until 11:00, when I went home for lunch. I ate and felt better, felt an increase in energy, and got back to my desk at 12:00 on the dot. I started feeling like I could actually concentrate on some work, and put on the Muse CD. Cleared out my in-box and did some stuff, and here it is 1:48 and I'm calm. Which is probably Elton John's influence, at the moment. Apparently, I'll always be beautiful in his eyes.

This mood will carry me through until 2:30, when my next round of meetings starts up again. When I get out of my last one at 5:00, I predict that the only thing that will mellow me out again is a glass of wine.


- posted by Laura @ 1:40 PM

 
Wow.

If you're trying to lose weight, read this right now. It's the most excellent and *sensible* perspective I've heard about the subject in a very long time. Rest assured, this person is going to become one of my regular reads.
- posted by Laura @ 10:35 AM

 
Wicked

This is one of the coolest things I've seen on the internet in a long time. I find the most useful links over at TUS.
- posted by Laura @ 9:40 PM

 
The Cool Kids

Sarah and Wing Chun are the reason why I always feel not quite cool enough to run with The Cool Kids. I get them, but I'm nowhere near as funny. And thus, my nose is pressed up against the glass of Coolness.
- posted by Laura @ 9:25 PM

 
New Entry

There's a new entry up in ~Snerkology~, which is simultaneously this month's
WordGoddess collab, and the letter "L" entry for AlphaBytes.
- posted by Laura @ 5:20 PM

 
Baby Tigers!

Link courtesy of TUS, check out the
Minnesota Zoo Tiger Cam. Best for those with high speed internet access, so you can check out the live video feed. Otherwise, they have stills that refresh every thirty seconds.
- posted by Laura @ 7:57 PM

 
More about Hibberts Gore

I just had to find out more. From this site:

"Hibberts is a gore located in Lincoln County, Maine. As of the 2000 census, one woman lives here.

Geography
According to the United States Census Bureau, the gore has a total area of 2.0 km² (0.8 mi²). 2.0 km² (0.8 mi²) of it is land and 1.28% is water.

Demographics

As of the census of 2000, there is one woman, white, aged 48. She earns either $5,000/year, $6,250/year, or nothing: the census results, as uploaded to Wikipedia, are inconsistent. She lives in one of the three housing units in the gore. According the United States Census Bureau, the gore is one of only four places in the United States to have a population of 1. The others are Ervings, New Hampshire, Lost Springs, Wyoming, and New Amsterdam, Indiana."

Rock.

- posted by Laura @ 4:18 PM

 
Town, party of one?

So I'm perusing the statistics for Maine. State Population: 1.27 million. Largest City: Portland, at a population of 64,249. Smallest "municipality" - Hibberts Gore, with a population of ONE. ONE PERSON.

The population of my home town of New Gloucester is 4,803 blessed souls.

Did you know there are 2,000 costal islands, and 17 million acres of forest?

Man, I can't get over Hibberts Gore, though.

By comparison, the town I live in in Arizona has a population of 219,000, and Phoenix has a population of 1.43 million. The city of Phoenix has a larger population than the entire STATE of Maine.
- posted by Laura @ 4:15 PM

 
Killer tuneage, dude

I love my truck. I love just about everything about it, except for how hard it is to see things that are directly behind me, because of the elevated bed and cover. But the thing I love most about it is the stereo. It came with a decent Kenwood system, and all we had to do is give the bass a kick in the pants. One amp and two sub-woofers later, and I have all the thump I could ever want.

I think we may disturb the peace a good bit with the thing. On a couple of occasions where I've been standing in the driveway when Calvin comes driving up, I can hear the stereo clearly from some distance down the street, even with all the windows rolled up. We've stopped at stop lights and have had the passengers in the cars beside us either grin and start singing along to whatever song is playing, or roll their eyes and give us a disgusted look. I, personally, like to drive with the stereo up so loud that it drowns out thought. Any song with a good beat that we come across, we exclaim, "That would sound GREAT in the truck!" and promptly buy the CD or burn the song off the internet. Hence our VAST collection of mix CD's.

This morning I drove into work blasting "Sandstorm", a trance number by Darude. Michael was infamous for playing it over and over (and over) when he still lived at home, and we got mightily sick of it. Then he moved away, we gave it a couple of years, and now it's one of our favorites. It's got a great, driving beat that kind of builds and ebbs, builds and ebbs, until it reaches a crescendo. I think it was responsible for Michael getting so many speeding tickets as a teenager - it's hard NOT to drive fast when you listen to it.

Of course, just about any hip-hop song sounds good on our truck stereo, which is one of the reasons, I think, why Calvin and I became fans of so many different artists and groups. It may have also come about out of pure defense, since we're exposed to it pretty much constantly through Marie.

Music is such a big part of my mood - I have CD's with playlists specifically designed to put me in a good mood. I have jazz CD's for when I'm feeling mellow, and old-school CD's for when I'm feeling nostalgic. We have mix CD's that we burned for specific road trips and occasions. We have a 200 disk carousel hooked up to our home system (also sub-woofered to such an extent that the walls shake, our hair moves, and the neighbors probably hate us) that has been at its full capacity for a long time, with several satellite CD cases migrating between the living room, Marie's room, and the truck. And I have a bazillion more CD's hanging out on my Amazona wish list as a reminder of what else I want to get.

We're all about having the killer tunes.


- posted by Laura @ 11:14 AM

 
Jittery

Maybe writing this out will make it go away.

When I'm anxious, I get jittery. I can't sit still, can't pay attention, flip through the channels, pace around the house. It's like, some days I can handle the level of stress that I have in my life as if it's a normal thing - almost not there, just another thing to get through. But some days it seems overwhelming, even though nothing has changed since the day before when I could handle it all.

Today is one of those overwhelmed days. I've been having screwed up dreams, which I think is an indicator that the day is coming where dealing with things is less easy than usual. My dreams get jacked up, and I know the next day I'll feel the knot in my stomach. Bills become gigantic, work becomes intolerable, and my mind hops from subject to subject to subject with barely a pause to digest anything before I'm off to the next worry.

Which is when I try to talk myself down off the ledge. We have a plan for the debt and we're doing okay. Other people make it paycheck-to-paycheck, and we've been doing it ourselves for years, so it's not going to all go up in flames at this point. Work is work - take it one day at a time... get through the next meeting, the next day, the next week. Write things down, have a plan, cross things off, organize. These are the ways to de-rail stress.

Some days I manage to listen to myself, other days I do not. So today is a jittery day, when I'm all about being the ADD girl of the office. I get up, go get tea, sit down again. Read a few e-mails, walk over to a co-worker's desk to talk to her about something instead of e-mailing, go sit down again. Go to a meeting, sit at the table for a while, get up and lean against the wall, sit back down again. Jiggle my foot, tap my fingers, catch another attendee's eye, subside.

Go back to my desk, dial into a teleconference, and listen with one ear as I type about how damned jittery I am.

I need to get away from here, take a vacation AWAY. We're thinking of going to San Diego over Labor Day. A road trip is just what I need.


- posted by Laura @ 9:21 AM

 
Hugh Jackman

I've heard all about Hugh Jackman's performance when he hosted the Emmy's. Does anybody know where I can find a video clip of it? I'm dying to see him singing and dancing with the Rockettes. Thanks!
- posted by Laura @ 6:49 PM