Oh-HO! I very nearly ran out of time for today’s entry! I have been attempting to blog once per day just to get into the habit. No, they are not always interesting. Yes, they are about my days usually. But since I restarted my blog and did not ‘port any archives over, because I wanted to start fresh, I wanted to get some serious archiving in and really get my “voice” down for when I get into the paid blogging.

Because, let’s face it. If you can make money off the internet some how, why not? A few paid blog entries here and there? Sponsored tweets perhaps? Heck, even an Etsy shop for when I get off my duff and get creative again. I love to work with my hands. Little by little, I am prepping myself and my web presence so that I can make some money. Eventually, I hope to be able to do so enough that it supplements my income to where I do not have to constantly stress about my finances.

I realized today that I may have forgotten to actually pay my Capital One bill last month. Oops. I think I had paid it a month in advance (or however early where they will count it) so that July’s was paid and I was a few days late on August’s payment. But I don’t actually remember and I did not spend enough time on the website to actually look for the information. What’s done is done. If I forgot? So be it. I’ve had one 30-day on my credit history in the past 6 years. It happens. Ironically enough, Cap1 was the company with the 30-day. Whoops. I really need to pare down my credit cards. I have too many. The problem is that the ones I want to get rid of are the ones that I have the longest history with. I may just wind up closing them anyway and go from there. Not the smartest thing to do but we’ll see. I may simply keep them and specify each account for specific tasks: IE groceries, gas, etc.

Going back to the idea of making money, I also decided to get some ‘business cards’ done up. $20 for 100 of my own designs? Why, yes. I do believe I will do that. I made up ten designs, which were actually the same design but with different inspirational quotes on the front. When I get myself up and running again with my swaps and with Etsy, they will be dropped into each envelope and hopefully drum up business each time.

It’s just a matter of getting to that point. It’s a process. It’s a journey. And I intend to have some fun along the way.

Today didn’t happen in any way that I thought it would. Originally, Angel and I thought we were going to have to drive to San Diego to find Mika and abscond with her. We were sort of just waiting on word from her that it would be okay to do so.

Then Lili jumped off the bed, over the foot board, and caught her foot on the way down. I instantly knew that she’d injured herself even as she landed. Sure enough, she immediately pulled the foot up against her body and did not want to put any weight on it. Unfortunately, due to her hind-end issues, she quickly realized that having her foot up like that meant that she was off balance. She made to go under the bed to hide but I nabbed her and put her on the bed where I could inspect her better. At the time, I had been on the phone with Robby but hung up with him quickly so I could focus on the cat.

She was very clearly hurt and in pain. I scooped her up and brought her out to Angel, in the loft, while she was still working and on the phone with someone. Lili sat in my lap and growled, voicing her displeasure while I waited for Angel to clear up. I hated to bother her but I needed an extra pair of eyes and an extra set of hands while I tried to figure out just how badly Lili had hurt herself. She put herself out of the phone and came over. Lili could put a little bit of weight down but it was very clear that she preferred not to. Then she laid down.

That was about the time that she refused to let me touch her. She swatted at us both when we went to touch the injured paw/leg. Lili will swat at me if she is upset but very rarely with claws. She was all paws and claws and even tried to bite me. That was a huge red flag. Angel called her vet and passed the phone off to me so I could make the earliest available appointment with them which was two and a half hours later.

I brought the small, soft carrier out and attempted to put Lili in it so she was confined, comfortable, and quiet. I would have put her in the large carrier if I had felt any sort of comfortable with her being able to move around. I didn’t want her moving around. Well, Lili turned into Demon Cat and clawed me up very well as I tried to grab her and put her in the carrier. Once she was settled in there, she calmed down and I put a towel over the carrier so she couldn’t see the other cats; I didn’t want to just move her into the bedroom and sequester her until it was time to leave. It worked out well.

