fatrockstar

Hi everyone, I'm not dead - I'm just not writing a lot of public posts on LiveJournal. Most of my online presence is limited to private and other security-managed social media when it comes to my personal life, something I learned long ago was necessary in order to keep assholes from doing random judgey drivebys online.

Also, it's not easy to make a joke online either. There's always that one person who will drop me a private message asking "what the heck does THAT mean?" because they think I'm talking about them. If I am, well, get over it. Chances are I'm not. I do like to inject humor when communicating online or with my face. Humor is not one size fits all on the internet.

So, if you want to know what I'm doing these days and you're not part of my LiveJournal circle of friends, here are a few places you can go to see what I'm up to*.

Twitter
Instagram
Wordpress for crafting
Wordpress for band stuff
ReverbNation (sign up for my mailing list here!)
Facebook for my friends (occasionally with public posts)
Facebook for band stuff
Pinterest

*I don't accept all friend requests sent to me, just those from people I know or have met. Lurking is fine. Stalking is not. Lurk Moar.

I've found in my 20+ years on the internet that I don't say nearly as much as I used to. I also don't get as much personal email anymore. The information superhighway is a very different place these days and continues to evolve. If you really want to contact me you'll be able to find me. I'm a long ways away from removing myself from the grid altogether.

Wynne

Because I know a handful of you on the crafting mailing list are also readers of this blog. Pay attention:

On Sunday I will send out the official invitation to the next Craft Night. If you do not want your email and/or name shared with the rest of the guest list you need to answer that mail TODAY. I won't send a separate invitation to you or mail you the details of when and where Craft Night is outside of that invitation.

I'm still investigating how Gmail handles contact information in calendar invites. If your email does not resolve to a name, your email will appear. If your email does resolve to a name, your name will appear. If I have you in my contact address book under a name, THAT name will appear. Heads up: I have had to add names to several people's entries in my address book so I know who the hell they are.

I'd really like to have a Craft Night this week. I'd like to make things and take pictures of things and be able to speak freely about the things that make me happy and cause me a little concern. Mostly those first two, but you get the idea.

Read the email I sent last week. If you get the invite please RSVP. If we have a quorum, it's on. If we don't, it's not.

I have determined that whatever is causing my sore throat is INSIDE this house. I don't know what it is or how I can pinpoint it, I just know that my throat is sore to the point where singing is difficult and I often have a dry cough. In addition to that I am also suffering from super-dry sinuses and my eyes are intermittently on fire. This overall pain and discomfort is very frustrating because I know my dad would like to hear from me and I also have a gig on Sunday afternoon to sing for. I can't have long conversations with a glass throat.

All this started to escalate after PAX, which is also when temperatures broke 80 here. Now that it's rainy and in the 60s I thought for sure it would calm down. Noop.

It's not Martha, either. I was having this problem before she came to live with us and it hasn't become worse by being near her. Is it a moisture thing? I'm worried that if I turn on my humidifier and I'm wrong it could make everything worse. I have a huge fear that my crawlspace, which I have not ventured into for a Very Long Time, is a biosphere all its own and has finally outgrown the space beneath my house to infect me with its alien micro-organisms.

Speaking of Martha, she is painfully adorable. She is also painfully codependent and follows me everywhere, chirping at me in her squeaky little meao. I am concerned I will end up with two cats anyway, which will upset me, but I don't want to traumatize an animal with endless hours of loneliness she doesn't want.

So far we haven't really established a Grady-esque rapport. The only things that really come through are LOVE ME and WATCH ME EAT. We'll get there, I'm sure.



I pulled a white corset out of the dark corners of my closet and decided I was going to fuck with it. Why not, right? I spent $40 on it for my wedding back in '02 and have worn it maybe once since. At first I considered spray painting it red and doing the WW motif, but that's way too predictable. Instead I ripped off the tacky lacy trim and am painting it a lovely royal blue. Maybe I'll add some new trim if I have something worthwhile here in the house, but for now it's drying in the garage.



My new washing machine arrived this week and will take some getting used to. Instead of standard washing machine noises this one sounds like it's heaving during the wash cycle. I honestly thought for a moment that it was going to vomit my clothes all over the interior of my laundry room. That would have been terrifying.



I've been thinking about my former in-laws a lot lately. I put away Nate & Karen's wedding party photo a long time ago, but the last family picture they sent me is still up on my wall along with photos of other family members I don't get to see very often or at all. I'm pretty sure a lot has changed since the last time we heard from each other. The more time that passes the more awkward it seems to reach out and say hello, but life goes on. I don't want to make things uncomfortable for the Blues. Despite my ex's past behavior, I still love them and want them to be peaceful and happy.



