Mmm. The happier I am, the less time I spend on the internet.

I totally just wiped out in front of our apartment building. It's been snowing for about 24 hours, give or take, without much accumulation, and the roads aren't slippery. Even so I was being careful on foot, and I still went flying. Bruising can be expected on my right wrist, my left hip, my left knee (this one will be a doozy), and possibly also on my face. I definitely hit my glasses against the pavement and might have hit my jaw, too - it doesn't hurt now, but there was definitely some snow packed on my face when I got up.

Really my wrist just hurts a little, and is already turning purple. Hopefully I didn't sprain it.

But this clears up one of my major fears from last year. The first was driving, and I've gotten over most of my paranoia at stoplights (although last night I turned right at three green lights while some idiot tried turning left right into me - which makes me wonder what they teach in driver's ed here in Madison). The second is falling, because they made a huge deal about it right after I left the hospital, mostly because I didn't have my full range of motion while in the brace, but also to avoid me twisting in some weird feline way and hurting my back even more. So I survived this fall okay; so we can move on with our lives.

One of the great things (and there are not many of them in the first place) about losing all of your music to a crashed hard drive (or equivalent) is going through all sorts of stupid mix cd's I made in late 2007 when I was driving a lot between Kalamazoo and Peoria. For about a month I made the trip once or twice a week - that's over four hours each way, so the radio got stale really quickly, especially since there are not a lot of great stations in the middle of nowhere, Illinois.

For about six months now a lot of that music has been lost to me, so now that I'm starting to listen to a lot of music again (which comes and goes), I keep thinking, "Hey, didn't I used to have a cover of Milkshake, done by some ridiculous male indie band? What happened to that?" And then I start burning old mix cd's back into my computer and find it, to my great delight.

Somewhere along the way I seem to have misplaced my stash of post-it notes. This could become problematic in the v. near future, as I love to make myself lists on paper with ink, the whole shebang.

Some things I need to do before the weekend, so I don't have to think about them:
1. mail the new, working digital frame to my grandparents;
2. call my legal eagle;
3. make bread (I kept putting this off last weekend and it never got done, so tonight's the night!);
4. divvy up and transfer chicken from fridge to freezer;
5. wash every dish in the entire house.

...I'm sure I'll think of a few more by the time I get home from work.


Meanwhile the landscaping guys employed by my apartment complex absolutely need to stop darting across my field of vision in between the slats of the blinds on my patio door. I get used to seeing it in the summer, but right now all of our sidewalks out there are buried under several feet of snow, and I don't know what they could be doing out there, but it's causing my eyes strain. Every time they walk by, my eyes dart over there to make sure I'm not seeing things.

I would normally just quote these, but I'll link to yes and yes, because this blogger does it better:

On speaking your mind...

On taking risks...

And on the subject of happiness... well, I believe this one halfway, because I've spent a number of years dreading adult life because there's so much you "have to do," i.e., taxes and working an imperfect-for-me job and grocery shopping, but now that I'm here I know attitude can change a lot of things for the better. Some things that you don't have control over don't have to control you. That said, the things that you can control are waiting to be burst wide open and made better for you, but you're the only one with the vision to make that happen for yourself.

I was reluctant to read yes and yes at first, because it's so damn upbeat, but after about three days, I was sold. More often than not, this girl gets me thinking about what I love, or what I'd love to change, or what I'd love to love in my life. Plus, she knows how it is to live in the frozen wastelands of the upper Midwest. Some of you might appreciate her.

ETA: Augh, on being yourself.

Oh, quasi-flirtatious, tattooed Copps cashier. You made my day a little brighter, with your ironic hip-hop lingo and teasing of the older lady bagger on your lane.

I suspect I live on the wrong side of town to come into contact with a lot of people like that in my daily errand-running, and maybe that means we need to move.

The stampeding herd of children living above us certainly do make a fine case against having kids.

Especially on Sunday mornings.

I've been alive one year.

Oh, so, also, if any of you have any love for Harry Potter, I highly recommend We Are Wizards. It's a documentary (available for instant viewing on netflix, if you have it) about Harry Potter fandom, and they talk to a handful of Wizard Rock bands, a few women who run major websites/internet campaigns, and Brad Neely (insert lovey sigh here) who did Wizard People, Dear Reader. They also interviewed a woman from some crazy anti-Potter Christian group, for the sake of an opposing argument, I guess, but she doesn't really make any remotely compelling arguments. Then again, I'm biased.

But! The things I like most about this film are A) the Hungarian Horntails, the two members of which are seven and four years old, and brothers, and adorable, and their parents are exactly the kind of parents I want to be someday, and B) Brad Neely, who is quite charming and bearded and throughout his interviews tends to chuckle to himself, like he really doesn't care if you're chuckling with him, because he's so entertaining to himself.

