countdown.

linda: i thought of you when i read this.

what was i thinking?

every couple of years alvin and i get annoyed with time warner cable and our inability to stop watching t.v. long after our brains have quit working and we end up cancelling cable. right now we're really put off by our lack of self-control in addition to time warner's inability to supply a working cable modem connection to us even though we pay them many dollars a month for what should be a working service. we tried to switch to another cable modem or dsl service, but--haha--there's nothing else available! SBC doesn't provide dsl to our area and there's NO other competition. we live in the middle of austin. in a neighborhood. you know, with other people. who presumably are all using time warner? i guess so, which is likely why time warner thinks it's ok to suck: they know our only other option for internet service is dial up. no way.

i would just like to point out that when alvin and i lived out in the ass-middle of nowhere in north carolina, and our stupid cable modem quit working then, too, we switched from roadrunner to dsl because dsl was available. i'm having a really hard time believing that the middle of nowhere, north carolina, has more internet options than austin. but it's true and, therefore, is completely retarded.

because of our inability to function without the internet, we couldn't cancel roadrunner even though our connection is crappy--so we cancelled cable instead. i tried to ask them what was up with our half-ass connection, and they were like, let me check your connection. and then: well, it's working now. (i knew they would say that, which is why i didn't bother asking sooner.)

anyway, today is our last day of television as we know it. this makes me sad. among some of the programs i'm going to miss so much i'll probably cry:

1. the daily show
2. drawn together
3. south park
4. law & order (all of them)
5. anything on HGTV

but i can still watch desperate housewives, my favoritest of them all. i'm hoping the picture will be good enough for me to see how bree is going to kick george's ass--because george needs a good ass kicking, and then he needs to be knocked over the head and thrown off a bridge after being poisoned while having a fatal heart attack. it's only fair. george is going down.

i still don't know what i'm going to do about law & order though. the thought of not being able to watch it almost makes me regret that we've cancelled cable. but not quite, because time warner is evil and must be destroyed.

martha stewart in the making.

alvin and i spent thanksgiving day with my family and it was really nice. i stayed up late wednesday night and made cranberry orange bread to take with us--i thought that would be my contribution since i wasn't going to be around thursday morning to help cook--and we got up early thursday and drove to houston. there was much less traffic than i expected and all was going well. alvin and i had a long conversation about acceptable ways to punish and/or annoy our future hypothetical children, and also what not to name them. but then we got there and i was greeted with many of these:




because my sister, shannon, in her bid to be like martha, made a fleet of tiny edible mice. you can't see it very well in that picture, but the mouse butt is a chocolate covered cherry. and the green and red icing gel stuff on the side? that's holly. it even has evil red eyes. they were staring at me.

i told her she put my cranberry bread to shame. she laughed like she knew it was true.

the night before she had talked my parents into helping sort the almond slivers, because all the ears had to be exactly the same size. there were two trays full of these things, and we weren't allowed to take the christmas rats off of the larger tray until the smaller tray was empty, because she had laid them out just so and they had to be symmetrical. every time a rat was eaten she had to rearrange them again. i am so not related to this girl, but she is just like our grandmother. my mom said the christmas rat assembly bred lots of anal retentiveness. well, yeah. so did the christmas tree assembly that took place that afternoon, but i won't get into that.

the christmas rats were good, though, and thanksgiving dinner was tasty, and it was nice to see my family. i got to hear tragic stories from my uncle about the many ways he has hurt himself, mostly by falling down stairs while running or falling down while chasing deer out of his yard or accidentally smashing his thumb with a block of wood and then being stung repeatedly by a wasp. good times.

best of all, alvin and i got to leave when we wanted to! the drive home was ok after we finished getting lost in houston and found a starbucks. spending only half a day in houston AND finding a starbucks open on thanksgiving night? so many things to be thankful for.

su*an rocks, yet again.

thanks, susan! all better now, and i fixed my links without any major catastrophes.

happy thanksgiving, people. don't forget to eat until you explode, and then eat some more.

