This is 100% real, unaltered (except to be resized) picture of a co-worker’s cat watching a National Geographic special last night. I would love to know what was going through his thoughts.

“Holy crap! He’s HUGE!”

There is a simple fact about me that my long time friends (seemingly) have just learned to accept. This fact is that I completely suck at the art of K.I.T.

If you’ve been out of high school as long as I have, and have forgotten all those acronyms that used to mean something to you, that would be “Keep In Touch”. (Or “Keeping In Touch” in this particular context.)

Even those friends of mine who live within a reasonable driving distance (including those who live less than a mile away from me) can likely attest to my suckage in this area.

Before the Internet (way back in the dark ages) I actually had real life pen-pals. Does anyone still remember this concept? There were people to whom I wrote actual letters on a semi-regular basis that I had never met before in real life, yet I considered friends of mine. I was really bad at it though. At first, I’d be really diligent about writing back quickly, and I was well stocked with the supplies necessary to design the art projects that most people referred to as envelopes. (You would not believe the amount of money I spent as a teenager on paint that puffed up, stickers, and glitter. Especially if you know me now, really, you would just find it unbelievable for the simple fact that it often involved pastels.) I loved my pen-pals; I honestly adored each and every one of them and looked forward to finding their own contributions to the envelope art world in my mailbox.

But I sucked at keeping it up.

It’s not that I didn’t want to. I truly intended to write back immediately upon poring over the latest opus from Melanie in Texas. (We actually shared the same first AND last name. It was like the coolest thing ever.) But I would put it off, and then after a week or two had passed, I’d feel guilty that I hadn’t written back, so I’d resolve to do it on Sunday. Then Sunday would roll around and other obligations would keep me from having the time to compose the brilliant prose that I knew was necessary to make my letter interesting. (If you count “Poison rulez!” as brilliant prose, that is.) More time would pass, and eventually I would tuck Melanie’s letter away and just sort of pretend I wasn’t the suckiest pen-pal in the world.

During this time, of course, I’d made at least one new pen-pal, because I can never seem to have enough friends, and the cycle would begin anew.

Looking back, I can point to the amount of labor that needed to go into each letter (hand writing a 4 - 8 page letter is time consuming, and that’s without even considering the time it took for all the envelope embellishments needed to be cool) and say that, ultimately, I was done in by the lack of time. I was a seriously over-extended teenager, what with school, extra-curricular activities at school, and the regular club hopping that my friends and I engaged in even though we were far too young to be doing so. I think sleep hovered at about 99 on my list of 100 priorities in life. I had much to do! I had life to live! I had no time for writing letters.

Yet here we are in the digital age, when dashing off a letter to someone takes very little time (comparatively, at least), where the only art involved in these communications is the art of the written word, and I still suck at K.I.T. The Internet makes it so easy to make new friends, and conceivably, to keep in touch with said new friends. There’s email, instant messaging, and commenting on blogs. Communication is never more than a few clicks of the mouse away.

The same pattern emerges. I have every intention of replying to each and every email and comment I receive, but then I put it off for a time when I have more time and energy to respond in the creative manner that the intended recipient deserves, which leads to a far longer passage of time than is acceptable, until finally, the guilt is too much to deal with so I push it away completely and move on.

What I mean to say with all of this is: I’m very sorry that I’ve been neglecting replies to emails and comments (I do read every one and love them all, even the crazy ones) and reading your blogs and commenting, and I will make attempts to do better in the future. But I wouldn’t count on that too much, as history has proven no matter what intentions I have, they are generally thwarted by the lack of time. I still love you all. Even the crazy ones.

(P.S. - Those of you who have subscribed via email to get notice of when I update… uh, it may or may not be working since the upgrade to the newest version. When I have more time, I’ll figure it out. If you got an email notice - please let me know.)

It’s an oldie but goodie, and it will forever remain the best blonde joke ever. You don’t see me posting jokes here very much, so you will just need to assume that this means it’s really, really, really good.

And it is!

(Credit should go to Red Wheelbarrow, but I had to find a different telling of it…)

We’re going to veer off into rant territory here, and I may even get a little preachy. This is not my normal fare - so if it’s your first visit, please, take a look around the rest of the stuff and ignore this. Hell, if you’re a regular in this spot, you might want to ignore this. I almost recommend it.

But I am strongly feeling the need to get this off my chest, and this being my outlet, here goes.

I am a low carber. (And immediately, I can see a collective eye-rolling in my direction.) Listen, I know. No really, I KNOW. The media made such a big deal out of the “low carb craze” and the big food companies all inundated the market with carb-this and carb-that and you are so over hearing anyone talk about it. It’s not even good enough that these days when you read about it the articles are proclaiming the death of low carb — they’re still talking about it! And it’s BORING!

I know.

(more…)

What? It’s only been two weeks. Sheesh. Stop looking at me like that.

I’ve been a little busy geeking out in a big way. I’ll be back to normal soon (I hope) and will commence with the storytelling and random griping. I’ve built a couple of new websites in the last two weeks, I’m in the process of building another now (scarily enough, a blog for David!), and though I’m not quite ready to show them off yet, I’ll just say that I think I’ve finally got the whole idea of designing with CSS down. I’ll be creating WordPress templates any day now… if I can keep from tearing out all my hair over the major differences in the way IE and Firefox display CSS. Yeah, I know. Geek city.

One quick note here, if anyone is thinking of signing up for Vonage phone service in the near future (as I’ve recently done), please email me before you do so I can refer you. You’ll get a free month; I’ll get two free months. Yes, this is a shameless plea to get referrals for phone service credit, what of it?

If you stuck with me through that, here’s a bonus:

When I got on the bus the other day, a guy was hanging out at the front of the bus, chatting with the driver. Shortly after I took my seat, I noticed that the girl sitting in the first seat was staring at him and not being very subtle about it. She attempted to get his attention a couple of times, but it’s loud on these little circulator buses, and he didn’t hear her. Brazenly, she got up and walked over to him.

I could only pick up snippets of the conversation, but it was clear that she was working the hook-up angle, and he was into it. They were talking about where they might go and she offered to cook him dinner. They had chatted for all of about 10 minutes when, apropos of nothing, he abruptly made this announcement: “My son is 15 years old, and I don’t want no more kids.”

Talk about laying it all out there early in the relationship. By my calculations, they should be on their honeymoon about now.