Today is the last day of November which means that it is the last day of NaBloPoMo and I am very proud to say that this entry (this one right here) means that I completed the whole month.  I know that in the scheme of things like achieving world peace and solving the energy crisis completing NaBloPoMo is relatively minor.  In the world of blogging, however, it is kind of a cool thing to do.

So, um, go me!

Okay, I know the commercials have been airing for weeks already but now that Thanksgiving is done and I have watched Love Actually for the billionth time I think that the Christmas season can officially begin!

Is it even possible to have a holiday season without at least one viewing of Love Actually?

I know that Thanksgiving is a very hard holiday for some, but mine felt like it lasted all of five minutes which, really, is a miracle since I only got three hours of sleep.  No joke. I made up for it between Thursday and Friday, though, when I got TEN hours of sleep! TEN! Last night I got around sixish but accidentally took a nap early this afternoon.

Yesterday my Mom and I braved some of the black Friday shoppers (though we decided to hit the stores after lunch to avoid the most zealous of them) and hit JoAnn’s fabrics and Powell’s.  I didn’t buy anything, but it was still fun to poke around.  Now I am absolutely motivated to crochet and read, which is awesome but will have to wait while I finish up one last “must get done before the end of the holiday weekend” project.

Finally, tomorrow is the end of November which means that it is the end of NaBloPoMo and can I just say? This year was a lot easier than last year.  I wonder why.

Was awesome!

Because it is after midnight here (and long long after I SHOULD have gone to bed but what else is new), I have decided to write my Thanksgiving Day post.  This allows me to both hang out with my Mom, fiance and cat all day tomorrow without breaking from the pack to post and to not fail NaBloPoMo.

This year I have already written a few things that I am thankful for–my awesome fiance who forewent levelling his (@!*#$!!) WoW character to come comfort me at three in the morning when I could not sleep, my freelance work being stable enough to for me to pay my bills without having to don a coffee slinger’s apron and–it feels like there should be a third link here but I is tired. Also? Kind of too tired to link correctly.  Oh well.

For me, Thanksgiving is mostly about family.  This will seem odd to anybody who knew me growing up and who knows that the huge family get togethers were few and far between and maybe? that’s why I am so grateful for having a family who genuinely loves each other and enjoys the time we spend together (because it is a treat when we do it, not an annoying obligation).  My family is filled with wacky, crazy, goofy loving people and I am very thankful to know all the way down in my bones that even though I rarely see them or talk to them that every single one of them would drop everything for me if I ever asked them to.  I am really lucky to have that–and to be able to have that sort of faith at all, especially in today’s world is kind of amazing in itself.  There are few things in this world that I do not doubt and my family is one of them.

I am also grateful for my friend-family.  The girls (women now!) that I grew up with and who I’m lucky enough to still call my closest friends.  So many people I know shun their high school friends in favor of collegiate buddies and friends they make as adults.  My high school friends are still my best friends.  We went our separate ways after high school but as adults most of us (Kt being the globetrotter that she is) have settled in the same area–not on purpose, just through sheer…serendipity? Is that the word that goes here? I’m grateful that I get to watch my friend’s daughter grow up in real life and that we are all more than once a year e-mails or holiday cards to each other.  It’s rare that people stay so close or come back together as easily as we have, so it is definitely something to be grateful for.  In this vein I am also glad that in the last couple of years I have reconnected with my oldest friend in the world.  We met when I was nine and she was eight and kept in touch through letters and phone calls for years after I moved away.  We lost touch for a while during our initial post-college years but found each other again not long before Will and I moved to Portland.  She got married earlier this year and now she is my go-to person when I get wedding freak outs.  Today I realized that she and I have been friends for twenty one years.  That’s a lot!

And now, I will gratefully go crawl into my bed and sleep.  Happy Thanksgiving!

When I first received my iPod I went crazy and added just about every single CD I had in my possession into iTunes.  A large number of these CDs were mixed CDs and albums put out by radio stations and soundtracks and I did not take the time to make sure that I actually liked all of the music that was being loaded into my iTunes library.  I won’t lie.  Over the last few years I’ve turned my iPod onto shuffle and then gone “gross, no, why do I own that? When did I buy that–oh that’s on one of the Alice Music CDs.” as I shuffled through the songs.