*also, i officially changed my name today at the social security office in san marcos. i was very proud of myself for not crying. now i just need to remember to use my new last name. yeah, that's going to be the hard part.

the cat in the hat strikes back.

to the kate and linda people who made my weekend fun, thank you. you're welcome here any time provided that you quit telling on each other and dragging unsuspecting victims to midnight showings of harry potter. unless it's harry potter porn, of course, and then i'm all for it. because how old is harry potter? hot. and barely legal.

also, kate (and susan, hi!) thank you for the coldplay ticket offer enticement, but sunday night isn't a good night for sarah to be in dallas when she has class the next morning. i do appreciate it, though. one of these days i'll grace you with my presence at a concert and you'll totally understand why you don't want me there. i have concert ADD, and i get bored super quickly, and then i'm like, can we go now? what about now? now? how long do we have to stay? i'll just be in the car. why can't i sit in the car? are YOU enjoying this? (then i usually get told to shut up)

i actually left BEFORE the nine inch nails concert was over, and they are my most favorite concert people ever. so. you don't want me in a big arena with lots of people while i'm tired and have class the next day. you really, really don't, but thank you. really.

this morning i discovered that beagle dog is afraid of my cat in the hat slippers. i guess they're still called slippers even though they're gigantic because of the cat in the hat's huge head. i put them on and beagle dog ran, then attacked them, and then i bitch slapped him with a cat in the hat head. it was awesome! he liked it. (and he had to know that if he went after the cat he was so going to get it, so not my fault.) now he's lying in a sunny spot in the living room and staring at me with his glowing eyes that are freaking me out. if a dog version of the movie the exorcist were ever made, beagle dog could play the part of the posessed child-dog with the glowy eyes. i bet his head spins around, too. i'm already familiar with his ability to projectile vomit whenever he wants. i'm so glad he stopped doing that.

tomorrow i'm driving to san marcos to get my name changed. my sources tell me that the line at the social security office there is muy corta and i won't have to wait very long. and alvin has the day off, so he gets to accompany me since he's the reason i've got to wait in line in the first place. it's only fair.

dirty laundry.

i walked outside earlier to retrieve the tv remote from the golden retriever (aka thief dog), and i noticed that our neighbors with the pretty yard, the yard i envy, were having it mowed by a team of mower/edger people. that they have a hoard of people to take care of their well-sculpted lawn didn't make me feel better, but it completely explains why their yard is so well kept even though they're never home and hardly ever DO anything to it. i wondered about that.

then, because this was an obvious train of thought, i wondered if they also have someone to clean their house for them. the possibility that they don't have to clean their home made me even more envious because right now i'm attempting to clean my own house without much luck. i thought it would be helpful if i made a list of everything that needs to be done, but i was wrong. two pages later it became painfully obvious that oh my god i'm never going to be finished cleaning. and the thing about cleaning is that it never ends. makes me want to live in a dirt hut because then, at least, you'd expect the place to be dirty. also, there would be less square footage of hut to clean. dirty, small, cramped living quarters? that would be ideal.

also, i've been thinking a lot lately about quality of life and how to define that. last night alvin told me he needs to work more hours per week starting, like, last week. i started calculating how many hours per day and days per week more actually means--relative to what he's working now--and when i realized it was something like 10+ hour days six days a week we had to end the conversation because it wasn't going anywhere good. that just upsets me. i don't know if i'm alone in this or what, but i've never understood working 60 hour weeks (i realize it's necessary but i don't understand WHY it's necessary or anywhere near acceptable). 40 or 50 hours, that's kind of enough. after that your brain ceases to work like it should, or at all. and if you want to see daylight, or if you want to interact with, say, your family, maybe you should cap the number of hours you work. i don't know. i'm about to start school and i know that's going to require lots of time and energy on my part--i'm not entirely sure how the seeing alvin thing is going to work. it's not working very well now, and i've got free time. what happens when i'm crazy busy?

