In which I get a second belated b-day present!
From Chelsea, who is superior in all ways.
Category Archives: Wishlists
Belated B-Day Goodness
In which there’s a box in my box!
Yesterday on my lunch break I went to the post office to check my post office box, and there was a ticket that said, ‘Parcel too large for box.’
Yay!
I stood in line and the hawt red-headed postal guy took the ticket and in return gave me a box from Amazon.com. I came back to the office and busted into the package, and it was this:
Diamond Dogs! Bowie! From Southern Expressions, who is SUPERIOR IN ALL WAYS! (Well, except for the way in which he lives somewhere warm so there’s no need for me to knit him a hat. I’ve been trying to think of something to knit him for a couple of years, but knit things and warm climates don’t really go together.)
Thank you, Brad! *smooch*
Things I Want
In which it’s probably true that McDonald’s isn’t so good for you. On more than one level.
There’s a story about a monk who suddenly and inexplicably becomes obsessed with the news. It turns out that the servant who prepares his food does so while reading the paper, and the subtle vibes in the food have affected the monk.
Similarly, today I had breakfast from McDonald’s and ever since I’ve been thinking about things I want, things I would buy if only I could.
I tend to avoid magazines and malls and catalogs because they cause me to want stuff I can’t have anyway and which is generally overpriced and no more functional than the things I already do have. Seeing the things I use, after looking at the nicer things available generally, makes me feel like a style-less bumpkin and so I make some effort to avoid the whole thing by shielding myself from advertising.
I’ve had New Agers tell me I don’t have tons of nice stuff because I have issues with abundance, that I need to realign myself and clear out feelings of guilt in order to experience proper flow. But that’s all crap, and I know it. If stuff was truly important to my path, I’d have figured out how to get it by now, hey what? That I haven’t – that I’ve given up all of my stuff repeatedly – informs me that this life I’m living is not particularly about the stuff. If I want beauty I can go outside and watch a sunset: I don’t have to own beautiful furniture and appliances in order to recognize myself as a lover of beauty, an appreciator of functional art, a Libra.
So, yeah, there’s a lot of nice stuff out there I’ll never own. And I’m okay with that. After all, it’s just stuff. Other than the occasional playful foray into the world of shopping, I tend to ignore the whole thing altogether.
Usually. But not today! Here’s a list of crap I want:
- This kick-ass knitting needle set
- a Flickr upgrade, since my older pictures keep sliding off and that makes me sad
- a new pair of mocs
- Back To The Bars – I wanna hear this album so bad I could puke (I used to have it but Bread lost it)
- a dedicated ebook reading device
- the yarn and pattern to make this sweater in the long-sleeved version
- any of this stuff
- this t-shirt
- and this couch because omgwtfbbq is it not gorgeous?!?
- …and some chocolate. Or coffee. Or both!
When I rejoin the ‘real’ world in the near future, I will probably have a fairly rocky readjustment period. In Iowa, one can get by without nice things for looooong periods of time. One can simply not think of nice things, if one is judicious, and be quite happy with what one has.
But in the ‘real’ world I’ll need normal clothes, at the very least. I have the feeling I’m going to be longing for things I can’t afford much more than usual for the next year or so, or until I can reconcile myself with the new local laws of nature. I’ll probably bitch at first, and then it’ll all go down hill from there. You should probably stop reading me now.
Well, after you buy me a birthday present, that is.
Ready For Change
In which I address the Universe at large.
Dear Universe,
I’m ready to do something else now, pleez.
This past year has been wonderfully safe and nurturing, and I really needed it. But now I’m ready to have a job that uses my brain, and a living situation over which I have a little control.
Two things seem to be on the horizon:
One is my upcoming visit to the left coast. I’ll be visiting Portland and Walla Walla, and if you feel like it you could totally give me a Big Hint… say about a job opportunity or music or being needed by my family or something. Then I could pack my shit into the jeep and move back out there, and that would be way cool.
The other is moving with Shadow Girl and her kids and maybe Bghead into a big house somewhere in town. It would be fun to spend a year with kids around — Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter! How kick ass would that be? I think it would be great to live in a big ol’ house with a bunch of people and re-learn how to play. My ex-employer called me Monday to see if I was interested in coming back, so with a second job I could afford this new living situation.