And also the crazy opposing viewpoint keeps making these points against Harry Potter that actually sound really positive and lovely, as far as the series bringing together a community of people who are so invested and creative and funny.

Anyway, it's wonderful, and it's just over an hour, so it's pretty short. And it's delightful.

A reason I love my husband: When other guys start talking about my boobs in a public forum, he doesn't get mad, or leap to "defend my honor."



I laugh every time I see that goofy little emoticon.

You know you're feeling better when you're way, way more bored than relieved on your days off.

Fortunately that boredom means I make delicious spinach and artichoke dip, and work on those paper garlands:



The only thing about them that I would change is that some of them have orange or lime green on the backside, because they're made from security envelopes, and my phone bills are orange. I really like the shadows. I might add a few more strings of them, to make them fuller and look more like a tent, or something.

I'm beginning to feel like 2010 will be the Year of the Baby. I feel like all I see on facebook these days are pregnancy and birth announcements.

This is not a bad thing. It's just strange and new, like when the first trickle of wedding announcements came through, and it was like, wait, what? When did we become adults?

So, as predicted, our tips have gone way, way down this week from the three-week holiday flurry. By the time I left this afternoon we were at least $20 down from what we normally have around four, and much less than what we've had the last few weeks. I guess people are getting their credit card bills from all their gift-giving and have decided that while spending $20 on lunch isn't out of their budget, dropping a dollar into our jar is just too outrageous an expense.

My coworker and I were joking about wearing low-cut tops from now on, to boost tips. Since we're allowed to DIY our own logo shirts, I'm considering upcycling a thrifted polo even more seriously than I was three months ago when they got on our cases again for the dress code. Especially now that I'm working almost exclusively afternoon shifts, when it's split even between genders.

Why, yes! I am that shameless. Fish's gotta swim, bird's gotta eat.

Did you guys know that Snuffy's first name is Aloysius? I thought he just had the one name.

Every time I see pictures of paper garlands strung up as full-time home decor, I fall a little more in love with the idea. Today I was bored enough to begin experimenting with the idea here in our little apartment, and while the results were iffy, I think I'm more interested in actually completing this project than walking away.

( inspiration )

Also in the realm of awesome-and-thrifty, I pulled a pair of trousers out of my closet, because I'm sick of wearing jeans when I'm not at work. My mother bought these for me for job interviews post-graduation, but they're too short, so I've never worn them out of the house. So I just let out the hems and am letting the raw edge go crazy, since they're still short enough not to be destroyed by an average amount of walking, but long enough now to actually cover my legs.

Score, new pants! And they're comfy like the yoga pants I usually wear on my days off.

I woke up this morning with my hair in perfect Jane Austen style. Now to find an appropriate dress, trudge through the mud at four in the morning, and marry a bazillionaire stud muffin (apologies to John, who is totally invited to be a butler or valet at Pemberley).

We had a customer complaining today that our store is not as good as a place in Ann Arbor, MI. Well, okay, sir - be sure to tell us how that commute goes, if downtown to the suburbs here is too long a drive.

It's weird, but my back has been hurting less after I work a full shift (6-7 hours) than it does when I slack off. I could work myself up to full time in about a month, I think - or less, if I wanted to be totally exhausted.

Ha, my OkCupid profile just reset itself to say that my body type is "overweight." How long has it said this? Who knows?

I seriously had a moment where I thought one of my high school buddies had logged into my account and changed it as a joke - we had a running thing where we'd tease each other about being grotesquely fat, which is still hilarious to me, because Derrall probably still weighs less than I do - and then I realized that he probably doesn't know I have an OkCupid profile, let alone the ability to hack it.

Hopefully it just looked like a joke, and not like I have some miserable body image issues.

Driving to work today, I was running a little late. I pulled up to a stop sign on our little side street, where I turn onto a busier road, and there was this van stopped in front of me. It was more or less just sitting there, no signals turned on or anything, and there was no traffic from either direction on the busier road, so I couldn't figure out why this van wasn't going anywhere. I was sort of annoyed, too, because there wasn't any room for me to slip next to it to turn right, and as I said, I was running late. Eventually the van turned left and I turned right, and as I was coming up to a stoplight - the same intersection where I had my accident, mind - the light was very green, but then a car came zipping right through the intersection on the red!

And, you guys, the timing was so perfect that if that van hadn't been mysteriously stopped at that stop sign, I would have been in the middle of the intersection when that car was running that red light.

At first I was freaked out because I saw the car blatantly run the light in broad daylight, and then I started thinking about the van, and about this section of Remainder by Tom McCarthy I was reading last night, where the protagonist talks about being hit by space trash only because he was standing at exactly the right place at exactly the right time when the trash came down, and how he thinks about his position in the world a lot more because of that. So then I was completely freaked out, because the timing was so, so perfect that I really would have been in the intersection if the van had moved even a couple of seconds earlier.

It's been almost five hours since this happened, and I'm still shaking a little.