i guess what i'm saying is that my quality of life standards include not working yourself (myself, alvin's self...) to death just because you can can can. i would happily trade my current house and stuff for a smaller house and less stuff if it meant more quality alvin time and less overworked stressed out alvin time. i'd trade starbucks (i haven't been there in three days!) and a car and maybe even beagle dog, too.

i have plenty to be thankful for--i've been bitch ass poor and living in north carolina where life just wasn't very good and i was working my ass off at a minimum wage job while living in sub-standard housing in the middle of nowhere, and let me just say that sucked and this is a hundred times better than that--but i want life to be optimal and right now it's really not. because it takes two to make things optimal, i'm pretty sure, and one of the two of us who lives in this house is so busy he doesn't even have time to read my blog! which i can't even imagine because if he had a blog i'd force him to update just so i could read it.

so many more things i could say on this subject, but this isn't solving anything. eh.

update and my sekrit marriage.

we have finished painting (yay!)--though i'm looking at the wall above the stairs and it looks like it needs another coat, which is so not yay--and cleaned up and i bought curtains and installed them and the living room looks really good as long as i don't look at that one wall that needs another coat of paint. < /unnaturally long and confusing sentence>

beagle dog just ran downstairs doing the screaming thing, so kate and linda, i want to warn you what beagle dog is capable of. he's screaming less these days, but still. if he does it while you're here i'm truly sorry (in advance) because it's going to scare the shit out of you. it sounds that bad, and like he's hurt, but really he's just being annoying. if his vocal cords just happened to fall out i would still be ok with that.

also, beagle dog sometimes thinks it's funny to act paraplegic by using his front legs to drag himself across the living room floor. he only does this on the living room carpet, so i think it scratches his stomach and he likes that. if you see him do this, it's not because his back legs are broken. it's because he's lazy and itchy. did i mention smelly? i'll give him a bath before you guys get here.

oh, and other dog will totally steal your stuff if you leave it on the floor. just keep the door to the guest room closed. that's all i have to say about the dogs, lest you decide not to visit because of all the dog warnings. they're sweet when they're not actively trying to annoy me.

and linda, i've got directions to the library. it's easy to get to, and not far from here (should i be encouraging this behavior?) so no problem.

in other news, i'm kind of concerned about my statistics class. class was cancelled yesterday because the instructor was sick (from chemotherapy, much to the class' surprise because we didn't realize she was still doing chemo)...we have four weeks of class left and three scheduled exams. i know, there's no way to get through three exams in four weeks, but what are we gonna do? there's no way we can cover the rest of the material in the time we have left. should i be worried about the instructor? should i have to worry about the instructor? i am concerned that i'm not going to learn everything that i need to know before i start school in january. this is a new type of worry, because normally i just want to get through a course or get a good grade. now i'm worried about content because it actually matters. eeeee!

and because i have to blog about this or it wouldn't be fair: after i got married, a friend of mine took one of my wedding pictures and photoshopped a picture of my longest standing crush into it. it looked cool and pretty believable, considering. unfortunately, i only have a framed version and not a digital copy so i can't post it here (i'm sure the person in question would find it and remove it, anyhow). a couple of days ago the photoshopped picture was posted on a nine inch nails message board by the aforementioned friend, with a disclaimer about how entirely fake the photo is. people were undeterred by that disclaimer, however, and the picture spread to other message boards and rumors were started about how i am trent's sekrit wife. i guess they thought it was a picture from our sekrit wedding.

hehe.

not long after, trent became aware of this rumor and had his people--beacuse trent has people, everywhere--delete our sekrit wedding picture from the sites it had been posted on.

i hear that trent is perhaps annoyed by this. that makes me sekritly happy.

be careful what you ask for.

sometimes it's hard to believe kate-berry isn't an only child, based on the level of demandingness when she forces me to post. i will give in to the pressure, if only because it's a good excuse not to apply for financial aid right now.

