Sniff What I’m Steppin’ In

I feel like a robot, going through the motions of life each day, and lately nothing seems all that worthy of my commentary.  Blah.  But Sniff isn’t over.  Just on a caution lap, warming up the tires and poppin’ the neck, preparing for when I’m back in action.

(tell me you’ve watched a Nascar race before.  pah-lease.)

Yesterday after work, I ran around like a tornado trying to pack for my weekend. I put my suitcase on my bed, and went about my business trying to find clean clothes while making a list of what not to forget (common items I forget include toothbrush, razor, underwear, cell charger - ya know, the crucial items). While taking these measures to avoid being a smelly, hairy, commando, phone-less, stank-mouth traveler, I noticed little Max crawling into my empty suitcase. How cute, I thought to myself, and looked around for my cell to take a picture.

Once I finally made it into the room with my cell, Max was no longer in the suitcase. Bummer, I thought. Missed a great photo opp. Of cute max.

Not so cute Max, it turns out. He had friggin peed in my suitcase. Not sitting being cute … no, peeing. Coppin a squat. Look at the back right area - where it’s dark? Yeah, cat piss.

This is cool. In my “free time” I’m going to check Penguin’s site out.

read about it on Boing Boing

and check out the actual site of We Tell Stories - Digital Fiction from Penguin

:::::::::clearing throat:::::::::ahem::::::::::::::::::

Hello everyone, my name is amy and I … I am a pistachiolic.

• I’m having one of those days where I feel hesitant to capitalize. I just want to be small and unobtrusive in everything I do. You know what I mean?
• I’m freezing. 2 of my fingers are numbish. I have my space heater on high. there was a freeze last night. It’s mid-april, and I live in north carolina. What the heck.
• did you know that if you can change your thoughts, you can change your thought-patterns, and therefore your feelings? and it is possible to control our thoughts. I’m now employing a technique of banning negative thoughts - acknowledging them, but asking them to move on. I think I’ll feel less hurt in general. wish me luck.
• I’m on a completely new food and exercise regime. well, not completely new - it’s just completely new that I’m adhering to it. wish me luck. I plan on being buff by June. because guess what? you cannot hail from the South, be 31 and single, and let the looks go. Particularly when that’s all anyone really values in you anyway! (”anyone” being potential men. I’ve yet to meet anyone who can handle and want the person that comes with the looks - it’s usually one or the other: they can handle it but don’t want to; they want it but can’t handle it…)****Clarification: This does not reflect how it has been with each and every person I’ve dated - just sayin’.
• speaking of melons, today i keep burping and it tastes like “vodka melone” - aka cantelope-flavored vodka with which I used to keep cool during my 2 summers in Italia. It’s a divine taste. I just don’t know where it’s coming from because I’m not eating any melon. nuts!

Of course, a night of blogging isn’t complete for me without posting a photo of the kids. Here they are watching me get ready one morning. They seriously make the world a better place. I smile and laugh approximately 50% more than I used to.

Haven’t written in days! Life’s been busy, life’s been good, life’s been bad. The past week has been really hard and really hurtful in general, but I’m good. Nice thing is, I’m always ok, and that hasn’t always been the case. Well it has - I’ve always been ok but haven’t always known that, you know?

I was talking to my parents recently, who I’m really close with, and I was saying that I’ve never been happier, although there are some things I’m really, really unhappy about. I wish I could figure out “what I want to do when I grow up;” I wish my career were more exciting and more lucrative; I wish I could find a man who would love me for exactly who I am and who’d treat me well and want to live the adventure of life with me; I wish I could have a family; a house with a back yard; and money to travel. But the nice thing is, I’m happy already, so that when I do get those things, it’ll only augment my current state of mind. I think it’s so crucial for people to reach a place where they’re happy within, because that’s really the only thing we can control. We cannot control the world, the workplace, luck, love, men, women, relationships, pets, etc. We can do our best, but in the end, shit happens, because this world is unfortunately ruled by humans, who are by nature …flawed, and forces of nature beyond our reach.

Anyway why haven’t I been posting? Because I don’t typically have a good reaction when I articulate this kind of thought to someone on a one-to-one basis …it just doesn’t seem well-received, (ie, someone recently said to me, after my attempt to communicate something difficult to reach a healthy place of understanding, that they “just didn’t do this“). In fact, often the folks less comfortable with themselves, their thoughts, their beliefs and their feelings - well as soon as they get to know me and hear my views on the world, they don’t like it.  For some reason, to hear my feelings and thoughts makes some people uncomfortable, which I’ll never understand.  Sooooo, I was hesitant to pontificate here on Sniff, but I couldn’t help it - here I am - luckily with the Web you can keep on surfing and you don’t have to read me if you don’t want!

