Lily arranging Baby and Teddy.
30 July 2006

A very accurate description of Dell:

Dell is a nasty machine that uses people like a lubricant, grinding them up and cleaning them out when they get messy or inconvenient.

I got this quote from here.  Whoever wrote that must have worked at Dell.  That feels like an insider’s sentiment — it’s certainly how we felt.

Lily putting diapies on all of her stuffed animals.
16 September 2006

I don’t have a lot to say this morning really. It’s a lovely autumn morning, the cat is purring next to me, and I have a really cute picture to post.  You don’t really need words when you have all that. 🙂

I fell off the sugar wagon after only three days.  I’ve been trying to get the sugar monkey off my back for years!  Years!  F***ing addiction.

*sigh* But I’m going to try again tomorrow.  Surely one day… one day I can leave sugar behind… one day… surely…

(It’s so hard — harder than I can describe with words. 🙁 )

On a happier note, it’s raining!  Central Texans love rain… love love love.  We don’t get it very often, living on the edge of a desert and all.  So when rain finally comes our way, it’s like a gift falling from the sky.  The sound, the smell, the saturated wet air.  It’s all wonderful.

I regularly keep up with the blogs of my friends and family, but I also read the blog of a person who I have never met, Andrea Scher.  She has a wonderful outlook on life and is very talented at telling stories.

Recently, she was having difficulty becoming pregnant.  Matt and I went through that pain.  And I thought that what we went through was awful (and it was — very emotionally painful), but, in the end, it turns out that we were among the lucky ones.  I finally got pregnant with Lily after only two years of trying, and we were also lucky enough to become pregnant naturally; we didn’t go through any invasive medical procedures or medications.  And I became pregnant with Baby #2 after being off birth control for a year.

So, we don’t become pregnant fast, but we do eventually get pregnant.  Given all the fertility issues my generation is having, that definitely makes us lucky.  And I’m grateful for that every day.

Andrea Scher just wrote the story of her journey to pregnancy on her journal.  It’s a touching and heartfelt story, so I’ve decided to link it.  She really is talented at telling stories. 🙂

The first part of the story.
The second part of the story.

Beautiful picture of Lily in the back garden taken by Matt.
12 August 2006

So what did I do last night with my spare two hours? Did I sew? Did I write?  Did I clean? Did I work on any of my current projects?

Now that would have been entirely too practical for someone like me, don’t you think?

I uploaded a new digital toy of course!  A calendar actually.  (I added a link to it along the sidebar.)  It’s very silly, and I don’t know how long my new digital toy will amuse me, but it’s fun right now. 🙂

Golly, what’s Angel doing today?  Why, let me look at her calendar… she has a doctor’s appointment today.

It’s very silly, but hey, silliness is to life as cinnamon is to apple pie — without it, it’s just not as good. 🙂

Baby G raiding the fridge.
(Matt loves this photo.  This is a very common sight in our house.)
01 September 2006

I would like to distribute this Halloween WordPress theme, but that would be Yet Another Project to complete before Baby #2 arrives at Christmas.  Actually, I would want to complete this project by October 1st so folks could download the theme in time for Halloween.

I did a quick and dirty job on the theme.  It’s not even close to being clean enough for public consumption.  First, I would have to read all the WordPress documentation, and then I would have to clean everything up.  It wouldn’t be a quick project.

But I think I would really enjoy it.  But I also feel like I abandon projects all the time and leave them half-finished.  I haven’t finished my jammie pants.  I haven’t finished Donna’s logo.  I haven’t finished Mary’s webpage.  The house is really due for a cleaning.  And my poor book… it’s like the prize-winning bastard stepchild of all almost-written books ever.  I’ve been writing that poor thing for years!  And what am I up to?  Chapter 3.

I want to rewrite a part of Ch 1 that I feel is very harsh and jolting.  Hmmm…. where shall I find time for writing between sewing, creating, cleaning, and being with my family?

See the problem.

But that’s life, isn’t it?  It flows and moves like the wind — sometimes a gentle breeze, sometimes a torrential hurricane, but always moving and changing and carrying you along.  There’s no sense in fighting the very nature of life.  Things will get finished when they get finished.  And some things won’t get finished.

