Lately online I’ve been feeling ignored. So many times I’ll post something on some forum, or say something on TCZ only to hear cricket noises as I wait for a response. It’s kind of disconcerting. I can kind of understand it on a forum, especially one where I’m not very well known – I’m more of a lurker than a joiner – but on TCZ it bothers me. I’m an administrator there, supposedly part of a team, but lately my ideas and suggestions on current issues are ignored or barely considered before being dismissed and even if I just ask some inane question or crack a joke on the admin chat channel, it’s like I’m not there.

Oh well. I’m way too dependent on TCZ anyway. Maybe I should retire. But everytime I think about it, I realise there are so many aspects of being an admin I’d miss. Ugh, I have a headache. Whinging about TCZ isn’t helping. I just feel like whinging full stop. What else can I moan about…. There’s always my granny. She’s so bizarre. In fact, my grandfather came to see me at work yesterday and I actually said ‘She’s whacked!’ to him. The scary thing is, he said, ‘Tell me about it!’ That floored me 🙂 Her current obsession of the moment is to get their house “in order” in case one of them (my grandfather) passes away. The morbidity of that aside, she’s been wigging out lately because my grampa has a habit of saving bits of wood, siding, carpet etc from past home improvement projects by storing them in the basement. And he’s squirreled away some of it on top of the ventilation system down there. Well she’s been after him to get it all down and out of the house for months now. I swear it’s the only thing she can physically talk about until it’s done.

Well, grampa has no need to be monkeying up and down a ladder to get all this stuff down so I said I would come by today and do it. Little did I know that I would be stricken with a particularly horrible set of cramps all night long and this morning. Ugh it was awful. Could not even stand up straight. Totally sucks because I used to be able to brag that I never got them – and I didn’t – so now it must be payback because I get ’em now with a vengeance. Anyway, too much info I know 🙂 So I called them and said I’d be over later than I’d intended so I could rest a bit. I finally show up, piss off granny even more when I ask if we can tackle the stuff in the garage when it’s cooler (beastly hot today) to which she said I should have come earlier that morning when it *was* cooler. I then replied that she was lucky I was there to help at all and proceeded to tell her I could barely stand up straight much less climb ladders in a basement all afternoon. Anyway, I made her feel bad then which made me feel bad, but you know, I was bitchy and all. Anyway I told her it was ok, I had taken some motrin and felt up to it etc etc and disappeared down the basement with my grampa.

As I looked around the basement ceiling and the plethora of junk my gran had been moaning about these past months I was shocked to discover that there werre a few slats of siding, one chuck of carpeting, 3 squares of glass and some old screening wire. That’s it. Took all of five minutes to get it all down.

Aye-yi-yi, to quote Ricky Ricardo.

I really want to do a roadtrip out to Cali this fall or if worse comes to worse, next spring. I would love to load up the car and head west for a nice leisurely drive along the southern route to Monterey with the kidlet. We could see the Rockies, the desert, stop over at the Grand Canyon (I’ve never seen it myself)… I think it would be cool for her to get a longer glimpse of the country and I’ve never attempted a roadtrip like that before. My car’s in good shape, I should have enough vacation time built up by then… The only thing stopping me is money. Well, money and getting the kid time off from school which is probably not a good idea. The only feasible time to do it for her is over xmas hols. Argh. I don’t want to go in the summertime because it’s too bloody hot. Winter, and I’d have to worry about hitting bad weather around the mountains.

Will leave that to ponder for a bit. I want to go see Kelly and Meechie and everyone so I’ll have to work something out. Not much else to say atm.. Just working away here waiting for 4.30 to come along so go outside where the heat index is 115 degrees F. And I have to go to the store aswell. Ugh. I shall be a puddle by the time I get home.

Ohh I’m getting a nice little tan from all this swimming. Excellent so long as I don’t burn. The kid and I spent a couple hours at the pool this evening and it was heavenly. It’s been beastly hot and I have to say, The next car I buy I will resist the urge to buy a black car with a black interior unless I live where it’s cold all the time. My car just sucks in the heat. I could fry an egg on the steering wheel. Anyway, the water felt wonderful.

Yesterday, nothing exciting happened. I don’t know why I keep writing that nothing exciting happened. Not every day is a party. Maybe I should change it to ‘nothing bad happened yesterday’. That might be better. I let the kidlet ride her bike to the pool over the weekend which isn’t as far as when she rode to the grandparent’s but it’s along one of my town’s busiest roads so i ended up following along behind her in the car. See, I didn’t want her to ride along the busy road, even though that’s the quickest way. It’s illegal anyway so she had to take a bit of a circuitous route. So I followed to make sure she didn’t get lost. Of course, she didn’t and I always worry for nothing. But she’s not allowed to ride to the pool to swim by herself, so she has to meet a friend there. I know she loves to swim but I doubt she’d have much fun swimming on her own with no buddy to hang around with.

Anyway, I’m working from home tomorrow, hurray! I wish I could think of a reason to keep that up during the winter because I’m going to miss it. Sometimes, even though I love my job very much, I wake up just not wanting to go to work. I just have no desire whatsoever to get up, shower, put makeup on, dress in uncomfortable office clothes and drive across town and sit in my little cave for 8 hours. But having a day at home to look forward to each week motivates me for some bizarre reason and I don’t feel like such a sluggard in the mornings. Besides, and I think I’ve said this before, I love working in my jammies 😀

And so ends another entry. I’m off to watch the Cheers marathon, then to bed with my 5th Harry Potter book. Gnight.

