I was in a meeting the other day with both bosses and the rest of the department and one of the bosses said we should start the meeting with a little icebreaker. I thought to myself, ‘Whatever…’ We’re a small department, we all know each other, there’s no ice to break, but ok. Anyway, he says we should tell one thing about ourselves that was false, and one thing about us that’s true.

It’s so much easier to think up the false stuff 🙂

So my turn comes around and I say my two things and my Big Boss turns to me and says “You’ve had such a wild life, I’m not sure what to believe.” To this day her comment stuck with me. Have I had a wild life? I never thought my life was particularly outrageous. I’ve done some stupid things. Done some cool things. Bad things have happened to me, but so have some good. I think I did have a bit of a wild and crazy youth – where I did a LOT of stupid things. But I had fun.

I don’t know… It just seems like my life right now is plain. That’s a good word for it. Plain. This is dangerous for me, when I start to realize my life is plain. This is when I decide to up sticks and move half-way around the world. Maybe I should just rearrange my furniture and call it good because I can’t afford to move away from my life right now.

The other day I told someone I was pretty much resigned to remaining in Nebraska, at least until my daughter graduates from high school, which is a good six years from now. I was actually starting to feel settled here, if not content. Now the thought of staying here for six years seems like a jail sentence. I can’t make anything exciting happen here. I’ve given up trying and convinced myself that it’s not so bad. And truly, it’s NOT as bad as I sometimes make it out to be. I like my job, my coworkers, for the most part, are friendly and fun…

Ohhh man. I didn’t mean for this to be a moaning blog. I was actually just thinking about the things I’ve done or seen that makes people think I have a wild life. I guess maybe my definition of a wild life is a bit different from other people’s.

Ok so I’m becoming more and more impressed with Blogger’s capabilities. Now I can have titles. Nifty 🙂 Problem is I can’t think of a title first before the blog – usually. Oh well, minor inconvenience.

So I’m getting sucked further and further into my fixation on Kiefer Sutherland. *sigh* I don’t know what my damn problem is. Maybe it’s just hormones. I blame the internet mostly. Before I got online, I’d see a flick and think ‘oh yeah, he’s hot.’ and that would be the end of it. Maybe I’d have a sex dream or two involving said actor deciding he couldn’t live without me *grin* and well, that would pretty much be the end of it. These days, I have far too much access to archived interviews, trailers, movie updates, interviews other obsessed fans made of when they appeared on Leno and dumped online to feed my craving. I waste ages trying to delve a little bit into what makes these guys tick.

Believe me I feel incredibly silly talking about this. I don’t like to let people see how weird I am but I’ve got a blog and I’m gonna use it. I want this to be a no-holds-barred journal so there you go. I… am a weirdo. Anyway, getting back to Kiefer… I can’t sum him up. I, of course, don’t know him as a person and never will really, all I know about him is his work and the articles I’ve read. No way does that give me any true insight to what he, or any other celeb is like as a plain old human being. So I think a lot of my attraction to him is based on the parts he’s played. Same with the other 2 or 3 actors I get like this about. I like stories about tortured individuals involved in some kind of struggle – mental or physical. Kiefer happens to play a lot of those. I find it fascinating that in one film he can exude pure evil like in Eye for an Eye where he plays a rapist and in another film play an abused young man who’s so traumatised that he can’t speak as in ‘Trapped in Silence’. Amazing. Maybe I simply admire the talent. Maybe I’m just letting my inner teenie out for a stroll. It’s hard to say. I’m sitting here writing this, feeling like such a dweeb and yet also feeling like I have to explain why I’m a dweeb.

Actually I’ve been wondering who the next little obsession was going to be. That’s how it works you see, I get hooked on one from seeing a film and then stupid me gets online and starts reading about the actor, or at least about the film that got me hooked and it just snowballs from there. With Kiefer it was a little different as I’d actually been a fan of his since Lost Boys. In fact, I can remember when that came out because my friends and I were so chuffed that it was filmed in nearby Santa Cruz. Half of the opening scenes were like seeing my home on the big screen 🙂 Anyway at the time I was big on vampires and into Anne Rice goth-y stuff, so naturally I was completely *phwoar* over Kiefer’s vampire. He was very yum.

