It’s been a long week. I was sick for part of it, but healthy for most of it. While at work, I worked hard, and barely had a free moment to tweet or play or pay a bill.
TV was great this week. Loved The Office, with Jim and Pam’s baby. So adorable. I’ve watched the episode twice already. Also, for the past year, I’ve been trying to catch my friend up on Lost so we could theorize about the show. As of yesterday, he is now completely caught up. It’s fun! We’ve never been on the same page, because I’ve always been so ahead. I’ve now seen every episode twice, which definitely helps. And boy-oh-boy does watching Season Five over again really put things into perspective.
If you haven’t heard, Sunday is the Oscars. Usually, I try my best to see everything that’s nominated, but it’s been hard to do so this year, particularly because of the Olympics. It also doesn’t help that there are 10 freaking Best Picture nominees. I hate that. Before the big show, I’ll be watching “An Education,” “District 9,” “The Hurt Locker,” and “A Serious Man.” Leaving just “Precious” and “Up.” I’m also for the first time ever watching all of the Live Action Shorts that are nominated, because Comcast has them bundled into one movie for $2.99. I always have to guess on my Oscar ballot for that category, this year I can actually make an educated guess!
Anyway, not much else to report. Here’s a couple of new pictures of the kitties.
Did you know that I’ve been blogging since 2001? I used to pore out my heart in those old blog posts. Like the icky private stuff. Then I started a blogspot account in 2004, and developed a blog that I could share with my friends and family. After that I got new ideas and went forward in a different direction. I changed names a couple of times, and then a few years ago I switched to wordpress because of the privacy options available.
Wanting more from Wordpress, I looked into domains, and doing a wordpress.org installation that would be give me more flexibility and access to tons of free templates and plug-ins.
It’s been a good ride. And while I’m about to do a little more shifting in the coming months with my template and my domain, I decided to look at some of those 2004 posts, which is where this blog begins, and give you a little update on some of the stuff I was talking about in May 2004.
So here we go……
When I walk into work every morning I always have the feeling that people still perceive me as a student. Perhaps it is my “casual Friday is everyday!” attire or my young demeanor.
Not the case anymore. At 30, people can see that I don’t fit in with the student body. Also…I get ma’am’d like crazy these days.
I hate Quark. If only QuarkXPress wasn’t the frontrunner of desktop publishing.
Good news for me, Quark was surpassed by InDesign a few years ago.
I made the mistake of eating half of a low-carb bagel and now I feel like yakking! So nasty.
Eww! I can’t believe I ever ate low-carb bagels. That was probably the last one I ever had.
I spent most of my weekend designing a new web site. It’s called Nine*Poems Creative Outlet, www.ninepoems.com. It is just for fun, but hey if I make a couple of bucks, that’s cool too.
Ha! Even back then I couldn’t resist new websites. Well as you can see, that old creative outlet was retired and you are currently on ninepoems.com. Funny thing is that I’m actually working on something to transition away from ninepoems.com. More to come on that later.
I wonder if my crafty-ness will ever wear off. That’s all I want to do. I go through phases I guess. This happens every now and again, and then it’s back to books, or some other thing to occupy my time.
No update required. Still the same.
I bought some new fonts today, hooray! Of course I had to pick up stuff for other people too, like a Tungsten C and some canned air.
The key part of that text is the Tungsten C. That’s an old Palm device. We thought it was the bees knees. I’m sure one day, I’ll laugh at my iPhone as archaic.
The weekend after a three day weekend is always so shockingly short. I swear, I just got off work and here I am preparing for tomorrow.
This one was a good one though. It started on Friday when I took Callie to the Vet and they put another bandage on her tail. They said she could wear it for two weeks this time and then she might not have to wear the cone when she goes bandage-free!