Last night I thought that it would be a good idea to start going through my iTunes library and pruning out all of the stuff I don’t listen to and/or do not actually like.  Space isn’t really an issue–I have a 35G iPod, but still… if I want to encounter music I don’t like, I’d just turn on the radio.  So last night while I was working on a project, I opened up iTunes and decided to listen to my music in alphabetical order–by song title.  This has led me to discover just how deep my mania for some songs go.

I have FOUR versions of All You Need is Love.  Four.  And two of them sound exactly the same. And I am keeping them all.  I did, however, delete both versions of…Air? Something that was on both an Alice CD and the Felicity Soundtrack.

I have also had a good laugh at some of the stuff my younger self loved.  I am not ashamed to admit that there was a time when I LOVED O-Town.  Yes that is kind of embarrassing, but there was a time when I was convinced that they would be around for a while and listened to their CD on repeat for weeks (and drove my roommate batshit insane in the process).  One of their songs came on last night and I won’t lie.  My first reaction was “what the hell is this piece of crap??”  But I didn’t delete it.  I like to laugh at my younger self.

According to iTunes, I can listen to my music for 74.5 days without a track repeating so this pruning? Is going to take a while.

Also can someone buy me this shirt for Christmas? Thanks!

1.  Make sure that you shower really really well before you leave the house.

2.  Don’t forget the deodorant!

3.  Take a book to read in the waiting room.

4.  Wear super warm socks.

5. Wear as few layers of clothing as possible.

It should be noted that I made sure to follow three of the five suggestions here.  I was squeaky clean, deodorized and armed with the Best Non-Required Reading of 2007 when I left the house today.  I? was also wearing kind of cruddy socks and about three layers of clothing.  Oh yeah, under my coat I had on a thermal shirt, a turtle neck, and a sweater–as well as thermal pants and jeans.  And that is how, when my doctor came back in after the exam, she found me hopping around on one leg, with both arms shoved into my jeans (one going in from the waist down, one going in from the foot up)–which were on both legs but down around my knees)–because one leg of my thermal pants got all bunched up when I was trying to shove myself back into my clothes.

At least she didn’t come back in while I was bent over and trying to figure out why I couldn’t pull up my underwear properly and it turned out that somehow, in my haste, I had managed to twist them around and put them on halfway upside down (the right leg went through just fine, the left leg entered through the leg hole and was coming out through the waistband).  Next time I am so wearing a dress to my appointment.  It’ll be so much easier!

I have to say, though, that I’ll take a little bit of personal embarrassment over the painful exam I had last year.  Last year I learned what other women meant when they said “my vagina is in a bad mood today.”  This appointment was wholly uneventful and it only took about fifteen minutes to take care of everything.  I also really liked the woman who did the exam (last year’s doctor was at least two years younger than me).  She was friendly, answered all of my questions and even went to look up an answer when she couldn’t remember the answer (for the record, I was asking a general medical question, not a woman doctor kind of question).

Still though: even if it’s only 35 degrees out (like this morning) and you are walking to your appointment (like I was)–don’t pile on the layers! I was a vaudeville sketch trying to happen.

Yep.  It took until one in the morning to get this thing to function properly.  Just for the record, I handn’t planned on working on this site at all yesterday (except to post for NaBloPoMo), let alone spend ALL DAMN DAY coding and putting in a new template.  I have to give a shout out to the very friendly Miss Britt who was super helpful when I e-mailed her in a lather over my comment section’s coding.  Thanks Miss Britt!

Yeah, so I spent all day working on and coding this blog.  In Firefox.  In Firefox? It looked quite dandy (I cannot figure out how to get the sidebars start on the same line as my main content but figure that fight is better left alone).  I was pretty happy at midnight when I decided that I was done and that my site looked fine and that I was happy with it.  I went skipping into the computer room to show Will the new look and found out that it didn’t translate to Internet Explorer.  Like, at all.  What came up as a super pretty site in Firefox came up as a blank page in Internet Explorer.  And, to give myself a little bit of credit, I did not scream and knuckle punch the wall like I really wanted to.  Instead I sat back down and, in IE this time, with the help of W3C Code Validator, went through my site fixing the code until the site did show up in IE.  Then I showed Will and he said it was pretty so I went to bed.  At one.  And did not fall asleep until three because I was still pretty worked up over spending the entire day in an “ihatethisihatethiscodingsucksihatethisihatethisstupidfuckingcodingpieceofcrapsitegoddamncode” place.

