A little of everything... update

I want to say hi and welcome to those that have subscribed for mail updates. Hi! And welcome. Thank you for subscribing. I hope you enjoy your stay with me, however long that may be.

Also, I wanted to thank everyone for their recent comments and apologize for not responding. My brain has been a little broken lately. Thanks, and sorry.

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I was digging a recipe out of my inbox on Wednesday when I noticed an email from my mother... only it was routed from my web site. I opened it and found the following words in big blue letters: EXCUSE ME!!! When was "daughter" dropped from your job description?

Come to find out, I've been a daughter for much longer than I've been a wife and mother, so I've changed my occupation on the about me:the basics page to include "daughter". While I was doing that, I made a few other changes, all of which are listed on the updates page.

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Speaking of my mother, a few posts back I said that she had laughed at me for feeding my family beans and hoe cakes for dinner one night. That should be clarified a bit more. She didn't laugh at me, but she did tease me. Normally her good-natured teasing doesn't bother me, and at the time even that teasing didn't. When I said she was laughing at me, I was in a severely bad mood and even the air around me was rubbing me wrong.

Mom did tease, and I did laugh with her, even though she was dreaming about her granddaughter (my daughter) being a malnourished stick body with a big balloon head (something I laughed at my mother for, by the way).

Also, it should be noted that even though my mother teased me about said meal, after she saw the picture of my dinner plate from that night (shown below), she wanted some. She didn't want to cook it, she just wanted me to fix her some.

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Project:movie clearance is progressing right along. In the past few days I've tossed four tapes. It's really funny to pop a tape into the vcr and have the video from one show and the audio from another show play simultaneously. It really is. Two of the tapes that went away were old television episodes. The rest had the movies The Hidden, (most of) Iron Eagle II, (a very badly decayed) Campus Man and Next of Kin.

Only Next of Kin is on the keeper list, though The Hidden was very... very... tempting.

No other cleaning has really been accomplished in the past few days. I've been utterly useless. Today is the last day I'm supposed to use the medicated eye drops, and Tuesday I should be able to wear my contacts again. Tuesday can not get here soon enough for me.

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I did most of the grocery shopping yesterday, and I can say now that I'll undoubtedly go over budget this pay period. On the plus side, my freezer is fully restocked (or will be by Saturday afternoon), so neither I nor A. are complaining.

My only concern is restocking for this year's hurricane season. Though there's very little that I have on hand that I can't cook on a grill (which we need to get, husband) should the power go out, I am a little concerned about what to take (food wise) should we have to evacuate. That's something I'll have to work on in coming days, I suppose.

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Yesterday while grocery shopping, I took the canvas grocery bags. Usually I forget them, but yesterday I remembered to take them. I was so proud of myself.

The "I'm doing good" feeling was short-lived, though. Two of the four stores I went to loaded up the groceries in plastic bags THEN put the loaded plastic bags INTO the canvas bags. Even after I pointed out that the whole reason behind bringing my own bags was to avoid the need for the plastic bags, they insisted on doing it that way. One of the baggers told me that it was store policy for all groceries to be bagged in store bags, even if customers had brought their own. Needless to say, I was a little shocked and a lot disbelieving. I've got a phone call into the day manager for that particular store, but he's yet to return my call.

Project: movie clearance

Two more tapes down, with one out the door, only a jillion or so left to go.

Movies watched (or listened to) today: The Toy, Batman, Westworld, Highlander, Enemy Mine.

I really didn't need to watch The Toy to know that it needed to leave, just as I really didn't need to watch Westworld to know that it needed to stay. Still, I watched Westworld because Yul Brynner was one of the best ever and always made any movie worth watching. As for Highlander, I already have other copies of it, so it's not a big loss if the tape I had my hands on today goes away. I could have lived without seeing Batman again.

Added to the mega wish list is Westworld and Enemy Mine. Both of those titles have been added to my ever-growing book wish list, too.

A little of this, a little of that

My eye was feeling much better today, but I decided to go to let some doctor-type person poke at it anyway.

He didn't poke at it much, but he was terribly impressed amused by my eye patch. Um... this... is my eye patch.


Yeah. If I'm gonna have to wear a patch, I'm doing it in style. Um. My style, but it's still a style.

Anyway, the diagnosis was that - for the past two, almost three, weeks - I've had a mild case of pink eye. In... just... the right eye. No trace of it in the left. Which is... really... beyond weird considering that my fingers are in both my eyes all the time. I wear contacts, take them out and put them in daily, always start with the right eye, and never ever wash my hands between eyes. How I don't have it in my left eye is just weird. And then there's the fact that it's been coming and going. Just... weird. But that's the diagnosis, and I now have some $68 antibiotic/steroid drop things to put in my eye four times a day for the next seven days. Wee.

Despite the complete and utter lack of accomplishment on anything else today (due to being on the phone most of the day with the insurance company), I have made more progress on Project: movie clearance.