We drove to Gilbert and made it on time for the 2:30 appointment. Lili was moving a lot better and was putting weight on the injured leg but I was still worried. The vet agreed to do some X-Rays, just in case, and they would have to keep her for a little while so they could sedate her. Angel and I headed out to find some food and kill time. It would up taking nearly three hours for them to finish with Lili since they had gotten busy. The X-Rays showed that there were no breaks or fractures and therefore it was probably just soft tissue damage. They sent us home with some morphine for Lili for the next few days while she recovers and heals. I think they might have thought I was a little silly requesting the X-Rays anyway but since Lili has so many physical problems, it is just too hard to really spot if anything is amiss. I wanted to be safe, rather than sorry… especially since the vet was an hour away.

I got Lili home and coaxed her out of the carrier, carefully pulling her and supporting her weight. She was still very groggy from being sedated. Poor baby. I will give her the first dose of morphine tonight before I go to bed so I know she is comfortable while I am asleep.

All in all, I am just relieved that nothing was broken and that she wasn’t seriously injured. And I am thankful for Angel accompanying me to the vet. I love having awesome friends.

I found a blog prompt that was simply titled: books I want to write.

Generally speaking, I want to write non-fiction. Urban Fantasy and regular Fantasy, to be specific. More specifically, I would love nothing more than to get the ideas in my head out and onto paper (so to speak). Phoenix, Third City, Waking Persephone… these are all books I would like to get written finally. They are always in my head, swarming and morphing and distracting me. But they have all been in my head for so long now that I feel like I cannot do them any justice. Phoenix, especially.

I keep hearing the advice: just write. I have tried that. I can write a chapter and then turn around and trash it. I can write out a few paragraphs and turn around and backspace through the whole thing. It is easy to become frustrated when you can no longer write your ideas out and still feel like they have been given the attempt they deserve.

One of my Day Zero Project goals is to give NaNoWriMo an honest attempt. This year I will make that honest attempt. I will write for one of my projects and force myself to just keep going and let the words flow. If I get stuck, I will move on and then come back later to fill in the blanks. It may be the only real chance I have at getting things out of my head and removing the mental block. I almost want to go out and buy some nice notebooks specifically for my novels but I know that if I get anything nice I won’t write in it. I know. I am weird like that. I have always been. I have this thing for stationery and journals fall under that category.

Ran some errands today, which included stopping at the bank and depositing that lovely little check Vanguard was nice enough to send me. Once again, it is wonderful to have money in the bank. Mental note: make sure August’s bills are all paid and pay September’s where allowed.

I got a bouquet of flowers today. It was half “I miss you” and half “I hope you feel better soon”.

Everything else aside, I feel at odds today. It isn’t a bad thing, though. Just like I felt a shift in energies today and I am waiting to see which direction it all takes. Nothing good, nothing bad… just neutral. But I still felt the shift and I think I was put on edge for a bit.

One of the things I haven’t done in awhile is burn some candles. I should do that. Soon. Maybe it will help me to refocus myself and my energies.

In other news, I believe it is time I treated myself to something. I shall be making a purchase soon. Something fun. Some sort of toy perhaps. I have not decided what yet.

Today was a pretty good day. Robert and I headed into Phoenix to hit up the Minute Clinic at CVS, so that I could get another prescription for the eyedrops, and then were heading to Ikea after that. It took a little longer than expected at CVS because apparently the elderly woman who went in before me was suffering from everything you can think of. At least, that is what I am assuming since she was in there for so freaking long. Oh well. I got the prescription and had it sent to the CVS by us so that we could move on to Ikea.

Needless to say, way too much time was spent there. *LOL* But it was fun! I love Ikea. And only because the Sweds have so many awesome ideas about modular designs, space saving, and things like that. They overcharge on some things but for the most part, I never feel like I’ve been ripped off. Robby and I had actually gone there with a purpose: to find some sort of rolling unit for the kitchen to keep his stuff in. You know, so it isn’t spread around everywhere and the mess can be more contained.