Today I really can’t spend any time working on my blog so it’s a good thing that it’s done.  Instead, today I am spending almost all day actually working on stuff that pays me.  My break will be when Will decides it is time to go to the store to do the Thanksgiving shopping.  What? We want to be prepared, but we just don’t have the space to store stuff for weeks ahead of time!

Knowing Will, that time will probably be at about 11PM.  So I should have a good twelve hours to get stuff done today.  See you tomorrow!

I’ve got Mozilla up and running.  i’ve moved all of my Outlook stuff into Thunderbird.  The reason I was using Outlook at all was because of its calendar/alert thing and guess what?  Mozilla makes one of those programs too! Yay!  So that’s downloaded and installed.  My browser still needs a few of the toolbar things re-installed: Stumble Upon, BlogRolling, etc.

I am glad, however, that I FINALLY got rid of all of that Yahoo! crap that somehow got installed.

Now for the not update stuff:

You know that phrase “let go, let God”?  I’ve known the phrase for a long time but it wasn’t until yesterday that I actually kind of got it.  It was about noon or so and I realized that I had a virus and that my usual virus scanner (AVG, which also needs to be updated) wasn’t catching it.  So I decided to check out the TrendMicro Housecall online virus check thing that Will swears by and when the “Scanning files: time left: 4 1/2 horus” came up on the screen I almost started to cry.  I was busy! I had stuff to do! I already lost a day because I had to fix my blog! ARrrrrrggggghhhhhhhhh!  And then I realized that, in order to do my work, I needed my computer to be working correctly and be virus free.  And that, apparently was going to take another four and a half hours.

And I got it.  I realized that, basically, there was nothing I could do.  My computer was going to be tied up for a while so I might as well just find something else to do.  So I did!  I spent the afternoon crocheting and watching Studio 60 on DVD.  And then when Housecall told me that I’d have to run a second (also excruciatingly long) scan to make sure that everything had been gotten, I did not freak out.  I just sort of shrugged and said “okay.  That’s what’s happening.” and went back to my crocheting and Studio 60 for the rest of the day.  And can I just say? It felt really good to not spend the entire day stressing out and saying “how long now? how ’bout now? and now?” as the scan was running. Instead I got almost an entire day of just relaxing on the couch being crafty and enjoying me some Sorkin.  It. was. awesome.

Seriously.  That whole “let go, let God” thing actually works.  Unless I’m missing the point completely in which case, this is my version.  You can get your own!

Today, of course, I have to bunker down and get three days worth of work done in one but I’m not afraid of a challenge.  In fact, the more I have to do, the better I am to concentrate on what needs to be done!  Today I will spend hanging on the couch with my now mostly behaving laptop and working.  My biggest decision? West Wing or Grey’s Anatomy on the TV?

Yeah….. so today I discovered that my poor little Dell laptop has a virus…or something icky.  It was attacking Mozilla Firefox and messing with the links.  As I am not super computer literate (anything beyond push the button, make it go is beyond me) I ran as many virus checks as I could think of, did some internet searches and no joke have now spent more than twelve hours trying to make everything behave properly.

I finally uninstalled Firefox and deleted it in the hopes that it will work correctly when I re-download and install it.

Will says I should just do a ….something fancy…. that will basically start my computer all over from scratch.  This? Scares me.  Not because I don’t have the important stuff backed up, I’m pretty sure I do.  It scares me because I am super paranoid about my backups not being as backed up as I want them to be.  My Outlook program is weird, and I don’t want to lose all of the information and e-mails I have stored there.  Will is, of course, a computer genius and I’m pretty sure that he won’t totally kill my computer.  He fixes the damn things for all of his friends after all.  I’m just….paranoid.  This is the only computer I have.  I cannot afford a new one (which, honestly, seems so much easier right now) if this one dies.  And, you know–all of my work and business stuff is stored here.  Yikes.

In good news–I work well when under pressure.  My output and focus increase significantly when I’m under a hard deadline.   This is how I didn’t panic when I spent today doing virus scan after virus scan after spyware scan after registry scan after you get the idea.

Also? I’m using Internet Explorer right now and it seriously jacked up my title entry box.

Double also?  Welcome back RSS subscribers that I feared I lost when Typepad refused to publish my feed correctly!