Well this blissful state ended a little abruptly for both her and I when I came home tonight to find her Jets-colored bandage on the floor completely in tact, as if she slipped it off disgusted with their loss. She herself was just chilling on her favorite blanket. She started to lick at it pretty good, so I was forced to put the cone on her…
She gets bummed out wearing the cone, and that bums me out pretty bad. But this could be for the best. I’m thinking that it’s somehow meant to be, because this is really what the Vets wanted to do in the first place. I’m wondering if they put her bandage on in such a manner so that it would slip off easily and we’d be forced to do the truly right thing! The tail needs air, and we’ll just have to deal with our sweet little girl living in her Elizabethian cone.
After the Vet, I went to Best Buy in an effort to get NetFlix streaming on my TV. I had lots of options. Could run a DVI->HDMI cable from my laptop. Could get a PS3. Could get a capable Blu-Ray player. Best Buy did not have the cable, so it was between the PS3 or Blu-Ray. After lots of internal debate, I ended up getting the Blu-Ray. It was half the price, didn’t require a disc from NetFlix to do initial setup, and I just don’t really play games that much.
You may be asking yourself, why not wait for the Wii NetFlix option that is coming soon? Well, there’s a bit of an urgency since I’m trying to catch up a friend on Lost before the new season starts. And the Wii version won’t have HD capabilities. Plus, I’m a bit excited for Blu-Ray. I bought Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince on Blu-Ray, and I can’t wait to watch it!
So overall I’m glad I got it. It was really easy to setup, and now I have a whole new gigantic option of viewing options whenever I want.
On Saturday I did a ton of cleaning (again), including some de-cluttering that I had planned on doing ever since last week’s big clean up.
Today, my dad and Cathy came up for a visit. The three of us, along with Marissa and Johnny, went over to the Great Indoors, which was a little bit like torture (I’m a renter and I have no real money to speak of), and then had a fun lunch at Panera (yum!).
We talked about how I love to teach people lessons. Okay, more like my family made fun of me for that. They called me George Bluth from Arrested Development.
If you’ve never seen Arrested Development, it’s the episode called “Pier Pressures.” I wish I could show you a clip, but alas, I couldn’t find one.
Anyway, I came home and did computer-y things, and plan to curl up with my Kindle tonight. I never did share my Kindle skin experience. I do love it so! It was really easy to apply and I think it looks so cute!
I was a 18-year-old bratty graduate bound for college and angry at her parents for setting such a lame curfew. 11 p.m. on weeknights and midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. My 17-year-old brother operated within the same guidelines.
So we’d go out most weeknights to hang out with friends. Me to my favorite coffee house (it was the 90s after all), and my brother to….well…I have no idea where he ever was.
And then 11:00 would roll around, we’d wander home and make our way into the kitchen for a late night snack–usually cereal, either Fruity Pebbles or Peanut Butter Captain Crunch.
By the time we settled in around the kitchen table, it would be about 11:30 and The Tonight Show would just be ending and Late Night with Conan O’Brien would be starting. As we munched on our cereal we’d laugh at Conan’s funny monologue, and we’d refill our bowls by the time the first guest would come on.
I don’t remember how we found Conan in the first place, but he became such a part of that summer and a permanent figure in the memory I have of spending time with my brother at that age, that I have been incredibly fond of him ever since.
In 2002, I went with my dad and sister to New York and we visited NBC’s Rockefeller building. We got to tour lots of the studios, but sadly not Conan’s. We were so sad! But we did the next best thing and paid for a fake photo shoot with a green screen, where it looked like we were on the set with Conan, sitting in his chairs, drinking out of mugs and laughing it up. When we got home from vacation, we lied and told my mom that we met him in real life and she believed us for a little bit, until we started laughing.
And that’s where I got my favorite mug!
I was thrilled when I heard that Conan was taking over the Tonight Show in 2009! Especially because I was no spring chicken anymore and had imposed my own self inflicted curfew to be in bed by 11 (amazing how life evolves). To have Conan start at 10:35 was most excellent to me.
So I was there watching on his debut night, and kept at it for quite awhile.
