This year we decided to go with a vampire theme in our pumpkin carving.  Vampires are so hot right now.

Okay, that’s not really why we decided to do it and there was no way in hell I was going to do a Twilight theme… but bloodsuckers still seemed like a fun theme to use.

As usual, we had grand plans this year, we were going to each carve two vampire related pumpkins and one smaller pumpkin with bats on it. But our grand plans didn’t quite work out the way we anticipated.

When we went to purchase pumpkins one week before the holiday, the grocery stores near us were all out of pumpkins.  What the hell?  So we went to the pumpkin patch* and spent a lot more on pumpkins than we normally would.  But the pumpkins were very pretty, having not been thrown in a box on top of other pumpkins.

They had several pumpkins that had warty-looking bumps all over.  That gave the pumpkins an interesting character and we purchased a few of those.  Two of them were our smaller pumpkins, and one was for Kevin’s bigger carving.  Little did we know those would end up to be the hardest and densest pumpkins we had ever encountered.  Kevin had a brutal time cutting into the pumpkin, so the two smaller ones ended up not getting carved.  I’m not crazy enough to use a hammer on a knife to get it through the pumpkin’s flesh (although my husband is crazy enough for that).

We spent hours carving the two pumpkins we each did. We watched “Hocus Pocus”, the Disney Ichabod Crane cartoon and “Shaun of the Dead” while we carved, pretty much our standard tradition now.  And by this morning, about 8 hours after I had finished carving, the pumpkins were already withering away.  My dracula’s eyes had started to droop and his mouth was sagging… I think he needed some botox.  And we discovered that fangs are small pointy parts that are one of the quickest things to shrivel up on the pumpkin.

At least I took some photos last night before they were too far gone…

My pumpkins:

Kevin’s pumpkins:

* A pumpkin patch in Vegas is an empty lot filled with hay bales and pumpkins trucked in from Ventura, CA.

Alright, continuing the saga…

I went to the eye doctor Tuesday morning.  They did a quick run through where I covered my left eye (the good eye) and had me read a few lines of random letters.  I could actually see the first two sets and read them back correctly, but when they shrunk the letters to the third level I struggled and by the fourth level I was completely illiterate.  (I told them that every letter was an O or some derivative of that shape.)

So instead of going through the whole pain of trying to dial in a prescription, they took me back to see the ophthalmologist.  The doctor took a look and said, “Well, the surface of your eye is better but it’s still pretty messy.  The whole thing is mystifying.  You’re sure you didn’t wear your contacts at all?”

I gave him a severe look and said, “NOOOOO…. I didn’t wear my contacts at all.”

He looked apologetic, “I didn’t think you had.  There’s a possibility that you’ve caught some kind of virus in your eye and that you just have to wait it out.  But the reality is that with the steroids we’ve had you using, we need to wean you off those before we can even consider a contact lens fitting anyway.  So let’s have you cut back to 3 times a day this week, then 2 times a day next week, then 1 drop a day the following week.  After that we’ll have you come back in and hope things are better.”

Hope….  I’m placing my vision on Hope.

Well, hope and preservative-free moisturizing eye drops along with decreased steroid use.

I asked him about things I had read online about patching or contact-bandages.  He said that he doesn’t think those would be beneficial in my case.

The truth is that I can tell improvement, but that ONLY came after I took the initiative on my own to patch my eye.  Information found online said that the fresh, healing cells need to adhere and constant blinking motion could push them away before they have a chance.  So I spent a weekend walking around my home like a pirate.  I hated it, but I didn’t see any improvement until I had gone through that process.

It’s hard to want to switch doctors now because I have actually seen a slight improvement.  But at the same time, I kind of wonder if the doctor is just telling me something to collect his fee and push me out of his office.  He’s the doctor that I was “assigned” to after my previous ophthalmologist moved away.  It’s not like I “selected” him… but then I don’t “select” any of my health care providers.  I just try to do the best I can with having insurance from an out-of-state employer to find someone that takes my insurance and isn’t on the other side of town.

I stress about how much we have to spend on my health care lately.  My mental health and physical health.  I’m sure that stressing over these things doesn’t help my body heal.  I’m not as stressed over these things as I used to feel.  I have definitely improved my ability to cope with difficult times, but it’s still occupying a prominent spot in my brain.  I feel like I’m falling apart lately, a walking disaster!

But I guess I will follow his orders, with a little supplemental patching of my own (It is Halloween, I can even venture out in public and pretend that I’m just dressing up!) and see what the appointment in another 3 weeks reveals.

I started my very first website on GeoCities back in 1995.