Today I will get my work done and I will swim. I will not pop a video in until I have gotten a healthy dose of pure exercise. And I will not just float around the pool when the waves are on. I will stretch and jog in place. I will do laps while avoiding petulant little kids who blame you for getting in their way. I will let my daughter stay longer than I actually want to stay. I will be oblivious to all the hardbodies there flashing their little bellybuttons and letting their suit ride up so we can all get a good view of their ass. I will not so much as look at the chiseled, slick men as they gracefully glide through the water. I will swim against the small current in order to give my arms a good workout. I will do flips and handstands and I will teach my daughter to do them too. And most of all, I will remember, this time, to put my bloody sun deflectors up in my car because it get bloody hot in there.

Love love loved Pirates of the Caribbean. Love the ride so much – it was great to see all the little homages to it in the film. The kid and I went to see it Wednesday night. It was pretty cool because PotC was one of the first films I started to follow when I started my movie site and I’d report on the progress here and there, read up on it whenever it got a mention on other film sites etc. And then to see the final product and to have it exceed my expectations was really kind of awesome. It’s my fondest wish to someday get a chance to hang out on a movie set and just watch. Ahhh bliss.

Anyway, day at home tomorrow… I think I really love doing that on Fridays then I sort of get a 3 day weekend every week 🙂 I know I still have to work, but there’s something about not having to dress up and go *in* to the office that makes it fun. I get so much more done as well since I don’t have to answer the phone.

What else is happening… Oh yes, Kelly made it back from london okay. A bit of a cockup with the cat in LA, but she got it sorted by pulling the pitiful crying girl routine 🙂 She is so resourceful. And damn lucky the beeyotch. She will eventually end up in a nice little place called the Carriage House in Pacific Grove near the Seven Gables Inn (gorgeous big yellow B&B right on Lighthouse Avenue that has appeared in a Visa advert). She’ll be one block from the beach, and from Lover’s Point. Cheap (for Pacific Grove and near-beachfront property) rent and all utilities paid. She got her job back at Pebble Beach, Spanish Bay Inn so yay more celebrity gossip for me 🙂 and our friends who own a couple of car dealerships are loaning her a car until she gets back on her feet. I don’t think she could have asked for a better way to start all over again – was certainly easier than the few times I’ve had to start all over, the wench. But I’m not hating. No no.. Just a little wistful I do miss foggy old Monterey sometimes. and my Meechie. I haven’t talked to him in a while, should give him a call…

Ahhh well… it’s getting late and I should really ummm.. yeah. I’m off now.

So I’ve got a vague story idea I’m kind of excited about. The only problem is that the more I think about it, the more I begin to talk myself out of writing it. Things like ‘No one’s going to be interested in that’ and ‘who the hell cares about that?’ dance through my head. Gotta love that self-doubt before I actually write the story. Well.. if anyone cares, the story idea is on my Evolve blog. Leave me a comment or something if you think it’s something you’d ever check out.

Anyway… So it’s July. Hottest fecking month of the year apart from August. I’m not one of those that exactly love the heat either so you can iomagine what torture Nebraska summers are for me. I scurry from one air-conditioned place to another as quick as I can, and spend as little time as possible outside. The only respite I find outside is when we hit the pool. It’s not so much the heat as it is the humidity, which is a killer.

I try to find positive things about living in Nebraska, I really do. I’m stuck here for who knows how long for various reasons, so I want to try to find a way to be happy here but this place does not make it easy. Let’s see… I love my job and the people there. I like swimming at the Waterpark.

….

I honestly can’t think of anything else. We have “cultural” things. We have an Ethnic Festival (outdoors, in July, the aforementioned hottest month of the year) in which a bunch of hispanic people cook hispanic food and some old people don leiderhosen and kilts and do a native dance of some kind. And we have Art in the Park where mediocre artists gather to show off their watercolours of flowers and butterflies. It’s not as bad as all that but again, it’s in feckin’ July. WHY??

There’s a museum here all about the Pioneers and there’s an ‘Old Town’ with real houses and stores leftover from the days of the cowboys. I went there on ever bloody field trip you can imagine when I lived here as a kid.

The ratio of restaurants to actual population is outrageous. If there’s construction in town it’s to build another one. Or an auto parts store.

Did I mention it’s hot? It’s fucking hot. Hotter than hot. It’s damn hot. And then we get 2 days of a lovely autumn, and then it’s a deep-freeze in the winter. Then it’s cold. Fucking cold. Colder than cold. it’s damn cold. And the scenery. Well, if you’re a fan of flat cornfields, then this is the place for you. My new thing now when someone asks me what Nebby is like is to tell them to go rent ‘About Schmidt’ with jack Nicholson. That is Nebraska. Depressing.

Wow what a rant. Anyway enough of that 🙂

My damn comments don’t seem to show up occasionally. How annoying. But not *too* annoying as no one who reads this ever leaves me a comment, hint hint 🙂

Hehehe, I dunno who reads this shite anyway, it’s just me rambling about stupid shit most of the time. Then again that’s what a journal’s for eh?

Don’t have very much to write about atm. just working out plans for the kidlet’s 12th (*sob*) birthday this Thursday. 12! ohhhh time flies so quickly. Just yesterday she was wearing little princess outfits and watching Barney. Now she’s wearing the princess outfits ONLY on Halloween and watching The Matrix. *sigh* Last weekend I cut the chord a bit and let her ride her bike to the grandparents, which is about a 5 mile journey. My nails are non-existent as I bit them waiting for her to phone me when she arrived. And she did, a half an hour after she set off. Her trip was incident-free and I worried for no reason. I can’t seem to realise that she’s a lot older now. It’s just so hard to think of her able to do things like that. I remember the first time I let her walk across the street to get a soda from the gas station. I felt like a horrible mother for it. But I wasn’t. Just letting go a little bit at a time. But nobody told me how much that sucks.