2008 – The Year of the Frog

For those of you who’ve met me, I have a thing for frogs. It’s not always the most obvious thing, but it’s something that seeps in to your consciousness after knowing me for a while. There are a few small magnets that I painted in my cube – a gift from my college roommates to keep me entertained before they came back to school. You walk downstairs into our main living area and the fireplace has an octagon of shelves centered on the side wall. The octagon is covered in all kinds of little frogs, from dime-store finds to one of Swarovski crystal. Our bedroom has a large stuffed beanie baby frog name Phoebe that was a gift for my twenty-first birthday and named after the local bar. And I can’t forget to mention Kermit and a good dozen of his fellow stuffed partners in crime hanging out in the spare bedroom.

The most obvious sign I have a thing for frogs is probably the bright green one on my left wrist. He’s been with me now for more than eight years, and I still get people asking me what bar I went to last night. He’s a tattoo; there to hide surgery scars and acting as a talisman against further damage. Just looking at it makes me smile, and thanks to a silly exercise my college senior year, he also relaxes me.

When the Bald One and I first visited the NC Zoological Park, I spent a good chunk of time staring into the little box of the poison arrow tree frogs. I always do. He bought me a pair of frog earrings to go with my obsession. Frogs of all sorts amaze me. I play with the ones that regularly show up in our yard…even going as far as to make sure dishes of water are available or leaving the lid off the jug I keep out there to water my hanging plants. So imagine my surprise at reading the Mini Page this week when it covered the Year of the Frog movement.

Then there was the ad from Clorax saying they are the first major brand supporter of the Year of the Frog. I’ve ripped the ad out and hung it in my cube, facing the hallway where everyone walks by. Courtesy of Amphibian Ark, I’ll also have the “official” Year of the Frog logo right next to it.

I’m also going to call my zoo. And see what else I can do locally to help out. If you’ve never thought about frogs as something other than slimy creatures in your garden…think about the bugs. Frogs help control the bug population in your backyard…and don’t you want to be able to have your cookout fly-free?

What can you do to help?

 

Geek Moment

New iPhone update will confuse and upset many Gmail users by ZDNet’s Garett Rogers — For people using POP access in their iPhone, the new update for the device will automatically convert your email to IMAP without you knowing. Why does that matter? Well, if you are in the habit of deleting messages from your iPhone after you’ve read them, those messages will now be sent to your [...]

If this is what they decide to complain about, then people need a bit more to go wrong in their life. First off, Google pushed out IMAP for the iPhone the end of October. If you’re used to having things updated either place you look at things, then you’ve been wondering what took them so long. Half the reason I hated POP versions of email accounts was because if I read something and deleted it on a mobile device, I didn’t want to see it in the original host version. I guess the big deal is now, if you were used to POP, you have to get used to something different.

The thing is, iPhone creates two new folders, ahem, labels for GMail - a deleted and sent messages folder. The crazy thing is if I delete something on the phone, then it’s marked “deleted messages” and if another message appears in the thread, then you have a thread with the labels deleted messages, sent messages and all show up still in your inbox. Another complaint next step would be allowing for the labels and keeping things in the inbox at the same time. Right now, it seems if you move something to a folder/label, you’ve archived it to that label.

 

Music madness

How do you find new music?

 

Cleaning House

I’ve been feeling…stagnated. Part of it is this whole lack-of-job thing. Which leads to the lack of meaningful employment issue. Neither of which is going to be solved overnight, and I’m doing everything in my power to change that. Well, maybe not everything. I haven’t tried any ritual work yet. That’s next on my to-do list.

But a friend’s reading got me thinking about a few other things. And some other thoughts have been bouncing around in my head. So I’ve started working on a few things around the place.

There’s a website called FlyLady that several of my friends online havediscovered and confessed a deep abiding love for the simplistic and directed paths do cleaning and balancing life. While some of it drives me insane (some of the Christian motivation, the simplistic colorings, the life-coach style pep talks), she does have a fabulous way for breaking down the house and trying to keep it ordered and sensible methods of attack if you’ve had a house get out of control. I just can’t attack it the way she does…but the lady makes great lists. Sure, I can do a fifteen minute fling where I run around and quickly pick up…but what I can’t do is take the babystep approach to getting my house clean. It first has to be cleaned from top to bottom and then kept there before I can start de-cluttering. And I can’t do both at the same time. My brain doesn’t fire that way.

Oddly, this approach works for me. It’s very calming to surface clean and then look out on the clean surfaces knowing that there’s chaos lurking just below those surfaces, being kept in my clean counters. And once the house has been restored to its dust free, vacuumed state of being, then I’ll be traveling with my trusty timer to sort, toss, store and sell various parts of our house. Things that have been moved and displayed because they should be instead of we want them to be. It’s too warm to work outside, so this is helping me redefine who and what I am. Figuring out the places and nooks makes me feel centered. Odd, but it works.

And while I’m doing this, I’m putting my thoughts in order. My mental self is sorting, tossing and storing various thoughts and processes. The whole state of being unemployed (or actually, under employed since being an independent contractor does bring in money - just not a lot). I’m figuring out what I like about myself, what these objects tell me about myself and why I’m keeping some things that make no sense to me but yet seem fit to take up space in my home/my self. Who am I? Why am I clinging to that definition of self? is it really who I am?

But right now, I’m just cleaning house.