Movies viewed in the past 26 hours: Chances Are, Quigley Down Under, Deceived, and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.

Quigley Down Under and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle are both going on my master wish list for movies.

Tomorrow is going to be a long day. A. and I are going to a Home Buyer's Fair and Seminar tomorrow morning. It's supposed to last from 10am to 2pm. I think we have to be there around 9am. The blurb for it it reads:

You're invited to attend a FREE seminar where you'll learn all about purchasing a new home. After this 4 hour seminar, you'll be prepared and confident about buying your home from start to finish!

So... yeah. We'll see. Hopefully we'll come away from it having some idea of how to proceed in both finding and buying the house I we want. We've already done a lot of research, but still feel pretty overwhelmed. We're hoping this seminar will help clear up a few things. This last incident was just the last straw. The push is on, and on hard, to get out of this apartment (and out of apartments all together) and into a house where we can control the security a little better (like changing the locks any time I feel like it, and installing additional security measures). My home is supposed to be my safe haven, and this apartment is not that. No apartment is. I do not feel safe in apartments anymore. There's too much personal history preventing that safe feeling.

I guess that's it for me. My thoughts are a little scattered (I'm actually tired!!) and my eye is starting to bother me. Off to bed I go.

Project: movie clearance update

This will be far shorter than I had planned, and not on topic, either. Why? Because my eye is driving me mad. Just the one. The right one. It feels like there's something in it - soap or something - and has for several days, on and off, but it's getting worse and has been particularly bothersome today. I don't know why. Not only that, but the eyelid is sort of... puffy... just a little swollen. And a little droopy. And almost constantly tearing. It's no better or worse with my contact in or out. Nothing seems to soothe it. I've tried flushing it out. I've tried patching it. I've tried heat. I've tried cold. If it keeps it up, I'll be heading down to the walk-in clinic. I just don't know if I'll break down and do it Friday or Saturday.

Thanks to my eye, I really didn't get much accomplished. Lots of laundry and a couple of movies from the project: movie clearance pile.

So.

Movies of the day:

This Gun For Hire, Into the Badlands, and Dream a Little Dream (amazon link here - on DVD, too!! - 'cause I want that one).

There was also a tape full of... episodes... from tv shows such as ER, Friends, Veronica's Closet. I didn't watch the whole tape. But I did get rid of it.

So! Progress. One tape down, and another is slotted for disposal (after I go back and get the name of the book the movie was based on and the author's name). I'm working on a third tape already.

Project: movie clearance

I have a lot of movies/shows that I've taped off of tv or cable. Sometimes it was because I thought it would be a better movie than it was, sometimes it was because I had to be elsewhere (work, school, out having fun, sleeping) when the show aired so I taped it to watch later.

This has been going on for more than twenty years. Seriously.

Well, at long last, it's time to purge them. However, the problem I face (and one of the reasons I've been dragging my feet on this project) is that I still watch some of them, and there are some real treasures amidst all the clutter of tapes. ('Treasures' being a relative term here and indicating, in this case, a movie so bad that only I, in my unique insaneness, would watch it once let alone repeatedly.) The only real solution I've been able to come up with is to go through them, watching one movie a day and adding to a wish list (link to come) those that I REALLY want to own. With any luck I can replace my taped copy of such movies (often littered with outdated commercials which I find entirely too funny) with a DVD (or if necessary a VHS) copy. I already know a few titles that will be on that list, but I won't spoil the fun of discovery just yet.

This is not a project that's going to take a few weeks. This is going to take... months. I'm sure of it. Most tapes hold no less than two movies. Some hold three. Some of the tapes have hours... and hours... of tv shows that were taped so I could watch them later, then were taped over weeks later as the cycle was repeated until I have no earthly idea what's on those tapes now. There are days when I may get through two or three movies, and there will be days that I get through none. I do not see me getting through more than one tape in any 24 hour period, though, because I'll have to really sit down and focus on the movie/show I'm watching to be able to determine if it's a keeper or not. For me, that's nearly impossible, and it's going to take no less than a two to four hour chunk of time out of my day, depending on how many movies I watch. (That's another reason I've been dragging my feet on undertaking this project.)

And I will have to fight, and fight hard, to resist the creative little sparks firing up all over my brain as I watch some of these movies. A lot of them made me want to write something based on the basic plot premise (or more precisely, re-write the story). Perhaps a reward-type system can be created and set into place so that I can get back to writing. I miss it.

I've already started on this project. Today.

Just one movie though, since I didn't start until after noon. Today's (cheesy) movie: Deadly Game. (Amazon link here, husband of mine, because yeah, I think it's going to be on that wish list.)

Maybe this not sleeping at night thing can be used to my advantage, because is there anything more satisfying distracting than watching cheesy old movies when you can't sleep?

Now, if I can just find that VCR remote so I can fast forward through the commercials...