We found something that would work perfectly and found matching pieces that Robby could mount on the unit. They weren’t meant to be mounted but it works out perfectly. So he will have a little workspace and the spices will be moved from the counter top to where the rack will be mounted. Aaaaand then we started picking up the random stuff when we went downstairs. He was very well behaved and only “plurged” on things that were too cheap to pass up. Like the set of three wooden cooking/serving utensils for 49 cents? Yeah. Worth it. Little things like that. I got a set of two cardboard-ish magazine boxes in black and white for $3. Just something that I’ll use to hold my mail and magazines. (Don’t even get me started on those stupid things… that I didn’t even want!) They fit perfectly on the side of my desk with a box of tissues shoved between them. I’d had another idea to go along with them but I am blanking on just what that was. I will remember at some point. Oh well.

Meanwhile, I just received my check from Vanguard with the 401K cashout and, let me just say that I under-estimated what I thought I would be getting.

By, oh, a grand.

I know, right?!

Now, before anyone gets any brainiac ideas: No. I am not going to continue to sit around on my ass now that I have that extra money waiting for me. It is not a crutch. It is the thing that will keep me sane while I get a job and get settled. Whatever is left over will be going to my debts. Not even to the fun stuff. Oh. Sure. I could totally run out and go buy whatever laptop I wanted right now. But I am not going to. Because I am responsible. I’m not like some people!

Did I mention that the CVS pharmacy over by home was closed by the time we got there? We missed it by 15 minutes. Oops! It opens at 8am and closes at 10pm so I will be able to get in there tomorrow with zero problems. And! AND! I’m not stressed about the cost now. Yay!

In other news, I managed to fall over the baby gate at the bottom of the stairs. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I fell. I never fall. I am not clumsy. Sure, I will stumble or whatever but I do not fall. The few times I have fallen, I have seriously injured myself. I’m talking contusions, massive bruising, concussions, strains, etc. I came out of this with a bruised ball of my left foot, a bruised right knee, and that’s about it. I had woken up with a sore left ankle and knee that were so bad I could not put weight on them. I also thought I had strained a muscle in my back. Nope! All is good on that front.

Still, it hasn’t been a very good last few days.

The second picture is one I found on flickr and the person titled it: Ikea National Park. Click the link for the larger image. It’s pretty funny.

Warning: I have been drinking. Just a little. But I tend to take two hours to write up a blog post when I am doing the apparently-weekly drunken EMB chat with the girls from Ecstasy MB. Wine, spirits, and fun times with some awesome ladies.

I managed to give myself conjunctivitis/Pink-eye again. What the Hell? I really think it happened because I finally did laundry the other night. I hadn’t done it since I got back from San Diego so I was handling all the clothes that were all kinds of germ-riddled. Lovely. And just my luck, right? Of course, I have no health insurance now because it ended July 31st. Luckily, I had some eye drops left over from the last time so I could at least get a jump start on getting it under control. But I will be running out as of tonight or tomorrow depending on how long I can make them last. The nearest CVS clinic is about an hour away or so. They wouldn’t just refill the prescription even though I was there two weeks ago with the same ailment. I have to go into the MinuteClinic again. And pay $69 for the visit plus whatever the eye drops are.

Times like these, I wish I had a better hook up for prescriptions. That is terrible to say because it’s not actually legal but you know what I mean. It would save me a trip to a clinic to get ‘diagnosed’ with what I already know I am suffering from since it’s the second occurrence in two weeks. It just sucks when I have no income at the moment and no health insurance.

Tomorrow I will head to the clinic to get another prescription and get some more eye drops to get rid of the pink-eye again.