So: should I dig in here, or leave? I don’t know which idea to focus my energy on, because they both have their upsides. It would be cool to stay here as a member of the human race rather than a depressed lump. It would also be exciting to abandon Fairfield altogether and go back out to where the weather’s totally better.
I guess I’m just askin’ for some kinda sign to help me decide where to place my energies. Thanks, Universe. You rock! I couldn’t be here without you!
Sincerely,
Mush
In other news, The Curse has arrived so I’ll be doing nothing of any import this weekend save lying around. I’d planned to take everything to the laundromat tomorrow – clothes, bedding, etc. – but we’ll see how it goes.
Geek Post, YHBW
In which I go on and on about crap like WP plugins and widgets and CSS.
I have made this new template work! Yay! In more than one browser, even! YAY ME!
It turns out that IE gets pissed if the math doesn’t work in one’s CSS; in other words, if your container is 800 px wide and your left column and right column (including padding or margins) does not equal 800, the page fails to render. Which sucks. Also, if you have an element inside a column that is wider than the column itself, the page fails to render. Which sucks.
Here’s the list of crap I accomplished last night:
- Make this layout work in IE.
- Find and install an RSS icon.
- Link to Rants9.
- Make an Archive page that works.
- Make a Category heatmap.
- Make the padding around Flickr images in the sidebar not suck.
- Add All Consuming to the sidebar.
- Add Current Status plugin to post pages.
- Figure out HOW to alpha sort my Blogroll.
- Feel like I have a template I can enjoy for more than two weeks!
So I know most of you probably hate this template, and want to go back to something else, and/or think it’s too busy… change sucks, I know. But sound off anyway. Hurt me.
I’ve quasi-updated the SiteTech page, which tells you all about what I’m running here on the site. I need to update it further because I’m not using some of the things listed there.
Now I’m gonna run and get some lunch. Ciao, babies!
Update: I bought soup and a sandwich from Revelations, where I found The Purse I Want. OMG! It costs $50, which is a lot for a purse, but it’s wonderful.
It has a long strap, so I can wear it across my body the way I like to, and it’s small yet big enough for all my electronics. I want I want I want I want it.
Maybe after Bindu sees the vet and the jeep sees the mechanic. *sigh* Poverty sucks.
My Mom Can Beat Up Your Mom!
In which my mom is better than your mom, because your mom didn’t send me TWO BOXES OF BOOKS.
When I got home from work tonight, I was greeted by the glorious sight of two boxes of books on the porch.
My mom sent me TWO BOXES OF BOOKS. Hell to the yeah, bitches!
There’s all kinds of fabulous stuff in there. Sci-fi. Fantasy. The Story of O. A little something by the Marquis de Sade. Ursula K LeGuin. Steven King. Barbara Kingsolver.
And more!
More more more!
We here at the little house on second street are beside ourselves with bibliophilical glee! AmmZon had already yanked out two books to read by the time I got home from my trip to the Dead Cock for an after-work cocktail.
Two.
Entire.
Boxes.
Of.
Books.
*faints*
Clarity Comes Creeping
In which I know what I need! I know what I need!
I was over at Copperred’s this morning and he’d posted about watching Pinky and the Brain and suddenly I realized… that’s what I need! Some Pinky! Some Brain! Hell yeah!
Therefore, someone (ideally someone with more cash than sense) should rush immediately over to my Amazon Wish List and buy me Pinky and the Brain, Vol. 1. This will need to be done right away, of course, considering that I won’t be receiving mail at this address come three weeks hence. Not that I’m being demanding or anything.
I’d take Vol. 2 too while you’re at it. It’s a screaming deal, really.
NARF!
Yesterday I did laundry, applied for two jobs, brushed my hair, bathed, and successfully kept two meals down. Today I intend to crest Mount Everest before lunch, visit the post office, and then do a little knitting in the afternoon while various companies blow up my cell phone with calls for interviews.
In other news, you may have noticed that now when you mouse-over external links, there’s a groovy pop-up preview thingy. (It’s from Snap and I installed it yesterday and I saw it first over at Jake’s blog.) I just wanted to say that if you decide to install it on your site and you use WP, don’t bother with the plugin because it doesn’t appear to work; just paste the Snap code into your Header template and save yourself the bother, yo.
Vuboq Totally Rocks
In which Internet friends are just as good as meatspace friends! Seriously! Dude.