Geocities had themed “neighborhoods” where people could choose to build their online home. Within your chosen neighborhood you had an address. The combination of your neighborhood and address made up your URL. I chose to “live” in the “SiliconValley” neighborhood due to my interest in computers. (Although, I think most people on GeoCities had some level of interest in computers given that they were creating websites before many people had even been on the internet.) My address was 7940.

I used the space to build all sorts of ugly pages, purely as a testing ground to learn new things. I helped other people within the GeoCities community make graphics (banners and buttons) for their pages. We all did banner exchanges and linked to each other’s pages. The site served a little bit as a journal, where I would share random thoughts and feelings, usually through a welcome on the site that I changed regularly. I had a big ugly hit counter on my page and I irritatingly embedded music into every single page that started playing on page load.*

I used my GeoCities storage space to house a crazy college project where a group of us forced one of our friends to dress up like he was some crazed, jungle lunatic to advertise a hula hoop. (Yeah… that was hilarious to us, but other people probably wouldn’t find the same level of humor.)**

In 1999 GeoCities was acquired by Yahoo!, so people no longer had their fun neighborhood/address URL’s but instead were relegated to using their username. Not nearly as fun. I still used the space to experiment and learn different things. I even putting together a resume that helped me land my current position as a full-time webmaster.

In 2001 I housed my wedding site on my GeoCities space. I had my own domain that pointed to the GeoCities space and that domain was printed on my wedding announcements.***

Post wedding I started blogging using a legitimate blogging platform, as opposed to the pseudo-blog I kept on GeoCities for so many years. The GeoCities site lived on, mainly to point people in the direction of my current online homes and as a storage spot for all those old web memories.

Today Yahoo! is closing down GeoCities for good. This is kind of sad for me, just a slightly nostalgic sadness, but a sorrow nonetheless. I realize that sometimes you have to move on, it’s a fact of life, but some things feel like significant moments even if they were inevitable. I’m glad I was able to save all those files and a little glad that they’re not going to be floating around on “teh interwebs” anymore. I got many hours of good fun from that free resource and it helped me get where I am today. So for now, I offer a moment of silence to mourn this loss to the online world.

*I’m so glad I got that out of my system before the internet was such a staple of society. Music that starts to play immediately on page load now, usually warrants in me leaving that site. I hate those players embedded into blogs that start screaming at me.

**Xula Hoop, the hoop with a tribal image.

***A practice that is a little more common now, but people kind of thought it was a little odd at the time.

Every month, Women’s Health magazine has a column at the back called the “Average Woman” or “AW” as abbreviated throughout. This month talked about the Average Woman’s level of competitiveness. One of the questions they posed was, “How do you feel about your man earning more than you?” The most popular answer was, “It’s cool, but I hope to catch up to him.”

I used to think I wanted to be the “powerful woman”, with a good career and earning tons of money. (Then I remembered where I work and realized it will never be TONS of money… but I digress.) I worked hard and I put my husband through grad school. I have contributed a majority of our retirement savings and I still contribute a good percentage to our household income.

I plan menus, take care of the shopping, clean the house, do yard work, hire repair people, make lists of things that my husband needs to do and then take care of those things when he forgets/neglects to complete them. I’m slightly terrified at the thought of having children someday, because that’s just even more to pile on my plate that already feels like it is overflowing.

I’m at a point where I want my husband to earn more money than me, because that’s something he can do for our family. If we do have children, I have to bear them… that’s not a task that he can take upon himself. And no matter how much happens in terms of “equality” it still seems that the mother has a larger caregiver role when it comes to parenting.

A recent interview on BlogHer with Maria Shriver had some interesting points, one segment in particular kind of jumped out at me:

However women, despite their increasing work responsibilities, still see themselves, as society does, as the primary caretakers of their children and their aging parents. This situation is made even more difficult because so many companies and institutions are not being responsive. We need more flexible work schedules, better child care and paid family and medical leave. It’s time to start thinking about “women’s” issues as “family” issues.

Oh boy… that has to throw in the “aging parents” aspect too. I don’t consider my parents “aging”, but I do take a lot upon myself when it comes to them and worrying about how they’re doing. It’s not my nature to be unconcerned for those I love, but I definitely don’t like feeling preoccupied with thoughts about how everyone is doing all the time.

An article from Redbook points to what could possibly be an answer to my struggles, an article my husband saw on MSN’s home page and pointed out to me. (He didn’t actually read the article, but the headline said “Wives, stop doing so much, it’s ruining your marriage!”, so he thought I should read it based on discussions we’ve had lately.) In “Are Power Struggles Ruining Your Relationship?” the author outlines how so many wives take on too many of the responsibilities around home and allow their husbands to slack. This unbalanced living leaves both parties feeling unfulfilled in a multitude of ways.