I was so certain that Conan would be there at 10:35 for years and years to come that I wasn’t as worried about viewership as I should have been. If I missed a night, it was no big deal. If I missed a week, I dealt with it.
So it should come to no surprise that I am livid at the late night fiasco at NBC. I could go on and on and on about my beef with NBC in general. I have never loved and hated something so equally and passionately as I do with NBC. Somehow NBC is my default channel, and a big chunk of my programming happens on NBC. So as much as I want to boycott or stay away from the network that chooses to destroy pretty much everything I love, I keep tuning in. LOSER!
Since this madness started, I’ve been watching every second of the Tonight Show, and he’s funnier than ever, which just makes it hurt more. I know that this isn’t the end of Conan by any means, but it still makes me sad. I hate that he only had seven months to be the host of the legendary “Tonight Show,” and I feel like he’ll forever be jaded.
And so that’s my story on that. I could dig deeper into all this, but really, this video pretty much sums it up for me!
You should actually take that as a good sign though. It means that all of my writing energy has been poured into my NaNoWriMo book! Last weekend, I finally got the breakthrough I was looking for and I have seriously increased my word count. That being said, I am still massively behind, at only 19,000 words. But I’m not afraid anymore. I feel rather confident that I can get it done, and I’m quickly falling in love with my story.
Falling in love with my story makes me happy, but it makes me worry about the other novel I’ve been working on for a year. I have already invested 300 pages into it and I am still determined to finish it. I’m pretty good and splitting my attention, but I must be honest and say that I am currently obsessed with what I’m working on now and the influences that I’ve been accessing to motivate me. I have a whole new music collection that I’ve been listening to as I write that is completely different from my other book (Click here to see it). I’m not going to lie. A lot of these songs come from Grey’s Anatomy and I think that’s a great thing. There’s a reason why the show uses these songs, because it evokes emotions and allows scenes to play out very well.
So anyway, if you’re wondering what I will be doing the rest of the month, you can bet it’s writing. I’m attacking this NaNoWriMo challenge hardcore!
Speaking of hardcore…I have some other things to report.
As you may recall from 2008, I am a Twilight fan. I shouldn’t be so ashamed about this. I have a strong philosophy of “to each their own.” My hugest pet peeve is when people who have their own nerdy, fringe, or even super popular interest are critical of one of the things I like. This comes out like crazy in the workplace. I happen to work with a lot of lovable nerds that love Sci-Fi, etc., that have literally gone to conventions, and some that love playing WoW and spend a good chunk of their free time doing that. So you would think that I wouldn’t get grief when I mention Days of Our Lives right? I totally do. It’s the most fucking obnoxious thing in the world when people do that and the most hypocritical. Star Trek is not my thing. I barely tolerated the movie and thought it was only okay. I’ll never own it or go to a midnight show for the sequel (actually, I might, because I like going to midnight shows of things). But I have a friend who loves it and I would never try to bring him down. Thankfully, he doesn’t try to bring me down either and totally grasps the “to each their own” philosophy.
So if you’re about to roll your eyes at the next part of this post, because I talk about Twilight. Spare me. It takes so much more effort to hate something than to just accept that some people like it. And if you think that hating on something that is popular, especially amongst women (which I would argue is part of the problem), makes you somehow superior or cool, it doesn’t. It makes you seem insecure.
Life is hard, and so it should be celebrated when anyone can have a ton of fun loving something in the fictional/escapism realm. To-each-their-fucking-own.
Last night I went to the Twilight double feature with my sister and my friend Michelle. It was a blast! We saw Twilight at 9 and then New Moon at midnight. It was a great time and I’m going again tonight with a larger group of friends. Is New Moon the greatest movie ever? Hell no. Do I care? Not one bit. Because I have fun watching it and living in that world for two hours.
So I guess you could call me hardcore for Twlight.
But do you know what you should actually call me hardcore for….
Grey’s Anatomy.
Because even though I got home at 2:45 in the morning and I had to be at work by 9 this morning, I stayed up and watched the new episode of Grey’s Anatomy at 3 in the morning. HARDCORE.
