Ad Woman: “After the birth of my first child, I put on 150 pounds. And I was looking at my friend one day, and I said “Girl, you are so slim. How do you stay so slim?” And she told me about [said diet program] and said she lost the weight with them. I’ve been on it for six months, and I’ve lost 100 pounds. And when I look at myself in the mirror…”

Rick interrupts: “I think, “Damn, Latisha, you still fat, but you ain’t as fat as you used to be, girl!”

Me (gasping for air because I’m laughing so hard): “Oh my god. How do you think of shit like that?”

Rick: “Really? Because I think of stuff like that all the time. I often wonder how other people don’t think of things like that.”

I can blame it on many things: Facebook. Twitter. Ravelry. Classes. Work. Laziness. But in the end I think I wasn’t sure I was a blogger anymore. The urge to blog just hasn’t been as overpowering as it was in the early days. In fact, I have had only one urge to blog in the past two months, and that was a post on why Ice Dancing and Curling are not sports and should not be in the Olympics. But instead I just bitched it out on Twitter.

Blog, on my second attempt at snowboarding I managed to bruise my tailbone. Instead of coming here with this comedic gold, I went to Twitter and Facebook and told thousands of people that I had bruised my ass. Which was awesome, but it could have been a great post. I let you down, blog.

Some of my two months of radio silence was trying to decide if I wanted to keep blogging. If I don’t blog as often, is it worth paying for the domain name and the hosting? On Monday, I decided to re-up for another two years, and my goal is to blog more so I am putting that $190 to good use. Little Blog, I resolve to not leave you in the corner gathering dust. So let’s get started with a stupid story!

Yesterday, my second visit to the doctor in two weeks (the first, where she diagnosed me with a bruised butt by putting on latex gloves and sticking her finger down my ass-crack to tell me that yes, my tailbone was “protruding more than usual,” apparently left an impression on her–can we blame her?–because she asked if my thumb injury was also due to snowboarding) resulted in a diagnosis of tenosynovitis in my thumb. (Side note: Why, hello, Google Health, and where have you been all my life?) She prescribed a gel NSAID for it. This gel shall now be known as $30 Copay Gel, because that’s what it cost with my copay, which makes me shudder to think of how much it costs without insurance.

Anyway, $30 Copay Gel is apparently often used for arthritis according to the Rite-Aid instructions that came with it. “Awesome,” I thought, “so I’m putting Ben-Gay on my snowboarding injury.” I read further. In order to accurately measure the dosage of the gel before you put it on, you need to squirt it onto a dosing card. The instructions clearly say “Put the card down on a flat surface so you can read it.” I relayed this info to Rick and said “It’s really for old people! Because their hands shake when they’re holding it so they can’t read it!” (Yes, I realize this is an extremely age-ist comment, but that’s okay, because Rick, an older person, laid the smackdown on me two seconds later.)

“No, it’s telling you to do that so you can read it. You know, as opposed to putting the card down upside-down so the writing is backwards and you can’t read it.”

Apparently $30 Copay Gel is for idiots like me in addition to old people.

Happy belated 6th birthday, Blog! Your writer is an age-ist moron!

- Watched Mr. Obama get sworn in from a South African bar in Ft. Greene. I was in the bar, Mr. Obama wasn’t. But you probably got that. The joy in the room was palpable, though:

- Watched my Steelers win another Super Bowl (this moment was obviously tense):

- Bought a Kindle, because I like to read, and I like the tech. Love this thing like burning.

- Met Franklin Habit at his reading at Knitty City, and just this minute realized how yellow my teeth are:

- Went to Washington, D.C. and Charlottesville, VA with Uncle Norm and took this picture, which is my “Calgon, take me away!” desktop picture at work:

- Went to Stitches South with Regan and Grace:

- Lost my best buddy, Joe, too soon even though he was 18.

- That same week, Jordana and I wrote a grant proposal that brought in $27,000 later that summer. Not bad in this economy, and especially not bad for a week when I was watching Joe die and mourning him and J was jet-lagged from a trip to South Africa.

- Went to Sagamore Hill with my mom for Father’s Day, bringing my total of presidential home visits to three (well, four, I was outside the White House during the D.C. visit, but three dead presidents. Okay, well, four dead presidents because we saw Monroe’s house but it was too late in the day to take a tour. Whatever.):

- Took a flying trip to Philadelphia with J, Thabs, and Samang so that I could see this man and get his blessing on an endeavor that was still in the works. Also, to eat cheesesteaks.

- Rescued this little guy, who brought a little of the light Joe took with him when he died back into my life:

- Moved into a new office.

- Took a trip to Pittsburgh so I could see my family and my friend Kim. And an elephant:

- Went to Ellis Island for my 32nd birthday and then back again a week later when I got into a tour of the South Side of the island, which I will never forget as long as I live:

And then I apparently stopped taking pictures because school got in the way. Oh, yeah, the thing Ben gave me his blessing for was my second Master’s degree, which I started this fall and which turned out to be the biggest time suck in the world. But hey, I got A’s in both courses I took, so it must have been time well spent. Kept me off the streets at least. After I stopped taking pictures, I also went to Asheville with Grace and Regan for SAFF. 17 knitters in a cabin for a weekend with a constant influx of new yarn and fiber. Heaven.