A lot of these issues are heavy on my mind lately; with all of the counseling I’ve been going through and books I’ve read, I’m really re-evaluating the way I live my life. I’ve been reading a really fascinating book over the past couple days, and that probably warrants a whole post on it’s own when I’m done.

I don’t have answers… hell, I’m not even sure what the questions are, the questions that leave me feeling slightly uneasy inside a good majority of the time. But all I know is that I’m tired of living for so many other people. I want to be me. Unapologetically.

The blogger Miz Fit has this sentiment on her site, available on shirts/mugs/keychains for purchase. I think it’s where I first took note of this phrase… “Unapologetically Myself”… it’s such an appealing idea. I’m not entirely sure how to live that way, although I know it’s not a magical switch that I can throw and suddenly I am unapologetically myself.

Part of the journey is figuring out who I am. I’m not the same girl I was as a kid, but some of that person is still in there and I’d love to reclaim her. I’m not the same girl I was 3 years ago, but some of that person is still in there and I wouldn’t mind if she went away. Of course, some of that negative part is helping to mold me into a stronger person.

I’m not sure what parts of me will be revealed in the coming years. It’s a scary yet exciting evolution. I just hope that the good parts continue to emerge.

I haven’t written any reviews or synopses of books I’ve read for a long time.

At the library the other day, I checked out a book I’ve already read.

That’s the exact reason that I started keeping track, so if something sounded vaguely familiar I could double-check that it wasn’t due to having read it already.

Sheesh…

I am so over visiting the eye doctor… and yet, I continue to do so.

I went to the doctor last Tuesday, the purpose of the appointment being to do a follow-up on the previous saga and to do a final check on my eyes to give me an updated prescription.  Things were supposed to be great.  At the conclusion I should be a normal person and not have to revisit the doc for another year.  I should be cheerful and relaxed as I make my way back home.

I didn’t leave cheerful and relaxed.

I honestly thought things were improving.  My eye no longer hurt and burned, so that’s an improvement.  I knew my vision seemed a little blurred, but I thought that was from wearing old glasses a lot of the time with an out-of-date prescription.  I had been wearing my glasses most of the time, just putting my contacts in to run or if I had somewhere to be and didn’t want to feel like I looked like a doofus.

So the appointment started with the vision check.  The eye assistant girl had me take off my glasses, cover my left eye and read off the line of letters.

“I can’t.”

She said, “That’s okay, how about this line?”

“I can’t read that either.”

“This one?”

“Um… maybe there’s an O… and perhaps a P. Or an F. Or a T. Or maybe it’s a Y. Or even an I.  I don’t know… I promise, I know my letters!”

She again reassured me that things were okay and decided to dial-in my current prescription on the crazy vision-check contraption. (Obviously, I am an eye expert.)  “Can you read it now?”

“No.”

She tinkered with the dials more and more.  With each adjustment there was no change, sometimes things came into focus for a moment, but that moment was so fleeting it was hardly noteworthy.  The panic was rising in my voice with each answer of “No.” I had to deliver.

She stopped reassuring me.  She said, “This isn’t right. Let’s have you see the doctor.  Maybe he can figure out what is going on, then we can work on your prescription.”

I was lead to another exam room, the doctor came in and took a look at my eyes, leaned back and said, “Did you go without your contacts for a few days like I said?”

“Yes.”

“There’s no change. The surface of your eye still looks just as roughed up. There’s no way you’ll be able to see anything clear through this surface. We can’t get you a new glasses or contact prescription until we clear this up!”

He gave me a new medicine prescription, a third type of eye drop (Prednisolone) and gave me strict orders to not wear my contacts AT ALL.  He told me to use the drops 4 times a day then come back in three weeks, with my glasses on – NO CONTACTS ALLOWED, to see how things are going.  He said we first need to get me seeing clearly with just glasses, then we can try moving back to contacts.

I left feeling very upset.  Truthfully, I was slightly devastated that I have to wear my glasses all the time.  I was miserable that my cornea hadn’t improved at all.  And I was TERRIFIED after sitting through so many rounds of saying “No I can’t see that.” and mulling over the possibility that this could be permanent.

I have been using the drops for 1 whole week now.  I don’t see much improvement.  Other than the fact that my right eye now leaks bright white goo out of the corner, there isn’t much change.

I have been reading on the internet, most sites say corneal abrasions heal rapidly, in just a couple days.  Most of them say the eye is typically tightly patched to protect it from too much eyelid movement and from light.  I have to wonder why the doctor didn’t do that.  I also have to wonder if the computer screen is having a detrimental affect as well.  The fact that my job is to stare at a computer screen ALL DAY, then I often sit and start at my computer screen outside work hours to read/write blogs and work on side projects means I get a lot of computer time.