Truthfully, I am not actually hardcore for any of these things. I personally know people that actually attend Days of Our Lives fan events, went to the New Moon premier in Los Angeles, and make montages of Grey’s. And while it’s unlikely that I’ll ever go that far, I could never discredit or mock those girls for being passionate about something they love.
So the next time you’re working hard at hating American Idol, soap operas, Nicholas Sparks, fan fiction, Star Wars, WoW, Lady Gaga, or High School Musical….remember, it’s all for fun and life is too short to stop the fun.
PS……
Grey’s turned out way better than I thought it would for Cristina and Owen last night! I hate that a love triangle is coming, but at least this episode made me pretty happy:
Big TV night. Jim and Pam’s wedding! Like everybody else in America (read 30 year old single women), I freaking love Jim and Pam. So I was totally stoked for their wedding episode. And I must say that the episode completely delivered. I loved it! So much so, that I didn’t take a picture of anything else. So once again, I am personally pictureless, but I must post one.
I am so so so happy that football is back. I love nothing more than fall and football=fall. This year, I’ve decided to start liking the Broncos again. Basically, it goes like this. When I was with Brian, I hated the Broncos. Mostly because he showed me how easy it was to hate them. And truthfully, I had grown to hate Shanahan and I really hated Cutler from day one. The fans were annoying and the city’s overall attitude about how the Broncos were somehow entitled to win every single game made me really annoyed. So this year, everything breaks down, they get a new coach, they get rid of Cutler and they are terrible. It’s like starting from scratch. Everyone has the lowest expectations and I think it’s grounded the city. So I’m back to like the Broncos, and it’s fun! And now for the fourth or fifth year in a row I’m participating in a pick pool for each NFL game. Something I’ve been successful at in the past. So Sundays are football days. And on this particular Sunday, I watched football while I planned my trip. Later that night, I watched the Emmys. NPH was awesome!
Since this season of True Blood has been pretty spectacular, particularly last night’s episode, I’m giving the books a second chance and trying to read them again. I’m in the midst of book two.
I'm reading "Living Dead in Dallas" which is not shown here.
One of my absolute favorite shows returned tonight! Psych is so great and I’ve been anxiously awaiting it all week. I made sure I had a pineapple on hand (never bought one of those before) to enjoy as I watched it. On the show, a pineapple always makes some sort of appearance. Anyway, the season opener didn’t disappoint. I’m glad it’s back, but the seasons go so fast.
So I’ve gotten some new TVs, and I’ve upgraded my cable package. I’m now one of the cool kids. At least on the surface.
Wanna guess what I’ve watched thus far in beautiful HD?
(Here’s a hint, it’s not what the cool kids are watching).
There’s been a little of this…
Yep, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. Not even the first one, the sequel.
And way too much of this…
The Bachelorette.
So tonight I tried to get a little cooler and watch this.
Nine Inch Nails, Beside You on Palladia
But then I remembered it’s not 1997 anymore.
So I switched to this (read, I was sad NIN was over and wanted more concert and this was all I could find).
Apparently, this is O.A.R.
So pretty much the only “cool” thing I’ve watched, which I don’t think was actually in HD, but looked killer nonetheless on my new 1080 upconverter DVD player was this.
Lost, Season 3.
That’s right, LOST. The 40” television with a very high quality picture only makes LOST creepier. Especially when you’re watching this particular episode.
The one with the paralyzing spiders and Paulo and Nikki get buried alive.
And just because I feel like it, and I’ve also been watching this since the NIN concert ended, which is on YouTube and not on my beautiful new TV.
Hi! I'm Rochelle. Welcome to my blog. This is a space that’s almost like a scrapbook, a little bit of a rant room, a gallery of creative work, and a dash of nonsense. My life is not terribly exciting but I have a lot of creative energy that’s got to be focused somewhere.
The Simple Sisters
Two silly sisters acting like grown ups. Check it out!