My laptop was stolen out of my car. Shocking, dramatic statement in eight simple words. Then it becomes not so simple. It actually ducks around a corner onto Weird Street. The car was locked, the alarm not armed because in this heat it winds up setting itself off. I didn’t arm it in the winter in PA for the same reason, except that it was due to the cold. Makes sense, right? Sort of? Anyway, the laptop was on the back seat on the driver’s side, under some things and well hidden. The windows are darkly tinted. Very darkly, in fact. The other day, I realized that I had left my laptop in the car and should bring it in but when I got home, my hands had been full. I became distracted and never made the trip back out to retrieve the laptop.

I remembered last night and headed out to go get it… only to find that it was not there. The doors were locked. No signs of forced entry. No broken windows, no damage, no nothing. In fact? Nothing else was taken from the car as far as I can tell.

Weird, right?

I haven’t bothered to call the police to make a police report because the laptop was not all that great, though new, and had been bought on sale for cheap. I did not actually like the laptop because of things I could not change (like the resolution! Max 1024?! Who does that anymore?!). That sounds absolutely terrible and very materialistic of me but it’s the truth. I do not grieve over the loss. It just… is what it is. The funny part is that the laptop had been newly reformatted so there wasn’t a whole lot on there. Not that a thief would have known, or cared, but there wasn’t anything personal on there. I went through and changed all my passwords for all of my websites just in case. I just don’t want to go through the hassle of doing the police report when there is no damage and nothing else missing.

Am I wrong for this thinking?

EDIT: Okay, I wound up making a police report after being yelled at by pretty much everyone I talked to. So… yeah. There we go.

It is no big secret that I love to read. I have gotten away from it for too long now because I just did not have the time, the desire, or the drive to read. It is not because I am lacking in books, either! I have, undoubtedly, at least 50 books currently waiting for me to devour. I used to be a voracious reader, reading one and sometimes two books a day. That was when I was younger and my tastes were far more varied. I did not cling to genres. I did not pass by sections in the library or book store because I assumed they held nothing for me.

I could spend an entire day in a library if I could waste that sort of time.

Maybe part of the problem is that reading so much has made me a little depressed about my own creativity. I have not written anything for myself in years. YEARS. I am the girl who always carried around spiral notebooks for her ideas or to jot down chapters at a time while I had some down time. My creativity has been shot. It depresses me. I suppose with the job market being what it is, perhaps I can find a new Muse for cheap? Usually, reading gives me inspiration and gives me back some of my drive to write creatively. This hasn’t been the case in quite some time, unfortunately. I am at a loss. My friend, Mark, had given me a task: write three short stories in three months; One short story per month. I was to write them and turn them over to him each month so that not only was I writing but I was having someone else read my work. This is something I have always had trouble with.

Oddly enough, I am active in several role playing games online. Five, in fact. Four of them are by e-mail through Yahoo!Groups in which I carry a grand total of eight characters and one game via InsaneJournal where I have four voices. In active role-play, people are constantly reading my writing. It is pretty much a requirement since we have to read everything in order to write the story with our characters. I do not have trouble with people reading my writing in these settings. Why? I have no idea. Maybe because everything involved is not 100% mine. I can play off of other people, bounce ideas off another player, et cetera. I don’t know. It is frustrating, though. I have been, at the risk of sounding self-important and conceited, complimented on many occasions for my writing style, scenes I play out, characterizations, and pretty much anything to do with the games that I have a hand in. Yet I have almost zero self-confidence in myself as a writer.

If you have found yourself to not be doing things you used to love, what has stopped you from going back to them?

I finally got my deliveries from UPS today! Silly Sears/K-Mart, though. I ordered a total of eight towels and they put one towel in each box. I had a total of TEN boxes show up. Really? We couldn’t have, I don’t know, combined things into a bigger box and saved some trees?

Anyway, I was super excited because YAY! Sheets! Comforter! Towels! And I got a couple under-the-bed storage containers.

These are just two of the hand towels to show off.

White 800-threadcount sheets!

My new comforter/bed set. Black and white plaid.

I didn’t actually buy the new mattress topper since I got it for free from my mother. But I had to show it off anyway!