Yesterday I had class until 4:30, then Bread picked me up and we went out to the farm. We made dinner together, with chicken from his mom’s freezer and veggies from AmmZon’s garden. Basically, everything save the tomato and the garbanzo beans in the salad came from someone else — —
— the world, it seems, is calculated at moments to make a girl feel all abjectly grateful and shit. I’ve never been so broke in my life, but dinner last night was wonderful, and all made up of gifts.
If that weren’t enough, after the dishes were done I walked down to the mailbox to grab the Netflix vid I knew was waiting there (it turned out to totally suck) and there was a box from amazon.com, too! And since I hadn’t ordered anything it had to be a present! A PRESENT!
I waddled back up the driveway with my prizes and sat on the bed — the bedroom has A/C — and opened the amazon.com box. Two books off of my Wishlist from Vuboq!
The first item in the box was Bags: A Knitter’s Dozen. I love to knit with wool, and I love to felt wool, and I’ve been searching for The Perfect Bag for about 15 years now. Perhaps after knitting a couple-few of the cute bags in this book, I will feel compelled to design, knit, and felt myself the bag of my dreams.
And then I’ll make it in a few colorways so I’ll always have one that matches my outfit. (Because if you know me in person, you know how important matching is to me.) (Which is, like, not at all. No, I mean, I like it when my stuff matches, but not enough to really go out of my way to be sure that it all does.) (Snort!)
The second book was Get A Financial Life: Personal Finance In Your Twenties And Thirties. The karmic grinder that has been my life of late has me thinking that a little self-education, particularly in the area of personal goddamned finance, wouldn’t be a bad idea.
To wit: I’m a few years shy of 40 and yet when I woke up this morning I had no savings, a bunch of debt, and an IRA that wouldn’t if cashed out even buy me a decent car (even before taxes). This strikes me as being less than ideal, particularly since I’m supposed to be a grown-up of some stripe, hence this book’s presence on the wishlist.
Anyway, the POINT is, friends rock! First, dinner courtesy of friends and family, and then a random present in the mailbox. This new theme of gratitude is a nice one; I much prefer it to the ‘everything sucks and this is really fucking hard’ theme.
The past few months have been — and are continuing to be — difficult on a lot of levels. It’s definitely an ego-grinding process; after you’ve spent a certain amount of time feeling like you’re the doer, that you’re the one who makes certain things happen, I guess the universe then conspires to teach you otherwise. In other words, at the foundation, all the things you do that make you feel like you’re doing what you’re supposed to, can just… go away. It’s ultimately out of your control; you really could get hit by a bus tomorrow. Not long ago, I was going to work and doing my chores and paying my bills, and all that made me feel like I was in control. Today, I’m not really doing any of those things but by some miracle I’m still eating. I guess the lesson is some combination of surrender, gratitude, and I-am-not-really-the-doer.
I guess I’m past the oh-fuck-this-sucks-and-I’m-frustrated-and-angry phase and have now ground off enough ego that I’m settling into the oh-this-sucks-but-not-my-will-but-Thine phase. Which is a much sweeter space to be in.
I do sort of wish I could be learning this lesson without being quite so desperately on-the-verge-of-bankruptcy broke, but I do have a rather thick head so it’s likely I’ve missed the lesson the past few times it was offered me.
Class has turned out to be pretty fun. I haven’t really learned much that I’ll actually use about the software, but I certainly will be able to pass the test. And that’s pretty much the point. The people have been really nice, and I like the instructor/s in particular. Too bad the next course I need is so many weeks away.
Hopefully I’ll get a job next week. Wouldn’t that be nice?
On second thought . . .
On second thought, maybe I want this instead for my birthday: a 5th gen 20GB iPod, for only $270.
Yesterday I was thinking I wanted to buy Tahmi’s old 3rd gen 15Gb iPod, and then I started surfing eBay to see what it was worth, and then I saw all the newer ones, and then… and then… I mean, COLOR, right?!
PPC or iPod or guitar? Holy cow, this birthday shopping is killing me.
Oh. My. God.
IwantIwantIwantIwantIwantIwantIwantIwantIwantIwant I want I want the Apple iPod nano now.
It’s small. It’s cute. It’s color.
It’s sooo cute I can barely stand myself.
If only the drive were bigger.