Let’s see, what else happened that I didn’t take pictures of? (stupid Flickr, letting me down) I took a tour of an abandoned subway tunnel under Atlantic Avenue, which was awesome. I went to Pittsburgh the day after Christmas to surprise my high school BFF, Colleen, at the reception her mom threw for her because she got married on a lovely island this summer and most of us couldn’t go. I watched Sage graduate from 8th grade and start high school, and I watched Amelia start her senior year of high school and apply to many colleges. I got a mostly permanent roommate (their father) only seven years into our relationship (I don’t call him Ant Speed–lovingly, of course–for nothing). I got my first smart phone. I paid off one credit card and am $450 from getting out of credit card debt entirely. All in all with a few major exceptions, it’s been a pretty damned good year, which I desperately needed. Actually, I could use many more so here’s hoping 2010 is another one for all of us.

Happy New Year!

I’m working on my final paper for my final class (final paper for pre-modern China class was turned in on Thursday). I think I’m going to be okay, since the prof says we should consider everything we’ve done so far in class as a draft, which I take to mean as “fair game, go ahead and put this in your paper verbatim if I didn’t say anything was wrong with it.” Now, I’m adding another four sources and looking for topics that can be researched further, but I still feel okay about it. I really want to ace it, though, because if I do, I could be looking at an A+ on my report card, something that has not happened since…well, I don’t know that it’s ever happened. I’ve gotten plenty of As, even in grad school, but an A+ on anything that wasn’t a quiz that had extra credit questions? No. And if I can get one on this, on the basis of three really good papers on Benjamin Franklin, I feel like I’ll have served him in much better stead than I did as an undergrad when I got a B on my senior thesis about him. Sorry, Ben. Trying to make it up to you…

I’m going to get back to that. It’s snowing and gross out anyway, so nothing better to do for the next several hours until the new Doctor Who special comes on anyway. Wish me luck!

I have always been a procrastinator. I have tried to break that cycle with this history degree that I’m pursuing, but old habits die hard. I still have the tendency to think that all writing must come out perfect the first time, and while I struggle to get that sentence exactly right the first time, hey, look, someone just tweeted, I should go check that out. I am working on overcoming this and even have a handy app on my Droid (so much for not talking about it) that has a timer so I know exactly how much time I’ve spent on task. This app is a miracle worker, because it kept my nose to the grindstone a lot yesterday. But today, even though I only have two more articles to critique and a conclusion to write and am so close to the finish line I can taste it, I still feel the need to procrastinate.

I played a game on my Droid for a while. Then I remembered that I took the ring out of my rook piercing out on Wednesday while I was waiting for the Fed Ex guy and never put it back in. And so I just did. And basically had to re-pierce the damn thing because it had been out for a few days. It did not bleed, but oh my god, my ear hurts right now. I took Advil and am waiting for the pain to die down a little so I can concentrate again.

I guess it serves me right for procrastinating, doesn’t it?

I’m at home today, awaiting a very important package from Fed Ex (there will be a separate post about it when I get it), and supposedly working on a paper for my Historiography class. Except my Macbook Pro battery is borked, so I started backing up files for that in prep for my Genius Bar appointment on Sunday morning and that took longer than I thought it would. But I felt so good about cleaning up stuff on my laptop that I thought, hmm, perhaps I should do the same thing for the blog. So I installed plugin updates and Wordpress updates. And that was great, but it didn’t clear up the most annoying thing in the world, one of the reasons I have not blogged in so long because it just annoyed the crap out of me: my WYSIWYG toolbar was missing when I tried to post. You have no idea how annoying that is.

Yeah, turns out the fix was so easy I could kick myself. I went through a big long list of things it could be and looked for the easiest one, because Murphy’s Law is always in effect around me. And yes, it was a variation of that easiest one. I went into my Wordpress profile, clicked the “Disable Visual Editor” button, saved it, went right back in and re-enabled it, and damned if my WYSIWYG isn’t back. *facepalm* I should have done that months ago, but didn’t have the patience. My tech fu, it comes and goes in cycles.

My writing lately has been either tweeting or one page critiques or papers, and it shows in this post. It’s like I have no idea how to blog anymore. With the WYSIWYG toolbar back, I’m going to try to fix that. I pay enough for this blog Well, actually, I don’t, my hosting company is really cheap, but I do pay for it, so I should start using it again.

But in the meantime, I should get back to writing this paper about Ben Franklin. So I’m going to do that.

I feel like I should write one of those “What I Did On My Summer Vacation” essays for all of you. Let’s see, what did I do? I missed Joe, of course. And then I found a little guy who needed my help because his owner was abusive. So we welcomed him into our home:

His first rescuer named him Nutmeg, then his foster family called him Shoyu, but I thought he was more of a Charlie, so that’s his new name. He had a little bit of an adjustment settling in, but every day he’s more at ease with us and torments Freddie a fraction of a millimeter less. But when I see Charlie harassing Freddie, I realize Joe probably sent him to us as revenge on Freddie. And I’m okay with that.

My office also moved to a new building, and there has been a hell of a lot of adjustment from that, let me tell you. We’re finally settling in, but it will be nice when the new building is finally finished. Which, at the rate they’re going will probably be in ten years.

And then last week I started classes for an MA in history. I’m struggling a bit with getting back in the academic groove (I’ve been working on what should have been a simple one page article summary for a couple of hours now because I’m not used to formal writing anymore), especially while living with Rick. Relationships didn’t phase my first two degrees at all (because for large portions of both degrees I wasn’t in one), but it’s interesting trying to figure out time to study and write without neglecting Rick. Of course, he’s got his own adjustment going on because he started a new day job last week, and that’s been quite a change for him. We’ll work through everything, I’m sure, but in the meantime it’s still a little strange. But also in the meantime, I’ve got this stupid summary to write, so I’m going to get back to that. Hope you all are well, and thanks for the emails prodding me back into blogging!