this weekend i received my congratulations! you don't suck enough that we don't want you! package from UT. they totally don't hate me, they totally want me (who doesn't?) and that's a good thing. so i got that in the mail on saturday and cried all over again. dear god, the crying never ends.

now i need to apply for financial aid, but i have a dilemma. it's a minor dilemma, but still. i need to change my name, if i am actually going to change my name (i am), even though i got married almost eight months ago and i really should have done it by now. i haven't.

i need to officially change it before i start filling out paperwork that is approved by the bureaucracy that is UT and our federal government, because i have a feeling that neither of those institutions is going to be very forgiving about my name change at the point that i'm like, hey, i filled out my paperwork, now hand over my money! i really can see them saying, nope, you can't have your money, because you're not you! you're someone with a different last name!

so the name change thing, it involves standing in line at the social security office downtown. now, i tried this once before many months ago--the standing in line part--and oh my god it's not fun. i finally gave up. also, all the downtown parking spaces are metered, which means i've got to waste valuable quarters that i could otherwise use for meters on class days, and i may or may not get back to my car before the meter expires. at which point i could very well get a ticket AND waste valuable quarters. and did i mention the line at the social security office? it's fucking long.

then, once i do that, i've got to go stand in line to get a new drivers license, and dude that's not fun either. i don't understand why it's so difficult to change my name, but i probably should just do it since it took me this long to finally figure out i wanted to change it, for real, and i need to do it before i can apply for financial aid. so now i have incentive. this really should not be so complicated. i would have done this months ago if it hadn't been for the new orleans people--it took them six weeks to mail our marriage certificate to us and by then the excitement of being married and acquiring a new last name had totally worn off. six weeks later, i didn't want to stand in line to change my name. at that point i had become indignant all over again about keeping my name. this obviously isn't my fault.

aside from that: we are almost finished painting the living room. half of one wall needs two more coats, and that should be done this evening. and since you people haven't had to hear me say this in awhile: i hate painting. i never want to paint anything ever again. as i finished painting wall #3 this morning i was saying awful things to the wall that it should not have had to hear. and then i thought of susan and her "fuckity fuck fuck fuck" mantra while running uphill and i felt a little bit better, because i'm not the only one who says awful things in times of self-inflicted adversity.

once the torturous painting ends, i want to find pretty curtains to go with the pretty walls. i'm trying to find tab-top panels that have red in them but aren't solid red, and a matching scarf valance. i tried to tell alvin this last night but he told me i was using words he doesn't know, like valance and tab-top, so i gave up trying to explain. he'll know what i'm talking about after the window treatments are up.

kate, i hope this satisfies your blog reading needs. i hope you and linda are still visiting this weekend. most of all, i hope there will be stalking.

this week in pictures.

i've tried to post several times this week but it just hasn't happened. the self-diagnosed ADD kicked in and i can't finish posts and then i'm like, eh, which is quickly followed by giving up. but this post has pictures! so that should help. less text + more pictures = less pressure to write.

the living room painting project from hell is half finished. we started with the trim and it wasn't long before i got tired of painting. so i did this instead:

by the way, that was a bad idea. it took five coats to cover it up, and the heart is still sort of visible. we have learned many lessons while painting, like the importance of using tinted, not white, primer. that lesson, it was painful. you would think that since this is room painting project #4, we would have learned these lessons long ago (perhaps on room #1 or 2). but no.

and that bar going across the living room, at the top of the picture--that is one of four metal tension rods that helps to keep the walls standing and the roof from squishing them flat. the people who remodeled our house decided to go with relatively unobtrusive metal support beams (that are then attached to metal supports in the walls) across the living room, instead of something like rafters. the first time someone sees our house, the conversation goes like this:

new person: what are those?

me: tension rods. they help hold up the walls.

np: no they don't!

me: yes they do!

np: that's impossible!

me: that's what i said. but really, they do.

np: i don't believe you.

me: you don't have to.

i know they're there to support the walls because 1. i haven't been squished to death by the roof yet and 2. they're ugly as hell, so why would anyone put those up for aesthetic reasons? i didn't think so.