There’s more where this came from, but I gotta be ready for The Bachelor to see others who find true love and acceptance. (HAAAAAAAAA!)

Because of errors that occurred in moving my iTunes library three times in the last 3 years, I have some duplicate songs in my library. Well, some quadruplicates, to be honest. 1) I don’t know how I did this. 2) I don’t know how to fix this. But the problem has snowballed (don’t they all)!

The situation, as it stands, is that my library currently has 16,214 songs, which amounts to 65.43 GB, or 47.7 days of music. When I choose to display duplicates, there are 15,351 items that display. I have been working to delete duplicates for a year now, in alpha order by song title, and am only at songs beginning with “al.’

If anyone can solve this for me, please send me a tip. Throw me a bone. Palease!

In May 2001, about a dozen or so of my friends all went to the beach together for Memorial Day.  Good times were had - you know - lots of sunshine, beer, margaritas, beach bocci ball, frisbee, swimming, sunbathing, fresh seafood dinners, card games, and you know, gun shows.

That’s right - we went to a party at a house where another friend was staying, and two nice gentlemen extended us an invitation to a gun show.  Why, how nice!  They’re sharing an interest in weaponry with us!  They’re opening up and letting us in on some of their hobbies!  Maybe we can share some knitting details soon!

Um, they meant the kind of gun show that The Superficial is reporting that Madge has two tickets to…a G.U.N. show.

Jerry Seinfeld was in a really bad car accident recently when the brakes on his 1967 Fiat BTM stopped working in the Hamptons.  Luckily he is fine, but made a hilarious comment to the press:

‘Because I know there are kids out there, I want to make sure they all know that driving without braking is not something I recommend, unless you have professional clown training or a comedy background, as I do,’ Seinfeld said. ‘It is not something I plan to make a habit of.’”

Paramount is enabling film buffs to view, comment on and share a whole library of film clips from their vault of movies, in an effort to better ride the wagon of interactive online user-generated fun.

Derrick J. Lang, an AP entertainment writer, explains:

LOS ANGELES - Paramount Pictures’ film vault is opening up in the virtual world.

Thousands of video clips from Paramount’s movie library — ranging from ‘Footloose’ to ‘Clueless‘ — will be available inside the virtual 3-D online worlds of There.com and vMTV, Paramount Digital Entertainment and Makena Technologies Inc. announced Wednesday.

‘Consumers today are not interested in a passive experience online,’ Paramount senior vice president of entertainment Derek Broes told The Associated Press. “‘ven when they are just watching a piece of entertainment, they’re commenting on it or looking at it with a friend. They’re very actively involved.’”

Read full story at Yahoo! News.

I forgot a couple things on my list yesterday.  One in particular is Winter Daphne, aka Daphne Odora.

Daphne is a genus of between 50-95 species of deciduous and evergreen shrubs in the plant family Thymelaeaceae, native to Asia, Europe, and north Africa. They are noted for their scented flowers and poisonous berries. The flowers lack petals and have four (rarely five) petaloid sepals, ranging from greenish-yellow to white and bright pink; most of the evergreen species tend to have greenish flowers, while the deciduous species tend to have pink flowers. In many species, flowering is in late winter or very early spring.” ~ Wikipedia

Daphne Odora blooms in North Carolina during February and lasts until about now, early April.  It grows in the form of a large shrub, and is covered with flowers that smell like absolute heaven.  My parents have one in their backyard, and it makes that entire side of the yard smell like heaven.  It’s the best smell in the world.  It’s also very poisonous.  Why is it that things that typically smell really good, feel really good or taste really good are typically either poisonous or bad for us???

