a day without chocolate is a day wasted.

that's what my dove dark chocolate promise said, anyhow. doesn't your chocolate talk to you? for shame.

i spent two hours at the mall today in a not-so-horrible shopping trip to find some new black pants. i didn't find any at ny & co., although i tried on every kind they had (seven different styles) but i bought a couple of really great striped button-downs, and i found some black pinstripe pants at old navy and a nice striped button-down there too. so i spent far too much money, but i've been doing really good, and if i do get this job i'll need clothes for work (no uniform, huzzah!) . i really hate shopping, so i was amazed it went so well. i have an interview with that lady at 9am on thursday and i need to be ready and lookin' good wouldn't hurt. i picked up crab rangoon and white rice for dinner and now i'm trying to do research for a couple of articles i'm trying to write for today's cacher. i hope they work out alright. more later, bored now.

nebraska ave. is the only place for whores.

they want to change the name of nebraska ave. to ray charles blvd. (hey, i'm down here on the corner of ray charles and dr. martin luther king) because nebraska has been synonomous with drugs and prostitution. i say no! how else will we know how to find the heroin and pussy?

in other news...

high score: 148.

all scores: 145, 113, 103, 122, 148. it was wave, trough, wave.

i finished one door away from heaven. i feel cheated. i read an entire science-fiction novel without realizing it was one until most of the way through. and then, of course i was going to finish it; i just felt it was unjustly put in the horror section. it was way too removed from reality. i know that koontz often has wisps of supernatural in his books; indeed, often it is the central theme. but those books are also much better than this one -- better spun. and i read all 681 pages.

i met with that woman about finishing my quilt. it would cost about $400 to finish it, so instead she's going to teach me how to quilt so i can finish gram's quilt myself. it will be beautiful (at least, from afar) and i'll post pictures in 10 years when i finish. i'm scared to death to touch it with a needle, afraid i'll mess it up royally. i've pretty much mastered all other sewing (well, i can't follow patterns but i do well enough without them) but i'm scared of touching my gram's quilt.

i got an email today from someone offering me a job. i emailed her back (yes!!!!) but really i think my reply was rather stilted. since the job pertains to proofreading, i read over the email i sent several times to be sure everything was capitalized correctly and was elequent and spelled correctly and i accidentally left out my personality. i hope that doesn't make a difference; my winning personality would definitely shine through in interview if i could get past the um's (you know, the um, yeah i know i could, uh, do whatever is needed, um, of me). and BTW, she mispelled it's (the email said its temp-to-perm instead of it's). i wonder if i pointed that out if i'd get the job?

dinner: tuna fish sandwich and sweet tea. yum. christen doesn't like tuna, so i chose tonight to make myself some since he's working and doesn't have to endure the smell (i lit candles for the dolphins).

how about that?

Outgoing (E) 69.44% Withdrawn (I) 30.56% Imaginative (N) 66.67% Realistic (S) 33.33% Emotional (F) 60% Intellectual (T) 40% Improvised (P) 51.35% Organized (J) 48.65% Your type is: ENFP You are an Inspirer, possible professions include - conference planner, speech pathologist, HR development trainer, ombudsman, clergy, journalist, newscaster, career counselor, housing director, character actor, marketing consultant, musician/composer, artist, information-graphics designer, human resource manager, merchandise planner, advertising account manager, dietitian/nutritionist, speech pathologist, massage therapist, editor/art director.

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over the meadow and through the woods...

i'm off to mom's house today. i would have already left, but i made an appointment of sorts in town here at around 9:30, and while most people would be thrilled to get appointments over with, i don't know if the appointees would appreciate me knocking on their door at 8:30 this morning. i'll wait till almost 9:30, i think.

so my appointment is with this lady who might finish my gram's quilt for me. since my gram died nearly 5 years ago i've been carrying around this unfinished quilt from home to home (i've moved ... 6 times since then) and i would really like to get it finished (i'd really like to finish it myself, actually, but i'm scared to near it with a needle). it's nearly 8 feet squared and really nice -- i've gotten in approximately dated to the 30s. but there's this guy who always comes into work and ships singer sewing machines and he told me he sells them mostly to quilters, so i asked him where i could get this finished and he called his wife and put her on the phone and her friend is in town for a few months (snowbird, i guess) and could do it. so i told them i'd drop it off on my way out of town so she could get a look at it. i'm so excited!

i bid on a new phone for my mom. she broke the last one, so she's completely without a phone except ian's that his dad pays for. so i bid on one for $40. hopefully i get it because she's been without a phone for awhile and i can't afford one of those really expensive ones. it's only at $26 right now and there's 2 hours to go, so we'll see when i get home if i won it or not. it's a LG-VX510 (i think) -- the little black flip one that they have -- it's actually the same one she just killed, so i know she'll like it. she's been through 3 phones since i gave her the phone and started paying her service, which was 1 1/2 years ago or so.

i think i'll take my sister geocaching today. she always asks if we can go and i stopped leaving the stuff in my car, so this time i'll throw it in there. also i'll take my bowling shoes in case she wants to go bowling. since she's growing up, i've become so much closer to my sister than my brother. when he was young we were inseparable and she was the outcast because she was a baby and was very needy. plus i couldn't tow her on my bike. i could take him anywhere, and i did, but i tried to tow her once and she stuck her foot in the spokes and almost broke her leg -- quite literally. we were all crying, and that was the last time that ever happened.