So now that he’s on 24, I find myself back into Kiefer-dom. It’s not a bad place to be really 🙂

Right so.. Summing up, I am really just a hormonal teenager with the hots for some actor. I am just a heartbeat away from creating a fansite, and I have Jack Bauer as my desktop theme. *sigh*

Right so… I think I finally got through to the bellydancer. I think she finally realised I’m not at fault and her own stupid business tactics failed her. Maybe she learned a valuable lesson from all of this too. Anyway she *says* she’ll be sending me my final check whenever some greek church pays her for work she did on costumes for them. I seriously doubt I’ll ever see that money. Kind of sucks really because I’m really down to my last few quarters. Good job tomorrow’s payday.

Anyway, It’s been a tight couple of months but I don’t feel too horrible about it. I feel sort of hopefull and energised about a lot of things right now. I’ve been in tighter spots back when I was making half of what I make now. I just need to sit down and go through every one of my expenses and work out some kind of schedule. I make more than my bills now, yet somehow, somewhere I’m spending more than I should and I end with nothing. Anyway I’ve got vacation coming up in a week so I’ll sort it out then.

What else is going on… Oh not much. I’ve been spending quality time with Kiefer Sutherland *grin*. Well, not really but I have become addicted to his show ’24’. I don’t really watch a lot of primetime television – in fact I think the only show I watch religiously is ‘Survivor’. But now I guess I have to add season three of ’24’ to my viewing schedule. A couple of weeks ago, I rented the first season DVDs, mainly because there was fuckall else to rent at the time, and I’d always heard it’s an excellent show. But I missed the first few episodes of it when it debuted and I’d also always heard that if you do that, you’re screwed for being able to follow the plot. So I didn’t bother to watch any of it. Same thing happened during season 2. I’m all caught up now tho baby 🙂 My god this is the best show I’ve ever seen. I simply love it.

After I became hooked on the show I started looking up Kiefer’s bio because even tho I’ve been a fan of his from the day I saw him in Lost Boys (can you believe he was only 17 when he made that???? I can’t.) I can’t think of anything I’ve seen him in lately. Apparently ’24’ is his ‘comeback’ or whatever. I didn’t even realise he’d been off the radar. I just adore him 🙂 Yes I’ve fallen into another one of my little obsessions with actors and I’m not happy about it. I get really preoccupied when I get hooked on one. Ahhhh well… This too shall pass. I haven’t reached the point of wanting to create a website for him or the show yet 🙂 hehehehe.

Anyway season three – October 28th – woohoo!

Oh I curse the day I ever said I would do a site for a bellydancer. The woman is unreasonable! After monthly battles to get her to respond to my emails both asking for input and requesting that she pay her growing bill, I quit doing anything for her site. Why work on something I’m not getting paid for? When she finally did respond to me I was more than generous in offering to let her make whatever payments she could towards her bill. I got two small check from her and then I heard nothing from her for ages. I pretty much wrote her off. My emails to her were bouncing, no replies to my phone calls – nothing. I tried last week to email her one last time, and the email went through. And I got a response! However I told her that I would be resigning as her webmaster and that she needed to pay me the amount owed in full. Her response was a very snotty ‘well I never could get the site to load’ and ‘I’m working 12 hour days for very little money’ or ‘I never got one response from the website’.

Well to those I said ‘How come you never mentioned to me you were having site problems?’ and ‘Well I don’t exactly live the life of the rich myself here in the mecca that is my midwestern town.’ and ‘The website has been live for about 4 months. You cannot seriously expect the money to roll in just because you have a website. You have to promote it, and you never did. I did all i could with search engine submission and attempts to reciprocal-link, but advertising is what you’re meant to do. If you don’t, of course no one’s going to go to your site.’ ARGH! Every flippin’ email she sent me these past few days have been one long guilt trip and veiled insults at my work and my price for the work – which she agreed to the day we met for lunch. She didn’t balk at my fee then when I was very up front about how much web startup was going to cost her, why is she balking now?? Grrrrrr. I cut her a lot of slack because I knew she was trying to start up her own studio etc etc – I let her make payments on her bill, payments which were sporadic and small at best, I didn’t charge her for half the stuff I’d done.

So this morning I fired off an email (something I really should not do just after waking up) and said as plainly and as nicely as I could that I did not appreciate the guilt complex she was laying on me but if she really wanted to have a pity competition, I would have no problem competing because my finances aren’t exactly the greatest either. I told her I’d done everything I could possibly do with very little communication and input from her, and for far less than I would normally charge. But the headache of trying to get her to pay *anything* on her bill was just one headache I didn’t need.