So excited!! Right now I don’t have the sheets on the bed because I wanted to make sure the topper fully expanded. I threw the old comforter on top so the cats weren’t laying directly on the foam.

Man! I am so tired right now. I did not sleep well last night at all. I mean, I went to bed later than I would have liked because my D-chan and I were running around in Aion and the stupid Dukaki Peons wouldn’t drop the friggin’ Amulet that we needed a fourth one of. We had to have spent an hour on that one quest alone before I finally gave up and she lagged out.

Adam

So I went to bed late, slept very restlessly because I was aggravated when I climbed into bed. I dreamed about Aion and kept waking myself up because I realized that was absolutely ridiculous. Then I was having issues with my throat again. Took some cough syrup (with Codeine!) to help which then, of course, made me groggy. Woke up an hour later with a charlie horse cramp in my calf. It wasn’t too bad and I was able to go back to sleep. That is, until Robby’s phone went off in the loft with his alarm. It’s the sound of a rooster crowing. Over. And. Over. This went on for about ten to fifteen minutes before it got turned off. I was going on 2.5 hours of “sleep” by this point and Codeine. I was not getting up even if I had wanted to. Meh. I should sleep better tonight. New bed, for all intents and purposes!

I’ve tripped again and things are starting to get interesting. Don’t give me choices cause I can’t decide. My mind is soaked in words; I’ve come to terms with all my insecurities and purity is no friend of mine. And dreaming doesn’t do no good ’cause I don’t wanna lie that I’m okay and I’m alright. I’d rather take it and forget it. Consider this a warning. ‘Cause I’ll start another fight and you’ll say its all alright. I’ll wait for the day when you find I’m too much for you, baby. So lay your hands over me and feel what you only see. But don’t bother wasting your time if you’re trying to change me. You’re kinda cool but I know better than to break the rules of messin’ with a lesson that I’ll never learn. I’ll go from bad to worse and later back to better, but I’ll never better bridges that I’m bent to burn.

Anna Nalick – Consider This

Apparently my dad got sick from when I was at his house on the first couple of days of my sickness. He was over his within about three days. I mean, I feel bad for getting him sick at all but man! I wish mine had only lasted three days! Mine just… mutated. His didn’t. Then throw the pink eye into the mix and, well, I was the “winner” if you can call it that.

It was still good to hear from him. Apparently, when I had called, he had been thinking about me and had decided to call me after he’d eaten some lunch. I beat him to it by about five minutes or so. My dad and I have always pretty much been on the same page. I think today was the first good day I have had in awhile. Not too worn out, not completely energy deprived, not in a constant state of losing my voice.

I even went out and explored a tiny bit! I went to Chase, deposited my last two checks from AAA, and then went to KFC to pick up some lunch for Angel and I. From there I went to the post office and sent out a couple things. Then I hit up the store for some Pepsi, pens, and an energy drink. Finally, I headed home. Ta-daaa~! Okay, so it wasn’t much in regards to exploring but it was a start. And I had food in the car which was making me more and more hungry the more I smelled it. I was supposed to do laundry today and got caught up in Aion. Oops. But I remembered to bring Charlie out for more socializing.

He and Weezy even shared the couch. Sort of. For a little bit.

The two boys.

“Hey Charlie! Did you see Weezy down there?”

“Hey! When did he get up here?!”

“Um… Mom! MOM! He’s TOO CLOSE!!”

“What? I’m not doin’ nuffin…”

“.. yet.”

Weezy then proceeded to chase Charlie off the couch and into Angel and Robby’s bedroom when I ducked away to go potty. Charlie came down the hall, not even realizing that Weezy was behind him. Then Weezy just ran and pounced on Charlie, yowling like mad. Charlie finally swatted back! Jeez. Only took like a MONTH to get up the nerve to swat back. *facepalm*

At least they’re getting more used to each other?

No lyrics tonight. Too tired.