happy blog birthday to me.

today is my one year blog anniversary. i'm not sure why i'm keeping track of this, except that other people do, too.

(speaking of anniversaries--sort of--next tuesday it will be four months since i moved out of my house.)

it's hard to believe it's been a year. it's gone by pretty quickly.

i celebrated today by eating a wild cherry sno cone. and then going to target. and maybe with a piece of chocolate cheese cake. there was much celebration on blog birthday day, though only coincidentally. i celebrated like it was any other day of the week! which means i really need to cut that out.

i found the snake, and yes, it scared the hell out of me.

i was looking for something in my closet tonight--a pair of scissors--which involved removing a stack of clothes off of luggage stacked on top of a closed box that contained a bunch of random shit, including a bag full of more random shit. i thought the scissors were in the bag.

turns out they weren't, but the snake was. i was digging through this bag, pulling things out of it, when i saw something black and white move at the bottom. my brain interpreted the wrongness of the situation before i actually figured out what the hell i was looking at, and then i dropped everything and nearly threw up. this is the effect snakes have on me, particularly when i'm not expecting to find said snake in my room in a random bag under piles of crap. which is, in retrospect, exactly where i should have expected the snake to be.

anyhow, i made shannon come retrieve loomis. he smells bad, and i'm sure he's hungry as hell--it's been four weeks since he last ate--and this totally explains a couple things, such as:

1. why my closet has smelled weird lately. i thought it was my dirty laundry, and i'm trying not to think about why i thought my unwashed clothing smelled like a dying reptile, but whatever, and
2. why the cats keep hanging out in my closet. i thought they liked it because it's obstacle course-like, but i guess it was more that it's like an obstacle course containing their favorite snake that kept them coming back for more.

shannon swore there was no way the snake could have gotten into my room (liar), but i think that since my closet is adjacent to her room, loomis probably escaped her room though a hole in the wall, somewhere, and found himself in my closet. and then slithered away to die. poor snake. he's being fed now. much as i'm not thrilled about the fact that he's back, instead of, say, halfway to mexico by now, i hope he's okay. i'm glad he didn't die. in my closet.

so wrong.

okay, so this uncf ad? it really bothers me, every single time i see it:











i have brain issues anyway (they're nice, i just don't like to talk about them), so i'm seriously bothered that there are books WHERE HER BRAIN IS SUPPOSED TO BE. it's like her head was unnecessarily opened up and the contents were replaced. i'm not cool with that.

good dog, bad movie.

chuck is the best dog ever! i want.

58 days left.

wasn't that the title of a horror movie? oh, no, that was 28 days later. close enough, though i'm not completely overcome with the desire to kill anyone. yet.

60 days and counting.

i filed a petition for divorce monday morning, and i was surprised at how easy the process is. once i finally found my way into the courthouse--because all but one of the entrances are barricaded shut, including the front door, and i walked around the entire building looking for that one entrance--all i had to do was hand the dude my petition and a check and i was done. it took about five minutes, which was long enough for it to occur to me that that's got to be a really depressing job, being the person who accepts and processes divorce petitions all day long.

almost as depressing as the office in the courthouse in new orleans where we got our marriage license--this one tiny room served as both the marriage license office and the death certificate office. how very appropriate. i'm still amused by that.

so, october 16 is the first day that i can possibly have the divorce fairy waive her magic wand over our heads and declare us completely free. i thought it was a week sooner than that, but no. turns out i can't count. and wishful thinking, etc.

i'm throwing a party when this is all over.

the snake is still loose.

and i feel bad about it curling up in some dark, remote corner of the house and starving to death, because that's pretty much what is happening. unless it learned to open doors and has managed to escape into the wilderness that is our backyard.

i was hoping this wouldn't happen, but.

every so often i check the aquarium in shannon's room to make sure her snake is all snuggly in his cage (in being the imperative term) and tonight when i checked i was having trouble finding him. so i told shannon this and she was all, sure he's there! he's in his coconut!

the snake has half of a coconut shell he likes to curl up and sleep in. so far every time i've been like, dude, where's your snake? i don't see him! she's been right about him being in his coconut.

but not tonight. he wasn't in his coconut. and he wasn't in his water bowl. nor was he buried under the fluffy stuff that lines the bottom of his home. the snake had escaped.

four hours later, the snake is still missing. we've turned over and looked under every piece of furniture and clothing in the downstairs part of the house, and we can't find loomis. we think he's probably still in shannon's room because it's unlikely he could have made it past the cats, into other parts of the house, without them clawing him to death. like they tried to do the last time he escaped. he's non-venomous and doesn't have any way to protect himself. it doesn't help that the cats think he's a toy.

so, loomis has some basic snake needs: food (today was his feeding day but he got out before mealtime), water, to be kept warm, and not to die a kitty-induced death. and i have some basic human needs, like not waking up in the middle of the night to find a snake slithering across my body, and then promptly dying of a heart attack.

i <3 being alone. and tile, of course.

i still love having weekends to myself. i sleep in, watch movies, hang out at coffee shops, get together with friends, go shopping, and best of all no one complains about what i'm doing or how i'm doing it. this level of weekend contentedness reminds me of how i felt when i moved back to austin from NC: i would wake up every day and just be grateful to be back here. it's like that.

for awhile i envied alvin and his situation (er, girlfriend), but not so much anymore. alvin was telling me yesterday that he feels smothered because they hang out together all the time, and sometimes he wants to be alone but she's not okay with it. i tried to give him some advice because i feel bad for him--i mean, if i were in that situation i would feel claustrophobic right about now--but i also laughed a tiny bit. i reminded him that he can make his own choices and shouldn't let someone else choose how he spends all his free time. because it's true. that's something i'm learning, that i have control over my life. i hope he realizes that, too. relationships are all about trade offs, but it sounds like it's not necessarily worth the sacrifices he's making. alas, not my decision to make. wheee!

in other news that is potentially uninteresting if you're not as big a fan of tile as i am, i'm about to start a huge project that may be completely infeasible: a ceramic tiled headboard for my bed. i don't know whether to tile/mosaic an already existing wood headboard (which would require buying one), or if i should mount tiles on a surface like plywood and attach that to the wall. tile is heavy, so attaching something to the wall would require lots of supports and would be semi-permanent since i probably wouldn't want to take it down for awhile because it might leave lots of holes in the wall. and this isn't exactly my wall. i only rent it. i think david's pushing for the existing headboard approach so i don't completely ruin his wall. but i already have my pretty tile--now i need to decide what to do with it.

i've also got a book that i want to read before classes start that i hope will give me some idea about what i'm doing when i'm thrown into my field placement this fall. i'm not sure that reading this book will help but i'm pretending it will just to make myself feel better.

movin' on up.

i'm still around; i just haven't had much to say lately. every once in a while things get shitty and then i get whiny and i'm really trying not to be whiny so i opt for silence instead. same old story.

i found out yesterday where my internship will be this fall: the nearest prison. i've never been to a prison! i'm all excited that i get to hang out with prisoners and mentor them. we'll see how this goes. it should be an awesome opportunity, and it's exactly what i wanted to do. i just need to get the silence of the lambs visions out of my head. a friend suggested i think shawshank redemption instead. yes. that. it's going to be completely intimidating and probably fucking scary until i get the hang of whatever i'll be doing. no idea about the specifics, but yeah, looking forward to it.

that's all for now. divorce stuff is soon to be in the works (hopefully by next week, and i'm v. happy about that). let the games begin.