Has anyone using Netflix seen The Hard Times of RJ Berger? I finished season 1 and loved it. Season 2 isn't available for streaming, which sucks, but I'm digging it. Word to the wise: I like strange television. My recommendations are not solid.

Two weeks ago I put out a lawn waste bag with my garbage can for pickup. The garbage can was emptied, but they left the lawn waste bag, and then the crows pulled it apart. Yay. I ended up having to clean up a mess of birdseed, shredded paper, and weeds, put it in a new trash bag (that was way too small, but I made it fit), and stick THAT back into the garbage can for the next week's pickup. It took up almost the entire can.

The next week we had a small windstorm, so the garbage didn't get taken out. More garbage accrued.

In the meantime, Grady's litter box was in need of a full change -- not just the remove-the-clumps-add-more-litter type, either -- because it was beginning to STINK. There had been no room in the garbage can to do such a thing, but I was left no choice. I needed to call Waste Management about putting out an extra can.

The girl on the phone was nice and answered all my questions, but informed me that my garbage collection had been canceled at the end of August. Because I had paid my bill eight days late, online, the service wasn't automatically reinstated. Apparently it is policy that online payers have to make a phone call to get their service back. It sucks, but oh well. I had her restart service and arrange to have a second can picked up.

But how did my garbage get picked up all in all the weeks since? The girl wasn't sure, because once my service was terminated THEY REPO'D MY TRASH CAN. Suddenly things made a lot of sense. For your convenience, I will recap:

Can you see where the mystery suddenly became clear? For the last two months the garbage men have been emptying my can and hers, believing that both of them were hers. This is the ONLY reason they have been picking up my trash. The new can was because I had taken hers not realizing that it wasn't her son that took my can, it was Waste Management. She hasn't bothered to come by to talk to me about it. If anything, she's been avoiding me, and probably because I confronted her son about the damn cans to begin with instead of coming to her first -- something that wouldn't have happened if she was ever home.

I have garbage service again, and that's all I really care about right now. That, and Grady having a spanky clean litter box.

If you've contacted me this week over my lack of entries you are not alone. Knowing that my writing will sometimes have some mass appeal, and that a lot of my net-friendly friends and family are not bloggers (or even LJ users), I try to write publicly on a regular basis. I have no restrictions on commenting on my entries because of this. However, if you comment Anonymously without identifying yourself... you are fair game and I will show no mercy.

There is not a lot in my personal life I care to share publicly right now other than I'm broke and looking for work. I'm not living in my car yet, but come May 7 I may need to consider it if I have nothing lined up. I have been actively applying for positions since about the 10th of last month, and next week I have a phone screen scheduled. My weekend will most likely be spent at the library or in a couple of books, brushing up on my programming theory.

I take things one day at a time. Saturday mornings are the hardest. The good days outnumber the bad days, but that is probably because my ex hasn't made his presence known outside of one or two emails in months. It's like he died and I don't know where he's buried. If he showed up on my doorstep or called me I would react accordingly.

My friend Allison is one of the few people I've met recently that's been able to pull me out of my shell, even for just a few hours. She's not local, and neither are any of her friends she's introduced me to since we started hanging out. Most all of them have roots back East. Allison herself is from the Carolinas and it shows. She's been supportive -- I can be obnoxious with her in a way only Southern girls know how.

I don't know what else I can share here. Everything else isn't what I want to open up about. There was a time where I felt I had enough people in my world I could be honest in an open forum, but all that changed on November 3rd, 2007. There is at least one person out there who, if I ever see her again, will lose an eye. If she's smart she has left the state. She's not as invisible as she thinks she is.

Today is my 5th wedding anniversary.

I don't have a great retrospective of what the last five years were like. There were good times and bad times as in any marriage. The last couple of years have been particularly bad as I wondered what it was I had to look forward to as a wife. Looking back on old entries it's clear that we never really stood a chance. The same issues existed then as they do now, and I should be grateful that he is detaching himself from me. I'm not, though. I still love him just as much.

When things started to unravel just a few months into our marriage it was due to devastation on top of devastation. I deleted all the journal entries in a fit of overwhelming grief and instantly regretted it. Not only had I lost all my accounts of my mother's last days, but I lost all the entries I ever made during the time that Garret made me deliriously happy. I wish I had them now.

I was hoping that today I would meet Garret for coffee so we could give this marriage a kind of quiet send-off, but the cold I'm fighting is not responsive to any medicines. We may have to skip it. That would make him happy -- he did not want to observe it at all.

I thought for sure that I'd be a bit more sentimental about today. I am a bit sad but also a bit numb. There's nothing I can really say to sum it up. Everything that could have saved us was in his hands the whole time, and he refused every opportunity.

And that's all I have to say about that.