BlogFerret

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I am a Trodon:

Current research suggests that Troodon was a small and speedy carnivorous creature…according to your answers so are you!

Troodon had an unusually large brain for a dinosaur, compared to the size of its body. Its teeth were also out of the ordinary for a meat eater, with bumps along the side like a plant-eating dinosaur. This hints that Troodon wasn’t a fussy eater and may have munched on insects, eggs and plants as well as meat.

Seems accurate, except for the not fussy part.

Find out what dinosaur you are!

I admit it. I am a sentimental slob. I have always had a hard time letting go of things that were once pleasant, or loving or secure: relationships, situations, cars…

My worst vice in this department: hanging on to people. The hardest relationship lesson I ever had to learn was that some people move on even when others who care about them don’t. Sometimes people I cared about moved on and didn’t have the good grace to let me in on it, but that’s probably a different story.
Recently, I’ve had conversations that both confirmed my tendencies to remain attached and also revealed their folly, respectively. The first, on New Years’ Eve, was with my former roommate at LSMSA, Margaret. We didn’t talk about this subject per se, but I had a great time with her, and it sort of reaffirmed my faith in myself, I guess. Which is what spending time with a friend should do! Margaret is really fabulously cool and intelligent. She’s working on an M.D. Ph.D. (almost done!) and all she really did was talk to me as an equal, if that makes sense. The holidays this year were kind of horrible for me. James was in New Orleans working on a tugboat because we were having a terrible time finding jobs. I would link to a previous article, but the hackers got that one! Anyrate, just having a decent, interesting conversation with someone who wasn’t hellbent on impressing or insulting me was a very healing thing. Monroe is sort of, um, deserty in the decent conversation department.

The second conversation I had a few weeks ago. It was with a person who shall remain nameless. We had had a falling out about the time I met my husband. This person seemed to want to resume our relationship, but they also seemed to think I was, well, deluded and stupid. In any case, I was not spoken to as an equal, by any means, which is sort of ironic, because um, well, just think about it. Pot, kettle, that sort of thing. A lot of people who know me know I am many things, but hopefully they know I am very self aware. Sometimes bordering on self-obsessed… but that’s a different story as well.

We color things with memory probably more than we should, but it’s the price we pay for being sentient. It’s good for creativity: one of the best things to do when you’re trying to start writing is to write about your first memory, or write about your childhood. I have learned that it’s important to let go when something is over, but I have also learned that I don’t want to let the good stuff go without a fight. I have had to let go of good friends as well as people who refused to realize that I had grown and changed in some way. Still, I tried to keep the good friends: I contacted them repeatedly and made overtures of friendship and desire for renewed contact if things had fallen off a bit due to distance. Some of them just chose to go away, and that’s cool, that’s their choice. What I’m going for here is simply to encourage you to go ahead and call your roommate from college you were so close to once, or your friend you said you would call back sometime last year but never got around to it. You have at least a fifty percent chance that they will be happy to hear from you.

Because she bought the Zojirushi, otherwise known as “the Cadillac of bread machines,” my mom gave me her old Panasonic bread machine. I believe it makes the 1.5 pound loaf, same as the bread maker we lost to Katrina, but mom said to make the 1 lb loaf recipe.

To try it out, I made one batch of honey oat bread that didn’t really rise. I thought that perhaps my yeast had expired, so I bought new yeast and made another loaf. That one seemed to rise, but not very high. It’s not really really dense, but it isn’t fabulously spongy either. So I decided to make the recipe I always made in my old bread machine (French Honey), and to live really dangerously, I made the 1.5 lb recipe. I put in the ingredients before I went to work this morning. Read the rest of this entry »

I was over at Mindhacks today and read an interesting blurb about the psychological nature of happiness. Most people think that having kids and getting more money will make us happy. Apparently, this isn’t true:

But the data show that money has minor and rapidly diminishing effects on happiness, and that parents are generally happier watching TV or doing housework than interacting with their children.

So THERE’s something to think about. I knew I was happier being child free, but I had no idea I was also happier being poor! Hooray! Take that, homeowners with children! I’m going to go sit on my couch naked and watch sexy movies and eat ice cream, and then I’m going to make loud passionate love to my husband without fear of interruption! Woohoo!

This would be such a great thing to make, if I had a dremel tool… Still, if you aren’t crafty, Rachel has many novelty USB keys for sale, too!

This could be the solution to my desire for all things novelty USB. Everytime I see a new USB key shaped like food, or animals, or Jerry Garcia (ok I made that one up) I covet it to the extreme, but usually they are cost-prohibitive. Besides paying for the key, you have to pay for the cutesy container. If you can find a deal on the USB key, and then go to the dollar store and find a Hot Wheels car or a novelty keychain, it could be cheaper, and certainly more rewarding to build your own!

I have always been terrible at decision making. I am often just as stymied by what to wear and what to eat as I am by major decisions, such as whether to go to the doctor for something, or lately, where to move. I’ve wanted to put a recipe section on my blog, but I can’t decide if I should just have a recipe category with sub-categories for each type of recipe, or if I should have an entirely separate recipe blog. After Katrina, we couldn’t decide where we wanted to move when we got the money. We kept changing our minds. Incidentally, we finally made a decision, but we aren’t going to tell too many people until we actually are ready to move. This is mainly because every time we’ve said to a bunch of people, “We’re moving to _____ ,” we’ve changed our minds almost immediately after doing so.

Still, I never anticipated that after making a decision I would find something even more difficult to do: wait. I have decied to go to graduate school but have to wait until NEXT fall because we were so up in the air after Katrina, and we really need to make some money for a while. It took me 10 years to make up my mind on what to do with myself, but now that I know, it’s a looooong road from here to there. We know where we’re going to move but we have to save up enough money to move. I hate waiting. It was almost better when things were scary and unpredictable. Almost.

If I were home, and by home I mean in New Orleans before the hurricane, I wouldn’t worry about it. I would go around the corner and get a tallboy and something to cook for dinner. Then I would sit on my front porch and drink the tall boy and think that everything was unfolding as it should. I wonder if anyone here would let me borrow their front porch?

So in the interest of providing new content to replace that hosed by the losers who hacked my site, I thought I might let y’all know how I waste my time. Besides the links that I am slowly adding to the sidebar under the “Almost Daily” category, I feel there are numerous other available time wasters out there!

ESS.tv : Online streaming television! Get yerself a copy of WINAMP and look in the media library under the Shoutcast TV streams. Try out an ess tv stream for free, then look at the listed media and see whose name is on the MOST channels. Yep, you guessed it. Now, to be guaranteed a slot (and not get “server full” errors when your favorite episodes are on) you must subscribe for $5 a month. But hey, it’s a pretty good deal for entertainment. My current favorite program to watch while wasting time is Penn and Teller’s Bullshit.

Another great thing is WEBOGGLE. I love it so much. Of course, now that it’s more popular, I am no longer in the top three scores as often as I would like, but it must be because people are somehow cheating. Yep, that must be it… Hee hee hee!
Another favorite of mine is, as you probably know, the new Dr. Who. Find it. Watch it. Tell your friends.

If this isn’t enough for you, well, too bad. Maybe you need a hobby. Or maybe you have too much time on your hands. These were just suggestions.

Back after 42geeks.com was hacked by malicious little twinks. I have installed Wordpress 2.0. I will soon install Gallery.

I don’t know if I like my new host because it doesn’t let me choose the names of my databases and email/ftp user accounts. It generates some random string. It’s kind of a pain in the ass.