She asked for her HTML files ‘because she deserves them after the great expense she went to to have me create them’ and her pics back, but frankly, she can wait until I receive her final check. In hindsight, I think the silly woman has absolutely no head for business. She should not have jumped into website development right as she was trying to begin building her studio up from scratch on very little money. She should have established herself first and ensured that her studio would be a success before hiring a professional designer to enhance her business with a website. I don’t believe she timed it right and if this fiasco is indicative of the way she runs things, I doubt she will succeed in her venture. I think she was counting on the website to bring in money from the original costumes she creates and sells, and she expected the money from sales online to happen almost immediately. But, she did not have the funds for me to setup any sort of sales system where people could buy what they wanted from her online. All I could do was put together pictures of her stuff along with prices and hope people would be bothered enough to call her long distance and order something. She said she wanted to reach people in other states and even internationally. Well I hate to say it but there are a gazillion bellydance sites out there, some of them very professional, and that do allow people to buy online and I think if someone is going to shop online, they are going to want to do the entire transaction online because it’s convenient. Someone in France is not going to want to make a long distance call to some woman in Lincoln, Nebraska and order a coin bra. Puh-lease.

Argh. I just had to vent. The woman pissed me off no end this weekend with her whiny, guilt-inducing emails. From now on I will: Not do websites for anyone just starting a business, Only work for established companies, and Make sure I have a contract next time. And I need a business partner to handle all the money crap. I hate squeezing people for money.

MMmmmm Vacation… Today I turned in my request for a glorious week off in a few weeks. Five whole days (9 if you count the weekends) to myself, and getting paid for it to boot! God I can’t wait. I need a break in the routine. I’ve never been very good at monotony. I feel like all I do is get up, go to work, come home, watch a movie or flit around the Net. It’s boring. I just need a little break in the monotony and then I think I’ll be juiced up and energized again. I need it. It’s been a rough couple of weeks.

Return of the King trailer came out yesterday and ohhhhhh my goodness I cannot bloody wait for this film. I just can’t. I think I’ve talked about it before but who cares, it’s my blog and I’ll go on and on if I want to 🙂 Anyway, yes I am a geek. YOU HEAR THAT ALL YOU EEJITS BACK IN 7th GRADE? I finally admit it now. I’ve read the books most of my life, I’ve loved the books most of my life, and I worship at the altar of Peter Jackson. Seeing the ROTK trailer was just an illuminating moment for me. December 17th just cannot come soon enough.

TCZ is crap. What else is new. Lots of problems there but nothing that won’t sort itself out eventually. I just have to learn not to let it bother me as much as it usually does. Some good has come out of the recent troubles tho. I learned who my true friends are and I learned that a few people I considered friends, really aren’t. I learned I can handle confrontation. I still don’t like it, but I can deal with it. And I learned that no matter what you do, there will always be people in the world who dislike you for no real reason and to stop worrying about it when people do that.

So there are my lessons for the day: Vacation good. ROTK even better. TCZ crap.

Short short blog today. Sorry.

Today I’m going to finesse some websites and try to find another host for my film site which is going down in a couple months :(. I don’t have a clue how I’m going to export all my data yet. Need to look into that. Anyway I’d better get started.

Blah. That’s how I’ve been. Just blah. But it too, shall pass. Lately I’ve been doing a few projects, one being letters to my mum in blog form. I kind of like it. It felt a little weird at first, writing to her, but after a while I found it kind of therapeutic. I finished up Meechie’s page after finally settling on a design I liked and that fit the wonderful pic of Meech that Leonie from my forums drew for me. She rocks. So Meechie’s sister saw his page and now apparently I need to put together a page for “his own flesh and blood” whom I neglected to link to 🙂 “Oh no she di-in’t” was the exact quote I believe 🙂 Hehehe.. So I’m waiting for her to send me some pics and I’ll put something together for them.

Today I had to go to a four hour orientation (or re-orientation rather) at work. *yawn*. No matter how they try to jazz it up, it’s still sitting on a hard plastic chair for four hours listening to people talk about things like ‘Emtala’ and ‘Bio-hazard’ safety. I understand that some of this stuff is important to know, but I don’t see the need to take 4 bloody hours out of my work day to go through it all. It can all be done in increments via the web. Oh well, til that glorious day, I have to sit through torture once a year. At least now I can have my job evaluation Friday and then get my raise next paycheck 🙂 I can’t believe I’ve been at the hospital almost four years already. This is the longest I’ve ever worked in one place 🙂 Not that I’m a job-hopper mind you. I just moved a lot, got better job offers, took time out to go to college etc.

Anyway, quick blog tonight.