below is a picture of the finished wall. the color is a deep red called cherry cobbler, which never fails to make me hungry. i like the range of color that showed up in this photo even if it looks nothing like the actual color.

and here, for good measure, is a picture of my dogs with their death ray eyes. see the beige wall behind them? that's the nasty color that's being covered up by the pretty red paint.

two tests down, two to go.

i just got home from taking my statistics test and oh my god my brain is fried. the test wasn't difficult so much as complicated, but yay me! i packed my head full of relevant statistical information this morning and should have done well on it. i checked and double checked answers and was finished an hour and a half later, and once i got to my car i was like, keys. i know i need to do something with my keys, but what? oh yeah. open the door.

the drive home was kind of fuzzy.

the one thing that got me through my test, besides the four o'clock deadline and the desire to see daylight once more, was that i was planning on going to starbucks (sorry, i'm talking about starbucks again) on my way home because after that test i totally deserved a latte. but then on the fuzzy drive home i remembered microsoft money. i started using ms money a couple of days ago to keep track of bills and spending and to try to start a budget, because we suck and haven't been able to do it on our own so far. i imported bank and credit card accounts and such and it started to get scary when i saw--in a pretty pie chart (mmmm, pie)--things like just how much i'm spending on coffee every week. i also took a debt quiz. the results were not good. i think ms money said i had a spending problem, or something equally offensive. so in light of my new budget software essentially pointing and laughing at my credit card issues, i decided to skip starbucks and have coffee at home. even though i was going to spend cash on the coffee, cash that ms money doesn't know about because i acquired it by selling my beloved futon and i didn't tell ms money about that sale. money doesn't need to know, though i wouldn't be surprised if it someone found out and recorded that income for me already.

i'd rather be a goat than sudan.

this is hilarious (and borrowed from jeanne, because i didn't know who she was so i checked out her blog and while there i had to take the what country are you? quiz).

You're Sudan!

Every time you get a headache, you reach for some aspirin, only to realize that someone destroyed it. That's just how things are going for you right now... it's hard to eat, hard to sleep, hard to not have a headache. You try to relax, but people always jump on you about something that doesn't make sense. If you were a goat, you'd be a Nubian.


Take the Country Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid

this would be awful even on a happy day.

this article is offensive on so many levels...my dooce.com addiction requires that i read the past four years of her archived posts and look at all her old photos, and i found it linked from her site.

if anyone ever referred to me as preggo--in the noun form, which i didn't know existed but is nonetheless how it is repeatedly used in this article--they would so die. ditto for the term bun-cooker. i know new york is trendy, but really.

and being made to feel like a cow? that's just wrong.

why?

pms is here again and it's making me angry.

none of my clothes fit right, and everything hurts, and all i wanna do is eat lots of chocolate. but then i feel bad about the chocolate binging, which pisses me off, and everything still hurts, and now i'm frustrated because nothing is right and that makes me want to cry.

at least alvin has caught on to this and knows what to expect. this morning he said that today is the beginning of several days where i want to Talk About Our Relationship--the part about where i think our relationship isn't working and will continue not to work. when he said that, i made a mental note not to have any relationship conversations with him, but later i found myself thinking about all the things he doesn't do right. then i got annoyed because he's right and this is the beginning of several days of agony.

i need to study for my upcoming test but i can't sit still for more than 10 minutes at a time. how do i expect to go back to school if i can't concentrate for longer than it takes me to eat a handful of hershey's kisses? why haven't the admissions people made their decisions yet? and why do my beady-eyed dogs keep staring at me? and following me around? like i want to be anywhere near them? i don't think so.

revenge of the salmon dog food.

when we acquired beagle dog in august, he came with some overly expensive dog food and was used to having made-for-dog sausage grated over his food and mixed with water to form a gravy. so, beagle dog was accustomed to his expensive food being covered in gravy so that he could eat it. i was told that this made his food easier to eat. i thought it was a physical thing, like maybe beagle dog couldn't chew so well and needed the dog equivalent of baby food covering his solid food in order to eat. but no. it turns out that he didn't like his food, mainly because it wasn't tasty enough.