And that’s why I don’t want to die anytime soon.  I have so many things I’m enjoying and I want to see the finished products.

Heh heh, so it seems I have Yet Another Project.  How hard could it be to create an elegant and clean WordPress theme anyway? 😉

I was feeling guilty about slamming the webpages on MySpace in the last entry.  I think it’s great that people are creating and owning a little piece of real estate on the internet.  And no one should ever feel bad about creating bad design.  We certainly didn’t “back in the day.”  And even now I don’t.  I can’t sing worth beans either, but I still do.

It’s just that MySpace annoys me, and I have no idea why.  I feel like it shouldn’t even be on my radar – that I shouldn’t be bothered by something so nonrelevant to my life.  I try to tell myself that it’s a great place for the kids, like Deviant Art or Lolita Snap which I totally adore and surf all the time.  I think that what the kids are doing on those sites is creative and brilliant!  But, for some reason, I find MySpace… what’s the right word… … just annoying.  It’s my personal black hole on the internet.

One day I am going to have to explore this dislike.  Although I think a fair bit of it is the webpage format that the MySpace engine forces people to use.  I find those pages so… ugh! just practically impossible to read.  MySpace is this massive website filled with page after page after page of jumbled, busy, badly-designed, difficult-to-read webpages.

I thought of a real life metaphor for the the MySpace webpages.  This is what my computer room once looked like:

The Woodings’ Computer Room
January 2006

Would you be able to find anything? Is it pleasing to look at?  It’s unorganized and a mess.  It’s practically nonfunctional.  This is what I see when I look at MySpace pages.  This is why they annoy the heck out of me.

ps. My silly, Halloween mouse-over effect still makes me laugh. :)  Silliness is a good thing.

Do you remember the days of early html?  Do you remember when every website had an “under construction” gif on it?  And, if you were really cool, your “under construction” gif was animated!

Do you remember the blink tag?  Did you use the blink tag?  I did. 🙂

Ah, those horrific, garish, ostentatious webpages of yore.  Now we have the garish, ostentatious webpages at MySpace which emulate the tasteless colors and complete lack of design (with the added element of sound!) of the early 90s personal webpages, but they are too complex.  The kids today have too many choices — it’s too easy to create a loud, flashy and abrasive personal webpage.  We had to really work at it in the early 90s.

Well, while surfing tonight, I found a website that specializes in garish mouse overs!  I went there to find holiday backgrounds (it’s where I found the background I use at the bottom of this page), and I found Text Effects.  Go ahead, hover your mouse over any of my links.

Isn’t it great?!  Can you feel yourself circa 1991?  Are you ready to cruise the usenet for porn now?  That was the only way to get it back then. 😉

Matt, Lily and Teddy Bear Swinging in the Back Garden
10 September 2006

I haven’t been able to think of much to write lately. For some reason, whenever I sit down at the computer to update my journal, my mind goes blank.

Good thing I have pictures of a cute baby to post. :)  Otherwise this would be a very boring journal.

I can’t decide whether to import my LiveJournal into this journal.  I think I’m going to though — that’s definitely the way I’m leaning.

I wish I had something interesting to say.  I’m just trying to complete some projects (Aunt Mary’s webpage, Donna’s logo, sewing jammie pants) before Baby #2 arrives on the scene and puts everything on hold for a little while.

I’m excited and nervous about the new baby.  I’m excited because I really do like our children.  They bring such joy into the house.  And I’m nervous because I don’t want to lose my precious free time when I get to work on the projects that I really enjoy.

I keep telling myself that I will only lose my free time for a little while.  Lily is just over a year and a half, and with each passing month, I get a little more time for me.  And it happened so quickly.  One moment, I only existed for her, and the next, I have an hour or two here and there where I can sew or write or play with my webpage.

Heh heh, not the most interesting post, but at least I posted something.  Maybe my mind will free up more with passing time.

Lily and her Posse
09 September 2006

When I hear Matt and Lily laughing in the other room, it makes me happy.  Even if I’m in a dark mood, their laughter pops me right out into sunshine.