As I walked Buddy this morning, I waxed poetic (in my head) about all kinds of things I vehemently like and dislike. Well, it got a little negative actually because I was having a really bad 24 hours, but then I gave myself a swift kick to the pants and tried to think of positive things as well. Today at the office, I feel like a work horse who’s been injected with Ritalin because I’m in such a bad place that it actually feels really really good to just focus on mundane tasks. I can’t stop focusing - my eyes are like saucers that won’t blink. My fingers are typing about 98 wpm. My work feels like very soothing aloe for some reason. But - so does list-making! Damn do I love a good list. Here goes:

Things I like right now:

• pistachios, in the shell (the process of shelling is thrilling because I’m so unbelievably fast and competent.)
• sleeping with my animals especially with they snuggle in so that when I’m on my side, one is in the nook behind my knees, and the other is on top of my feet, or waking up with one on either side of my head, like when I was sad last night. animals are amazingly intuitive to needs!
• Gorillaz (just good)
• Evanescence (to be angry and sad with)
• after St. Patty’s day, a woman I work with introduced me to The Red Wellies - fantastic Irish music - I listen in my office every day
• Fergie (to work out to)
• red wine, any
• my new phone, the LG Voyager
• the promise of Spring and the occasional warm day
• relationships
• sleeping with my windows open
• feeling a little bit wiser and knowing that even when things feel like they’re hitting rock bottom, somehow I know I’ll be okay
• sushi - I am having near-daily cravings for sushi
• dark chocolate peanut M&Ms (not with the sushi)
• extra hot nonfat chai tea lattes
• extra hot triple skinny one-pump vanilla lattes
• daphne odora

Things I currently dislike:

• the return of my ganglion cyst
• the return of my achilles pain
• rude people
• dumb people
• rude dumb people
• bad drivers
• rude dumb bad drivers
• the coffee at work
• being forced to sit still for longer than 1 hour, like in a meeting
• not having my dream career
• being paid the same amount I did at age 23
• somehow having fallen off the ladder
• not being able to attain the goal of home ownership
• cold rain
• body fat
• un-attached foreign body hair at the gym, as seen on the floor or in the middle of the pedals on the elliptical
• relationships
• my brain
• old gum when you’re not near a trash receptacle
• inefficiency
• injustice
• war
• un-met hopes
• unsalted, unseasoned almonds
• unexplained headaches
• danishes
• John Mayer
• people that don’t pick up their dog’s poop
• when bad things happen to good people
• when good things happen to bad people

This is awesome. This is my dream. (Don’t worry, I’m not holding my breath.)

• WordPress Blurb about Book Deals

• Why Blog? Reason No. 92: Book Deal (NYT Story)
  

Seriously, how cute are these two.  I seriously think I smile twice as much now that I have them.

Ooooh, ahhhh…

Lolcat Guys Squeeze Laughs Out of Graph

By Jenna Wortham

Calling all graph nerds and lolcat fans: GraphJam, the latest project from the duo behind I Can Haz Cheezburger?, wants your savvy pop-culture observations in visual form.”

more here

I think that this post, from the Best of Craigslist, was written by my ex (three ex’es ago). I knew he’d get published one day.

If men wrote m4w ads like women wrote w4m ads

Date: 2008-02-27, 8:51AM MSTIsn’t it funny how most w4m ads are like checklists of requirements. These women think finding a guy is like ordering a sandwich - a little more height please, easy on the love of sports, and can you throw in a weekend house in the mountains and a willingness to support some other guy’s children?

If men wrote their m4w ads the same way, we would expect to see something like this:

Looking to meet the woman of my dreams. Someone who appreciates me for who I am. I love big TV’s, big trucks, baseball caps, and wife-beater tanks. I love going out with my friends to get drunk at strip clubs too. I’m looking for a nice woman who is not looking to jump into a relationship too soon but who knows what it means to be sexy and take care of her partner. Please no BBW’s (sorry) but you won’t look good on my arm when I wear a white t-shirt.

You must love dogs and my beer can collection, my dogs, my cans, and I are a package, so if you’re not into them then please move on. I like to let all 6 of my dogs sleep in my bed with me, so hopefully you don’t have a problem with that.

Deal breakers:

• likes to shop too much
• obsessed with height (i am short)
• fat
• talks about yourself too much
• neediness
• always wanting to talk about the relationship
• small breasts (sorry, there is nothing sexier than grabbing onto a nice pair)
• doesn’t like to cook for her man
• bossiness
• nagging
• always wanting to get up early in the morning
• fat
• intolerance of me and my habits
• pressure to have kids

Turn ons:

• thin
• large breasts (very sexy)
• quiet
• beer drinker
• has her own friends and won’t try to make me watch chick flicks
• smells good
• likes football
• doesn’t expect me to pay all the time
• intelligent but not too intelligent (i dont like nerdy girls)
• rich father
• thin
• doesn’t have a relationship calendar, i.e. doesnt wonder after 3 months if we are going in the right direction.

Can you find me a woman like that??? LOL

• Location: Reality

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