we noticed that beagle dog wouldn't eat his own food but was super interested in eating other dog's food. also, we noticed that beagle dog sometimes likes to throw up. and our response to having to prepare a gravy sauce for the dog's food so that he could eat was along the lines of: no way. instead, we switched him to a food made for sensitive dog systems, and it is now clear that he likes his food because he has learned how to break into his locked dog food container to eat his fill of nasty-smelling dog food. his food is nasty for the same reason that he loves it: the main ingredient is salmon.

i am very fond of salmon, but only when it's cooked and presented to me on a plate in a way that is fit for human consumption. salmon dog food smells like ass in a way that a salmon filet does not, so i'm really not in favor of having to smell the salmon dog food. but beagle dog likes it, so all good.

i have noticed, however, that in the couple of months since beagle dog started eating this food, he has started to smell reeeely bad. he didn't smell like this before, really, and i'm wondering if his food is causing weird things to happen inside his sensitive system and leak out his doggie pores. last time we had him groomed--and he wouldn't stop howling at the doggy groomer place so they cut his appointment short--he only smelled clean for about three days.

also, a couple of nights ago the salmon lover decided he would strategically place his poo right in the walking path in our front yard. so far there has been an understanding between our dogs and their people that the yard is pretty much theirs to do with as they please (well, within reason), but they aren't supposed to go in the walkway between the front door and the gate. they've been very good about this so far, until the other night when it was completely dark and i stepped in something that shouldn't have been there. alvin stepped in it, too. we were not happy.

i cleaned off our shoes, wondering who had broken our unspoken walkway rule, when it became clear that it was beagle dog's fault because the shoe stuff smelled overwhelmingly like salmon and poo. it was salmon poo. it was deposited by the beagle dog, and it was disgusting.

so. he has almost run out of this current dog food, and i think we're going to switch him to a food that doesn't smell so bad. i hope that makes his coat smell better. i could try bathing him more often, but he's difficult to bathe because he dislikes water, and the groomer dislikes him, and i'm running out of options.

two things:

1. susan is awesome for designing a header for me. i love it! and you made it larger! i love the colors! and the green eye! thank you!! :)

2. i didn't have any caffeine past 10 a.m. yesterday, just because i didn't think about it. well, i thought about it once yesterday evening but i was like, nah. i don't need to drink coffee at night.

i was so wrong. i woke up this morning with a pounding caffeine-deficiency headache that won't go away, despite the grande coffee that i've (sadly) almost finished. also, i finally gave up mocking starbucks lingo and decided that what the hell, if i'm going to like them, i can use their silly terminology. i bet they like me more now when i order a grande coffee instead of calling it a medium coffee. i'm still annoyed with their caramel macchiato, because it's not a real macchiato, but other than that they've won me over.

my head hurts. and i really should quit talking about starbucks so much.

but it's ok because there were others.

i had another bizarre dream last night--alvin and i were on a train and we had a baby, and the one thing i remember about this baby is that it was cute, and then the train ran over the baby. the train conductor guy acted like he had no idea he'd run over my baby. and how did it get under the train, anyway? but in the dream it was ok, because i had LOTS of babies that looked just like the squished one. once i told conductor guy i knew what he'd done, he started the train again and i was relieved that we could finally go. i didn't want to just sit there while he pretended he didn't know what had happened. i was more upset about the train stopping than i was about my child. what's up with that?

i'm sure this is symbolic of something, somehow, but i have no idea what. i didn't actually have the kid so much as *poof*, suddenly i was holding it, and in my dream mind i was aware that i had also acquired lots of little exact replica babies (you know, in case of an accidental squishing). so maybe it wasn't really mine? i have no idea. it was disconcerting and i feel bad about it, even though i don't have any real reason to since i can't control what my brain does while i'm asleep.