but now she's 12, which makes ian 14 and he's hopeless right now. if i'm not an animated video game, he's not interested (and no, i'm not a video game). but she always wants to hang out with me and know about my interests and spend the night -- like we're friends, and it's very cool. i wish they lived closer (but christen doesn't because then they'd always be over.) i'm only 24, so the gap seems to be getting closer as she ages. she looks up to me and i can ask her questions to make sure she's not fucking up her life, and what to watch out for so no one takes advantage of her like they did me. and she knows what happened to me when i was her age, so she's better off. my stepfather is her "father", but she's adopted so that doesn't have to stop anything in his mind. and she's damn cute.

it was my first real 6-string...

bought it at the five and dime. played it till my fingers bled. was the summer of '69.

i made creamy chicken pasta for breakfast. maybe i'll have a toaster strudel for lunch. you know, for balance.

i had a really wierd dream last night, but i don't remember all of it. -- there were children (mine) with downs syndrome, and lots of shooting near my old high school and some sex (not with the children -- what are you, some kind of perv?) and ... i just can't remember it, but it was really wierd in a kind of good way. maybe it's because i went to bed when christen was still playing gta san andreas. i tried to play but i can't drive the dern car. i get stuck in a back alley when i'm trying to take a whore to her john and lose the pimping mission trying to pull back out.

i wasted two hours of my life last night reading a fern michaels book. never read a fern michaels book. it was one of the ones that melissa gave me and i thought "well, i've never read a fern michaels books so what the hey." no. bad idea. it had so many errors and was so confusing without having a knowledgeable plot to begin with ... ack! i can't believe i read the whole thing. yes i can, because unless i lose a book, i will finish it one way or another. and it only took 2 hours; it's not like the book was hard to read or 800 pages or anything. no worse than sitting through dogville. that was 3 hours of my life.

i feel it necessary to justify my lack of caps. jordan criticized me last week saying that my grammer was terrible (how dare he?) because i don't capitalize anything. well, maybe i don't feel that any one word is more important that any other word. i am no more important than you or bob or scuba. so there. or maybe i'm just lazy and am used to ms word capping everything that should be.

in my father's house (cue christian music)

my parents split when i was 5. i don't remember much of before i was 5 except a few hefty duty fights, and i do remember my room. i remember our oscar fish (look it up, it's a damn ugly fish) committing suicide by jumping out of its tank in the living room and flopping into the kitchen and dying on the linoleum before we got home. he had done this before but we had been able to rescue him before death. i remember my mom telling me when there wasn't a santa claus because we were poor and she didn't want me to think that when i didn't get the appropriate amount of gifts that i would think i had been bad (although there was that little bag of coal in my stocking every year. ... some jokes never wear thin.) i remember learning to ride a bike without training wheels (they put me on a 10-speed and pushed me down a hill) and i remember my dad leaving on my birthday and taking the coffee table so we had my cake on a cardboard box.

but after the split i only remember certain things about being at my dad's house. they are all good memories and i relive them sometimes.

-- wrestling. i hate wrestling, but when i was over, dad and i would watch it and mimic their moves in the living room. they wrestled, we wrestled. i think i won a few more times than necessary, and i think my dad body slammed me more than neccessary (but it was great fun).

--swanson's chicken and dumplings. dad couldn't cook, really, so everytime i went to his house and stayed for lunch or dinner he brought out the can of swanson's. i haven't had this as an adult so i don't know if it's any good, but it was dern tasty at dad's house. if i was there for breakfast we had ...

--eggs over easy and limp bacon. he liked the meat part of the bacon cooked and the fat limp and uncooked. i can't eat it that way now, but it was good there.

--denorex shampoo. in college i started getting anxiety attacks that started with a bad case of ecsema (sp? anyone?) and would scratch my scalp raw and even a little sticky. so i got some denorex and i was seriously transported back to childhood. my dad used denorex almost exclusively, and when i spent the night i would have to use that smelly dark brown shampoo too. good times.

atari-- dad had one of the ones that had a white ball you rolled around instead of a regular controller, and we'd play pong and snake for hours and hours and hours and hours ... well, you get the drift.

--wide brimmed straw hats and cheap plastic sunglasses. my dad is a surveyor for the city, so he wears these ugly straw hats and sunglasses. when i was little he'd always leave them on the passenger seat and i'd invariably sit on one or the other, ruining it. there's a guy who comes in to OD regularly who wears the same straw hat and the same uniform (white polo shirt with the city seal and khakis) and i get a little homesick everytime i see him. the first time i gushed at great length about how he looked like my dad, but he really doesn't. he just walks the same and wears the same clothes.

--buttered noodles. this one is from before the divorce, but i attach it to my dad so i'm including it too. dad was on a bowling league when i was real small, and every thursday night we would go there while he bowled and then we'd have dinner at the little restaraunt there. i was a picky little shit and i wouldn't eat anything on the menu so the cook took pity on me and would make me buttered egg noodles for dinner. i completely forgot about this until college when i picked up a bag of no-egg egg noodles for beef stroganoff and had a bowl of buttered noodles and freaked out when i remembered. for a week after i ate nothing but egg noodles for dinner.

i think that's all the memories i have of my dad in connection with my childhood. i've used many of those memories in poems and short stories ... so they're copywrited. hehe. i began an actual relationship with him in '96 when everything came out about my stepfather's sexual abuse.