 

Anonymity

For the first time, I saw in my search engine links my actual name. I’ve been getting many hits based on things from my wedding a year ago (daisies in wedding bouquets), choices of plants (a T13 I did on what I wanted in the yard) and oddly a little post I did about catty women at work gets a lot of hits. I had never really thought before about what I was posting. Previously, on LJ, there wasn’t much of a search engine hit base and I rarely had people finding me. Also, I don’t use my name. Sure, people could put facts together and figure it out…but only if they knew me. And I don’t think people are really reading this, so why worry that much about it. It’s my friends, a few previous coworkers and some old college friends have found the site. Nobody is actively looking for me.

 

today’s news

Have you ever felt like this?

Think about it… Where do most people turn now to get a complete digest of the world’s events? In the digital age, most people have stopped getting the newspaper delivered to them for perusal with their morning coffee. Some still read them, but usually the online version delivered in digest form for different subjects.

Al Gore, while not a great documentary filmmaker (after all, powerpoint makes boring presentations…why in a movie?), remarked recently that such shows as the Daily Show were better sources of news than the 24 hour news channels (or words to that effect) . And the Daily Show does a great job of pointing out why people who don’t have a lot of time on their hands don’t watch CNN. Nothing better to get information than hour after hour of some overblown blond saying they have no more information than these five minutes.

And aren’t we often told that fewer, well-chosen words get a point across better? Well then.

 

women & work

I’ve heard repeatedly lately that women don’t work well with other women - they’re too catty, too competitive, too… and I’ve been trying to figure that all out. It doesn’t make sense, despite the number of instances I see it happening. It just presents as insecure women thinking that the only way for them to maintain their position is to degrade and demean every female around them.

 

300 and the “Bush bias”

I got rather incensed this weekend. Someone decided (without actually having seen the movie) to listen to someone who might have seen it and decided it was all a trumped up FOX News pro-Bush rally set to brainwash Americans into fighting the unjust war in Iraq. What? Let’s go point by point, shall we? We’ll compare a 2007 movie based on a 1998 comic book of a 480 BC battle to the 2000’s war in Iraq.

 

pop. pop. pop-ahhhh

after having a very painful morning proceeded by a rather painful night (which included some whining to the Bald One about said pain), I called my primary care physician and asked when I could see someone because I couldn’t really walk correctly. Instead of setting me up with someone, they sent me to their preferred chiropractor.

I’ve never been, really. Well, I went to one who did a bunch of free testing to get a client in but wanted to charge me full price for everything and have me bill my insurance after the first visit. Oh, and he wouldn’t tell me a gd thing until I came in for my second session. Not to mention the adjustment tables were in a large open room where anyone could see you. I wasn’t really comfortable with that…so out I went and never came back. This time was different. This time felt better from the get-go.

The doc came in and asked what was bothering me. Not knowing where to begin, I explained that this felt very similar to something that had happened about six years ago. The event that proceeded that was me working backstage on Damn Yankees and not having much time to get from backstage left to backstage right. In order to get there, I’d have to go into the back hall, run down the stairs, hit a wall, turn left and go twenty feet, turn right and go another forty feet, turn right again and dodge the clothing racks to go back another twenty before running up the stairs and come out backstage to calmly set a pyrotechnic pot with fuses and cable and powder in low light before setting it onstage in the next scene change. I’d then have to check the connection and go back to where I came from and be ready for the explosion in the next scene. Several times I’d skip about a half-dozen stairs…a few times were fairly bone-jarring, but adrenaline would get me through.

And apparently my body did what it often does - keep going until it’s okay to crash and burn. I very very very rarely get sick during a production. Since I’m often in a production, it means I’m rarely sick. To make up for it, as soon as I’ve got some time off, my body ceases to fight off every germ and they attack with a vengeance. This time instead of getting sick, my back acted up. I went to a doc who sent me to a physical therapist who noticed one leg was shorter than the other and yanked it so it wasn’t. That made some of the pain go away and we PT’d the rest out.

Now we’re up to today. I thought it was my hip again. I finished my show, I’ve been laying out on my couch and the new, firm cushions have been giving both D and I issues because our bodies aren’t quite used to the new cushions. I thought that’s all this was. No such luck. I was misdiagnosed six-plus years ago. What I actually did was goof up my lower back (L5 vertebrae to be exact) where the little fingers that come off the main portion are rubbing wrong and causing disk degeneration. I’m only late stage one (of three) so I’m not horribly bad off. But it does mean a few weeks of visits for me to get better. But now, I’ll probably actually get better.

 

well, they’re both blue

I shouldn’t complain. But I’m amused.

I recently placed an order with Vicky’s online because I didn’t feel like going into a store in my limited time to buy underwear. Not to mention the fact that I really didn’t feel like dealing with all the tweens that would undoubtedly be hanging out in my favorite mall en masse because school is now back in session. So online I go.

Now mind you, I’m not completely insane, but occasionally I like to buy things that match. Just every once in a while. And not have to match-match (like same exact color and pattern) but sorta-match. So I was a little shocked when I opened my first of two packages from Vicky’s with what should have been (and were, according to the packing slip) two different blues.

Turns out someone bagged a beautiful deep blue Ipex ($50) bra in a bag for a cotton bra of a lighter blue with a smaller band size. I debated being good and returning it immediately, after all, it was the wrong size from what I ordered - but like shoes, sizes change by cut and style…so maybe I’d just try it on for size.

Now I know why they’re charging $50 for a bra. And it’s worth it. And it’s not going back.