My Billow

This is my billy. He's cute. He looks kind of stunned and lost here but I assure you that he is usually quite alert and awake... Well, he is if it is after noon or better yet two. Caffine helps but doesn't quite cut it before 10am.

Even if he isn't awake or alert he makes a good billow, nice and firm, yet squishy with a pleasant scent.

busy weekend

Some old friends are coming to visit this weekend. I am really excited but also kind of stressed as well. For the past several years I haven't really known what to say to them. We don't have very much in common, or we didn't when we were in school. Or maybe I just thought we didn't. Either way, I have become kind of on my guard when I am with them. I feel like I will say something or do something to make them realize that I am not the kid they remember playing with every day. That we only see each other a couple times a year and don't really have much contact inbetween visits. Again that is mostly my fault. I am really bad at thinking of things to say when I haven't talked to someone for a long time. I figure nothing I have done is particularly interesting. This time though, I am determined to be a normal person. I have been trying to think of things to say. I am going to bring my favorite ice breaking game, Apples to Apples. Hopefully the little part of my brain that actually has self esteem will come out and I might be able to talk to my friends again. Sad that I have to trick myself into talking to someone I think of as a sister.

My new couch!

Well, not yet but I am pretty sure that is the one I want. It opens out into a bed too!

Yay! Piano Squall!!!

PianoSquall.com | Game and Anime Pianist

Three times today something has come up that made me think of this guy, so I figured I'd better bookmark his site before something catastrophic happened to me. He rocks in an exciting piano sort of way. Very spiffy. So thank you, Think Geek, Picasa, and Box of Random Things From Otakon, you have reminded me of spiffiness. I just wish the line hadn't been so long to buy the cd at Otakon. hmm...

Random

I woke up this morning with the random thought that this is the first time in my entire life that I will be with someone on Valentine's Day. Kind of pathetic, isn't it. Yeah. All my previous relationships have begun just after, and not lasted all the way round. Or the relationship was in the "off again" stage at the time. So this year, hopefully, I will get my pretty fl0wer and my kiss and all will be well.

Meanwhile...

I hate packing. Hate it. I have way too much stuff and I know most of it is probably garbage but I can't throw it away. I feel like someday, I might need it. I haven't used most of it in at least three years but I reason that it has been so disorganized or buried in boxes for those three years that I probably had been looking for it and just couldn't find it. Two days ago, I found two dvds that I had written off as having been left at the ex's house. But there they were, safe and sound only a few feet away from my tv. But that is what happens when you are short. Tall people put things away for you, and you never find them again until you move. I am finding a lot of things. Lots of them I know I can totally live without but I feel guilty about throwing them away because they were gifts. I also have an amazing amount of things that have sentimental value. Stuff that I think I am going to throw together in a box and label "do not unpack ever" like my parents did. I have so much paper that I have to sort through. I am very tempted to throw it all away but I know that there is 10% important stuff in the 90% garbage.

feh! feh on packing, feh on moving, feh on holidays!

This is me.

Finally got around to posting pics. Silly me didn't look at the toolbar. Serves me right for abandoning my blog for two years. Will post house pics later. This is me and Boyfriend 2.6. We are all dressed up for a friend's wedding. (i think) We don't spiff up very often.

House is moved!!

It took all day monday to actually move it. And in fact they were moving it in the dark, but it is in. YAY YAY yay!!!!!

Ahem... anyway the house is on the site... now they just need to attach everything and make it level and such. Of course, right after it was set on monday night they discovered a huge water main break in the camp so my house has been put on the back burner for a bit. That is ok. I probably won't be actually moving in for another month or so, but the reality of it is starting to sink in.

We went out to look for couches too, and I still really like one of the first ones I saw. Somehow it always works out that way. Still haven't had time to really look at how to post pics though. Maybe later. Boyfriend 2.6 is sick and sniffly and needy so I haven't done much today. I feel pretty crappy but I think it is completely unrelated.

Housing Update

This morning they tried to move my house. Apparently the hitch on the tractor is too low or the crown of the road is too high. Either way the A frame of the hitch on my house is scraping the ground and they are afraid to keep moving it. We tried to raise the shoulder with stone but we don't have enough stone. We have stopped for lunch and to figure out what to do. After calling every hitch and trailer place in a 40 mile radius, we have established that a 3 inch ball raiser thingie that they were looking for does not actually exist. Now they are trying to MacGyver something to make it work. This thing is 25 tons and if you heard some of the sounds it was making when they were moving it... I was cringing non stop. I do hope that they can figure something out today because the ground is finally frozen and tomorrow it is supposed to rain and make it all muddy and soft again. I will post again this evening. Hopefully I will figure out how to add pics too!