I’m just scared. Vision is so important. I want mine back. I’ll even deal with having to wear glasses all the time if only I could see properly again.

My video from the trip to DC is now available online:

Also, since October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I’m raising money for the Komen for the Cure foundation.  If you’ve got a spare $1, please consider donating it!

Last weekend I lost my iPhone.

Let me reiterate that so you can feel my pain.
LOST… MY… iPHONE!!!!!

I had the phone in my hand, using the maps to navigate to where we were headed. We arrived at a Pei Wei for lunch and I thought I had tucked my phone into the pocket on the front of my purse. We went into the restaurant, ordered food and sat down to eat. Suddenly I had a premonition to check my purse for my phone, and before I did so I had a sinking feeling in my stomach, knowing I wouldn’t find it.

I said to my husband, “We need to go to the car.”
He chastised me, “Finish eating your food.”
I begrudgingly shoved part of a fortune cookie in my mouth and said, “Now!”

So we went outside and looked around the car and the passenger seat, but it revealed what I already knew… my phone was gone. In anger and frustration I threw the remains of my cookie on the ground, violently.

I have two possible scenarios of what happened:
1) I didn’t actually put the phone in my purse, but instead set it on my lap. When I got out of the car, the phone fell to the ground without my noticing. Someone picked it up and decided to play finders-keepers.
2) I did put the phone in my purse but didn’t zip the pocket closed, as I have a habit of not doing. The phone was sticking out of the pocket and someone plucked it out while we waited in line to order. I was using a purse that slings across my person, I often push it behind me, out of sight.

I had a mini meltdown, it felt like the world was over. Not only do I use that damn thing all the time and it feels like an extension of me, but it’s a pretty expensive gadget and I’m not at a point in my contract where I am eligible for an upgrade, so replacement would be even more expensive. Plus the fact that I had a 16 GB iPhone 3G, a model they decided to stop making when they released the new 3Gs meant that I couldn’t do a straight replacement. I was angry with myself, feeling like I was the most irresponsible person alive and frustrated with myself, because my brain has been feeling like it is on the fritz lately.

Fortunately my husband did not have a meltdown and kept a level head. He contacted AT&T and stopped service on my number for the day, just to give us a chance to see if we could find the phone. When it didn’t turn up, he said to me, “Okay, time to go get you a new phone.”

The nice salesperson at the AT&T store informed us that we could add a 3rd number to our account, thus being eligible to buy a phone for the lower price (sooooo glad I didn’t have to pay $699+). Because of this I got a shiny new iPhone 3Gs, we have another cell number we could use for some random purpose and I was only without phone service for about 24 hours. The world didn’t end, I’m not destitute, nobody was hurt and my husband wasn’t upset with me.

But man… the incident felt pretty traumatic.

*Title reference: From the movie Idiocracy

The new season of the Amazing Race started tonight. Kevin and I decided to make picks as to who we think will go all the way based solely on the intros at the beginning of the episode. We have to document them somewhere, so it might as well be here.

Kevin’s pick:
Herbert and Nathaniel – Harlem Globetrotters

Kevin’s backup pick:
Sam and Dan – Brothers

My pick:
Brian and Ericka – Married

My backup pick:
Eric and Lisa – Married yoga teachers

My backup pick has already been eliminated. This doesn’t look very promising for me!

I don’t know what the winner receives in our little game. Perhaps we should have come up with rules or rewards for our competition, huh?

Synopsis:
A grief-stricken mother takes on the LAPD to her own detriment when it stubbornly tries to pass off an obvious impostor as her missing child, while also refusing to give up hope that she will find him one day.
From the IMDB Profile

Notable:
Based on the true story of the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders

Quote:
I used to tell Walter, “Never start a fight… but always finish it.” I didn’t start this fight… but by God, I’m going to finish it.

Rating: R for some violent and disturbing content, and language

My Thoughts:
This film had many elements to keep a viewer involved; mystery, drama, emotion, dismay, subtle humor. But when you combine all of these things with the knowledge that this is BASED ON TRUE EVENTS, that’s when the true outrage sets in. It appalled me that these were real events, still sickens me to think about that. This is a film that will stick with me.

The cast did a great job, Angelina Jolie definitely earned that Academy Award nomination (as well as several other nods from different awards). John Malkovich is always a pleasant addition to the cast for me, I think he’s got such extraordinary delivery. And with Clint Eastwood at the helm as director, well… that man definitely knows how to deliver a cinematic punch.

The movie is kind of an “investment” film. It runs nearly 2.5 hours and you definitely can’t watch flippantly while multi-tasking. But after finally setting aside the time for it, the movie left me feeling slightly haunted and a little dumbstruck. It was a beautifully crafted piece of film which I applaud.

Verdict: ***** out of 5