but…for a whole month now…Every single day…It’s a bit of a muchness.

If anybody needs a 2 bedroom condo in Glendale, we’re having an open house on sunday next.

and after that…I WILL BE THROUGH

uuuhhhhh….

It’s been a sad few days. My laptop began to freeze and refuse to reboot. The good news is that it required a new hard drive and now it works fine.

The bad news is, I lost all my contacts for all my friends and such. I did not lose my writing files, so I cannot cry forever. But I hope that I can re-create connections to my friends.

Please, email me with you contact info if you wold like us to stay in contact with one another.

I’m sure it will surprise no one to hear that my pants are tighter than they were at the beginning of the month. There are just too many good things lying around to be eaten!

Around the office, all the “vendors”, aka people who take our money for stuff or services, send us little goodies to say they appreciate us giving them money and would like us to keep doing it.

So there are chocolates, cheeses, crackers and today an entire spiral cut ham.

Complete with mustard.

These are sometimes sent to individuals, sometimes to departments, and sometimes to the entire IT department.

The purchasing lady was looking over the chocolates, saying, “I haven’t been getting very much good stuff this year. I think my vendors are getting stingy.”

“Drop hints,” I said. “Like, ‘You know, Beef Stick. A little Beef Stick this time of year is always appreciated.”

Okay, Brother Superior is telling me iTunes is the answer. He works for apple, so he has to say that…

But I am very suspicious of downloaded music. It just sounds like crap. I mean, didn’t we all move from am to fm and cassettes to CDs because it sounded better?

I find my appreciation for music is increased when it sounds good, when I can hear the nuances. Sometimes, I won’t even realize that’s why I like a song so much. THen I buy the cd and listen closely and realize that the song I keep stopping to listen to on the radio has great quality sound.

so…When I encounter the craze for MP3s, it’s like…oh man! it’s compressed, all the nuance squeezed out. I don’t want to listen to crappy recordings of music! I don’t care that I can fit thousands of songs on a player the size of a credit card. I NOTICE that it sounds bad.

But before I whip out a flame at Brother Superior for recommending the apple version of mp3s, I decided to doublecheck. This guy
thinks iTunes has the goods.

I will have to check it out. Stay tuned…

I talked once before about my family moving to Humboldt county when I was small. We came back to alaska, because that didn’t work out.

We had moved down to California to start a church. It was the thing, in our circle, and so we did it. We were in Humboldt for four years, but it didn’t work out.

And it was a hard thing for my parents. They believed in it, they believed in the team. THey thought they would be planting a church, a church that would be around for years and years and years and be a sheltering place of refuge.

But that wasn’t what happened for us. The pastor who’d come down to plant the church with our team started spreading his seed elsewhere. That didn’t come out till later, but it was very evident that something had gone very wrong.

My parents listened to that voice that said, “This is not right…” and got out. They were quite wrenched about it. THey wanted to build a monument, a church community that would be there for a long time.

But they left after four years, feeling like rats. Dad went back to Alaska to look for a job, and to prepare a place for the rest of us. That meant mom was supposed to pack everything up, us four kids-wait, three. The oldest was 18 now and could stay behind on his own.

But the house and us kids, all packed up and ready to be driven up the alaska canada highway to Daddy. It was a lot of packing. Mom was very organized and cranky about all the things, keeping track of what went where.

But the last day, she sat down on a chair and cried. I was 11: “Mom, why are you crying? You are all done! You should be happy.”

She sniffed and sobbed, and then told me “I only cry when it’s all done.”

It wasn’t done, though. SHe still had to drive all the way to alaska, in a VW bus filled with her children and our stuff. But to her mind, the hardest part was over. The part where she packed up her feelings and her dreams and put them away forever.

For me, I feel as if I’ve come through the hard part right now. It’s a sort of thing, where, you’re not quite out of the woods, but there is a light filtering through the leaves.

Now that the heat of the battle has passed, it’s okay to fall down in the dirt and beat my fists and howl with all the hurt I couldn’t feel before. Let the guard down. I faced the monsters so now I can be weak.

This was highly recommended to me, but it took two tries to get through it.

Yes, by the time I got past the first 60 pages, I was starting to enjoy it. But it annoyed me a lot right off the bat. I HATE it when the person telling the story knows something but won’t tell you. Atwood dragged it on and on, and you knew that the man character knew more than she was telling, but she took a long time to tell it.

All these flashbacks and flash forwards, interpolated with news stories. Let’s just say that if you like mysteries, this is a really good one. Fine writing for that. But I hate mysteries. I always feel like someone is trying to pull one over me.

It was a good book, but it annoyed me a lot.

Here is another picture I have taken. I think it is interesting that the cactus’s pokey bits were formed while it was still a tight bud. It left traces on the younger leaves.

What do you thinK?

The fabulous Kisa, my friend and fellow SJSU alumn, had an amazing experience with Bill Clinton…You should read about it.

But the picture is too darn big..