Moving, Maybe

I am supposed to be moving soon. Actually I was already supposed to have moved. First I was supposed to have moved into the existing place in the spring of '04. That got delayed and delayed and delayed because the person who was supposed to be moving out didn't actually do it until fall. In fall of '04, we actually got to go into the place where I was planning on moving. I had lived there from about age 1 to age 7 and was planning on moving back in. Apparently the renter who had been so slow moving out had failed to tell us, the landlords, that there were problems with it. We knew about the electrical issues and wanted to fix them but she had so much shit in there that we couldn't get to the walls to take the paneling off. What she failed to mention was that since she failed to close the windows so many times, the floors were rotting out and also she didn't mention the crack in the floor of the shower which she had put a mat over. The crack in the floor let so much water out that everything holding the shower up was rotted away. Consequently, my move was delayed still further. We debated over whether it was worth fixing and decided it wasn't. Now we had to go about replacing the unit. My paternal unit declared it too late in the season to order a new one as it would arrive in the beginning of winter and the weather would be bad. heh. So we waited. Meanwhile, friends of ours determined that they could be a dealer for Liberty Homes. They began the process of renewing their expired license. The extremely obnoxious, drawn out, beaurocratic nightmare of a process that took months longer than it should. Finally their stuff went through. It is now the end of July '05 and I have been living half out of boxes for over a year. We get the goahead to pick floorplans and after waiting for them to send them, drive all the way out to central pa for samples that sucked anyway. By the time we figure out what we can pair with what and in what room of what floorplan it is the beginning of September. We submit our order. One week later we recieve a call saying that due to FIMA's order for Katrina victims and workers, our home will not be available for delivery for an extra month. So that puts the delivery date in the end of November. No problem. October comes and goes and no work has been done for the foundation. The old unit has not even been removed. In the beginning of November we get a call from the company again. The date for delivery will be the first week of December, then the second week in December. Suddenly they are spurred into action. They attempt to pull off the old unit. It makes it as far as the front yard. Work begins very slowly on the foundation. Second week in December, the arrival has been pushed back to the thursday after christmas. My father stays home to work on Christmas Eve though all he managed to do was break the backhoe. twice. Finally, just a day before the thing is scheduled to arrive, they get the concrete poured. It has been so cold for weeks that digging for the foundation was extremely difficult. It barely warmed enough to pour the concrete. Then, suddenly, it rains. It rains all day the night before the arrival date. It rains all morning before it arrives. The temperature has warmed enough that the ground is a soupy mess of mud and water. It arrives. The truck gets stuck in the mud several times just trying to get it out of the road. Finally a neighbor with a logging machine helps get it out of the mud and nearly runs over my brother in the process. My house gets as far as my driveway. The rain is still pouring down. The guys with the truck go back to PA. And that is where it sits. In the driveway, just yards away from where it is supposed to be. The weather has warmed up so much that there is no frost at all left in the ground. No one knows when the ground will be hard enough to move it. We don't even know what we will move it with. To top everything off, the water doesn't come out where they said it would and nothing else does either. So he had to make shift something and hope it won't freeze. Also, there are numerous problems with it. A shutter blew off somewhere between here and Central PA. There are cracks under all the windows, Scratches in the paneling in most of the rooms that were very poorly covered up. There are upside down panels in my bathroom and various other careless mistakes. Fortunately the company sent someone out to look at it who said he can fix it in under two weeks once it is level and has heat. Who knows when that will be. I am just hoping and praying for a nice long dry coldsnap.

Interesting coincidence

I have returned from my lengthy absence from blogging. I'm not sure why I have suddenly had the urge to record my thoughts and such again, but now just seemed like the right time. So many things are happening and maybe I just need the catharsis of writing to calm down my silly little brain. More about that some other time though.

I have an agenda. I have been trying to figure out if anyone else shares my somewhat skewed idea that the lyrics of Green Day's American Idiot parallels the events and themes of Neil Stevenson's Snow Crash and Diamond Age. I know, I know. It sound like a bit of a stretch even to me, but there is something there that bugs me... it just fits a little too well for me to discount it out of hand. It is primarily my fault for reading Stevenson's books during the same period that I was listening to the album all the time. I'm not saying that Green Day wrote the album so that it would match the books or anything like that (though I am very curious to know if they have ever read them). I just was surprised how well they went together. Listening to songs like "She's a Rebel" and "Extrodinary Girl" while reading Diamond Age gave both works a depth of meaning, at least for me, that I didn't see on their own. "American Idiot" and "Jesus of Suburbia" fit quite well with Hiro Protagonist's world in Snow Crash also. It isn't just the events of the books and the albums that struck me. Mostly it was the themes. Stevenson and Green Day both seem to have similar views of American society and where it's going and why. What I guess I really need to do to properly hash this out is to grab a copy of both books for myself (my boyfriend practically forced his copies on me when we first met and I fell in love, first with the books then with him). I already own a copy of American Idiot. As soon as I heard Blvd of Broken Dreams on the radio for the first time, I knew that this album would be one of the few I would actually own. I don't buy that much music. I own very few CDs and I don't have very much downloaded music either. I generally just listen to the radio.

Anyway I will finish this train of thought some other time. I need to sleep.